Reconstruction 8.1 (2008)
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"Reading Forward" from the Left: an interview with Barbara Foley / Joseph G. Ramsey
Barbara Clare Foley teaches in the English Department at Rutgers University-Newark Campus and has written extensively about literary radicalism, African American literature, Marxist theory, and the politics of the academy. Her 1993 study Radical Representation: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction 1929-1940, has exerted considerable influence on emerging scholars of left-wing literature. Her most recent books are Spectres of 1919: Class and Nation in the Making of the New Negro (2003) and Wrestling with Prometheus: Ralph Ellison, the Left, and the Making of "Invisible Man," her forthcoming work, which she discusses below. Foley is also a member of the MLA Radical Caucus and serves on the manuscript committee of Science and Society.
This interview was conducted by Joseph Ramsey over email, during January and February 2008
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<1> Joseph Ramsey: You're now on the verge of publishing your fourth book on the intersections and overlapping of Left politics and American literature, to go along with dozens of articles on this topic. How did you first get involved in the study of this field? Looking back on the past thirty years, could you have anticipated then where you would stand today? How do you look back on the path you have traversed since that early work on Dos Passos?
<2> Barbara Foley: The impetus behind my deciding to write about literary radicalism was my own political radicalization. I was not born into a leftist family - by any means! - so I consider myself fortunate indeed to have come of age in the late 1960s, when you would have to have been in a state of completely zoned-out denial not to be aware of, and touched by, what was going on in the world beyond the groves of academe. I did my graduate study in literature (after a brief foray into clinical psychology) at the University of Chicago, which was at the time dominated by neo-Aristotelian formalism. I learned a lot there about how to analyze narrative structures, but my political convictions and activities were for some time almost schizophrenically separated from my study of literature. My decision to do my thesis on John Dos Passos's radical USA trilogy was motivated by my desire to find some way bring together my passion for literature and literary study with my passion for revolutionary social transformation. The dissertation was quite formalistic, though; it took me several years of self-education in Marxism before I felt I could call myself any kind of Marxist critic.
<3> JR: You have said previously that you are very much a "child of the Sixties." How so did your political commitments, organizational affiliations, and activism inform and shape your scholarly work?
<4> BF: In the spring of 1969 - when I was still an undergraduate - I became involved in SDS (Students for a Democratic Society). When SDS split in June of 1969, I remained affiliated with the Worker-Student Alliance wing of SDS associated with PLP (Progressive Labor Party), which was placing a lot of emphasis upon the fight against racism. Things were intense: by the Fall of 1969 I had gotten involved in a demonstration in support of campus workers at the U of Chicago and was suspended from graduate school for a couple of semesters. Before I had barely begun! But in a way this was an important experience: activism - and the awareness that activism has consequences - has shaped my sense of the responsibilities of the leftist intellectual ever since then.
<5> During the Sixties, too, US campus activists were continually aware of the international context of our (modest) efforts to transform the world. The Chinese Cultural Revolution, the uprising of Vietnamese peasants, the Cuban revolution - all these events shaped our sense of our project. My continuing interest in what is going on in China dates back to this period.
<6> JR: It's been over 20 years now since you first published Telling the Truth: the theory and practice of documentary fiction, and a decade and a half since Radical Representations came out. How far has the study of proletarian literature and left culture of the mid-20th century more generally come since the 1980s and early 90s? What have been the most remarkable changes in how people relate to radical and proletarian literature, since you first entered the field?
<7> BF: A lot has been accomplished as regards the study of proletarian literature over the past couple of decades; I could list some two or three dozen books, as well as scads of articles, which show that this body of literature is now routinely accorded a good deal of respectability. Hey, literary proletarianism is even seen as integral to modernism (which of course the literary radicals of the time realized - they were all for "making it new.") Radical Representations (1993) helped to do some of the ground-clearing of the knee-jerk anticommunism that had guided almost all discussions of leftist literature up to the late 1980s; I am glad wrote the book.
