From the Empirical Archives: Three Kinds of Soldiers by Randall Auxier

Three Kinds of Soldiers

Randall Auxier

Originally published in the November 2012 issue of Empirical

We all collect experiences. They pile up like garage sale fare, and even if one man’s treasure is probably another’s trash, still we love to rummage. One thing always arrests me when I’m pawing through other people’s discards. It’s the pictures of soldiers. Somehow soldiers finally become the pictures they leave behind, whether or not they die young. To have been a soldier in time of war is always to be a soldier of that time, of that conflict. No other image has this kind of presence. Being an Olympian comes close, perhaps, but Olympians compete and fade. Astronauts are set apart, like the legendary explorers. These sorts of people also do something “ultimate,” but you don’t find them on every block. Soldiers dress, pose, and leave their souls inside the pictures. 

And then they kill and die on command. 

Their officers give those orders. Officers are interesting creatures, and pictures of officers don’t seem to end up in the garage sales and antique stores. In one corner of my mental garage is an untidy pile of past conversations with military officers. My first was a retired intelligence officer, fresh from the war in Vietnam who became a teacher in the Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps at my high school. The JROTC course had been required in the city school system shortly before my time, but by 1977 it was an ever less popular substitute for PE. That officer did not care for my attitude, and I now see how reasonable his opinion was. Thinking back, I don’t care for it either. But even if he wasn’t interested in being kind, he wasn’t unfair. Age nearly always tolerates youth. It’s a token of contrition we lay at the feet of our former selves.

The rest of that heap holds images and sound clips of other officers, including those who came through the graduate school I attended. There was a professor in our department who specialized in military ethics. Unfortunately, that’s an uncommon niche, so the US military (along with some other allied nations) often sent their promising young officers to our school for graduate education. I knew one Korean and two American officers during my four years there, all of whom went on to distinguished careers as professors and soldiers, and that is also a pretty scarce sort of person, the officer-professor.

One of these officers did not survive the war in Iraq. I had not seen or heard from Ted Westhusing for many years, but I followed his career. I never knew a more determined, even fierce, individual. I reach for comparisons and find none. One of his former professors compared Ted to the infamous Colonel Kurtz of Apocalypse Now, but that seems extreme to me. Yet, he was utterly uncompromising and inflexible, closed minded but very smart and not judgmental. Ted was also an intellectual and he was gentle where gentleness was appropriate. He was a captain when I knew him, having come from an assignment as a company commander in the fabled 82nd Airborne Division. He was fluent in Russian, but the Cold War was coming to an end and West Point needed an ethics professor.

In time, Ted became that professor, writing a dissertation on honor and becoming a specialist in ancient Greek philosophy. Like every West Point professor, at least those who aren’t civilians, Ted volunteered for a turn in the second Gulf War. I suppose it is difficult to sit at home in safety while others risk their lives, at least if the military is your life. In June of 2005, with one month left in Iraq, (now) Colonel Theodore Westhusing, professor of ethics at the United States Military Academy at West Point, either killed himself or was murdered. The news was shocking, and he was, at that time, the highest-ranking officer to die in the conflict.

Historians will judge the second war in Iraq to have been unjust, unnecessary, unwise, and financially disastrous for the United States. Andrew Bacevich’s expert assessment in The Limits of Power will carry the interpretive day, if one can judge at this point. If the loyal military lifers and Republican faithful, like Bacevich, are convinced of the foolishness and injustice of that war, the rest of us will follow without much dissent. 

As documents gradually appear, widespread corruption (beyond the typical profiteering that comes with every war) will come to light. Some of the guilty will probably be punished. But as memories weaken and witnesses pass, as the world becomes absorbed in taking and making money, Ted Westhusing will become his picture. He must. Otherwise, for what purpose did he die? Many thousands of grieving families have no choice but to cling to those pictures. Can they share a historian’s judgment about the war? Can we? Gaze at the picture and say it was unjust, a waste?

The infamous manifesto of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) says that “we need to accept responsibility for America’s unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles.” That is the reason, if there is one, for Ted’s sacrifice. After all, these signatories are the ones who sent him to Iraq, although he found something other than a friendly situation when he arrived. Theirs is the language of American empire and perhaps empire is not wholly to be despised. Niccolo Machiavelli knew as much about empires as anyone in Western history, and with a thousand years of historical distance from the fall of Rome, he understood some things that world leaders in the present might still appreciate–and of course, he wrote the handbook for the PNAC cabal.

Machiavelli says there are three kinds of soldiers. There are those who serve their own nations for security, for peace, for advancement, and for glory. Call these “Soldiers of Honor.” We all know and admire them. Then there are “auxiliaries” who serve for reasons of overlapping interests, and we could call them “Soldiers of Circumstance.” And then there are mercenaries, who serve the power that can pay, and do so for reasons of their own. Obviously we call them “Soldiers of Fortune.” War has surely changed since the 14th century, but not in every respect. I look at the PNAC verbiage and I look at the picture of Ted. What sort of soldier was he?

The answer to that question explains his death, I believe, even if it does not tell us who pulled the trigger. There is no doubt how Ted saw himself. He was a Soldier of Honor, freely dedicating his life to the demands of his country. He believed he was a born warrior. Before he went to Iraq, he believed (and he argued) that the war was a “just war,” in the formal sense taught by his Roman Catholic Church and as historically defined by world consensus. When Ted’s former professor of ancient Greek suggested in an e-mail that he knew some soldiers who disagreed with the administration about the war, Ted demanded their names and units–I presume he planned to report them. His former teacher and friend declined to provide the information, and that ended all communication between them. 

That was Colonel Westhusing. Duty. Honor. Country.

I have come to believe that the work of soldiery requires what William James called “a certain blindness” in those who carry it out. To serve an unjust cause for the sake of duty, honor, or glory is a contradiction, an all too common one. Yet to presume to judge for oneself the justness of a cause when military order demands obedience, well, that cuts to the very heart of military ethics, does it not? When must the call of conscience interrupt the presumption of obedience? Officers, in particular, must know how to think without thinking, and to act on what they have thought about as if they hadn’t thought at all. That is part of what makes them so interesting.

Ted Westhusing trained officers, elite ones. Every cadet in his classroom was there for the sake of the country, and for the sake of honor. He taught them not tactics, not strategy, not logistics, and certainly not weapons. Professor Westhusing taught our future general officers (and that is what they were) the difference between right and wrong, from a military viewpoint. Perhaps no American soldier, indeed, no American citizen, knew more about that subject than Dr. Westhusing. For me, and for many others who know his story, when Ted died, the difference between right and wrong in that war died with him.

At a personal level, being surrounded by the most patriotic among America’s brightest and best, commanding their highest esteem and intellectual respect, as was Ted’s daily context, would surely have crystallized what was already inflexible in his mind. Honor was a matter of remaining on the side of right, and his country was honorable. Therefore his country was right.

There could be no dilemma of conscience once the decisions were made. It didn’t matter which commander in-chief made them. Dilemmas of conscience affect the Soldiers of Honor most deeply. Those soldiers have been easier to find in American military in the past than they are now. These days we draw citizens into military service by appealing to their aspirations for a better material future for themselves, individually.

Historically there have always been those who joined up to escape poverty, or the law, or even a bad love life. It’s nothing new. These Soldiers of Circumstance, however sincere their patriotism may be, don’t aim to sacrifice their lives. Valuing their future prospects brought them to sign the induction papers. These soldiers cannot be the backbone of any nation’s military force. They are, in Machiavelli’s words, auxiliary to those who serve for the higher reasons.

