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Nineteen states cut higher education spending by more than ten percent last year, and total state funding to higher ed dropped by 7.6% nationwide, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports.
A quarter of the cuts came in California, which slashed its higher ed budget by 13.4%, but in percentage terms, ten states cut more. Three states’ cuts topped 20%, with New Hampshire clocking in at an incredible 41.3% decline.
And though the budget crunch bore the blame for a lot of cuts in 2009 and 2010, the latest round is taking place in an environment of growing state revenue — according to the Chronicle, aggregate state tax revenue has risen nationally in each of the last seven quarters. Meanwhile, higher ed spending is now 4% lower than it was in 2007, and still dropping.
And of course the brunt of these cuts are being felt by students, in many cases by those least able to pay.
This essay is from January 2012. For my thoughts on Schwyzer as of August 2013, see the final update at the end of the post.
• • •
As regular readers of this site know, professor and blogger Hugo Schwyzer has been the subject of mounting criticism from feminist activists in recent weeks.
To date, the controversy has centered on Schwyzer’s history of gross personal misconduct and on the content of his writing. (Schwyzer’s disclosure last year of a 1998 attempt to kill his girlfriend and himself sparked the current clamor, drawing new scrutiny to his earlier admissions of sexual activity with his students and to various troubling statements he’d made.)
In his defense, Schwyzer and his supporters regularly contrast his reckless past with his sober present, couching their arguments in the language of forgiveness and redemption. Schwyzer’s bad acts are behind him, they say, and the controversies over his current writings are properly understood as debates within feminism, debates among friends and allies.
To fully understand why so many remain so hostile to Schwyzer, though, we need to look beyond his past misdeeds and his problematic writing, and examine the ethics of his recent public acts.
A week ago Healthy is the New Skinny, an organization Schwyzer helped to establish in 2010, announced that they had decided “to end all ties” with him. In a statement, the group declared that Schwyzer had not fully informed them of his past when he became involved with their work. Similarly, the sex education organization Scarleteen recently announced that they would be removing several pieces Schwyzer had written for them from their website.
This weekend I asked Scarleteen executive director Heather Corinna whether Schwyzer had made the group aware of his past before coming on board with them. She said that he had not.
When Schwyzer was approached to write for Scarleteen in 2009 he knew that he had for years engaged in sexual activity with his students. He knew that he had a personal history of domestic violence. But he withheld these facts from Scarleteen — a group that provides sex education and crisis counseling to young people — and in so doing deprived the organization of the chance to make an informed decision as to whether to be affiliated with him.
The question of which elements of his past a person like Schwyzer is obligated to divulge to a group like Scarleteen is a thorny one, and if he had simply concealed facts from them that he had similarly concealed from the rest of the world, the ethics of his choice could perhaps be debated.
But when Schwyzer started writing for Scarleteen his history of sexual misconduct with students was, though unknown to them, a matter of public record. He had first admitted those relationships online in 2005, and had written about them extensively since. And when he later described the attempted murder of his girlfriend in a blogpost, he again chose not to notify them.
Schwyzer’s failure to reveal such potentially explosive information was an act of appalling recklessness. As a small non-profit working in the field of teen sexuality, Scarleteen relies on fragile networks of financial and institutional support — support that is precarious in the best of circumstances. (As a group co-founded by Schwyzer himself, Healthy is the New Skinny was compromised even further by their association with his name.) By acting the way he did, Schwyzer put feminist organizations, organizations he has championed, at serious risk.
I’ve previously discussed the fact that Schwyzer has quietly taken steps to scrub from his blog statements that pose difficulties for the rehabilitation of his reputation. I’ve suggested that his behavior has needlessly exacerbated the damage the current controversy has done to feminist communities. And the ugly revelations just don’t seem to stop.
This is the third blogpost I’ve written about Schwyzer. I expect it’ll be the last. I have no interest in condemnation for condemnation’s sake. But because Schwyzer’s best writings and best acts have moved so many people, I do think it’s important to be clear that this isn’t just about whether a person can be redeemed. It’s not just about the role of men in feminism. It’s not just about folks not liking some of what he has to say.
It’s about the fact that he continues to behave recklessly and dishonestly. It’s about the damage he’s done, in the very recent past, to causes and principles that he claims to value. It’s about the fact that despite his promise to withdraw from feminist spaces, the harm he’s doing to feminist institutions is ongoing.
