A Place for Political Theater in the Academic Environment

On June 3, the Mideast Solidarity Project (msp) held a panel discussion to explain the purpose of the May 13 checkpoint street theater and to answer questions, in light of the controversy that had stirred around it. One of the panelists was Evergreen faculty David Wolach, whose lecture is reproduced below, with minor edits.

I want to make a couple provisos before I begin. First, I’d like to say that my observations about the street theater itself, the event of May 13, are my own. I was not in attendance for the whole event, and so can only base my thoughts of its impact on what I saw – which was a good chunk, from what I understand – of the event. Second, though I am a proud member of our faculty union, and though I will be speaking some of union struggles, as this is very much part of my Detroit and Northeast backgrounds, I am in no way speaking on behalf of our United Faculty of Evergreen aft/nea local union. I am speaking as a concerned member of the Evergreen community.

I open with an example of how things go south when disorder suddenly rears its head. It’s a memo unearthed by sources at Columbia University – now part of author and investigative journalist Jennifer Washburn’s new and important book on the conservatizing cultures of “academe,” Corporate Universities, Inc. – that gave us, organizers of a teacher’s union at Columbia University, a window into the administration’s plan for punishing us – as lawful strikers – up to and including blackballing us from job interviews as new faculty candidates. The memo was written by famed and, until that point, well-respected liberal historian (and Columbia Provost) Alan Brinkley. It is a lesson in how, as positions of power and pressure shift, even the seemingly least likely of us will compromise former systems of value, stated missions. (The memo can be found at www.thenation.com/special/pdf/brinkley_letter.pdf)

This is where I am coming from, to be clear.

The checkpoint detournement of May 13 called attention to larger – though in some ways, more basic – problems of social and economic justice than the very heated, indeed very complicated set of problems specific to Israel–Palestine.

Rights of freedom of speech and expression are at stake, as are our tenuous, less protected, and often less talked about negative educational freedoms. And here – amidst the distinctly current trend of our brave faculty unions, in the face of threats of dismissal, seeking to win back contractual guarantees to freely educate – the term “freedom,” without basic pedagogical rights to risk and discomfort, becomes hollow, indeed empty, such that its usage is easily weaponized; the butter knife is used, a la David Horowitz, to stab those of us who wish to organize against prejudice, against hatred, against the silencing effect of a shattered, ill-educated ruling class.

Hence, the stakes are as high as whether we wish to work and live in an ecosystem that nourishes our mouths, our bodies, one-another’s human-ness. If we do wish this world, then we must organize, and organizing is born of a necessary and deeply unsettling pessimism, that necessary pessimism-as-desperate means to better things. Struggle born of pessimism is not nice, it is not clean, it will not hug you, nor will it wash your dishes or lather your comforts with niceties and compromise.

On a cold picket line in New Haven, in three feet of snow, I had the warming experience of hearing Cornel West speak on these very issues. We’d asked him to speak at a noon rally when we were organizing a union at Yale, perhaps the greatest example of academic corporatization and colonization in America. They’d locked out the workers, fired several, mainly minorities because minorities were the most vulnerable of all the staff. I was struck by the first strokes of West’s speech:

I hope that I say something this evening that unsettles you, unnerves you, maybe even for a moment, “unhouses” you. Very much like the experience that we want with each and every one of our students for them to recognize that, if only for a second, their worldview rests on pudding. That kind of existential vertigo, that tragic qualm that goes hand in hand with the best kind of education.

Socrates says that “the unexamined life is not worth living,” and Malcolm X adds that “the examined life is painful.” And it seems to me that any serious discussion about education, especially this rich tradition of Essential Education, begins in many ways with Socrates, though he’s not the only starting point, but he’s such an appropriate starting point. Because he enacts as well as embodies what the great California-born philosopher, Josiah Royce, called the “spirituality of genuine doubting”. By spirituality he does not mean anything ephemeral. I know we associate California with “new age” spirituality, but that’s not what Josiah had in mind. He had in mind self-involved and self-invested wrestling with, grappling with, visions, perspectives, arguments, wrestling with oneself, mustering the courage to learn.

We will not live in peace as an interdependent ecosystem without struggle, and on May 13 what I witnessed was not an unlawful act threatening our safety, but an unsettling disruption of our daily lives in the tradition of Brecht, who we read in our classrooms, of Dr. Martin Luther King, whose name is evoked at least once a month in community emails that conveniently leave out parts of his speeches at union rallies and sit-ins that call for such discomfort, of Laura Elrick and Rodrigo Toscano and Kaia Sand and Jules Boykoff and Kristin Prevallet and Rob Halpern, all of whom have been invited to this campus with open arms and have performed similar artistic interventions – in fact, as recently as last week. Why have they not been threatened with criminal liability? Is it because they publish books? Because they are vouched for? Because they are not children playing radical? Are we interested in infantilizing while criminalizing those who are easily dismissed because of the power structures of this institution? I hope not.