Yet, Ted believed that “in the minds of friend and foe alike, our army is, without a doubt, the best-trained, best-equipped, best-led, and most intelligent of any in our nation’s history. Our soldiers are recognized as the world’s finest.” I defer to his superior understanding of these matters.

Unfortunately, this is the same army that, in the judgment of Ted’s colleague, Colonel Andrew Bacevich (West Point, ’69, PhD Princeton), would be destroyed by Bush’s “immoral, illicit, and imprudent” preventive war, the same war Ted defended. No one ever promised that Soldiers of Honor would always agree. Two years after Ted’s death, Bacevich sacrificed a son to the same war, a young and idealistic first lieutenant who carried his father’s and grandfather’s honorable name. I wonder whether Ted would think Bacevich disloyal. He would not say so if he did, but if I could see only one debate in my adult life, I would like to see Westhusing and Bacevich make their cases for and against Operation Iraqi Freedom, but not until after Ted came home. But I don’t know if it was possible for Ted to come home after the mess he uncovered while attempting to serve his beloved nation.

Part of Bacevich’s objection to the war regarded the use of military power as an alternative to being fiscally responsible at home. His case is complex, but he did not believe it was a genuine war of liberation. The administration tipped its hand, calling it “Operation Iraqi Liberation” (or OIL) in the early days of the war. They might have called it any number of other things, but protecting the “vital interests” of American corporations was certainly on the list of reasons for the invasion. Even if it was a true war of “liberation,” our national troops became “auxiliaries,” one and all, to the national will of the Iraqi people and to the formation of the (initially non-existent) Iraqi Defense Force (IDF).

Ironically, Ted Westhusing was assigned to oversee the private military contractors USIS who were hired by the US government, and paid by you, the American taxpayer, to train the Iraqi Defense Force. The US military, along with its “coalition of the willing,” became uninvited auxiliaries to a non-existent national army. I wonder what Machiavelli would say about the wisdom of that. Further, the Bush administration hired mercenaries to raise and train that force, and then placed its leading expert on ethics and honor “in charge” of the mercenaries.

In a way, it makes sense. Put the ethicist, the guy you can really trust, where the violations might most likely occur. Admittedly, it would not be a comfortable role for a soldier who sees himself as dedicated wholly to the protection of the Homeland and to its people–not necessarily to its economic interests. But no one ever said the mission of such a soldier would be easy. So Ted arrived in Iraq in a dual consciousness that was soon to become a double bind, and finally a triple bind. Here was a soldier of honor asked to do the work of an auxiliary in-country, tasked with managing mercenaries.

Machiavelli notes that “auxilliaries may be excellent and useful soldiers for themselves, but are always hurtful to him who calls them in; for if they are defeated, he is undone, if victorious, he becomes their prisoner.” This was the dilemma of the IDF and the provisional government in Iraq. If the auxiliary forces are not invited by a legitimate power, and yet they also have no intention of annexing the territory to their own, the credulity of every thinking person becomes strained: if these are not simple invaders, what is their mission?

Thinking people can tolerate ambiguity.

“Flexible” people, those who are willing to see duty as something to be balanced with other interests, have an easier time with this sort of vagueness than those who place the value of honor ahead of their own lives. Professors are usually flexible, but not professors who are Soldiers of Honor, like Bacevich and Westhusing. For them, the war had to be either right or wrong. Interestingly, mercenaries are flexible in about the same way professors are. Ted found corruption, “money grubbers,” and he tried to report them. Such was his nature. He found a command chain that didn’t want to know about the abuses of his mercenaries. 

Mercenaries have a viewpoint too, but they are a little harder to locate in my sheltered world than Soldiers of Honor and Circumstance. I wanted to ask a mercenary about Ted’s story, so I found one. I will call him “Jack.” He is a thirty-six-year-old son of the heartland, a veteran of Operation Enduring Freedom (Afghanistan) and Operation Iraqi Freedom, and other actions, and a contractor for a private military company (other than USIS).

Jack did two tours in Iraq, including Fallujah and the Surge, and also serving under Ted’s immediate superior, an obscure Lieutenant General and former West Point professor who was then in command of operations in northern Iraq. His name was David Petraeus. Jack holds Petraeus in very high regard, and Jack knew of Ted Westhusing, but did not know him personally. As Jack said, “they would beam in the big brains for seminars and sessions. I’m sure I saw Westhusing there.”

I wanted to know whether Jack thought Ted was murdered. Jack warned me not to make assertions about it. “The current [Obama] administration doesn’t want these things to be known. They’ll come after you. You’ll be investigated. Your taxes will be audited. It’s better to stick with questions and speculations.” All right then; general questions about mercenaries for the mercenary (he doesn’t mind being called a mercenary). So I say, “Jack, don’t mercenaries pose a threat to civilians as well as to the Soldiers of Honor and Circumstance? They only care about money, not about people.”

“Not at all. You should look at the research of Ian Murphy. Private military companies are far less likely than UN troops to commit human rights violations. We are task-oriented and we are cheaper than doing things in house. We like well-defined missions with clear parameters. The few certainties we can get our hands on, we value that above everything else. What’s my target? Where, when, and how much collateral damage can be tolerated? We go in, we do the job, we get the fuck out. We do what we have to do to get what we know we need. It is diametrically opposed to the accepted mentality, but it is true. We get stigmatized as dirt-bags, but you won’t find anyone more idealistic than me.”

Like Ted, Jack feels he was simply born to be a warrior. “I tried to be an artist, I’ve tried other things. I am not good at those things. I have been a soldier since I was a child. It’s what I’ll always be. The volunteers who were in the Second Gulf War, they all wanted to be me–better pay, greater freedom. I eat what I want when I want. I do the job I agreed to do. They get those kids when they are young, when they don’t understand the world. I was seventeen when I joined and I didn’t understand what it was about. You get through it. The vast majority of mercenaries are vets; you should go through the interview. ‘Where have you been? What unit were you attached to? What are your thoughts about this or that weapon or tactic?’ If you haven’t been there, you’re not in. But one mistake as a mercenary and your career is over. You’ll never work again. But I do it for the sake of being here, with my kids. This is heaven.” He indicates a peaceful, sunny Midwestern day. “No one shoots at me here.” He smiles.

Jack has a very quick mind, great powers of recall, but for me, a conversation with him is like entering a parallel universe. But then, I haven’t worn the uniform. “You can’t stand on the laurels of your grandparents until you’ve put on the uniform yourself. You can’t claim their honor. If you haven’t taken fire for your ideas, you don’t know what your ideas are. People who haven’t been in the military think it’s complex. But it’s simple. Beans, bullets, and band-aids. You’ve got to have bread, you’ve got to have lead, and you’ve got to have meds. These are bad guys we go and get. I wish the world was different, but it’s not. You have to have people like me. Get me there, let me put steel on the target and get me out.” I wonder what Ted would say about Jack’s ideas about honor, and his ideas about ideas.

Jack says that the Soldiers of Circumstance and the Soldiers of Fortune work together surprisingly well. “But you can’t create the cohesion until the tension comes to a certain point. You won’t really have faith until you have nothing else left.” Jack’s picture is one in which the mercenaries have specialized skills, experience, and motivation, and they show the Soldiers of Circumstance what it means to be professionals.

Unlike the friction I imagined, Jack says there is mutual respect.

On the other hand, Jack holds the service contractors beneath contempt. Halliburton and other corporations who feed the military, who supply it with toilet seats and thumb-screws. “That’s where the waste is. That’s money for Dick Cheney.” Jack has no respect for either political party and identifies himself as a Libertarian and a supporter of Ron Paul. He’s one kind of soldier, an ancient kind of soldier. Ted Westhusing was given the task of managing people like Jack as they created a professional army from those who signed up for the job. I have no doubt that many of those Iraqi citizens were Soldiers of Honor, some were Soldiers of Circumstance, and some were Soldiers of Fortune. And when one considers the situation, could uninvited auxiliaries really teach honor to those whose homeland they were occupying? Would it not be more honest to have Soldiers of Fortune teach the Iraqi volunteers to be professionals?

