America's Stupefying Pedagogy of the Oppressor: Scholarship Intended to Flatter White Men, Not Study Them
Trump Administration Attacking Ivy League Institutions For Failing to Corral Free Speech and Critical Thinking
In researching her novel, Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell read prodigiously, relying heavily on one text in particular, Reconstruction in Georgia, written by the historian C. Mildred Thompson.
Upon Gone With the Wind’s publication in 1936, Thompson—the dean of Vassar College at the time—wrote to Mitchell to tell her that she had thoroughly enjoyed the novel, so much in fact that she had named her new puppy after Scarlett O’Hara. Mitchell wrote back, and the two white women, both from Georgia, became fast friends, bonding, no doubt, over their politics, patrimony and prose.
In Reconstruction in Georgia, for instance, Thompson dropped nuggets such as this:
“The bad repute of the Freedman’s Bureau was due more directly to the political activities of its agents in 1867 and 1868, when they manipulated the helpless black voters for their own aggrandizement.”
That prompted Mitchell to write in Gone With the Wind:
“Formerly their white masters had given the orders. Now they had a new set of masters, the Bureau and the Carpetbaggers, and their orders were: ‘You’re just as good as any white man, so act that way. Just as soon as you can vote the Republican ticket, you are going to have the white man’s property! It’s as good as yours now. Take it, if you can get it!”.
In her 2022 book, The Wrath to Come: “Gone with the Wind” and the Lies America Tells, the cultural critic, Sarah Churchwell, posited that you can, in fact, draw a straight line between Mitchell’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of white aggrievement and victimhood and the violent white mob that was coaxed by Donald Trump to alight on Capitol Hill 84 years later.
What is seldom mentioned, however, is the pivotal role that America’s most prestigious universities have played in championing the understanding of the United States as a “white man’s country,” and promoting a narrative in which the defining tragedy for the U.S. was neither the transatlantic slave trade nor the wanton slaughter of Native Americans but the postbellum Reconstruction era that prematurely gave freedmen the vote.
Thompson was the only female scholar in Columbia University’s Dunning School—named for the historian and political scientist William Archibald Dunning—that was among the first academic institutions to study Reconstruction by scrutinizing primary sources, yet still got it agonizingly wrong, reaching more or less the same cartoonishly racist conclusions as the director D.W. Griffith’s film, Birth of a Nation.
Another Dunning School scholar who influenced Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind was Claud Bowers who wrote in his book, The Tragic Era: Reconstruction After Lincoln:
“The freedmen clung to the illusion planted in their minds by demagogues that the economic status of the races was to be reversed by the distribution of the land among them. This cruelly false hope was being fed by private soldiers, Bureau agents, and low Northern whites circulating among the negroes on terms of social equality in the cultivation of their prospective votes.”
Just as W.E.B. Du Bois’ groundbreaking 1935 book, Black Reconstruction in America exposed the Dunning School’s chicanery, the Trump administration’s announcement last week that it would cancel $400 million in federal grants and contracts to Columbia University unmasks the fraud at the heart of higher learning in the United States, and so-called intellectuals who do not, in the main, seek to interrogate settler colonialism but to alibi it.
Trump’s Federal Task Force to Combat Antisemitism accused Columbia of failing to address anti-Jewish racism on its Upper West Side campus in the 17 months since Israel responded to the Palestinian resistance’s lethal military attack with a genocidal campaign in Gaza, sparking worldwide protests.
It is all part of a coordinated attack against free speech: The White House task force announced last week that it is reviewing federal funding for nine other colleges and universities, including Harvard and MIT; over the weekend, immigration agents arrested a Palestinian student activist, Mahmoud Khalil, at Columbia and whisked him to a detention facility in Louisiana; and yesterday, the Department of Education put 60 colleges and universities on notice that they could face sanctions if they do not comply with the administration’s interpretation of federal civil rights laws to include protests against Israel’s genocide.
Former Columbia University President Minouche Shafik was among seven college leaders summoned by Congress to testify about how they would address hypothetical calls for another Jewish Holocaust while faculty and students—many of whom are Jewish—were protesting a real genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. An account in the Intercept over the weekend described the university administration’s efforts thusly:
“Columbia University could hardly have been more draconian in the last year and a half since students began speaking out against Israel’s assault on Gaza.
In early November 2023, four months before the Columbia Gaza solidarity encampment even began, the university banned its chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace. A few hundred students from the groups had the audacity to walk out from classes and hold a “die-in” protest on campus — some of the most widely celebrated nonviolent protest tactics available.
The crackdown was just getting started.
Since then, the university has ordered police raids on campus three times, leading to the arrests of over 100 students. Last week, the school expelled four students, three from Barnard College, one from Columbia. Many dozens of students have faced discipline and suspensions for participating in pro-Palestine protests and speech. Professors have been slandered before Congress, censured, removed from positions, and reportedly pushed into retirement over their support for Palestine and criticism of Israel. The campus has been essentially locked down for almost a year.