That’s a problem. And it’s not going away.
Note | In an email to me, Heather Corinna said she regrets not vetting Schwyzer more thoroughly before he started writing for Scarleteen. The organization has long had policies in place requiring disclosure of relevant past conduct by those volunteers who do direct service work with Scarleteen’s clients, and the group is now extending those policies to cover guest writers on their website.
Update | A friend just pointed me to a January 17 video interview, posted online this afternoon, in which Schwyzer made the following remarks:
“I wrote many pieces for Scarleteen.com, a well-known, wonderful site that teaches young people about sex ed — I think it’s the best sex ed site for teens there is. Scarleteen dissociated itself from me, and actually took down many of the pieces that I’d written, acknowledging that the pieces themselves were valuable, but that my past so thoroughly compromised those pieces that they could not stand behind them.”
I asked Heather Corinna about this, since it was my impression that he’d only written a handful of pieces for them over a period of years, and she said my impression was essentially correct. He’d written two posts for their website and contributed content to two more. (They took one of those four pieces down before the current scandal broke, after deciding it didn’t meet their needs.)
Schwyzer was never a regular volunteer at Scarleteen. He never did direct service work for them. He wrote three or four pieces for them. That’s it.
And because of that marginal relationship, they have been the target of some anger and confusion in recent weeks, from clients and friends with legitimate questions about how they wound up affiliated with a man with a history of domestic violence and sexual predation. And how does that man respond? By exaggerating the extent of his relationship with them. By wrapping himself in their mantle. By pulling them close at a moment when to do so can only compound the trouble he’s already caused.
Oh, and what did Scarleteen actually say when they took down his stuff? They said this:
“Previously unknown information about this writer and his history has recently been made available to Scarleteen, information and history with which we have very serious conflicts. For the benefit of the safe environment we always aim to create for our users, and in accordance with the ethics and practices of our organization as a whole, we no longer wish to be associated with him or his work, which is why his contribution here was removed. He had contributed to two other pieces, one of which was removed, and the other of which is down while we create a new piece instead. We apologize for the loss of content any of our readers found of value, and intend to make up for that loss with new content.”
Second Update | Much more here. And on the subject of ongoing harm, here’s a discussion of Schwyzer’s habit of following women who mention on Twitter that he makes them uncomfortable, and even favoriting the tweets in which they do so.
• • •
August 2, 2013 Update | Two weeks ago Schwyzer announced his intention to withdraw from the internet and from public life. That announcement was followed by a string of blogposts and media interviews that as of yesterday were ongoing.
Others have said most of what needs to be said about the current spectacle, but given the focus of this post, I did want to update it to note a couple of things.
Schwyzer’s overarching narrative, as I mentioned above, has long been one of sin and redemption. In the bad old days, the story goes, he abused drugs and alcohol, slept with his students, and mistreated his wives, but then he got sober, and put all that behind him. Framing his story in this way allowed him to be confessional in his writing without ever being self-critical — the “self” that he laid bare in his most intimate pieces was a self that he no longer identified with, no longer felt represented by. It also allowed him to characterize his critics as motivated by a refusal to let the past be the past, as insisting on holding the new good Hugo responsible for the actions of the bad old one.
That false framing was why I gave this post the title I gave it, and why I took pains in another post to draw lines of connection between his past and his present. But it turns out that the framing was false in another way that I was at the time unaware of.
In his most recent blogpost, Schwyzer admitted to conducting “multiple affairs” in recent months, including one with a woman he identified by name. That he engaged in those affairs doesn’t itself concern me — they’re not relevant to Schwyzer’s public life. What is relevant, though, is that during and after the affairs he was writing at length to excoriate other men for exactly the conduct he was himself engaged in.
In a representative column published in May of this year, Schwyzer declared that the “one tangible thing that men can do to help end sexism — and create a healthier culture in which young people come of age— [is] to stop chasing after women young enough to be their biological daughters.” When older men date younger women, he insisted, they are “eroticizing…a pre-feminist fantasy of a partner who is endlessly starry-eyed and appreciative” and in so doing betraying those women and the feminist movement. The peg on which he hung that column was Johnny Depp, who, at the age of 50, had just started dating actress Amber Heard, a 27-year-old “who wasn’t yet born when he made his film debut.”
