Cary Nelson

CENSORSHIP and the President of the AAUP
The history of intellectual growth and discovery clearly demonstrates the need for unfettered freedom, the right to think the unthinkable. Discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable. To curtail free expression strikes twice at intellectual freedom for whoever deprives another of the right to state unpopular views necessarily also deprives others of the right to listen to those views. [...] If a university is a place for knowledge, it is also a special kind of small society. Yet it is not primarily a fellowship, a club, a circle of friends, a replica of the civil society outside it. Without sacrificing its central purpose. It cannot make its primary and dominant value the fostering of friendship, solidarity, harmony, civility, or mutual respect. To be sure, these are important values; other institutions may properly assign them the highest, and not merely a subordinate priority; and a good university will seek and may in some significant measure attain these ends. But it will never let these values, important as they are, override its central purpose. We value freedom of expression precisely because it provides a forum for the new, the provocative, the disturbing, and the unorthodox. Free speech is a barrier to the tyranny of authoritarian or even majority opinion as to the rightness or wrongness of particular doctrines of thoughts.
—Woodward Report to the Fellows of the Yale Corporation (1975), which set a standard for freedom of expression at Yale and for the rest of the nation

Inside Higher Ed, an online academic publication, has been CENSORING my voice for several years (see http://www.theamericandissident.org/InsideHigherEd.htm). There’s not much a staunch individual like me can do to contest incidents of censorship. Last year, I informed Cary Nelson, tenured English professor and president of the AAUP, that my opinion regarding his IHE essay had been censored. Nelson did not respond. Yet, Nelson is the author of No University Is an Island: Saving Academic Freedom. That's right: SAVING ACADEMIC FREEDOM! So, how does he define academic freedom? The freedom to be PC indoctrinated? The freedom to CENSOR and condone CENSORSHIP?
Thus, I satirized Nelson in the above cartoon. The only thing a lone free-speech advocate can do against the Nelsons (and Ledermans) is satire and posting blog entries. Fortunately, posting such entries enables recusant voices like mine to be "heard" on the Internet. Thus, when someone googles Doug Lederman (editor of InsideHigherEd.com) or Cary Nelson, he or she will eventually find my CENSORED opinion. Both of those fellows, if they had it their way, would likely desire to "filter" or "moderate" all such opinions on the Internet. Thankfully, they do not yet have their way. One day, I suspect, however, they will have their way as the cloud of PC Big Brother and Big Sister gets larger and larger.

Both Lederman and Nelson have been duly informed about this blog entry. Below is the harsh comment I tried unsuccessfully posting on Inside Higher Ed regarding Nelson’s self-serving, book plugging essay, “Solidarity vs. Contingency” (see http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2010/09/07/nelson), which makes him appear to be on the side of the “working” academic and further enhance his “tenured radical” image. But he is one of those riding on the comfy bullet-proof academic gravy train, a "successful" academic ladder climber. The comment below contains no threats, no four-letter words, and no pornographic images. It is thanks to the Ledermans and Nelsons that higher education has become anything but an arena for vigorous debate, cornerstone of democracy.

