Steve Nass's Continued Assault

State Representative Steve Nass is serious about manipulating state funding to force UW-Madison to adjust it's ideology. Let's get one thing straight: There are a lot of programs at Madison which are more ideological than academic -- names will be named later. There are a lot of professors and instructors who dabble in the ideological irresponsibly. The insane and irrelevant Kevin Barrett, quoted in the piece, is as good an example as any. But these are issues which UW can sort out for itself, while remaining true to its creed, and any respectable Badger should demand an end to this politicking. We are not a spoiled liberal child whose parents (here, Nass and the state legislature) need to cut off our allowance to get us to behave better. The parents here have a misguided idea of what we are doing wrong, and their goals for our campus are as immature and ideological as some of the elements being targeted.

I browsed around the website for the Havens Center, the progressive off-shoot of the sociology department which Nass is seeking to eliminate. I looked at their description, which does not deceive potential donors; it calls itself a "combination of progressive political commitment and scholarly rigor." And I looked at their past events, a broad selection of speakers dealing with race, class, and gender. It all seemed very dogmatic and progressive at first, and for a moment I felt like very tentatively sympathizing with Nass, until I realized that I'd never been to a Havens Center event and neither (presumably) has he. Their next event, on October 10, is a lecture by Boris Kagarlitsky, an academic from Moscow who organized workers' movements in the Soviet Union and was imprisoned by the Soviet government for distributing suppressed grassroots literature. Kagarlitsky is a socialist, but he opposed the Soviet order, and will no doubt touch upon that opposition in his speech. We should be honest: During the immediate post-Soviet era, when George H.W. Bush's approval ratings were northward of 90 percent, Kagarlitsky is a speaker that Rep. Nass might have loved.

The issue is not whether the Havens Center has a stated political orientation. It does. Rather, we should be asking whether it has an academically irresponsible, inflexible bent which makes students uncomfortable and serves no purpose. If the Center is an organization which presupposes that progressive policies lead to the best sociological outcomes, UW might be right to withdraw funding very quickly. But they appear to be more open-minded, more transparent, and more focused than other more indirect ideological positioning at UW -- here, the Comp. Lit. and English departments are good examples. (I have been told in an English class than Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde might be a metaphor for turn-of-the-century homosexual panic.) But we'll fix the English department, just like we'll fix the Havens Center if it stops being relevant. The key word there is we'll. This is an issue for UW, best handled by supporters of academic freedom who have experienced the Madison bubble and know how to change it and who to ask for help. Nass wouldn't ask to cut funding for the English department no matter what he found out about it -- and let's hope he finds out very little.