<8> To this day, though, anticommunism continues to color a lot of the commentary on literary radicalism. It has gone into the groundwater of much contemporary theory, taking the form of a critique of "class reductionism" and "master narratives," the relegation of class to a matter of identity, and the embrace of various "intersectionality" models for examining what Terry Eagleton calls the "holy trinity" of gender/race/class. So much work remains to be done.
<9> JR: Interestingly, you don't let the Communist Left off the hook here either. Indeed, one of the thrusts of your interpretive approach, from Radical Representations, to Spectres of 1919, to the Ellison book, seems to be to examine the way that literary texts open a kind of window in to dramatizing and critiquing the contradictions within the mid-century political Left itself, in particular in and around the Popular Front period. In particular, a running theme in your work, Spectres of 1919 especially leaps to mind, is a deep and thorough criticism of nationalism, in all its myriad forms, "progressive" or otherwise. To put it somewhat in vulgar fashion: What exactly is the problem with nationalism? And how has this concern grown out of your research?
<10> BF: I think that nationalism has proven to be the Achilles Heel of revolutionary movements in the 20th century. There's no way this could have been known in advance: when Lenin and co. (and then the Comintern) called for self-determination of all oppressed and colonized peoples in the era of WWI, this was a tremendous advance over the racism of the Second International. But I think that the track record of nationalist movements over the course of the century has shown them to result time after time in the formation of governing elites whose interests diverge from those of the masses. Look at Vietnam; South Africa. So my harsh assessment of nationalism - all nationalisms, including those of the colonized and oppressed - derives not only from my own literary-related research - into the New Negro movement, Depression-era literary radicalism - but also from my being (I hope) an aware citizen of the world.
<11> JR: Yet, despite - and perhaps you might argue because of, - your thorough critique of the CPUSA during the period, would it be fair to say that of the "second wave" of revisionist scholars of American literary and cultural mid-20th century radicalism and communism (here I think of Wald, Denning, Nelson, and company, positing Aaron and Rideout as the "first wave") that your work remains most sympathetic to the actually existing institutions, platform, and project of the Communist movement and the CPUSA's role within it?
<12> BF: I think so. My view is that, warts and all, for several decades the movement associated with the CPUSA was the best thing around, and that it drew in the people most concerned with revolutionary social transformation. Especially important was the CPUSA's role in the fight against racism.
<13> JR: On that note, how would you position yourself politically, theoretically, and if you want methodologically in relationship to works such as Repression and Recovery, The Cultural Front, Labor and Desire, and say Exiles from a Future Time or Trinity of Passion? How does the way you generally frame and understand the interwar and early post-war/Cold War period compare and contrast to these other scholars' views?
<14> BF: Well, that is a huge question, largely because Nelson, Denning, Rabinowitz, and Wald all have different points of view. I have gotten a lot out of the writings of all these scholars. Re the first two, I'd say that I take more seriously than they do the role played by the CP in generating the class-conscious mass movements that enabled to growth and development of the exciting revolutionary cultures that they describe and analyze. Wald and to a lesser degree Rabinowitz are programmatically hostile to many features of the CPUSA, especially in relation to its membership in the Third International and support of the USSR. While I think that the Third International ended making up a lot of serious mistakes, I don't find the term "Stalinism" at all useful in analyzing what these mistakes were. (Nor do I consider these mistakes to be "crimes.") Those are some key points of difference. Regarding Alan Wald in particular, though, let me underline my respect for the excellence of his scholarship, as well as the nuance in his appreciation of many individual figures associated with CP-affiliated literary radicalism.
Current Work - Ralph Ellison and Invisible Man
<15> JR: You've spent the better part of the last decade working on Ralph Ellison. How did you become interested in pursuing your present project?
<16> BF: Ellison has figured for years as Exhibit A in the case for arguing that Communists have historically exploited and abused African Americans. My research into the 1920s-1930s showed me otherwise; so I decided to take on this biggie and see what I could find out. I began work on what I called the "rhetoric of anticommunism" in Invisible Man long before I viewed any of the materials in the Ellison archive that have subsequently verified my speculations in various ways.
<17> JR: Your current work is concerned with thoroughly pursuing the implications of what you term "one of the best kept secrets of U.S. literary history," namely Ralph Ellison's long-standing intimacy with American Communism. For those who aren't familiar with it, could you briefly outline the thrust and scope of your forthcoming Ellison book?
