Lida E. Maxwell — Who Gets to Demand Safety?

Lida E. Maxwell is Associate Professor of political science at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and is the author of Public Trials: Burke, Zola, Arendt, and the Politics of Lost Causes.

As protests against racism on campus have rocked the University of Missouri and Yale University—and spread to places like Claremont McKenna and Amherst—student protesters have come under fire for their call for “safe space.” In particular, writers like Connor Friedersdorf have argued that their demand for safe spaces has created a new kind of intolerance, where all dissenting views are excluded and condemned. This critique of the demand for safety finds allies in leftists who see student activists’ demands for safe spaces as an attempt to avoid rather than address the complexities and realities of the world. In contrast, writers like Roxane Gay have drawn attention to the fact that critics of students demanding safe spaces at Yale, Mizzou, and elsewhere tend to be those who have never feared for their safety, who experience safety as an “inalienable” right. For Gay, the call for safety is not a call to be “coddled” or not to hear opposing perspectives, but rather for the freedom for all students to voice experiences and views in a setting where they do not feel in danger of being mocked, derided, or physically threatened. While some (white, male, cisgender) students might take the privilege of safety for granted—and, in turn, their ability to speak their views however and whenever they like—others (notably, black, female, and queer students) may have to demand it.

I agree with Gay that critics of the student protesters fail to acknowledge the privilege of safety that most of them inhabit. However, I think that Gay’s claim that some people “have” safety while others have to ask for it may keep us from seeing a different and perhaps more insidious problem: namely, that some people’s demands for safety are taken more seriously than others. That is, the issue is not that some people simply feel safe while others do not, but rather that some people’s demands for safety are backed up by state violence and law, while others are left at the mercy of that violence. Put differently, the “feeling” of safety that Gay rightly says is a privilege is one that is created through social, political, and legal institutions that frame some people’s demands for safety as legitimate and urgent—and in need of violent enforcement—while framing others’ demands for safety as a desire for “coddling.” 

For example, while black students and their supporters at Mizzou and Yale are often mocked when they ask for a safe space, Donald Trump is taken seriously by Republican voters when he argues that we must erect a United States’ southern border to keep Americans safe from Mexican rapists and criminals. In fact, Trump’s demand that we keep (white) Americans safe from Mexicans has him atop the Republic primary poll in New Hampshire. Similarly, when Darren Wilson says that he felt so threatened by Michael Brown that he had to shoot him, or when George Zimmerman claimed that he felt threatened by Travyon Martin (and thus had to shoot him), or when the Cleveland police officer who killed 12 year old Tamir Rice claimed that he felt so threatened by this little boy that he had to shoot him, these men are taken seriously and their demands for safety are affirmed legally and sometimes politically.

Some people might say that the kind of safety that police officers and Donald Trump and George Zimmerman demand is an entirely different kind of safety than the kind called for by the college students at Yale and Mizzou—that they are talking about physical rather than psychological safety. But can we separate out these two kinds of safety? The safety from racist comments, threats, and (yes) even costumes that these students demand is not just a demand to be kept safe from the violence of speech, but also from the always present risk that hateful speech will turn into hateful violence—a risk that many of us have felt when having homophobic or racist comments shouted at us, or when we have been sexually harassed or intimidated. On the other hand, Trump’s, Wilson’s, and Zimmerman’s claims that they felt or feel physically threatened are not at all self-evident; their demands for safety are demands that we see certain kinds of individuals (Mexicans, African-Americans who possess no weapons but who look, in Wilson’s words, “like a demon”) as greater threats than others (i.e. the armed white men who kill or threaten to kill black and Latino individuals).

Surely what the students at Yale and Mizzou are protesting is not simply racism, but precisely this kind of racist view of safety: that is, a view of safety that allows certain lives to count more than others, and that allows some people’s demands for safety to come at the expense of the lives of others. 

