When The Professors was first published in February 2006, it was greeted by cries of outrage from the academic Left. The author was denounced as a reincarnation of Joseph McCarthy and his book as a “blacklist,” although no evidence existed to support either claim and both were the opposite of the truth.

Far from being a “blacklist,” the text explicitly—and in so many words—defended the right of professors to teach views that were unpopular without fear of political reprisal. The author also publicly defended the First Amendment rights of Ward Churchill, the most notable case of a professor under attack for his political views.

Professor Aptheker also claims the author misidentified the date of her departure from the Communist Party as taking place after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The author is willing to accept her word on this matter and stands corrected. The Aptheker profile in the original text presumed she had been expelled with her longtime friend and political ally Angela Davis after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Aptheker objects that she actually left the Party ten years earlier over the rejection of a manuscript she had written for the Party’s official publishing house. What Aptheker does not mention is that she contributed to the author’s error by concealing the fact that she had left the Party when she did. She only revealed this deception twenty-five years later in her autobiography, which appeared after the publication of The Professors. According to her autobiography, Aptheker concealed her Party resignation so that her departure would not be taken as a sign of protest against the Soviet Union. In other words, while she left the Party she did not abandon her commitment to Communism, which is exactly what the passage in The Professors was written to reflect—that she remained committed to the Communist cause until after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

This minor error, caused by Aptheker’s own admitted deception, is one of only six identified in the Free Exchange report that can actually be regarded as factual errors, and not merely another name for differing interpretations. Like the others, it has been corrected in the paperback edition.

Aptheker’s autobiography provides powerful evidence, on the other hand, to support the substantive claims The Professors make about her ideological agendas in the classroom. In her memoir, Aptheker reveals that she was responsible for designing key elements of the Women’s Studies curriculum at UCSC. By her own account she designed them as elements of a program whose purpose was not academic but was to train students to be political radicals: “I redesigned the curriculum [for the introductory course] and retitled it, ‘Introduction to Feminism,’ making it more overtly political, and taught the class in the context of the women’s movement . . . Teaching became a form of political activism for me, replacing the years of dogged meetings and intrepid organizing with the immediacy of a liberatory practice, . . .” This is confirmation—by a critic—of the academic abuse that The Professors was written to document.

Professor Aptheker is not unique among the author’s critics in defaming him without evidence, as a seventy-page point-by-point response to the Free Exchange report written by Jacob Laksin makes clear. Reviewing each of the Free Exchange charges, Laksin concludes: “ ‘Facts Count’ is a tendentious document that misrepresents and distorts the arguments of The Professors in order to attack the book and its author, and is not above fabricating evidence to make its case. Time and again, the report insists that The Professors cite no evidence for a given claim when even a cursory reading of the text and its sources would confirm the opposite. Time and again, the report rebuts arguments that appear nowhere in The Professors, but are the inventions of the Free Exchange authors themselves. The overall impression created by these methods is that either these authors have not read the book or else they are unwilling honestly to engage with its arguments.” Free Exchange failed to respond to Laksin’s refutation.

Professor Bettina Aptheker, University of California, Santa Cruz

— Professor of Feminist Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz
— Describes her teaching philosophy as “revolutionary praxis.”
— Marxist-Feminist

Professor Bettina Aptheker is the daughter of a famous American Communist, the late Herbert Aptheker who, after the fall of the Soviet system (which both he and his daughter deeply regretted), was honored by the Columbia University history department and hired as a visiting law professor by the University of California (Berkeley) and as a history professor at several prestigious academic institutions.

Professor Bettina Aptheker is by her own proud admission both a Communist and a self-described “lesbian activist.” Her introductory course at UC Santa Cruz (UCSC) on feminism, which she has taught since 1980, turns Marx’s “historical materialism”—the idea that society progresses through successive stages from feudalism to capitalism to socialism into a theory of sexuality, and turns sexuality into a species of political consciousness-raising. One of Aptheker’s course syllabi describes lesbianism as the “highest stage of feminism” (an obvious homage to Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism). In other words, change in sexual orientation is an inevitable final stage in the development of the socially conscious individual. This is intended as a serious analysis. Aptheker teaches the course to 400 students a year, and the lectures have actually been filmed at university expense as an important contribution to what the university describes as lesbian “herstory.”

Aptheker describes her teaching philosophy as a “revolutionary praxis.” The crux of this approach, she has said, is to subvert the traditional mission of the university by breaking down the distinction between subjective and objective truth, what Aptheker dubs “breaking down dualisms.”¹ This approach is especially relevant to women’s studies, Aptheker notes because it allows her to inject a “women-centered perspective” into the curriculum to correct what she claims was the “male-centered” bias of traditional university study.² Aptheker has even based an entire course around her notion of feminist pedagogy, called “Feminist Methods of Teaching.” Aptheker’s contribution to women’s studies also includes her marriage of radical politics to feminist sensibilities—all under the guise of an academic curriculum. A typical brainchild is Aptheker’s graduate-level course “Feminist/Radical Pedagogies.”³

Although a full-time professor of feminist studies and history at the UCSC, Aptheker does not have a single work of reputable scholarship to her name. Most of her books, including Intimate Politics: Autobiography As Witness and The Morning Breaks: The Trial of Angela Davis, and If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance” (co-authored with Angela Davis) are frankly political.

As for Aptheker’s ostensibly scholarly effort, Woman’s Legacy: Essays on Race, Sex, and Class in American History (1982), this amounts to little more than a review of Aptheker’s politics. Radical feminist poet Adrienne Rich has hailed the book as “feminist to its core.”⁴

On the website RateMyProfessors.com, one of Aptheker’s less than happy students complains that she focuses “way too much on personal history—relied on pseudo-celebrity status to entertain the class.” According to the student, Aptheker wants everyone to know that she “met my life partner, Kate Miller, at a Holly Near Concert . . . in October 1979.”

