Chris Hedges: The integrity and quality of public education
in the US has been under assault for decades. As Ellen Schrecker documents in her new book,
The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s,. tThe American dream of high-quality,
affordable, mass higher education is no longer within reach of many Americans. Tuitions once low, if not free, have soared,
and with them tremendous student debt. Although the Biden administration has made
an effort to reduce some of this debt, millions of students, graduates, and dropouts, still
owe a staggering $1.6 trillion. State legislators and the federal government
have dramatically slashed funding to public universities, forcing them to seek support
from corporations and reduce most faculty to the status of poorly paid adjuncts, often
lacking benefits as well as job security. Nearly 75% of the instruction at colleges
and universities is in the hands of adjuncts who have no hope of being granted tenure. Public institutions, which serve 80% of the
nation's students, are chronically short of funding and basic resources. Higher education has evolved even at major
research universities into primarily vocational training, no longer a vehicle for learning
–. Instead, one about economic mobility. The assault sees elite schools, where tuition
can run as high as $80,000 a year, cater to the wealthy and the privileged, locking out
the poor and the working class. Joining me to discuss the crisis in higher
education is Ellen Schrecker, retired professor of history at Yeshiva University and the author
of numerous books, including her latest, The Lost Promise: American Universities in the
1960s. In the book, you argue that the upheavals
on campus in the 1960s laid the groundwork for the assault against higher education. But before we go into that, you contrast what
was happening in the US and at the universities with the early periods of the Cold War. You note that there was no blacklist. The expansive job market not only enabled
the protagonists in your book to find new academic positions once they were removed,
but removed the fear that had previously constrained colleagues from making a fuss. More professors were willing to stand up for
sanctioned colleagues, refusing to countenance violations of academic freedom and professional
autonomy. You, at one point in the book, called this
the golden age –, Wwe're talking about the 1960s –, Oof higher education. But just to begin, what did we come out of? Because people had to sign loyalty oaths in
the 1950s. I remember Sheldon Wolin telling me that he'd
signed one in the military. It doesn't make any difference if he signed
one to teach at Berkeley. But just set the stage before we go into the
'60s. Ellen Schrecker: Sure. What the '60s followed was McCarthyism, which
I have written about as well. And during the late '40s and 1950s, there
was a massive political chill on American campuses. We all know about Joe McCarthy and, have you
no decency, sir? And we know about J. Edgar Hoover and the
FBI, who was collecting political information of conservative nature for more than 100,000
a hundred thousand people at least. This was a period of repression. There were congressional investigations, there
were blacklists. In my own work, I interviewed more than 100a
hundred faculty members who lost their jobs for political reasons during the late '40s
and 1950s. The irony here is that at the same time that
Hoover and McCarthy were running roughshod over the First Amendment, colleges and universities
were experiencing their golden age. They were experiencing a moment when the American
people were incredibly supportive of higher education. The GI Bill after WWII brought a whole new
cohort of students on American campuses, which were no longer mainly for the elite, but were
educating middle- class, lower middle- class, not too many working- class or lower- class
Americans, and werewas expanding enormously, as were faculty members, who really benefited
from this so-called golden age. There was money being thrown at people, myself
included, to go to graduate school, to get a PhD, and then, as people today would be
salivating about, people could get jobs. Chris Hedges: Well-paying tenured jobs. Ellen Schrecker: Well-paying tenured and tenure-d
track jobs. And as you noted earlier, if they were fired
for political reasons, they would find another one. There were so many jobs... Chris Hedges: Which wasn't true in the '50s. And I remember from your earlier book on McCarthyism,
which I didn't know until I read your book, the FBI would go even into high schools with
lists of professors or teachers that they wanted removed without any evidence at all,
and these people would be instantly dismissed and then they were blacklisted. They couldn't get hired anywhere else. Ellen Schrecker: Right. But by
the mid '50s, higher education, especially, of course, in the sciences, was considered
a matter of national security. So they were really throwing federal money. States were looking to build up their universities,
they wanted to have the prestige as well as the winning football teams, and it was really
a genuine golden age for people who were interested in ideas. It was very exciting to be a graduate student
in the late 1950s and early '60s. Chris Hedges: I want to, just as an aside,
talk about the historically Black institutions, because you mentioned Philander Smith College
in Little Rock, and that because of antisemitism, Jewish refugees often ended up at these institutions. This is not in your book, I just happen to
know. Also, a lot of blacklisted professors ended
up at colleges like Philander Smith in Little Rock, and Philander Smith College is where
