The NRA threatens our schools, our democracy, and our future

Thus far, there have been eight school shootings so far in 2018. In 2017, there were 345 mass shootings in our country, some of them at schools. Yesterday, in the wake of the massacre in Parkland, Florida, Wayne LaPierre, the head of the powerful NRA gun lobby, fired a series of rounds at the heart of American democracy, intending to put our political structure--based on principles of democracy, a critical understanding of the past, and a concern for the welfare of all citizens--on life support.

LaPierre’s intervention, made at CPAC, a gathering far-right interests, was extraordinary in a number of ways.

He accused “elites” and “socialists” of undermining Americans’ constitutional rights. They care more about control and more of it,” he argued, claiming that “their goal is to eliminate the second amendment and our firearms freedoms so that they can eradicate all individual freedoms. They hate the NRA, they hate the second amendment, they hate individual freedom.” The “socialist enemy”, according to LaPierre, is a “political disease” spread through our university system.

LaPierre is drawing on decades-old American stereotypes of liberalism by invoking Marxism, socialism, and elitism against individual freedoms. It is first perhaps worth clarifying that the American political spectrum, capacious though it might be in including carnivalesque figures like LaPierre, does not today include socialists and communists. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 primary platform, would barely qualify to sit on the right-wing of European social democracy, let alone the democratic socialism Sanders himself claimed, and certainly never mind the socialism and communism that LaPierre bleats about.

Socialism and communism are ideologies associated with a political economy advocating an ascendant working class, the eradication of private property and industry, and the common ownership of the means of production. In some ways, these ideologies are highly concerned with individual rights, but see the path toward making them meaningful as taking a very different route than what LaPierre describes. But that aside, they are not ideologies which have any purchase on American politics. All parties to and members of that politics, until the Republican Party’s flirtation with fascism, have been defined by a broad, but fundamentally (and perhaps fundamentally flawed) shared version of liberalism that prioritized civil and political rights over social and economic rights, mounted fierce defences of capitalism, and shied away from social democracy’s efforts to nationalize--literally or through subsidies--the provision of services like healthcare, higher education, and other social benefits.

So what’s behind LaPierre’s abject ignorance and almost comical attempts to distort the meanings of words and concepts? Because he, his arms lobby, and his fascist political backers* are on the defensive, he has to portray people trying to protect children as “elites” or “communists”, thereby making himself more American and more virtuous, leading to the laughable claim that “the NRA does care.”

As a part of the pretence that they care, the NRA and Trump have joined forces to advocate immediately arming a million teachers and transforming schools into armed fortresses. “We must,” LaPierre declared, “immediately harden our schools!”

There are a number of reasons why this approach is not only flawed, but dangerous.

Schools serve a number of purposes in our society. In addition to conveying important content, based on professionally established standards to our children, our public schools are one of just a few kinds of civic institutions in our country that are open to all regardless of background. Schools might be unequal in their access to resources, but the public school ideal is a fundamentally democratic one.

But schools, because they are based on the idea of democratic learning and the importance of collectively as well as individually nurturing, guiding, and empowering our children, should also be spaces devoted to showing children what our world can be. Education prizes words over weapons, reason over paranoia, kindness over cruelty, and excitement about the future over fear of the world.

Children should enter each school day excited, knowing they are arriving in a space devoted to allowing them to learn and play, make friends, experience joy, absent the discrimination, inequities, cruelties, and hardships that they experience in an imperfect world. Children cannot prosper in an atmosphere that valorizes violent struggle, and they cannot learn in an environment defined by fear.

“Hardening” our schools will ensure that imperfection and the presence of violence become naturalized for children. It would be a genuine tragedy to transform schools into armed encampments, where entrance is monitored by grim security officers, where teaching is carried out by armed teachers trained to evaluate their children as potential threats, and where routines revolve around drills designed to ingrain in children that the world is a place defined by violence.

