Professor traces patriotic correctness in the wake of 9/11

In November 2001, as the ashes of the World Trade Centre still lay smouldering, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni released a report entitled, “Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done About It.”

In what some critics called a blacklist, the report listed 117 alleged instances of “unpatriotic” speech by university personnel whose responses to the 9/11 attacks had, according to the document, “ranged from moral equivocation to explicit condemnations of America.”

The American Council is a Washington-based group that has close ties to former US Vice-President Dick Cheney’s wife, Lynne. The report was considered by some to be an opening salvo of the broader conservative movement’s attempt to use 9/11 to revive the “culture wars” of the early 1990s and renew an attack on the American professoriate.

Among those who viewed the development with alarm was Dr. Valerie Scatamburlo-D’Annibale BA 1990, MA 1994, associate professor in the Department of Communication, Media and Film at the University of Windsor. Her subsequent research into the issues forms the basis of her new book, Cold Breezes and Idiot Winds: Patriotic Correctness and the Post 9/11 Assault on Academe, published in April 2011, just a few months before the tenth anniversary of the tragedy.

“When the American Council report came out, the one thing that I thought was ironic—and that inspired me—was that we kept hearing how 9/11 changed everything,” says Scatamburlo-D’Annibale. “But the one thing it didn’t change were the US conservative movement’s concerted attempts to demonize the academy, which started at least 40 years ago.”

Her 1998 book, Soldiers of Misfortune: The New Right’s Culture War and the Politics of Political Correctness, which earned her a Critic’s Choice Award from the American Educational Research Association in 2000, had dealt with the perception of universities as bastions of liberal-left political correctness and provided a backdrop for Cold Breezes.

After 9/11, she says that conservatives created their own version of political correctness that she calls, “patriotic correctness.”

“The patriotic correctness that emerged after 9/11 purported to define what America was all about. There was this notion of America as God’s chosen country, and dissent became unacceptable, especially in the academy.”

The book’s title is drawn from a quote from the April 2005 edition of The Nation, the oldest continuously published weekly magazine in the US, self-described as “the flagship of the left”:
“(t)he suppression of … dissent, a disconcerting feature of political life since the Bush administration took power, has been most sharply felt on college campuses … Not since the McCarthy era have American campuses felt such a cold breeze—make that an idiot wind.”

The book points to such examples as “the efforts of right-wing student groups to suppress campus dissent, attempts to introduce legislation that would police the content of courses offered in universities and target professors critical of US foreign policy, as well as calls for the dismissal of faculty members who failed to sanction the Bush administration’s ‘war on terror’” as evidence of a reinvigorated conservative effort to target academe.

Scatamburlo-D’Annibale recounts how David Horowitz, a well-known American conservative “culture warrior,” created a website encouraging students to complain about “licentious liberal professors and leftist lunatics who were presumably trying to poison their young minds with anti-American ideologies.”

At the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2005, Andrew Jones, a former campus Republican operative and one-time Horowitz protégé, offered to pay UCLA students to surveil professors critical of the Bush administration. He then created a website exposing what he dubbed “the Dirty Thirty,” a list of liberal/left educators who were supposedly, among other things, collaborating with radical Muslims to undercut the ‘war on terror.’

Right-leaning media provided strong support for the cause, says Scatamburlo-D’Annibale: “The Fox News Channel, for example, had a tremendous influence in demonizing specific academics and academia in general.”

Scatamburlo-D’Annibale is, however, quick to mention that the “patriotically correct” assault is about much more than the academy and her book details how it must be understood in relation to the American right’s broader offensive against liberalism, the legacy of the New Deal era and the democratic social reforms of the 1960s.  

The election of Barack Obama has seemed to redirect conservative’s wrath from the academy to the White House, but, as Scatamburlo-D’Annibale argues, Republican opponents and Tea Partyers are invoking many elements of the “patriotically correct” discourse. The book cautions against complacency:

“… the campus project for ‘cultural conservatism’ is very much alive. It lives on in Horowitz’s new ‘teach-in’ campaign, the ‘9/11 Never Forget Project’ started by the Young America’s Foundation, and the 2009 unveiling of the overtly racist ‘Youth for Western Civilization,’ just to name a few.”

Thus far, she says her book has not received any negative reaction, “but I certainly expect and welcome it.”

It seems a cold breeze may still blow.

Cold Breezes and Idiot Winds: Patriotic Correctness and the Post 9/11 Assault on Academe is available at the UWindsor Bookstore and online at Amazon.ca and Barnesandnoble.com.