Inside Higher Ed Censored Comment
It is difficult to believe in the sincerity of a Cary Nelson who perhaps earns upwards of $100,000 per year as a full-time tenured English professor at a big university teaching perhaps six measly courses per year, if that. It is indeed difficult to believe in an academic ladder climber, who once was a hippie. Indeed, how facile for Nelson to proclaim solidarity and equity, while enjoying what inequity and lack of solidarity have accorded him as a professor over the years: a life-time pass on the ivory-tower gravy train. Would Nelson be willing to scale down to the $20K per year those like me earn as adjuncts? Doubtfully. Would he be willing to give up just half his big salary, teach a few more courses, and spread the cash equally amongst adjuncts at his particular university? Now, that would be more than mere socialist feel-good jabber!
“Why congratulate ourselves for selling out?” asks Nelson, though I’m not convinced he realizes the depth of that selling out. And how to trust someone like Nelson who will not even stand up to decry censorship in academe? The last comment I’d posted regarding one of his articles was censored, and in vain I’d brought that to his attention. Nelson simply did not respond. Was I, an unconnected adjunct, simply naïve in thinking he might respond?
Nelson’s proclamation is as unrealistic and unattainable as it gets. The future is not in tenure and the cocoon security and salary that tenure affords professors. The future is online and the future is adjunct. I am happy with that situation because if it did not exist I would be without employment today. The Nelsons would certainly not be writing me three letters of recommendation or otherwise backing my quest for tenure. The AAUP and state college union stood idly by when I once fought corruption in the ranks.
Nelson’s comparison of adjuncts with sharecroppers is pitiful nonsense. Adjuncts are educated, while sharecroppers clearly were not. Adjuncts do not toil in unsanitary, menial, and physically exhausting hardcore labor. Adjuncts can seek employment in other spheres, while sharecroppers generally were stuck. Nelson belittles the tough life of sharecroppers by making such a comparison! One would have to believe that he’s never known the tough life of physical labor.
Unfortunately, I could not bring myself to finish reading Nelson’s lengthy article, stopped where he plugs his book, and wondered what he’ll be doing with the cash from book sales. Will he be refurbishing his little wainscoted luxury apartment or expensive home?
The problem with academic freedom is that tenure tends to be granted to those who would never speak out of line to begin with. In other words, it tends to be wholly unnecessary. Tenure tends to be awarded to those who play the game—to those who kowtow to the department chairperson Nelsons in power. I’ve seen it. I know it. Tenure has become in itself a rot in the heart of democracy, for it is a sham, a risible front. With all the tenured professors in the nation’s colleges and universities, how not to wonder why free speech and vigorous debate, democracy’s cornerstones, seem ever to be in peril in those very colleges and universities (see thefire.org). Indeed, it seems the tenured professors themselves are bent on keeping it that way. Yes, students, burn and steal those conservative newspapers! Yes, students, heckle that conservative speaker so he can no longer be heard! We’re in full solidarity with you. A-men.

The Education of Oronte Chum or How to Feed at the Academic Trough

Censorship of anything, at any time, in any place, on whatever pretense, has always been and will always be the last resort of the boob and the bigot.
—Eugene O’Neill

He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves, and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper. This amicable conflict with difficulty helps us to an intimate acquaintance with our object, and compels us to consider it in all its relations. It will not suffer us to be superficial.
—Edmund Burke

The cartoon above was inspired by a minor encounter with a minor academic, John Griswald, on InsideHigherEd.com, which I received via email several times per week. Upon one occasion, I was actually censored by IHE for a comment I’d made on a rather lame poem by Laurence Musgrove, associate professor of English at Saint Xavier University, in Chicago:

Syllabus

On the first page just after the required novels

And before the list of learning outcomes

I’d paste a photo of me from ‘73

Scraggly hair and wire-rimmed glasses

And then torn from my long gone journal

Some half poem or worry on the day

So they might see me and not me

Who could be their dad or worse

With these handouts and so much to read

How jealous I am I am almost crying

How much I love them.

My commentary was the following. Sure, I suppose, I could have been politer, more bourgeois in tone, more collegial, as they liked to say, but should the comment have been censored in a democracy? You decide.

“Why publish such a lame poem? Well, it is indicative of the general state of professors in higher education today, where few have the courage to openly question and challenge the various hands that feed and otherwise fatten them into submissiveness. Democracy is at stake in America today, so let's write a poem about the syllabus! For poems et al decrying the state of higher ed that Inside Higher Ed would likely never publish, see www.theamericandissident.org. Vigorous debate is the cornerstone of democracy... but not in higher ed, where speech codes, collegiality, and cutesy wit rule!”

