SELECTING AN NMSU PRESIDENT: A LETTER TO THE REGENTS AND A COMMENT

 24-03-07

NMSU Regents:

 

I have read with interest the resumes and DEI statements of the five finalists for the presidency of NMSU.  I am disappointed with the search committee and its choices.

 

Under its heading “Opportunities and Expectations,” the search committee stated that it would ask the candidates “to address the following significant priorities:

 

·       Preserve the land-grant, spacegrant mission of New Mexico State University and elevate distinctive attributes.

·       Strengthen commitments to provide a student-centered experience and grow enrollment.

·       Grow fundraising opportunities and engage with the broader community.

·       Foster a sense of belonging and inclusion.

·       Provide leadership that demonstrates understanding and commitment to the principles of shared governance and responsibility.

·       Champion academic excellence and advance research and creative activity.

 

Given the phrase “significant priorities,” I assumed that the search committee’s list of priorities itself would reflect NMSU’s or the search committee’s priorities.  So it came as a shock that, of the six priorities, academics—“Champion academic excellence and advance research and creative activity”—ranked last.  The search committee seems to discount NMSU’s status as an academic institution, with academics constituting its primary rationale.  Instead, it ranks more highly the other five priorities, all of which are ancillary, though important, considerations, in no evident order.

 

The same criticism applies to the “Professional Qualifications and Qualities.”  Seventeen items are listed in no evident order and in no grouping of related items.  This lack of ranking and grouping suggests the work of an overly large committee of 24 members.  It seems that every suggestion was accepted and added to the lists as it arose.

 

I believe that only one of the five candidates has anything resembling the kind of academic background and university experience in academic administration which would well serve NMSU.

 

The inadequacies of the “DEI Statements” of all candidates reveal their deficiencies.  Two statements name no minorities who might be addressed by DEI efforts.  A third made passing references to a “Hispanic-Serving Institution” and the “LGBTQIA communities.”  A fourth mentioned Hispanics and Blacks or African Americans.  A fifth mentioned African American, Asian-American, Hispanic/Latin X, and LGBTQIA groups.  None of them mentioned religious groups which are sometimes marginalized, among others: Muslims and Jews.  In short, none of the candidates seems to have the breadth of perspective required for diversity as a pre-condition of equity and inclusion (and for the fourth priority).  Their myopia is the more notable because of today’s political issues and campus demonstrations.

 

In sum, I believe that none of these candidates, if selected for the presidency, can elevate NMSU academically or improve the institutional quality of life.  I wish it were otherwise because mediocrity begets mediocrity.

 

Michael L. Hays

 

 

24-03-09

 

An additional comment not sent to the regents on the candidates’ DEI statements.

 

Without exception, all five of their statements detail work on committees and in programs.  This professional activity involves collaborative work with others, is mostly administrative, and only imperfectly identifies individual responsibilities and contributions.  Although the candidates might have undertaken such work because of a personal commitment as well as a professional obligation, their statements mention little personal involvement based on empathy or a concern for social justice.  With one exception, an embarrassing one—one candidate mentions making “close friends” of two Hispanic students at NMSU but lost track of them when they dropped out—, none stated a DEI commitment based on personal experiences with people of different races, religions, gender orientations, and backgrounds.  The exclusive focus on the larger minorities, blacks and Hispanics, and on women is blind to smaller minorities, unacknowledged and presumably overlooked—one reason for questioning the candidates’ understanding of and commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.  A DEI statement reporting the discharge of a professional obligation does not do much to signify such a commitment.

TRUMP: CHICKEN LITTLE OR LITTLE CHICKEN--OR BOTH?

We know the traditional children’s bedtime story about Chicken Little warning that the sky is falling, so I shall not repeat it.  The updated version, given at a 24 February session of the recent gathering of CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Committee, in National Harbor, Md., is Donald Trump’s.  As reported in a New York Times article, much more than a falling sky will befall America if Joe Biden is re-elected in November.

