The opening of the controversal arabic-centered public school in New York, once again, raises the issue of the reintroduction of separate but equal principles in America.
A prior column addressed this problem in a different context in Chicago: Continue reading “America’s Separate But Equal School System”
In a case with serious implications for academic freedom, Norman Finkelstein has agreed to resign in an undisclosed settlement. Regardless of his controversial views on the Holocaust, the international campaign against Finkelstein has caused many academics object that core principles of academic freedom are being assaulted. For the full story, click here
Norman Finkelstein has long generated controversy over his writings on the Holocaust. His critics, however, have launched a campaign to have him terminated from the school and have been successful. Many academics are alarmed by the official move to cancel his classes and lock him out of his office. At risk is the most important element of the American experience in higher education: academic freedom. For the most recent story, click here
The creation of a school with an emphasis on Arabic culture has drawn criticism in New York. The controversy should not be one about Arabic culture but the departure from a traditional view of public education that one sought to create a shared curriculum and culture for a diverse population. Continue reading “Arabic School in New York Drawing Attention to the Balkanization of Public Education”
Published May 2002
Constitutional scholars and weatherman share an unstated fascination with the worst conditions; the freak storms that join together to release fantastic energy and fireworks. A fight is brewing in Washington this week that may produce such a perfect constitutional storm. All three branches of government are now colliding over the question of who controls access to presidential papers. The outcome of this fight, however, may also redefine aspects of executive privilege as well as core principles of open government.
Continue reading “Bush, Presidential Records Act, and History”
Published Feb. 14, 2002
A YEAR after the presidential election, some liberal Democrats still appear to be slowly moving through the stages of loss first defined by psychiatrist Elizabeth Kubler-Ross: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. A recent proposal from former Clinton White House Counsel Abner Mikva would suggest that some Democrats remain mired somewhere between denial and bargaining. Continue reading “Abner Mikva and Living in Constitutional Denial”
Published December 2001
IN Afghanistan, all politics are tribal. National governments, like the recently announced interim government, are examples of the triumph of hope over experience. Of course, no American official wants to suggest that the new government should be shaped in our own image at the risk of appearing culturally chauvinistic or insensitive. While understandable, this reluctance is tragic because James Madison has much to offer the Mujahedeen including a system that is designed to handle the very thing that is tearing their country apart. Continue reading “James Madison and the Mujahedeen”
Published October 2001
THERE is an interesting by-product of the bombings on September 11, 2001 that seems to be sweeping the country. In universities and the media, people are learning about Al-Qaida and their religious philosophy. There is a tendency in our country, particularly among academics, to treat all beliefs as worthy of equal merit. It is a type of intellectual relativism that ignores the obvious in favor of the inquiry. Continue reading “Intellectual Relativism and the Al Qaida”
Published 2/11/2004
At a time when efforts to reform the corporate world are getting all of the attention, there is another group of chief executives who remain insulated from the effects of scandals at Tyco, WorldCom and the like. They are America’s not-for-profit profiteers: the executives who cash in at universities, foundations and other tax-exempt organizations. Continue reading “Non-profits’ Executives Avoid Scrutiny, Valid Reforms”
The Washington Post
February 13, 2005 Sunday
HEADLINE: Good Intentions Aside, Separate Still Isn’t Equal
BYLINE: Jonathan Turley
BODY:
Few legal doctrines are more dangerous or despised than that of separate but equal rights — the philosophy that legitimized racial apartheid in the United States. It took the sacrifices of the civil rights struggle to put an end to both this doctrine and the officially sanctioned segregation that it justified.
Yet only months after the nation celebrated the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education — the landmark Supreme Court decision that struck down the doctrine as unconstitutional — some public and private institutions are again dabbling in separate but equal policies.
Two examples highlight this insidious trend. The first comes in the very area in which the battle for civil rights was waged most fiercely decades ago — the schools. It involves a New York City high school created specifically for gay and lesbian students two years ago.The second concerns the California prison system, whose 25-year policy of strict racial segregation of incoming prisoners has been challenged in a case now pending before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Both plans are being vigorously defended on pragmatic grounds — arguments long used by segregationists. From the court’s first articulation of the doctrine in 1896, separate but equal was always an exercise of pragmatism over principle. Rather than confront racial animus, society chose to yield to it — to achieve the appearance of racial coexistence through racial separation. While there are clearly differences between the old segregationists and the new (particularly in terms of their motives), there remain striking similarities in their methods.
New York’s Harvey Milk High School was created with the best possible intentions. Named for the assassinated San Francisco gay rights leader, it was meant to provide a sanctuary for gay and lesbian students who face tremendous pressures and even violence in many schools.
Gay rights activists have long modeled their work on the civil rights movement. But such civil rights leaders as Martin Luther King Jr. and Thurgood Marshall steadfastly refused to accept segregation in public schools — even though thousands of black students faced violence in desegregated systems. They understood that, to be truly equal, blacks had to be assimilated into every aspect of American life, even if the objective could only be reached after a period of painful confrontation.
