Robert Jensen : Truce at the UT Factory

East Mall fountain, University of Texas at Austin. Photo by Frank Jaquier / Flickr.

With truce at the UT factory,
time to face tough choices

More than ever we need a university that refuses to serve power and instead focuses its resources on the compelling questions of social justice and ecological sustainability.

By Robert Jensen / The Rag Blog / September 5, 2013

AUSTIN -- A truce seems to have been negotiated in the long-running skirmish between the University of Texas and its conservative critics. The Board of Regents’ new chairman has toned down the rhetoric and signaled he wants to reduce tensions that have built over the past two years, which suggests that UT president Bill Powers may keep his job, at least for now.

The start of a new school year, along with this lull in the public squabbling (though Lord only knows what is going on behind the scenes), is a good time to step back and evaluate both sides of the debate.

On one side are Gov. Rick Perry and the regents he has appointed. Their basic complaint is that UT isn’t efficient enough in pursuing what they seem to believe is the primary purpose of the modern university: Churning out technologically competent and politically compliant graduates who will take their slots in the corporate capitalist hierarchy without complaining or questioning.

From that perspective, too many resources are being wasted on irrelevant research by a self-indulgent faculty, and the campus needs a president who can crack some professorial skulls.

On the other side are UT officials and supporters in the state Legislature who defend the quality of the instruction and research at the university, invoking the tradition of academic freedom and an intellectually diverse university, and/or Longhorn loyalty.

As a longtime UT faculty member (with tenure, and hence wide latitude to say what I really think), I don’t hesitate to condemn the anti-intellectual attacks coming from right-wing forces that want to undermine genuine critical thinking. But I also recognize that some of the conservative critique is on target -- there is a lot of irrelevant research being done by a lot of self-indulgent professors, though conservatives misunderstand the problem that creates.


Not enough oxygen for critical thinking

Because of both forces -- attacks pushing the university to the right, and faculty complacency -- there’s not enough genuine critical thinking going on at UT, at a time in the world when multiple cascading crises -- economic and ecological -- demand a critical thinking that is tougher than ever.

Stated bluntly: In 21 years of teaching at UT, I have seen how the reactionary politics of the conservatives and self-serving reactions of the faculty have not served students or society very well. The solution isn’t to force the university to become more factory-like or to defend the existing system of evaluating professors. Instead, we should ask: What is real critical thinking, and on what should it be focused?

Let’s start with the roots of the public squabble: Right-wing forces run the United States, and most of the world, but are never satisfied. Corporate profits are healthy and democracy is ailing; the increasing concentration of wealth undermines the radicalizing potential of democratic processes.

But that level of domination is never enough for the masters, and the right-wing has long wanted to shut down spaces where even token resistance is still possible, especially in journalism and education.

Challenges to corporate values are possible in the university, but that doesn’t mean they are widespread. Take one look at the UT catalog -- pay special attention to the economics and business courses -- and you will see the university isn’t exactly on the front lines of the revolution. The University of Texas is a corporately-run institution largely supportive of corporate values.

Where do faculty members fit in all this? The vast majority coexist with that corporate structure and value system, either because they agree with it or because they have decided not to fight. For the past three decades -- after the threat to an “orderly” society that broke out on college campuses in the 1960s was largely contained -- most faculty have been willing to keep their heads down and let individual career interests be their guide.

In science and technology fields, the result has been increased capitulation of research agendas to corporate demands. University research increasingly is valued when it can be turned into profit, the sooner the better, regardless of the effects on society or ecosystems. Basic science that has no immediate profit-potential is allowed, in part because it provides a necessary foundation for more applied work.

In the humanities and social sciences, the result has been a trend not only toward research that serves the master, but toward research that just doesn’t much matter. The most glaring example is the faddishness of so-called “postmodern” approaches to society, in which marginally coherent “theorizing” that is detached from the real world is not only accepted but celebrated.

When I ask students how they react to this allegedly sophisticated material, they usually roll their eyes. To them, it’s just one more part of college that must be endured to get a degree, like standing in line to get forms signed.

In the social sciences, researchers can easily advance careers not by asking important questions about how systems of power work, but by constructing complex models and methodologies that are, again, so allegedly sophisticated that they have to be important. Students also find most of this kind of work annoying, especially when faculty members have a hard time explaining why the articles being assigned are worth plodding through.


Finding our focus

I’m painting with a broad brush, of course. The University of Texas has many outstanding faculty members who care -- both about students and about the state of the world. I have colleagues I respect and from whom I learn. But the mediocrity and mendacity that I am describing is routine, and the system not only allows but rewards it.

If an individual professor breaks out of the system and spends too much time writing in plain language about subjects that potentially threaten the powerful, the career path gets rocky. As a result, most faculty members take the path of least resistance, accepting the conventional politics of the university and their academic disciplines.

I’ve been lucky in my own career, entering academic life more than two decades ago when it was easier to chart an alternative path; being white and male with the accompanying privileges; and getting some lucky breaks from sympathetic colleagues. As a result, I’ve been able to spend my career writing and teaching from a sharply critical perspective, and keep my job.

My focus has been on the human and ecological crises that existing systems of power -- both corporate and governmental -- have created and the problems those systems cannot honestly face, let alone solve.

That’s what I mean by critical thinking: Focusing first on power, and how concentrations of power undermine decent human communities. That focus is more important than ever, as the human species faces new and unique threats to a sustainable future. Climate change, soil erosion, fresh water shortages, chemical contamination, species extinction -- pick a topic in ecology, and the news is bad and getting worse, and our economic system is compounding the problems.

More than ever we need a university that refuses to serve power and instead focuses its resources on the compelling questions of social justice and ecological sustainability. Instead, the University of Texas has been caught up in a struggle with right-wing forces that want to eliminate what little space for critical thinking still exists. Given the siege mentality that this attack produces, critical self-reflection by faculty members is more difficult than ever.

I believe in the power of people to collectively face these problems and turn away from the death cult of contemporary consumer capitalism shaped by corporate values, and I believe that education is an important part of that struggle. I do not believe the University of Texas, as it exists today, is likely to contribute much to that struggle unless it not only fights the right-wing forces but recognizes that it is failing students and society.

To my faculty colleagues who scoff at this analysis, I would say: You are smart people, probably smarter than I, but being smart isn’t everything. Instead of investing time in your building status in academic cliques -- where you spend a lot of energy reminding each other how smart you are -- wade out into the world and let your work be guided by a simple question: How are we humans going to save ourselves and save the planet from ruin? We live in an unsustainable system that was created by systems that concentrate wealth and power. Do we care?

America is burning, and professors have a choice to fiddle or fight.

This article was also published at the Austin Post.

[Robert Jensen is a professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center in Austin. His latest books are Arguing for Our Lives: A User’s Guide to Constructive Dialogue and We Are All Apocalyptic Now: On the Responsibilities of Teaching, Preaching, Reporting, Writing, and Speaking Out. His writing is published extensively in mainstream and alternative media. Robert Jensen can be reached at rjensen@austin.utexas.edu. Read more articles by Robert Jensen on The Rag Blog.]

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RAG RADIO / Thorne Dreyer : Journalism Prof Robert Jensen is 'Arguing for Our Lives'

Robert Jensen in the studios of KOOP in Austin, Texas, Friday, May 10, 2013. Photos by William Michael Hanks / The Rag Blog.

