Rachel, meet Tony: Megan Dodds in the 2006 (not-the-New-York-Theatre-Workshop) production of My Name Is Rachel Corrie. Photo: Sara Krulwich, New York Times.

UPDATE (10 May): Brooklyn College’s Prof. Kristofer Petersen-Overton reaches similar conclusions in this article today for the Guardian.

It is the policy and purpose of the Board of Trustees to preserve, enhance, and improve the University as an institution of the highest quality and standards, with a faculty and administration charged to fulfill both the general and specific missions of the University: to educate and serve the people of New York City, to constitute an urban-oriented institution of higher education, and to engage persistently in the search for knowledge and truth. … It is the resolve of the Board of Trustees that all officers and administrators of the Board of Trustees be directed, exhorted, and admonished that the efforts aimed at the survival and preservation of the University and of its separate identity and mission, and of an appropriate and essential budget from both the State and the City sufficient to meet the vital needs of all present elements of the University shall be the first priority of all such officers and administrators.
From the City University of New York Manual of General Policy
Article II: Board of Trustees
Policy 2.1: Autonomy and Jurisdiction of the University

History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.
Karl Marx

Early this evening in a near-unanimous vote, the executive committee of the CUNY Board of Trustees reversed the earlier decision by the board to table discussion of an honorary degree this year to playwright Tony Kushner, reinstating the John Jay College’s recommendation that such a degree be granted to the dramatist. Winnie Hu reports the story at The New York Times.

This is a heartening decision (though the big story here might be in evolutionary science, board chair Benno Schmidt managing to grow a backbone in a miraculous five days’ time). It would be nice at this point to say job well done, sweep up the bunting and balloons and get back to work. It is this last imprecation, though, that sticks in the craw, because work and expression that undermines the limits of any status quo political, cultural or aesthetic assumptions and preconceptions will continue to be done — and will continue to meet with hostility, misrepresentation and silence.

The Israel/Palestine controversy has long been a third-rail issue in U.S. and especially New York politics: to indulge in an additional metaphor, it is the rabid dog at which it is unwise to shake a stick. But the CUNY/Kushner debacle is not about that, it is not about trustee Jeffrey Wiesenfeld’s or Kushner’s specific opinions on this or any other particular geopolitical issue. If this is not to become a referendum on the correctness of Kushner’s political views, however repugnant they might be to some, it should not become a referendum on Wiesenfeld’s, however repugnant they might be to others.

This is about the extent to which the boards and major donors of academic institutions feel that they have become, through their positions and financial contributions, entitled to interfere with the academic dynamics and consensus decisions of the institutions, faculties and students they claim to defend and represent.

In this particular case, the issue entered the spotlight for a number of rather peripheral reasons — the celebrity and stature of Tony Kushner; the volatility of the political questions debated; the size of the university, as well as its status as a public and not a private academic institution; and of course the publicity that attaches as a result to these first three characteristics. But none of this should serve to obfuscate the issues of academic freedom that this represents for all universities and colleges, not only on the Israel/Palestine question but on other questions of political, cultural — and artistic importance. The expression of a duly-constituted committee of academics that a public figure is due the award of an honorary degree from the institution they represent is just as much an academic expression as anything said in a lecture hall, whatever Stanley Fish might believe, and the facile dismissal of this expression by those who demonstrate an ignorance or misunderstanding of that public figure’s work is an encroachment on that expression. (And, lest we forget the parlous state of American education generally, it was a grim coincidence that New York mayor Michael Bloomberg proposed laying off 5% of the city’s public school teachers to close a budget gap the same week; as the father of two young daughters who looks forward to their attending public schools, I am rankled by this as well.)

