Some time ago, a book entitled “The professors” (The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America) written by “David Horowitz” was published in the United States. The subject of this book is the introduction of one hundred and one university professors whose crime was to speak about the Holocaust and the Jews in their classrooms and books. In addition to publishing this book, professors at other universities have been warned not to use their work because these people have crossed the red line. In general, when freedom is unlimited, it creates problems that will ultimately limit it. The following text introduces “Professor Stanley Aronowitz”, one of the one hundred and one professors discussed by the author of the book.
Professor Stanley Aronowitz
City University of New York
— Professor of sociology at City University of New York
— “We know that the charges against us—that University teaching is a scam, that much research is not ‘useful,’ that scholarship is hopelessly privileged—emanate from a Right that wants us to put our noses to the grindstone just like everybody else.”
One of the leading figures of the academic Left, Stanley Aronowitz is a professor of sociology at City University of New York, where he has also been the director of the Center for Cultural Studies since 1988. Before his academic career, Professor Aronowitz was a union organizer for the Clothing and Oil and Chemical Workers unions.
In February 1997, Aronowitz wrote an article in the academic journal Social Text, titled “The Last Good Job in America,” which also became the title of a book he published in 2001. Couched as a personal memoir, this article is a self-portrait of the liberal arts professor as slacker-in-residence.
In his memoir, Professor Aronowitz acknowledges that City University originally hired him “because they believed I was a labor sociologist.” In fact, as he admits, this was just a scam: “First and foremost I’m a political intellectual… [I] don’t follow the… methodological rules of the discipline.” After being hired as a sociologist, Professor Aronowitz signed up for the then-hottest new academic fad, “cultural studies,” and created the Center for Cultural Studies to escape the rigors of his original professional discipline. “Cultural Studies” provided him with a broad umbrella under which to pursue his Marxist politics and pass them on to his students.
As a member of the editorial board of Social Text and head of the Center for Cultural Studies, Professor Aronowitz is more than just a professor. He is an academic star with a six-figure salary and a publishing resume to match. In today’s politicized university, it is thoroughly in keeping with Aronowitz’s elevated academic status that his chef d’oeuvre is a book called Science As Power, whose core thesis is the view—which was last popular in the era of Joseph Stalin—that science is just an instrument of the ruling class. Of Professor Aronowitz’s book, a reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement said: “If the author knows much about the content or enterprise of science, he keeps the knowledge well hidden.”
Non-leftist readers of Professor Aronowitz’s work could hardly have been surprised in 1996 when he and his fellow editors at Social Text fell victim to a famous academic hoax perpetrated by physicist Alan Sokal. Sokal submitted a phony paper on quantum mechanics and “post-modernism,” another intellectual fashion of the academic Left. It was Sokal’s intention to demonstrate that the magazine Social Text would publish nonsense about science, if the nonsense was politically correct.51 Although the Sokal article created an international scandal, Professor Aronowitz’s university career was unaffected. Aronowitz was promoted to distinguished professor of sociology in 1998.
The “last good job in America” turns out to be the lucrative job that Professor Aronowitz has created for himself at the expense of New York taxpayers and the economically disadvantaged minorities who make up the CUNY student body. “What I enjoy most,” says Professor Aronowitz, “is the ability to procrastinate and control my own work-time, especially its pace: taking a walk in the middle of the day, reading between the writing, listening to a CD or tape anytime I want, calling up a friend for a chat.” Professor Aronowitz teaches only one two-hour course a week. This is a seminar in Marxism. On Mondays and Wednesdays, Professor Aronowitz does not bother to leave his house. These are the days devoted to writing a piece for The Nation on “the future of the left,” and of course the article for Social Text on what a good job he has.
For decades, Professor Aronowitz and other academic leftists have been escaping the reality of their failed revolution in America’s streets during the 1960s by colonizing the American university and politicizing its curriculum. In the course of this self-absorbed intellectual destruction, they have abused the educational aspirations of unsuspecting students, poor and well-fed alike. And even while this equal-opportunity exploitation goes on, they never lose the ability to see themselves as the victims of vast conspiracies of the political Right. “We know,” writes Professor Aronowitz, “that the charges against us—that university teaching is a scam, that much research is not ‘useful,’ that scholarship is hopelessly privileged—emanate from a Right that wants us to put our noses to the grindstone just like everybody else.”
The conclusion to Professor Aronowitz’s memoir is naturally a call to arms, but phrased in the form of a reproof to his comrades for not advancing their struggle militantly enough: “We have not celebrated the idea of thinking as a full-time activity and the importance of producing what the system terms ‘useless’ knowledge. Most of all, we have not conducted a struggle for universalizing the self-managed time some of us still enjoy.” Loafers of the world, unite!
Research: David Horowitz
