The Review

“The censor,” Judith Butler wrote in The Chronicle Review in 2018, “expresses himself as a fearful being. He fears speech and seeks to contain it.” The occasion for her remarks was Turkey’s crackdown on higher education — thousands of professors fired, tens of thousands of students jailed, and at least 15 universities shuttered, all on the pretext that they were somehow supporting Kurdish terrorists. Turkey is an extreme instance of a phenomenon common across the globe — Butler goes on to mention the suppression of academic life in Iran, in India, and in Brazil, where “at least three faculty members in gender studies were threatened with their lives for working on the controversial topic of the gendered division of labor in the workplace.” If she’d written the essay today, she would surely include efforts across the United States by Republican legislatures to ban critical race theory from college curricula.

Add Russia to the list. On June 21, Radio Free Europe reported that Bard College, which operates Smolny College, in St. Petersburg, had been prohibited from operating in Russia under a 2015 “undesirable organization” law. (Our Karin Fischer has more.) Bard is the 35th organization to be banned, and the first college. Violating the law is punishable by six years in prison.

Why Bard? Why now? No specific charges were adduced. Smolny has operated for 25 years without major incident. I asked Leon Botstein, Bard’s president, whether the philanthropist George Soros’s association with Bard — his Open Society Institute recently gave the college hundreds of millions of dollars — could have been to blame. Botstein didn’t think so. He pointed out that although Soros was an important early donor to Smolny, “no Soros money has gone to this project since 2015.”

But the forces of reactionary nationalism for which Soros is anathema may not be so different from the forces behind Bard’s expulsion, as Botstein acknowledged. He speculated that anti-academic sentiment may be motivated by a desire to appeal to the far right: “You have to count on the fact that the pressure, as in the United States, is from the right, and Putin may be in the same position as Liz Cheney is in. There’s a massive right wing, a real right wing. QAnon is a huge attraction to that kind of Russophilic nationalism. I think [Putin] is playing to his right.”

Grim as all this is for Smolny, its global implications might be even more alarming. “Autocrats, single-party regimes, think they have a reason to fear universities,” Botstein said. There is every reason to think that Russia’s actions could embolden analogous crackdowns in Poland, in Hungary, in Brazil — anywhere the university is a charged symbolic target for political invective.

“It’s a tragedy,” Botstein said. “I loved working on the program, I feel very badly for our Russian colleagues. I’m very grateful to them. I’m in a state of shock.”

Recommended:

• At The Nation, David Bromwich — who has been writing a regular column there since February — with some “Notes on Cant.” Examples include “weaponize,” “toxic,” “reckoning,” and “silo.” On this last, see Jonathan Kramnick’s Chronicle Review essay on “The Interdisciplinary Delusion” (2018).

• “History, as always, only serves to confound and complicate memory.” That’s the Berkeley historian Abhishek Kaicker writing in Journal18 about the tangled religious and sectarian semiotics of the Sikh flag, the Nishan sahib, hoisted by protesting farmers who occupied Delhi’s iconic Red Fort on January 26.
  

• “I suppose there’s a private music to each person’s writing, and mine involves an extended line. I have a naturally expansive way of thinking, and that fits with the wide horizons of northern New Mexico, where I live.” The Bollingen Prize-winning poet Mei-mei Berssenbrugge in conversation with Lacey Jones at The Yale Review.
  

I’m always hoping to hear from you — write to opinion@chronicle.com.

Yours,
Len Gutkin