Rag Radio podcast: 
Journalism professor and activist
Robert Jensen is 'Arguing for Our Lives'

"I feel what I’m often doing is kind of a remedial course in how to see the world." -- Robert Jensen on Rag Radio

By Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog / May 23, 2013

Author, activist, journalism professor, and cutting-edge radical thinker Robert Jensen was our guest on Rag Radio, Friday, May 10, 2013. Rag Radio is a syndicated radio program produced at the studios of KOOP 91.7-FM, a cooperatively-run all-volunteer community radio station in Austin, Texas.

Listen to or download our interview with Robert Jensen here:


On the show, we discuss issues raised in Jensen's latest book, Arguing for Our Lives: A User's Guide to Constructive Dialog. The book has been described as a "lively primer on critical thinking... that explains how we can work collectively to enrich our intellectual lives." Author Raj Patel says that Jensen, in the book, "reacquaints us with the political and social skills we'll need if we're to reclaim politics for the 21st century."

Robert Jensen is a widely-published writer and author, a political activist, and a professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, where he teaches courses in media law, ethics, and politics. Prior to his academic career, Jensen worked for a decade as a professional journalist.

In Arguing for Our Lves, and in our Rag Radio interview, Jensen addresses issues related to how we comprehend the world, how we organize the information we learn, and how we communicate what we have come to understand. It's about analysis and rhetoric and critical thinking.
 
Jensen believes that people in our increasingly complex society are struggling  "to make sense of and organize this incredible flood of information that’s available to us now. And so a book on some basics about critical thinking struck me as useful both for a student audience and an adult audience."

"So I try to do critical thinking about difficult and controversial subjects," Jensen told us.

In his teaching at UT-Austin, Jensen told the Rag Radio audience, "I feel what I’m often doing is kind of a remedial course in how to see the world."

"The public education system doesn’t really function," he says, "especially in the way it buries so much of our history."

"In the classroom it seems clear to me that every year students come in a little less able to deal with some of the basic concepts like democracy," he said. "Not just a textbook definition, but what does it really mean? They’re often very technically competent but unimaginative."

"I’ve noticed a trend in the last few years where I have very good students in traditional terms. They test well, they score highly on exams and standardized tests. But they have no conception of the larger world."

Jensen says he has students, "usually from smaller towns," who tell him that their parents, people in their church, and others in their community "will take them aside and say, 'Now remember, you’re going to UT-Austin and they’re going to try to destroy everything you believe, and you have to stay strong.'"

Tracey Schulz, left, Robert Jensen,
and Thorne Dreyer.

"Critical thinking is threatening," he says "It’s certainly threatening to certain kinds of traditions. It’s certainly threatening to concentrated wealth and power."

Many in our increasingly complex world, Jensen believes, are feeling what he characterizes as "authentic anxiety."  They're "looking at the world, realizing that we face these complex problems that have no easy answers, maybe don’t have answers at all, and that that is a source of anxiety," he says.

We all feel "anxiety about things like the multiple ecological crises, the fact that no one really thinks that democracy is working in any meaningful way, the fact that our pop culture is increasingly corrosive, especially around issues of gender and sexuality."

"And I think, especially at this moment in history, especially on the ecological front where the data is pretty clear, that we are facing down problems that are not going to be solved easily and that may not be solvable at all in the confines of our normal everyday lives."

"Well," Jensen says, "when I look at that, I feel a sense of anguish."

But he thinks that anguish, "and a certain kind of grief," is an understandable and appropriate response. Just as "anxiety does not lead to paralysis," he says, "neither does anguish and grief. It can lead to action, it can be a great motivator."

"And," Jensen adds, "that sense of overload that people feel is perfectly understandable. I feel it myself. We’re all talking about how marvelous it is to live in the information age, but a lot of people experience it as a kind of burden."

Jensen believes that in order to comprehend and deal with the world around us, we need to overcome the pervasive anti-intellectualism in our society. "A lot of people kind of sneer at the idea of being an intellectual, because it’s been so associated with elitism," He says. But, "you can’t act in the world if you don’t understand the world."

"If you are going to be meaningful in organizing and acting to make a more just and sustainable world," that action must be "based on some idea, some theory, some analysis." "We all have an ideology," Jensen told the Rag Radio audience. "Everybody’s got a worldview, a framework through which we understand things. Nobody comes into the world 'fresh.' There’s no such thing as a 'blank slate.'

"Ideology," he says, is also "a very useful word to use to describe the way people in power can sometimes impose their point of view, through the educational system and mass media... and make their ideology appear to be the common sense of the culture."

Dreyer and Jensen at KOOP.

According to Jensen, "Modern science has done a very good job of helping us understand this universe by what scientists call reductionism. When you take a little part of the world and you try to figure it out, and then you hope that by putting all those parts together you can figure things out."

"And on the surface," he says, "it appears that that’s been a huge success. We’ve figured out an enormous amount in a couple of centuries about how the world really works as a physical system." And, Jensen says, "the knowledge is quite stunning."

"But we are also learning every day more and more about what we don’t know," he points out. "It’s just kind of a reminder of the importance of intellectual humility." "What we don’t know," Jensen says, "will always outstrip what we do know."

"We continue to intervene in this larger universe in ways that we can’t predict and the consequences of which are often potentially -- and now, with climate change, literally -- life-threatening."

"And when we intervene on the basis of incomplete knowledge, what we’re really doing, not to get too theological here, is playing God. And the Bible itself is full of a lot of reminders about what happens when human beings think they’re God."

"It usually doesn’t end so well."

Robert Jensen's writing is published in mainstream and alternative media and appears regularly on The Rag Blog. He is a board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center and is active with the 5604 Manor Community Center in Austin, the Workers Defense Project, and Cooperation Texas, an organization committed to developing and supporting worker-owned cooperatives.

Jensen's other books include We Are All Apocalyptic Now: On the Responsibilities of Teaching, Preaching, Reporting, Writing, and Speaking Out; All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice; Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity; The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege; Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity; and Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream.

Robert Jensen was previously Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio on July 8, 2011.

Rag Radio is hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor and long-time alternative journalist Thorne Dreyer, a pioneer of the Sixties underground press movement.

The show has aired since September 2009 on KOOP 91.7-FM, an all-volunteer cooperatively-run community radio station in Austin, Texas. Rag Radio is broadcast live every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP and is rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EDT) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA.

The show is streamed live on the web by both stations and, after broadcast, all Rag Radio shows are posted as podcasts at the Internet Archive.

Rag Radio is produced in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive Internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation. Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.

Rag Radio can be contacted at ragradio@koop.org.

Coming up on Rag Radio:
THIS FRIDAY, May 24, 2013 (RESCHEDULED): Amsterdam-based poet John Sinclair, legendary founder of the White Panther Party and former manager of the MC5.
Friday, May 31, 2013: Philosophy scholar Bill Meacham, author of How to Be an Excellent Human.
Listen to our May 17, 2013 Rag Radio interview with political economist Gar Alperovitz, author of What Then Must We Do?

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Bob Feldman : Civil Rights, SDS, and Student Activism in Austin, Texas, 1954-1973

Massive march against the War in Vietnam, Austin, Texas, May 8, 1970. Image from The Rag Blog.

The hidden history of Texas

Part 13: 1954-1973/2 -- Student Activism and the Anti-War Movement at the University of Texas

By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / April 17, 2013

[This is the second section of Part 13 of Bob Feldman's Rag Blog series on the hidden history of Texas.]

Inspired by the early 1960s Civil Rights Movement protests of groups like the Congress of Racial Equality [CORE], the Southern Christian Leadership Council [SCLC], and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee [SNCC], and in response to the 1965 escalation of the Pentagon’s War in Viet Nam, an increasing number of students and non-students in Austin, Texas, became involved in New Left and countercultural groups like SDS and in underground press journalism during the 1960s.