I hope not because I’ve been there. As have many, many faculty who spoke recently on this very event, who spoke of the worrisome trend of spit-shining our image in the wake of things we should not condemn, things we should at least have mixed feelings about, and dialog around – the very real and I think justifiable sense of fear members of this community feel towards the higher administration and what is at least perceived to be their complicity, or at least their silence, after the anti-war port protest roundups two years ago.

I’ve seen this before, this insidious attempt to reorder a place for fear that the deviant elements will bring us down. It’s a corporate mentality. And in the worst economic times, that corporate mentality, that fear of losing one’s grip, escalates with exponential fervor. It’s important we as a community critique ourselves – all of us, including those on the panel here today – as things get downright strange when you’re poor, or suddenly claiming poor, or poorer than you were last year at this time. Things get strange and they get scary when a higher administration, instead of pushing back, rearranges its priorities in the face of real – and speaking with sincere empathy here – and constant legislative pressures.

Let’s just be clear about it: put away your mythical academic landscape with its staunch defense of the First Amendment. Get that out of your mind. I’ve helped organize unions at maybe twenty colleges and universities, and none are interested in thinking that their constant refrain when protests occur – “We must hold our community members to a higher standard” – is to breach our protected constitutional rights. Let’s just be clear: what occurred on May 13 was and still is protected speech. Political theater. As a professor of text arts, one of my areas of study, of work, of output, is the study and production of experimental performative poetries – or, if you will, experimental guerilla theater. Things reverberate.

[Evergreen Chief of Police] Ed Sorger’s email, and the administration’s follow-up, was successful: “Will we be investigated?” some of my students asked in reference to working out their final projects, figuring out ways to work collaboratively to help answer the question of what “performing the text” can come to mean. I don’t want to hear about higher standards. And I don’t want to hear about how unconsidered this particular event was. In my classroom, as in most of my colleagues’ classrooms, we’re working together to ask not only is the experimental art working as art, aesthetically, but is it responsible to the larger social frame? What are its organizational politics? What are its poetics?

Don’t sell us short to shove through some new measures that will make us, as faculty, have to think twice about whether what we teach is permissible by the lights of a board of trustees, most of whom have no training in pedagogy or art. What, are we to assume they’re all going to brush up on their Judith Butler, their N. Katherine Hayles, their Rosemarie Waldrop, their Charles Bernstein, their Derrida, and then, maybe by the time a new case is heard, there they can crack open some experimental cinema and put it on trial as a test run for the new student conduct code? Is Art Costantino – with all that first name signifies – going to seminar with us on Walter Benjamin next week?

I sit here today not with individuals who are born of white privilege, as some who have infantilized reactively – and out of what I take to be understandable disturbance in the immediate aftermath – have suggested. Not with those for whom playing radical is shotgun politics on a Sunday afternoon. I am sitting with individuals from diverse backgrounds, ethnicities, socioeconomic realities to face like many, many of us. I am sitting today with some courageous students and organizers who care deeply about social and economic justice. Of some of the attacks thrown their way, setting aside the very real threats these organizers have been handed by Ed Sorger in consult with the higher administration – setting aside for a moment Art Costantino’s rapid fire communique implying that further “disturbances” will not as likely occur in the future (I’ve said my peace on that), I am reminded of something else Cornell West has said: “It’s hip today not to be involved.” It’s hip on this campus to call organizers “hip,” which is a way to frame and tame in one’s mind the activists one is met by – and this has a marginalizing effect, itself a victimizing that I don’t hear a lot about.

“It is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home,” Edward Said wrote in Culture and Imperialism – another text that is often cited, but only, it seems, within the inoculating confines of the square room with desks and chairs, blackboard that is easily erasable.
I spent a good amount of time watching, as an interested onlooker, the checkpoint theater. I, too, having grown up under ugly circumstances that led me through the horrifying maze of the penal system as a young child (family gone for months), I too was viscerally wounded by the theater. It affected me deeply, in both individual ways regarding personal trauma, and in ways that confrontational, difficult, but legally protected street theater should effect one.

I am afraid that we mistake political art for reality due to our distances from everyday horrors, and I am afraid as well that, to give us all the benefit of the doubt, we often mistake being unsettled, unnerved, unhoused, for being – in legal senses or otherwise – harassed, victimized.
I came to Evergreen, in part, because of its stated mission. The idea of a public school that values interdependence and freedom of expression, that values experiments and risks in pedagogy and art? What a fucking dream!

These values are still at work here. Don’t get me wrong. We’re doing really good things, and I have to say I’ve never taught at an institution where most of the deans are goddamn helpful, committed to teaching as much as anybody else – risk takers and forward thinkers. Nor have I ever felt such comradeship with students, staff, and faculty. But that doesn’t mean we should let things slide. You do that and you’re neck up in mud wondering what the hell happened. That I’m sitting here is because I find this place to be a gem in many ways. I like it here, a lot. So I have a stake. I have a stake in what our stated mission is – in the ways we are importantly different amidst such otherwise self-sameness.

Let’s step back a bit and not fall into the corporate academic sinkhole. Hell, even from a business standpoint it’s a bad idea. You get rid of what makes us unique, then why come to Evergreen?