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by Allison S. Finkelstein

Womens Overseas Service League Seattle Unit members on the 50th Anniversary of Armistice, November 11, 1968. From left to right: Mrs. Edna Lord (American RedCross), Mrs. I.M. (Anna) Palmaw (Army Nurse Corps), Miss Rose Glass (YMCA), and Miss Blanche Wenner (YMCA). Womens Overseas Service League Collection, National WWI Museum and Memorial Archives, Kansas City, Missouri.

The past several years of domestic debate over the roles and meanings of memorials on the American landscape can be enriched by looking to the example of female commemorators of the past. Todays conversations tend to focus on statues and other artistic works. By learning about an overlooked cohort of American women who served in World War I, we can find inspiration for creative memorialization projects that will expand our understandings of memorials beyond physical statues and monuments.

In the decades after World War I, American women who served or sacrificed during that conflict championed memorial projects that prioritized community service over statues. Their efforts can provide a blueprint for how to change our approach to memorialization, should we care to look for it. Examining their philosophy can yield the untapped wisdom of a generation of activists, mothers, civic leaders, and unrecognized female veterans.

The women who pursued this unconventional approach to memorialization had contributed to the war effort in a variety of ways. Some had directly supported the military through service in wartime organizations, both at home and abroad. Others had suffered extreme sacrifices. In their number were Gold Star mothers and widows who lost a child or husband. The larger community of female veterans embraced these women as their own and honored them as having served the nation just as much as male veterans.

These women banded together and put service at the center of their commemorative work. They coordinated their efforts through new organizations such as the Womens Overseas Service League (WOSL), which represented the interests of the thousands of American women who served overseas during the war.[i] Instead of monuments, the WOSL concentrated their memorialization projects on aiding people impacted by the war, whether male or female. They felt obligated to help the male veterans they served during wartime, but they also supported their own community, particularly civilian women excluded from veteran status. [ii] In the absence of government support for them, the WOSL served as their advocates and benefactors.

Although these projects included no constructed components, the WOSL defined them as memorials. In 1923, WOSL President Louise Wells wrote that in her organization, there was an overwhelming sentiment to the effect that for the present at least our best memorial to the dead would be our service to the living.[iii] WOSL members repeated this mantra as they pushed for a radical reinterpretation of memorials focused on service. Instead of spending their limited resources on statues or memorial buildings, they funded what Wells had identified in 1923 as a more pressing need: projects to help disabled ex-service women.[iv] For the WOSL, these were the most important memorials they could ever create.

During World War I, gender-based restrictions on military service meant that many American women served as civilians outside of the official armed forces, even when they worked directly for the military, in uniform and under oath. As a result, the government did not consider them to be veterans. They could not receive veterans benefits such as medical care, even for illnesses and injuries that stemmed from their wartime service. The WOSL took it upon themselves to aid these women, who included the telephone operators known as the Hello Girls, the Reconstruction Aides who worked as physical and occupational therapists, and others.[v] Among numerous initiatives, the WOSL established the Fund for Disabled Overseas Women to provide financial aid to women disqualified from government veterans medical benefits.[vi]

Despite only achieving limited success during their lifetime, both in their quest for veteran status and their attempt to change commemorative practices, these womens experiences provide powerful lessons for today. Their wartime service offers examples of how women supported the armed forces even before they could fully and equally enter all branches of the military. By identifying as veterans, they compel us to question the definition of a veteran and to consider that those who serve outside of the ranks may also be veterans in their own right.

Through their memorialization projects, the unrecognized female veterans of World War I offer alternatives to traditional memorials. They pioneered a selfless form of commemoration that memorialized the past by helping those in the present. What if we also sometimes chose this method? How much time and money would we save if, instead of debating the next memorial on the national mall, we pursued a commemorative service project? How many people could we help if we directed even just a portion of funds for memorials into service projects alongside them? Recently, we have seen how problematic permanent memorials can be. Foregoing them for intangible memorials could save future generations from further culture wars. As the nation grapples with this current reckoning over memorialization, we can learn much from the American women of the World War I generation who prioritized the needs of the living over bronze and stone.

