Academic Freedom: Collaboration and Resistance

Academic Freedom: Collaboration and Resistance

Howard Zinn delivered this lecture, the Twenty-Third T. B. Davie Memorial Lecture, at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, on July 23, 1982, as an act of protest against a government edict restricting free speech. He opens by acknowledging the weight of speaking in South Africa, recalling his father's warning against moving to the segregated American South, and describing his own decision in August 1956 to move with his wife and children to teach at a college for Black women in Atlanta, Georgia, where he found both racial hatred and extraordinary courage among Black people struggling for equality. He invokes a line from Lillian Hellman's Watch on the Rhine about people everywhere who will fight for a livable world, drawn from his travels across the United States, Canada, Mexico, Cuba, Western Europe, Yugoslavia, Japan, Laos, and Vietnam. Zinn states he has not come to lecture South Africans on their faults, citing 246 years of American slavery, the recency of the Thirteenth Amendment, school desegregation, and the Voting Rights Act, alongside persistent Black unemployment. He condemns human rights abuses as universal, citing Steve Biko's death, the "suicide by hanging," "slipped in shower," and similar official explanations for deaths in South African detention, and comparing South African sites of violence (Queensboro 1921, Sharpeville 1960, Soweto 1976) to American ones (Kent State, Jackson State, Attica). He argues patriotism permits and requires criticism of one's own government, and that foreign visitors have the right to speak on injustice anywhere. He discusses his limited but engaged reading on South Africa, including Nadine Gordimer, Athol Fugard, and especially the Freedom Charter adopted at the Congress of the People in Kliptown on June 26, 1955, following a strike in which eighteen people were killed by police. He quotes its provisions on wealth redistribution, fair trial, free speech, equal pay, food, health care, and care for the aged, calling it a profoundly democratic document unfairly branded communist in treason trials. He also discusses Nelson Mandela's 1963 courtroom speech before his life sentence, describing Mandela's stated willingness to die for a free and democratic society without domination by any race, and Mandela's admitted influences from Marxist thought, Gandhi, and Nehru. Zinn then turns to academic freedom, defining it as the university's obligation to challenge society's institutions, not merely its ideas. He recounts his own background: working-class upbringing, shipyard labor from age eighteen, service as a US Air Force bombardier in World War II (including participation in a bombing he calls senseless), and later academic training at New York University, Columbia, and Harvard. Drawing on Camus, he argues no institution, including universities, can claim neutrality between "pestilences and victims." He describes Spelman College in Atlanta as an ostensibly independent campus actually bound by a historical pact between Northern philanthropic capital (the Rockefeller family, financiers of the college) and Southern politicians, tracing this arrangement to Booker T. Washington's accommodation offering Black labor for limited education in exchange for accepting segregation. He recounts his son noticing that the campus's barbed-wire fence was angled to keep students in rather than intruders out. He narrates the shift beginning in 1956: the 1954 Supreme Court desegregation ruling (linked partly to Cold War pressures involving Africa), the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56 with its famous "my feets is tired, but my soul is rested" quote, Atlanta students integrating the public library by requesting books like Locke's Essay and Mill's On Liberty, and the 1960 sit-in movement, in which his Spelman students participated, some faculty joining them, resulting in arrests and lasting transformation of the college and the South. Moving to his time at Boston University from 1964, Zinn describes universities training a compliant "middle management" class and cites direct institutional service to state power: Harvard students replacing striking Boston police in 1919, ROTC training, a Harvard mural glorifying death in the First World War, Michigan State University training police for the Saigon government, and research units at prestigious universities developing weapons during the Vietnam War. He credits the 1960s student antiwar movement, joined by soldiers, clergy, and the broader public, with pressuring the government to withdraw from Vietnam, describing Boston University teach-ins and blockades against Dow Chemical recruiters and Marine recruiting. He calls for renouncing academic "pacts with the devil" that trade freedom for privilege, invoking the Declaration of Independence's principle of government by consent, and criticizes both the United States (military spending amid domestic need) and the Soviet Union (betraying Marx's emphasis on freedom) for violating legitimate governance. He identifies self-censorship as the university's most insidious control mechanism, illustrating it through the artificial separation of history from political science and political science from economics, textbooks omitting corporate influence on foreign policy (citing a telephone and telegraph company's role in planning the overthrow of the Allende government in Chile, United Fruit's role in the overthrow of the Arbenz government in Guatemala, and "tin, rubber, and oil" as stated US motives in Vietnam), and political science's overemphasis on voting over direct social struggle (independence, emancipation, labor organization, sexual equality, desegregation, Vietnam withdrawal). He warns against purely theoretical radicals who avoid real struggle, calling them "jet-set Marxists." Addressing specialists in other fields, Zinn contrasts J. Robert Oppenheimer's deference to political leaders on using the atomic bomb against Hiroshima with Albert Einstein's outspoken advocacy against war and weapons-making. He notes the rise of Physicians for Social Responsibility and a recent antiwar demonstration of three-quarters of a million people in New York against the arms race. He closes by urging listeners to overcome internalized restraints on freedom, arguing that mass withdrawal of compliance can overcome even organized force, and calling for universal solidarity across class, race, religion, and nationality against the shared threats of nuclear holocaust or endless civil war.

By Howard Zinn · Genre: Political Essay, Social Criticism, Academic Discourse · 7,010 words

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Twenty-Third T. B. Davie Memorial Lecture, University of Cape Town, South Africa, July 23, 1982.

Zinn was truly international in his thinking and spirit. He welcomed chances to speak abroad, to break down national boundaries and build new ties of solidarity. He also came to represent to millions of people around the world "the other United States" of striking workers, civil rights workers, antiwar voices not represented in the mainstream media in the United States or abroad.

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academic-freedom · intellectual-freedom · higher-education · universities · free-speech · censorship · resistance · collaboration · activism · social-justice · dissent · power-dynamics

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