 

In Trump’s apocalyptic re-telling of the old tale, Biden’s re-election to a second 4-year term would bring multiple, overwhelming disasters to America.  Here it is:

 

If Mr. Biden is re-elected for a second four-year term, Mr. Trump warned in his speech, Medicare will “collapse.”  Social Security will “collapse.”  Health care in general will “collapse.”  So, too, will public education.  Millions of manufacturing jobs will be “choked off into extinction.”  The U.S. economy will be “starved of energy” and there will be “constant blackouts.”  The Islamist militant group Hamas will “terrorize our streets.”  There will be a third world war and America will lose it.  America itself will face “obliteration.”

 

Fortunately, Trump offers an antidote of comfort—his promise of a better tomorrow if he is re-elected after an interruption of 4 years.

 

Mr. Trump promised on Saturday that if he is elected America will be “richer and safer and stronger and prouder and more beautiful than ever before.”  Crime in major cities?  A thing of the past.  “Chicago could be solved in one day,” Mr. Trump said.  “New York could be solved in a half a day there.”

 

As experts in many fields know, many children’s stories are scary as all get out.  If another person’s hallucinations can scare you, Trump’s hallucinations must terrify you.

 

It is one of the easiest things in the world to dream up apocalypses to make ignorant, insecure people fearful and desperate for relief.  So it is with Trump scaring the bejesus out of his gullible followers.  Although Trump is not a preacher but a cult leader, he and his gulls resemble generations of hellfire-and-damnation or health-and-wealth preachers and their credulous Christian followers.  They have not learned from previous fleecings and, instead of changing their ways, seek the next Chosen One.  For Trump, his story has a happy ending, win or lose the election.  Making chumps of those whom he swindles for self-enrichment or legal expenses, he will laugh all the way to the bank.  Thus ends the story of Trump as Chicken Little.

 

The other story is of Trump as Little Chicken.  It is another of the easiest things in the world for weaklings to dream up heroic tales of their holding up the falling sky, of warding off apocalypse.  In a second term, Trump says not only that he will do it, but also that he will do it easily, in little time.  He asserts and likely believes that he alone can solve crime in Chicago in one day, in New York in half a day.  How does the Little Chicken do it?  Apparently, by saying so (i.e., issuing an Executive Order), just as God did in creating the world in six days and resting on the seventh.  All God had to do was say let there be something or other, and, lo and behold, it was so.  Only after God said it, did He pronounce it good—proof that he was winging it, not knowing that it was good before he created it.  Likewise, Trump’s phone call to Zelensky, which he later called “perfect,” not just “good.”  Trump presents himself as the god who his chumps think he is.

 

Here is where the Little Chicken part comes in; Trump chickens out.  All chickens have foot spurs for fighting; Trump’s bone spurs, which prevented him from fighting in Vietnam, also prevent him from fighting the apocalypse.  First, he fails to say how, if elected, he will save America from multiple collapsing systems or end crime in a day or less in at least two major metropolises.  To be fair, if all he-as-god has to do is say something to make it so, there is not much “how” to explain.  But it should be easy enough for him to just say that he will speak up, then do so when the time comes.

 

Second, he refuses, if not elected, to prevent for the good of America the collapses of Medicare, Social Security, health care generally, public education; the demise of millions of manufacturing jobs, insufficient energy, and blackouts;—and get this—the roving bands of Hamas terrorists in our streets;—and more—a Third World War, which will “obliterate” America when it loses.  To be fair, Trump has never done anything for the public good if there is nothing in it for him; he remains consistently transactional.  But, if he-as-god claims that saving America is so easy, it must be that he is chicken-hearted because he fears revealing his inability to live up to his imagined, pretended heroism, the weakling’s dream.

 

I use a children’s bedtime story as a framework (flimsy) for humorous satire (a flop) to poke fun at Trump, his implausible proposals, and his pompous pronouncements.  I might have written directly about a very sick but very dangerous man who imagines himself as possessing a divine right as president, thinks himself the law above the law, and is a threat to all living under his rule: Hispanics first, LGBTQ+ and Muslims next, other minorities eventually, Jews last.  This nightmare is a long way from my childhood bedtime stories but not from a childhood nightmare.  When I was 10, I knew enough about fascist Germany to imagine that I might live long enough in America to die in a concentration camp—a possibility, thanks to Trump, not unimaginable today.

