*Photo: Prof Kehinde Yusuf*
“History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” So said renowned philosopher, Karl Marx. One phenomenon re-enacting itself in different forms today in the United States is ‘McCarthyism’. Cambridge Dictionary defines it as “the practice of accusing someone of being a Communist and therefore avoiding or not trusting them.”
It derives its name from that of a Wisconsin Senator of the 1950s, Joseph McCarthy, who latched on to the American phobia for the ascendancy of the Communist ideas and principles of the Soviet Union with which America was engaged in a race for world dominance.
A 23 August, 2006 account by Arthur Miller states: “Joseph McCarthy made a public accusation that more than two hundred ‘card-carrying’ communists had infiltrated the United States government. Though eventually his accusations were proven to be untrue, and he was censured by the Senate for unbecoming conduct, his zealous campaigning ushered in one of the most repressive times in 20th-century American politics.” Continuing, Arthur Miller noted: “Known as McCarthyism, the paranoid hunt for infiltrators was notoriously difficult on writers and entertainers, many of whom were labeled communist sympathizers and were unable to continue working. Some had their passports taken away, while others were jailed for refusing to give the names of other communists. The trials, which were well publicized, could often destroy a career with a single unsubstantiated accusation.”
In a 9 June 1954 United States Senate document, the unraveling of Senator McCarthy is recorded as follows: “In the spring of 1954, McCarthy picked a fight with the U.S. Army, charging lax security at a top-secret army facility. The army responded that the senator had sought preferential treatment for a recently drafted subcommittee aide. Amidst this controversy, McCarthy temporarily stepped down as chairman for the duration of the three-month nationally televised spectacle known to history as the Army-McCarthy hearings.”
The Senate document noted further: “The army hired Boston lawyer Joseph Welch to make its case. At a session on June 9, 1954, McCarthy charged that one of Welch’s attorneys had ties to a Communist organization. As an amazed television audience looked on, Welch responded with the immortal lines that ultimately ended McCarthy’s career: ‘Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.’ When McCarthy tried to continue his attack, Welch angrily interrupted, ‘Let us not assassinate this lad further, senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency?’ Overnight, McCarthy’s immense national popularity evaporated. Censured by his Senate colleagues, ostracized by his party, and ignored by the press, McCarthy died three years later, 48 years old and a broken man.”
Senator McCarthy is no more, but he left behind a notorious legacy. As Britannica.com put it, “The term McCarthyism has since become a byname for defamation of character or reputation by indiscriminate allegations on the basis of unsubstantiated charges.” Dictionary.com also defines it as “the practice of making unfair allegations or using unfair investigative techniques, especially in order to restrict dissent or political criticism.” In today’s terms, McCarthyism is a combination of bigotry, fake news and hate speech.
McCarthyist phobia seems to be the reason for the cancellation of the speech by the 2024 valedictorian scheduled for Friday, 10 May, at the graduation ceremony of the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles in the United States, citing unspecified security concerns. According to Collins Dictionary, “a valedictorian is the student who has the highest marks in their class when they graduate from high school, college, or university, and who gives a speech at their graduation ceremony.” Selection as a valedictorian is therefore honour for being the best graduating student for the year.
There was, as such, righteous indignation when the Muslim-American valedictorian, Asna Tabassum, who studied biomedical engineering, was denied the honour to deliver her valedictorian’s speech on account of her views on Israel, which were presumed to be ‘anti-Semitic’, and also because of USC’s authorities’ fear of what she might say in the speech. Tabassum was reported by CNN to have lamented deprivatively: “I am both shocked by this decision and profoundly disappointed that the University is succumbing to a campaign of hate meant to silence my voice. … I am not surprised by those who attempt to propagate hatred. I am surprised that my own university – my home for four years – has abandoned me.” It is to be underscored that as at the time the speaking engagement was cancelled, the speech had not yet been written.
