CLIOPATRIA: A Group Blog
Entries by Robert KC Johnson
Saturday, March 13, 2010
Sullivan's Fun with "Historical" Maps
I have long admired Andrew Sullivan’s writing. He was way ahead of his time in both supporting gay marriage and discerning the significance of the Bush administration’s embrace of torture. During the 2008 primaries, he often articulated Barack Obama’s case more effectively than did Obama. And he saw through the fraud that was Sarah Palin before virtually any other prominent political commentator.
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
The Reid Remarks
Over the weekend, Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder and the New York Times’ “Caucus” blog obtained early copies of Game Change, and posted around 15 or so “juicy” items. I read the posts, and figured the most attention would be paid to the revelation that Sarah Palin didn’t know why North and South Korea were different countries and thought that Saddam was responsible for the 9/11 attacks. Among the Democratic tidbits, I figured the highest-profile items involved Ted Kennedy’s anger at Bill Clinton (the former President suggested that a few years ago, Barack Obama would have been serving coffee to the two of them) and the demonstration that the campaign images of both of the Edwardses, not just the former senator, were totally fraudulent.
Instead, of course, nearly all attention has been paid to Harry Reid’s statement about Obama’s electability given his light skin and lack of a “Negro dialect.” Reid’s remark could be deemed a “Kinsley gaffe,” in that he said something basically true but politically stupid. As Ambinder pointed out, no one would have paid any attention to the comment if Game Change authors John Heilemann and Mark Halperin had simply summarized Reid’s sentiments with this kind of sentence: “Reid believed that America was ready for a black president, and it didn't hurt that Obama was lighter-skinned, or that he talked like a Harvard law professor.”
Saturday, January 9, 2010
The Ford Conundrum
The talk of New York politics in recent days has focused on the prospective Senate candidacy of former Tennessee congressman Harold Ford, Jr. Poll numbers for appointed senator Kirsten Gillibrand have been weak, partly because of the taint of the botched process through which Gov. David Patterson appointed Gillibrand, partly because Gillibrand’s positions on controversial social issues (immigration, gun control) “evolved” toward more liberal stances almost immediately after her appointment.
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Congressional Oral History Sites
The House of Representatives' Office of History and Preservation has just made posted its oral history website, which contains the first batch of staffers' and families' oral histories (a highlight is a discussion with Cokie Roberts, both of whose parents served in the House.) The site contains transcripts, contextual information, and a YouTube channel with audio and video of the interviews.
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Cory Maye Reversal
In an injustice that my colleague Ralph Luker several years ago highlighted, the Mississippi Supreme Court has overturned Cory Maye's conviction for murder and remanded the case for a new trial.
The grounds for the decision were exceedingly narrow--a finding that the trial court judge erred in his response to Maye's second request for a change of venue--suggesting perhaps that even this very conservative Supreme Court was troubled by the circumstances of the conviction.
Monday, November 16, 2009
Celebrating Ernest Gruening
A rare shout-out to my favorite former Alaska senator, in Chris Hitchens' dissection of a fawning Palin book.
That the McCain team never seems to have understood just how much Alaska politics differed from that of the Lower 48 is one of many failures in the vetting process that netted Palin.
Friday, November 6, 2009
The New Alabama
On Election Day, Maine voters (of which I am one) did something extraordinary. In record numbers for an off-year election, hundreds of thousands of us went to the polls and stripped from some of our fellow citizens the right to marry.
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Complicating Korry
The headline of his obituary spoke to the unfairness of false charges, “Edward Korry, 81, Is Dead; Falsely Tied to Chile Coup.”
Sunday, October 18, 2009
Maine's Question 1, Education, and Historical Analogies
As longtime Cliopatria readers know, the issue of bias in public education long has concerned me. A few years ago, I publicly criticized the Brooklyn Education Department for its implementation of a new standard—assessing students for their “disposition” to “promote social justice”—that amounted to little more than application of an ideological litmus test. (Students were faulted for, among other things, not welcoming an in-class pre-election screening of Fahrenheit 911.) Efforts by FIRE and ACTA showed that such abuses occurred at other public institutions, such as Alaska-Fairbanks and Washington State (which used dispositions theory to drum out a student teacher who opposed racial preferences in hiring). Under congressional pressure, NCATE eventually abandoned its “social justice” standard.
That said, I don’t have much stomach for misleading claims of indoctrination, and so have been troubled by the ads run by Maine’s anti-gay marriage campaign, which has made the threat to schoolkids its major issue. (I’m a Maine voter, and have gotten thorough exposure to the campaign each week when I return home.) The campaign’s three most recent ads are below the fold:
Friday, September 25, 2009
History U.
Today's Globe brings news of a most unusual sort--the founding of a two-year college (for junior and senior transfer students) in New Hampshire, whose curriculum will consist solely of history classes.
The founding dean describes the project: "In a sense, the whole school is the history major you would get in a traditional college . . . This is sadly a very ahistorical country, and we think that perhaps some mistakes could be avoided if Americans knew some history."
I'd prefer to see one college or university, anywhere in the country, commit to pedagogically diverse hiring and curricular practices. But the New Hampshire initiative, if it has any chance to success, will certainly have to offer a broad array of history classes, and not simply confine itself to the pedagogical approaches currently in fashion. I hope it does well.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Remembering Kennedy
Yesterday, Politico interviewed several historians of Congress and American politics (including me) to ask about Ted Kennedy’s historical legacy. I argued that he will be remembered in the Senate elite, alongside the Great Triumvirate from the pre-Civil War Senate, progressive George Norris, and conservative hero Robert Taft, Sr. I could have included Lyndon Johnson in this list as well.
Of the group, despite their dramatic differences in personal background (and out-of-Senate personal behavior), Kennedy’s career most closely imitated that of Norris. Both were long-serving (30 years in the Senate for Norris, 46-plus for Kennedy). Both involved themselves in a wide range of issues, were respected by ideological foes, and were remarkably successful in passing legislation (Kennedy more so than Norris on the latter issue). Both successfully transitioned historical eras—Norris was virtually the only Senate progressive to remain influential among New Deal liberals, Kennedy’s endorsement of Barack Obama proved how significant he remained even after 1960s liberalism had largely passed from the scene.
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
The Sotomayor Senior Thesis
Over the weekend, I had a chance to read Sonia Sotomayor’s Princeton senior thesis, which examined the intersection between the political and economic agendas of longtime Puerto Rican governor Luis Muñoz Marín. My colleague on the lacrosse book, Stuart Taylor, posted some of my comments at National Journal’s “Ninth Justice” blog.
The Sotomayor nomination strikes me as a brilliant political move but a somewhat puzzling selection in terms of jurisprudence. (I write as someone who was and is a fervent Obama supporter.) As a candidate, the President promised excellence in appointments, yet I haven’t seen many people favorably compare Sotomayor’s opinions to those of Diane Wood, or favorably compare her intellectual excellence to that of Elena Kagan or Pam Karlan. Obama also expressed a repeated desire to move beyond the culture wars that polarized U.S. politics in the 1980s and 1990s—yet, of the finalists for the appointment, Sotomayor was the only selection (due to her “wise Latina” speech and the odd emphasis on a possible ADA claim in her initial, unpublished, opinion in the Ricci case, which suggested a desire to distract from the central claim of reverse racism) who seemed likely to inflame the conflict over identity politics.
Something of the puzzle inherent in the Sotomayor nomination was evident in the thesis as well. Like most of her later opinions, it’s well-written and well-researched, and she allowed her arguments to follow her data. Yet, like Ricci and the “wise Latina” remark, it has occasional jarring items, such as her reference to Congress as the “North American Congress” or her support for the fringe position of Puerto Rican independence.
Friday, May 22, 2009
No Liberty at Liberty
Private universities aren't bound by the First Amendment, of course. But it's impossible to take seriously an institution of higher learning that revokes recognition to the campus organization of student Democrats, on the grounds that "the Democratic Party platform is contrary to the mission of Liberty University and to Christian doctrine (supports abortion, federal funding of abortion, advocates repeal of the federal Defense of Marriage Act, promotes the 'LGBT' agenda, hate crimes, which include sexual orientation and gender identity, socialism, etc.)." Socialism?
It seems to me the best recent historical parallel to the conservative response to the Age of Obama is the Labour Party's Michael Foot era. I suspect the GOP will share a similar electoral experience to Foot's Labour Party.
Thursday, May 14, 2009
2010's Worst Congressional Candidate
It takes a lot to surpass the worst candidate of 2008--Oregon's Mike Erickson, who ran on a pro-life platform despite revelations that he had paid for a girlfriend's abortion--but Kim Hendren, the likely Republican challenger to Arkansas senator Blanche Lincoln, is off to a good start.
Here's a recent Hendren "apology": “At the meeting I was attempting to explain that unlike Sen. Schumer, I believe in traditional values, like we used to see on ‘The Andy Griffith Show.’ I made the mistake of referring to Sen. Schumer as ‘that Jew’ and I should not have put it that way as this took away from what I was trying to say.”
Even better was his excuse for the statement: he was speaking without a teleprompter.
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Defining Academic Freedom Down
Writing in today's Daily Beast about the Bush OLC legal staff, University of Colorado law professor Paul Campos has guidance for law school personnel committees around the country:
For instance, if you’re doing a job interview with a candidate who has worked with or under or in the same office or the on the same city block as any of these people, ask him or her about this subject. And don’t be bullied by nonsense about “academic freedom” if you need to make it clear that you don’t hire torturers, or those who support them.
For better or for worse (I would say for much worse), recent polls show over 40 percent of the country is willing to consider the use of torture to protect the national interest--thereby seeming to fit under Campos' definition of "support" for the Bush OLC positions.
I'm sure the AAUP will rebuke Prof. Campos for suggesting that personnel committees can so blithely dismiss "nonsense about 'academic freedom.'"
Friday, May 1, 2009
Prof. Robinson's Odd E-Mail
In Mark Bauerlein’s extraordinary “groupthink” article, the Emory professor detected three characteristics of the pattern. One of these is the false consensus effect, which “occurs when people think that the collective opinion of their own group matches that of the larger population. If the members of a group reach a consensus and rarely encounter those who dispute it, they tend to believe that everybody thinks the same way.”
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Should We Require . . .
Members of Congress to pass a basic U.S. History exam?
Talking Points Memo posts a clip from the House floor of Michelle Bachmann. The Minnesota congresswoman is contending that the "recession" FDR inherited was no more severe than the recession Calvin Coolidge inherited (she seems to be confusing Coolidge, who took office in 1923, with Warren Harding, who took office in 1921 and actually did inherit a recession). Bachmann then hilariously suggests that FDR made the "recession" worse by pushing through Congress something called the Hoot-Smalley Act. The Smoot-Hawley tariff, of course, was a GOP initiative, signed into law by President Hoover in 1930. Just amazing.
Monday, April 27, 2009
Senate Contested Elections
In light of the seemingly endless Coleman-Franken battle in Minnesota (the Supreme Court announced last week it wouldn’t hear oral arguments on former Sen. Coleman’s appeal until June 1), U.S. Senate Historical Office has put together a most useful page listing the contested Senate elections in U.S. history.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Why Are So Many of Obama's Cabinet Picks Facing Republican "No" Votes?
The Senate Finance Committee recently reported the nomination of Kathleen Sebelius to be HHS secretary by a 15-8 vote; just two committee Republicans voted for the Kansas governor. While Sebelius is certain to be confirmed, it seems likely that somewhere between 20 and 30 Senate Republicans will vote against her.
Friday, April 3, 2009
A Historical Anomaly
For anyone who thinks individual votes don't matter, this screenshot from the New York Board of Election site, as of 4pm this afternoon:
I should note that in the history of the House, there never has been a tied election.
Thursday, April 2, 2009
Churchill Prevails in Trial
Ward Churchill has prevailed in his wrongful termination suit against the Univ. of Colorado. (He was awarded $1.) The case, by the way, was covered in a wonderful live-blog, which accurately predicted that the jury would decide for Churchill.
I disagreed at the time with the decision to terminate, since it seemed to me impossible to separate the decision to investigate his academic misconduct from his offensive essays; and also because Colorado, which hired Churchill under a "diversity" hiring initiative that seemed tailored to hire underqualified faculty with extremist views, knew or should have known what it was getting when it hired Churchill.
The low point of the trial came when former Univ. of Colorado president Betsy Hoffman seemed more concerned with the criticism she received from ACTA than with what it said about the U of C's personnel policies that someone like Churchill could not only have been hired but tenured.
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Special Elections in Context
The special election for appointed Sen. Kristen Gillibrand's former House seat remains too close to call, with Democrat Scott Murphy overcoming a massive GOP registration edge in the district to lead Republican Jim Tedisco by 59 votes--with around 6000 absentee ballots still to be counted. As Politico points out, while it's not clear now which candidate won, it's hard to argue that the deadlocked outcome doesn't represent a setback for the national Republican Party.
That said, special elections to the House rarely mean anything. A very useful table compiled by Greg Giroux of CQ Politcs lays out all the House special elections of the past four decades. It's not hard to discern a pattern--the party out of power in the White House usually does pretty well, at least if the district is somewhat competitive.
But of all the party switches since 1968, only two seem to have indicated significant broader patterns: in 1969, when Wisconsin Democrat David Obey took the seat of Mel Laird, who had resigned to become Nixon's secretary of defense; and in 1993, when Republican Ron Lewis won a rural Kentucky district made vacant by the death of Democrat Bill Natcher. Obey previewed the type of young, politically talented Democrat who would ride anti-war fervor and support for ethics reform to the House in the 1970s, from districts long thought of as GOP bulwarks. And Lewis' win anticipated the 1994 GOP sweep of conservative Southern districts long represented by white Democrats.
Regardless of whether Murphy or Tedisco winds up prevailing, it's hard to see the New York race as a bellweather of anything significant.
Monday, March 30, 2009
SHAFR & Professional Organizations' Blogs
I am presenting at this June’s SHAFR (Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations) Conference, and so wanted to check the day and time. I went to SHAFR’s reorganized website, which contains membership information and a useful international relations newsfeed. The site’s right column consists of SHAFR member op-eds, which touched on an array of international issues but were generally thoughtful in tone.
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
The Bachmann Counter
Yesterday, I posted a clip of the bizarre line of questioning pursued by Maxine Waters in the Geithner hearing.
Waters, however, was hardly the only House member to go off the deep end in the session. Huffington Post highlighted Illinois Republican Don Manzullo for the "worst congressional questioning ever"--while Minnesota Republican Michelle Bachmann (below) used her time to show ignorance of the Constitution; to speak of a seeming $10 trillion(!) bailout; and to ask the nation's financial leadership about an alleged plot to create an international currency, being orchestrated by the PRC, Russia, and a country Bachmann called "Kazakastan": Again, such performances make it hard to defend the principle of congressional oversight. Perhaps if C-SPAN had always existed, we'd have lots of clips of such ill-informed hearings from earlier periods of congressional history. But somehow, I doubt it.
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Waters' Wacky World
I'm normally a defender of Congress in general and congressional oversight in particular, but the House's response to the AIG affair has been disappointing.
Perhaps the most bizarre take on the financial meltdown came in today's Financial Services Committee hearing from Congresswoman Maxine Waters, who, in "questions" to Treasury Secretary Geithner, described the meltdown as an elaborate plot designed to use the government trough to advance the cause of Goldman Sachs. That would be the same Maxine Waters who went out of her way to try to steer federal funds to a local bank on whose board her husband had served.
Monday, March 9, 2009
MacDonald: Victimology and Evidence at Yale
In this week’s Weekly Standard, Heather MacDonald has an excellent piece examining the reasons (or lack thereof) for Yale’s decision, as the university is cutting its budget amidst the collapse of its endowment, to provide university funding for a new Office of LGBTQ [Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer] Resources.
Monday, March 2, 2009
The Polarized Congress
National Journal just released its 2008 congressional rankings. The most liberal senator? Washington's Patty Murray. The most conservative? A quartet of Republicans, including Wyoming's two GOP senators. The most liberal members of the House: twelve Democrats, of whom the most prominent is current Labor Secretary Hilda Solis. The most conservative: three House Republicans, including Georgia's Paul Broun, who claimed of Barack Obama's agenda, "That’s exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany, and it’s exactly what the Soviet Union did."
I agree completely with Brendan Nyhan that the individual rankings are of little value, largely because the Journal doesn't use enough votes and calculates absences in odd ways. (That's how the magazine came up with Barack Obama as the most liberal senator for 2007.) But taken as a whole, the rankings reveal some interesting trends. Take this graph prepared by Washington University political science professor Stephen Smith. It shows how, in both the House and the Senate, the most conservative Democrat is still more liberal than the most liberal Republican. The reverse side of the ideological equation holds true as well.
As recently as 1994, such a finding would have been inconceivable--giving a sense of just how much more polarized, along partisan and ideological lines, Congress became during the Clinton and Bush presidencies.
Saturday, February 28, 2009
Taylor on Holder
From this week’s National Journal, my lacrosse book co-author Stuart Taylor has a superbly reasoned column responding to Eric Holder’s “nation of cowards” address.
In his article, Taylor references the pending Ricci v. Destefano case, for which the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in April. The Obama administration filed a middle-of-the-road amicus brief, but the more interesting question is why affirmation action proponents haven’t settled the case, which strikes me as a non-winner for them. (After a promotions exam in which no African-Americans received a high enough score to merit promotion, the city of New Haven simply set aside the entire test.)
The case might also have some indirect bearings on higher education. In justifying the decision to ignore its own objective criteria for promotion, one New Haven representative “mentioned ‘diversity’ as a compelling goal of the promotional process." Obviously, the personnel processes of colleges and universities don’t have the kind of objective criteria at issue in Ricci. But a Supreme Court ruling for the plaintiffs could shake the legal underpinnings of “diversity” plans, at least at public colleges and universities.
Sunday, February 15, 2009
Rating the C-SPAN Survey
C-SPAN’s second presidential survey has just been published. The network’s first version, in 2000, was unusual in its scope and breadth, rating presidents overall and according to ten categories. (At the time, the historians’ ranking of Bill Clinton as 41st of 41 in moral authority probably attracted the most press attention.) I suspect that George W. Bush’s #36 overall ranking (of the 42 people to occupy the office before Barack Obama) will generate the most attention from this year’s poll, especially since Bush spinners have placed so much emphasis on the judgment of “history.”
Monday, February 2, 2009
The Obama Effect in Israel
The Israeli elections are looming, and the latest polls suggest a victory for the Likud's Benjamin Netanyahu. It would be hard to imagine politicians more different than Netanyahu and Barack Obama, but a reader who clicks on the English-language Likud site might be forgiven for assuming otherwise: anyone who spent time on Barackobama.com would find the Likud site designed in almost the same way--down to a "mynetanyahu" social networking site, modeled on mybarackobama.com.
Likud isn't the only Israeli party to have imitated Obama's tactics (although Likud seems to have managed it more successfully--Ha'aretz reported that 50 percent of its campaign budget went to online material). Ha'aretz also reported that at the start of the campaign, the left-leaning Meretz Party invited to Israel Obama campaign consultants David Fenton and Tom Mazzei. The party's campaign chair said that "we intend to wage a massive campaign on the Internet, and we see the social networking sites and blogs as a serious tool that we intend to use widely."
As the Israeli elections have shown, Obama's tactics aren't ideology-specific.
Sunday, February 1, 2009
Times on the Tapes
A historians’ dispute makes the A group of extremist professors, all from California and all opposed to Israeli foreign policy, have launched a new organization devoted to bringing about an academic boycott of Israel.
Asked by Ha'aretz about the membership's position on U.S. foreign policy, group spokesperson David Lloyd confirmed that all signatories opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq. This revelation prompted an unintentionally hilarious exchange:
I hope that Lloyd, et al., more fully explore the merits of a "self-boycott." Such an outcome would, perhaps, represent a perfect outcome for the organization's effort. Harry McPherson, a former aide to LBJ who went on to serve as the widely hailed head of the Johnson Presidential Library, has a well-reasoned essay in today's Politico. He writes,
But if Barack Obama recognizes that link – if he is in any way aware of the historic debt he owes to the president who forced open the door – he has yet to acknowledge it. Not once during his long campaign did Obama mention Johnson’s name. He accepted the nomination of his and Johnson’s party on the 100th anniversary of Johnson’s birth, and still was silent on the symbiotic relationship connecting the two.
For Barack Obama, it’s as if Lyndon Johnson had never existed.Thursday, January 29, 2009
The Logic of An Illogical Position
Asked if logic wouldn't dictate that he and his colleagues boycott themselves, he responded, "Self-boycott is a difficult concept to realize. But speaking for myself, I would have supported and honored such a boycott had it been proposed by my colleagues overseas."
Monday, January 19, 2009
LBJ Memories
There is a line – clear, firm and unbroken – linking Lyndon Johnson and Barack Obama. That is a heavy part of the historic significance of this day.
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Clinton as Bryan?
As Hillary Clinton begins her confirmation hearings, today's Times asked a series of experts for questions the Foreign Relations Committee should pose.
The most interesting was a historical comparison, offered by Fouad Ajami of SAIS: "In 1913, Woodrow Wilson appointed William Jennings Bryan secretary of state for solely domestic political reasons. He needed but distrusted him, and thus relied on other advisers to conduct diplomacy. Have you read up on Wilson’s relationship with Bryan, and will it be relevant to your own situation?"
The comparison isn't exact: given the realities of the Democratic Party at the time, and given his preference for governing with Democratic votes alone in Congress, Wilson had little choice but to appoint Bryan. Obama, on the other hand, could have named someone other than Clinton without political fallout. Nonetheless, it would be interesting to hear Clinton's answer to Ajami's question.
Monday, January 12, 2009
The (anti-)Israel House Lobby
Last week, the House overwhelmingly approved a resolution addressing the situation in Gaza. In the nine-part measure, the House recognized Israel’s “right to act in self-defense to protect its citizens against Hamas's unceasing aggression”; encouraged “the Administration to work actively to support a durable and sustainable cease-fire in Gaza,” including urging Egypt to prevent arms smuggling into the Gaza; reiterated “that humanitarian needs in Gaza should be addressed promptly and responsibly; called for Hamas to release kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit; and expressed “its strong support for . . . the welfare, security, and survival of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state with secure borders, and a viable, independent, and democratic Palestinian state living side by side in peace and security with the State of Israel.”
Thursday, January 8, 2009
Walt's World
After the last eight years, we need the highest quality work from international relations theorists. Instead, alas, we have the anti-Israel obsessions of Stephen Walt.
Monday, January 5, 2009
Burris and the Vare Precedent
The fiasco that is the Roland Burris Senate appointment continued today. One day after proclaiming that the Lord had mandated his seating in the Senate, Burris gave what the Times termed a "defiant" press conference, asserting, “This is all politics and theater, but I am the junior senator according to every law book in the nation.”
Monday, December 22, 2008
LBJ on the South and the 1968 Election
The latest clip from the newly released batch of LBJ phone calls. This one comes from just after the November 1968 general election, as the President reaches out to Terry Sanford to urge the former North Carolina governor to become the new chairman of the DNC.
Johnson makes clear his disdain for Hubert Humphrey’s performance in the South. And, in a revelation of the different climate of government ethics that existed before Watergate, notes how Sanford could personally profit from the position.
In the event, Sanford elected to become president of Duke University; the post went to Oklahoma senator Fred Harris.
The clip is below; full transcript below the fold.
Friday, December 19, 2008
LBJ, Fortas, & Israel
Given the context in which he operated—the necessities of the Cold War tilting the United States toward conservative Arab states; a U.S. public opinion far less favorable to Israel than what exists today, when both nations face the common threat of radical Islamist terrorism—LBJ was the most pro-Israel President in U.S. history.
Johnson concluded his presidency by authoring the selling of Phantom planes to Israel. Continuing with some clips from the newly released LBJ tapes, LBJ discusses the matter in this conversation with Abe Fortas (who the President had just nominated as chief justice for the Supreme Court). Johnson lashes out at Missouri senator Stuart Symington—making the transition from a stalwart Cold Warrior to among the most effective Senate critics of Cold War foreign policy.
The discussion also offers insight into the pro-Israel lobbyists with whom LBJ associated—Abe Feinberg, a major Democratic fundraiser from New York who had close ties to the Israeli government; and Arthur Krim, an entertainment lawyer who would serve as a chief fundraiser for the LBJ Library.
Clip is below; draft transcript below the fold.
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
LBJ, Humphrey, & Vietnam
In listening to some of the mid- and late-1968 LBJ phone calls, I’ve been struck at how much more hard-line the President appears. Johnson never had a particularly sophisticated view of international affairs, but the sort of commentary evident in the call below was rare.
The excerpt is from a conversation with New Jersey governor Richard Hughes, who had just written to the President to urge that he consider a bombing pause in Vietnam. LBJ brusquely dismissed the request, implying that halting the bombing could be equated with “mass murder.”
The clip also previews the ferocity with which LBJ would oppose efforts of Hubert Humphrey would have to distance himself from the President’s Southeast Asia policy.
The clip is below; draft transcript below the fold.
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Recounts & the Internet
Anyone whose scholarship involves working with U.S. government documents has benefited from the internet. FRUS is now all on-line; all of the presidential libraries have robust sites, the Miller Center has digitized versions of all the presidential tapes, and some archival collections have scanned documents available.
The internet also allows transparency in political documents as well. A good example comes in the Minnesota recount, where the Star Tribune has placed digitized versions of all the ballots challenged in the Coleman-Franken race. Both the AP and a group of S-T readers have gone through all the ballots and concluded that Franken is likely to narrowly prevail.
How is this possible, given Coleman's current lead of nearly 200 votes? The Coleman campaign, it appears, was far more aggressive in making frivolous challenges, which took ballots out of play in the preliminary count, thereby temporarily inflating Coleman's overall total.
A favorite Coleman tactic appears to have been claiming that voters who included the same name for write-ins in multiple other offices were actually identifying themselves, in violation of Minnesota law.
None of those challenges, of course, will succeed (voters have every right to vote for themselves as write-ins for as many offices as they want), and a handful are downright comical. Take this ballot from heavily Democratic St. Louis County. The Coleman campaign challenged it, for an "identifying mark." It's just a guess, but I doubt Jesus Christ came back to Earth to vote for Al Franken.
Monday, December 15, 2008
LBJ, Nixon, & Czechoslovakia
The LBJ Library recently released the final batch of telephone tapes, covering the last eight months of 1968. (The President also taped meetings in 1968; most of those tapes remained unprocessed.) Over the next few weeks, I thought I would post excerpts and transcripts of some of the more historically significant phone calls.
Today’s somewhat lengthy clip comes from a late-night phone call between LBJ and then-GOP presidential nominee Richard Nixon, a few hours after Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin informed the President that Warsaw Pact troops had invaded Czechoslovakia.
LBJ’s handling of the Dobrynin meeting has attracted strong historical criticism, and nothing in this clip challenges the consensus that the President seemed more interested in achieving a summit meeting with Aleksey Kosygin than addressing the topic that had prompted Dobrynin’s 8pm visit to the Oval Office.
But the clip also offers a few other interesting themes: (1) a President remarkably unsympathetic to the plight of the Czechs; (2) lengthy discussions between Johnson and Nixon about how the invasion proved the need for a firm Vietnam policy; and (3) Nixon’s typical hypocrisy, as the man whose campaign would work behind the scenes with the South Vietnamese to scuttle the Paris peace talks promising LBJ he would put the country first on foreign policy, as he implied to the President that Hubert Humphrey was placing his political priorities ahead of the national interest.
The first part of the clip is below; the transcript and second part of the clip are below the fold.
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Bad News with FRUS
The Foreign Relations of the United States series, an invaluable source for the study of diplomatic history, is in the news--and not in a good way.
In what the FAS blog has termed a "crisis," William Roger Louis, chairman of the Department’s Historical Advisory Committee, has resigned his post, with a blistering attack regarding the performance of State Department Historian Marc Susser. Louis especially criticized the heavy turnover on Susser's staff. The FRUS, as has become standard for the past generation, is well behind schedule in publishing volumes.
Louis' concerns were echoed by SHAFR president (and my friend and undergraduate advisor) Tom Schwartz. The Louis and Schwartz memos raise grave concerns about the state of the FRUS program. That the State Department appears to have dismissed these concerns entirely is even more troubling.
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Historical Corruption & Blagojevich
At yesterday's press conference announcing the criminal complaint against Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, the lead FBI agent on the case remarked that if Illinois wasn't the most corrupt state in the union, it was very competitive for the honor.
It turns out, however, that Illinois isn't even in the top five of most corrupt states--at least according to statistics from 1997 through 2006 compiled by Corporate Crime Reporter. Of the nation's 35 most populous states, which is the most corrupt? Louisiana. Illinois ranks 6th.
Louisiana's reputation for corruption goes back much further than 1997, as Lyndon Johnson explained on Election Night 1964: By the way, the least corrupt states? Little surprise here: Oregon, followed by Iowa and Minnesota.
Saturday, November 29, 2008
When Legislative Independence Matters
The case of New Orleans congressman William (“$90,000-in-my-freezer”) Jefferson offers a case study in the abuse of legislative independence from legal inquiry. Jefferson recently won renomination—and easily, too!—and seems assured of a new term in the December election. (The vote was delayed because of the effects of Hurricane Gustav.)
An alarming UK case from a few days ago represents the opposite extreme from the Jefferson affair. Tory MP (and Shadow Immigration Minister) Damian Green was arrested for aiding and abetting misconduct in a public office. Nine police officers—including members of the counter-terrorism unit—raided his house. As occurred with Jefferson, Green’s official office was searched by police, who called his office a “crime scene.”
Green’s offense, however, differed considerably from Jefferson’s: he allegedly received and disseminated leaked documents related to PM Gordon Brown’s economic plans. Legal experts expressed strong doubt that the charges would stand—but the chilling effect of the act nonetheless remains.
One Times columnist wondered if New Labour would now change its name to ZANU-Labour. Conservative leader David Cameron called the arrest “Stalinesque.” That’s an overstatement—but the move was clearly an abuse of legislative independence, quite unlike the Jefferson fiasco.
Thursday, November 27, 2008
Wilentz's Dubious Honor
As the year comes to a close, Andrew Sullivan has highlighted some of the most outrageously incorrect predictions about Barack Obama’s political fate. Most such remarks came from strong Republican partisans, often at NRO. For instance, this gem from Michael Graham, after the South Carolina primary: “When he is forced to fight, Sen. Obama's inexperience shows. His record, slight as it is, is tough to defend. He's got a glass jaw, and he will fall into the trap of identity politics. In fact, he already has. The ‘could we beat Obama?’ conversation is purely academic. It's over. The Clintons have defeated him already, because he is leaving South Carolina as ‘the black candidate.’ He won't win another state.” (For the record, after the S.C. primary, Obama won 27 states, plus Guam, D.C., Democrats Abroad, and the Virgin Islands.)
Thursday, November 13, 2008
History and Rove's Analysis
Karl Rove has an op-ed in today’s WSJ pointing to history to suggest that 2010 will be a good year for Republicans. Writes Rove, “In a sign Mr. Obama's victory may have been more personal than partisan or philosophical, Democrats picked up just 10 state senate seats (out of 1,971) and 94 state house seats (out of 5,411). By comparison, when Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter in 1980, Republicans picked up 112 state senate seats (out of 1,981) and 190 state house seats (out of 5,501).” The Dems also gained fewer House and Senate seats than did the Republicans in 1980.
Monday, November 10, 2008
Lieberman
There’s a lot of discussion about whether Joe Lieberman should retain his chairmanship of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. In resolving the question, Senate Democrats might swallow their institutional pride and follow the precedent of the House, placing the matter before the entire caucus for a vote.
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Summers Follow-up
A follow-up on my earlier post about Larry Summers: one of Summers' Harvard faculty detractors takes to the pages today of Talking Points Memo. After bringing up Summers' management skills, the (anonymous) correspondent--just as was done in the crusade to purge Summers--darts into an ideological attack: "Never mind that he and Rubin are Wall Street cronies who have enjoyed the revolving door between government and lucrative non-government positions, and were responsible for a big part of the deregulation (especially internationally) that led to the current crisis."
The A.C. concludes: "Things are so much better now that he's gone." For those who led the purge against Summers, that's undoubtedly true--it must be pleasant to no longer have a president willing to challenge academic groupthink.
Congressional Non-Surprises
Given the magnitude of Barack Obama's win, I had expected a few unexpected House victories for the Democrats. But they were all but non-existent (Ted Stevens' embarrassing win in Alaska ranks as the night's biggest surprise), with the possible exception of Virginia's 5th District, where Virgil Goode is trailing to a political unknown.
On another front, Julian Zelizer has an excellent essay at Newsweek, taking to task the poorly run McCain campaign.
Monday, November 3, 2008
The Maine Event
On leave this semester, I’m spending most of my time in Maine. The big political news here came a few days ago, when the head of the state GOP announced that John McCain would be making a last-minute appearance in the Pine Tree State, as part of his weekend trip to New England. The apparent goal: to make a play for the Second District’s electoral vote. In a fitting conclusion to a poorly run campaign, McCain’s spokesperson announced the next day that, in fact, the Arizona senator would go only to New Hampshire—the Maine visit had been canceled.
If the state has to get by without a McCain visit, Maine has stood out this year in one way: while Democrats appear ready to make sweeping gains everywhere else in the country, and as the final GOP House member in New England, Chris Shays, might lose, Maine’s incumbent Republican senator, Susan Collins, is cruising to re-election. Despite facing popular Democratic congressman Tom Allen, Collins hasn’t trailed in even one poll taken all year. In fact, her lead hasn’t fallen below 10 points. How to explain this development?
Saturday, November 1, 2008
Georgia
Thursday, Barack Obama’s campaign announced it would begin advertising in North Dakota (where polls show a dead heat), Arizona (John McCain’s home state, where polls have considerably tightened), and Georgia (where early voting lines were stunning).
Georgia has been an elusive target for national Democrats: apart from favorite son Jimmy Carter, no Democratic presidential candidate since John Kennedy in 1960 has received a majority of the Peach State’s vote. Of the candidates on that list, perhaps the most surprising was Lyndon Johnson: though Johnson had expected to carry Georgia, Barry Goldwater benefited from a surge of backlash voters, coupled with local distrust of LBJ's chief backer in the state, Governor Carl Sanders.
Deep South neighbors Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama also went GOP in 1964. The President’s reaction to the result, from an Election Night conversation with Bill Moyers:
Thursday, October 30, 2008
McCain's Appeal to Ignorance
We’re a long ways from John McCain’s springtime promise to run an honorable campaign. So what Andrew Sullivan has correctly termed McCain’s willingness to run a “disgusting, stupid, inflammatory and, in its use of Arabic-sounding music, bigoted ad” should come as no surprise.
Monday, October 27, 2008
Reality Checks
An interesting piece in this week's New York, speculating on who would staff a possible Obama administration:
Although there has been chatter that Obama might also retain Hank Paulson at the Treasury, the inside betting is on a Larry Summers encore. “They’re gonna want somebody who knows the building, knows the economy, has been confirmed before and been advising them on economics,” says the former Clinton aide. “I’d be flabbergasted if they chose somebody else.”
Obama is hardly the "socialist" that Sarah Palin, among others, has suggested: it's worth remembering that as of January, he probably was the most centrist of the three leading Democratic contenders for the nomination. That said, if elected he would certainly be the most liberal Democrat to win the White House since LBJ in 1964.
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Palin's Constitutional Theories
One unfortunate aspect of the general media narrative about Sarah Palin—that the Alaska governor is, to put it charitably, not too bright—is that too often the few substantive comments she makes get overlooked.
One such comment came in the vice-presidential debate, when—in an otherwise rambling answer near the end of the 90-minute affair—she endorsed a more robust legislative role for the Vice President.
Palin is back at it. Yesterday, in an interview with a local TV station, Palin claimed that the Vice President is “in charge of the U.S. Senate so if they [sic] want to they [sic] can really get in there with the senators and make a lot of good policy changes.” Perhaps not surprisingly, given the quality of local journalism, the reporter didn’t follow up and ask Palin under what interpretation of the Constitution she could make such a claim.
Monday, October 20, 2008
Esquire's Ten Worst
Esquire has released its list of the 10 worst members of Congress--a stiff competition, given that Michelle (neo-Joe McCarthy) ranked only as the third worst.
Number two is Georgia senator Saxby Chambliss, best-known for the worst ad of the 2002 cycle, against Vietnam veteran Max Cleland:
Chambliss is in a surprisingly tight race for re-election, against lightly regarded Democrat Jim Martin.
Beating out Chambliss for Esquire's top honor: Joe Lieberman. In politics, the magazine notes, "Some lose gracefully, some lose poorly, and, as in the case of Joe Lieberman, some lose their minds. Since being defeated by an antiwar candidate in the Democratic primary in 2006, Lieberman (who was subsequently reelected as an Independent) has pursued his campaign of revenge against his former party, thinly disguised as an act of principle, replete with the quavering sanctimony that no country should have to put up with from anyone, much less from this small man."
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
More Ayers
With Sarah Palin stoking up the audiences, the Ayers issue seems likely to continue.
Sol Stern, whose work I very much admire, addresses the Obama/Ayers question in today's City Journal. I agree 100% with everything Stern says about Ayers, and also agree with him that it's perfectly reasonable to "ask Obama what he thinks of Ayers’s views on school reform." Policy disputes, rather than guilt-by-association, should be the focus of the campaign.
Monday, October 6, 2008
Maine in the National Arena
At this stage of a campaign season, Maine is rarely in the national news. But 2008 appears to be different. Last week, John McCain’s campaign announced that he’s abandoning Michigan and shifting staffers to, among other states, Maine. And today the Supreme Court opened its term by announcing that the year’s first two oral arguments would involve cases from the Pine Tree State. The Bangor Daily News termed the development “a once-in-a-lifetime event for court watchers in Maine.”
Sunday, October 5, 2008
Obama and the Khalidi/Ayers Attacks
A few years ago, I testified before the Senate Education Committee about the diminution of the academy’s intellectual diversity. I spoke as a registered Democrat, and contended that the issue should concern Democrats as much as Republicans, since neither party has an interest in an academy dominated by race/class/gender groupthink.
Indeed, it seemed to me both then and now that the Democrats have much to lose from the current state of affairs in higher education. First of all, Democrats no more than Republicans should want a generation of students trained in ignorance of U.S. political structures and culture. Second, as Mark Bauerlein most persuasively has argued, “when like-minded people deliberate as an organized group, the general opinion shifts toward extreme versions of their common beliefs.” A campus environment overwhelmingly dominated by people who occupy one side on issues of race, class, and gender has allowed extremist voices to become an increasingly public face of the academic “left,” thereby providing Republicans with an opportunity to discredit mainstream Democratic liberalism.
Friday, October 3, 2008
Palin & Executive Authority
[correction & update below] There are, I suppose, two extremes in analyzing last night’s performance by Alaska governor Sarah Palin. The first could be termed the David Brooks test: “Was this woman capable of completing an extemporaneous paragraph — a collection of sentences with subjects, verbs, objects and, if possible, an actual meaning? By the end of her opening answers, it was clear she would meet the test.” The second approach would involve presuming that beyond a narrow range of energy and Alaska-related questions, Palin actually understood what she was talking about, and analyze what she said accordingly.
Admittedly, this second approach sometimes wasn’t easy. Take, for example, Palin’s statement about the criteria for the United States to use nuclear weapons. (The Alaska governor offered an incoherent, 15-second response, and then asked moderate Gwen Ifill if she could talk about Afghanistan. Ifill, incredibly, said yes.) But perhaps Palin’s most significant response came near the end of the debate, when she spoke about the powers of the vice presidency. While her answer was somewhat rambling, she praised the “flexibility” inherent in the VP’s constitutional powers, and said she wanted to expand the vice president’s role in the legislative arena.
Monday, September 29, 2008
The Year's Oddest Ad
I never thought I would see an outright revival of the Daisy Ad, yet here it is, from Illinois congressional candidate Colleen Callahan.
The Dems' original candidate in this race, former Bradley basketball coach Dick Versace, withdrew: perhaps the party should have looked a little harder for a replacement candidate.
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Palin on Russia
There seems to me a tension between the efforts to diminish or eliminate entirely instruction in U.S. political, legal, and diplomatic history on the one hand and, on the other, the stated aim of most public institutions (including, I assume, Palin's alma mater, the University of Idaho) to prepare their graduates as citizens. How, in effect, can universities tell state legislatures that they are preparing citizens when those future citizens are taught little or nothing about U.S. politics and foreign policy?
In a clip that looks like an SNL parody, Palin demonstrates the extreme version of ignorance in diplomatic affairs, as she amplifies on her point about how Alaska's proximity to Russia enhances her foreign policy experience.
Watch CBS Videos Online
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Black Americans in Congress
The House Clerk's Office has launched its latest topflight historical website, this one dealing with Black Americans in Congress. The site accompanies publication of a volume profiling all black Americans to have served in Congress. (The Clerk's Office has produced a similar volume on women in Congress.)
The site serves as a model of how the web can make political history widely accessibly to the public. It contains in-depth profiles of every black congressman and senator; well-researched historical data; intriguing historical artifacts; overview essays; and, perhaps most important, educational sections geared toward high school teachers.
I have been critical of the House's Office of the Historian--whose head, Robert Remini, was profiled in a March 2008 Chicago Tribune article as working not in Washington in the Office of Historian but in Chicago, as a "professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago."
As a historian of Congress who tries hard to integrate congressional material into my general U.S. political and diplomatic history classes, it is encouraging to see that the Clerk's Office has taken up the slack left by Remini. My sense is that this high-quality website and publication will have a particular use for educators.
I'm (professionally) acquainted with the editor of the book (Matt Wasniewski), who I invited to serve as one of the co-editors to a (stillborn, unfortunately) Encyclopedia of US Congress. Also, while I have been strongly critical of Remini, I did not apply for the House Historian's position, nor would I do so in the future.
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Evaluating the "Sleaziness" Factor
Politico asked several presidential historians to evaluate David Axelrod’s recent statement that John McCain is running the “sleaziest and least honorable campaign in modern presidential campaign history.” The conclusion, according to authors David Mark and Avi Zenilman: “McCain’s approach is no harsher than those used in previous modern campaigns.” I disagree, with a caveat.
The caveat: the article didn’t mention what is beyond doubt the “sleaziest and least honorable campaign in modern presidential campaign history”—Richard Nixon’s 1972 effort. Whatever people think of John McCain’s tactics in 2008, nothing that’s come from the Arizonan’s campaign even remotely resembles Nixon’s dirty-tricks efforts against Edmund Muskie, or CREEP’s threatening IRS audits to extort six-figure campaign contributions, or the Watergate burglary—an attempt to install listening devices in the headquarters of the opposition party.
And McCain’s cynicism doesn’t hold a candle to that demonstrated by Nixon in the clip below, which occurred the day after the filing of the case that eventually became Millikin v. Bradley. Nixon and aide Pat Buchanan discuss how to exploit the racial tensions associated with the Detroit busing controversy to weaken Muskie’s political standing, with Nixon actually making Buchanan look idealistic by comparison.
Friday, September 5, 2008
Exaggerations
TNR flags this item from John McCain's remarks today about Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin: "Isn’t this the most marvelous running mate in the history of this nation?"
TNR notes Jefferson, Adams, and TR as past vice presidents that McCain evidently feels don't measure up to the Palin Standard. But why not go more recent, when the concept of a ticket and running mate was clearly established?
Compare Palin--a figure who, as far as can be determined, had before last week scarcely expressed a public position on any foreign policy issue, and most domestic issues--with Harry Truman (1944). Or Henry Cabot Lodge, II (1960). Or LBJ (1960). Or George H.W. Bush (1980).
I suppose it all depends on what your definition of "marvelous" is.
Thursday, August 28, 2008
LBJ's Triumph
Politico asked African-American political and business leaders to reflect on the significance of Barack Obama's nomination. The quotes make for an interesting read, especially this one from Roger Wilkins, one of LBJ's most significant allies in the civil rights community:
"I’m 76 years old, and I have participated in one aspect of the struggle or another since I was a teenager in high school. After I grew up, I understood that this wasn’t an effort that you accomplished in one lifetime or one great magic movement, as we held in the 1950s and 1960s. It was long-range project. You know that you have to keep pushing and you know that you have to keep struggling. And you don’t know exactly how it will come out, but you believe the struggle is worth it because you know there is more decency in the country then the status quo has it. ... Well, I never, back in the ‘60s, I never pushed with the idea that sometime in my lifetime a black person would get to be president of the United States. It never occurred to me."
Party conventions make no claim to historical accuracy. This convention coincided not only with the 88th anniversary of women gaining the right to vote and the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I have a Dream Address" but also the 100th anniversary of LBJ's birth. The first two events, appropriately, have been celebrated. The third has essentially been overlooked. George Packer and Robert Caro reflect on the unfortunate historical amnesia.
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Alaska's Odd Primary
Quite apart from the fireworks in Hillary Clinton's speech, last night featured the year's last significant congressional primaries--in Alaska.
You'd think being indicted for bribery and influence-peddling (Senator Ted Stevens) and coming under investigation for the same case (Congressman Don Young) would be politically fatal. It appears not.
Stevens coasted to renomination, defeating two well-funded opponents with 63% of the vote. And Young, after trailing for most of the night, has now inched ahead in his primary contest by around 150 votes.
This outcome, of course, is great news for the Dems--making it likely that the state will send its first Democrat to Congress since 1980.
Saturday, August 23, 2008
Biden Historical Trivia
A few historical quirks in Joe Biden’s Senate career:
1.) Despite Richard Nixon’s 49-state sweep of the 1972 presidential race, Democratic Senate candidates captured five GOP-held seats in what was probably the most left-wing class of Senate freshmen since World War II. In addition to Biden, William Hathaway ousted Margaret Chase Smith in Maine; Dick Clark bested Jack Miller in Iowa; Floyd Haskell upset Gordon Allott in Colorado; and Jim Abourezk took the South Dakota seat left vacant by the terminally ill Karl Mundt.
Of the five, only Biden won re-election. Haskell, Hathaway, and Clark all lost in 1978 (Hathaway and Haskell by more than 20 points), and Abourezk almost surely would have fallen to Republican Larry Pressler had he not retired from the Senate instead.
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Remembering Barbara Jordan
As we anticipate a Democratic convention likely to the culminated by a brilliant African-American orator, the Rocky Mountain News ran a profile of the late Barbara Jordan's performance as 1976 Democratic keynoter. The lengthy piece also profiled Jordan's debate coach and professor from Texas Southern, Thomas Freeman.
My favorite Jordan address came two years earlier in her Judiciary Committee statement regarding articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon. The site isn't the most user-friendly, but American Rhetoric has posted a video of the remarks. It's hard to imagine any member of the current Congress, even Obama, delivering such a powerful statement.
Monday, August 18, 2008
The Year's Worst House Candidate
Every election season, it seems as if there's one candidate who rises above the pack. This year, it's no contest: Oregon Republican Mike Erickson, a wealthy businessman running for a potentially close open seat in the Portland suburbs.
Erickson won the GOP primary despite at attack from his opponent, subsequently confirmed by the Oregonian, that he had paid for an ex-girlfriend's abortion. (Erickson's less-than-credible story was that he gave the woman the money and drove her to an abortion clinic, but had no idea what she wanted the money for or what she planned to do at the clinic.)
Now, the Oregonian has revealed another item that is--to put it mildly--embarrassing for a conservative Republican. It turns out Erickson traveled to Cuba in 2004, ostensibly for a humanitarian mission, but really for a high-end vacation. To satisfy U.S. immigration requirements, Erickson claimed to make a large donation to a medical clinic that doesn't exist. When the paper confronted him with the discrepancy, he revised his story to assert that he made the donation to another medical clinic, whose name he couldn't recall, and he couldn't remember any of the people with whom he dealt at the clinic, and that he had no records of the donation.
The kicker: the vacation was advertised as "Comandante Fidel Castro's Annual Gala Cigar Dinner and Auction."
Thursday, August 14, 2008
The Unusual Hashmi Case
A number of my Brooklyn College colleagues were profiled in a Chronicle article discussing their protests against the treatment of Syed Fahad Hashmi. Hashmi, a 2003 Brooklyn College graduate, is currently being held without bail, awaiting trial on charges of providing material assistance to Al Qaeda.
The petition, alas, seems unlikely to achieve its stated intent. Given the Bush administration’s record on terrorism cases and civil liberties, it’s plausible to believe that Hashmi’s civil liberties have been violated. Yet the petition’s presentation of the case is so one-sided—and its comments about the case’s effects on the academy so off-the-wall—as to make any undecided reader less, rather than more, likely to embrace the signatories’ position.
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Obama & Alaska in Historical Perspective
Yesterday, a Hays Research Poll showed Barack Obama five points ahead (45-40) of John McCain in Alaska. That’s the best that Obama has done in a poll this year, but it’s not inconsistent with other results (all of which came before the indictment of longtime Alaska GOP senator Ted Stevens), which showed McCain with a 5-7 point lead.
To give a sense of how striking this figure is, consider the last two elections: John Kerry lost the state by 25 percent in 2004; Al Gore trailed George W. Bush by 31 points in 2000. Alaska was also Bill Clinton’s third-worst state (after Utah and Idaho): he attracted 30 percent of the vote in 1992, and 33 percent in 1996. The only Democratic presidential candidate to win the state was LBJ, in 1964. No Democrat has won any federal election in Alaska since 1974, when Mike Gravel prevailed in a bid for his second and ultimately final term.
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
The Clinton E-Mails
If nothing else, the Clinton campaign e-mails and attached memos, released yesterday by the Atlantic and mentioned below by Ralph, should remind historians just how valuable e-mails can be as a historical source. (Alas, neither the Bush I nor the early Clinton e-mails have been released, thanks in large part to a Bush II executive order.) The e-mails range from the unintentionally hilarious—ordering staffers to move their cars so soon-to-be-fired campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle could have a parking space—to the serious, most notably strategy memos from Mark Penn and Harold Ickes.
Penn’s memo urging the campaign to treat Barack Obama as insufficiently American has attracted the most press attention. But I found a February 4 Ickes memo the most interesting. As regular Cliopatria readers know, my scholarship explores the relationship between procedure and policy outcomes, and procedure obviously was critical in the 2008 nominating contest. As the race was occurring, I was baffled by the almost banal statements from the Clinton campaign in February, March, and April that their candidate could somehow pull ahead of Obama in the delegate race—even though the procedures through which the Democrats choose their nominee made that all but impossible. Were the Clinton staffers operating from a magic abacus?
Monday, August 11, 2008
McCain and Wikipedia
It's hard enough to discourage students from using Wikipedia in their end-of-term papers. But to see a presidential candidate appear to crib from the online source in a major foreign policy address?
The Georgia crisis hasn't featured particularly good use of history from commentators, either. Here's Robert Kagan: "Do you recall the precise details of the Sudeten Crisis that led to Nazi Germany's invasion of Czechoslovakia? Of course not, because that morally ambiguous dispute is rightly remembered as a minor part of a much bigger drama."
It's startling, to put it mildly, to see on the pages of the Washington Post the Sudeten Crisis termed a "morally ambiguous dispute." I fully sympathize with those who argue that we need to do what we can to help Georgia. But comparing the current unrest to the "morally ambiguous" Sudeten dispute is an abuse of history.
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
The Daisy Ad
Tony Schwartz, creator of the daisy ad, died yesterday. The ad remains the most famous political commercial in U.S. history, though it obviously wasn't necessary for LBJ's overwhelming victory. Nonetheless, in an era when Democrats have traditionally been attacked as "soft on defense," the daisy ad is a reminder that a successful Dem candidate can handle the national security issue.
Ironically, given its later prestige, at the time many Democratic leaders felt that the ad (which only ran once, and which prompted calls of complaint to the White House switchboard) went too far. Larry O'Brien, a senior advisor to LBJ's campaign, told the President that 90 percent of the state party leaders to whom he spoke considered the ad too harsh. (They added, however, that they also viewed the ad as very effective.) Even LBJ--in the one item from the Johnson tapes--expressed some doubts about the ad. The brief clip is below; the President is talking with Labor Secretary Willard Wirtz.
Saturday, June 7, 2008
Clinton's Rhetoric and Reality
Here is Politico’s Ben Smith highlighting an item from Hillary Clinton’s withdrawal speech:
“But I am a woman, and like millions of women I know there are still barriers and biases out there, often unconscious, and I want to build an America that embraces and respects the potential of every last one of us.”
The idea that sexism played a role in Clinton’s defeat has been a high-profile storyline coming from the Clinton campaign and its allies (Ellen Malcolm, Gloria Steinem) in recent weeks. With this type of remark, the Clinton campaign ends its effort true to form—making an assertion, not an argument. In fact, the assertion of sexism as a contributing factor for Clinton’s defeat is one for which very little evidence exists.
Friday, June 6, 2008
Forcing a Vice Presidential Nomination
The last few months face featured a good deal of (appropriate) commentary on the similarities between the Obama candidacy and that of Robert Kennedy in 1968. In one way, however, it’s Hillary Clinton who most resembles RFK. Much like RFK in 1964, Clinton is waging an aggressive—and unusually public—campaign for the vice-presidential nod, despite the opposition of the party’s presidential nominee. In the end, the Clinton VP effort seems likely to meet the same fate as RFK’s 1964 bid.
Saturday, May 31, 2008
When Credentials Fights Were About Democracy
Today, of course, the Democrats’ Rules & Bylaws Committee meets to decide the fate of the Michigan and Florida delegations, which were stripped of all delegates after state leaders flouted party rules and moved up their primaries. Hillary Clinton had no problem with this decision in 2007—she even said the Michigan primary wouldn’t count—but after falling behind in 2008, she started comparing those demanding a full seating of the two delegations to democracy advocates in Zimbabwe, abolitionists, suffragettes, and defenders of Al Gore’s position in the 2000 recount.
Clinton has never quite explained how she reached this morally absolutist conclusion after having such a differing position on the issue only a few months earlier. Her comments are particularly objectionable because they trivialize the occasions in which credentials fights really were about basic issues of justice, democracy, and fairness.
Perhaps the best example of such a fight came in 1964, when the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party—a biracial group of civil rights activists—challenged the credentials of the mostly pro-Goldwater, segregationist Mississippi regulars. After considerable effort, Lyndon Johnson (who feared a disruption to the convention) and his aides brokered a compromise. The Mississippi regulars would be seated, but with two caveats: two MFDP members would receive credentials as at-large convention delegates; and racial discrimination would be taken into account in future credentials fights.
As he expected, Johnson received criticism for the deal from some liberals. To his astonishment, however, some of his Southern allies attacked the compromise as too favorable to the MFDP. Johnson’s frustration boiled over in a conversation with Georgia governor Carl Sanders, his strongest supporter among the ranks of the South’s governors. The clip below (full transcript below the jump) references Mississippi’s segregationist senators, James Eastland and John Stennis, as well as its even more segregationist governor, Ross Barnett.
The Clinton forces might want to keep 1964 in mind as they offer hyperbolic arguments about the alleged immorality of the party’s attempts to enforce its calendar in 2008.
Sunday, May 25, 2008
Clinton's Constitutional Conundrum
Over the past eight years, the most powerful Democratic argument against GOP-sponsored constitutional amendments on such issues as flag-burning or gay marriage has been a procedural one: the Constitution is too important to modify for insignificant issues (flag-burning) or proposals inserted for partisan political gain (anti-gay marriage). In recent weeks, however, the Clinton campaign has proposed two constitutional amendments that almost make the GOP efforts look Madisonian by comparison.
Thursday, May 15, 2008
The Besieged LBJ and Israel
On May 1, the LBJ Library released the recordings from the first four months of 1968--which include items on Tet and the President's decision not to run for re-election.
I'm currently working on a piece about the recordings and Johnson's policy toward Israel. One of the newly released items features Johnson chatting with UN ambassador Arthur Goldberg, one week before LBJ announced his withdrawal from the 1968 election. The ostensible subject matter was a UN resolution condemning Israel, after a retaliatory raid against a Palestinian terrorist attack from Jordan. But LBJ then suggests his growing political isolation has made him more sympathetic to Israel, and reaffirms his support for Israel in rather earthy terms. Transcript is below the jump.
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Colorado Conservatives
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the University of Colorado, seeking to redress its problems with intellectual on diversity on campus, has created a newly endowed professorship in conservative thought and policy.
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
From Utah to West Virginia
2008 has the potential to be a realigning election (in either direction). Perhaps its most remarkable potential element, however, comes in the potential new electoral map associated with the Obama candidacy. Despite his status as the (slight) favorite to be elected President on the Democratic ticket four of Obama's six worst states in polling against John McCain are states that voted Democratic for President as recently as 1996: the Appalachian-extended arc of West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Arkansas. (Oklahoma and Wyoming are his other two very weak states.)