The logic of safety expressed in the violent acts of Wilson and Zimmerman (among others)—that in order for some to be safe, others need to be disciplined, threatened, or killed—is entirely familiar. It is evident not only in the police violence against (and racial profiling of) black men and women, and in violence against queers and trans people. It is also evident in the cycle of violence that we see re-perpetuated in response to the Paris attacks, where some French and American leaders claim that in order to be safe, Syrian refugees must be kept out, and cities in Syria must be bombed.

In the context of these racist and Islamophobic demands for safety—backed up by state violence and law—it seems more important than ever to support and stand in solidarity with college students’ demand for safe spaces. While their demand for safety could certainly re-enact (on a limited scale) the exclusivity of the violent logic of safety I sketched above, their demand for an ideal of safety as a space of inclusion and equality stands as an important counterpoint to the racist idea that safety depends on the violent exclusion of difference. In this ideal, safety is not contingent upon the exclusion and disciplining of (minority) others, but rather upon the shared commitment to affirm, acknowledge, and find space for the diverse experiences of everyone. Here, safety is not a feeling of knowing that threats to you have been killed or quarantined, but rather in a feeling of knowing that the risk of being who you are—expressing your views, presenting yourself freely to others—will be borne not only by you, but also by others, who will create a space of safety around you.  

Student protest at the University of Missouri

One thing—among others—that these student protestors have done is reminded us of an insight of the feminist and gay rights movements: that safety is not a purely physical condition, having to do with whether you are physically threatened, but also a political and social condition. In other words, political and social structures—such as racism, sexism, transphobia, and homophobia—turn certain people (usually marginalized groups) into supposed “threats,” and in turn license violent behavior toward them. The move to create “safe spaces” for women and gays and lesbians was a way to try to create spaces where individuals could feel the freedom and equality that they wanted to create on a broader social scale. In our current political moment—where demands for safety have been used to license increasingly violent acts—standing with students’ demands for an ideal of safety premised on equality, freedom, and shared risk holds out one of the few hopes of challenging this violent logic for safety on behalf of creating (even if only in microcosm, as an ideal) the conditions of a safe world for everyone.

Student protests at the University of Missouri

Campus divestment: sports

Steven Johnston

Neal A. Maxwell Chair in Political Theory, Public Policy, and Public Service, University of Utah

In July Bill Connolly published a manifesto entitled “Toward an Eco-Egalitarian University.” I would like to complement his call for educational reinvention and resistance to the “neoliberal machine” by addressing selected aspects of the sports-violence-money-media-entertainment complex that governs and plagues so many of America’s colleges and universities.  There are a number of issues here.

1) Major men’s college football and basketball programs serve primarily as minor league training academies for the NFL and NBA. This self-selected subservient role, highly profitable to some schools, financially problematic to many more, comes at the expense of the academic and moral integrity of the institutions implicated. As recent events at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill indicate, schools will not hesitate to corrupt their basic academic functioning, including manufacturing imaginary courses and bogus grades, to keep mercenary athletes eligible and turnstiles rotating.

A UNC-Chapel Hill student athlete's paper.

2) These programs generate tens of billions of dollars in revenues for themselves and other dominant corporate players (broadcasters, apparel companies, the auto and beer industries, etc.) in the neoliberal capitalist arena while exploiting the non-union labor of (mostly) teenagers.  Thousands of students on athletic scholarships, so-called student athletes, are effectively the fulltime employees of colleges and universities who control their lives and can dismiss them at will.

3) Football and basketball coaches are often the highest paid employees at their institutions with compensation packages—totaling millions—exceeding even the most lavishly paid college and university presidents. This warped financial structure informs students, who incur unsustainable debt to pursue the American dream, and professors, who may never be able to afford retirement, of their value in the so-called academic world.

Source: nytimes.com.

4) Running a football program means, by definition, that colleges and universities are co-conspirators in a corrupt enterprise that sacrifices the short- and long-term health and well-being of its participants. Morally, if not legally, this amounts to felony assault and battery. Players may or may not be removed from games even when they are obviously damaged from routine plays. Statistically, the vast majority of college football players will never play at the professional level, which means they are sacrificing themselves for, at best, an illusion.

