Harry Targ : Academic Freedom and the Mitch Daniels/Howard Zinn Kerfuffle

Political cartoon by Gary Varvel / Indianapolis Star

Academic freedom under fire:
The Mitch Daniels/Howard Zinn kerfuffle

If education at any level is to be shaped by the principle of academic freedom it must encourage student exposure to varieties of theories, perspectives, and points of view.

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / August 7, 2013

WEST LAFAYETTE, Indiana -- On July 17, 2013, an Associated Press story was published in several newspapers quoting from 2010 e-mails Governor Mitch Daniels of Indiana, now the president of Purdue University, wrote to “top state educational officials.” The e-mails encouraged the suppression of popular historian Howard Zinn’s book, A People’s History of the United States in Indiana public education, including university level teacher training courses.

Upon the death of popular historian Howard Zinn, Daniels e-mailed that “this terrible anti-American academic has finally passed away.”

When challenged on the seeming threats to academic freedom, Daniels claimed that his directives “only” referred to K through 12 instruction despite the fact that his e-mails made it clear he opposed instruction that used Zinn’s writings as tools for in-service training for teachers.

Ninety Purdue University faculty (including this author) signed a letter to President Daniels objecting to his implied threat to academic freedom. In addition to defending the university as a place for debate among competing ideas, the faculty objected to the negative characterization of Zinn’s scholarship as an historian.

They also objected to Daniels’ claim that although he was not interested in censoring scholarship and teaching at the university, when he was governor he had the responsibility to oversee school curricula from kindergarten through high school.

Faculty pointed out that restricting what was being taught to teachers pursuing advanced credits and restricting the right of teachers to use Zinn’s work in pre-college curricula violated academic freedom. Many Purdue faculty believed that extreme statements damning the substance of Zinn’s work cast a pall on the university and made serious reflection on American history in elementary and high schools more difficult for young people and their teachers.

It is important to note that the Daniels e-mails, and their threat to free discussion and debate in educational institutions in Indiana, reflect the deep struggles being waged in the American political system. Rush Limbaugh once remarked on his radio show to the effect that “we” have captured most institutions in the society with the exception of the university.

Since politics is usually about the contestation of ideas and the development of ideas comes from an understanding of the past and its connection to the present and the future, schools and universities can aptly be seen as “contested terrain.” That is teachers and students learn about their world through reading, writing, debating, and advocating policies, ideas, and values in educational settings.

Consequently, if one sector of society wishes to gain and maintain political and economic power they might see particular value in controlling the ideas that are disseminated in educational institutions. During the dark days of the Cold War professors who had the “wrong” ideas were fired. Professional associations in many disciplines rewarded scholars who worked within accepted perspectives on history, or political science, or literature, or sociology and denied recognition to others.

The preferred ideas trickled down to primary and secondary education. In most instances, professors and teachers who suffered as a result of their teaching were merely presenting competing views so that their students would have more informed reasons for deciding on their own what interpretations of subject matter made the most sense.

American history was a prime example of how controversial teaching would become. Most historians after World War II wrote and taught about the American experience emphasizing that elites made history, men made history more than women, social movements were absent from historical change, history moved in the direction of consensus rather than conflict, and the United States always played a positive role in world history. European occupation of North America, the elimination of Native Peoples, building a powerful economy on the backs of a slave system, and a U.S. pattern of involvement in foreign wars were all ignored or slighted.

Howard Zinn, a creator and product of the intellectual turmoil of the 60s presented us with a new paradigm for examining U.S. history, indeed all history. His classic text, A People’s History of the United States, which has been read by millions, compellingly presented a view of history that highlighted the roles of indigenous people, workers, women, people of color, people of various ethnicities, and all others who were not situated at the apex of economic, political, or educational institutions.

He taught us that we needed to be engaged in the struggles that shaped people’s lives to learn what needs to be changed, how their conditions got to be what they were, and how scholar/activists might help to change the world.

Perhaps most importantly, Zinn demonstrated that participants in people’s struggles were part of a “people’s chain,” that is the long history of movements and campaigns throughout history that have sought to bring about change. As he wrote in his autobiography, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times:

What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places -- and there are so many -- where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.

And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.

In the 1970s the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) was formed by wealthy conservatives and corporations such as Koch Industries, ExxonMobil, and AT&T which invested millions of dollars to organize lobby groups, support selected politicians in all 50 states, create “think tanks,” and in other ways strategize about how to transform American society to increase the wealth and power of the few.

