Michael Yates
THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION May 14, 1986
Point of View
By Michael D. Yates
South Africa, Anti-Communism, and Value-Free Science
At a recent faculty meeting I suggested that our senate discuss the university's portfolio of stocks in corporations with investments in South Africa. I did not ask my colleagues to support divestment; I asked only that we debate the issue. Yet as I spoke I could feel the tension mount, and grim expressions formed on several faces. As soon as I had finished, hands shot up.
A chemistry professor spoke first. He said in a disgusted voice that he was getting tired of campus fads. It used to be Vietnam; now it was South Africa; tomorrow it would be something else. While he agreed that the situation in South Africa was deplorable, he said it was the same in many other countries. What about the atrocities in Nicaragua? In Afghanistan? Were we, in the interest of fairness, going to discuss those, too?
Then an economist chimes in smugly with what I'm sure he thought was a sophisticated remark. He said the university's stock holdings were a question of "portfolio management," and even he, an economist, had no experience in that area. Therefore, it was unlikely that the faculty had the competence to advise the university about such matters. The other responses were along the same lines.
I was stunned. I wondered why my colleagues could not see that South Africa is unique in its policy of systematic racial oppression. Whatever faults can be attributed to the Sandinista government of Nicaragua, it has treated no group, including former members of the National Guard, remotely as badly as the white South African state has treated its black citizens. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan is to be condemned, of course, but the university holds no stock in companies there.
Such is not the case in South Africa, where the influence of our government is great, our investments are considerable, and the victims of apartheid have asked for help. My colleagues seemed to be saying that since we cannot solve all of the world's problems we should not try to solve any of them. Although it is true that we are not experts in portfolio management, I'm sure we could quickly learn enough to be able to give some sound advice. After all, we pretend to no such lack of expertise when we apply for grants.
I left the meeting furious, muttering loudly about my colleagues' racism–what else, I thought, could explain such hostility to the mere discussion of divestment? But now that I am in a calmer mood, I see that racism alone is an insufficient explanation. Of course, it is a factor. I have witnessed open racism many times. A colleague once wondered aloud in the faculty dining room why he had to pay for his daughter's treatment at the university's dental clinic when "all those Negroes" got treated for nothing. Others have groused about making Martin Luther King's birthday a national holiday. And, to many teachers, nothing seems more likely to destroy college standards than affirmative action, unless perhaps it's "black English."
I believe my colleagues' remarks can best be accounted for not by racism but by two ideological beliefs that are deeply entrenched in academe. The first is anti-communism. Nowhere in the industrialized world is anti-communism more the official, state-sponsored ideology than it is in the United States, and nowhere are academics as subservient to state interests as they are here.
The range of ideological debate in this country is extremely narrow; anything "radical" is by definition off limits. Members of the media–and of academe–exercise rigorous self-censorship, lest they be accused of harboring subversive ideas. Thus it is permissible to oppose aid to the contras in Nicaragua, but not to speak or write favorable about the Sandinista government there. Similarly, although many journalists and professors eventually opposed the war in Vietnam, it was never on the assumption that the National Liberation Front might actually have wanted to construct a free and just society in that country.
Academics have succumbed to and actively supported official anti-communist ideology in many ways. They have greedily sold themselves to the Pentagon to design the weapons systems that are the backbone of anti-communism. They have participated in the "neutralization" program of assassination in Vietnam, and they have proposed bogus land-reform schemes there and in El Salvador. They have learned that anti-communism pays: with publications, grants, appointments as advisers, and lucrative consulting work.
Former political leaders, no matter how despicable their actions in office; former C.I.A. operatives; A.I.D. officers; Rand Corporation and Heritage Foundation scholars; and corporate executives, as well as defectors from socialist countries, are all actively sought by our colleges and universities as faculty members and administrators. Yet let a curriculum vitae appear that vies the sender away as a leftist, never mind a communist, and the applicant will be rejected out of hand. Suppose a candidate in political science told a search committee that she was conducting research on how El Salvador's revolutionaries could best defeat the U.S. - backed government; it is not imaginable that she would get the job, regardless of her brilliance.