The cancellation is reminiscent of the world of Oceania in George Orwell’s novel 1984. Oceania has the Thought Police, who ensure that ideas that the government doesn’t agree with cannot be incubated. If people were to incubate them, Orwell says they “had committed – would have committed, even if [they] had never set pen to paper – the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it.” As Study.com puts it, “The Thought Police symbolize the overpowering and overarching control that the government has over the citizens of Oceania. They had the capability of arresting people based on supposed and suspected thoughts they may or may not have ever expressed.” It is ironic that, as in Oceania, USC, America’s 28th Best University, by one rating, at which the tuition and fees are US$68,237, would not allow the free exercise of the intellect by the best student it has produced for 2024. This is antithetical to the development of scholarship.
Dr. James Herbert, President of the University of New England, Armidale, Australia, articulated this point beautifully in a November 2018 presentation, at Portland, Maine, in the US, titled “Universities as the marketplace of ideas.” Dr. Herbert said: “Colleges and universities have many different functions, but, most fundamentally, they are designed to be places where ideas can be explored, debated, discussed in the pursuit of truth. And in that sense, universities can be thought of as the ultimate marketplace of ideas. … Looking back now, I realized that the most important part of my education was developing the ability to deal with ideas through the process of critical discourse. In fact, it’s that kind of discourse that afforded me the intellectual humility to realize that I don’t have all the answers and I have a lot to learn from other people. I’m worrying that we’re beginning to lose the integrity of that kind of discourse at college campuses across the country. If everyone comes to the table with the same biases and if the answers to the important questions are all preordained from the beginning, the marketplace of ideas can’t function.”
Using aerobic exercise imagery, Dr. Herbert continued: “If you want to develop a muscle, you have to stretch it beyond its normal functional range. You have to stretch it and challenge it. And so it is with the mind. If you want to develop your mind muscles, you have to stretch them to deal with uncomfortable ideas, stretch them beyond their normal comfort zone. In fact, the university can be thought of as a sort of gym for the mind; a place where one’s mind muscles are stretched and tested and challenged with the goal of becoming a deeper and more critical thinker. … It’s only at universities where the full panoply of ideas are open for discussion and debate, and when universities abdicate that function, they do a disservice not only to their students but to society as a whole.”
A key component of any good university is a well-stocked library. About the content of libraries, Jo Godwin is widely quoted as saying, “A truly great library contains something in it to offend everyone.” According to Felice Belle of Brooklyn Public Library, this “means that if a library is truly committed to representing different viewpoints, then there are going to be books on the shelf that you don’t agree with. And that just means that it’s a really good collection of books.” Hopefully, the authorities at USC would not find the need to screen the university’s library for ideas they disagree with, expunge them or burn the books and related media bearing them.
The foregoing raises the question, “Where is the commitment to ‘free speech’ as guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States?” The amendment states: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” What constitutes freedom of speech as well as its abridgement in America has a long history of controversy.
In one instance, on 3 April, 1968, Martin Luther King Jnr said as follows, about an injunction against a planned protest march: “We have an injunction and we’re going into court tomorrow morning to fight this illegal, unconstitutional injunction. All we say to America is, ‘Be true to what you said on paper.’ If I lived in China or even Russia, or any totalitarian country, maybe I could understand some of these illegal injunctions. Maybe I could understand the denial of certain basic First Amendment privileges, because they hadn’t committed themselves to that over there. But somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech. Somewhere I read of the freedom of press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right. So, just as I say, we aren’t going to let dogs or water hoses turn us around; we aren’t going to let any injunction turn us around. We are going on.”
Rather than nobly reversing its intellectually retrogressive decision of depriving its best student her hard-earned day in the sun and appropriately enhancing its security arrangements, USC sank deeper in the bog of intellectual retrogression by deciding to cancel the scheduled presentations by other invited speakers. That action constituted an expansion of the range of ideas the university was seeking to suppress or attack, even if the ideas were yet unformed. This raises the question, “Is ‘anti-Semitism’ the excuse for McCarthyism today the way Communism was in the early 1950s?”
One point that has been established with great clarity by the USC incident is that there’s no value-free education. Education is, largely, gilded indoctrination. The protests by the students of the university against the decision to cancel the valedictorian’s speech indicate that there’s a misalignment between USC’s efforts to inculcate intellectual docility and the students’ desire to develop a muscular intellect. USC is a marketplace of ideas. In that market, let no one vandalise the wares they don’t like.