There was substantial New Left activity in other Texas cities, including Houston where underground newspaper Space City! helped pull together an active movement community, but Austin -- which had always been a center for cultural and political iconoclasm -- would become one of the nation's New Left hot spots.

As Beverly Burr observed in her thesis, "History of Student Activism at the University of Texas at Austin (1960-88)":

The Students for a Democratic Society [SDS] formed a chapter in the early spring of 1964. From 1964-7, the UT chapter of SDS began to build the local white, radical student movement. Alice Embree, one of the early participants in SDS at UT, said that when she went through registration at the beginning of the Spring 1964 semester, there was an SDS information table. She conjectured that 4 or 5 people started the group.

The early focus of the group was participating with black student activists in the sit-ins at downtown Austin restaurants... In mid-October 1965, SDS held a death march protesting U.S. policy toward Vietnam. This protest was apparently the first antiwar demonstration on the campus during the 1960s. About 70 students participated in the march and rally... SDS had attempted to get a parade permit to march on the streets during the rally but the permit had been refused by the City Council...

SDS held its first fall 1966 meeting in late October [1966]... At the same time, students organized an underground newspaper called The Rag... Most of the staffers were SDSers who created the paper not only to publicize issues of importance to the movement but also in reaction to the corporate controlled mainstream media... During the fall [of 1966] 10 SDS and Rag women... held a sit-in protesting the draft at the Selective Service in Austin. In January of 1967 several demonstrations were held against Secretary of State Dean Rusk while he was in town... Over 200 came to the second protest which succeeded in canceling Rusk’s dinner at the UT Alumni Center...

The first conflict between SDS and the University occurred later in the spring of 1967 during Flipped-Out Week... SDS had planned a week of activities including a speech by... Stokely Carmichael..., an anti-war march to the Capitol, and Gentle Thursday... The activities attracted several thousands... The week after Flipped-Out Week, SDS distributed flyers... to plan a Monday protest against Vice President Hubert Humphrey who would be speaking at the Capitol... On Monday, about 150 students protested at the Capitol against the war in Vietnam. Later that day, UT withdrew recognition of SDS as a campus organization...

UT initiated disciplinary proceedings against 6 students involved in the anti-war protest... against Hubert Humphrey... Simultaneously the UT administration... called for the arrest of George Vizard, a non-student. Vizard was arrested by Austin police... The police brutally arrested him in the Chuckwagon, a café and radical hangout in the Student Union... Over 250 outraged students and faculty members... founded the University Freedom Movement [UFM].

University Freedom Movement rally,
UT campus, 1967. Photo from The Rag.

But despite subsequently well-attended free speech rallies and extralegal campus protests by UFM supporters during the rest of April 1967, the six anti-war students who were being disciplined by the UT administration were all placed on probation for their political activity on May 1, 1967. Yet the anti-war countercultural movement in Austin continued to gain more local popular support, and in October 1969, around 10,000 people protested in Austin against the Republican Nixon Administration's failure to end the Pentagon’s War in Vietnam .

African-American student and non-student Movement activists also continued to organize anti-racist protests during the late 1960s in Austin. As the “History of Student Activism at the University of Texas at Austin ” thesis also noted:

In 1966, the Negro Association for Progress [NAP] was formed... During the spring of 1967, NAP... members converged on the office of... athletic director and... football coach Darrell Royal to find out why UT was not accepting or recruiting black athletes... In October [1967]... NAP held an illegal demonstration for black student rights... In the spring of 1968 NAP was replaced by the Afro-Americans for Black Liberation [AABL]...

In May [1968]... the owner of a Conoco station... attacked a black musician... Larry Jackson of Austin SNCC and Grace Cleaver, chair of AABL, called on all persons opposed to racism to picket [and to boycott the station]... Jackson requested that SDS participate in the action and the group agreed. The students held several sit-ins at the gas station. City police arrested about 50 in the demonstrations... That fall AABL won 2 academic programs in Afro-American Studies...

And in a Feb. 1, 2003, speech before the W.H. Passion Historical Society at the Southgate-Lewis House in Austin, former Austin SNCC activist Larry Jackson also recalled how a SNCC chapter came to be formed in Austin during the late 1960s:

I was born in central East Texas, a little town called Hearn... And that’s the place I first began my activities in civil rights... I first got involved in a lot of civil rights activities when I was in high school in Hearne, Texas. And I was trying to integrate the pool... I left Hearne, Texas because I was involved with so much strife there...

And in Houston I became very active in school activities at Texas Southern... And what really got me here in Austin was I had previously worked on the Martin Luther King speech day in Houston... And at the music hall, outside of the TSU people and a few whites to hear Martin Luther King speak, there was not 200 people there. And this happened in 1967... And I ended up coming here on a speaking deal with Stokely Carmichael and Rap Brown. That’s how I got to Austin , Texas... And so he was speaking out there at the University of Texas. So I stayed on here because I was gonna form a SNCC chapter here in Austin...”

Austin was also a center for the fast-growing women's liberation movement and, according to Jo Freeman in Women: A Feminist Perspective, the landmark Supreme Court decision on abortion, Roe v. Wade, "was the project of a small feminist group in Austin, Texas and the lawyer [Sarah Weddington] who argued Roe before the Supreme Court was one of its participants."

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s. Read more articles by Bob Feldman on The Rag Blog.]

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RAG RADIO / Thorne Dreyer : A Conversation With Austin Chronicle Editor and SXSW Co-Founder Louis Black

Austin Chronicle editor and South by Southwest co-founder Louis Black in the studios of KOOP-FM in Austin, Texas, Friday, March 1, 2013. Photo by Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog.

Rag Radio Podcast:
Austin Chronicle editor Louis Black,
co-founder of South by Southwest

"It used to be that you had to leave Austin to establish yourself politically, as a writer, as a filmmaker, as a musician. And now the world comes to Austin." -- Louis Black

By Rag Radio / The Rag Blog / March 7, 2013

Austin Chronicle editor Louis Black -- co-founder of the massive South by Southwest Music, Interactive and Film Festivals and Conferences -- was Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio, Friday, March 1, 2013.

Rag Radio is a syndicated radio program produced at the studios of KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin, Texas.

Listen to or download our interview with Louis Black here:


Louis Black is the editor of The Austin Chronicle, Austin’s major weekly newspaper, which he co-founded with Nick Barbaro in 1981. In 1987 Black co-founded South by Southwest Music, Interactive and Film Festivals and Conferences, along with Barbaro and Roland Swenson.

SXSW Music is the largest music festival and music industry event in the world; SXSW Interactive is arguably the largest event of its kind in the world; and SXSW Film has become one of the preeminent film festivals in the country. And there's a new educational component (SXSWedu) that "supports innovations in learning for education practitioners, industry leaders and policy maker."

(This year's SXSW takes place between March 8 and March 17, 2013, at the Austin Convention Center and all over Austin, Texas.)

On Rag Radio, Louis Black talked about his personal history growing up in Teaneck, New Jersey. ("I had dyslexia, I had attention issues, all kinds of authority issues. I was a disaster as a student.") So he became a film geek. At about 12 he became best friends with Leonard Maltin -- who would grow up to be one of the nation's most honored film critics -- “and we began to go into New York City after school and all-day Saturdays to watch films -- to museum screenings, we’d go to the film societies... We saw tons of movies."