Much like the integration of black students into white schools, the rise of a new generation of openly proud gay and lesbian students has led to greater tensions in New York schools. The city’s response was to essentially remove the victims and call it an act of reform. Mayor Michael Bloomberg defended the policy on the grounds that a separate school “lets them get an education without having to worry.” Yet, in classic civil rights terms, it is hard to see how removing gay students is any more a solution to homophobic violence in New York schools than removing James Meredith would have been a solution to racial violence at the University of Mississippi.
Harvey Milk — or Gay High, as it is often called — has become a lesson in the unintended consequences of segregation. Its creation reinforces the stereotype of gay students as fundamentally different and in need of special treatment. Some have suggested that the $3.2 million spent to establish the school could be better used to create a systemwide program of counseling and education for all students on the issues of sexual orientation and discrimination. In a city with roughly 300,000 public high school students, Harvey Milk’s 100-student capacity can handle only a small fraction of the city’s gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender teenagers. The remainder must deal with the stigma of a segregated group and predictable taunts that they should “go to Harvey Milk,” where they belong.
On America’s other coast, California provides a second example of a separate but equal policy. The state prison has sought to control violence and reduce gang activity by temporarily segregating incoming prisoners on the basis of race. Hispanic prisoners from Southern California are separated from those from the north; Japanese and Chinese inmates are kept apart; and smaller groups — Laotians, Vietnamese, Cambodians and Filipinos — are segregated as well.
Other large states such as Illinois and New York face similar gang demographics, but none has adopted this sort of automatic segregation. California’s policy of yielding to racism rather than fighting it began almost three decades ago with small concessions, and escalated into a systemwide policy of apartheid for convicts entering any prison. In 1999, when tensions between northern and southern Hispanics erupted into riots at Pelican Bay State Prison, the standard response of corrections professionals elsewhere would have been to crack down on the inmates with a policy of zero tolerance of violence. Instead, California solved the problem by sending each group to its own prison, where it could reign as the dominant Hispanic gang.
Despite the fact that this racial segregation policy has been in place for 25 years, California prisons continue to convulse with racial violence. In 2002, there were about 7,000 incidents of assault and battery and seven deaths — the vast majority linked to racial gangs.
Officials insist that the violence would be worse without segregation for new prisoners. The federal appellate court in San Francisco agreed last year, rejecting a challenge from Garrison Johnson, a black prisoner who refused to join a gang and felt more threatened in a segregated environment. Using a test heavily weighted in favor of the prison, the court demanded that Johnson prove the impossible — that violence would not occur in cells if the policy were lifted. Officials insist that they are just dealing with the realities of racial gangs and their mutual hostility. One prison official observed that “if we have a Northern Hispanic with a Southern Hispanic, they already have a conflict before they come to prison” and the best thing is to simply give them their own space. It is the very logic that the Supreme Court used when it created the separate but equal doctrine in Plessy v. Ferguson, saying the Constitution did not require “a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either.” Integration, the court said then, would have to be “the result of natural affinities, a mutual appreciation of each other’s merits and the voluntary consent of individuals.” It seems unlikely that the white skinheads, black Crips, and Hispanic Fresno Bulldogs will achieve “mutual appreciation” any time soon.
The decisions to embrace separate but equal policies in a high school and a prison system are telling and tragic. Both schools and prisons represent controlled environments that strive in part to shape future conduct through compelled behavior and observation. High schools are the last such environment before most individuals join the larger society — they are the critical forum to teach not just basic curricular skills but basic citizenship skills. Removing gay and lesbian students allows prejudices and intolerance to continue unnoticed and unaddressed, permitting hateful students to become hateful adults.
Prisons are populated by certifiably asocial individuals, who failed to learn basic social principles and values. As a controlled and supervised environment, the prison is supposed to reinforce social rules of conduct through compulsory measures. The segregation policies of the California prisons not only leave racist and violent impulses unaddressed, they actually reinforce those impulses by yielding to them. A segregated prison is fertile ground for gang recruitment.
Equally disturbing is the growing level of “self-segregation” in institutions where there is no claim of racial violence or intolerance. Some colleges and universities now hold official and separate graduation ceremonies for certain minority groups; a growing number have created separate housing aimed specifically at minorities. The University of Pennsylvania houses almost one-quarter of its African American students at the W.E.B. Du Bois College House, and other schools including the University of Michigan and Dartmouth College have similar options. In a rhetorical echo of the Plessy decision, the segregated dormitories at Dartmouth are called “affinity houses.”
While many of these are voluntary choices by the students, such self-segregation still frames the academic experience in at least partially racial terms. This lesson was not lost on one Latino student at Amherst College, who was quoted in a report by the New York Civil Rights Coalition as saying: “Before I came to Amherst, I wasn’t thinking about race or class or gender or sexual orientation, I was just thinking about people wanting to learn.”