 

 Indeed, my nightmare has enhanced vividness because of the fascist propensities of Las Cruces officials, especially councilors who purport to be Progressives.  They—Abeyta, BenComo, Corran, Flores, Gandara, Graham—accepted the creation or operation of the secret Public Safety Select Committee.  Three Councilors on the PSSC were Gabe Vasquez, incumbent Congressman from the 2^nd District and candidate for re-election; Abeyta, who took his place, lost her race for a second term, and now does make-work for Sheriff Kim Stewart; and Gandara, who lost her race for mayor.  Others on the PSSC were mayors, a city manager, city attorneys, a city clerk, police chiefs or deputies, fire chiefs or deputies, and others on call.  Such a clandestine committee focusing on police policy and practice is the prototype of an organization which can evolve into a clandestine cell threatening, not protecting, citizens and their rights, especially in a little city like Las Cruces, which cares little about good, honest government, with transparency and accountability.  Thus, to avoid both after its unexpected exposure, the Mayor suddenly and secretly disbanded the PSSC, and he and all Councilors refused my two emailed requests to explain why.  So, given my understanding of the latent antisemitism of many city officials, particularly all three police chiefs, I have the nightmare of being among the first to go to camp.

THE GOLDEN RULES, THE CULTURE WARS, AND AMERICAN DEMOCRACY

In thinking about political polarization in today’s America, I have asked myself a troubling question: Can a populace, heterogenous in race, gender, ethnicity, and religion, live harmoniously in a polity of shared goals and ideals?  The answer appears to be “no.”

 

The oldest divide in America is that between North and South, which, because of slavery, resulted in the Civil War.  Slavery was a material realization of a fundamental political belief opposed to the first principle in the Declaration of Independence, the equality of all men.  The North gradually eliminated slavery in accordance with that principle; the South continued its repudiation by entrenching slavery and seeking its expansion.  This belief in white supremacy has since metastasized to the trans-Mississippi west, especially the Northern Rockies and Pacific Northwest, and spread everywhere else.  The result: racism exists to a greater or lesser extent throughout the county.  The repudiation of equality extends to other identifiable groups based on sex and gender (women, LGBTQ), ethnicity (immigrants), and religion (Jews, Muslims).  Christian nationalism is explicitly antisemitic and anti-Islamic.  The next Civil War in America is less likely to be fought by armies than by paramilitary gangs (“active clubs”), between neighbors, and among family members.  It will involve in-your-face rudeness, insults, and worse—bullying, intimidation, assaults, shootings—between those who believe in political equality and those who do not.

 

The difference in belief about equality becomes the basis of differences in conduct toward other people, with resulting inter-personal dissension, acrimony, hatred, and violence on both sides, but more on the Right than on the Left.  The near-universal rule for treating others is the Golden Rule (not invented by either Judaism or Christianity) has different phrasings, one positive, one negative.  The positive phrasing—do unto others as you would have them do unto you—occurs in both the Holy Scriptures and the New Testament.  The negative phrasing—do not unto others as you would not have them do unto you—occurs only in the Holy Scriptures.  Both can be appropriate, but one can be perverted more than the other.

 

The difference between them is large and important.  The positive form is self-centered and assertive; it enjoins a person to define what is good for another in terms of what is good for the definer.  This positive form of the Golden Rule may invite a person to meddle in the lives of others.  The negative form is empathetic and passive; it urges inaction out of regard for the personal autonomy of others and leaves them alone.

 

These different phrasings of the Golden Rule are paralleled in today’s culture wars being waged by the Right and resisted by the Left.  The Right tacitly assumes the positive Golden Rule to justify government intervention and meddling in the lives of people with different beliefs and practices.  The Left tacitly assumes the negative Golden Rule to justify respecting people with those differences and wanting them able to do or be as they wish.  Here, some might think of Jefferson’s position, that that government is best which governs least.  Jefferson would repudiate the Right’s belief that that government governs best which makes choices in the private domain according to its ideology and imposes them on others, whether they agree or not.  He might not reject the Left’s belief that that government is best which governs in the public interest without encroaching on personal choices not adversely affecting others.  After all, Jefferson inspired the Bill of Rights, with its many protections of individual rights against government power.

