Corey Robin's Blog, page 9

No Ivory Tower: McCarthysim in the Universities, then and now

“The academy did not fight McCarthyism. It contributed to it.” That was historian Ellen Schrecker’s devastating conclusion in her classic study, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities, which came out in 1986. Columbia University, while not the worst in Schrecker’s account, was certainly not the best. Today, as the New York Times has revealed, it’s probably the worst. At the height of the Second Red Scare, just as HUAC was beginning its first of many hearings on the threat of communism in higher ed, a group of 37 university presidents, from the nation’s most prestigious and elite institutions, including Columbia, gathered to make a statement of principles on academic freedom and the Cold War. The year was 1953. The […]

At moments like ours, the devil is in the details, the miracle is in the minutes

Last night, on Chris Hayes’s show, I learned about Sarah Inama, who teaches 6th grade in Idaho, and has a poster on her wall that says, “Everyone is welcome here.” Inama’s school administration told her to take down the poster because…not everyone agrees with that principle. No one ever complained about it or spoke against the principle. But the administration fears that…not everyone agrees with that principle. At a public school. So they told her to take it down by the end of the day. Here’s where the story gets interesting. Inama did as she was told. She took the poster down. For a few days. But then she thought about it and decided, no, I can’t live with this […]

A message to my colleagues at elite universities: You must choose, Stockwellism or Solidarity

It’s amazing to me—though it shouldn’t be—that at a moment when anyone and everyone who teaches or works or studies at an educational institution is under threat, that a professor at Columbia would formulate the threat in the New York Times in this particular way: “Ultimately, the university cannot exist without research,” said Brent R. Stockwell, the chair of biological sciences at Columbia. “It would be really, really more akin to a high school or a local community college where you’re just teaching some classes without world-class researchers bringing the frontier of knowledge into the classroom.” I don’t doubt that Stockwell sees his lifeworld in this way and that it would in fact be threatened in the way he says […]

Things you should never ask a political scientist

The screenshot below is of a passage in a chapter written by Susanne Lohmann, a top UCLA political scientist, in the Oxford Handbook of Political Economy, which is edited by Barry Weingast, an even more senior political scientist at Stanford. Two things of note. First, Lohmann claims that the Yale economist William Nordhaus coined the phrase “political business cycle” in 1975. That’s untrue. As Nordhaus himself acknowledges in his 1975 article, it was in fact the Polish Marxist economist Michał Kalecki who formulated the phrase, in 1943, in his article “Political Aspects of Full Employment.” But, second, by mistaking the authorship of the “political business cycle” idea, Lohmann erases its original meaning, or even the fact that it ever had […]

Not in our name

If you’re like me, you’re probably all-petitioned and all-statemented out. But if you are Jewish, and in academia, whether as a teacher, student, worker, staffer, or any kind of employee, I ask that you read and sign on to this statement. The statement denounces the cynical and terrible use of Jews and spurious charges of antisemitism “to harass, expel, arrest, or deport members of our campus communities” and “to concentrate power and exert ‘existential terror’ on our institutions and our communities–in part by threatening and slashing federal funding.” The statement has been signed by more than 2000 Jewish members of the academy, including noted Israeli scholar of the Holocaust Omer Bartov, the political theorists Wendy Brown and Seyla Benhabib, and […]

Salvador and Social Death

New York Times: Shortly after the Trump administration deported hundreds of Venezuelans to El Salvador this weekend, the Salvadoran president, Nayib Bukele, posted a three-minute video on social media. It featured shackled men being marched off a plane over a dramatic electronic soundtrack and into prison, where they were shaved bald….Many of the 85,000 Salvadorans apprehended have disappeared into the prison system, held for years without trial and without their families knowing if they are alive….Mr. Bukele said the deportees would be held for at least a year and made to perform labor and attend workshops under a program called “Zero Idleness.” Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: There is one form of identification that deserves special attention, since it […]

Hard Choices in the NYC Mayoral Race

Politics, they say, is about making hard choices. And none seems harder right now than whom to vote for in the New York City mayoral race. According to the New York Times, the top two fundraisers in the race are Zohran Mamdani and Andrew Cuomo. It’s true that Mamdani is overwhelmingly getting his money from small donors, which is good, while Cuomo is getting his money from the big wigs. Including Jessica Seinfeld, who, last I heard, was giving thousands of dollars to a pro-Israel group that beat the crap out of pro-Palestine protesters at UCLA. But, as the Times notes, there are other issues of concern about both candidates. On the one hand, there’s this: Andrew Cuomo, who resigned […]

McCarthyism at Yale, Then and Now

At the height of the Second Red Scare, Yale University covered itself in glory when Yale president Charles Seymour declared, “There will be no witch-hunts at Yale because there will be no witches.” In other words, no McCarthyite congressional committee is going to investigate our professors because…we’ll make sure not to hire any professors who’d be investigation-worthy. That’s what they called protecting academic freedom—I kid you not—during the 1950s.* I was reminded of old Charles Seymour when I read in the New York Times that Yale Law School has suspended Helyeh Doutaghi, deputy director of the Law and Political Economy Project, whose work and affiliated faculty and staff I’ve long admired and spoken with. Why was Doutaghi suspended, which, the […]

When Bogie Betrayed Himself

After reading my interview in n+1 on “Muskism and McCarthyism,” the producers at On the Media, the weekend show on NPR hosted by Brooke Gladstone, contacted me for a follow-up conversation. It’s airing this weekend. We ranged widely, from the abduction of Mahmoud Khalil to how Humphrey Bogart betrayed himself to HUAC, from why the term McCarthyism is so misleading to what kind of people and institutions a regime of fear can create. At the end of the interview, Brooke reminded me of a conversation we had had, on her show, during Trump 1.0 on the question of fascism and authoritarianism. She asked me where I stood on that question today. You should have a listen. Speaking of having a […]

Full Speed Ahead

Last summer, long before the election and inauguration of Trump 2.0, I wrote a piece in The New Yorker, arguing that American Jews were returning to a form of politics they had perfected in Europe but abandoned in the United States. Surveying what happened on college campuses during the last year of Biden’s presidency, I warned that we were reverting to a kind of politics from the Middle Ages and early modern era that betrayed the democratic traditions of Jewish politics in the United States: Instead of organizing or joining democratic movements to fight racism, defend immigration, and build social democracy, Jewish leaders and donors supplicate sovereigns or would-be sovereigns who are antisemitic, or aligned with antisemitism, yet promise special protection for the Jews at home or in Israel. The […]