Defend CORS! Against Neo-McCarthyism on US Campuses
From Central Ohio Revolutionary Socialists Facebook page
Following a series of nationwide attacks on Palestinian organizers and others in solidarity with the Palestinian people, the Ohio State University recently announced a campuswide suspension of the Columbus Marxist organization Central Ohio Revolutionary Socialists (CORS). In the wake of similar bans on Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) at George Washington University, Brandeis, Columbia, and Rutgers, we cannot help but see this action as part of larger effort by the US capitalist class and its ideological organs to silence the growing numbers of intellectuals, oppressed peoples, and working-class Americans speaking up against the genocidal policies of the Zionist Israeli state and its domestic accomplices. Cincinnati Socialists stands in unconditional solidarity with CORS, and we demand their immediate reinstatement as a student organization at OSU. We also oppose without exception all attacks on Palestine activists in the US, including attacks on SJP and JVP. We denounce all forms of neo-McCarthyism at US institutions of higher learning as corrupt, undemocratic, and contrary to the principles of academic free enquiry and intellectual rigor.
Factories of consent
Many incorrectly imagine US college campuses as hotbeds of radical thought. In fact, the academy, especially over the past fifty years, has become largely a site for manufacturing intellectual passivity and political reaction. As historian Henry Giroux has written:
“Turning its back on the public good, the academy has largely opened its doors to serving private and governmental interests and in doing so has compromised its role as a democratic public sphere. In keeping with the progressive impoverishment of politics and public life over the past two decades, the university is increasingly being corporatized, militarized and dummified, transformed into a training ground for corporate, military, and right-wing values rather than a public sphere in which youth can become the critical citizens and democratic agents necessary to nourish a socially responsible future. Strapped for money and increasingly defined in the language of a militarized and corporate culture, many universities are now part of an unholy alliance that largely serves the national security state and the business policies of transnational corporations while decoupling all aspects of academic knowledge production from democratic values and projects.”
The transformation of the academy into a factory for capitalist propaganda has been facilitated by a growing legion of technocrats and administrators who are accountable neither to faculty, nor to students, nor to their surrounding communities, nor to accepted standards of scholarship and pedagogy. It is not surprising, for example, that the incoming president of OSU, Walter "Ted" Carter Jr., has no credentials whatsoever as a professional scholar or researcher, but instead built his career in the military as a naval aviator who “flew 125 combat missions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Bosnia, and Kosovo” according to OSU’s Web site.
Weaponizing “civility”
Again, academic attacks on the freedoms of Palestinians and their supporters are nothing new. Most notoriously, in 2014, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) revoked the tenured faculty position of recent hire Steven Salaita after donors and Board of Trustees members objected to his tweets critical of Zionist militarism. Although administrators had assigned Salaita two courses, an office, and an email account, UIUC Chancellor Phyllis Wise informed him of his termination a mere two weeks before the start of the Fall 2014 semester. Salaita was dismissed over the vigorous objections of the academic units involved, along with outrage from the international academic community, and in open violation of the University’s own policies and the standards of faculty governance. As with the CORS suspension, the so-called unhiring of Salita had no academic legitimacy. Salaita was fired, in clear violation of the standards of academic freedom and the putative mission of the academy, to silence his political views, which ran counter to those of the bourgeois oligarchs on the Board of Trustees and their bureaucratic henchmen in the UIUC administration. Rather than fostering debate, intellectual rigor, and the pursuit of knowledge, the UIUC Board of Trustees and their agent Wise acted in corrupt defense of their own power and influence, and to soothe the feelings of wealthy donors and Zionist parents. As with the CORS suspension, the anodyne and bourgeois ideal of “civility” trumped clear reason and the right to seek objective and verifiable truth. Scholar Dana L. Cloud has pointed out that the rhetoric of civility on college campuses is almost always deployed to silence any speech that challenges, however obliquely, the political power of the administrators themselves. Moreover, as Cloud writes,
“[W]idespread investment in civility can happen only when an elite has more or less convinced a nation's people that they share the economic and political interests of their rulers. When antagonism erupts in a time of crisis or controversy, that fiction is potentially disabled. Then the guns come out. The rhetoric of the open hand is replaced by the rhetoric of the closed fist.”
The Salaita case confirms that, in the case of Palestine, there can be no modus vivendi between those who fight for the liberation of Palestine and the bourgeois ideologues and capitalist technicians who run higher education. As Salaita himself has written,
“Siding with Israel is ultimately about political ambition, conformity, establishment bona-fides, state power—in other words, maintaining the status quo. It’s about keeping power consolidated among the elite. It’s about not setting the terrible precedent of allowing the colonized a say in their own futures.”
The cause of Palestine is the cause of the world
Cincinnati Socialists insists that the current uprising among the Palestinian people is a world-historical event of global importance. It has become a central, if not the central, front in planetary class struggle. We reject Zionism in toto and call for a democratic and socialist Palestine, welcoming to Muslims, Jews, and Christians, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. We commend the millions of young people, workers, and members of oppressed nationalities who have taken to the streets in support of Palestine and call on all communist, socialist, and Marxist organizations, along with all labor and Civil Rights activists, to join them. We stand in unconditional support of CORS here in Ohio, and JVP and SJP nationwide, and ask others to follow suit. We demand an end to the technocratic, imperialist, neoliberal academy and call for a democratic university dedicated to human progress and accountable to the people. Finally, we say to all students, education workers, and intellectuals—along with all the people of the world—that we have nothing but our chains to lose, and a socialist world to win.