Among the complex reasons that anti-communism is our official ideology is that it serves to camouflage U.S. imperialism, to maintain the absurd fiction that we are the world's good guys. When we portray communists as the embodiment of evil, we relieve ourselves of the duty to establish the morality of our own actions. They are bad; we oppose them; therefore, we are good. The government has repeated this formula, in various guises, and drawn into its net our major institutions–the media, labor unions, much of religion, and education–through repression, through co-option, and through the blandishments of money and prestige. Anti-communism is an article of faith of most American academics, and the effect on higher education has been entirely negative.
Their ideology prevents them from looking at the world objectively; everything is seen and judged through the filer of anti-communism. The same economist who talked about portfolio management expressed amazement at the grief and rage I felt at the time of the murder of President Salvador Allende by the fascists who now rule Chile. "Didn't the other side of the same thing?" he asked. In other words, since Allende was a socialist, he must have been a murderer, too. On another occasion, I sharply criticized some comments made by a conservative speaker. When the next day at lunch someone asked about my questions, a history professor dismissed them with the declaration that I was a Marxist–no thought, no analysis, just "Oh, he's a Marxist."
Those professors were exhibiting knee-jerk anti-communism, not objectivity. They would be laughed out of their professions if they approached chemistry or economics or history in the same thoughtless way. But such is the power of official ideology that no issue, even one as clear-cut as apartheid, can be discussed outside it.
The second deeply held belief is the notion of "value-free" science. In that light, let us examine the statement that university stockholdings are a question of portfolio management. It implies that every circumstance surrounding stock acquisition by a university must be ignored, except the rates of return on the stocks. The murder of black South Africans, their exploitation in mines and mills, apartheid itself, and U.S. policy toward the state that practices it–none of these things are to be considered. To do so would debase the analysis, make it unscientific because it was not value-free.
Perhaps the ‘portfolio management" assertion struck me with particular force because I, too, am an economist. Nevertheless, I'm afraid it reflects a methodology that transcends disciplines. Physicists and engineers are concerned only with making the best weapon; they see the decision to make it in the first place as beside the point. Literature teachers ignore such questions as, For whom was this work written? And What values does it convey and why? Instead, they zero in on the ‘text," as if it had some magically objective quality in isolation from everything else.
The quest for value-free science has impaired higher education. It has forced every discipline to take as narrow a focus as possible, concentrating upon learning more and more about less and less. Another economist is my department once said he was perplexed by events in the macroeconomy; stagflation, runaway deficits, high interest rates. His reaction was to retreat to the most "micro" phenomena he could find, admitting that what an economist can best analyze is what is trivial. Indeed, most of modern economics is a wasteland of elaborate studies of the trivial–value-free, but also value-less.
Value-free science allows its practitioners to hide within their disciplines, to refuse to take a stand on political issues on the ground that to do so is unscientific. The falseness of the that position becomes clear, however, when we remember that in any society in which political and economic power is concentrated in the hands of a minority, so-called value-free science ends up supporting the status quo.
If academics refuse to address divestment because they believe it is a matter of portfolio management, then they are supporting apartheid just as surely as if they were a part of the system itself. Values enter into any pursuit of knowledge, from beginning to end; to refuse to admit that is simply to concur with one set of values rather than another.
There is a connection between the two ideological constructs. Anti-communism requires for its effective penetration of mass consciousness a conservative and apparently apolitical scholarship. Scholarship that is explicitly value-laden–that is, political–would reveal anti-communism for what it is: the ideology of our ruling elite. Science that takes values (politics) as given cannot analyze those values, and therefore cannot explain or, more important, challenge them, which is exactly what the powers that be want. Value-free scientists proclaim that "radical" science (which in actuality seeks to explain the things that value-free science ignores) is not science at all. It is value-laden and politics is built into its structure, thereby, according to them, rendering it hopelessly biased. The very concepts that a radical might use to study apartheid, such as exploitation, capitalism, imperialism, ruling classes, and probably racism, as well, are inherently political (value-laden) and hence cannot constitute the terms of scientific discourse. Needless to say, these same concepts brand their users communists.
Anti-communism and value-free science work hard in glove to render impossible the discovery of any truth worth knowing. They stultify creative thought and serve the interests of the powerful. I firmly believe that until academics reject those twin ideologies, they will at best condemn their disciplines to irrelevance and at worst make them into the indirect exploiters of most of the people in the world, including, of course, the people of South Africa.
Michael D. Yates is professor of economics at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown.