Grace Ambrossi
We Demand: The University and Student Protests, by Roderick Ferguson, University of California Press, 136 pp., $18.95
The Assault on American Excellence, by Anthony T. Kronman, Free Press, 288 pp., $27.00
Last year, in mid-April, I found myself breaking down in most of my classes. Not because my assignments were too hard or my schedule too full (which it was), but because existing at Yale is exhausting. I had been mobilizing and strategizing with the Coalition for Ethnic Studies (CES) for a couple of weeks at that point, and my exhaustion exceeded any amount of sleep or rest.
In the midst of mobilizing for CES, other organizations were also demanding that Yale recognize and end its parasitic relationship with the citizens of New Haven. I wrote the following excerpt as a response for my Comparative Ethnic Studies class, some days after Yale Police Officer Terrance Pollock and Hamden Police Officer Devin Eaton fired 16 bullets at Stephanie Washington and Paul Witherspoon.
I feel restricted by my body and my mind, and [our readings for this week] remind me to think that others accompany me. I do not have to be the one always imagining [a new world], right? But, there is always one more thing, and there is not enough of me and I feel like I’m melting and being slowly eaten away by the monsters of coloniality. This response is certainly not an answer to the question, but I cannot think beyond the right now because it is so pressing on my mind and I am enraged and apathetic all at once. Perhaps, this question that I have posed fundamentally comes from fear, as mentioned before – a fear that is rooted in the reality of myself: the fear that others are just as tired and this exhaustion will defeat them as much as it is me, the fear that others have moments of desperation and hopelessness, the fear that others cannot imagine. But, there has to be the “both/and” – Yale contains both violence and a community that is resistant; I am both tired and awaiting.
I was in a dance of sorts – feeling energized by our actions and mobilizations while at the same time feeling exhausted by having to prove that our studies, and in turn, our interests and beings, were worthy of investment. It is this dancing between excitement and exhaustion that has constituted my time at Yale; sometimes, they occur at the same time and sometimes, one overwhelms the other. I start with this story because reading Anthony Kronman's The Assault on American Excellence and Roderick Ferguson’s We Demand, which both discuss the transformation of the elite university and its relationship to its students, also feels like a dance, going back and forth between two different narratives that nonetheless create a full account of university dynamics when read together. Understanding their relationship to each other is critical to our work as students, organizers, and people who venture to imagine a different world than the one we currently live in. Thus, I am not interested in granting victory to one over the other. Rather, I want to explore how reading them together creates a fuller account of the intended purpose of universities like Yale, the knowledge created within them and in relation to them, and those who participate in this project. I invite my readers to dance with me.
***
Anthony Kronman is a former Dean of Yale Law School and continues to teach classes on campus. The release of his book The Assault on American Excellence, an indictment of elite institutions like Yale and their prioritization of diversity, was quite controversial. Many of Kronman’s peers, including John Witt, law professor and head of Davenport College, and classics professor Emily Greenwood, fiercely resisted the critiques put forth by him. In his work, Kronman argues that student and professors’ are compromising human excellence through their desire for democratic ideals in the university. What alternative order should students and professors strive for, or another way to put this question is, what loss within elite universities is Kronman lamenting throughout his chapters? The aristocratic ideal, which he defines as the belief that “there is an art to being human; that this art is not a skill yet can be taught; and that those who succeed in acquiring it do better not in some particular endeavor but at the all-embracing work of being human.” His concern lies in the fact that when we begin to prioritize and give authority to inclusive speech and students’ personal feelings within the classroom, we foreclose a true learning community that is grounded in truth-seeking and intellectual critique. In effect, we limit the possibility of truly developing excellence and most importantly, our selves.
