Why did it take a NYTimes investigation?
How a statewide political curriculum dampens serious scholarship
Why did it take a New York Times investigative report to change the status of César Chávez on college campuses in California, after years spent elevating him in classrooms? I heard hints of the new allegations years ago, from Chicano/Chicana Studies faculty when I was a dean at Sonoma State. At the time, California was building an enormous educational infrastructure supposedly dedicated to scholarship focused on historically marginalized California communities. I presumed this would be good for ethnic studies scholars and scholarship in the CSU.
The goal of California’s AB 1460, signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2020, was noble:
It is the intent of the Legislature that students of the California State University acquire the knowledge and skills that will help them comprehend the diversity and social justice history of the United States and of the society in which they live to enable them to contribute to that society as responsible and constructive citizens.
Every student in the state needed to take a 3-unit course in either Native American studies, African American studies, Asian American studies, or Latina/Latino studies. I have written critically about the ethnic studies rollout as a burden on scholars in the field, overly focused on surface-level activism, not scholarship. It turns out I was right. The problem of implementing a curriculum at scale is that no real scholarship gets done. All the teaching is tops of waves.
Within forty-eight hours of the NYTimes story, as Josh Moody of Inside Higher Ed reported, Fresno State covered its Chávez statue with a black tarp. Sonoma State pulled murals and portraits. UCLA’s Chicana/o and Central American Studies department voted in an emergency meeting to strip his name. UC Davis rebranded a youth leadership conference. San Diego’s community college district began reviewing the name of an entire campus. How swiftly these institutions acted in response to a high-status story in a major newspaper! Nobody had been listening to their own scholars.
No scholar expects political figures to be saints, and faculty are acknowledging the sexual abuse was news, but only by degree. Chávez’s adultery was well documented. Published accounts document his wife leaving him after intercepting a love letter from an eighteen-year-old. But accounts of victims and survivors had circulated for years, the investigation reported. The NYT findings are based on work any California scholar could have done:
interviews with more than 60 people, including his top aides at the time, his relatives and former members of the U.F.W., which he co-founded with Ms. Huerta and Gilbert Padilla…review[ing] hundreds of pages of union records, confidential emails and photographs, as well as hours of audio recordings from U.F.W. board meetings.
So where have California ethnic studies scholars been? Rolling out a massive, statewide, 3-unit course to the 460,000-student CSU system, the community college transfer pipeline, and the University of California system. Chávez is a central figure in Chicano/Latino studies and the California Department of Education maintains a standalone César E. Chávez Model Curriculum with a research center containing thousands of primary source documents and over five hundred historical photographs. Everything is automated, fixed. AI could teach it.
Chávez is taught in the K-12 history and social studies curriculum at fourth, ninth, and eleventh grade. His name is on at least forty-three schools in the state. He has a state holiday. Dolores Huerta, his co-founder at the UFW, has six schools named after her nationwide. I suspect many names will change.
Anyone paying attention in 2021 could predict how operationalizing Shirley Weber’s mandate would bury faculty under heavy teaching loads and regulations and turn overly political. Students were required to “apply theory and knowledge produced by” the four designated communities to describe “critical events, histories, cultures, intellectual traditions, contributions, lived-experiences and social struggles of those groups with a particular emphasis on agency and group-affirmation.” The UC required students to “describe and engage with anti-racist, abolitionist, and anti-colonial thought, issues, practices, and movements.” A great deal of attention was paid by ethnic studies to global politics, while stories were left untold at home.
Scholars can be investigators. But a curriculum built to affirm agency and celebrate resistance does not tend to welcome research that damages the movements and leaders it was built to honor. Not to mention that the mandate was to focus on ethnic communities, not the women in them.
Scholarship means grappling with canonical figures, warts and all. I’ve taught work by very unsavory characters. On the same day the Chronicle of Higher Ed published a story about the fallout from the NYTimes Chávez story (‘A Painful Reckoning’: After Bombshell Report, Higher Ed Scrambles to Review Cesar Chavez Tributes,’ which also does not note the oddness of journalists doing scholarship that “higher ed” ought to have done) it ran an interview with Annette Gordon-Reed and her groundbreaking scholarship on Thomas Jefferson’s “sustained relationship” with the enslaved Sally Hemings. It is a pity the CSU did not support similar scholarship over the past decades.
I shook my head at the CSU system’s statement that it was “deeply troubled” by the allegations. The CSU has a record of refusing to investigate people it celebrates. This is the system that badly handled a series of campus president sexual misconduct scandals. So when I read about CSU presidents calling for a moral reckoning about NYT findings of a leader long dead, I noted that once again no CSU leader is calling for a reckoning within their own system.
These are treacherous waters in which to wade but I feel compelled to say there is an investment in heroes that lead to a kind of reversal of what William James called a certain blindness in human beings. In this case, as with so many heroes--Jefferson, Dickens, Heidegger, Pound, Gandhi, Lennon--we are blind to their moral failings because of what they achieved.
I appreciate that you did not use the term "me too" because I think it borders on trivializing what seems to me an unfolding of a genuine social movement to insist that sexual exploitation of less powerful by the more powerful is monstrous. The surprising thing to me is not the institutional blindness, but the fact that the NYT ran the story and that it was accepted as grounds for action--no blue ribbon committees or task forces to make recommendations. Similarly, I remain surprised by the fall out in academia of the Epstein revelations.
Institutions function to protect the powerful, and that includes their presidents and their icons. When I think back to what Annette Gordon-Reed faced and what so many accusers have faced, the speed of this response seems a genuine achievement. To your point, the question is whether universities can turn this into a habit such that credible reports of sexual exploitation turn into action. I am more hopeful than I have ever been that this is happening.
“All the teaching is tops of waves.” - Great analogy; I think surfers might call it surfing ankle-high instead “heavy waves”.