ALEC lobbyists and scholars developed programs and legislation around labor, healthcare, women’s issues, the environment, and education that were designed to reverse the progressive development of government and policy that social movements had long advocated.

Speakers at ALEC events have included Governors Rick Perry, Scott Walker, Jan Brewer, John Kasich, and Mitch Daniels. ALEC legislative programs include lobbying for charter schools, challenging teachers unions, revisiting school curricula to include materials that deny climate change, and more effectively celebrate the successes of the Bill of Rights in U.S. history.

The conservative Bradley Foundation, has awarded $400 million over the last decade to organizations supporting school vouchers, right-to-work laws, traditional marriage laws, and global warming deniers. Two of the four recipients of the organization's 2013 award for support of “American democratic capitalism” were Roger Ailes, CEO of Fox News, and Purdue President Mitch Daniels.

Associations which lobby for restricting academic freedom in higher education include David Horowitz’s Freedom Center and the National Association of Scholars, funded by the conservative Sarah Scaife, Bradley, and Olin Foundations among others. NAS seeks to bring together scholars whose work opposes multiculturalism, affirmative action, concerns about climate change, and the “liberal” bias in academia.

NAS current president Peter Wood contributed a blog article in the Chronicle on Higher Education on July 18, 2013, entitled “Why Mitch Daniels Was Right About Howard Zinn.” Wood wrote that “a governor worth his educational salt should be calling out faculty members who cannot or will not distinguish scholarship from propaganda, or who prefer to substitute simplistic storytelling for the complexities of history.”

Howard Zinn’s A Peoples History of the United States is a history of how social movements of workers, women, people of color, native peoples, and others often left out of conventional accounts have made and can make history. This is a part of history that political and economic elites, influential organizations such as ALEC, the Bradley Foundation, and education-oriented groups like NAS do not want included in course curricula; in middle school, high school, or the university.

If education at any level is to be shaped by the principle of academic freedom it must encourage student exposure to varieties of theories, perspectives, and points of view. It is in an environment of discussion and debate that rigorous and critical thought emerges. Efforts to expunge certain scholars such as Howard Zinn from educational curricula contradict the spirit of free and rigorous thought.

A version of this essay appeared in the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, August 5, 2013.

[Harry Targ is a professor of political science at Purdue University and is a member of the National Executive Committee of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. He lives in West Lafayette, Indiana, and blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical. Read more of Harry Targ's articles on The Rag Blog.]

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Lamar W. Hankins : ALEC and the Right Wing Agenda

Graphic from alecwatch.org.
The ALEC agenda:
How the right-wing molds
legislators to shill for corporations

By Lamar W. Hankins / The Rag Blog / February 28, 2012

"[Any law proposed by businessmen] ought always to be listened to with great precaution... It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it." -- Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations

In 1973, a group of state legislators from around the country met with some right-wing ideologues to form the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to promote policies favorable to limited government, free markets, federalism, and individual liberty, as they understood these concepts.

These are the same concepts that underlie the neoconservative and libertarian agenda that has become well known recently in Wisconsin and Ohio, and which permeate the actions of legislators throughout the U.S., including in the Congress.

One of the key founders of ALEC was Paul Weyrich, co-founder of the right-wing think tank Heritage Foundation, promoter of direct mail fundraising for right-wing causes, and the first right-winger to cultivate and recruit evangelical activists to support social conservative causes.

With Jerry Falwell, Weyrich founded the Moral Majority, a name he invented. Weyrich was one of the key right-wing leaders who worked to develop conservatism into the powerful force it is today after the defeat of Barry Goldwater in 1964 and the disappointment with Richard Nixon's too-moderate presidency.

But Weyrich, who died in 2008, would not support Goldwater or Nixon were they alive today. They were too moderate for Weyrich's tastes.

In the late 1980's, ALEC saw an opportunity to move beyond policy and education by producing model legislation to promote its right-wing, pro-corporate agenda. ALEC organized itself into a number of task forces to write and promote legislation in many areas of public life. It describes itself this way:

For more than 35 years, ALEC has been the ideal means of creating and delivering public policy ideas aimed at protecting and expanding our free society. Thanks to ALEC’s membership, the duly elected leaders of their state legislatures, Jeffersonian principles advise and inform legislative action across the country.

