The Secular Priesthood, Commissars, and
in this case, the public's University of California
It's now been some time since British
philosopher and intellectual historian Isaiah Berlin coined the term
"secular priesthood" to describe Soviet-era commissars:
Communist Party intellectuals whose so-called scholarly work provided
the intellectual trappings—'the emperor's new clothes'—to
legitimate or, more often, obfuscate the brutal functioning of power
in the former Soviet Union. And at the time, the West's own
designated intellectuals accurately described their Soviet
counterparts as mere servants of power.
Pursuing Berlin's description, linguist
and philosopher Noam Chomsky points out that it's a near historical
universal that those designated and honored by their
own societies in their own times as "intellectuals" have
been the equivalents of those rightly derided Soviet-era commissars.
And from his well-documented descriptions of this secular priesthood,
Chomsky concludes: "The intellectual tradition is one of
servility to power, and if I didn't betray it I would be ashamed of
myself."
If one agrees, as I do, with Berlin and
Chomsky's assessments of history's intellectuals and their
tradition, then we ought to betray our own intellectuals when we can
show they are dismissing crucial facts and ignoring widely accepted
academic and ethical principles—i.e., that they themselves are
betraying the public's trust and their own positions within the
public's institutions of higher education—and are thereby acting as
servants of power.
Here I am offering email
correspondence I've had with three University of California professors, whose valuable work and
scholarship have earned them elevated and secure positions as career
intellectuals within our public universities. I am betraying them by making
their exchanges with me public because I believe their correspondence
shows that in this case these university faculty members are
substantiating and perpetuating the intellectual tradition Chomsky
speaks of—"one of servility to power." And if I didn't
betray these professors' participation in this intellectual tradition
in this case, I feel that I, too, would be ashamed of myself.
These professors' statements on this
case, examined separately and together, enable us to see how faculty members
participate in the university's "real selection for obedience
and conformity" (Chomsky) through their waving away this student
termination at UCLA. And only by bringing these
faculty-to-student dismissal 'techniques' into the broadest
possible light can students (and the public) become better at
recognizing them for what they are: sometimes subtle but always
powerful forms of faculty participation in the university's selection
operation. Furthermore, these exchanges can contribute significantly
to our understanding of how the university functions if they are used
to create opportunities for these faculty members (and their
colleagues) to refute arguments showing how they are participating in
a student termination case that has discarded essential facts and
violated the university's own academic and ethical principles.
Should these professors (and their colleagues) then also dismiss
these opportunities to refute these arguments, we'll be all the more
forcefully compelled to look at our own intellectuals as commissars
working within our own secular priesthood in ways that are
dangerously impeding the public's efforts to build and sustain open
and vibrant public universities.
Come what may, I hope this public act
of betrayal and how these professors (and their colleagues) respond to
it (including not responding) will contribute to our understanding of
how universities—and notably, UCLA, now "the most popular
campus in the nation"—actually operate behind their often
corporate-driven "brand" marketing and their often
quasi-religious status, for which our own secular priesthood is
directly responsible.
(Here's how I put this particular matter—publicly releasing this UC faculty email correspondence—to the media, posted January 6, 2011, as a "tip" to the San Francisco Bay Area's community-funded journalism website, Spot.us:
http://spot.us/tips/763-is-erwin-chemerinsky-also-a-commissar-for-the-university-of-california )