the radical theologian James Cone was educated, and I just thought that was fascinating, that
because of antisemitism, and because of McCarthyism, and because historically Black institutions
were considered marginalized and second-tier, you often had these tremendous faculties on
them at that particular time. So let's start with the beginning of the unrest
in the universities who spend a lot of time in the book talking about the Free Speech
Movement at Berkeley and the importance of teach-ins, which I didn't quite get until
I read the book, how important those were. So perhaps you can speak about that. Ellen Schrecker: Okay. But I want to speak, since you actually discussed
those Black colleges and universities. Chris Hedges: Sure. Ellen Schrecker: The HBCUs is, of course,
where the '60s began to a large extent. because it's the students at schools like
Fisk University in Nashville or Morehead and Spelman in Atlanta that really jump-started
the Ccivil Rrights Mmovement in a way that brought political activism,; first to their
own campuses and then to the rest of the country. And one of the things I discovered was that
most of the leaders of what we might call the academic left, had, in one way or another,
been involved with the Ccivil Rrights Mmovement before the Vietnam War, before the Berkeley
Free Speech Movement. They had been working with the main civil
rights organizations fighting for racial equality. So it's incredibly important to make that
connection between the movements of the later '60s on American campuses and then, of course,
the repression against them, to make that connection between the political awakening
after McCarthyism and the Ccivil Rrights Mmovement. And I can remember I interviewed a very active
sociologist named Dick Flacks, who told me that when he was in graduate school at the
University of Michigan, he went out on the street and saw a group of students and faculty
members picketing in front of the Woolworth's store, which was a national chain that had
been boycotted by the Ccivil Rrights Mmovement, and he said, oh, finally there's some political
action happening on campuses. And that was incredibly important. Chris Hedges: Well, two of the important figures
in your book, Staughton Lynd, who we just lost, unfortunately, and Howard Zinn, I think
they were both at Spelman, both fired because they were doing precisely that with their
students. Ellen Schrecker: Exactly. They desegregated the Atlanta Public Library. Howard Zinn would take his students, and they
just went in, and student after student would ask for a copy of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty. Then finally the Atlanta Library officials
decided they were more trouble than they were worth, and so they desegregated the place. So Zinn was incredibly important in the Ccivil
Rrights Mmovement and the anti-war movement, and is a main history-maker as well as a historian. Staughton Lynd, the same thing, although Lynd
was not fired by Spelman. Chris Hedges: He was fired, pushed out of
Yale eventually. Ellen Schrecker: Yeah. What happened was he quit. He quit as a protest against the firing of
Howard Zinn and was immediately hired by Yale. So this is somebody who is not exactly a slouch
as a historian. He's quite reputable, and wrote a very important
book on the American Revolution. And what we're seeing there is a connection
between the Ccivil Rrights Mmovement and the anti-war movement, and lots of people who
were active during the '60s did get their start picketing Woolworth's. Or even more important, like Mario Savio,
who was the leader of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, went south in the summer of 1964
in a project called Mississippi Summer to help register African American men and women
as voters in Mississippi. They lost the right to vote, and what this
Mississippi Summer project was trying to do was gain attention because there was so much
political repression in Mississippi and so much violence. People were being killed for trying to register
to vote. And so the leaders of the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, devised this program of sending white well-connected college
students to do voter registration in Mississippi to get some attention, and it certainly worked. And many of those, shall we say, veterans
from the Mississippi Summer, from the Ccivil Rrights Mmovement in the Nnorth as well, became
very active in the following decade. Chris Hedges: That's also true for William
Sloane Coffin, who you write about in the book. Ellen Schrecker: Exactly. Chris Hedges: Let's talk about the Free Speech
Movement at Berkeley. It occupies a pretty important chunk of your
book. Ellen Schrecker: Right. Well, you don't ordinarily have such a dramatic
change in the political climate as you do with the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. It launched the student movement. It was the first time in American history
where students engaged in non-violent direct action directed against their own universities
on political issues. This politicized American students, who until
then, maybe they were interested in left things, maybe they were interested in Cuba, maybe
they were interested in anti-nuclear weapons, in the anti-nuclear peace movement. But Berkeley did it. Berkeley said, your university is behaving
in an undemocratic manner. This was what the Free Speech Movement was
about. The university would not let student groups
on campus recruit students for off-campus political activities. It was incredibly repressive, much more so
than you would expect, because Berkeley was a major school, and most people thought of
it as a rather liberal place by the late '50s, although during the height of the McCarthy
