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

Academic attention to the Sept. 11 landscape reconfiguration came to me in the form of a November lecture on the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan for my History of the Cold War course. The stammering graduate student pawing at his nose and ramming his thumbs into the crevices between his belt and his waistband attempted to navigate Afghanistan's journey from uneasy Soviet client to theocratic wasteland. For an 8 a.m. class, attendance was surprisingly robust and no one walked out mid-exposition. Yet despite the ubiquity of Afghanistan news?this was before Kabul fell?the grad student lazily made repeated mention of the proud and fierce "Afghani." My teeth clenched with each mistaken reference. The whole enterprise was cast into doubt.

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.

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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.

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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.