[i] Helene M. Sillia, Lest We Forget: A History of the Womens Overseas Service League (privately published, 1978), 1, 218; Allison S. Finkelstein, Forgotten Veterans, Invisible Memorials: How American Women Commemorated the Great War, 1917-1945 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2021), 70; Susan Zeiger, In Uncle Sams Service: Women Workers with the American Expeditionary Force, 19171919 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 2; Dorothy Schneider and Carl J. Schneider, Into the Breach: American Women Overseas in World War I (New York: Viking Adult, 1991), 287-289. Estimates of how many American women served overseas in WWI vary widely. Zeiger estimated there were at least sixteen thousand, while Sillia estimated about ninety thousand. Dorothy Schneider and Carl J. Schneider argued that twenty-five thousand seemed like a realistic, conservative figure.

[iii] Finkelstein, Forgotten Veterans, Invisible Memorials, 70; Louise Wells to Mabel Boardman, June 19, 1923, box 428, folder 481.73, Memorials-Inscriptions, RG 200, National Archives, College Park (NACP).

[iv] Finkelstein, Forgotten Veterans, Invisible Memorials, 70; Louise Wells to Mabel Boardman, June 19, 1923, box 428, folder 481.73, Memorials-Inscriptions, RG 200, NACP.

[v] Finkelstein, Forgotten Veterans, Invisible Memorials, 7-8, 39-40; Zeiger, In Uncle Sams Service, 170-171; Elizabeth Cobbs, The Hello Girls: Americas First Women Soldiers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 73, 78, 83, 94, 102, 104-105, 133; Lena Hitchcock, The Great Adventure, V, Box 240, The Womens Overseas Service League Records, MS 22, University of Texas at San Antonio Libraries Special Collections.

[vi] Finkelstein, Forgotten Veterans, Invisible Memorials, 34-36.

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"Our Best Memorial to the Dead Would be Our Service to the Living" - History News Network

Why do Putin and the Republican Party sound so much alike?

Simple: Their culture wars have similar agendas.

Both are trying to distract attention from the economic looting by their respective oligarchies.

Vladimir Putin has been blasting so-called cancel culture.

This was his third cancel culture rant in recent months. Its the same imaginary crisis that Trump and the GOP have been ranting about for several years.

Tucker Carlson, one of Fox Newss most infamous personalities, accuses liberals of trying to cancel all sorts of things.

Last fall, Putin argued that teaching children about different gender identities was, quote, on the verge of a crime against humanity. Putins fixation on LGBTQ people is also echoed on the American right.

Republican state legislators are attacking trans people and restricting discussion of gender and sexual orientation in schools. And in Texasstate attorney general Ken Paxton likened kids getting gender-affirming medical care to child abuse.

While Putins MO has been to fuel Russian ethnic pride and nationalism, Americas right wing has been fueling white nationalism.

To conclude from all of this that authoritarians think alike misses a deeper truth. Putin, Trump, Carlson, and Americas right wing have been promoting the same narrative for the same reason: Manufacturing fears of the other to distract from where all the wealth and power have goneall the way to the top.

Remember, Putin was put into power by a Russian oligarchy made fabulously rich by siphoning off and privatizing the wealth of the former Soviet Union.

Likewise, Trump and the radical right in America have been bankrolled by an American oligarchy Rupert Murdoch, Charles Koch, Rebekah Mercer, Peter Thiel, and other billionaires.

Sowing racism, homophobia, and transphobia creates life-or-death dangers for many people in our society. For both Putin and the American right, it serves to divert attention from the economic plunder by the ultra-rich.

They want people to fear one another rather than unite behind higher wages, better working conditions, and a fairer economy and against authoritarianism.

To fight back, we must fight widening inequality while defending marginalized communities from these demagogues attacks. The real threat is not diverse identities its corporate greed and political corruption.

We have to see the culture wars waged by Putin and Americas right for the cynical strategies they are, and build a future in which prosperity is widely shared.

See the original post:
Reich: What the GOP culture war is really about - Minnesota Reformer

If dispassionate debate of ideas is the theoretical means by which policy is formed in liberal democracies, in these increasingly hostile and desperate conditions of late capitalism, culture war has become the reality. By culture war, we mean the polarisation of debate, the Othering of opponents, the use of wedge issues loaded with any number of unspoken prior assumptions to hijack debates, and the adoption of a permanent victim complex.

The latter in particular is conspicuous for its intimate ties to an associated conspiratorial mentality that sees the world in terms of us and them, and alleges our way of life to be under siege from an endless parade of what H.L Mencken once referred to as hobgoblins, most of them imaginary. The function of mostly imaginary hobgoblins, he noted, was to provide a means with which rulers might menace the populace, who, thus alarmed, would be clamorous to be led to safety.