period, it had a loyalty oath for faculty members that led to firings and a blacklist. But by the mid '60s, Berkeley was a political
scene. People were going there and they were radicals,
and then people who got there who weren't radicals got radicalized. So Berkeley was a hotbed. And then, boom, a group of like 1,000a thousand
students, sat down around a police car that was taking a civil rights activist to the
local jail because he had violated the university's regulations on recruiting students for off-campus
political activities, and that did it. The university cracked down on student leaders. Student leaders fought back, organized the
Berkeley Free Speech Movement, and forced the university to revise its procedures for
on and off-campus political activities. In other words, the Free Speech Movement was
fighting about free speech. It wasn't a very radical demand. They weren't demanding curricular changes,
the hiring of certain radicals, or anything like that. All they wanted was to have the same political
rights as any other American. Chris Hedges: You write in the book, "As a
result, the authorities paid insufficient attention to the content of student demands
while seriously overreacting to their style." This is, of course, a political figure like
Ronald Reagan rides this into the governorship and, eventually, the presidency. So you're right that it wasn't particularly
radical in any way, but it got a lot of coverage. I think there's a picture of Mario Savio standing
on top of that police car, right? Ellen Schrecker: Sure. Chris Hedges: And that really triggered the
rightist forces that had been in sympathy or, in many cases, actually participated in
McCarthyism. Ellen Schrecker: Exactly. There was, beginning with Berkeley, a real
backlash against the students. What they were doing was not necessarily legal. They were trespassing. They had taken over the administration building
at Berkeley. This had never happened before, not for any
political cause, and so the administration at Berkeley was blindsided. They hadn't expected this. They didn't know what to do. One of the themes of the book is simply that
this was unprecedented. This was the first time in history that university
administrators had to deal with left-wing radicals who were disrupting classes, who
were taking over buildings, who were demonstrating, who were doing things that the administration
wanted stopped. This was really bad publicity. Chris Hedges: I just want to talk about the
role of the FBI. They start disseminating all sorts of allegations
to figures within the administration. For instance, the vice chancellor, Alex Sherriffs,
who became Reagan's top advisor in education, said that this was a communist radical bloc.k,
Nnone of this was true, of course. That the elements of the Free Speech Movement
were practitioners –, Tthese are FBI words – , tTactics of Fidel Castro and Mao ZedongTse-tung. And this charge, this demonization of the
students was picked up by the media, and you're right that there was not much sympathy within
the public for the students. They did a very effective job at marginalizing
them on a national level. Ellen Schrecker: Yeah. This was done from the start with the Berkeley
Free Speech Movement. Clark Kerr, the president of Berkeley, who
was one of the first victims of the backlash against the student movement, was being fed
stuff through this guy Sheriffs, who was a vice chancellor at Berkeley. And Sheriffs was being fed stuff by the FBI
about these so-called communist connections of these crazy students, and Clark Kerr, to
his discredit, parroted that stuff and talked about it. The main evidence they had for these communist
connections was the fact that one of the leaders of the Free Speech Movement was an undergraduate
student named Bettina Aptheker, whose father was a well-known or publicly-known communist
historian. Therefore, they claim that the communists
are in charge. Well, Bettina Aptheker was not only one of
the few women in the leadership of the Free Speech Movement, but she was one of the most
moderate figures in that group. She was somebody who didn't shout slogans
or anything. She said, look, we're just asking to be given
our rights, and let's work this out. And ultimately, the cavalry that came to the
rescue of the students was the faculty. This is very important. There was an important vote by the Berkeley
fFaculty sSenate about two months into the Free Speech Movement, when the campus was
just doing nothing but holding meetings. The faculty held a meeting and voted in favor
of revising the school's regulations for political activity on campus and managed to convince
the Board of Regents, which was the final authority to make those changes, and the Free
Speech Movement ended with a victory, with a new, more democratic form of campus regulations. Chris Hedges: And this leads into the anti-war
movement. And of course, students are directly affected
by the war. Much of the anger on campuses is about collaboration
between universities and the war industry, including the manufacturing of chemical agents
such as Agent Orange, etc. And you said the escalation of the war brought
about the creation of a new form of protest, the teach-in, which you place a lot of importance
on, you consider a very important moment. One of the things I found moving, by the way,
is the way the students would react to the teach-ins, that it suddenly gave a vitality
to their university experience, almost euphoric in the sense that professors came out of the
classrooms. These things were often done outside the confines
of the university. They would last, I think at one point you
