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.

The influence of radical attitudes is not confined to radicals on a given faculty but has a tendency to spread throughout an institution. Robert Reich, a former cabinet secretary in the Clinton administration and now a professor of economics and social policy at Brandeis University are not a political radical. But in the present academic environment, Reich is a member of the faculty committee of the “Social Justice and Policy Program” in the undergraduate school. The Social and Justice Policy Program, as the name implies, is little more than a training course for students to become advocates for expanding the welfare state. It is a program of indoctrination in the strictest lexicographical sense—“to imbue with a partisan or ideological point of view”—and thus inappropriate for an academic curriculum. The proper setting for such a course would be a training institute maintained by the Democratic Party.

One of the professors profiled in this volume, Columbia University’s Todd Gitlin, explained in a 2004 essay that after the 1960s, “all that was left to the Left was to unearth righteous traditions and cultivate them in universities. The much-mocked ‘political correctness' of the next academic generations was a consolation prize. We lost—we squandered the politics—but won the textbooks.”29 Professor Richard Rorty, a renowned professor of philosophy and ardent left-winger, described this development with equally refreshing candor:

“The power base of the left in America is now in the universities since the trade unions have largely been killed off. The universities have done a lot of good work by setting up, for example, African-American studies programs, Women’s Studies programs, Gay and Lesbian Studies programs. They have created power bases for these movements.” That a distinguished philosopher like Rorty would find the political debasement of the university development to praise speaks volumes about the changes that have taken place in the academic culture since the war in Vietnam. 

Professor Derrick Bell

— Professor at New York University School of Law
— Pioneer of “Critical Race Theory”
— “Slavery is, as an example of what white America has done, a constant reminder of what white America might do.”

Derrick Bell is a professor at the New York University School of Law. Born in 1930, Professor Bell may be considered the founder, or at least the godfather, of “Critical Race Theory,” an academic tradition in which race plays the same role as a class in the Marxist paradigm.

In the mid-1970s, Professor Bell was, along with Alan Freeman, a pioneer in the field. Professor Bell was not only angered by what he viewed as the slow progress of racial reform in the United States but also held that the gains brought about by the civil rights laws of the 1960s were being eroded in the 1970s.

He believed as he does to this day, that whites would support civil rights protections for blacks only if those protections would also promote white self-interest and social status. Since racial minorities, in Professor Bell’s view, are a permanently oppressed caste—and racism is a normal, permanent aspect of American life—equality before the law is oppressive to African Americans, whose moral claims are superior to those of whites. The perspective around which Professor Bell has built his academic career is the endless repetition of the claim that whites and white institutions are irremediably racist. He has endorsed a journal dedicated to the “abolition of whiteness,” called Race Traitor, whose motto is “Treason to the white race is loyalty to humanity.”

According to Professor Bell and his fellow Critical Race theorists, existing legal structures are, like American society at large, racist in their very construction. Critical Race Theory suggests that to combat this “institutional racism,” oppressed racial groups have both the right and the duty to decide for themselves, which laws are valid and are worth observing. Critical Race Theory also promotes the use of storytelling narratives in law-review articles to better reflect the “oral traditions” of the black experience.

Professor Bell has used the technique of placing legal and social commentary into the mouths of invented characters extensively in his writings. He acknowledges that this “style of storytelling” is “less rigorous than the doctrine-laden, citation-heavy law review pieces” that law professors traditionally publish, but he and his disciples employ it nonetheless.

Derrick Bell earned a bachelor’s degree from Duquesne University in 1952 and a law degree from the University of Pittsburgh in 1957 (he was the school’s only black graduate that year). The first job of his legal career was in the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department. He left that position after a short time to work as an attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, where he became a protégé of Thurgood Marshall.

In the immediate aftermath of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1968 assassination, members of Harvard University’s Black Law Students Association pressured their school to hire a minority professor; this led eventually to Bell’s hiring in 1971 as the first black faculty member in the law school’s history. From the very outset of his stay at Harvard, Professor Bell was acutely aware of the fact that he lacked the qualifications that had traditionally been prerequisites for an appointment at Harvard: he had neither graduated with distinction from a prestigious law school, nor clerked for the Supreme Court, nor practiced law at a major firm. Yet he mocked such criteria as being nothing more than the exclusionary constructs of a racist white power structure that had traditionally sought to deny African Americans an opportunity to teach at the nation’s elite schools.

