When I heard that University of Washington students were poised to conduct a “disorientation” for entering students that featured the institution’s radical history I thought that was an oxymoron. Radical and U.W. in the same sentence? Surely, the administration had not engaged in “radical” acts. But then I realized I’d fallen into an Orwellian trap of accepting “radical” as a trait of leftists. More often it is used to smear liberal or moderate leftists. But in the forties and fifties many universities, including the UW, took radical rightwing action or supported it. McCarthyism reigned.
Flash! It’s 1954. I’m a U.W. student. I’m sitting next to Stull Holt, the chair of the history department, as we listen to members of the “Velde Committee” hearings hurl damaging accusations at university professors among others. Barbara Hartle, an admitted former member of the American Communist Party, has offered up to the committee more than three hundred names of people she alleges are or were Party members.
For weeks I’ve been ranting to Professor Holt about violations of civil liberties, but he just responds with a sigh of resignation, pointing out that throughout U.S. history Alien and Sedition laws had come and gone. These hearings, too, shall pass. I’m not confident of that, given the fact that UW President Raymond Allen has already fired three professors for “suspected association with Communists.”
That kind of radical action threatens the very roots of our freedoms. It pervades the university as well as the rest of America. In 1949 one hundred and three professors signed a letter to the U.W. Board of Regents objecting to the firings. But six hundred of the faculty remained silent. (For more on this topic go to http://historylink.org/index.cfm?DisplayPage=output.cfm&file_id=1482
Flash! It’s 1966. In a Political Science class discussion, I refer to an article I’ve read in the New Republic. Another student, agitated, shouts at me across the room that I’m obviously a “Commie.” Clouds of anti-civil libertarian notions are omnipresent on and off the campus.
Academic radicalism takes the form of what is not taught.
Flash! It’s 1968. I’m a U.W. summer school student preparing to teach Washington State History to middle school students in the fall. All teachers of the course must take a university course in that subject. I know that teaching in the Central District will mean I have mostly black students. I want the course to be relevant to them but I’m required to use a particular text book and there’s not a word about African Americans in it. I ask my professor of Washington State history to refer me to some other texts that include the history of blacks in our state. “There weren’t any here,” he says, blithely. Though I have no evidence yet, I’m pretty sure he’s wrong about that. My skepticism is reinforced when I wind up spending most of that summer in the university’s Suzzallo Library pouring over scrap books kept by Negro church ladies’ organizations. I learn how wrong the professor is.
The textbook also excludes information about actions by the Industrial Workers of the World, the radical acts of creating Japanese “relocation” camps, corporations luring blacks from Indiana to Roslyn, Washington to break mine strikes. Nor does the book include more than a sentence about the Chinese exclusion acts or… well, it simply ignores any part of Washington history that is exciting or that casts a dark shadow over Washington’s political history. All this is supported by the disinformation spread by some of my professors in the history department.
While I try to engage my ninth grade students in our state’s past actions, history is being made nearby when the Central Contractors Association organizes for fail employment opportunities. The group protests the U.W. administration’s failure to abide by federal laws that prohibited racial discrimination in hiring. For more about this, see http://www.blackpast.org/?q=aaw/central-contractors-association
The students who are organizing the current “disorientation” event have their hands full in recovering even a few of the University’s radical actions. And the beat goes on, as current student organizations pressure the Board of Regents to divest the university’s investment portfolio of “all stocks in Big Oil, Big Coal, and all companies comprising the backbone of the fossil-few economy.” For more info, click here: http://blog.seattlepi.com/seattlepolitics/2013/06/13/students-to-regents-uw-should-rid-itself-of-oil-coal-stocks/
After taking this little stroll down memory lane, I’m curious about which of the many radical actions the University tour will relate. The “disorientation” for new students is a fitting way to begin their university education. For more information about historic and current UW students’ political actions see
http://crosscut.com/2013/06/17/environment/114962/martha-baskin-campus-fossil-fuel-divestment/
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