Lean Left

In which I rise again to defend the validity of procedural fairness against those who find it convenient to use the levers of power to exercise their personal grievances, and are endorsed in so doing by the general mass that, too often, can think of no other use for power. And in thus expect my due reward . . .

Bill Ayers – former Weatherman, long-time academic and noted educational reformer, and recent whipping-boy for the ahistorical but ever-aggrieved right wing, on the grounds that he and Obama were once in the same room and thus Obama is responsible for everything Ayers ever did that the right doesn’t like – has just been denied “Emeritus” status on retirement from the University of Illinois, Chicago, an honor that is usually granted without issue. The reason was that, during his radical anti-war days, Ayers and several other Weathermen published an anti-war booklet that carried a dedication to  “political prisoners”, listing as one of about 200 examples Sirhan Sirhan, the assassin of Robert F. Kennedy. As it happens, Kennedy’s son is Chair of the university’s Board of Trustees, and made an “impassioned speech” against Ayers, saying he would “vote his conscience” to deny the appointment “to a man whose body of work includes a book dedicated in part to the man who murdered my father”, and encouraging the rest of the trustees to do likewise.

So, basically, Ayers’s (unpaid and mostly honorary) status at a respected university was being voted on by a board chaired by someone who believes – and who could fault him for that? – that he has a personal grievance against Ayers, and who used his position, not just as a member, but as the chair, of that body to act against Ayers while citing his personal feelings about one of Ayers’s past doings, long ago and outside the academic environment (and which Ayers himself has said he regrets “absolutely” and was “stupid”), apparently without offering any assessment of that issue in terms of its implications for Ayers’s fitness for academia.

However understandable Kennedy’s feelings on this matter may be, however offensive that trite and provocative characterization of Sirhan is, from the information available in the press reports on this incident it is hard to believe the issue was handled appropriately in its scholarly context, or fairly in respect of the standards and procedures applicable to a (usually almost automatic) decision on granting of honorary status to a professor with a long and successful academic career. Given Kennedy’s explicit casting of his vote in terms of his personal feelings about an incident touching on a tragedy in his immediate family, and the apparent lack of any other consideration, especially any assessment of Ayers’s professional achievements (which apparently were considerable), it seems obvious that Kennedy’s vote, and his appeals as Chair to fellow Board members, were motivated by personal animosity, almost certainly based on issues that would not normally have been considered in the case of any other academic. No one would fail to sympathize with Kennedy’s feelings about the book in question, or even to understand his apparent feelings about Ayers, but he should have recused himself from the vote in this matter precisely because of those feelings, and the other Board members should have confined themselves to consideration of the ordinary question of academic worthiness. (In this case, Ayers was not merely a successful professor but had been closely involved in numerous governmental and charitable reform projects and had won awards; his admission to a status that is routine even for ordinary faculty would have been expected to go without question.)

The issue here is whether the institutions of our society will operate in accordance with the principles and procedures that  nominally define them, or whether anything and everything – not just political campaigns and the corporate machine, but the law, the state (UofI is a public university system), school boards, the healthcare system, and every other place in which people can use power to act against others for purposes of their own choosing – will be put at the mercy of public opinion whipped up by aggrieved axe-grinders striking some sympathetic, usually angry, bathetic, or religious, chord. The greatest danger I see in America is not any specific trespass of right-wing sap-headedness – the bigotry, the racism, sexism and homophobia, the xenophobia, the anti-intellectualism, the selfishness, the religious smarm – but the fact that such willful weakness and abdication of principle is so pervasive, and so effective. It was once understood that a personal inability – from emotional instability, or simply lack of intelligence – to consider issues rationally and fairly on their merits was a disqualifier to a position of authority; but again and again emotion is offered, and openly appealed to by political opportunists, as a reason for decisions that rightly must be made on grounds of fact and principle. The mere existence of strong feelings on some issue is justification for vacating the procedures that govern fair and equitable decisionmaking on that issue; we are told, all but explicitly, that because people cannot address certain issues rationally, they are entitled to deal with them irrationally, idiosyncratically, and on the basis of personal passions.