Friday, May 9, 2008
The Clinton Dozen
Last night, New Jersey congressman Donald Payne, who represents Newark, withdrew his endorsement of Hillary Clinton and endorsed Barack Obama. Payne didn't mention the item in his announcement, but it's hard to overlook the timing: he moved less than 24 hours after the national press seized on Hillary Clinton's comments in West Virginia, where she suggested that an AP article had shown how "Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me . . . There's a pattern emerging here." (The article, needless to say, contained no equation of "white Americans" with "hard-working Americans.")
Clinton's statement, of course, was only the latest in the campaign's effort to play the race card. Slate's Timothy Noah recently did a fascinating post comparing a statement in West Virginia of Bill Clinton with remarks of George Wallace from the 1968 campaign. He asked readers to guess which statement came from Clinton and which from Wallace. As Noah concluded, "Harder than you expected, isn't it? Welcome to the final weeks of the Democratic primary campaign."
Payne's change of heart leaves Clinton with the support of only 12 African-American members of Congress: Maxine Waters, Lucille Roybal-Allard, Diane Watson, Alcee Hastings, Corinne Brown, Kendrick Meek, Emmanuel Cleaver, Charlie Rangel, Ed Towns, Yvette Clarke, Stephanie Tubbs Jones, and Sheila Jackson Lee.
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
Spin
Spin—the art of politicians or their advisors seeking to shape how the press covers political and public policy issues—hardly originated with Newt Gingrich or Bill Clinton, Dick Morris or Karl Rove. The most effective spin transforms a political weakness into a strength, changing the narrative by providing a new evidentiary base.
Take, for instance, the performance of LBJ in the 1964 election. Throughout the summer of 1964, Democratic operatives worried about the “backlash”—Southern (and northern ethnic) whites abandoning the party to vote for Barry Goldwater, following passage of the Civil Rights Act, which Johnson championed and Goldwater opposed. The President, however, seized on the idea of the “frontlash,” a term used by pollster Oliver Quayle to describe the liberal and moderate Republicans abandoning Goldwater over issues ranging from civil rights to nuclear war. In the conversation below with aides Bill Moyers (at the Atlantic City convention) and Dick Nelson (at the White House), the President laid out how he wanted to “stampede” the convention with the “frontlash” concept.
Monday, April 28, 2008
Reforming the Rules
After virtually every presidential contest since 1968, the Democrats have considered—or gone ahead with—rewriting the rules for the party's nomination. And just as consistently, these rules changes have had unintended, and often negative, consequences. Two of the problems with this year's race (the superdelegates and the anti-majoritarian tendencies of the current proportional allocation structure) date from previous rules changes, after the 1980 and 1988 contests, respectively. So while Democrats can be hopeful that the post-2008 changes will yield a more rational process, it's far more likely that the changes will create new problems for the party.
Saturday, April 26, 2008
Race and Indiana
Since the Pennsylvania primary, there's been quite a bit of discussion of the role of race in propping up the Clintons' campaign. Few, however, have been quite as blunt as a supporter of the Clintons polled in the just-released Indianapolis Star poll. (Obama leads by three, with a large number of undecided voters--and, remarkably, beats McCain in a hypothetical Indiana general election matchup.)
Sharon Jacobs fits all of the Clintons' demographics--she's a white woman, she's over 50, and she's retired from her job as a foundry worker.
Asked why she was supporting Hillary, she said, "It's because I liked Bill Clinton as president. I figure two heads are better than one."
And the opposition? She fears that "if Obama gets in there, the blacks will kind of try to take over." Jacobs did assure the Star reporter that she didn't want to discriminate.
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Bill Channels Wilentz
Politico's Ben Smith has the audio of Bill Clinton, advancing Sean Wilentz's bizarre thesis that Obama, not the Clintons, played the race card in the nominating process:
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Intensity in Indiana
Something you don't see on the campaign trail every day: Barry Welsh, the Dems' long-shot nominee in Indiana's 6th District (Muncie), was punched in the face by Republican election official Will Statom after Welsh stepped in to break up a fight between the election official and a local reporter.
Statom was angry at what he considered the reporter's pro-Democratic bias in explaining the surge of voter registrations for the upcoming Indiana primary. The election official was arrested for battery.
Sunday, April 6, 2008
Rankin
On the campaign trail yesterday in Montana, Hillary Clinton invoked the career of Jeannette Rankin, the first woman elected to Congress: "Remember, Jeannette Rankin was elected before women could vote. So who says men don't vote for a woman?"
Setting aside the question of who, exactly, "says men don't vote for a woman," Rankin was elected in 1916. Montana women received the right to vote in 1914. And, even though Clinton has tried to redefine herself as an early opponent of the Iraq war, is it really good politics to link herself to the only member of Congress to oppose going to war against Germany and Japan in World War II?
The Poverty Czar
Last week, Hillary Clinton announced that, if elected, she would appoint a poverty czar, endowed with authority of a cabinet officer. Issue czars don’t have the best track record over the years (Bill Bennett’s tenure as drug czar comes to mind), and poverty certainly wasn’t a priority of Clinton’s tenure in the Senate, or the initial year of her presidential campaign.
Friday, April 4, 2008
Disenfranchisement
Voter disenfranchisement has been a theme much on the mind of the Clinton campaign. Campaign manager Maggie Williams recently penned a memo stating, “Hillary Clinton respects those voters [in the states yet to vote] and their right to participate in this historic contest. Their votes, along with all the others, will determine when this contest is at an end. It’s the American way – everybody counts in this country. The last time that we were told we’d better cut the process short or the sky would fall was when the Supreme Court stopped the Florida recount in 2000. But Chicken Little was wrong. What was true then is true now: there is nothing to fear – and everything to gain – from hearing from all of the voters.” Meanwhile, in an interview with a Montana TV station, Hillary Clinton asserted, “A lot of Senator Obama’s supporters want to end this race because they don't want people to keep voting. That's just the opposite of what I believe. We want people to vote. I want the people of Montana to vote, don’t you?”
Thursday, April 3, 2008
Historians' Poll
The HNN homepage brings news that 61 percent in a poll of historians rated George W. Bush the worst president in American history. I fear this finding says more about the groupthink that dominates the contemporary academy than it does about Bush's poor performance in office.
Sunday, March 30, 2008
Burying the Lede
This, from the tenth paragraph of Jeff Zeleny's article in the Times today: "If hopes are diminishing among some supporters of Mrs. Clinton — privately, many concede they do not see a clear mathematical path to winning the nomination — that word has yet to reach the voters here who filled gymnasium after gymnasium on her two-day trip through Indiana."
If Clinton advisors are conceding the daunting math, doesn't it require the press to start asking some hard questions of what the campaign's real motives are in continuing forth? And might it be that one reason this word "has yet to reach the voters here who filled gymnasium after gymnasium on her two-day trip through Indiana" is that the press has done a poor job of explaining the Democratic nominating process?
As Jonathan Chait recently wrote in the New Republic (after Ralph Nader supported Clinton remaining in the race), "Clinton's chancing of winning the presidency, while not zero, are much closer to Nader's than to Obama or McCain's . . . Her rationales for continuing have the same flavor, all full of grandiose rhetoric about the rights of the voters combined with a stubborn refusal to examine the practical consequences in any realistic way."
Monday, March 24, 2008
The "Nixonian" Thesis
David Greenberg has a piece in the New Republic suggesting that the Obama candidacy would be a retreat to "doughface" liberalism, and that Obama's calls to transcend partisanship bring to mind the political errors of Adlai Stevenson. Greenberg also takes to task those who have criticized the tactics of the Clinton campaign; he suggests that labeling the Clintons "Nixonian" is "as scurrilous as the smears that Obama is a closet Muslim or that John McCain sired a bastard child." That's a strong statement.
Friday, March 21, 2008
Obama, Race, and North Carolina
Not since 1976, when Ronald Reagan’s victory over Gerald Ford revived his then-floundering campaign, has North Carolina’s primary played a significant role in the nominating process. That’s likely to change in 2008. The early May primary provides an opportunity for Barack Obama to rebound from a likely Clinton victory in Pennsylvania, and in the process gain ground in the Clintons’ latest measuring stick for success, the popular vote total. The state seems to play to Obama’s strengths: it has a sizable black population, as well as a good number of college-educated whites in the Research Triangle and in Charlotte. Moreover, unlike Pennsylvania and Indiana (and Ohio before them), the state’s political leadership is either supporting Obama or is neutral. That said, Obama’s lead in North Carolina dropped precipitously in the latest poll.
Monday, March 17, 2008
The Subcommittee
This morning, the Clinton campaign released a memorandum that Time’s Mark Halperin described as “question[ing] Obama’s national security credentials.” Among the allegations: the previously-stated claim that “when [Obama] took over the subcommittee that oversees NATO and Afghanistan and had a chance to follow up on the part of his 2002 speech that argued that Iraq diverted attention from Afghanistan, he failed to hold a single hearing.”
Thursday, March 13, 2008
Metzenbaum
News across the wire that former Ohio senator Howard Metzenbaum has died, at age 90. Metzenbaum had one of the most interesting careers of any postwar Democratic senator: a multimillionaire who made his fortune in the airport parking lot business(!), he was campaign manager for Stephen Young's two upset victories to the Senate, in 1958 and 1964. He ran for Young's seat in 1970, surprised John Glenn in the primary, but lost to Bob Taft, Jr. (whom Young had defeated in 1964) in the general election. Glenn came back to defeat him in a 1974 Senate primary, but Metzenbaum was finally elected to the Senate on his third try, in 1976, and served three terms.
He was a significant figure in Senate history: in the late 1970s and early 1980s, after the decline of the normal filibuster but before the emergence of the contemporary culture of needing cloture votes for all major legislation, Metzenbaum developed a tactic that amounted to a one-man filibuster. On bills he didn't like, he would introduce dozens of amendments and then demand roll-call votes for each. The sponsors could either negotiate with him or see their bill delayed. When he used this tactic at the end of a congressional session, Metzenbaum had the power to unilaterally kill bills he didn't like. (Senate rules were subsequently reformed to limit this sort of dilatory amendments.)
Metzenbaum retired in 1994, and his seat was one of the eight captured by Republicans that year, as they reclaimed control of the Senate.
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
3am and D.W. Griffith?
As Ryan Lizza observed in this week's New Yorker, "It is tempting to say that the Clinton campaign’s plan is to burn the village in order to save it—that Hillary Clinton believes that Democrats, hypnotized by Obama, are making a historic mistake from which only she can rescue them. And it is tempting to add that this means the political destruction of the man who is still most likely to be the Democratic nominee."
Monday, March 3, 2008
Obama and the Foreign Relations Committee
Among the most extraordinary allegations made recently by Hillary Clinton--and the subject of her most recent television ad, in Texas--is that Barack Obama has shown his insufficient commitment to dealing with Afghanistan because he didn't convene any hearings in the Subcommittee on European Affairs, which he chairs.
Leave aside, for a moment, the question of whether such subcommittee hearings could have influenced this administration, which has shown little inclination to consider congressional oversight. Primary jurisdiction for Afghanistan lies not with Obama's subcommittee but with the Armed Services Committee (which has oversight authority over military matters) and with the FRC's Subcommittee on Near East and South and Central Asian Affairs--on which Obama isn't even a member. Obama's subcommittee, at best, has a limited type scope (intra-NATO questions) on anything dealing with Afghanistan.
Incredibly, the press--the same press that the Clinton campaign alleges is treating her unfairly--hasn't challenged the campaign's assertion that the Subcommittee on European Affairs is a critical arm of oversight for Afghanistan events. Indeed, take this line from a just-filed AP report: "Clinton launched a new 30-second ad in Texas that criticizes Obama for failing to hold hearings as the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee on European Affairs, which has oversight for Afghanistan."
Saturday, March 1, 2008
Another High School Survey
Slate brings news of another survey of high school students, with depressingly predictable results. In a multiple choice test, "only half knew why the Federalist papers were written . . . Fewer than half knew when the Civil War was fought." The questions that attracted the best results were civil-rights related ones: who said "I Have a Dream" in the history section, the plotline of To Kill A Mockingbird in the literature section.
The--ideologically diverse--group that conducted the survey, Common Core, blamed curricular changes associated with No Child Left Behind for the result. Perhaps. But based on what I've seen of the Education bureaucracy in New York, I doubt that even a repeal of NCLB would lead to an increased curricular emphasis on the purpose of the Federalist Papers.
Friday, February 29, 2008
Friday Items
Dana Goldstein discusses the education policy differences between the two Democratic candidates.
Sean Wilentz's New Republic piece comes under more criticism, this time from Too Sense.
Hugo Schywzer on why tenure matters.
The Chronicle previews Twitter as a teaching tool.
A reminder of the value of a free press: the work of the Detroit Free Press in uncovering Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick's efforts to use city money to hide text messages showing that he lied about having an affair with his chief of staff--in a civil suit filed by two police officers who Kilpatrick fired out of fear they would discover the affair. The Michigan Supreme Court yesterday ordered the release of all the text messages, overturning a confidentiality agreement that Kilpatrick and city attorneys had brokered with lawyers for the former police officers.
And for those with too much spare time on their hands, Slate's delegate counter allows adjustable projections on the final delegate total.
Thursday, February 28, 2008
Clinton's Cow Palace Moment
One of the most famous events from the tumultuous 1964 GOP nominating convention came when NBC's John Chancellor was surrounded on the floor by Goldwater backers and then taken away by a sergeant-at-arms. The convention itself featured delegates lustily booing members of the media.
Thursday News
Rick Perlstein memorializes William F. Buckley: "He did the honor of respecting his ideological adversaries, without covering up the adversarial nature of the relationship in false bonhommie. A remarkable quality, all too rare in an era of the false fetishization of 'post-partisanship' and Broderism and go-along-to-get-along. He was friends with those he fought. He fought with friends. These are the highest civic ideals to which an American patriot can aspire."
The Times City Room, meanwhile, taps into the archives to look back at Buckley's 1965 bid for NYC mayor.
Inside Higher Ed examines the controversies over the senior theses of Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton. Reed College president Colin Diver: "Let’s face it. Some of the theses involve an outpouring of post-adolescent ideas or language that people later might find embarrassing."
Taylor Marsh, unsurprisingly, celebrates Sean Wilentz's peculiar New Republic article on the "race card."
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Taylor, Wilentz, and Race
In this week’s National Journal, Stuart Taylor (who has published several columns sympathetic to Barack Obama) expresses his hope that a President Obama would move the country beyond the idea of racial preferences, and instead embrace a race-neutral, class-based approach. Taylor’s doubtful—if only because such a move would generate fierce resistance among some in the Democratic Establishment and, of course, many in higher education.
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
The Year's Strangest Argument
Today's Washington Post has an article exploring the dilemmas of black politicians who endorsed Hillary Clinton. Beyond the fact that their constituents have overwhelmingly supported another candidate, you'd think the endorsers would have some qualms about affiliating with a campaign that played the race card in South Carolina and whose chief Hispanic strategist informed the New Yorker that the campaign's premise was that Hispanics would be reluctant to vote for a black candidate.
Instead, the article reveals that a quartet of African-American Clinton endorsers--Trenton Mayor Doug Palmer, former Denver mayor Wellington Webb, and congresswomen Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas and Stephanie Tubbs Jones of Ohio--are outraged that there might be political repercussions for Clinton's black supporters.
Declared Palmer, "To intimate that you may face a challenge for what you believe in, I just think that's over the top." It's "over the top" for someone to decide to challenge an incumbent because of a position that officeholder took, provided the officeholder "believe[d] in" the position?
I realize Palmer is from Trenton, and New Jersey politics doesn't enjoy a reputation for deep principles, so perhaps he might consider it unusual for a politician to take a principled position. But his argument is nothing short of absurd.
Monday, February 18, 2008
Reforming the Democratic System?
As Ralph mentioned in yesterday's roundup, Princeton's Sean Wilentz (who has published a number of pieces aggressively promoting Hillary Clinton's candidacy) and Julian Zelizer had an interesting op-ed in yesterday's Washington Post on the shortcomings of the Democrats' primary process.
Some of the Wilentz/Zelizer recommendations are uncontroversial—the parties "grabbing power back from the media," the need for a more "rigorous system of national debates"—though it's not clear how they can be achieved. With debates, for instance, one way to increase rigor would be excluding non-viable candidates (think Kucinich or Dodd or Tancredo in 2008), so people could have more of a chance to evaluate the real contenders. Yet such a move would doubtless be denounced as anti-democratic.
Friday, February 15, 2008
Clinton, Caucuses, and the Maine Vote
The last week has featured two particularly outrageous pieces of political analysis from the Clinton campaign. The first, which was widely scorned, came from Mark Penn: “Could we possibly have a nominee who hasn't won any of the significant states—outside of Illinois? That raises some serious questions about Sen. Obama.” Since Obama easily won Georgia—the ninth largest state—Penn appeared to be consigning a whopping 42 states to political insignificance.
The second remark, however, has received less attention. It came from Bill Clinton: “The caucuses aren’t good for her [Hillary Clinton]. They disproportionately favor upper-income voters who, who, don’t really need a president but feel like they need a change.”
Sunday, February 10, 2008
Maine Caucus News
My parents braved the weather today and caucused in Scarborough (I voted absentee, along with a record 4000 others). Scarborough is a Republican-leaning suburb of Portland, which had a record turnout and went to Obama 401 to 283 (31 state delegates to 22). Demographically, it's the sort of town that Obama would need to prevail today--he carried the town over the opposition of state senator Peggy Pendleton, who, along with most of the state's party leadership, endorsed Clinton.
Thursday, February 7, 2008
New Mexico News
The latest in what has to be the worst-run presidential primary in recent memory: the New Mexico Democratic Party is now recounting all ballots--and only then will begin counting the 17,000 provisional ballots. "There is still no word," according to Albuquerque station KOB, on when to expect an announcement on who actually won the primary (Clinton leads Obama by around 1000 votes).
Because of the closeness of the results, there should be no shift in apportioned delegates. New Mexico, by the way, featured a quite significant gap between the exit poll (5-point Obama win, whites of all age groups for Obama, Hispanics of all age groups for Clinton) and the ultimate result, raising further questions about the nature of the process.
HS Heroes
An interesting item in USA Today, first mentioned below by Ralph Luker, about a poll of high school students, asking them to name the 10 most famous Americans, outside of Presidents. Number one on the list, unsurprisingly, was Martin Luther King, Jr. (67 percent). The remainder of the list, however, was revealing as to the type of American history offered in today’s high schools: Rosa Parks (60%), Harriet Tubman (42%), Susan B. Anthony (34%), Benjamin Franklin (29%), Amelia Earhart (25%), Oprah Winfrey (22%), Marilyn Monroe (19%), Thomas Edison (18%), and Albert Einstein (16%).
Maine & Obama
It’s always difficult to determine whether public remarks about pending political matters from the Clinton campaign represent anything beyond spin. That said, as a longtime resident of Maine, I’m baffled by the campaign’s current line that Barack Obama is the favorite in every contest until those of March 4. With the exception of a post in today’s Fix, the Clinton version seems to have become conventional wisdom. Obama may very well win Maine on Sunday. (There have been no statewide polls in several months.) But it would be hard to imagine a state less favorable to him politically.
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
Super Tuesday Reflections
Michael McGerr’s The Decline of Popular Politics is a remarkable work of political history, showing how seemingly unrelated technical changes in ballot and election codes, as well as a politics that stressed issues over symbolism, had the effect of depressing voter turnout. Even seemingly innocuous tinkering with the political system can have far-reaching, and often unintended, consequences.
Saturday, February 2, 2008
The Clintons' Southern Strategy
From differing ideological perspectives, and with differing guesses as to the strategy's ultimate fate, John Judis in The New Republic and Noemie Emery in the Weekly Standard critique the Clintons' Southern Strategy.
Monday, January 28, 2008
NY NOW
Today's event at American University was--if nothing else--extraordinary political theater, and a reminder that political culture can move beyond the "talking points" approach pioneered by James Carville and Paul Begala and expanded upon by Karl Rove.
Friday, January 25, 2008
Chafe, Hillary, and LBJ
William Chafe is widely considered one of the nation’s leading historians of civil rights. The former president of the AHA has, among other works, authored an influential book on the Greensboro sit-ins.
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Till the Cows Come Home
One of this year's cleverest advertising campaigns, in the GOP primary to replace Speaker Dennis Hastert. The target is dairy farmer Jim Oberweis (who has also run, unsuccessfully, for Senate and governor).
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
Freedom House Ratings
The 2007 ratings are now available, and the overall trend is discouraging: "According to the survey’s findings, the year 2007 was marked by a notable setback for global freedom. The decline was most pronounced in South Asia, but also reached significant levels in the former Soviet Union, the Middle East and North Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa. It affected a substantial number of large and politically important countries—including Russia, Pakistan, Kenya, Egypt, Nigeria, and Venezuela—whose declines have wider regional and global implications. Furthermore, results for 2007 marked the second consecutive year in which the survey registered a decline in freedom, representing the first two-year setback in the past 15 years."
Monday, January 21, 2008
"One of the Worst Negative Ads . . ."
It remains open to debate whether Hillary Clinton’s New Hampshire remark about Martin Luther King, LBJ, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was an attempt to play to race. I suspect probably not, but given a variety of other initiatives of the Clintons’ campaign that do seem to have been racially polarizing, it’s hard to give Clinton the benefit of the doubt. At the very least, the remark suggested how Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama approach politics differently, a theme recently explored in a long George Packer article: “Obama offers himself as a catalyst by which disenchanted Americans can overcome two decades of vicious partisanship, energize our democracy, and restore faith in government. Clinton presents politics as the art of the possible, with change coming incrementally through good governance, a skill that she has honed in her career as advocate, First Lady, and senator.”
Thursday, January 17, 2008
Nevada Caucus OK'd
A Las Vegas judge just ruled against a lawsuit filed by several Hillary Clinton supporters and the Nevada teachers' union to change the rules for the state's Saturday caucus. The judge upheld the state party's plan to have nine at-large caucuses in Las Vegas casinos.
This has been a strange campaign in virtually every respect: seeing backers of a major Democratic candidate sue to make it tougher for minority voters to participate is most unusual. As things developed, Clinton got the worst of both worlds: the negative publicity associated with the lawsuit; and the caucus goes ahead as scheduled.
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Shades of '64 and '40
A central principle of postwar American politics has been the power of the Republican establishment. From Tom Dewey (1948) to Dwight Eisenhower (1952, 1956) to Richard Nixon (1960, 1968, 1972) to Gerald Ford (1976) to Ronald Reagan (1980, 1984) to George H.W. Bush (1988, 1992) to Bob Dole (1996) to George W. Bush (2000, 2004), the GOP establishment has not only rallied behind its candidate for the nomination, but has generally done so with ease.
Sunday, January 13, 2008
Obama as "White Hope"?
David Greenberg has an interesting article in today’s Washington Post, describing Barack Obama as the “great white hope,” because Obama—unlike previous African-American presidential candidates such as Jesse Jackson or Shirley Chisholm—allows “whites to feel good about themselves and their country . . . [and] doesn't threaten or discomfort whites.”
Wednesday, January 9, 2008
FAS on Tonkin Gulf
From newly released documents:
Steven Aftergood, director of the FAS project on government secrecy . . . said that probably the "most historically significant feature" of the declassified report was the retelling of the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident . . .
"What this study demonstrated is that the available intelligence shows that there was no attack. It's a dramatic reversal of the historical record," Aftergood said.
"There were previous indications of this but this is the first time we have seen the complete study," he said.
Just checked the FAS website, which doesn't seem to have posted the documents yet. [Update, 12.27pm: FAS has posted the full file of documents, here.
A Bradley Effect?
Andrew Sullivan and David Kuo invoke the possibility of a "Bradley" effect (or a Harvey Gantt effect, given that Gantt led in polls just before his 1990 election against Jesse Helms)--i.e., a segment of white voters lying to pollsters about their willingness to vote for a black candidate, only to vote for the white candidate in the polling booth--to explain last night's outcome.
Tuesday, January 8, 2008
Gloria Steinem's History Lesson
After chiding Barack Obama for invoking John Kennedy and erroneously asserting that Ted Kennedy had endorsed Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid, feminist icon Gloria Steinem provided an American history lesson in today’s Times.
Wednesday, January 2, 2008
Iowa Coverage
With both parties' races wide open in today's vote, here is a good portal with links to various live-blogging coverages of the caucus.
Thursday, December 27, 2007
The Filibuster Expands
Although the term filibuster was first applied to the practice in the 1850s, the opportunity for unlimited Senate debate dates from the creation of the Republic. Indeed, in the 19th century—especially the 1830s and 1840s—great Senate oratory was something of a spectator sport.
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
End of DADT?
60 Minutes had a fascinating story this week on the military's Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy. The arguments put forth by defenders seemed--to put it mildly--a stretch.
Monday, December 17, 2007
The Electability Canard
The Fix is my favorite political blog; throughout the fall, Chris Cillizza has been analyzing the Democratic presidential race as a contest between the party's head (Clinton) and heart (Obama). This approach appears to have factored into yesterday's endorsement of Clinton by the Des Moines Register.
Even as an Obama supporter, however, this line of thought from many Democrats strikes me as odd. Based on public opinion polls, the most "electable" candidate is actually John Edwards, not Clinton. Indeed, Clinton's frighteningly high negative ratings could make her the least electable of the serious contenders for the nomination, including relative dark horses such as Joe Biden and Bill Richardson.
The heart/head split isn't new: to a much greater extent than the Republicans, the question of "electability" has factored into recent Democratic nominating contests. Its first clear emergence appeared in 1984. Gary Hart burst onto the scene with a second-place finish in Iowa and an upset win in New Hampshire—followed by Super Tuesday victories in the two largest states that held ST primaries that year (Florida and Massachusetts).
Friday, December 14, 2007
Regret the Error
For those not sufficiently depressed by Ralph's post below, the blog Regret the Error has just published its most outrageous newspaper/TV corrections of the year.
Suggesting that some journalists might have guest-spots lined up on The View, the corrections include:
--"An article in some copies Monday erroneously included President Vladimir Putin among major Russian figures who died recently." (International Herald Tribune)
--"A Nov. 19 article about a new study indicating that Detroit is the most dangerous U.S. city incorrectly stated that Detroit has seen nearly one million people killed since 1950. In fact, that number represents the overall decline in Detroit’s population since 1950, not the number of people killed." (Toronto Star)
--"In an article on drug smuggling in Venezuela that began on Page 1A Monday, an incorrect photograph was used on Page 2A for jailed drug trafficking suspect Feris Farid Domínguez. The error occurred in the newsroom production process. The photo that was used was that of Leonel Fernández, president of the Dominican Republic." (Miami Herald)
--"A caption on Saturday with a picture showing a Pakistani man on his bicycle carrying a painting of his son, who he says was abducted by Pakistani intelligence agents in 2001, misspelled the name of the Pakistani capital. It is Islamabad, not Islambad." (New York Times)
And, on an academic matters, this item from the Manchester Union Leader: "Due to a reporting error, a story on Page A2 in Saturday’s edition of the New Hampshire Union Leader misquoted University of New Hampshire employee Bernardine Schultz. She said Professor John Collins was prone to giving students 'easy A’s,' not that he had 'lazy aides.'"
Thursday, December 13, 2007
More Iowa Rationalizations
Professors in the University of Iowa's History Department have had some unusual explanations about the department's partisan imbalance. Several weeks ago, for instance, department chairman Colin Gordon cited the registration figures for Johnson County (home of the University) to account for the fact that his department has no registered Republicans. The University, I assume, has a policy of actively recruiting its membership from beyond county lines.
One of Gordon's colleagues, History professor Sarah Hanley, was quoted in a recent article by the Iowa City Press-Citizen, which examined registration figures for all academic departments at the University of Iowa. The paper discovered that the University hosts 21 departments of 10 or more professors with one or fewer registered Republicans in their ranks. Seven of these departments (including History) had no registered Republicans.
BHS Exhibit
Cliopatria readers from the New York City area should put on their calendar a new Brooklyn Historical Society exhibit, "In Our Own Words: Portraits of Brooklyn Vietnam Veterans." The exhibit, which opens Saturday, was overseen by Phil Napoli, a colleague of mine from Brooklyn College, who has conducted dozens of oral histories with Vietnam-era veterans. As Dennis Hamill of the Daily News recently observed, Napoli has provided "the most comprehensive oral history of [the Vietnam] war in the city's history."
The basic structure of the exhibit, laid out in Hamill's article:
Noted photographer Alison Cornyn, BHS' director of picture projects, took life-size digital portrait photos, printed on canvas, of the nine main interviewees, which will be stationed around the exhibit. Beside each photo will be an artifact case containing personal belongings, diaries, medals and other mementos of the war. On the 35-minute tour, when you step in front of each photo, it will trigger a three-to-five-minute recorded clip of that veteran's personal story, in his own words.
The BHS website, with directions, is here. [Update, 12-14: The exhibit received a glowing review in today's Times, whose on-line site also has excerpts from the veterans' oral histories.]
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
Assessing the GOP Plunge
Today features two House special elections--one in Ohio, the other in Virginia. Both come in heavily Republican districts; both were caused by deaths of GOP incumbents.
On paper, both should yield easy Republican victories. Yet the Ohio race, in particular, appears far closer than expected--an article in yesterday's Roll Call pointed out that the cash-starved RNCC has flooded the district with money on behalf of Bob Latta (who was rebuked for ethical improprieties in a closely contested primary).
In Virginia, meanwhile, Democrats have nominated an Iraq war veteran, Philip Forgit; and though the national party has largely ignored the race, the state Dems have been very active in aiding their nominee, who has been backed by quite a few newspapers in the district.
Should either of these races go Democratic--or even produce single-digit Republican victories--it would be a sign that the plunge of GOP congressional fortunes still has a ways to go.
Monday, December 10, 2007
Condemned to .. .
It's not exactly reassuring to hear White House press secretary Dana Perino confess that, when asked by a reporter, she didn't know what the Cuban Missile Crisis was.
Her theory? "It had to do with Cuba and missiles, I'm pretty sure."
Sunday, December 9, 2007
Maranto on University Reform
An interesting piece in today's Washington Post from Villanova political science professor Robert Maranto.
While he notes the troubling effects of ideological one-sidedness in the contemporary academy, Maranto also dismisses the Horowitz ABOR concept, which he terms unworkable.
His conclusion: "Ultimately, universities will have to clean their own houses. Professors need to re-embrace a culture of reasoned inquiry and debate. And since debate requires disagreement, higher education needs to encourage intellectual diversity in its hiring and promotion decisions with something like the fervor it shows for ethnic and racial diversity. It's the only way universities will earn back society's respect and reclaim their role at the center of public life."
The entire article is here. I agree with his conclusion, but see little evidence such encouragement will be coming anytime soon.
Sunday, December 2, 2007
Rich on Obama
Frank Rich's columns too often have an element of predictability, but he has an interesting look at the bipartisan appeal of Barack Obama in today's Times.
Friday, November 30, 2007
The Albany Collections
A couple of weeks ago, I was back in the US, in part to speak at a conference hosted by the University of Albany. The Special Collections Department there has brought together the papers of 23 former House members (and more than three dozen former New York state legislators), in what has become one of the most important legislative archives in the country.
Research in congressional archives has two significant drawbacks. First, papers tend to be scattered all over the country. With a few exceptions (the Albert Center in Oklahoma; the Southern History Collection at UNC; the University of Missouri's Special Collections Department; and Cal's Bancroft Library), most libraries house only one or a handful of House and Senate collections. Contrast that to presidential libraries, where researchers can get one-site access not only to presidential papers but often to collections of most of the president's key aides.
Second, even those collections that do exist tend to be processed incompletely--making research difficult.
The theme of the Albany conference was occasioned by the Library's acquisition of a major collection--that of recently retired upstate congressmen Sherwood Boehlert. The 500-box collection chronicles the career of a figure who chaired the House Science Committee and was active on intelligence issues as well.
Boehlert is hardly the only big-name House member to have deposited his papers in Albany. The collection also holds the papers of James Delaney, a Queens Democrat who was a major player on the Rules Committee in the 1960s and 1970s (and who was succeeded in the House by Geraldine Ferraro); Major Owens, who served 20 years as a Brooklyn Democrat; and John Goodchild Dow, one of the quirkiest members of the Cold War Congress. Dow was elected in a major upset in 1964 from a heavily Republican district, was re-elected in 1966, lost in 1968, but came back to win a final term in 1970 after the law-and-order GOP incumbent was investigated for tax evasion. In the process, he refused to bow to district opinion, and emerged as one of the few strongly liberal voices in the 1960s House on foreign policy questions.
Other collections housed in Albany include those of Leonard Farbstein (best known as the House member unseated by Bella Abzug in 1970); Seymour Halpern (a major player in 1960s liberal Republican circles); Normman Lent (who ousted Allard Lowenstein in 1970 and was a key GOP voice on defense issues in the 1980s); and Gerald Solomon (a leader in the caucus of upstate Republicans during the 1980s).
In a bonus for researchers, the Library is easily accessible--less than 15 minutes from the Albany airport, scarcely more from the Albany Amtrak station.
Given the breadth and depth of collections, it's definitely a congressional history resource worth increased usage.
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Lott's Departure
Yesterday, former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott announced that he will resign from the Senate by the end of the year.
Lott’s decision to resign is significant in three respects. First, it brings to a close an era of Southern politics. Lott was essentially the last of the first generation of Southern Republican officeholders—people who started in politics either working for segregationist Democrats or in opposing the 1960s Southern Democratic Party from the right.
Lott’s first campaign came when segregationist congressman John Bell Williams ran for Mississippi governor in 1967. (Williams had actively supported Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential campaign, causing the Democratic caucus to strip him of his seniority.) Lott then went on to work for longtime Representative William Colmer, Judge Smith’s right-hand man in House Rules Committee efforts to obstruct civil rights legislation. When Colmer retired in 1972, Lott ran on his predecessor’s platform but not his party.
Second, the Lott resignation will put to the test whether a Democrat has any chance of winning a Senate race in Mississippi. No Democrat has done so since 1982, when John Stennis captured his final term—besting a then up-and-comer in Mississippi politics, current governor Haley Barbour. Since 1982, however, the only Democrat to run even a mildly competitive Senate race was former congressman Wayne Dowdy, who opposed Lott in an open-seat race when Stennis retired in 1988. Dowdy ran a close-to-perfect campaign and still attracted only 45 percent of the vote.
For the special election to secure Lott’s seat, the Democrats likely will nominate former Attorney General Mike Moore—a pioneer in the state lawsuits against the tobacco industry and the strongest candidate the party possibly could offer. If Moore can’t win (and I suspect he can’t), then no Democrat can win at the Senate level.
Finally, though Lott is denying it, there seems to be little doubt as to the peculiar timing of his resignation. The Times: “James A. Thurber, director of the Center for Presidential and Congressional Studies at American University, said there was no question in his mind that Mr. Lott’s decision had been influenced by the new ethics and lobbying rules. Senators who retire this year have to wait only one year before lobbying their former colleagues, instead of the two years that go into effect in 2008.” The Post article makes a similar point.
Shouldn’t it generate outrage that a sitting senator, just reelected in 2006, would resign a seat in the world’s greatest deliberative body to pursue a lobbying career—much less time his resignation to allow him to make money more quickly?
Thursday, November 15, 2007
ClerkWeb Timeline
A remarkable new website from the House Clerk's office provides a model of how federal government agencies can use the internet to bring congressional history to the public.
The House History timeline provides an interactive, narrative summary of the history of the House. In addition to covering all of the key dates and events in the House's history, the timeline also features nuggets of less well-known information, such as:
--1822, when "Joseph Marion Hernandez, a Delegate from the Florida Territory, became the first Hispanic American to serve in Congress."
--1857, when "the House convened for the first time in its new chamber in the recently extended South Wing of the Capitol, the site of the present-day chamber."
--1899, when "Speaker David Henderson of Iowa selected Representative Sereno Payne of New York as the first Majority (Republican) Floor Leader. Minority candidate for Speaker James Richardson of Tennessee served as the first Minority (Democratic) Floor Leader. Their new positions signified an increased interest in enforcing party unity on the House Floor."
--1930, when "the Republicans won a narrow majority of House seats in the fall elections, but the deaths of 19 Members-elect before the opening of the 72nd Congress (1931–1933) allowed the Democrats to gain a majority after a series of special elections. Texas Representative John Nance Garner was elected Speaker of the House."
In an era when History Departments are increasingly abandoning positions devoted to the study of the U.S. government, the work of federal government historians becomes critical from both an academic as well as a public perspective. The ClerkWeb site therefore deserves high praise.
Wednesday, November 7, 2007
Elections
Kentucky governor Ernie Fletcher was crushed yesterday in his re-election bid, garnering only 41 percent of the vote. He went down in a classless fashion: with the state GOP authorizing gay-bashing calls against Democratic nominee Steve Beshear and the governor himself ostentatiously ordering the displaying of the Ten Commandments in the Capitol Rotunda, violating the spirit of a court ruling to do so.
Fletcher lost in large part because of a series of ethics scandals. In neighboring Ohio, however, Republican Bob Latta overcame a campaign ethics scandal to narrowly prevail in a special House primary in an overwhelmingly Republican seat. The Ohio Elections Commission unanimously reprimanded Latta for knowingly lying in a campaign brochure asserting that his primary opponent "opposed" prayer in public schools and "didn’t want" the Ten Commandments posted in public places. Latta's own attorney described the brochure as "misleading," a "cheap shot," and a "political low blow."
And Virginia, where Democrats took control of the state Senate for the first time in a decade, continued its progression to a "purple" state, a remarkable development in a state that has voted Democratic for president only once in the last 50 years but which now seems highly likely to have two Democratic U.S. senators after the 2008 elections.
Monday, November 5, 2007
A New Mexico Anomaly
Last week's "Fix" in the Washington Post contained an intriguing item: New Mexico congressman Tom Udall is strongly considering a Senate race. Udall's two House colleagues, Republicans Heather Wilson and Steve Pearce, already have signaled their intent to run for the seat being vacated by retiring GOP senator Pete Domenici.
If Udall runs, it will set up what appears to be a first in at least the last fifty years—a state with more than two House members all running for the Senate in the same year.
Friday, November 2, 2007
More PSC Speech
At Inside Higher Ed, Scott Jaschik profiles what plaintiff Susan O’Malley herself described as a “very, very silly” cause of action against CUNY gadfly Sharad Karkhanis. O’Malley refused comment to Jaschik, allowing her attorney to speak for her, an approach she should have followed before her damning statement to the Sun.
Thursday, November 1, 2007
Victory for FIRE
Two days ago, FIRE publicized a stunning program at the University of Delaware, whose residential life apparatus has been organized to ensure that "students will recognize that systemic oppression exists in our society," or that “students will recognize the benefits of dismantling systems of oppression." In mandatory meetings with their resident advisors, students learned how “[a] racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality." The program even had required, politically correct door decorations.
Delaware's VP of student life offered a misleading defense of the program, even as the University removed some of the most embarrassing documents from its website.
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Free Speech, PSC-Style
Most CUNY professors are familiar with The Patriot Returns. Published by professor emeritus Sharad Karkhanis, TPR is an on-line newsletter that has directed barbs at the extremist leadership of the CUNY union (the Professional Staff Congress) and the largely ineffectual leadership of the CUNY University Faculty Senate. TPR played a key role in last year’s union election, where a new slate headed by Kingsborough professor Rina Yarnisch almost upset incumbent Barbara Bowen, falling 53%-47%. Yarnisch, who was just overwhelmingly reelected KCC chapter chair, is widely expected to challenge Bowen again in two years.
Kentucky
This year's gubernatorial elections are likely to be a wash: Republicans captured Louisiana, but the Democrats are almost certain to win Kentucky, thanks in large part to Governor Ernie Fletcher's appalling ethics record.
Fletcher took office following the ethically challenged administration of Democratic governor Paul Patton, and called himself an ethics "reformer." In what's certainly the year's most biting political ad, a Kentucky good-government group contrasts the rhetoric with the reality.
Monday, October 29, 2007
Revising Giuliani's Record
Below, Ralph references David Greenberg's Post op-ed on Rudy Giuliani. Writes Greenberg, "As any New Yorker can tell you, the last word anyone in the 1990s would have attached to the brash, furniture- breaking mayor was 'liberal' -- and the second-to-last was 'moderate.'"
That's more than a bit of an overstatement: take, for instance, Conservative Party chairman Mike Long, who repeatedly withheld the party's line from Giuliani because of the former mayor's positions on abortion and gay rights. Former Staten Island borough president Guy Molinari, a Giuliani ally, even accused Long of being "on a mission to destroy Rudy Giuliani."
There's no doubt that on some social issues (usually related to crime or education) Giuliani took positions as mayor that were strongly opposed by New York City liberals. (He also enjoyed considerable success in both of these areas, especially education.) And there's also no doubt that Upper West Side liberals never warmed to Giuliani—as illustrated in their strong support for David Dinkins and their enthusiastic backing of Giuliani's second opponent, Ruth Messinger, who the mayor crushed in his 1997 re-election bid.
But I fear that columns like Greenberg's minimize what should be the central critique of Giuliani—namely, that on four key issues (gay rights, abortion rights, gun control, and immigration) candidate Giuliani has offered dramatically different positions than did Mayor Giuliani, even though at least the first three of these are the sort of issues that should illustrate a candidate's core beliefs. In that respect, candidate Giuliani has seemed like nothing more than an opportunist, and has tarnished his mayoral legacy.
Sunday, October 28, 2007
Cardoso & The Death of Dependency
This evening, I attended a lecture by former Brazilian president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who was in Israel in an unofficial capacity and was invited to speak by the the S. Daniel Abraham Center for International and Regional Studies. Before his career as a successful foreign minister, finance minister, and then two-term president, Cardoso was an eminent scholar, affiliated with the dependency school.
Saturday, October 20, 2007
Iowa's Diversity Test
It’s hardly fresh news to learn that most humanities and social sciences departments are politically one-sided. But the extent of and rationalizations for the one-sidedness should raise eyebrows.
Below, Ralph mentioned the controversy over the decision by the University of Iowa’s History Department to exclude Mark Moyar from its list of initial interviewees for a position in the United States and world affairs. I’ve known Mark for a long time (he was a student in several classes for which I served as a TF in graduate school) and like him.
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
The Craig Scandal in Retrospect
Yesterday afternoon, Roll Call broke the story that Idaho senator Larry Craig, a married, ultra-conservative Republican, was arrested on August 8. The arrest came in a men's room of the Minneapolis men's room on the charge of disorderly conduct, allegedly for soliciting an undercover police officer engaged in a sting operation. The arresting officer's report is here.
According to the report, "At one point during the interview, Craig handed the plainclothes sergeant who arrested him a business card that identified him as a U.S. Senator and said, 'What do you think about that?'" The officer, evidently, was unmoved. Craig then entered a guilty plea, paid a $575 fine, but, it seems, told no one--either in the state Republican Party or from his congressional staff. After Roll Call published its article, the AP, the Idaho Statesman, and an Idaho TV station picked up the story.
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
Misusing History
President Bush delivered an address today before the VFW, pointing to historical lessons from East Asia to justify his policy in Iraq.
For a positive legacy, he cited South Korea: "The defense strategy that refused to hand the South Koreans over to a totalitarian neighbor helped raise up an Asian Tiger that is a model for developing countries across the world, including the Middle East."
That statement might very well be true: it certainly would justify the war to liberate Kuwait. But it's hard to see what relevance it has to the war in Iraq--which was started, after all, by a US-led invasion.
Sunday, August 12, 2007
Shoot-to-Kill
The Times is reporting that, for the first time, a written shoot-to-kill order from the East German government has been found.
The unsigned order, found in Stasi files, stated that border guards needed to "stop or liquidate" those trying to flee the state: "Do not hesitate to use your firearm, not even when the border is breached in the company of women and children, which is a tactic the traitors have often used."
Monday, July 16, 2007
Ignoring Congressional Norms
A disturbing item from this morning’s Roll Call on the continuing breakdown of congressional norms.
Erin Billings reports, “Barring an unlikely confirmation of Leslie Southwick to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals by the Judiciary Committee this week, Senate GOP leaders have privately mapped out a retaliatory plan that involves blocking passage of Democratic legislation from now until the August recess.”
This is an extraordinary plan, tantamount to legislative blackmail. The issue is not (as sometimes occurred both earlier this decade and in the 1990s) committed ideological minorities of the Senate using the rules to prevent a nomination from coming to a vote. In this case, Republican senators have urged delay, in a thus-far unsuccessful attempt to persuade committee Democrats to support Southwick’s nomination.
To date, a majority of the Senate Judiciary Committee appears intent on casting “no” votes against Southwick, which would ordinarily doom the nomination. Yet Senate Republicans argue otherwise.
Thad Cochran: “The Senate should consider this. It’s a question that ought to be decided by the Senate, not by a few members of one committee.”
Arlen Specter: “Let the full Senate vote on it. That’s what the Constitution says — the Senate, not the committee, has the power to confirm or reject. If he loses, I’ll abide by the will of the body, but I’m not going to sit still and allow him to be bottled up in committee.”
Yet on lower-court judicial nominees, a negative vote of the Judiciary Committee has traditionally killed nominations. Senate Republicans are thus arguing that they want to change how the upper chamber normally functions, effectively demanding the bypassing of the Judiciary Committee on judicial nominations, and arguing that if the majority of the committee doesn’t go along with them, they’ll exact retribution.
This is a troubling way to do business.
Thursday, July 12, 2007
Bush & Congress
I watched the Bush press conference this morning, and was particularly struck by his repeated statements that it was the job of Congress to "fund" the war (but to have no input into how the war was waged).
That the assertion passed unchallenged from the media probably isn't surprising--few people any longer defend the abstract powers of Congress. But it was a chilling interpretation of constitutional theory, well beyond anything offered even by LBJ (who conceded Congress had the right to repeal the Tonkin Gulf Resolution) or Richard Nixon (who conceded that Congress could defund the Vietnam War). The tenor of Bush's remarks suggested that defunding wasn't an option, and that amendments to appropriations bills likewise were unacceptable.
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
Lady Bird
The AP is reporting that Lady Bird Johnson has died, at age 94.
Perhaps the most interesting experience for me in working with the LBJ tapes came not with listening to the President but getting to hear the person on the other end of the line. Sometimes, the figure would be far less impressive than his historical reputation--Hubert Humphrey comes to mind. Sometimes, especially in conversations with Southern members of Congress, the tapes provide a window into a political world that has passed.
But Lady Bird was easily the most impressive of any other person on the LBJ tapes. She was the only caller who consistently could say no to LBJ--and have her word stick. For instance, following the October 1964 arrest of Walter Jenkins on a morals charge, she called the President to inform him that she planned on issuing a statement expressing personal sympathy for Jenkins and his family. Johnson told her not to do so (the average farmer, he said, would be outraged by such a statement; city folks, the President continued, might not mind).
But Lady Bird was calling to inform, not to seek permission. She issued the statement, and it helped to defuse the potential political damage--just one of the many times when her political instincts would be superior to her husband's.
Monday, May 28, 2007
Military History
In today's New York Post, Rich Lowry has an appropriately timed op-ed on the collapse of military history as a field staffed in History Departments.
A study of the top 25 History departments by former University of Wisconsin professor Edward Coffman reveals the same sort of pattern that I have seen in staffing decisions for political, constitutional, and diplomatic history: he found "that a mere 21 professors out of more than 1,000 listed war as their specialty
Lowry also cites the case of WVU professor Steven Zdatny, who World War I as one of his "teaching fields," but whose latest work is on "the French hairdressing professions" and the "evolving practices and sensibilities of cleanliness in 20th century France."
The battle for military history was lost years ago--despite strong student interest in the topic. But it's good to continue to shine a spotlight on hiring practices.
Sunday, May 27, 2007
The AP and Dartmouth Trustees
In the last decade, the Dartmouth administration also made a name for itself by supporting a combination of political correctness and hostility to athletics. In the process, insurgent candidates have taken advantage of the petition method to win trustee elections. In the past three years, four such candidates have been elected. All four have called for an increased emphasis on athletics; abolishing speech codes; and returning the college to a platform of research and teaching excellence.
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
Women in Congress
A pathbreaking website from the House of Representatives Office of History and Preservation on Women in Congress is now live.
The site contains a comprehensive index of women members of both chambers, plus artifacts, historical essays, and a data set about women who have served.
The site complements a 1015-page book edited by OHP's Matt Wasniewski--volumes on African-Americans, Hispanics, and Asians/Pacific Islanders members will follow.
Both the book and the website will be invaluable assets for those of us to do congressional history, but they also serve as good examples of how the House and Senate history offices can bring congressional history to the public.
Tuesday, August 29, 2006
The Return of W+M
Dana Milbank presents a devastating account of an appearance yesterday by Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer before the Council on American Islamic Relations. After beginning with an impressive display of bipartisanship--Mearsheimer, despite his proclaimed expertise on how Congress functions, managed to mispronounce the names of both House majority leader John Boehner and Maryland congressman Chris Van Hollen, a rising star in the Democratic Party--the duo offered a series of comments that will do little to quell their critics or impress the undecided about the intellectual impressiveness of their thesis. As Milbank noted, "Whatever motivated the performance, the result wasn't exactly scholarly."
Sunday, August 20, 2006
Cunningham
You don't normally think of Kitty Kelley as an astute congressional commentator, but this week's New Republic has a lengthy interview Kelley conducted with Duke Cunningham's estranged wife. Speaker Dennis Hastert doesn't come across well at all; and the article as a whole provides a glimpse into a House of Representatives that seems to have seen better days.
Friday, August 11, 2006
Slate and 9/11
For those who haven't seen it, Slate this week has featured a fascinating exchange between Lawrence Wright and Steve Coll, discussing Wright's new book, The Looming Tower. (Coll's Pulitzer prize winning study of the US, Al Qaeda, and Afghanistan from 1989 until 9-10-2001 is for my money the standard work on the topic; I've used the book in several classes and am using it again this spring for a course on the US and the Middle East.) We hear a lot, correctly, on how little we know about our enemies in this struggle. Yet people like Coll and Wright--and the publications of the 9/11 Commission Report--suggest that, in fact, there's extraordinary contemporary history being done on this conflict. Whether this scholarship has any effect on policy is, of course, another matter.
Wednesday, August 9, 2006
It's Lamont
Mr. Johnson is a professor of history at Brooklyn College and a contributor to HNN's Cliopatria.
I just watched the post-primary speeches of Ned Lamont and Joe Lieberman following Lamont’s stunning victory in the Connecticut Democratic primary. (And it was stunning: even though he led in the last two pre-primary polls, several months ago Lamont trailed by nearly 50 points.) Lamont’s speech was effective, though with politically dubious visuals: he was flanked by Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson as he spoke. Lieberman’s address, meanwhile, was remarkably bitter, filled with denunciations of Lamont for personal attacks. The senator insisted he’d run as an independent.
What . . ., and when . . . ?
Timelines are unusually significant in the Duke lacrosse case. Sunday’s N&O article by Joseph Neff, and subsequent correction of the date of a key memo whose existence Neff first revealed, provides more timeline clues. For the first time, it seems more than plausible to suggest that D.A. Mike Nifong’s misbehavior extended beyond procedural misconduct.
Tuesday, August 8, 2006
The Soucie Memo
At a time when most reporters in the state have either moved on to other matters or—as in the case of the Durham Herald-Sun—seemed to uncritically evaluate the motives and statements of D.A. Mike Nifong, one North Carolina journalist has consistently been ahead of the pack: the N&O’s Joseph Neff.
Monday, August 7, 2006
CT Developments
I have a piece on the homepage placing the travails of Joe Lieberman in historical context--in the last 46 years, only 19 senators have been denied renomination by their party. A poll out this morning shows that Lieberman has sliced challenger Ned Lamont's lead in half (from 13 points to 6), suggesting that perhaps he might be able to recover tomorrow.
If he doesn't, though, I'd suggest it's less because of his stand on Iraq per se and more because of the themes illustrated in this devastating video. Until very recently, Lieberman seems to have delighted in having become the Republicans' favorite Democrat. His peculiar attempts to backtrack from that stance haven't been convincing, as in his absurd claim yesterday that when he was referring to Karl Rove and not to Democratic critics of the war when said in a WSJ editorial, "In matters of war, we undermine presidential credibility at our nation's peril." Perhaps the visits to CT on Lieberman's behalf of such liberal icons as Max Cleland, Barbara Boxer, and Bill Clinton will allow the senator to scrape through, though as of now, the race would seem a toss-up.
Boasting of Closed-Mindedness
Duke president Richard Brodhead—having declined to protest a system in which local authorities refuse to follow their own procedures when investigating his own institution's students—now has publicly claimed that three Duke students will have the opportunity “to be proved innocent” in a situation that “only the criminal justice system can resolve.” In the Alice-in-Wonderland world that is Durham justice, such sentiments, which turn American judicial philosophy on its head, are all too common—as in a peculiar editorial from the Durham Herald-Sun, which praised D.A. Mike Nifong for stating at a recent press conference, “I have not backed off from my initial assessment of the case.” This comment provided a “boost of confidence” to those, like the Herald-Sun editorial board, who support Nifong.
Sunday, August 6, 2006
Changing Pictures
Reuters today has admitted that it doctored a photograph of Beirut to intensify the effects of Israeli bombing. The caption: "Smoke billows from burning buildings destroyed during an overnight Israeli air raid on Beirut's suburbs." The same photographer had snapped pictures for Reuters at Qana last week.
Little Green Footballs has an easy-to-follow photo summary of the affair--which raises some troubling questions. We know the BBC and Arab media are biased against Israel. CNN coverage can occasionally get on the unusual side, especially in its International channel. (I recently saw an interview with a reporter for the Lebanese Broadcast Corporation, in which the CNN anchor asked him how he verified his stories. His response: from his personal knowledge of events in Lebanon, from the official statements of Hezbollah, and from the official statements of Lebanese security. The obvious follow-up question--"is there a reason you speak only to one side?"--went unasked.) Now Reuters joins the list. I wonder what steps the organization will take to guard against such bias in the future.
Friday, August 4, 2006
Race and Tennessee
Yesterday's primary in Tennessee (which has to be the only state to hold a primary on a Thursday) was notable in three respects: a comparative moderate, Bob Coker, captured the Republican nomination, diminishing Democratic chances of taking the seat; Congressman Harold Ford, Jr. easily won the Democratic nomination, as he hopes to succeed where Harvey Gantt and Ron Kirk failed, and become the first African-American elected to the Senate from the Old Confederacy; and a white candidate, state Rep. Steve Cohen, narrowly won the Democratic primary for Ford's old seat, even though the district is majority minority.
Scapegoating
Richard Brodhead’s recent denial of “scapegoating” the lacrosse team seems unsustainable. In the Duke president’s public response to Friends of Duke University, the sole evidence that he cited to substantiate his claim that he hasn't scaegoated the team was the existence of the Coleman Committee report. But he had described this document to the University community as favorable to the lacrosse team only in that it did not “confirm the worst allegations against this team”—which, of course, were that three players committed gang rape and dozens of others covered it up. Many people would consider Brodhead’s failure to mention that the report detailed the players’ positive academic performance, excellent relations with Duke staff, and extensive record of community service confirmation of the charge of his scapegoating the team.
Wednesday, August 2, 2006
Kansas Chaos
There were no significant races in Kansas' primary yesterday--except for the primaries for the state Board of Education. If there's ever an example of why BOE's should not be publicly elected, it's Kansas. Creationists lost their 6-4 majority on the board when an open seat went to a supporter of teaching evolution and one creationist board member (who had labeled evolution a "nice bedtime story") narrowly lost. So, no doubt, in early 2007, the new board will change Kansas' standards back to real science--making this the fourth shift in Kansas' science standards in the last decade.
Tuesday, August 1, 2006
More Fredonia
I posted a few days back on the troubling situation at SUNY-Fredonia, which denied Professor Stephen Kershnar promotion to full professor on grounds of insufficient "service," pointing to several Kershnar op-eds critical of the campus administration's policies.
This is as transparent an academic freedom case as is imaginable: a professor publicly criticized the university's "diversity" policies, and the university responded by citing that criticism to deny him promotion. Remarks in the Inside Higher Ed comment section on the case were chilling: Roger Bowen criticized not Fredonia but Kershnar, who tried to work out a compromise where his op-ed pieces would be pre-screened for accuracy; regular commenter "UnApologetically Tenured" fretted that the case could undermine support for the badly needed "collegiality" criterion. U.T. never said why he/she disagreed with Bowen and the AAUP that using collegiality inherently threatens academic freedom, but promised that he/she only wanted to use collegiality only to fire "malevolent," rather than benevolent, colleagues. How reassuring.
The Brodhead Files
It’s easy, if wholly appropriate, to criticize the Group of 88. Indeed, a recent parody imagines the look of their infamous “listening” ad/public denunciation had race/class/gender “groupthink” not dominated Duke’s faculty. That signatory Alex Rosenberg subsequently claimed that Group members fully understood that D.A. Mike Nifong was exploiting the case for political purposes but chose nonetheless to publicly denounce their own students renders the Group’s actions even more unconscionable.