Such a transformation would send the message that “might makes right,” a doctrine designed to enshrine an inequality enforced by violence into the fabric of our society. Such a transformation, in addition to being deeply harmful, would address only symptoms of a far deeper problem.

Part of that problem is that a single amendment--and one that in even the most mulishly literalist reading is qualified by clauses describing a world that no longer exists--has been permitted to transcend the welfare of our society and of the individuals who comprise it. The second amendment has been perverted by an industry that profits from increasing the likelihood of lethal violence in our society. That industry has worked to ensure that Americans do not just have the right to own reasonable firearms in appropriate circumstances--things that can be defined by collective debate and a system of courts--but that we worship and valorize the mass possession of such weapons, including those that serve no other imaginable purpose than to take human life at horrifying rates.

The culture of fear and paranoia the worship of guns has created is one that has delegitimized all efforts to have reasonable conversations about their regulation. Any such conversation is portrayed as an assault on fundamental rights, disregarding the contextual qualifications that courts have attached to other rights (the first amendment, for example). It also inexplicably suggests that the ability for all people to own all guns is more fundamental to individual liberties that the ability to receive medical care when ill, to receive economically and socially empowering education, to support parents in their care for children, to allow workers to define the parameters of their labor, or to live free from fear. Such a notion, though possible in the literal sense through a deliberate and self-interested mis-reading of an 18th century document, is neither morally, logically, or ultimately constitutionally defensible.

The culture LaPierre is seeking to engineer suggests that disagreement in society is best or most fundamentally resolved through violence, promotes the notion that our fellow citizens are innately bad, and discourages empathy by intimating that threats lurk around every corner. The more common it becomes to see people walking in public spaces visibly armed--I have been shocked in Nevada to see people openly carrying guns in the DMV, restaurants, malls, a car dealership--the more it promotes a cycle of fear that leads to cycles of violence.

The more a culture that venerates guns, the more likely people--who are dangerously animated by internal and external factors--are to be able to imagine the gun as a solution to their particular trouble. By prizing such lethal weapons over welfare, we shape in destructive ways the manner in which angry, frightened, or metaphorically cornered people act. Instead of seeking assistance in a culture that prizes compassion and shared responsibility for our troubles, they seek the instrument of the wronged and isolated individual’s false and tragic liberation, and use it to claim the lives of their brothers and sisters, generally as a prelude to their own death.

In promoting this culture, LaPierre advanced the radical and utterly false argument that the second amendment was “not bestowed by man, but granted by God to all Americans at our American birthright.”

It is one thing for people to believe that morality has sources that are spiritual as well as civic. But it is something else, something extraordinary, to make this claim about the origins of our rights. Such a violently ahistorical claim about the origins of our rights would come as news to the people who gave of their lives and labors to create our republic, craft its legal framework, and ensure that our liberties have been expanded to include people initially denied full membership of our society. Both the original architects and ongoing authors would be appalled at the idea that we should think of governance as being removed from the hands of human society and placed into the hands of a divinity, ownership over which can be claimed by skilled and cynical ventriloquists intent on doing harm to the basic principles of our constitution and human decency. We have enhanced our framework to guarantee people equal status before the law; what is to prevent us from doing so again to decrease the centrality of violence to our social order?

Wayne LaPierre’s god, if we take his word for it, whistles at a pitch only audible to cynical profiteers and plunderers, who clamber to power and prosperity over a paranoia of their own deliberate design, and up the mounting pile of bodies that the instruments of their twisted trade scatter in our streets and our schools.

LaPierre’s vision for our country, one apparently shared by his enablers, beneficiaries, and hired thugs in Congress, involves a people in fear of each other and of their government, intent on living a version of liberty that strips their lives of support, community, opportunity, and hope for a genuinely richer life, materially and morally.