"We weren’t really auteur freaks or international film fans," he said. "We would see lots of B movies, lots of cartoons... When we were 15, Len and I met Buster Keaton under the Brooklyn Bridge where he was filming the film, Film." Film was written by the legendary Irish playwright and novelist Samuel Beckett, who was standing nearby at the time. Black and Maltin were thrilled to meet Keaton but had no idea who Beckett was.

Thanks to Maltin's connections, Black ended up studying film in graduate school at the University of Texas. "I had been watching movies all my live, I had an enormous amount of knowledge," and suddenly he was not only a star student, but he had found his calling. Black received an MFA from UT-Austin, with a concentration in film studies, in 1980. And he would soon find himself at the epicenter of Austin's big-time cultural explosion.

Louis Black was a founding board member of the Austin Film Society, and the board's first president, and, along with then Texas Monthly Editor Evan Smith, co-founded the Texas Film Hall of Fame in 2001. He executive produced the documentary Be Here to Love Me: A Film About Townes Van Zandt, by Margaret Brown, and was an associate producer on Brown’s documentary, The Order of Myths, which won a Peabody Award in 2009.

Black executive produced the DVD release of the late Eagle Pennell's The Whole Shootin' Match, a 1968 film which had long been thought lost and that Robert Redford cites as inspiration for starting the Sundance Institute.

Louis Black and Thorne Dreyer.
Photo by Tracey Schulz.

Black says that the Austin Chronicle, with a circulation close to 450,000, can no longer legitimately be called an "alternative" publication ("KOOP radio is 'alternative,'" he said), but is a weekly newspaper featuring local news reporting and extensive cultural coverage -- and with a "definite point of view." The Chronicle has played a big role in Austin's evolution as a cultural hub. "Austin’s a unique place and a very special place," Black told the Rag Radio audience, "and certainly we’ve contributed to that, and we’ve benefited enormously from that."

When they started South by Southwest, Black said, they thought they'd have a "nice regional event, a little gathering in Austin for a couple of days, with workshops and panels and hearing some music… and we’d end it with a softball game and a barbeque." Well, "it was regional for the first year or two," he added, "but then it became national and then international. And then, under Roland Swenson's leadership, we added film, we added interactive, and now we’ve added an education component. And it mirrors Austin. The event is just a multiplier for what goes on in Austin all year round. It’s really succeeded."

And has it succeeded! As the UT alumni mag Alcalde put it in its March/April 2011 issue:

From its modest beginnings as a regional music conference in 1987, South by Southwest has ballooned into a multimedia powerhouse. Its music, film, and interactive-media conferences attract tens of thousands, turning Austin into the center of the cultural universe for one week every March.

Whatever you’re doing, South by Southwest is the place to show it off. Johnny Cash launched his big comeback at South by Southwest in 1994. More recently, Norah Jones started building buzz there before she won all her Grammy Awards. Newly launched Twitter saw tweets per day more than triple at the 2007 interactive conference. And Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, which won [the 2010] best-picture Oscar, was the talk of the 2009 film festival.

At last year's music festival, Bruce Springsteen provided a memorable keynote address and electrifying showcase performances, heading a stellar cast of artists, from world-renowned to (as yet) little-known, and this year's bill includes Dave Grohl, Stevie Nicks, and Green Day. There will be more than 20,000 registered participants and many thousands more will come into Austin for the related musical events involving more than 2,000 bands performing at easily a hundred venues. The film festival will offer screenings of more than 150 films.

SXSW Interactive is "probably the biggest event of its kind in the world, and now has hundreds of speakers," Black says. More than 25,000 attended last year's Interactive gathering and a substantial increase is expected this year. "With Interactive you can just feel the energy sizzling," Black says. As The Wall Street Journal wrote, "The brainpower that assembles in Austin is overwhelming. Everywhere you look there are smart people discussing smart ideas."

And the film festival is now "one of the most highly-regarded film festivals in the world." Austin is widely-known as the "live music capital of the world," with thousands of active musicians. But it has also become a major independent film center, home to filmmakers like Richard Linklater, Robert Rodriguez, and Mike Judge.

According to Black, "There’s more creative people in Austin now. More artists and musicians and filmmakers making a living in Austin or living in Austin and having their work seen around the world. It used to be that you had to leave Austin to establish yourself politically, as a writer, as a filmmaker, as a musician. And now the world comes to Austin."

"And the special thing about the creative scene in Austin," he said, is that it's "a completely culturally-integrated community. When you go to New York, the documentary filmmakers don’t hang out with the theatrical filmmakers who don’t hang out with the animators. In Austin all those filmmakers do, and people with a lot of different political stripes do: poets hang out with filmmakers who hang out with novelists who hang out with artists."

And, host Dreyer added, "everybody hangs out with the musicians."

Rag Radio has aired since September 2009 on KOOP 91.7-FM, an all-volunteer cooperatively-run community radio station in Austin, Texas. Hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor and long-time alternative journalist Thorne Dreyer, a pioneer of the Sixties underground press movement, Rag Radio is broadcast every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CST) on KOOP, and is rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EST) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA.

The show is streamed live on the web by both stations and, after broadcast, all Rag Radio shows are posted as podcasts at the Internet Archive.

Rag Radio is produced in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation. Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.

Rag Radio can be contacted at ragradio@koop.org.

Coming up on Rag Radio:
THIS FRIDAY, Friday, March 8: Novelist David McCabe, author of Without Sin, based on a true story of a sex trafficking ring exploiting young, undocumented women.
Friday, March 15: Legendary producer Chris Strachwitz of Arhoolie Records, and filmmakers Maureen Gosling and Chris Simon, This Ain't No Mouse Music!
Friday, March 22: Progressive sportswriter Dave Zirin, Sports Editor at The Nation.

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RAG RADIO / Thorne Dreyer : Anne Lewis' Documentary About Anne Braden Is 'Gem of a Film'

Filmmaker Anne Lewis on Rag Radio in the studios of KOOP-FM in Austin, Texas, Friday, February 22, 2012. Photo by William Michael Hanks / The Rag Blog.

Rag Radio Podcast:
Documentary filmmaker Anne Lewis,
co-director of Anne Braden: Southern Patriot

By Rag Radio / The Rag Blog / February 27, 2013

Documentary filmmaker and University of Texas senior lecturer Anne Lewis, whose most recent work, Anne Braden: Southern Patriot, was called a "gem of a film" by folksinger and civil rights activist Joan Baez, was Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio, Friday, February 22, 2013.

On the show, Lewis discussed her impressive body of work as an independent filmmaker and, in particular, her acclaimed film about the remarkable Southern civil rights fighter Anne Braden.

She also addressed recent developments at the University of Texas at Austin, where university president Bill Powers has made radical proposals to "increase efficiency" at the the school, in part by privatizing much of the university staff. Powers' plans have drawn reaction from faculty, students, and union activists on the UT-Austin campus, and Lewis wrote about the issue in The Rag Blog.

Rag Radio is a syndicated radio program produced at the studios of KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin, Texas. This episode was produced during KOOP's Spring 2013 Membership Drive and includes fundraising pitches for the cooperatively-run all volunteer public radio station.

Listen to or download our interview with Anne Lewis, here:


Anne Lewis is an independent filmmaker, a senior lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin's School of Radio-Television-Film, and an active member of the Texas State Employees Union (TSEU-CWA Local 6186) and NABET-CWA. She has been making documentary films since 1970. Most of her filmmaking depicts working class people -- often women -- fighting for social change. She is associated with Appalshop, an arts and education center located in the heart of Appalachia.

