MIT Professor Noam Chomsky makes the point that if you serve power,
power rewards you with respectability. If you work to undermine
power, whether by political analysis or moral critique, you are
"reviled, imprisoned, driven into the desert."
"It's as close to a historical truism as you can find," Chomsky says.
Let's test Chomsky's theory of power and respectability with the case
of David Noble.
Noble is a historian of corporate control over our lives and
institutions -- from technology to universities.
Forces of Production (Knopf, 1984), for example, is a detailed
history of the automation of the metalworking industry. In that book,
Noble shows how technology, in its design and deployment, reflects
class and power relations between workers and owners.
Noble started out his academic career in 1978 at MIT. His first book,
America by Design (Knopf, 1977), focused on the rise of the science-
based industries, the electrical and chemical industry, and how
universities essentially became corporate research centers for these
new industries.
Noble believed that corporations should be kept off of university
campuses. In the late 1970s, he wrote a series of articles for the
Nation magazine, including two classics, "Ivory Tower Goes Plastic"
and "Business Goes Back to College."
Then in the early 1980s, Noble wrote a series of articles in praise
of Luddism for the now defunct journal Democracy. (That series has
since been pulled together in book form (Progress Without People,
Between the Lines Press, Toronto, 1995).
In addition, while at MIT, he teamed up with Ralph Nader and Al
Meyerhoff and started an organization called the National Coalition
for Universities in the Public Interest.
MIT, a model of education in the corporate interest, was not pleased.
In 1983, MIT fired Noble.
"It was a political firing," Noble told us. "I sued MIT in 1986."
After five years of litigation, Noble forced MIT to make public the
documents shedding light on the firing.
"I got all of the documents and turned them over to the American
Historical Association, which then reviewed them for a year and then
condemned MIT for the firing," Noble said.
Next stop: Smithsonian Institution. The Smithsonian wanted Noble to
be a curator for an exhibit on automated technology. Noble went to
Washington for two years and produced an exhibit highly critical of
technology. He includes a hammer used by the Luddites in the 1800s to
smash machines in England. George Lucas donates robots R2D2 and C3PO
from the first Star Wars movie. Noble calls the exhibit "Automation
Madness: Boys and Their Toys," in which he documents a history of
resistance to automation beginning in the 1800s. Not what the
Smithsonian had in mind. They too fired Noble.
Most people think that the Smithsonian is a public institution. It
started out that way, but has slowly been taken over by big corporate
interests.
When Noble arrived at the Smithsonian in 1983, he figured he would
have a budget to work on projects. No such luck.
"What I had to do was go out and hustle -- to the National
Association of Manufacturers, to the Chamber of Commerce, to various
companies, to get money to put on exhibits," Noble said. "At that
time, the fundraiser for the National Museum of American History was
the wife of the president of the National Association of
Manufacturers."
Noble then spent five years at Drexel -- protected with tenure -- and
then headed North to the University of York at Toronto, where he is
also protected by tenure.
Noble doesn't use e-mail or the Internet, but last year after The
Nation magazine turned down an article he wrote called "Digital
Diploma Mills," he published it and two subsequent pieces on the
Internet <communication.ucsd.edu/dl>. The articles describe how
corporations are using digital technologies to gain control over
university course content.
He believes that the Internet can be a useful way to disseminate
information, but not to teach students.
"You can't educate over the Internet, because education is an
interpersonal process," he says.
And he laughs when asked whether the Internet will level the playing
field between activists and their corporate adversaries.
"Have you noticed that -- any leveling the playing field?" he asked
incredulously "Wake me when it is over. It is a joke."
"The key thing about organizing is trust," he says. "You have to have
relations with people, especially if you are asking people to put
themselves on the line in any way. There is no real way of
establishing that over the Internet."
Whether Noble continues to get into trouble with the masters of the
Internet or universities, depends on whether he changes course mid-
life and decides he wants some respect from the powers that be.
Looks like Chomsky is right again.
Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate
Crime Reporter. Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-
based Multinational Monitor.
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