Hate Groups, Big Dykes and Other Problems in Academic Freedom

"Standard" practices of academic freedom can reinforce inequities. Addressing this paradox is a complicated, but necessary, business.

By Erica Rand

A white supremacist group, the World Church of the Creator (WCOTC), announced plans to hold a rally for its cause on the first Saturday of the semester in Lewiston, Maine, where Bates, my college, is located. The group's imminent appearance forced me to struggle, not with "evildoers" who would threaten academic freedom from the outside, but with my own disturbing disinclination to support the principle wholeheartedly. I realized that, despite wanting to make my classroom a place where people could express divergent views, I was hardly eager to support the articulation of white supremacy. I couldn't imagine how an environment made friendly for WCOTC supporters wouldn't negatively impact the academic freedom of people in their targeted groups.

This article uses my work around teaching this course at this particular time as the occasion to consider a blind spot within the concept of academic freedom when it appears as a singular standard: the free expression of ideas by some can be used to create a hostile climate for others. In pointing to this problem, I intend not to undermine academic freedom but to argue for a way to strengthen it by twinning our loyalty to the principle with sustained work against inequities that threaten the practice.

As I said, my first worries about "Women, Gender, Visual Culture" concerned the atmosphere that the WCOTC demonstration would create for its targeted groups, which include people who are of color, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, Muslim, Jewish, or a combination thereof. Even knowledge of a planned citywide counter-demonstration (which, happily, drew 4,500 people) and the college's firm statement against the WCOTC could not erase the possibility of violence far more direct than hate speech. In 1999 and 2001, young white men associated with the group had killed and injured numerous people. 1 In addition, Lewiston had already seen an increase in harassment of Somali immigrants, whose presence was the WCOTC's ostensible reason for coming to town. The group had taken advantage of the international media attention Lewiston received after the mayor sent a letter to Somali community leaders asking them to curb future arrivals because, he erroneously contended, the thousand already in the city had tapped out Lewiston's resources with their need for services.

The specter of past, present, and possible future violence in the area hardly contributed to ideal conditions for productive thinking. Besides, despite much good-faith work to create an inclusive learning community, Bates has had its problems with harassment, discrimination, violence, and exclusion. Most people in WCOTC-targeted groups had also dealt with situations on campus ranging from dorm harassment to exclusionary curricula. Negative effects of prejudice were neither new nor external to Bates.

Balancing Act

So when I begin my courses by having students brainstorm ground rules with me, I have in mind discouraging them from asking, for example, an Asian American student to speak for all Asian Americans, or from presuming by looking around the room that no one has personal ties to transgender matters. On the other hand, I aim to encourage respect for people who think that only heterosexuality is normal. I also try to start with topics and readings that don't throw what students might take to be my identity or my politics in their faces. For the same reason, I generally don't require them to read my work; I want students to work on critical thinking without immediately having to think about critiquing me. These are some of the ways that I factor my structural power over students into the course design.

But, crucial to the topic of academic freedom, such strategies also protect me. Threats to academic freedom, of course, predate the events of September 11, 2001. For many people in marginalized groups, our hold on academic freedom in our classrooms has always been somewhat precarious. For the past decade, I have been a member, twice serving as co-chair, of the Queer Caucus for Art: The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Caucus for Art, Artists, and Historians, an "affiliated society" of the College Art Association. As such, I can cite numerous examples of queer faculty whose course content was used to threaten their jobs. Some teachers were accused of forcing their sexual orientation on students through allegedly relentless presentation of queer material. I say "allegedly," because the professor usually had a different, often documentable, account of the queer content as occasional (although one parent who contacted the president of Bates to accuse me of turning his son gay was angry about a course that had sexuality as its explicit focus).

In other cases, a faculty member's sexual orientation was used to heighten suspicion against her or him, even if the material in question was not queer. One dyke, for example, came under fire for a student's artwork that was deemed anti-Catholic, even though the student conceived of the content on her own and considered it a respectful engagement with her religion. The press accounts, the debates, and the death threats made it clear that the teacher's sexuality functioned as fuel and target.

As artist, writer, and professor Catherine Lord points out in her essay "Lesbian Accused of Promoting Pedophilia," forthcoming in the June 2003 issue of Radical Teacher, the very presence of queers in the classroom threatens sometimes tacit expectations that academic institutions should contribute to the production of "normal" heterosexual citizens. "We don't want them teaching our children" gets deployed long after the so-called children grow up. In all these situations, the ability to demonstrate attention to noncoercive course content is helpful.

Cases like these highlight impediments to academic freedom that extend beyond literal proscriptions. I deliberately did not give full identifying details in the examples above because, even if one emerges from such incidents with one's teaching, work, and job successfully defended, living through the ordeal, simply put, can be hell. It's nerve-wracking, dangerous, exhausting, and, in many ways, overwhelming: it's hard to wrap your mind around, and the imperative to do so sucks up attention that might go elsewhere. In fact, there is such a thing as bad publicity, and I believe that people who have already been through such incidents should be able to decide on their own whether to attract more hostility.

