Barbara Sniffen: Fighter, Mentor, Friend (From 2003)

[Note: This obit was originally written in 2003. UW Oshkosh is currently in the process of revamping their website, on which this piece appeared. I'm moving pieces from that site to this blog. Barb Sniffen is still greatly missed.]. 

November 4, 2003

Barbara Sniffen, UW Oshkosh Professor Emeritus of History and passionate TAUWP (American Federation of Teachers) advocate, died in her sleep last Thursday night while attending the Wisconsin Federation of Teachers Convention. "Shock" does not even begin to describe the feelings of everyone who knew and loved Barbara. Though we knew she suffered from a variety of ailments including a bout with cancer, her energy and enthusiasm always made it difficult to imagine that she might someday leave us. I know I speak for all TAUWP members in offering the deepest condolences to Barbara's husband, son, and the rest of her family and friends.

I suspect my history with Barbara Sniffen matches that of many others: I stood in awe of Barbara the fighter, sought guidance from Barbara the mentor, and was comforted by the warmth of Barbara the friend.

There will never be another fighter like Barbara Sniffen on the UW Oshkosh campus. When I first arrived at the campus in 1989, like most faculty recently out of graduate school I was naive about the realities of university power and politics. I had great faith and belief in the idea that the American university really was a place where students, faculty, staff, and administrators stood united in the search for truth. Barbara Sniffen understood, more keenly than most, that administrative power trips, unfair workplace rules, and double standards blocked the truth search. There's a famous quote by the great African-American abolitionist Frederick Douglass that always reminds me of Barbara every time I hear it. That quote says, "Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will." Most people who met Barbara were shocked that this tiny, outwardly reserved looking older woman could be so brazen and forceful. I think Mark Twain explained it best, "It's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog."

Two short stories, both from the last two months of Barbara's life, I think illustrate her fighting spirit. A little over a month ago I returned to my office after teaching one morning and saw a message on my telephone answering machine. It was from Barbara, saying there was something "urgent" she wanted to tell me. Between meeting with students and doing assorted other odds and ends, I did not return her call. When I got home that evening, there was a message on my home answering machine from Barbara: "Tony, you really do have to call me. This is extremely important." I called her early the next morning, and what she wanted to tell me was that Kay Neal (who followed me as chair of the department of communication) had finally joined TAUWP. You see, Barbara had been recruiting Kay for years and years and years to join the organization. Barbara aggressively recruited faculty to join the organization, and she refused to accept "NO" from anyone. When a faculty or staff member finally joined, Barbara considered it a great moral victory and a significant stride toward attaining justice for all members of the campus community. I used to laugh at how seriously Barbara took the whole issue of membership recruitment, at how she would religiously come to every campus opening day ceremony in September and place TAUWP membership cards in the hands of everyone who wanted one and especially in the hands of those who did NOT want one. Now I cry wondering how we will ever replace that exuberance and persistence that really is the lifeblood of any organization or community, be it a university community or any other.

Then just a few weeks ago the UW Board of Regents met on the UW Oshkosh campus. Our new Wisconsin Federation of Teachers TAUWP representative Kevin Kniffin (Barbara loved the fact that the WFT hired someone whose name was so similar to hers) and staff organizer Andrew Cantrell had been busy taping TAUWP signs on the doors of the Reeve Union building in which the Regents would be meeting. But Barbara went one step further: she placed the signs in the women's' rest rooms, an act that drew the ire of the Reeve Union management and the campus police. When Kevin, Andrew, and I broke the news to Barbara about the authorities' displeasure with this evil act of civil disobedience she had committed, she was just beaming. She was like an energetic teenager who had moved the minute hand on her parents' watches back so as to extend the curfew. Nothing gave her more pleasure than tweaking the establishment, even if it meant placing--gasp!--unauthorized flyers in their rest rooms

Barbara was always chastised, even by many of her friends, for being overly confrontational, exaggerating problems, and personalizing issues. Often I would say to these critics, "look, I don't always agree with Barbara's style of communicating, but on the other hand if I were taken hostage somewhere and allowed just one phone call, I'm pretty sure Barbara Sniffen is the person that I'd contact. She'd set the wheels in motion to get me released in ways that no mellow and non-confrontational diplomat ever could."

I think Barbara was amused by the criticisms aimed at her, and saw them as signs of the discomfort that most of us feel when someone urges us to confront power. She got a big kick, for example, at how some members of the university faculty would claim to throw her caustic "TAUWP Comments" newsletters right in the trash, yet they somehow were able to engage in point by point refutation of every claim in the Comment.