5) Major sports programs are commonly linked to a culture of privilege and entitlement, which includes violence against women, a seriously underreported phenomenon, as the Florida State examples demonstrate. It might be convenient to presume that this is the isolated conduct of a few malefactors with a disposition to violence they brought with them to college, though it’s perhaps just as likely that they cultivated and extended the pleasures of domination and violence the sport teaches them and celebrates.

6) When football players at Northwestern initiated a unionization drive in order to protect themselves and their interests against their employer, the university, aided and abetted by the head coach, and concerned about possible repercussions to its bottom line, waged a concerted campaign to defeat them. To my knowledge, not one college or university president spoke in favor of the players’ autonomy and self-determination. Rather, they were determined to keep them in their properly subjected position.

Still, let us suppose, against the evidence, that Trustees and Presidents are serious when they talk about student athletes and seek to really fold sports into the intellectual life of a college or university. Well, here are some things they would do with respect to basketball.

For programs it will mean:

1. no athletic scholarships will be granted;
2. practices will be conducted and games will be played in only one semester; they will no longer encompass both fall and spring;
3. regular season schedules will be limited to 20 games, roughly 1 and 1/2 per week;
4. conferences will be realigned so that no road trip covers more than 200 miles and no flight lasts longer than 2 hours;
5. no post-season conference tournaments are to be allowed; they are designed not for competition in a conference race but the gratuitous generation of revenue;
6. the NCAA tournament will be reduced to 32 teams, which means the tournament can be completed in just over one week, minimizing the disruption to the end of the semester and final exams;
7. no coach will be paid—from any and all sources—more than the median salary of an associate professor. Comparisons to CEOs notwithstanding, a coach contributes nothing to the university as a university; a coach is merely parasitic upon student-athletes.

For students it will mean:

1. no morning practices before the first scheduled on-campus class;
2. no practicing on weekends, when there generally are no classes; this is the time to study and rest;
3. if students are expected to put in roughly five to six hours of work outside class per week, per course, basketball players will be allowed to practice no more than five to six hours per week; after all, they are not employee-athletes;
4. should student-athletes leave before graduating to pursue a professional career, they will redirect 10% of the value of any NBA or European league contract they sign to their alma mater’s general scholarship fund.

As for football, it is to be abolished—now. There is too much evidence that brain damage is a routine, predictable part of the sport to sanction its continuation. Colleges and universities can lead a nationwide campaign for the abolition of football, a commitment to which can be made a condition of (continued) employment for all top-level university officials. NCAA member institutions form one key link in a long chain of injury, abuse, and exploitation. Irreparable brain injury does not begin in college—or even high school. It begins when young children playfootball for the first time as pre-teenagers. Pop Warner starts with the Tiny-Mite division for ages 5 to 7 with a weight range of 35 to 75 pounds. It has 6 other divisions that extend to age 14 and noweight limit.The brain, always vulnerable to concussion from any head-on collision, is especially vulnerable during the early stages of its development. Parents who allow, let alone encourage their children to play football are arguably guilty of abuse. (Soccer parents may be guilty, too). Either way, colleges and universities cannot participate in a sporting culture and structure that inspires and implicitly rewards the systematic maltreatment of children. These young boys (and girls, too) are also students and they should not be repeatedly and irreversibly harmed before they can matriculate to the many colleges and universities waiting to welcome them. We in academia can best plan for this day by reining in the horrors of American sports that have either a limited place (at best) or no place at all on our campuses. Some might find these proposals utopian, but, following Bill Connolly, I would say that not only is this partly the point; the recommendations also reflect a catalytic, life-affirming utopianism as opposed to the self-destructive, death-laden utopianism of the neoliberal machine that aspires to consume the academic world.