This was not a matter of honor, after all, it was about survival, and the Soldier of Fortune is flexible about everything but that. If you were such a volunteer, would you want Jack or Ted to teach you the ropes? This viewpoint was unacceptable to Ted Westhusing, but David Petraeus seems to have understood it a little better. Ted felt unsupported. The one thing redacted from the suicide note Ted allegedly wrote was a name, with the following sentence reading “You are only interested in your career and provide no support to your staff.” Ted was on David Petraeus’s staff.

The Army ruled Ted’s death a suicide. Many people did not believe it. Before researching this, I did not. But I don’t see how he could come home. His own code would have obliged him to take what he had learned about corruption and waste all the way to the top. He would have had to testify against his superiors, and I think he would have had to admit that the war was unjust and dishonorable.

The suicide note that he either did or did not write said “death before dishonor.” That was the triple bind: Ted could not stay in Iraq and be dishonored, he could not come home and be dishonored, and he could not commit suicide and be dishonored. Maybe he didn’t take any of those courses. Maybe he did. But he was surely depressed. As his beloved wife said, “I’ll know what happened to Ted when I see him in heaven.”

Heaven. That’s the Midwestern United States on a sunny day, with your kids, isn’t it? Apparently the hierarchy at West Point disagreed with the Army’s findings too, since I think it is not the usual practice to bury such suicides on campus, where Colonel Theodore Westhusing rests among the honored dead, laid there with full military honors. David Petraeus left Iraq to attend the service. Michelle Westhusing says she wishes he hadn’t attended.

I know nothing about these matters, but it does seem to me that Petraeus has gotten the glory, and I know that Jack respects him. I don’t know what kind of soldier he was, but I do know he directs the CIA these days, and I feel that Niccolo would advise me that a wise man speaks carefully on such subjects.

Jack says that the US government made a Faustian bargain when it invaded Iraq. Machiavelli says that “he who holds his State by means of mercenary troops can never be solidly or securely seated. For such troops are disunited, ambitious, insubordinate, treacherous, insolent among friends, cowardly before foes, and without fear of God or faith with man; so that in peace you are plundered by them, in war by your enemies.” 

I think Ted would agree. When Jack saw this quote he said that there is a very real difference between the mercenaries of Machiavelli’s day and our own. And those who made the deal with the Devil, those who designed the Project for the New American Century, those who put Ted in the triple bind, those men certainly read The Prince. There was no way out of Iraq without putting officers in Ted’s position. Ted, and everything he stood for, was the price America paid for that dishonorable war. As his widow said, “Iraq killed Ted.” For me he has become his picture. It wasn’t worth it. I wish I could argue that point with him. Maybe in heaven.

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Picktures and Pieces 25: Tactic, Strategy, Philosophy

Tactic, Strategy, Philosophy

by Randall Auxier

Nonviolence. Just refraining from hitting somebody? Gandhi's original idea, ahimsa, had the same problem. It's called a "privative" term --the absence of something that might have occurred. But Gandhi made it clear that he meant something positive by "nonviolence." It's supposed to designate a kindness and respect for others and for oneself, a certain power of the soul by which the violence and oppression we experience can be transformed into a force for good. Not to trivialize it, but say, for example, someone cuts you off on the expressway. You feel a surge of energy in your body. You snarl, you want to make a certain gesture, right? You are empowered. Nonviolence is the power to take that energy and channel it into constructive action. Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., believed that this power could create peace where violent responses never could.

Picktures and Pieces 24: Bus 109

Bus 109

by Randall Auxier

To tell the truth, I don't remember the bus number. I thought I would never forget it. But I chose 109 because Kate Campbell's song by that name pretty well sums it up. It was a strange time to be a kid. (I speak from experience.) In the South, we tended to act --and to think-- like our parents. I don't know what they did in California or New Hampshire, but in Tennessee we learned to say "sir" and "ma'am" in addressing all (white) adults. Some of us were taught to say that to black adults as well. Some of us used the "n" word; some of us were told never, ever to say it. By accident of birth, I was in the latter group. Many of my white friends were in the former group.

Picktures and Pieces 22: Conversion(s)

Conversion(s)

by Randall Auxier

Here is a smiling Malcolm X. Many think of him as the angriest black man ever, and the most famous photographs of him show intensity, conviction, defiance, an iron will. Yet, those who knew him well always talked about his sense of humor, his charm, his easy manner. Men and women of great personal power often seem contradictory to more ordinary folks. It isn’t surprising. The same exasperating spread of stories is told about Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Gandhi, Joan of Arc. Malcolm X surely belongs in such company, historically, and we aren’t likely to get any final clarity on such extraordinary people.

Picktures and Pieces 21: True Believers

True Believers

by Randall Auxier

To dangle at the end of a tether seems extreme. But these devout fellows don't worry about the judgments of other people. What calls human beings away from comfort to freely chosen suffering can't be fully explained. It's for those who can discern a reality that exceeds our everyday senses, but also pervades all that we see, hear, feel. There is an aesthetic quality to this religious pull, but the senses are subordinated as the pain becomes a conduit of connection between those who find themselves confined in a human body and those intelligences not so cramped.

Picktures and Pieces 19: Indian Givers

Indian Givers

by Randall Auxier

When I was a kid, my schoolmates used the phrase "indian giver" as a slur against anyone who gave something away but then wanted it back. I probably said it myself. None of us knew any Indians and I don't know where we got this phrase --probably from television. The stupidity, racism and injustice of this verbal tick needs no further analysis. But the context that creates such slurs is worth pondering. Every image is reversed when you see it in a mirror, and TV of that time reflected the dominant culture back to itself in two dimensions. When the white-dominated culture tried to grasp the customs of native peoples, and when the values expressed in those customs were strange, the white people overlaid their own values and fears on what they saw. Distortions abounded and spread.

Picktures and Pieces 18: The Heart in the Dark

The Heart in the Dark

by Randall Auxier

A bleeding heart liberal. That's what Richard Henry Pratt was. At this late date it doesn't matter whether believed "white civilization" was superior to other ways of life, or whether he just saw the inevitability of its march. Either way he stood on the advancing edge of a world that would have no place for these children unless somebody did something. The problem of the good heart in the dark isn't what it foresees, or why, but what it believes must be done. Pratt believed that the ancient connections these children carried around within themselves had to be severed, for their own good, of course.

Picktures and Pieces 17: Isn't It Rich?

Isn't It Rich?

by Randall Auxier

This fellow stands out in a crowd. I'll bet he wants it that way. Most of us would be unable to connect with him. Say, you and me are having coffee and he wanders into the Starbucks. Are we allowed to stare? Surely the answer is "yes, you may even gawk." A person who is made uncomfortable by a few stares does not work this hard to attract them. Our question to him and to ourselves is: "Dude?"

Picktures and Pieces 16: Belly Up Boys!

Belly Up Boys!

by Gary L. Herstein, Guest Blogger 

Let me tell you a story.
Well, first, let me explain why I want to tell you a story.

Science (for example) can give us a pretty compelling account about what and how things are, employing the tools of logical coherence and empirical adequacy. However, once we've gained some sense of what and how things are, we've yet to determine what we should do about them or why we should care. For that we need a different kind of understanding, not just logic and facts. We need a convincing story. So let me tell you a story about why I want to tell you a story. I hope you’re convinced.

