Kent State University’s Center for Applied Conflict
Management
In November 2003, while appearing at the National Conference on Current Trends
in Conflict Resolution in Higher Education at Maryland’s Salisbury University,
Patrick G. Coy, assistant professor at
the Conflict Management Center of
Kent State University in Ohio, made a striking confession. When asked, during a
question and answer session, to share his approach to the teaching of conflict
resolution, Coy gave a frank reply: “Keep
away from set rigid programs and encourage change and liberalism in teaching
Conflict Resolution.”
That overtly political approach is
visible in the work Kent State’s Center
for Applied Conflict Management (CACM), of which Coy serves as the director.
The Center (formerly known as the Center for Peaceful Change) was established
in 1971 to serve as a “living memorial” to four Kent State students who were
killed by Ohio National Guardsmen under siege from rock-throwing radicals
during an anti-Vietnam War protest on May 4, 1970. Even more than commemorating
the deaths of the slain students, however, the Center has been committed to the
task of enshrining the animating agendas of the anti-war protest movement as an
integral part of the educational curriculum.
To this end, CACM inaugurated in 1987 an undergraduate degree program in
conflict resolution. Now ubiquitous at American Universities, where it is
offered under the rubric of “Peace Studies,” the Kent State program was among
the first of its kind. Insofar as it sought to impose the narrow framework of
leftwing pacifist ideology on complex issues like conflict resolution, the Kent
State program may be accurately said to have been the forerunner of “Peace
Studies” programs.
The Kent State program continues
the same mission today. Although the undergraduate program purports to provide
students with a “solid background in the theory and skills of conflict
management,” a survey of the courses
on offer suggests that this background is limited to the patently political
view—apparently espoused by all CACM faculty members—holding that non-violence
is the only acceptable and effective solution to conflicts. To make this very
point, a course called “Nonviolence: Theory and Practice” is not above rewriting
history. A description of the course informs prospective students that “The
American colonists used nonviolence to launch their revolution against the
British, just as East Europeans used it to help bring down the Berlin Wall,” an
interpretation of the historical record ungrounded in historical fact.
More aggressively political is the
slant of another course, “Public Sector Dispute and Resolution.” Supposedly an
investigation into the nature of “public disputes,” the course carries a
pronounced bias against free-market capitalism. To illustrate what is meant by
public dispute, the course description derisively states: “For example, a
national drug store chain wants to buy a historic building in a residential
neighborhood, tear it down, and put up a new ‘cookie cutter’ drug store
building.” Another telling example states: “An oil company wants to drill for
oil in the nearby national forest; the forest service says OK but environmental
groups say no, loudly.” The underlying hostility of “Public Sector Dispute and
Resolution” to business again finds its expression in the course description,
which explains, “Throughout it all we will ask whether these techniques tend to
disempower community groups while serving the interests of the state and
corporations.”
Other courses offered through the
conflict management program are little more than forums for leftwing political
causes. Such is the case with a class called “Reconciliation Versus
Revenge: Transitional Justice.” The question posed by the course—“How can reconciliation
be achieved in long-running conflicts?”—is a serious one. Rather than encourage
a serious discussion of these conflicts, however, the course asks, “Should the
U.S. government pay reparations to the citizen descendants of African slaves?”
Unlike the abovementioned courses, “Reconciliation v. Revenge” is a recent
addition to the Kent State conflict resolution curriculum, having been
introduced in 2004. The other course added in 2004 was another favorite of
leftwing academia: “Gender Studies.”
Kent State has also attempted to expand these courses into
the broader university curriculum. For instance, a course called “Introduction
to Conflict Management,” which is already a requirement for conflict-management
majors, has been extended to all students who need to fulfill the university’s
“liberal education” requirements. Karen Cunningham, an assistant professor of
applied conflict management, has been quoted
as saying that the course is “beneficial for any student.”
In addition to promulgating a political agenda inside the
classroom, the conflict studies department also encourages students to carry
its message to the campus at large. In November 2002, for instance, students
enrolled in the course “Nonviolence: Theory and Practice,” in keeping with the
dogmatically anti-war views advanced in the course, convened a special evening
of anti-war protests. Crudely entitled “Bombs There, Brutality Here!” the event featured poetry, music,
and art “against the war abroad and police brutality at home.” Previously, in
the winter of 2001, Kent State had hosted several anti-war panel discussions
aimed at establishing opposition to U.S. military intervention as the
prevailing attitude on campus. One such panel explored the “relationship
between pacifism and patriotism.”
