How long has a conservative takeover of academe been in the works? ADVERTISEMENT [The Review Logo]( Did someone forward you this newsletter? [Sign up free]( to receive your own copy. You can now read The Chronicle on [Apple News]( [Flipboard]( and [Google News](. âWe should be appalled,â Roderick A. Ferguson writes in a recent [essay]( in our pages, âthat Gov. Ron DeSantis and his administration seek to make it unlawful to teach and study intersectionality, the Black Lives Matter movement, Black feminism, Black queer studies, reparations, and Black freedom struggles.â Ferguson, a professor of womenâs, gender, and sexuality studies at Yale University, is among the scholars the Florida Republican governor struck from college-level Advanced Placement curriculum, the New York Times [reported]( part of DeSantisâs Orbanesque assault on his stateâs institutions of higher learning. DeSantisâs interventions are novel, and conservative suspicion toward higher education has never been more intense. As Tom Nichols wrote in his Atlantic [commentary]( on DeSantis, âAs recently as 2015, most Republicans, by a wide margin, thought of universities as a positive influence on the United States. Four years later, those numbers flipped, and nearly 60 percent of Republicans saw universities as having a negative impact on the country.â But conservative anxiety about the destabilizing influence of leftist critique harbored by the academy is nothing new. The urtext of that concern, at least in its contemporary guise, is the 1971 âPowell Memoâ sent to the Education Committee of the Chamber of Commerce by the late Lewis F. Powell Jr., who would later become a Supreme Court Justice. That [document]( as Ferguson writes, expressed particular worry âabout the charismatic and prolific nature of certain scholarsâ â Herbert Marcuse, who remains a preoccupation of some on the right even today, is named. But its major emphasis is far less cultural than the contemporary Republican campaign against higher education. Powellâs primary concern is with âthe free enterprise system,â which he imagines is under threat by, among other things, the anticapitalist ideology he takes to be common among professors. He mentions race only glancingly; sexual and social mores not at all. NEWSLETTER [Sign Up for the Teaching Newsletter]( Find insights to improve teaching and learning across your campus. Delivered on Thursdays. To read this newsletter as soon as it sends, [sign up]( to receive it in your email inbox. Indeed, unlike DeSantis and his ilk, Powell was fairly moderate on social issues. As a justice, he joined the majority in Roe v. Wade, and he wrote the majority decision in The Regents of the University of California vs. Bakke, which established the legality of affirmative action. But he was also, to an almost parodic extent, a corporate shill. He once argued that tobacco companies had a First Amendment right to have their denials of a link between cancer and smoking treated seriously by the media. And in the 1971 memo, he damns Ralph Nader, whom he calls âthe single most effective antagonist of American business,â as a false âidol of millions of Americans.â Nader was then at the height of his fame as a campaigner for stricter automotive safety standards. When he intones against the enemies of American business, Powell sounds like nothing so much as a caricature of his type from one of the novels of the period â or perhaps of an earlier one, something right out of Sinclair Lewis: âThe time has come â indeed, it is long overdue â for the wisdom, ingenuity, and resources of American business to be marshaled against those who would destroy it.â In the memoâs most remarkable moment, Powell permits himself a maudlin dirge on the class-victimhood of the big businessman: âOne does not exaggerate to say that ⦠the American business executive is truly the âforgotten man.ââ Such sympathies are not out of place for DeSantis, but they do not form the core of his campaign against higher education, which has focused instead on putative indoctrination around gender, sex, and race. This isnât to say that thereâs no connection. To stay just with Black studies, obviously arguments about âracial capitalism,â or reparations, or the links between slavery and capitalism might tend to encourage skepticism about what Powell calls, lovingly, âthe system.â But the distinct Cold War cast of Powellâs concerns differentiates him starkly from DeSantis, and his conviction that academic critical theory poses a threat to capitalism seems merely quaint. Read Roderick A. Fergusonâs â[Fear of a Black-Studies Planet]( and if youâre feeling masochistic, Lewis F. Powellâs 1971 [memorandum](. ADVERTISEMENT SUBSCRIBE TO THE CHRONICLE Enjoying the newsletter? [Subscribe today]( for unlimited access to essential news, analysis, and advice. The Latest THE REVIEW | OPINION [Theyâve Been Scheming to Cut Tenure for Years. Itâs Happening.]( By Jacques Berlinerblau [STORY IMAGE]( Weâre in the execution phase of the professionâs demise. ADVERTISEMENT THE REVIEW | ESSAY [The Sad Humiliations of Academic Ghosting]( By Alicia Andrzejewski [STORY IMAGE]( The academy is a haunted house. THE REVIEW | OPINION [Fear of a Black-Studies Planet]( By Roderick A. Ferguson [STORY IMAGE]( Thereâs a reason Ron DeSantis feels threatened by AP African American studies. Recommended - âInventing a set of private aesthetic laws, he worked out their possibilities over the course of his career with admirable stubbornness and conviction.â In The Baffler, Paul Grimstad [writes about Thelonious Monk](.
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