Historian Charles Tilly describes this kind of politics as that associated with official protection rackets. In exploring the business models of empire-builders, he noted that rulers often resembled racketeers: at a price, they offered protection against evils that they themselves would otherwise inflict, or at least allow to be inflicted. The endless parade of imaginary hobgoblins was necessary to the proper functioning of the business model; as long as they could be found or invented, the panicked clamour for national security would override and neutralise dispassionate judgement.

In his comments to US psychologist Gustave Gilbert while awaiting trial at Nuremberg, Nazi second in command Hermann Gring admitted as much, in as close as any of them ever came to a mea culpa;

Naturally, the common people dont want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America nor, for that matter, in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship. [V]oice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

In reflecting on this truism of politics for the conditions of 2022, we might observe that the exact same remains true of the culture war. It certainly might be seen to be no coincidence whatsoever that his ideological progeny are its instigatorsno small irony in light of their deep investment in victimhood identity politics, and general tendency to be the root cause of social and ideological conflict by virtue of habitually conflating being criticised and being attacked.

In this instance, we are being told that civilisation is under attack from woke leftists who want to weaken toxic masculinity and the collective narcissism of elite ingroupism by allowing traditionally marginalised and oppressed groups to share in the privileges that they have always taken for granted. The old wine of xenophobia and hatred of immigrants and refugees is repackaged in new bottles of the Great Replacement Theory, as the downtrodden looking to throw the boot off their necks are said to be stealing pieces from the rights pie, or swamping the lifeboat as the world cooks (no mention of course as to why the world is cooking or who might be behind it).

Where might these culture war fairy tales be coming from? We know that Christian fundamentalist Patrick Buchanan gave a speech during the 1992 Republican National Convention on the culture war with feminists, environmentalists and various other heretics associating structures of power with the rule of evil (as per John 12:31), alleging that

There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself . . . The agenda [Bill] Clinton and [Hillary] Clinton would impose on Americaabortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat unitsthats change, all right. But it is not the kind of change America wants. It is not the kind of change America needs. And it is not the kind of change we can tolerate in a nation that we still call Gods country.

Notable in this commentary is the conflation by the Christian Taliban of America with the values of religious fundamentalists, in defiance of the doctrine of separation of powers as well as any notion that religious values might be the basis for how we as individuals choose to live our lives, and not as an excuse to police the morality of everyone else. The supreme irony of this fact is evident in the tendency of culture warriors like Pat Buchanan, and others like him, to accuse his critics of policing morality, when they make it the stated lynchpin of their entire worldview.

This, however, does not stop dark-money funded, far-right corporate think-tanks like the Heartland Institute from crowing that Americas newest religion is secular, and its zealous missionaries are focusing their efforts on the countrys youth, in articles with titles like Woke Evangelists Spread the Gospel. Psychological projection of this kind only ultimately feeds the impression that the Heartland Institute, and the neo-aristocratic class of transnational corporate oligarchs and kleptocrats they represent, only find single-minded fanaticism problematic when it doesnt operate in their favour.

In everyday usage, the Woke Conspiracy feeds the demonisation of the Left as a monolithic entity of global and totalitarian proportionsmuch like the aforesaid transnational corporate oligarchs and kleptocrats in fact. In everyday usage, it gives rise to the whinging politics of the perpetual victim, who appear not to be able to tell the difference either between being criticised and being attacked, or between opinions and facts.

Asserting the right to an opinion in defiance and militant ignorance of facts they dont like becomes the go-to tactic of choice of every authoritarian and defender of injustice in shutting down discussion of facts they dont like, and dont want to have to acknowledge. This becomes the basis for the culture war conspiracy theory surrounding Critical Race Theorythat talking about historical racism, acknowledging it exists and attempting to do something about it is divisive (in this it figures that the problematising of critical thinking should pass entirely under the radar also).

The war on historical knowledge and consciousness implicit in the conspiricism surrounding the paranoid suspiciousness and hostility towards Critical Race Theory is useful as any other facet of culture war wedge politics in shifting blame for social conflict, oppression and injustice to the victims and sweeping the divisive nature of racism as a matter of definition under the rugalong with the class hierarchies they help to uphold through age-old divide and conquer the vassals strategies of imperial overlordship.