Literally hundreds of dedicated ALEC members have worked together to create, develop, introduce and guide to enactment many of the cutting-edge, conservative policies that have now become the law in the states. The strategic knowledge and training ALEC members have received over the years has been integral to these victories.

This description is not an exaggeration. ALEC task forces have broad mandates in the areas of Civil Justice; Commerce, Insurance, and Economic Development; Communications and Technology; Education; Energy, Environment, and Agriculture; Health and Human Services; International Relations; Public Safety and Elections; and Tax and Fiscal Policy.

ALEC is funded largely by corporations and corporate leaders, so it should come as no surprise that its model legislation benefits corporate interests to the exclusion of the public interest. As Progress Texas, a membership organization focused on holding elected officials responsible to the people, explains:

ALEC is made of more than 300 corporate and 2,000 legislative members who work behind closed doors to approve "model" legislation designed to increase corporate profits at public expense. These corporate-approved bills are then introduced in states like Texas, where lobbyists of many of those same corporations also write checks donating to the political campaigns of lawmakers who advance their agenda in the Texas Legislature. The typical cycle is as follows:

1. Corporate lobbyists and conservative legislators approve 'model' legislation
2. Corporations donate money to receptive legislators to help them win their elections
3. Legislators file and pass the bills drafted by their corporate counterparts in ALEC
4. Repeat

More than 80% of the corporate representatives on ALEC's board are lobbyists for corporations, such as Altria/Phillip Morris USA, Bayer, Corrections Corporation of America, ExxonMobil, GlaxoSmithKline, Humana, Johnson & Johnson, Koch Industries, Reynolds, State Farm, United Healthcare, and Wal-Mart. Around 200 pieces of legislation initiated by ALEC are passed into law each year in legislatures around the country.

ALEC chart from Daily Kos.
At least one house of the Texas Legislature in 2011 approved ALEC-model bills that were vetted and endorsed by a small number of corporations, including the photo ID bill, the women’s sonogram bill, and the sanctuary cities bill (which would have denied state funds to local governments that prohibit peace officers and employees of special districts from inquiring into the status of a person arrested or detained for the investigation of crime).

Progress Texas reports that ALEC's

legislative leadership is comprised almost entirely of Republicans and also corporations, and ALEC receives 98% of its funding from corporations, foundations, and sources other than legislative (membership) dues. ALEC corporations and their corporate representatives will give money to state legislators, in one of three ways: directly to candidates, to statewide ballot campaigns, and/or directly to Republican committees. In the past 20 years, ALEC corporations or their employees have donated $228.3 million to campaigns, $202.1 million to candidates, and an additional $85.8 million to Republican Party committees, totaling $516.2 million.

To find out which legislators and corporations are involved with influencing and funding legislators in your state, go to the ALEC Exposed website. ALEC Exposed is a project of the Center for Media and Democracy, a non-profit investigative reporting group that focuses on "exposing corporate spin and government propaganda."

At the ALEC Exposed website, you can learn how ALEC plans to undermine public school systems throughout the U.S. by turning them over to corporations, to limit your legal right to seek damages for injuries caused by corporations, to turn government-run prisons into private prisons, to limit access to the ballot box by ordinary citizens, to dismiss the effects of second-hand smoke on non-smokers and block anti-tobacco laws, to limit the ability of states to raise or collect taxes, to limit the ability of public-sector workers to organize together to improve worker benefits, to create new give-aways to big business, to give tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans, to undermine environmental protections, to limit the ability of local governments to manage land use, to further distort the harshness of the criminal justice system by incarcerating more people for longer sentences, and a host of other legislation that will fatten corporate coffers and diminish the lives of ordinary citizens.

Although ALEC has built itself into a powerful tool of right-wing and corporate interests for nearly 40 years, its influence can be combated if people are aware of its largely hidden activities. ALEC Exposed helps ordinary citizens become aware of ALEC activities and provides the knowledge needed to combat its influence on our lives.

[Lamar W. Hankins, a former San Marcos, Texas, city attorney, is also a columnist for the San Marcos Mercury. This article © Freethought San Marcos, Lamar W. Hankins. Read more articles by Lamar W. Hankins on The Rag Blog.]

