Pacifist Professor

by Lee Nichols

If a mainstream journalist dares to actually have strong convictions, life can be frustrating. The nature of so-called "objective journalism" is to simply observe, not to act. It's a fact that eventually sends some journalists looking for another career, and that's exactly what happened to Robert W. Jensen over the past two decades. After working for various papers in Maryland, Florida, and Minnesota, the combination of a growing social conscience and a love of the intellectual life sent him back to school for a doctorate and eventually to an associate professorship in the journalism school at the University of Texas.

Over the last year, Jensen, 40, has made the most of the liberty which tenured professorship offers him by establishing a noticeable profile among the circles of Austin's peace and justice activists. His involvement with local groups protesting against U.S. policy on the Middle East, especially the sanctions against Iraq, has led to a couple of op-ed pieces in the Austin American-Statesman, an editorial in the latest Texas Observer, and an arrest for shouting out discomfiting questions to former President Bush and former national security advisor Brent Scowcroft at last November's Texas Book Festival. He has also been heavily involved in The Working Stiff Journal, the monthly newspaper collectively published by several local labor activists since September 1.

Appropriately enough, "Media Clips" caught up with Jensen at a Martin Luther King Day march and spent three miles and about an hour talking with him.

Journalism Professior Robert Jensen photograph by John Anderson

The Austin Chronicle: What got you into the activism that you're doing?

Robert Jensen: When you're a mainstream journalist, you're conditioned not to be political. You're sort of immersed in the politics of your local town or whatever you're covering, but you stay strangely apolitical. All through my 20s, I was like that. I was a journalist. I had opinions, but I didn't see any role for myself beyond being a writer. And then I went to graduate school and studied, among other things, feminism. And feminism politicized me and made me understand that the work is in the public arena, it's political, it's engaged, and it's got to be activist. Once I figured that out around questions of gender, then the rest of it just unfolded. It was like, OK, there's race questions, there's labor questions, there's foreign policy questions, and they're all of a similar dimension and you've got to resist these sort of unjust systems. Basically what I figured out was that we live amid an incredible number of illegitimate structures of authority. Gender structures of authority, all sorts of things. Once I figured that out, it sort of unfolded rather naturally.

AC: Talk to me a bit about The Working Stiff Journal. How did you get involved with that? What is your role within that?

RJ: It was just pure luck. I was not part of the core group that came up with the idea. It was a group of independent labor people in town, and through personal connections one of them heard about me and dropped me an e-mail and said we're doing this thing, would you like to get involved? They were still in the planning stage. So I went to a meeting, and I said, "These people got something going." They're smart, they're committed, they have basically the same principles as I do, and since I'd been a journalist, I said tell me what to do, I'll do whatever I can. And then I became part of the collective. Apart from the product -- which I think is getting better and better and is going to be a really important --

AC: I've noticed it's grown.

RJ: Yeah, we're up to eight pages, we brought a lot of new people on board, we need to bring even more, but after four issues to have a pretty solid eight-page paper I think is quite an accomplishment. But beyond the content, what I really love about The Working Stiff Journal is it's a true collective and it gets things done. You know, there's no shortage of collectives that have been rather inefficient and they fall prey to internal struggles. But these are people with a commitment not only to labor issues but to a certain kind of democratic way of working in the world. I love it. And I have a role. I'm not the big cheese. I don't want to be the big cheese. I want to be part of a collective. I take minutes at the meetings, which I love to do. And the other thing I love about it is it's not an academic setting. These are real people involved in real struggles. Not that some of us in the academy aren't.

AC: Are you the only academic involved with the collective? What's the makeup of it?

RJ: I think so, at the moment. It's all working people. Louis Malfaro is from the teachers' union. Josh [Freeze] and Chris [Kutalik] are officers in their bus drivers union. People who work for the state, various kinds of things. That's the joy of it. You get out among people who are from different sectors of the world other than your own. I find it really important to get out of academic circles as often as I can, which really, I think makes me a better professor.

AC: How do your beliefs translate into the classroom?

RJ: I basically have two thoughts on that. One of the main things I want to do in the classroom is model for students what public life can be. So they hear about me doing these things or see me doing these things, and what's important about that for all faculty I think is that it says, listen, I accept a moral and political obligation to be a part of the society, not to be tucked away in some university office. University life is incredibly comfortable and for me, fun. I can't think of a more privileged position than what I have. I'm paid more than a living wage, I have a lot of control over my own work and I get to read and think and talk to people and write. What's there to complain about? I feel like I've gone to heaven. But that's not where it ends. If that's all I did, I don't think I'd be making good on my obligations. The more privilege you have, the more obligation you have to be a part of the struggles for justice. ... There's a great joy in public life. When I come together with the Anti-War Committee on campus and the community group doing Middle East stuff, it's not only that we're engaged in a collective struggle, but ... people don't understand that political life isn't just a drain on you. It's a source of nurturance, both intellectual and personal. It's a way you overcome not just apathy, but, you know, there's a lot of hopelessness that these systems of power that we struggle against can't be beaten. Well, you realize that they can be beaten because of course they have been beaten throughout history and that it's in the struggle that you find a certain kind of joy in living. So, to get back to your question, I think it's important to model that for students. And it doesn't matter if I'm left-wing and they're right-wing. I've actually had some of my most rewarding experiences with students who don't agree with me. I supervised the honors thesis for a woman who's a conservative Christian. She wrote about environmental issues. I learned from her, and she learned from me, and it was really quite an enriching experience. I've had all sorts of conservative students.