Meanwhile the burgeoning corporate theocracy makes no effort to challenge the divisiveness of white supremacist Great Replacement conspiracism; insurgent fundamentalism and totalitarianism benefits from this kind of woke, virtue-signalling evangelism, in all its vacant, pretentious moralism and double standards. It likewise benefits from the reversal of the democratic onus on power to justify itself to the individual, which is a threat to corporate powerwhich has never had to justify its own existence democratically, and is clearly threatened by the potential of political democracy to present challenges to, and limit the haughty power of, economic autocracy.

As Noam Chomsky has noted in the past, corporations are internally totalitarian power structures that replicate the absolutist hierarchies abolished in the political sphere by democratic revolutions hundreds of years ago. As the anarcho-syndicalist Rudolf Rocker presciently observed, liberal democracy was shipwrecked on the rocks of class hierarchy; so long as one class monopolised wealth, resources and control over the means of production, democracy ended as soon as one stepped over the threshold at work.

And so it has always been; indeed, no less than the Father of the Constitution, James Madison, argued during the 1787 Constitutional Convention that the proper role of governments out to be to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. In this was borne out the truth of the graffiti of the French rebels of May 1968, to the effect that those who make half a revolution dig their own graves.

The point here was that, in not addressing underlying economic autocracy, or instituting economy democracy at the same time, the door was left open for growing economic monopoly power to consume political democracy from within. Such fears are being borne out in the emergence of culture wars as a way of shoving the kind of ideological conformity necessary to the protection of the minority of the opulent from the majority down the throats of the population in the name of preventing it; the imaginary hobgoblins aid the construction of new empires and new fascist protection rackets.

Corporate dark money-funded think tanks with millions of dollars exist to innovate on conspiracy theories necessary for explaining why transnational corporatism, the enslavement and destruction of the planet, and protecting the minority of the opulent against the majority is the fault of anyone who notices. In demonstrating the great value of conspiricism to the project of defending the minority of the opulent from the majority, we come back full circle to Menckens observations about the whole aim of practical politics being to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary, and Tillys observations about empire-builders operating on a standover racket business model.

The difference here is that the biggest ones have a coat of arms and their own marching bandand, thanks to corporate capture of governments, a trademark in being wholly owned subsidiaries of Wall St titans like Goldman Sachs and Blackrock. Under the late capitalist culture-war driven protection racket, we can enjoy Democracy and Civilisation freed from the totalitarian yoke of critical thinking, historical consciousness and political dissent. The protection of the minority of the opulent against the majority is at least completein the name of the defence of the majority from a minority, no less.

Such was a characteristic feature of the dark days of global moral panic during the so-called War on Terrorism, the dark decades of moral panic over communism during the Cold War, and the dark centuries of moral panic over Brides of Satan during the European Witch-hunts. Each of these periods of ideologically-induced hysteria was based on a conspiracy theory that fed into a standover racket business model of political and class control; each aided empire-building, the smashing of resistance, rebellion and dissent, and the protection of the minority of the opulent from the majority, as per the prescription of the author of the US Constitution.

This latest iteration of the oldest trick in the book is absolutely nothing new. While claiming to defend democracy, the totalitarian corporate insurgency habitually conflates, as we have seen, individual freedom and privilege. It reverses the democratic burden of proof, such that critics of totalitarianism from the left, in both its corporate and religiously fundamentalist forms, are made out to be attacking individual rightswhile a culture-war powered corporate and theocratic totalitarian insurgency attacks them in fact.

As the memory of any vestige of democratic culture is increasingly relegated to the Orwellian memory hole in the name of a bastardised interpretation of freedom identified with corporate totalitarianism and racial, gender and class supremacy (Libertarianism), it merits reflecting on what democracy actually means. If democracy places burden of proof in power to justify itself to the individual, this also means that our individual freedoms end where other peoples begin, and that individual freedom means doing what you want as long as you respect the equal rights of others. Defending class and social privilege on the other handprotecting the minority of the opulent from the majoritymean doing what you want irrespective of the consequences for anyone else.

In the face of these normative truisms of democracy, the project of corporate supremacism and fascist totalitarianism must habitually conflate defence of individual freedom and the project of defending the minority of the opulent from the majority, under pain of taking any responsibility for the abuses of capitalism historically, the great crimes against humanity associated with its origins in history, and the injustice and oppressiveness and class and other hierarchies. For the same reasons, it must habitually conflate being criticised and being attacked.