In any case, I’d since written perhaps harsher comments, which were not censored. Perhaps my email to the editor in protest of his censorship actually served to sensitize him to the proliferation and harmful effects of censorship in Academe vis-à-vis Democracy. Apropos, in the ivory tower, the censor was not referred to as a censor, but rather as a moderator.

In actuality, my grievance was really not with Griswold, but rather with self-proclaimed tenured radical Cary Nelson, president of the established-order Association of American University Professors. Griswold had written a hagiographic piece, “Cary Nelson, Provocateur.” Thus, I challenged him on it. Also, I mentioned the incident of censorship to him. He was of course, as a pup at the InsideHigherEd trough, entirely indifferent to it and did not respond with its regard.

Was Griswold’s vignette (see www.insidehighered.com/blogs/the_education_of_oronte_churm/cary_nelson_provocateur)
an example of what “provocative” or “provocateur” had come to mean in Academe? If so, the corporate co-optation of the University must surely have become a fait accompli, instead of simply in progress. The castration of terms like “provocative” and “radical” served that co-optation well as an integral part of the rationalization process of far too many Academics.

Regarding Nelson, the question, of course, remained and, of course, was not raised: how did a radical become a tenured, bourgeois, faculty cocktail-party attending president of the established-order Association of American University Professors? Kowtowing ones way up the ladder was how it was normally done in Academe, while truth telling was the normal way straight out the freakin’ door… or rather out the window on to the ledge of chronic unemployment. Did Cary Nelson possess some secret formula to do it otherwise? If so, why hadn’t Griswald even posed the question?

Nelson’s website, Modern American Poetry, was anything but radical or even remotely “provocative,” or even at all necessary. Well, it did have a Soviet-Union looking sketch of a worker holding a sledgehammer on it (www.english.illinois.edu/maps/), but how did that make it different in substance? Nevertheless, I had to give Nelson kudos for being somewhat unusual in academe for his being somewhat open to criticism; he’d actually posted the satirical cartoon I’d done on him on his webpage (see www.cary-nelson.org/nelson/cartoon.html). Just the same, his was really but a rehash of Academe’s canon. Where was the hardcore questioning and challenging of that largely bourgeois canon? How did twisted thinking (discoursing in oxymorons, castration of vocabulary et al) become so seemingly prevalent (the norm!) in Academe? Now, that would have made a great subject for a doctoral thesis! If I hadn’t already done mine, I’d get to work on it right away.

Finally, Griswald aka Churm, scribbler of the dubious Nelson tribute, needed to ask himself how his education (i.e., the Education of Oronte Churm) had failed him so royally. How had it succeeded in blocking the natural flow of his intellect, placed it into a state of paradigmatic paralysis, where politeness and collegiality, not to mention obsequiousness, hagiography, and rampant self-vaunting, were far more pertinent than truth telling, and indeed rendered his intellect utterly incapable of raising the simple—though truth unearthing—questions and points underscored here? The quip and silence were academe’s favorite rhetorical weapons of choice for dealing with uncomfortable truth jams. Perhaps this time, Griswald would simply choose silence.

BTW, Griswald actually prefaced his Churm blog with the above quote by Edmund Burke. It was, at least for me, difficult to comprehend professor/writers like him... and so many there were! Was his simply a matter of some deeply unconscious inability to perceive reality? Clearly, Griswald was not into the "wrestling" Burke rightfully praised; he rejected it outright. For him, "our antagonist" was not our "helper" at all, but rather someone to be ignored and buried. If he really agreed with Burke, he would not have eschewed "wrestling" (i.e., vigorous debate, cornerstone of democracy) with me. Granted, he did respond, regarding this blog entry, though not in the comment area. Nevertheless, his brief email was hardly evidence at all of a desire to "wrestle": "Thank you! Where do you teach, Tod?"

Now, why did he wish to know where I taught? Did he want to contact the deans in the hope of getting me ousted for un-business-like (i.e., pro-democracy) behavior? Why else would he want to know? Again, it was difficult to understand such professor/writers.