I know that queers in the classroom certainly will. The important theorist Gayle Rubin wrote in "Thinking Sex," first published in 1984 in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, that "it is precisely at times such as these . . . when we live with the possibility of unthinkable destruction, that people are likely to become dangerously crazy about sexuality." Her words, although written in the early 1980s, certainly apply now. As scholars Jasbir K. Puar and Amit S. Rai demonstrate in "Monster, Terrorist, Fag: The War on Terrorism and the Production of Docile Patriots," published in the fall 2002 issue of Social Text, current constructions of the terrorist depend on the idea of sexual perversity and invite an "aggressive heterosexual patriotism" as maker and marker of normality. The widely circulated revenge images that use bikinis and ballerina outfits to signal Osama Bin Laden's humiliation and portray anal penetration as his punishment offer visual evidence of their point.

I don't worry too much about my own job these days; tenure puts a few more roadblocks before my dismissal, and sufficient institutional backing helped me weather a few queer-related job threats before that. But my continuing involvement with antiqueer cases, and cases connected to other marginalized groups, brings one more constant element to my course planning: the knowledge that an accusation about generating discomfort can be used as a weapon against academic freedom, as can a profession that comfort in the classroom constitutes a good and a goal (which it shouldn't—I'm a big fan of productive discomfort).

I mentioned earlier that my disinclination to abet WCOTC values in "Women, Gender, Visual Culture" stemmed partly from my concern about the classroom climate for targeted groups. How different was my thinking from that of people who try to get rid of their professors, arguing that queer teachers or queer content makes them uncomfortable? Certainly, I can name a few differences. Not least is that the threats allegedly posed by queer teachers or content are generally more phantasmagoric than real-sure, we might be trying to destroy heteronormativity, but not by recruiting or seducing our students into a particular erotic life. With the WCOTC, my concerns matched the group's stated ideology and track record. Nonetheless, my impulse to expel remained dangerously close to that of those discomfited by queer teachers-close enough to make attempts to separate my objections from theirs seem mostly like grabbing at rationales for censoring behavior.

Such attempts also, I believe, constitute exercises in condescension and abstraction that offer little guidance for teachers trying to facilitate intellectual and creative work (not that "intellectual" and "creative" delimit separable areas of endeavor). Without active involvement from students, we cannot really know what impedes thinking, talking, writing, and making.

In one earlier incarnation of "Women, Gender, Visual Culture," after discussion devolved into silence and hostility, I distributed a form asking students to write anonymously about factors affecting their class participation, including their perceptions of me and their classmates. I expected comments like, "Because you're a lesbian, I am afraid to say anything that would sound homophobic." Instead, although I did get some answers, if not that exact one, that confirmed my suspicion that issues of race and sexuality had precipitated our meltdown, I got others that I'd never expected: "You wrote a book. I don't want to look stupid." "Everyone but me is an art history major" (false). "Why don't you ever talk about how beautiful the nudes are?" (This last comment, on an omission I'd never noticed, suggests unconscious strategies I might have used to avoid accusations about imposing my sexuality.) I learned, too, that students don't know unless we tell them that faculty often struggle with issues concerning who we are in the classroom-not surprising if we turn mostly to each other-and that bringing them to the classroom can generate learning and good will, if not easy solutions.

In the end, I used what I learned from students in that exercise and elsewhere to guide the way I started the January 2003 semester. In 1996 I co-produced a pamphlet titled Racism in the Classroom: Insights from Students with the director of Bates's Multicultural Center and students involved with the center. In that pamphlet, as in a 2002 student resolution asking faculty to take a stand against antiqueer acts on campus (like "I'm going to fuck you straight" written on a student's dorm door) and in numerous other contexts, student acti-vists have made one consistent demand of faculty: show that you take seriously issues facing people in marginalized groups on campus by addressing them in visible, recognizable ways. This imperative is far different from a request to foreclose hostile comments. It demands instead, and rightly, that we take them on.

Head-On Approach to the Issues

Your grade is not about your politics. I write this on the syllabus partly because of the circumstances in which we start the semester. We face both the appearance of a white supremacist group in town-which targets people who are of color, Muslim, Jewish, immigrant, or lgbt [lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender], among others-and the onset of another war that may lead many of us in the course, including me, to highly visible political actions. So I say up front the following: I intend to promote in this class an environment that has as a core value the treatment of all people with dignity and respect. I expect to hold myself and others to behaviors that support that goal, which, in fact, one might call a political goal. I also intend to make the study of contemporary political material part of the subject of the course. As with all courses, however, I will base my evaluation of your work on your analytic approach to the material we study and to the problems assigned, not on the political values that may come out in them.

I hesitated to include this statement, being loath to fan the dubious notion that teachers who address justice issues are "political," while those who choose not to do so are somehow politically neutral. I considered it more important, however, to make clear that I wouldn't take attendance at demonstrations, that I would actively promote an anti-WCOTC environment, and that I had given serious thought to power relations in the classroom.