Sunday, July 30, 2006
Teachers for What?
Tim (all religious people are "moral retards") Shortell appears to have found a new calling--serving as web/blog master for a new site called Teachers for a Democratic Society. A few days back, Ralph mentioned the group's new crusade, a petition on behalf of Ward Churchill. Brooklyn provost Roberta ("teaching is a political act") Matthews will be pleased to see that the college is substantially over-represented, with nine signatories.
Saturday, July 29, 2006
Ney and Ahmadinejad
A few years ago, Ohio congressman Bob Ney attracted widespread ridicule after he used his position as chair of the House Administration Committee to demand that all House restaurants change their menus to sell "Freedom Fries" and "Freedom Toast," as a way to express displeasure with French opposition to the Iraq war. Congressman Ney, obviously, now has bigger things to worry about than the House restaurant menus.
Friday, July 28, 2006
The Steele Door Shuts
Among other storylines, 2006 was supposed to be the year of the black Republican. Former Steeler wide receiver Lynn Swann pushed aside Pennsylavnia's former lieutenant governor (and GOP gubernatorial candidate) Bill Scranton to capture the Republican nomination against Ed Rendell. In Ohio, Secretary of State Ken Blackwell sailed to victory in what started out as a closely contested primary. In Michigan, state party leaders were excited about the candidacy of evangelical minister Keith Butler. And, in the party's greatest coup, Lieutenant Governor Michael Steele, who played a key role in Bob Ehrlich's 2002 upset win in the Maryland governor race, was persuaded to jump into the race to succeed retiring Dem Paul Sarbanes.
Thursday, July 27, 2006
mikenifong.com
Campaign websites, obviously, seek to offer a positive spin, usually by highlighting candidates’ strengths and downplaying or ignoring their weaknesses. Take the sites of two of the most ethically challenged figures from this House election cycle, Ohio Republican Bob Ney and West Virginia Democrat Alan Mollohan. Ney’s site touts his using his “positions of influence” to tend to local concerns. Similarly, Alan Mollohan’s website boasts, “His senior position on the Appropriations Committee allows Congressman Mollohan to fund hundreds of millions of dollars in economic development projects throughout north central West Virginia.” Neither site frames the candidates as champions of an ethical Congress: most voters might not follow the day-to-day affairs of politics closely, but they’re not stupid.
Wednesday, July 26, 2006
Strange Doings in Fredonia
FIRE has issued a public release, picked up this morning by Inside Higher Ed and the Chronicle regarding the bizarre decision by SUNY-Fredonia's president to deny promotion (to full professor) to philosophy professor Stephen Kershnar. The university admitted that Kershnar was an excellent teacher and had sufficient shcolarly publications to merit promotion. His offense? Publishing articles critical of the administration's policies, thereby, according to Fredonia's spokesperson, failing the University's "community service" requirement. According to both stories, the two sides are in agreement about Kershnar's alleged offenses.
Sunday, July 23, 2006
Foreign Policy Misc.
An answer to Oscar's post a couple of weeks ago on the Mexican election comes in this week's New Republic, which profiles the post-election strategy of defeated candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Leon Krauze noted that when he was well ahead in the polls, López Obrador campaigned as a strong democrat. "When it comes to democracy, you either win or lose," said he. "I'm a democrat and I've always said so. Yes, we will respect the [Mexican electoral tribunal] IFE's ruling." Krauze concludes:
To some, López Obrador's bet appears to hinge on diminishing Calderón's legitimacy, thereby hindering Mexico's governability for the next six years. Tainted by a supposed fraud, a Calderón presidency would not go far, paving the way for a López Obrador return in 2012. Simply put, the PRD's candidate seems to be gambling with national paralysis for the sake of his own political future. What a curious bet for a self-proclaimed democrat.
Court TV Will Have the Answer
I haven't commented much on the media coverage of the Duke lacrosse case, in part because several other bloggers (John in Carolina, Lead
and Gold) have analyzed the topic much better than I could have. But this morning, a disturbing column appeared, penned by Bob Ashley, the editor of the Durham Herald-Sun. Ashley's remarks seemed worthy of notice--partly because of their exceedingly narrow conception of what constitutes the "legal process"; partly because they might explain the remarkably passive attitude that the local press has exhibited in this case. (The work of the N&O's Joseph Neff stands in stark relief to this pattern.) The editorial pages of both the N&O and the Herald-Sun have hardly been imitators of Ben Bradlee in speaking truth to power.
Thursday, July 20, 2006
More McKinney
The website of Cynthia McKinney, unexpectedly facing a runoff election in Georgia's 4th District, has just posted a bulletin to "Team McKinney" voters:
It's time! Refuse to Lose!As you know, there will be a runoff election in the 4th District of Georgia on Tuesday August 8th. I will be pitted against a mostly unknown and unproven opponent, who will nonetheless have the unanimous backing of big national media and national money. The media and money behind my opponent will do their utmost to polarize the election along racial and party lines. To win, they must provoke a stampede of Republican voters to the polls on August 8th. To accomplish this, they must and will portray not just my voice, but yours too, as dangerous, unpatriotic and downright loony.
The previous announcement on the website? "One persistent problem with the Diebold electronic voting machines is their tendency to cast votes against the intentions of the voter. The voting day in Cynthia McKinney's primary began with voters complaining that their votes for McKinney weren't being cast for her, but instead for her opponent. Interesting, no complaints have been lodged that this is happening in reverse--that is, that the computers are registering McKinney votes intended for any one of her opponents."
It doesn't take the media to portray McKinney as "downright loony."
Wednesday, July 19, 2006
Poetic Justice in Georgia
When 2006 dawned, it looked as if yesterday’s primary in Georgia would be a sleepy affair. Republican governor Sonny Perdue seemed like a strong favorite for re-election. Neither of the state’s senators faced re-election. None of the state’s members of Congress seemed likely to encounter strong primary opposition.
Seven months makes a big difference. The GOP primary for lieutenant governor featured the implosion of Ralph Reed—undone not by liberals but instead by Christian conservatives disgusted by revelations from the Abramoff inquiry, which showed how Reed’s Christianism took a back seat to his pursuit of money. And in the Democratic primary for the 4th district, Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney has been forced into a runoff by a badly underfunded challenger. McKinney, of course, is a very controversial figure, but this race looked like a shoo-in before she decided to strike a Capitol Police Officer who asked her to go through a security checkpoint on a day when she wasn’t wearing her members’ ID.
Georgia voters have, in my opinion, made some peculiar choices in recent years, especially in the 2002 Senate election. Yet yesterday they delivered some appropriate poetic justice to two of the more disreputable politicians of recent times.
Open Letter to Brodhead
Today's Duke Chronicle features an open letter to President Richard Brodhead and Duke's Board of Trustees. Sponsored by Friends of Duke University, a grassroots organization, the letter urges the Brodhead administration to do more to speak up for Duke students, in part by "formally demand[ing] that Mr. Nifong immediately correct, to the extent now possible, the grave errors that he has committed to date." The letter also notes that beyond acknowledging bad conduct by the lacrosse team, as he has repeatedly done, Brodhead needs to "call attention to the larger, more positive, context the [Coleman] committee found” about the team. In general, the letter advocates a more robust response by Duke to the crisis, asking the institution to use its formal but especially informal powers on behalf of both itself and its students.
Thursday, July 13, 2006
North Carolina Norms
One month ago, Duke law professor James Coleman expressed his concern about the circumstances under which the lacrosse case accuser identified the three defendants. “According to the police account of the identification,” he noted, “the police officer who presided over the proceedings told the alleged victim at the outset that he wanted her to look at people the police had reason to believe attended the party. Thus, the police not only failed to include people they knew were not suspects among the photographs shown the woman, they told the witness in effect that there would be no such ‘fillers’ among the photographs she would see. This strongly suggests that the purpose of the identification process was to give the alleged victim an opportunity to pick three members of the lacrosse team who could be charged. Any three students would do; there could be no wrong choice.”
Wednesday, July 12, 2006
The Strange Barrett Case
Inside Higher Ed has a review of the odd case of Kevin Barrett, who has been cleared to teach a course this fall at the University of Wisconsin. In the class, Islam: Religion and Culture, Barrett will cover, among other topics, his claim that the United States plotted 9/11.
Monday, July 10, 2006
Teaching to the Audience?
As Ralph noted below, Mark Bauerlein has a stimulating piece in today’s IHE. Bauerlein notes the hypocrisy of many on the cultural left, who demand to analyze the language of outside people and institutions but bristle when anyone attempts to analyze their own language. As Bauelein asks of today’s campus majorities,
Have they lived so long and so closely to “social justice,” “social change,” “queer,” “whiteness,” and “gender equality” that they do not recognize them as loaded terms? Have they imbibed the political currents of the campus so thoroughly that they regard a polemical phrasing in a course description as merely a lively description?
Saturday, July 8, 2006
More on Mexico
Today's Times features a peculiar editorial from NYU professor Greg Grandin, who urges the United States to refrain from recognizing the declared winner in Mexico's recent election, Felipe Calderón. Instead, Grandin wants Washington to call for Mexico to hold the recount advocated by the runner-up leftist candidate, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. That Grandin describes López Obrador as a "center-left candidate" (on that ideological spectrum, Hillary Clinton would be a reactionary conservative) gives a sense of where he's coming from ideologically.
Wednesday, July 5, 2006
Shameless
With Houston Baker having officially departed Duke for Vanderbilt, the lacrosse team’s two most outspoken critics on the Duke faculty are Orin Starn and Peter Wood. The duo have something else in common: they both taught Reade Seligmann, one of the three targets of Mike Nifong’s quixotic crusade. In the last week, Starn and Wood again went public about lacrosse matters. But disappointment awaits anyone hoping the professors might find time to ask how, in the Alice-in-Wonderland world of Durham “justice,” charges could still be pending against one of their former students who has provided multiple, unimpeachable sources that he is demonstrably innocent. Instead, the Starn/Wood tag-team continued to do some volunteer p.r. work to boost support for Nifong’s viewpoint.
Tuesday, July 4, 2006
Full Circle in Connecticut
Joe Lieberman's recent announcement that he'll run as an independent if he loses the Democratic primary to insurgent Ned Lamont provides an interesting historic parallel for Leiberman's career. He holds the seat he now does in part due to a similar split within the Democratic Party over a foreign war.
CUNY News
The New York Post led yesterday with an editorial chastising Governor Pataki for his inexplicable reluctance to renominate Trustee Jeffrey Wiesenfeld to the CUNY Board of Trustees. Pataki seems to be using BOT spots to reward big donors in advance of his (sure-to-fail) bid for the GOP presidential nomination in 2008; one would think he would be more concerned about his legacy. Wiesenfeld has been an outspoken advocate for raising standards in CUNY--and he's also been willing to take on faculty defenders of the failed open-admissions/remediation policies of the 1970s and 1980s.
Monday, July 3, 2006
The Texas Failure
I have a piece on the homepage placing the Texas redistricting decision in historical context.
In many ways, it's possible to see the Texas decision as the end-point to a process begun by two key Warren Court decisions, Baker and Wesberry, which deemed it proper for the Court to intervene in the redistricting process to ensure fair representation. That said, some of the blame for the setback should fall on the plaintiffs--who gave Anthony Kennedy, the key vote in this case, a way out by simultaneously making a Voting Rights Act claim on two specific districts; and then weakened their case with a transparently absurd claim that mid-decade redistrictings should be held unconstitutional.
Whether or not the Court had a legal rationale for overturning the Texas map, the practical result is a real setback for anyone who hopes for competitive elections.
Sunday, July 2, 2006
The Grassley Plan
Fresh off its important work seeking to prevent the non-existent wave of flag-burning, Congress is tackling a new and important issue: taxing pimps. This idea is the brainchild of Charles Grassley, who has parlayed an upset victory in 1980 over John Culver into what appears to be a lifetime seat in the Senate.
Michelle Cottle ridicules the Grassley plan in the latest New Republic. Grassley's proposal would require pimps to be file W-2 forms for every prostitute they control. How, exactly, the IRS would enforce this provision is not entirely clear.
"According to Grassley," Cottle notes, "the move is 'a no-brainer.' Maybe--but probably not in the way the chairman means." Indeed.
Thursday, June 29, 2006
Roy Cooper's Silence
The Times’ Nicholas Kristof has compared Mike Nifong’s actions to the Scottsboro Boys trial; on the other coast, Chris Reed of the San Diego Union-Tribune has labeled Nifong “America’s worst district attorney,” a figure who, by “ruining three students' lives to win re-election . . . deserves to be pilloried every day the rest of his life.” Citing Nifong’s myriad procedural irregularities, blogger Johnsville News has ridiculed North Carolina as a “banana republic,” a point made more directly in a recently posted cartoon. A debate raged for several days before Wikipidea deleted an entry for a new verb: “nifonged,” defined as “the intentional railroading or harming of a person or persons for one's own gain.”
The BBC Closes Its Eyes
On a day when a group of Palestinian militants murdered an Israeli hostage in the West Bank, the Jerusalem Post provided a useful reminder of how BBC's leadership continues to defend its policy of not using the word "terrorist" to describe the deliberate killing of civilians.
Wednesday, June 28, 2006
Protecting the Flag
Yesterday's vote on the flag amendment to the Constitution captures much of what's gone wrong with American politics over the last two decades--an emphasis of symbolic matters over substance. Seventeen years out from the Supreme Court decision that said flag burning was protected speech, I haven't noticed an array of charred flags littering the country.
The roll call vote, however, was a fascinating one.
Tuesday, June 27, 2006
More Group of 88 Hypocrisy
There seems to be something of a tactical split developing among the Group of 88, the Duke faculty who issued a public statement in late March promising to “turn up the volume” and thanking campus protesters who had distributed a wanted poster containing photos of the lacrosse players while banging pots and pans outside one player’s residence, shouting, “Time to confess.”
Friday, June 23, 2006
The First Amendment Comes to Kentucky
The dumbest politician of the year award is a close call. One nominee would be Georgia congressman Lynn Westmoreland, who, in a recent interview with Stephen Colbert, spoke eloquently of his co-sponsorship of a bill to put up copies of the Ten Commandments in public buildings--and then could name only three of the then commandments when asked by Colbert.
But Westmoreland seems to be outdone by Kentucky governor Ernie Fletcher, who was elected on a promise to "clean up the mess in Frankfort" and promptly pardoned a host of his top aides after they were indicted. Now, Fletcher is making news after his cabinet secretary banned state employees' access to an anti-Fletcher political blog--even though pro-Fletcher blogs weren't blocked. Somehow, I don't think we'll be seeing a second Fletcher term.
Thursday, June 22, 2006
Turning on Nifong
Today’s hearing in the Duke lacrosse case did nothing to increase confidence in the integrity of the investigation. Mike Nifong admitted in open court that no toxicology report existed—despite having previously hinted to Newsweek that the accuser had been given a date rape drug. The district attorney added that, more than two months after indictments, one of the case’s two police investigators still had not prepared his notes. Nifong divulged an early meeting between the accuser and the two investigators for which no notes would be turned over (a decision backed by the judge, Nifong’s former boss). And one defense attorney stated that the new material contained reference to a third photo ID session—the first two of which, also confined to lacrosse players, yielded no identification at all, the third which violated several guidelines of the state’s Actual Innocence Commission.
Wednesday, June 21, 2006
Disconnected Dots
On Monday, Ralph mentioned the peculiar Inside Higher Ed column from Alan Jones, dean of the faculty and professor of psychology and neuroscience at Pitzer College. The piece provided a conspiratorial analysis of how the dreaded “well-funded right-wing think-tanks” seek to take over the academy. Leaving aside the logical discrepancies in Jones’ argument, to which Ralph’s post provided a link, Jones’ closing suggested a figure whose viewpoint is not, to put it mildly, mainstream: “The academy stands today as one of the last spaces in America where the democratic ideas that shape the social, economic and political fabric of the nation can be openly and independently debated on the basis of their merits and without coercion or distortion from vested economic and political interests.”
Monday, June 19, 2006
World Cup Anomaly
Following his team's 6-0 defeat to Argentina and subsequent elimination from World Cup play, Coach Ilija Petkovic announced his resignation. In many ways, Petkovic's move was a formality: as coach of Serbia and Montenegro, he represented a country that no longer exists. Between the end of the qualifying round and the start of the World Cup, voters in Montenegro voted to secede and establish their own state. So, technically, this year's World Cup featured teams from 31 countries and one former nation.
Sunday, June 18, 2006
Nifong and the Blogs
Testifying to his p.r. savvy, it used to be said that the most dangerous place in Washington was between Chuck Schumer and a microphone. In the run-up to the Democratic primary, the most dangerous place in Durham was between Mike Nifong and a microphone. Between the initial reports of the alleged rape and the first indictments, the district attorney gave more than 70 interviews. Since securing his renomination, however, he has refused public comment, citing state ethics guidelines. Nifong has not explained why, after making 70 highly prejudicial statements, he suddenly decided to start adhering to Rule 3.8(f) of the North Carolina Rules of Professional Conduct, which requires prosecutors to “refrain from making extrajudicial comments that have a substantial likelihood of heightening public condemnation of the accused.”
Saturday, June 17, 2006
Shifting the Goalposts
As the presumed “facts” initially associated with the Duke lacrosse case have melted away, those on campus who aggressively condemned the lacrosse players have found themselves in an uncomfortable position. While a few columnists (such as David Brooks and Nicholas Kristof) have revised their opinions in light of the Coleman Committee report and the recently released prosecution documents, no one at Duke has publicly done so. A small minority have ignored the new material, and even leveled new charges against the lacrosse players. But most still condemn the lacrosse players, though now with a focus on issues relating to alcohol—acting as if their earlier critiques, which centered on allegations of the players’ alleged racism or sexism, or insinuations about the likelihood of rape, never occurred. This shifting of the goalposts is at best intellectually dishonest, and at worst shameful.
Wednesday, June 14, 2006
Academic Freedom, BYU-Style
Jeffrey Nielsen is a practicing Mormon who has been an adjunct professor of philosophy at BYU. He recently published an op-ed criticizing the LDS leadership for supporting a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. The op-ed was written in respectful tones, and based its case on arguments rather than emotion, and avoided harsh criticism of the integrity of the LDS leadership.
Tuesday, June 13, 2006
Coleman Tears Down the Wall
In spectacular fashion, by Professor of Law James Coleman has shattered the Duke faculty’s “blue wall of silence” regarding Mike Nifong’s myriad procedural improprieties. The former Democratic chief counsel to the House Ethics Committee called in this morning’s News and Observer for a special prosecutor to replace Nifong: "I don't think he's showing detached judgment. I personally have no confidence in him." Coleman added, correctly, “I think any decent prosecutor in North Carolina could handle this case. It's important to have somebody that people respect, someone who has no dog in the fight. It has to be resolved in a way that people have confidence in the outcome." He specifically pointed out that he was not urging dismissing the charges. Yet, in practical terms, it’s hard to imagine any prosecutor other than Nifong pursuing this case.
Sunday, June 11, 2006
The AAUP and Its Survey
I don't support the legislative ABOR--both because I think it would cause more problems than it solves and because I think it misdiagnoses the main problem of the academy, the increasing homogeneity of pedagogical approaches in staffing decisions, and the accompanying, unprecedented, attempt to restrict the range of questions that the academy explores. Yet I don't find the AAUP's approach all that more compelling--under the leadership of Roger Bowen, the organization has turned a blind eye to threats to academic freedom from within the academy, come close to saying (as in the Shortell case) that academic freedom means that academics should be free from anyone outside the academy criticizing their views, however unintellectual those views are, and has maintained that outsiders have no right to know about internal academic affairs.
As part of its anti-Horowitz campaign, the AAUP commissioned a survey on public attitudes toward the academy. A recent AAUP press release trumpeted the findings as largely, though not wholly, a vindication of the organization's strategy. A closer look at the figures, however, and an examination of the questions left unasked, suggests a more complicated picture.
Wow
Nicholas Kristof from behind today's Times firewall:
"As more facts come out about the Duke lacrosse scandal, it should prompt some deep reflection," about not just racism and sexism, "but also about the perniciousness of any kind of prejudice that reduces people — yes, even white jocks — to racial caricatures. This has not been the finest hour of either the news media or academia: too many rushed to make the Duke case part of the 300-year-old narrative of white men brutalizing black women . . . Let's look at facts . . . One of the defendants is Reade Seligmann, whose cellphone made at least seven calls between 12:05 and 12:14," which is "a pretty good alibi . . . Poring over a half-dozen police reports and witness reports filed in court in dribs and drabs, the latest just a few days ago, . . . as I see it, [Nifong] may be the real culprit here," since he "may have had a motive for prosecuting a case that wouldn't otherwise merit it: using it as a campaign tool . . . Unfortunately, many in the commentariat started by assuming that the lacrosse players were thugs. Prof. Houston Baker, who is now leaving Duke, demanded that the university dismiss the coaches and players as a response to 'abhorrent sexual assault, verbal racial violence, and drunken white male privilege loosed among us.' . . . So let's take a deep breath and step back. Black hobos shouldn't have been stereotyped [in the 1930s], and neither should white jocks today."
First David Brooks, now Kristof. No cracks yet in the "blue wall of silence" that has characterized Duke's 500-plus person faculties of law and arts and sciences, not one of whom has publicly questioned the procedural improprieties that have marred this case; and no indication at all that political or legal authorities in North Carolina are willing to step in and restrain Nifong. But perhaps things are changing.
Friday, June 9, 2006
California Nightmare
Today's Washington Post brings a thoughtful column from EJ Dionne on two overlooked ballot questions in last Tuesday's California primary. Golden State voters rejected referenda to increase funding for local libraries and to establish mandatory preschools for four-year-olds. There's a good-government argument against both: as Dionne notes, California has struggled over the last 20 years with budgeting by referendum, a tool that was designed to consider policy, not spending, questions. But the results also showed a suspicion of government spending that, Dionne argues, should alarm liberals.
Comings and Goings at Duke
Coming: The men’s lacrosse team, which will resume play in spring 2007. For an interim period, while a national search for a new coach occurs, the team will be led by former All-American and assistant coach Kevin Cassese, who appears to have been an inspired choice. (At the press conference introducing his appointment, Cassese became the second Duke administrator, faculty member, or coach—after women’s lacrosse coach Kerstin Kimel—to publicly express support for the players targeted by Durham D.A. Mike Nifong.) By this point, it’s clear that any response from Duke other than restoring the program would have given legitimacy to what has been, to date, a thoroughly illegitimate investigation by Nifong’s office. The state NAACP protested the move, arguing that Duke president Richard Brodhead needed to review the findings of his investigatory committee. Yet that committee, chaired by former (Democratic) House Ethics Committee counsel James Coleman, explicitly recommended the program’s immediate restoration. It seems as if state NAACP President William Barber II hadn’t read the report before issuing his press release.
Thursday, June 8, 2006
Dispositions Victory
While I was in Israel, several people emailed me with word of a stunning reversal by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education. NCATE decided to nullify its post-2002 requirement that the dozens of Education departments around the country that list “social justice” as a goal to “include some measure of a candidate’s commitment to social justice” when evaluating the “dispositions” of their students. The organization acted only under the threat that its dispositions policy might prompt the Department of Education to revoke its ability to accredit Ed programs—and thereby put it out of business. A coalition of groups, including FIRE, NAS, and ACTA, had formed to testify publicly against NCATE at its reauthorization hearings.
Internet and Research
It was just announced that the JFK Library plans, over the next 10 years, to post online 48 million pages of documents, as well as photographic and video material. The initiative is part of a pilot program that might serve as a model for other presidential libraries.
As someone who works in 20th century US history using government sources, it amazes me how many documents have become available online in just the last five years (the FRUS series is the best example). If the JFK program succeeds, this could be a revolutionary development in opening a new array of material not only to students, but also to scholars whose research interests might have not justified a trip to Boston to look at the material, but who could easily incorporate some online sources into their projects.
Saturday, May 27, 2006
Gagging in Durham
Fox News reports that Durham D.A. Mike Nifong is considering a gag order for the Duke lacrosse case. The request would have more credibility had the district attorney not made 70 public statements, many of them so inflammatory that an on-line forum archived them , in the weeks before the Democratic primary for county district attorney.
Having captured the nomination, Nifong has no continued political need to speak out; he is also confronting increasingly troubling revelations about his peculiar investigation. It turns out that when he “hinted” to Newsweek that the police file would show the accuser was given a date rape drug, it appears that he either (a) hadn’t read the file, which contains no toxicology report; or (b) deliberately misled the reporter. Thursday, defense lawyers filed a motion stating that the only mention of the accuser describing her alleged attackers came in the following note by a police investigator: “I asked her questions trying to follow up on a better description of the suspects, she was unable to remember anything further about the suspects.” So, Nifong either (a) didn’t turn over all case material to the defense, despite informing the court he had done so; or (b) dealt with an accuser who couldn’t give even a basic description of her alleged attackers, but then had no trouble doing so three weeks after the incident at a photo ID that blatantly violated state guidelines. And yesterday, another defense motion revealed that a previously unreported photo ID session (which also ignored state guidelines, in that it consisted solely of photos downloaded from the Duke lacrosse website) occurred on March 21, and police records from that session revealed that the accuser did not identify at least one of the arrested players, Dave Evans, as among her alleged attackers. As Ralph Luker reminds us, the latter two items come from the defense alone—though in the form not of leaks but of formal court motions, subject to sanctions if they contain demonstrably false statements.
Thursday, May 25, 2006
The Churchill Response
Ward Churchill has posted his somewhat bizarre response to the University of Colorado's investigation against him. The basic line is unsurprising: that the university was politically motivated; that any misconduct he committed hadn't been caught before his controversial remarks, so it couldn't have been serious; that he was denied due process, for a reason or reasons unknown. He hilariously chastises the committee for failing to perform its role as a "nonadversarial" body, even though his own adversarial conduct prevented that from happening. The Churchill line was anticipated by comments in Inside Higher Ed from Prof. Tim Shortell and a figure calling him/herself "Unapologetically Tenured," neither of whom seem to like what either Ralph or I had to say about the case.
But apart from blatantly distorting the committee's findings (which he essentially characterizes as agreeing (!) with his conclusions), a couple of the lines in the report are breathtaking, even for Churchill.
Tuesday, May 23, 2006
La Follette, Taft, Gruening, and . . . William Jefferson
During World War I, Robert La Follete risked his career to stand up for congressional prerogatives--first in the run-up to World War I, where he challenged Woodrow Wilson's authority to wage an undeclared war; then during the war, when he upheld the authority of senators to speak on issues of the day against threats to expel him from the upper chamber for his continued dissent. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Robert Taft fought a courageous if unsuccessful battle against Harry Truman's efforts to consolidate the warmaking and treatymaking powers in the executive branch. During the 1960s, Ernest Gruening articulated a case for a robust congressional role in government based on the innovative use of procedure, intellectual forcefulness, and the appropriations power.
In recent years, those of us concerned with the erosion of congressional power have been looking for an intellectual leader in the legislature. Robert Byrd is the figure most frequently cast in this role--but the West Virginia senator is in many ways a poor choice: during the Vietnam War, Nixon officials referred to him as a "king's man," and he repeatedly sponsored amendments to weaken Congress' role in international affairs.
Monday, May 22, 2006
Duke's Party Line
This week’s National Journal contains the single best analysis of the Duke case yet to appear. Penned by national correspondent and senior writer Stuart Taylor, the article is direct. “When a petty-tyrant prosecutor has perverted and prolonged the legal process without disclosing his supposed evidence, and when academics and journalists have joined in smearing presumptively innocent young men as racist, sexist brutes—in the face of much contrary evidence—it's not too early to offer tentative judgments.”
The article describes a rogues’ gallery headed by Mike Nifong, condemned for “gross prosecutorial misconduct” in Taylor’s earlier examination of events in Durham. But Taylor does much more than simply discuss the case: he now turns his attention to the behavior of Duke and the national media as well. He correctly characterizes the document produced by William Bowen and Julius Chambers as an attempt to “slime the lacrosse players in a report . . . that is a parody of race-obsessed political correctness.” The Group of 88 earns a spot in Taylor’s rogues’ gallery for “exuding the anti-white racism and disdain for student-athletes that pollutes many college faculties,” all while “treating the truth of the rape charge almost as a given.” And he faults the national media for having “published grossly one-sided accounts of the case while stereotyping the lacrosse players as spoiled, brutish louts and glossing over the accuser's huge credibility problems.”
Sunday, May 21, 2006
Israel and the University Summit, I
I’m in DC as a summit scholar for Hillel’s Summit on the University and the Jewish Community, which features what could in understated fashion be termed a high-powered program. I should note that I’m here courtesy of Brooklyn’s wonderful Hillel director, Linda Askenazi, and with special thanks to Lynne Harrison for sponsoring me.
The conference theme is linking Jewish distinctiveness with university values—an approach for which Askenazi’s Brooklyn organization is already well known. The conference opened with several testimonials from Hillel directors or students from around the country talking about their success in recent Hillel programs designed to produce an inclusive atmosphere that would welcome both Jewish and non-Jewish students to Hillel. But this has been the approach at Brooklyn’s Hillel as long as I have taught there, so it’s good to see Brooklyn serving as a model for positive behavior.
Saturday, May 20, 2006
Nagin Wins
In a racially polairzed runoff, by a 52-48 margin, Ray Nagin has been re-elected mayor of New Orleans. I'm not sure anyone could do the job: Nagin certainly has given little indication that he's up to the task, and in some respects his victory could be interpreted as heartening to incompetent politicians everywhere.
The figures have to be alarming for Louisiana Democrats. Before Katrina, 2/3 of New Orleans was black. Now, at least in terms of voters, that percentage has dropped to roughly 50%. Louisiana is one of three Southern states (along with Florida and Arkansas) in which national Democrats have a chance; these are the only three of the South's 11 states to send any Democrats to the Senate. Yet the Democratic margin in Louisiana has been perilously thin: Senator Mary Landrieu has twice won election with less than 52 percent of the vote; Governor Kathleen Blanco likewise failed to clear 52 percent in her 2003 triumph. So with any diminution of the number of African-American voters in New Orleans--can the refugees resettled in Atlanta, Dallas, or New Orleans really be expected to return?--this state moves from marginal to pretty strong GOP territory. Since Nagin's 52% percent suggests that the black vote total has dropped, Landrieu might have real problems in 2008.
Friday, May 19, 2006
Nifong and the Black Vote
The one time I've attended a Supreme Court oral argument came in 2002; with a student group from Brooklyn, I saw the arguments for Republican Party of Minnesota vs. White. The case involved a Minnesota law that forbade candidates for the state's elected judiciary from announcing their positions on issues that might come before the bench. Writing for the majority, Justice Scalia declared the law unconstitutional, holding that while opposition to judicial elections might be reasonable, "the First Amendment does not permit it to achieve its goal by leaving the principle of elections in place while preventing candidates from discussing what the elections are about."
Republican Party of Minnesota dealt with the obvious tension between the legal and political arenas—a tension that, in a different way, has played a key role in the Duke case. While both of Mike Nifong's vanquished opponents, as well as opposing counsel, have claimed that political motives influenced the district attorney's actions, Nifong's motives for his peculiar behavior remain unclear, and, indeed, unfathomable. But election data suggests that his handling of the allegations probably ensured Nifong's renomination—though only because of North Carolina's unique election law and the peculiarities of a three-way contest in a racially divided electorate.
Thursday, May 18, 2006
Bush Approval Rating
Andrew Sullivan has a link to the latest Survey USA state polls of Bush approval ratings. The President has positive approval ratings in only three states--Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming. (When you're a Republican president and your disapproval numbers are larger than your approval numbers in Oklahoma, you know you're in trouble.)
The most signficant result, however, comes in the two states carried by Bush in 2004 where his approval rating currently is the lowest: Ohio, at 32%; and Missouri, at a stunning 29%. Perhaps not coincidentally, those two states have highly vulnerable Republican senators attempting to win reelection in 2006: Mike Dewine in Ohio, Jim Talent in Missouri. Based on these numbers, and the fact that Missouri's Claire McCaskill is a stronger challenger than Ohio's Sherrod Brown, I'd say Talent might now be the more vulnerable of the duo, but clearly both are in tough shape.
The approval numbers for the other states with competitive Senate elections this year: Nebraska, 47%; Montana, 46%; Arizona, 39%; Tennessee, 37%; Minnesota, 33%; Maryland, 29%; Pennsylvania, 28%; New Jersey, 26%; Rhode Island, 23% (Bush's worst state).
The Silent Boycott Begins
The British faculty union NATFHE has yet to vote on its proposed resolution for a "voluntary" boycott against all Israeli universities and academics whose views on national security issues don't meet with NATFHE's approval. But a "silent boycott" by resolution supporters already has begun.
On May 12, Professor Richard Seaford of the University of Exeter was asked to review a book for the Israeli journal Scripta Classica Israelica. Both the author of the book, D.M. Schaps, and the editor of the journal, Daniela Dueck, are professors at Bar-Ilan University. Seaford responded as follows.
Dear Daniela Dueck,Alas I am unable to accept your kind invitation, for reasons that you may not like. I have, along with many other British academics, signed the academic boycott of Israel, in the face of the brutal and illegal expansionism, and the slow-motion ethnic cleansing, being practised by your government. There is of course nothing personal in this. I am aware of the honest arguments for and against a boycott, and that even some Israeli academics support the boycott and many do not. Whatever your views, I hope you will understand that my view is based on a widely shared moral outrage. You are welcome to report my position (if you wish) to anyone you may like to.
With best wishes,
Richard Seaford
Wednesday, May 17, 2006
AFT Follies
A union newspaper is something of an oxymoron: journalists are supposed to reveal the truth, but union publications must reflect the party line. It seems to me, however, that a union paper ought, at least, to pretend to follow basic principles of journalism.
The March/April edition of the AFT's "On Campus" featured a critique of David Horowitz's 101 Most Dangerous Professors. Two Brooklyn College profs made the list: Tim (all religious people are "moral retards") Shortell and Priya ("white English is the oppressors' language") Parmar. Neither Shortell nor Parmar could be seriously considered "dangerous": Shortell is more a caraciture of the tenured radical, while it was the policy Parmar implemented (dispositions), not the person, that is dangerous. Beyond that, though, the coverage of Parmar and Shortell didn't contain the errors of fact that characterized other sections of the book; Horowitz essentially relied on press accounts from the Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, and the New York Sun.
Monday, May 15, 2006
Where's the AG?
North Carolina's attorney general is Democrat Roy Cooper; under the state's somewhat peculiar prosecutorial structure, he has authority to take control of the Duke lacrosse case away from Durham DA Mike (Ahab) Nifong. It seems as if the time has come for Cooper to act.
ABC reports that today Nifong has obtained an indictment against a third player, David Evans, in the Duke case, who was identified by the accuser with 90% certainty. The accuser also claimed that the player had a mustache. Yet the defense says that it possesses photos from the day of the attack and several days before showing that the player had no mustache. As Ralph has pointed out, the defense could be lying--but this claim isn't a terribly difficult one to verify. Nifong, of course, has not sought a subpeona for the photos, and there's no sign that he requested copies of the photos from defense lawyers. Evans' attorney told WRAL, "I tried to meet with the D.A. this morning, and he was unavailable."
More to the point is this item from the ABC report: "In a hallway confrontation today at the Durham County courthouse, Nifong laced into defense lawyer Kerry Sutton in an expletive-laden tirade where he complained angrily about last Friday's defense news conference." This is not the behavior of a normal prosecutor. Nifong--he of the 70 press appearances in the weeks following the alleged attack--has also recently demanded that the press stay off his floor in the DA's office, while, for reasons that remain unclear, delaying handing over promised material to the defense by at least 33 days, until mid-June.
It's possible that Nifong possesses heretofore unrevealed evidence showing that a rape occurred in this case. But there's no evidence that a district attorney who launches into a public "expletive-laden tirade" against one of the most prominent defense lawyers in his jurisdiction (and one who actually backed Nifong in the primary) is capable of serving the interests of justice. Cooper should act now.
Update, 6.21pm. Defense attornney Jeralyn Merritt posts the following: "This was the most compelling and believable public statement of denial I have ever heard. Dave Evans' parents should be so proud of him. If this accuser is lying, she must be held criminally liable for ruining these young mens' reputation. This has seemed to me to be a bogus case from day 1. If she lied, what a travesty for all of the team members and for true rape victims everywhere."
Give Me Liberty, Or . . . forget it
This morning's Washington Post brings news of Patrick Henry College, a Christian college in Loudoun County (suburban DC), Virginia. Five professors recently quit--apparently before they could be fired--because they challenged the institution's argument that in academic affairs, the Bible must be the "ultimate standard." In a college of only 16 professors, this represents a 31% departure rate.
Founded by Michael Farris, a leader in Virginia's home school movement who was the GOP's unsuccessful nominee for lieutenant governor in 2001, Patrick Henry isn't exactly a mainstream institution: it prohibits "PDAs," or physical displays of affection, by students. The school also offers a bizarre, though unusually frank, definition of academic freedom: "the freedom for scholars holding similar worldviews to associate and in so doing to form a community of scholars actively pursuing truth in a collegial and cooperative fashion," since, after all, "Would a politically left-leaning feminist seek to be a contributing member of a community of conservative Thomists? Or vice versa?"
Saturday, May 13, 2006
DNA and Durham's Ahab
Flawed procedures often beget flawed results. The likelihood of the Duke lacrosse case confirming this maxim, indeed providing a record for future law students looking at how many procedural irregularities a prosecutor could commit in a single case, only continues to increase. In late April, Durham district attorney Mike Nifong requested that a court mandate all 46 white players on the Duke lacrosse team to give DNA samples. The filing cited the imperatives of clear-cut justice: “The DNA evidence requested will immediately rule out any innocent persons, and show conclusive evidence as to who the suspect(s) are in the alleged violent attack upon this victim.” A local court granted the order, even though Durham police appear to have made little effort to determine which of the 46 players even attended the party. Outside of Durham, people normally are not asked to give samples of their DNA based solely on their membership in a group.
Let's Be Corrupt
In a year where political corruption has formed a more important political theme than any election since 1974, it takes a good deal of doing to stand out from the crowd. But Kentucky governor Ernie Fletcher is trying as hard as he can.
Fletcher, a Republican, was elected in 2003 on a promise to "clean up the mess in Frankfort." And a mess it was--his Democratic predecessor, Paul Patton, had ended his term in disgrace after revelations of having ordered state audits of a nursing home owned by his former mistress, audits began only after the affair turned sour. Fletcher, however, might be making Bluegrass State residents long for the good old days.
Thursday, May 11, 2006
Another British Boycott?
Last year, the AUT, a British faculty union, attracted international condemnation when it passed a resolution demanding an academic boycott against two Israeli universities and all Israeli scholars at the two schools who failed to condemn the security policies of their government. Now, Britain's other major faculty union, the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education (NATFHE), has entered the fray. (NATFHE and AUT are in the process of merging.) The group is scheduled to vote on a resolution to urge a voluntary boycott against professors at all Israeli universities, as a way of protesting Israeli "apartheid policies, including construction of the exclusion wall and discriminatory educational practices." Ha'aretz reports that the resolution is expected to pass.
In the past decade, the only country against which NATFHE has considered a boycott is Israel. The conference is also considering a motion condemning the "outrageous bias" of the British government in opposing Hamas' victory in Palestinian elections--as if Britain, a liberal democracy, should have supported a party that embraces terrorism and whose charter calls for the destruction of its neighbor.
Wednesday, May 10, 2006
Nebraska Stunner
We might already have witnessed the biggest upset of 2006: in Nebraska's GOP gubernatorial primary, Congressman Tom Osborne lost, 50%-44%, to interim governor Dave Heineman. The former Cornhuskers football coach had won election to the House with majorities upwards of 70 percent; when this race began, he was considered a shoo-in and state Republican leaders pressured Heineman to defer the contest. But, as it turned out, having a background against the electoral equivalents of the creampuff football schedule that Osborne used to feature at Nebraska didn't serve him well: Heineman ran a steady campaign, and Osborne struggled to find his footing as the race tightened.
Tuesday, May 9, 2006
Duke's Dueling Reports
During the height of the Vietnam War, Foreign Relations Committee chairman J. William Fulbright established a subcommittee, chaired by Missouri senator Stuart Symington, to examine U.S. commitments abroad. Commentators jokingly referred to the Symington Subcommittee as "the Foreign Relations Subcommittee for Oversight of the Armed Services Committee," since its real purpose seemed to be challenging the viewpoint of John Stennis' hawkish Armed Services Committee.
Duke's version of the Symington Subcommittee was the Bowen/Chambers Committee, which released its report last night. Ostensibly created to review the Duke administration's response to the lacrosse scandal, the committee seemed to view itself as a "Duke Committee for Oversight of the Coleman Committee," the body that examined the behavior of the men's lacrosse team. After an investigation governed by procedures quite unfavorable to the lacrosse players, that committee sharply rebuked the lacrosse team's culture of excessive alcohol use but also praised the team members' academic achievements, community service, and on-campus behavior. That message didn't go over well with some quarters of the Duke community, many of whom were interviewed by William G. Bowen, former president of Princeton University, and Julius Chambers, former chancellor of North Carolina Central University. The duo's report challenges many of the Coleman Committee report's conclusions, though without engaging any of its rival report's evidence.
The House Historian's "District Office"
KC Johnson is professor of history at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center, and a contributor to the HNN group blog Cliopatria. His most recent book is Congress and the Cold War.
Today's Roll Call has a troubling article on the struggles of the newly created House Historian's Office. As some Cliopatria readers might recall, last year Speaker Hastert selected a distinguished historian, Robert Remini, to become the new House historian. The Roll Call story suggests that the Remini appointment isn't working out. (In the interests of disclosure, neither I nor anyone I knew applied for the House Historian's job.)
The House has tough competition on the Historical Office front: the Senate Historical Office, headed by veterans Richard Baker and Don Ritchie, is a scholar's dream. I can't recall a single instance during the writing of the three books I've done on Congress where the Senate Historical Office hasn't been able to provide whatever (usually arcane) information I needed, and almost always on the spot. It simply would not be possible to work on the history of the Cold War Congress without the office's ambitious oral and photo history programs, as well as its compilations of dozens of volumes of executive sessions of the Foreign Relations Committee and the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. And, of course, any historian or political scientist working on Congress knows that whenever we're in Washington, we can always drop by and see Ritchie or Baker if there's anything on the ground that we need. Perhaps there's a better example of an office devoted to institutional or public history around, but if there is, I haven't encountered it.
Sunday, May 7, 2006
Paging Atticus Finch?
In his column this week, Jason Whitlock, a Kansas City Star writer who regularly appears on ESPN’s Sports Reporters, laments, “If the Duke lacrosse players were black and the accuser were white, everyone would easily see the similarities between this case and the alleged crimes that often left black men hanging from trees in the early 1900s.” Regardless of the truthfulness of the allegations—Whitlock reiterates that neither he nor anyone else now knows what happened—“this case seems like an updated re-enactment of To Kill a Mockingbird.” After detailing the many “uncomfortable" aspects of D.A. Mike Nifong’s investigation, Whitlock argues that the civil rights movement didn’t occur “so that the poor, black and oppressed could surrender the moral high ground and attempt to inflict injustice on the privileged,” and he fears that what is happening in Durham is “justifying a [white racist] mind-set that states: Do it to them because they’d do it to you.” He concludes by urging African-Americans in Durham to reverse course, and start “pressuring the authorities to pursue justice in the Duke lacrosse case regardless of where that pursuit leads.”
Whitlock’s words would have little effect on the likes of Duke Professor Houston Baker, a member of the Group of 88 last heard from demanding that all players on the Duke lacrosse team be expelled from school. Baker has resurfaced to dismiss the recent Coleman Committee investigation of the men’s lacrosse team. The report’s apparent fault? It failed to uncover evidence to support the professor’s previous portrayal of the team as the embodiment of “violent, white, male, athletic privilege.” Baker fumed that the report “says they are model academic citizens -- they've been on the honor roll. But there has been underage drinking. There has been bad behavior.” (The latter claims could probably apply to 80 percent of Duke’s undergrads.) The committee’s report is not “nothing, but it's as close as you can get to nothing.”
Saturday, May 6, 2006
More Ohio
The Sunday Times has a good preview of the situation in Ohio after Tuesday's primary, painting a somewhat less optimistic view of Democratic chances in the state than I consider justitifed (especially regarding the candidacy of Zach Space, who won the primary to challenge embattled Congressman Bob Ney).
One exception exists, however. Last year, after they recruited him into the race, state and national Democratic party leaders turned against Paul Hackett, preferring the more conventional Sherrod Brown, a central Ohio congressman. Hackett eventually dropped his Senate run, but it's clear that Brown's liberal House record makes him a far less appealing statewide possibility than the anti-gun control, Gulf War veteran Hackett. It would be most ironic if a flawed decision by party leaders wound up costing the Democrats a chance to win the Senate.
Israel Lobby--Response, II
As a follow-up to Manan's post below, Ralph noted that I might "have a hard time shaking the suspicion that Walt and Mearshimer's paper is 'shoddy scholarship' because it takes a position that you don't support." My positions on Middle Eastern policy are hardly a secret to Cliopatria readers, though, regardless of its message, there are three aspects of the W/M piece that, I believe, justify the claim of shoddy scholarship. None of these, I should note, are original to me.
1.) To quote Daniel Drezner, W+M did "piss-poor, monocausal social science." In another of his posts, Drezner has a good time with the following assertion from W/M: "[T]he mere existence of the Lobby suggests that unconditional support for Israel is not in the American national interest. If it was, one would not need an organized special interest group to bring it about." In a PoliSci 101 exam, a student who offered that thesis to describe how American politics works would get an F. Or, consider this good synopsis of the W/M definition of the "Lobby" from the Harvard Crimson : "In their piece, the authors savaged those on both the political Left and Right, calling groups as diverse as the Brookings Institution and American Enterprise Institute, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal editorial boards, and Sen. Hillary R. Clinton, D-N.Y., and World Bank President Paul D. Wolfowitz members of the 'Israel Lobby.'" The definition is so amorphous as to be meaningless--it's as if anyone in public life who at any time said anything favorable about Israel is part of the "Lobby."
ABOR Shortcomings
As David Beito, Ralph Luker, and I have noted previously, there are lots of reasons to be skeptical of the ABOR concept. For me, pragmatic concerns are critical. First, in our current political environment, I see no way to extricate any legislatively backed ABOR from what Andrew Sullivan calls the GOP's "Christianist" wing. As we saw in Ohio and Florida, creationist legislators backed ABOR as a way of striking against evolution. Second, ABOR presumes that the central problem in today's academy is students being punished for expressing their political opinions in class. While such instances do occur--the Brooklyn dispositions case, the Cal.-Santa Cruz prof a couple years ago who gave extra credit to students who wrote anti-Bush letters--they are few and far between. And focusing on them distracts attention from the real problem: the framing of lines and the evolution of disciplines in such a way to restrict rather than expand intellectual inquiry.
Mark Baeurlein, author of what I consider the single most persuasive short critique of the contemporary academy, and David French, former FIRE president, expand on this second idea in recent posts at PhiBetaCons.
Thursday, May 4, 2006
The News and Observer Weighs In
Though I'm a minority among Cliopatriarchs on this score, I continue to believe that a considerable difference exists between criticizing procedural improprieties in an investigaton and rushing to judgment on the facts of the case, or failing to urge authorities to respect the due process rights of your own institution's students, as the Group of 88 faculty did at Duke.
This morning's Raleigh News and Observer raises the point about procedure as well, in its lead editorial. The first paragraph:
When someone lodges an official complaint that he, or she, has been the victim of a crime, the police and other authorities within the justice system are expected to respond with resourcefulness and determination. Yet their methods are supposed to be controlled by standards of fairness.The editorial reviews several "disturbing" procedural elements of the investigation; the editors might have elected to publish this article before the election.
Good News for CUNY
Colin Powell came to New York yesterday to announce a $1 million gift to his alma mater to jumpstart a policy center at City College that he helped found nine years ago. In addition to the gift, the center announced an expanded advisory council that includes such figures as James Baker; Tom Brokaw; Harold Evans; Richard Haass; Vernon Jordan; Henry Kissinger; Elie Wiesel; and Fareed Zakaria. It remains to be seen how aggressively the center will expand, but for CUNY this represents an extraordinary potential advancement.
At the press conference announcing the gift and advisory council, Powell made it quite clear that he supports the military critics of Donald Rumsfeld. He declined to comment on their demand that Rumsfeld resign, but pointedly said that they "have contributed to the public debate" with their remarks.
Wednesday, May 3, 2006
Chafe Chimes In
This morning’s Chronicle features an opinion piece by William Chafe on conditions at Duke. I’m a great admirer of Chafe’s scholarship, which I’ve frequently used in my classes. So of all the signatures on the Group of 88’s statement, his disappointed me the most.
Many of Chafe’s current comments are common sense. He argues that based on the undisputed facts, the lacrosse team deserved “censure and disciplinary action”—which, of course, it received, in the form of a cancellation of the season, the forced resignation of the coach, and resumption of the program under restrictions, behavior-related penalties as draconian as virtually any in intercollegiate athletics over the past 15 years. Chafe urges Duke to adopt a stricter behavior code, to forbid things like students hiring strippers—a commendable idea, though probably one that’s not even needed at this stage. And he hopes for a university where alcohol plays a less significant role in students’ social lives, one “about celebrating the ‘playfulness’ and pleasure that infuse the process of debating intellectual and spiritual issues over extended lunches after class,” and “using some of our ‘party time’ to discuss the origins of the universe or existential ethics, even as we socialize at mixers.” I can’t imagine a single professor anywhere in the country would oppose this vision, and I hope Duke can achieve it. But I’m enough of a realist (and surely Chafe is as well) to know that progress along these lines will be fitful at best. Duke could make a healthy start by ensuring that all students live on-campus for all four years, as Chafe recommends, though I gather there are some practical limitations here revolving around space and town/gown tensions in the construction of new dorms.
Cole
Andrew Sullivan has a run-down on the debate between Christopher Hitchens and a contender for a Yale professorship, Juan Cole, regarding recent remarks from Iran about Israel. Cole provided an interpretation of President Ahmadinejad's recent remarks that suggested the Iranians were criticizing only Israeli control of East Jerusalem, not calling for wiping Israel off the map.
Sullivan concludes:
Cole's rhetorical sleight of hand strikes me as deliberate deception, an attempt to deny the existence of a real genocidal evil in the world that Cole himself knows exists. Why? You decide. But Cole has exposed himself more brutally than Hitch ever could.
Ohio In
To follow up on my posts below, the Ohio primary results are now in--and it would be hard to imagine a better outcome, across the board, for the Democrats. In the gubernatorial race, Republicans nominated Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, a hard-line social conservative; Congressman Ted Strickland easily captured the GOP nod. Blackwell will join Lynn Swann as black GOP gubernatorial nominees, but he's almost certainly too conservative for the state to win. In the Senate race, GOP incumbent Mike Dewine polled only 71% of the vote against nuisance challengers, hardly an impressive showing for a two-term incumbent. State party leaders pressured their strongest candidate, Paul Hackett, out of the Democratic primary, but Dewine's weak showing suggests possible problems for him against Congressman Sherrod Brown.
In the primary for Brown's seat, the Dems nominated the strongest possible candidate; ditto in a three-way primary to run against embattled incumbent Bob Ney. And in the 6th district seat being vacated by Ted Strickland, the strongest possible Democrat, Charles Wilson, failed to make the ballot after submitting only 48 valid nominating signatures. (He needed 50.) So he had to stand as a write-in, and captured an impressive 34,000 (63%) votes. A write-in candidate hasn't been elected to the House since, as far as I can recall, 1982, when Ron Packard won as a write-in in a three-way general election contest.
At this stage, it looks like a 1-seat Dem gain in the House from Ohio, with a very outside chance at 2, and a good shot at the Senate seat.
Tuesday, May 2, 2006
Fix on Ohio
The Fix has a primer on today's Ohio primary--which has several important races, including three key House primaries and a gubernatorial primary that likely will yield an African-American (and very conservative) GOP nominee. Despite the state GOP's abysmal poll ratings, the best the Dems can hope for in the state is a gain of one House seat, and that's only if scandal-plagued Bob Ney doesn't drop out. Another Republican would probably hold his district.
Stuart Rothenberg recently noted that the Ohio River (not a location that would immediately spring to mind as a political battleground) could be viewed as the focal point in this year's battle for the House. Nine districts, beginning with WV1 and ending with KY2 and including several seats in Ohio, KY, and Indiana, bordering the river are potentially competitive.
Duke Lacrosse Report--and "Aggressive Body Language"
Slate has a piece by David Feige, an author and former public defender in the Bronx, outlining the myriad of procedural abuses associated with the D.A.’s indictment of two Duke lacrosse players. Feige’s conclusion: “In the end, between his media mania, harassing search warrants, and the outrageous attempt to interrogate individuals already represented by counsel, Mike Nifong has exposed a reality of the criminal-justice system that can often escape our attention: Prosecutors captivated by the beneficial glare of the media spotlight are often ready to ignore convincing evidence of innocence in the politically motivated pursuit of criminal defendants. The Durham district attorney's actions raise the question of whether prosecutors really are willing to win elections at the cost of wrongful prosecutions. Sadly, for Durham and Duke and for all of us, the answer in this case seems to be ‘yes.’”
As a reminder that flawed processes can sometimes produce flawed results, as part of a set of motions, defense attorneys released a photo of one indicted player, Reade Seligmann, time-stamped from an ATM machine at a time when the police report alleged that the rape was occurring. (Since Nifong, for reasons that remain unexplained, made the arrest before even investigating whether Seligmann had an alibi, the prosecution never presented this evidence to the grand jury; there are several other photos of the ATM scene.) In his only quote of the day, the D.A. said that he plans to seek a third indictment in two weeks. But from taking a look at the Raleigh TV websites, last night’s 11pm news ignored Nifong’s promise and instead, quite correctly, showed the Seligmann photo.
Monday, May 1, 2006
Durham Poll
The ABC affiliate in Raleigh has just released a poll showing a dead heat in the race for Durham district attorney, with Mike Nifong trailing challenger Freda Black by one point, 39-38. Nifong leads among blacks and liberals; Black leads among whites and conservatives; tomorrow is Election Day. The third candidate, African-American defense attorney Keith Bishop, has only 11 percent, presumably siphoning votes away from Nifong. North Carolina has no runoff if the winning candidate receives 40 percent of the vote; given these polling figures, a runoff seems unlikely.
Obviously tomorrow's result will influence the next step in the Duke case. A Nifong defeat might provide the excuse for the state's attorney general to intervene and take over the case, as is allowed under North Carolina law when a prosecutor is compromised. (This morning, defense attorney Kirk Osborn filed a motion to remove Nifong from the case, claiming a violation of the state bar's ethics provisions.) Presumably, the AG could determine whether Nifong has any evidence against the accused that would survive legal challenge; and, if so, move ahead and prosecute the case competently, while, if not, drop the charges. Given the closeness of the ABC poll and the recent signs that Duke's student body, if not its faculty, have grown concerned with the DA's erratic behavior, a heavy turnout from Duke's students could play a major factor in the outcome.
Update, 5.57pm: The motion of Reade Seligmann's attorney is now publicly available. Although it's obviously the statement of an advocate, this is considerably more than a defense leak, and the amount of exculpatory evidence presented--that Nifong, according to Seligmann's attorney, refused even to consider before indictment--does not reflect well on how this case has been investigated. CNN also has a photo of Seligmann at at ATM machine at the time the rape was allegedly committed.
Friday, April 28, 2006
DaVinci Code Ruling
We need more judges like this in the United States: the judge in the lawsuit against Dan Brown inserted a historically informed item, in secret code, into his ruling, based on a key event in military history roughly 100 years before the trial.
Thursday, April 27, 2006
Victory at Penn State
Inside Higher Ed reports that Penn State president Graham Spanier has overturned a decision by the School of Visual Arts to censor student Josh Stulman's art show on the grounds that the art (which is critical of Palestinian terrorism) conflicted with the school's "diversity" policy. The director of the art school had justified his decision on the grounds that the art school “is committed to promoting cultural diversity and assuring opportunities for democratic dialogue within the context of its classrooms and its exhibition spaces. I believe that Josh’s work does not promote those tenets.”
At Volokh, David Bernstein has several excellent posts on the controversy--which is another reminder of the too-often need for off-campus publicity to be used to uphold free exchange of ideas on campus.
Monday, April 24, 2006
Teaching the Survey
I'm part of CUNY's US History Initiative, which seeks to develop web-based modules for use in US history survey classes. Some of the modules are very good (for instance, on the Constitution or this entry on American evangelicalism in the early Republic). The project as a whole is a reminder that there's nothing irreconcilable between pegadogical innovation and maintaining academic rigor.
