The Cold War and the University: Towards an Intellectual History of the Postwar Years by Noam Chomsky, et al; The New Press, New York, 1997; $25.00 (hardcover).
IN 1997, Johns Hopkins University proposed to set up a research institute at Munnar in Kerala to study public health. Kerala was not chosen arbitrarily; it has emerged as a "model" of popular development, notably in the areas of health, education, land reform and public distribution of food supplies. The principal representative from Johns Hopkins was Carl E. Taylor, Professor Emeritus of International Health.
The money for the project (the equivalent of Rs.700 crores) was to come from unspecified "corporate donors, regional nations and international donor organisations". The Left Democratic Front (LDF) Government in Kerala rejected the proposal on the grounds that the interests of the people of the State may not be served by an institute funded by pharmaceutical companies and other multinational donors. After all, Kerala was doing just fine and it had already been quite generous in sharing its model (more a set of principles than a model to be replicated, as the late E.M.S. Namboodiripad so keenly noted). Further, the reputation of the United States towards Communist regimes and successes hardly endorsed Johns Hopkins' efforts to create the institute. This was only one reason to reject Johns Hopkins' proposal. The other reason was Carl E. Taylor himself.
Carl E. Taylor is a leading expert in public health. At the World Health Oragnisation's (WHO) 1978 Alma Ata World Conference on Primary Health Care, Taylor was the primary consultant who wrote the document on the three pillars of public health care and child nutrition: to locate health care services in far-flung localities, to ensure community participation and, finally, to ensure "intersectoral cooperation". Taylor was United Nations Children's Education Fund's (UNICEF) representative in China from 1984 to 1987 and he is now associated with Future Generations, a non-governmental organisation committed to an environmentally-sustainable future whose major project is in the sensitive region of Tibet.
Professor Taylor first came to India after Partition to conduct missionary work. In 1962, he returned to oversee the Narangwal community development project. In 1974, he was asked to leave the country under mysterious circumstances. He was accused of being an agent for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and in 1996 he said of these allegations that "such charges were raised, but we did not bother to refute them; and because we did not refute the rumours, people assumed that they were true" (Frontline, December 12, 1997). The Taylor-Munnar controversy raises the question again of "academic colonialism" and of the nexus between the corporation, the academy and imperialism.
Thirty years ago, Indian journals such as Seminar focussed on just this question (issue No. 112, 1968); today those who speak of "academic colonialism" are seen as anachronistic and paranoid. Few people know of Project Camelot (1964) or of the Committee of Cultural Freedom; even fewer people know of the National Endowment for Democracy, a U.S.-funded agency that gives grants to influence the hearts and minds of those who are not yet in favour of neo-liberalism.
To review a book on the Cold War and its influence on the U.S. academy without introducing the dynamic of academic colonialism renders such a history to the past and not as a problem that continues to frame current concerns. The Cold War and the University is a combined product of nine leading U.S. scholars from various fields, but all strongly committed to some form of leftism or another. Noam Chomsky (Linguistics), Ira Katznelson (Political Science), David Montgomery (History), R. C. Lewontin (evolutionary Biology), Laura Nader (Anthropology), Richard Ohmann (English), Ray Siever (Geology), Howard Zinn (History) and Immanuel Wallerstein (Sociology) gathered to reflect upon the impact of the Cold War on intellectual activity.
Lewontin makes the case that the crackdown on the Left within the academy was not part of state policy, but it was produced by "the opportunism and cowardice of boards of trustees and university administrators" faced with a right-wing torrent against radicalism in general (page 20). When the right gestured, the liberals in power acted with vengeance either to earn favours or to protect themselves.
This is a story repeated in the account by Howard Zinn, who tells us of his own experience and also quotes at length from Ellen Schrecker's No Ivory Tower (Oxford University Press, 1986), a wonderful study of the repression of academics during the 1940s and 1950s in the U.S. Some of these U.S. academics, such as Daniel and Alice Thorner, made their way to India as political refugees to teach in universities far more open than those in the U.S. While many intellectuals faced the institutional gibbet, the vast majority of them began to share in an illiberal prosperity that allowed them "academic freedom" and the resources to conduct any research as long as it did not turn towards such subjects as class struggle and exploitation (page 2). "Marxism," argued Ohmann, "disappeared from the academy; the tradition dried up" (page 84).