Again and again, Columbia has shown a willingness to throw students, faculty, free speech, and academic freedom under the bus in acquiescence to a right-wing, pro-Israel narrative that treats support for Palestinians as an affront to Jewish safety.
One student who gave her name only as Layla told the Intercept:
‘Columbia has worked overtime to appease. Students are miserable. Campus is a panopticon. And their funding was still cut.”
Much like its Dunning School scholars a century ago, Columbia’s administrators are complicit in what is essentially a racial hoax, wielding vastly exaggerated accusations of anti-Semitism as a cudgel to flog dissidents who protest Israel’s crimes against humanity. Built, literally, with the money accrued from the slave trade, the nation’s elite institutions—the Ivy League especially—are tasked with producing the knowledge to qualify the Empire’s expansion and its dispossession of racialized groups, especially.
While there are some exceptions—Columbia was the home of the late Edward Said, as one example, who developed the concept of Orientalism to explain the West’s cultural misrepresentations of its predations—America’s brand of scholarship is decidedly anti-intellectual and intended to undermine de-colonizing resistance movements from Gotham to Gaza by flattering the white settler rather than studying him. In this fashion, the Dunning Boys, as they were colloquially known, were no different from the Chicago Boys, a coterie of economists trained at the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman, whose macroeconomic neoliberal economic policies helped Wall Street pilfer financial resources from Chilean workers, dramatically widening inequality in that country following the 1973 military coup organized by the Nixon administration.
It is reminiscent of the Dark Ages when knowledge production was subordinate to the politics of the throne, or the church, or both. While vastly overstated, Europe’s Enlightenment Era freed scholars to engage in serious study without fear or favor. By canceling Columbia’s contracts, Trump hopes to signal to university administrators across the country to crack down even harder on students and faculty protesting Israel’s illegal occupation and killing, through heavy shelling and starvation, of at least 65,000 Palestinians in Gaza, virtually all of them civilians.
An article published by the New Yorker over the weekend showcases the conundrum facing universities today. The article, entitled “Will Harvard Bend or Break” describes the days after Hamas’ October 7 attack when the college president Claudine Gay weighed the institutional response with administrators and board members. Joined by the hedge fund manager, Bill Ackerman, an alum, former college President Larry Summers lit into Gay for lacking a sense of urgency.
The child of Haitian immigrants, Gay was Harvard’s first Black president, and in her testimony to Congress struggled to balance protesters’ constitutional right to free speech with demands from powerful Zionists like Ackerman and Summers to denounce Hamas for its October 7 attack, which international law recognizes as legitimate. But in the end, the narrative of Gay as a DEI hire who was— like the freedmen in the Dunning School’s estimation—in over her head stuck; within months of the conflagration in the Middle East, she was out as president.
Her antagonist, Summers, was also forced to resign as Harvard’s president in 2006 following a litany of controversies in his five years on the job, including a dispute with Cornel West and his close relationship to Andrei Shleifer, a Harvard economist who had the university on the hook for $26.5 million after he was found liable for defrauding USAID when he invested in Russian stocks while leading an international effort to privatize state-owned enterprises.
Summers also had a relationship with the convicted sex trafficker and pedophile, Jeffrey Epstein, who agreed to donate $25 million to endow Harvard’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, or eugenics. And in January 2005, at a Conference on Diversifying the Science & Engineering Workforce, Summers went full Dunning School in attributing the underrepresentation of women in math and science positions at top universities to
“issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude, and that those considerations are reinforced by what are in fact lesser factors involving socialization and continuing discrimination. I would like nothing better than to be proved wrong, because I would like nothing better than for these problems to be addressable simply by everybody understanding what they are, and working very hard to address.”
At the time that Summers offered his remarks, the data had shown for nearly a half- century that there are no genetic differences between boys and girls in their capacity to learn math and science, and where there are, they tend to favor women who are more verbal, which is the biggest factor in developing math and science skills. In light of that, the question Summers should’ve addressed is what are men doing to discourage women from careers for which they are well-suited.
As I write in my book, Class War in America: How the Elites Divide the Nation by Asking ‘Are You a Worker or Are You White?” the Academy, along with the news and entertainment media, and organized labor, form a triptych of institutions that have most failed the American working class. It hasn’t always been this way: in the New Deal era, some media outlets reported expansively on organized labor’s struggle to wean its rank-and-file of racism, and scholars, such as Lani Guinier’s daddy, Ewart, provided labor leaders with the data to justify their loudening demands from the bosses. A decade later, in the 1960s, Malcolm X (an autodidact it should be noted) exhorted universities to serve the communities they were in, resulting in the creation and proliferation of Black studies programs across the country.
It's not clear to me that the Academy can continue to serve two masters and survive, at least not as we have long known it. The elite institutions of higher learning can comply with Trump’s edict to sanction anti-Semites who don’t exist, thereby making their college or university increasingly less relevant in a world that is looking for answers to dire problems; or they can defy Trump and lose access to tens of millions of federal dollars.
Or we the people can reinvent the Republic in our image, and liberate higher learning from stupefying white men like Donald Trump, Larry Summers, Bill Ackerman, and William Archibald Dunning.
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