The Point: “Unnatural Silences”
12/5/2024
This week’s Point was written by Jeff Melnick, Professor of American Studies and former VP and Communications Director of the FSU
Greetings, Colleagues,
The Point crew spoke together recently and realized it was due time for us to do a periodic digest/wrap-up of the academic labor and politics stories we wanted to make sure were at least somewhere on your radar. But then we immediately confronted a somewhat knotty reality: a huge number of the top stories we have been tracking are about various kinds of silencing on US college campuses—most clearly a response to last year’s active protests inspired by the ongoing devastation of Gaza by Israel in the wake of the October 7, 2023 attacks. How do we, as scholars, teachers, and labor activists talk about (and more importantly, organize around) silences? How do we make sense out of—and refuse the terms of—a new university landscape on which our bosses (the friendly chancellor and engaged provost who send us all of those community-building email blasts and host holiday parties and whatnot) suggest that we collaborate with them in suppressing our own speech?
In my field there is a long tradition of exploring the meaning of silences in literature and beyond. One of the signature works in this arena is Tillie Olsen’s “Silences,” a brilliant speech from 1962 which finally saw print in book form in 1978, and which articulated a taxonomy of silences which included “natural” silences (those periods when we let the vehicle idle, let ideas gestate and so on) and “unnatural” silences (including straight up censorship and the realities of women’s work burdens under patriarchy that Olsen was most focused on). These unnatural, enforced silences can be devastating, immobilizing: as Olsen puts it “when again I had to leave the writing, I lost consciousness.” This understanding of silencing as a tool of social control was elaborated in dramatic fashion in the late 1980s by the queer artists who first articulated “Silence=Death” as a central axiom of the AIDS activist community.
So, here we are in 2024 and coming to terms once again with the weaponization of silence by some of the most powerful figures in our culture. Without falling prey to conspiracy theorizing, it seems pretty clear that university administrators are collaborating with each other (and with political leaders and others) to silence the collective voices of their students, staff, and faculty. This is happening at the level of national legislation (as with the introduction of the Antisemitism Awareness Act in Congress in 2023 which would—in the name of fighting antisemitism—purposefully discipline principled anti-Israel speech across the nation) to draconian speech codes on our own campus as we discussed in The Point earlier this semester. It seems clear that silence is only one tool that is being deployed in a larger process of the degradation of higher education that some scholars are referring to as “enshittification.” Originally popularized by Cory Doctorow, the term “enshittification” first referred to the process of “platform decay” whereby a tech product is developed that a huge number of users find congenial and useful which is then slowly (and then not so slowly) ruined by tuning out the concerns of users in favor of the demands of advertisers (or in the case of academia, donors and boards of trustees). The American university—ours included—is in danger of being enshittified; the sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom, for instance, has traced the ways this process has afflicted HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) and now threatens all of US higher education.
With this in mind, our academic news digest begins with some particularly egregious examples of silencing and then moves to a few news stories that remind us of the power of our collective voice.
Silencing on US Campuses
Our first example comes from just across the river, at Harvard, and would be hilarious if it were not so terrifying. After last year’s quite lively on-campus antiwar protests at Harvard, that university (like ours) instituted a whole new set of rules about “acceptable” forms of collective speech on campus. In response, groups of faculty, staff, and students innovated a series of silent library protests. These actions were apparently not quite quiet enough and participants at this university were disciplined by having their library privileges suspended. A real industry leader, that Harvard is, punishing its scholars by keeping them from the books! It is important to recognize that the forces of reaction are definitely using last year’s protests as an excuse to crack down on Palestine justice activists (see here for a particularly egregious example at George Mason University), but they are also applying the worst lessons of academic year ’23-’24 to a host of seemingly unrelated situations—we see this at University of Alabama where a planned pro-DEI rally was shut down before it could take place, and at Ohio State where a fairly standard-issue (if nasty) post-football game brawl was met by the now standard operating procedure of police attacking students with pepper spray. The silencing and militarization will likely get worse with the incoming next administration but we must learn what 2023-2024 tried to teach us: the governing figures in United States life, from the Capitol to the Quinn Building think that the likes of us should just shut up already. But let’s remember Tillie Olsen, and not “lose consciousness” through silence.
K-12 Teachers Raising their Voices
Our next item is a much more heartening story about what happens when educators insist on raising their voices together. In Marblehead, Beverly and Gloucester K-12 teachers remained resolutely on strike, even as their local unions faced mounting fines and various other kinds of pressure as well. If you are a regular reader of the Boston Globe for instance, you might have noticed their editorial board getting increasingly bent out of shape by these three strikes. The Globe has often been top-of-the-class in the “teacher hate” rankings, but they were borderline incoherent by the end of this set of strikes. It was impossible not to feel a certain level of pleasure when two of the three unions reached tentative agreement, and the Globe was forced to headline its news story “"After Hitting the Picket Lines, Teachers Score Major Wins". I was especially gratified to see the focus in each of the three strikes on the status of paraprofessionals, those hard-working and skilled (yet underpaid and underappreciated) colleagues. (If you want to learn more about the place of paraprofessionals in modern educational history, be sure to attend our colleague Nick Juravich’s virtual book talk this coming Tuesday at 5, at which he will be discussing his brand-new Para Power: How Paraprofessional Labor Changed Education.)
Grad Worker Unions from Coast to Coast
We were especially gratified to get the news that graduate workers at Boston University ratified a contract after a difficult seven month strike. The BU union is part of an SEIU local—another reminder that major national unions (SEIU and the UAW above all)) have come to recognize that graduate workers represent a major organizing opportunity for them and will continue to swell their ranks and increase their power. Speaking of which, across the country the AFL-CIO associated Coalition of Graduate Employees at Oregon State University is on strike for fair pay and contract duration. If you are interested you can donate to them by venmo @CGE-OSU with a note that says “strike fund.”