Kronman maps this argument across three chapters – “Speech”, “Diversity” and “Memory.” In the first, he suggests that the call for “safe” speech does not actually lead to a more inclusive campus, but rather confers an authority on students’ feelings and breeds a spirit of intolerance among them that prevents them from developing open-mindedness and a “community of conversation” in the classroom. He expands this view in his next chapter by outlining how the university administration positioned diversity as an inherent good to the student body, which allows them to create an entire bureaucracy around diversity, specifically that of race, gender, ethnicity and sexuality. In doing so, the university both excludes diversity of thought and establishes grounds upon which students can use their victimization as a “universal currency” in the classroom. In other words, he argues that students are conflating “politics and intellectual inquiry,” when only the latter belongs in the classroom. Lastly, Kronman takes on the issue of memory and the university’s responsibility to both students and history, using the renaming of Calhoun College as a case study. In this chapter, which was the focus of Head Witt’s article in the Yale Daily News, he argues that Yale was irresponsible in its choice to rename as it prevents students from grappling with the moral ambiguity of the past, which is a necessary skill for future leaders of our democracy.
Roderick Ferguson’s We Demand, on the other hand, proposes a fundamentally different understanding of the relationship between the university and its students. Ferguson is a professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies and American Studies at Yale, with particular attention to critical university studies, woman of color feminism and queer social movements. He uses these interests as a foundation for his work, which is a history of how the university has changed and adapted itself in response to student movements. He views protests as “intellectual and political moments” that demand new social orders – that is, transformations in how people exist within and in relation to the institutions they encounter through their daily lives, such as the university. We are, according to Ferguson, the inheritors of a history of conflicting struggles and demands around the university’s purpose and its responsibility. As such, this project is an endeavor to identify and untangle the different nodes of power and actors that made the university what it is today and a starting place for “the student who believes that we can or should do better than the world we’ve inherited.”
In his first chapter, Ferguson focuses on the “usable past” of two events in 1970 on university campuses – Kent and Jackson State – that catalyzed the use of “diversity” in higher education as well as the increase in police forces on campus. At Kent State, students protesting the U.S. invasion of Cambodia and Vietnam, the violent deaths of their people, and the military draft were shot and killed by the U.S. National Guard. In Jackson, students threw rocks at a road that was often “a site of racial harassment”; when the local police were met with resistance from the group, the police shot at them approximately 400 times. These events, only happening a few days apart, garnered attention from both university administrations and politicians, including President Richard Nixon. In The Report of the President’s Commission on Campus Unrest, released later that year, Nixon demonized student activists and blamed them for the incidents at Kent and Jackson State University. He framed them as “potential criminals who – if unchecked – could disrupt the social order”.
The commission’s report served two purposes. The first is easy to understand: it justified the increase of police forces on campus. The second is more convoluted. Nixon and other politicians in charge of addressing these events drew a connection between social order and diversity. That is, by making a claim that diversity was part of American social values and the pre-existing social order, these politicians suggested that any threat to the social order was also a threat to diversity. The students that were advocating for "diversity" were therefore reconfigured, in the very act of making demands, as threats. These conclusions further justified campus police forces that would protect our nation’s diversity from these criminal students. They also led to the promotion of “diverse” individuals within university administration and the creation of an administration relating to diversity – “the diversity bureaucracy.” What is particularly important about these developments is that they are forms of management. The only forms of “diversity” permitted in higher education are the ones that the administration itself can control. Ultimately, these “adjustments” were framed as responses to student demands for representation and a new social order when in fact they were a means to preserve the institutions’ status quo and control against the “disorder” of the students.
Ferguson’s second chapter is dedicated to further teasing out how the university continued to transform itself in response to the demands of student movements. Here, he focuses on how a memorandum called “Attack on American Free Enterprise System”, written in 1971 by future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, identified elite institutions as the source of attacks on business interests. The report promoted the idea of corporate personhood and suggested that corporations were also minorities that should be listened to by universities. The promotion of corporate personhood was a means by which the corporate sector could resist the critiques against capitalism levied by students. Thus, for Ferguson, the struggle between corporate personhood and minority personhood, which students promoted through their social movements, was ultimately a struggle to determine which social vision held more value in the university and society at large. The third and fourth chapter are dedicated to students as actors and the strategies used to undermine their movements, respectively. Students’ insistence on a different social order fundamentally required a different way of relating to one another, a way that did not dismiss difference, but intentionally engaged with it. Ferguson considers student movements and their relational practices revolutionary – they work to destabilize current social orders that attempt to keep students apart. One of the main strategies used to demean student movements is to frame them as personal issues and cries for coddling, which often prevents others from seeing the connection between the power that institutions like universities exercise and their own daily struggles.
