NOTE: For a more straightforward account of my take on the McCain protest, go to my piece on Huffington Post:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jan-clausen/the-new-school-commenceme_b_21606.html

…because they have learned how to hollow out democracy and make it lose meaning. All it means, it seems, is elections, where whoever you vote for, they are going to do the same thing.—Arundhati Roy interviewed by Amy Goodman, May 25, 2006

The McCain protest looks, on the other side of a Memorial Day weekend that put cookouts, war deaths, and war atrocities (Haditha) front and center on the national agenda in place of graduation controversies, both astonishingly large and depressingly puny. It’s tempting to measure magnitude on the Mainstream Media scale of seismic news events: not only Maureen Dowd but Ann Coulter! Not only two news articles and three Letters to the Editor in the New York Times, but three interviews (two for student speaker Jean Rohe) by Brian Lehrer; local TV coverage; AP stories that made their way around the world; and a string of comment-intensive pieces on the Huffington Post, plus a “Truthdigger of the Week” award for Jean. Yet, with the story already “over” in media terms, apart from what the crypto-fascist slime machine can still do with it (why do I have a feeling the McCain/New School graduation brouhaha is destined to go down in right-wing folklore alongside bra burning, Jane Fonda, and peace activists who spit on Vietnam vets?), I want more than ever not to lose the texture of what happened.

It has really been an astonishing experience to watch an event that one was deeply involved in morph into a media extravaganza. So much is lost in the streamlining and simplification that reporters deftly and automatically perform to craft a “good story” out of complicated facts. In this case, Jean’s gutsy speech was largely represented, not by Jean herself but by the media frame placed around it, as an all but spontaneous act of courage rather than the iceberg’s tip of a collective effort. How much sexier it was to hear about a lone, fair young maiden taking on an ogre than a cross-generational group of student organizers, faculty unionists, and other University employees coming together to improvise under intense pressure and thereby flipping a script meant to conscript us into playing passive extras in a McCain campaign commercial.

As I mentioned in Part I, an impromptu call to action by Lang College graduate Elijah Miller, given at the divisional recognition ceremony for Lang graduates on the day before the university-wide event at Madison Square Garden, was cited by Jean Rohe as having helped inspire her own last-minute decision to ditch the remarks she’d prepared for the latter event in favor of deconstructing McCain’s recycled speech before he even delivered it. Elijah’s remarks, of course, were no more “spontaneous” (in the sense of springing full-blown and historyless from anybody’s head) than were Jean’s. Elijah is a long-time student activist who not only mounted an impressive organizing campaign to support the part-time faculty in our unionization effort, but who put his antiracist politics into action by joining with students of color and a handful of other progressive whites to create something called the Diversity in Practice Coalition, an organization that challenges the New School on the monoculturalism that flourishes behind its “globalizing” façade.

At the Lang recognition ceremony, Elijah was scheduled to receive the David Woods Humanitarian Award, given each year to a student who has shown extraordinary commitment to helping others during the course of his undergraduate career. A few days before the event, he told me he’d been informed that he wasn’t going to be allowed the time customarily afforded the Woods Award’s recipient to deliver a short acceptance speech. Nevertheless, he said, if he could get near the microphone, he’d speak up about McCain.

In the event, Elijah almost had to battle his way to the microphone, waved off by our dour but ineffectual Dean, who couldn’t quite afford to physically tackle his student, but looked as though he might have liked to do so. “I just can’t accept an award like this without saying something,” Elijah deftly insisted. Before he got around to calling on his fellow students to protest the McCain appearance—eliciting the passionately positive vocal response that strongly impressed Jean Rohe—he pointedly thanked the teachers who had most strongly influenced him during the previous four years. Foremost among the names was that of his senior work advisor, an anti-racist white feminist teacher of philosophy and cultural studies named Barrie Karp whose personal contributions and political stance have been consistently marginalized by the school. Also prominently mentioned were two radical faculty members of color, Amit Rai and Gary Lemons, who had left the institution about halfway through Elijah’s undergraduate stint. Thanks to their vocal objection to the status quo, both had been subjected to intense pressure during their time at Lang, and had eventually been edged or forced out. For those with access to the institutional memory required to grasp the significance of these references, the projected rebuke to McCain was being positioned as an effort to reclaim a radical intellectual/activist tradition that had severely eroded over the short span of years required to complete a bachelor’s degree.

The perception of this erosion isn’t confined to Elijah. Late in the spring, a sophomore in my Reading for Writers class who’d gotten involved with the McCain protest confided in me that she’d like to take some time off from school, but “this place seems to be changing so fast—I’m afraid if I go away and come back, the education I came for isn’t going to be here anymore.”

