We stand with Howard Zinn

TWO WEEKS ago, the Associated Press reported that current Purdue University President Mitch Daniels, in 2010 as governor of Indiana, tried to censor and ban Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States from Indiana schools. Daniels called Zinn "anti-American" and a "fraud." When the news became a national scandal, Daniels dug in his heels, repeating his criticisms of Zinn and rebuking 92 Purdue faculty who wrote an open letter condemning his attacks on Zinn.

Taking their cue from the university president, leading Purdue administrators have, since then, expressed "concern" about inviting sociologist James Loewen to Purdue, for being perceived as a "deliberate antagonism" against Mitch Daniels. As citizens-scholars, we are concerned that such views from administrators imply that it is controversial to invite a scholar to a university who has a record of disagreement with *one* man on said campus.

While these attacks are real, Howard Zinn has also taught us that "to be hopeful in bad times is not...foolishly romantic" for if we could live "in defiance of all that is bad around us, [that] is itself a marvelous victory."

In honor of this people's historian and all the ordinary people he celebrated in his work, on Tuesday, November 5, people from across the country will take part in a "read-in" of Zinn's work on Purdue campus. The day marks the birthday of another fighter for social justice--Indiana-born labor militant Eugene Debs.

Beyond that, the event symbolizes the ongoing fightback in the United States against the privatization of public education, attacks on teachers and teachers unions by politicians like Mitch Daniels, and the need for real democracy in both schools and curriculum.

As we learned from last year's heroic strike by the Chicago Teachers Union against privatization and corporate school reform, the fight for the right to teach anti-capitalist writers like Howard Zinn is never separate from the fight to improve the material lives of students, teachers and workers around the world.

We stand with the scholars and activists on November 5 at Purdue who are going to be reading from Howard Zinn because we stand in solidarity with all teachers, students and public school employees across the country who are fighting to stave off the attacks of big business and corporate education reform. In the words of Howard Zinn, we realize now more than ever that we can't afford to be "neutral on a moving train."

Steering Committee of Historians Against the War
Cornel West, professor, Philosophy and Christian Practice, Union Theological Seminary
Robin Kelley, Gary B. Nash Professor of American History, UCLA
Anthony Arnove, writer, co-editor with Howard Zinn, Voices of a People's History of the United States
Diane Ravitch, educational policy activist and analyst, former Assistant Secretary of Education, Professor, New York University's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development
Ann Wright, retired U.S. Army Colonel and former U.S. diplomat who resigned in 2003 in opposition to the Iraq war.
Dave Zirin, sports editor, The Nation
Sherry Wolf, author, Sexuality and Socialism
Carl Mirra, author, The Admirable Radical: Staughton Lynd and Cold War Dissent with a foreword by Howard Zinn
Mark Naison, professor of African-American Studies and History, Fordham University
Tithi Bhattacharya, Associate Professor, History, Purdue University
Bill Mullen, professor, English and American Studies, Purdue University
Susan Curtis, professor, History, Purdue University
Marilyn Haring, professor emerita and former dean, Purdue College of Education
Alex Lichtenstein, associate professor Department of History, Indiana University
J. Kehaulani Kauanui, associate professor, American Studies and Anthropology, Wesleyan University
Sunaina Maira, professor, Asian American Studies, University of California at Davis
Malini Johar Schueller, professor, Department of English, University of Florida