<18> BF: The book - provisionally titled at this point Wrestling with Prometheus: Ralph Ellison, the Left, and the making of Invisible Man - is an attempt to "read forward" through Ellison's early radical writings and the drafts of the novel to the final text. Although Ellison, in post-Invisible Man interviews and essays, denied having taken seriously his early leftist commitments, and provided a conservative lexicon through which to read the published text, I view his time on the left as deeply formative in many ways. His early fiction - especially some of the unpublished material - shows him to have been fascinated by the figure of the black red organizer. His early journalism shows him to have subscribed to many features of the CP's analysis of domestic and world events. Even though by 1945 - when he began work, more or less, on Invisible Man - Ellison was vituperating against the Communists in letters to Wright and other correspondents, Ellison in fact took many years to shed the Marxist (and in some ways abidingly pro-Communist) lenses through which he had for several years understood the world. The drafts of the novel - over which he agonized for seven years - reveal the changing politics guiding his revisionary process. So the book is a closely textual study, tracing these many changes, but also an analysis of anticommunism as a discourse.
<19> I also see the contradictions within the Communist movement - especially during World War II - as playing a key role in alienating Ellison from the left. Had the CP maintained a more revolutionary position throughout the Popular Front and the war, Ellison might have ended up in a different place. Ellison's personal odyssey has to be seen in this larger context. But then again, many radicals and fellow-travelers - African-American and otherwise - did not jump ship after the war, but instead remained in and close to the Communist movement. Some moved closer: think of Robeson and Du Bois, for starters. It was not determined in advance that Ellison would become a cold warrior. Wrestling with Prometheus tries to tease out this historical dialectic, as it was played out in Ellison's writings.
<20> JR: How do you see your work in relation to the recent major biographies of Ralph Ellison, by Arnold Rampersad and Lawrence Jackson?
<21> BF: Both biographies are well-researched and have been very useful to me. Jackson's - which ends with the publication of Invisible Man, as does my book - does quite a thorough job of tracing the ins and outs of Ellison's relationship with the left. It is very unsympathetic to the left, though, and in many places attributes to Ellison reactions and motivations that are undocumented. So it vacillates between speculation and causal analysis in ways I at times find frustrating.
<22> My approach differs from that of Rampersad - who by the way does not treat the early fiction or the drafts of Invisible Man - in that I discern a good deal more sincerity in Ellison's engagement with the left. Rampersad views Ellison's character as having been molded quite early on by the constraints - emotional, financial, and of course racial - of his early life. He greatly dislikes Ellison (as do I - at least the man that Ellison became). In a way, though Rampersad's portrait is more deterministic than mine, in that I see an Ellison who, in his leftist period, in fact had the potential to become quite different kind of person. Rampersad sees him as having been hard-wired for selfishness and opportunism from youth onwards. The metaphor of roads taken and not taken, by contrast, continually appears in my narrative.
<23> JR: It seems to me that your upcoming book is remarkable from a methodological perspective. As you point out in your introduction, you consider Invisible Man "from the standpoint of the many decisions that went into its making, rather than from that of the product that results from those decisions, seemingly inevitable once enclosed between covers." You actually speak of writing a kind of "biography of a text." The emphasis seems to be on the decisions involved in the writing process. I wonder if you could elaborate on this point, and in relationship to the discipline of literary studies more generally?
<24> BF: What I have learned through tracing the process that generated Invisible Man is that a published text is truly an arti-fact, the end point of a process that could have gone in any number of different directions. It is important not to try unduly to reconcile the gaps and fissures in a text - especially one that has become a "classic" - by resorting to irony and paradox. Or aporia. Novels come into being in history; their contradictions play out larger historical contradictions.
<25> JR: On a related note, at the end of the introduction to the new book, you write that "the discarded drafts and notes of Invisible Man…constitute the repressed political unconscious lurking in the novel's basement." How does your notion of the "political unconscious" here - and for that matter, elsewhere - differ from the influential notion spelled out by Fredric Jameson in his work of the same name? What are the implications of your different understandings of the term?
