Sidney Hook is a name lost to history, yet in his day he was the undisputed philosophical leader of democratic socialism – a founder of Social Democrats USA. Unlike their rival Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the SDUSA took the word “Democratic” seriously. They had no tolerance for totalitarianism. This applied to the world inside and outside the ivory tower. And having been a professor at New York University in the 1960s, he formed a strong opinion about political violence on campus.
“American colleges and Universities today face the gravest crisis in their history,” he wrote in 1970. The crisis was not unrest in and of itself. “Intellectual unrest is not a problem but a virtue, and no university can have too much of it if it is engaged in genuine educational tasks.”
“The problem and threat is not academic unrest but academic disruption and violence which flow from substituting for the academic goals of learning, the political goals of action.” The crisis will “lead first to the political polarization of the campus, then to the political alienation of the campus from the democratic community. If unchecked it will result in academic genocide – the destruction of academic freedom.”
It seems remarkable that professor Hook was speaking of a time decades ago, but with words that could be reprinted today without alteration. “The political process is open to students and faculty on the same footing as all other qualified citizens to express their point of view. It shows profound contempt on their part for democratic due process to use or to threaten or even to condone violence, when they have failed to persuade or convince the electorate.” He could very well have been writing about students’ reaction to the 2016 election.
He wrote of how the “most militant of the student factions are small minorities. They make no bones about their hostility to democracy, their scorn for rational process. Their heroes are the leaders of the most ruthless dictatorships – Lenin, Mao Tse-tung, Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Che Guevara. They openly declare that ‘our major social and foreign problems of our society’ can never be solved to their satisfaction, for their goal is the destruction of our society.”
And what of this paragraph:
It is no exaggeration to say that on many American campuses today academic freedom has been severely crippled. Certain extremist groups have interfered with the rights of students and faculty to hear views that disagree with or challenge their own. The aftermath of the so-called Free Speech Movement at Berkeley is that in many areas free speech has disappeared at that campus. And not only at Berkeley. At scores of universities speakers are shouted down, sometimes assaulted. While spokesmen for movements hostile to the government have unlimited freedom to incite to violent action in opposing government policies, spokesmen for these policies are often barred from campuses or can appear only under heavy police escort.
Had anybody else acted like this, “Everybody would recognize such threats as subversive of the democratic process, as harbingers of fascist rule no matter what the revolutionary rhetoric in which such threats were clothed.”
In his essay, published in the Los Angeles Times, Hook made 8 proposals to defuse the crisis. There is not room to repeat them, but they can be found here.
Hook concludes: “The reminder that in the long run the most serious threat to the integrity of teaching and learning comes not from the criminal violence of extremists but from measures of appeasement and capitulation in the vain hope of curbing their frenzy.”
It takes courage to stand up to mobs, because there is no appeasing them.
The history of American higher education is a history of change. Violence has never played an appreciable role in that history. It need not play a role today if it is recognized that the primary function of higher education is the quest for knowledge, wisdom and vision, not the conquest of political power; that the university is not responsible for the existence of war, poverty and other evils; and that the solution of these and allied problems lies in the hands of the democratic citizenry and not of a privileged elite. The universities can by indirection help in their solution by providing the knowledge, wisdom, and vision required for intelligent action—but only if it retains its relative autonomy and objectivity, and freedom from partisan political bias.
These are sentiments common among conservatives today, but these were the words of a lifelong socialist.