Sherman’s March to Afghanistan: A Rutgers Prof Links History & Current Events

Over and
over I revisited that improper final letter as if I were tonguing a cavity.
What to call the inhabitants of Afghanistan is no trivial, obscure or disputed
issue. A presumed doctoral candidate in history’s inability to properly
name one of the most blighted peoples of the planet during a moment of crucial
relevance to college students across the Hudson from a mass grave demonstrates
an inability to prepare students for an inescapable moment. Had Leon Wieseltier
audited the class, he would have thrown a chair. Afghani. Give this man
a job at the CIA.

•

Some people I spoke with
on campus at Rutgers were satisfied with their in-class discussions after the
attacks. I greeted every nod of contentment with suspicion and envy. Students
by and large confirmed that my classroom experience after Sept. 11 was by no
means unique. Professors tended to devote their 80 recitation minutes to soliciting
a deluge of emotion, without offering–certainly without demanding–any
opportunity for student introspection beyond the initial outpour. Anyone at
Rutgers trying to grasp orienting context for his or her scattershot reactions
would be better advised to watch MSNBC than sit in on a history class.

My suspicions
inclined me to wonder how cowered the professors were, fearful of a wayward
word bringing career-haunting reprisal. Their students, in any case, received
no help in sifting through the carnage, and so found no recuperation, stuck
in the apoplexy of horror. The inevitable round of campus antiwar rallies and
equivocal university-sponsored teach-ins kept Rutgers mired in cliche. With
only one exception, I mean to say that if my case is typical, higher education
has failed in making sense of the catastrophe.

That exception
is breathtaking in its contrast, and came from a shockingly talented 31-year-old
assistant professor, whose History of the South course I took this past fall.
Modest and easygoing in disposition–prepared to namedrop Juvenile and Southern
Culture on the Skids as necessary during class discussion–it will surprise
me even further if William Jones does not emerge as an academic superstar.

While he
declined to address the New York nakhba until weeks afterward, Jones one morning
called attention to the opposite side of the distributed outline for that day’s
lecture, where he had reproduced novelist Allan Gurganus’ New York Times
Magazine essay about the terror. The essay, "Sherman’s Ghost,"
is a beautifully written attempt to place the fall of the World Trade Center
within the context of Gurganus’ youthful family pilgrimages to enduring
North Carolina sites of Sherman’s march through the South, where the author
found he and his fellow Southerners drew the wrong lessons from the past. "We
vilified not our own slave-owning culture, but Sherman himself. We romanticized
our loss… Invaded, aggrieved, we felt nobler, almost Roman… Pride
goeth before a fall. Our nation’s insularity promotes a richer arrogance
that isolates us further."

Now, Jones
asked, what do you make of this?

It was hard
to pay attention to the essay at first. I’m nearly finished with college,
and I have little good to say about my education. I’ve grown accustomed
to disinterest and condescension from my professors and resigned myself to hearing
platitudes in the face of strenuous questions. I was unprepared to encounter
a professor willing to treat such a difficult essay seriously–as well as
for Jones’ displayed fearlessness over the danger posed by any student
calling a local newspaper to report an un-American intellectual activity.

Jones himself
does not endorse Gurganus’ position, a point he emphasized to me in an
interview last month. "I’m confident that I could defend my decision"
to discuss an essay ascribing to some form of blowback theory, he says.

The ensuing
discussion rose to the occasion, and any professor disillusioned with the capacity
for his students to penetrate multifaceted historical questions should have
attended. Nimble, nuanced, civil and considered, we argued the truth and value
of Gurganus’ assertions, particularly his analogy between the America targeted
by Mohammed Atta and the "slave-owning culture" Sherman assaulted
(as it turns out, less voraciously than some of his peers). Gurganus, I argued,
was capable of both exquisite turns of phrase, such as "We could not credit
that–in one hour–those Babel towers might fall on their knees toward
Mecca," and sclerotic analysis like "we treat our sacred treaties
as some salad bar; our sacred word, we pick and choose," as if ratifying
the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty would have shuttered Al Qaeda. Responding
with appropriate thoughtfulness to preceding comments, students accepted and
rejected Gurganus’ points piecemeal and wholesale, including his assessments
of Southern historical memory. Jones didn’t want any interlocutor to escape
without defending his or her argument, nor did he want to lose sight of the
conjured Southern past that brought more than 100 of us into his course. I’m
still amazed at that discipline, and enduringly shamed by how ephemeral I find
it.

•

In his basement office at
Van Dyck Hall, Jones tells me later that he would have offered and accepted
nothing less. Expressing a view for undergraduate education that a less feeble
and disinterested academia should render a bromide, the professor of Southern,
labor and African-American history unpretentiously says he "wouldn’t
be doing [his] job" unless he brought controversial events into historical
focus, or facilitated enough careful discussion to competing explanations that
his students found themselves with a compass to traverse jagged intellectual
terrain.

Not that
he was prepared to delve into the fresh wound of the terror in his History of
the South class without immediate recourse to material relevant to the subject.
Jones’ class met on Monday and Thursday mornings, and his Sept. 13 lecture
made no mention of the country’s shifted focus. Providentially, he found
Gurganus’ essay not long afterward. And he thought the cautionary tale
of the essay was the truer link between an incinerated Georgia plantation and
a felled World Trade Center–a warning against opting for simplicity in
the ways to remember transformative experiences. Listening to Jones speak, I
grow angrier over "Afghani."

After I
leave higher education behind, Jones will publish his first book, a foray into
the Southern lumber industry’s pre-civil-rights movement black workers.
Certainly not the sexiest of topics, but if it’s anything like his 2000
Labor History essay on the Congress of Industrial Organizations’
campaign to organize black North Carolina lumber workers in the late 1940s and
1950s, it should make for a striking debut.

Here’s
how that essay began: "‘Run your car over the black son-of-a-bitch!’
yelled Floyd Cross. Waving a shotgun, the white store owner leapt from his car
and urged passing drivers to smash through the picket line that encircled Greene
Brothers Lumber Company, Elizabethtown North Carolina’s largest employer.
With other members of the town’s all-white Chamber of Commerce, the store
owner and former mayor then ‘cursed and abused’ the nearly 200 African-American
strikers, according to a union report, ‘urging the by-standers to run them
out of the county.’"

Academia
will be healthier when Jones’ brand of instruction is unremarkable. I hope
I’ll see his model exported during my final semester, when a sprawling
war will fully withdraw from its "Afghani" theater for less predictable
frontlines, and higher education’s indispensability will find starker relief.