Anne Lewis was associate director of Harlan County, U.S.A, and the producer/director of Fast Food Women, To Save the Land and People, Morristown: in the air and sun, and a number of other social issue and cultural documentaries. She was associate director/assistant camera for Harlan County, USA, the Academy Award-winning documentary, which focused on the Brookside, Kentucky, strike of 1975. After the strike, Lewis moved to the coalfields where she lived for 25 years.

Lewis was co-director with Mimi Pickering of the 2012 film, Anne Braden: Southern Patriot, a first-person documentary about the extraordinary life of the American civil rights leader. The film was first screened by the Austin Film Society on July 18, 2012.

Filmmaker Anne Lewis.

Writing at The Rag Blog, William Michael Hanks called the film "a wellspring of intellectual reason, a blueprint for action [that] includes some of the most iconic footage from the civil-rights movement ever seen." The Rag Blog's Hanks, himself a former documentary filmmaker, joined us in the interview, discussing with Lewis her unique use of first person narrative in constructing the film.

According to The Texas Observer's Susan Smith Richardson, Anne Braden, a middle-class white woman from Alabama who "rejected her racial privilege in the Jim Crow South and devoted her life to fighting racism," was considered a "traitor to her race" by many who opposed her. Braden and her husband Carl, who together published the crusading Southern Patriot newspaper, were targets of Sen. Joseph McCarthy's anti-Communist witch hunts. Braden, who was an inspirational figure among movement activists, was called "eloquent and prophetic" by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Joan Baez called Anne Braden: Southern Patriot, "a gem of a film, accented with freedom fighters who speak firsthand about carving a path through a traumatized, violent, racist South, to make way for one of the largest and most effective nonviolent movements for social change the world has ever seen."

To learn more about Anne Lewis' work, visit her website, AnneLewis.org.

Rag Radio has aired since September 2009 on KOOP 91.7-FM, an all-volunteer cooperatively-run community radio station in Austin, Texas. Hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor and long-time alternative journalist Thorne Dreyer, a pioneer of the Sixties underground press movement, Rag Radio is broadcast every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CST) on KOOP, and is rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EST) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA.

The show is streamed live on the web by both stations and, after broadcast, all Rag Radio shows are posted as podcasts at the Internet Archive.

Rag Radio is produced in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation. Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.

Rag Radio can be contacted at ragradio@koop.org.

Coming up on Rag Radio:
THIS FRIDAY, March 1, 2013: Louis Black, co-founder and editor of the Austin Chronicle and co-founder of the South by Southwest Music, Interactive, and Film Festival (SXSW).
Friday, March 8: Novelist David McCabe, author of Without Sin, based on a true story of a sex trafficking ring exploiting young, undocumented women.
Friday, March 15: Legendary producer Chris Strachwitz of Arhoolie Records, and filmmakers Maureen Gosling & Chris Simon, This Ain't No Mouse Music!

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Bob Feldman : Texas Civil Rights Movement Wins Big Victories, 1954-1973

White and African American students from Austin area colleges sit in at a segregated lunch counter on Congress Avenue in Austin, April 1960 as part of a concerted effort to integrate lunch counters. Image from Austin History Center.

The hidden history of Texas

Part 13: 1954-1973/1 -- Civil rights efforts to desegregate schools, public facilities, have wide success.

By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / February 25, 2013

[This is the first section of Part 13 of Bob Feldman's Rag Blog series on the hidden history of Texas.]

Between 1953 and 1964, the percentage of non-agricultural workers in Texas who were unionized dropped from 16.8 to 13.3 percent; but the number of labor union members in 1964 in Texas  -- around 375,000 -- remained about the same as it had been in 1953. As F. Ray Marshall’s Labor in the South observed:

The main losses in Texas were the OCAW, which had 31,000 members in 1955 and about 20,000 in 1964; and UAW, whose membership had declined from 16,057 in 1955 to about 14,000 in 1964; the carpenters, who had 27,321 members in Texas in 1957 and about 15,000 in 1964; the packinghouse workers, who had 2,035 members in 1955 and 1,200 in 1964; and the textile workers who had 720 members in 1955 and only 185 in 1964.

The main unions to gain membership in Texas between 1960 and 1964 were the American Federation of Government Employees, the National Association of Letter Carriers, the state, county and municipal employees; the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and the Amalgamated Meat Cutters.

Yet between 1947 and 1973, the number of factories in Texas increased from 7,128 to 14,431; and the number of factory workers in Texas exceeded 730,000 by 1972.

By 1960, the number of African-Americans who still lived in rural Texas had dropped to 256,750 and the number of African-American tenant farmers and sharecroppers in Texas had dropped to 3,138, while the number of African-Americans in Texas who still owned their own farms had declined from 52,751 in 1940 to 15,041 by 1960.

And “by 1960 only 8 percent of all black workers in Texas remained in rural areas -- a sharp decline from the 32 percent of two decades before,” according to Alwyn Barr’s Black Texans. But, in contrast, the “urban black population in Texas grew from 428,110 in 1940 to 905,089 in 1960,” according to the same book.

Although “Texas Attorney General John Ben Shepperd made a concerted effort to drive the NAACP out of Texas by suing the association” in 1956, according to Merline Pitre’s In Struggle Against Jim Crow, after the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision ruled that racial segregation in U.S. public school systems was unconstitutional, African-American civil rights activists in Texas continued to protest against racism within Texas society during the 1950s and 1960s; and -- despite the political opposition of some white Texans who wanted to preserve legalized segregation in the state -- were able to win some of their anti-racist demands between 1954 and 1973.

As Black Texans recalled, “protests by local black organizations and court cases brought the integration of publicly owned restaurants, golf courses, parks, beaches and rest rooms in Houston, Beaumont, and other Texas cities during the 1950s.” In 1954, for example, Houston ’s public golf course and public library were desegregated; and between 1954 and 1956 all major Texas cities ended racial separation on their city buses.

Yet, “at Texarkana College in 1955 -- a crowd of whites prevented blacks from enrolling” and “White Citizens Councils, an anti-desegregation group…appeared in Texas during the summer of 1955 and soon claimed a membership of 20,000,” according to Randolph Campbell’s Gone To Texas, with 250 delegates attending its 1955 convention.

And, “although enrollment at UT was fully integrated by 1956, blacks were banned from varsity athletics and relegated to segregated and substandard dormitories;” and “Austin in the early 1950s was still segregated in most respects -- restaurants, hotels, movie theaters, drug stores, public schools, parks, swimming pools, hospitals, housing and public transportation,” according to David Humphrey’s Austin: An Illustrated History.

Barton Springs, for example, “was off limits to blacks as late as 1959” and “some residents saw in [former Austin Mayor] Tom Miller’s plans for an interstate highway  just an extension of the wall of separation,” according to the same book. [I-35, in effect, created a barrier between downtown Austin and mostly African-American East Austin.]

Near Fort Worth, “forceful opposition to school integration at Mansfield” also developed in the fall of 1956 “when over 250 whites stopped the entry of black pupils into formerly white schools” and then-Democratic Texas Governor Shivers “used Texas Rangers, not to disperse the mob, but to remove the students,” according to Black Texans; and “Mansfield schools remained segregated for at least two more years,” despite the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, according to the same book.

Houston also still had the largest racially segregated public school system in the United States in 1957. And while Southern Methodist University (SMU) administrators finally began allowing African-American applicants to attend this college in 1955, Texas Tech, Rice University , Baylor University, and Texas Christian University administrators apparently didn’t allow African-American applicants to become students on their campuses until 1960.