The alternative liberties that LaPierre and his hangers-on deride are collective in their fashioning, but no less individualistic in their end goal. What is a liberated individual if not a person who does not have to fear that an illness can bankrupt and kill them? What is a liberated individual if not a person who does not have to fight tooth and nail for time to care for their children and a workplace that respects their humanity, dignity, and inherent worth separate from the arbitrary values that their employers assigned to what they produce? What is a liberated individual if not a person who knows that a political economy outside of their control will not be allowed to destroy their livelihood? What is a liberated person if not someone free to learn, love, labor, dwell, dream, and dare while knowing that the central purpose of the government in which they have placed their trust is to ensure their wellbeing?

It is with these liberties, and not that wielded like a deadly fetish, that we should concern ourselves. In protecting our children and making a better world, we should not allow the NRA and its adherents to define the terms of debate, the meaning of freedom, or the environments in which our society’s children spend formative years of their precious lives.

-----

* Unlike LaPierrre's description of "socialism", I use the concept of “fascism” in a concrete fashion. Donald Trump’s campaign and politics contain most of the ingredients of fascism: palingenetic nationalism (“make America great again”); ethnic nationalism (using language and advocating policies that define the U.S. as a white, Christian nation); invoking an internal enemy to be vanquished (variously, Latinos, American Muslims, liberals, African Americans); militarism (“bombing the shit out of them”; requesting a military parade); a leadership cult (the centrality of Trump himself to this politics); anti-internationalism (attacks on the UN, NATO); hostility toward democracy (threatening courts, journalists, musing about postponing elections, trying to delegitimize the political process); advocacy of political violence (encouraging violence at rallies, suggesting supporters assassinate his opponent, his campaign threatening a crisis or bloodbath if he lost the election); hostility toward organized labor (packing a cabinet with anti-union members); patrimonialism (nepotistic appointments, using policy to benefit “his” people and harm others).

Hold down tuition at public institutions to make Nevada different, daring, and diverse

Last month, UNLV hosted a forum offering students the opportunity to comment on proposed 1.8% increases to in-state fees and out-of-state tuition across NSHE (Nevada’s higher education sector). As recommended, 2019 and 2020 would each see a 1.8% increase. Most of the small number of students who attended expressed hostility to the increases, and many suggested that even small increases could be the difference between continuing at UNLV and leaving the university.

Context for the proposed increase is important. NSHE officials operate in a political environment that is often neglectful or dysfunctional. Nevada’s political economy has not historically been conducive to robust public institutions. And by national standards, tuition and fees in Nevada remain low. The latter point was one that administrators were particularly keen to stress. Things at NSHE could be worse, they argued, and their “modest” increases were only tracking unavoidable national trends. There was also a “because we can” element to NSHE’s argument, which was based on national “cost of living” data rather than on the ability to cite any compelling need to increase the burden on students.

Tracking a bad trend is not a good argument. And doubling down on a bad model is particularly self-destructive at a time when growing numbers of Americans are familiarizing themselves with arguments for or examples of systems with reduced or eliminated tuition. Many U.S. public universities were, only a few decades ago, nearly free at the point of entry, supported by taxpayers who recognized the long-term public and private value associated with investing in the education of young people. This truly public model of higher education is also something enjoyed by students in many other countries around the world.

Strong public institutions and frameworks for the delivery of welfare and of guaranteeing social and economic rights are not only more just, in that they help those who need help, diminish the stigma of means-tested welfare, and perform badly needed forms of redistribution in our highly unequal society. They are also more robust. By ensuring that all members of society, across class, racial, geographic, and other boundaries all access precisely the same good for the same cost, and then all contribute to funding our institutions as taxpayers, they ensure that all members of society have something at stake, making public institutions genuinely civic enterprises.

Instead of successfully leveraging the importance of these national conversations and citing the examples of successful cases elsewhere, NSHE is joining other American universities in participating in what scholar Christopher Newfield called the “great mistake”: the slow and harmful privatization of public institutions. On the one hand then, NSHE officials pursue policy recommendations that are partly constrained by the--to all appearances limited--scope of their imaginations, and simultaneously structured by a noncommittal state.