<26> BF: I realize that I am at once referencing and tweaking Jameson when I use the term "political unconscious" in this way. I have no quarrel with Jameson's immensely fruitful definition and deployment of this term to describe the ideologically-saturated discourses that supply writers with the means of representation and communication. Willy nilly, writers swim in vast historical seas, and their texts reflect (I love to use the word "reflect"!) all kinds of premises and assumptions encoded in the language and literary conventions that the writers are compelled to use. Whatever their individual intentions (a term I also find indispensable), writers thus bear historical - and political - burdens of which they are largely unconscious. (Excuse all the mixed metaphors!)
<27> I do think, though, that the ways in which individuals are inserted into the particularities of their moments, and undergo in their own lives the playing out of larger historical forces, are also of concern to literary scholars. There is a history which each writer has grappled with in her/his own life, and which she/he often to one degree or another represses - as something too painful to confront, as a source of abiding guilt, whatever. I explored this notion in an article I wrote about Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener" some years ago. As I engaged with Ellison in Prometheus, it struck me that the invisible man in the basement of U.S. history had an analogue in the consciousness - and conscience - of the author himself.
<28> JR: You pointed out in a 2003 article how Ellison seems to have "added in" the well-known, (and oh so pedagogically seductive) symbolic trappings of Invisible Man - the images of blindness and veiling, the paper-identity trail, etc. - rather late in his process of production. What are the most notable changes in this vein? And what caused him to make these changes? To what extent was his choice free vs. determined by external forces, such as editorial intervention, etc.?
<29> BF: Much of the imagistic patterning - which by the way was strongly influenced by Kenneth Burke's theorization of "equations" and "associative clusters" - was in Ellison's mind from the outset. But the components constituting these clusters were reworked in various ways. For instance, at several points Ellison considered introducing (non-ironically) the notion that Marxism would have supplied lenses (camera lens, eyeglasses) through which better to see. In an early version of the "eye scene," it is not Brother Jack whose glass eye pops out, and the IM does not enter into his long disquisition about the "dialectical deacon." Clearly these different narrative elements reconfigure the trope of visibility/invisibility in interesting ways. Another point: in early drafts, the slip of paper containing the IM's Brotherhood name has the name typed, not handwritten; and at first there is no revelatory moment when, in the basement toward the end, the IM compares the handwriting on the two slips of paper that, in the published text, establish beyond a doubt his betrayal by the Brotherhood. The published text is much more streamlined in its symbolism, but also much simpler and more reductive - in line with the rhetoric of anticommunism.
<30> JR: You have previewed some of your findings in recent articles such as the one in the anthology Left of the Color Line… Can we get a glimpse behind the "basement doors"? What are some of the more striking, and previously unpublished, revelations that you uncover in the new book?
<31> BF: Bledsoe is shown handing over to a lynch mob a sharecropper who has fled to the campus for sanctuary. At first there is no Brother Tod Clifton. Brother Hambro is Brother Stein and bears a concentration camp tattoo on his arm. Really, the drafts are quite incredible.
<32> JR: How do you see the (in)famous trope of "invisibility" functioning in the early drafts of Invisible Man relative to the published text?
<33> BF: In many of the same ways, of course. And the novel in all its versions quite wonderfully conveys how racism functions to divest both the seer and the seen of their humanity. One difference, though, is that in earlier drafts the question of the invisibility of the black worker gets greater attention. So invisibility is linked with the fetishization of labor power in provocative ways.
<34> JR: Are these early drafts of Invisible Man in anything resembling a form that could be potentially republished as a rough-edged or even fragmentary whole?
<35> BF: I don't think so. The rewritings are so many. The devil really is in the details.
<36> JR: So, Ellison seemed to be revising on at least two levels here then: on the one hand tending toward myth and symbolism in a way that often distanced his text from social realism and the historical specificity that it entails, and on the other, there was a struggle between differing sets of myths-symbols with different political motifs. It follow that it was conceivable for instance that Invisible Man might have emerged as a novel still very much sympathizing and identifying with the Left, but still touting something of a high modernist form? A kind of proletarian high modernism?! Your selected title, Wrestling with Prometheus, is remarkable in this regard.