An eloquent “open letter” on the McCain matter signed by six undergraduates speaks to this issue of the eroding space for substantive democratic dialogue about crucial issues: “The New School is founded on the inclusion of marginalized political and academic views. This institution melds activist and intellectual pursuits, creating a space where change is seen as a tangible possibility. Even at The New School we feel the possibilities for critical discussion have been shrinking.” A faculty colleague described to me her own perception of the structural roots of this phenomenon, saying that for her the problem isn’t so much the specific decisions that get made as it is that so many among the university’s various constituencies casually acquiesce in allowing top-down “deciders” habitually to determine the shape of everything from commencement ceremonies to departmental hires. Despite the recent creation of a Faculty Senate—an elementary building block of faculty power that the New School lacked for most of its existence—there’s little or no sense of faculty groups coming together in the give and take required for meaningful faculty governance, never mind that this element is supposed to be basic to the running of any reputable academic institution. (It doesn’t help that the Senate has no independent powers, functioning in a purely advisory capacity to President Kerrey.)

I believe it’s symptomatic of both this local structural problem and of an alarming shift in the society at large that many New School administrators, as well as faculty who’ve acquired a bit of administrative power, consistently behave in ways similar to those outlined in Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman’s “propaganda model” for explaining our conformist mainstream media. One virtue of this model is its help in explaining why, in a “free” society lacking overt constraints on expression, challenging ideas and inconvenient facts become so effectively marginalized. Like the journalists described by Chomsky and Herman, the majority of people who’ve made successful careers in academia, including those employed by the “liberal” New School, have developed an acute sensitivity to the boundary lines separating acceptable (read “career-advancing”) discourse from the sorts of inquiries and positions that lead, at best, to having one’s opinions routinely disregarded. More likely, especially for junior faculty, is a more ominous scenario that includes falling afoul of one’s review committee, being labeled “insufficiently rigorous,” having one’s teaching and scholarship impugned—in short, getting fired, under the guise of the committee’s decision not to recommend renewal of one’s contract. The predictable result is that open voicing of real opinions on controversial issues has become nonexistent, so much so that a friend recently quipped we should stop referring to faculty meetings and speak, instead, of “The Silence”: “Will you be attending ‘The Silence’ this afternoon?”

I have found it astonishing, over the course of the McCain organizing, to witness the baring of mental mechanisms that help keep this propaganda model in place. “Why didn’t they protest sooner?” said one faculty member, apparently speaking of the students—then, when presented with the petition asking President Kerrey to withdraw the speaking invitation, “No, I can’t sign that—the language is too strong for me. Anyway, the real problem I have is not with his positions, it’s just that I think a campaigning politician shouldn’t be making an appearance.” Another faculty member, who had served on the committee that recommends honorary degree candidates—the list his committee produced made no mention of McCain as a possible candidate for an honorary degree, much less for commencement speaker—lamented Kerrey’s bizarre and ridiculous behavior: “He’s not really part of the university at all.” Purporting to criticize Kerrey, he actually sought to absolve himself from the necessity of taking potentially risky action to curb our CEO’s abuses.

It is this sort of doublethink that allows for the continued—and most assuredly planned—shrinkage of the space that fosters critical discussion, both at the New School and in the larger society. It is this mental dance of dissociation that facilitates the broad and hugely sinister phenomenon termed by Arundhati Roy the hollowing out of authentic democracy. Schematic, essentially empty rituals of debate, dissent, and decision-making are substituted for the real thing; those who object get vilified as rude,[1] intolerant[2], or members of a lunatic fringe[3]. How much cozier and more pleasant to keep one’s head down, focus on very limited career objectives, and hope for a spontaneous remission of the potentially fatal illness afflicting our body politic.

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[1] I find remarkable not merely the restraint but the genuine civility with which both Elijah Miller and Jean Rohe stated their cases; in a Huffington Post piece, Jean referred to Elijah’s tone as humble, an accurate description that creates a vivid contrast with most of the famously brash protests of my own Vietnam-era generation. Of course the right-wing slime machine is utterly indifferent to tone.

[2] While I believe it’s completely legitimate to explore how the invitation to McCain and subsequent protest might fit into notions of free speech, the public debate around this issue has proven exceedingly impoverished and one-dimensional. For instance, liberal icon Brian Lehrer, interviewing Jean Rohe for his morning talk show on WNYC in the wake of the commencement uproar, spoke of his view that McCain is a “work in progress” and his consequent wish that students might have adopted an open-minded attitude and listened to what the Senator had to say. Such a comment conflates the possibility of a genuine evolution in views with the maneuvering of McCain in “positioning himself” for his presidential bid; it ignores not only McCain’s highly consistent right-wing track record on several critical issues in foreign and domestic policy, but the fact that the speech he delivered for the third time at the New School was available in advance and contains nothing in the way of new positions. It doesn’t even provide any substantive support for the one old position he re-affirms, his support for the Iraq war.

[3] Following the 2004 election, I had a conversation with a New School administrator—someone with considerable power over my own job—during the course of which I commented that the disenfranchisement of African-American voters in the recent voting offered a vivid demonstration of the continuing relevance of race as a determining category in American political life. I met with a contemptuous dismissal and the astonishing claim that “if there were really anything to the stories of voting irregularities, the Democratic Party would be all over it.”