So, not surprisingly, anti-racist civil rights protests and demonstrations by both students and non-students in Texas continued during the 1960s. As Black Texans recalled:

In the early 1960s black and white students from Texas Southern University in Houston, the University of Texas in Austin, and other colleges across the state began to protest restaurant and theater segregation. Bishop and Wiley college students in Marshall undertook one of the first series of non-violent demonstrations in Texas during the spring of 1960. Prairie View students with limited white support boycotted Hempstead merchants in the fall of 1963.

Local chapters of the NAACP and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) also picketed, petitioned and boycotted against segregation in Austin, Houston, and San Antonio... In El Paso, where Negroes formed only 2 percent of the population, the city desegregated public accommodations by ordinance... In some smaller East Texas towns, such as Huntsville and San Augustine, sit-ins and protests remained necessary even in 1965 to bring integration of public accommodations...

Since University of Texas “dormitories were still segregated” and African-American students at UT were “still excluded from varsity athletics” in 1960, in Austin during the spring of 1960 “black and white students protested UT’s dormitory and athletic policies” and also “picketed nearby restaurants” and “staged sit-ins at downtown [Austin] lunch counters, according to Austin: An Illustrated History. But the same book also observed:

Most downtown eateries stood pat... Demonstrations accelerated in December [1960] when groups of 100 to 200 UT students participated in "stand-ins" at the two movie theaters on the Drag...Hundreds of demonstrators celebrated Lincoln’s birthday in 1961 with stand-ins at both movie houses on the Drag and the State and Paramount theaters downtown... In September [1961] the two theaters on the Drag agreed to integrate... Sit-ins at a white dormitory brought disciplinary probation to several participants... Finally, the regents gave in on integrated housing in 1964...

At UT in Austin (whose student body included only around 200 African-American students in 1961), the Students for Direct Action campus group (which was founded in the fall of 1960) also picketed in 1962 at “the Forty Acres Club, a newly-opened private "whites-only" faculty club often used for university meetings and entertaining official university visitors,” according to the 1988 “History of Student Activism at the University of Texas at Austin (1960-1988)" thesis by Beverly Burr that was posted on the UT Watch website.

And in the fall of 1962 student activists on UT’s campus also founded the Negroes for Equal Rights (NER) and Campus Interracial Committee [CIC] campus civil rights  groups which were successful in pressuring the University of Texas administration to finally hire its first African-American faculty member (an assistant professor of civil engineering named Ervin Perry) in May 1964; and to finally allow African-Americans to become members of the UT faculty’s Forty Acres Club in March 1965.

Yet despite the early 60s civil rights protests in Austin, as late as the fall of 1963, Austin’s 24,413 African-American residents “were still barred from half or more of Austin’s white-owned restaurants, hotels, and motels and from business schools and bowling alleys,” “9 out of 10 black elementary-age children attended schools that were at least 99 percent black” and “discrimination in employment and housing was common,” according to Austin: An Illustrated History.

So, not surprisingly, Austin’s NAACP chapter held a six-day civil rights filibuster at an April 1964 meeting of Austin’s City Council to demand that it pass an anti-discrimination ordinance; and Joan Baez even appeared at a“freedom hootenanny” in the front of Austin’s City Hall before an audience of 200 local civil rights movement supporters on the first day of this Austin NAACP civil rights filibuster.

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s. Read more articles by Bob Feldman on The Rag Blog.]

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Anne Lewis : UT-Austin Ponders Privatizing Staff

Members of the Make UT Sweatshop-Free Coalition gather at the UT-Austin Tower Wednesday, February 6, to protest the University's consideration of job privatization for staff members. Photo by David Maly / The Horn.
'Culture war' at UT-Austin: 
President Powers considers privatization

The most deeply-rooted problem with Powers’ plan for cost cutting through privatization, consolidation, and commercialization is that it does not respect the rights of workers.

By Anne Lewis / The Rag Blog / February 8, 2013

AUSTIN, Texas -- On January 29, 2013, University of Texas at Austin President Bill Powers convened the UT-Austin community to make recommendations about increasing our efficiency that would include job privatization for university staff.

President Powers’ speech led to despair, anger, and confusion across our campus. Despair and anger came from threatened loss of health care, state pensions, jobs, and community; confusion from the contradiction posed by the projected image of Powers as our defender against the likes of Governor Rick Perry and the University of Texas Board of Regents.

Powers is presented as an administrator who wants both affordability and high quality in a February 2, 2013, Associated Press article, “Texas Fight Highlights Higher Ed Culture Clash.” The article -- which says that, "If colleges were automobiles, the University of Texas at Austin would be a Cadillac: a famous brand, a powerful engine of research and teaching" -- defines Texas as ground zero in a culture war to preserve educational quality and research, but degenerates towards the end when it quotes Peter Flawn, our emeritus president:

"Universities are by their very nature elite," he said. "Their job is to separate the sheep from the goats and the goat-sheep from the sheep-goats, and try to produce people who are knowledgeable and can reason, think and solve problems.”

And that, it seems, is the intellectual quality of this particular thread of discussion. I would not characterize my students as sheep, goats, sheep-goats, goat-sheep, nor would I consider the role of a university to be a sorter of the forenamed critters. It is not true that the enemy of our enemy is our friend. I think it’s critical that we look hard at what President Powers said.

The United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, which lays the groundwork for “an existence worthy of human dignity,” states in Article 23:

Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favorable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment. Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.

The most deeply-rooted problem with Powers’ plan for cost cutting through privatization, consolidation, and commercialization is that it does not respect the rights of workers.

The plan is based on a report from the Committee on Business Productivity which convened for the first time in April 2012. Committee Chair Steve Rohleder is part of the executive leadership of Accenture, a global outsourcing company that cost the state of Texas more than $800 million in a failed effort to privatize food stamp and TANF eligibility. Other members of the committee are tied to equity firms TPG, Capital Royalty, HM Capital, Falconhead Capital, and Bull Ventures; and to Boeing, StarTex, Dell, and Susser.

President Powers says that the only way that UT-Austin can become “the very best public university in America” is to operate like a business through outsourcing and privatization of services; market costs to students for meal plans, housing, and parking; job reductions through consolidation of human resources, technology, and financial processing; and commercialization of intellectual property. He calls this a moral imperative.

President Powers states, “We’ve been outsourcing all along: we don’t have a fleet of airplanes used by faculty to get to meetings; we use Southwest Airlines.”

UT probably should not own a fleet of airplanes and pay the pilots with public funds. But the relationship of pilots to our university is quite different from that of workers who serve food, clean buildings, support our offices and technical facilities, and generally keep the university running.

These workers (who include many students) will lose and lose big -- guaranteed pay levels and advancement possibilities, state pensions and benefits, safety and environmental standards, rules against discrimination in employment, and the right to join a union.

I also question the assumption that cost-saving experiments endorsed by finance capital are best for the citizens of Texas. Accenture’s failed contract needlessly increased the suffering of thousands of poor and working class Texans and their children. The attempt to take over management of the Kerrville State Hospital last year by Geo Group, the private prison corporation, was resolved when State Health Commissioner David Lakey stated that reductions in staffing would put both the patients and the State of Texas at risk.

The notion that a business model is the only way for human endeavors to succeed seems strange at best. Cost cutting business practices have contributed to economic inequality, disregard of safety and environmental standards, and discrimination in employment. It’s why we need laws, government regulation, and labor unions where workers can have a collective voice.