Forging Coalitions to Stop the Common Core

Nicholas Tampio

Fordham University

I have children in elementary school. As a parent, I have a front row view of the attempted corporate takeover of America’s schools.

The Common Core State Standards Initiative provides a justification for this takeover. The Common Core is a set of educational standards in mathematics and English Language Arts (ELA). Many people from across the political spectrum endorse the notion of national education standards. This version of the Common Core, however, has been funded and promoted by groups such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Walton Foundation, Exxon, and the US Chamber of Commerce. The Common Core proposes to make students “college and career ready,” but corporate interests define what that readiness means.

If a counter-movement does not act soon, then the Common Core will impose a neoliberal model of education on America’s schools where results, for instance, are measured by standardized test scores. As I have argued elsewhere, the Common Core drains initiative from the classroom and makes school an oppressive place for teachers and students.

Fortunately, I am part of several groups fighting the Common Core. Some allies are on the political left, including Diane Ravitch, who just wrote Reign of Error, a polemic against the educational privatization movement, and Mark Naison, a colleague at Fordham who started the Badass Teachers Association (BAT). Many people recognize that the Common Core’s progressive rhetoric is a Trojan horse for the corporate takeover of schools.

I also work with groups composed largely of self-identified conservatives. For the past year, I have been on the Truth in American Education (TAE) list serve. Many of the members protest the trend whereby corporations and the U.S. Department of Education, rather than teachers and school boards, determine the standards that drive curriculum and assessment.

I oppose the Common Core because I’m watching it harm my children’s school experience. But my personal interests align with my political theoretical ones. I’m a democrat and a pluralist. I agree with philosophers such as James Madison, J.S. Mill, Alexis de Tocqueville, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, William E. Connolly, and Richard E. Flathman that centralized power facilitates tyranny. Positively stated, I favor political arrangements that distribute power as widely as possible. In the realm of education, I support a variety of educational experiments, including Montessori and Waldorf schools.

In general, I believe in critical thinking, rigor, high education standards, and student and teacher evaluations. Even if I had the power, however, I would not impose one model of education upon the country or define once and for all the key terms in the debate. Intelligent people disagree on how to educate children; it would be foolish to put all of our eggs, so to speak, in one basket.

Proponents of the Common Core sometimes claim that opponents belong to what Paul Krugman calls the “party of stupidity.” That is an unfair description of the coalition forming to stop the Common Core.

To stop the Common Core, citizens need to forge a coalition of people on the political right and the political left. In a pluralistic society, citizens need to make alliances with people we agree with on some issues and disagree on others. 

Here are responses to a few potential objections: 

Aren’t the Common Core just standards? Yes, but that is not the whole story. The Race to the Top program incentivized states to adopt the Common Core and use aligned tests (PARCC or SBAC) to rate students, teachers, and school districts. State Departments of Education mandate that Local Education Agencies (LEA) prepare students for these tests. On paper, schools and teachers have flexibility in how or what they teach; in practice, LEAs throughout the country are making teachers use Common Core-aligned curricula, including scripted lesson plans, or modules. Teachers whose students fail the Common Core exams may be fired; school districts with a certain percentage of failing students may be taken over by the state.

Does local control mean that schools may teach intelligent design in science classes? The Supreme Court case Edwards v. Aguillard (1987) prohibits that. There is a big difference, however, between national bodies enforcing Constitutional limits and laying the foundation for curricula across the country.

Might the problem with the Common Core be the execution? Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, for instance, supports the idea of the Common Core and argues that the states are failing it. The problem with this line of defense is that it can be used to justify any idea. My school district in Westchester, New York was thriving before the Common Core and is suffering under it. Some people say that the problem with the Common Core is the high-stakes testing associated with it. Proponents, however, will respond that there needs to be “big data” to determine if students are learning the Common Core. The Common Core is the bait to make people adopt much of the corporate education agenda.