 

The Right wants to deny abortions to all women because some people object to them on narrow religious or irrelevant scientific grounds.  The Left wants to allow them to those who seek one but does not want to impose them on women who do not want one.  Take other culture-war issues.  If a neighbor’s child requires a change of sex, neither the operation nor the result affects, much less threatens, me except for a concern for the child’s welfare.  I believe that the child’s parents are more likely than not to know what is best.  If the local LGBTQ community plans a parade, I can attend or not, but I shall hope that it does not rain on it.  And if my children learn about the history of race in America, I do not worry that they will grow up hating America; I did not.  Instead, I would worry if they did not grow up hating racism.  To end the culture wars, embrace the negative Golden Rule: mind your business, and leave others alone to mind theirs.

 

Ironically, the positive Golden Rule as famously espoused by Jesus (Matthew 7:12; Luke 6:31) makes a mockery of those who proclaim themselves “Christians,” not to mention “Christian nationalists,” in our culture wars.  Religion, traditionally thought to imply respect, decency, and love toward others, is becoming its antithesis in hatred, abuse, and domination of others.  These radical Christians, militarized or sectarian imperialists on steroids, seek to erode or destroy a democratic system of government which affirms a laissez-faire, a negative Golden Rule, approach to racial, gender, ethnic, and religious differences.  As I blogged, the Christian right is neither Christian nor right.

 

The question is what motivates the perverse tarnishing of the positive Golden Rule into an Iron Rule of Authoritarianism.  The answer is fear, a common, reflexive response to anything different, including the onset of change, by the weak, the ignorant, and the insecure.  The Right wants power to compensate for its condition by controlling, erasing, or eradicating differences, and impede or prevent change.  As culture and society change, the Right fears that these differences will, according to “replacement theory,” overcome them, not by coercive means, but by the attraction of what appears to be true, right, or good.  The contrast between reversions to political abuses like Jim Crow laws and gerrymandering, and efforts to enlarge the franchise and make all votes equal works to the disadvantage of the Right and to the advantage of the Left.  The Right loathes the Left because of its popular appeal to what is best for all.  What the villain Iago says of Othello’s honorable friend Cassio—“He hath a daily beauty which makes me ugly”—perfectly articulates the Right’s response to the increasing attraction of the Left.  So, to support democracy, support equality in all matters civic and political.

WHAT HAPPENS AFTER 20 JANUARY 2025?

     A question to be asked on Presidents’ Day.  When an issue was resolved or a problem solved in episodes of The West Wing, President Jed Bartlett would ask, “what’s next?”  Since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas conflict, leaders of neighboring states, some European countries, and the United States have been planning for what happens after hostilities end.  With four trials and an election approaching, all involving former-president Donald Trump, no one is asking what happens after the inauguration.

    Trump could be acquitted or convicted of some or all of the 91 federal and state charges against him.  He could be sent to jail or not.  He could be re-elected or not.  A cheeseburger and a Diet Coke could kill him before the election or, if elected, before his inauguration.  No combination of outcomes changes the answer to the question “then what?”  Whatever happens will augment for decades the degree and the kind of damage which he has done to the country.  To consider that future, we must consider the past. 

Both history and philosophy are written and read by those whom today we call the elite.  The Preamble to the Declaration of Independence states what our Founding Fathers believed to be “self-evident” truths.  But the first such truth, “all men are created equal,” was not “self-evident “to most colonialists, who believed themselves intellectually and morally superior to blacks, whether they owned slaves or not.  When the colonies declared their independence from England, many more than the third of the population who remained loyal to the crown disliked or disregarded this truly revolutionary proposition.  The conservative position was the inequality of man; America was racist.

 

But the tides of intellectual thought and social policy were slowly beginning to erode, if not racism, at least slavery.  The North slowly abandoned it as commerce and industry showed that free workers were more productive than slaves.  The South increasingly relied on slavery because a cotton-based economy required cheap labor.  The South justified one person’s ownership of another person as a piece of property on the assumption that whites were superior to blacks.  The notion of the inequality of man was as much a part of the “Southern way of life” as corn pone, pecan pie, or mint juleps.

 

The Civil War ended Southern succession and, in theory, the structures of racism endemic in the South.  But Reconstruction under Northern military rule, terminated after twenty years, failed to effect a radical reorientation of Southern life.  Indeed, under it, former rebel officers and soldiers formed the Ku Klux Klan in 1865 to keep former slaves in their subservient place in society and the economy.  When Reconstruction ended, Southern states enacted Jim Crow laws, which, though outlawed a hundred years later, continued to operate in many places many years later.  (In Odessa, TX, memorialized in Friday Night Lights, schools remained officially segregated until 1982.)

