The Review

“We should be appalled,” Roderick A. Ferguson writes in a recent essay in our pages, “that Gov. Ron DeSantis and his administration seek to make it unlawful to teach and study intersectionality, the Black Lives Matter movement, Black feminism, Black queer studies, reparations, and Black freedom struggles.” Ferguson, a professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Yale University, is among the scholars the Florida Republican governor struck from college-level Advanced Placement curriculum, the New York Times reported, part of DeSantis’s Orbanesque assault on his state’s institutions of higher learning.

DeSantis’s interventions are novel, and conservative suspicion toward higher education has never been more intense. As Tom Nichols wrote in his Atlantic commentary on DeSantis, “As recently as 2015, most Republicans, by a wide margin, thought of universities as a positive influence on the United States. Four years later, those numbers flipped, and nearly 60 percent of Republicans saw universities as having a negative impact on the country.” But conservative anxiety about the destabilizing influence of leftist critique harbored by the academy is nothing new. The urtext of that concern, at least in its contemporary guise, is the 1971 “Powell Memo” sent to the Education Committee of the Chamber of Commerce by the late Lewis F. Powell Jr., who would later become a Supreme Court Justice.

That document, as Ferguson writes, expressed particular worry “about the charismatic and prolific nature of certain scholars” — Herbert Marcuse, who remains a preoccupation of some on the right even today, is named. But its major emphasis is far less cultural than the contemporary Republican campaign against higher education. Powell’s primary concern is with “the free enterprise system,” which he imagines is under threat by, among other things, the anticapitalist ideology he takes to be common among professors. He mentions race only glancingly; sexual and social mores not at all.

Indeed, unlike DeSantis and his ilk, Powell was fairly moderate on social issues. As a justice, he joined the majority in Roe v. Wade, and he wrote the majority decision in The Regents of the University of California vs. Bakke, which established the legality of affirmative action. But he was also, to an almost parodic extent, a corporate shill. He once argued that tobacco companies had a First Amendment right to have their denials of a link between cancer and smoking treated seriously by the media. And in the 1971 memo, he damns Ralph Nader, whom he calls “the single most effective antagonist of American business,” as a false “idol of millions of Americans.” Nader was then at the height of his fame as a campaigner for stricter automotive safety standards.

When he intones against the enemies of American business, Powell sounds like nothing so much as a caricature of his type from one of the novels of the period — or perhaps of an earlier one, something right out of Sinclair Lewis: “The time has come — indeed, it is long overdue — for the wisdom, ingenuity, and resources of American business to be marshaled against those who would destroy it.” In the memo’s most remarkable moment, Powell permits himself a maudlin dirge on the class-victimhood of the big businessman: “One does not exaggerate to say that … the American business executive is truly the ‘forgotten man.’”

Such sympathies are not out of place for DeSantis, but they do not form the core of his campaign against higher education, which has focused instead on putative indoctrination around gender, sex, and race. This isn’t to say that there’s no connection. To stay just with Black studies, obviously arguments about “racial capitalism,” or reparations, or the links between slavery and capitalism might tend to encourage skepticism about what Powell calls, lovingly, “the system.” But the distinct Cold War cast of Powell’s concerns differentiates him starkly from DeSantis, and his conviction that academic critical theory poses a threat to capitalism seems merely quaint.

Read Roderick A. Ferguson’s “Fear of a Black-Studies Planet,” and if you’re feeling masochistic, Lewis F. Powell’s 1971 memorandum.

Recommended

• “Inventing a set of private aesthetic laws, he worked out their possibilities over the course of his career with admirable stubbornness and conviction.” In The Baffler, Paul Grimstad writes about Thelonious Monk.
• “Before long, a substantial subset of people started to assert that the government, at its highest levels, was run by a cabal of Satanic pedophiles.” In Compact, Michael Clune on the polarization of the left and the right. And check out Clune’s most recent Review essay, “Are Humanities Professors Moral Experts?”
• “She gossips! She drinks! She tells her husband’s secrets! She looks for a new husband at her previous husband’s funeral!” In Lapham’s Quarterly, Marion Turner writes about Chaucer’s Wife of Bath. For more on Chaucer, see Joe Stadolnik’s Review essay, “A Literary Cold Case Heats Up.”

Write to me at len.gutkin@chronicle.com.

Yours,

Len Gutkin