Might the Common Core improve the educational standards for some districts? Maybe. Up to now, however, there is no longitudinal data on what the Common Core accomplishes. There are also stories from around the country (many posted on Diane Ravitch’s blog) that students, teachers, and parents hate the Common Core.

The Common Core is a tree that prevents other educational models from getting sunlight. That is a tragedy, and one easily avoided. The American educational landscape should be a garden with many flowers.

The Assault on Public Education: Inspired by Actual Events

Leo Zimmermann
  Activist, Researcher, and Writer in Baltimore, Maryland

The new film Won't Back Down, inspired by actual events, tells the uplifting story of parents and teachers fighting to control their school. Maggie Gyllenhaal, a working-class mom who's had enough, comes to spunky Black teacher Viola Davis with a crazy idea that just might work. They're fighting a vast network of miserable, bored teachers, power-hungry administrators, and wealthy union bosses. "I punished her because she does not follow rules!" says the authoritarian white teacher who imprisons Gyllenhall's cute kid in a closet. "All-out war is how we gotta look at it" says Davis as she surveys a row of model fighter planes. Davis and Gyllenhaal use "parent trigger laws" to abolish the school's clumsy bureaucracy and assert community control. At the end of the day, we've see a few courageous individuals take power back from an uncaring system.

It's a vision that the Democratic Party supports. Won't Back Down isn't scheduled for release until September 28, but delegates at this year's DNC were treated to an advance screening. The special event was sponsored by Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), a group started by hedge fund managers which claims credit for the appointment of Arne Duncan as education secretary. Although the DFER billed the screening as a town hall, they weren't particularly interested in allowing two DAER to attend. Party leadership has made it clear which side they favor.

But the Democrats aren't the only ones who love Won't Back Down. The film has been shown at least two other times: at the Republican National Convention, and at a special benefit concert organized by Wal-Mart and Anschutz Film Group/Walden Media—organizations not previously known for protecting the public commons or standing up for the underdog. Teach for America (TFA) was another sponsor. Also playing at both conventions was Michelle Rhee, a famous education reformer who once, during her three years teaching (with TFA), taped her students' mouths shut when they wouldn't stop talking on the way to lunch. Rhee is one of many Democrat celebrities who now push Republican education policies.

Though they show different faces, these groups are heads of one hydra, serving an elite group of extremely wealthy people. They are fighting and winning a trans-partisan campaign to deliver the public educational system into the hands of private companies. And Won't Back Down is not just a tearjerker with Oscar aspirations and questionable framing: it is a two hour advertisement for a new campaign to make parent trigger laws a reality. If successful, these laws will enable an unprecedented wave of public school closures.

The forces of privatization are, sensibly, pursuing a strategy of infiltration, astroturfing, and co-option. Elizabeth Warren's "the system is rigged" speech at the DNC deploys the words of a radical critique to champion "small businesses" and "the middle class". (All we need to do is start with a "level playing field", because everyone wins in Monopoly.) Won't Back Down similarly exploits legitimate anger about our neglected public schools, redirecting blame away from the corporate culprits and towards the very people who have dedicated their lives to working with children. Perhaps even worse, the film depicts a successful attempt at community control—cooperation between parents, teachers and students, the radical event that we desperately need—and reduces it to the question of whether school choice is permitted.Yes, if we could only open a charter school, then other politics would become unnecessary. "Change the school, you change the neighborhood", Davis tells us with sincerity.

The film's release coincides not only with the parent trigger campaign and the presidential election, but also with a major strike by the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU). Contrary to the message of the 'reformers', Chicago's teachers do have support from local parents, who are frustrated with the systematic neglect of public education. The CTU is indeed contract changes for teachers. But they're also explicitly targeting the problems that afflict America's urban school systems, such as large class sizes and insufficient social services. They're demanding a return of art, music, and gym classes to public high schools. And they're calling attention to favoritism for charter schools combined with neglect for neighborhood schools that serve the nation's poor and minority children. 