By the 1950s, interest in political economy was a cottage industry around the Monthly Review group and the moth-eaten Communist Party (with Paul Baran and Victor Perlo being their respective Marxist economists). Nader and Wallerstein detail for us the manner in which the CIA infiltrated the world of intellectuals, through such endeavours as Project Camelot and through some officers of the American Political Science Association (1967).
The state put intellectuals to use not only overseas; it worked on projects to justify state policy domestically as well (as, for example, the use of anthropologists to promote the idea of nuclear testing among the Eskimos of Alaska and the natives of Oceania). Other intellectuals, notes Katznelson, produced models of social stability to undermine the value of protest.
These models of social equilibrium ended up accusing people who struggled against social oppression of being provocateurs rather than freedom fighters. It is far better, this school of thought suggested, "for the excluded to remain apolitical than challenge the dirty secrets of the regime" (page 255). This was no text of an "ivory tower", but it was the consideration of an auxiliary for the ruling fraction of the dominant classes.
The real victims of the Cold War academy, as far as this book shows, were the humanities and the social sciences. Here pragmatic and right-wing theories ruled the day, while Marxism was forbidden. Here radical sentiments came in for rebuke, as the guardians of the academy encouraged conservatism and/or apolitical behaviour. Scholars were given the freedom to do what they wanted as long as they did not violate these rules. And many scholars prospered. "On the whole," notes Ohmann, "we went along unthinkingly with the ideology of the Free World, though with no racing of the blood - after all, the Soviets were no threat to our freedom." The bulk of U.S. scholars saw themselves as "spectators" or "outsiders" to the Cold War, even though their actions impinged upon it in a fundamental way (pages 80-81).
In the sciences, Chomsky, Lewontin and Siever show, there was far more room for political dissent (pages 28-30 and page 178). The scientists felt that they had a closer relationship to the Cold War, since many worked to produce weaponry or intelligence machines (of course, the ideologues of the system also produce ammunition of a sort, but few saw themselves in such a light). Many geologists changed from doing pure science to applied, Cold War science without much fuss and with little protest (page 163). This may indeed have been the norm. A few scientists, however, did complain, but their jobs could not be taken away because of the sheer need for more and more scientists. The radicalism of a section of scientists, within a technocratic society, is something that remains alive to this day. To protest against nuclear testing, one can be sure that there will be a slew of scientists from major universities offering to speak and to sign their names to anti-nuclear petitions.
U.S. imperialism's vulgarity in Vietnam and the student protests against the U.S. war in Asia changed much of the apolitical nature of teachers. The struggle of black Americans for civil rights was the parallel episode that rendered the U.S. self-image false and prodded intellectuals towards self-assessment and criticism. The anti-war and anti-racist movements pioneered the attack against the apolitical/conservative academy. Students and radical faculty dragged Area Studies (itself a mode of imperialist control of the formerly colonised world) and transformed it into Ethnic Studies. Rather than study the world outside in order to control it, these students demanded that the U.S. academy study the people of colour within the U.S. (blacks, Latinos, Amerindians, Asians) and link the history of these peoples to the spaces outside the U.S. from which their ancestors came (page 227). This academic enterprise was from the "bottom-up", as Wallerstein put it, and it included the dynamic entry of Women's Studies into the academy.
THE flush of the anti-imperialist moment lasted for a brief instant. The institutions that it created have not retained the links to social movements, since many of them have become the bureaucratised arms of a bourgeois multiculturalism (wherein each "culture" is seen to have its political and economic constituency and its cultural authority is mainly seen to be the orthodox element within it). This is what Nader seems to mean when she complains that current intellectual work misses the "creative impulse that connects us and the institution of academic bureaucracy to a democratic social life" (page 137).
"The Cold War experience of universities needs to be reviewed," Montgomery reminds us, "not only to teach us how the human imagination has been contained, but also how it has broken through the veils of secrecy and deception" (page xxxv). If we are to create a university that lives through the creativity of popular social movements (rather than the congealed will of the dominant classes) and if it must be alert to theories partisan to those movements (rather than to the positivist and one-dimensional theories that justified quiescence and reverence of the GDP), then we must tend to those moments of struggle that predate us and provide us with the realisation that the dynamic of progressivism need not be created afresh.
It exists, but often in an inchoate and disorganised fashion. The anti-imperialist groups that sheltered Central American leftist refugees in the 1980s (in solidarity houses), the anti-war groups that protest against U.S. interventions and nuclear tests, the women's groups that protest against sexual harassment and unequal hiring of women, the gay and lesbian groups that criticise the academy's licence towards homophobia, the socialist and Communist groups that provide leadership on campuses, and the faculty that tries to recreate forms of radical thought in the dreary deserts of pragmatism: this is the ground that must be drawn together if the university is to be reshaped.