If there are angels in Heaven, I can see Barb right now organizing them to confront God about all the violence and misery on Earth. I can hear her telling them, "Look, there's all this talk about love and peace around here and yet the boss tolerates wars, natural disasters, hunger and disease. Let's demand that this Great Spirit start acting like one."

But Barb was not only a great fighter. She was a tremendous mentor and friend.

I believe the greatest gift a mentor can give to a mentee is the confidence to use their talents and abilities for a cause bigger than themselves. In my 14 years at UW Oshkosh, Barb Sniffen was one of only a handful of people who steered me away from the narrow careerist agenda that plagues so many people at a modern university. Barb kept reminding me that someone with my abilities was obligated to join the centuries old struggle for justice and human rights. She showed me the folly of trying to curry favor with people in power if they do not respect basic principles of democracy like due process and equal opportunity. She showed me the necessity of exposing those who abuse power and demanding accountability from them, even if that means great personal discomfort and sacrifice of many of the rewards available to people who remain silent in the face of injustice. In her personal example she showed me the truth of Margaret Mead's declaration to "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." Barbara Sniffen never let me forget that I could be that ONE thoughtful citizen who could change the world.

Ultimately, Barbara Sniffen was a friend. In her one sensed a deep love of humanity in general and a genuine care for everyone in her immediate environment. In Barbara's presence I always felt like I was around a modern version of Mother Jones, the great late 19th and early 20th century champion of the rights of children and the oppressed. Mother Jones told us to "pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living." Barbara told us the same thing, loud and clear.

I think the best way for us to pay tribute to Barbara Sniffen is to pledge to continue that fight. I only hope that in my fight I can display the passion and dignity that Barbara modeled for us so eloquently.

The January 6th Committee: Government of the Media, By the Media, and For the Media

In the early 1970s I was not like the typical urban middle-school boy. Most were into wiffle ball, rolIler skates, etch-a-sketch, two hand touch football, super elastic bubble plastic, collecting baseball cards, an occasional game of checkers or chess, wheelie bikes, and playing bottle caps. Some even displayed spectacular feats with hacky sacks, hula hoops and jump ropes. 

Me? I enjoyed some of those activities, but they all seemed to pale in comparison to my fascination with political rhetoric. My parents looked at me strangely when I sat in front of the rabbit ear TV fixated not on Bugs Bunny (pardon the pun) or the Banana Splits (Google them) as much as Meet the Press or William F. Buckley's Firing Line. 

For a kid like me, and for millions of Americans, the Congressional Watergate Hearings of 1973-1974 were an eye-opening, transformative experience. President Nixon in November of 1972 had been reelected in one of the biggest landslides in history (he carried 49 states and 60 percent of the popular vote), yet barely two years later the corruption exposed by the Congressional Hearings pushed Tricky Dicky into resigning the office. 

Video: A Look Back at the Senate Watergate Hearings 

The Watergate hearings were educational--anyone following them closely learned a great deal about how government "works"--and had enough surprise and suspense to keep even a middle school kid glued to his seat. Because the hearings occurred before the age of cable news, no one had to suffer through hours of hyperpartisan corporate media telling us who among the committee members and witnesses to love or to hate. There was not the equivalent of a Fox News doing whatever it could to defend Nixon and undermine the process, nor was there the equivalent of an MSNBC treating Democrats on the Committee like trusted old friends. 

In their testimony before the committee, Nixon's henchmen like John Ehrlichman, H.R. Haldeman, and John Mitchell tried to defend a theory of executive branch power that would justify pretty much any of Nixon's actions--a theory that's been referred to as the "imperial presidency." Watching both Democrats AND Republicans joust with Nixon's henchmen and challenge the theory made me feel that I really was watching government of the people, by the people, and for the people. 

Fifty years later, I watched pretty much all of the hearings conducted by the Select Committee to Investigate the Attack on the United States Capitol. Even though a line from congresswoman and committee co-chair Liz Cheney's opening remarks should be included on the Wikipedia page of pretty much every Republican member of Congress ("Tonight, I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible: There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain"), the hearings as a whole did not convey the sense of civic emergency as powerfully as the Watergate committee did decades earlier. Indeed, through most of the hearings I kept asking myself how 12-year-old Tony would be reacting to the proceedings, and I concluded that he would be disappointed that the hearings seemed to be a "made for TV moment" in a literal sense. 

In the opinion of this blog, Liz Cheney's call out of GOP cowards should be featured on all of their Wikipedia pages and should be a permanent part of their legacy. 