Also see:

• "Naked ALEC and the Right Wing Conspiracy" by Paul Beckett / The Rag Blog / November 10, 2011

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Paul Beckett : Naked ALEC and the Right Wing Conspiracy

Graphics from the Center for Media and Democracy.
ALEC Naked:
More news from the 'vast
right wing conspiracy'

By Paul Beckett / The Rag Blog / November 10, 2011

MADISON, Wisconsin -- It’s all we needed! Another dimension of the “vast right-wing conspiracy” comes to light, like a horror movie monster emerging from primeval slime.

What’s its name? ALEC. But if you’re thinking of the irritating but ultimately cuddly boss in 30 Rock you’re way off. This ALEC is an acronym standing for American Legislative Exchange Council.

ALEC brings together state legislators (overwhelmingly, conservative Republicans) and corporate leaders in annual meetings to propose, review, and approve the legislation that they would LIKE to see passed at the state level.

Corporations’ business interests (profits, reduction of taxes, regulation, environmental protections, etc.) are melded with the ideological content of the right-wing politicians (guns, privatizing schools, anti-abortion, Voter ID, etc.). Sitting together in task forces, corporate representatives (often very high-level) work together with legislators to produce model legislation that is approved to be taken home and introduced in state legislatures.

ALEC staff assist adaptations in language and strategy to the circumstances of different states. Authorship of introduced legislation (about 1,000 bills a year in the country as a whole) is claimed by the local legislator: ALEC does not sign its work!

Is ALEC new? Not at all. It was created in 1973, and was closely associated with the Heritage Foundation, created at about the same time. Little noticed outside of conservative circles, ALEC grew and grew. Now its influence touches every state, and some of America’s top corporate leaders attend ALEC’s annual meetings.

But we in Wisconsin were largely blindsided, even though an earlier generation of Wisconsin conservative leaders such as former Governor Tommy Thompson and former Senator Robert Kasten were ground-floor ALEC participants.

For most of us, ALEC remained unknown, as obscure for us as, say, a pair of billionaire brothers named Koch.

Then came January 2011 and the inauguration of Governor Scott Walker. Virtually instantly, as snowflakes flew outside the Capitol, a blizzard of legislation was introduced inside touching on almost everything in Wisconsin’s public life and traditions: education (“choice” charter schools, teachers’ rights to organize, education funding, even the organization and governance of state universities), taxes, rights of labor, health care (Wisconsin’s successful “Badger Care” adaptation of Medicaid), funding for Medicare, concealed gun carry, voter ID, the state civil service. There was little that was not in there. And most of it was bundled together in a “Budget Repair Bill," to be passed as “emergency legislation” by monolithic GOP majorities.

The Budget Repair Bill contained 9,355 sections, mostly packed with dense legalese. How had Walker and his lieutenants, who had never claimed to be intellectual giants, put together such an immense construction by the early part of February?

You guessed it: ALEC. ALEC indeed had not signed its work. But we were beginning to wake up. It emerged that there were few things in Walker’s legislative package that were NOT underlain by legislative “models” developed within ALEC.

Two thirds of a year after the events of February-March, the ALEC legislation is still wreaking havoc to Wisconsin’s proud political traditions. Most recently, we have Voter ID (read, voter suppression), and concealed carry on the books, with lots more to come.

Now, Wisconsin progressives are beginning to push back and make themselves a headache for ALEC.

This dimension of the “vast right-wing conspiracy” (for that is exactly what it is) has flourished in obscurity. But in a stunt reminiscent of a Hollywood spy flick, Mark Pocan, a Wisconsin Assembly Democrat (and one of the Assembly’s most progressive members) infiltrated the 2010 ALEC national conference in New Orleans.

His method was simple. As a state legislator, he simply paid the dues and attended. He attended the assemblies and the cocktail parties (he was excluded from the task force meetings) and obtained the password to the ALEC collection of more than 800 “model” bills ready and waiting for introduction in state legislatures.

Pocan’s experience and the access he gained was an important asset as the Center for Media and Democracy, based in Madison, did a thorough and fascinating research job on ALEC, resulting in “ALEC Exposed.”

Good, muck-raking investigative journalism lives! There is little you will not find in “ALEC Exposed.” Included here are lists of ALEC member corporations, politicians, the ALEC state Chairs, ALEC “scholars,” and ALEC Boards and Task Forces. It would have been unfair to omit the role of the infamous Koch Brothers, and they are given the credit they deserve. Finally, “ALEC Exposed” provides a vast compendium of the more than 800 ALEC “model” bills, organized by subject matter.