Picktures and Pieces 15: The Land of the Free

Picktures and Piece 15: The Land of the Free

by Randall Auxier

The stray apostrophe on this sign doesn’t surprise me. No one likes a grammar snob, but I don’t like this sign. It comes from “Goldwater country,” now world famous for its inhospitality. The meaning of “white” is a moving target. With so many Italians arriving a hundred years ago, they somehow ceased being “white,” as did the Irish in the 19th century. Both groups are "white" again, now, it appears. In the great Southwest, evidently “white” includes people who are ethnically Jewish, like Barry Goldwater, but not people from Spain or Mexicans, even Mexicans of German parentage, I suppose.

Goldwater said: “The Mexican is industrious, kind and a very warm family man whose hogar (hearth) is his citadel, his castle and his life. A Mexican is particularly devoted to his country and will defend it against any slur or attack. Mexicans are loyal and true friends whose word becomes their bond. One doesn’t find all of these attributes reflected in any one face, but often a reflection of the dignity born of them comes through.” He had many Mexican friends, and many Native American friends, and his friends saw in him an old-fashioned kind of integrity they could recognize, even when they differed with his opinions. His word was his bond and his hospitality was not extended for personal gain.

The Goldwater version of the Republican Party was supposed to shun racism and bigotry of all kinds, and it would not cozy up to religious fundamentalists. His party would actually cut government programs to prevent the encroaching menace of executive power. It would stay out of education because the Constitution does not authorize such intervention. (This is true. It really doesn’t.) And Goldwater’s Republican Party would pass laws in accordance with a strict interpretation of that document.

Barry’s pipe dream. He was repeating what James Madison said in Federalist 10 and 44. Each branch of government to tries to expand its own power at the expense of the others. There is excellent evidence for this observation, and not just among governmental entities. Look at corporations, universities and schools, and pretty much any complex social structure. To prevent the problem, Goldwater wanted a civil right defined as a right already protected by law, as distinct from natural rights or human rights. He was willing to defend whatever rights the legislature specified, if they were in keeping with the Constitution. Many Libertarians take this view, but Republicans and Democrats are both heavily disposed to exercise executive power broadly and to legislate without explicit reference to the Constitution.

Not many people know that Goldwater was a daring pilot, one of the few to fly the U2 spy plane. He was inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame in 1982, three years after Neil Armstrong (ironically, Lyndon Johnson signed the law creating that institution). Goldwater eventually retired as a major general from the Air Force Reserves. But when he became chief of staff of the Arizona Air National Guard, in 1947, one of his first acts was to desegregate the unit. He insisted on it. His crews came in all shades. But that was the military, not a private business. You can’t make private citizens nonracist through government intervention, he believed.

Goldwater was soundly defeated in 1964, carrying only his home state of Arizona and the five most reactionary, segregationist states in the deep South. He won the latter because he voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act. I doubt the white citizens of those Southern states (and they were the ones voting, make no mistake–the Voting Rights Act passed the next year) understood Goldwater’s position on the bill. I wonder whether Goldwater would have actually voted for the Voting Rights Act. He was not a member of the Senate when it came up.

The stated reason for Goldwater’s opposition to the Civil Rights Act had nothing to do with his views about desegregation. He had some integrationist credentials in his past, after all. But he wouldn’t pass a law, federal, state or local, to make this benighted fool remove that sign from his window or change his business practices. Goldwater’s solution to that problem? Don’t eat there, or anywhere that bigotry reigns. He served everyone at his family's department store. That is the solution, for “a free people,” as he understood that concept. Any government that can force this business owner to do things differently cannot be trusted to refrain from deeper incursions into the freedoms of its citizens.

I struggle with this. I admire the Civil Rights Movement, about as much as I admire anything. I don’t believe things would have changed without the law. Things needed to change. I am also aware that many of the negative effects of integration Malcolm X predicted have come true. Like anything human, desegregation involved trade-offs. And there has been creeping executive authority: Cheney’s “unitary executive,” and so on. We all want the government to act when it is doing what we think ought to be done, but then we cry foul when government uses the same kind of authority to do what we don’t favor. Each side argues that freedom is being taken away. Do we or don’t we agree on what freedom is?

I think we don’t. Just as there is an old fashioned and a new fangled version of integrity, there is an old version of freedom that says people are free when they are left alone, and a younger version that says unless all are free, no one truly is. These are individualists arguing with communitarians. Communitarian freedom favors using governmental power to secure a level playing field, while the individualists say that if you use governmental power in that way, pretty soon no one will be free.

There are good citizens on both sides, but the old fashioned integrity is what makes them so. The new integrity, like everything that has fear as its seed, puts down no deep roots in history or experience. It isn’t a perennial. You have to plant fear over and over. It grows mainly in the shade and isn’t indigenous to human nature. Goldwater may have lost an election because of it, because people thought he would blow up the world, or because they feared he was a racist, or because they were afraid of having three presidents in just over a year.

Goldwater grumpily put up with being feared, but he didn’t think anyone needed to be afraid of that sign in the window. He said the biggest mistake he ever made wasn’t his vote on the Civil Rights Act, or his acceptance speech, it was his decision not to buy this bar in Phoenix. We will pick up next time with that, in the final entry on Goldwater.

Picktures and Pieces 14: A Giant Leap

A Giant Leap

by Randall Auxier

There was no internet, needless to say. That gave the US government a kind of control over images that we can barely imagine today. No one fully understood the power back then. I like watching the characters in Mad Men as they gradually discover what images can do when disseminated throughout an affluent mass culture. The government seems to have had some early inklings of the power invested in these media, but not enough to keep it off television when Bull Connor’s dogs and fire hoses were turned on the children of Birmingham. And they failed to understand the likely effects on young people of watching a war on television, the war they would be expected to fight. They didn't understand that by 1968 Walter Cronkite was more credible than any government.

But when it came to the moon shot, the government got the memo. They knew what message they wanted to send. Here is Neil Armstrong, American pioneer. He was carefully chosen by his government to exemplify everything noble, decent, brave, brilliant, adventurous, and most of all independent in the “American spirit.” He was chosen because he knew how to keep his mouth shut, too. He managed to do that until he was near the end of his life, when he really felt he had to speak out against President Obama’s plan to privatize the space program. No one ever doubted Armstrong was a Republican, but to have the American Right criticizing the Left for privatizing a government program is ironic, to say the least. Pictured also, looming upper left, is our technological achievement, and center stage, bathed in pure white light, is the flag. It looks interestingly windblown considering the complete absence of wind on the moon--an indication of foresight more likely than fraud, I think; they must have consulted Don Draper on this point.

The space programs of the super-powers struck fear into the hearts of everyone, pretty much, but the fear was tinged with hope and awe. Apart from the military advantages that are too scary to think about, there was the race to see whether the “loyalty of free men” or “Soviet class consciousness” would prevail in this greatest of all races –the race for the meaning of freedom. Nothing in human history comes close to this contest for the meaning of freedom. That, friends and neighbors, was the giant leap. Any sensible person knows that winning or losing the space race isn’t proof that one form of government is superior to another, but there is something inexorable in the symbol above, something that cannot be reasoned away. Ecce homo. It is a fact. Either that picture would exist or a different one with a very different meaning, featuring a different flag. I don’t know how the Soviet Union would have chosen to present the moment, but I’m sure they thought about it. A lot. They might even have gotten the windblown effect, although I'm guessing not. That seems like an American touch to me.

No one disagreed with the Soviets about the meaning of freedom more profoundly than Barry Goldwater. He prophesied their downfall in his famous acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in 1964, saying: “I can see and I suggest that all thoughtful men must contemplate the flowering of an Atlantic civilization, the whole world of Europe unified and free, trading openly across its borders, communicating openly across the world.” That seems to have happened. But Goldwater added: “This is a goal far, far more meaningful than a moon shot.”