In fairness to the January 6th Committee, they faced a set of constraints that their Watergate era ancestors did not. For one thing, the Republican Party in 1972-1974 was not dominated by trolls for whom "owning the libs" was more important than protecting the institution of government or even protecting just their personal integrity. For another, the Watergate Committee did not have to deal with a 24-hour a day "news network" (i.e. Fox and even more right wing outlets like One America News) that spent most of its on-air time undermining the investigation. Finally, even though Nixon's cronies were morally compromised and complicit in his crimes, none of them had the audacity to ignore congressional subpoenas like Mr. Trump's enablers have done. 

The January 6th Committee admirably refused to be deterred by the constraints and ended up producing an 845-page final report that is kind of like the USA Today in how it includes scores of colorful photos to help our attention-challenged culture stay focused on the seriousness expressed in the printed words. Unfortunately, the Committee took its desire to make the events of January 6th "accessible" to an extreme, and that's where they erred. Though he would have not used this exact language to describe it, young middle-school Tony would have been frustrated by (1) the slickness of the production, (2) the fact that all the politicians on the panel seemed to be acting as if they were in a movie about the government's investigation of January 6th, and (3) that the entire series of hearings seemed to be guided by some kind of "narrative arc" leading to an already established conclusion. Young Tony was intrigued by the Watergate hearings in part because they seemed radically different from almost everything else on TV at the time. The January 6th hearings, on the other hand, seemed to go out of its way to be like a big budget media production. 

My feelings about the January 6th committee's obsession with producing a made-for-TV spectacular were confirmed by a lengthy December 23, 2022 New York Times piece called Inside the Jan. 6 Committee (behind a paywall). Turns out that the Committee hired James Goldston, former president of ABC News, to handle media production efforts. Working closely with Goldston was Melinda Arons, former ABC "Nightline" producer. According to testimony received by the Times' reporters, the nine televised hearings that aired from June - October 2022 were "meticulously choreographed." One senior staffer said that "Every word was intentional . . . nothing was spontaneous." 

Goldston and Arons treated the committee members as if they were actors: "Each hearing was preceded by at least two rehearsals held in the Cannon Caucus Room on evenings or weekends. Each monologue was timed with a stopwatch usually held by [Timothy]Mulvey, the communications director. One rehearsal lasted five hours, and the script of the hearing had to be cut nearly in half." Somehow I cannot imagine old Sam Ervin or Howard Baker participating in something like that. 

The January 6th Committee literally hired a former TV executive (James Goldston) to help make the hearings more viewer friendly. 

Because the Committee was concerned with constructing a compelling narrative that would keep viewers engaged (like a 20/20 broadcast), they had to invent provocative characters. Gripping true crime narratives always feature heroes, villains, and those who have "seen the light." That latter category of characters were what I found to be most repulsive; it included gaslighters like former Attorney General Bill Barr and former White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, both of whom were allowed to rebrand themselves as somehow deserving kudos for telling Mr. Trump that he lost the election. That they had enabled and even propagated Mr. Trump's bullshit for years was politely ignored. 

Just as appalling were the characters the Committee transformed into principled public servants just because they resigned as a result of the insurrection. This group includes deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews, deputy national security adviser Matthew Pottinger, transportation secretary Elaine Chao, education secretary Betsy DeVos, Northern Ireland special envoy and former acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, acting chair of the Council of Economic Advisers Tyler Goodspeed, deputy assistant secretary of commerce for intelligence and security John Costello, and White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham. Given Trump's erratic and shameful behaviors long before 1/6/21, the idea that January 6th was the "bridge too far" for these people was laughable. Unlike Jeb Stuart Magruder, Nixon's deputy director of communications who came clean to the Watergate Committee and famously said, "Somewhere between my ambition and my ideals, I lost my ethical compass," Trump's "principled public servants" made no such mea culpas. Instead they simply reinforced the Committee's narrative that the primary ethical villain in this entire travesty was Mr. Trump himself. 

As important as the January 6th Committee's work was, and as sincere as most of its members appeared, the panel was ultimately a classic example of what happens when we get government of the media, by the media, and for the media. The committee's work resulted in viral videos, social media trends, and enough video to be used in dozens of the inevitable documentary films, podcasts, and a myriad of additional media products that will be coming from all ends of the political spectrum. 

Meanwhile, Mr. Trump has been allowed back on Twitter and Facebook, his main competitors for the 2024 GOP nomination are running on Trumpian themes, and the mass media is once again providing the former president with free advertising that candidates dream of. If the situation were this dire in 1974, middle school Tony would have probably backed off on the political rhetoric and started taking Bugs Bunny and the Banana Splits more seriously. At least Bugs and the Bananas didn't pretend to be anything other than entertainment.