This is not just the mechanism driving ordinary political debates over hot buttons like abortion or the death penalty, where ungrounded emotionalism is the entirety of the debate on the conservative side of the issue, but is also the grounds for the incursion of irrationality into almost every point of contention in public life. It drives – and justifies – creationist nutcases on public schoolboards (“expelling God from the classroom!”), anti-healthcare conspiracy theorists (“death panels!”), delusional religious wingers on political power trips in the Schiavo case, torturers in prisons and POW camps, secret police rounding up random “terrorists” without warrants or charges or lawyers, anti-immigrant demagogues, self-righteous pharmacists who claim the right to make your healthcare decisions on the basis of their religious biases, and all the many varieties of braying bigot who plague us so. It creates our wars: Kennedy’s line about “murdered my father” was eerily reminiscent of George Bush’s statemement that he was determined to invade Iraq because Saddam Hussein “tried to kill my Dad”. It destroys our (majority-black) cities: recall the lurid, and utterly false, stories about rampant cannibalism and rape in the Superdome during Hurricane Katrina – or the cold-blood shootings by white police of black citizens trying to cross bridges out of the city into neighboring towns at the same time? It eviscerates our justice system: we are now told we cannot allow trials of people we “know” are terrorists because some of them might be found innocent. It creates and perptuates the discrimination that still pervades public issues: gay marriage, DADT, immigration, anti-poverty programs, and on and on. It dominates our electoral politics, to the exclusion of rational discourse: “who would you rather have a beer with?” (the stupid one, apparently).

The Ayers case is none of these, of course. By itself it’s a small thing, and bad decisions by non-academic university trustees regarding academic matters are hardly new. But it’s another case in which somebody felt entitled to inject their personal animosity to some notorious party into an issue that is expected – and by established rules ought to be – determined by dispassionate consideration of factual matters, and in which the emotional power of that intruded controversy was accepted as sufficient to vacate procedure, fairness, or principle. (Ironically, and frustratingly and very uncharacteristically, the agent in this case is fairly liberal, but, understandably, no more able than anyone else to put aside his feelings about a gross and violent tragedy in his own family.) The case is of a piece with the general trend toward public acceptance of the idea you don’t have to follow the rules about anything that makes you mad enough (and that you don’t even have to have a personal reason for being mad – take a look at the howling personal abuse that follows Michael Schiavo, on the part of people who never knew anyone involved in that case personally, even years after the fact).

I tried to suggest once that this was the phenomenon at work in the unbridled vituperation directed at Roman Polanski when he faced deportation from Switzerland: every commentator went beyond themselves to excoriate him for his crime and propose fitting punishments, but, given the fact that he had pled guilty to the crime more than 30 years ago, and the legal issues at hand were what his sentence should have been under the laws of the time and the unmistakable evidence of the original judge’s malfeasance, these outbursts were largely just emotional venting, and in almost no case did they address the actual operative question in the case – but the reactions to the case, and the anger they conveyed, were exclusively directed to the writers’ feelings about Polanski or his crime, on which they grounded their beliefs about legal questions that were entirely different. This was not well-received; the universal feeling seemed to be that any (even justifiable) emotional reaction to one issue is grounds for actions or decisions addressed to other issues, if those happen to allow an avenue for the exercise of oen’s anger. The Ayers case is more straightforward: one person’s anger about a family issue was brought to bear – from a position of  authority – on decisions made about academic issues, ostensibly by way of standards of academic work. It clearly was not made in that way, but Kennedy’s summation of his own actions was: “How could I do anything else?” I assume that question answers itself: the problem is that nobody seems to think that that obvious answer is one that Kennedy, or anyone else, would actually be expected to accept or act on.

If  we aren’t going to have our every encounter with authoritative institutions – state, communal, or corporate – mediated by angry self-interested ideologues, or even just well-meaning but emotionally overwrought functionaries, we have got to demand the sanctity of prinicple and procedural fairness in how those institutions are run. So very much of our public space has already been given over to irrational blowhards, demagogues, religious nutjobs, and manipulative sleazeballs that most of our public institutions are now barely functional. We must demand – from ourselves as well as our leaders and public servants – the discipline to make hard and rational choices, even in the face of emotional provocation if necessary, but at any rate when issues are at stake that require and deserve that degree of maturity, intellectual honesty, and devotion to principle. Whether Bill Ayers is named a Professor Emeritus is of little consequence; whether any of us can stand before the institutions that control our lives and demand of them fairness and honesty – or are willing to make that demand of each other in our public actions – is of the greatest consequence, and the evidence of late is not encouraging.