***
It certainly can be frustrating reading Kronman, especially as a student who has participated in the movements that he derides as infantile. What I would like to suggest, however, especially for students who are interested in justice or activism, is that understanding Kronman’s work is necessary to ours. His arguments and reflections are part of a larger history of discrediting student movements, as Ferguson points out to us in his last chapter. As such, untangling the ways in which these critiques are part of the university landscape is critical to our own work of pursuing a different social order within it.
Reading The Assault on American Excellence, I had an uncomfortable feeling. Why was Kronman so insistent that the university was losing something critical; that students are no longer open-minded and cannot deal with moral ambiguity; that the classroom and university are only for intellectual pursuits, not political ones? Ferguson’s account argues quite the opposite - university campuses have always been sites of political and intellectual struggle. Surely, Kronman is aware of this reality - he experienced it himself. He is no stranger to student movements and their demands, having left Williams College in his sophomore year to organize with Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in the midst of the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 60s.
Then a word came to my mind: nostalgia. Nostalgia is a difficult concept to grasp; it is intangible, something that exists in the recesses of our minds. Maybe a smell or sound triggers a memory to come rushing back to us and we feel a sense of longing for it. This is not the kind of nostalgia I am referring to. Kronman is nostalgic for the past university, one that valued excellence and the aristocratic ideal. However, what I find uncomfortable, especially after reading Ferguson, is that Kronman is evoking a nostalgia that flattens history and helps his own narrative of loss, something that he himself resists fervently throughout his chapter on “Memory”. However, Kronman’s strategy is not uncommon. Perhaps the starkest comparison is that of the “Make America Great Again” slogan. And we must give credit to Donald Trump's campaign – they created an incredibly powerful message that is fundamentally rooted in a very narrow and specific view of history, one that blames the conditions of poor whites on the loss of a mythical past America. The corollary to this kind of nostalgia is that if we recover what is “lost”, then we will recover a critical part of ourselves or our country, and it will lead to major progress or improvement. However, proposing the past as a site of recovery, as a source of betterment feels intentionally ignorant. In the case of Kronman, painting the past university as something that we need to maintain into the future, while ignoring the reality that the university has always been a site of struggle and transformation, is inconsistent with the critiques of anti-intellectualism he exacts against students.
Thus, both Kronman’s lamenting of the loss of an aristocratic ideal and Trump’s lamenting of a lost America are part of the same thread, part of the same history that allows such claims to gain traction and power. The nostalgia that they evoke speaks to a particular few, but very loudly. And it is with this thundering tone that anyone who challenges their narrative is immediately disqualified as an aberration. You know the tropes: people who challenge the claims of MAGA now seek to destroy democracy; students who demand more of their institution in regards to climate change, financial aid, and academics are framed as ungrateful snowflakes. In other words, dissenters are refused from their version of history.
Ultimately, it is not that we are illegible, even though some of our bodies do read as illegible within the university itself. It is that structures like the university refuse to see us and our demands as generative, as openings to greater possibility within the university, as containing a semblance of truth. It is this refusal that grounds Kronman’s ability to say “feelings of outrage kill the search of truth and collaboration and ability for people to live a more realized existence.” I find it ironic and quite entertaining that he makes such argument when in fact, if he really understood the student movements that he is critiquing, he would realize that it is the feelings of outrage that have led to a search for truth and collaboration amongst students. These feelings do not foreclose anything, but he dismisses the feelings and demands of certain subjects because they are not packaged and presented in a digestible way. That is, how black and brown women have been socially punished because they are too angry or “howling” as they insist on carving out space for their and others’ bodies.
