Jerry Hough, former James B. Duke professor of political science, caused controversy in May with his comment on a New York Times editorial that compared the ability of black people and Asians to integrate into society. Hough will teach two classes in political science next semester. The Chronicle’s Amrith Ramkumar spoke with Hough Wednesday about his return from a two-year leave, the comments he made in May and his classes.
The Chronicle: Can you talk about how the reaction to your comments in May has affected what it is like to come back and teach next spring?
Jerry Hough: I’ve been on leave last year, I’m on leave this fall. I have no idea whether this is a University of Missouri campus, or whether it’s the nice, old stodgy campus I’ve known for 40 years, and therefore this will have no impact at all.
You can always say that any professor should teach anything that you want them to teach, so if someone says that I’m not teaching enough about x, y and z about minorities, they have the right to say that.
TC: Did you have any reactions to what happened in May?
JH: I have two reactions. One is annoyance at myself because I said it was a peripheral comment. I essentially believe what I said there, but I phrased it in a very bad way. The trouble with these blogs is they’re 250 words, and since they virtually all disappear that day, you’re just not as careful as you should be. It was talking about the New York Times, the way they treated the riots in Baltimore. I was talking about the Democratic party and I was talking about the New York Times, which is nothing really but an organ for the Democratic National Committee and the President. I throw in about 25, 30 words, that no doubt I should not have thrown in. It wasn’t on theme, really. I’m annoyed with myself for causing trouble that I didn’t even intend to cause.
The second thing that surprised me was when the president of the University speaking through his official communications agency—you don’t attack a James B. Duke professor...without clearance at the higher level—that [Richard] Brodhead came out and said both in public and in private and said there should be no freedom of speech on this sort of issue. If he wanted to say I’m wrong, fine—I knew he didn’t agree with me—if he just said, “This is Duke. Duke professors say strange things on all sides of issues, and Duke is great because we permit freedom of speech,” but he said, “No, we don’t permit freedom of speech here, that what was said was totally inappropriate for a professor to say.”
It turns out that it was quite an appropriate issue to discuss and two major articles in The New York Times [covered the issue]. We’re not even supposed to have the freedom of speech of The New York Times.
I was happy that at The New York Times, maybe I did generate a debate. If it does a generate a debate, then it was worth it.
TC: Have you had to do bias training or anything else before returning to teach?
JH: No. I had to go through what everybody has to go through on sexual harassment, which generally says it’s really not good for me to harass undergraduates or graduates. I did one thing that I think was only on sexual harassment, which was required by the federal government by some new law.
Once [the controversy] was over, the University has essentially dropped it, which strikes me as politically wise from their point of view because the reaction I got was overwhelmingly negative to Duke.
I don’t think this did Duke any good. So far as I can tell, they’ve dropped it. It seems wise to me because I’ve signed my letter of resignation. I teach for this academic year and next and then I get a half-pay sabbatical, so it is a generous standard retirement. It would be crazy from them to try to do anything more since I’ll be moving on in any case. I’m hoping that the students won’t really care, and if they come to my class, they’re going to find very little that I say that’s going to offend anybody on racism.
As I said to various people at the time, I was born in 1935. My hero was Martin Luther King, the Montgomery [bus boycott] and the sit-ins in Greensboro and the like. Those were my heroes. I love King. The first course I taught at the University of Illinois I assigned “Black Like Me,” and I was all for affirmative action at that time.
People are going to find it hard to attack me for any kind of racist comments I make in the class, and I don’t think what I said was racist. I made [a statement] that probably wasn’t polite—if you’re given a name by your parents, it generally is not polite for you to change it. I was really speaking to the students [saying], “Don’t name your children this way,” and for the perfectly good reason that The New York Times gave—it leads to discrimination.
TC: What do you think your interaction with students will be like?
JH: One of the awful things about teaching something like political science, is I was one of the country’s top specialists on the Soviet Union, that’s how I got a James B. Duke [professorship], so you’d love to be able to say in class ‘Do you remember how it was under communism?’ Then you suddenly remember they know no more about communism than they do the pharaohs, that it’s ancient history.
What’s striking if you’re teaching the presidency is that [students] know something about Bill Clinton because of Hillary [Clinton], but if you start talking about Michael Dukakis to them, heavens knows how many even know the name.