By the same token, speakers invited by the
conflict-management program to Kent State can be counted on to endorse the
program’s leftwing political tilt. In May 1995, for instance, the 25th
anniversary of the deaths of the aforementioned Kent State students, the
university hosted a scholarly symposium titled “Legacies of Protest”—ostensiblty
to present a “global perspective” on issues of conflict management. Belying
that noble aim was the list of the symposium’s attendees, an ideologically
homogenous panel that included left-wing journalists like R. W. Apple Jr.
of The New York Times, and two famously anti-war senators,
Eugene J. McCarthy and George McGovern.
Arguably the most vocal preacher of the pacifist catechism
that undergirds the course load at Kent State is Professor Patrick Coy. Coy,
whose politics tend toward radical leftism, and whose consuming scholarly interest is the socialist Catholic Worker movement,
nurses a deep resentment of American primacy. Writing in 2003 in the quarterly
leftist journal Peace Review,
Coy despaired of the “United States’ placement as the world’s lone
military superpower” and raged against its “imperial policies in a globalized
economy.”
A staunch opponent of military intervention, Coy has
condemned every American military campaign in recent history. In recent years,
he has emerged as Kent State’s foremost critic of the Bush administration,
which Coy has charged with “rallying support for a policy of
a permanent war economy, aggressive military retaliation, preemptive attacks
abroad and civil liberty suppression at home.” Hardly confined to the pages of
obscure academic journals, Coy’s leftist politics clearly inform his views on
the study of conflict management. To this end, Coy is an enthusiastic supporter
of the United Nations, which he argues exists to check the power of what is, to
his mind, the single greatest threat to international peace: the United States.
This belief found pungent expression in a 2002 op-ed for the Catholic Reporter, wherein Coy expressed his outrage at the U.S.
attempt secure a United Nations resolution holding Iraq accountable for its
violations of the U.N. sanctions. From Coy’s perspective, this evidenced
nothing less that an American attempt to exploit the international body. He
wrote:
Conflict resolution theory and practice show us that
ultimatums issued in multiparty forums typically reveal two things: severe
power imbalances between the two parties, which is what the ultimatum is
designed by the more powerful to exploit; and a corresponding lack of openness
and good will on the part of the party that has thrown down the gauntlet. Both
are on display here.
Flushed with anti-American fervor,
Coy insisted that the more serious threat to the U.N. came not from Saddam
Hussein, but the U.S. administration. “It is not just Saddam Hussein whose
actions threaten U.N. credibility. George W. Bush may be the greater long-term
threat,” Coy opined.
The subsequent overthrow of Saddam Hussein served only to
further rile Coy’s rancor. In a particularly cantankerous June 2004 op-ed in the Ohio newspaper, the Akron Beacon
Journal, Coy claimed that “most
decent Americans are at least shaken and embarrassed by the debacle in Iraq.”
According to Coy, most Americans were not only unsupportive of the U.S.
military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan but were actually “ashamed of the
sexual war crimes being committed in their name in Iraq, Afghanistan and
Guantanamo Bay.” Coy also used the occasion to revive a leftwing conspiracy
theory, asserting, on no evidence, that “the Bush machine delivered Florida
with a series of sleights of hand.”
Coy’s abrasively anti-war views are also the subject of his
research. In August 2004, he received a grant for $110,460 from the National
Science Foundation for a research project called “Harnessing and Challenging Hegemony During Three
Wars: The U.S. Peace Movement, 1990-2004.” Teaming up with two leftist
proffesors, Gregory Maney and Lynne Woehrle, Coy plans to investigate
some ways to expand the anti-war movement in the United States, or, as the
project’s mission statement has it, to “highlight cultural obstacles to
generating mass dissent as well as the strategic choices and dilemmas facing
activists in responding to these obstacles.” The project was inspired by the
work of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who defined hegemony as the means by
which society’s upper classes compel lower classes into accepting their views
about society. Several Kent State students will work as research assistants on
the project, on the presumed benefit that they will be exposed to the “broader
study of social movements, conflicts, and social change.”
This “research” project would not be the first time
that Coy has attempted to impose his views on his students. According to a testimonial
that appeared in the Kent State newspaper, “Students in Dr. Coy’s classes don’t
just learn the facts, we become educated individuals—better than we were before
taking his classes.” What constitutes “educated,” however, seems to be little
more than a commitment to the leftism of Patrick Coy, with its unreflective
embrace of pacifism in all circumstances.