<37> BF: One thing that I discovered in researching the book is that even myth-symbol criticism - which we associate with the cold war-era pursuit of anti-historical and apolitical archetypes - was of considerable interest to the literary left. Ellison was seeking "universals" that would connect the experience of his African-American protagonist with that of nonblack readers, but he originally sought to do this via figures embodying rebellion against hierarchies of various kinds. Hence Prometheus, whom he linked with Denmark Vesey, John Henry, and other folk/myth characters embodying a proto-proletarian and proletarian standpoint. These figures are epitomized in the figure of LeRoy (get it? The King?), an antiracist union activist and former roomer at Mary Rambo's apartment who functions as kind of double for the IM. Proletarian high modernism indeed!
<38> JR: When I was taught this novel in graduate school, one of the major "lessons" unveiled to us through reading Invisible Man involved the novel's supposed insight into how those who focus on "the class struggle" often become almost willfully obtuse to the "ass struggle." But you point out that if anything Ellison's early engagement with Marxism may have actually encouraged a more intense engagement with Freud and questions of sexuality, than we see in the published text. How so is this the case?
<39> BF: There is a gay (in earlier drafts, Communist) professor at the college who acts as the first mentor figure for the IM. (A good deal of what he says is transferred to the vet at the Golden Day in the published text.) The IM has a sexual relationship (of sorts!) with a young black woman at Mary Rambo's and later gets involved in a love affair with a young white woman in the Brotherhood. The incest theme in the Trueblood-Norton relationship is linked more explicitly with political economy. Altogether sex and sexuality are treated more boldly in the drafts, and more is made of repression of sexuality as both a personal and a political phenomenon.
<40> JR: In a post-Cold War cultural climate what ideological and political work do you see a text like Invisible Man, and for that matter Ellison studies, doing today? For instance, I've had students in class, who until I give them a basic history lesson, aren't able to recognize that the "Brotherhood" is arguably "supposed" to be the U.S. Communist Party. How has the reading and teaching of this novel changed with the supposed "death of Communism," the postmodern sapping of historical consciousness, and (arguably) the easing of overtly anti-Communist indoctrination?
<41> BF: I don't think the political agenda has changed all that much. Anticommunism has migrated largely to the realm of epistemology. In current commentaries on Invisible Man, the Brotherhood is scored for its scientism more than for its Stalinism. But the net effect is much the same.
<42> JR: Obviously Invisible Man and the receipt of the National Book Award fairly catapulted Ellison onto the national stage as an American public intellectual. How would you characterize his role and influence as public intellectual and icon during the period following his one and only novel?
<43> BF: He became a valued member of the cold war intellectual establishment. Rampersad is excellent on all of this.
<44> JR: In essence you are inaugurating a major paradigm shift in a long-established sub-field, one where ostensibly aesthetic judgments have long been - consciously or unconsciously - entangled with political assumptions. Granted Wrestling with Prometheus has yet to hit the racks, but what is your impression of the critical reception that your work has received within the field of "Ellison studies" to date?
<45> BF: I can't really say much about the impact of my work on Ellison studies to date. But I do think that this book is going to be of interest to a wide range of readers, and I have very deliberately steered away from literary-critical and political jargon. I want it to be broadly accessible, especially to, say, high school teachers who are charged with teaching this novel and are interested in what went into its making.
Beyond Ellison, now…
<46> JR: I was reading the other day an article in Symploke by David Shumway entitled "Marxism without Revolution." In many ways a lucid and very critical review of major trends in left cultural theory in the United States of the 20th century. One of his main arguments is that Marxist hopes of a revolutionary situation developing in a place like the United States have long been misplaced and even harmful to the real work of institution building that might constitute positive social(ist) change. At one point he writes that "the history of the United States - presumably the leading instance of capitalism - in the twentieth century does not give us grounds for thinking that a successful revolution of the sort Marxism has imagined might have occurred." "The problem is not" he writes, "that capitalism lacks the contradictions and crises that might have brought down the state, but that there is no reason to believe that a genuinely socialist, much less communist society could have been built in its place." What do you say to this? How do you see work on radical literature and culture of the early to mid-20th century U.S. as relating to this statement? Does revisionist scholarship from the period of U.S. capitalism's intense crises to some extent provide the imaginary "ground" that Shumway alludes to?
