A Life

As an 18-year-old Brooklyn College student, decades ago in the 1950s, I became a “professional revolutionist.” This meant that, together with my student comrades, I would spend most of my time in a course I called “cafeteria” where we tried—for the most part unsuccessfully—to convince Stalinist students that the Soviet Union had betrayed socialism and the working class.

I also distributed leaflets with that message before a meeting of a Stalinist-dominated maritime union. A six-foot sailor took one look at my leaflets and threw me into the gutter. We were right about Stalinism, but we were wrong in regarding World War II as an imperialist war, which, like World War I would end in widespread social revolution. I declared at the time, “The exploiters of the world are sitting on a powder keg.” Years later our views of the Soviet Union were confirmed by Khrushchev’s 1956 speech. When asked whether he regretted what he had done under Stalin, he replied: “I am up to my knees in blood and I hear the voices of my dead comrades.” I wondered whether my sailor assailant ever learned the truth about the Soviet Union which he defended so valiantly against me.

Now, as a retired philosophy professor, I can no longer claim the title of “professional revolutionist.” But I can say that the habits of rational argument, first honed in those early years, remained with me, both in philosophy and in politics. For the next 50 years, I spent much of my time teaching, from first grade through graduate school. I taught many different courses, including philosophy of religion. I think that if God appears in my afterlife, I would inform him that I have refuted all the arguments for his existence.

In 1963 and 1966 I published articles strongly criticizing Hannah Arendt’s view that in the Holocaust almost all Jewish leaders cooperated with the Nazis in the murder of Jews “to an extraordinary degree.” Her claim, I said, was made in shocking disregard of available evidence. After reading one of the articles, Sidney Morgenbesser, the late Columbia University philosopher, said “Arendt isn’t so bad. She just leaves out little words like ‘not’.”

I opposed the Vietnam War and organized a teach-in at Brooklyn College. My other anti-war activity took place in England in 1969 when I met regularly with Americans to discuss opposition to the war. I should add that I held the umbrella of an anarchist student at an anti-war rally so that he would not be accused of wielding a deadly weapon.

En route to Oxford in 1968 where I was to be a visiting scholar at Wolfson College, I attended an international philosophy congress in Vienna. It was the year of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and, although I planned to visit Prague, the border was closed. I distinctly remember a newsreel of Shirley Temple Black, when she was the American ambassador, kissing the flag as she left. A Czech student escaped to the Vienna Congress and immediately selected me as his savior. A colleague and I obtained a visa and put together the money to send him to the United States. But it seemed that he had friends—six of them. So we obtained more visas, collected more money and dispatched them all on Icelandic Airlines to a midwestern U.S. university.

At the Congress, a friend and I met with three Soviet philosophers in an amusement park just outside Vienna (was it the same amusement park filmed in The Third Man?) I learned later that the third philosopher was there to watch the other two. They told me that they were going to Oxford to study the philosophy of Sir David Ross (an intuitionist philosopher whose work could not be further from Marxism). Were they telling the truth? I never found out.

I never criticized the feminist movement but I felt that women with real ability—like me, for example—had done pretty well and didn’t need them. I began to change when I discovered that, although there was nothing wrong with my teaching evaluations or publication record, the chairperson would prevent me from being promoted unless I took on almost half of the secretary’s departmental work. The ex-professional revolutionist knew how to fight back. The chairperson finally collapsed and I became an associate professor. I wondered whether other academic women had failed to obtain the advancement they deserved. I remembered Eleanor Kuykendall who, at one time, had been a part-time lecturer in my department. Although she had more philosophical ability than some of the men who were promoted to tenure track positions (with my support), she was never promoted to that rank.

I read studies showing widespread sex discrimination in universities. For example, in 1972 a team of sociologists, who had performed a carefully controlled study, concluded that “sex discrimination is rampant in academe.” Then I acted on what I read. In the early 1970s, universities were required by the government to take “affirmative action” to end sex discrimination by setting reasonable numerical goals for hiring women and minorities by departments that had clearly excluded them. In the next decade much of my political activity consisted of arguing for numerical goals. I spent three months organizing a New York Times advertisement with 3,000 signatures and lots of endorsements from academic VIPs—Nobel Laureates, distinguished professors, and the like. The upshot was that President Ford invited two professors—a male academic who opposed numerical goals and a female academic who supported them. Referring to a particular study, the female stated that women in that study “produced more.” President Ford asked “Produced more what?”

Ford concluded that the paperwork of universities had to be reduced, but the numerical goals would be kept because of all the support for them out there. But the conservative campaign against numerical goals using a misleading analogy with quotas (like those that had excluded Jews from professional schools) was successful. Definite numerical goals were eventually abandoned in favor of an indefinite concept: “diversity.”

One consequence of my campaign for affirmative action was the hostility I engendered from some academic men. Often when they lost out on a job, they blamed it on affirmative action (without relevant evidence). In some cases where they could take it out on me, they did so.

My activity on behalf of affirmative action was not limited to academic women. In 1991 I published a book Racism and Justice: The Case for Affirmative Action which turned out to be a great success (Cornell University Press). The book has been used in ethics, social philosophy, and black study classes.

I look back now when, as an 18-year-old professional revolutionist, I issued the revolutionary declaration that the exploiters of the world were sitting on a powder keg. I was wrong then. But why? Because the Communist International, which was supposed to be the agent of world revolution, had become the foreign agent of the Soviet Union, a class society for whom workers’ power was anathema. How does my revolutionary declaration stand now?

Note the World Social Forums involving hundreds of thousands of people declaring “a better world is possible”; the seismic knowledge that today’s children will have a lower living standard than their parents; the takeovers by workers of bankrupt businesses in Latin America; the widespread land invasions by impoverished agricultural workers around the world; a disastrous global financial crisis with high worldwide unemployment rates especially among young workers leading to protests in countries as varied as Latvia, Chile, Bulgaria, and Iceland; strikes in Great Britain; the riots in 2008 that plundered the streets of Greece, invoking solidarity actions throughout the world.

This last prompted a Christian Science Monitor journalist to write: “Athens is not as far away as we think….” Greece gave us philosophy. What new gift does Greece have for us now?

Z

Gertrude Ezorsky, professor of philosophy at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, is an author and serves on the editorial board of New Politics.