Hmmm. Is it?

I was a kid and too young to understand all this when it was happening, but memory is a tricky companion in the best of us. It seems to me now that the moon shot won the Cold War, not in fact but in the more important arena of hearts and minds. The rest was not easy, but the Soviet image, and hence also its social philosophy, never recovered from this picture. It is so visceral and powerful that it portends, indeed, partly causes one course of history instead of another. The moon shot was the symbol of the giant leap, but it was not the leap itself. Goldwater missed this one. I think about how much Goldwater and JFK really had in common and I don't wonder that the rest of the world cannot distinguish our Democrats from our Republicans. Goldwater criticized the war in Viet Nam that night, which had not been formally declared and hadn’t had a chance to become entrenched in the conservative mind. He blamed all of our wars on Democrats, which, up until Nixon bombed Cambodia, seems to have been supported by all of history. The story is rather different now, but it doesn’t look like anyone’s hands are clean.

Some people say that Goldwater lost the election that night and also initiated our present culture wars. Others say that Bill Moyers famous TV ad showing a little girl who is about to be vaporized by a nuclear explosion is what defeated him. Some say it was his association with segregationists. I think Crispin Sartwell makes an interesting point when he suggests that Goldwater knew the nation would not accept a third president in the space of one year. Kennedy’s assassination made it impossible for anyone but Johnson to win that election. Seeing this as the reality of things, Goldwater decided to do what he really wanted to do, which was speak his mind as fully as completely as he could.

Sartwell, an anarchist of the libertarian stripe, admits that he admires Goldwater’s “integrity,” and by this he means that we (the public) could believe that Goldwater believed what he was saying, whether we agreed with him or not. And he may have been the last politician on the national stage about whom we could feel certain of that. Somehow, after the 1964 election, things changed. Maybe the Bill Moyers ad was the turning point, the moment when the parties realized that persuading people to vote against the candidate they feared was better strategy than appealing to hopes, aspirations, or dreams of the MLK fabric.

There was an old fashioned sense of integrity: we stick with who we are, with what we know, with our own experience, learning, roots and convictions, even if it costs us friends, elections, money, or even our freedom and our lives. That idea of integrity seems completely absent from public and civic life today. It may be dying in private life too. I have been disappointed, as I have aged, at the willingness of people I thought were good to put self-interest ahead of truth, or simply to be unable to see the difference.

Today, integrity seems to be defined by the fear that we will be “called out” about who we really are, that the world may learn the truth about us. Integrity today only means that our enemies can’t dig up any dirt on us and the stuff they fabricate doesn’t stick. No one seems to believe that anyone would hold to truth if it means great sacrifice. But the fear of being “called out” is a pretty flimsy line of defense for one’s character. If we are morally decent because we fear the censure of others, can anyone’s character survive the fickleness of collective emotion? Most of all, whose character can hold up when mass fear is driving opinion? If anyone can hold firm, it won’t be due to the new-fangled sort of integrity. I want to look next at the issue of civil rights from this pivotal moment in US history. So much of what we face today was set in motion between October of 1962 and November of 1964.

Picktures and Pieces 13: Culture Wars, Old and New

Culture Wars, Old and New

by Randall Auxier

I lived in Oklahoma for some years, and learned to be suspicious of pictures like this one. Friends there helped me begin to grasp the depths of my own unconscious racism. One day I was walking with a colleague and our Dean to the lunchroom. We were discussing campus politics and I made the remark “it’s time to circle up the wagons.” After a pause, my colleague, a member of the Choctaw tribe, remarked, with a half smile, “yes, there must be some wild savages out there.” I wanted to crawl under a rock.

This stoic looking fellow was named Charlie Potato. The picture was taken in 1938 by Barry Goldwater. Yes, that Barry Goldwater. He was a very good photographer–as my friend Crispin Sartwell says, he’s no Ansel Adams, but he’s very good. You should visit his photography site. When you do, you will see that Goldwater regarded this as one of the most successful of his photographs, and it is certainly the most famous. The photo is now called “The Navajo,” but it was originally called “Charlie Potato.” The subject himself wanted the title changed. Goldwater obliged. I like the original title better, and so did Goldwater, who didn’t like stereotypes. Speaking of an equally rugged looking photo of a Mexican friend, he said: “There is no more typical Mexican face than there is a typical face of any other people.”

Whatever Goldwater was doing here, it wasn’t supposed to be about the “Noble Savage” or the “Stoic Indian.” He was sensitive to that side of the question, but, like my thoughtless remark about the wagons, perhaps he overlooked some crucial unintended information conveyed by his image. Of Charlie Potato he wrote: “the dignity of the ancient citizens of Arizona shows clearly in the features of this man.” That seems to contradict what he said above, but there is a difference. It isn’t the face as an example of the race or the tribe, it is the dignity of a group of citizens that Goldwater sees in his features. Is he referring to bone structure and cranial capacity? I don’t think so. Goldwater intends us to see, and himself only sees, a citizen who has worked all his life, someone who is representative of the dignity of others who work in the heat for their living.

That is a thin line, isn’t it? The racial generalization compared with the intended meaning. The racial generalization might be defended by some, since some generalizations may not be automatically racist. We are hyper-sensitive to it these days. It's the culture wars. Try to forget, if you can, who took the picture and attempted to convey his intention. It is the very same man who initiated the present culture wars. “Extremism in pursuit of liberty is no vice; moderation in defense of justice is no virtue.” That’s what he said. But what he meant in practice is that government shall not be used to protect this man’s civil rights, because given the authority to do that, government will also have the authority to deprive him of those rights.

In my last post I pointed out that Victor Hugo, and indeed, the anarchist Voltairine de Cleyre, have more in common with Goldwater than with radicals of Emma Goldman’s stripe. Unlike her, these strange bedfellows believe, with heart, mind, soul and strength, that the individual is both the most basic unit of social reality and that its liberation is the meaning of history. And they are all willing to kill (and die) for that idea. Goldwater looks at Charlie Potato and sees an individual he can respect, and a citizen, and a person whose work is etched into his physiognomy. It is a powerful story, quite appealing when defended by de Cleyre, based on unselfishness rather than narcissism (Barry and Victor needed a few hours with de Cleyre).

But they are not conscious of everything they could learn. I am not sure what my Choctaw friend would say about this image (and I may get a chance to learn, if he sees this post), but I think it is good to balance this image against the sobering reminder of the troubled history between the Navajo and the Hopi. I don’t dare recount the story as if I had scholarly understanding, let alone genuine cultural understanding. I have read that the Hopi have always been agrarian. The Navajo have always been herders. These are incompatible ways of life. The story of the Navajo and the Hopi looks a good deal like the Bible, wherever Canaanites and Hebrews had land disputes, and with similar results (it doesn't pay to be a Canaanite). The history of the range wars in the US recapitulates this same history, except the herders eventually lost. It has happened ten thousand times in ten thousand places over the last ten thousand years. Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel devotes fair attention to it.

This is the primal culture war. Until recently the agrarians almost never prevailed. Prior to modern times, agrarians were physically smaller and did not usually cultivate the arts of war. They defended themselves when necessary, but determined invaders almost always won. Agrarians are not mobile and they need a lot of land--too much to defend. Herders are mobile. The politics, religion, ethos and outlook of these two groups are profoundly incompatible. Agrarians tend to be communitarian and to favor customs over formal organization. Their religions are about fertility and the earth. Herding peoples tend to have very strict rules that lead to frequent and violent conflicts within and without the group. One result of the herding ethos has been, over several millennia, the creation of individuality. Their God is an individual with a powerful will and, generally speaking, a plan.