Kronman rarely specifies which students he is talking about, instead relying on the reader to imagine who these students are and what their grievances may be. The problem with this lack of specificity is that not every student at Yale is participating in the movements that he finds obstructive, and a result, he forces the reader to make conclusions about which kind of students are participating in such obstructions. Conversations that cause a “scramble for victimhood” are not occurring in physics or English classrooms; thus, he plays upon subtleties of language to bring a specific student to mind. “Huh, he’s talking about me and my friends” is what my response was as I read. I’m not frustrated by the suggestion that we are obstructing the academy, but by the fact that we are not legible as legitimate creators of knowledge, that we are “corrupting” higher education itself with our claims for a more responsive and responsible institution. This suggestion isn’t Yale-specific, as all the student movements that Ferguson discusses were viewed in a similar light. One of the ways in which Nixon and other politicians invalidated student movements and justified their use of police forces on campus after the Kent State and Jackson State events was by labeling students as “irrational.” Thus, if students are considered to be illogical, then so are their claims. Neither deserve to be paid any mind at an institutional level. If we think more critically about what this means for a student, if claims for critical change at an institutional level are ignored, what other experiences or discussions are also being actively ignored?
And this is a question that Kronman engages with. He writes the following as a response: “The special form of freedom that we call ‘academic’ depends upon a measure of disengagement from the political realities that are the subject of many academic disputes…” (my emphasis). When reading this, I could only sigh… heavily. Granted I understand the basis of Kronman’s fear about classroom conversations that turn towards a battle of identity politics – “I” statements and discussing individual experiences have the potential of limiting classroom conversation. This is something that I am cautious of myself when I participate in discussion. However, I cannot recall a moment in my four years at Yale in which this was the case. Such a disengagement requires educators like Kronman to treat the classroom as a vacuum, for students to leave their baggage at the door and to come in as academics. My older sister was a kindergarten teacher in the New York City public school system, and as much as she planned her lessons, sometimes the political realities of the students would disrupt them. Students who were experiencing abuse at home, whose parents feared deportation, who had an undiagnosed learning disability – whatever the case was, my sister’s job became more complex as she had to deal with both the education of her students and their political realities in the same time and space. I provide this anecdote because disengaging from political realities is tantamount to asking students to separate themselves from their work, to rely on only one identity – that of the academic – in the classroom. But, what is freedom when it ignores all the other parts of oneself? And let’s be honest, black bodies on this campus are read as not belonging by Yale Security. My peers have been asked if they were students before entering into the comfort of their residential colleges. Kimberlé Crenshaw’s term “intersectionality” does not refer to the fact that each person has many identities – it explores how violence is enacted at the crossroads of these identities. And violence, in this case, is not just corporeal but also discursive. That is to say, how is disengagement possible in the classroom when they have been asked to legitimate their existence within certain blocks on this campus, when they have to work multiple jobs to remain on this campus, when their loved ones and their livelihoods are also part of the weight they carry? As Ferguson shows us, university administration did not disengage with these political realities either, but found a way to manipulate them towards their own ends, particularly through creating a bureaucracy around diversity that they themselves can control.
This entanglement isn't just limited to students. The university has also always been explicitly engaged in political realities that do not speak immediately to the campus and classroom, but nonetheless have implications for it. An example is Yale’s investment in Puerto Rican debt. The power and actions of a university have the ability to touch those outside of its campus perimeter – it can choose, as Ferguson says,“what kinds of life” to protect and “what kind it [is] willing to compromise or even disregard.” Thus, if we truly acknowledge how the university’s power is implicated way beyond its immediate mission of providing an elite education to students, then Kronman’s argument that political realities do not belong in the classroom discussion has no hold. The experiences of students are not floating around in some bubble waiting to be used for victimhood. This physical campus was established on native genocide and enslavement, and these ghosts continue to haunt students through different manifestations of surveillance and violence! And yes, these are more difficult to engage as an educator. However, Kronman, I invite you to engage with our political realities. It is not for the sake of “correctness and convention” that I ask you to do so, but for the purpose of seeing us your students, as full beings, not just academics at your round table.