In 1980, Professor Bell left Harvard to become the dean of the University of Oregon School of Law. He resigned from that position in 1985, ostensibly as an act of protest against the fact that the school had failed to grant tenure to an Asian female professor. A number of Professor Bell’s colleagues at Oregon, however, viewed this as a contrived, face-saving pretext for leaving a position from which he was about to be fired. They believed that Professor Bell, who had largely become an “absentee dean” known for spending more time on the lecture circuit than at Oregon, was slated for imminent termination. 

Professor Bell joined the faculty of Stanford Law School in 1986 and immediately became a source of controversy. Many of his students there complained that he was not using his lecture time to teach principles of law, but rather as a platform from which to indoctrinate his captive audience to his left-wing theories and worldviews. Cognizant of Professor Bell’s glaring deficiencies as a teacher but afraid to openly address them, Stanford quietly instituted a lecture series designed to help his students learn the course material that Professor Bell was not teaching them. Perceiving this as a racial affront, Professor Bell left Stanford and returned to Harvard in the fall of 1986.

In April 1990, Professor Bell demanded that Harvard Law hire a black woman—specifically the visiting Professor Regina Austin—as a tenured faculty member. A critical race theorist herself, Professor Austin was of the view that as an oppressed race, African Americans could decide what laws they would be justified in breaking and what crimes they would be justified in committing. 128 Though Harvard had a long-standing policy that forbade the hiring of visiting professors during the year of their residence at the school, Professor Bell made Professor Austin’s hiring a “non-negotiable demand.”

When the law school would not cave to Professor Bell’s pressure, he protested by taking a leave of absence from his $120,000 per year teaching post. He explained that black female law students were in desperate need of “role models” with whom they could identify. Although 45 percent of Harvard Law’s faculty appointments since 1980 had gone to minorities and women, none of them were both black and female—hence Professor Bell’s objection. But even if Harvard had agreed to grant tenure to Professor Austin, Professor Bell would not have been satisfied. As he would later write in a law review article condemning schools for hiring “token” minorities: “The hiring of a few minorities and women—particularly when a faculty is under pressure from students or civil rights agencies—is not a departure from, or an adherence to, this power-preserving doctrine” of white male supremacy.

Left-wing students staged two sit-ins in the office of the dean of the law school to demonstrate their support for Professor Bell’s position. The relatively small supply of credentialed black professors, coupled with the intense competition among so many colleges to secure their services, was apparently irrelevant to the Harvard protesters.

In 1990–91, Professor Bell taught a civil rights course at Harvard without pay, though he later acknowledged that he had gotten himself placed on the payroll of a “major entertainment figure” as a “consultant.” To express his displeasure with Harvard in definitive terms, in the spring of 1991 Professor Bell announced that he would take a one-year visiting professor’s position at New York University Law School. He later extended this to two years, and later still announced that he would spend a third year at NYU. This third year would require not only NYU’s waiver of time limits on visiting professorships, but also Harvard’s waiver of its firm policy forbidding professors to be on leave for more than two years. Harvard dean Robert Clark stated that if Professor Bell did not return to his post, he would lose his place on Harvard’s faculty. Professor Bell refused to return and thus lost his job. 130 He has taught at NYU ever since.

A few of Professor Bell’s more notable quotes (all of them from his 1992 book Faces at the Bottom of the Well) on the subject of the race include the following:

• “Unable or unwilling to perceive that ‘there but for the grace of God, go I,’ few whites are ready to actively promote civil rights for blacks.”
• “[D]iscrimination in the workplace is as vicious (if less obvious) than it was when employers posted signs ‘no negras need apply.’”
• “We rise and fall less as a result of our efforts than in response to the needs of a white society that condemns all blacks to quasi citizenship as surely as it segregated our parents.”
• “Slavery is, as an example of what white America has done, a constant reminder of what white America might do.”
• “Black people will never gain full equality in this country.... African Americans must confront and conquer the otherwise deadening reality of our permanent subordinate status.”

Research: Joseph Wilson, John Perazzo

REFERENCES:

The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America - David Horowitz