When he wrote those words, Schwyzer was having an affair with a woman the same age as Heard.
Schwyzer is 46.
In another recent column, Schwyzer insisted — as he has consistently when discussing the subject — that his past affairs with students were confined to women who “were only a few years younger than me (and in one instance, three years older),” but in his latest blogpost — an excerpt from a planned memoir — he reveals that one of his students was eighteen at the time of their affair. He was then in his early thirties.
This is hypocrisy, of course, and lying. But it’s something more than that, too. Schwyzer’s ideological commitments were constantly changing. (He was pro-life, then pro-choice; against porn, then for it.) What he offered in lieu of consistency was a personal narrative, a story about who he was and is. His tale of redemption was simultaneously his raison d’etre as a writer and his defense against his ever-growing list of antagonists.
But feminism never came easy to Hugo Schwyzer. He never found it congenial. It was always a struggle, an act of self-denial, a matter of making himself into a new and better person by force of will. When he described male feminism as a “cold pool” in which “none of us can fully immerse ourselves forever” it struck me as both profoundly revealing and profoundly sad.
It’s not an accident that Schwyzer found so many enemies in both the world of feminism and the world of Men’s Rights, and it’s not a matter of “if everyone is criticizing you, you must be doing something right,” either. Feminists saw a falseness in his writing on feminism, and MRAs saw a falseness in his writing on men. What he was telling other people to do, he could never do himself. And rather than explore that — rather than try publicly or privately to make sense of the impulse to righteously insist on the necessity of following an ever-changing code that he himself could not follow — he kept pounding the drum, disguising his muddled, untenable aspirations as hard-won, clear-eyed wisdom.
I wish him well. I hope he finds a path through his current troubles. And for his sake as well as everyone else’s, I hope he finds a way to just be quiet for a while.
It’s been clear for a while — since well before the Occupy Wall Street movement arose this fall — that something new was happening on American campuses. The surge of activism that swept California in the fall of 2009 went national by the spring of 2010, and though there have been peaks and valleys since, a shift in mood, a sense of possibility, has been apparent throughout.
And of course that “something new” was itself part of what created OWS. Students occupied NYU and the New School in 2008, UC and CSU in 2009, and those actions, those occupations, formed a part of the history that the folks who occupied Zuccotti Park drew on last fall. (Student Activism is Back, Micah White declared on the Adbusters blog three years ago, reporting on a wave of occupations in the UK and the US.)
Today’s New York Times picks up the story where it stands now, with a thorough, thoughtful article on the present state of the Occupy movement on American campuses. Occupy, it says, is “turning on its head the widespread characterization of today’s young people as entitled and apathetic,” creating “a giddying sense of possibility” for a new generation of activists.
Sounds about right.
About a week ago I put up a quiz post asking folks to guess whether 25 quotes came from Ron Paul’s newsletters or from the Turner Diaries, a notorious racist novel from the late 1970s.
In that original post I said this:
The worldview of the Ron Paul newsletters is the worldview of the late 20th century American rightwing fringe — not merely racist, but paranoid, conspiracist, sexist, anti-Jewish. It is, in short, the worldview of The Turner Diaries, the apocalyptic novel that inspired Timothy McVeigh’s 1995 attack on the federal building in Oklahoma City.
The Turner Diaries, a bizarre fantasy of race war, white supremacist revolution, and nuclear holocaust, is far more extreme than the Ron Paul newsletters, but the obsessions and even the writing style of the two documents resonate powerfully with one another. The two are even weirdly contemporaneous — though The Turner Diaries were written in 1978 and revised in 1980, they are set in the years 1991-1993.
I wasn’t expecting anyone to get all 25 answers right, but I’ll admit that I was surprised by how poorly everyone did. Flipping a coin would have gotten you 12 or 13 answers right, but only four of the six readers who made it all the way through did better than that. The highest score was 64%, and the average score was just 55%.
As I said last week, the problem with the Ron Paul newsletters isn’t just a few isolated quotes. It’s that their approach, their style, their worldview is that of the fringe apocalyptic racist rightwing of their era.
Answers below. Quotes in bold are from Ron Paul.
- A lady I know saw a black couple in the supermarket with a cute little girl, three years old or so. My friend waved to the tiny child, who scowled, stuck out her tongue, and said “I hate you, white honkey.”