<47> BF: This is a huge question. And I don't have the full context of these quotations from Shumway's essay. On the basis of what you have selected above, though, I'd say that the "real work of institution building" aimed at creating an egalitarian society cannot take place under capitalism - although of course millions of people need to get engaged right now in the kinds of oppositional activities that demonstrate to them their own ability to run society in the interest of the great majority of people, whom Ellison called the "dispossessed" of the world. But I am not a social democrat; I think that revolution is necessary to get rid of the material basis of injustice and inequality. What sounds like the hard realism of "institution-building" is, to me, an illusion-ridden embrace of liberalism.
<48> Scholarship on the radical 1930s can go - and has gone - in any number of directions in shaping present-day understandings of how society can and should be transformed. Those who enshrine the most reformist features of Popular Frontism simply reinforce mythic notions of "America" as the site of a democracy that can be won by the nation being true to its espoused ideals. Those who underline the unremitting critique of capitalism and the sympathetic treatment of leftists in much of the really radical material from the 1930s, by contrast, take scholarship in a much more revolutionary direction.
<49> JR: Shifting modes a bit, you were the object of a political/free speech fight some time ago, weren't you? How did that fall out? And what lessons did you learn about the politics of higher education through this process?
<50> BF: I was denied tenure at Northwestern University in the mid-1980s because of my activity in opposing a Nicaraguan Contra directorate leader who came to campus. I am not now or ever have been apologetic for the speech I made on that occasion. But in my tenure case, "service" was conflated with "citizenship" (I kid you not) and deemed more important than either scholarship or teaching in the decision to deny me tenure. (I was approved on all levels through the dean; it was the provost who brought down the ax.) What did I learn from all this? That radical faculty, if they act on their beliefs, have no real protection. But that it is important to act on one's beliefs.
<51> JR: What do you see as the opportunities, responsibilities, and dangers facing left intellectuals today in 2008? What do you see as the main political threats facing radical educators in the academy and higher education in general today? For instance, how do you understand as the principle threats to freedom of speech and to academic freedom today in the U.S? What do you see as the principal opportunities for combating these trends?
<52> BF: The threats are several. While we can't get paranoid about things, we need to realize that the legal apparatus for fascism (yes, I'll use that word) is in place in the United States. The movement associated with the Academic Bill of Rights is right now relegated to the fringe of academia, but it can, under not-much-changed circumstances (i.e. a replayed 9/11), become much more influential. The recent witch-hunt of ethnic studies professor Ward Churchill; the abrogation of the academic freedom of scholars critical of Zionism; the many constraints on the classroom activities of non-tenure-track faculty - all these events and situations point to a good deal of repression right now in the academy. The movement for so-called "outcomes assessment," parading as a commitment to excellence, is a university-level version of "no child left behind" and threatens to impose a neo-liberal political agenda on teaching and scholarship. In the coming period things will, I fear, get worse - and getting rid of Bush is not the solution. In fact, the ruling class (if I may use that term) can get away with more under a liberal Democratic regime than under an overtly conservative Republican one. So there is a lot of work to be done. That is why I am involved in the MLA Radical Caucus, which is trying to build consciousness and activism about such matters.
<53> JR: You mention your work with the MLA Radical Caucus. Perhaps we could close by hearing more about what this organization has done and is planning to do in the future to meet the dangers and challenges facing academic radicals and critical thinking more generally in the U.S.? From a left-intellectual's perspective: What is to be done?
<54> BF: Aha, "What is to be done?" (By the way, this was a favorite query of Ellison's, during his left period!) For one thing, the MLA Constitution has to be revised. In the late 1980s, in reaction to the "culture wars," the MLA Executive Council turned tail and ran, taking steps to change the organization's constitution so that it can't take positions on issues beyond the immediate purview of the academy. This has resulted in such absurdities as our having to condemn the language rationalizing the war in Iraq, rather than the war itself. In the coming period, activists in the MLA need to be able to grapple with the real world, not just its figure in the mirror. The Radical Caucus will be taking steps over the next two years to raise the issue of changing the Constitution (just back to what it once was, by the way! - we'll be fighting to preserve a past status quo!).