 

Before and after the Civil War, emigres from Southern states populated the area between the hundredth meridian and the eastern side of the Pacific Coast ranges.  They took their racism and their resistance to the federal government with them.  The embodiment of these propensities was the invariably white cowboy, the hero of movies and TV serials with enormous audiences in the 1950s and 1960s.  (In The Olympics’s 1958 hit “Western Movies,” the singer complains that he cannot get a date with his girl because she watches so many western shows.)

 

The modern Republican Party, once the party of Lincoln and emancipation, became a racist party with the nomination of Senator Barry Goldwater in 1964 and the election of Richard Nixon in 1968.  Exploiting the racist reaction to Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights legislation, Nixon’s “Southern strategy” changed the South from a racist, anti-Republican, Democratic stronghold into today’s racist, anti-Democratic, Republican stronghold.  The dog-whistles of Republican politicians prove that racism abides in the character profile of millions of Americans.  Racism is as American as apple pie.

 

Until the advent of Donald Trump, those millions remained mostly silent and sullen.  His racism and his appeal to this disgruntled and resentful “base” have enabled their emergence into public, their noise, their anger, and their violence.  Nothing new here, just more of the same, only more apparent and widespread than before.  Their attacks on public officials, election workers, protesters, teachers, and the FBI—not state and local police, many of whom sympathize with the base (and might endanger the rest of us one day)—are like the attacks on people since Reconstruction who have fought for legal and political equality for themselves or for others, with “liberty and justice for all.”  The difference is that Trump has increased the degree and deployment of bigoted animosity.

 

But he has also effected a change in kind.  Trump has focused the base’s grievances with the ascent of blacks (and others of color and women) on government efforts to reduce disparities and enable their rise in employment and education.  He has led Republicans to redouble familiar efforts to bias elections by gerrymandering, limiting the franchise, and making voting more difficult for some groups.  But his change in kind has been to lead the base in new directions, to challenge the legitimacy of elections which they lose (or expect to lose) as “fixed,” and by attacking the courts and the rule of law itself.  The difference in kind is his attack on institutions, norms, laws, and systems.

 

The aftermath of Trump’s attack on democratic practices, principles, and values—among the latter, decency, respect, honesty, truth, reason—will remain corrosive.  Like the “lost cause” of Southern rebels, the “lost cause” of his base, perhaps with Trump as a convicted and incarcerated martyr, will survive as a continuing threat to American democracy, with the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and other such groups as a latter-day Ku Klux Klan.  No doubt, Trump’s disgruntled and resentful base, like their predecessors, will abide and scheme, rather than admit a mistaken loyalty to a man hostile and a cause alien to the Preamble of the Declaration of Independence, with its assertion of equality.

 

What happens after Inauguration Day depends on those who support democracy.  They must resolve to live by advice dubiously attributed to Thomas Jefferson: “The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.”  Which means that, every day, in every way, all little-d democrats must work for equality and justice at every opportunity, not just at elections.  My corollary: Do not think that a battle won—say, Trump’s defeat on 5 November 2025—means victory in the war.  Of course, a Trump victory will make resistance to autocracy and recovery from its ravages even longer and harder.

THE CHRISTIAN RIGHT IS NEITHER CHRISTIAN NOR RIGHT

I wrote this blog after reading Tim Alberta’s The Kingdom, The Power, and The Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism.  To those who see merit in religion and value in American democracy, the book is a horror story told in twenty-one chapters and an epilogue by a man well-versed both in Christianity and in the current religio-politico scene.  What Alberta does not say is that many evangelicals are extremists in supporting the Republican Party and former president Donald Trump.

 

Everyone knows that Christianity in America has been in trouble, increasingly so in the past decade.  Common opinions about Christian churches are that non-mainline denominations are rabid, mainline denominations are insipid, and neither provides much in the way of non-political moral or ethical guidance.  Church affiliation and attendance are down.  The average age of church members is rising because younger people are opting out or not joining.  With a few notable exceptions, many churches are struggling, splintering, or closing.

