Professor Angela Davis, the American author and activist, has received an honorary Doctorate in Letters from Cambridge University. This is heartening news indeed. Cynics who have questioned academic standards in the UK will surely think again.
After all, Professor Davis shows how intellectuals can make an impact on the world. Her life proves that scholars need not be trapped in their ivory towers. They can actually make a difference.
Consider her credentials. How many scholars can claim to have received the Lenin Peace Prize? Accepting the honour, in Moscow in 1979, Professor Davis celebrated “the glorious name” of the man who had “led the great October Revolution”. Lenin, of course, had also shown that thought and action need not inhabit separate worlds — that you can write books and massacre thousands of your enemies.
Traditionalists will surely approve of the home of the Cambridge Five honouring another friend of the Soviet Union. Professor Davis was often recognised behind the Berlin Wall as a “freedom fighter” — so different from troublemakers like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The feeling was mutual. She was, for example, a firm friend of the communist regime in East Germany, which elevated this symbol of resistance to iconic status while resisting the idea that people should be able to speak their mind or leave the country.
Davis, for her part, praised the regime in East Germany for showing “what it means when the working class holds the power in their own hands”. (Did East German workers hold power? Just ask their Stasi agents!) Jiri Pelikan, a Czech dissident, appealed to her for solidarity on the grounds that both of them had faced imprisonment. A representative of Professor Davis was reported as saying that “people in Eastern Europe got into difficulties and ended in jail only if they were undermining the government”. Cynical observers might suggest that Professor Davis was functioning as a kind of “useful idiot”, but more generous souls might call her a “helpful idealist”.
There are countless instances of Professor Davis lending her voice to the voiceless. She was a vocal supporter of Jim Jones — the revolutionary preacher who inspired hundreds of the members of his “Jonestown” community to liberate themselves from their lives. (Talk about emancipation!) According to the Jonestown Institute, Professor Davis told the members of Jonestown that there was a “profound conspiracy” against them, which is just the kind of the thing it is advisable to tell isolated men and women gathered around a charismatic leader in a utopian commune. Professor Davis also wrote to President Jimmy Carter — again, according to the Jonestown Institute — calling Jones “a humanitarian in the broadest sense of the word”. From Lenin to Jim Jones, Professor Davis is nothing if not an excellent judge of character.
Since the fall of communism, Professor Davis has been a key supporter of the prison abolition movement. She certainly has intimate knowledge of criminals. She has lent her support to Rasmea Odea, a Palestinian Jordanian woman convicted of killing two Israelis with a bomb, and Assata Shakur, convicted of murdering a state trooper, and “all the … sisters and brothers in Connecticut” who were on trial for murdering a Black Panther member and suspected police informant, some of whom would be convicted. Thank God we have had people prepared to speak up against the essential injustice of separating killers from law-abiding citizens. (Czech dissidents have been unavailable for comment.)
In more recent years, Professor Davis has moderated her radicalism. She left the Communist Party in 1991, displaying the bold heterodox approach of someone questioning the “unsinkable” nature of the Titanic in May 1912. In more recent years, she has endorsed the presidency of Joe Biden — the gerontocratic nature of which may have reminded her nostalgically of the Eastern Bloc in the 1970s.
Three cheers for Cambridge University for honouring this bold thinker. While some have criticised our universities for failing to inspire young people in difficult times, Professor Davis shows that you too can honour tyrants and cult leaders and achieve success as long as you become iconic in fashionable circles.