- On September 1, a federal data bank for tracking health-care professionals began operating. This program is designed to monitor physicians, but it will spread to all professions and businesses.
- Our biggest difficulty is that the public sees us and everything we do only through the media.
- Washington—with its racist government, racist radio, racist ministers, racist universities, and racist attitudes–is the black New Jerusalem, so no white is supposed to question it.
- I had a chance to do some thinking on the plane from Washington. From 35,000 feet one gets a different perspective on things. Seeing all those sprawling suburbs and freeways and factories spread out below makes one realize just how big America is and what an awesomely difficult task we have undertaken.
- Perhaps the most scandalous aspect was the response by the media and the Washington politicians. They all came together as one to excuse the violence and to tell white America that it is guilty, though the guilt can be assuaged by handing over more cash. It would be reactionary, racist, and fascist, said the media, to have less welfare or tougher law enforcement.
- In January 1990, I predicted major race riots before this decade ends. I may have to move up my timetable!
- For the first time in our nation’s history, the organized forces of perversion were feted at the White House.
- All ticket counters, motels, physicians’ offices, and the like will be equipped with computer terminals linked by telephone lines to a huge national data bank and computer center.
- Most of all, though, many of them seem to be convinced that any effort at self-defense would be “racist,” and they fear being thought of as racist, even more than they fear death.
- “Let’s do a victory dance,” barked one minister, as a sea of fists gave the Communist/black power salute and the congregation shouted anti-white slogans.
- If you’re trying to convince the public that the races are really equal, how can you admit that it’s worse to be locked in a cell full of black criminals than in a cell full of white ones?
- We learned long ago not to count our enemies, only our friends.
- It’s astounding how many dark, kinky-haired Middle Easterners have invaded our country in the last decade.
- The president also promised to look the other way when the Soviets crush the Baltic states and the other captive nations in the USSR. The timetable for the planned massacre is as soon as US troops move against Iraq, and the media’s attention is riveted there. The wonders of the New World Order.
- In San Francisco the rioting was led by red-flag carrying members of the Revolutionary Communist Party. A friend of Burt’s, a jewelry store owner, had his store on Union Square looted by blacks, and when the police arrived in response to his frantic calls, their orders were not to interfere with the rioting.
- The largest blood bank in San Francisco succumbed to political pressure and holds blood drives in the Castro district, where the people give at three times the usual level. Either they are public spirited, or they are trying to poison the blood supply.
- We have to do an end-run around the controlled media and get our message onto TV ourselves.
- None of the politicians are willing to face the real issues involved here, one of which is the disastrous effect Washington’s Israel-dominated foreign policy during the last few decades has had on America’s supply of foreign oil.
- The reporter, who certainly had an axe to grind, and that’s not easy with a limp wrist, claimed that Roony believed that blacks have watered down their genes because the less intelligent ones are the ones that have the most children. Roony denied making the remarks, although only in today’s crazed environment could such statements get you in trouble.
- Is this really the same race that walked on the moon and was reaching for the stars 20 years ago? How low we have been brought!
- The inability to face reality and make difficult decisions, that is the salient symptom of the liberal disease. Always trying to avoid a minor unpleasantness now, so that a major unpleasantness becomes unavoidable later.
- The streets of New York City are terror zones, and home burglaries are not even investigated unless someone is hurt or more than $10,000 of property is taken. There are a zillion well-paid police, but they are of virtually no use.
- We now know, if we did not before, that we are under assault from thugs and revolutionaries who hate Euro-American civilization and everything it stands for: private property, material success for those who earn it, and Christian morality.
- As everyone is aware, the bands of mutants which roam the Waste remain a real threat, and it may be another century before the last of them has been eliminated.
January 19, 2012 Update | Hugo Schwyzer has taken down the two blogposts mentioned in this essay. The original confession can, for the moment, still be found at this cache, and the followup post is cached here and duplicated here.
January 23, 2012 Update | More on the Schwyzer controversy, and on the harm he’s still inflicting on the feminist movement, can be found here.
August 2, 2013 Update | Nothing more from me on Schwyzer for a while. Some final thoughts here.
Male feminist blogger and professor Hugo Schwyzer has been taking a lot of heat recently, much of it precipitated by a blogpost in which he detailed what he describes as “a binge episode that ended with my attempt to kill myself and my ex-girlfriend with gas.” (The incident took place in 1998, and he disclosed it publicly for the first time early last year.)