 

Of the many reasons for Christian fissiparousness, my two may be unconventional.  The first traces back to the apostles and their missions to different lands, peoples, and cultures.  The apostles themselves were a varied lot who had different understandings of Jesus and his message.  In preaching to different audiences, they not only preached according to their understanding, but also tailored their message to their audiences’ interests.  By preaching different messages to different audiences, they established different Christian beliefs, some of which survived underground despite homogenizing efforts by the Catholic Church and which, if they re-emerged, it declared heresies.  One such heresy was Protestantism, with a tendency to fissiparousness built in.  For allowing individual interpretation of scriptures inevitably means different opinions.  To forestall theological dissension and social chaos, Protestant leaders organized local and regional churches, from then to now, splintering into smaller churches, merging into larger ones.

 

The second reason for Christian fissiparousness is a codified theology without a codified ethics.  Establishing this ethics-free Christianity are the two early, essential creeds: the Nicene and the Apostles’.  Both mention the miraculous birth and miserable death of Jesus; both ignore his life, his message, and their meaning.  The Catholic Church deals with this void by claiming that faith without works is faith without effect but does not stipulate what counts as good works.  Protestant churches declare that faith alone justifies and say nothing about works.  Love, which can mean anything, everything, or nothing, does not specify ethical conduct.  So Christians have no credal basis to argue about “culture war” issues.  For example, abortion rages as an issue creating contention among Christians of many denominations.  Although both sides cite Christian verses to support their positions, abortion is not mentioned in either the Old or New Testaments, not that opportunities to do so did not exist, given its occurrence.  The void, which a Christian ethics sketched out in the creeds might have precluded, is filled with this and other political and social issues promoted by some Christians and protested by others.

 

Abortion is only one, though perhaps the most bitterly contested, political or social issue among American Christians.  Jesus had no position on abortion, but he would have had a position on the acrimonious exchanges between the two contentious sides.  Given their aggressive conduct, he would think that one or both could not call themselves Christian on the basis of his pacifistic inclination evident in two of his most prominent messages: turn the other cheek and resist not evil.  So, in the context of our contentious times, it makes sense to ask, not what would Jesus do, but what would he say about conduct underlying claims on both sides to be Christian.  The answer depends on his life and message to provide criteria defining what is Christian and what it not.

 

Doing so, in the simplest terms, means starting with the basic facts of Jesus’ life.  He was a Jew throughout his life; he was born a Jew, circumcised as a Jew, educated as a Jew, lived and taught as a Jew, and died a Jew.  With few exceptions, everything which he professed is compatible with Judaism.  One exception—resist not evil conflicts with the Jewish commitment to justice—is a forgivable one under a repressive Roman occupation, for non-resistance meant survival.  Yet nothing about what he professed or practiced is incompatible with the creeds and could not be included in them.

 

A notable fact about Jesus was his recurrent conflicts with Jewish authorities, the basis of which was the difference between observance of ritual and obligation to others.  One way to visualize the difference is to consider that Jewish law has two axes.  One is a vertical axis for rite, or the laws governing the relationship between God and man.  The other is a horizontal axis for right, or the laws governing relationships between man and man.  The Ten Commandments sort themselves on one or the other axis, the first four of rite, the last six of right.  For Jesus, the priorities of his teachings were laws of conduct; as he said, the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.  Pharisees criticized him for violating rite when he had done right.

 

The Nicene and Apostles’ Creeds fit the primary Christians observances, the rites of Christmas and Easter.  Nothing about Jesus, his life, or his message would rule out bridging the gap between his birth and death with generalized statements sacralizing his ethics: his concern for service to others, as is clear from his Sermon on the Mount, or his concern with right, as defined by the Ten Commandments.  As a devoted Jew, Jesus would understand the need to enlarge upon them or, as Jewish scholars say, put a fence around the Torah.  For instance, he put a fence around the Seventh, the proscription of adultery, by proscribing lust.

 

Jesus’ messages are for all times and thus for our time, especially for our politics.  The Sermon on the Mount can serve as a Christian rationale for social programs to help the disadvantaged, whatever their disadvantages.  The Ten Commandments, with fencing extended outward to protect them in today’s world, can serve as ethical criteria for what is Christian and what is not.  I offer expanded versions of four commandments as I think Jesus would have expanded them.