The resurrection of separate but equal is not some reflection of its inherent truth or merit. Rather, it is a reflection of a society that has increasingly favored the most expedient over the most ethical means of addressing contemporary problems. The separate but equal doctrine was the very scourge of the civil rights movement, but it continues to have pragmatic appeal — certainly over the more abstract principle of integration. After all, principle is often quite costly while pragmatism offers at least the outward appearance of tranquility at a bargain price. However, as new citizens walk out of places like the New York schools and California prisons, society may rediscover not just the convenience but the costs of separate but equal programs.
In the collective nightmare of the Virginia Tech massacre, myriad images are seared into our minds. For some, it is the detached and blank expression of the killer, Seung Hui Cho. For others, it is the image of terrified students running past heavily armed police. For me, it is a single door. Indeed, if there is to be a memorial to remember this tragedy, there could be no more poignant or powerful symbol than the bullet-ridden door of Room 204 on the second floor of Norris Hall.
Before April 17, it was the door that led into the classroom of professor Liviu Librescu. For 20 years, students had passed through the doors of Librescu’s classes to learn about engineering from one of the world’s leading aeronautical engineers. Like all academics, his classroom was his special domain, an almost sacred place in the hearts of all academics. It is a place protected from ignorance and intolerance — the enemies of learning. Yet, what makes such rooms special is not the interior but the occupants. The earliest “universities” did not have a conventional campus or building. A university was the collection of faculty and students who’d meet wherever they could find shelter and safety. When a famous teacher such as Plato met with his students, it was often in the open. He and his students would form a circle, and the interior of that circle became a place of learning, a protected space.
Even after universities created the physical protection of campuses, faculty remained the primary protectors of the place of learning. Shutting the school door to ignorance or hatred was an oft-used metaphor. For Librescu, this common metaphor would become a chilling reality.
Saving his students’ lives
About 9 a.m. April 16, when Seung Hui Cho began his shooting spree in Norris Hall, Librescu was in the middle of his solid mechanics class. Panic quickly took hold of the class as students began to scream and turn over desks for shelter. Librescu knew better. He shouted for his students to kick out the window screens and jump for safety as he used his body to block the door. As many as 15 students were saved before the 23-year-old English major was able to overcome the 76-year-old professor by shooting him through the door. Librescu died there in his classroom while most of his students jumped out of the windows to safety.
This was not Librescu’s first encounter with terror. Born in Romania, Librescu was sent to a ghetto holding Jews in World War II and his father was sent to a cruel work camp. He barely escaped the fate of hundreds of thousands of Romanian Jews methodically executed by their government. Now, after surviving the Nazis and later persecution under the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu, he found himself literally holding back a man bent on methodically killing his students. He would die on Holocaust Remembrance Day, ending a life struggle against homicidal rage that began for him as a boy in the work houses of Romania.
The image of Librescu holding back a killer from entering his class is an image that most academics will never forget. Indeed the next day, when I opened the door to my torts class at George Washington University Law School, I felt an immense sense of pride and gratitude to be a member of the teaching academy. Even before we had walls on our classrooms, generations of academics have protected this special place. When I walked into my first class roughly two decades ago, I can remember the overwhelming feeling that this is my classroom and what occurs here is something of my making. It is a notion that is sometimes lost on non-academics. When a painter or a carpenter creates, he has a painting or a chest that is the physical expression of his skills and his vision. It is a manifestation on some level of himself.
For academics, our most important creative enterprise is non-physical. It is a journey of learning that we take every term with our students, a journey that is truly reciprocal in every way. The classroom may be ours for only an hour a day, but during that time, it is entirely ours. For better or worse, it is what we make of it and the truly great teachers, such as Librescu, can make something, while intangible, last a lifetime.
Liviu Librescu was not the only teacher to die in his classroom that day. French teacher Jocelyne Couture-Nowak of Canada; German teacher Jamie Bishop of Georgia; engineering teacher G.V. Loganathan of India and biomechanics teacher Kevin Granata of Ohio also fell where they taught. (Granata died after pulling 20 students into the safety of his locked office and, with another professor, sought to help others.) These five teachers came from three countries but shared a common bound with their students and their classrooms. They died with 27 gifted students who had come to this place of safety to learn about the world and about their role in it.
The gateway. The door.
This brings me back to that bullet-ridden door. The door of Room 204 became a literal barrier for an academic to shield his class and his students from harm. It stands as a reminder of the struggle and sacrifice that so many have made to preserve our places of learning. On one side was a force of unblinking, unthinking hate. On the other side was a force of unbridled loyalty and, yes, love. Cho had to shoot him through the door to gain entry into Librescu’s class. Yet in the end, Librescu won. He prevailed by showing that there are things and people worth dying for. His students were worth dying for. In the midst of unparalleled carnage, he offered a symbol that transcended fear and found meaning in sacrifice. He died as he lived, teaching his students perhaps the most important lesson of his life.
I expect that Virginia Tech will construct a memorial to replace the makeshift memorial outside Norris Hall. Here is my proposal. Place this door where everyone can see it while walking to and from their classes. Under it, simply put the well-chosen Latin motto of Virginia Tech: Ut Prosim— That I May Serve.
Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University and a member of USA TODAY’s board of contributors.