Professor of History Andrew Donson and the University of Massachusetts History Department held the second and final lecture panel in a series discussing the meaning of democracy in Herter Hall.
Speakers at the panel included History Lecturer Tim Hart, Professor Sigrid Schmalzer, Assistant Professor of History Asheesh Kapur Siddique and English Professor David Fleming, with History Department Chair Anne Broadbridge introducing the speakers and moderating.
The lecture began with Hart, who discussed a summary of the history of power struggles in ancient Athenian democracy and examples of tyranny and dictatorship. Hart explained the aftermath of an attempted coup in 632 BCE where a man named Cylon occupied the acropolis of Athens with an armed band of his followers.
“Two generations later, a more successful individual named Pisistratus manages to rally support from an underrepresented rural population within the countryside of Attica, folks that were perceived as having not been paid attention to by the other aristocrats that were more closely based in the city,” Hart said. “He uses that combined with strategic alliances with other aristocrats to get himself set up as a kind of a populus dictator in the city of Athens.”
Hart’s lecture revolved around framing historical context for the earliest form of democracy, which rose in the fifth century in reaction to this period of tyranny.
After Pisistratus, a man named Cleisthenes wanted to remove the system of election because the chief magistrates were monopolizing power amongst themselves. He created the Boule, or the Council, which was made up of 10 tribal units that were randomly chosen by lottery to serve for one month of the year. Hart drew parallels to our modern Juror selection system, which is still randomly allotted and a necessary part of our civic duty.
Next, Professor Schmalzer discussed the global and political relationship between the values of science and democracy from at least since the early 20th century. Schmalzer also used vignettes to explain “this tension between a democratic science and a capitalistic economic system.”
Schmalzer quoted Maxim Gorky, a Russian philosopher who said, “I deeply believe that if it is not enriched by science, democracy has no future.”
She presented Gorky’s view that democracy should ideally protect the sanctity of science by ensuring autonomy to the educated, and in turn expected intellectuals to make well-informed political decisions.
“In the present day, science and democracy similarly often appear in the abstract, as cardboard cutout ideals that need rescuing from ‘politics,’ also in the abstract,” Schmalzer said.
She continued that in the 1980s, during the democracy movement in China, liberal physicists argued that “without dissent, there is no science.”
“I want to caution that it is inaccurate and dangerous to imagine that science necessarily nurtures democracy or dissidents. Scientists have built too much of the apparatus of militarist and corporate power,” Schmalzer said.
Schmalzer concluded by urging the audience to challenge their academic and moral thought in relation to economic and political structures.
Next, Professor Siddique lectured on the influence that prominent members of the American Historical profession have on higher education and American Politics.
The members he referred to – Heather Cox Richardson, Tim Snyder, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Joanne Freeman, Kevin Kruse, Kathleen Belew and Eddie Glaude – are in private institutions like Boston College, Yale, Princeton, New York University and Northwestern, and “directly contributed to the underfunding of public higher education in these states including us,” he said.
“They were all at rich private institutions that don’t pay state taxes and are not going to lose their jobs, generous research funding and their regular sabbaticals,” Siddique said.
“In the very same period as these historians were performing in the public,” whom he said were advisors to President Joe Biden earlier this year, “the academic job market in history cratered, majors shrunk, research funding dried up and the discipline became more irrelevant in universities, though profitable for some individuals.”
Siddique critiqued that these influential historians’ ideas of what were vital to voters, such as “threats to democracy,” polled as actually not relevant to most voters’ concerns. He said they never mentioned issues like income inequality and public education funding.
He also later stressed that “Public education corrects for the distorting effects of wealth and class privilege by providing a high-quality education at low to no cost. But the professional class tries to find ways to profit and find influence.”
Siddique concluded by saying that a democratic culture cannot flourish while public university board of trustees are largely dominated by corporate lawyers and finance capital, who “underfund humanities and call police on peaceful protests.”
Lastly, Professor Fleming explained the history of the discipline of rhetoric at UMass and the importance of civil discourse and debate in higher education.
Fleming explained that until 1971, speech and English composition were required courses for the university, and then eventually public speaking was dropped as a general education requirement.
“I think students suffer from this. I wish we talked more than we do about our students’ speaking abilities,” he said.
He also mentioned Richard J. Light’s book, “Making the Most of College,” where he interviewed seniors on what was most memorable in the classroom. Students overwhelmingly remembered courses that fostered “structured disagreement,” where students are given the opportunity to prepare, experience and manage debates.
Fleming said that the biggest lesson is that there is a need to help students work through differences in opinion and use modes of civility and persuasion to prepare them for a diverse political climate.
Kavya Sarathy can be reached at [email protected].