This accounts for why the willing executioners of the New Order of Liberty in Gods Country are as intolerant of points of view they dont like as everything they claim to oppose (but use as a pretext to justify their own cultishness, toxicity and totalitarianism). The Woke Conspiracy is not about being heard, it is about shutting down critical thinking, heterodoxy and dissent. It is about silencing history and keeping the traditionally marginalised and oppressed. It enables a tantrum, now raised to the level of ideology, that the wheels are falling off the bandwagon of capitalist individualism.

To those who have traditionally benefitted from class hierarchy and institutional structures of exploitation, oppression and extractivism, the clamour of the downtrodden for an equal share or rights must be as daunting as the innumerable signs of impending social, economic and ecological collapse. In the face of this great dilemma, the Woke Conspiracy myth provides a mechanism for ideological acting out, and for cruelty theatre supremely evident in the toxic scaremongering and hate-targeting of major news outlets like Fox News.

With demagogues like Tucker Carlson at the forefront, cruelty theatre turns sadistic victimisation of anyone in the way of the bandwagon of accumulation into righteous vengeance for defiance of the money cult and its standover racket business model of class domination and tribute-extortion. Cruelty theatre makes attacking witnesses to the criminality of the mob bosses of institutional standover rackets a righteous exercise in defence of the tribal ingroupeven if the tribe drinks from the poisoned chalice of collusion with corporate totalitarianism, the proverbial deal with the devil.

Making a deal with the devil does, however, always guarantees betrayalin this instance, not least of which being used as an enabler for the big accumulation party for the minority of the opulent while they try to make an endless-growth economy work on a finite planet. As the vanguard of the class warfare of the minority of the opulent, collectively narcissistic culture warriors neither know nor care about the consequences of their tyranny for the majority. Their whole worldview is, and always has been, devoted to naturalising slavery, while denaturalising the slaves.

As billionaire Warren Buffett quite openly admits, Theres class warfare, all right, but its my class, the rich class, thats making war, and were winning. While they perpetrate class warfare, cooking the planet in the process, the minority of the opulent making class war and winning remain very deeply invested in victimhood identityso deeply as to distinguish neither between criticism and attack, individual rights and class privilege, nor personal spirituality and ethics and the policing of morality while claiming to oppose it.

This perpetual victimhood feeds the conspiracist mentality that the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didnt exist (Charles Baudelaire). In contrast to this mentality, the demonstrable fact of culture war conspiracism, as a means for protecting the minority of the opulent from the majority is that the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he was a God, and questioning his authority was giving aid to the Devil. The Woke Conspiracy does, after all, presume to defy Gods Country.

It is almost as through the most dangerous minority looking to replace democracy with the tyranny of spongers and freeloaders looking to be kept, while they pull the will over the eyes of the populace, is the opulent. It is the minority of the opulent who have motive, means and opportunity to perpetrate class control through an ideological standover racket, parading an endless succession of hobgoblins in front of the public and make everyone clamorous to be lead to safety, trading freedom for security.

The root claim of culture war conspiracism over the Woke Left holds that all opinions are equally valid on the one hand, and that opinions and facts carry the same weight on the other. This functions ultimately to silence debate, suppress history and protect the minority of the opulent by preferencing opinions defiant of debate, history and a distinction between facts and opinions, criticism and attack, and social and class privilege and individual freedom.

Similarly, valuing individual voices means valuing ones we dont like, and having the capacity to be contradicted. Every ideology across the spectrum has the capacity to silence dissent in the name of protecting society from external threats. The logic of if you think for yourself, the communists win, works just as well as if you think for yourself, the enemies of communism win. Both logics work equally well again recast as if you think for yourself, the terrorists win, if you think for yourself, the satan-worshippers win, and if you think for yourself, the critical race theorists win.

Strong, self-contained individuals know that freedom means survival, not victimhood; that our troubles and traumas dont define who we are. Capture-bonded slaves within class structures of inherited, perpetual class privilege, on the other hand, and slaves to the property they have invested their identities in, need to define themselves by their alleged troubles and traumas in order to justify their victimisation of others. As in the case of culture warriors like Pat Buchanan accusing their critics of policing morality, when they make it the centrepiece of their entire purpose in life, the great irony of this project of perpetrating culture war in defence of the minority of the opulent from the majority is that they embody everything they claim to oppose.

