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“The patriotic correctness that emerged after 9/11 purported
to define what America was all about. There was this notion
of America as God’s chosen country, and dissent became
unacceptable, especially in the academy.”
The book’s title is drawn from a quote from the April 2005
edition of
The Nation
, the oldest continuously published weekly
magazine in the US, self-described as “the flagship of the left”:
“(t)he suppression of . . . dissent, a disconcerting feature of political
life since the Bush administration took power, has been most
sharply felt on college campuses . . . Not since the McCarthy era
have American campuses felt such a cold breeze—make that an
idiot wind.”
The book points to such examples as “the efforts of right-wing
student groups to suppress campus dissent, attempts to introduce
legislation that would police the content of courses offered in
universities and target professors critical of US foreign policy, as
well as calls for the dismissal of faculty members who failed to
sanction the Bush administration’s ‘war on terror’” as evidence of a
reinvigorated conservative effort to target academe.
Scatamburlo-D’Annibale recounts how David Horowitz, a
well-known American conservative “culture warrior,” created a
website encouraging students to complain about “licentious liberal
professors and leftist lunatics who were presumably trying to poison
their young minds with anti-American ideologies.”
At the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2005, Andrew
Jones, a former campus Republican operative and one-time
Horowitz protégé, offered to pay UCLA students to surveil
professors critical of the Bush administration. He then created
a website exposing what he dubbed “the Dirty Thirty,” a list of
liberal/left educators who were supposedly, among other things,
collaborating with radical Muslims to undercut the ‘war on terror.’
Right-leaning media provided strong support for the cause, says
Scatamburlo-D’Annibale: “The Fox News Channel, for example,
had a tremendous influence in demonizing specific academics and
academia in general.”
Scatamburlo-D’Annibale is, however, quick to mention that the
“patriotically correct” assault is about much more than the academy
and her book details how it must be understood in relation to the
American right’s broader offensive against liberalism, the legacy of
the New Deal era and the democratic social reforms of the 1960s.
The election of Barack Obama has seemed to redirect
conservative’s wrath from the academy to the White House, but,
as Scatamburlo-D’Annibale argues, Republican opponents and Tea
Partyers are invoking many elements of the “patriotically correct”
discourse. The book cautions against complacency:
“ . . . the campus project for ‘cultural conservatism’ is very much
alive. It lives on in Horowitz’s new ‘teach-in’ campaign, the ‘9/11
Never Forget Project’ started by the Young America’s Foundation,
and the 2009 unveiling of the overtly racist ‘Youth for Western
Civilization,’ just to name a few.”
Thus far, she says her book has not received any negative
reaction, “but I certainly expect and welcome it.”
It seems a cold breeze may still blow.
Cold Breezes and Idiot Winds, Patriotic Correctness and the Post 9/11
Assault on Academe
is available at the UWindsor Bookstore and
online at
Amazon.ca
and
Barnesandnoble.com.
The tragedy of 9/11 inspired a “patriotic correctness” that some conservative groups have used as a springboard for attacks on liberal views found on
American university campuses, says Dr. Valerie Scatamburlo-D’Annibale BA ’90, MA ’94.
