Broken Heartland

The war on Indiana University and beyond

Photo of Indiana University by Wikipedia User Momoneymoproblemz

We hear a lot about how Democrats—or liberals, or leftists; whatever the term, it’s always a reflexive insult—simply don’t care about people in “flyover country”. Let’s leave aside the fact that I have never in my life heard the term “flyover country” used unironically as an insult. To be fair, probably the most common reaction to the more corn-intensive states by Brooklynites or other avant-gardians is simply not thinking about them. But not a few folks who end up living in Brooklyn—or Los Angeles, or Washington, DC, or London—care about those places because they are from there.

The you-just-look-down-on-rubes chorus, in both its left and right versions, rarely acknowledges this. The flat white-sippers of laptop-job districts simply emerge, fully formed, from the foam of the seaboard, unconnected to any ties that might complicate the stereotypes. But everyone comes from somewhere. Gatsby came from North Dakota; Daisy came from Louisville.

If you, like me, are from those quarters, it’s hard not to feel as though the places you’ve left on your journey have decided to fully turn their backs on you. The closed-minded bitterness that’s gripped the redder states feels like not just bad policy or reactionary hatreds but actual animus toward their absent sons and daughters—a twisted parable of the prodigal son in which the paterfamilias works out his anger at rejection by whipping the child who remained. That isn’t, to be clear, what has actually happened—but it is what it feels like it to see the places that molded you slide into promoting policies and values opposed to what you became.

Consider.

Earlier this year, Indiana state legislators stripped Indiana University of self-governance. The legislator removed the elected alumni positions from the university’s board, placing it entirely under the control of Governor Mike Braun, and demoted the school’s faculty senate to advisory status.

For the snider Brooklynites out there, it’s worth noting that policies like these—assaulting the idea of knowledge and the producers of it—is a change. Indiana University, like the other great public universities of the country’s central, was built in midcentury by a cheerful American lite socialism. Universities would become engines of growth as well as temples of knowledge and culture. There would be public television, public radio, public culture—maybe never supported as well as in Europe, but certainly far more than before the Second World War. World-beating research would take place miles—or less—from the sturdy farms and factories of the heartland. (Squint, and the marriage of practicality, science, and culture in agrarian-industrial provinces begins to look rather Soviet.)

The full story is more complicated than that—there were Red scares and culture wars, protesters and reactionaries—but the net result was that by the 1980s it was simply taken for granted that every state between Pennsylvania and Wyoming would have oases of culture, science, and diversity.

And good football teams (or, in Indiana’s case, basketball teams) to boot. Oxford couldn’t match that.

Over the past several decades, state and federal funding have retreated, leaving the pieces to be picked up. Over the past several months, that steady retreat has become something like a blitz. And of course the war on universities is just one broader front in a Kulturkampf that seems to have as its objective the troglodytization of swathes of the country. (Don’t be too smug, Brooklyn—the folks who support cultural institutions in your metropole are products of this system.)

The attack on Indiana University has hit me hard.

Broadly, there are three principle ways that members of a community can respond to crises, as A.O. Hirschman argued in a classic work: exit, voice, and loyalty. Exit means leaving, giving up, ceding the field; voice means speaking up and arguing for change; loyalty means sticking with the organization no matter what. Eventually, one must choose what to do in response; if one does not, then a choice will be made regardless.

As an alumnus of Indiana University, what am I supposed to do? The state government has told me, as a member of a class of alumni, that it does not care what I think. Only current residents of Indiana are to have any say in how the institution is governed, and in practice only a tight circle of Republican legislators and electeds will exercise that power in their name. Loyalty is not much of an option because I am deemed irrelevant.

Maybe voice would work. Perhaps I should argue and agitate long and loud that policies that attack academic freedom are misguided—not just in the long term but in the short term. Indiana University has long done well in recruiting out-of-state students (who pay much higher tuition, by the way) because of its combination of rustic charm and decent academics. Take away the latter quality, however, and the rustic setting may lose its charm relatively quickly. Shuttering dozens of majors and generally tearing apart the quality of an institution tends to demoralize and degrade an institution relatively quickly. Yet the same people who would make such decisions are ones who are unlikely to listen to me—I am, after all, too easily dismissed as a liberal academic who’s gotten the university into this mess. (What mess? Well, the existence of some mess justifies sweeping attacks on an institution, so there must be a mess to justify these measures.)

So I am left with exit. What does exit look like if I’m being cast out? I suppose it means I should suspend my donations to the university; they’re not record-setting but, you know, every little helps. Yet that’s painful! It means giving up! But why contribute to, in essence, those who are mauling the institution that’s meant to benefit from my pennies? But if I do give up on them, then will there be any argument not to accelerate the destruction?

It is not an easy problem. And it is not even the hardest question of exit, voice, or loyalty I’m facing these days.

The same conflict is being played out in grander and smaller settings as the scale of the current struggle becomes clear—from Congress to city halls. It’s a cold civil war, to use the increasingly common phrase, and at the moment the other side—or sides, rather, as there are many—have got the upper hand. Worse, much of what they have seized they do not value even as hostages; rather, they seem to view the infrastructure of knowledge and culture as a waste—or valuable only for its raw materials.

Perhaps someone has run the numbers on how much could be gotten by recycling the copper in the Statue of Liberty.¹

When the Taliban brought down the Buddhas of Bamiyan, it was an act of cultural desecration that made headlines around the world — although subsequent Taliban-sponsored atrocities would shortly eclipse that one. At the moment, powerful interests in the United States—federal, state, and even local—are destroying the institutions that create public culture. Even looking at these desecrations from afar, it still hurts to see the institutions that shaped me tossed aside so callously.

1. Ok, actually someone has: about $200,000. Lady Liberty is safe at that price.