The Cold War and the University is an adequate account of what has been. It will help campus activists wend our ways to make the future. With the cut-backs in funding to humanities and social sciences, graduate students have become increasingly an exploited workforce of auxiliary teachers. Graduate assistants at the large universities of Kansas, Michigan, Oregon and Wisconsin have affiliated themselves with the American Federation of Teachers; their comrades at Iowa found fellowship with the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America; Rutgers' assistants joined the American Association of University Professors; those at the State University of New York affiliated themselves with the Communication Workers of America and, finally, students at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst as well as five University of California campuses have signed up with United Auto Workers.
At private colleges such as Yale and Brown, the struggle continues in earnest. In October 1996, two thousand scholars, unionists, students and activists flooded into Columbia University for a teach-in on the current state of the labour-academy relationship and of its future. A slew of such teach-ins took place across the country, mainly in response to the left-turn within the leadership of the American Federation of Labour-Coalition of Industrial Organisations (AFL-CIO) and of a renewed sense of hope felt by many leftist intellectuals.
In mid-1997, the AFL-CIO invited some of these intellectuals to form an independent organisation, Scholars, Artists and Writers for Social Justice (SAWSJ), which held its first national meeting in April 1998. The SAWSJ's statement bears extended quotation: "In the academy and in publishing, in the arts, sciences, and entertainment, we also experience the growth of low-wage, part-time employment which erodes our craft and creativity. We call upon our colleagues and friends to declare their solidarity with the organising drives of the new labour movement. The time is ripe to restore the mutually empowering relationship that once gave hope and dynamism to the labour movement and its allies in the academic and cultural communities. We envision a movement that can reshape the nation's political culture by combating inequality and powerlessness, and by fostering the growth of a vibrant, militant, multicultural working-class movement. In an era when elite opinion makes a fetish of the free market, unions - with a commitment to solidarity, equality, and collective struggle - remain fundamental institutions of a democratic society." The Cold War and the University provides us with some history of how the Right structured the educational industry; the current struggles will attempt to conduct some fundamental restructuring.
One additional point. This study introduces us to a form of censorship that pervades university life, but it neglects an equally pervasive form of gatekeeping: market censorship. Through the past few decades, the U.S. publishing conglomerates began to absorb smaller publishing houses in order to control the market better. The $20-billion U.S. book market is dominated by eight houses: Hearst Books, Murdoch's News Corporation (HarperCollins), Pearson PLC (The Penguin group), Viacom (Simon & Schuster), the Newhouse family's Advance (Random House, Knopf), Ted Turner's Time-Warner (Warner, Little, Brown), Reinhard Mohn's Bertelsmann AG (Bantam, Doubleday, Dell) and Holtzbrinck (Henry Holt, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, St. Martin's).
In a long expose on the power of big publishing, Mark Crispin Miller notes that "this being the national entertainment state, books are also whacked in New York or Hollywood without a word from Langley." That is, if a book offers a critique of neo-liberalism, capitalism, imperialism or even of any magnate from a social democratic position, the publishers deem it to be "not of publishable quality" and the writer is forced to seek out a small press with very limited means to circulate the book. The publishers seek our ready-made ideas, now vetted not by editors, but by "publishing committees, in which the financial and marketing people play a pivotal role. If a book does not look as if it will sell a certain number - and that number increases every year - these people argue that the company cannot 'afford' to take it on, especially when it is a new novel or a work of serious nonfiction." If in an earlier age a publisher like Alfred Knopf was happy with an annual profit of 4 per cent after taxes, today the major houses are satisfied with no less than 12 to 15 per cent. Slim volumes that promote consensus are now all the rage.
The book under review was published by a house created to buck the system. The New Press was founded by Andre Schiffrin in 1990 after he resigned a 28-year-long at Pantheon/Random House. The company, Schiffrin claims, urged its editors to publish more political books from the Right, a move that can now be seen in their catalogue. It would not be surprising if Murdoch and others turn their sights on the Indian publishing industry and substantially narrow the political visions of the books published.
The Cold War and the University traces the way ideas are formed by the political vision of the imperialist state and its intellectuals; let the very publication of the book remind us that the struggle against such a narrowed vision is not just in ideas alone, but in the material means to transmit ideas to the general public.