I don’t think [Marco] Rubio has a chance this year, partly because he has the same problem as Dukakis being a second-generation American, and we’re not ready for it, rightly or wrongly. Wrongly maybe, but we’re not. I’d love to be able to say that “the trouble with Rubio is he’s like Dukakis.” It’s a total waste of breath because nobody remembers Dukakis. They probably didn’t even read about him in class.
You probably remember something about 9/11, because that was dramatic and that was visual, but my guess is that you probably don’t remember much about the disputed election of 2000.
I’m hoping that they’re coming in here to learn something about this presidential election and the presidency, and hopefully about where the America from 2020 until 2050 will go.
The issue of racism is not my issue. I’m totally pro-integration. I’m hoping that was an unfortunate sloppy writing on my part that alas is going to live forever on Google. When I’m gone [in] 200 years, people will say “Oh, yes, he only did one thing in his life, a Donald Trump on racism—that’s who Hough was.”
TC: Can you talk about the courses you will be teaching?
JH: I’ll be teaching two courses, a lecture and a seminar on presidential strategy in the first term, which by the nature of things has to concentrate more on the primary. In the Fall semester it’ll be about what happened in the whole year.
I’m not going to be talking about racism one way or another. It’s just not my theme.
TC: What sort of perspective do you think you’ll bring to classes given that you’re planning to retire?
JH: It’s not only that I’m planning to retire, I’ve signed a paper. By the time I officially retire, I’ll be 83 years old, which may be a bit old in any case.
I think it makes a great class because [the students] see the world from an entirely different perspective. Not everybody on the faculty now actually remembers Pearl Harbor very well or did his first political activity for Dwight Eisenhower in [1952]. I teach a course that’s political strategy. I have a historical perspective. Like some others, I see America in 30-year cycles, that we had a cycle of the progressives in 1900, and the New Deal in the 1930s, then the revolutions of the [1960s]. The book I’m writing talks about five revolutions, including the women’s revolution.
Then most people say nothing new happened with Clinton. I say this was a great revolution when the new left took over the Democratic Party and moved far to the right, and when the Goldwater [faction] took over the Republican Party and moved it far to the right, so we’ve had essentially an extremely conservative, undemocratic 30 years.
You have these sorts of cultural issues. People like Brodhead—who was born in 1947, the same year as [Mitt] Romney and Hillary [Clinton]—these people are reliving their youth on the cultural issues, but on economic issues they were and are very conservative.
If you believe in the cycles, this too will pass. If you were born in 1947, you’re going to be 69 years old next year, and you too are moving towards retirement. The people who are going to be in the cycle from 2020 to 2050 are basically people born in the 1980s, who’s formative years were the rather wild economic times of the 1990s, of Bill [Clinton] and [George W.] Bush, and then the crash in 2007 and then the rather unsatisfactory results since. They’re going to be much more pro-old left, and there’s going to be a change in policy.
What I tell the students in the course is, “You’re going to be the ruling class in 30 years.” What the class should do is give you a sense of, “This too will pass.” The world that you are used to is not what it will be when you come to power, and you need to look at things with great perspective. If you want to make change, then you’re part of that change.
TC: How are you hoping the class will go when you get back to campus?
JH: I’m hoping that I’ll come back in January and it will be a course like any course. Normally, the course gets decent enrollment in presidential years, and there will be people coming in basically interested in this election, interested in what’s going to be a different thesis about the world they grew up in, the world they were born in.
The last time I was teaching Bill Clinton was a useful person to Duke students because he taught them about facts of life that they had never heard before. Your generation is too young to have learned anything about [Monica] Lewinsky and the like. And Bush is beginning to fade with you.
So the world you take for granted because it’s the only world you know is going to change, partly because because the Vietnam generation that has dominated the last 30 years will be gone by 2020. A new generation is going to come up who was formed in the chaos that led to 2007 and 2008. The thesis of the course is that the decisive elements when you’re in your 20s often have impacts 30 years later. That’s why there tends to be a 30 year cycle. So this is what I’m writing about, this is what I like to teach. I like talking it out with students, and I like getting feedback.
I don’t want any discussion of racism one way or the other, people praising me or not praising me. It’s not the subject of the course.
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