Late last year, former University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill came to the University to deliver a diatribe masked as a speech. Churchill had already lost his University teaching job as a result of academic fraud and plagiarism. Nonetheless, Churchill drew a huge audience.
Churchill’s status as a radical, rock-star academic seems to be over, his University appearance serving as one of his last hurrahs; his Lenny-Bruce-as-scholar act – smoking a ubiquitous cigarette and espousing trite truisms – is currently on hiatus.
But every year, the University attracts radical speakers whose views are stuck in a sort of time warp, emblematic of the adversarial campus climate of the 1960s-1970s; for some inexplicable reason, the University remains a magnet for fringe activists who cling cloyingly to the tattered tenets of revolutionary politics.
On Jan. 20, Angela Davis brought her brand of crazy to the University. Davis, a tenured professor of the History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz, is still revered within the activist community for her outspokenness concerning prison abolition and for her communist politics (I use the word literally, not pejoratively).
Perhaps Davis is most famous for being dismissed from her teaching position at UCLA for her affiliation with the Communist Party in 1970. Clearly, the California Regents acted hastily and made an ill-advised decision. The California Regents and California Governor Ronald Reagan made Davis a momentary martyr, a victim of stringent University speech codes. This is unfortunate because, similar to Churchill, Davis’ intellectual output is sparse. She has published a number of books and essays, though they carry the collective intellectual rigor of a poorly cited high school term paper filled with, like, big ideas.
Her most famous stance concerns prison abolition. She knows about prisons. She’s been to prison. In 1970, she allegedly supplied guns to Jonathan Jackson, a member of the Black Panthers. Jackson used the weapons in a surreal courtroom hostage situation that resulted in a shootout – a failed attempt to free another Black Panther, James McClain, who was standing trial for a prison stabbing. When the smoke settled, Judge Harold J. Haley’s head was blown to bits. Shortly after the incident, when the FBI traced the smoking gun back to Davis, they placed her on its 10 Most Wanted List. She would later be exonerated; the experience, however, gave Davis credibility.
“In utter disregard of the institutions’ totalitarian aspirations, the passions and theories of black revolution and Socialist revolution have penetrated the wall,” wrote Davis in an essay about prison abolition. “The combined effect has been a conscious thrust among many prison populations toward new and arduously wrought collective life.”
And this is the problem with radical “activists.” For all their talk of penetration and thrusting, their ideas remain impotent. Self-fashioned revolutionaries must only spew tough-sounding reproaches of some mythologized repression, even if it amounts to a vapid hodgepodge of fashionable terms like “social emancipation” and “progressive objectivity.” That’s their meal ticket. It’s not surprising that these people, Churchill included, are embraced by the radical left. It’s not important that these people accomplish anything academic; it’s important that they remain iconic. For more than 30 years, Davis has positioned herself beneath the spotlight. Those who hang on her every word worship a cult of personality.
In the Soviet Union – a place fond of worshipping revolutionary figures with slavish piety – Davis was revered. In a speech before the AFL in 1975, Russian dissident and Nobel Laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn criticized Davis for her unwavering support of the Soviet Union and her utter hypocrisy concerning prisoner rights (Solzhenitsyn won his Nobel for literature about the Soviet Gulags). In his speech, Solzhenitsyn recounted a conversation between Davis and a Czech freedom fighter during the Spring of 1968, when the citizens of Prague revolted against the Soviets.
“‘Comrade Davis, you were in prison. You know how unpleasant it is to sit in prison, especially when you consider yourself innocent. You have such great authority now. Could you help our Czech prisoners? Could you stand up for those people in Czechoslovakia who are being persecuted by the state?’ Angela Davis answered: ‘They deserve what they get. Let them remain in prison. That is the face of Communism. That is the heart of Communism for you.’”
I wonder how Václav Havel felt about this statement. Havel, a dramatist who would become the Czech Republic’s ninth president, was instrumental in the Prague Spring of 1968. He was also an outspoken opponent of totalitarianism – the type of totalitarianism that Davis conveniently overlooks. Whereas some figures change the historical trajectory of the world, others serve their own interests: Davis, too, would run for public office; in 1980, she ran for vice president on the Communist Party ticket. Davis, too, would win an international award. It was the Lenin Peace Prize (formerly the Stalin Peace Prize), awarded in 1978. And this is the type of speakers who regularly come to campus.
Angela Davis: another post-hoc pseudo-revolutionary, another remnant of poor ideas past, wallowing in the waste bin of history. Why do we keep inviting these people?
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