On the other, whatever factors are involved in the decision, raising tuition at a public institution, by whatever amount for whatever constituency over whatever number of years, represents a failure. More specifically, it represents a failure of public policy and an abdication of responsibility by state government, and a failure of advocacy and of mission by university officials.

Officials defended increasing the contributions from students and their families as burden-sharing, but our students already contribute more than previous generations, even as wages stagnate, housing costs rise, and debt increases. They also share doubly in the burden, as taxpayers and as “customers,” a status which degrades the learning experience that in theory should remain at the heart of our institution’s work.

Behind these increases are a set of competing demands and imperatives: the quest for top tier status and the costs associated with a more robust research university, particularly at a time when federal funding for the public research endeavors which drive private development is collapsing; new infrastructure; increasing demands for higher education; upward trending administrative salaries; and the perverse sentiment I’ve heard expressed quietly on campus that too-low tuition could actually hurt universities’ reputations admidst the steady drive to introduce damaging market principles into institutions which should be driven by a different set of motivations. NSHE and the legislature are responsible for reconciling those demands in a manner which does not compromise universities’ public mission and character.

Student critics at the town hall requested increased transparency from NSHE officials. But they should also ask why, in contrast with other moments in the history of public universities, students rather than the public at large are required to shoulder the costs of funding a public good that benefits our entire state community, private and public interests alike. They should ask how the state can reconcile its latent libertarian sensibilities with the demands of a more diverse population that has higher expectations of its public sphere. They should ask why their generation should not enjoy the public support for their future that previous generations did.

Students should pressure legislators, who provide the parameters in which university administrators make decisions about funding. Those administrators make comparatively better or relatively worse arguments about the rationale for their decisions, but students and the state community should realize that a university can only be as public--and therefore, as accessible and affordable--as its legislators and voters are willing to make it. If the most productive focus is likely on public officials, students should continue to dialogue with and confront NSHE administrators, who can choose--as California’s administrators did ten years ago--to embrace rhetoric and practice which makes a return to a more public university unlikely. NSHE Regents are particularly important figures, not just as the figures who will vote on proposed increases. They are also elected officials who will react if they feel pressure, and can pass on their anxieties to legislators.

Many might question why it’s worth making a fuss over such small increases. But when it comes to keeping public institutions public, and resisting the erosion of our civic institutions, momentum counts for a great deal. Processes like privatization and the erosion of the public welfare are generally long and slow and difficult to discern rather than swift and spectacular, and should be resisted at every opportunity.

UNLV’s motto is “different, daring, and diverse.” NSHE and Nevada can prove that we are indeed “different” and “daring” by resisting the ill-advised national trend of shifting the costs of public goods to students. Doing so can contribute toward preserving and increasing the diversity of our universities and colleges. Nevadans can commit to shouldering the burden for students who will later do their bit as taxpayers, and officials could halt or even roll back the costs to students and their families.

Mark Yudof visits UNLV, bringing memories of dark days in California

This week, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, is hosting two high-profile figures from the education world to whom I have my own institutional connections. The first is Howard Gillman, the Chancellor of my alma mater, the University of California, Irvine. The second is Mark Yudof, the former President of the University of California. Gillman came to UCI some time after I had moved on. But I was a student at Berkeley while Yudof was responsible for leading the world’s best public university system.

Mark Yudof served as system president during the recession. That was a disaster over which he had no control, but his response drove powerful wedges between the university and the state, the university and the public, and the university and its students. I suspect I’m not the only student, faculty member, or staff member from those days who responds viscerally and negatively to his name.

In 2009, responding to a broken state budget, Yudof explained that UC would have to “change the way we do business.” The model adopted by the system under his stewardship revolved around shifting the burden of funding from the public to individuals, transforming students into customers, permanently damaging the integrity of the university, and around the fetishization of an upper cadre of ever-more-lavishly compensated administrators, whose presence was supposedly all that was standing between UC and utter ruin.