 

Fifth: Honor your father and thy mother.  Jesus would extend this commandment beyond the family to society in respecting, not necessarily blindly following, tradition.

Sixth: You shall not kill.  Jesus would extend this commandment to prohibit violence, including threats of violence or other acts of intimidation or harassment, against another person.

Eighth: You shall not steal.  Jesus would extend this commandment to prohibit fraud, extortion, and other violations of trust in transactions involving anything of value.

Nineth: You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.  Jesus would extend this commandment to prohibit lying about, smearing, libeling, or slandering another.  He would insist on truth-telling because, as he said, the truth will set you free.

 

With these fences around the Ten Commandments, anyone who wants to distinguish true from false Christians can do so.  For example, in today’s political environment, those who self-identify as Christians yet support Trump are fakes.  Their departures from these standards in speech and conduct reveal their moral bankruptcy, as I have argued before.  The same may be said of Christian nationalists as well; it is not possible to be a Christian and a nationalist.  For they render unto Caesar not only what is Caesar’s, but also what is God’s.  Ultimately, evangelicals, Republican politicians, and others supporting Trump are ungodly, neither Christian nor right.

THE INTRUSION OF POLITICS INTO COLLEGE ENGLISH COURSES

Almost 70 years ago, Philip Wylie’s Generation of Vipers taught me a lesson never forgotten and almost always observed: listen to and learn from one’s “enemies.”  For about 60 years, I have heard conservative, usually Republican, politicians decry the liberalism of America’s institutions of higher education.  Usually, they have meant the best public (Berkeley, UCLA, Michigan, UNC, UVA) and private (MIT, Stanford, California Institute of Technology, Duke, Johns Hopkins) colleges and universities.  Tops on their list and sneered at as “elitist” are those constituting the Ivy League.

 

For 45 years, I have reacted to trends in my field, English.  It was my second major as a Cornell undergraduate and my field of graduate study at Michigan, where I earned a Ph.D.  Unlike conservatives, I have supported the trend expanding the canon.  By and large, English literature consisted of works almost exclusively by white males until about 1800, added works by white women thereafter, and expanded to include works by writers of diverse races, genders, and nationalities after about 1950.  Like conservatives but for different reasons, I have opposed the pernicious trend politicizing the humanities, the social sciences, and administrations.

 

Current controversies about campus politics prompted my curiosity about changes in Cornell’s English Department since my day 65 years ago.  Its website revealed its new name, Literatures in English Department, and only one course description, that of the first semester of its introductory survey, recognizable to me.  Then, the course title of English 251 was, as I recall, “English Literature from Beowulf to 1800”; now, English 2010 is “Literatures in English: From Old English to the New World.”  The implications of the different titles are significant.  I do not recall the older description then, but I know it was nothing like the new one now:

 

English 2010 is an introduction to key works of English and American literature for majors and non-majors.  Here's a chance to study some of the greatest hits of the literary tradition in a single semester: Beowulf; Arthurian legends; works by Chaucer, Shakespeare, Anne Bradstreet, Ben Franklin, Sageyowatha, Phillis Wheatley.  Reading across history and geography allows us to ask big questions about literature and society.  How did literature factor in England's transformation from a cultural backwater into a global empire?  What role does literature play in disciplining, civilizing, and colonizing subjects?  When and how is it used to delight, resist, and rebel?  From our reading, we will create a toolkit of literary terms and techniques.  And through a series of exercises, students will get hands-on experience with literary experimentation.  The class counts toward the pre-1800 requirement for English majors.

 

I was put off by the Department’s use of the phrase “greatest hits,” as if the professor were a D.J. playing them in a lecture hall, in a tawdry attempt at folksy “with-it-ness” to appeal to those who might think the study of English stuffy and old hat.  The “key works” or “greatest hits” of the authors cited do not represent “the [or even a] literary tradition” by definition: a “literary method or style established by [a] … writer … and subsequently followed by others.”  The diversity of the authors and their works makes the only unifier the English language, if one assumes the similarity of the Old English of Beowulf and the modern English of Phillis Wheatley.  The inclusion of Sageyowatha, or “Red Jacket,” points the problem.  An eloquent speaker in English, he contributed no “greatest hit” to “the literary tradition” (emphasis mine).