The ultimate irony of the whole scenario is that the national union to which the Chicago teachers belong—the American Federation of Teachers (AFT)—won't express support for a strike or even allow its membership to dissent against Obama's expansion of Bush-era education policies. These policies, which explicitly promote competition at all levels (among students and teachers as well as school systems and states), are antithetical to principles of labor solidarity. Yet the union bureaucracy—portrayed by 'education reformers' as a lumbering defender of rules and bad teachers—is in fact a tool used quite efficiently to dampen actual solidarity among teachers (and students and parents) who oppose the neoliberal onslaught. This apparatus captures the massive energy that flows inherently from organized labor, but carefully diffuses and directs it to serve status quo interests. (Still more easily, it captures the attention of the media.)

Shape-shifting Randi Weingarten, the collaborationist president of the AFT, first agreed with the movie's portrayal of bad teachers, then criticized it for its stereotypes, then acknowledged that many teachers were "crappy" but blamed their crappiness on insufficient evaluations. (Unlike the rank and file of her union, Weingarten explicitly favors the creation of charter schools.) Dennis Van Roekel, the president of the National Education Association (the other major teacher's union) simply called it "a great movie". These leaders, who have quietly but desperately resisted the Chicago strike, will seek to undermine and contain it even as they weakly state their support.

In Chicago itself, it was only after the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE) won control over the CTU—through an astounding campaign of aggressive grassroots organizing—that a strike appeared possible at all. The city's negotiators have already made progress in thwarting the strike by cutting early deals with more docile unions. Elaborate and overwhelming astroturfing, amplified by the mass media, creates the illusion of support for the 'reformers': The CTU's main opposition in Chicago, beyond Mayor Rahm Emanuel, comes from Stand for Students, another wholly owned subsidiary of Wall Street trying to represent itself as a popular movement. As the money for neoliberal education reform soaks in, we can no expect resistance from political parties or "non-profit" institutions. Indeed, we cannot trust institutional boundaries at all when the whole arena is saturated by 'reformer' money.

In 1968 we saw a very different kind of teachers' strike in New York. A minority-run school board, empowered to make decisions for the Ocean Hill–Brownsville schools, actually implemented changes in curriculum and personnel—firing some white teachers in the process. Outraged union leaders, with media assistance, carefully drove a wedge between teachers and communities. They presented community control as a threat to the union bureaucracy—and the union bureaucracy as a critical check against the 'low standards' of the supposedly antisemitic Negro school board. New York's UFT (still the AFT's most powerful Local and the CTU's primary foil) so greatly feared community control that it shut down the entire city's school system with a 36-day strike. The school district challenged the perverse vision of individualist meritocracy that permeates American education; the UFT and other authorities found this challenge unacceptable.

Now privatizers including the UFT are recycling images of community control. Instead of black nationalists, we see a post-racial fantasy coalition, united not even by their poverty or sense of community so much as by their American dreaming. Instead of Dr. King, let alone Malcolm X, we get John Adams. Instead of socially-conscious education, we're told to demand a "good" education: defined no doubt as perpetual competition, high-stakes test preparation and workforcery. (Oh, and civics.) And the difference between a school staffed by volunteers from within the community and a school staffed by Teach for America (again: Wal-Mart's cosponsor at the WBD screening) couldn't be more stark.

The Chicago strike is neither a chaotic wildcat action nor a meaningless union power play. It actually seems to be a legitimate seizure of institutional machinery. If the CORE-led CTU comes out of this strike with its principles intact, it stands to make real gains on behalf of Chicago's children. Meanwhile, established neoliberal institutions—the two major parties, the union bureaucracy, and wealthy "non-profits" of all types—are united in wishing that this strike would just go away. 

The actual events that inspired Won't Back Down can't be the community takeover of a school through parent trigger laws because a takeover of this kind has never happened. The film presents a neoliberal fantasy cloaked in the image of popular uprising. Its real-life appeal thus comes from real resistance to the model it promotes—resistance which it desperately hopes to control.