Schwyzer has put up a new post this morning expressing additional regret for the murder-suicide attempt, and apologizing for certain elements of the original piece. But his apologies evade many of his critics’ core complaints.
First, there’s the incident itself. The woman, his sometime lover, came to him for help after being tied up, raped, and abused by her drug dealer. They went back to his apartment, took more drugs, and had “desperately hot, desperately heartbreaking sex.” Then, when she passed out, he decided to kill them both. He turned on the gas on his oven, aimed its flow at his girlfriend, took some booze and pills, and lay down to die beside her.
Schwyzer now describes this act as one of “sheer monstrousness,” and it certainly is that. But it’s also something else. It’s a crime he construed and justified as an act of caretaking:
I looked at her emaciated, broken body that I loved so much. I looked at my own, studying some of my more recent scars. (I’d had a binge of self-mutilation earlier in the week, and had cigarette burns on both arms and my torso.) And then it came to me: I needed to do for her and for myself the one thing I was strong enough still to do. I couldn’t save her, I couldn’t save me, but I could bring an end to our pain. My poor fragile ex would never have to wake up again, and we could be at peace in the next life. As drunk and high as I was, the thought came with incredible clarity. I remember it perfectly now.
She was “fragile.” She was “broken.” But he was “strong enough” to do what she needed, what she didn’t have the strength to do for herself. He would bring her peace, a peace they would share forever.
It’s not enough for a feminist to describe this crime as horrific, though it is. It’s not enough to describe it as “something truly awful,” as he does. This was an act of a very particular kind, and Schwyzer never calls it by its name.
Because it’s not just the fact that Schwyzer committed an act of violence that’s of such concern, or even the fact that he committed an act of intimate partner violence. It’s that he committed an act of gendered violence, the nature of which he still hasn’t come to terms with.
Murder-suicide is a crime committed almost exclusively by men, with their intimate partners their typical victims. In the post he wrote this morning, though, Schwyzer refers to the woman he tried to kill as “another human being” twice, as “another person” once, as his “ex” six times, but never as his lover, his girlfriend, a woman.
In all his writing about this act he has never addressed its implications for his feminism — the feminism he professed when he committed the crime, or the feminism he professes today. And though he construes the story as the final dramatic act of his old life of addiction and irresponsibility, it’s a story that resonates powerfully with his current public presence.
Here’s how Schwyzer described his relationship to his students not long ago:
Go ahead, call me paternalistic. I’ll wear that title with pride, thank you. I see my students not merely as independent, autonomous agents whom I need to empower, but as vulnerable young people whom I — and others around me — need to protect. And I still have the nerve to call myself a feminist.
This notion that feminism calls him to protect the weak — to save them from themselves, to guide them to the right path — recurs again and again in his writing. As the co-organizer of the LA Slutwalk earlier this year, he referred to his role as “Herding sluts. In the best and most responsible way.” His students say he’s an electrifying lecturer, but complain that he severely restricts class discussion. And he frequently conceptualizes moral behavior as a matter of denial and restriction. (He has, for instance, described feminism as a “cold pool” in which “none of us can fully immerse ourselves forever.”)
I don’t have any reason to believe that Hugo Schwyzer is likely to attempt another murder anytime soon. But the man who described his girlfriend as fragile and broken and in need of his sheltering strength as he plotted her death has not gone entirely away. The paternalistic impulse to save that young woman from herself — an impulse that came to him with “incredible clarity” then, one which he remembers “perfectly” today — is still in him, still driving him. It’s an impulse he’s redirected, but it remains unexamined, unchecked, and dangerous. (It particularly inflects and infects his writing about sexuality, about youth, and about people of color.)
Like Hugo Schwyzer, I’m a white male professor teaching history in an urban community college. Like Schwyzer, I consider myself a feminist. Like Schwyzer, I work with young people extensively outside of the classroom. And it’s from that perspective that I offer him this piece of advice:
You’re doing it wrong. You need to stop.
Update | An old blogpost has surfaced that calls into question Schwyzer’s claim that he called a friend to warn her about the murder-suicide attempt.
Second Update | Hi to all the folks finding this post via Tumblr and the Feminists Against Hugo Schwyzer Facebook page. I’ve included pointers to a lot of the discussion of this subject in the followup post I linked above, so if you’re interested in reading more, that’s a good place to start.
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