Yesterday, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported that the Associated Press had obtained a disturbing set of emails by former Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels. The man whose name was bandied about as a potential presidential candidate in 2012, and who many think will make a run in 2016, tried to censor teachers and professors and interfere with curricula in his state.
Specifically, he reveled in the 2010 death of Historian Howard Zinn, gloating that “this terrible anti-American academic has finally passed away.”
For the record, Professor Zinn was a World War II veteran, while Daniels went to Princeton instead of Vietnam, where he was arrested for possession of LSD, marijuana, and illicit prescription drugs in 1970.
Funny what passes for being a “good American.”
But more important than the hypocritical smears, Daniels tried to ban Zinn’s textbook, A Peoples’ History of the United States, from every classroom in Indiana, including colleges.
Attacking the book as an “anti-factual piece of disinformation that misstates American history on every page,” Daniels had a pointed request to one of his assistants:
Can someone assure me that [book] is not in use anywhere in Indiana? If it is, how do we get rid of it before more young people are force-fed a totally false version of our history?
Before I eviscerate Daniels for being a totalitarian ideologue, I want to briefly talk about Zinn’s book and why I’ve never assigned it in any of my classes.
Revisionism often gets a bad rap in the media, which tends to have only a spotty understanding of what professional historians actually do. To state it bluntly, I’ve never met professional historian who thinks historical revisionism, in and of itself, is a bad thing.
And I mean, not a single one. Ever.
There are many reasons why Historians often re-write history. For example, as with any other academic discipline, including the natural sciences, new evidence is sometimes discovered.
Many people mistakenly think historians have already looked at all the archives and figured it all out. The truth is, we’ve only scratched the surface. And it really doesn’t take much imagination to understand the profound impact of discovering new documents, and how that necessitates reassessing earlier ideas.
In addition, many people mistakenly believe that history “just is.” That the past is the past, what happened simply happened, and that it’s not open to interpretation; that historians then should simply relay the one story of the past in an objective fashion.
This popular misconception about history is easily deflated with a single question:
If there’s no one, single interpretation of the present, when we have infinitely more evidence and information at our disposal, then why on earth would anyone think there’s a single interpretation of the past?
If we cannot, in the here on now, unanimously agree on topics ranging from Honey Boo Boo to the George Zimmerman-Trayvon Martin killing and trial, then how can you possibly expect that we would agree on the meaning of past events shrouded by the mists of time?
And so beyond correctives from new evidence, historians disagree with each other about the past just like people disagree with each other about the present.
Howard Zinn’s brand of revisionism was designed to shine a light on the the stories and lives of working people who had been previously ignored. He wanted not only to tell their stories, but to interpret them 
When Zinn first became a professor at Spelman College back in 1956, the history of everyday people was in fact largely ignored. Most textbooks still focused on the “great men” of history. Women, non-whites, and poor and working class people were almost entirely absent.
In retrospect, a revision was much needed. And Zinn was hardly alone. Thousands of scholars have worked to recover the histories of previously ignored peoples.
However, I never used A People’s History in my courses. There are many textbooks to choose from, and others suited me better. Frankly, by the time I started teaching in 1999, I found his Zinn’s work to be a bit dated. His brand of revisionism, which was important during the mid-twentieth century amid the Cold War and Civil Rights, was no longer cutting edge. Minorities, women, and workers were now featured in many standard U.S. history textbooks. Indeed, by the end of the 20th century, Zinn’s revisions were in need of some revising of their own, which simply illustrates the healthy and dynamic nature of academic scholarship.
But the other reason I never used A People’s History is because I just wanted a different kind of textbook. I was looking for something that dovetailed differently with my in-class lectures and discussions.
College professors usually have discretion over their curriculum to design courses as they see fit. In part, this is an acknowledgment of their varied expertise. Academics must have the freedom to choose readings when designing courses because they’re just far more qualified than someone like Mitch Daniels, whose comments about Zinn’s work being an”anti-factual piece of disinformation,” is utterly laughable, and should immediately disqualify him from any curricular conversations.
But perhaps more importantly, academic freedom is a barrier against exactly the kind of politicized, ideological interference with our curricula that Daniels’ grotesque emails exemplify.
Daniels’ effort to ban A People’s History was of course not based on Zinn’s inclusion of people who’d been previously ignored. Rather, it was stemmed from the way Zinn interpreted them.
Howard Zinn was a Marxist. As such, he believed history was best understood through the lens of class division, by explaining how the workers of the world had been exploited by the privileged classes.
The great irony here, of course, is that Zinn was in some ways as much an ideologue as Daniels. And I have very limited patience for ideologues of any stripe.
I wouldn’t want Zinn telling me what I can and can’t assign anymore than Daniels. But of course Zinn never would have done that. For while they’re both ideologues, Zinn was a professor committed to the free exchange of ideas, which is what a university is all about. Whereas Daniels is a rank politician in the worst sense of the word.
Indeed, the former governor’s email
s reveal that he wanted to ban one university professor, who had publicly criticized him, from receiving anymore state funded research grants.
And you wonder why we need tenure?
And now here’s the closer: Mitch Daniels is currently the president of Purdue University.