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For me, the question I want to ask Kronman is: what is truly at stake when you refuse to see us? Or maybe the better question for my readers is, what are the possibilities that we gain when we let go of inclusion within the university? Of course, to make such a suggestion is contingent on the fact that my presence and body on this campus are often not questioned by others. But, the root of my suggestion is not that we stop fighting for our place here, but that our belonging does not need to be legitimated by spaces that are legible and approved by the university, such as our cultural centers. This is not to say that those are not important places on campus, but I am pushing for a more expansive understanding of where we can create radical community and relationship. We have and will continue to flourish and thrive despite our lack of legibility to the university. What these alternative forms of community look like depends on the individual. For me, they have occurred in common rooms and off-campus homes with students, over some coffee with members of my church, and with New Haven residents who sit in front of our shops. These are relationships that are not seen by the university. I view these moments and alternative communities as parts of a shadow realm that exists and overlaps within the institution that hopes to choke them out. Ferguson articulates this in his conclusion, “Rule for Radicals”, as “Rule 6: Assume you don’t belong.” Being in does not necessarily require belonging to. We can be in this university and not belong to it. I am thankful for his work because he provides models for being in and not of.
In the shadow realm, there is a relationship to one another that Kronman can’t seem to imagine. That is, the demands and movements that we see on our news feed do not just pop out of the blue. They are built on relationships, ones that prioritize love and sacrifice and pain and sharing. Most importantly, these relationships are built on an engagement with one another’s difference, or as M. Jacqui Alexander puts it, “becoming fluent in each other’s histories.” He writes: “… the spirit of solidarity that has an appropriate place in the struggle for justice is transferred to the academy, where its effects are entirely bad.” It is not solidarity that is driving the struggle for justice… it is relationality, and Kronman fails to see how these are distinct. Solidarity forms tenuous relationships in the struggle for justice; it does not demand action from anyone and it certainly does not create responsibility to others within the struggle. One can claim solidarity, and that could be the extent of their participation. However, relationality means creating relationship across difference; it means being responsible to the ways in which your own life might be implicated in the violence of another’s; it means fighting for a liberation that does not just consist of your own, but of those standing beside you. Relationality allows us to challenge one another in the classroom, not for the purpose of intellectual sparring, but because we are invested in one another’s growth, personally and intellectually. The assumption that these kinds of relationships and communities do not belong in the classroom dismisses the ways in which the way they have the potential to contribute to intellectual diversity, something that according to Kronman is fading away within the classroom. In a twisted sense, I believe that the university relies on relationship created in solidarity as opposed to relationality because it creates weak relationships, ones that will break immediately under any form of stress or critique. The hope for these movements to go away is nothing new, again. It is something that administrators hoped for in the ’60s, and it is something that they continue to hope for as we move into 2020.
I recommend Ferguson’s concluding chapter to any of my peers invested in justice and relationship and the transformation of the future. They serve as a guide in our work. I also invite you all to create your own “Rules for Radicals”, rules that help you survive in the university, maybe even thrive. I will end this essay with one of my own rules that I gained in one of my classrooms last semester. Again, I was crying in class from the exhaustion and hopelessness I felt deep within me. I was struggling to imagine a world outside of the one we were occupying, and that was frustrating too because the work of someone engaged in justice is to that very imagining. Professor HoSang opened up the classroom to engage with these emotions and feelings, not treating them as a disruption as they might have been characterized in other classrooms, but as an opportunity for relationship and discussion. My peer, Mary Miller, sitting next to me proposed the following (paraphrased), which has stuck with me since and now I give to all of you: “When I was in chorus, my chorus teacher would tell us to stagger our breathing, so that while others breathe, others are singing. No one will notice that you are breathing because there is still sound.” Of course, she said it more beautifully in the moment, but the lesson for myself in that moment and even now is that as I breathe, others are still singing. As I feel hopeless, others are still hopeful. And as I fail to imagine, others are still imagining. All of it in community, mindful and watching of one another. To my readers: let us sing together.
Grace Ambrossi is a senior in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration. She is incredibly thankful for all the people, near and far, who have walked with her over the last eight semesters.