Although this has nothing to do with Kushner or his work per se — to say that it does is to distract attention from that central concern — he is no stranger to similar controversy in the artistic sphere. In 2006 (a century ago in Internet time), the non-profit New York Theatre Workshop announced that it would produce the U.S. premiere of My Name Is Rachel Corrie, a controversial play about a young woman who died in the Israel/Palestine conflict; the NYTW then announced that it was “postponing” the production (in much the same way that Kushner’s CUNY nomination was “tabled” in the original trustee meeting last Monday), for reasons which still remain far from clear but which appeared to be the result of political maneuvering. In the wake of the debacle, Kushner played an admittedly small and peripheral role in the dialogue, but he did tell The Nation‘s Philip Weiss (instead of rehearsing the details of this controversy, I point to Weiss’ comprehensively reported article from the 16 March 2006 issue of The Nation, which is online here):

… that he was quiet [about the NYTW situation] because of his exhaustion over similar arguments surrounding the film Munich, on which he was a screenwriter, and because he kept hoping the decision would be made right. He said [New York Theatre Workshop artistic director Jim] Nicola is a great figure in American theater: “His is one of the one or two most important theaters in this area — politically engaged, unapologetic, unafraid and formally experimental.” Never having gotten a clear answer about why Nicola put off the play, Kushner ascribes it to panic: Nicola didn’t know what he was getting into, and only later became aware of how much opposition there was to Corrie, how much confusion the right has created around the facts. Nicola felt he was taking on “a really big, scary brawl and not a play.” Still, Kushner said, the theater’s decision created a “ghastly” situation. “Censoring a play because it addresses Palestinian-Israeli issues is not in any way right,” he said.

As, indeed, denying an academic honor to a figure because he does the same is not in any way right either. And it is only relevant to note the differences between the two events: CUNY is a large public academic institution, NYTW is a moderately-sized non-profit off-Broadway theatre; CUNY is an educational institution, NYTW an artistic one; Kushner is an individual, My Name Is Rachel Corrie a play — and CUNY’s executive committee reversed the original decision of the trustees, while NYTW did not reverse theirs.

The central possible similarity arises from another passage from the Nation article on My Name Is Rachel Corrie:

Questions about pressure from Jewish leaders morph quickly into questions about funding. Ellen Stewart, the legendary director of the theatrical group La MaMa E.T.C., which is across East 4th Street from the Workshop, speculates that the trouble began with its “very affluent” board. Rachel’s father, Craig Corrie, echoes her. “Do an investigation, follow the money.” I called six board members and got no response. (About a third appear to be Jewish, as am I.) This is of course a charged issue. The writer Alisa Solomon, who was appalled by the postponement, nonetheless warns, “There’s something a little too familiar about the image of Jews pulling the puppet strings behind the scenes.” … I doubt we will find out whether the Workshop’s decision was “internally generated,” as Kushner contends, or more orchestrated, as I suspect. What the episode has demonstrated is a climate of fear. Not of physical harm, but of loss of opportunities. …

Weiss’ fear of external influence aside, no members of any religious or social group need to be imagined pulling any kind of strings to see the dangers that even an “internally generated” decision — like that of the CUNY trustees — may mean to the chilling of expression.

Many members of boards of both artistic and academic institutions are significant donors to those institutions as well — presence on these boards is often a reward for those significant donations; and often enough, the corporate affiliations of these members are duly attached to their names in the publicity material for those organizations. Through the presence of these individuals and their money in the institutional coffers, corporate America is represented — and, at arm’s length, is dictating expression through those boards. In the not too distant past, these boards were entrusted with the defense and financial oversight of the institution and the academic or aesthetic ideals that institution represented, the debate it sponsored or the work it produced; the board’s honor and esteem inhered in that defense and in nothing else; they were not buying influence in the operations of those institutions. That, it appears, is changing, and it is good to be reminded of abolitionist Wendell Phillips admonition that “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty,” as appropriate to discussions of what is permitted in artistic and academic cultures as well as a wider democratic culture.

In 2006 Weiss quoted me in the same article. “This is far too important an issue for everyone to paper it over again, with everyone shaking hands for a New York Times photographer. It’s an extraordinarily rare picture of the ways that New York cultural institutions make their decisions about what to produce,” I said then. I clearly did not go far enough. The CUNY/Kushner fiasco is also an extraordinarily rare picture of the way that a New York institution makes its decisions about what to honor or approve. Fine to see the Kushner award reinstated, of course — but if you’re not Tony Kushner, or you’re writing on an issue just as controversial and vital in any respect as the Israeli/Palestine question, or you’re coping with the invisible, arbitrary influence of a non-profit theatre’s board of directors and the administrative and artistic staff who are beholden to and afraid of that board, the situation remains just as dire.