Read more here:
Culture Wars Defend the Minority of the Opulent From the Majority - CounterPunch

Americans have traditionally had great faith in their local teachers. As recently as 2013, polls found close to 90 percent of Americans expressed trust in teachers. Even as trust has eroded in other public institutions, Americans have generally maintained that their local schools were doing quite well.

Yet this faith is being challenged as schools and teachers become embroiled in national ideological debates about what and how we teach the next generation about race and racism in the U.S. As recently as October 2020, most Americans (81 percent) agreed teachers SHOULD discuss issues like the history of racism in the United States. But as national debates have heated up, opinions are diverging, and teachers appear to be bearing the brunt of national ire.

What has changed since 2020? We suspect that national media coverage and political conversations about critical race theory (CRT) are fueling the decline in trust of teachers.

Since spring of 2021, CRT has shifted from a theoretical framework for understanding systemic racism discussed in academic circles to a mainstream, K-12 educational issue even though many school districts clearly state they do not teach CRT. Forty-two states, including Michigan, have introduced legislative bans or similar restrictions on CRT.

Despite this prevalence, CRT debates tend to be fueled by misinformation, making discussions about the topic even harder. Our team wanted to know what people in Michigan were hearing and how it was shaping their opinions. We invited participants to share their views on the State of the State Survey (SOSS) run by Michigan State Universitys Institution for Public Policy and Social Research. Over three-quarters (79 percent) of Michiganders reported hearing at least one misinformation statement about CRT, like "CRT teaches kids to be racist or CRT teaches children to hate the United States. Nearly half (42 percent) had heard all eight false statements we tested.

Misinformation seems to be fueling declining trust in our local teachers, especially when it comes to addressing issues related to race and racism. Our research in Michigan found only about half (53 percent) of all survey participants agreed that I trust my local teachers to discuss race and racism with my children this coming year. Slightly more (67 percent) Michiganders trust teachers to supplement their curriculum while under two-thirds (62 percent) trust their local teachers to discuss national events related to race.

While race and racism have always been potentially sensitive topics in the classroom, it seems the increased attention, deep national partisan divide and misinformation have led community members and parents to question if their own local teachers can be trusted to address these issues with children.

Declining trust poses a significant concern because it can result in policies that micromanage and politicize teachers work, increasing pressure on teachers. This comes at a time when teachers nationally are already less satisfied with their jobs and schools in Michigan are coping with significant staffing challenges.

The additional pressure might contribute to more teachers leaving the profession. This lack of trust could also lead teachers to shy away from these topics, understandably avoiding confrontation with parents and community members. But this would come at a cost to students, who need to learn about race, racism, and the ways racism continues to impact our country.

Instead of avoiding the topic, we hope educators intentionally build trust with parents when teaching about race, racism, and other politicized hot topics. For teachers, this may look like directly communicating with parents about what they are teaching related to race and racism, how they are teaching it, and what their goal is. Many educators have already established lines of communication newsletters or learning management systems so now is the time to invite parents into this conversation, not shy away from it.

Nationally, it seems teachers are maintaining lines of communication, with three-quarters of parents indicating they feel informed about the curriculum in their childrens classrooms.

Administrators can also provide much-needed support for teachers by incorporating research-based strategies for best practices when discussing controversial topics in the classroom to offer professional development sessions. Administrators could also provide support for teachers if there is pushback when they bring up issues related to race and racism.

Perhaps the best way to build trust in the community is for teachers to include parents and community members in the classroom. This could mean learning together, with school districts scheduling educational speakers and programs about race and racism for the adults in the community both parents and teachers. There may also be ways for teachers to co-construct lessons with parents that cover controversial topics, so that parents understand how these topics are actually being discussed in the classroom.

Trusting relationships are built by all parties; parents need to approach their concerns about curriculum from a place of collaboration and curiosity first, rather than assuming ill-intent. Talk with teachers respectfully, share your concerns, and work together to find ways that support learning about this critically important topic. As we approach the end of the school year, recognizing the difficulties teachers are balancing and showing appreciation through trusting, professional relationships is important.

Finally, despite the national rhetoric, finding common ground may be easier than one might expect. Our survey results show the majority (79 percent) of Michiganders thought equity and fairness were important values that should be taught in school. So perhaps starting with these broader values will help everyone see that teachers and schools are working towards educational goals shared broadly by the public.