It’s often more -- not less -- expensive when neoliberals turn not-for-profit into profit-making ventures. The savings that come from lower pay, lower health care costs, and erosion of pensions for workers will most likely benefit the company more than our university. That’s part of the margin of profit. The other part is increased cost for services.

We already see Powers’ suggestion that students should pay the market value -- 50% more for their privatized meal plans; 113% more for privatized parking for staff and students; more for privatized student housing -- all going towards the profits of contracted corporations and none benefiting our community.

President Powers boasts that “over the past five years, some 4,000 people left the payroll voluntarily. That’s 20 percent of UT’s core staff workforce.” Those jobs and positions have not been replaced. The thought of an additional 20 percent cutback is feared not only by workers who may not leave voluntarily but also by their co-workers who have added workloads and sometimes have impossible jobs.

Go to any office in our university at 7 p.m. and you will find workers who have been there since 8 a.m.. The work of support staff is necessary for the university to function properly. It’s wrong to balance a budget on job loss and inadequate staffing.

Finally, in an unfortunate example, President Powers compares the effort, which will be led by Chief Financial Officer Kevin Hegarty, to the Pope moving an obelisk in 1586. As a union woman who respects the dignity of work both intellectual and manual, I ask who exactly carried that 344-ton obelisk and under whose organizational authority.

We're sure that Mr. Hegarty would agree that he has none of the moral authority of a pope. Our university is not a 344-ton obelisk. We who devote our intellect, energy, and care to UT should have a voice in these decisions that so deeply impact our lives, our families, and our community.

I would suggest another approach. President Powers should go to the Texas legislature and demand that Texas pay its share with the same force he used to promote Austin taxpayer funding of a new medical school.

The Texas Constitution (1876) states:

The Legislature shall establish, organize and provide for the maintenance, support and direction of a university of the first class, styled "The University of Texas."

Thirty years ago, Texas funded more than half of the budget of UT-Austin. It’s now down to 13%. President Powers should join us at the Capitol on April 10 for a march and rally in defense of the public good and public workers.

Will Rogers once said, “When you’re in a hole, stop digging.”

[Anne Lewis, a senior lecturer at the University of Texas and a member of TSEU-CWA Local 6186 and NABET-CWA, is an independent filmmaker associated with Appalshop. She is co-director of Anne Braden: Southern Patriot, associate director of Harlan County, U.S.A, and the producer/director of Fast Food Women, To Save the Land and People, Morristown: in the air and sun, and a number of other social issue and cultural documentaries. Her website is annelewis.org.]

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Mercedes Lynn de Uriarte : Supreme Court Case Raises Larger Diversity Issues at UT-Austin

Though the UT-Austin student body is among the most diverse in the country, other related issues plague the school and its history. Photo by Eric Gay / AP / Christian Science Monitor.
Supreme Court focus on UT
student DNA masks pressing issues

The matter being debated by the Supreme Court is not apt to really address the long uneven evolution of the University of Texas toward integration.

By Mercedes Lynn de Uriarte / The Rag Blog / November 29, 2012

AUSTIN -- Several weeks ago the U.S. Supreme Court once again heard a lawsuit (Fisher v. the University of Texas) challenging the admission policies of the University of Texas that take race and ethnicity into account as one of the various factors considered. At the heart of the recurring conflict over admission policy is the struggle over whether UT must become integrated -- an achievement long resisted.

In fact, like many southern universities, the institution has layers of diversity, the most evident of which are the maintenance and service staff. The transient student population is now integrated by population based on DNA count. Over half -- 26,090, 51% --of the campus student body is white. This fall there are 8,973 Latinos, 2,140 African Americans, 7,939 Asian Americans and 151 American Indians. Of these, 80% are Texas residents. UT clearly meets its mandate as a land grant institution to educate future decision-makers largely the result of admission policies.

The battle to retain a bit of intellectual diversity rages on. This month Asian-American faculty and junior administrators met to discuss the implications of what the current suit might mean to their studies center. Just last year Mexican-American students demonstrated against curriculum cutbacks in their studies center made necessary by budget shortfalls. African and African-American Studies also felt the sting of cuts.

But even more visible are a series of racist actions, the most recent and most nasty three occurring since the start of the fall semester three months ago. A UT sorority threw a “Mexican theme” party where invited guests came as gardeners, maids, or criminals -- or wore T-shirts identifying themselves as “ILLEGAL.” Others dressed as border guards mingled.

In another stunt, fraternity members threw balloons of bleach at minority students. One fraternity party, also planned around race themes, was cancelled. The press covered all of these incidents. The October 22 issue of the student Daily Texan, reported that someone carved swastikas in an off-campus dormitory door where three Jewish students live. These sorts of hate messages have a long history at UT where the statue of Martin Luther King has often been vandalized.

July 16, 2004, cover of UT student newspaper, The Daily Texan, featuring story about campus dormitory named after former law prof who was also a Ku Klux Klan leader. Creative Commons image from fretna.org.
Even the buildings reflect a racist past. In 2010, after publication of a history book by Tom Russell, a former UT Law School professor, the University, after some deliberation, changed the name of a dorm memorializing William Stuart Simkins, a Klan leader and Law School professor in the early 1900s. UT administrators named the residence hall just after the 1954 Supreme Court decision outlawed segregated schools.

The least integrated of the UT human component is the faculty.

Demographics of teaching faculty (which excludes those who are deans, directors, or administrative officials) testifiy to slow integration across rank, gender, and diversity. At first glance, this does not seem to be the case: Of 3,018 of this faculty 1874 are male, 1144 are female. Within this group 80% are white.

But the ratio of full professors indicates significant skewed reality -- in 2010 (the latest posted data) just short of 800 were male, only 210 were female. Because race and ethnicity narrows the general professorial group, the ratio of minority professors to full professor whites is minute.

Some departments, including my own, have never promoted a woman or a minority to full -- although one minority woman (no longer at UT) was appointed to full,  a move that avoids the usual review and promotion committee approval -- and recently hired a woman who had earned the rank of full at another university.

Some of UT’s DNA profile records earlier years of blatant discrimination, but more recent evidence indicates a fairly tenacious hold on troubling patterns of the past. For example, three years ago UT authorized a study of the treatment of its faculty women drawing on its own statistics, pay records, and promotion experiences. That produced 170 pages that charted inequity.

The experience of minority females was not made specific because, as one equity researcher explained: “The small number of minority women faculty is not statistically significant.”

So the matter being debated by the Supreme Court is not apt to really address the long uneven evolution of the University of Texas toward integration. The suit, of course, does not consider intellectual diversity -- a component critical to the success of social integration. A legal mandate would raise both first amendment protections and academic freedom guarantees.

But the push in some quarters to do away with studies that focus on minority literature, history, sociology, and other content is short-sighted as well as anti-intellectual. And narrowing access to education contributes to these problems.

[Mercedes Lynn de Uriarte, a PhD, is an Associate Professor Emeritus at the University of Texas. She currently directs a funded study -- Austin Displaced -- which explores the impact of gentrification on affected residents. Mercedes is also president of the board of the New Journalism Project, the nonprofit that publishes The Rag Blog.]

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Robert Jensen : Learning to Hate Longhorn Football

Bevo goes to college. Photo by Mose Buchele for KUT News. Inset photo of Texas cheerleader by Donn Jones / AP.
Learning to hate Longhorn football

Dealing with UT’s jock-obsessed culture is easy -- I critique it, without hesitation. Dealing with student athletes is more complicated.

