Minneapolis Lessons for Higher Education

By Michael Meranze

It is too soon to tell what will be the long term impact of the federal invasion of Minneapolis.  But it is clear that the images--both of the thuggish brutality of ICE and CBP and the solidarity and bravery of Minnesotans opposing the brutality and occupation--will not going away soon.  Minneapolis offers many lessons for possibility of a democratic future in the United States.  But, although less obviously, it also offers lessons for the future of a democratic higher education in the United States.  It is the latter that I want to point to here.

Before I go further though, I do want to acknowledge that what we have been seeing in Minneapolis may be an intensification but not a departure from long standing practices of policing in the United States.  Police, ICE, and the Border Patrol have long histories of violating constitutional rights, violently attacking disfavored--especially minority--communities, gaslighting the public through coverups afterwards.  And for the most part they have been able to get away with it.  The courts, legislators, and large swaths of the public have enabled these patterns.  What is newish is that they have now expanded the targets of their violence to include white Samaritans like Renee Good and Alex Pretti.  (That is why I have chosen a photograph of Kent State for my image.) Of course, as my son recently reminded me, that's because from the vantage point of the Trump Administration, Good and Pretti are race traitors.  Nor can we know what will happen if these cases get to the Taney  Roberts Court.  But given "Kavanaugh Stops" we cannot be confident.

Still, I think that it is clear that all who hope for a democratic United States and for a democratic higher education can take at least two points for inspiration from the courage shown by the citizens of Minneapolis.

First, organization and solidarity does matter.  The city's ability to challenge the occupation was the result of a culture and practice of solidarity and from lessons drawn from past efforts.  As draining and difficult as resistance to fascism may be, it does matter and people should take energy from it.  In this light, it is absolutely crucial that we continue to build upon the growing numbers of faculty who have joined the AAUP and other organizations recently and also that we recognize that, in the language of the IWW, "in injury to one is an injury to all."  Any day that you look at a newspaper you will see new efforts--especially but not only in red states--to attack academic freedom, to reduce higher education to a tool of state ideology, to eliminate tenure.  Even those who live in states where that is not an immediate threat should stand with their colleagues where it is.  Just as people throughout the country are now standing with Minneapolis, so must everyone stand together in higher education.  You may not be involved in Gender Studies and you may not live in Texas.  But the fact that Texas A&M is closing their Women and Gender Studies program because their state legislature and board of trustees decided to control the teaching of sex and gender is a threat to everyone.

Second, the importance of independent perspectives and evidence has made a huge difference in the politics of the invasion of Minneapolis.  This should remind everyone that what they do is important.  Truth-telling, challenging official propaganda with disciplined evidence and alternative perspectives--in other words what scholars and scientists do and what they teach their students--is crucial to challenging the effort of the state to define reality.  Given that the Trump administration has demolished so much of the federal government's ability to provide scientific and scholarly based knowledge, the capacity of scholars and scientists outside of their grasp because even more important.  This challenge is admittedly tricky.  Colleges and Universities depend on federal funding and the Trump administration has tried to reduce that dramatically.  So far, thanks to the efforts of the AAUP and other groups, they have faced serious push back in the courts.  But at stake in their efforts, in our resistance, and in the knowledge that we produce is the perpetuation of knowledge that can provide alternatives to the Regime.  Just following RFK Jr.  will make clear what failure in this struggle will mean.

In "Lying in Politics," her review of the Pentagon Papers, Hannah Arendt demonstrated the extent to which the Johnson and Nixon administrations engaged in self-delusion around Vietnam.  As she made clear, the government bureaucrats knew well that what their leaders were saying about the war and the situation in Vietnam were false; indeed they provided numerous reports to that effect.  But both administrations believed that they could impose their imagined reality upon the public at large.  What prevented this from happening in the end was wide spread protest situated within a culture of independent truth-telling that gradually penetrated into the most important magazines, newspapers, and television reports.  Our official mediascape is much more degraded--whether it be Jeff Bezos efforts to turn the Washington Post into a mouthpiece for the billionaire class prostrating itself at the feet of the President or Bari Weiss overturning the integrity of CBS news in an uncanny emulation of Mussolini's Italy--but even today we can see how public pressure is driving the NYT to cut down on euphemism.  Moreover, as we have seen, the ubiquity of cell phones means that neither DHS or the White House can easily control the narrative.  Even George Will understands that.

And again, it is in the practices of faculty, researchers, students, and independent scholars--that is to say the scholarly community--that a commitment to truth telling must be sustained and offered against the regime's efforts to destroy knowledge and eliminate free thought.  The federal government's knowledge production has been damaged--we should not let it happen to ours.  Nor should we let anyone tell us that that knowledge production is unimportant, or doesn't serve the needs of society, or should be silenced.  Minneapolis has shown how important that is.

There is one more lesson I want to raise.  The people of Minnesota have led the efforts to stop the invasion of Minneapolis.  But it is striking that the state's Democratic political leadership--Ellison, Frey and Walz--have stood with them.  I am not a huge fan of Walz and don't know enough about Frey; Keith Ellison has been a strong leader before.  At a moment of intense threat they have stood up to the federal government at potentially great personal risk.  How many of our college and university leaders can make the same statement?  Instead, we have seen compliance and euphemism, in some cases a willingness to throw faculty, student, and staff protesters under the bus, throughout a hedging of the bets and a reluctance to lead.  I understand that the situations are different, and that universities and colleges have been divided on pressing political questions.  But with (very) few exceptions where have been those who claim to provide leadership actually taken leadership for defending academic freedom and the importance of scholarship and science as opposed to meekly dodging questions?  Collaborators or compliers I am not sure.  But I doubt future historians will look back at this period as anything but a nadir of university leadership.

So solidarity, truth-telling, and leadership.  We owe all of these to the people of Minneapolis, to the other victims of police and state violence, and to ourselves.