I thought of the initiative this morning in reading a piece in Inside Higher Ed on a panel devoted to teaching the survey at OAH. As our colleague Jon Dresner pointed out in the comments section, "nearly every 'new' technique mentioned draws directly on methodologies and themes of scholarship that’s been 'new' for at least two or three decades now: biographical portraits of non-elites; microhistory; material culture history; public history; etc." Incorporating historiography, then, automatically achieves "innovation."
Sunday, April 23, 2006
LA Times on Cheney
A quite extraordinary editorial in today's LA Times, calling on the President to replace Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. The case for replacing Rumsfeld is obvious--though it's unlikely it will occur anytime soon.
The case for replacing Cheney, though, is more interesting. Through the tenure of Alben Barkley, the office was essentially impotent. But ever since Nixon during Eisenhower's term (with the possible exceptions of Hubert Humphrey and Spiro Agnew), the V-P's policy influence has expanded--and expanded considerable with the last three V-Ps (Quayle, Gore, and now Cheney). During the Clinton years, this development was celebrated as a good thing--expanding the V-P's role allowed someone talented like Gore to make a positive contribution to the administration, rather than just represent the US at overseas funerals. But what happens when--as we've seen with this administration--the empowered V-P becomes associated with a failed policy initiative? He can't simply be fired, like a cabinet officer.
The result, in essence, is a constitutional conundrum. This is an office that really isn't designed to execute power, since its occupant can't really be fired for incompetence or policy disagreement--yet over the past 17 years, it has morphed into an office of enormous power. Perhaps the Times is right, and that it's logical to assume with an empowered vice presidency, the security of tenure no longer applies.
The Duke 88
88 members of the Duke faculty—including 11 members of its History Department, among them such luminaries as William Chafe and Claudia Koonz—and 15 academic departments or programs recently signed a public statement saying they were “listening” regarding allegations against the Duke lacrosse team. The statement spoke of “what happened to this young woman” (which at that point consisted of nothing more than uncorroborated allegations) and gave a message to campus protesters: “Thank you for not waiting” until the police completed their investigation. Activities of these campus protesters, as we now all know, included such items as the “wanted” poster and branding the team “rapists.”
In today’s Newsweek, a student at predominantly African-American North Carolina Central carried the Duke 88’s thinking to its logical, if absurd, extreme. The student said that he wanted to see the Duke students prosecuted “whether it happened or not. It would be justice for things that happened in the past.”
Newsweek also became the second major news outlet (ABC is the other) to have received access to the exculpatory evidence of one of the indicted players, Reade Seligmann. (The story confirmed that the D.A. refused to review this evidence before making a charge, despite a request from defense attorneys.) According to the magazine, during or within the 16 minutes after the time of the alleged rape, Seligmann placed eight calls on his cell phone, was waiting on a curb a block away from the site of the alleged rape, where he was picked up by a cab; and he then went to an ATM machine, a fast-food restaurant, and card-swiped his way into his dorm. The cab driver has given a statement, cell-phone records exist of the eight calls, the ATM withdrawal slip was saved, and the card-swipe was timed by Duke’s security system.
At this stage, we don’t know whether a crime was committed in this case. But unless Seligmann had contact with the accuser before the alleged crime (which no one is claiming) or his defense team has engaged in a massive doctoring of evidence that fooled both Newsweek and ABC, it seems unlikely that Seligmann (who has no prior record of any misconduct, and who has received an outpouring of support in recent days from those who know him) committed any crime. In the words of Newsweek—hardly known as a bastion of overstatements—Selgimann’s “lawyer was able to produce evidence that would seem to indicate it was virtually impossible that Seligmann committed the crime.”
How many of the Duke 88 would affix their signatures to a public affirmation that they are “listening” to the exculpatory evidence of a student at their own institution, and expressing concern that local authorities could be veering toward a miscarriage of justice regarding Seligmann? Or do they “listen” only to versions of events that conform to their preconceived worldview, like the student at North Carolina Central, seeking “justice for things that happened in the past”?
Sunday Misc.
The AP has an interesting article on a heretofore little-explored aspect of the politics of immigration—the way in which the issue might form a wedge between the GOP and Catholics.
A potential scandal at Penn State: the university canceled an art exhibit by a Jewish student, whose work dealt with the effects of Islamic terrorism. The director of the school’s visual arts program proceeded on the grounds that the exhibit "did not promote cultural diversity" or "opportunities for democratic dialogue.” He cited Penn State’s “Statement on Nondiscrimination and Harassment” and “Zero Tolerance Policy for Hate.” In an Orwellian addition, Penn State’s spokesman noted, “We always encourage those who are offended by free speech to use their own constitutional right to free speech to make their concerns known . . . We don't have a right to hide art."
Mayor Ray Nagin came first in the New Orleans mayoral primary yesterday--but with well short of the 50% needed to avoid a runoff. The state's lieutenant governor, Mitch Landrieu (brother of LA's senior senator), finished a strong second.
In more ill fortune for Duke, this is alumni weekend—and President Richard Brodhead received some tough questioning from alumni regarding the university’s decision to suspend Reade Seligmann, who was indicted despite strong exculpatory evidence (which the D.A. refused to review before he proceeded). The indictment of Seligmann, who was well-liked and had no disciplinary or other problems, appears to have turned the tide on campus, leading students to begin standing up for the players—who have experienced what at best could be termed erratic behavior from the D.A.
Was the Vice President actually attending an unusually dull OAH panel? Perhaps Cliopatriarchs who were on the scene can report.
Saturday, April 22, 2006
Saturday Items
Charles Krauthammer casts a critical eye on the generals leading the charge against Donald Rumsfeld, contending “that kind of dissident party within the military is alien to America.” Although Rumsfeld has been a disaster as Defense Secretary, I’m inclined to agree. As Krauthammer points out, “Last time around, the antiwar left did not have a very high opinion of generals.”
Indeed, in 1966-1967, a rogue group of leading military figures worked hand-in-glove with John Stennis’ Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee to pressure the Johnson administration to intensify the air war in North Vietnam (a policy that, among other things, would have risked an outright Chinese intervention in the war). The Stennis Subcommittee ultimately issued a report chastising the administration’s approach and holding that “logic and prudence” required endorsing whatever military tactics the JCS recommended. To Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, the affair challenged “one of the most fundamental principles of our constitutional structure—the civilian direction of the defense establishment.” The electorate clearly knew what Rumsfeld’s policies were when they re-elected Bush, and the precedent of a military pressure campaign against the civilian chief is a dangerous one: next time, who’s to say the result won’t be like the Stennis Subcommittee effort?
The CIA has fired a veteran agent who leaked the story about the agency’s secret prisons in Europe.
Lots of debate (both from supporters and those critical of the idea) on whether Juan Cole merits an appointment at Yale. Cole’s scholarly record hardly seems up to Yale’s standards, suggesting that the prominence he’s received as a “public intellectual” regarding the contemporary Middle East is helping his case. I’d be more persuaded about the merits of Yale’s proposed move if Cole’s commentary was of higher quality.
National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru has an fine book on the politics of abortion, Ponnuru contends, quite convincingly, that pro-choice activists are deluding themselves if they believe that overturning Roe will necessarily benefit them politically.
Next week we move into the 1990s in my spring-term undergrad elective (US history since 1953); I wanted to track down some clips of Admiral Stockdale from the 1992 v-p debate, which remains for me the most bizarre debate performance in a national campaign. Managed to find a couple here, including his famous, “Who am I? Why am I here?” Not supplied, alas, was his performance when Gore or Quayle was speaking and Stockdale would occasionally be seen wandering the stage behind the speaker.
Friday, April 21, 2006
Duke's "Campus Culture"
The Duke Chronicle has coverage of the first university-wide event, held last night, to address campus culture at Duke. Professor of African and African-American Studies Mark Anthony Neal maintained, “We need an innovated and brave curriculum that will allow our students to engage one another in a progressive manner.” Remembering that this is the same college whose philosophy chairman joked that there were few conservatives on the faculty because J.S. Mill held that conservatives aren’t very smart, I doubt that an insufficiently “progressive” curriculum is Duke’s main problem. When a student in attendance called on Duke to do more address “heretosexism” (again, not an obvious problem issue emerging from recent events), a panel member, in the words of the Chronicle reporter, “described a hypothetical situation about an incoming freshman finds out his or her future roommate is homosexual and thus requests to be paired with a different person. ‘Instead of simply letting people avoid these uncomfortable situations, we should make these students sit down and talk to each other, and to make progress in accepting one another.’”
Friday Misc.
Cliopatria contributing editor Sean Wilentz tells Rolling Stone readers that George W. Bush might go down as the worst President in American history. Coming out the same day that Bush’s approval rating plunged to an all-time low (33%), Wilentz’s thesis is plausible. But unless Bush launches a nuclear strike against Iran, I’m skeptical. It’s always hard to evaluate contemporary political figures through a historical lens, but it seems to me that Bush would have to go much further than he has to surpass either James Buchanan or Richard Nixon.
Buchanan started his administration by conspiring with the Supreme Court over the timing of the Dred Scott decision, stood idly by as civil war raged in Kansas all while engaging in a (failed) power grab in foreign affairs, and then impotently watched Southern states secede. Nixon’s level of corruption is of a league unmatched in American history—the idea of bugging the offices of the opposition party and the subsequent massive cover-up (not to mention the credible allegations of encouraging the South Vietnamese to avoid a peace settlement before the 1968 elections) strikes at the heart of our democracy. Of course, that Bush could even be compared to Nixon or Buchanan shows how far he has fallen since the months after 9/11.
Crooks and Liars has the best of Scott McClellan—in video form!
Tony Judt gives his all to defend the Walt/Mearsheimer piece—but falls a bit wide of the mark, given that his Times essay critiques the “Israel lobby,” not W/M’s “Israel Lobby.” Indeed, the mere publication of Judt’s op-ed in the Times—a key component of W/M’s “Lobby”—would seem to undercut the W/M thesis.
The Chronicle has an interesting piece on junior faculty bargaining for higher salaries. Those of us who teach at institutions with wholly fixed salary structures might not mind confronting this dilemma.
The Keystone Kops Duke lacrosse investigation continues—D.A. Mike Nifong executed search warrants for the two indicted players’ dorm rooms yesterday (wouldn’t it have been more appropriate to have taken this step before indictment—and perhaps have checked if either or both had alibis in the process?). After searching in vain for the accuser’s clothing, a shoe, or other property, the police seized . . . a Times article on the case and an Ipod.
Thursday, April 20, 2006
Reconstruction Constitution
Arguing for a close textual analysis of the Constitution normally is the domain of conservatives, but, as University of Michigan law professor Richard Primus points out in this week's New Republic, liberals can just as easily struggle with the difficulties of reconciling a text-based approach to the necessities of constitutional law. Primus has a lengthy, incisive critique of Akhil Amar's new book, America's Constitution: A Biography, in which Amar asserts the primacy of text--though not, a la Scalia, of the Founders, but instead of the authors of the Reconstruction amendments.
As the past generation of historians has reinterpreted Reconstruction, so too have they reinterpreted Reconstruction’s role in American law: I’ve used Foner’s book when I’ve taught constitutional history classes. Amar carries this line of thought to its logical extreme. As Primus notes, “Amar's theory is that of a radical democrat. In his eyes, the legitimacy of law is a function of its process of enactment: the more democratic the process, the more authoritative the law. Thus he contends that if a federal statute conflicts with the provisions of a treaty between the United States and a foreign country, the statute should prevail. His reasoning is straightforward. Treaties are made by the assent of the president and the Senate alone, but statutes also require the concurrence of the House of Representatives, a larger legislative body closer to the people themselves. An enactment of the House, Senate, and president together has more democratic authority than an enactment of the Senate and president without the House. By the same logic, the greatest of all authorities is the Constitution, which was enacted more democratically than any other law. Unlike statutes, which are passed by the people's elected representatives, the Constitution was adopted--so the story goes--directly by the people themselves.” Democracy, Amar contends, was subverted by the Founders; and only restored through the Reconstruction amendments. Accordingly, it is in amendments 13-15 that we should look for the essence of the Constitution’s meaning.
Amar is undoubtedly correct in the critical importance of the Reconstruction amendments specifically; and, more generally, the basic debates about the essence of American democracy that accompanied ratification of these amendments. Yet Primus points out some of the difficulties in contending that 13-15 represented the triumph of democracy. The North’s decision not to seat Southern congressional delegations and the peculiar ratification procedures of the 14th and 15th amendments were less than democratic---and even the polities that ratified the amendments excluded women and (in most states) free blacks from voting. Primus also points out some of Amar’s excessively clever use of text. For his part, Primus prefers a rights-based, living Constitution interpretation, with rights arising not out of textual interpretation but from the political context of the time.
A middle ground between the interpretations of Amar and Primus, and one that I find persuasive, is that offered by David Kyvig in Explicit and Authentic Acts. Kyvig contends that the amendment process signifies constitutional revolution—and that, therefore, we have witnessed three such revolutions in our history (the Bill of Rights, Reconstruction, and the Progressive Era). Fundamental constitutional change, in Kyvig’s view, cannot occur absent the amendment process—which provides the democratic legitimacy that Amar sees as critical and avoids interpretation of constitutional doctrine solely on short-term political context, as Primus contends frequently has occurred. Kyvig’s thesis, of course, elevates the Progressive Era (amendments 16-19) to critical importance, while downplaying the significance of the New Deal and even the 1960s.
The Primus review is definitely worth reading; thanks to my student, Eric Lee, for the tip.
Thursday Items
While many Yale US history Ph.D.'s are joining some Cliopatriarchs at the OAH, one recent student in the Yale program, Scott Kleeb, is running for Congress. Kleeb, who wrote his dissertation on the history of the American cattle industry, is standing as a Democrat in Nebraska's western 3rd district. The district hasn't elected a Democrat in the last 50 years--though the Dem candidate came exceedingly close in 1974 and ran reasonably well in 1990--so Kleeb has his work cut out for him.
The Times tells us of the importance of humanities courses, even for would-be doctors.
Juan Cole becomes one of the few scholars to issue an out-and-out defense of the Walt/Mearsheimer interpretation of the "Israel Lobby."
Big Brother can work both ways: various invasions of privacy (ATM video, cell records, dorm cardkey swipes) appear to have established a pretty solid alibi for one of the accused in the Duke case. How the DA could indict without attempting to determine whether alibi evidence existed is beyond me.
The FBI is trying to get access to Jack Anderson's papers, to remove "national security" items. I've looked at Drew Pearson's collection, which was surprisingly uninteresting, but perhaps Anderson's contains juicier items. It would be quite a setback for the integrity of the archival process for this request to be granted.
Inside Higher Ed reports on Northern Kentucky professor Sally Jacobsen being suspended after urging her class to exercise their "free speech" rights and vandalize a pro-life display on campus.
Monday, April 17, 2006
Best and Worst
Time has just named its 10 best and 5 worst members of the US Senate. The top 10: Cochran; Conrad; Durbin; Kennedy; Kyl; Levin; Lugar; McCain; Snowe; Specter. The bottom 5: Akaka; Allard; Bunning; Burns; Dayton. Newly elected members weren't ranked. Of the top 10, my only quibble woud be with Kyl, who strikes me as mediocre; Orrin Hatch or Chuck Hagel would be better Republicans.
No objections to the bottom five, three of whom (Akaka, Burns, and Dayton) might very well not return to the next Senate, although I would have found a way to include Jim Inhofe in the bottom rung as well. (Maybe do a bottom 6.) The writeup on Bunning is particularly cutting.
The Travails of "Leah Bowman"
This week’s Chronicle published a piece by Dr. “Leah Bowman,” which demonstrates, among other things, the shortcomings of anonymous articles. Bowman is, in fact, Assistant Professor Laura Bier, an NYU Ph.D. newly hired in Georgia Tech’s History Department, where she is a social and cultural historian of post-colonial Egyptian history whose “research interests include gender and decolonization, the history of sexuality and the family, feminist theory and oral history.” Bowman/Bier’s article decries the “witchhunt” that she faces as a lonely voice among today’s college faculty demanding justice for the Palestinians.
Bowman/Bier alleges that after publication of an article in Frontpage, she received hate e-mails—which, if true, is utterly inexcusable. The rest of her piece, however, makes for interesting reading. Now that the cloak of anonymity has been removed from Bowman/Bier (though not on the HNN homepage, where the Chronicle formally protested the posting of her article under her real name), it’s possible to provide some context to her portrayal of events.
Sunday, April 16, 2006
Duke News
There aren't too many people who have come out of the current Duke controversy looking good, but there are two that have performed about as well as possible, it seems to me, under current circumstances. The first is the editor (and by extension, the reporters) of the Duke student newspaper, the Chronicle, whose coverage has been first-rate. As the Crimson demonstrated last spring during the Summers controversy, student newspapers with talented reporters can actually outperform the regular media on campus stories.
The second is Duke's president, Richard Brodhead. He--quite appropriately, it seems to me--suspended and then cancelled the lacrosse season; based on the most benign interpretations of their actions, many of the lacrosse players were guilty of conduct unbecoming university students and gravely embarrassing the school. He's reached out to students and administrators at NCCU. At the same time, he's avoided any rush to judgment--unlike a handful of Duke professors, led by Afro-Am studies professor Houston Baker, who essentially advocated dismissing the lacrosse students from school. (Baker, alas, looks mild compared to Jesse Jackson, who yesterday promised that the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition would pay the accuser's tuition, even if her story proved false.)
That said, I was somewhat troubled by Brodhead's rather weak response to events of last Thursday. In the latest in what has seemed a poorly managed investigation, the Durham police gained entry, without warrants and apparently without the assistance of the Duke police, to Duke dorms and attempted to interrogate several lacrosse players, who all sides knew had lawyers. When asked about the matter Friday, Brodhead said he didn't know enough about the issue to comment, and hasn't said anything since.
While Brodhead is obviously in a very difficult position, if I were a Duke parent, I would have expected more from him on this matter. From the standpoint of legal ethics, the police were clearly in the wrong; pragmatically, the DNA and photo evidence of the past week, while not exonerating the players, substantially boosted their presumption of innocence. In an era of speech codes, when universities often improperly act in loco parentis, there are times when administrators ought to act in loco parentis. Police offers attempting to gain access to dorms to question students without their lawyers' presence is one such instance.
Friday, April 14, 2006
McCain as Schweiker
This week has featured some interesting debate about John McCain's apparent repositioning himself in his run for President. Monday's Washington Post column by Howard Kurtz captured prevailing sentiment among most liberals--ie, McCain was basically a conservative all along, and the press and liberal blogosphere exaggerated the few differences he had with Bush to make him out as something he wasn't. In yesterday's Slate, Jacob Weisberg countered that "McCain looks like the same unconventional character who emerged during the Clinton years: a social progressive, a fiscal conservative, and a military hawk. Should he triumph in the primaries, we can expect this more appealing John McCain to come roaring back."
I'd like to suggest a third explanation--McCain as a latter-day Richard Schweiker, the two-term former Pennsylvania senator. In a week when former Alaska senator Mike Gravel (whose two terms in the upper chamber coincided with Schweiker's) became the first Democrat to officially declare his bid for the 2008 nomination, going back to the 1970s seems particularly apt.
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
Archives and Secrecy
This is certainly a depressing piece from today's Washington Post, showing how, from 2002 till 2006, the National Archives kept secret its program to restore large numbers of previously released documents to secrecy. Allen Weinstein's response in suspending the program, however, does provide some grounds for encouragement.
Monday, April 10, 2006
Rothenberg on This Year's House Races
If 2006 were 1976, Nancy Pelosi would now be selecting artwork for her move into the Speaker's office. The 15-16 point lead that Democrats have in the generic congressional poll would suggest that the party should easily be able to capture the 16 seats needed to regain a majority in the House.
But, as Stuart Rothenberg points out in this morning's Roll Call, while the Dems "are competing seriously in places that they haven’t for years," their "recruiting is also falling short in some districts they’ve repeatedly targeted, and most of the competitive districts this time — not counting open seats — have been targeted time and again."
Anyone wondering why the Republicans remain likely to retain control of the House in 2006 should glance at the 2004 election returns in Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. The latter two states have voted Democratic for president in each of the last four elections, and currently have Democratic governors. Ohio has been one of the three or four most closely contested states in each of the last four presidential elections. By all rights, you'd expect that MI and PA would have Democratic majorities in their House delegations, and Ohio would be closely divided between the parties.
Instead, Republicans comfortably control all three delegations, a result of post-2000 census gerrymanders: Ohio, 12-6; Pennsylvania, 12-7; and Michigan, 9-6. More important from the standpoint of 2006 are the margins in individual contests. In 2004, the closest GOP re-election in Ohio was by 20 points; in Michigan, the closest GOP margin was 15. Pennsylvania had only one House race closer than 10 points (Republican Jim Gerlach's close win over Lois Murphy, who's running again in 2006 and right now is probably a slight favorite to take the seat.)
In short, in 2006, Democrats could reduce the Republican margin of victory by 10 points in each and every House district in Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, and have a net gain of one seat from the three states. (And that one-seat gain would almost certainly be wiped out by a likely GOP pickup in the Dem-held but open Ohio 6th District.) So even though it's possible for the Dems to retake control of the House, the wave needs to be a very strong one indeed.
The Israel (capital-l) Lobby
There's been much speculation on the motives of Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer in writing their "working paper," but one aspect of the case has particularly puzzled me. If the authors believed the Israel (capital-l) Lobby was as powerful as they contended, why didn't they take care to ensure that all of their facts were correct (i.e., not confusing Israel's law of citizenship with its Law of Return)--since the forces of the "Lobby" surely would catch them on such matters. And why did they elect to take quotes wildly out of context, to reverse the apparent intent of the speaker (i.e., as in two Ben Gurion quotes, on page 21)--since the forces of the "Lobby" surely would supply the full quotes.
I'd like to think that such serious structural errors--along with the unequivocal denunciations of the paper's conclusions from Establishment figures such as David Gergen and Marvin Kalb, hardly people known for making rash statements, might have caused those sympathetic to the conclusions of the W/M paper to, at least, think twice about its conclusions.
A survey released last week by the Institute for Research: Middle East Policy suggests otherwise.
Saturday, April 8, 2006
Bender on Transnationalism
Thomas Bender has a piece in this week’s Chronicle advocating “the end of American history as we have known it,” to be replaced by an approach “that rejects the territorial space of the nation as a sufficient context and argues for the transnational nature of national histories.” There’s a disconnect, though, between the specific examples he cites—all of which seem to me to be examples of how to teach a U.S. survey well—and his broader recommendations, which strike me as a departure that would close off large segments of the American past from inquiry by historians.
Bender’s essay provides a nicely done summary of how to teach US history on the theory that “American history cannot be adequately understood unless it is incorporated into that global context.” The effects of the global Anglo-French rivalry and the Haitian revolution inform the history of the post-Constitution period. The Civil War can be examined in the context of the European revolutions of 1848 and the subsequent burst in nation-state formation, a “’federative crisis’ in which nations, from Argentina to Japan, from Germany to Siam, from the Russian and Ottoman Empires to the Hapsburg, were participants. All were recalibrating the relations between national and local authority. In most cases, wars were part of the story. So was emancipation. While the United States emancipated four million slaves, another 40 million serfs were freed in this era. Nation-making was a global phenomenon with distinctive local results.” US imperialism, Bender recommends, should be studied as part of a global phenomenon in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Progressivism—both in ideas and in policies—was part of a global phenomenon, a point well illustrated by Daniel Rodgers’ recent book on the subject.
Monday, April 3, 2006
DeLay Is Done
Just posted on the AP wire. On the surface, this would seem like bad news for the Democrats--they won't have Tom DeLay to kick around anymore. But thinking back to the late 1980s and the hasty resignations of Jim Wright and Tony Coelho, resignations of high-ranking figures often fail to stem the stench of corruption.
Saturday, April 1, 2006
Conflicting Messages at NYU
Last Thursday, NYU made the news after its administration denied permission to the campus Objectivist Club to show four of the Danish cartoons at a panel on free speech and the cartoon controversy. The administration's rationalization for its decision seems troubling at best. University spokesman John Brenkman maintained, "Realistically, one can have a discussion on smallpox without actually handing out the the live virus to the audience." [Displaying controversial political cartoons is the equivalent of infecting people?] He added that the administration sought a "balance between the serious concerns of one segment of our community, on the one hand, and NYU’s tradition of free speech and free exchange of ideas on the other." [If the campus Republicans hold a bash-Howard Dean rally with photos mocking Dean, must the administration take into account "the serious concerns" of campus Democrats that their party's leader not be mocked before deciding to authorize the event?]
Today, however, NYU's approach has moved from troubling to disingenous. In an email reprinted in Dartblog, Brenkman blames the event organizers themselves for the cartoons not being shown. "On Wednesday afternoon, a few hours before the event, the student leadership of the club came to the University and indicated it had changed its mind: it would choose not to display the cartoons, and would like to be able to invite about 75 people to the event who were not members of the NYU community. The University agreed, but let’s be clear: the students made this choice, and they made it after the University had indicated to one and all that the event could go forward WITH the cartoons displayed." A reader of the Brenkman email would imagine that the first university administrators heard about non-NYU people attending the event was a few hours before.
Yet, as this email from NYU's director of student activities shows, all along the event had been planned as open to outsiders who pre-registered, and university officials were well aware of this fact. Then, three days before the event, the university intervened, informing participants that "this event is to be close [sic] to all non-NYU guests including any non-NYU guests who have already made a reservations with you." The club's organizers were told re "about 75 non-NYU people who had asked to attend . . . you’ll need to contact them and let them know that the event is no longer open to non-NYU guests so they should not plan on attending . . . This is not negotiable."
"This is not negotiable." And it's the organizers who are responsible for not showing the cartoons?
Tuesday, March 28, 2006
Evans Retires
Democratic chances for regaining the House just experienced a setback, when Illinois congressman Lane Evans announced his retirement. (Evans had been suffering from Parkinson's Disease for several years, and he's been quite ill for the past month.)
Evans was a good example of why the Dems were able for so long to retain a House majority. He first won election in 1982, in an upset, helped by the fact that a conservative primary challenger had defeated the moderate GOP incumbent, Tom Railsback. His district retained a GOP tilt at least until the 2002 redistricting, yet Evans compiled a strongly liberal record in the House. He kept his seat by outcampaigning his opponents and by repackaging his agenda as "progressive" or "populist"--a skill too few Dems seem to possess in the current climate. Evans also gave an early endorsement to Barack Obama's 2004 bid for the Senate--long before Obama was the primary frontrunner. Evans was, in fact, the first prominent white Dem officeholder to endorse Obama.
Under Illinois rules, the local Dem leaders will name Evans' replacement, but the party will be hard pressed to keep the seat.
Monday, March 27, 2006
The AAUP Does Walt and Mearsheimer
Below, Ralph links to a fine piece in today's Inside Higher Ed about the controversy regarding the W/M paper. I was particularly struck by the lengthy comments in the article from AAUP general secretary Roger Bowen. Bowen correctly noted that academic freedom protects all scholarship, regardless of its quality or point of view. But he then added that he would be monitoring reaction to the W/M piece and held the following:
While academics comment on a range of controversial issues all the time, Bowen said that dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian issues posed particular difficulties. Bowen said that one of his “real shocks” at the AAUP was when “a very close friend and colleague” who is Jewish, a “strong civil libertarian,” and has “wonderful values on academic freedom” approached him about trying to urge Duke University to block a group there from organizing a national conference for student supporters of the Palestinian cause. “On that issue, there are blinders,” Bowen said.
I'm suspicious of argument by personal, anonymous anecdote ("As I was riding home today on the subway, I overheard two good friends noting the lack of intellectual diversity in the academy . . ."), but Bowen's anecdote is both distasteful (with his choice to identify the religion of his "close friend and colleague") and off-base: it seems to me perfectly reasonable to question the criteria by which outsiders are invited to speak, or hold a conference, on campus.
Saturday, March 25, 2006
Walt and Mearsheimer Respond . . . Sort Of
In the only public comment from either author of the controversial "working paper" that argued US policy toward the Middle East has been manipulated, contrary to US interests by a vaguely defined Israel Lobby, John Mearsheimer informs the Asia Times, "We fully recognized that the lobby would retaliate against us. We expected the story we told in the piece would apply to us after it was published. We are not surprised that we've come under attack by the lobby."
As with the "working paper" as a whole, it's unclear exactly what constitutes the "lobby" that has attacked the W/M Paper, which has come under vociferous criticism, mostly in the blogosphere but also from figures such as Marvin Kalb (who knew even Kalb was part of the "Lobby"?), for its factual inaccuracies and unsubstantiated sweeping assertions. It's also unclear how W&M have suffered "retaliation," unless, as has become so common among the contemporary academy's dominant voices, they're equating "retaliation" with public criticism of their academic work. And if, as Mearsheimer claims, the duo expected their piece to trigger an attack from the "Lobby," it's shocking that they produced a paper so riddled with factual errors and quotations whose full context undermines rather than supports their conclusions. I'd hate to see what criteria W&M apply to determining what constitutes "good" scholarship in personnel matters. When even Joseph Massad (half-heartedly) can't sign on to an anti-Israel diatribe, you know you're in trouble.
Sunday, March 19, 2006
Scott, et. al., Go Out in Style
A five-person AAUP committee headed by Joan Scott has announced the cancellation of the AAUP's much-criticized "academic boycotts" conference, which was postponed after conference organizers distributed, as pre-conference reading material, an item from a journal known for publishing material denying the Holocaust. (Scott, you might recall, was last heard from deeming faculty who spoke out against the conference "fellow travelers" of the Israeli "regime" who were violating AAUP procedures.)
The cancellation letter typifies the AAUP's high-handed and tone-deaf handling of this issue from the start. Scott, et al, lament the lost conference as "a fruitful opportunity to address issues of academic freedom that are at the center of AAUP concern." (Blacklisting Israeli faculty, promoting academic freedom--the connection is obvious.)
An alternative to cancellation, the Scott letter conceded, was "to hold the conference with a significantly revised set of participants, as critics suggest." But such a course "would unfairly exclude some previously scheduled participants" and "imply that we had come to accept [critics'] arguments about the direction and composition of the conference." (Planners who would even consider material from a journal with a reputation for anti-Semitic diatribes apparently have nothing to gain from listening to their critics.)
Instead, the AAUP will publish a series of papers on the issue, to include an introduction that "will answer those who wondered why we were holding a conference on a topic on which we had already taken a position in the AAUP statement condemning academic boycotts written in the spring of 2005." (Should make for fascinating reading: perhaps the AAUP can follow a similar procedure for its next such conference--on its statement upholding the value of tenure, where Joan Scott and associates will make sure that one-third of the slots go to administrators from the University of Phoenix who are open critics of AAUP policy and principles.)
Brinkley on Phillips
For those who haven't seen it, the country's leading 20th century political historian, and current Columbia University provost, Alan Brinkley, has a perceptive review of Kevin Phillips' new book, in today's Times Book Review.
Friday, March 17, 2006
Wilentz and ABOR
Ralph noted below the attack that he and I, along with David Beito, received for our anti-ABOR/anti-speech codes amendment at the AHA. I appreciated the timing of Horowitz's comments, since they came one day after the AFT bi-monthly newsletter branded me part of Horowitz's "thought police" because I publicly criticized the Brooklyn Ed Department using the "dispositions" criterion to screen out ideologically undesirable students. The newsletter seems not to have noticed that even NCATE has repudiated this use of dispositions.
The errors of fact in Horowitz's book undermine its credibility, but it's worth remembering that many of Horowitz's critics don't exactly have clean hands on the issue of academic freedom. As Mark Bauerlein observed today, the single-minded opposition of groups like AAUP, AAC&U, AHA, and others to ABOR "begs the question of the choice of targets. Across the country we have speech codes written into campus by-laws, ideological advocacy groups passing themselves off as academic centers and departments, and university administrators who need regular lessons in the First Amendment . . . And yet, what gets these groups exercised is one aging man in Los Angeles whose books and web site have rightly tapped into public dissatisfaction with the state of higher education." Horowitz is also correct, it seems to me, in noting that it reflects poorly on the principle of academic self-governance when someone like Ward Churchill (before the controversy) was regularly honored and solicited as a campus speaker; or when an academic department elects as its chair someone who wrote that all religious people are "moral retards."
Wednesday, March 15, 2006
Bloomberg on Free Speech
Today, Mayor Bloomberg announced a two-week suspension for the Correction Department's top chaplain, who delivered a speech last year stating that "the greatest terrorists in the world occupy the White House" and denouncing "the Zionists of the media." Bloomberg rejected calls for fire the imam (who three Jewish chaplains publicly supported), and said that he issued the suspension on grounds that the imam, in making an "inappropriate and offensive" statement, hadn't made clear that he was speaking for himself and not in an official capacity.
Bloomberg's bold defense of free speech, however, most caught my eye. "Looking across America, it seems that free speech is being attacked by the right under the guise of patriotism and by the left through academic intolerance that stifles necessary debate," he said, adding, "We must never use the war on terror, or political correctness, as the pretext for stifling political speech."
The mayor appoints five members to the CUNY Board of Trustees. I hope that he keeps his own words in mind when he makes future appointments, and names figures who will seek to dismantle the culture of "academic intolerance" that continues to exist in some quarters of CUNY.
Erratum
A few months back, I did a post on the CUNY B.A. program and a Vanity Fair essay contest. The contest asked students to analyze, in 1500 words or less, what was on the mind of America's youth. An email circulated to CUNY B.A. students under the signature of a CUNY B.A. administrator also contained an ideologically confining description of essay guidelines, which were not posted on the Vanity Fair website. In my post, I expressed concern that this description essentially would tailor students' responses in one direction, and therefore was inappropriate.
Yesterday, I received an email from the administrator assuring me that she didn't add the language--that she forwarded it, as she received it, from VF, and that the lnaguage, though it didn't appear on the web, was in the VF print edition. She added, "I don't censor opportunities for students. I'll post a job notice with the FBI as easily as one with ACORN or NYPIRG. I want our students to succeed in any area of their interest."
I only wish that we could see more of such a professional approach from academic administrators; and I apologize for suggesting that the administrator added language that, in fact, she did not.
Wednesday, March 8, 2006
Ghosts of Landslide Lyndon
Old-time politics is alive and well in Texas, which had its primary yesterday. The predominantly Mexican-American counties of south Texas long have had a reputation as among the most corrupt in the country. The most notorious example, of course, was Alice's Box 13, where 200 votes were "discovered" six days after the 1948 Dem Senate primary. The votes broke 198-2 for LBJ, giving him an 87-vote victory.
Although Tom DeLay's race attracted the most national attention, the nastiest primary occurred in Texas' 28th District, a predominantly Mexican-American area that snakes south from San Antonio to the Mexican border. In 2004, Henry Cuellar, a conservative Dem, very narrowly ousted incumbent Ciro Rodriguez in a primary marred by credible allegations of fraud. (Initially untabulated ballots reversed an apparent Rodriguez triumph.) Rodriguez ran again this year.
Early reports last night had Rodriguez ahead, but the 30 precincts in Cuellar's base, far southern Webb County, experienced what was described as a computer malfunction. As of 10 p.m., the country hadn't reported any results. When the votes finally did come in, the figures were startling: Cuellar took 12,341 votes in the county to just 1,475 for Rodriguez. Of those who cast ballots before Election Day, Cuellar's margin was even more overwhelming: 8,145 to 789, with 454 for a third candidate in the race. (That's a total of 86.8% of the early ballots.) George Parr, the Duke of Duval County, would have been proud.
Monday, March 6, 2006
Kudos to Davidson
Davidson College has secured two honors in the past week. First, its men's basketball team captured the Southern Conference crown, trouncing Chattanooga, 80-55. Second, it received FIRE's award for "Speech Code of the Month." The Davidson code prohibits such “patronizing remarks” as “referring to an adult as ‘girl,’ ‘boy,’ ‘hunk,’ ‘doll,’ ‘honey,’” or “sweetie.” The code also prohibits “comments or inquiries about dating.”
Perhaps there's a connection between these two events. Given that the code seems likely to decrease romantic liaisons, basketball players probably had extra time and focus for their athletic activities.
More Summersiana
The Crimson reported last week that Harvard “professors are facing a backlash in the court of public opinion,” frustrated by “attacks in the national media that are painting them as reactionary, lazy, radical, and worse.” If so, Camille Paglia’s piece in today’s Times seems likely to add to the frustration. Paglia, hardly a member of the Reactionary Right, lamented that Larry Summers was overpowered by "an ingrown humanities faculty that has been sunk in political correctness for decades,” characterized by “ideological groupthink.” The president, Paglia contended, was guilty of “foolishly thinking plain speech and common sense would suffice.” The unwillingness of Summers’ critics to provide concrete (non-ideological) explanations for their actions “illustrates the cagey hypocrisy that permeates fashionable campus leftism, which worships diversity in all things except diversity of thought.”
The Crimson article reports on possible plans for a more coordinated (and convincing) public explanation by Summers’ faculty critics. One Summers critic announced that she was “so sick of hearing that charge” of political correctness; another termed the allegation “ridiculous.” Timothy McCarthy, a lecturer on History and Literature and on Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, takes perhaps the most brazen approach. “Those who characterize Summers as an undeserving victim of ‘political correctness’ fail to apprehend the real significance of his truncated tenure,” McCarthy assured Crimson readers. One reason why? “‘Political correctness” was a concept invented by conservatives to malign progressive attempts to democratize and diversify the academy and to make higher education more hospitable to a broader range of people and ideas.” If the concept was invented and doesn’t really exist, Summers could hardly have been a victim of it. (Well, that clears things up.) McCarthy might want to peruse FIRE’s speech code archives before making this argument again.
Saturday, March 4, 2006
The PSC and the Adjuncts
Transit workers and CUNY faculty are the only two New York municipal unions without a contract. It’s hard to determine which group is more incompetently led. TWU leaders encouraged their workers to strike illegally, only to prove too weak to push through the subsequent contract. Transit workers now almost certainly will get an even worse contract, imposed through arbitration, while having to pay the fines imposed for their lawbreaking activity. The CUNY union, the PSC, has spent much of the last four years asking such bold questions as, “Why shouldn’t unions have a foreign policy?” (One PSC activist recently used this line on a CUNY list-serv.) PSC leaders established a committee devoted to the subject, while conducting contract negotiations through such childish pranks as disrupting Board of Trustees meetings or protesting outside the residences of the Chancellor and Trustees’ chairman. PSC leaders seem unable to comprehend that at a public institution, the faculty and administration need to work together to persuade city and state lawmakers to fund the university, and so vilifying “management” is counterproductive.
A contract settlement seemed imminent last week, but the union refuses to budge on what PSC leader Barbara Bowen terms a “groundbreaking new proposal for 100 full-time positions reserved for eligible CUNY adjuncts.” (At CUNY, adjuncts and full-time faculty both belong to the union, and long-term adjuncts tend to be strong supporters of the current union leadership.)
Friday, March 3, 2006
Tolerance in Illinois
Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich has had a rough month in terms of public relations. First, he looked like a fool in a Daily Show interview when he didn't realize that the show is a spoof news program. Now, he faces a political crisis after he appointed Louis Farrakhan's chief of protocol and director of community outreach to the Governor's Commission on Discrimination and Hate Crimes. The appointee then invited commission members to a Farrakhan speech where the minister criticized "Hollywood Jews" for "promoting lesbianism, homosexuality" and other "filth," and asserted that Zionists (but now teamed with conservatives!) had manipulated the Bush administration into declaring war against Iraq.
Three Jewish members of the panel have resigned, and gay and lesbian organizations are also criticizing the governor. An African-American state senator, however, has defended the appointment and criticized the commission members who resigned. State senator Diane Trotter reasoned, "Given the mission of the commission to look at discrimination and hatred, I think these [members who resgined] are demonstrating their hatred ... of others is too big to effectively do their jobs. It may be the best for the commission" that they departed.
Fascinating logic. The governor admitted that he hadn't known of the member's Nation of Islam affiliation before making the appointment.
Thursday, March 2, 2006
The Colorado HS Incident
I've just finished listening to a world geography class recorded by a 16-year-old high school student at Overland High School, which is just outside of Denver. Michelle Malkin has transcribed most of the class, and her transcription seems to me accurate.
The remarks are astonishing. (Israel, for instance, was founded because "the Israel-Zionist movement conducted what? Terrorist acts. They assassinated the British prime minister in Palestine." The teacher doesn't say whether the "Israel-Zionist movement" assassinated Winston Churchill or Clement Attlee.) Beyond such factual errors, the teacher hits all the expected points--vehement denunciations of Israel, globalization, capitalism, Bush (whose State of the Union address sounded "a lot like the things that Adolf Hitler use to say"), US drug policy, and the like. His best comment: "I don't know if I'm necessarily even taking a position." The student's questions and explanatory comments were far more intelligent than those of the teacher, which is depressing enough. As far as I could determine from the tape, the student who recorded the class was the only person who spoke more than a few words.
The teacher has been suspended pending a review of his performance, a reminder of one critical difference between HS and college instruction: HS curriculum falls under the control of state or local governments, and there is no presumption of absolute academic freedom of instruction.
This event, however, seems to me relevant in two ways regarding college classes. First, the recording demonstrates how a teacher can spend virtually an entire class talking but doing almost no instruction in the ostensible subject of the class. There are, of course, some college classes that properly deal with contemporary matters. But the vast majority don't: and so every second spent denouncing Bush or discussing the war is time taken away from instructing in the topic for which the student (or her parents) paid to be taught. Second, there's a big difference between having a student complain that a teacher is biased and actually hearing the teacher in his own words--perhaps one reason why the higher education establishment has so vociferously resisted moves to make what goes on in the classroom more transparent.
Wednesday, March 1, 2006
Global Studies at LeMoyne
I've written previously about the new and growing discipline of "global studies." Despite the name, most "global studies" programs amount to attempts to critique contemporary US (and, sometimes, Israeli) foreign policy and globalization under the guise of an academic rather than partisan lens.
I was struck, therefore, by the recent Zogby poll of US soldiers in Iraq, which has attracted a good deal of attention after Nicholas Kristof referenced it in his Times column. According to Mystery Pollster, the poll had "in effect a 'partisan' sponsor in that, according to Zogby, [it] opposes the war in Iraq."
That sponsor? The new "Peace and Global Studies major" at LeMoyne College. It seems to me extraordinary for an academic department to take an official position on a contested political issue unrelated to the institution's operation. Will we next see the LeMoyne Economics Department endorse a permanent repeal of the estate tax? Did LeMoyne's History Department formally oppose the Alito nomination? Perhaps the Biology Department will take an official stance on reforming the President's prescription drug plan.
More seriously, the LeMoyne "global studies" department purports to offer courses that "will help students understand the origins, challenges and ethical dimensions of 'Globalization'," through courses that ask students "to think about a host of issues that transcend national boundaries--migration/immigration, global climate change, refugees, terrorism, the movement of capital and development." Yet, much like the war in Iraq, all of these issues are inherently controversial ones, on which people of good faith can (and do) disagree. Good courses on such topics, therefore, should reflect a diversity of viewpoints. But is there any reason to believe that students will receive instruction that departs from the department's official party line?
Tuesday, February 28, 2006
A Well-Deserved Win for FIRE
Under pressure from FIRE and in the face of negative publicity, Washington State University has modified its "dispositions" requirement, which had been used to screen out prospective public school teachers on the basis of their (conservative or libertarian) opinions on selected political and social issues. The school introduced new evaluation forms that provide Ed professors with no opportunity to penalize an undergraduate based on the student's ideology.
WSU's action comes on the heels of a decision by the nation teacher accrediting agency, NCATE, to similarly modify its guidelines. (NCATE, too, was acting under pressure from FIRE.) Abandoning previous instructions for Ed schools to individually assess the "disposition" of each student to "promote social justice," NCATE now maintains that professors cannot use dispositions to evaluate a student's political or social beliefs, but merely a student's behavior.
Unlike WSU, my own institution, Brooklyn College, has made no public alteration in its widely condemned dispositions policy. Yet its chances of acting in defiance of NCATE's own guidance seem slim.
The affair provides another reminder of FIRE's importance to the academy.
Tuesday Misc.
My Brooklyn colleague Andy Meyer takes both sides to task in the Iraq war debate.
The Univ. of Michigan considers extending the tenure clock, to better accomodate untenured faculty who are raising children. This interested me for several reasons, not least of which is the fact the CUNY's faculty union has bitterly fought the administration's attempts to extend the tenure clock at CUNY from its current five years to seven. The union contends that this move would unfairly raise expectations of scholarly production.
William Stuntz analyzes Larry Summers' departure through an organizational rather than ideological or pedagogical lens, but nonetheless reaches a depressing conclusion about its effects.
Katherine Harris trails by 21 points in the latest Florida Senate poll--taken before revelations yesterday that she is one of two House members whose fundraising has been linked to the Duke Cunningham bribery scandal.
Cliopatriarchs in New York City are invited to a rally of solidarity with Denmark, Friday at noon at the Danish consultate in the city.
Monday, February 27, 2006
Matory on Summers
A piece in today's Globe examines the the role in his resignation of Larry Summers' confronting anti-Israel sentiment among the faculty. The article correctly notes that Summers' vocal opposition to a faculty petition urging Harvard to divest from Israel was not the only reason for faculty opposition to the president, but reporter Alex Beam suggests that attitudes toward Israel represented a "fault line" among the faculty. Extreme anti-Israel professors generally populated the ranks of Summers' critics, and backers of Israel generally stood up for Summers.
J. Lorand Matory, professor of anthropology and of African and African American Studies, sponsored the initial no-confidence motion against Summers. To the Globe, Matory argued that Summers' support for Israel represented "one among a variety of issues on which Mr. Summers seemed to advocate the rights of the privileged." Quite like Summers' success in pushing through guaranteed free tuition for lower middle-class students. Standing up for the "rights of the privileged" indeed!
Matory continues: "Because of his extremely vocal support of Israel, he essentially shut down the national divestment movement." So, in other words, Summers was worthy of censure not only because of what he said, but because he was effective in saying it. Prof. Matory offers quite a model for a university president.
Monday Matters
Henry Kissinger outlines what could be expected of Hamas to produce a possible road to peace.
Two of my books deal with peace activists of various sorts, and I think courses in peace studies--dealing both with the history of peace movements and their ideological underpinnings--are welcome additions to the curriculum. But this offering at one Maryland high school? An assignment having students stand on the roadside with anti-war signs?
Inside Higher Ed on continuing academic objections to Google's creating digitized versions of books.
Paul Bremer's depressing memoir of his time in Iraq, reviewed in the Times. The former proconsul doesn't exactly come across as a paragon of courage.
Becker and Posner on Summers' resignation.
Very interesting piece (subscription req.) by Stuart Rothenberg in today's Roll Call. The nation's preeminent analyst of congressional election argues that "Americans, or at least many Americans, now assume the worst about the president. They interpret events through the lens of pessimism. Good news, such as the state of the economy, is not appreciated, and bad news is not merely bad, it’s catastrophic." Therefore, he notes, "you need to go back at least to 1982 to find an environment that is close to as bad as the current one for the GOP." The Repubs lost 26 House seats in 1982, setting the stage for 12 years in which the Dems had working ideological control of the lower chamber.
Sunday, February 26, 2006
Sunday News
Julian Sanchez has a fascinating piece in Reason critiquing the rise and fall of neoconservative ideology.
FIRE co-founder Harvey Silverglate is, as usual, on target, in outlining the speech that Larry Summers should have given in the aftermath of his NBER remarks controversy. Peter Berkowitz similarly faults Summers' insufficient defense of freedom of inquiry.
In the LA Times, Tim Rutten condemns the Western media's silence about assaults on their Arab colleagues.
Eugene Volokh on one of the more bizarre pro-gun laws, from VA, seeking to deny pediatricians the right to question about guns in the home.
President Yoweri Museveni has been reelected in Uganda, in a contest marred by allegations of fraud; TNR analyzes how one of the hopes for a new, democratic Africa became another dictator.
Saturday, February 25, 2006
Summers Fallout
I have been struck by the remarkably sharp reaction to the Summers resignation from Establishment voices of the center-left. The Washington Post described Summers' departure as "prejudice wins," a setback for those who believe that "universities exist to pose tough questions, promote critical thinking, and generally challenge complacency and prejudice." Peter Beinart, editor of The New Republic," alleged that "the most prestigious professoriate in the world, Harvard's, has just made an ass of itself," unseating "one of the few contemporary college presidents who tried to turn liberal ideals into government policy, rather than just opining about them from the ivory tower." Marty Peretz, in the same journal, noted "tact is not the issue. It's conviction that's the issue, and many FAS faculty do not like his convictions." Alan Dershowitz lamented "an academic coup d'etat" that originated from Summers having "committed the cardinal sin against the academic hard left: He expressed politically incorrect views regarding gender, race, religion, sexual preference, and the military" (and policy toward Israel). Even the New York Times Magazine's James Traub, in a piece that minimized the ideological nature of the conflict, lambasted Summers' most outspoken faculty critics, observing that, as "university presidents who have something to say that is worth hearing are as rare as hen's teeth," he worried "that an emboldened faculty will push the Harvard Corporation to choose as his successor the reincarnation of Neil Rudenstine."
These comments aren't coming from the Wall Street Journal editorial board. And they reflect a general understanding that, regardless of Summers' obvious interpersonal shortcomings, there's a problem when a considerable portion of the faculty of the nation's most prestigious university considers the specific views that Summers presented on Israel, ROTC, expectations of scholarship, and faculty diversity not merely wrong but so beyond the pale that he deserved a vote of no-confidence and a continued opposition campaign thereafter that ultimately ended in his resignation. As the Post noted about Summers' public positions on the Israeli divestment petition, ROTC, and the idea that University Professors should remain productive scholars, "the fact that these commonsensical positions alienated people at Harvard speaks volumes about the cultural gap [between university faculties and the rest of the country] that troubled Mr. Summers."
Saturday News
Video and photos of yesterday's rally in support of Denmark, outside the Danish embassy in Washington. For those who couldn't attend the rally and don't like Danish products, another way of showing sympathy for the Danes.
I have a piece at Inside Higher Ed critiquing my friends at the PSC, CUNY's faculty union.
Ohio is one of 16 states whose legislature is considering proposals to outlaw gay adoption (initiatives that would hand almost no chance of passing constitutional muster); a Dem state representative gently mocks the proposal.
The New Republic notes the story of one of the Dems' key recruiting victories of the 2006 elections--the fact that Katherine Harris is the all-but-certain GOP nominee in Florida. To counter, a Republican recruiting victory of a similar type: the Dem frontrunner in Ohio's 6th district--an open seat being vacated by a Dem incumbent running for governor--failed to secure enough signatures to qualify for the ballot. How many did he need--2000? 1000? Try 50. (He only got 46.)
A remarkable document from 9-11 showing Donald Rumsfeld's early attempts to link a response to Iraq to the attacks.
And an educational outrage :) in Newfoundland and Labrador: the provincial governornment sends all schoolchildren home early . . . so they could watch the curling finals. (The local team won the gold medal.)
Friday, February 24, 2006
Blagojevich
I realize that among Chicago politicians, concerns begin and end with politics--and largely the politics of the Windy City itself. But for a governor never to have heard of "The Daily Show"?
The video is here, at "Pill of Rights."
Wednesday, February 22, 2006
Summers' Departure
I agree with Tim Burke that a central lesson of Larry Summers’ resignation is that “academic institutions have become extraordinarily difficult to lead in some strongly centralized and idiosyncratic direction,” and a determined presidential agenda “would go a lot further in the hands of someone more skilled politically and interpersonally than Summers.” I was struck, in recent weeks, by how few members of the Harvard faculty spoke up in Summers’ defense. A leader with no followers has lost the ability to lead.
That said, it also seems to me impossible to disentangle Summers’ leadership difficulties from broader ideological issues affecting the academy. The original draft of the 2005 faculty resolution listed three specific events justifying a motion of no confidence: the president’s remarks about women in science; his handling of the Cornel West matter; and his denunciation of a proposed faculty resolution urging Harvard to divest from firms doing business in Israel. In an attempt to win the votes of more moderate faculty members, the final resolution excluded mention of specific issues. But had Summers taken the opposite position on these three matters, it’s very, very hard to believe that a no-confidence measure would ever have been introduced, much less passed.
Tuesday, February 21, 2006
Power of E-Mail
Today's Globe has yet another reminder that e-mails are permanent in a way that conservsations are not. The "trust fund baby" who turned down the job in the article seems like a real piece of work.
Monday, February 20, 2006
The AAUP Strikes Out (Again)
It’s been an interesting couple of weeks for the AAUP. First, the organization was forced to postpone a conference on academic boycotts after distributing literature from a journal that traffics in Holocaust denial. Then, the body’s immediate past chair of Committee A, Joan Scott, suggested that academics who criticized the conference for its apparent anti-Israel bias violated (an unspecified) AAUP “procedure.” Today, the group’s Committee on Graduate and Professional Students came out with the long-expected denunciation of NYU’s opposition to a graduate student union.
It’s unsurprising, of course, that the AAUP, an academic union itself, favors establishing more academic unions. But claiming that NYU’s policy violates “academic freedom” stretches the concept beyond recognition, and calls into question whether Joan Scott isn’t the only AAUP officer who seems unclear on academic freedom’s meaning. The report’s reasoning does not befit the AAUP’s (rapidly eroding) status as the conscience of the academy.
Friday, February 17, 2006
The Perot Legacy
Interesting review in today's New Republic about how to interpret the political legacy of the 1992-6 Ross Perot movement. It remains amazing to think back that a man who was, shall we say, creative in his interpretation of reality actually led in 1992 polls, albeit only for a brief period.
As Marty Peretz notes, the Perot phenomenon seems to benefit the GOP, but in Slate, Mickey Kaus proposes a Democratic alternative: run in 2008 on a campaign slogan of "Return to Normalcy." The central premise of the proposal: "Bush has stretched the military, the Constitution and the civility of our politics to the limit in reaction to the threat of future 9/11s."
Given the margin of victory enjoyed by the last candidate to run on such a slogan, Kaus might be onto something. There are some similarities between Bush and Wilson, in that both abused constitutional norms in pursuit of national security and governed in highly partisan fashions. One big difference, though: WW was repudiated by the Senate with the defeat of Versailles, but the Dems nonetheless nominated a strongly pro-Wilson ticket. Bush is unlikely to experience such a complete repudiation, nor is it clear that the GOP 2008 ticket will consist of Bush acolytes.
Thursday, February 16, 2006
The AAC&U Confronts "Anti-Intellectualism," Or Itself
The Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) recently concluded its annual conference. It’s ironic that a group whose agenda in many ways defines “anti-intellectualism” chose at its conference theme a denunciation of contemporary “anti-intellectualism.”
Despite copious rhetoric about promoting “excellence” and “quality” in providing a “21st century” education, the AAC&U made perfectly clear its intended audience: at a conference with dozens of sessions, panelists from three low-quality but AAC&U-oriented schools (Evergreen State, Cal. St.-Monterey Bay, and IUPUI) more than doubled the combined number of presenters from the eight Ivy League institutions, Cal.-Berkeley, Stanford, and the University of Chicago. (Two-thirds of those from the latter group came from Columbia’s Teachers’ College.) The AAC&U’s fundamental agenda—shifting the emphases of a college education away from instruction in the traditional disciplines of the liberal arts toward a focus on “skills,” and infusing the resulting courses with content designed to purge lower- and middle-class (white) students of their allegedly intrinsic racism and sexism—has no chance of adoption by any school in which parents or alumni play an active role. So the group targets middle and lower-tier, mostly public, colleges and universities. To date, around 20 colleges follow most of the AAC&U line, while the organization has some influence over the policies of perhaps 30 or 40 more schools.
Monday, February 13, 2006
Military History and Groupthink
A few days ago, Ralph linked to an important post by Tom Bruscino on the weak nature of military history in the academy—a field whose status, in terms of staffing, is even more dire than U.S. political, diplomatic, or legal history. Bruscino’s comments on the significance of military history are well taken, though I fear that the battle has been lost. It’s almost impossible to imagine most history departments, as currently constituted, electing to hire someone whose scholarship involves military history.
Bruscino was prompted to write in response to two H-LatAm list-serv requests by Victor Macias Gonzalez, a professor at Wisconsin-LaCrosse. “I'm a fish out of water . . . help!,” he wrote. “I am teaching my historiography seminar, and two of my 8 students want to work on Military History. My knee-jerk reaction, of course, was to object, but I want the students to work on topics that are close and dear to their hearts . . . any suggestions for germinal works on military history?” “Dare I think,” Macias Gonzalez continued, “there may be something in U.S. military history similar to what we have witnessed in our own field over the last 15-20 years with the influence of cultural history and gender?”
Sunday, February 12, 2006
Alaska
The AP wire brings news that the State of Alaska has hired a p.r. firm to "to change the perception of Alaska and its people as greedy for federal dollars and all too willing to plunder the environment for profit."
As long as Ted Stevens and Don Young are part of Alaska's congressional delegation, I'm afraid the p.r. firm will have its work cut out for it.
The ABA and Diversity
David Bernstein has an interesting piece in this weekend's Wall Street Journal, looking into a resolution mandating law school "diversity" likely to pass at the ABA convention.
In and of itself, such a resolution is unremarkable, though it is a reminder of the difficulty of implementing in the real world the theoretical distinction that Sandra Day O'Connor drew between diversity and quotas in Grutter and Gratz.
Instead, two legally binding interpretations of the resolution attracted Bernstein's notice. First, the ABA states that "the requirements of a constitutional provision or statute that purports to prohibit consideration of gender, race, ethnicity or national origin in admissions or employment decisions is not a justification for a school's non-compliance" with the "diversity" resolution. In other words, law schools in states like California and Washington are being told by an organization whose mission is to uphold respect for the law that they should ignore their own state constitutions.
A second interpretation holds that "consistent with the Supreme Court's decision in Grutter v. Bollinger, a law school may use race and ethnicity in its admissions process to promote equal opportunity and diversity." Yet Grutter listed only diversity as grounds for using race and ethnicity in the admissions process. Are ABA accreditors unfamiliar with the law?
It seems all but certain that implementation of this resolution will generate more lawsuits. And with Alito replacing O'Connor on the court, the ABA might have been well advised not to press this issue at the present time.
Friday, February 10, 2006
Joan Scott and the AAUP
No AAUP committee is more important than Committee A, which investigates allegations of institutional abuse of the AAUP’s academic freedom guidelines. Princeton’s Joan Scott recently concluded a stint as chair of the committee, for which she remains, through 2008, a consultant. In light of the definition of “academic freedom” offered yesterday, in print, by Scott, she should step down from her position with the committee.
By this stage, we all know the background to the story of the AAUP and the proposed boycott of Israeli academics. The organization, along with many other groups, condemned a British teachers’ union for passing a resolution boycotting two Israeli universities. But then, for reasons never convincingly explained, the AAUP elected to schedule a conference on what its president, Roger Bowen, patronizingly termed this “most nettlesome subject.” The decision seemed curious: as UIC’s Peter Shalen observed at the time, “the AAUP does not normally organize conferences devoted to issues on which it has already taken irreversible positions, especially when those positions are simple reaffirmations of its core principles.” That more than one-third of those scheduled to attend the gathering had backed the anti-Israel boycott gave the appearance of the AAUP retreating from its firm anti-boycott position. Then, when the organization distributed an article by a Holocaust denier as part of the pre-conference reading material, the gathering was postponed.
Enter Professor Scott, who lashed out in the comments section of a recent Inside Higher Ed piece. “Critics” of the conference, she contended, were “lobbyists on behalf of the current Israeli regime (or fellow travellers [sic] of those lobbyists)," and needed to be identified as such. This “lobby” consisted of “people (pro-Israel occupation) who believe that any representation of a point of view other than theirs is ananthema [sic]"; academics who defined academic freedom as “the freedom to listen only to those who agree with them.” Those who protested the conference behaved unprofessionally, as “they did not protest quietly, but alerted entire list serves of lobbyists who began to campaign for closing down the conference.” Remarks by the University of Illinois’ Cary Nelson (hardly a neocon) critical of the conference, Scott maintained, “violate AAUP procedure and harm the reputation of AAUP,” since his comments were “based not on careful inquiry, but on polemic.” In conclusion, Scott lamented, “those of us dedicated to the protection of academic freedom can only mourn its loss on this occasion.”
Ponder the implications of these remarks. Without citing evidence, Scott publicly maintained that:
--professors who disagreed with her were fellow travelers of “pro-Israel occupation” lobbyists;
--professors who disagreed with her wanted to squelch all ideas other than their own;
--those who disagree with AAUP positions apparently violate AAUP procedure by either informing non-academic groups of their concerns or by (as Nelson did) speaking out publicly in a way that Scott deems “based not on careful inquiry, but on polemic.”
This is the conception of “academic freedom” held by the figure who, until recently, was the AAUP’s point person on the issue? The organization should ask all its officials to review its 1940 statement on academic freedom and tenure, lest others join Scott in turning on their heads the organization’s basic principles.
Sunday, February 5, 2006
More Dispositions
NCATE, the national accrediting agency for teacher-training programs, continues to be on the defensive for its new "dispositions" criteria, which has been used at several institutions to screen out potential teachers solely on the basis of their beliefs on social or political issues. Today an op-ed in the Washington Post summarizes many of the key cases, the first of which went public at Brooklyn College around nine months ago.
The piece contains the following howler from NCATE president Arthur Wise: the organization didn't "expect or require institutions to attend to any particular political or social ideologies." The organization, Wise continues, expected only "that candidates exhibit two professional dispositions: fairness and the belief that all students can learn." Hmm. I wonder how, exactly, the organization expected the following disposition-related mandate, conveniently not mentioned by Wise but adopted by NCATE in 2002, to be implemented?
For example, if the unit has described its vision for teacher preparation as ‘Teachers as agents of change’ and has indicated that a commitment to social justice is one disposition it expects of teachers who can become agents of change, then it is expected that unit assessments include some measure of a candidate’s commitment to social justice.
Saturday, February 4, 2006
Buy Danish
A "Buy Danish" site has now appeared. I can't recall seeing any of these items in a recent trip to the store, but in light of recent events, I'll certainly go out of my way to purchase Danish goods in the future.
Sunday, January 29, 2006
On the Web
Princeton's Robert George urges colleges to spend more time teaching civics--a good idea in theory, though I'm skeptical as to whether George would be comfortable with how today's professoriate would teach civics.
The New Republic looks at Latin America, and issues "a bold call for inaction" in light of the growth of the anti-American left. This is probably the best policy, but isn't this the approach the Bush administration has been following since 2001?
Gotham Gazette looks at the declining pay scales among public university professors in New York.
James Ryan with a skeptical view of the recent Breyer and Cass Sunstein critiques of originalism. I'm far more persuaded by the duo, especially by Sunstein's book.
The Chronicle's coverage goes national, in a potentially important way, as "reform" majority leader candidate John Boehner's support from for-profit colleges and the student loan industry comes under review.
Heather MacDonald provides a strong critique of the ideological agenda offered in law school clinics.
Lewis Gould argues that the State of the Union address no longer serves any purpose.
Saturday, January 28, 2006
Saturday News
Joe Ellis looks at where to place 9/11 in the context of American history.
An odd suggestion to do away with letters of recommendation in academic searches. Letters have their limits--no professor should, say, rely solely on a letter of recommendation to evaluate a candidate's scholarship. But they seem to me important tools in narrowing searches down to the finalists.
The Washington Post on how gay rights is splitting the black community--with possible major implications for the 2006 Senate race, where Dem co-frontrunner Kweisi Mfume has come out in favor of gay marriage.
More turmoil at Harvard, as Pres. Summers forces out dean of faculty (and professor of Chinese history) William Kirby.
FIRE casts a skeptical eye on the AAUW's recent claim that 62% of college students experience sexual harrassment.
Friday, January 27, 2006
Around the Web
Inside Higher Ed reports on an Ohio State proposal to revamp its general education requirements. Among the components: creating large thematic interdisciplinary courses, while eliminating the current requirements that students take 6 credits in US history. Most unfortunate.
Excellent piece in Slate on "the power madness of King George."
As promised by NYU president John Sexton, those TA's who choose not to teach will not receive spring-term teaching stipends.
A conference at Bar-Ilan University takes aim on the academic boycotts of Israel and the pervasive anti-Israel sentiment among some quarters of the academy.
Seems like bloggers on the right don't like John McCain. But they do like Rudy?
With Robin Givhan, faux blowhard Stephen Colbert discusses how to make a power statement with fashion in the Washington political scene.
Thursday, January 26, 2006
Thursday News
Hamas wins. It's hard to see how this result will not benefit Netanyahu in the Israeli elections.
Contrasting views on how the internet will affect the Islamic world: Joseph Braude cautions against complacency; Stephen Schwartz sees blogging as undermining the Saudi leadership. I'm inclined to agree more with Braude.
EphBlog had a winter study on-line seminar analyzing Williams' "diversity" initiative; I have a concluding post. The tip-off: the sole outside consultant on "faculty issues" for the initiative described Ward Churchill as "her hire" and recommended that Williams adopt the same process that led to Churchill's hiring, tenuring, and promotion. How reassuring.
Interesting take on history and the Hillary Clinton '08 bid: will the Alito nomination help trigger another "year of the woman" politically? It's not impossible.
Donald Hall's three-part collegiality posting at IHE concludes, though with recommendations far less controversial than his first two essays.
Friday, January 20, 2006
TWU Says No
Wow. The MTA (correctly, in my opinion) came under heat for elements in the contract that seemed to reward the illegal strike. I can't imagine the city or state providing a more generous offer. The final vote was 11,234 to 11,227: are there any hanging chads?
Hawaii Surprise
Just after a poll from New Jersey that showed interim senator Bob Menendez trailing Republican Tom Kean, Jr. by 11 points (though with more than 30 percent of the electorate undecided), a surprising piece of bad news for Democrats from Hawaii: incumbent Daniel Akaka is going to face a primary challenge from Democratic congressman Ed Case. (Akaka is 81 years old; Case is 53; and Case has said he'll stress the age issue in the primary.)
It's still unlikely the Republicans will be able to contest this seat, but a race that was safe Democratic now has a bit of unpredictability.
Tuesday, January 17, 2006
The Kennedy Court
My colleague, Oscar Chamberlain, correctly notes below that today's Supreme Court decision on Oregon's assisted suicide law gives the lie to any argument for consistency by the Court's conservatives on issues associated with federalism.
The decision was significant for another reason, however: it reminds us that even though Samuel Alito's likely elevation will create a block of four conservatives unlike anything seen on the Court since the Four Horsemen of 1937, the Court as currently constituted will be Anthony Kennedy's. And the jurisprudence of Kennedy, as Dahlia Lithwick points out, is even harder to predict than was Sandra Day O'Connor.
Monday, January 16, 2006
Bachelet's Victory
I thought the Washington Post did a particularly good job of covering the Chilean election--in sharp contrast to much of the US media.
I just watched a segment of Lou Dobbs, in which he took time from his usual denunciations of illegal immigrants long enough to describe Michelle Bachelet's triumph as the latest in a string of leftist victories in Latin America--followed up by a map of the region showing Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Venezuela, and Cuba in red. John Foster Dulles couldn't have done better.
The Dobbs piece made no mention of the fact that the same center-left alliance in Chile has now won four consecutive elections in Chile, nor that Bachelet succeeded a wildly popular Socialist whose policies were neither anti-American nor anti-capitalist, nor that the Brazilian and Argentine administrations have done little or nothing to harm US economic or strategic interests. To classify these three governments with Fidel Castro's dictatorship is absurd.
More important, such classification blinds the public--where knowledge of Latin America isn't high anyway--to the dilemmas posed by Bolivia and Venezuela, where anti-American leaders rule after capturing elections that weren't wholly free and certainly without having demonstrated any respect for other aspects of democratic culture, such as the law or civil society. Bush's policy of ignoring Latin America represents the most tempting alternative to dealing with figures such as Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales, except that there's little sign to date that the policy has worked.
Institutionalizing Bias
I'm participating in a winter-term project at Williams, where the EphBlog is analyzing the college's new "diversity" initiative. A good hint of the initiative's direction comes in the identity of the sole consultant brought aboard to discuss "faculty issues." Evelyn Hu-DeHart was chair of the ethnic studies department at Colorado when Ward Churchill was hired, has described Churchill as "her hire," and has resolutely defended the propriety of Churchill's hiring, tenure, and promotion. That alone would seem to disqualify her from giving guidance to another institution on personnel matters, and it's little surprise that the specific policies that Hu-DeHart recommends are exactly those followed by Colorado in the early 1990s--the policies that led to Churchill's hiring, tenure, and promotion. To those who raise the possibility of a lack of ideological balance in ethnic studies departments, Hu-DeHart plays the race card: critics should look into the ojectivity of “all these dominant white professors [who] are studying European history or the [history of] white Europe.” How reassuring.
Meanwhile, FIRE continues to fight a strange policy at the University of Wisconsin, where a committee has recommended upholding the policies of two UW branches that ban RAs from leading Bible studies on their own time and in their own dormitories. Quite apart from the obvious free speech issues related to the ban, you have to wonder about the mindset of the Student Life administrators who imposed the ban in the first place. There can't be more than a handful of RAs who even want to lead Bible study sessions. Any reasonable administrator would have simply done nothing, rather than provoke a constitutional fight.
Tuesday, January 10, 2006
FIRE on North Carolina
FIRE has issued its first comprehensive survey of a state's public higher education institutions, and the results are not comforting: the report faults 13 of the state's 16 public colleges and universities for having on the books at least one policy "that both clearly and substantially restricts freedom of speech." The state legislature seems to be entirely asleep on this matter.
The best speech code clearly belongs to North Carolina-Greensboro, whose speech code outlaws statements suggesting "disrespect for persons." (Interpreted literally, the code would seem to mean that, in class, a student couldn't question the integrity of historical actors who are still alive.) The school is also going after two students for protesting the school's "free speech zones." The students' offense? They protested outside the free speech zone.
But, as Sandi Cooper would say, we ought not concern ourselves with such matters. The faculty has more important items to protest than university policies restricting speech. Let the students hire a lawyer so the courts can handle the issue!
(FIRE's Robert Shibley has a great post in response to Cooper's bizarre argument.)
On another type of free speech issue--an amazing project being undertaken by some University of Montana journalism students, who are trying to assemble evidence to persuade Governor Brian Schweitzer to posthumously pardon Montanans tried and convicted under the WWI Sedition Act. Montana had an unusually aggressive US attorney during much of the war, and abuse of the act was more pronounced there than in just about any state other than New York.
Lithwick on Alito
Slate's Dahlia Lithwick does her normal sharp job in analyzing Samuel Alito's rather odd opening statement. From the tenor of events today, we can pretty much mail in the 10-8 Judiciary Committee vote.
Unlike Roberts, Alito's path to the Supreme Court was very much smoothed by the 2004 Senate elections--if Tom Daschle, Tony Knowles, Betty Castor, and Erskine Bowles had won instead of John Thune, Lisa Murkowski, Mel Martinez, and Richard Burr, this week's confirmation hearings might actually matter. But even assuming that Alito starts with 44 negative votes (Jim Jeffords plus all of the Dems except for Nebraska's Ben Nelson, the only truly vulnerable Demmocratic incumbent up for re-election in 2006), there aren't seven Republicans who even might vote no.
I suppose the hearings' major value will be seeing if Tom Coburn again breaks down in tears.
Monday, January 9, 2006
The World of Sandi Cooper
IHE has an article this morning on the unsuccessful amendment that David Beito, Ralph Luker, and I co-sponsored at the AHA. (The amendment called for the organization to express concern with not only ABOR but also with campus speech codes as threats to academic freedom.) As David wrote from Philadelphia, "This vote is a great disappointment and critics will have a field day. They will charge--and with some justification--that it shows that the AHA subscribes to a double standard of 'academic freedom for me but not thee.'"
The most peculiar argument against it came from CUNY's own Sandi Cooper, who, according to IHE's Scott Jaschik, said:
courts have thrown out speech codes so criticizing them is “beating a dead horse” while the Academic Bill of Rights is “a very serious threat.”
Now, if ABOR would force colleges to hire more "conservative" faculty, as Cooper and others have claimed, then the courts would throw out ABOR as well, since public colleges cannot hire or fire on the basis of political beliefs. (ABORs passed by a state legislature could not apply to private colleges.) Since Cooper sees no reason for the AHA to come out against concepts that can't pass judicial muster, I wonder why she felt compelled to resolve against ABOR? Given that dozens of colleges around the country have some form of speech codes and not even one state has adopted ABOR, it would seem to me that the more "serious threat"--at least in the 12 months until the next AHA convention--is speech codes.
Perhaps the AHA should just follow Cooper's advice, close down shop, and allow the courts to uphold academic freedom.
Update, 1.31pm: Mark Goldblatt, a professor at SUNY's FIT and self-described conservative, has a fascinating recap of an MLA session on why "anti-war" courses are fine, but "pro-war" curricula or scholars have no place in higher education.
Sunday, January 8, 2006
Misc.: Sunday
Capital Eye with the most detailed summary to date of Abramaoff-related campaign contributions, broken down by member and by party. And ex-congressman Duke Cunningham might have been wired for some conversations with defense contractors: I wonder if other members were mentioned?
"Truthiness"--the initial selection in Stephen Colbert's hilarious "The Word" segment--was named the word of 2005 by the American Dialect Society.
Hamilton College has a survey on high school attitudes toward social issues--abortion, gay rights, gun control. Findings are interesting (especially on gay rights, where the overwhelming support offers a clue as to why conservatives have been so aggressive in attempting to constitutionalize discrimination now); just as interesting is the clear discomfort of the poll director, Sociology professor Dennis Gilbert, a former LA to Bernie Sanders and author of The American Class Structure in an Age of Growing Inequality, with the students' moderate views on abortion. Odd that the patronizing comments he makes about the abortion findings don't appear in his analysis of the gay rights polling issues.
Scientific American proposes the term "murdercide" and looks at the motives of suicide murderers.
DePaul's contribution to the fair and balanced field of "global studies." I have to give the department credit for its candor: program director Michael McIntyre announces that as "DePaul aspires to train the activists who will change" the world, "we concentrate on the non-profit sector and welcome activists of all stripes to our program." The program's homepage also contains the (almost obligatory) reference to 9/11 as a justification for the pedagogy--perhaps the only thing that the global studies movement and the Bush administration have in common.
Saturday, January 7, 2006
Abramoff and Historical Analogies
One thing that most struck me in working with the LBJ tapes was the degree to which Johnson thought in historical analogies. On matters political, the press does as well, and it will be interesting to see how the Abramoff scandal gets framed over the coming weeks. There seem to me three options:
--the House bank scandal. Bruce Bartlett made the case six weeks ago that this analogy would work best for Democrats, but I'm dubious. More than a decade after its revelation, the scandal remains one of the more curious affairs in American political history—a perk that was impossible to defend politically, but hardly an event that should rank high in the annals of improper congressional conduct. And even Bartlett terms the scandal an example of "petty corruption." If the Republicans can frame the Abramoff case as one of petty corruption, they're in pretty good shape.
--Abscam. This is the analogy I suspect we'll hear the most about, though I'm not sure it's wholly on-point. While an extraordinary breach of the public trust, Abscam seems to me a public corruption case: members of Congress took money in exchange for performing services, but the effect on broader public policy was negligible. (Philadelphia congressman Ozzie Myers, a product of the Rizzo machine, uttered on tape the scandal's most memorable line--that in Congress, "Money talks, bullshit walks.") This comparison, of course, wouldn't be good for the Republicans--1 senator and 6 congressmen were convicted as a result of the probe--but the reaction to Abscam didn't have a long-lasting political effect, either.
--the scandals of the 1920s. Teapot Dome is the best-known of these, which featured not only bribery but also a series of scandals revolving around excessive campaign contributions and improper corporate access to the levers of congressional policymaking. Two events of the 1920s strike me as directly relevant to the lessons of the Abramoff case. (1) The cases of William Vare (PA) and Frank Smith (IL), who won election to the Senate in 1926 but were denied their seats for flagrantly violating their states' (weak) campaign finance laws; (2) The case of Connecticut senator Hiram Bingham, who was formally censured by the Senate for placing a lobbyist from the Connecticut Association of Manufacturers on his Senate staff during the closed markup sessions on the Smoot-Hawley taff. Bingham ingeniously defended his action by claiming that the lobbyist was not "trying to get [colleagues] to do something they did not want to do," but was merely reflecting the mindset of the pro-business committee.
The 1920s scandals strike me as the most appropriate analogy for the kind of abuses we've seen with Abramoff.
Misc.: Sat.
Compellingly argued column by Jonathan Rauch in National Journal on the Bush administration's expansion of executive authority.
The last of China's "gang of four" is dead.
Marquette has upheld the punishment of a dental student for negative comments about a professor and unnamed students that he wrote on his blog.
Another victory for FIRE: DePaul has retreated from its attempt to ban the College Republican Club from posting flyers critical of the university's Cultural Center inviting Ward Churchill to speak.
Very interesting piece in TNR on recent events in The Netherlands and the failure to assimilate Muslim immigrants.
Friday, January 6, 2006
Misc.: Fri.
A fascinating site from Cal-Santa Barbara containing more than 5000 soundclips from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, available through streaming technology on-line.
Marty Peretz has a couple of great recent posts at TNR's blog, though I think he's far too charitable in his assessment of Eugene McCarthy, a latecomer to the anti-war movement in Congress and a figure whose contribution to 1960s liberalism on the domestic front was insignificant.
George Will on the NCAA's achieving the impossible: becoming more politically correct than the typical college administration.
The Fix, at the Washington Post, is my favorite political blog; interesting update on the sleeper race of the 2006 Senate contests, Tennessee. The Barone reference was first made in the 2002 Almanac of American Politics, when Barone put forth Ford as presidential material.
Thursday, January 5, 2006
Misc.: Thurs.
Maureen Dowd's (firewalled) column in yesterday's Times notes that Bush has, on 108 occasions, issued signing statements that the administration claims determines "legislative intent." That the President can in any way--much less unilaterally--define "legislative intent" is as violative of the principle of separation of powers as anything we've seen from this administration.
IHE has more on the MLA's proposal to water down the scholarship requirements associated with tenure. Obviously there's a problem with declining publication rates by academic presses, but I'm sure this idea will go over well with state legislators. Also in IHE, the AAC&U proves how out of touch it is by expressing surprise that many students who don't identify their race/ethnicity on college admissions forms are, in fact, white, rather than multi-racial.
The full list of Abramoff campaign contributions makes for very interesting reading.
Wednesday, January 4, 2006
PA-NY Battle
The New York Republican Party has been doing its best to make itself irrelevant--most recently when state Senate majority leader Joe Bruno floated the name of Donald Trump as a possible gubernatorial candidate this fall. Trump quickly shot down the idea.
Now, from PA, comes news that Lynn Swann is seeking the GOP nomination for governor. The GOP isn't exactly bringing its "first team" against incumbent Ed Rendell--the frontrunner is former Lieutenant Governor William Scranton, who lost a gubernatorial race 20 years ago and whose website lists coordinating the response to the Three Mile Island accident as his most relevant government experience--but for anyone who's ever seen Swann do a college football sideline report can't help but cringe to picture him in a debate with incumbent Ed Rendell.
Perhaps the Cliopatriarchs in Philadelphia for the AHA convention can set aside some time to coach Swann on the issues of the day?
Collegiality 102
A few weeks ago, I responded to part one in a series of essays advocating an increased use of “collegiality” in training graduate students. In part two, out today in IHE, author Donald Hall, a professor of English at West Virginia and a specialist in specialist in British studies, queer theory, and cultural studies, takes his thesis to even more alarming degrees.
Collegiality was once bad, Hall recognizes: it “was long abused by retrograde forces in the academy — it was deployed to deny tenure to women, people of color, individuals working in identity political fields, and those who resisted harassment or attempted to change a culture of abuse. Sometimes it was referenced with less explicitly nefarious intent but with the same consequences, when departments simply did not understand the shifts that were occurring in the broader academy and reacted with incomprehension to still untenured agents of change within their own institutions.”
Now, apparently, that those “agents of change” rather than the “retrograde forces” are in charge of departments, threats from abusing collegiality no longer exists. As I discovered in my own tenure case, this proposition is absurd. Collegiality as a mechanism for evaluation cannot be divorced from subjectivity, and it therefore is always subject to abuse by dominant pedagogical forces. In the 1950s, as Hall notes, those forces were those intent on keeping women, people of color, or avowed leftists out of the academy. Now, of course, the dominant ideological forces within the academy are of a very different ideological complexion.
Colorado and Tenure
Very interesting article in this morning's Chronicle about the University of Colorado's decision to institute a general review--under strong political pressure--of its tenure process. The subtext question: was the decision to hire and tenure Ward Churcill an anomaly, or a signal of a broader problem in the system? The university has hired a retired Air Force general, Howell Estes, to run the process. It's clear that Estes was hired in part because he has credibility with the legislature. Estes also hired a consulting team from PriceWaterhouseCoopers to assist him.
A couple of revealing elements from the article. First, the AAUP, while not opposing Estes' selection, did oppose the selection of the outside consultants. AAUP general secreatry Roger Bowen remarked that the AAUP has more knowledge and experience in the field of tenure. Quite so. But over the last couple of years, the AAUP's conduct has revealed it to be excessively partisan on the issues related to the Colorado inquiry. It's unfortunate that the AAUP seems to have lost some credibility on whether it can speak objectively to the question of whether the higher education personnel system might be improved.
Second, Colorado apparently has a system of post-tenure review in place. Critics contend that the fact that Ward Churchill regularly survived post-tenure review proves that system isn't working either.
I'm generally supportive of post-tenure review: I see no reason for a system that allows those who receive tenure to then shirk one of the two main qualifications--producing scholarship--for which they were granted tenure in the first place. That said, it seems to me that those institutions with effective tenure processes in place are those least likely to need post-tenure reviews. And schools that use tenure to determine factors other than academic quality are also those likely to see to it that post-tenure review doesn't work well.
Anyhow, I'll be intrigued to see what kind of report Estes produces.
Wednesday, December 28, 2005
IHE on MLA
Today's IHE has a depressing story on the current MLA convention, as presenters blame everyone but themselves for the diminishing public financial support for the academy. The chief villain? The "corporate" university--a concept that critics denounce with vehemence but never quite seem to define.
Anyhow, Ohio State professor Francis Donoghue contends that the "corporate" nature of colleges explains why people “no longer trust college as a place for intellectual broadening.” I can think of several other reasons why people no longer trust many humanities and social science departments for "intellectual broadening"--I would place little trust in, say, the UCLA History Department for broadening the horizons of its students intellects.
Trinity's Paul Lauter calls for a kind of guerrilla professoriate, one that thinks "of ways we can intervene to make governing or living untenable for” so-called corporate administrators. In the words of IHE reporter David Epstein, "Lauter railed against the labor practices of private institutions that deny graduate student unions."
An insufficient number of graduate student unions and a unwarranted loss of trust that faculty are committed to intellectually broadening their students' horizons. Very perceptive analysis at the MLA.
Sunday, December 25, 2005
UMass-Boston
A frightening story from today's Globe about a UMass-Boston professor who was followed home by a student and then repeatedly stabbed by him after a dispute over his grade.
Thursday, December 22, 2005
Workload Breakdown
Today's IHE has an interesting story on the workload breakdown between teaching, research, and service--broken down further by type of institution and discipline.
The report seems to have assembled its data based on faculty members' self-reporting, leading to some odd figures. (I find it hard to believe that natural science professors at doctoral institutions spend almost twice as much time on teaching as they do on research.) I was particularly struck, however, by the field breakdown: only Fine Arts professors say they devote less time to research than Education faculty. Maybe that explains how we got dispositions theory.
In the roundip, IHE also reports that the Homeland Security Department "adamantly denied" the claim of a UMass-Dartmouth student that he had been interrogated after requesting Mao's Little Red Book via ILL. This story is looking more and more like it could be a hoax. (Incredibly, the original story was published without the reporter even having talked to the student or his parents; the reporter relied simply on the word of two professors.) While Wisconsin professor Uli Schamiloglu uncritically accepted the professors' version of events and lamented that "we are on the path to becoming like the totalitarian countries studied in the course taken by that poor student at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth,” the comments in IHE's original story raise some pretty strong questions about the anonymous student's claim. The professor who originally publicized the claim, Bryan Glyn Williams, has a quite interesting website, and has implied that the alleged interrogation was part of an attempt by the government to discourage him from teaching a course called "Critically Assessing the Historic Roots of Terrorism in the Middle East (Hamas, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda, Al Aqsa Martyr Brigades, Islamic Jihad, Harkat-ul Mujahideen)." While this assertion doesn't exactly enhance Williams' credibility, the syllabus for the course doesn't seem to be on-line; I'd be curious to see exactly what Williams means by "critically assessing."
If, in fact, the story is untrue, what action will UMass-Dartmouth take?
Wednesday, December 21, 2005
Politics and Policy for Pataki
Here in New York, as we work our way through the second day of the Transit Workers' Union's illegal strike, TWU head Roger Toussaint has accomplished the seemingly impossible--producing a unified reaction, on a domestic issue, from the editorial boards of the city's six leading dailies. In a rambling press statement this afternoon, Toussaint claimed that he had a "higher calling" than following the law and compared the striking workers to Rosa Parks. Even ignoring the extraordinarily generous health and pension packages the TWU enjoys, given that the starting salary for a transit worker is higher than the starting salaries for police officers, firefighters, teachers, and even CUNY assistant professors, it's a little hard to see the TWU cloak itself in the mantle of social justice.
George Pataki's chances of receiving the GOP presidential nomination in 2008 range from slim to none. But the TWU strike presents him with an intriguing opportunity to do what's best from a policy angle--take a hard line to try to control runaway public employee pensions--while also acting to maximize his political interests--standing up to a union that almost casually defied the law. Reports from the Times this morning aren't promising in this regard: it appears as if the MTA all but caved in to the TWU in final negotiations, and only Toussaint's ideologically driven eagerness for a strike led the TWU to look for an excuse to walk out.
Those of us at CUNY have much at stake in this affair. Not only did the illegal strike disrupt our fall-term finals, but the TWU's action represents the first test in a generation to the Taylor Law. The law prohibits public employee unions from striking; it has been the only thing preventing Barbara Bowen, president of the PSC, CUNY's faculty/staff/adjunct union, from pulling the trigger on the strike that she very much desires. No wonder, then, that Bowen today sent around a missive to all CUNY faculty claiming that as "the TWU negotiations spotlight the ideological nature of [the PSC's] negotiations," one "of the strongest things we can do to support our own contract fight . . . is support the TWU." (Always good, when you need political support, to side with a lawbreaker who's even been repudiated by his national union.) "In defying the Taylor Law's regressive, punitive ban on strikes for public employee unions," Bowen continued, "TWU is helping to change the political climate in which all collective bargaining for public employees in New York takes place." The PSC head speaks the truth: we've seen more aggressive attacks on organized labor in the last two days than at any point in the last five years in New York.
Hopefully, Pataki will hold firm, and leave figures like Bowen and Toussaint to live out their ideological fantasies without causing any more direct harm.
Friday, December 16, 2005
Collegiality 101
A distressing article in this morning's IHE. Donald Hall, chairman of West Virginia's Department of English and a specialist in British studies, queer theory, and cultural studies, has called for setting new priorities in graduate school education. Specifically, Hall wants "more training in service and other forms of collegial interaction," since in grad-school programs, "little is written or said about collegiality as a concept and activity that is vital to our institutional health and one connected intellectually and intimately to the other work that we do."
This strikes me as a bad idea, for three reasons. First, I question its practicality. At the CUNY Graduate Center (as, I know, is the case elsewhere as well), we're doing everything we can to encourage our PhD students to finish more quickly. Imposing service requirements upon them--one of the paths Hall recommends to train in "collegiality"--would represent a move in the opposite direction. There's a good reason why most schools try to shield untenured faculty from service requirements to the extent possible.
Second, it seems to me that we should do everything we can to encourage graduate students to view scholarship and teaching as the primary responsibilities of the professoriate, since surely they will encounter administrators and even some colleagues who think otherwise. Schools that rigidly follow the AAC&U line demonstrate the dangers of abandoning academic pursuits to create instead campus "learning communities" that deem service and "collegiality" equally or more important than scholarship and teaching.
Finally, and most important from my own experience, prioritizing collegiality risks imposing ideological or pedagogical litmus tests, as Thane Doss, in a comment to Hall's piece, unintentionally reveals:
Recent doings at NYU have got me thinking that a necessary part of “collegialization” may be participation in union activities. Even at private schools, the majority of graduate students are being prepared for work at institutions where unions and the fight for reasonable working conditions in the face of administrative desire to cut all labor costs below the level of administration in order to justify administrators’ raises are a part of the essenceof academic life. Union participation is as much part of preparation for an academic worklife as apprenticed teaching.
How do graduate students who don't accept the wisdom of the union's philosophy fit into this definition of "collegiality"? Would, for instance TA's at NYU who put their students first and refused to follow the union's demand to walk off the job in the middle of the semester be deemed insufficiently "collegial"?
More Proxmire
As a follow-up on my post yesterday, William Proxmire, who died yesterday, was almost a one-term senator: deep divisions within the Wisconsin Democratic Party swept the party's ticket under in 1964, making John Reynolds the only Dem governor to lose that November and holding Proxmire to 53 percent of the vote.
An early sign of the problems came in this call from March 1964 between LBJ and Cliff Carter, his point man at the Democratic National Committee. The President telephoned Carter just after a brief meeting with John Reynolds, who was in town to complain about White House meddling in his attempt to install future governor and vice-presidential candidate Pat Lucey as the state’s Democratic national committeeman, a move that had generated opposition from liberal activists in the Dane County (Madison) branch of the party. This was a battle the President clearly had no interest in joining: he viewed with scorn the internal battles of the Badger State’s reform-minded Democratic Party, and, among the state’s prominent partisans, he had enjoyed a close relationship only with Lucey, who shared with Johnson a combination of political pragmatism and idealism and who also happened to be a close friend of the Kennedy family. From the “Little Lounge,” with Bill Moyers, Sargent Shriver, and Larry O’Brien at his side, the President spoke to Carter regarding the Reynolds affair.
Clip is here (around 3 minutes); transcript is here.
Thursday, December 15, 2005
Proxmire
The AP reports that former Wisconsin senator William Proxmire, who had been ill for some time, died early this morning.
We correctly think of Wisconsin as among the more liberal states in the country--it sends two interesting Democrats (Russ Feingold and Herb Kohl) to the Senate, and has a Dem governor (Jim Doyle). Yet when Proxmire was first elected to the Senate in 1957 (in a special election to replace Joe McCarthy after his death), the last Dem to have represented Wisconsin in the Senate was Paul Husting--elected in 1912. By the end of his career, Proxmire was so popular that he was routinely re-elected in campaigns that cost him less than $10,000.
By all accounts, Proxmire was a pricklish figure personally. But he was also ahead of his time in terms of philosophy--his economic restraint, social liberalism, and military-skeptical foreign policy would become far more mainstream in the Democratic Party of the 1990s than that of his day. He co-sponsored (with George McGovern) the first significant Senate amendment in the Cold War to cut Pentagon spending (in 1963); the amendment attracted four votes. By the early 1970s, though his position as chairman of the Joint Economic Committee, he had been identified by Armed Services Committee chairman John Stennis as the most dangerous Senate foe of the defense budget.
Feingold, in many ways, carries on Proxmire's traditional as a maverick Democrat, though Feingold is far more a party regular than the man who first made a name for himself--very shortly after winning election--for attacking LBJ's performance as majority leader.
Monday, December 12, 2005
The Dispositions Crisis
Just out from the Chronicle is the first comprehensive article on the misuse of "dispositions" in teacher-training programs. (The concept has been used to screen out ideologically unacceptable prospective public school teachers on the basis of their bad "dispositions.") Two important revelations, both from NCATE president Arthur Wise. First, Wise concedes that in 2002, the organization made "a very big change" in its accreditation standards, which included the following language:
Unit assessments must also reflect the dispositions identified in its conceptual framework and in professional and state standards. Often team reports do not indicate any connection between dispositions specified in the conceptual framework and dispositions that are assessed. For example, if the unit has described its vision for teacher preparation as ‘Teachers as agents of change’ and has indicated that a commitment to social justice is one disposition it expects of teachers who can become agents of change, then it is expected that unit assessments include some measure of a candidate’s commitment to social justice.
Second, reporter Robin Wilson revealed that last month, NCATE "sent a bulletin to the 614 programs it accredits, saying that education schools should not evaluate students' attitudes, but rather assess their dispositions based on 'observable behavior in the classroom.' It also said it does 'not expect or require institutions to attend to any particular political or social ideologies.'"
The question now: will NCATE enforce this new guideline?
Alexander Speaks Out
Today's Chronicle has coverage of Lamar Alexander's Friday appearance before the Secretary of Education's Commission on the Future of Higher Education.
The Tennessee senator contended that the academy's lack of intellectual diversity is hampering efforts for sustainable public funding. "When I go to talk to people about funding for higher education," he noted, "the single biggest pushback I get is from elected representatives who think that higher education is too one-sided."
Even those not concerned with the current state of staffing patterns in the academy might wonder whether the self-interest of the professoriate might be better served by making a token effort at greater pedagogical and intellectual diversity among the faculty.
Friday, December 9, 2005
Bradford
Reader Jacob Paul Segal (in the comments section at the post below) posted an article from a recent edition of the Indy Star that I had missed: IU Law professor William Bradford, who received five highly suspicious votes against his reappointment, has resigned, after admitting lying about his military record.
Before I went public in my tenure case, I was told frankly that every possible negative thing about my background would come out, and therefore I needed to make sure I had no skeletons in my closet. I didn't, and so had no problems with going public. Bradford, clearly, did--and therefore got what he deserved. Since he lied about a serious matter on his resume, he had to resign.
The broader issue about this controversy, however, remains unchanged: according to the testimony of a member of the personnel committee, Bradford's lying about his background was not known when the reappointment vote occurred, and therefore wasn't an item considered by the committee. The Law School has never offered an explanation as to why five faculty members voted to fire someone whose scholarship and teaching were considered first-rate but who had disagreed on highly charged political and social issues with the department's two most prominent left-leaning members, who then turned around and voted to dismiss him. Unfortunately, because of Bradford's own misconduct, his five critics will not be forced to explain their bevahior. If I were on the law school job market, I'd steer clear of IU-Indianapolis.
Congress News
As I recently discovered from Ralph Luker, the Washington Post has made available the full services of the Thomas website, which basically has every Congress-related document since 1991 on-line. A similar site, the Century of Lawmaking, similarly has every Congress-related document between 1789 and 1873 on-line. Alas, we continue to wait for Congress to approrpiate funds to fill in the gap between 1873 and 1991. I can't think of any way the institution could more advance the cause of congressional history.
The Post, by the way, has my nominee for the best new blog of 2005--The Fix. Written by former Roll Call reporter Chris Cillizza, it's updated 5-6 times daily during the week, and has the best inside info on congressional politics other than what's available at the expensive Cook and Rothenberg sites.
This morning's Times, meanwhile, has a fascinating piece on the Dem primary for the central Brooklyn congressional district that includes, among other areas, Brooklyn College. The district is around two-thirds black and one-quarter white, with a small percentage of Hispanic voters. The incumbent, an African-American congressman named Major Owens, is retiring this year, and four black Dems quickly jumped into the primary to replace him. They were joined by a white member of the City Council, David Yassky. As the article points out, a considerable number of prominent African-American politicians (and some "progressive" whites) have argued that Yassky shouldn't run for the seat because of his race, since it's critical that majority-minority districts be represented by a minority.
Tulane and NYU
It's a truism--but one that we sometimes forget nonetheless--that the purpose of universities is to educate students, and that without the tuition payments that students or their families supply, professors would need to find other employment.
Yesterday, at Tulane, the decline in student enrollment following Hurricane Katrina had its first dramatic impact: the university is eliminating 230 tenured faculty positions. Most of the cuts came in the medical school, though 50 engineering positions were eliminated. The university's engineering and overall graduate programs also will cease to exist as a distinct entity. Implied but not stated is that more cuts might yet occur: the university is anticipating that 85% of the pre-Katrina student body will re-enroll in January, but admits that it lacks the facilities to house these students. According to the Times-Picayune, the university plans to accomodate students through a combination of temporary housing and placing 1,000 students on a "Greek cruise ship."
As Tulane pleads for more students, a group called "Faculty Democracy" is doing everything possible to drive undergraduates away from NYU. With a membership of more than 200 professors, the group recently passed a resolution condemning NYU Pres. John Sexton's demand that all spring TA's actually agree to show up and teach their sections before being hired. (An "undemocratic" requirement indeed, fumed the FD.) According to the resolution, unless Sexton bows to the group's demand that NYU recognize a graduate student union, the faculty will consider such "consequences" as "withholding grades, implementing a moratorium on the graduate admissions process," and canceling all discussion sections, so that such a section could not "legitimately be held to have failed to meet owing to the absence of a TA or preceptor."
This set of demands suggests that a good portion of the NYU faculty has lost its way, substituting the mission of educating students with a vision that urges faculty to hold undergraduates hostage to the professoriate's ideological whims. Having declared war on their undergraduates, the members of "Faculty Democracy" might want to reflect on the Tulane experience, and remember that faculty at a university with no undergraduates will need to find other lines of work.
Update, 2.03pm: To answer a reader question, Inside Higher Ed reports that 65 of the fired profs were tenured.
Monday, December 5, 2005
With Friends Like These . . .
In 1958, a great year for Democrats nationally, Minnesota DFL congresswoman Coya Knutson lost her seat, in part because her husband, Andy, issued two public letters pleading "Coya come home." The letters also hinted that Knutson had an improper relationship with her legislative assistant.
I was reminded of Knutson this morning reading to the front page of today's New York Post. It turns out that the husband of GOP Senate nominee Jeanine Pirro originated a covert campaign to pressure her out of the Senate race, with a face-saving solution of standing for state AG. Albert Pirro, whose conviction for income tax problems had previously derailed a Pirro statewide bid, appears to have conspired with NY Senate majority leader Joe Bruno to begin a public pressure campaign to get Pirro to drop her bid. Bruno is concerned that Pirro will be a drag on the ticket and might cost the Repubs control of the state Senate.
Pirro hasn't been the greatest of candidates--her campaign got off to a bad start when, in the midst of a fiery denouncement of Hillary Clinton in her announcement speech, she misplaced a page and had a 40-second or so pause. But it's hard to see how another nominee could do better, or how Pirro could possibly be elected AG after getting into the race under these circumstances.
There are some national ramifications, potentially, to this story. The GOP has kept control of the state Senate in NY only through gerrymandering. If the Dems ever recaptured it (they'd need to pick up four seats), they could promptly redraw the lines and create a near-unassailable Dem majority--and, at the same time, they could similarly push through a DeLay-like redistricting of the state's US House districts, which would probably net the Dems three or four seats.
I'm sure that J. Pirro has a good sense today, though, of how Knutson felt a half-century ago.
Friday, December 2, 2005
New York News
Today, NYU's striking graduate students are holding a rally to denounce President Sexton's announcement that strikers who don't return to the classroom by Dec. 5th won't receive spring-term teaching assignments. One striker complained, "President [John] Sexton is refusing to acknowledge the importance of self-determination and democracy, and wants to turn this university into a corporation instead." The strike has been going on for three weeks, and NYU has continued to pay all strikers, and will continue to do so for the rest of the semester. I'm not sure I know of many corporations that operate in this fashion.
I think this entire matter could be best handled by a kind of market pressure. I doubt that the union is correct in its argument that to attract first-rate grad students, NYU needs to go beyond the $50,000 annually that it currently provides in tuition aid, health care coverage, and stipends isn't enough, and must also provide grad students with a unionized atmosphere that dictates hiring patterns, negotiates contracts, intervenes in the relationship between grad students and advisors, and pushes other aspects of its goal to bring "self-determination and democracy" to campus. But if the union is correct, good students will cease attending NYU as a result of Sexton's position, and will go to unionized graduate programs instead. In that case, Sexton would have to choose between a non-unionized environment or a second-tier program.
Joining the NYU rally is the indefatigable faculty union at CUNY, the PSC--despite PSC leaders' statements that the union is engaged in "round-the-clock" negotiations to get a contract. (Right now, the PSC is the last major municipal union in the city without a contract, though this is what happens when you spend two years refusing to back down from 100+ "non-negotiable" contract demands.) The PSC also has taken time away from its "round-the-clock" negotiations (which, apparently, aren't so "round-the-clock" after all) to testify and then protest against a new plan by the CUNY Chancellor for a "Compact" in higher education, to leverage increased funds for CUNY from the city and the state with promises on CUNY's behalf for increased fundraising, more efficient management, and regular 2-3% tuition increases. (I supported the Compact in an op-ed published Wednesday.) Sounds uncontroversial: but PSC head Barbara Bowen denounced the plan on the grounds that it violates the union's desire to restore CUNY's policy of "radical openness"--open admissions--despite the disastrous failure of this initiative in the 1970s.
So, the PSC is demanding huge pay raises for faculty at the same time it is vitriolically opposing the Chancellor's plans to increase the funds available to CUNY--funds that would pay for, among other things, raises for faculty. That's the kind of logic that would appeal to those advocating "self-determination and democracy" for the NYU strikers.
Update: The WSJ's Taste page comments on the strike, noting, "The real issue is whether the union mentality and the blunt weapon of collective bargaining are any way to advance academic excellence. The last four weeks at NYU demonstrate that they are not."
Wednesday, November 30, 2005
Congressional Hypocrisy
It turns out that Congresswoman Jean Schmidt's infamous attack on John Murtha was only her second address on the House floor. Norman Ornstein in yesterday's Roll Call has an excerpt from her maiden House speech, from 9/6:
This House has much work to do. On that we can all agree. We will not always agree on the details of that work. Honorable people can certainly agree to disagree. However, here today I accept a second oath. I pledge to walk in the shoes of my colleagues and refrain from name-calling or the questioning of character. It is easy to quickly sink to the lowest form of political debate. Harsh words often lead to headlines, but walking this path is not a victimless crime. This great House pays the price.
It's worth remembering that Schmidt is a fluke member of Congress. In a four-way GOP primary for a special election occasioned by Rob Portman's resignation, the top two candidates killed each other with negative ads, and Schmidt prevailed by (remarkably) casting herself as the more moderate of the remaining two choices.
Given that she was able to beat a Dem dream candidate, Paul Hackett, it's hard to see her losing in a general election--this is an overwhelmingly Republican district. But if I were an ambitious Republican in Cincinatti, a primary challenge would be awfully tempting.
Saturday, November 12, 2005
Another Wood Review
Gordon Wood has his second important review in as many weeks. In tomorrow's Times Book Review, he hails publication of Sean Wilentz's "monumental" The Rise of American Democracy.
I'm one of the academics Wood notes are likely to "slog through" this enormous work, and I'll defer judgment on the text itself till I have had time to reflect on it some. As with his review of Ackerman, however, Wood uses the occasion to lament the state of study about American history.
Wood accurately notes that the book
is not likely to receive similar acclaim from the scholarly left; for it very much runs against the flow of current academic trends. Most historians today, especially those writing about the period Wilentz is concerned with - the period of the early Republic from Jefferson to Lincoln - are interested in what they call 'the new political history.' They seek to transcend the usual stuff of politics - elections, parties and the political maneuvering of elite white males in government - and to provide a history that views politics through the lenses of race, gender and popular culture. So they devote themselves primarily to the symbols and theatrics of politics - the various ways common people, including women and blacks, expressed themselves and participated in the political process, whether in parades, costume or drinking toasts. These historians believe culture trumps policy and power. They explicitly reject any sort of narrative of dead white males bringing about the triumph of democracy within the two-party system. This, however, is the very subject of Wilentz's book.
Indeed, there's very little "political" in the "new political history" at all--although hiring its practioners allows departments (like, say, UCLA) to claim that they have a political historian on staff. Wilentz himself, as Wood points out, has described the "new political history" as filled with "bargain basement Nietzsche and Foucault, admixed with earnest American do-goodism, that still passes for 'theory' in much of the academy."
Since the book seems likely to have little effect in the academy, what is Wilentz's intended audience? Wood speculates that Wilentz hopes to emulate Arthur Schlesinger's study of a similar (though obviously less broad, both thematically and chronologically) period to speak to the dilemmas of contemporary liberalism. In the 1940s, Schlesinger saw in Andrew Jackson a model for the vital center. Today, argues Wood, "by suggesting that the race, gender and cultural issues that drive much of the modern left are not central to the age of Jackson, Wilentz seems to imply that they should not be central to the future of the present-day Democratic Party."
The Dems would be wise to take this lesson to heart.
Wednesday, November 9, 2005
Gould and the Senate
I noticed on the home page that Rick Shenkman has an interview with Lewis Gould, who has just published an overview of the 20th century Senate. Gould informed Shenkman, “I found no golden age in the 20th century . . . For the most part, however, senators spend time reminiscing about past decades when the body was more collegial and responsible. Yet, when I explored these supposed ages of comity and mutual respect, such as the 1930s or the 1940s, the actual behavior of Senate members at the time fell well short of these qualities.” He adds that he wasn’t “sure that the Senate ‘went wrong’ since I was hard-pressed to find when it was acting ‘right’ on a sustained basis throughout much of the 20th century.”
I agree completely with Gould about the tendency of senators to wax nostalgic about a past that was never quite as pristine as they recalled it. And, it’s hard to speak clearly about whether or not the Senate ever acted “right” at any point in time—since everyone’s definition of what constitutes “right” differs.
That said, it seems to me that Gould misses a sharp change in the character of the Senate over the past 25-30 years, one that has produced a fundamentally different institution than what existed before 1978 or so. What’s changed?
Tuesday, November 8, 2005
Better than Fiction
It appears as if some NYU graduate students are planning to strike, to protest the university's refusal to recognize their representation by the UAW. The issue is an unusually clear-cut illustration of the broad ambitions of the academic unionization movement: the university had previously offered to negotiate with the union on economic issues alone, but the union refused, creating the current impasse.
Anyhow, according to today's New York Sun, a group of NYU faculty has demanded a meeting with President James Sexton to discuss the issue. The faculty union activists, in theory, have the power to resolve this matter. They could, for instance, offer to transfer some of their salaries to the union's coffers. Or they could make a public statement that they don't want the university to stand up for academic freedom and announce that they will accept the union as a partner on curricular, personnel, and other academic matters. Or they could go out on strike themselves, and sacrifice their paychecks and perhaps even put their tenured positions on the line.
Instead, however, they're confining their offerings to symbolic expressions of sympathy, such as the plan of History professor Molly Nolan, who told the Sun that "she would move her undergraduate course on the history of women and gender in modern Europe to Fat Cat Billiards on Christopher Street."
Settle with the union or consign Prof. Nolan's class to a pool hall? There's a tough choice for Pres. Sexton.
Sunday, November 6, 2005
Wood on Ackerman
For those who missed it, this weke's New Republic had a review by Gordon Wood of Bruce Ackerman's new book, The Failure of the Founding Fathers: Jefferson, Marshall, and the Rise of Presidential Democracy. The review is lukewarm, contending that Ackerman overstates his thesis (which contends that the outcome of the 1800 election was reminiscent of a banana republic and downplays the control that John Marshall held over the Supreme Court after 1810) but offers many useful insights about the constitutional history of the early republic.
Wood opens his review, however, with a useful reminder:
Academic historians are not much interested in constitutional history these days. Historians who write on America's constitutional past are a vanishing breed. For much of the academy, constitutional history, with its concentration on the actions of dead white males, is much too old-fashioned, and not to be compared in importance with cultural and social history, especially of the sort focusing on issues of race and gender. And so the teaching and the writing of constitutional history in American universities has been left almost exclusively to law school faculties. This is unfortunate. An understanding of our constitutional past would seem to be an integral part of a liberal-arts education, but few of our undergraduates have an opportunity to gain such an understanding. Having Congress mandate, as it recently did, that universities receiving federal funds find a way every September 17 to celebrate something called "Constitution Day" will scarcely suffice.
Indeed.
Saturday, November 5, 2005
FIRE Turns Ten
I'll be at FIRE's tenth anniversary celebration this evening in Philadelphia. The event is both encouraging and depressing at the same time--encouraging, because of all the good work FIRE has done, depressing because the state of the academy is such that an organization like FIRE is still very much needed.
A few of FIRE's recent cases: assisting a lawsuit against Troy University's speech code (which bans, among other items, "gossip"); publicizing a bizarre policy at Wisconsin-Eau Claire that prohibits dorm RA's from leading Bible study sessions in dorms on their free time; and exposing another abuse of dispositions theory, this time at Washington State, where the Dean of Education said that she didn't know if the dispositions criteria would disquality Justice Scalia from becoming a public school teacher because of his views on "diversity"-related issues.
Saturday, October 22, 2005
Times Endorses Bloomberg
The only question left in the New York mayoral race is whether incumbent Mike Bloomberg will prevail by more than 20 points. Just up on the web is an endorsement from the Times, which criticizes the mayor's refusal to submit to the city's campaign finance system but otherwise offers surprisingly strong praise.
As for challenger Fernando Ferrer: "New York may be governable, but getting things done in a place this complicated still requires an intense, and perhaps even irritating, self-assertiveness - something Mr. Ferrer seems to lack."
Wednesday, October 19, 2005
Let's Bring Back Mediocrity
Barbara Bowen, president of the CUNY faculty union, the PSC, recently urged CUNY profs to take time away from their scholarship and teaching preparation to tend to union activities. As I walked onto campus today, I encountered around nine Brooklyn professors following Bowen's advice, carrying signs that indicated, “Great Contract=Great University." A slogan of "Bring Back the CUNY Culture of Mediocrity” would have been more appropriate.
These so-called “informational picketers” were distributing leaflets to students urging them to support the PSC’s contract demands and “stand together for a better CUNY!” Why should students back the PSC? Because the union has “been at the forefront of the struggle” to “defend Open Admissions” and to “protect SEEK” (the functional equivalent of senior-college remediation). While consistent with the union’s ideology, the combination of open admissions and remediation at the senior colleges badly devalued CUNY degrees in the late 1970s and 1980s. It’s hard to see why students would rally behind an illegal strike that promotes an agenda that will devalue their degrees.
The “informational” flyer explains that the union has “rebuilt CUNY as an outstanding university.” That’s certainly news to anyone who’s observed CUNY matters over the last few years, since the union leadership has opposed virtually every major initiative to bolster quality at CUNY. The PSC opposed creation of the CUNY Honors College, which has brought in hundreds of Ivy League-caliber students to CUNY over the past five years, contending that the Honors College violated CUNY's mission. The PSC opposed the abolition of remediation at the senior colleges, falsely predicting that the number of minority students in the senior colleges would diminish. The PSC opposed extending the tenure clock from 5 to 7 years, arguing that giving more time for junior faculty to produce scholarship before tenure might dangerously increase expectations for research. The PSC opposed filling all new faculty lines through competitive national searches, demanding that some lines be confined to applications from current or past CUNY adjuncts. And the PSC has opposed anything resembling merit pay, resulting in a pay scale based solely on seniority, so that a senior professor with, say, 12 pages of publications for his career and 30-plus years of seniority receives the same salary as a professor of roughly equal seniority who has 8 books and multiple teaching awards.
Dashing the union's hopes, a variety of students from around CUNY have spoken out against the PSC’s threat to break the law—most recently in a Metro article (scroll to p. 3). The piece also referenced the letter signed by 130 CUNY faculty (including me) affirming our commitment to uphold state law regardless of the union’s decision.
Tuesday, October 18, 2005
Times and Post
While the editors at the New York Times have been busy deciding which information could be published to conform to Judy Miller's legal strategy, maybe it's time to look to the Washington Post as the paper of record. Today's paper features a remarkable profile of alleged corruption by Ohio congressman Bob Ney, who ironically was elected to a previously solid Dem district on an anti-corruption platform in 1994.
I remain dubious that we'll see much of a turnover next year in House races, because district lines have been drawn to maximize incumbent safety. But Stuart Rothernberg, in yesterday's Roll Call, speculated about the possibility of 2006 turning into a Dem version of 1994 for the GOP. In Rothenberg's words,
My 1993 column ended by suggesting that if Clinton remained weak, a Republican generic advertising campaign might “force Democrats to defend more seats” and “help turn a small wave into a tsunami.” That’s how I feel now, except that the beneficiaries this cycle would be Democrats, not the GOP.
Monday, October 17, 2005
Goldstein on Academic Freedom
CUNY’s faculty union, the PSC, has issued some unusual statements on academic freedom over the past year. Although the CUNY contract doesn’t give adjuncts the right to reappointment, the PSC claimed that “academic freedom” mandated the reappointment of adjuncts Mohammed Yousry and Susan Rosenberg, who were accused or convicted of crimes associated with political causes the PSC found appealing. (Such a philosophy puts a whole new spin on the criminal nature of the contemporary adjunct system.)
Then, the union demanded that BC president C.M. Kimmich ignore his requirements under the CUNY Bylaws to certify that all professors elected to chair their departments be able to act as spokespersons for the department and college, and immediately approve the election to chair of a sociology prof. Who had written, among other off-the-wall items, that all religious people were “moral retards.” (For good measure, the PSC previewed the Times’ Judy Miller strategy of allowing an extreme voice to essentially speak for the entire institution, claiming that Kimmich, when asked by the media, had no right to comment on the substance of the professor’s remarks.)
Finally, after a New York Sun article appeared quoting several students who appeared to have experienced attempted ideological indoctrination in an Education class, the PSC demanded that the CUNY chancellor publicly condemn the article—prompting a vigorous rebuke by BC student leader Yehuda Katz. (The union seemed blissfully unaware that the legal protections for academic freedom rest under the same First Amendment protections that the PSC wanted the Chancellor to publicly condemn.)
All told, these pronouncements exhibited about the same quality of thought as demonstrated at the union’s recent strike rally, when a senior professor urged sympathy on the grounds that she might not be able to live in her neighborhood of choice on a $118,000 salary. Fortunately, CUNY Chancellor Matthew Goldstein has issued a measured and reasoned defense of academic freedom, demonstrating at the very least that the PSC doesn’t speak for the institution in its bizarre definition of the concept.
Saturday, October 15, 2005
Badly Disposed at Washington State
The “dispositions” movement is again rearing its ugly head, this time in Washington State University’s Education Department. This vague concept is a favorite of the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), which in 2002 changed its accreditation requirements to mandate that dozens of education programs around the nation needed to measure each student’s disposition to promote “social justice.”
Events at Washington State—which have attracted the attention of FIRE—have a depressing similarity to what we saw last spring in Brooklyn’s School of Education. At WSU, the controversy has raged around a self-described hunter and conservative Christian, an A-level student named Ed Swan. In an account that WSU hasn’t disputed, Swan made a terrible mistake in two of his Ed classes—according to one of his professors, he said that he does not believe that “white privilege and male privilege does not exist” in contemporary society to such an extent to justify affirmative action. Some of Swan’s opinions, continued the professor, expressed “primarily though written papers”—papers that received grades of A—contradicted the Education Department’s “cultural norms,” chiefly its commitment “to equity, diversity and social justice.”
As a result, Swan received a substandard dispositions evaluation. Another Education professor, Mira Reisberg—an ABD who states on her webpage that “after 21 years in San Francisco (primarily in the Mission district) I was called [she doesn’t say by whom] to come to Washington State University"—went even further. She labeled Swan a “White Supremacist,” hoped that the department could “find a way to prevent Ed from becoming a teacher” because of “emotional problems that are manifested in his racist beliefs,” and urged her superiors to accomplish this task without giving Swan a chance to defend himself. On the same form, ironically, she admitted, “Ed [Swan] never made any personally threatening comments to me and was an excellent student apart from his comments and choices.”
More Tierney
A while back, I wrote a piece on the educational establishment's response to the surveys of faculty partisan breakdown, arguing that these responses, much more than the partisan numbers themselves, made the case for those concerned about the current lack of intellectual diversity on campus.
John Tierney appears to have noticed the same thing. Earlier this week, he published an op-ed on the ideological imbalance among faculty at j-schools and law schools. As my colleague Tim Burke pointed out, the article was probably not the most well-reasoned critique of the tenure system, but it nonetheless seems to have provoked a furious reaction from defenders of the status quo. According to Tierney's column this morning (shielded behind the Times firewall), these responses broke down into four categories:
1. Conservatives do not value knowledge for its own sake.
2. Conservatives do not care about the social good.
3. Conservatives are too greedy to work for professors' wages.
4. Conservatives are too dumb to get tenure.
As Tierney notes, such responses don't "shake the notion that there just might be some bias on campus."
Tierney makes two additional important points. First, he quotes Mark Bauerlein, who notes, "The filtering out of conservatives in the job pipeline rarely works by outright blackballing. It doesn't have to. The intellectual focus of the disciplines does that by itself." We've certainly seen an example of this pattern in the reconfiguration of History staffing as well. Secondly, Tierney persuasively notes that the radicalization of the academy has probably benefitted conservatives politically, since liberals can no longer call on academics for realistic public policy alternatives.
Friday, October 14, 2005
Marquette's "Diversity" Initiative
Inside Higher Ed this morning has a troubling article on a new "diversity" initiative launched at Marquette. Provost Madeline Wake has announced that no new hires will be approved unless one "diverse" candidate is in the final pool.
“I’m not looking for less qualified candidates, but I want a good faith effort to get people in the pool,” said Wake. But for all practical purposes, the policy will set up a two-track search process, one in which quality is subordinated to the applicant's race or ethnicity.
The article profiles how Marquette's History Department has responded to the new initiative. This year, the department had decided to hire a historian of US foreign relations. Concerned, however, that it was unlikely such a field would produce a sufficient number of minority candidates, the department chairman said he decided to tweak the description to include a desired sub-specialty in immigration and ethnicity, which is perceived as a field more likely to attract minority applicants. In an academy in which more "traditional" approaches to history are already under assault for reasons that seem more ideological than pedagogical, Wake's "diversity" initiative is particularly distasteful.
Provost Wake justified her policy by stating, "The world is diverse, and we as a university are not preparing leaders for the world as it is if we remain as white a campus as we are.” My congratulations to her. An early effect of her policy to prepare "leaders for the world" will likely be that her History Department will hire not a professor who can teach these future "leaders for the world" about the interaction between the US and the world, but someone who focuses on cultural studies.
Wednesday, October 12, 2005
Iowa Political Flashbacks
Iowa has had only three governors since 1968, so Tom Vilsack's announcement that he wouldn't seek re-election is a critical event in the state's political culture. Republican frontrunner Jim Nussle would be the state's most conservative governor since the early 1960s, meaning that the Dem primary may very well choose the next governor.
Last week, the majority of Democrats in the state legislature endorsed former director of the Iowa Department of Economic Development Mike Blouin, the most conservative of the four Democrats seeking the nomination.
His 2006 gubernatorial bid is Blouin's first run for electoral office since 1978, when he failed to win a third term to the House of Representatives from Iowa's Second District. I cannot think of any former member of Congress in American history who has a longer gap between elections. Blouin was a member of the Watergate class of House Democrats, though he was also pro-life on abortion. He lost to a moderate Republican, Tom Tauke, in a disastrous year for Iowa Democrats (in the year's biggest Senate race upset, Iowa voters ousted incumbent Democratic senator Dick Clark, who was attacked by his opponent, Roger Jepsen, for spending too much time on international issues; Clark maintained that such work would be rewarded politically, since "Iowans are not hicks.")
Blouin's immediate predecessor in the House was John Culver, who vacated the seat to make a successful run for the Senate. The subject of a flattering biography by Elizabeth Drew that remains a perceptive analysis of the inner workings of the 1970s legislature, Culver narrowly lost his re-election bid to Chuck Grassley in the Republican sweep of 1980. Had he prevailed, Culver would almost certainly have been among the key players in late 20th century politics--1986, 1992, and 1998 were strong Democratic years in Iowa, and so in all likelihood, this talented Democrat would have been a 30-year senator.
Ironically, Blouin's biggest obstacle to the Iowa governorship is none other than Culver's son, Chet Culver, currently Iowa's secretary of state. There was some talk that Chet Culver might challenge Grassley in 2004, but he deferred to 2006, only to see Blouin mount a surprisingly strong bid.
As Hillary Clinton apparently gears up to run for president in 2008, events in Iowa remind us that it's not just national politics that seem to be running in cycles these days.
Tuesday, October 11, 2005
Ferrer's Flops
A Marist poll out tonight shows Fernando Ferrer's support plunging, with the Dem mayoral nominee now trailing Mike Bloomberg by a 59-32 margin. Ferrer's campaign has almost no money, and virtually no presence in Brooklyn, where he would need to be competitive to have any chance of an upset.
In a sign of desperation, a handful of Ferrer's council supporters today accused Bloomberg of deliberately inflating last week's subway threat--a line of attack dismissed by the Times in a just-released editorial.
It looks like Anthony Wiener knew what he was doing when he conceded rather than contesting the Democratic nomination.
Tierney and Zywicki
Behind the firewall in this morning's Times, John Tierney discusses the irony of journalists and legal scholars "decrying 'cronyism' and calling for 'mainstream' values when picking a Supreme Court justice," when they seem oblivious to such concerns in "picking the professors to train the next generation of journalists and lawyers." Recent studies suggest that the faculty of j-schools and law schools are almost as one-sided as that of the nation's undergraduate colleges and universities.
As Tierney points out, institutions of higher education "keep meticulous tabs on the race and gender and ethnic background of their students and faculty, but the lack of political diversity is taken as a matter of course. As long as the professors look different, why worry if they think the same?"
Volokh Conspiracy contributor and Dartmouth trustee Todd Zywicki expands on this theme in an important article published in the most recent issue of American Spectator. I've been unable to find the article on-line, but it builds off arguments Zywicki initially made in this lengthy Volokh post.
Zywicki offers the most persuasive case I have seen that "self-selection is a deeply flawed explanation for the prevailing ideological imbalance on college campuses." He does so by taking apart the most serious critique of the Stanley Rothman study of ideological one-sidedness in the academy, especially at more elite institutions.
Friday, October 7, 2005
The Feather Circle
The diversity movement in higher education has focused on the positive educational and social ramifications of exposing students to undergraduates of different backgrounds. It’s rather difficult to square this justification, however, with the celebration of self-segregation by these same diversity advocates. The AAC&U, for instance, has recently published a study arguing that colleges should seek to create interracial friendships among the student body while simultaneously championing social structures that exclude on the basis of race or ethnicity, since minority students are culturally vulnerable and need a “safe space.” A case could be made that neither of these goals are appropriate for higher education, but it’s difficult to see how both could be accomplished at once. Nor is it hard to miss the paternalism inherent in the “safe space” argument.
This same mindset appeared at Arizona State, which FIRE recently took to task for sponsoring introductory English classes that excluded on the basis of race. (Only Native American students were admitted to the class.) The basic message of these courses, which promised a “non-threatening atmosphere” based on the “Feather Circle” approach to writing: American Indian students can’t handle a regular writing class. As Jacob Gershman observes in today’s Sun, Professor Lynn Nelson’s typical assignment was,
“Tell me a story - and then tell me another - and I will tell you mine - and we will sit in the feather circle and listen carefully to each other. And then we will write thank-you notes to each other for gifts given in these stories. And then we will do it again, anew. And we will continue doing this - until we heal ourselves, until everything begins to become properly precious, until we stop killing each other and destroying the Earth, until we care for it all so much that we ache, until we and the world are changed.”
This might be a bit of amateur psychology, but it’s hard to see how students would learn to write based on such an experience.
Wednesday, October 5, 2005
The Politics of Katrina
Last week, Roll Call published a piece on the "political storm" brewing in LA following Katrina. The most immediate effect appears to be in the Third District, one of the few in the nation to shift from GOP to Dem control in the 2004 elections. Republican state Sen. Craig Romero, the likely challenger to Congressman Charlie Melancon, traveled to Washington a week after Katrina hit, handing out demographic analyses suggesting that, as refugees from the south central district were more likely to be Democratic voters, in the aftermath of the hurricane, the district had tilted even more to the GOP. (One-third of the district was unihabitable at the time Romero made his comments.)
Yesterday's Times expands upon the theme, noting that the likely population loss from refugees not returning to the state means that LA may very well lose a House seat following the 2010 Census. Moreover, state politics could substantially change, reducing the influence of New Orleans in the state legislature and in state elections.
If the thrust of the Times and Roll Call stories turn out to be true, the potential political effects are enormous. Louisiana is one of the few Southern states that remain competitive for the Dems. LA was twice carried by Bill Clinton (46% in 1992, 52% in 1996). Until 2004, it was the only state in the country to have never elected a Republican senator. Its senior senator, Mary Landrieu, has twice won election by exceedingly narrow margins; Governor Kathleen Blanco, a Democrat, also won with just 51% in 2003.
Although Romero's timing was questionable, his analysis was correct: the refugees are disproportionately poor and minority, core Democratic voters in a state where the Democrats have no margin for error. Despite the short-term political setback for Bush, the long-term effect of the hurricane, then, could be to move LA into the GOP column firmly.
Looking at this from a historical perspective, I can't think of a comparable situation when a natural disaster so profoundly affected a state's demographic and political alignment.
Tuesday, October 4, 2005
UFT, Ferrer, and the PSC
Another setback for the floundering Ferrer campaign this morning, as the city's largest teachers' union, the UFT, reached a contract settlement with the Bloomberg administration. With the deal, the UFT almost certainly will remain neutral for the mayoral contest.
The settlement represents a slightly more lucrative package than that recommended several weeks back by an arbitrator, but follows the arbitrator's framework: the union got higher raises than the city wanted; the city got more structural concessions than the union wanted.
Joining Ferrer as a big loser in the deal: PSC president Barbara Bowen. At the union's Sept. 29 rally for an illegal strike, Bowen explicitly rejected using arbitration, since "arbitration is conducted in the same political environment as negotiation" and a basic PSC contract demand is to change the city and state political environment. Bowen also dismissed the type of contract agreed to by the UFT (trading salary hikes for workplace changes desired by the city) as "concessionary" ad therefore unacceptable.
Here, of course, is the difference between Bowen and UFT president Randi Weingarten. While both engage in sometimes fiery rhetoric, Weingarten's basic goal all along was a good raise for her members. Bowen's goal all along has seemed to be produce an illegal strike that she (oddly) believes will have a revolutionary effect on the city's political culture.
I've joined more than 130 professors from around CUNY in signing a public letter urging Bowen to start negotiating in good faith. The letter also affirms our intention to follow NYS law (which prohibits public employees from striking) regardless of what the PSC does. I suspect the UFT settlement will substantially increase pressure on Bowen to focus on economic rather than political matters in the contract negotiations.
Sunday, October 2, 2005
The PSC Strikes Out
Last Thursday night, I attended a mass rally organized by CUNY’s faculty union, the Professional Staff Congress (PSC). The event was designed to build support for a strike vote, which the union is expected to schedule sometime after November 3. (Strikes by public employee unions are illegal under New York state law.) Though most of the meeting consisted of speeches from PSC president Barbara Bowen or heads of other unions, the PSC invited three members—one each from the ranks of staff, adjuncts, and full-time faculty—to address the audience as to why they support an illegal strike. The two faculty selections said a lot about the PSC’s agenda.
The adjunct announced that he had been at CUNY since 1989. Long-term adjuncts are a key constituency of the current union leadership, which has demanded for them seniority rights and pushed through an increase in their salary and health care benefits that had the effect of drying up funding for the full-time faculty’s dental and life insurance. Both the speaker and the union leadership seemed blissfully unaware that basing contract demands around protecting those unable to get a tenure-track job for a decade or longer doesn’t serve the University’s overall best interests.
The faculty speaker was Hunter political science professor Rosalind Petchesky, who has made a name for herself by taking rather extreme positions—denouncing the "massacre" in Jenin after the allegations against the Israeli army had been disproved; or equating the fetal form with “American imperial might,” since “it is not the image of a baby at all but of a tiny man, a homunculus”; and criticizing the war in Afghanistan on the grounds that it showed that “global capitalist masculinism is alive and well but concealed in its Eurocentric, racist guise of ‘rescuing’ downtrodden, voiceless Afghan women from the misogynist regime it helped bring to power.”
At the mass meeting, Petchesky mostly delivered as expected, informing CUNY professors that the “War on Terror is a war on us”; attributing a “fear-mongering” campaign against PSC leadership “right up to the White House’; and positing that a faculty strike would be “very exciting,” even a “life-transforming” experience. Then, she added, she also backed a strike for personal reasons: “I am worried that I might have to move out of my apartment in Manhattan.” (Petchesky is a distinguished professor, which has a salary in the range of $120,000.) Imagine the horror: CUNY professors might have to suffer the indignity of living in the . . . dreaded Outer Boroughs.
Petchesky’s remarks (unintentionally) captured the essence of the union’s ill-conceived call for an illegal strike, which combines a discomfiting sense of entitlement with a belief that the contract should be a vehicle to pursue fundamentally political goals.
Saturday, October 1, 2005
Iraq and Vietnam, the Anti-War Movements
Mr. Johnson is a professor of history at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center.
It seems to me that the differences between the wars in Vietnam and Iraq far outweigh the similarities. But it’s still useful to think of comparisons between the two. To date, there’s been a considerable difference between the two movements opposing the administration’s policy. On the one hand, public opinion has consolidated remarkably quickly against the Bush administration’s policies in Iraq, while for most of the 1960s, the anti-war position lacked majority popular support. On the other hand, the movement against the war in Iraq has had almost no policy impact, while the movement against the Vietnam War had a considerable impact in Washington, and at a relatively early stage.
Four years after Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, the only two senators to vote against it (Wayne Morse and Ernest Gruening) lost their re-election bids—partly because of their strongly anti-war positions. Public opinion polls from 1968 showed a majority either supporting LBJ’s policy or favoring an escalation of the conflict. Yet by this time, the Fulbright Hearings already had made challenging Cold War foreign policy respectable. In 1967, Congress passed a resolution sponsored by Mike Mansfield urging a negotiated settlement to the war. And congressional critics had scored important victories in curtailing Johnson’s military aid policy, as well as blocking the administration’s efforts to expand its commitment to Thailand. In short, the movement against the Vietnam War affected policy well before it ever enjoyed majority public support.
By this calculus, American troops should now be out of Iraq. Why aren’t they? Partially, of course, the explanation lies in the differences between the Congress of 1967 and that of 2005. As the United States has moved toward a quasi-parliamentary system, Congress has fewer and fewer members willing to challenge their party’s leadership on any issue of substantive importance.
Friday, September 30, 2005
Miller Time
I was in D.C. today, and wandered past the Federal District Courthouse to see the press frenzy covering Judith Miller's testimony.
The disgraced Times reporter gets savaged by the Washington Post, Slate, and, perhaps most cuttingly, Arianna Huffington. I agree with Jack Shafer of Slate that the affair made the Times editorial board look foolish. We're a long ways from the Pentagon Papers case.
Wednesday, September 28, 2005
The Ferrer Flop
Dem mayoral nominee Fernando Ferrer had a tough day yesterday, after revelations that an entry posted under his name in his campaign blog had him falsely claiming to have been "educated in public schools for most of my education." In fact, Ferrer went to Catholic schools, and then to NYU for college. The campaign attributed the problem to an "editing error."
During the Dem primary, Ferrer also made an odd statement about public schools, claiming that his daughter graduated from public school, even though she attended a Catholic high school.
The editorial pages of the Post and the Daily News are having a field day; the Times, on the other hand, gave the story little play.
The Ferrer candidacy is of more than passing interest for faculty at CUNY, since, as Bronx borough president, Ferrer bitterly resisted the ultimately successful effort to raise standards at CUNY (chiefly by ending remediation at the senior colleges), and so a Ferrer victory, as unlikely as that now seems, would almost certainly turn back the clock at the institution.
Tuesday, September 27, 2005
Norman Convicted
This summer, the New York state legislature passed a peculiarly rationalized plan to increase the attention to African-American studies in the US history curriculum. Without citing any evidence for his claim, the bill's sponsor, Brooklyn Democratic Assemblyman Clarence Norman, contended, "We feel there is, indeed, a void in our education curriculum in New York state when it comes to the issue of slavery and the de-humanization of Africans at that time" and of subsequent racism that African-Americans have experienced. Norman added that this could be the first of many such laws to demand increased attention in US history courses to oppressed racial and ethnic groups. "Commonalities of struggle," he said, "create a common bond."
This afternoon, a Brooklyn jury convicted Norman on three felony counts and one misdemeanor count regarding the solicitation of illegal campaign contributions. He had to immediately resign his Assembly seat. The cause of insufficient attention to the oppressed in the contemporary curriculum will apparently need a new champion.
Hmm . . .
I see my Brooklyn colleague Ed Kent (Philosophy Department) is finally onto me . . . :)
Kent’s comments are nothing compared to those of David Benfell, who speculated in Kent’s “academic freedom” group that my critique of dispositions theory was comparable to “attacks that have led to crimes against humanity, hate crimes, and discriminatory attacks.” It’s unclear whether Benfell’s comments also apply to other recent critiques of “dispositions” theory, such as Stanford professor William Damon’s perceptive recent essay; or FIRE’s successful effort to have repealed a Washington State dispositions requirement that essentially required students to give a loyalty oath to the academic majority’s definition of “diversity.
It might be that we should individually assess, as NCATE’s dispositions requirement holds, all prospective public school teachers for their “disposition” to “promote social justice.” Remarks such as Kent’s, however, illuminate how confident defenders of the status quo are in the moral superiority of their position. Of course, on a campus where your views are never challenged, it’s easy to engage in such moral superiority.
Along with many others at Brooklyn, Kent seems particularly disturbed about the fate of Timothy Shortell, who withdrew his bid to become chairman of the Sociology Department in light of public criticism of his deeming all religious people “moral retards,” his comment that “on a personal level, religiosity is merely annoying—like bad taste,” his comparing Karl Rove to a Nazi war criminal, and his celebrating the alleged political effects of older people’s higher death rates. Although I disagree with it, I could understand a free speech absolutist position holding that anything a professor says should not block him from assuming a department chairmanship (though I wonder what Kent and his supporters would have done had Shortell’s remarks been about, say, gay people rather than religious people). But Kent doesn’t take such an approach. Instead, he hails Shortell’s comments as “quite valid critiques of much of modern religion with its bitter and murderous attacks on others.”
At the core of the intellectual diversity movement is a belief that ideologues representing the current campus orthodoxies have abused the inherently subjective nature of the academic personnel process to ensure the hiring of like-minded colleagues. If Kent considers an essay deeming religious people “moral retards” an example of quality thought, what kind of Philosophy work would he be looking for among job applicants? Or if, say, a Grover Furr can accuse FIRE’s Greg Lukianoff of “dishonest” writing in a Lukianoff essay replete with examples of his thesis, how could Furr be expected to evaluate fairly the scholarship of applicants for a position in his department?
Virginia Desperation
It always was a longshot that VA governor Mark Warrner would challenge incumbent senator George Allen in 2006. Warner, after all, has a legitimate chance of winning the Dem presidential nomination in 2008, and it's hard to see how his candidacy would have been strengthened even by a successful race against Allen.
But the party's bench in the Old Dominion seems rather shallow. In 2002, the Dem candidate against longtime incumbent John Warner dropped out of the race following the 9/11 attacks, and the party didn't even field a challenger. For 2006, this morning's Washington Post reports that in the aftermath of Mark Warner's decision not to run, VA Dems are flirting with the idea of running . . . Ben Affleck. Now, I know that the current Republican majority traces its heritage to the successful political career of a failed actor. But, to paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen, I'm afraid that Ben Affleck is no Ronald Reagan.
Saturday, September 24, 2005
The Bradford File: Where Are the Trustees?
I generally favor an activist role for trustees. As the professoriate moves toward increasing ideological homogeneity, it seems to me that trustees—who are, after all, part of the traditional academic system, and therefore do not represent the imposition of authority from the outside—can serve the function once occupied by open debate on campus. They can check against the worst of faculty actions and help ensure that the faculty majority is forced to articulate clearly the rationale for its decisions.
Regardless, however, of whether you favor an activist or a passive role for trustees, no doubt exists that they have one clear role: serving as the fiduciary guardians for the public.
This role would seem to compel aggressive action by the Indiana University trustees in the Bradford case—since, apart from heaps of negative publicity, the Law School’s handling of the matter is exposing the university to potential financial liability. Stripped to its basics, the case involves a white executive vice chancellor, William Plater, and two senior white faculty, Florence Roisman and Mary Mitchell, leading a campaign to oust an untenured faculty member who belongs to an EEOC protected class (Bradford is Native American, and also a veteran).
At the same time, this trio supported the promotion and early tenure of a white candidate, Robin Craig, whose credentials resemble Bradford’s. This action would make it difficult for the university to contend that Bradford’s scholarship was insufficient for reappointment, despite the votes of Roisman and Mitchell; and his teaching commendations speak for themselves. Roisman, meanwhile, publicly informed Bradford, “My conviction that you are not deserving of or likely to earn tenure here is not based on any political views you may hold, and I have made that clear in every statement I have made on the subject. I made that clear in the discussions in the Promotion and Tenure Committee.”
If I were an Indiana trustee, Roisman’s heated public statement would cause me grave concern. First, by publicly revealing her vote and discussing her arguments before the college’s Promotion and Tenure Committee, she undeniably pierced confidentiality. In light of Roisman’s actions, I can’t see how, if this case winds up in court, the university could have any credible claim to the confidentiality of any element of its process. The genie, to be blunt, can't be put back in the bottle.
Second, Roisman’s vehement denial of ideology as a factor in her vote increases the likelihood of a negative judgment by the EEOC against the university should Bradford file a racial discrimination claim. If his scholarship and teaching were acceptable; and the law school, as I noted yesterday, doesn’t use collegiality as a criterion; and Roisman says that ideology played no role in her negative vote; and she supported the tenure and promotion of a similarly credentialed white candidate, it’s not hard to see the EEOC making a finding of racial discrimination.
I’ve yet to see any public statements, one way or the other, from any of the Trustees. But it would seem to me a violation of their fiduciary duties for them to sit idly by while the actions of Law School administrators and senior faculty expose the University to a potentially significant financial judgment.
Katrina and Feminism
Reason columnist Cathy Young has started a blog: her first post deals with the take of women's studies professors on the hurricane and its aftermath as a feminist issue. Let's hope the quoted faculty give more thought to the arguments they present in their classes.
The Bradford File
I’ve come to believe that, to paraphrase Samuel Johnson, collegiality is the last refuge of scoundrels. In early July, William Slater, IUPUI’s executive vice chancellor, stated, “Collegiality is not a criterion for promotion or tenure, and disagreements over issues should never be considered in evaluating a colleague for advancement.” And so I assumed at the time that the tenure candidacy of IU-Indianapolis law professor William Bradford was back on track. It turns out I couldn’t have been more wrong: IU-Indianapolis seems to have embraced the position that it doesn’t need even a superficial justification to drive Bradford out, and is bringing him up on ethics allegations.
The Bradford case, in its most basic form, really isn’t about tenure. At its heart is an academic mystery: this past spring, why did 5 of the 15 members of the IU Law’s personnel committee have voted against Bradford’s reappointment—in effect demanding his immediate dismissal? Bradford’s record of scholarly publication is extraordinarily good. His teaching has been prize-winning. And, as Slater reaffirmed, IU-Indianapolis Law doesn’t use collegiality as a criterion. So, what criteria did the Bradford Five employ? Several months into the controversy, the university still hasn’t offered anything approaching a plausible explanation.
The identities of two members of the anti-Bradford coalition are publicly known. Bradford has contended that his relations with Professor Florence Roisman deteriorated when he refused to sign a statement prepared by Roisman defending Ward Churchill, and has claimed that Roisman retaliated by opposing his reappointment. Roisman has termed the allegation "deeply offensive and outrageous," since she is “devoted to the principle of academic freedom." Indeed, she publicly informed Bradford, “My conviction that you are not deserving of or likely to earn tenure here is not based on any political views you may hold, and I have made that clear in every statement I have made on the subject.” As she has refused to discuss her reasons for opposing Bradford, however, these denials ring hollow. Nor can Roisman hide behind the wall of confidentiality of the personnel process, since she has publicly admitted that she voted against Bradford's reappontment. (This admission alone would seem to me to violate the university's personnel policies.) Apparently Roisman wants to invoke confidentiality only when she lacks an explanation that will be publicly defensible.
Moreover, it has recently come to light that Roisman supported the tenure bid of a candidate who differed with Bradford not in scholarly credentials but in gender and ideology. Could it be, then, that Roisman’s definition of “the principle of academic freedom” is flexible enough to allow her to base votes on gender or ideology rather than a candidate’s credentials? To quote from one of her students (who described her as a fine teacher), “Prof. Roisman is not always a model for diversity. It is true that adhering to a principled position is acceptable and encouraged. But Roisman arguably takes it to another level by advocating her extreme positions at the expense of dissent.”
Thursday, September 22, 2005
The Perils of Groupthink
The best recent analysis of contemporary academia that I've read was Mark Bauerlein's 2004 essay on the anti-intellectual nature of "groupthink." I accidentally encountered a perfect illustration of the Bauerlein thesis a few days ago.
The CUNY B.A. program is one of the shining lights of the university. The program allows talented students, in consultation with a faculty mentor, to design their own majors and then take approporiate courses from any of the 19 CUNY campuses. The last two CUNY B.A. students I have advised are both now getting their History Ph.D.'s--one at Cornell, the other at UCLA.
A CUNY B.A. administrator recently sent around an e-mail alerting students to an essay competition sponsored by Vanity Fair, which has a top prize of $15,000. Given the quality of CUNY B.A. students, it seemed that one might be competitive for the prize.
Here was the announcement from the administrator.
In 1,500 words or fewer, explain what is on the minds of America's youth.What's on the minds of America's youth today? More than 30 years ago, young people across the country staged sit-ins for civil rights, got up and protested against a misguided, undeclared war, and actually gave a damn if a president lied to them. Although a lot has changed since then, there are still racial divides, and America is once again mired in a largely controversial war. Back in the 1960s and 70s, a similar climate motivated great numbers of young people to act, organize, and take to the streets in defiance. Today it seems as if younger Americans are content to watch their MTV, fiddle with their game players, follow the love lives of Brad, Jen, Jessica, and Paris, and assume the hard work is being done for them by others. What has changed? Is it simply that we do not have motivating factors such as a draft or Kent State to bring us together, to anger us? What is going on inside the minds of American youth today? In 1,500 words or fewer, explain what is on the minds of America's youth.
Tuesday, September 20, 2005
European Politics and the Holocaust
Last week, the London Times reported that a group of Muslims appointed by Tony Blair to examine how the government might diminish Muslim extremism are pressuring the PM to replace Holocaust Memorial Day with "Genocide Day," since "Muslims feel hurt and excluded that their lives are not equally valuable to those lives lost in the Holocaust time." The head of a British Muslim charity added, “There are 500 Palestinian towns and villages that have been wiped out over the years. That’s pretty genocidal to me.” (One Labour MP appropriately responded, “These Muslim groups should stop trying to evade the enormity of the Holocaust.”)
Perhaps French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy might want to visit Britain for next year's Holocaust Memorial Day, which is held on January 27. Yesterday's Ha'aretz reports that Douste-Blazy revealed a shocking lack of knowledge of the Holocaust and European history during a recent visit to Israel's Holocaust memorial site, Yad Vashem.
The museum, which is an extraordinary achievement in public history, includes detailed maps showing the number of Jews killed in each nation occupied by the Nazis. Douste-Blazy asked why no British Jews were listed as murdered, prompting the museum curator to point out, "But Monsieur le minister, England was never conquered by the Nazis during World War II."
The Foreign Minister's response: "Yes, but were there no Jews who were deported from England?" Amazing.
Monday, September 12, 2005
Primary Day
New York polls are open from 6am till 9pm Tuesday. As a supporter from the start of the mayoral bid of Congressman Anthony Weiner, the only candidate who would have a chance of beating Mike Bloomberg in November and a figure who's been head-and-shoulders above his competitors intellectually, I've been delighted by his recent surge in the polls--he's now a solid second, although there still seems to be a large number of undecided voters.
Under New York law, if no candidate receives 40% of a vote, we'll have a runoff between the top two. To me, quite apart from Weiner's surge from fourth to second place, the remarkable story of the campaign is the continued frontrunner status of Fernando Ferrer. A figure who all but defines the moniker "retread," Ferrer has spent the campaign confirming his repuation as someone who demonstrates a flexibility when it comes to major issues (once pro-life, now pro-choice; once committed to civil disobedience in the Abner Daillo beating, now saying it wasn't a crime; one committed to a class-warfare campaign tactic, then positioning himself as a cross-class unifier, and now heading back to old territory). Most striking, however, is that Ferrer openly undermined the Dems' 2001 nominee, Mark Green. For the party to turn around and give him the nomination in 2005 would send an unusual message about the value of party loyalty.
Should be an interesting evening.
Sunday, September 11, 2005
The Comments Section
I've done a few pieces for Inside Higher Ed, and have been quite interested in the comments section, in which the critics have often unintentionally enhanced my case. (This was particularly true with the last piece I published, which discussed this issue directly.)
That said, I was particularly struck by the comments section in the recent Inside Higher Ed article by Greg Lukianoff and Azhar Majeed, which discusses the continuing attempts at institutions such as William Paterson, Suffolk Community College, and Washington State to punish students for speech that some on campus deemed "offensive." Such initiatives represent an outgrowth of the speech-code movement of the 1990s, which should have been discredited by now but instead has morphed into a variety of new forms.
Fighting attempts to suppress free speech on the nation's campuses has been the central mission of FIRE, of which Lukainoff serves as Director of Legal and Public Advocacy. FIRE has helped me out on several occasions, most recently in the call by Brooklyn's School of Education that I "stop" speaking publicly on issues relating to a new assessment scheme called "dispositions." In any event, you'd think that whatever Lukianoff had to say about speech codes would be taken seriously.
Wednesday, September 7, 2005
Katrina's Political Effects
Given the solid nature of President Bush's political base, I remain somewhat skeptical about the ability of the administration's failed response to the hurricane to cause him long-term political harm. But a couple of events in the last couple of days offer a glimpse of the hurricane's impact on broader political forces.
First, in Missouri, the Dems' strongest possible Senate candidate, Auditor Claire McCaskill, has announced a challenge to GOP incumbent Jim Talent. Talent is in many ways an accidental senator, elected very narrowly in 2002 over Jean Carnahan, who was a victim of the Dems' ill-considered strategy to ignore security issues in the year's midterm elections. McCaskill's bid makes Missouri a toss-up state for the fall. The Dems have no chance of taking control of the Senate in 2006, but a two-seat gain is now within the realm of possibility.
Second, after two unsuccessful attempts, the California assembly approved a bill to legalize gay marriage. (The Senate already had approved the measure.) Passage puts Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in a tough position: he campaigned as a social moderate, but if he signs the bill, he is guaranteed right-wing challenger in the 2006 primary. His response? The issue should be handled by the courts: according to his spokesperson, "he will uphold whatever the court decides." Since the GOP has spent the last four years saying gay marriage should be decided by elected bodies and not the courts, Schwarzenegger's reversal complicates the question, and provides the first sign that the Dems might be able to neutralize what has been until now a wholly harmful political issue.
Thursday, September 1, 2005
Strike-Planning 101
I've never planned an illegal strike, but it would seem to me that a union intent on striking illegally would lay the groundwork by reaching out to possibly sympathetic elected officials. CUNY's faculty union, the PSC, seems to have another strategy. (New York's Taylor Law prohibits strikes by public employee unions; the PSC has set a September 29 date for a vote on a "job action": just a guess, but I doubt many judges will be fooled by word games.)
The current leadership of the PSC, which took over in 2000, has established a pattern of endorsing the most extreme candidate in Dem primaries and then going out of its way to antagonize likely winners in the fall election. In 2001, the PSC endorsed Freddie Ferrer for mayor and Norman Siegel for Public Advocate, NYC's number-two elected position. (Ferrer and Seigel both lost the primary.) In the fall, the PSC rallied behind Mark Green. (Green lost.) In 2002, as politically savvy unions either endorsed George Pataki's all-but-certain reelection or stayed neutral in the contest, the PSC enthusiastically backed Democrat Peter Vallone. (Vallone lost.) And then the union leadership expresses wonderment when Bloomberg and Pataki don't back the PSC agenda for CUNY.
It's widely expected that for this year's mayoral contest, the PSC will again endorse Ferrer, who few expect to unseat Mike Bloomberg. (According to a Times poll out today, half of NYC's Dems favor a Bloomberg re-election.) The PSC already has made an endorsement in the race for Public Advocate (though the union seems confused about the job's title, since the endorsement page calls the position "city advocate.") Incumbent Betsy Gotbaum has been endorsed by all five borough Dem Party organizations, all four Dem borough presidents, former mayors Ed Koch and David Dinkins, and such liberal luminaries and Congressman Jerry Nadler and Assemblyman Scott Stringer. With such a force behind her, she seems all but assured of victory. (She leads by 13 points in the latest Quinnipiac poll.) Moreover, Gotbaum is the city's highest-ranking female officeholder. Given the PSC's oft-stated commitment to "diversity" and overt celebration of indentity politics, Gotbaum would seem like the obvious choice.
Monday, August 22, 2005
The Job Market
Browsing through H-net's job guide, I was particularly struck by two postings.
The first came at UCLA. As I've written previously, the department's contingent of 21 Americanists is heavily tilted toward social and cultural history. Its ranks include no historians of U.S. foreign relations, no U.S. legal historians, and no U.S. military historians, while its two faculty members who describe their interests as political history are practioners of the "new political history" whose work is indistinguishable from women's or labor history.
This year, UCLA is advertising for a tenure-track assistant professorship or tenured associate professorship in "modern American history." Any hope that the department might be eager to broaden its intellectual coverage rather than replicate itself, however, vanished when looking at the desired specialties: "cultural, environmental, labor, and urban history." Where is the UCLA administration? What possible rationale could exist for a department already top-heavy in American cultural and labor history to hire another professor in these fields when the department has no coverage at all in other vital aspects of the American experience?
The second listing that caught my eye came at Case Western, which is advertising for an open-rank 20th century US historian. The department is defining the desired interests, however, in an unusual way: "a focus on areas that examine issues of social justice." The advertisement states that "specialists in the history of race or ethnicity, labor, poverty, criminal justice, gender/sexuality, and social movements are encouraged to apply. However, applicants in all fields of 20th-century U.S. history will be considered, so long as there is a focus on social justice."
Within the desired subfields, imagine a few topics: a focus on women critics of feminism, or African-American critics of affirmative action, or a dissertation in labor history critical of Walter Reuther and the UAW. What about a specialist in American religious history whose work has examined the pro-life movement, which some quarters consider the most powerful social justice movement of the last quarter century? Would any of these candidates be considered? Unlikely, because the current majority in the academy would not consider their work as reflecting an examination of "issues of social justice."
Moreover, there's no sign that Case Western's 14-person department is lacking coverage of the themes implied in the job ad. As things now stand, at least three of its US historians (in a department that totals only 14 members in all fields) would fit the job description, and that's not counting a professor whose most recent book is The Female Marine and Related Works: Narratives of Cross-Dressing and Urban Vice in America's Early Republic. The Case Western and UCLA job postings do little to soothe concerns that the academic establishment is not capable on its own of addressing the lack of intellectual and pedagogical diversity currently plaguing many social science and humanities departments around the country.
Sunday, August 21, 2005
The One-Sided World of "Global Studies"
This week’s New Republic contains a sharp critique of a book called Imperial Nature: The World Bank and Struggles for Social Justice in the Age of Globalization. Author Michael Goldman is a University of Minnesota sociologist and an affiliate at the U of M’s Institute for Global Studies. Reviewer Joshua Brook (a former aide to the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan) terms the volume a “jeremiad against the World Bank” reflecting “the militantly negative view of the World Bank espoused by the demonstrators who regularly protest the Bank and its sister institutions.” Imperial Nature, Brook concludes,
is ultimately marred by the author's utopian politics. Like his Marxist forebears who saw no difference between Franklin Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover (both were supporters of capitalism), Goldman seems unwilling to recognize any grey area in the field of development economics. Even worse than Goldman's utopianism is his tendency to deploy impenetrable academic jargon in support of it. He writes, for example, that the World Bank is "deeply embedded in multi-tentacled structures of power, culture, and capital." In another passage, Goldman seeks to "demonstrate not only how the world of sustainable development is constituted in situ ... but also the regimes of power, truths, and rights on which these new institutional practices are based.” Quotations of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci and French post-structuralist Michel Foucault abound.
Goldman’s work provides a glimpse of the growing field of “global studies,” about which I’ve written previously. Most high schools have a “global studies” component of their social studies curricula (in New York, students take the course in 9th and 10th grades), so it would seem to make sense for universities to expand their offerings in the subject. Moreover, how could anyone object to a providing students with a greater understanding of the international environment in which we live?
Yet, much like Goldman’s book, the institute with which he’s affiliated—and the global studies movement in general—seems to focus on providing a one-sided critique of contemporary globalization, not on providing students with an academic understanding of global affairs.
Friday, August 19, 2005
Paging Dr. Frist
My favorite line from the 1992 presidential campaign came when Paul Tsongas labeled Bill Clinton the "pander bear." But Clinton is a paragon of ideological consistency compared to Bill Frist. After diagnosing Terry Schiavo from his Senate office, Frist now has endorsed the teaching of intelligent design (and done so in a classic late-Friday news dump, hoping that the Post and Times somehow won't notice).
Even if Frist didn't want to alienate the religious right by making a science-based argument against ID, he could have offered pragmatic ones--that the US can't afford to fall behind potential competitors like Japan or Korea on high-tech issues; or that there is so little time currently devoted to teaching science in the public schools that we can't rationalize imposing additional requirements.
Clinton overcame the "pander bear" label by (rightly or wrongly) convincing middle-class voters that he had a plan to "grow" the economy. Somehow I doubt the path for Frist will be as easy.
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Earlier this week, I made note of Cindy Sheehan's troubling insinuation that Jewish neoconservatives influenced the President to go to war in Iraq to defend Israel. There no longer seems to be much doubt that she did make such a claim. Sheehan, of course, is entitled to her opinion. But it seems to me that those who brand her testimony on the war "eloquent" might want to reconsider their position.
Monday, August 15, 2005
Sheehan
A colleague of mine from the Presidential Recordings Project, Tim Naftali, recently posted at the Huffington Blog on Cindy Sheehan's activities outside of the Bush vacation home in Crawford, Texas. Entitled "Cindy Sheehan and James Madison," Naftali's post argues that Sheehan's questions "are those that Congress should be asking more forcefully but because the legislative and executive branches (and soon the judiciary) are controlled by the same political party," this hasn't happened, showing that the doctrine of separation of powers, "an ingenious means of not only placing restraints on government but also a way to ensure vibrant public debate," has fallen by the wayside.
Tim's absolutely right that Congress hasn't been asking hard questions about the war in Iraq. This seems to me part of a broader transformation of American political culture that began in the early 1990s. We have moved toward a quasi-parliamentary system, with ideologically homogenous congressional parties under strong leadership that do the bidding of (or consistently oppose) the occupant of the White House.
Such a change might be a good thing; it might not. (As a historian of Congress, I don't consider it a good development.) This transformation, however, does not mean that ordinary people, like Sheehan, haven't had a chance to make their voices heard on the war in Iraq. The course of Bush's policy (and the shortcomings of that policy) was clear before the 2004 election. As a couple of recent polls have noted, for critical swing voters--especially non-college educated whites--cultural issues were more important than economic and/or foreign policy ones. This finding is troubling--but it certainly doesn't suggest that the people have been shut out of the political process.
Naftali also hails “Cindy Sheehan's eloquent vigil on behalf of truth in Iraq.” On this point, I’m dubious. As Christopher Hitchens points out in today’s Slate (in a comment published after Naftali’s posting), Sheehan has argued that her son “was killed for lies and for a PNAC Neo-Con agenda to benefit Israel. My son joined the army to protect America, not Israel.” Eloquent is not the one adjective that immediately comes to mind to characterize such a statement.
Saturday, August 13, 2005
Thank God for the Lutherans
By a nearly 3-to-1 margin, the Lutheran Church assembly passed this evening a resolution declaring a campaign called "Peace Not Walls: Stand for Justice in the Holy Land." Although the resolution did not commit the Lutherans to supporting divestment from Israel, its wording--hoping for the "stewarding financial resources — both U.S. tax dollars and private funds — in ways that support the quest for a just peace in the Holy Land" endorsed the principle of divestment, given the delgates' conception of what constituted a "just peace."
Delegates claimed that the security barrier constructed by Israel--which has dramatically lowered incidents of terrorism--"isolates and intimidates" the Palestinian people. (Neither the resolution nor any of the assembly's supporting documentation makes note of the Palestinian Authority's inability or unwillingness to contain the suicide murder attacks against Israeli civilians.) In the words of a Pennsylvania delegate, the barrier is a "form of violence" committed "against innocent people."
Delegates did, however, generously affirm that "Israel has every right to protect itself from acts of terrorism."
The irony of this particular assembly lecturing anyone on human rights is rich: the day before, the same delegates defeated a watered-down resolution that would have given gays some opportunity to serve as pastors. The day's session, according to the Church's press release, "continued to encourage the church to welcome gay and lesbian people into its life."
At least the convention was consistently hypocritical.
Friday, August 12, 2005
More on the NYS Curriculum
Today's Newsday carries a piece from AP reporter Michael Gormley raising additional concerns about the initiative on which I wrote yesterday to increase the attention to African-American studies in the US history curriculum.
The bill's sponsor was Brooklyn Democratic Assemblyman Clarence Norman (heretofore best-known for having been indicted on minor corruption allegations). According to Norman, academics and non-academics "well versed in this type of issue" will be appointed to the commission. "We feel there is, indeed, a void in our education curriculum in New York state when it comes to the issue of slavery and the de-humanization of Africans at that time" and of subsequent racism that African-Americans have experienced. Norman provides no evidence to sustain this interpretation--which, if true, would suggest that the entire US history curriculum in New York is flawed. But, again, there's no reason to believe that Norman's allegation is true.
Suggesting a broader agenda, Norman added that this could be the first of many such laws to demand increased attention in US history courses to oppressed racial and ethnic groups. "Commonalities of struggle," he said, "create a common bond."
Several educators speak out against the procedural aspects of Norman's initiative; substantively, it strikes me as equally flawed.
Hackett for Senate?
Paul Hackett, the Iraq war veteran who just missed a stunning House upset in a recent special election in Ohio, is being touted by some for the Senate nod in next year's race against incumbent Mike DeWine. On paper, Hackett would seem a great choice--especially given that the Buckeye State party really hasn't fielded a Senate candidate with a chance at winning since John Glenn and Howard Metzenbaum retired.
One place you won't see Hackett is CNN's Inside Politics, which, of course, was recently cancelled, replaced by the three-hour "Situation Room" and Wolf Blitzer. I happened to catch Blitzer's first guest interview (with Michael Chertoff); the background graphics made it appear as if Chertoff was on a nuclear submarine. I've yet to see a positive review of the program; for a humorous take, check out Wonkette.
Thursday, August 11, 2005
Majority-Rules Curricula
In Title U of the arts and cultural affairs law, Article 57-B, the New York legislature just passed a bill to create an “Armistad Commission.” This group, to be appointed by legislative leaders and the secretary of state, will operate under the premise that “it is the policy of the state of New York that the history of the African slave trade, slavery in America, the depth of their impact in our society, and the triumphs of African-Americans and their significant contributions to the development of this country is the proper concern of all people, particularly students enrolled in the schools of the state of New York.”
I can’t imagine that there’s any historian in the country who would disagree with this statement. Nor can I imagine that such themes are not extensively covered in every high school (and college) US history course in New York State. So, what will the commission—whose purview includes “teacher training activities,” and therefore involves both high school and college-level matters, do? Among other things, it will make “suggestions for revisions to the curricula and textbooks used to educate the students of New York state to reflect a more adequate inclusion of issues identified by the commission.”
Whoa. Isn’t that exactly what the Kansas board of Education is doing with intelligent design? Where is the AAUP, or the CUNY faculty union, denouncing the threat to academic freedom inherent in a politically-appointed board making “suggestions for revisions to the curricula and textbooks”? I’m not holding my breath waiting for either group to act.
Monday, August 8, 2005
Obfuscating Intellectual Diversity
Today's Globe has two important articles on the intellectual diversity debate. The first, from Cathy Young, represents a strong conservative argument against the teaching of "intelligent design" as part of an intellectual diversity campaign. As Young points out, "'intelligent design' is not science. A scientific hypothesis must be testable -- meaning that, if it is wrong, there should be a way to disprove it." The growing association between the anti-evolution movement and promotion of academic bills of rights in state legislatures (especially in Ohio and Florida) is deeply troubling. Young contends that conservatives should find much to like in evolutionary theory; more to the point, rather than alienating them, proponents of intellectual diversity should be reaching out to the sciences, where merit plays a much more important role in personnel actions and ideology much less.
In another Globe column, Ronald Crutcher, the president of Norton's* Wheaton College, shows how defenders of the status quo are trying to sidetrack complaints that colleges and universities have become overly one-sided ideologically. Crutcher cautions that the intellectual diversity movement could " weaken American higher education's greatest strength: the wide variety in types of colleges and universities and their unique missions." (In other words, public liberal arts colleges have a mission to be one-sided ideologically?) Rather than calling for an examination of hiring and curricular practices, Crutcher calls for increased attention to assessment. (In other words, confuse people with educational gobbeldigook.) And, when all else fails, resort to the old fallback for defenders of the status quo: Crutcher recommends "strategies identified by the Association of American Colleges and Universities." Best of luck to those students unfortunate enough to be enrolled at Crutcher's institution.
*--corrected from original version
Sunday, August 7, 2005
The PSC Strikes Again
Ellen Schrecker (last heard from making the fantastic claim that untenured faculty might not feel comfortable, given the current ideological climate on campuses, speaking out against U.S. military involvement overseas) and the Professional Staff Congress (last heard from making the even more fantastic claim that academic freedom protects those CUNY adjuncts accused or convicted of crimes associated with political causes with which the PSC agrees) have teamed forces in this month’s Clarion, the PSC’s monthly tabloid. The focus of their insights? “Academic freedom under attack at CUNY.”
Professor Schrecker’s article continues her slate’s refrain from recent AAUP elections: any outside criticism of the academy violates academic freedom. “This system only works,” she cautions, “if the men and women who enforce the norms of the academic profession are academics themselves.” So, what should be done when (as recently occurred at Brooklyn College) a department elects as its chair someone who wrote that all religious people are “moral retards” and rejoiced at the political effects of the higher death rate of older voters? Apparently, we should take solace from the fact that such events show what happens when “the men and women who enforce the norms of the academic profession are academics themselves.”
Unlike Jonathan Cole, who at least conceded that humanities and social science departments might substitute non-academic criteria for merit in personnel and curricular matters (even if he was unwilling to propose a solution to the problem), in Professor Schrecker’s mind, everything’s as it should be in the academy. So what accounts for the concerns? “Right-wing propaganda” and a “scandalously one-sided debate.” Perhaps the debate has been “scandalously one-sided” because Professor Schrecker’s arguments are so weak?
The Clarion also contains a pull-out section that goes beyond even Professor Schrecker’s claim that academic freedom means that academics should be free from outside criticism. A few months ago, I published a piece in Inside Higher Ed about Brooklyn’s School of Education, which has used a new theory called “dispositions” to individually assess the commitment of each of its students to promote “social justice.” The issue also generated a lengthy, multiple-sourced investigatory article in the New York Sun.
In response, the School of Education faculty sent me a letter (with signatories). The SOE document opened with a couple of obvious factual errors; moved on to concede that the issue involved state and federal educational policies; and concluded—all in the name of upholding academic freedom—by demanding that I stop commenting publicly on the matter. (I pointed out the peculiar nature of this request here.) The tabloid’s article mentioned the SOE letter, but the reporters—in an unintentional illustration of the PSC’s true beliefs on academic freedom—didn’t even bother to contact me for a response.
So, in the PSC/Schrecker worldview: professors representing the majority viewpoint on CUNY campuses cannot be criticized from the outside; and dissenters from within the faculty cannot publicly challenge the majority’s agenda. Some might call that an Orwellian conception of academic freedom. But we all know that Orwell was just a right-wing propagandist.
Erin O'Connor has more on the issue at ACTA's blog.
Friday, August 5, 2005
What's Up at Columbia?
Earlier this year, Columbia president Lee Bollinger affirmed his commitment to promoting intellectual diversity at the Morningside Heights campus. It’s difficult, however, to see how that commitment can co-exist with the $15 million “diversity” hiring initiative announced earlier this week. Although superficially comparable to Harvard’s $50 million pledge to increase the number of women among its faculty, the Columbia program is different in four important—and disturbing—ways.
1.) Bollinger isn’t Larry Summers. Regardless of the propriety of Summers’ original remarks, his subsequent reaction—apologizing profusely, admitting that his statement was misguided—could be construed as an admission by Harvard’s leadership that it had discriminated against women in the science appointment process. Columbia has, to my knowledge, made no such finding of current discriminatory practices. The university’s attorneys have, obviously, signed off on the new initiative—but it clearly comes very close to quota hiring, especially since it seems as if Asian males are not to be included in the preferred hiring cluster.
2.) Jean Howard’s record isn’t exactly reassuring. Howard, Columbia’s diversity vice provost, has been in the news previously. She signed the petition demanding that Columbia divest from companies doing business in Israel—a petition Bollinger rightly denounced as “grotesque”—and she re-emerged this past term as a member of the committee that seemed to whitewash the MEALAC controversy. Given this background, why should anyone believe that women or minorities who have taken pro-Israel public positions will be recruited by Howard’s initiative?
3.) Columbia’s initiative goes beyond Harvard’s. It will recruit women, minorities, and white men—but only white men who, in Howard’s words, “through their scholarship and teaching and mentoring, in some way promote the diversity goals of the university.” Let’s take, then, the example of a white male professor, of distinguished scholarship and teaching, in political science or sociology. Let’s say, further, that this professor has publicly argued that a color- and gender-blind legal code is the best way to sustain a diverse society. Columbia’s academic freedom policy “guarantees that [its faculty] will not be penalized for expressions of opinion or associations in their private or civic capacity.” But does anyone seriously believe a white male who has taken such a position would pass Howard’s “diversity” test? How, then, can the pro-diversity white men aspect of this initiative be reconciled with Columbia’s academic freedom policy?
4.) Howard’s initiative is designed to be self-replicating. She informed the Chronicle that the initiative would “bring on board a critical cluster of new talent” that would then help recruit additional women and minority faculty members. How, exactly? To return to the sociology example, let’s say that after completing a search stating that “white men with undesirable views on ‘diversity’ need not apply,” the Sociology Department hires two new senior professors who fit Howard’s parameters and who promise that in future searches, they will support the hiring only of candidates who fit Columbia’s diversity profile. The department currently has 12 associate or full professors, so adding these two new professors would not necessarily alter votes on new hires. Will the diversity professors’ votes be given additional weight in hiring practices? Probably not. Instead, they’ll undoubtedly form the roster for search committees fulfilling Howard’s desire to “undertake more interdisciplinary hiring”—or, in other words, hires outside departmental control, that her office can shape to ensure the preconceived outcome.
So, how does all of this fit with Bollinger’s previous desire to improve the intellectual diversity of Columbia’s faculty? Unless Columbia is seriously maintaining that the cultural hard left currently constitutes an underrepresented ideological minority among its professoriate, the faculty hired through Howard’s initiative will clearly not improve Columbia’s intellectual diversity. Indeed, there’s every reason to believe that the new hires will be ideologically acceptable to the current campus majority. But that seems to have been Howard’s goal all along.
Thursday, August 4, 2005
The Wonders of State Control
I've never played golf, but apparently it's a very easy game--at least according to the North Korean official state press agency. DPRK dictator Kim Jong Il, we've been informed, shot 11 holes-in-one in the first round of golf he ever played. (Perhaps he should take up a year on the PGA Tour to raise funds to feed his people.) He also knows all the phone numbers of government workers off the top of his head.
This news will undoubtedly provide more material for one of my favorite web series, Today in Despotism, which allows us to keep track of the miraculous doings of the leaders of Libya, Cuba, Syria, Iran, Myammar, and, of course, North Korea.
The Trials of Katherine Harris
Dems have been celebrating at the remarkable showing of Paul Hackett, the first Iraq war vet to run for Congress, in a special election contest in Ohio. Hackett lost, but his 48% of the vote was the party's best performance in the district in over a decade.
As the New Republic points out, such celebrating may be off the mark--Hackett's performance probably won't be replicated elsewhere in 2006. The good news for the party in recent days has, instead, come from Florida, whose Senate race increasingly is looking as if it won't be a problem for the Dems. First, the strongest possible GOP challenger, House Speaker Besse, has decided not to run. Second, all-but-certain GOP nominee Katherine Harris, is now charging a media conspiracy against her--claiming that (unnamed) newspapers doctored photographs of her in the 2000 recount fight to highlight her unusual makeup skills. When asked about details of the allegations, Harris' spokesperson reported her saying, "I haven't worn blue eye shadow since the seventh grade when I was in the Girl Scouts." The spokesperson didn't identify any newspaper that showed a photo of her with blue eye shadow.
It's nice to see that Harris hasn't lost touch with reality.
Update, 6.24pm: The AP reports that the White House is still trying to find a challenger for Harris. Despite Bush's famed loyalty, the President hasn't been too loyal to Harris--to whom, perhaps more than any other single person, he owes his office.
Wednesday, August 3, 2005
Cole's Version of Aacdemic Freedom
This morning’s Chronicle brings news that Columbia is devoting $15 million on behalf of gender and racial diversity in its faculty. The initiative is being coordinated by Jean Howard, Columbia's vice provost for diversity initiatives. Howard, you might recall, served on the special committee that looked into allegations of bias in Columbia’s MEALAC Department. Even though she signed a petition demanding that Columbia divest from all companies doing business in Israel (a petition that Columbia president Lee Bollinger properly termed “grotesque”), Howard refused to recuse herself from the special committee. It should be noted that the committee contained no signatories of the petition decrying the divestment initiative.
Somehow, I doubt that Howard will cast as wide a net as possible to ensure that she oversees the hiring of women and minorities of diverse ideological and pedagogical views. If it showed nothing else, the MEALAC controversy suggested that the Morningside Heights campus is much shorter on intellectual diversity than it is in racial and gender diversity. By my count, less than five CU faculty members publicly questioned the teaching techniques of Joseph Massad or Hamid Dabashi, while hundreds defended MEALAC’s curricular and personnel practices.
This legacy casts a useful light on an article by former Columbia provost Jonathan Cole, published in the recent version of Daedalus. In the article, Cole adopts a more temperate line than he did in a pro-MEALAC rally held on the Columbia campus this spring. There, according to New York Sun reporter Jacob Gershman, Cole cast Joseph Massad (who even the biased special committee conceded had acted improperly by throwing a student out of his class for failing to publicly state that the Israelis had committed atrocities on the West Bank) “as an exemplary teacher who is under no obligation to give equal weight to student opinions expressed during class. Just as a Jewish history professor doesn't have to take seriously a student who denies the Holocaust, Mr. Massad is not required to give equal time to an argument denying the 1982 Shatila refugee camp massacre in Lebanon, he said.” (A fascinating comparison—which, to borrow one of Cole’s favorite phrases, could almost be termed “anti-intellectual.”) “‘The American research university is designed to be unsettling,’ Mr. Cole said. ‘The university must have and always welcome dissenting voices.’” (Indeed it should. The crux of the battle at Columbia centered on the efforts of the MEALAC faculty and their allies on campus to stifle voices that dissent from their theories.)
In contrast to most MEALAC defenders, Cole fears that academic freedom is under assault in the natural sciences as well—though his argument here isn’t at all convincing. After lamenting the difficulty that some foreign students have had in getting into the United States, “without a scintilla of evidence that they are security risks,” he cites three examples (the public relations campaign against LSU professor Stephen Hatfill as a “person of interest” in the anthrax scare; the arrest and subsequent conviction of Texas Tech professor Thomas Butler, who was originally charged under the Patriot Act with failing to report his transport, from Tanzania, of biological agents that could be used by terrorists; and the concerns of Cornell professor Robert Richardson about the government’s ability to control “pathogens that might be developed as bioweapons.”) It’s hard to see, however, how any of these examples fall under the definition of “academic freedom” as commonly understood. Hatfill is currently suing the New York Times for libel, and may very well win. But the initial allegations against him seem to have had nothing to do with his being a professor and more with the administration’s attempt to find a convenient scapegoat for the anthrax scare. As for the issues raised by the Butler and Richardson cases, is Cole really saying that any attempt by the government to regulate the use of biological toxins that have both academic and potential terrorist uses constitutes a violation of academic freedom?
The crux of the battle involves the humanities and social sciences, as Cole essentially concedes. “The governing role played by peers makes universities different,” he contends, “from most other American institutions,” and it’s clear that Cole believes in retaining self-governance at all costs, even when evidence of abuse (as in the MEALAC case) is undeniable. He believes that university structures are sufficient to ensure effective self-governance. “There is no place for faculty members,” he writes, “to use their positions of authority to coerce and cow students into conforming to their own point of view.” There are, he notes, “workplace rules in place at universities that govern and control such forms of behavior.” Of course, the rules in place at Columbia gave students the option to go to then-MEALAC chair Hamid Dabashi, who had violated other Columbia rules in an apparent attempt to coerce students in one of his classes to attend an anti-Israel rally at which he was speaking.
Cole seems particularly displeased with the language used by MEALAC critics. They have, he laments, tended to “expropriate key terms in the liberal lexicon, as if they were the only true champions of freedom and diversity on college campuses.” From such groups, he warns, “there is a growing effort to pressure universities to monitor classroom discussion, create speech codes, and, more generally, enable disgruntled students to savage professors who express ideas they find disagreeable.” I share Cole’s concern with speech codes. He was, however, provost of an Ivy League school for the entire 1990s, and I don’t recall him claiming that the “diversity”-related speech codes imposed throughout the academy during those years represented a threat to academic freedom, much less one of a greater scale than McCarthyism. Perhaps he’s just never heard of FIRE.
Unlike most MEALAC defenders, however, Cole concedes that, in theory, a problem exists regarding a lack of intellectual diversity on campuses. In his words, “the university must do everything it can to combat the coercive demand for political litmus tests from the Right and the Left, and the pressure to conform with established academic paradigms.” Indeed, he notes, the growth of knowledge is inhibited when claims to truth are advanced “on the basis of supposedly possessing privileged insight simply as a result of one’s race, gender, religion, or ethnicity.” Intolerance for “competing points of view” within disciplines, Cole observes, is a problem, especially since “different disciplines have evolved somewhat differently in institutionalizing mechanisms to ensure that rigorous standards exist to evaluate ideas and the results of research.”
So, how can the university defend itself when critics contend that, say, departments of History, or English, or Middle East Studies are using ideological or pedagogical litmus tests rather than academic merit to make personnel and curricular decisions? “Currently,” Cole admits, “there is broader agreement about the appropriate corrective mechanisms in the natural sciences than in the humanities and social sciences.” Oh. That’s not exactly reassuring.
Cole argues that faculty “must convince the public that a failure to defend dissenting voices on the campus places at risk the greatest engine for the creation of new ideas and scientific innovation the world has ever known.” I couldn’t agree more. Unfortunately, until Cole and his allies actually do “defend dissenting voices on the campus” and not those (like the MEALAC faculty) whose views represent campus orthodoxy, I’m afraid Cole’s broader comments on academic freedom don’t have much credibility.
Tuesday, August 2, 2005
Singling Out Israel
I’m just back from a trip to Israel, which is currently experiencing a tumultuous debate over Ariel Sharon’s disengagement plan from the Gaza Strip. I had supported construction of the security barrier before I went, but getting to see the fence in several places gave me a much better sense of its necessity; I didn’t speak to even one Israeli, regardless of their political opinion, that didn’t support completing the fence. I also was struck by the dramatically different perspective on the war in Iraq, in two respects. First, the conflict received much less media attention than in the US, with greater focus on the disengagement plan and on the general issue of international terror. Second, Israelis as a whole seemed to be more supportive of the war than not, attributing broader regional changes—Libya’s abandonment of WMB, Syria’s forced withdrawal from Lebanon—in part to the fall of Saddam.
Since coming back to the US, I’ve been catching up on the news, particularly broader comment on Israel and terrorism. The hostility to Israel in some quarters of the academy is, of course, well documented. Yet, as Martin Peretz points out, this blind hostility also has spread to the religious community. Several traditionally mainline or left-of-center denominations, led by the National Council of Churches, have engaged in what Peretz terms the “macabre spectacle” of singling Israel out for exercising self-defense. Recently, the Disciples of Christ joined the NCC in demanding that Israel dismantle the security fence—after their national meeting refused to hear from an Israeli survivor of a suicide murder attack.
The religious left isn’t alone in behaving oddly toward Israel in the last few days. The Israeli Foreign Ministry formally protested a statement by Pope Benedict condemning recent terrorist attacks in Egypt, Iraq, Turkey, and Britain—but excluding Israel, which experienced a terrorist attack that killed civilians on July 12.
And then there’s Ken Livingstone. After comparing the Likud Party to Hamas, the London mayor suggested that the suicide murder attacks, at least in the Middle East, represented an understandable response to Israeli policies. “Under foreign occupation and denied the right to vote, denied the right to run your own affairs, often denied the right to work for three generations, I suspect that if it had happened here in England, we would have produced a lot of suicide bombers ourselves.” The last time I looked, Palestinians were denied neither the right to vote nor the right to work, and Livingstone’s use of the “three generations” timeframe raised the question of whether he believes that we wouldn’t have to deal with Middle Eastern terrorism if only Israel never existed.
Thursday, July 14, 2005
Chertoff
By and large, I think Michael Chertoff has done a good job as Homeland Security Secretary. (Of course, following Tom Ridge, it would have been hard to have done worse.) But today he made some astonishing comments about the federal response to the War on Terror.
According to the AP, Chertoff argued that while the federal government would handle airline security, improving security against terrorism on the nation's mass transit systems is primarily the responsibility of state and local governments. "The truth of the matter is, a fully loaded airplane with jet fuel, a commercial airliner, has the capacity to kill 3,000 people. A bomb in a subway car may kill 30 people. When you start to think about your priorities, you're going to think about making sure you don't have a catastrophic thing first."
Chertoff was grilled on the issue at a hearing today (transcript isn't yet available) by Chuck Schumer and Joe Lieberman, and backtracked slightly, commenting, "We have an equal responsibility to protect Americans across the board. We have to be partners with everybody but we have to recognize there are differences in the way we apply our partnership."
Obviously, areas of the country with mass transit systems tend not to vote strongly Republican. But national security is a federal, not a state or local issue, and Chertoff of all people should know this--it's the reason his cabinet department exists. Coming off a (pre-7/7) vote by the Senate Apprpriations Committee to reduce the money the federal government spends on mass transit security, Chertoff's comments raise grave doubts about the federal government's commitment to this aspect of the war on terror.
Friday, July 8, 2005
Cole Is Misinformed
I rarely find Juan Cole's Informed Comment particularly informative, but his backhanded defense of Respect MP George Galloway features a wholly incorrect reading of the historical record.
The issue: after Galloway, the fanatically anti-war MP, described the London attacks as a response to British participation in the war in Iraq, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw responded, "People have to remember that 11 September was in 2001 before the military action." Cole then takes Straw to task: "Straw seems unaware that according to the September 11 Commission report, al-Qaeda conceived 9/11 in some large part as a punishment on the US for supporting Ariel Sharon's iron fist policies toward the Palestinians."
This would seem to be a compelling rebuttal to Straw's claim, except for one problem. It's wholly untrue. Nowhere in its report did the 9/11 Commission argue that "al-Qaeda conceived 9/11 in some large part as a punishment on the US for supporting Ariel Sharon's iron fist policies toward the Palestinians." The report is quite eloquent, and persuasive, in arguing, as the commission's senior consultant, Ernest R. May, has recalled, "that Al Qaeda attacked the United States because of what the nation was rather than because of what it did."
Indeed, to quote May further, for political reasons the commission decided not even to entertain the thesis that Cole claims it adopted. "The report is weak in laying out evidence for the alternative argument that the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the Capitol might not have been targeted absent America's identification with Israel, support for regimes such as those in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan, and insensitivity to Muslims' feelings about their holy places. The commissioners believed that American foreign policy was too controversial to be discussed except in recommendations written in the future tense. Here we compromised our commitment to set forth the full story."
Now, it might be that the 9/11 Commission was wrong, and Al-Qaeda "conceived 9/11 in some large part as a punishment on the US for supporting Ariel Sharon's iron fist policies toward the Palestinians." My guess is that this certainly represents Juan Cole's belief. But his misrepresentation of the report's conclusions is staggering.
Wednesday, July 6, 2005
Academic Freedom in the P.A.
A few weeks back, a group of academics circulated a petition promoting calling upon "academics, intellectuals, professional academic organizations, and educational institutions in Israel and internationally to become actively involved in defending the Palestinian people’s right to an educational system that is open, sustainable, and accessible." Among other items the group deemed a violation of academic freedom: Israel's construction of a security fence. The resolution also cites "the internationally recognized entitlement to education," although its authors never explained why they expressed concern solely about Palestinians and not, say, Saudi Arabians, Iranians, Sudanese, North Koreans, or Chinese, among others. I'm sure they had their reasons.
This morning's Jerusalem Post brings news of Prof. Riad al-Agha, president of the Gaza-based National Institute of Strategic Studies, who was arrested on charges of "incitement" after he criticized the operations of Palestinian security forces on Palestinian state TV. Agha was released only after agreeing to publish a statement in which he apologized for making "offensive remarks" against the security forces, which, he was compelled to state, are led by "nationalistic figures whom I highly appreciate and respect and who have a known history of struggling [against Israel]."
I'm sure that given the scholars' concern "in defending the Palestinian people’s right to an educational system that is open, sustainable, and accessible," I'll soon be receiving an e-mail asking me to sign a petition condemning the P.A. for its handling of the al-Agha case. Surprisingly, however, that e-mail doesn't seem to have yet arrived.
Tuesday, July 5, 2005
Stockdale
The AP has just reported that Admiral James Stockdale has died. Historians shouldn't make predictions, but I'll guess that we'll never see a stranger debate performance than Stockdale's ("Who am I? Why am I here?") in the 1992 VP debate--as Stockdale himself admitted. Stockdale's uncomfortable nature was the subject of a variety of parodies; I recall watching the debate and worrying that he was going to suffer a heart attack, as he wandered into the screen behind Al Gore when Gore was speaking.
Stockdale was, of course, an American hero and POW during Vietnam. That he was chosen as a vice-presidential running mate, however, served as confirmation of Ross Perot's unfitness for the presidency.
Sunday, July 3, 2005
Gaylord Nelson
Former Wisconsin senator Gaylord Nelson died this morning, at 5.10am, at the age of 89. Nelson is best remembered, as his biographer suggests, for being the Senate's first environmentalist, a key player in the start of Earth Day. For those interested in politics or foreign policy, however, Nelson also left important legacies.
Through the 1930s, Wisconsin was a one-party state, dominated by the Republicans, with the key battles fought in the GOP primary between progressives of the La Follette ilk and pro-business conservatives. In the 1930s, the La Follette faction split to form its own party, the Progressives, but the third party collapsed during World War II and Young Bob La Follette, who returned to the GOP, was defeated for renomination in 1946 by Joe McCarthy. The Democrats were bystanders in all of these battles, but in the mid-1950s, Nelson, along with William Proxmire and Pat Lucey, built the modern WI Democratic Party. Proxmire was elected to the Senate in 1957, for the vacancy created by McCarthy's death; Nelson was elected governor the following year and then ousted Republican Alexander Wiley in the 1962 Senate election. Nelson, in turn, lost in the biggest Senate upset of 1980, to a mediocre Republican candidate, former congressman Bob Kasten. The outcome symbolized the decline of the liberalism that Nelson personified--a domestic emphasis on rights-related issues and a foreign policy oriented around anti-militarism and the promotion of human rights.
The Capital Times bio quotes Nelson's best line from the Vietnam debates: in 1965, when LBJ reqested from Congress a $700 million appropriation to serve as an endorsement of the President's Vietnam policy, Nelson joined Wayne Morse and Ernest Gruening in voting no, commenting, "You need my vote less than I need my conscience." The previous year, he had planned to vote against the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, only to be swayed by heavy lobbying from William Fulbright. But after the 1965 vote, Nelson remained at the cutting edge of foreign policy dissent for the next decade and a half. He sponsored one of the most important measures designed to bolster Congress' standing in US foreign policy, the 1974 Nelson-Bingham amendment, which gave Congress the option of vetoing, through a joint resolution, any foreign arms sale over $25 million. The amendment helped to deter a variety of major arms sales packages in the late 1970s, especially to Pakistan and pre-revolution Iran, and paved the way for the first major foreign policy showdown of the Reagan administration, the October 1981 vote over Reagan's proposal to sell AWACS planes to Saudi Arabia.
Nelson was a quiet, thoughtful man of principle and ideas, someone uncomfortable in sound-bite politics based on partisan attacks from both sides. He was missed when he was defeated in 1980; senators like him are missed even more today.
Friday, July 1, 2005
Latest from IU
Marian College professor Pierre Atlas has an impressive analysis of the continuing controversy over IU-Indianapolis law school's personnel standards. Untenured associate professor William Bradford, you might recall, had an "excellent" rating in scholarship, teaching, and service; a publication record that exceeded that of some of his long-time senior colleagues; and yet received 5 negative votes (of a total of 15) on his reappointment.
To explain the outcome, Bradford has cited complaints about his "collegiality" coming from two leftist professors, complaints that seem to have increased after he publicly defended Bush's preemptive war doctrine and refused to sign a petition defending Colorado's Ward Churchill. Atlas received extensive comments from one of Bradford's key critics, Professor Florence Wagman Roisman, who dismissed Bradford's claims as "ridiculous." Indeed, Roisman continues, there could be no repercussions for Bradford's political positions, since "most of the faculty here are fairly conservative." To Roisman, "it is deeply offensive and outrageous that anyone would suggest that either Mary Mitchell [another left-wing Bradford opponent who has published next to nothing in 25 years as an IU faculty member] or I would base any decision about a colleague on their politics. We are devoted to the principle of academic freedom."
OK, let's take Roisman at her word. The vote, again, was on reappointment--which has a lower threshold than does tenure. I presume that IU does not normally deny reappointment to untenured faculty who are rated excellent in scholarship, teaching, and service. Roisman, Mitchell, and their three allies say that they did not take into account their disagreement with Bradford's political positions in voting against his reappointment. So, then, what criteria did they use? Perhaps they have very high standards, and believe that for a professor to be reappointed after his third year, he should have at least 30 law review articles or book chapters, rather than, as in Bradford's case, only 20. Or perhaps the Law School dean should require them to recuse themselves from future votes regarding Bradford.
Thursday, June 30, 2005
IHE and Collegiality
As someone with a painful first-hand experience with the criterion, I oppose the use of collegiality in personnel matters. In theory, of course, it's better to have a department peopled with professors who work well together. But in practice, I don't see any way to structure a system that can ensure that the criterion won't be abused.
A couple of recent articles in Inside Higher Ed illustrate the point. The first, by Mary McKinney, a clinical psychologist who advises academics, proposes 15 pro-collegiality "rules" an untenured person should follow. McKinney's piece, it should be noted, doesn't take a position one way or the other on whether collegiality should be used; rather, it's a "how-to guide" for untenured faculty working within an institution that uses the collegiality criterion, either formally or informally.
A lot of McKinney's rules (i.e.--don't whine, look for a mentor, be a good listener) are common sense. Others strike me as more off-putting: "the rules of collegiality are similar to the rules of dating"; "sometimes, make your concrete, focused compliments in front of a third party (such as right before a faculty meeting begins)"; "if there are 10 people at the meeting, make sure that you speak less than 10 percent of the time"; "avoid campus when you’ve got to write and reserve tasks that require less focus for your office."
McKinney sounds like she's quite good at what she does, and I have no doubt that someone who followed all 15 of her rules would be likely to get tenure. That said, McKinney's rules also offer insight on why the use of collegiality is such a dangerous criterion.
First, several of her rules amount to advice to suck up to figures in power and show deference, whether appropriate or not, to those in authority. Obviously, no one, junior or senior, should go out of their way to attack people. But the principle of academic freedom depends on the argument that faculty self-governance is the best way for the academy to function. Will someone who has spent six or seven years of his or her life as an untenured professor following McKinney's collegiality rules suddenly be likely, upon receiving tenure, to function as an autonomous unit within a self-governing structure? Or is it more likely that this professor, having received tenure by engaging in self-censorship, deference, and not challenging those in power, will continue to do so upon receiving tenure?
Second, McKinney's rules illustrate the subtle but pervasive bias against research inherent in the use of collegiality as a criterion. She advises untenured professors not to come to the office to do writing or scholarly-based activities, since senior colleagues like to stop by and chat. But for many untenured faculty, especially those with families, the office is a refuge from distractions and a good place to write. Moreover, as she herself concedes, we all know of people who have followed the "pro-collegiality" path to compensate for mediocre or worse research records. That's not exactly something the academy as a whole should encourage.
A second recent story in IHE, on the personnel difficulties of William Bradford, offers further insight on the anti-research bias inherent in the "collegiality" criterion. Bradford is the IU law professor who received only a 10-5 vote for his third-year reappointment--a sign of long-term trouble--even though his performance was rated as "excellent" in teaching, scholarship, and service. His problem? Several senior members deemed him "uncollegial," on grounds that seem transparently political.
But Bradford seems to have done something else very uncollegial--he's outperformed some of his senior colleagues in publishing. One of Bradford's leading critics is a law professor named Mary Harter Mitchell, whose website discretely declines to provide a link to her publications. This 1978 graduate of Cornell Law School, who has been on the IU faculty since 1980, has published one book, Legal Reference for Older Hoosiers, put out by a press called "The Foundation" in 1982; a search of Lexis-Nexis reveals no law review articles published by Mitchell in the last decade. Bradford, on the other hand, has a forthcoming book, The Laws of Conflict in the Age of Armed Terror, and has published four book chapters and 20 law review articles in the last six years.
Is there any way to ensure that Prof. Mitchell's judgment of Prof. Bradford's "uncollegiality" doesn't consistitute anything but professional jealousy? And shouldn't that fact alone suggest that universities might want to dispense with the criterion?
Tuesday, June 28, 2005
Dorn on Searches
Sherman Dorn has a fascinating post--with which I completely agree--on possible ways to guard against intellectual uniformity in department searches.
Dorn offers two suggestions: (1) Conducting external reviews of assistant-professor candidate pools, modeled on the procedures used when candidates go up for tenure, in which outside reviewers would take a look at the qualifications of the final pool, those who just missed the cut, and a random sampling of the rest of the applicants: and (2) using target of opportunity lines to promote pedagogical diversity as well as the more traditional types of diversity for which TOA lines currently are used.
Both seem to me to be great ideas. They share a common element: administrative willingness to proactively promote intellectual diversity and to devote financial resources to the cause, recognizing that faculty self-governance and a prudent system of checks and balances need not be irreconcilable. To my knowledge, there isn't one institution in the country that gives departments the sole power to make tenure decisions--there's a recognition that some internal check needs to exist. The same principle should apply to the hiring process. Without some outside pressure from campus administrations, there's no reason to believe that intellectually uniform departments will suddenly decide to change their ways.
The Court and the Plame Case
Today's Times reflects the widespread consensus in the journalistic community that the inquiry into the Valerie Plame matter threatens the freedom of the press. In stirring language (to borrow a sarcastic term from Justice Scalia's opinion on yesterday's Ten Commandments cases), the editorial page criticizes the Court for not overturning lower-court contempt citations against Judith Miller and Matthew Cooper. The case, raged the Times, involved the "principle of a free and fearless press on which the nation was founded." Readers are told that "American history is full of examples of whistle-blowers who were able to inform the public of malfeasance only through reporters who were able to guarantee them confidentiality. The federal courts' assault on this tradition could have a chilling effect on their future willingness to speak up."
As the Times is well aware, reporters have never had an absolute privilege: there are elements of the Constitution other than the First Amendment, despite its enormous importance. It seems to me that it would take a pretty high bar for the court system to say that reporters should be forced to reveal their sources--but if the Plame case doesn't pass the bar, nothing does. Those who leaked about Plame are not "whistle-blowers who were able to inform the public of malfeasance only through reporters who were able to guarantee them confidentiality"--they were practioners of malfeasance who were only able to inform the public through reporters who were able to guarantee them confidentiality. If the Court's non-action provides a deterrent effect to future administrations--the next time you want to leak the name of an intelligence operative to score political points, you can't count on reporters not revealing your identity--all the better.
Sunday, June 26, 2005
Here We Go Again?
While courts have, for the most part, upheld the use of "collegiality" in academic personnel processes, I don't think any institution of higher learning that claims to be interested in quality should use the concept. A test of "collegiality" too often serves as a club to punish ideological dissenters among the untenured faculty.
This morning's Indianapolis Star has a column on the case of Indiana Law School professor William Bradford, who's being opposed by some law school professors for tenure on grounds of "uncollegiality."
I'm going to be looking into this case more intensively, but the story as presented by the Star is frightening: Bradford's qualifications as a teacher and a scholar are excellent; he has supported the war against terror and refused to sign a pro-Ward Churchill petition prepared by colleagues; and his leading opponents are on the far left of the department and have crossed swords with him on political issues.
Friday, June 24, 2005
Faculty Reps Declare War on Their Students
CUNY has witnessed some peculiar thinking on “academic freedom” over the past few weeks. First, Barbara Bowen, head of the faculty union (which was last heard from claiming that “academic freedom” applied to adjuncts charged with, or convicted of, terrorist crimes associated with ideological causes the union favors) issued a “public letter" asserting that academic freedom was “under attack” at CUNY. She demanded that Chancellor Matthew Goldstein publicly denounce articles in the New York Sun, New York Daily News, and unnamed on-line sources regarding the controversies in Brooklyn’s Sociology (archived here)and Education Departments. (You can just see the headlines, “CUNY Head Slams Free Press.”) Then, former Sociology chairman Jerome Krase, who personally termed himself “quite amused” upon reading would-be chairman Timothy Shortell’s essay deeming all religious people “moral retards,” compared Shortell’s decision to step down as chairman-elect, in the face of a public outcry, to the early stages of McCarthyism and . . . the Inquisition(!).
The common thread in the ruminations of Bowen and Krase? A belief that students have no right, under any circumstances, to publicly challenge the arguments of professors who represent the ideological majority at CUNY. The articles that Bowen wanted the head of the university to denounce publicly consisted primarily of feedback from students (at least eight of whom spoke out on the Sociology and Education controversies). In Bowen’s version of the academy, students publicly criticizing either a professor’s questionable in-class behavior or deliberately inflammatory out-of-class writings constitute, ipso facto, an assault on academic freedom. The perspective of Krase, if anything, is even more bizarre. This former department chairman and named professor at Brooklyn described the pro-religious tolerance students as “fascists” who “pined for the days when Brooklyn was whiter if not (in their opinion) brighter.” Apparently Krase has never run across any minorities who were people of faith.
In this environment came a remarkable defense of students’ right to express an opinion on academic issues from Brooklyn student Yehuda Katz, a two-time candidate for president of Student Government and former editor of the campus newspaper, The Excelsior.
Katz recently issued a public letter on academic freedom. On the one hand, it’s a little embarrassing to see that the thinking of an undergraduate is so transparently superior intellectually to the thoughts of the elected head of the faculty union and a former department chairman. On the other hand, Katz’s letter testifies to the high quality of CUNY students, and, perhaps, to the good instruction that selective undergraduates can achieve at the institution. I’ve reprinted the letter in full, since it’s not posted elsewhere to date.
AN OPEN LETTER TO CHANCELLOR GOLDSTEIN, THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF CUNY, and BARBARA BOWEN, PRESIDENT OF THE CUNY PSCTo Whom It May Concern:
Academic freedom at Brooklyn College is under attack. In the guise of protecting academic freedom, a substantial contingent of the faculty has been working to undermine the right of faculty members, and especially students, to dissent about issues that affect them directly.
In an open letter to Chancellor Goldstein, Barbara Bowen, the President of the PSC, referred to an article by the New York Sun. She refers to the Sun as 'a right-wing newspaper' and the article as a report 'on the views Professor Shortell had expressed in his non-academic writing.'
In fact, that 'article' was an editorial by the New York Sun, which had previously taken a position on Shortell's writings with no response by the PSC.
Bowen then says that the 'report' was followed by another in the Daily News. That 'report' was not about Shortell's views, but about student reaction to the news in the wake of the Sun editorial.
In an attempt to further drum up evidence of a conspiracy, Bowen claims that President Kimmich, 'contrary to the normal procedure following departmental elections' wrote a letter to the New York Sun about an 'investigation' he had ordered.
As you know, according to the CUNY Bylaws, the college president is responsible for approving departmental chairpersons, affirming that they can 'act effectively as the departmental administrator and spokesperson and as a participant in the formation, development, and interpretation of college-wide interest and policy.'
Bowen's quotation of President Kimmich's letter to the Sun is highly selective. Her implication is that Kimmich would be investigating the 'offensive' nature of Shortell's writings. In addition to the widely circulated quotation calling the material offensive, Kimmich said: 'While his right to express these views is protected, what is not protected is the injection of views like these into the classroom or into any administrative duties he might assume as chair of the sociology department. I have convened a committee of three high-ranking college officials and asked them to investigate the situation and report back to me. While there are no specific complaints against Shortell, the review will preserve the rights of all involved.'
As is clear from the unedited letter, Kimmich was investigating whether Shortell engaged in unprotected 'injection of views like these into the classroom.' He specifically states that the review would preserve Shortell's rights, and affirmed Shortell's right to hold the views while simultaneously serving as a professor and even as a chairperson.
Bowen's letter also refers to a 'front page attack' on Professor Priya Parmar. Actually, the article was a detailed discussion about the use of dispositions in grading students. It included statements from Brooklyn College as well as statements from students who were involved in a dispute with Professor Parmar. Parmar refused to be interviewed, passing the reporter along to a college spokesperson, who was quoted.
The article also discussed the allegations of several students who told the Sun that they had been aggrieved by Parmar's behavior in the classroom. Parmar was offered an opportunity to respond by the reporter, but declined the offer.
Bowen's letter calls the article an 'attack' and decries that fact that there has been no public denunciation of the article and its contents.
In her demands, Bowen calls on the Chancellor to condemn "the May 31 article in The New York Sun, "'Disposition' Emerges as Issue at Brooklyn College."
Put in perspective, Bowen is asking the Chancellor to denounce a New York City newspaper for publishing an article and several editorials it deemed newsworthy. She is also asking the Chancellor to denounce those who were quoted in the article (mostly students) for expressing their points of view to the newspaper.
This is unacceptable. Students and faculty members should have the right to speak freely about points of dissent they have with faculty members, other students, or even the University itself. Last time we checked, the principles of academic freedom do not impose a gag rule on those who wish to make themselves heard in the press.
Quite the contrary, the principles of academic freedom demand a free and open debate on issues of importance, like those discussed here. Those principles envision a climate where dissent is welcomed, irrespective of the venue in which that dissent is presented.
Unfortunately, President Bowen's letter demands that faculty members be free to express controversial viewpoints, and that students and local media be silenced in response. Her letter clearly expresses a lack of respect for the academic freedom, as well as the academic rights of students. It expresses a lack of respect for the basic right to free press that we enjoy in a free society.
We hope that you will clearly indicate your opposition to attempts to silence dissent, regardless of whether their source is protected under the PSC contract or simply by the United States Constitution.
Update, 10.49pm: At the Torch, Greg Lukianoff has a lengthy analysis, which I share, on academic freedom and the recent ACE announcement. Perhaps Bowen and Krase might want to take a look at it before they next claim that academic freedom requires either denouncing a free press or describing proponents of religious tolerance as "fascists."
Changing Congress
For those who missed it, an important study in this morning's Times on the changing nature of Congress. Tracking roll-call votes, social scientists Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal note the dramatic decline in centrists in both the House and the Senate over the last half-century. The figures in the House: a drop from 33 percent in 1955 to 8 percent in 2004. The plunge in the Senate is from 39 senators in 1955 to just 9 senators five decades later.
The speculated causes, according to congressional scholar Norman Ornstein: congressional redistricting, the permanent campaign style, the change toward more politically partisan media. Ornstein believes (as do I) that the former is the most important in killing off centrism. But the drawing of partisan House district lines doesn't explain the equally dramatic decline among centrists in the Senate. Here, it seems to me, we need to consider a few other factors:
1.) The increasing inability of Democrats to compete in Senate elections in predominantly Republican states. In the past, such senators (for electoral necessity, if for no other reason) tended toward centrism. In the 2004 presidential election, Bush took 60% of the vote or more in 14 states: Utah (71%), Wyoming (69%), Idaho (68%), Nebraska (66%), Oklahoma (66%), Alabama (63%), North Dakota (63%), Alaska (62%), Kansas (62%), Texas (61%), and South Dakota, Kentucky, Indiana, and Mississippi (each with 60%). A quarter-century ago, in 1980, these states sent 14 Democrats to the Senate--ID: Frank Church; NB: James Exon and Ed Zorinsky; OK: David Boren; AB: Howell Heflin and Don Stewart; ND: Quentin Burdick; Alaska: Mike Gravel; TX: Lloyd Bentsen; SD: George McGovern; KY: Dee Huddleston and Wendell Ford; IN: Birch Bayh; MS: John Stennis. (And even Utah and Wyoming were only four years out each from having had their last Democrat in the Senate--Ted Moss and Gale McGee, both of whom were moderates.) In 2005, these same 14 states sent 5 Democrats to the Senate--NB: Ben Nelson; ND: Kent Conrad and Byron Dorgan; SD: Tim Johnson; IN: Evan Bayh.
2.) The increasing unwillingness of Republican electorates (outside of Rhode Island) to nominate moderate or liberal Republicans. In 1972, the Senate GOP caucus included such moderate or liberal members as Ed Brooke (MA), George Aiken and Robert Stafford (VT), Lowell Weicker (CT), Jacob Javits (NY), Clifford Case (NJ), Charles Mathias (MD), Charles Percy (IL), and John Sherman Cooper (KY). (With the exception of Stafford and Percy, any of this list would now be the most liberal Senate Republican if they were alive and serving today.) Of this list, Case and Javits were both defeated by conservative primary opponents; Cooper's state party was taken over by conservatives led by Mitch McConnell, and Aiken, Mathias, Percy, Brooke, and Weicker were all replaced by Democrats--the latter three involuntarily.
3.) The enormous financial resources required to run for the Senate. Senate races today are so expensive that except for wealthy self-funders, it's almost impossible to stand for the Senate without appealing to the base: there's no centrist equivalent to moveon.org or the Christian Coalition that will help raise the needed funds for moderate Senate candidates.
That people such as Lindsey Graham, John Warner, Robert Byrd, or Dan Inouye could (accurately) be considered what passes for a centrist in today's Senate suggests that the centrist bloc in the upper chamber is likely to continue to erode.
Thursday, June 23, 2005
Rhetoric and Outrage
Brian Leiter's "outrage" at Juan Non-Volokh's critique of Leiter's impeachment posting would have been laughable had it not contained the (since repudiated) threat to "out" Non-Volokh through solicitation of anonymous e-mails. Can you imagine Leiter's real--and justified--outrage had, say, David Horowitz issued a public call for anonymous e-mails to "out" a leftist blogger who had criticized the Academic Bill of Rights?
Leiter's original anger was directed against four prominent professors (Cass Sunstein, Mark Tushnet, Jack Rakove, and Michael Gerhardt) who had attacked Ralph Nader's argument that George W. Bush should be impeached. Leiter then concluded his posting with the following "somewhat tangential observation":
[I]n every society of which I'm aware the vast majority of the preeminent academic figures were, in general, cowards when it came to their own regimes, and apologists for what later generations would see clearly as inhumanity and illegality. This was clear in Germany in the 1930s, as it was in America in the 1950s. There is no reason to think the United States today is any different. This is one reason I should probably abandon attempts to evaluate law schools in terms of scholarly caliber.
It was this paragraph, and in particular the Nazi comparison, that generated Non-Volokh's comments. Non-Volokh, quite properly, noted Leiter's own faulty analysis, finding "the idea that American academics at large are too afraid to criticize the Bush Administration to be quite laughable." Leiter, after expressing doubts about non-Volokh's ability to read, responded that he had never compared contemporary US to Nazi Germany, nor had he focused his comments on academia as a whole, but merely on "preeminent academic figures." While it's not entirely clear how Leiter has defined "preeminent academic figures," at most campuses, a resolution stating, "Resolved: George W. Bush should be impeached," probably would pass even among senior faculty. For the purposes of his argument, Leiter seems to contend that "preeminent academic figures" are those preeminent figures who disagree with him.
The issue here, however, is Leiter's reaction. Indeed, as he points out, academics displayed cowardice both in Nazi Germany and in the US during the high point of the McCarthy era. How, in any way, is that observation relevant, even in a "somewhat tangential" fashion, to a debate among leading constitutional scholars about whether a motion of impeachment against George W. Bush has merit? And why is disagreeing with Leiter's interpretation evidence of "cowardice," rather than a good-faith intellectual disagreement? It was Leiter--not non-Volokh--who elected to argue his case in an inflammatory manner. It strikes me as peculiar to frame rhetoric in such a way that will deliberately inflame opinion and then to express "outrage" when opinion is subsequently inflamed.
Now, onto my "somewhat tangential" point--with the tangent being the intellectual variety in the academy. Today's statement from prominent academic organizations on "academic rights and responsibilities" is admirable in every respect. But the question, of course, remains how such rhetoric is implemented into policy. That one of the statement's signatories is the AAC&U gives me considerable pause.
Update, 4.41pm: Brian Leiter has E-mailed to state, "Your posting, which purports to be about my dispute with Mr. Non-Volokh contains a number of errors, which, as an historian, you will no doubt want to correct for your readers." His original posting on the impeachment issue is here; my apologies for not posting the link previously.
Update, 8.19pm: Brian Leiter has emailed, asking me to list the four specific items of disagreement with my posting, to wit:
1.) While Tushnet opposed impeachment, he did not attack Nader's argument;
2+3.) Prof. Leiter reiterates that (a) his initial posting referred only to "leading academics," and (b) argues that he has defined preeminent academics more precisely than I argue. I never claimed otherwise on (a); on (b) readers can be the judge. It doesn't affect my principal point, namely, that at most campuses, a resolution stating, "Resolved: George W. Bush should be impeached," probably would pass even among preeminent academics.
4.) Prof. Leiter says that "disagreement with me is irrelevant to the question of cowardice," and argues that "it might be interesting if you have something of substance to say about the actual arguments that were at issue in this dispute. Your opinions about matters of rhetoric, based as they are on some rather careless misrepresentations, are of less value." I'm disappointed that Prof. Leiter didn't find my opinions of value on this issue; as I said in the opening, my interest in this particular matter wasn't over the impeachment issue at all, but instead over the question of rhetoric and response--namely, that people who use inflammatory rhetoric and/or historical analogies shouldn't be surprised when that rhetoric triggers a strong response, as occurred in this case, even when that response was focused not on the substance of the post but on an item that Leiter himself deemed "somewhat tangential."
Monday, June 20, 2005
Senate and Anti-Lynching
My colleague Ralph Luker recently posted on the Senate's anti-lynching resolution, and the peculiar decision of a handful of Senate Republicans to decline to co-sponsor the resolution (which passed by a voice vote). Today's Roll Call (subscription only) follows up on the story, asking each of the senators' offices for an explanation of their decisions. The results are below:
Lamar Alexander (Tenn.)
“I also condemn lynching. … But, rather than begin to catalog and apologize for all those times that some Americans have failed to reach our goals, I prefer to look ahead. I prefer to look to correct current injustices rather than to look to the past.”
Bob Bennett (Utah)
“I come from a State that does not have a history of lynchings, but that does not mean I should be absolved from the concern that all Americans should have over the lynchings that have occurred. I note that it was the filibuster that made it possible for the Senate to be the body that blocked this legislation in the past. I would hope that in the future, we would all realize that the filibuster should be used for more beneficial purposes than that.”
Thad Cochran (Miss.)
“I don’t feel I should apologize for the passage of or the failure to pass any legislation by the U.S. Senate. But I deplore and regret that lynchings occurred and that those committing them were not punished.”
John Cornyn (Texas)
“There are different ways to acknowledge those times when Americans have failed to achieve the goals we have set for ourselves.”
Mike Enzi (Wyo.)
“Sen. Enzi believes the lynchings that took place were tragic and that they never should have occurred. The legislation was passed by voice vote. Sen. Enzi agreed to that. He did not object.”
Judd Gregg (N.H.)
“The fact that this amendment passed unanimously showed the depth of the support this resolution rightfully received, and Sen. Gregg was pleased to offer his support.”
Kay Bailey Hutchison (Texas)
“You don’t have to co-sponsor everything that you are in favor of. She abhors lynching and thinks it is a horrific part of American history.”
Jon Kyl (Ariz.)
No response.
Trent Lott (Miss.)
No response.
Richard Shelby (Ala.)
“There are many instances where Sen. Shelby supports legislation and resolutions without being a co-sponsor.”
Gordon Smith (Ore.)
“Sen. Smith strongly supports the resolution. He has a long record protecting civil rights.”
John Sununu (N.H.)
“Sen. Sununu supported the resolution, and was on the Senate floor Monday evening when the resolution passed unanimously by a voice vote.”
Craig Thomas (Wyo.)
“The Senator was working on the energy bill and CAFTA when that came around. ... If it passed by unanimous consent, that means everyone supported it. I don’t see the news value.”
It's interesting that Trent Lott's office didn't issue a statement, and the comments of Lamar Alexander, Craig Thomas, and Bob Bennett are rather odd, to say the least.
Thad Cochran's response, however, is more interesting. Cochran is clearly the most moderate Republican senator from the South. He argued that he would have supported anti-lynching legislation had he been in the Senate, and therefore should not have to apologize for the actions of people opposed to his position. When pressed by his hometown newspaper, the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, he noted that the paper had not yet responded for 50 years' worth of editorials opposing anti-lynching legislation.
Friday, June 17, 2005
Gay Divorce in Iowa
There are some ways in which the ideological extremes in American society mirror each other. Both, it seems to me, are susceptible to "groupthink"--talking only with like-minded people on the extremes. And so, when they do go public with their arguments, they often look ridiculous.
A case in point has been the recent controversy over at Brooklyn College, involving the aborted bid of Sociology professor Timothy Shortell to become his department's chairman. The CUNY faculty union (the PSC) has claimed that the controversy violated Shortell's academic freedom. In an open letter to the Chancellor, PSC head Barbara Bowen demanded that CUNY, among other things, officially condemn an article on the controversy published in the New York Daily News. The piece, which unfortunately is now off-line, contained quotes from several students (of differing genders and faiths) about Shortell's anti-religious comments. Only in an intellectually hermetically-sealed community could someone think that the outside world would find persuasive the argument that a newspaper article quoting the college's students about a professor's controversial remarks constituted not only a threat to academic freedom but a threat of such graveness that the article itself required an official condemnation by CUNY administrators.
Today's news provided an example of "groupthink" from the other ideological extreme. Iowa's Supreme Court refused to overturn a ruling from a district court judge, who had presided over Iowa's first gay divorce. (Officially it wasn't a divorce but a dissolution of a Vermont civil union.) The case was a peculiar one: the divorce was amicable; and the district court judge initially signed off on the forms thinking the matter was a regular divorce, without closely examining the names of the two litigants. When the oversight was brought to the judge's attention, however, he simply amended his ruling and dissolved the civil union.
In response, six conservative politicians, three Christian activists, a pastor, and a church(!)--the Church of Christ of Le Mars--filed suit. They demanded that the state Supreme Court overturn the ruling dissolving the civil union. The plaintiffs contended
The Iowa public has an interest in preserving the integrity of the marital union by making opposite-sex marriage the exclusive form of family relationship endorsed by the government. Loss of this exclusive endorsement will de-emphasize the importance of traditional opposite-sex marriage to society, weakening this vital institution, and placing our entire democratic system in jeopardy by eroding its foundation.
A dissolution of a civil union in Iowa is placing our entire democratic system in jeopardy by eroding its foundation? Like the PSC on the extreme left, the extreme right flank of gay marriage opponents appears to test their ideas only on fellow true believers. I'm hard pressed to understand how any lawyer could have presented such an argument to his or her state's highest court with a straight face.
In the end, the Iowa Supreme Court dismissed the lawsuit on a technicality. The Court contended that the plaintiffs lacked standing to file the case because the ruling did not cause them individual harm or otherwise affect them in any individual way. The decision itself is online and worth a read. Despite (or, perhaps, because of) the Court's decision to dismiss the suit on technical grounds, the ruling is almost openly contemptuous of the primary arguments against gay marriage. This, of course, is the main reason why opponents of gay marriage have gone the constitutional amendment route. Maybe they can get together with Barbara Bowen and next claim that gay divorce violates their academic freedom.
Tuesday, June 14, 2005
Election Patterns?
Today was primary day in Virginia, as well as for a special election in Ohio, for the U.S. House seat vacated by Rob Portman, the new USTR. In Virginia, six GOP incumbents in the House of Delegates faced anti-tax primary challenges after voting for Governor Mark Warner's compromise tax increase, which was necessary to balance the budget without massive cuts in social and educational program funding. As of now (10.04pm), five seem to have prevailed, while a sixth is losing.
In Ohio, meanwhile, a wild four-way primary battle for the GOP nomination (tantamount to victory in a district that has sent only one Dem to Congress in the last half-century) was captured by the most moderate candidate in the field, former state Rep. Jean Schmidt. Schmidt took 28 percent of the vote, around 700 votes better than former congressman Bob McEwen. As In Virginia, Schmidt came under attack (in an ad sponsored by the conservative Club for Growth) for having supported a tax increase in the state legislature.
It's always tough to read trends from off-year elections. But, for today at least, the anti-tax message which has been at the core of GOP philosophy since the late 1970s didn't carry the day in Republican primaries.
The AAUP Targets CUNY
Lyndon Johnson once colorfully compared the Tonkin Gulf Resolution to his “grandmother’s nightgown,” in that “it covers everything.” Over the last 18 months or so, it seems as if the AAUP is verging toward a similar definition of academic freedom, at least for professors whose viewpoints are in the majority in today's academy. The group’s apparent unwillingness to concede that students have any academic freedom protections or that threats to academic freedom exist from inside the academy as well as from outside of it is increasingly compromising its historic mission of upholding a culture of open exchange in the academy.
Responding to real and imagined threats to academic freedom played a role in several contested races this past spring for the AAUP’s governing council. Defining the concept as chiefly a tool for protecting the professoriate’s dominant ideological faction, a successful slate of candidates headed by Yeshiva’s Ellen Schrecker ran on a platform of resisting outside scrutiny of the academy and limiting publicly available information about academic matters. Schrecker, whose scholarly works have focused on McCarthyism, is particularly quick to play the “McCarthyism” card when attacking critics of the academic majority; she has even written about Internet-related “virtual McCarthyism.” The Schrecker viewpoint accurately reflects the approach of Joan Wallach Scott the current head of the AAUP’s “Committee A” (which handles academic freedom and tenure issues). Indeed, it would be hard to imagine a figure more representative of the contemporary academic mainstream than Scott, a highly regarded specialist in women’s history and gender theory.
As yesterday’s Inside Higher Ed reports, Scott, Schrecker, and the AAUP are now targeting CUNY, expressing “grave concern” about the state of academic freedom in the City University system. CUNY’s offenses against academic freedom? The non-reappointment of two adjuncts (Susan Rosenberg and Mohamed Yousry) convicted of terrorist acts; and what Scott termed CUNY’s unwillingness to resist “outside pressures” in the recent withdrawal by Brooklyn professor Timothy Shortell of his bid to be Sociology chairman.
According to an AAUP press release on the issue, these three events suggest a “pattern of failure to safeguard the university from political interference in matters of academic appointments.” As I’ve noted previously, adjuncts have no right of reappointment under the current CUNY contract. (The AAUP has vehemently opposed such provisions, not just at CUNY but nationally.) Surely, however, the AAUP cannot seriously contend that being indicted for or accused of a criminal act—even if that act was associated with political causes that enjoy disproportionate support in the academy—should confer upon an adjunct an “academic freedom” right to reappointment that adjuncts with clean criminal records do not possess.
As for Shortell: after he wrote a series of essays and blog postings that could only be described as calculated to inflame opinion among wide elements of the Brooklyn community, both on campus and beyond, he pronounced himself shocked—shocked(!)—when his postings did inflame opinion. But in the end, he was not “denied” anything—he withdrew his candidacy in the face of widespread public outcry. His withdrawal email condemned the Brooklyn and CUNY administration for not issuing statements in his defense (I’d say I could count on one hand the number of public college administrators who would publicly state that department chairs should be able to call all religious people “moral retards”). But the Shortell e-mail focused most of its attention not on academic freedom but on unsubstantiated attacks against the professionalism of his colleagues. It’s hard to make an “academic freedom” claim for someone who, in the end, wasn’t even willing to fight for it himself.
Perhaps Joan Scott and her colleagues might want to take a look at the Torch, the fine blog maintained by FIRE; and in particular at two recent postings by FIRE president David French. As French notes, “Censors are, almost by necessity, individuals with power.” Given this reality, it is unsurprising that 80 to 85% of FIRE’s cases involve censorship from the left. “On campus, the self-identified left has more power. It is the majority. This is, of course, not true in larger society.” Threats to academic freedom, of course, can also come from outside the university, where most often the right is the driving force. But, French continues, “since the larger political culture pays only sporadic attention to campus events—usually arousing itself only when the speech at issue is perceived to be particularly sensational—the vast majority” of FIRE’s cases involve threats to academic freedom from within the academy itself. Today’s Inside Higher Ed has a good example of the kind of issue about which French spoke--the kind of issue that seems to be of little concern to today's AAUP.
In the reality of Scott, Schrecker, and the AAUP, the internal threats to academic freedom that represent the majority of FIRE’s cases don’t seem to exist. Instead, their view of academic freedom is like LBJ’s grandmother’s nightgown—covering everything a professor might do or say, provided that the professor’s attitudes are acceptable to the current academic majority.
Friday, June 10, 2005
9-11 and Lessons of the Past
Today's Times brings details of what could only be considered a colossal failure by the FBI in the months before 9/11. The FBI joins the FAA as the two federal agencies that seem to have done virtually nothing right in the run-up to the attacks.
For those who missed it, Ernest May, senior consultant to the 9/11 Commission, penned a behind-the-scenes narrative and critique of the commission's report a couple of weeks back. The Commission's report is remarkable in many respects, but perhaps most importantly as a first-rate work of history.
Wednesday, June 8, 2005
Shortell Is Out
As Inside Higher Ed and the New York Sun report this morning, Professor Timothy Shortell has withdrawn his bid to become chairman of Brooklyn’s Sociology Department. I have generally been a critic of BC president C.M. Kimmich, but in this instance, Kimmich handled the controversy just right. Early on, he exercised his own free speech rights and issued a public statement noting his strong disagreement with Shortell’s views that religious people are “moral retards.” Then, as required by the CUNY Bylaws, Kimmich conducted an investigation into Shortell’s fitness for the position, which included a consultation with the entire membership of the Sociology Department.
Shortell, on the other hand, remained defiant throughout. "We laugh at our critics,” he wrote in response to press criticism. “We will behold with joy their silly tantrums . . . We are becoming Ubermenschen.” Yesterday, in an email widely circulated around campus, he accused unnamed senior colleagues of “dishonesty and opportunism,” charging that they “demonstrated their capacity for and willingness to use all manner of unprofessional conduct.” He supplied no evidence for any of these wild allegations; throughout the controversy, Shortell’s departmental critics consistently declined public comment, and behaved as models of professionalism.
Two issues in the Shortell matter have broader significance. The first is that at CUNY, department chairmanships are extraordinarily powerful. As a result, the Bylaws impose additional requirements for the position—unlike the situation at most universities. The CUNY Bylaws require the college president to give "careful consideration . . . of the qualifications of those selected by the respective departments" to serve as chair. The president must also certify that the prospective chair can “act effectively as the departmental administrator and spokesperson and as a participant in the formation, development, and interpretation of college-wide interest and policy."
This clause originates from the controversial tenure of City College’s Leonard Jeffries, who was removed as chairman of CCNY’s Africana Studies Department in the early 1990s after he made continued anti-Semitic statements in public and in the classroom. Jeffries appealed his demotion to the Second Circuit, and lost the case, in Jeffries v. Harleston. The Jeffries court stated that colleges in the jurisdiction of the Second Circuit can remove department chairs if they have a “reasonable belief” that the publicly expressed views of the chair could harm the college, whether from negative publicity or the loss of pledges from donors.
Given the crudity of Shortell’s public statements, his case pretty clearly fell under the provisions of a Bylaws removal or the Jeffries decision. Indeed, in response to a question from the Sun, the AAUP’s Robert Kreiser question whether the affair was an academic freedom matter, remarking that an administration may not want to have as chairman someone whose views "are outside the mainstream" of the department or the college, since department chairmanships are partly administrative positions.
Second, the Shortell matter offers an opportunity to reflect on the definition of academic freedom. The CUNY union, the Professional Staff Congress, has adopted Shortell as its poster boy for academic freedom. The union’s conception of academic freedom, however, has left a bit to be desired. Under the terms of our contract, adjuncts have no right to reappointment. Yet in recent months the union has claimed a denial of “academic freedom” to two adjuncts who were not reappointed—Susan Rosenberg, convicted during the early 1980s of a variety of crimes related to her terrorist activity in the Weathermen underground; and Mohammed Yousry, tried and convicted for violating the special administrative measures for imprisoned cleric Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, mastermind of the 1993 attack on the WTC. Under the PSC's conception of academic freedom, the only adjuncts entitled to reappointment in the CUNY system would be those charged with or convicted of politically-related terrorist acts.
A more reliable barometer for defining academic freedom might be the 1940 AAUP Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure. This document notes, "College and university teachers are citizens, members of a learned profession, and officers of an educational institution. When they speak or write as citizens, they should be free from institutional censorship or discipline, but their special position in the community imposes special obligations. As scholars and educational officers, they should remember that the public may judge their profession and their institution by their utterances. Hence they should at all times be accurate, should exercise appropriate restraint, should show respect for the opinions of others."
It would be hard to argue that Shortell’s public writings deeming religious people "moral retards," or comparing Karl Rove to Joseph Goebbels, or celebrating the higher death rate of older Americans fit these guidelines. Instead of following the AAUP’s suggestions to "at all times be accurate," "exercise appropriate restraint," and "show respect for the opinions of others,” Shortell elected to frame his statements in a way deliberately designed to inflame opinion. That, of course, is his right under the First Amendment. But he might have been better served to remember the AAUP’s guidelines impose obligations as well as confer rights.
In the end, I agree with CUNY Trusstee Jeffrey Wiesenfeld on this issue: “While [Shortell] is entitled to his voice, the school is certainly better off served by a different chair."
Tuesday, June 7, 2005
The Limits of Cultural Competence
Last week, Inside Higher Ed reported on the University of Oregon's Orwellian proposal to make "cultural competence" a key factor in all hiring and promotion decisions. As Boris Botvinnik, a math professor, noted, the plan seemed designed to "tell us what to do in terms of research in mathematics." The implications for History professors would be equally grave: taken literally, the diversity plan would allow the hiring and promotion of only specialists in race, class, and gender.
This morning's University Diaries follows up with a critique of U of O president Dave Frohnmayer's response to the public outcry. "To me," Frohnmayer muses, cultural competence "means that we are able to effectively reach all of the students who have demonstrated their competence to be in the university but for whom, because of cultural background, traditional techniques of teaching may not be as effective as others. A good teacher is always open, I hope, to ways to increase teaching effectiveness." I assume that the U of O, like just about every other institution of higher learning, already measures teaching effectiveness in their personnel decisions. (If they don't, this diversity draft is the least of their problems.) And, of course, Frohnmayer obfuscates the proposal's call to evaluate the research interests of professors according to a "cultural competence" standard.
Even a defender of the U of O's proposal, history professor Matthew Dennis, admitted that "the plan gave the impression that cultural competence was going to be the chief criterion for salary increases." (Dennis himself wouldn't be harmed by the new criteria, since his specialties include environmental history and the history of American Indians.) But the outcry nationally and on the U of O campus suggests that there might be some limits to a "diversity" agenda.
This morning's Inside Higher Ed offers another interesting take on the issue. Scott Jaschik reports on a new study that suggests that Asian-American students are the chief victims of affirmative action policies in college admissions. The authors of the study--Princeton's Thomas Espenshade and Chang Chung, a senior staff member in the university’s Office of Population Research--are clearly sympathetic to affirmative action. To them, the study's “most important conclusion is the negative impact on African American and Hispanic students if affirmative action practices were eliminated.”
The figures, according to Jaschik: "without affirmative action, the acceptance rate for African American candidates at elite colleges would be likely to fall by nearly two-thirds, from 33.7 percent to 12.2 percent, while the acceptance rate for Hispanic applicants probably would be cut in half, from 26.8 percent to 12.9 percent." White admission rates, however, would be essentially unchanged (23.8 percent with affirmative action; 24.3 percent without.) The biggest change comes with Asian students. Again quoting Jaschik, "Their admission rate in a race-neutral system would go to 23.4 percent, from 17.6 percent. And their share of a class of admitted students would rise to 31.5 percent, from 23.7 percent."
Although in the aftermath of the University of Michigan Supreme Court decisions the official justification for affirmative action became the promotion of "diversity," the moral justification for the concept comes in its use as a tool to rectify past discrimination. In this respect, if the figures from this study hold up (and further data, obviously, is needed), the moral case for affirmative action becomes much shakier--since the students most directly harmed by the policy would come from ethnic groups that suffered long-term discrimination from state governments and (in the case of Japanese-Americans) the federal government.
This issue has already played out to some extent in California, most notably when a group of Chinese-American parents filed suit against the San Francisco School Board over the affirmative action program at Lowell High School, the city's top public high school. (As a magnet school, Lowell required admission tests, for which Asian students had to score substantially higher than blacks or Hispanics and higher than white applicants.) The case was settled with cosmetic changes in Lowell's policy. But both the Lowell case and the Espenshade/Chang study suggest that affirmative action in higher education might increasingly be played out as an issue in which the chief targets as well as the chief beneficiaries are minorities.
Thursday, June 2, 2005
Wood and Felt
Today's New Republic has a fine review by Brown historian Gordon Wood of Gary Nash's new study of the American Revolution. Nash describes the book as a "history of inclusion," giving agency to women, lower-class whites, slaves, and Indians. Wood's review is less than flattering, but perhaps its most interesting paragraph was the following:
Since Pennsylvania experienced the most radical change in 1776, largely through the efforts of Scots-Irish farmers and urban artisans, Nash gives its new state constitution a good deal of attention. The constitution provided for a unicameral legislature, term limits, a broad suffrage, and a plural executive. The constitution also stipulated that the assembly be re-apportioned every seven years. "This commitment to proportional representation," Nash observes, "was followed by no other state." It is a strange statement, since four other states--New Jersey, New York, Vermont, South Carolina--wrote into their constitutions specific plans for periodic adjustments of their representation, so that, as the New York constitution stated, it "shall for ever remain proportionate and adequate." This error is only one of many that Nash makes throughout his book. He mistakes Horace Walpole for his father Robert Walpole as prime minister of England. He writes that "American colonists, with rare exceptions, agreed that Parliament was entitled to pass external taxes meant to control the flow of trade," even though Edmund S. Morgan and Helen M. Morgan decisively refuted this point more than fifty years ago. He refers to Edmund Randolph as Jefferson's son-in-law, confusing him with Thomas Mann Randolph. He says that Richard Henry Lee was "destined to be one of Washington's generals," mixing him up with his cousin Harry Lee. Small matters, perhaps; but cumulatively they tend to undermine the reader's confidence in Nash's knowledge of the period.
Even in a narrative that treats political history as irrelevant to understanding the Revolution, such mistakes are remarkable.
On another matter entirely--for those interested in what Nixon himself had to say about Mark Felt, the Miller Center has posted some audio excerpts on its website.
Tuesday, May 31, 2005
Deep Throat Revealed?
It appears as if Slate's Tim Noah was correct in his speculation from 1999 and 2002: a report out this morning says that Mark Felt, now 91 years old and in the early 1970s the #2 man in the FBI, is saying that he was Deep Throat. All those who were hoping for Pat Buchanan to have been the secret source for the Woodward/Bernstein stories will be disappointed.
Update, 3.10pm: Here's the Vanity Fair piece detailing Felt's admission.
Update, 5.51pm: Woodward, Bernstein, and Ben Bradlee confirm that Felt indeed was Deep Throat, while Noah does an on-line chat about the topic.
Friday, May 27, 2005
Lenora Fulani's World
New York politics is peculiar in a number of ways, but no more so than in the breadth of alternative parties. Some--such as the American Labor Party in the 1930s and the Conservative Party since the 1970s--have exercised a decisive impact on the state's ideological climate. (The Conservatives even elected a senator on their ticket, James Buckley in 1970). Others, such as the Right to Life Party on the right and the Working Families Party on the left, embody single-issue politics. And the Green Party, as elsewhere, always threatens to siphon voters on the liberal fringe away from Dem nominees.
Most NY third parties, however, exist not to run candidates of their own but to cross-endorse nominees running on either the Democratic or Republican ticket. In exchange, the third parties receive patronage. The best example of this pattern: the Liberal Party. The party's regular endorsement of liberal Republicans like Jacob Javits allowed Democratic voters to cast ballots for Javits without voting GOP. By the 1980s, the Liberals were little more than a patronage machine, as their leader, Raymond Harding, traded endorsements for various favors. The Liberal line was crucial for Rudy Giuliani in his 1993 mayoral victory, but corruption scandals, the growth of the Working Families Party, and the increasing sense that the Liberals stood for nothing cost the party its automatic line after a poor showing in 2004.
Today's Times has a feature on the most dangerous of these third parties to come along in some time, the Independence Party. The party dates from the early 1990s, when it was used as a vehicle by Tom Golisano, New York's version of Ross Perot, to twice run for governor; and, indeed, Perot himself ran on the Independence line in New York in 1996. In the last few years, however, the Independence Party has been taken over by a pair of far-left extremists, Lenora Fulani and Fred Newman, who have a disturbing pattern to offer anti-Semitic statements. Fulani, for instance, has written that Jews "had to sell their souls to acquire Israel and are required to do the dirtiest work of capitalism" and had to "function as mass murderers of people of color" to keep it.
The Times reports that the Independence Party is prepared to endorse the reelection of Mike Bloomberg (all of the major Democratic candidates had also courted the endorsement). Bloomberg has repudiated Fulani's comments, but added, "You know, [if] you walk away from every party where one person in it said something that you violently disagree with, you wouldn't be a member of the Democratic Party, you wouldn't be a member of the Republican Party, you wouldn't be a member of any party." Quite true. But in this case, we're talking about a leader of the party, and the statements aren't regarding a dispute over, say, alternate-side parking. Bloomberg should disavow the endorsement as long as Fulani is in a position of Independence leadership.
Sunday, May 22, 2005
Filibustering
Both the Times and the Post have lengthy analysis stories today on how the filibustering fight is weakening the standing of the Senate. In the Post, Dick Meyer (correctly, I think) sees the filibuster as part of a broader decline in the Senate, caused by the elimination of Senate moderates, the 24/7 news cycle, and the tendency to ignore key issues in the name of a "permanent campaign." In the Times, Carl Hulse notes that the two sides seem to be disputing over which party has fallen the furthest in public esteem as a result of this battle.
Both stories are worth reading, especially Meyer's. The nuclear option fight was a needless one, indicative of Bill Frist's shortcomings as majority leader, and at this point, however it comes out, it will leave lasting damage to the institution.
Saturday, May 21, 2005
The Shame of Shortell
Earlier this week, the New York Sun revealed that 7 of the 12 members of Brooklyn College’s Sociology Department elected as their new chairman, for a three-year term, a professor named Timothy Shortell. Shortell has some unusual views, all of which, I’m told, were made known to the six other Sociology professors who voted for him. The new chairman has written that religious people are “moral retards”; has compared Karl Rove to Joseph Goebbels; has described the United States as a “fascist” nation; and has urged Leftists to take heart in the realization that, as older people are more culturally conservative than younger ones, the next four years will see more cultural conservatives perish.
Of course, the First Amendment protects Shortell’s right to make such utterances. Nonetheless, that a majority (albeit a bare one) of professors considered a figure with such views a suitable candidate to lead their department is shameful. Shortell's website lists this 1993 Ph.D. having one peer-reviewed article (and no books) published since his coming to Brooklyn in 1998, so it's not as if Sociology voted for someone with academic heft.
In the late 1980s, City College’s African-American Studies Department embarrassed the institution by re-electing as its chairman Leonard Jeffries, who regularly denounced Jews in anti-Semitic language. To avoid another Jeffries fiasco, CUNY’s bylaws were changed to give college presidents authority to act in the best interests of the university and remove department chairs. As we recently saw in the Ward Churchill case, colleges and universities have an obligation to act when department chairs make statements that transparently contradict the academic mission of the institution.
One can imagine the outcry had Brooklyn’s Sociology Department elected a new chairman who had expressed the opposite views of Shortell—say, deeming atheists and agnostics “moral retards”; or comparing Donna Brazile to Stalin; or saying that an unintended positive consequence of the war in Iraq has been that it’s increased the death rate among American youth, who are more culturally liberal. Of course, it’s inconceivable that a professor who expressed such views would ever have been elected a department chairman.
Preventing public relations damage was not the only reason for the post-Jeffries Bylaws change. Under Brooklyn’s governing structure, department chairs shape the college’s personnel policies. At the start of the tenure process, chairs prepare a confidential report on each junior faculty candidate from their department, a document widely considered the single most important one in a junior professor’s tenure bid. Moreover, the final faculty vote on tenure at Brooklyn comes not at the department level but from the Committee on Promotion and Tenure—which consists of the college’s 31 department chairs. This vote technically is advisory, with the President and the Board of Trustees having the final say. But to my knowledge, in the 5.5-year reign of Brooklyn’s current president, Christoph M. Kimmich, the vote of the P+T has been overturned only four times. (Two of those occasions involved my tenure and promotion case, and a third was a direct fallout of my case, in spring 2003, after a Philosophy professor who disagreed with his department chairman in a search was denied reappointment for "uncollegiality.") So, for all practical purposes, Brooklyn’s chairs decide who gets tenure and who gets fired.
Viewed in this context, the Shortell election is highly alarming. Can a figure who has written that religious people are “moral retards” fairly evaluate the tenure candidacy of an Orthodox Jew? Can someone who has compared the nation’s top GOP strategist to a Nazi war criminal fairly evaluate the tenure candidacy of a junior professor who has commented favorably on the GOP? Can someone who has deemed the United States a “fascist” country fairly evaluate the tenure candidacy of an untenured colleague who has editorialized in favor of the Patriot Act? The shrillness of Shortell’s comments suggest not. After all, I doubt that, whatever their political views, many professors around the country believe that “moral retards” should get tenure.
Shortell has been a strong supporter of the current Brooklyn administration, whose chief academic officer, Roberta Matthews, operates under the written mantra that “teaching is a political act." It therefore came as little surprise that the college’s public spokesperson implied to the Sun that Kimmich does not plan to set aside Sociology’s election. But while the president might feel comfortable with a figure like Shortell serving in an administrative post and voting on the tenure candidacies of every junior professor at Brooklyn for the next three years, it’s unclear that the courts will feel the same way. I wish the college the best of luck in trying to prove that Shortell’s prejudicial views—and the administration’s failure to take corrective measures to safeguard untenured faculty who disagreed with Shortell—did not affect future tenure denials to junior professors who are openly religious or who are considered centrist or conservative on campus.
Wednesday, May 11, 2005
Presidential Recordings News
I will be light blogging for the next week because of events associated with the release of the first three LBJ tapes volumes: Friday, I’ll be part of a panel at the LBJ Library on the tapes; next Thursday, will be at the 92nd Street Y. Meanwhile, in last Sunday’s Times, Eric Foner had a review of the volumes in which he largely offered praise for the work itself but questioned the historical significance of the transcripts. In one important area, I think that Foner is simply wrong.
“Despite the insights these volumes yield into Johnson's modus operandi,” Foner notes, “they do not significantly alter our understanding of the man or his presidency.” To paraphrase Bill Clinton, this issue depends on what the definition of “significantly” is. As Foner points out, the tapes reveal a President with who was a master political manipulator and a legislative tactician of unparalleled skill, reinforcing the reputation that Johnson had in the 1960s. Yet on matters such as these, it’s the details themselves that matter, as Robert Caro demonstrated in his volume on Johnson’s tenure as Senate majority leader. The significant historical question, it seems to me, is not whether Johnson knew his way around Congress or national politics, but how he did so. And on that point, the tapes do significantly enhance our understanding of the Johnson presidency, because they access the kind of background conversations that never made it into any written record.
Foner has a couple of technical criticisms of the volumes. “Perhaps because Johnson knew he was being recorded,” Foner notes, “his legendary earthiness is missing.” Perhaps—but I’m doubtful that a President who recorded this type of conversation (with the son of the head of Haggar slacks) or recorded himself obstructing justice with future Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas screened out calls in which he was overly earthy. Johnson never intended for the tapes to become public. Additionally, Foner correctly notes that “to make the transcripts readable, the editors have inserted punctuation, turning rambling, ungrammatical remarks into coherent, complete sentences,” while making “no attempt to convey Johnson's Texas accent.” The latter point isn’t quite true—times when LBJ spoke in a pronounced drawl are noted in the text. But as Foner doesn’t call for phonetic transcription for anyone besides Southerners, such an approach, as I’ve written before, would render Southerners “corn pones” (to use a Johnson phrase) while everyone else spoke standard English.
The only aspect of the Foner review I find troubling comes in its closing paragraph: “Perhaps the greatest limitation of the presidential tapes is that they give so myopic a picture of politics and government. Almost by definition the participants in these conversations are government officials, business figures, labor leaders and heads of organizations -- what C. Wright Mills famously called America's ''power elite.'' Grass-roots civil rights activists, antipoverty crusaders and critics of America's role in Vietnam go unrepresented.”
On one hand, this is a surprising critique coming from Foner, whose own scholarship offers some of the most sophisticated interpretation that exists of mid-19th century American politics and congressional workings. On the other, perhaps the comment isn’t surprising, in that it encapsulates the underlying assumptions of the academic Left’s assault against political (or diplomatic) history in the past two decades. Because the 2500 pages of transcripts from LBJ’s first 70 days in office contain few items from “grass-roots civil rights activists, antipoverty crusaders and critics of America's role in Vietnam,” in Foner’s mind they ipso facto offer a “myopic a picture of politics and government,” focused on the ''power elite.'' (This last comment recalled for me the written statement of Brooklyn’s former women’s history professor, dismissing all U.S. political and diplomatic history classes on the grounds that they dealt with “figures in power.”)
I would suggest, however, that it is “myopic” to tell U.S. history in the 1960s as if government institutions didn’t matter, or as if the federal government (perhaps aligned with business interests) was engaged in a monolithic oppression along lines of race, class, and gender, only to be challenged by grassroots activists and crusaders of the type seen in various 1960s Leftist movements. Foner’s words almost suggest a fear that the tapes might compel scholars—to borrow Theda Skocpol’s phrase—“to bring the state back in” when analyzing U.S. history in the 1960s. I certainly hope this will be the case.
Tuesday, May 10, 2005
Another Win for FIRE
FIRE (with an assist from two independent candidates for trustee running on a pro-academic freedom platform) has achieved another important victory--persuading Dartmouth to repudiate its speech code. As FIRE president David French observes, however, it's important to use the Dartmouth triumph to maintain pressure on Ivy institutions that maintain speech codes, most notably Cornell.
Cornell's speech codes are justified in the name of its commitment to "diversity." President Jeffrey Lehman recently explained his approach to the issue:
Integration today does not mean assimilation. Rather, it means a recognition of the value of a pluralistic society in which ideals are shared at the same time that different identities are values. They involve a recognition of the fact that integration does not describe the static demographic mix but rather involves a dynamic process of dialogue. This is a powerful and, to my mind, vital contribution to our society's understanding of diversity and I want to endorse it wholeheartedly.Parents considering spending $40,000 to send their children to either Dartmouth or Cornell--roughly equivalent educational institutions--might want to follow French's advice and choose Dartmouth.
FIRE's triumph is particularly timely given a peculiar article in yesterday's Chronicle that attacked "outside groups" (at least, "outside groups" other than the AAUP, a couple of labor unions, and the NYCLU, which in this case means pro-Israel groups and FIRE) for activity in the Columbia MEALAC crisis. Reflecting the new talking points of the pro-MEALAC faculty, author Jon Wiener compares the MEALAC crisis to the complaints by three black students against Harvard professor Stephan Thernstrom for alleged insensitivity in the classroom. Weiner argues that the two cases were almost identical, but explains the different impressions on the grounds that "political forces outside the two universities played key roles in shaping what the public was told about the cases."
I can only assume that Weiner didn't follow the events at Columbia that closely. (He wildly charges that the David Project sent "monitors" into the classrooms of MEALAC faculty, an allegation I haven't heard even the MEALAC professors themselves make.) In the Harvard affair, Thernstrom was charged with making racially "insensitive" remarks. When asked to define insensitivity, one student replied: "I am left to question his sensitivity when affirmative action is incompletely defined as 'government enforcement of preferential treatment in hiring, promotion, and college admissions' in a book we had to read for his course that he edited." There was never any allegation that he behaved in an unprofessional fashion, that he made factually inaccurate claims in the classroom, or that the Harvard History Department in general hired only those who lacked the requisite "sensitivity" to "diversity"-related issues.
In the MEALAC case, the entire department was alleged to have promoted an anti-Israel bias in hiring and promotion. Two professors clearly violated Columbia rules (Joseph Massad by tossing a student out of his class for refusing to state that the Israelis were guilty of crimes against Palestinians, Hamid Dabashi for cancelling his class at the last minute to attend an anti-Israel rally). Massad's classes were littered with factual inaccuracies (i.e., the Mossad was responsible for the slaughter of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics or the Israelis originated the tactic of hijacking airplanes or Zionists allied with European anti-Semites to drive the Jews out of Europe). The response of MEALAC defenders only enhanced the credibility of student claims that improperly biased courses were being offered, as when Rashid Khalidi reasoned that Arab-American students and only Arab-American students knew the truth about the Middle East or when Massad claimed, without explanation, that all courses other than his own on the issue at Columbia were "pro-Israel."
This background might explain why the MEALAC crisis differed from the heightened "sensitivity" of a few students in Thernstrom's late 1980s course. But Weiner instead points to the ominous outside forces--groups like FIRE--aided and abetted by the media. I'd choose to side with FIRE in this dispute.
Roll Call's Top Ten
This morning's Roll Call offers its list of the nation's top ten Senate races since the magazine's founding 50 years ago. The article is subscription only, but here's the list:
1961 Texas Senate race: John Tower (R) vs. William Blakley (D)
1970 Tennessee Senate race: Al Gore Sr. (D) vs. Bill Brock (R)
1974 Nevada Senate race: Paul Laxalt (R) vs. Harry Reid (D)
1980 Idaho Senate race: Frank Church (D) vs. Steve Symms (R)
1980 New York Senate race: Al D’Amato (R) vs. Elizabeth Holtzman (D)
1984 North Carolina Senate race: Jesse Helms (R) vs. Jim Hunt (D)
1992 Georgia Senate race: Paul Coverdell (R) vs. Wyche Fowler (D)
1994 California Senate race: Dianne Feinstein (D) vs. Michael Huffington (R)
1994 Virginia Senate race: Chuck Robb (D) vs. Oliver North (R)
2004 South Dakota Senate race: Tom Daschle (D) vs. John Thune (R)
I'd agree with 2004 SD, 1984 NC, 1980 NY, 1970 TN, and perhaps 1961 TX, but in lieu of the other five, I would include the following:
--1964 NY. Along with Helms/Hunt, the only Senate race during this time period that overshadowed the same year's presidential contest. This race had everything: personal intrigue between LBJ and RFK; the typical ethnic, racial, and regional squabbling among the NY Democratic Party; Kenneth Keating's debate against a chair, after the Keating staff blocked RFK from entering the debate hall; an outcome that positioned RFK to eventually rival Johnson for control of the Democratic Party.
--1970 NY. A three-way contest between Republican Charles Goodell, appointed to the seat following RFK's assassination; Richard Ottinger, an early environmentalist and ardently anti-war Dem congressman; and the Conservative Party nominee, James Buckley (brother of the National Review founder and editor, William F. Buckley). Goodell's lurch to the left in the Senate robbed him of much Republican support, and it appeared that Ottinger would edge Buckley until Spiro Agnew made a highly-publicized visit to the state lambasting Goodell (whom the VP denounced as a "political Christine Jorgenson"). As the White House had hoped, Agnew's attacks triggered a sympathy vote for Goodell among the principled voters of the New York City Left, who switched from Ottinger to Goodell in just a large enough number to ensure the election of Buckley with 39 percent of the vote.
--1986 SD. A race that matched the state's leading political figures of a generation: incumbent Republican James Abdnor, who had crushed George McGovern in 1980; maverick then- and future governor (and congressman) William Janklow; and then-congressman Tom Daschle. Abdnor edged Janklow in the primary but could not best Daschle in an outcome that previewed the Dem recapture of the Senate in 1986.
--1992 IL. A case could be made that this contest featured the biggest Senate upset of the last 50 years: in 1991, who could have predicted that incumbent senator Alan Dixon, overwhelmingly elected in 1980 and re-elected in 1986, would fall in the primary to a black woman who had never run statewide? Though her Senate career didn't live up to the promise of the campaign, Carol Moseley-Braun's victory in many ways set the stage for the (slowly) increasing number of African-American candidates making realistic statewide runs across the country.
--2000 MO. Another clash of state political titans, pairing former governor and then-senator John Ashcroft against then-governor Mel Carnahan. Carnahan's death in a plane crash seemed to seal the race for Ashcroft, only to see his widow, Jean, announce that she would accept the seat in her late husband's place.
And, perhaps replacing Texas 1961 would be North Carolina 1990, if only because it featured the most famous Senate campaign commercial of the last 50 years--Jesse Helms' brutally effective "white hands" ad, used against the African-American mayor of Charlotte, Harvey Gantt.
Monday, May 9, 2005
Iraq and Vietnam
The HNN homepage has an article by Marilyn Young discussing the wisdom of using comparisons between Vietnam and Iraq in the classroom. In Young's words, "If you happen to be teaching a course on the Vietnam War and you happen to read the newspapers regularly, opportunities to connect the past to the present without undue risk of presentist violations abound. You can, for example, lead a class through a close examination of the analogies in constant play in the press"; or in the development of a "quagmire"; or in the disillusionment of the US forces on the ground.
I agree that teaching students both about how policymakers used historical analogies and how students themselves can employ historical analogies comes with the territory when teaching courses in US foreign relations. But the Young piece (quite beyond its unusual and unconvincing sourcing) scarcely serves as a model in this effort.
It would be hard to argue that the Bush administration didn't politicize intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war or badly botch the postwar planning by basing policy on a best-case scenario without any fallback plans. Yet the critique of the academic anti-war movement has been, if anything, more shrill, and the Vietnam analogy of which Young seems quite fond strikes me as misguided.
The differences between Iraq and Vietnam are considerable, making comparisons tricky at best and misleading at worst. A few off the top of my head:
(1) Vietnam was a creeping commitment; in the Iraq war, the number of US troops has been basically static. (2) The US army in Vietnam was mostly conscript; the US army in Iraq is technically all volunteer and de facto mostly volunteer. (3) In Vietnam, the US ally never was a legitimate government in a conflict that at least began as a civil war, while the other side did have such a regime; in Iraq, at least after the elections, the US ally does represent a legitimate government, while the other side has no such regime. (4) The war in Iraq was much more controversial--internationally, in Congress, and among the American public--than was the conflict in Vietnam at a comparable stage. (5) Constitutional processes were followed in the war in Iraq, whereas in Vietnam, no President ever submitted to Congress a resolution intended to authorize the war. (6) From a realpolitik standpoint, a precipitate US withdrawal from Vietnam (say, the Aiken strategy) would have caused no harm and almost certainly would have benefitted the United States; that certainly cannot be said with the Iraq scenario. (7) In Vietnam, the enemy was receiving support from two superpowers; the Iraqi enemy has no such international state-based backing. (8) The international and domestic media is far more skeptical about US foreign policy now than at a comparable stage in the Vietnam War, when few dissenting voices existed.
This is not to say anything one way or the other about the merits of the war in Iraq. But we ill serve our students by making historical comparisons that might serve a political agenda but don't hold up well under scrutiny.
Sunday, May 8, 2005
A Step Back for the House
Mr. Johnson is a professor of history at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. He is the author of Ernest Gruening and the American Dissenting Tradition (1998). He is a member of HNN's blog, Cliopatria.
The House and Senate Historical Offices both trace their roots to the post-Watergate environment, when Congress bolstered its institutional standing in myriad ways. With political scientist Richard Baker and historian Don Ritchie, the Senate Historical Office has been a model for how government agencies should address their past. In addition to providing quality bipartisan service for senators and a media outlet for information about the upper chamber, the office has overseen ambitious oral history and photo history programs, published dozens of volumes of executive sessions of the Foreign Relations Committee and the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, and provided a comprehensive bibliography of publications relating to the Senate—all while Baker and Ritchie have remained among the nation’s most prominent published scholars of Congress.
The House History Office never achieved the bipartisan backing of its Senate counterpart, and the lower chamber went without an official historian for nearly a decade following the Republicans’ capture of Congress in the 1994 elections and associated personnel difficulties in the office. A few years ago, however, positive signs began to emerge from the House. Largely thanks to leadership provided by House Clerk Jeff Trandahl, the House established an Office of History and Preservation. Led by Kenneth Kato, a veteran of the Center for Legislative Archives, the OHP has undertaken ambitious projects ranging from profiles of women and minorities in Congress to providing the type of assistance for scholars that the Senate Historical Office made routine.
When word went out last year that the House planned to hire an official historian, it seemed as if Trandahl’s efforts to restore the lower chamber’s historical infrastructure would be complete. This expectation, therefore, makes recent news from the Capitol all the more perplexing.
Speaker Dennis Hastert named as the new House historian Robert Remini. (For full disclosure, I did not apply for the position, nor did anyone that I know.) Remini is clearly a distinguished scholar—a dominant figure in the historiography of the Jacksonian era, the University of Illinois at Chicago professor emeritus is author of a forthcoming government-sponsored (and much-needed) narrative history of the House of Representatives. Yet Remini is also 83 years old, and it seems highly unlikely that he can provide the type of hands-on, durable leadership that has allowed the Senate Historical Office to flourish under Baker and Ritchie. Indeed, he got off to an awkward start: his refusal of repeated interview requests from The Hill generated the headline, “New House historian Remini to the press: Get lost.” The Capitol Hill newspaper warned reporters not to expect Remini “to be as cooperative and helpful as his Senate counterparts, Richard Baker and Don Ritchie.”
Perhaps because of his advanced age, Remini was allowed to hire an associate historian, a position that was not initially advertised. His selection was baffling: Fred Beuttler, a UIC adjunct professor and associate university historian. According to the information supplied on his website, Beuttler has no background at all in congressional or even political history: his dissertation is on 20th century religious history, and he is the main author of a book called The University of Illinois: A Pictorial History. I wasn’t privy to the pool of candidates that Remini considered for the position. But unless there wasn’t even one younger scholar well-versed in U.S. political or legal history who wanted to serve as associate historian of the House, I am skeptical of the wisdom of hiring someone who, in effect, will have to learn the field of congressional history on-the-job.
This appointment seems to be a step backward in what, up until now, had been a series of positive developments to restore the luster of the House’s history program. I began studying congressional history in 1990, the year that Daniel Patrick Moynihan deemed the academy’s lack of attention to Congress a “scandal” of American scholarship. A decade hence, I fear that we will look back on the Remini/Beuttler appointment as a lost opportunity to undo the late New York senator’s lament.
Friday, May 6, 2005
Religion and Politics
Among the year's more bizarre stories, but one that probably was inevitable given the increasing fusion between religion and politics: a pastor of a rural church in North Carolina sought to expel Democrats from his congregation.
Tuesday, May 3, 2005
The Academy and the Solomon Amendment
Bad cases make bad law. I’m giving the last lecture tomorrow in my spring-term constitutional history class, and this theme has reappeared throughout the course. Muller, Schechter, and Bakke exemplify cases whose facts made the rendering of an elegant Supreme Court judgment difficult if not impossible. Today brings news of the latest such bad case, the challenge by a group of law schools and law faculty to the constitutionality of the Solomon amendment, which conditions federal assistance on colleges and universities granting equal access to military recruiters, even though the military’s treatment of gays violates the institutions’ anti-discrimination policies.
The military’s policy toward gays is morally dubious and pragmatically absurd—as we’ve most clearly seen in the discharges of gay linguists. Yet the position of the anti-military faculty critics is far from pristine. Both the anti-recruitment strategy and the anti-ROTC policy from which it intellectually derives have allowed faculty to express their views through initiatives that seem highly unlikely to change the military’s approach but at the same time directly harm some of their institution’s students.
Over the past decade, the Court has taken a three-pronged approach on gay rights. Most prominently in the Boy Scouts decision, it held that the 1st amendment gives private organizations the right to deny membership to gays. On the other hand, in the powerfully written Romer and Lawrence decisions, the Court struck down state laws that discriminated against gays. Finally, the justices have proven reluctant to intervene on matters relating to the military.
By focusing on the intersection of these three patterns, the Solomon amendment case threatens to disrupt the constitutional balance the Court has structured—and it’s hard to see an outcome that will favor gay rights. On the one hand, the Court could uphold the Solomon amendment, probably by a 6-3 margin with Justices O’Connor, Souter, and Kennedy joining the conservatives, thereby blunting the legal momentum gained from the Lawrence and Massachusetts Supreme Court’s gay marriage decisions. Less likely, a 5-4 Court (with Souter and Kennedy joining the liberals) could strike down the Solomon amendment, thereby all but certainly triggering an anti-gay backlash. Achieving gay marriage or decriminalizing sodomy might be worth facing the resulting backlash; inconveniencing military recruiters on college campuses is not.
So, in the end, there are likely only to be two groups of winners from this case. The first, as profiled in this morning’s New Republic by Nathaniel Frank, will be old-guard homophobes in the military. The second will be the professors who can rejoice that they didn’t compromise their principles as they move onto their next cause célèbre and express amazement as to why policymakers pay so little attention to people in the academy.
Friday, April 29, 2005
Another Approach to School Safety
The police didn't find the gun they were looking for in this lockdown of a New Mexico school, but perhaps the effort can be praised as part of the war against obesity.
9-11 at NC Wesleyan
From everything I've seen to date, including Scott Jaschik's Inside Higher Ed piece referenced by Ralph in his post below, I'm disturbed at the treatment SIU professor Jonathan Bean has received. Unless new information comes to light, this case seems to amount to an open letter denouncing Bean from eight colleagues and a formal rebuke from the dean (without consulting him about the issue but who now says she can't comment out of respect to "due process") because of one optional assignment from a conservative webzine--an assignment that I still haven't seen anyone describe as factually inaccurate.
Frontpage is obviously a controversial publication. Some of its articles are over-the-top; a few have not withstood critical scrutiny. But simply because a piece appears in Frontpage should not automatically discredit it. In the last two years, I've published three articles in the webzine, dealing with "global studies" and with academic freedom issues at Brooklyn, and these pieces mirrored many of the posts I've done at HNN. I simply wanted to reach a different audience.
This morning, I received an email from a colleague recommending that I look at a course offered by an associate professor in the at NC Wesleyan political science department named Jane Christensen. The course is entitled "911 The Road to Tyranny." It has come under strong attack in Frontpage, where author Jon Sanders went through Christensen's syllabus, followed several of the links, and quoted from what he found. As far as I can tell, the article's critique of the course is correct
Professor Christensen responded by labeling Sanders a "neo-Nazi." She provided no supporting evidence.
The course itself is an embarrassment to the academy. Christensen states, "This course is outside the scope of traditional 'political science' in many ways. First it is 'unscientific' in that it relies much on eyewitness accounts and speculation. Secondly, there is not yet a solid literature on the September 11 'attacks' or on the war on terrorism. This literature is emerging, particularly on the latter. Thirdly, this course will rely somewhat extensively on alternative news media accounts and a variety of films and videos in lieu of literature." Yet the grading is entirely traditional--2 exams, at 25% apiece, a paper at 25%, and participation at 25%. What are the exams to be based on: "speculation"? Should students not use government documents in their research papers?
The single most appalling element of the course, however, comes in its total exclusion of the 9-11 Commission Report. No section of the report is assigned as reading. Nor is the report listed as recommended reading. The report is not even included as a link on the syllabus. A student who had traveled to a remote section of Australia weeks after 9-11 and returned just in time for Prof. Christensen's course would have no way of knowing that a 9-11 Commission even existed, much less that its staff waded through millions of pages of government documents and produced a study that has received almost unanimous praise from reviewers.
What does Prof. Christensen assign instead of the Report? A self-published book by George Humphrey (whose background is interesting indeed) called 9/11: The Great Illusion; a book published by San Francisco's City Light Books titled The Terrorism Trap, and assorted links from various anti-war and socialist websites.
According to its website, the political science program at NC Wesleyan "provides a crucial element of a liberal arts education . . . through course work that emphasizes the relationship between democracy and citizenship." How would Prof. Christensen's course meet any of these requirements? And what does its approval say about the general state of curricular affairs at NC Wesleyan? While college curriculum committees generally give enormous deference to individual departments and professors, how could any responsible college committee have approved this course?
The existence of courses like Christensen's--or, as I've written about previously, Vinay Lal's similar course at UCLA--should serve as a caution against an absolutist defense in the case of someone like SIU's Bean. From the available evidence, Bean has been wronged not because criticism of the content of a professor's course is automatically out-of-bounds, but because the criticism that he has received seems unprofessional and based on a double standard, since I doubt any of his critics would like Bean to be able to demand exclusion of readings from their courses that he doesn't like. Christensen's course, on the other hand, doesn't even come close to meeting the minumum standard of what a college-level political science (or history) course should entail.
Thursday, April 28, 2005
British Academics and Israel
For those who missed it, Alan Dershowitz and Effraim Karsh had effective rebuttals to the decision of the British Association for University Teachers to advocate a boycott of two Israeli universities, Haifa and Bar-Ilan, and support a moratorium on EU and European Science Foundation funding of Israeli cultural and research institutions.
The organization has resolved "to give all possible support to members of AUT who are unjustly accused of anti-semitism because of their political opposition to Israeli government policy." But, of course, the AUT has gone well beyond "political opposition to Israeli government policy": it has advocated a boycott of Israeli scholars and two Israeli universities. As Karsh notes in TNR, the "academic boycott resonates of darker periods in European history in which Jews were ostracized and denied free access to institutions of higher learning. Only now it is the Jewish State of Israel, rather than individual Jews, that is singled out for ostracism."
British academics who can't get enough of their dose of anti-Israel sentiment at the AUT convention can attend a showing of My Name Is Rachel Corrie, which opened this month at London's Royal Court Theatre. As reviewer Tom Gross notes, "It is ironic to reflect that there have been several real victims of the intifada called Rachel – and hard to believe that these critics have ever heard of them. All these other Rachels died within a few months of Corrie but – unlike her – in circumstances that weren't disputed. They were deliberately murdered: Rachel Levy (17, blown up in a grocery store); Rachel Levi (19, shot while waiting for the bus); Rachel Gavish (killed with her husband, son and father while at home celebrating a Pessah meal); Rachel Charhi (blown up while sitting in a Tel Aviv cafe, leaving three young children); Rachel Shabo (murdered with her three sons aged 16, 13 and five, while at home)." There are no plays about any of these Rachels.
Wednesday, April 27, 2005
Lemisch: Liberalism in Collapse?
Mr. Johnson is a professor of history at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. He is the author of Ernest Gruening and the American Dissenting Tradition (1998). He is a contributing editor of HNN's blog, Cliopatria.
On the HNN homepage, CUNY professor emeritus Jesse Lemisch has penned what could charitably be termed an overheated attack on Columbia University provost Alan Brinkley, whose decision to look out for Columbia's overall interests rather than that of graduate student union activists Lemisch sees as explaining "liberalism in collapse." The issue: for the last two years a fraction of Columbia's graduate students have gone out on strike. Last year, they protested Columbia's decision to pursue its rights, under the Wagner Act, to appeal the legitimacy of a vote on graduate student unionization to the NLRB. This year, after the NLRB ruling went against the graduate student union movement, the strikers are protesting Columbia's decision to follow federal law.
Lemisch is an activist in CUNY's faculty union--whose leadership started its tenure by sending union dues to the legal defense fund of Lori Berenson, the American convicted of terrorism in Peru. The sins that Lemisch attributes to Brinkley and Columbia are, perhaps, more explicable through this unusual perspective. To handle its interests in the NLRB case, the university hired a New York law firm. (Apparently, only unions are entitled to legal representation.) This spring, after union activists announced a plan to go out on strike, Brinkley penned a memo to other Columbia administrators urging them to make "plans for the strike." (Apparently, the provost was supposed to sit idly in his office and ruminate on the horrors of the corporate university.) The contingency plan included exploring the possibility of not paying those grad students who went out on strike and/or requiring strikers to teach an extra term to compensate for the time that they missed in teaching. (Apparently, strikers are supposed to get paid even when they don't fulfill their teaching responsibilities--a pretty good deal!)
Lemisch breathlessly links to a Nation article that reads like a parody of political correctness. Columbia's measures, we are told, "would likely rise to the level of illegality if graduate student employees were covered under the National Labor Relations Act." But, of course, the graduate students are not covered under the act.
Columbia's response to the unionization movement, we are told, reflects a "new, corporate style of management." But, of course, it was the unionization movement itself that introduced the labor-management model to Morningside Heights.
Graduate students, we are told, "increasingly feel exploited," since "most are acutely aware that their chances of finding a secure full-time position in academia are slim." I'd challenge that argument strongly about Columbia Ph.D.'s. But if the claim is true, then perhaps these people should choose other careers--it seems foolish to spend several years getting a degree that the recipient knows going in will be valueless in securing employment.
Lemisch's call for Columbia's top administrators to resign over this issue is absurd.
Monday, April 25, 2005
Skills and Bias
Erin O'Connor links to a fascinating post at the Writing Program Administration list-serv. The gist of the story: three students in an introductory composition class complained to the university ombudsman (a position that lots of schools don't even have) after a male, African American TA penalized them for disagreeing with his opinions on race in America. Contrary to the assignments listed on the syllabus, he spent three weeks of his course "showing films about government conspiracies to keep inner city blacks addicted to drugs and about police brutality against blacks." The administration at the institution seems to have handled the issue well after the students complained, although originally, the director of the program (who looked into the matter and discovered that the students' complaints seemed meritorious) was chastised by his department chair for, in his words, "a)questioning the motivations of the undergraduates who were complaining and b)expressing surprise that someone with my political views (I'm fairly easily identified as very liberal in my department) would question a teacher trying to expose students to racism in our country."
The comments at Erin's post suggest that few of her readers are particularly surprised by this tale; I'm not, either. At Brooklyn, we have a two required composition courses, taught mostly by grad students. Because the courses are skills rather than content-oriented, instructors have considerable leeway about what material they bring into the classroom; from the varied reports I receive from students, many instructors simply use the course to assign papers oriented around whatever political crusade has captured their fancy that term. (The worst single example I encountered came after an English 2 adjunct chastised a student, in writing, for quoting from the "Jew York Times.")
Brooklyn, obviously, is extreme on such matters: we have a provost whose written mantra is "teaching is a political act," while, as Derek Catsam noted the other day at Rebunk, lots of institutions and departments, such as his own, don't view the ideological agendas of their faculty as preeminent in their concerns.
That said, skills courses strike me as particularly vulnerable to improper use by instructors who see little wrong in bringing their non-academic political and ideological preferences into the classroom. It is for this reason, I suspect, that organizations such as the AAC&U, which advocates restructuring college curricula around such goals as training "global citizens" or "teaching diversity skills," so aggressively champion a greater emphasis on skills in teaching. For, in the end, all courses must have content. But while there's only so far anyone can range in teaching, say, a US history survey or any other course organized around a specific content set without violating academic norms, a course devoted solely to teaching students skills such as critical writing or reading can have as its subject matter virtually anything. Students can just as easily write a short essay analyzing Shakespeare as they can write a paper discussing why, say, academic organizations should boycott Israeli universities. In an ideal world, peer pressure, if nothing else, would exist against the kind of teaching reported in the WPA link. I wish I were more confident that, in the real world, such peer pressure actually existed.
Thursday, April 21, 2005
More Summersiana
Since I’ve been at Harvard this term but don’t really have a sense of the institutional culture, it’s been hard to determine how much of the faculty opposition to President Larry Summers flows from ideology and how much is due to his management style. As a long recent profile in the Washington Post suggested, both Summers and his critics have a vested interest in pointing to the latter explanation (Summers from his obvious discomfort at receiving support from conservatives, his critics because of divisions in their coalition).
The anti-Summers ideology is, in many ways, not a commendable one. Last week, the New York Sun obtained a copy of the original no-confidence motion against Summers, which attacked not only Summers’ statement about women in science but also the president’s defense of Israel, his policies while at the World Bank, and his generally positive attitude toward ROTC. As Alan Dershowitz noted, the no-confidence resolution’s sponsor got smart and “took out those three specifics in order to try to cobble together a coalition of angry feminists, angry anti-Israeli people and angry leftists in general.” Concern about Summers’ management style was nowhere to be found in the resolution.
Yesterday, meanwhile, the Harvard Crimson published the transcript of a September speech delivered by Summers to a September 2004 conference entitled “On Our Own Ground: Mapping Indigeneity within the Academy,” which dealt with Native American studies at Harvard. (The transcript was prepared from a video of the address taped by Harvard’s ethnic studies program.) The Post story quoted an anonymous Harvard professor who attended describing Summers’ speech: “It was wrong, it was hurtful, it was unnecessary, and it was offensive." The Crimson article quoted three attendees terming Summers’ remarks “quite problematic”; “really, really insulting”; and leaving her “appalled.” According to Tara Browner, associate professor of ethnomusicology and American Indian studies at UCLA, “What Larry Summers said, and this is an *exact quote*, was that ‘The genocide of American Indians was coincidental.’ As in it was an accidental by-product of Western European and Euro-American expansion.”
It turns out that Summers never even used the word “genocide” in his remarks. When asked to retract her recollection of Summers’ “exact quote,” however, Browner argued that the president’s remarks were “essentially” as she recalled. These remarks, however, seem wholly innocuous. Summers expressed his support for establishing a Native American program at Harvard; pointed with alarm to public health data showing low life expectancies on Indian reservations; commented on how, as Treasury Secretary, he had worked hard to try to lessen deep-seated poverty on reservations while avoiding having the reservations become permanently dependant upon federal aid; challenged the conference attendees to work toward “defining both identity and assimilation”; noted how far more Indians had been killed by disease than through warfare waged against them by whites; and concluded by affirming that Harvard “has an obligation to promote discussion on the vital issues that today's vexed relationships with the Native American community pose.”
Several items in these comments angered conference participants. Kansas University professor Yellow Bird faulted Summers for discussing the dangers of Native American “dependency” on the federal government, since, according to the Crimson’s paraphrase of her remarks, “the U.S. owes tribes hundreds of billions of dollars under treaties that have largely been abrogated by federal officials.” (The vast majority of court decisions on this question have held otherwise.) Summers also was criticized for mentioning the fact that more Indians died from diseases brought to the Western Hemisphere by Europeans than from any other cause, a comment that Oklahoma professor Robert Warrior claimed “helps perpetuate a myth of American innocence.” That Summers cited as a source Jared Diamond’s Pulitzer-Prize winning Guns, Germs, and Steel aroused further controversy: “Oh my goodness,” commented Professor Kay K. Shelemay, a member of Harvard’s Committee on Ethnic Studies, “this is not a nuanced source on Native American history.” Regardless of its nuance, of course, Diamond’s claim about Indian deaths is factually correct.
To review: Summers advocated more federal aid to reservations, expressed support for a Native American studies program, and was factually correct in all of his statements. His critics made at least one demonstrably false claim about his speech (the “genocide” charge) and based other criticisms on legal theories that don’t enjoy anything close to mainstream support and the president’s failure to cite sources they considered sufficiently “nuanced” when relating facts whose accuracy they themselves don’t dispute.
During the no-confidence debate, Harvard professor Stephan Thernstrom commented on how many of Summers’ critics seemed intent on creating a university barricaded by a “mental Maginot Line,” in which ideas that challenged the majority’s worldview—regardless of whether those ideas might have intellectual merit—would be excluded. That certainly seems to be the case with the critics of Summers’ Native American conference speech.
Wednesday, April 20, 2005
A Socialist Senator?
Roll Call has just reported that Vermont independent Jim Jeffords will announce his retirement from the Senate this afternoon. The frontrunner to replace him--Socialist congressman Bernie Sanders, though the GOP has been gaining at the state level in recent years in Vermont.
The last candidate elected to the Senate from a party other than the Dems or Repubs came in New York in 1970, when Conservative James Buckley upset Democratic congressman Richard Ottinger and the liberal GOP incumbent, Charles Goodell.
TNR on Cole
Today's New Republic has a less-than-flattering profile of Juan Cole, president of the Middle East Studies Association and author of the blog Informed Comment. A couple of weeks ago, Cole had a bizarre reaction to the New York Times editorial criticizing Columbia's MEALAC investigatory report. He rationalized pro-Palestinian bias in MEALAC classes on the grounds that "the real question here is whether it is all right to dispute the Zionist version of history," given "that the master narrative of Zionist historiography is dominant in the academy."
As the TNR piece points out, Cole has seen Zionist conspiracies lurking in many places beyond the academy. He claimed that Ariel Sharon manuevered U.S. forces in Iraq into going after Moqtada Al Sadr "because he had objected so loudly to Sharon's murder of Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, the clerical leader of the Hamas Party." Cole predicted, "[I]f Sharon and aipac decide that they need the US government to take military action against Iran, it is likely that the US government will do so." Indeed, in rhetoric that could have come from Pat Buchanan, he sees Israel playing the puppet-master role for U.S. policy in the Middle East as a whole: "The Founding Fathers of the United States deeply feared that a foreign government might gain this level of control over a branch of the United States government, and their fears have been vindicated." One might wonder just how "informed" this "informed comment" is.
Tuesday, April 19, 2005
Leftists and Serious History
The aftermath of the MEALAC investigating committee report—which sharply criticized the activities pro-Israel “outside” organizations while avoiding comment on the outside organizations, such as the NYCLU, the Nation, or the AAUP, that supported the MEALAC faculty—has brought renewed attention to the question of intellectual diversity at Columbia generally.
The investigatory committee included one member of the History Department, Mark Mazower, who had issued strongly critical public statements of Ariel Sharon’s foreign policy. And the department’s most prominent member, Eric Foner, has been a fierce defender of the MEALAC faculty. This would have come as little surprise to the campus newspaper, the Spectator, which last fall observed that “conservative professors are noticeably absent from history, philosophy, and the rest of the humanities departments.” The History chairman, Professor Walt Harris, publicly objected to the editorial.
I remain concerned less with the problem of ideological diversity than with a lack of pedagogical diversity on campus. And, along these grounds, Harris had potential rebuttals to the Spectator editorial. Unlike, say, Michigan or UCLA, Columbia’s History Department has recognized the value of fields perceived as more “traditional”: it has a senior U.S. diplomatic historian, Anders Stephanson, and, until he became provost, housed the nation’s leading scholar of 20th century U.S. political history, Alan Brinkley. Or, Harris could have pointed to the scholarly quality of some of the department’s most outspoken leftists: few American historians have been more influential than Foner, while Mazower’s work on 20th century Europe has been widely commended.
Yet, after consulting with Foner, Harris raised neither of these points, and his defense of the department’s hiring practices increased rather than soothed concerns that factors other than intellectual merit are at play in Fayerweather Hall.
Harris began by saying it was possible that one or more of the 48 members of the department voted for George Bush in 2004. As he couldn’t identify even one History professor that did so, however, I’m not sure why this point helped his case.
The chairman then chastised the newspaper for not investigating “the political coloration of, say, the Business School.” I’d guess that most CU Business School professors are on the right. I’d also speculate that most faculty at Teachers’ College, the school of Social Work, and the Journalism School are on the left. Professional schools’ faculty tend to reflect the ideological mainstream of the profession for which they train. Is Harris really saying that the intellectual diversity of a History Department should be evaluated as if the department were a professional school rather than a component of a liberal arts college?
Finally, and most alarmingly, Harris wondered, “Is it possible that serious scholarly study of history tends to lead a person towards the left?” Yes, it is possible. It’s even more possible that those who believe that a link might exist between a person’s ideology and whether they are engaged in “serious scholarly study of history” can convince themselves, in the inherently subjective nature of the personnel process, that non-leftists who apply for positions have, for some reason, not produced high-quality history.
What makes such comments so depressing is that many institutions have situations far worse than Columbia—whose administration seems to understand why intellectual diversity matters, and whose History Department is more pedagogically diverse than at least some of its Ivy League counterparts (notably Princeton). So if someone like Harris can ponder about the connection between left-wing political beliefs and serious study of history while simultaneously claiming that no job candidate before his department has ever been subjected to an “implicit political test,” what can be expected at institutions whose administrations seem to desire an ideologically homogeneous faculty, or who don’t particularly care about having faculty of the intellectual quality of someone like Foner or Mazower?
Sunday, April 17, 2005
Gaddis on Kennan
Among the most anticipated books for the dwindling number of us who remain in diplomatic history is John Lewis Gaddis' biography of George Kennan. Gaddis was granted more or less complete access to Kennan's papers, as well as numerous interviews with Kennan, with the proviso that the book would not appear until after Kennan's death.
A glimpse, perhaps, of some of the arguments the volume might contain comes in this week's New Republic.
Pedagogy, Scoundrels, and Reflections on MEALAC
Charles Jacobs, head of the David Project, reflected a few days ago on the controversy surrounding Columbia’s Middle Eastern Studies Department. (The David Project funded the student film that brought the issue to public light.) Joining virtually the entire New York media—ranging ideologically from the Village Voice to the New York Times to the Daily News to the New York Sun—Jacobs dismissed the findings of the special committee that allegedly investigated the student complaints. In his words, a committee stacked “with colleagues of the accused and anti-Israel partisans” successfully “reduced what is a major academic scandal—the use of podium as pulpit for an exclusive viewpoint”—to a discussion of “narrow bureaucratic foul-ups.” Indeed, the New York Sun just reported that one of the special committee’s members, Dean Lisa Anderson, was not only the dissertation advisor of one of the professors under investigation but had written Columbia president Lee Bollinger describing the complaints about MEALAC professors as “the latest salvo against academic freedom at Columbia” even before the committee took one word of testimony.
This stage of the Columbia struggle is essentially over: the faculty will resist to its utmost any attempt to curb MEALAC abuses, and so progress will have to occur through the quiet efforts of an administration that seems to understand the essentials of the problem. Jacobs makes three points of broader relevance, however.
First, he takes issue with MEALAC defenders’ framing the issue as primarily a psychological one, caused by the apparently fragile psyches of Jewish students exposed to the “rhetorically combative” teaching style of some MEALAC professors. As Eric Foner recently informed the Times, “for a student to encounter unfamiliar or even unpleasant ideas does not constitute intimidation,” since “exposure to new ideas is the essence of education.” Former CU provost Jonathan Cole additionally termed exposure to “radical” ideas a vital element of a college education.
This approach falsely frames the dispute as a pedagogical rather than a substantive one. When I teach a course in US constitutional history, I might have a few die-hard Republican students who have grown up convinced that Richard Nixon was blameless for Watergate. Doubtless such students would find “unfamiliar,” “unpleasant,” and even “radical” my lecture on the Watergate crisis. So too would these students find “unfamiliar,” “unpleasant,” and even “radical” a lecture claiming that Richard Nixon regularly beat his wife. Yet the fact that it would expose pro-Nixon students to new, uncomfortable ideas does not make the second lecture defensible. The content—not the students’ psychological reaction to that content—is what matters.
Students, in short, should have felt uncomfortable when a professor such as Joseph Massad told them that Israeli agents were responsible for the massacre of Israeli athletes at Munich; or when he claimed that Israelis originated the tactic of hijacking airplanes in the Middle East; or when he asserted that early Zionists allied with anti-Semites to drive Jews from Europe.
Second, Jacobs correctly observes that the investigatory report “invokes a sort of ‘professors’ omerta’ to intimidate dissenting professors, upbraiding whistleblowers who helped students report abuse.” (The report even sympathized with Professor Hamid Dabashi, who was upset when then-CU Rabbi Charles Sheer, acting at the behest of students, complained about Dabashi’s breaking a Columbia rule regarding the cancellation of classes.) In this vision of the academy, transparency in the classroom is, in and of itself, an evil. According to Joan Scott, chair of the AAUP’s academic freedom and tenure committee, “organized outside agitators who are disrupting classes and programs for ideological purposes . . . pose a threat far more serious than anything Prof. Joseph Massad may or may not have done.”
Again, translate the MEALAC defenders’ rhetoric from the theoretical to the specific case at hand. In this instance, the outside criticism has been sharp, and much of it, no doubt, has been motivated by an ideological agenda—ensuring that issues related to Israel are fairly treated in the classroom. Scott and others might disagree with that agenda, but, to my knowledge, none of the articles about matters at Columbia have contained factually incorrect statements. (Scott doesn’t define what she means by “organized outside agitators”; I suppose that my blog postings on Columbia would also come under her heading of an activity dangerous to the principle of academic freedom.) In contrast, we know that Professor Massad made demonstrably false statements to his classes, geared toward painting Israel in the worst possible light. And even the investigating committee conceded that Massad abused his authority when he expelled from his class a student who refused to publicly state that Israel was guilty of atrocities. Is Scott, speaking on behalf of the AAUP, really serious when she says that any outside criticism, regardless of that criticism’s merits, poses “a threat far more serious than anything Prof. Joseph Massad may or may not have done”?
Finally, Jacobs reminds us of the degree to which the public statements of the MEALAC establishment have essentially proved the critics’ point about unacceptable bias in the classroom. Massad made four public statements on the controversy—twice to the Times in articles where no one from the other side was interviewed, and twice on his website. The latter two statements raised grave concerns about his ability to fairly evaluate evidence. Rashid Khalidi told a reporter from New York that Arab students and only Arab students knew the “truth” about the Middle East. Perhaps most incredibly, MESA president Juan Cole argued that the real problem was the fact that “the master narrative of Zionist historiography is dominant in the academy,” including among international relations contingents of political science departments.
When challenged to produce even “a single syllabus at the American Political Science Association archive or elsewhere with a ‘Zionist’ bent,” Cole replied that he didn’t “give a rat's ass whether those courses have a Zionist bent or not. I am saying that ‘bent’ is not a relevant category of analysis when evaluating university teaching. Everybody has some bent. The question is, whether students come out of the class having learned to reason about a set of problems or not. The content is not as important, since they'll forget a lot of the content anyway, and will receive it selectively, both during and after the class.” As University of Chicago professor Daniel Drezner points out, however, this response flies well wide of the mark, since Cole’s original post was about content, not pedagogical approach.
Over the past few years at Brooklyn, I’ve been struck by how often an administration committed to reorienting the curriculum around a quite explicit ideological agenda has defended itself from criticism not by discussing the content of the courses it’s championing but by trying to obscure the issue through points about pedagogy. This pattern seems to have spread to defenders of MEALAC as well. To paraphrase Samuel Johnson, it seems now as if, in the academy, pedagogy is the last refuge of scoundrels.
Tuesday, March 15, 2005
More Bérubé, Ravitch
For those who missed it, an important op-ed this morning from Diane Ravitch. Her criticism of the Gates project seems on-target; more broadly, I completely share her analysis of the dangers of having a public school faculty with Education School rather than disciplinary training.
Meanwhile, as Ralph notes below, I have continued to attract the ire of Michael Bérubé. More to the point, as Ralph also noted, Bérubé has been around this track before: after Erin O'Connor published an article critiquing his Chronicle piece, he e-mailed her on several occasions, once dismissing her as "lassie," another time informing her:
So you're cowardly as well as dishonest. Very well-- I thought you would do me the courtesy of a direct reply, but I overestimated you. Suffice it to say that the only other person who's pulled this kind of stunt with me is the loony far-leftist Alexander Cockburn at CounterPunch. Your commentary on my essay was indeed unscrupulous (regardless of the link), as is your behavior with regard to my letter to you.As a long-time reader of Erin's blog, "cowardly" and "dishonest" are two adjectives that don't come readily to mind when describing her, so I guess I'll wear Bérubé's slams at me with a bit of pride and leave my response to him at that.But take comfort in your correspondents and their bizarre little theories about my class. Your business professor from southern Cal (who's really arguing with Powers, and really doesn't have the intellectual wherewithal to do so) and your English professor from Wheaton (who believes that I think conservatives support the AJA camps-- kudos to you for telling him that I wrote to you and said otherwise!) are real prizes. Cherish them. They're your readers, they're your fans. Be proud.
When you think you've scared up the intellectual integrity necessary to reply to me, let me know.
As noted in Ralph's posting below, people of good faith could interpret Bérubé's article in different ways--Tim Burke disagrees with my reading, as does a colleague who I respect very much, who e-mailed me last night to tell me I was flat-out wrong in my interpretation. I, obviously, side with Erin on this question; perhaps we all could have been spared this problem if Bérubé (who is, after all, a professor of English) had been a little clearer in his original Chronicle article. One thing I learned from this exchange: based on his responses to Erin and me, I wouldn't want to be a student who expressed ideological disagreement with him in the classroom.
update, 12.29pm: Comments on this post have gotten a bit on the nasty side. I've shut them off.
Monday, March 14, 2005
The Bérubé Factor
In my always collegial fashion, I seem to have attracted the ire of Penn State professor Michael Bérubé through a piece that I published a few months back for Mainstream, a bi-monthly journal on issues relating to Israel and Jewish issues. As Mainstream isn’t on-line, I was asked by Campus Watch if it could post the article, and I happily obliged.
Bérubé offers three objections to my article: that I urged faculty and administrators to assist students who support intellectual diversity in the academy; that, to demonstrate the gulf between the faculty and students on issues relating to the Middle East, I mentioned E. L. Doctorow’s anti-war address at Hofstra, a well-reported event in the New York area in which Doctorow’s speech was greeted with a standing ovation from the vast majority of the faculty and near-silence from the student body; and that I . . . criticized Michael Bérubé. (You can take a guess as to which of the three elements of the piece he finds most objectionable.)
Even before writing the Midstream article, I had run across Bérubé’s name in a few different venues. In a 2000 commentary in boundary, Bérubé reminisced about a visit to CUNY’s faculty senate, a special occasion for him in that it allowed him to “meet faculty activists such as Sandi Cooper.” (Cooper, a professor at the College of Staten Island who at the time had never even met me, uttered the single best line of my tenure case, when she informed the faculty senate forum that my receiving tenure constituted the Chancellor of CUNY’s “slapping” her in the “face.”) Bérubé also is the subject of a book review I’ve occasionally assigned to my graduate classes, as an example of the most effective skewering of a subject I’ve encountered in a review essay. Reviewing Bérubé’s The Employment of English: Theory, Jobs, and the Future of Literary Studies, Mark Bauerlein detected
another issue w