Second, I began with a topic related to the WCOTC's imminent visit: the use of gender in the production of hate imagery. As I told my class-again working to demystify rather than mask my own struggle with coming events and with course planning in general-I ordinarily try to ease into theoretical complexities and topics with intense currency. But with only two class meetings before WCOTC day, I sent them right off to study hate sites and pictures, telling them to return for the second class with an image in which gender representation, with other facets of identity, such as race, nationality, economic status, or sexuality, contributes to the portrayal of people as worthy of either hate and destruction or protection and defense. I also added on the assignment, in bold, "If you're new to the study of images or the issues involved, don't panic," reiterating in writing that the course did not require prior experience in studying images or using gender as a category of analysis.

This assignment yielded several positive results. Most simply, many students knew little of hate groups and hate sites. The very existence of sites like DeadArab.US (formerly DeadArab.Com) was illuminating, as were its numerous images of cross-dressed and anally penetrated Saddams and Osamas. The obvious role of gender in the production of meaning did not, however, generate unity of interpretation. Disagreement about issues such as the link between hostile images and the perpetration of violence—a difficult and contentious matter to be sure-offered the occasion to affirm diversity of opinion even in the context of an assignment with a clear political slant.

Besides encouraging the practice of academic freedom, the images also prompted a discussion about the politics of touting possession of it. One student had brought in a cartoon showing a bunch of guys in beards and turbans looking aghast as one of them reads a missive saying, "To the Taliban: Give us Osama Bin Laden or we'll send your women to college." This cartoon offered a great example of a point that the students would soon read about in a statement by Paola Bacchetta, Tina Campt, Inderpal Grewal, Caren Kaplan, Minoo Moallem, and Jennifer Terry, the feminist theorists who in 2001 co-authored "Transnational Feminist Practices Against War," which I had assigned for the class following WCOTC Saturday. Writing about the aftermath of September 11, the authors note that, "while middle-class Euro-American women in the United States are held up as the most liberated on earth even while they are being encouraged to stand dutifully by their husbands, fathers, and children, women in developing regions of the world are depicted as abject, backward, and oppressed by their men."

As they point out, an opposition between "our" free women and oppressed women elsewhere not only misrepresents both—not in any way to downplay the lack of access to education referenced in the cartoon—but also obscures the complicity of supposedly liberating nations in generating the situations condemned as alien: "One of the important elements missing from this picture is the fact that many women in Afghanistan are starving and faced with violence and harm on a daily basis not only due to the Taliban regime but also due in large part to a long history of European colonialism and conflict in the region."

Students also took off from an image tagged "We're Coming, Motherfuckers," which I had found by searching on the Internet for "Osama (or Saddam), Statue of Liberty," that depicts the Statue of Liberty giving the finger. They used it to consider representational disparities in the United States, such as the use of a woman-and one of complex, variously read gender (is Liberty a butch or a lady?)-to represent the male-dominated national government presiding over inequities in gender, race, and economic status, among others that affect access to education.

I have been arguing in this essay that our understanding of how academic freedom is threatened in this "time of crisis" must extend beyond, while surely including, the headlines about alleged terrorists. In many ways, and often to the side of the headlines, this time of crisis informs, magnifies, and transforms threats to academic freedom that hamper equal access to the practice of it. Heightened anti-immigrant sentiment and increasing economic strain contributed to the WCOTC's descent on Lewiston. The funneling of "terrorist" through "sexual pervert" gives new dimension to a long-standing panic about queer people and content in education-making threats to national security more vivid, perhaps, although certainly not more coherent. Examples regarding access to education multiply daily. Two days before February 15, the international day of action against President Bush's proposed war on Iraq, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill that would cut from twelve to four the number of months that welfare recipients can attend college in a twenty-four-month period. This setback is merely one among others pushed through during a daunting onslaught of restrictive actions and policies.

Meanwhile, in my own classroom, a student who did not register for the draft anticipates having to withdraw. Unlike many state schools, which allow men eligible for the draft to matriculate only if registered, Bates requires no such compliance. Like most institutions that do not demand registration, however, Bates refuses to help nonregistering students with the tuition assistance they would have received from federal education aid, for which registration now constitutes a prerequisite. The result, effectively, is economic discrimination. Bates supports only those students making this decision of conscience who can come up with its $38,000 plus annual price tag. The current call to patriotism and panic will likely forestall attempts to change this policy, despite its fundamental incompatibility with the values for which Bates professes to stand.

A commitment to academic freedom demands, I think, a commitment both to social justice, including the equitable distribution of power and resources upon which broad academic access depends, and to social-justice models of political work, including resistance to top-down strategizing. I don't presume to have come up with the best of all possible plans for promoting academic freedom in "Women, Gender, Visual Culture." But I am absolutely sure that the course is all the better for the work with students that informed my practices.

Note

1. For information about the WCOTC and the college's response, see the "Bates College Community Information and Action Resource Page" at <http://abacus.bates.edu/admin/offices/doc/action/>. As is indicated on the Bates site, which refers to the "group formerly known as the WCOTC," the group's right to its name has come under copyright challenge. Back to text

Erica Rand teaches in the art department and the program in women and gender studies at Bates College. She also serves on the editorial board of the journal Radical Teacher.

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