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Opinion | MSU research shows culture wars eroding trust in Michigan teachers - Bridge Michigan

Im a scholar of the culture wars in the US. I used to believe that universities could provide a kind of solvent for these conflicts, by clarifying different positions and suggesting compromises between them.

I dont believe that anymore. Universities have embraced the same polarised, winner-take-all spirit as the rest of American politics. And thats very bad news for anyone who cares about the future of the American academy.

Witness recent events at Princeton University, where president Christopher Eisgruber recommended that the board of trustees dismiss classics professor JoshuaKatz.In lockstep fashion, faculty divided quickly into Team Eisgruber by far the bigger group and Team Katz. And neither squad acknowledged the validity or even the humanity of the other one.

The university fired Katz on Monday, citing hisbehaviour during a sexual relationship with an undergraduate student 15 years ago.Princeton officials already knew about that affair and had punished Katz by suspending him without pay for a year.But they said that the student had come forth with new information, including claims that Katz had discouraged her from seeking mental health treatment for fear that she would disclose their affair and that he pressured her not to cooperate with an earlierinvestigation.

THE Campus resource: How to create an open atmosphere for discussing difficult subjects

To Katz defenders, all of that was window dressing to disguise the real reason he was sacked: his remarks on race.In 2020, a few weeks after the police murder of George Floyd, Katz published an online essay blasting an open letter about racism at Princeton. Signed by more than 300 faculty, staff members and students, the letter called on the university to dismantle systemic racism, incentivize anti-racist student activism and apologise to members of a student group known as the Black Justice League for repeatedly rebuffing their demand to remove President Woodrow Wilsons name from the universitys School of Public and International Affairs (three years ago, Princeton agreed to remove Wilsons name).

Katzs essay endorsed parts of the open letter, including its support for summer move-in allowances for new assistant professors. But he rejected its demand that junior faculty of colour receive an additional semester of sabbatical. He also charged that the Black Justice League had bullied dissenting students including African Americans in a struggle session, which Katz called one of the most evil things I have ever witnessed.

Most controversially, hedescribed the group as a small local terrorist organization. When that quote went viral, Katz became a campus pariah. Colleagues in the classics department posted a message calling Katz choice of words abhorrent at this moment of national reckoning. Eisgruber denounced Katzs false description of the Black Justice League. And the university featured Katz in a rogues gallery of racist Princetonians presented at the universitys first-year student orientation last August.

The presentation did not mention the handful of professors and students who have defended Katz. Instead, in bold font, it quoted two African American faculty critics. One said that Katz had engaged in race-baiting, disguised as free speech; the other said Katz seems to not regard people like me as essential features, or persons, of Princeton.

So far as I know, Katz did not receive a chance to respond to these highly derogatory charges. And I havent heard of any other university denouncing a standing faculty member in such a public venue. Absurdly, Eisgruber defended the comments about Katz as teaching material for the incoming students. But if the university was truly interested in teaching about this controversy, it would have presented supporters of Katz alongside critics of him. Anything less isnt teaching; its indoctrination.

Surely there are many faculty, at Princeton and elsewhere, who believe that flaying Katz at the first-year orientation was wrong, but theyre mostly biting their tongues because saying so would seem to place them in Katz corner. Why aid and abet the other team?

Likewise, Katz defenders have generally refrained from condemning his newly reported misbehaviour towards his ex-lover. Princeton clearly had a duty to investigate herclaims, which she detailed in a formal complaint. And if Katz indeed told her not to cooperate with the investigation or not to seek mental health treatment of course he should be held accountable for that. But you wont hear that from the people on Katz side. If they mention the new allegations at all, it is simply to dismiss the charges as a mean-spirited retaliation against an outspoken colleague.

Its all or nothing, kill or be killed, my way or the highway, heads I win and tails you lose. In other words, its a war.

We frequently cite Princeton dropout F. Scott Fitzgeralds observation that the mark of intelligence is holding two opposing ideas in mind at the same time. If we truly believed that, we could denounce both the universitys mistreatment of Katz and also his alleged mistreatment of his student. But our faith in that principle is hugely frayed, not just outside universities but within them. Indeed, theres not much of a difference between the two any longer. And that just makes me incredibly sad.

Jonathan Zimmerman is Judy and Howard Berkowitz professor in education and professor of the history of education at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools, which will be published in a revised 20th-anniversary edition by the University of Chicago Press this autumn.

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Katz case is another culture wars skirmish - Times Higher Education