Take a Class From One
of the CounterPunch 16
By ROBERT JENSEN, published 1/8/06 on CounterPunch.org
In his self-promotional mass emailings
from which no inbox is safe, David Horowitz, right-wing pensioner
of Richard Scaife Mellon, hypes hyped his latest book about threats
to America’s youth from leftist professors.
The ad for ‘The Professors — The 101 Most Dangerous Academics
in America’ describes me as: ‘Texas Journalism Professor Robert
Jensen, who rabidly hates the United States, and recently told
his students, ëThe United States has lost the war in Iraq
and that’s a good thing.”
I’m glad Horowitz got my name right (people often misspell it
‘Jenson’). But everything else is distortion, and that one sentence
teaches much about the reactionary right’s disingenuous rhetorical
strategy.
First, I’m not rabid, in personal or political style. I’m a sedate,
non-descript middle-aged academic who tries to approach political
and moral questions rationally. I articulate principles, provide
evidence about how those principles are often undermined by powerful
institutions, and offer logical conclusions about how citizens
should respond. I encourage people to disagree with my principles,
contest my evidence, and question my logic — all appropriate
activities in a university where students are being trained to
think for themselves, and in a nominally democratic society where
citizens should to do the same.
Second, I offer such critiques without hate. Sometimes my assessments
are harsh, such as in evaluating George W. Bush’s invasion of
Iraq and concluding the attack was unlawful and, therefore, our
president is guilty of crimes against peace and should be prosecuted.
Similarly harsh was 
the judgment that Bill Clinton’s
insistence on maintaining the harsh economic embargo on Iraq
in the 1990s resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands
of innocents and, therefore, Clinton was a moral monster who
was unfit to govern. None of this has to do with hating either
man, but instead with assessments and judgments we should be
making.
Third, these critiques are not of the United States, but of specific
policies and policymakers. No nation is a monolith with a single
set of interests or political positions, and it’s nonsensical
to claim that harsh critique constitutes rejection of an entire
nation.
Why would anyone suggest that I rabidly hate the United States?
It’s easier to defame opponents using emotionally charged language
than engage on real issues. Accuse them of being irrational and
hateful. Ignore the substance of the claims and just sling mud.
By even minimal standards of intellectual or political discourse
it’s not terribly honorable, but it often works.
Beyond these junkyard dog tactics, Horowitz’s email also makes
one crucial factual error. I did write that the U.S. losing the
Iraq war was a good thing — not in celebration of death and
destruction, of course, but because the defeat temporarily restrains
policymakers in their dangerous attempts to extend the U.S. empire.
But that was the first sentence of an opinion piece I published
in various newspapers in 2004, not a statement to students. The
distinction is important.
Horowitz and similar critics argue that professors like me inappropriately
politicize the classroom, forcing captive student audiences to
listen to radical rants. No doubt there are professors who rant
— from the left, right and center; there’s a lot of bad teaching
in universities.
But I’m constantly attacked by people who have no knowledge of
— and as far as I can tell, no interest in learning about —
how I teach. Because they hear me express strong opinions at
political rallies or read my newspaper opinion pieces, they assume
I treat my classroom like a pulpit and students as targets for
conversion.
I teach journalism, and in the course of that teaching I regularly
discuss how journalists cover controversial topics; it’s hard
to imagine teaching responsibly without doing that. When appropriate,
I have talked in class about how journalists cover war — explaining
that many people around the world believe the U.S. invasion of
Iraq violated international law, observing that U.S. journalists
in the corporate commercial media rarely write about that, and
suggesting reasons for the omission.
There’s always a politics to teaching; the choices professors
make about what readings to assign and how to approach a subject
are influenced by their politics — left, right, or center. But
that does not meaning teaching is nothing but politics.
No one knows that better than professors who hold views challenging
the conventional wisdom, those of us who don’t rabidly hate the
United States but do passionately love learning and the promise
of an open, independent university.
The CounterPunch 16
Boston University: Howard Zinn
Cal State University, Fresno: Sasan Fayazmanesh
California State University, Long Beach: Ron (Maulana) Karenga
Columbia University: Joseph Massad
De Paul University: Norman Finkelstein
Georgetown University: David Cole
Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Noam Chomsky
Montclair State University: Grover Furr
Northeastern University: M. Shahid Alam, Northwestern University:
Occidental College: Tom Hayden
Princeton University: Richard Falk
Rutgers University, Stony Brook: Amiri Baraka
University of California, Santa Cruz: Angela Davis
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign: Robert McChesney
University of South Florida: Sami al-Arian
University of Texas, Austin: Robert Jensen
Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University
of Texas at Austin and a member of the board of the Third
Coast Activist Resource Center. He is the author of The
Heart of Whiteness: Race, Racism, and White Privilege
and Citizens
of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity. He
can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu.