Joan Wallach Scott is the author of On The Judgment of History. Her father was a teacher who lost his job in the Red Scare of the fifties, and she brings that perspective to the challenges facing education today in an essay published in Boston Review.
My response to injustice these days is visceral rage at the powerful, but it’s not the same feeling I had in the oddly more optimistic time of the 1950s. Then I had the sense that justice was on the side of virtue—that my father was a hero, a David fighting Goliaths, whose evil motives would eventually bring about their defeat. There was justice and injustice and we were on the side of history. Now the attacks feel like yet another manifestation of the relentless self-preservation of the powerful, at the expense of the dedicated teachers and the school children whose education was in their hands. These days, as a much larger authoritarian behemoth wreaks havoc on democratic education in the name of white supremacist masculinity, I am no less committed to resisting, but without the belief that history is on my side. It’s a form of stubborn resistance that is the legacy of my father.
My need to resist leads me to support others doing the same: the increasing numbers of courageous faculty whose petitions call on administrators to stand up to the attacks; the students and faculty condemning Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza and, in the process, claiming their rights to protest under the First Amendment; the individual university presidents (Michael Roth, Patricia McGuire, Christopher Eisgruber, Gregory Washington) who have defied Trump’s bullying orders in the name of academic freedom, and their hundred or more colleagues who have signed a letter protesting “unprecedented government overreach and political interference” in the academy. My immediate community of resisters is the American Association of University Professors, which has been producing statements, reports, and lawsuits at unprecedented speed. This is the latest chapter in my long education in the importance of communities of resistance, however implacable is the power we confront.
We are again confronting a massive attack on the very foundations of democratic education and, this time around, the stakes feel even higher. In the 1950s, the targets were individual teachers—communists, progressives, liberals—and their left-wing unions. Now the target is the system itself. Its value as a public good is being redefined as a matter of parental choice (vouchers, charter schools, home-schooling, all paid for by public funds), and its commitments to principles of equality and justice—to say nothing of truthful accounts of history—are being trashed. In their place, stories of violence and greed are forcibly imposed to glorify our nationalist destiny. I am reminded—for a second time in my life—that the stakes we have in a democratic system of education are always under threat and that, for those of us who value it, the fight for its preservation is an urgent, if never-ending, challenge.