O Say Must We Stand?

It has been six weeks now since Colin Kaepernick did not stand up.

He was vilified. His jersey was burned. Numerous sports announcers felt duty-bound to point out that the San Francisco 49er wasn’t much of a quarterback anyway. They wanted him fired. Donald Trump suggested he leave the country. But then something else happened: Across the country, more and more athletes sat down, knelt, or raised their fists when “The Star-Spangled Banner” played. Fans are joining. Within the space of a few weeks, a compulsory ritual — singing the anthem, standing for it, putting your hand on your heart — has been transformed into an active choice. Sing or remain quiet. Stand, sit, or kneel. Hand on heart or fist in the air. A choice, fraught, uncomfortable, liberating. For that alone, we owe the quarterback thanks.

At our universities, we have to make a choice as well now. And the choice is not merely whether to stand, sit, or kneel, and not even how to react to what is perhaps becoming a movement. Instead, we should ask ourselves why we are singing the anthem at all, at what occasions we should sing it, and even whether we should stop singing it altogether. Not merely because, in the musicologist Dale McGowan’s apt description, it is “an aggressive, unsingable, relatively-recently-adopted, ill-constructed descendant of a raunchy bar ballad turned celebration of obscure military stalemate.”

A personal detour: Aggressive, unsingable, ill-constructed descendants of raunchy bar ballads turned celebration of obscure stalemates actually seem to me rather well-suited to football games. Like many Europeans, I have always been puzzled by Americans’ propensity to bellow out their national anthem without provocation at events that have no obvious connection to national affairs of any kind, but all team sports are war games, so “The Star-Spangled Banner” felt vaguely appropriate at our football games. Until I was elected chair of the Faculty Senate, however, I never knew that we also sang the anthem at convocations and commencements here at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

My first official duty was to greet freshmen at a fall convocation. The development office, which naturally scripts all academic events of this kind these days, had given me a bare two lines: “Welcome to New Student Convocation. Please remain standing for The National Anthem.”

All displays of nationalism make me uncomfortable — if you studied German culture for a living, you might feel the same way. I have been in the United States long enough to have developed a high tolerance for them, but I wasn’t particularly chuffed to preside over one. I didn’t want to be a bad sport, either. So I settled for a gentle and unoffensive compromise that was meant to signal a choice: “You may remain standing for the national anthem.” I remained standing myself and arranged my face into the benevolent beam I imagine new students would find comforting in their professors. I didn’t sing along, I left my right hand where it was and didn’t even know I was meant to find a flag to gaze at. I’m not an American citizen. It’s not my anthem.

The reaction was swift. Academic robes were burned in front of the student union. Pundits all across the country pointed out that I hadn’t published enough. President Schlissel was inundated with calls to revoke my tenure. Donald Trump demanded that all departments of comparative literature be closed, “just until we know what’s going on.” My publisher announced that all my books were to be remaindered during a public pulping at the half-time show at the Rose Bowl.

Just kidding. I doubt anybody noticed. Nobody cares what humanities profs think, anyway. Most of us throw like girls. And even if somebody had noticed: I’m a white woman with a Ph.D., and as long as I don’t object to video games where naked women are hacked to pieces for fun and enjoyment, my right to express myself in public is safe and secure, and I have no retribution to fear.

The same cannot be said for the football team at Eastern Michigan University, just down the road from Ann Arbor. Faced with the prospect of student athletes’ displeasing the regents donors loyal fans by engaging in a meaningful act distracting from the beautiful game of football, EMU decided to remove them from the field altogether. Just for the anthem. And their own protection. Seriously.

As MLive.com reported, “EMU Spokesman Geoff Larcom said the university became aware of some student discussion regarding a possible protest prior to the game, leading to the decision to play ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ earlier than normal. Players and the EMU marching band were kept off the field during that time.”

Let this sink in fully: We are no longer at a point where student-athletes’ decision to express their misgivings about the land of the free and the home of the brave by peaceful, quiet protest is merely controversial. We are now at a point where we remove them from sight altogether, lest they engage in an act that requires the very courage and autonomy the song they refuse to sing claims is America’s hallmark. That is not how a university treats its students. That is how Rome treats its gladiators: bodies meant for entertainment.

Perhaps that is too cynical a reading; perhaps EMU wanted to spare students the discomfort of having to choose between standing or kneeling and alienating their peers or their fans. But if, for any reason, the presence of the anthem necessitates the absence of the student players whose work and skills are the very reason we have come together in the first place, then this is also the point where all university presidents and their bosses athletic directors need to speak up. At the very least, they need to say, loudly and clearly, that singing the national anthem is optional for all: students, faculty, staff. They need to say that all peaceful protest of racism — and all the other ills plaguing us — is protected and even encouraged at all universities, whether they have a Division I team or not. At public universities, such protests are protected by law, at all universities, they are protected by both common decency and the core principles of higher education, which do not and cannot thrive under conditions of compulsion and conformity.

That would take a very little bit of courage. If university leaders are in the mood for displaying more than a very little bit, they could start a conversation about the kind of songs we should be singing at our universities. Do we want to continue to intone lyrics written by a man who wrote that Africans in America were “a distinct and inferior race of people, which all experience proves to be the greatest evil that afflicts a community”?

Do we want to continue to compel students of all racial and ethnic backgrounds to stand for those lyrics, if not by command, then by the sheer pressure of collective expectation?

By all means, as long as everybody is free to decline participation, keep the anthem for the football games, if you must — a war song for a war game. But at those events that are dedicated to the core mission of the university, which is the making and sharing of knowledge for the benefit of humankind, let us acknowledge that American universities are jubilantly international institutions, and wide open to the world at large. Here at Michigan, we have students hailing from more than 100 countries. We are at our most American, and American at America’s best, when we joyfully welcome all of them. Luckily, at a time when so many seem willing to close the borders and circle the wagons, we already have the perfect song to sing with them: “This land is your land, this land is my land ...this land was made for you and me.”

Bonus: It’s singable.

Silke-Maria Weineck is a professor of German studies and comparative literature at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. She has served as chair of the Faculty Senate and as a member of the Advisory Board on Intercollegiate Athletics at UM.