“ALEC Exposed” really IS a “model”: a model of hard-hitting, fact-filled reporting on a subject of huge national significance.


But, how does a web-based, The Nation-connected media report like “ALEC Exposed” make its way out through the filters of a tired, timid, and conservative-leaning mainstream media and a hyper-energetic and deliberately slanted right-wing infotainment complex led by Fox News?

Well, that’s the big problem, alright. It is not that we don’t have investigative reporting and writing of Lincoln Steffens quality these days. There is a lot of it: perhaps unprecedented quantities. The problem is that most of this is confined within the left in a politically segregated America, and it effectively reaches only a small proportion of American brains.

A step in doing something about this was taken recently by another Wisconsin group. On October 22 a day-long program entitled “All About ALEC” drew some 300 participants, this on one of the last sunny and warm Saturdays of the year.

Organized by the Oregon (WI) Area Progressives or OAP, the conference included a stellar set of nearly 20 presenters covering ALEC’s history, financing, organization, and its connection to current crises in healthcare, education, tax policy, and state government finance, the Voter ID legislation, labor rights, education, and campaign finance.

State Assembly member Mark Pocan presented an entertaining account of his “undercover” work at the New Orleans ALEC national conference. A significant point was his perception, as he watched the interactions of state legislators with corporate leadership (often very high level), of the dominance of the corporate side.

Joanne Ricca of the Wisconsin AFL-CIO laid out the historical roots of ALEC in the early 1970s, showing its connection to the Heritage Foundation and to Grover Norquist and the other founders of neoconservatism. Almost 40 years later, ALEC literally has a legislative answer prepared on almost every issue. A comparison of this position of strength to that of the American left is frightening. We really need an ALEC of the left she noted, with a wistful tone.

Mike McCabe of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign put ALEC in the larger context as he laid out a four-part net of political hegemony developed by conservative forces. First is ideological hegemony through media control and “message development.” Second is electioneering (in a competition that is increasingly rigged). Third comes the legislative offensive, using majorities to legislate the conservative goals. Fourth is to ensure judicial confirmation of legislation as high courts are packed with conservative judges.

ALEC’s primary significance is in the third area: using a legislative majority to quickly embed a comprehensive conservative agenda in the legal code, state by state, especially in the 21 states that elected Republican majorities in 2010.

That liveliest of the U.S. House of Representatives progressives, Jan Schakowsky, came up from Illinois to speak. (Fending off references to Wisconsin’s traditional joking antagonism toward its neighbor on the south, she informed us that Illinois, where Wisconsin’s 14 progressive state Senators took refuge in February, should now be called the Sanctuary State.)

Speaking as a political professional, Jan Schakowsky had a simple message: we should not give up. The popular uprising in Wisconsin (for one description go here) demonstrated the power of an aroused public. Wisconsin “lifted a cloud of paralysis and despair,” she said.

The politically fortified positions of the right are formidable (for instance, she said, the National Rifle Association [NRA] simply “owns” the U.S. Congress in its area of interest). But it is extremely important to remember that the left’s positions ARE majority positions on all the crucial issues, as poll after poll confirms.

The right’s money is important; but remember, she said, that it takes less money to convince people of their TRUE interests than it does to convince them of false ones. What we on the left have to do is make legislators fear us more than they fear them.

Wisconsin’s ALEC story is no more important than that of any other state. ALEC is organized and active in every one of the 50 states. (To get started with your state, go here.) Exposure is a powerful weapon. ALEC has flourished in the shadows, never “signing its work.” In each state, we need to pull aside the curtain. In the Wizard of Oz, the little dog Toto pulls aside a curtain and we see that an apparently omnipotent force really consists of a portly little man pulling levers and speaking through loudspeakers.

Shining a strong light, state by state, on ALEC, its legislators (and its connection to their legislation), and to the corporate benefits provided to ALEC’s corporate funders, is a start to taking back our democracy at the state level.

ALEC also makes an important point about us, the progressive left. Suppose we came to power, all over the country. How much of a progressive agenda do we have, one that we all agree on, one that comprehensively moves America toward the progressive society that we could be? As Joanne Ricca said, maybe we need something like an ALEC on our side of the political divide!

[Dr. Paul Beckett lives in Madison, Wisconsin. He can be reached at beckettpa@gmail.com. Read more articles by Paul Beckett on The Rag Blog.]

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