Staying Active
From the Archive
In our April interview [“Lesson Plan”] Pranav Jani, an English professor at The Ohio State University, discusses the current state of activism on college campuses. With the Trump administration bullying schools into cracking down on political speech, are our institutions of higher learning still a free marketplace of ideas?
Of course, restrictions on freedom of speech in academia are nothing new. Also in this month’s issue, essayist Gary Percesepe [“Practice Losing Everything”] writes about losing a tenured position at a conservative religious college in the 1990s because he edited an anthology about feminism.
Gillian Kendall could commiserate. In 2004 we published her essay “Allies,” about the time she served as the faculty advisor for a newly minted LGBTQ student group at a Baptist college in Georgia. It’s the first of this month’s archive selections.
After that we go to Wyoming with David Romtvedt, who served as poet laureate of that deep-red state at the start of the Iraq War and had to explain to the governor why he’d written a poem titled “Fuck You, Patriotism.”
Another poet, Edwin Romond, recalls the Vietnam War era in “Brother in Arms.” An English major with a draft deferral back then, he worked a summer job alongside veterans of that war, one of whom had his back after he made a mistake.
In “Big Lies” historian Benjamin Carter Hett speaks with interviewer David Barsamian about how the far-right political shift in the US, already well underway when they talked in 2019, paralleled the rise in German nationalism in the 1920s and 1930s.
And finally our readers share stories about disagreements, political and otherwise, in our September 1996 Readers Write on “Taking Sides.”
Read well, and keep up the good fight,
Andrew Snee, Managing Editor
Allies
January 2004“He took a long time telling me why he had come. It was kind of personal and difficult, he said, and he didn’t want to risk offending me. With a lot of encouragement, he finally got it out: he was thinking of starting a club on campus, a support and social group for students who might be considering their sexual orientation.
‘Well, Sean,’ I said, ‘I’m a lesbian, and I’d be happy to help.’”
Red Politics and Blue in Wyoming
June 2006“When the United States was preparing to invade Iraq, I put a sign in my front yard that said, NO IRAQ WAR. It was red, white, and blue with some stars. I was a little nervous about publicly expressing an antiwar sentiment, but I went ahead with it. Within a few days, three different people knocked on my door.”
Brother in Arms
June 2008“The vets, who had faced bombs and grenades / on the other side of the world, would not look / Mr. Stenner in the eye. It was “Yes, Mr. Stenner. / Right away, Mr. Stenner,” for they remembered Tony, / who’d complained about loading a sweltering boxcar / and the next day had found his locker empty.”
Big Lies: Benjamin Carter Hett on What We Can Learn from Hitler’s Rise to Power
June 2019“Hitler could only make angry arguments. Trump, too, can’t make an appeal to reason. All he can do is push the anger button and throw abuse at people. In a sense, he is just lucky that the one thing he can do is something that resonates with a certain segment of the population.”
Taking Sides
September 1996“Back then, I believed in causes. I took sides, read books on politicians, devoured newsmagazines cover to cover, and watched presidential debates. Now I don’t want to be bothered with social issues, campaign slogans, the worries of the world. I’m tired. I have what some call ‘compassion fatigue.’ . . . I don’t take any of this as a good sign.”
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