"Why I Got Fired From Teaching American History"
Thaddeus Russell
Five years ago, I had every reason to believe that my job as a history
professor at Barnard College was secure. I had been teaching there for
four years, I had published my dissertation with a major publisher, and
because I had tripled the sizes of the introductory US history course
and the American Studies program, colleagues told me they "would be
shocked" if I were not promoted to a tenure-track position.
But that was before my colleagues knew what I was teaching.
I had always been a misfit in academia, partly because of my
background, partly because of my personality, and increasingly over the
years because of my ideas - ideas that are now a book called A Renegade
History of the United States (2010).
I was raised by pot-smoking, nudist, socialist revolutionaries as an
egghead white boy in black neighborhoods in Berkeley and Oakland. I
nearly flunked eighth grade and finished high school with a C average.
Then I went to the anarchist, ultra-hippy Antioch College in Ohio,
which accepted all their applicants, didn't give grades, and didn't
have a history department.
So even though I managed to pull myself out of that background and into
and through Columbia for a PhD, then onto a job at an elite college, I
was highly uncomfortable moving from the world of weed to the world of
tweed. I hated being "Professor". I cursed in class. I talked about
sex. I used politically incorrect terms. My students said they had
never heard the things I was teaching them in class. They called me
"Bad Thad".
I showed them that during the American Revolution drunkards, laggards,
prostitutes, and pirates pioneered many of the freedoms and pleasures
we now cherish - including non-marital sex, interracial socializing,
dancing, shopping, divorce, and the weekend - and that the Founding
Fathers, in the name of democracy, opposed them. I argued not only that
many white Americans envied slaves but also that they did so for good
reason, since slave culture offered many liberating alternatives to the
highly repressive, work-obsessed, anti-sex culture of the early United
States. I demonstrated that prostitutes, not feminists, won virtually
all the freedoms that were denied to women but are now taken for
granted. By tracing the path of immigrants from arrival as "primitives"
to assimilation as "civilized" citizens, I explained that white people
lost their rhythm by becoming good Americans. I presented evidence that
without organized crime, we might not have jazz, Hollywood, Las Vegas,
legal alcohol, birth control, or gay rights, since only gangsters were
willing to support those projects when respectable America shunned them.
This was not the standard left-liberal perspective my students had
heard, and it certainly wasn't a conservative one, either. It was
informed by an unlikely mix of influences, including the hippies and
other cultural radicals I had encountered in my early life, black and
gay cultures that showed me a way out of the self-imposed limitations
of being white and straight, and libertarians who caused me to question
the commitment to freedom among the left that I had been born into and
which employed me as a professor.
I gave my students a history that was structured around the oldest
issue in political philosophy but which professional historians often
neglect - the conflict between the individual and community, or what
Freud called the eternal struggle between civilization and its
discontents. College students are normally taught a history that is the
story of struggles between capitalists and workers, whites and blacks,
men and women. But history is also driven by clashes between those
interested in preserving social order and those more interested in
pursuing their own desires - the "respectable" versus the "degenerate",
the moral versus the immoral, "good citizens" versus the "bad". I
wanted to show that the more that "bad" people existed, resisted, and
won, the greater was what I called "the margin of freedom" for all of
us.
My students were most troubled by the evidence that the "good" enemies
of "bad" freedoms were not just traditional icons like presidents and
business leaders, but that many of the most revered abolitionists,
progressives, and leaders of the feminist, labor, civil rights, and gay
rights movements worked to suppress the cultures of working-class
women, immigrants, African Americans, and the flamboyant gays who
brought homosexuality out of the closet.
I had developed these ideas largely on my own, in my study and in
classrooms, knowing all the while that I was engaged in an Oedipal
struggle to overthrow the generation of historians who came of age
during the 1960s and 1970s, controlled academic history, and had
trained me. They were so eager to make the masses into heroes that they
did not see that it was precisely the non-heroic and unseemly
characteristics of ordinary folks that changed American culture for the
better.
So I was quite anxious when I was asked to present my work to
colleagues in order to get a long-term contract and be moved into line
for a shot at tenure. A friend in the history department told me that
given my publishing record and popularity among students the talk would
be "really just a formality". But I knew it would be trouble.
Several distinguished professors from Columbia showed up, since the
university has final say on all tenure decisions at its sister college,
Barnard. During my talk, a Columbia professor who had been named by a
national magazine as the most important public intellectual in the
United States, stared at me with what I took - rightly, it turned out -
to be disgust. Another walked out before I finished. One of my graduate
school advisors asked a series of hostile questions. Other colleagues
told me after the talk that I was "courageous", that I was
"wonderfully, relentlessly revisionist", and that I made some famous
historians "look like dinosaurs".
But emails came into the hiring committee from "important places", I
was told, calling my ideas "improper", "frightening", and "dangerous".
They said my ideas had no place in the academy and insisted that I be
terminated. It was simply not okay for me to describe the "oppressed"
in the terms used by their oppressors - "shiftless", "sexually
unrestrained", "primitive", "uncivilized" - even though my argument
transformed those epithets into tributes.
After I was told that I would be leaving Barnard, hundreds of students
protested in faculty and deans' offices and the Columbia Spectator
devoted an editorial to my case, but to no avail. There did indeed seem
to be no place for me in the academy. And so I wrote a book.