LETTER TO THE EDITOR
Checking my phone over coffee this morning, I saw a message from a friend and retired employee of Texas State University. She forwarded me an article from The University Star reporting that President Kelly Damphousse has fired a history professor, Thomas Alter, for the capital crime of saying something along the lines of “Workers of the World, Unite!”
Shocking? To some, obviously. But Karl Marx beat Alter to the punch and came up with the concept more than 175 years ago. I’m not criticizing Alter for not originating the idea, but I do find it remarkable that both the University’s President and Chancellor found his words so immediately threatening that they sentenced Alter to what the labor movement calls industrial capital punishment.
Here’s the big reveal: Professor Alter didn’t do this in a classroom or a lecture hall filled with students. No, he committed what the University brass clearly considers the capital sin of free speech at an online convention. Not a convention of students. Not a convention of Texas State faculty, administrators, or other workers. It was a gathering of folks who, during the reign of Senator Joseph McCarthy, would have been called “fellow travelers.” It was the 2025 Revolutionary Socialism Conference.
So what did Professor Alter actually say? Well, after a few minutes of criticizing capitalism – and he certainly had a long list of complaints – and criticizing the existing political parties for being complicit in what he considers the deficiencies of capitalism, he jumped the rails. He called for building “a working class-based revolutionary socialist party that puts the working class in power.”
He didn’t call for a general strike of University workers. He didn’t call for barricades to be set up in the Quad. He didn’t call for members of SDS to come out of retirement, occupy every Bobcat Shuttle bus and begin mobile teach-ins. He didn’t call for conference participants to surround the University and hurl their laptops at Old Main.
It was clear that if a person identified by the Star as a self-described “anti-communist cult leader” had not posted a recording of the meeting on social media, Alter’s comments would never have become an issue. In fact, they would probably have been summarized in the conference’s minutes and filed away. If any damage was done to the University’s reputation, it does not seem to be attributable to Alter. Rather, the overreaction of the University’s leadership put this story on the map.
Alter made no secret of his belief that that the “revolutionary” change he seeks is not going to happen soon, although he believes it will eventually come. His remarks were actually critical of the actions of “insurrectionists” who have called for more “direct action” and “shutting down the military industrial complex.” He is interested in building a workers party so that, eventually, workers— not capitalists—will hold the reins of power.
While the meeting transcript does show that Alter believes in some form of what might be called a “revolutionary moment,” let’s not read too much into it. Chancellor McCall has said that Alter’s intent was to “incite violence.” That is not supported by the transcript. It is certainly more likely, given the history of the glacial movement of American political change, that moment may come only if and when a workers party has grown to the point when it can effectively and successfully compete in a national election. To believe otherwise is not realistic.
At the moment, we don’t even have an American workers party, and there is no third-party threat to the two-party system. To deprive someone of his livelihood by reasoning that somehow Alter’s goal will result in violence—immediate and sufficient enough that the University has no other option—is pure sophistry.
We have been here before. We have seen speech demonized and punished. We have seen academic freedom curtailed. Don’t we have enough to do right now defending the Constitution and the democracy it supports? Do we also need to educate our educators in basic civics?
To borrow an idea expressed by Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis almost 100 years ago, “The cure for free speech is more free speech.”
Sincerely, Jon Leonard San Marcos