Barry Goldwater was no agrarian. But he respected hard work, and this is something that good people from both cultures generally agree upon. The ground of dignity is hard work. If Goldwater, Charlie Potato, and the communal Hopis have something in common, it probably grows from hard work. But Goldwater could not and would not recognize that the communists and socialists he despised also believed in hard work, at least as ardently as he did. They do disagree on what motivates people to work hard. For Goldwater, it is only the lash and the lure, the ignominy of failure and the rewards that go with success. For his opponents, what makes work dignified is precisely because we choose it freely. Those who will not work do not respect themselves, according to Goldwater, but for his communitarian counterparts, those who will not work fail to respect anyone.

If you were expecting a suggested resolution to these culture wars in a blog post, then you are of a hopeful nature. The individual and the community may always exist in tension. My own moral feelings are agrarian. I merely tolerate individualism, at the visceral level. I do not know how that sort of thing happens, since my family, like most I think, has both temperaments within it. But I will say that if ever I saw “the individual” romanticized, I see it more in this picture of Neil Armstrong than the one of Charlie Potato. I want to talk about this next.

From the Empirical Archives: A New Class Consciousness

A New Class Consciousness:

Labor Strife and the Future of the University

Randall Auxier

Southern Illinois University, Carbondale PHOTO: Michael Steinbach

Originally published in the September 2012 issue of Empirical

They don’t make bosses like they used to. Back in the day, you could at least count on your boss to know what was in his own interest. As the USA unionized, from the 1870s to the 1930s, the class of people who fought against the unions was a 1% of self-made millionaires, savvy and ruthless. They believed (and not without reason) that nature favored them for a fitting survival, and that, in turn, entitled them to wield power. Were they anti-democratic? Not in the least. As they understood it, democracy meant that those who excel by wit and sweat are rewarded with, well, whatever they want. A visit to the vacation homes they built in places like Newport provides a sense of what they wanted. They all wanted to be country squires who dressed for dinner.

Fast forward a hundred years and so much has changed. The corporate shark of century number twenty-one is no captain of industry. And as much as it might seem otherwise, government is not nearly as much in the thrall of corporations as it was when, for example, J.P. Morgan personally financed our national debt to prevent default (1893) and bailed out Wall Street (1907). Moving in the circles of privilege then really did involve smoky backrooms and unmarked envelopes. Today’s rise to power is only partly a matter of access and pedigree. There is also a mind-numbing conformity of speech and dress, along with a willingness to force top-down thinking on the little people. Anyone with those characteristics and a “plan” for re-organizing the business to cut labor costs can succeed.

Back when Americans actually manufactured products for markets, the result of an “innovation” was more palpable: quality was maintained while costs were cut, resulting in lower prices and a competitive edge. But when the “product” is a service, as it is today, it isn’t easy to determine right away whether quality has been maintained, and prices can rise even when costs are cut. Education in the US is an example of one such service, and public sector services in general is the category that came to national attention due to the draconian decrees of Wisconsin governor, Scott Walker. The strife in Wisconsin is symbolic of a full-court press on labor, whether organized or not, that is happening nation-wide, led by Walker and Governors Snyder of Michigan, Corbett of Pennsylvania, and Brewer of Arizona. In these cases, the “industry” is service and the “captain” is a Governor. This is new territory for labor. They don’t send Pinkertons with clubs, they just send pink-slips.

Protest in Carbondale, Illinois PHOTO: Aaron Veenstra

In a quiet little corner of rural Illinois, a community got a chance to explore this new territory last year. I should alert you that the community is mine and that I was no detached observer. I cannot bring you an account that is “fair and balanced,” any more than can the network whose slogan I mock. I have been a negotiator for my union for a half-dozen years. But my union isn’t your classic Hoffa-headbusting closed shop. It is the Faculty Association of Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Membership is voluntary and hovers around 50% of those eligible to join, but we do see spikes when the administration is being especially naughty. In November of 2011, the faculty was driven to strike for the first time. I was on the inside of all that. I don’t want to tell you what that was like, but rather what I think I know now that I didn’t know before.

First, there are forces that were beyond anyone’s control. The baby boomers have been unwilling to pay for the higher education system their parents and grand-parents built. That is true all over the country, and in all fairness, perhaps the idea has run its course. My story is typical. My own grandparents never finished high school but vowed that their children would. They did, and the younger ones, with help from elder siblings and scholarships, managed to go to college. Then, my parents’ generation provided for every need and most wants for their children, the boomers, and happily poured their considerable taxes into creating a system of higher education unequaled in the world, and indeed, in the history of the world. Those lucky kids partook and became the best, most widely, most highly educated generation of all times and peoples. We had ours. But, perhaps we have not appreciated the sacrifices that made that possible.

Such a service provided to so many isn’t cheap. The collective will no longer exists to pay for it. Smart public universities, like the University of Colorado in Boulder or Grand Valley State in western Michigan began to wean themselves from the public dole long ago, when the writing was on the wall but few were willing to read it. When things later crashed in Michigan and the public sector was squeezed until it bled, GVSU was creating new positions and hiring to serve its growing enrollment. At the time of the 2008 crash, Boulder’s total support from state budget was only about 8% of its annual revenues. When funding from the state was cut in half, it was a relatively minor and temporary annoyance. Compare that to Governor Corbett’s 2010 budget that slashed state funding to public universities in Pennsylvania by half, leading to layoffs and rumors of layoffs in places like East Stroudsberg and West Chester, and Kutztown, Altoona, Slippery Rock, and two dozen other towns.

My university did not have the foresight to take the reins of its own financial destiny, and actually very few public universities did. We remained dependent on tax money, which meant we were beholden to the good offices of the people of Illinois, and to their increasingly conservative baby- boomer representatives. As belts tightened around the country, and as academic leadership came increasingly to be drawn from semi-mindless climbers of the growing corporate culture (a sickness that had been seeping into the universities since the Reagan era), confrontation between the teachers and their masters became inevitable. There will be more of this in the near future, not less. But many teachers, especially college professors, have some difficulty seeing themselves as “labor,” even when they have no trouble in recognizing their administrators, school boards, and varying boards of regents and trustees as classic examples of management. What solidarity can we claim with people who, well, work for a living?

Many have been shocked in recent weeks as news became public about discussions within the Board of Visitors of the University of Virginia as they salivated at the potential savings in labor costs from having UVa students simply complete free on-line and distance courses offered by Harvard and M.I.T., retaining only those programs characteristic of UVa and the handful of professors who teach them. The context of their deliberations was an article in the Wall Street Journal, the essence of which is contained in the following lines:

[C]olleges and universities, whatever their status, do not need to put a professor in every classroom. One Nobel laureate can literally teach a million students, Protest in Carbondale, Illinois and for a very reasonable tuition price. Online education will lead to the substitution of technology (which is cheap) for labor (which is expensive)—as has happened in every other industry—making schools much more productive. (“Chubb and Moe: Higher Education’s Online Revolution,” May 30, 2012)

University of Virginia PHOTO: Phil Roeder

Finding UVa’s President, Teresa Sullivan, unwilling to comply with plans to have the students of that elite school take their classes on-line, the Board of Visitors ousted her. According to the Washington Post ( Jenna Johnson, Susan Svrluga and Laura Vozzella, June 21, 2012), board chair Helen Dragas said that “she and her supporters on the board were concerned that Sullivan lacked a long-range plan to find new revenue to supplant lost state subsidies.” Dragas gave ten reasons for the decision, most of which were factually false, according to the Post article. The firing of a sensible defender of public higher education triggered widespread protests, and the Board of Visitors backed down after two weeks of chaos and recriminations on campus. 

