Failure to Quit: Reflections of an Optimistic Historian by Howard Zinn

Author:Howard Zinn [Zinn, Howard]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf, mobi, azw3
Published: 2011-04-09T23:00:00+00:00

How Free is Higher Education?

I was invited to write this essay as part of a symposium on the university for the Gannett Center Journal, which was edited by Craig LaMay. There was going on at the time, and still is, I suppose, a hot national debate on multi-culturalism, on freedom of speech in the university, and conservatives were getting a little hysterical. I thought I would add my bit, based on my own experience in higher education.

1991

In early 1950, Congressman Harold Velde of Illinois, rising in the House of Representatives to oppose mobile library service to rural areas, told his colleagues: “The basis of communism and socialistic influence is education of the people.”

That warning was uttered in the special climate of the Cold War, but education has always inspired fear among those who want to keep the existing distributions of power and wealth as they are.

In my 30 years of teaching—in a small southern college, in a large northeastern university—I have often observed that fear. And I think I understand what it is based on. The educational environment is unique in our society: it is the only situation where an adult, looked up to as a mentor, is alone with a group of young people for a protracted and officially sanctioned period of time and can assign whatever reading he or she chooses, and discuss with these young people any subject under the sun. The subject may be defined by the curriculum, by the catalog course description, but this is a minor impediment to a bold and imaginative teacher, especially in literature, philosophy, and the social sciences, where there are unlimited possibilities for free discussion of social and political issues.

That would seem to be an educational ideal—an arena for free discussion, assuming a diversity of viewpoints from a variety of teachers, of the most important issues of our time. Yet it is precisely that situation, in the classrooms of higher education, which frightens the guardians of the status quo.

They declare their admiration for such freedom in principle, and suggest that radicals are insufficiently grateful for its existence. But when teachers actually use this freedom, introducing new subjects, new readings, outrageous ideas, challenging authority, criticizing “Western civilization,” amending the “canon” of great books as listed by certain educational authorities of the past—then the self-appointed guardians of “high culture” become enraged.

Early in my teaching career I decided that I would make the most of the special freedom that is possible in a classroom. I would introduce what I felt to be the most important, and therefore the most controversial, questions in my classes.

When I was assigned, as a young professor at Spelman College, a college for black women in Atlanta, to teach a course in “Constitutional Law,” I changed the course title to “Civil Liberties” and departed from the canonized recital of Supreme Court cases. I did not ignore the most important of these cases, but I also talked with the students about social movements for justice and asked what role these movements played in changing the environment within which Supreme Court decisions were made.

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