Ronald Reagan, the College Movie Political Demonology, Academic Freedom, and the University of California CURTIS MAREZ y title is a reference to an essay by the late Berkeley professor Michael Rogin entitled, “Ronald Reagan, the Movie,” in which he argues that the forms of political demonology President Reagan directed at leftists, women, unions, and people of color were profoundly informed by his prior career in Hollywood. It was while working in the film industry, according to Rogin, that the future US. president first learned how to objectify him- self as an image on the screen, removed from the world of everyday reality and safely enclosed within the universe of Hollywood films. The actor’s tal- ent for self-reification, as it were, would come in handy when he became president, imaginatively clothing his self-image in the quasi- ment of US, nationalism while distancing himself from responsibility for the destructive consequences of his administration’ policies. Rogin’s claims were influential well beyond academia, generating a number of high-profile media events. When he delivered an early version of “Ronald Reagan, the Movie” at the American Political Studies Association in 1985, it was reported on in the New York Times, complete with photos of Reagan playing Notre Dame football star George Gipp, as well as pictures of Sylvester Stallone as Rambo and Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry, two other actors whose film lines Reagan had famously borrowed. When Rogin published the essay as part of a University of California Press book entitled Ronald Reagan the Movie, and Other Episodes in Political Demonology (1987), the Times gave it a detailed, positive review, primarily focused on the chapter about Reagan. Rogin’s research even inspired a segment on 60 Minutes, also called “Ronald Reagan, the Movie.” in which he was interviewed by reporter Morley Shafer.' Building on Rogin’s work, in this essay I turn to Ronald Reagan's college films, arguing that they presage contemporary models of academic freedom L us J eligious rai-[ Ro that emerge from a matrix of white supremacy, settler colonialism, and het- eropatriarchy. My thinking about academic freedom is inspired by the response to the American Studies Association's passage of a resolution calling for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions in 2013, when I was ASA president. Afterward, according to Jodi Melamed, the ASA “would become the target of a hege- monic bloc of university presidents and regents, politicians and watchdog institutions connected through their condemnations of the ASA resolution to boycott Israeli academic institutions.” Answering a call from Palestinian civil society, the ASA national council endorsed a resolution calling for an academic boycott not of individual scholars but of Israeli academic institu- tions complicit in the occupation of Palestine and the violation of Palestin- ian human rights and academic freedom. In response, almost 250 university presidents publically denounced the ASA in the name of academic freedom. In “Dangerous Associations’—a response to my presidential address— Melamed presents a compelling reading of the statements by university presidents, concluding that they represented a version of academic freedom that supported repressive police power while encouraging individuals and institutions to willfully ignore violence and exploitation. As she and many others have argued, the statements by the university presidents refused to acknowledge the routine violation of the academic freedom of Palestinian scholars. Such constructions of academic freedom exercise “a kind of epis temological violence” that radically limits knowledge about the contradic- tions between, on the one hand, abstract articulations of the university as a place of dialogue and diversity, and on the other hand, the university as a “key institution within racialized and gendered capitalism,’ “[a] locus for the social reproduction of racial, class, and gender inequalities and norma- tive morality,” and “[a] center and transit for the ongoing neoliberal debt economy, controlling dissent, and perpetuating old and new forms of settler colonialism” In my ASA presidential address, “Seeing in the Red: Looking at Student Debt,” I presented an intersectional analysis of university regimes of debt as modes of race, class, gender, and settler exploitation in ways that connected the Palestinian question to the crisis in contemporary universities. | argued that both the Israeli occupation and student debt undermine a right to edu- cation, while the “student-led BDS movement on college campuses could thus also be described as part of a broader effort to take some control over the student debt financing of settler colonial violence.’ The various statements by university presidents denouncing the ASA thus depended on disconnecting Reagan, the College Movie « 149. |[ so + curtis MARE? ] precisely what I had attempted to connect—academic freedom, occupation, and exploitation. At the same time, the university presidents promoted global universities and knowledge production as capital accumulation. Among other things, the ASA boycott laid bare the ways in which dominant models of academic freedom have turned universities into the educational equivalent of free-trade zones.’ The forms of political demonology that the university presidents and others aimed at the ASA have compelled me to write “Ronald Reagan, the College Movie” as part of a genealogy of cam- pus militarization in tandem with the neoliberal redefinition of academic freedom. The comparison of militarization and the forms of academic free- dom mobilized by contemporary university administrators is revealing since they function in similar ways, combining both repression of students and faculty and the production of market-driven forms of pedagogy and research. Ronald Reagan’ five college films—three playing a student and two a professor—anticipate in multiple ways his subsequent political demoniza- tion of the University of California system. Reagan became California gov- ernor partly by vilifying the system, especially Berkeley, as sites of radical anticapitalist, antiwar, and anti-heteronormative politics. As Christopher Newfield has argued, such attacks were part of a larger effort to discredit the ideals of social equality that had, however imperfectly, guided the Univer- sity of California since its inception.’ When Reagan was elected governor, he raised fees at state colleges and universities, repeatedly slashed construc- tion budgets for state campuses, and engineered the firing of University of California (henceforth UC) president Clark Kerr and the firing of Angela Davis from UCLA. According to Gary Clabaugh, as governor and subse- quently as president, Reagan “demagogically fanned discontent with public education, then made political hay of it” and “bashed educators and slashed education spending while professing to value it” At the same time, Gover- nor Reagan initiated a new militarization of college campuses, deploying the National Guard against students and faculty in ways that anticipate our contemporary education-scape of baton-swinging, pepper-spraying, tank- driving campus cops. Recently, a number of scholars have produced important work at the in tersection of critical ethnic studies and critical university studies. Melamed, in her cultural history Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism, analyzes how university and other official antiracisms and models of multiculturalism sustain and extend capitalist investments in racial inequality, In The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies