"Let knowledge serve the city" reads the golden letters on a pedestrian bridge just 200 feet from my faculty office in Neuberger Hall at Portland State University. Public peace scholarship might allow knowledge to help the polis by keeping it out of war via changing the national discourse toward a strong and informed peace analysis. Educators have an uneasy relationship to public scholarship and mainstream media have a nervous attitude toward public peace intellectuals. Institutions of higher learning are also often either unaware or uncomfortable with a public promotion of a positive peace platform. Academic writing and research is hard to translate into publicly accessible knowledge and time constraints mitigate professorial efforts at such civic engagements. This dissertation looks at the evolving nature of this intersectionality between and among factors and analyzes data derived from research interviews conducted with 12 academics/activists. The conclusion is a grounded theory generated by this process. Key findings include problematic lack of academic freedoms--especially in the promotion and tenure context, overwhelming faculty workloads, infrequent faculty development of public scholarship skills and a spotty distribution/connection system that often fails to facilitate competent and willing faculty to engage as public peace and justice scholars. Policy recommendations attempt to address all these obstacles.

When the national Democratic Party began to transform to progressive era politics because of the New Deal, conservative reactionaries turned against the social welfare programs and used red scare tactics to discredit liberal and progressive New Deal Democrat professors in higher education. This process continued during the Second World War, when the conservatives in Texas lumped fascism and communism in order to anchor support and fire and threaten professors and administrators for advocating or teaching “subversive doctrine.” In 1948 Texas joined other southern states and followed the Dixiecrat movement designed to return the Democratic Party to its original pro-business and segregationist philosophy. Conservatives who wanted to bolster their Cold Warrior status in Texas also played upon the fears of spreading communism during the Cold War, and passed several repressive laws intended to silence unruly students and entrap professors by claiming they advocated communist doctrine. The fight culminated during the Civil Rights movement, when conservatives in the state attributed subversive or communist behavior to civil rights organizations, and targeted higher education to protect segregated universities. In order to return the national Democratic Party to the pro-business, segregationist philosophy established at the early twentieth century, conservatives used redbaiting tactics to thwart the progressivism in the state’s higher education facilities.

This thesis explores academic propaganda in the first two years of the First World War, examining the activity of the university men in Britain and Germany who were left behind when their students went to the Front. Using pamphlets and manifestoes, it seeks to highlight the way the War split the international academic community and the creation of a debate which examined not only the causes of the War, but the reasons for which the nations were fighting. By exploring the propaganda organisations of both countries, as well as the academic milieu in which the subjects of this thesis worked, it hopes to provide the context within which this propaganda was created, before turning to an examination of the content of the propaganda - an aspect which has often been overlooked in propaganda studies. The investigation of the content looks first at the outbreak of war and the reaction of the academic community to a shock which shook their community. It then turns to the arguments expounded on culpability for the War, and the ideals for which each side felt they were fighting, illustrating the shift in emphasis from a political war to an ideological conflict between two opposing world views. Finally, the thesis considers perceptions of the War in the early years of the conflict, and the way in which it was seen both as a panacea to overcome social divisions and a catharsis which would lead the way to a new world - ideas which would provide the foundation for later war aims. In taking this comparative approach, the aim is to provide new insights into a fascinating and relatively little-known aspect of the history of the First World War.