In the end, the dispute came down to what was described in the Post (Jenna Johnson, Anita Kumar and Daniel de Vise, June 26, 2012) as a “philosophical difference.” Sullivan sought to bring change to the university from the ground up, through a process of building consensus and empowering individual academic units. Dragas and her allies thought Sullivan was moving far too slowly in an economic climate that demanded swift and decisive action.

Unhappily though, the Board of Visitors is not wrong about what is happening to higher education, and they are not wrong to demand that UVa should be on the cutting edge of it. The enthusiasm for these changes is also defensible. As they said in the now infamous editorial, some parts of an elite education will now be available globally, and they faithfully report that the sponsoring institutions (Harvard, M.I.T, and Stanford) are currently uncertain of how their free programs will generate revenues, but then, no one was sure of how Google or YouTube would be viable businesses either, but these things have a way of being progressively worked out, especially by young people, who have the ingenuity to find the way through. It seems clear to me that advertising will eventually be sold somewhere, by someone. Where the Board of Visitors erred was in underestimating how old-fashioned its students and employees were.

But here is an uncomfortable fact: libraries are no longer book depositories, classrooms are no longer intimate spaces of communication mediated by only slate and chalk, and education is no more a hallowed human endeavor for those fortunate enough to get it. The mercenary and mass-market character of contemporary education is the natural expression of the values of our global society. The teacher is, therefore, not a professional, but a kind of technical laborer whose job is to move information from the databases into the skillsets of the students. There is precious little demand for non-technical thinking, and factual knowledge is available to anyone who can use Google. A teacher does not need to carry around a great body of knowledge in the coming world. This is where we are, whether we like it or not. This is what we built. It was our choice. The question it begs: “Is this really what we want?” The resounding answer from our baby-boomers is “yes, that is what we want.” President Teresa Sullivan didn’t get the memo, but she will land on her feet. If the UVa Board doesn’t come around to her way of thinking, some other old-fashioned southern university will quickly snap her up.

Because UVa is an important institution in American higher education and my own institution is a third-tier also-ran, our labor struggles at SIUC have gone under the national radar (and it didn’t help that our strike occurred at the same time the ugly and sensational story broke about child molester Jerry Sandusky from Penn State). Our labor troubles have a long history, beginning when a previous SIUC administration outright fired over a hundred cantankerous (liberal) faculty members in the early 1970s. Subsequent lawsuits led to their reinstatement. The story is well told in Richard Russo’s thinly fictionalized novel Straight Man. Russo was the chair of the English Department at SIUC when that meltdown occurred, and labor relations never really recovered.

University of Oregon PHOTO: Jeff Ozvold

I see SIUC as a coal mine canary when it comes to these matters. If something stupid is being tried in higher education, it is almost certain to come early to our campus, and to end in a major debacle. We have, for example, outsourced everything that can be outsourced, have suffered the consequences of that perverse economic arrangement, and found ourselves no longer able to provide in-house services when our corporate relationships soured. After all, once an outsourcing contract has been signed, it is in the service provider’s corporate interest to give as little service as possible to fulfill the letter of the contract, and to offer improvements only as the time approaches for renewal. Like the US military, then, we have had to settle for whatever quality of service the corporations are willing to provide, given what we can afford to pay. If you have been out of school for a while, you may not realize how corporate your own alma mater has become. In the same way that our labor strife at SIUC has a long and distinguished history that ran decades ahead of the curve,

I believe that our recent strike portends a sea change in higher education. After years of mismanagement and mistreatment, the tenured and tenure-track faculty (reluctantly) unionized in 1996. Instability in top leadership (eight chancellors and nine provosts have been named since 2000, each less competent and more corporate than the last) led to the further unionization of the part-time and non-tenure track faculty, and finally even the graduate assistants unionized in 2006. The problem was that with every new administration we had a “new sheriff in town,” each with a personal ambition to move from SIUC to some more prestigious institution, and this meant implementing policies that would look like growth and flourishing for about five years. That is how corporate success works. They all failed, however, dashed on the rocks of labor strife. SIUC is where administrative careers go to die.

We painfully attempted to negotiate for months with our current oligarchy of corporate yes-persons, but our administration demanded the “flexibility” to implement wage reductions whenever it “deemed them necessary,” and to lay off the faculty members it selected with thirty days notice, without specified cause, and with no clear right of recall. If you read between the lines, the first flexible bit eliminates collective bargaining and the second eliminates tenure, in effect. And third, they wanted the authority to assign distance-education sections to faculty members, without any recourse for faculty to decline. They also wanted the authority to beam our classes anywhere and to beam in classes from other places so that SIUC students could get SIUC credit for classes taught by non-SIUC faculty. That will sound familiar to the faculty of UVa. The faculty at SIUC was not asking for raises, and indeed, we were mainly trying to fend off those three demands. Nothing less would have motivated an actual strike.

Contract negotiations have been a nightmare from the beginning of our union. What is it like to sit in a room with management and labor negotiators? My experience with this must surely top a thousand hours by now, and it is not what most people imagine. People do not sit around yelling and making demands. It is more like a courtroom minus the judge, with every word choice carefully noted as the two sides attempt to discover what the other really wants and is willing to do to get it. Things do sometimes get testy, of course, and this time around our management had a large man with a big voice whose evident role in negotiations was to yell at us once or twice a week. We quickly learned to relax when he began, to ignore him until he wound down, to ask politely “are you finished?” and to resume the dialogue wherever it left off.

But our negotiations failed. I can speculate with some sense of confidence that the administration seems to have miscalculated the willingness and ability of the union to carry off a strike. Had they left either tenure or collective bargaining of wages intact, they might have prevailed over a faculty that, honestly speaking, lacked class consciousness and solidarity. But with all three of those major issues at stake, and assisted by a number of public relations blunders on the part of our administration, the faculty was just barely able to cobble together a successful strike. About 200 of the 650 tenured and tenure-track faculty did actually strike, and the administration was unable to cover the classes of a few indispensable departments, especially math and history (where solidarity was admirable and scab labor unavailable in such a rural setting).

Illinois has favorable labor law, if you happen to be on the side of labor, and our strike was entirely protected by law. Such is not the case in most states where public employees are concerned, but in Illinois, there are very strict rules about what management can and cannot do during a strike. To shorten the story, mistakes were made, and the students became increasingly agitated as the administration treated them like children, censoring their social media and ordering them around like bad parents do. Having sacrificed its credibility with the students, the size of student protests on behalf of the faculty steadily increased for five consecutive days until their emotions were beginning to auger a loss of control on campus. Occupy Carbondale was running the student protests according to its standard practices and the smallish band of faculty could not oversee or maintain what was starting to happen. The combination of riotous students, unhappy parents, nervous local leaders, and apparently a miffed governor (this has come out later), led to a resolution after five days. The faculty gained almost nothing except to maintain the autonomy and role in university governance it already possessed. In short, the effort to corporatize SIUC failed, this time.

Microsoft Campus, Redmond, Washington PHOTO: Wonderlane

Those of us who negotiated were aware that we were canaries. If this bumbling lot of corporate wannabes could succeed on our campus–a bastion of the radical left, unionized, in a blue state with arguably the best labor law in America–what will happen when they want to do this stuff at the University of Oklahoma, or South Carolina, or some other good university in a deeply benighted state? It felt a bit like defending the Alamo, but with the advantage of a modern air force. No one knew we were down here fighting, but at least the corporate raiders were charging uphill over open ground. We had advantages our compadres in Texas couldn’t imagine. But it was not our solidarity or our organizing that saved us. Nor was it our labor law or our governor. It was the students. And that would never have happened if our administration hadn’t unwisely angered them.