By Robert Jensen / The Rag Blog / August 30, 2012

[The opener of the 2012 Longhorn football season is Saturday, September 1. In this essay UT-Austin journalism prof Bob Jensen reflects on the downside of the team that is so beloved in Austin and around the state.]

I have never much liked football. But after 20 years as a professor at the University of Texas, I have learned to hate football, and really hate Longhorn football.

I’ve also learned that some players hate the football machine as much as I do.

As a child, I liked running, jumping, and throwing a ball around; like most kids, I enjoyed the games that let us enjoy our bodies. But I developed a distinct distaste for organized sports, especially football, as I learned about the different kinds of damage that the sport could do.

I grew up short, skinny, and effeminate in a small Midwestern city in the 1960s and ‘70s, which meant I was unlikely to measure up to the norms that football players seemed to embody -- the celebration of domination and aggression, conquest and control. Boys like me dreamed not of playing football but of avoiding being beaten up by football players. My younger brother, the only one in the family with any serious athletic talent, had it worse -- he played football well and by junior high he was on his way to knee problems. The smartest thing he did was to walk away from the sport while he could still walk.

Today, I dislike almost everything about football -- the senseless violence, the fans reveling in that violence, the pathological glorification of competition, the sexual objectification of female cheerleaders and dancers, the obscene amounts of money spent on the spectacle.

Yes, I know that for some young people football can be a great character-building and teamwork-enhancing experience. But weigh it all up, the positive and the destructive, and football is a loser.

I have some of the same complaints about other sports, too, but I have learned to hate football -- from the junior leagues to the NFL, with a special disgust reserved for big-time college football.

This presents a particular challenge at UT, home of the storied Longhorn franchise. Like many faculty members, I don’t hesitate to criticize the university’s obsession with athletics or to ask students to reflect on what that obsession teaches us about the university’s priorities and values. Such critique is easy when the head football coach’s salary gets bumped to $5.2 million a year as the university struggles with budget cuts.

Dealing with UT’s jock-obsessed culture is easy -- I critique it, without hesitation. Dealing with student athletes is more complicated. I don’t dislike jocks; like any other group of students, athletes run the gamut from smart to dull, from hard worker to slacker. When we interact in my office, roles and rules are clear -- I act professionally and they are generally respectful. At a university where football players are demigods, the real accomplishment is to treat them like normal students, and I pride myself on doing that.

The complication comes in my desire to help them, given the limits imposed by the system. Not surprisingly, many of the athletes’ problems are the same as students working a job (or two, or three) -- students who work full-time need extraordinary focus and great time-management skills to succeed in class. The athletes in the high-profile “revenue” sports are unpaid fulltime employees, but the fact that they aren’t paid doesn’t mean their coach-bosses cut them any slack.

For example, one student was routinely late and missed the quizzes at the beginning of my 8 a.m. class. When I noticed that the lost points left him with a failing grade, I asked him to come to my office and explain his tardiness. He was a football player, and required weight training in the morning was delaying him. Why hadn’t he asked the coaches to let him leave early? He said that he had asked, but nothing changed.

He and I worked out an alternative assignment so he could recover the points. But I couldn’t help him with the coach who treated him like an employee. I asked the student if he wanted me to inform the athletic department about his situation, and he made it clear that would not be a good idea. He didn’t trust the athletic department and feared retribution. Even if he was wrong about that, his fear says something about the atmosphere in which he works.

After 20 years and several interactions like that, I have come to hate the football machine more than ever, just as some football players do. These players are not naïve and know, perhaps better than anyone, how they are used. They know that the university athletic department, like any other employer, is primarily interested in productivity, not the long-term welfare of employees.

My most memorable lesson in the system’s disregard for athletes came in a conversation near the end of a semester with a football player who came to my office hoping to make up enough points to pass my class. I don’t remember the details of the missed assignment, but the student seemed honest and sincere, and we quickly worked out a plan for him to make up the work.

He also was searching for the right questions to ask about his future without football. He was a scholarship player at the end of his junior year with a serious injury that meant he would never play again, but the university was letting him finish his last year on scholarship.

What’s next? I asked. If his hopes for a pro career were over, what would he do?

He said he wanted to be a high school coach. That means teaching as well, and I asked how he planned to get certified. He had no idea what that entailed; no one had advised him on that process. I suggested that he not rely on the advising in athletics and get the information from the College of Education for himself, and we talked about how to do that.

I told him bluntly that my main concern was that he understood what it took to be a good teacher and that he not become one of those coaches who treated teaching duties as a footnote to their “real” job on the field. There are enough bad teachers in the world already, I said. If you are going to do this, know that it’s rewarding but hard work.

Then I asked him what he wanted to teach. History seemed most interesting to him, which made me smile as I remembered my experience 30 years earlier as a college student getting certified to be a high school history teacher. I told him how intimidated I had felt standing in front of a class as a student teacher. We kept talking. I asked him what his favorite part of history was. U.S. history? World history? Any particular era?

He didn’t have an answer. I asked him what he knew about history. He acknowledged that it wasn’t much. Thinking back on my student teaching, which included several weeks of trying to get seventh-graders interested in the War of 1812 (something I wasn’t much interested in at the time, and must confess that I have never gone back to study in detail), I asked him what he knew about that war. Nothing, he said. Which countries fought the war? He didn’t know.

I wasn’t surprised, because I routinely talk with students who have significant gaps in basic historical knowledge. He was neither ashamed nor angry at me for pushing him; he was struggling to create a new life and knew he needed help. We talked about the inadequate schooling that he had endured. He was struggling, honestly, to understand who he was now that football was over. He knew he had a tough year ahead.

We kept talking. He told me a bit about why he loved sports. I told him why I loved books. We didn’t dwell on the fact that he was a jock and I was the antithesis of a jock, or that our childhood experiences had been dramatically different. He was black and I was white, he had grown up in poverty and I had been a middle-class kid, and we talked about what that meant for each of us.

I talked to him about why I went into teaching, about my own development as an intellectual. If his playing days were over, he was going to have to find a new identity, pick up new habits, see the world in a new way. After an hour, he got up to leave. I told him I would be happy to talk more, if he wanted. He thanked me, and I thanked him. Then he looked at me and said something I will never forget.

“No one has ever talked to me this way before,” he said. I asked what he meant, afraid I had been too harsh and he had felt disrespected. Instead, he was grateful that I had spoken honestly, that I had assumed he was capable of the conversation. His experience with education up to then had been sadly predictable: Few had cared about his mind as long as his body was performing on the field.

I told him I had enjoyed talking with him, which was true. I told him I hoped to see him again, which I knew was unlikely, simply because most students -- athletes or not -- don’t come back after such a conversation.

After he left, I sat by myself for a long time, thinking about how toxic masculinity norms in a white-supremacist society defined by economic inequality had structured both our lives. All the abstractions about the hierarchy in gender, race, and class were palpably real at that moment; he and I were individuals, of course, but we had lived our individual lives within those categories that had so profoundly shaped our choices.

I don’t really hate football, which is just one of many children’s games. But I do hate most of the things adults do with football, the way the destructive hierarchical values in patriarchy, white supremacy, and a predatory corporate capitalism are woven into big-time college sports.

I hate what the reality of football does to ideals of a university.

I hate what Longhorn football does to the University of Texas.

[Robert Jensen is a professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center in Austin. He is the author of Arguing for Our Lives: Critical Thinking in Crisis Times (City Lights, coming in 2013) His writing is published extensively in mainstream and alternative media. Robert Jensen can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu. Read more articles by Robert Jensen on The Rag Blog.]

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