John McCumber
        Germanic Languages

            Professor John McCumber doesn’t rank highly on a list of radical professors at UCLA.  Nonetheless, a comprehensive look at his work reveals a radical who, here and there, is willing to let his freak flag fly – a bad practice indeed if and when it bleeds over into the classroom.

            McCumber came of age under the cloud of the Vietnam War, graduating from Pomona College in 1967.  But while a war of any kind if still exceptionally dangerous, military enlistees with top-level skills like a college graduate (as McCumber was) were in great demand for rear-echelon work removed from direct fighting.  The idea that being drafted or enlisted meant certain death in the rice-paddies of Vietnam is convenient myth for those who wished to avoid the draft, as McCumber did.  In the May 5, 2000 issue of The Student Life (Pomona College’s student newspaper), McCumber recalls that upon graduation, his future was “guided and oriented by only one burning desire – somehow not to go to Vietnam.”  

            As a member of the radical cognoscenti, McCumber is required to guide his actions by certain political lodestars, among them, that the McCarthy era was a witch-hunt, pursuing phantoms of anti-American subversion.  Indeed, as he complained in the Summer 2002 issue of the ACLU Southern California’s newsletter, “The FBI created a public atmosphere of fear and suspicion, and that atmosphere has had lasting effects on universities.  My own academic field, philosophy, remains today what it became during the McCarthy Era: a safely technical discipline, essentially purged of the kind of critical but uncomfortable questioning associated with philosophers for millennia.”  That claim, we will see later, is the nutshell thesis of McCumber’s book, “Time in the Ditch: American Philosophy and the McCarthy Era.” 

            McCumber continued this tissue-thin complaint in the same issue of the ACLU-SC’s magazine by accusing a political enemy, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, of using “McCarthyite tactics for McCarthyite goals.” 

            ACTA’s sin, it seems, was issuing a report, “Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done About It.”  The brief report contained analysis about anti-Americanism in U.S. colleges and universities, and closed with a series of quotes from professors.  McCumber condemned this list as “both indiscriminate and padded.”

            Radicals, viewing the world through the Marxoid glasses of overclass and underclass, find it most comfortable (and profitable) to publicly play the victim, while casting their political opponents as oppressors.  Thus does ACTA’s trifling report, addressing an American higher educational system controlled virtually top to bottom by academic radicals, come in for special condemnation by at least two UCLA professors among the small group profiled on this website alone.  ACTA’s solitary report, which merely recites, word for word, some of the more inflammatory post-9/11 comments by professors, is in McCumber’s mind a return to the supposed outrages of the McCarthy era.  But while radicals love bandying about the tired phrase “witch-hunt,” they would do well to remember another allegory: the boy who cried wolf. 

The amount of abuse heaped on this lone report evokes those old Smokey the Bear promotional comic books (from the McCarthyite 1950’s, ironically enough) advising outdoor campers to drown their campfires in water, stir the remains, add more water, stir again, and then feel all material with your bare hand to ensure the fire is extinguished.  Such is the fate of even the feeblest of conservative warning fires – radicals drown them in cries of McCarthyism, stir with self-righteousness, then drown them once again for good measure.

            McCumber is one of those radicals always standing by with the verbal bucket of water, ready to inundate any dissent.  His favorite method is the brief letter to the editor.  From his perch in Rolfe Hall, McCumber rains invective down upon a broad variety of political opponents.  In his November 25, 2005 Los Angeles Times letter reacting to the Vatican hierarchy’s proscriptions against actively gay priests, McCumber compared the action to (if you can believe it), Josef Stalin’s “purges against the good and decent people in the Communist Party, of which there were many, in order to convert the party into a dependable instrument of his will.”  McCumber immediately followed with the disclaimer, “Pope Benedict XVI is obviously no Stalin.”  This is a clumsy piece of mental association, about as sly as remarking about a co-worker, “Frank has a mustache, and so did Hitler.  Not that I’m suggesting that Frank is anything like Hitler.”  The point there, and with McCumber’s letter, is to insinuate an inflammatory idea while retaining a nominal defense against charges of outright hatred.

            While clearly no fan of traditional Catholicism, McCumber also has no patience for the atheist Ayn Rand or her philosophy of objectivism.  McCumber commented in a February 7, 2005 Los Angeles Times story that Rand’s philosophy is “not taken very seriously – it's considered to be sort of a flat-earth type of thing.”  Piling on the abuse, McCumber called Rand’s ideas “a philosophy of social gridlock,” and noted that his “own personal problem [with objectivism] is that selfish interest is taken to be the only moral consideration.”  And, lest you be concerned that McCumber isn’t an open-minded guy, he put those fears to rest, declaring that objectivism “ultimately beg[s] too many questions for philosophers to take seriously.”  Ergo, McCumber won’t consider it at all.  Very open-minded indeed.

            While McCumber’s views on President Bush and the current Republican administration lack the certain zest of a Douglas Kellner, there is nonetheless no uncertainty as to McCumber’s take on the current political scene.  Responding to a Los Angels Times column by conservative Max Boot, McCumber’s March 14, 2005 response stated:

“Boot says that Kwiatkowski, Ray McGovern and Wilson have “flaky” views because they claim, essentially, that a gang of fascists has hijacked the American government and seeks to install a global Pax Americana.  Sorry, Max, I don't see a single flake in there. Did you get snowed?”

            McCumber’s disdain for Republicans extends to his deterministic view of why so few conservative academics are found in higher education.  In a November 22, 2004 New York Times letter to the editor, McCumber allowed that:

“The view that campus collegiality leads to tyranny of the majority has some plausibility in explaining the absence of Republicans from academia, but the main causes clearly lie elsewhere.

A successful career in academia, after all, requires willingness to be critical of yourself and to learn from experience, along with a lack of interest in material incentives. All these are antithetical to Republicanism as it has recently come to be.”

            As someone bold enough to assert radicals’ exclusive ownership of self-criticism and “lack of interest in material incentives,” the thesis of Cumber’s most notable book, “Time in the Ditch: American Philosophy and the McCarthy Era,” comes as little surprise.  It argues that, as the reviewer in the June 2002 issue of Philosophy of Science puts it,

“The methods and values that constitute modern analytic philosophy…are a child of the cold war and, specifically, the anticommunist atmosphere that blanketed American colleges and universities in the 1950s. As J. Edgar Hoover, Joseph McCarthy and other federal and local investigators scrubbed the red and pink out of higher education, they helped create a politically sterilized mode of philosophical practice, the one we know today as analytic philosophy.”

            However, as another reviewer points out, there is significant evidence arguing against McCumber’s theory that McCarthyism is the cause of philosophy’s isolation from other disciplines.  After balancing the two sides, the reviewer is forced to conclude that McCumber “has not proved his main theses, in particular not the alleged connection between McCarthyism and analytical philosophy.”  In short, there is no conspiracy (fascist, Republican, McCarthyite or otherwise) on which McCumber can blame philosophy’s disappointing lack of politicization.