SIUC students, like students at other also-ran public universities, are not inclined to take sides in the troubles between faculty and administration. They like their teachers, but they know nothing about how universities are run or funded, apart from what they pay, which is always too much as far as they are concerned. They do not know that the graduate students who teach them are trying to survive on a thousand dollars a month, minus fees and taxes. They do not know that many of their teachers are parttime employees who get $1500 a semester to teach a class of forty, no benefits. Why should students know about such things, or care? They go to college only once and the aim is just to get the ticket punched.

Many young people nowadays are reckoning and recognizing that the outlay for a university degree does not warrant the promised return, and they are making other than traditional educational choices. A Microsoft certification is cheaper and worth more in practical terms than a bachelor’s degree in computer science, and Microsoft does a very rigorous job of preparing and testing those whom it certifies. Other proprietary schools, some accredited, some not, are forging ahead into the business of education, while the University of Phoenix does reach the masses. The proprietary schools squeeze traditional education from one side, while Harvard and M.I.T. now squeeze us from the other side. What place is there for a non-elite institution in the future? What value does its degree carry?

The answer many schools have adopted is to specialize. Why pay professors to repeat the generic education (the core curriculum) found everywhere when that can be had for free? The trick is to identify your strengths and co-ordinate those to your market niche. Then one must create and sell an image, recruit the targeted demographic, and “retain” them (that is corporate-speak meaning “give them the grades they paid for”). There is no need and no room for tenure or benefits in such a system, and the high pay must be reserved for those teachers who could command a high salary in the realm of the free market. This is certainly the future of the mass education market, and it is not only not far away it is already here. The question is whether anything ought to be done about it, and if so, who will do it?

PHOTO: Dell's Official Flickr Page

I am a realist about things like this, and a pragmatist in about the sense William James and John Dewey were. The key to a democratic future is to work with the habits people already have, to grasp what they bring to the table, and to turn those habits in the directions they already value. Throughout the endless hours of negotiation at SIUC, even during the actual strike (when everyone felt under siege), it was not hard for me to remember that everybody in the room wanted what was best for the university and for our students. We simply could not rise above our fears that if the other side got its way, the place would be wrecked.

The faculty admittedly wants the old-fashioned university, the place where professors are secure, well-paid, autonomous, and respected leaders of a campus community in which the adventure of learning is its own reward, the intrinsically valuable humanization of our wards. We want administrators who are drawn from the best of our peers and who accept their posts reluctantly, hating to leave the classroom and their research, and doing so only to take a turn at steering the ship. That sort of institution really only existed for about fifty years, following the Second World War and riding on the coattails of a public-minded and prosperous generation that was deeply concerned to educate its young people and to preserve democracy as the viable middle ground between communism and fascism. There was no vaunted golden age of enlightened devotion to the liberal arts, there was a Holocaust, a Cold War and an arms race, and since the liberal arts were already in place in our colleges, they got a hell of a ride into the present on a jet rocket called science and technology.

Professional administrators, for all their dullness, do grasp who pays the freight and how. It isn’t the traditional liberal arts and it never was. There will always be at least a small market for traditional liberal education, as a niche for old-fashioned people. Frankly, the University of Virginia is in a fine position to dominate that market, which its Board of Visitors might want to consider. But the pragmatist in me says we should look at what is redeemable or even good (God help me) in our habit of corporatizing ourselves. Is there not something here that can be directed to the betterment of all? Is this trend wholly corrupt? My emotional inclinations are to condemn it with no room for compromise, but teachers do not become teachers by following their feelings uncritically. There must be something at the heart of this struggle that points to a path forward.

Here are a few things to consider as we all attempt to cope with the massive transformation that is underway. First, our young people are every bit as curious, inventive, hard-working, and brilliant as any kids any generation was ever blessed with. They are also hell bent on thinking for themselves (nothing new there), and unlike their current generation of parents, they have a pretty good sense about whether to believe what they see on television or read on the internet. These kids do not write well or read books (that has become a specialty for those with the inclination), but they are very sophisticated about communication, and they manipulate and interpret images with a skill and daring that is awe-inspiring. When they create, they move from the image to the word, not from the word to the image. They cannot remember assignments they read, but they can recount the plots of movies and Facebook threads with remarkable accuracy. These kids are sharp, but they didn’t get this from their primary and secondary schools, and they definitely didn’t learn it in college.

Has no one noticed that today’s “students” are educating one another, largely outside of school? How long can it possibly be until it dawns on them that the stamps of approval offered by our traditional institutions are unnecessary? It is already a widespread fact of their consciousness. It is true that a Harvard degree is still worth the price, but a college degree isn’t. On the other side, when historians a thousand years hence comment upon the civilization that the Americans helped to build, one thing they are sure to notice is the brief period during which an astonishing university system was created to raise the educational attainment of the masses, and how its very own scientific and technological achievements made those institutions redundant after about a century. The institutions fulfilled their purpose and then were not needed.

I am a union activist mainly by circumstance. The teachers’ unions probably need to adapt themselves to the genuine prospects for public and traditional private education in the coming years. We are not here to protect the economic interests or job security of the teachers. There is only one thing we do that is not made redundant by the changes that the information age has wrought. We do know how to humanize our students, how to elevate their thinking, but even that has changed. In all the ages of humankind, the teachers taught in virtue of superior knowledge and lengthier experience. The rate of change in the last 25 years has set the old formula on its head, and I find myself being educated by the adaptability of my own students, by their willingness to continue to seek their humanity and to show me that I do not have the answers to their questions, but am only in possession of older ways of asking them. I belong to the last generation of traditional teachers.

If today’s teachers could imitate the culture of mutual peer education that our students have created, we might be able to shed the habit of seeing ourselves as little repositories of specialized knowledge that professionals have customarily been. In the age to come, the lawyer is not the one with the law degree, it is the one who knows how to use the law for the chosen ends; the doctor is not the one with the medical degree, but the one who understands how to preserve and heal the body; and the teacher is not the one with a degree attesting to the mastery of a traditional discipline, but the one who knows how to learn and to model learning in the presence of others for their freely chosen imitation and variation. The next generation of teachers will do this more easily. But the next 25 years involves getting dinosaurs like me to adapt and to pitch in to make the changes more smoothly. I think that those who can model the habits of learning will always be able to make a living, but I doubt whether special institutions that gather such people into one place will always be necessary.

Traditional educational institutions in America are not inherently democratic, but are only contingently so, and only in some cases. Their common reliance upon a revenue stream is now all too obvious, and the reduction of tax support has led them to corporatize on one side and to unionize in response. This is a dialectical tension that wastes everyone’s energy, destroys communities, and leads nowhere. By contrast, the democratic purpose of education is the creation of responsible citizens and communities, and that can be accomplished in many ways, as the Occupy movements have so well demonstrated.

The standard enemies of the good society are always among us: greed, narrow self-interest, weakness of the will, fear of the unknown, incomprehension of our own weaknesses, and hubris. These must be resisted in every society, but a society that aspires to be democratic has a peculiar enemy, and that is ignorance, writ large. I mean not the passing ignorance of geography or history or math. I mean ignorance of our interconnections and interdependencies as communities and communities of communities. The good news is, from my point of view, that I see less of that sort of ignorance among my students than among my peers. Now if only the faculty and administration in Carbondale could overcome its utterly false sense of its place in the present. Our struggle last year may have been a successful symbol of resistance to corporatization, but if our ideas about a path to the future involve only the continued delivery of an outmoded education, then we might have done better to lose and get it over with.

Occupy Portland PHOTO: Bart Howard Everts

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