Yudof dismally failed to read the state’s political climate, setting UC back by decades in terms of its relationship with the state. The recession proved to be a painful interlude for California as a whole, but UC’s behavior during those years ensured that the very real possibility of renewed state support for UC thereafter was never realized.

Increasing executive salaries gave Governor Jerry Brown, historically hostile to the University of California, just the excuse he needed to force further budget cuts on the institution in an effort at fiscal discipline. So the institution as a whole suffered at the same time that executives did better than ever before, ensuring that state lawmakers and the public at large were unlikely to see the badly-needed recommitment of state funds as a priority given UC’s reputation for handing out raises to executives, none of whose labors seemed to save the UC education from being montetized, the project of learning from being instrumentalized, the labor of teaching from being casualized, or the university itself from being privatized.

Administrative salaries might not have been nearly a sufficiently large line-item to explain the need for higher tuition, but it was certainly the crucial factor in explaining why the university has been unable to recapture significant amounts of funding even when the state is dominated by the previously friendly Democratic Party.

Yudof is probably best-remembered by those of us who called UC our home during those years for an extraordinarily contemptuous interview he gave to the New York Times, wherein he likened the honor of heading a vibrant, diverse, intellectual powerhouse, and the hopes, dreams, careers, and ideals it contained, to “being manager of a cemetery.” There, he swatted away concerns about faculty furloughs by invoking his working class origins, and refused to address whether rising executive salaries played a role in the UC’s crisis, responding to the observation that he made more than the President of the United States by snarkily asking the interviewer whether he’d “throw in Air Force One and the White House.”

Under Yudof, tuition and fees at the University of California rose dramatically, as did executive salaries. Coinciding with the recession, these affronts provoked a considerable student backlash, and thousands of us marched in Berkeley and other campuses. Chancellors responded with a mailed fist, and hundreds of students wore the bruises from truncheons and rubber bullets as vivid evidence of the hostility and contempt that University of California leadership had for the young people in its charge.

Yudof and Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau became loathed by students. Birgeneau for his e-mails, which described protesting students as a “health and safety” problem and blamed the lack of internet technology in Asia for his inability to control the campus crisis, and for the bone-headed contempt for students that film makers captured as he stalked his campus “war room”.

While the breathtaking and savage violence of the response was the responsibility of campus Chancellors, Mark Yudof defended them to the hilt. A famously egregious incident involved UC Davis police spraying unthreatening, seated students point-blank with pepper spray after campus chancellor, Linda Katehi authorized them to deploy force against peaceful protesters.

Yudof had once defended Katehi as one of the “Tom Cruises of the academic world,” a judgment called seriously into question first by a later report which found that Katehi personally “substantially undermined the goal of avoiding a physical confrontation” between students and police, and then by spending tens of thousands of dollars of UC resources scrubbing the internet of negative references to her chancellorship.

In later years we learned that Katehi, bored by her over-$400,000 per year day job, Katehi joined the for-profit DeVry Education Group as a paid board member, and added a paid position at a textbook company, and a board slot at King Abdulaziz University to round out her docket. Yudof might not have been responsible for Katehi’s actions, but during his tenure, he and the UC Regents celebrated the UC’s corporate leadership, and made them virtually untouchable, fostering the culture of arrogance that led to these abuses.

Yudof is speaking at UNLV on the topic of speech, drawing on his years in university leadership and legal expertise. But his presence on campus--at a time when UNLV debates its path to Top Tier and students question the need for tuition increases--should cause our campus community and leadership to reflect on the desirability of slow privatization, the interests and worldviews of administration, and how to maintain and in Nevada’s case improve the relationship with the wider public that ought to be responsible for equipping the university to fulfill its public mission.

In explaining his role to the New York Times, Yudof flippantly remarked, “I smile, I shake hands, I tell jokes.” And time and again, UC’s community of students and educators, and the state with which we sought to rebuild ties, found that the joke was on us.