The other thing that I think's important is, universities are ideological institutions.They do what Chomsky calls "doctrinal management." ... [There is] this insane legend that universities are run by left-wing people -- which is not even a sick joke, it's just so far from the truth. Anybody who knows the workings day in and day out of a university knows that not only are radical people not in charge, but not even liberal people are in charge. It's a very centrist kind of organization, centrist to right-wing. I always say look at the business school. One of the biggest, best-funded enterprises on campus is the business school. Check it out -- it's not a hotbed of left-wing politics, you know. And they're churning out more students than, I don't know what percentage of the student body it is, but it's really incredible. A lot of professors get afraid of bringing politics into the classroom. My point of view is, you're always bringing politics into the classroom. The business school is the most overtly politicized unit on campus. They're teaching how to execute corporate capitalism, which is one of the most illegitimate structures of authority that's ever existed. It's a downright totalitarian system -- anti-democratic, in fact classically fascist in character. Well, they're political. Everything you do when you talk about how human societies are arranged or should be arranged, and how you execute those things, that's all political. So I try to bring in politics in a way that I don't try and hide it. I don't try to pretend to be neutral. What I try to do is highlight the assumptions of my politics. So for instance, in this critical thinking class, [I say] "Here's the assumptions on which I make my judgments. Now let's examine the assumptions. You might disagree with them. Why? What evidence would you bring into this?" It's kind of a modeling of engaged political discourse, which I think needs to happen. But you know, professors often get very afraid that they'll be criticized for being political. To my mind, that's what we're there for, is to engage.

AC: That would seem to translate into journalism. Journalists claim to be non-political, but they really are, because they carry certain assumptions in with them. And the corporate nature of their employers reinforces those assumptions.

RJ: Certainly. People focus way too much on the individual politics of reporters, as if that's the central determining factor. I'm not so interested in that. I heard somebody use the example: If you have a lot of vegetarians who work in a restaurant, but the owner wants a steakhouse, it doesn't matter if you have a vegetarian chef if they're throwing steaks on the grill.

AC: Why did you pick Middle Eastern issues as a focus for your activism?

RJ: Part of it was that I sort of came into political consciousness in a sense in '91. I was working at the St. Paul Pioneer Press on the copy desk at night while I was in graduate school and I watched that particular newspaper, as well as the entire mainstream media, become unreflective boosters for U.S. aggression, and it sickened me. I used to literally come home from work so angry that I would have trouble sleeping. I was just so angry at what was happening. And that was a real turn for me. So my interests in Iraq and the Gulf and the Middle East in general have always been sort of strong.

But the other reason I care about it is that I'm an American citizen and it's a place where the U.S. has extensive influence which is all used against peace and justice. And if you look at the statistics on the future of oil, the Middle East is going to become increasingly important as reserves elsewhere dwindle, so the Middle East is going to be a focus for U.S. policy well into the next century because of the material questions. Which means that the U.S. is going to continue to do what it has always done, but which was intensified during Bush's war against Iraq, which is to use force and coercion to demand that we run the Middle East. George Bush said during the Gulf War, "The lesson of all this is that what we say goes." When a country has that attitude, and that country has shown no reluctance to use grotesque levels of violence against innocent people, I think it's a morally compelling argument that citizens have to resist that.

In related news, The Working Stiff Journal will host a public forum with Mike Parker, author of Democracy Is Power, on Friday, Feb. 5, 7pm, at the AFL-CIO building at 11th & Lavaca. For more on Jensen, go to http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/home.htm.

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Much Ado About Nothing

Barbs continue to fly in the KOOP radio wars, in unexpected places: The January/February issue of the newsletter of La Peña, a local Latino arts organization, gave KOOP programmer Eduardo Vera, a supporter of the unpopular KOOP board of trustees, a platform to throw inflammatory charges at his opponents, specifically KOOP volunteer Pat Powell, station engineer Jerry Chamkis, station founder Jim Ellinger, and newly appointed board member Michael Zakes. Among other things, Vera charged that, "A few white males have tried to usurp the authority of the board and to sabotage proposals, and have led a campaign of harrassment and intimidation, including an attempt to carry out a coup-d'etat against the board of trustees. Jim Ellinger, who calls himself the founder, has bothered Latino and Gay people at their workplaces at the Teatro Humanidad and the Paramount." He also wrote, "One of the two white males who joined the board has been criticized by the gay community for placing homophobic ads in the Chronicle to support his bike shop."

That would be Zakes, the owner of Waterloo Cycles, previously an opponent of the board until he was appointed to it as part of the settlement to a lawsuit he filed against the station and the board in December (see "Naked City," Jan. 8, 1999). In the Feb. 25, 1994 issue of The Austin Chronicle, Waterloo ran an ad for Kona mountain bikes which contained the text, "Humuhumu-Nukunuku-a-Pua'a" preceded by "Might Mean 'Gears Are for Queers' in Hawaiian. Might Not." Contacted last week, Zakes explained, "We were trying to be tongue-in-cheek in the ad. Back in the days of the cruiser [a type of bicycle], people would ask, 'Why ride a cruiser rather than a mountain bike?', saying 'Gears are for queers.' I will admit it was in poor taste, but it was not meant to be derogatory," Zakes said, adding, "The fact that he put in no background or context and criticized an ad that ran five years ago just shows that he is grasping at straws."

One may wonder why La Peña, a credible nonprofit organization, even allowed the article to appear at all. Apparently, some at La Peña are also wondering. Lydia Hernandez, the president of La Peña's board of directors, sent Ellinger a letter of apology and offered him space to reply in the next newsletter.

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