 

The Department’s misuse of the word “tradition” reflects the political desirability of giving a certain gravitas to some minor authors not white or not male in an introductory course.  Unhappily, its concern for diversity and inclusion overrides cogency.  The word “Literatures” in the title and the claim that “Reading across history and geography allows us to ask big questions about literature and society” undermine the idea of a unified “the literary tradition” (emphasis mine).  Notwithstanding, politics expands the “tradition” of American writers on the basis of their race or gender: a white woman (Anne Bradstreet), a white man (Ben Franklin), a male Native American (Sageyowatha), and a black woman, a slave from Africa (Phillis Wheatley).  Whatever their achievement, they made little contribution to “the literary tradition.”  (My second-guessing adds Jonathan Edwards or, white man for white man, replaces Franklin with him.)  The Department might have less politically, less pretentiously, and more honestly said that the selections were a sampling of important literary works (excepting Sageyowatha) throughout the period.

 

More importantly, the Department’s political considerations underlie the three “big questions.”  Students do not ask them, cannot answer them by reading the “greatest hits,” and lack the information to address a relationship between literature and society.  An answer to question one requires knowledge about the relationship between cultural attainment and political power, and the role played by literature in influencing the growth of that power.  An answer to question two requires knowledge about the political, educational, and cultural circumstances in each colony of subjects, and about how literature can discipline, civilize, and colonize suppressed people.  (Note that the question assumes the “white man’s” definition of “civilized” and posits that literature can “colonize” people.)  An answer to question three requires knowing who so uses literature and under what conditions; and why the purposes are limited: “to delight” but not to instruct, and to “resist” and “rebel,” but not to accept and comply.

 

Since the “greatest hits” cannot provide answers to questions which go beyond their literary boundaries, whence cometh the information or opinion to answer these “big questions”?  Necessarily, from politically oriented lecture hall or classroom instruction, or assigned reading.  As the questions are biased by political considerations, instruction and assigned reading are likely to involve political preaching, not humanistic teaching.  For many of today’s English professors believe that the proper purpose of the study of literature is to use literature as a pretext to address political issues.  Whence cometh this political orientation?  Historically, from a change in literary theory and criticism, from my day’s New Criticism, seeing a work of literature as an aesthetic object, to today’s New Historicism, viewing it as a force in society operating in matters of race, gender, class, and colonialism—a change much for the worse.  Raised in a different time and place, I regard this approach as having little, if anything, to do with the purpose of the study of literature, to appreciate the variety of experience represented in literature.

 

Two nits.  Meant to be alluring, the chances to “create a toolkit of literary terms and technique” and “get hands-on experience with literary experimentation” are instead peculiar and puzzling.  No need exists to “create” (whatever that process entails) a “toolbox” (whatever that object is).  Glossaries of “literary terms and technique,” like Cornell’s late distinguished English Professor M. H. Abrams’s, A Glossary of Literary Terms, are available.  The idea of “literary experimentation” by “hands-on experience” suggests the fanciful manipulation of texts (improving a Shakespearean sonnet?).

 

Despite a little incidental mockery along the way, I am serious about the pernicious effects of literary criticism which politicizes the study of literature.  I am not surprised by lower enrollments in English courses and declining numbers of English majors on many campuses, results which punish professors who have dismayed themselves and discredited the field by preferring politics to literature.  My daughter took a politically oriented English course at Cornell in the 1990s and swore off taking another; obviously, she is not alone.  My “big questions” are why are English professors blind or indifferent to a self-defeating, politicized approach to literary criticism, and why do they no longer maintain the study of literature as a part of a humanistic education.  Self-righteousness?

 

I began by affirming that we can learn from our “enemies.”  I assume that other course descriptions reflect a similar politicized approach to the study of literature.  I assume that conservative teachers politicize English courses as well, but on a smaller scale or on smaller and less prestigious campuses.  Although conservatives have been right about the liberal bias in many colleges and universities, their criticism stops at eliminating only liberal biases, not also conservative ones.  In my field, they offer no alternative based on an appreciation of literature per se or the humanistic tradition in research and teaching—where I plant my flag.