I don't usually post about things having to do with my work at DePaul University. Academic blogs are risky endeavors, particularly when they dig up dirt on their own institutions. But given the recent spate of right wing attacks on DePaul University over our series on "Confronting Empire," and particularly since I'm a member of the organizing committee, I think that there are some things to be said that I'm in a position to say. However, before I begin I want to make clear that, as with all things having to do with this blog, I speak for myself, and not for DePaul University, the Religious Studies Department, or for the Confronting Empire organizing committee.
With limited time and energy, there's only so much ground that I can cover, but there are three aspects of this controversy that I want to touch upon right now. First, why I am involved in this project; second, what do I mean when I talk about empire in the modern world, and as it relates to the United States; and third, the controversy at DePaul.
Why I am Involved in the Empire Quarter
My involvement with the Empire Quarter is an extension of my involvement in issues of religion and globalization. I teach a course on the subject, and I am particularly interested in the moral and political dimensions of the way that religion interacts with the increasingly dynamic and destabilizing aspects of the global economy. I'm also interested in the creative possibilities for new ways of organizing social, political, and religious relationships in light of globalization. My research touches in part on the significance of civil society as a category of social analysis, and I have become particularly interested in the import of civil society on a global as well as a national level.
What Do I Mean By Empire?
So then, how does globalization intersect with the concept of empire? At its best, globalization is about breaking down the boundaries between nations and cultures and creating a kind of a socio-cultural mischung in which everyone takes the best of the variety of cultural influences available and creates new kinds of dialogs and relationships. It can also create economic opportunities and open up the possibility of democracy where democracy hadn't previously existed.
Yet, globalization often fails to live up to its best potential. At its worst, it is about the exploitation of the poor by the wealthy and the weak by the strong. It is about corporations moving from countries with social contracts and moral expectations to kleptocracies that will allow anything for the sake of a bribe in the right hands. It is about violating workplace safety, fair wage, pollution and unionization rules, and moving to wherever those rules are weakest. This benefits nobody but the richest and the most powerful, since it undermines all of those hard-fought moral rules and laws within countries that already have them, and undermine the ability to get them in the countries that don't have them.
I have to confess that there has been improvement on these fronts over the past several years, but much work still needs to be done, and it can only happen if folks take seriously the moral and political implications of globalization.
So, where does empire fit in? First of all, a lot has to do with how one defines "empire" in the first place. For simplicity's sake, I'd like to define it for my purposes as "international hegemony maintained through force or the threat of force, military or economic." Military force is the primary means by which any empire seeks to maintain hegemony, but economic power can be deployed as well.
Is the United States an empire then? Certainly many think so, and more and more books seem to be coming out that not only accept the label of empire for the United States, but even embrace it, as the outcome of a process by which a reliably fair and free country has come to take the reigns of international peace and the expansion of liberty. For my own part, I'm unsure. It seems to me that the United States has many of the characteristics of an empire, but it also strikes me that many of those characteristics are peculiar to the current administration -- refusal to seek multilateral solutions to international problems, bellicose and Sabre-rattling foreign policy, exploitation of weaker nations, strong-arming of supposed allies, and failure to act in a consistent manner with regard to what we claim to be our deepest principles. But it must be said that these are not necessary elements of U.S. foreign policy, and could be handled differently by a different administration.
From my perspective, getting involved in the Empire Quarter was a chance to bring this kinds of issues to a broader audience, through the variety of speakers and events that we had organized.
The Controversy at DePaul
I suppose its typical of an academic to plan an event around an interesting topic, and then fail to realize that it will have consequences outside of the academy. Alas, this is a trap that I, at least, fell into with regard to the planning of this quarter. I had no idea that there would be any controversy, in part because I wasn't sure that it would have much impact. But it seems that at least some segment of the student population was incensed by the topic, and their indignation found its way to the notorious Frontpagemag.com, which did a rather inflammatory article on the subject.
Frontpage is, of course, a propaganda organ of David Horowitz's various right-wing organizations, which all exist to extinguish the idea of academic freedom under the guise of promoting it. Their task is aided by their complete and total disregard for the truth, and so it was with the article they published about the Empire series.
In the first place, and rather humorously, they described the series as "Confronting Amerikan Empire." This is always red meat for the right-wingers, but it could lead to some confusion, since nowhere in any of our literature do we use that spelling of "American." It is typical of horowitzian distortion (you know you've made the big-time when you've got your own adjective!) that they would plaster this on their headline, despite its complete irrelevance to our program.
They have some fun with the fact that we refer to ourselves as the "Empire Committee," comparing it to Star Wars (did the Empire have committees in Star Wars?), which is again humorous, if you like obvious and shallow jokes, but really has nothing to do with us.
Here's my favorite quote from the article. After listing the goals of the quarter, the author then writes:
In other words, it is to be a one-sided campaign of on-campus brainwashing designed to turn DePaul students into Manchurian candidates of radical political correctness.
I'm particularly fascinated by this conclusion, given that, to the best of my knowledge, the author didn't talk to a single member of the organizing committee. If he had, he may have discovered that we share in common a commitment to raising the issues, not imposing an ideology upon our students. This may be a confusing concept for the author to grasp, however, since based upon the tenor of his article, Manchurian-candidate style brainwashing is precisely his agenda.
Had the author contacted even one of us, he might have discovered that, far from seeking to provide a single unitary view of empire, we sought a variety of very different perspectives on Empire. We invited a variety of people, many of whom couldn't come. We considered others, who were out of our price range, and are actually bringing to campus several speakers who are very critical of the application of the term "empire" to the United States. However, since none of us were consulted, it is unsurprising that none of this is reflected in the article.
Since Religious Studies is targeted specifically, and two dear colleagues are mentioned by name, I do want to say a word about my department. I am frankly offended by the ill-informed drivel that the author spews regarding my colleagues and my discipline. As is so typical of Frontpagemag.com, it uses guilt by association and a complete misunderstanding of the very task of the academic study of religion to smear very good people. While the author, and the followers of David Horowitz in general, seem to feel that the purpose of any academic discipline is to mask the ambiguities and failures of the United States beneath a veneer of patriotism and triumphalism, what actual grown-up scholars do is consider the wide variety of different reactions to the United States in the world. This entails actually becoming knowledgeable in a wide-variety of different traditions and texts, and learning how to read and interpret those texts. When a professor assigns a text in a class, he or she is not necessarily endorsing that text. In fact, we will often assign texts with which we deeply disagree, because we think that, our disagreement notwithstanding, the texts themselves are important.
The author of this piece takes a big, broad swipe at Religious Studies, without ever considering the merits of particular courses or particular topics. Again, this is good for right wing propaganda, but makes for lousy journalism, and even worse understanding of the academic task.
The remainder of the Frontpage.com article meanders off into issues that are beyond the scope of this post, such as the decision last fall to invite the reprehensible Ward Churchill to speak on campus, and a number of other issues about which I must plead ignorance.
What this controversy signifies to me, in the end, is that the idea of empire is a subject that desperately needs further exploration and analysis. The job of a university isn't simply to study what we already know, but to apply what we have come to know as a society to the world in which we find ourselves. Is the United States an empire on par with ancient Rome or China? There are many who say yes, but, as the Frontpage article indicates, in saying so they provoke outrage in many others. What is the cause of this outrage? Is it justified? In the end does the idea of empire actually provide a helpful template for understanding the role of the U.S. in the world?
I honestly don't know. I'm involved in this project because it is a question that's worth answering. What else should a university do?
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