said like 30 hours or something? Ellen Schrecker: That was at Berkeley. Chris Hedges: At Berkeley. Talk about that. Ellen Schrecker: Sure. Well, one of the things that I discovered
in my research was that at the time the Vietnam War really escalated, which was in the early
spring of 1965, which is, what, three months after the end of the Free Speech Movement,
okay? So, boom, there's the Free Speech Movement,
and then all of a sudden there's Vietnam. And what I discovered was that nobody knew
anything about Vietnam. It had been a French colony, it had fought
for more than a decade against the French after WWII to win its independence. It was led by communists, so that the American
foreign policy establishment, especially in the aftermath of McCarthyism, which had a
large component of attacks on the Truman administration for "losing China." We have to understand there was a major revolution
in China. Communists came to power so there was this
sense that in the Johnson administration, we can't lose another country, because the
Truman administration was under such heavy attack. We don't want to go through that again. Little did they know that they were doing
something that would, in fact, lead to a massive anti-war movement. But anyhow, in the beginning, nobody knew
anything about Vietnam. My late husband wrote the first bestselling
book. It was a collection of documents and articles
about Vietnam that was published in the summer of 1965. It became a bestseller because nobody knew
anything. Chris Hedges: Ellen, I want to stop you there
because I only have five minutes left. And so you saw the rise of the anti-war movement. The same tactics were used to demonize the
campus radicals, if we want to call them that, that were used in the Free Speech Movement,
and this led to tremendous blowback against the universities. Just briefly tell us what the blowback was
and where we are now. Ellen Schrecker: Okay. Well, we're skipping many things. Chris Hedges: I know. Well, it's a long book. People are going to have to read it. Ellen Schrecker: Oh, good idea. And eventually it's going to come out on paper. Chris Hedges: Okay. Ellen Schrecker: So anyhow, what happened
was the Berkeley Free Speech Movement made the career of Ronald Reagan, a lot of other
rather opportunistic politicians followed suit, and within a few years, by the early
1970s, there were laws on the books against student radicals. They criminalized anybody who rioted on campus
in certain states, they took away their state funding, but especially, they took away funding
for the institutions across the board. They were still expanding in size, but the
percentage of their budgets that were being supplied by the states and federal government
also declined. And so where did these schools get the money
to continue? Student tuition. That's where this massive debt, $1.6 trillion,
was accrued. Universities raised tuition and they cut courses,
and the cutting of courses led to a hollowing out of the faculty. They did not replace full-time tenure track
and tenured professors. When they retired, they simply hired adjuncts,
part-time workers, or people on one- or two-year contracts, none of them with any academic
freedom, none of them with the ability to criticize what's going on. Chris Hedges: Ellen, I just want to stop there
because I only have a minute. They also purged the universities, which you
write about. They would drive people out, like Staughton
Lynd was driven out of Yale, and they wouldn't tell them that they were being purged for
their political positions. Like McCarthy, although it wasn't overt, large
numbers of faculty who had been politically engaged were pushed out. Ellen Schrecker: Well, they weren't pushed
out. That's what differentiated the '60s and early
'70s from McCarthyism, because universities were still expanding, and so people could
get jobs. Now, they wouldn't get very good jobs often,
but they were able to get jobs at these expanding colleges, the second-tier, third-tier public
universities. And in fact, Staughton Lynd was an exception
because he really was blacklisted. But I've seen cases of somebody who was fired
once, twice, three times and still got a job. So it was a different era. But then, as people retired, they were not
being replaced, and so you now have a ‘gig professoriate’ as we call it, and these
are people who are paid so badly and have so little economic security that they really
can't give their students the education that those students deserve. They have to teach at one, two, three different
schools. They don't have offices, they don't have the
library privileges, they can't do research. And what we're seeing is a decline in the
quality of higher education as well as a rise in the cost. And then because these things are happening,
institutions of higher education are becoming increasingly unpopular to the extent that
you now have opportunistic politicians, like our dear governor in Florida, Ron DeSantis,
cracking down on them politically for things that they're not even doing. And we're seeing a real existential moment,
I would call it, within the world of higher education that's terrifying. Also, there's an undercurrent here of racism,
and I want to stress, and I'm not sure I even stress it enough in the book, this connection
between this country's racial problems and the problems of higher education. And that's a theme we have to pay a lot of
attention to today. Chris Hedges: Great. We're going to stop there. That was Ellen Schrecker on her new book,
The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s. I want to thank The Real News Network and
its production team:, Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley, and Kayla Rivara. You can find me at chrishedges.substack.com.