<55> But in the academy itself we need to be alert to the many implications and manifestations of the increased repression, racism, and militarism in society at large. While multiculturalism, feminism, and working-class studies have made the academy a much more comfortable place for leftists and progressives than it was when I entered it some thirty years ago, we should not be lulled into complacency. It is important for us to be aware that this kind of institutionalized left liberalism is compatible with increasing polarization of the wealthy few from the rest, increasing surveillance of the discontented, and increasing relegation of large sectors of the population to low-waged grunt-work, the military, and the prisons. Compound all these developments with the ever-heightening danger of imperialist war to keep control of close-to-the surface oil amidst the peak oil crisis - and we are faced with a noxious brew. We must refuse to drink it down.
<56> What does this mean for work in the academy by the MLA Radical Caucus - and other professionally-affiliated progressive groups? We need to defend the academic freedom of teachers (and students) who speak out against various reactionary features of US foreign and domestic policy - and in particular find ways to support non-tenure track teachers, who can be "let go" without explanation. We need to keep attention focused on the devastating effects of war budgets on higher education - especially since the U.S. is in what the Pentagon calls a "long war" against "terrorism." We need to be alert to the insecure toehold of many ethnic studies departments and the racism fueling current attacks on affirmative action. We need to support and spend time with activist students who are grappling with these issues and could use some mentoring. Above all, radicals in the academy need to be radical, continually designating capitalism as the structural underpinning of the many injustices we contest. We need to bear in mind that the world need not be the way it is, and that our efforts can and should contribute to not just patching up the system, but transforming it in profound and far-reaching ways.
<57> JR: One last question. Recently, university administrators, and others - even the MLA's own Gerald Graff - have been pushing for greater use of "outcomes assessment" tools in academia, as a way of making professors more accountable to "the public" and to counter the widely held stereotype of academics in the humanities as "tenured radicals ruling their classrooms with an iron fist." What is your view of the current trends in the academy towards OA and greater "public accountability"? And how do you think radicals should relate to this development?
<58> BF: While I like and respect Jerry Graff, I think he is dead wrong to advocate that faculty join in the movement for outcomes assessment (OA). Given the current realities of U.S. higher education, it is at best naïve and utopian (in the pejorative sense of the word!) to propose that if college and university teachers go along with OA they'll improve their public image, get their campuses rewarded with bigger state budgets, and ward off the attacks of right-wingers. Sure, in the best of all possible worlds teachers would be united around the imperative to produce a coherent, unified curriculum that ensured that students really learn; and they'd be willing to be held accountable for meeting their students' needs. But this is far from the best of all possible worlds. What is driving the OA movement at present is the felt need of administrators - and, behind them, boards of governors and trustees - to make higher education more productive for U.S. capital in the era of intensified global competition. They want to guarantee that young people graduate from college with packaged and marketable skills that have been subjected to standardized measurement. OA is basically No Child Left Behind as applied to higher education. Its implications are profoundly anti-intellectual, conformist, and conservative. And there's no reason at all to think that, if faculty were to knuckle under, their state legislatures would become more generous, or that the David Horowitzes of the world would shut up. In fact, our timidity would make us all the more vulnerable.
<59> Although teachers and students in all fields would clearly be adversely affected by the full-scale institution of OA, the humanities would suffer the most, for reasons that are pretty obvious. And the non-tenure track faculty members who in many departments make up nearly three-quarters of college instructional staff would be muzzled in horrific ways - teaching to the test, refraining from centering their curricula on controversy and critique. (In fact, one of the ironies of Graff's advocating OA is that his beloved pedagogical principle of "teach the debates" would go out the window!) There has been a good deal of discussion about OA in the Radical Caucus of the MLA; we have already spoken out against it in the Delegate Assembly. In coming months we will, I anticipate, go on the counter-offensive. Keep your ear tuned and your eye peeled.
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