The Santa Cruz campus is a fertile ground for Communist politics and its faculty also includes Professor Angela Davis,⁵ winner of a Lenin Peace Prize from the East German police state during the Cold War. Davis was expelled from the Communist Party in 1991 after the failed coup against Gorbachev. Communist Party head Gus Hall supported the coup, while she did not (making her part of the more “liberal” faction of the Party). With other expelled comrades she formed the “Committees of Correspondence,” an organization for themselves and other Gorbachev supporters.

A member of the antiwar movement during the sixties, Aptheker has not shed her reflexive opposition to U.S. military intervention. Appearing at an April 2003 UCSC faculty teach-in against the Iraq War, Aptheker proclaimed, “This war in Iraq is an obscenity.” Aptheker also claimed to see similarities between the political strategies of the United States under George W. Bush and those of Nazi-era Germany. “We should make no mistake between the kinds of diplomacy Hitler’s regime engaged in during the 1930s and the kinds of diplomacy the Bush administration has engaged in. There are direct parallels, and it’s very frightening,” said Aptheker.⁶ “Our agenda should be to overthrow Bush,” she informed UCSC students. Writing several months later, in the Summer 2003 issue of The Wave, the newsletter of the UCSC Women’s Department, Aptheker let loose with a yet more high-pitched attack on the Bush administration, accusing it of “[i]mplementing a proto-fascist program of racist abuse directed especially toward peoples of Arab heritage, while giving license to the worst forms of persecution of all peoples of color,” and declared her assurance that “the Washington clique promises to lead us further towards an abyss of unending imperial wars and economic catastrophe.”⁷

Aptheker is similarly outspoken against Israel and has labored to make the UCSC campus into a focal point of anti-Israel activism. Aptheker has signed an open letter to the U.S. government demanding the ending of all American aid to Israel. In 2002, she authored an article in The Wave pledging support for Palestinian terrorists, whom she euphemistically described as “anti-occupation activists.”⁸

References:

See also: Professors Davis, Furr, Jaggar, Marable, Targ
Research: John Perazzo 

1. Todd Gitlin, “Varieties of Patriotic Experience” in George Packer, ed. The Fight Is For Democracy: Winning the War of Ideas in America and the World, Perennial Books, 2003.
2. Collier and Horowitz, eds., Surviving the PC University, Center for the Study of Popular Culture, 1996.
3. An email from the panel chair, Professor Dvora Yanow of California State, Hayward, described the proposed session in these words: “The panel, which is co-sponsored by the Conference Group on Theory, Policy, & Society, the Latino Caucus, New Political Science, and the Women’s Caucus, emerged from a question that [Professor] Kathy Ferguson started asking last winter-spring (at ISA and WPSA) to focus on both substantive aspects and strategic/tactical ones: Is there theoretical-definitional grounding to make a claim for the present US administration as fascist, and is it useful, critically, to use that language at this point in time? One of the original intentions was also to create a teaching tool out of this discussion—a handout that presents these questions and offers relevant information to students to think about it for themselves.” The panel included professors from the Universities of Hawaii, California, and Colorado, among other schools, and the suggestion that the “questions” should be handed to students—undigested—indicated an intention to disseminate their views of the Bush administrations to undergraduates, again for obvious political reasons. The email was relayed to the author by political scientist John Earl Haynes.
4. For a hundred more, see: discoverthenetwork.org
5. The profiles appear in alphabetical order.
6. Cf, Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America, Harvard University Press, 1998.
7. Paul Campos, “Finding Responsive, Responsible Leadership at CU is Just a Dream,” Denver Rocky Mountain News, January 29, 2005.
8. Stanley Fish, “Save the World on Your Own Time,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, Jan. 23, 2003; Fish has written a book on the same subject, Professional Correctness, Oxford University Press, 1995

Professor Anatole Anton, San Francisco State University

— Professor of philosophy at San Francisco State University
— Former chair of the Philosophy Department
— Co-coordinator of the Radical Philosophy Association

Professor Anatole Anton is a professor of philosophy at San Francisco State University and the former chair of the department. He “writes and researches on political philosophy, the philosophy of social science, and Hegel and Marx.” He is also the general editor of the San Francisco State University Series in Philosophy.

Professor Anton is co-coordinator of the Radical Philosophy Association, an anti-capitalist group of Marxist professors who “believe that fundamental change requires broad social upheavals but also opposition to intellectual support for exploitative and dehumanizing social structures, [including] capitalism, racism, sexism, homophobia, disability discrimination, environmental ruin, and all other forms of domination.” The Radical Philosophy Association supports Cuba’s Communist dictatorship and opposes U.S. economic and military aid to Israel, on grounds that such aid is “perceived” as supporting “the enem[y] of Muslim nations.” The Association has taken a strong stand against the war on terror in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Radical Philosophy Association attributes the terrorist threat to America’s ill-advised support for “corrupt and repressive regimes” in the Third World.

In a September 27, 2004 email circulated to his colleagues, Anton wrote: “Companeros [sic], I thought a number of you might find these words by E.L. Doctorow [on the “Unfeeling President”] moving and useful and therefore might want to circulate them widely.” President Bush, according to Doctorow, “does not suffer the death of our twenty-one-year-olds who wanted to be what they could be.... [He] does not know what death is. He hasn’t the mind for it... How then can he mourn? To mourn is to express regret and he regrets nothing... He does not drop to his knees, he is not contrite, and he does not sit in the church with the grieving parents and wives and children... He does not feel for the families of the dead,... He cannot mourn but is a figure of such moral vacancy as to make us mourn for ourselves.”

References:

See also: Professor Jaggar
Research: Lisa Makson