Month: July 2013

Benno Schmidt, what university are you a trustee of?

Benno Schmidt has an oped in the Wall Street Journal that’s filled with a lot of nonsense. The sun also rises. But this passage caught my eye: The greatest threat to academic freedom today is not from outside the academy, but from within. Political correctness and “speech codes” that stifle debate are common on America’s campuses. Schmidt is the chair of the Board of Trustees at CUNY. CUNY is the home of Brooklyn College. Brooklyn College is the home of my department. My department was the target last semester of powerful New York City politicians who were angry about our co-sponsoring a panel on the BDS movement. Some of them even threatened to withhold funding from CUNY in response. I […]

More Information on Brooklyn College Worker Ed Center

David Laibman, a professor emeritus of economics at Brooklyn College, has been circulating a critical response to my post about the Brooklyn College Graduate Center for Worker Education. I’d prefer not to get into the weeds of his various allegations; as he admits several times, he has no knowledge of most of the facts and events that led the Brooklyn College administration and the New York State Attorney General’s office to take the actions they have taken. But Professor Laibman does make two claims that merit a response: I have personal knowledge about the vicious and irresponsible behavior of the Department, in summarily firing the former Director of the CWE, and his secretary, and depriving the faculty and students, in […]

Islam Is the Jewish Question of the 21st Century

Imagine a noted scholar of religion, who happened to be Jewish, writing a book on the historical Jesus. Then imagine him appearing on a television show, where he is repeatedly badgered with some version of the following question: “What’s a Jew like you doing writing a book like this? Raises questions, doesn’t it?” And now watch this interview with noted scholar Reza Aslan, who happens to be Muslim, and tell me that Islam is not the 21st century’s Jewish Question.

Please do not sign Brooklyn College Worker Ed Petition

A petition titled “Save Brooklyn College Graduate Center for Worker Education” is currently being circulated on the internet. As the interim director of that center, a former union organizer, a vocal advocate of labor rights, and a firm believer in worker education, I am asking people NOT to sign this petition. By way of background, the Graduate Center for Worker Education (GCWE) was historically run by a small group of faculty in my department (political science). In 2011, the department elected a new chair and a new executive committee, including myself. We discovered that the GCWE was suffering from severely compromised academic standards. We also found evidence of financial wrongdoing. The Brooklyn College administration took immediate action and removed the […]

ACLU Demands Loyalty of Its Employees

According to the Village Voice, the ACLU is looking to gut the union contract of its lowest paid workers, including its receptionists, mail clerks, and bookkeepers. Non-profits and do-gooders are often bad employers, so I wasn’t too surprised to hear this. But I was surprised to hear this: Managers are also looking to defang the “just cause” provision in union workers’ contracts, the right of a worker to get a fair hearing with an arbitrator if managers are looking to fire her. It demands that employers prove they have a good reason for terminating someone. The ACLU management hopes to narrow the infractions protected by the arbitration process, and to make “disloyalty” a fireable offense without defining what exactly disloyalty […]

When it comes to our parents, we are all the memoirists of writers

Writing in last week’s New Yorker about the memoirs of children of famous writers, James Wood raises a question that has been asked before: “Can a man or a woman fulfill a sacred devotion to thought, or music, or art or literature, while fulfilling a proper devotion to spouse or children?” As Wood points out, George Steiner entertained a similar proposition some 20 years ago, also in The New Yorker. (Steiner had been moved to this suspicion by the prod of Louis Althusser’s strangling of his wife. Of course. It wouldn’t be Steinerian if weren’t just a touch Wagnerian.) And Cynthia Ozick wrestled with it in the 1970s or maybe early 80s in a pair of reviews: one of Quentin […]

Jackson Lears on Edward Snowden

I don’t agree with everything in this editor’s note on Edward Snowden by historian and Raritan editor Jackson Lears—I actually think the traditional left/right distinction is still of value and relevance, even on this issue; I’m not so partial to the framers of the Constitution; and I’m not big on calls for restoration, even (especially) a constitutional restoration of the framers’ vision (Seth Ackerman’s views here are closer to my own)—but on the fundamental question of the surveillance state I could not be in more agreement. Besides, reading anything by Jackson is always a treat. So check it out. And then subscribe to Raritan. It’s one of the best journals around.

Libertarianism, the Confederacy, and Historical Memory

In the last few days libertarians have been debating the neo-Confederate sympathies of some in their movement. I don’t to wade into the discussion. Several voices in that tribe—including Jacob Levy, Jonathan Adler, and Ilya Somin—have been doing an excellent job. (This John Stuart Mill essay, which Somin cites, was an especially welcome reminder to me.) But this post by Randy Barnett caught my eye. I should preface this by saying that I think Barnett is one of the most interesting and thoughtful libertarians around. I’d happily read him on just about anything. He’s a forceful writer, who eschews jargon and actually seems to care about his readers. He’s also the architect of the nearly successful legal challenge to Obamacare, […]

If you’re getting lessons in democracy from Margaret Thatcher, you’re doing it wrong

Here’s a photo of a letter Margaret Thatcher sent to Friedrich von Hayek on February 17, 1982, in which she draws a comparison between Britain and Pinochet’s Chile.  I wrote about the letter in chapter 2 of The Reactionary Mind. It now turns out, according to Hayek scholar Bruce Caldwell, that there is no No one has yet to discover—not in the Hayek or the Thatcher archives—a preceding letter from Hayek to Thatcher, even though, as many of us have wondered about this letter before.assumed. So we don’t know what exactly it was that Hayek said that elicited this response from Thatcher. Hayek scholar Bruce Caldwell speculates, in an email to John Quiggin that I was copied on, that Thatcher […]

What the Market Will Bear

So that New York Times article I discussed in my last post mentions as an aside that General Petraeus and Macaulay Dean Ann Kirschner spent the spring emailing each other about an oped they hoped to get published in the Times. JK Trotter, the Gawker reporter, has now gotten dozens of pages of emails between these two, of which he estimates roughly half are devoted to this draft oped.  He has just tweeted two different parts of this draft. It’s—how shall I put this?—a real meeting of the minds. @CoreyRobin @slicksean small preview of Petraeus’s draft of the “op-ed” mentioned in the Times pic.twitter.com/NKylZfongX — J.K. Trotter (@jktrotter) July 16, 2013 @CoreyRobin @slicksean pic.twitter.com/eBY0NJdSYv — J.K. Trotter (@jktrotter) July 16, 2013 […]

CUNY Backs Down (Way Down) on Petraeus

Today CUNY announced that it would pay General David Petraeus exactly $1 to teach two courses next year. As the New York Times suggests, the scandal just got to be too much for the university and for Petraeus: It was supposed to be a feather in the cap for the City University of New York’s ambitious honors college. Or perhaps a careful first step back into public life for a leader sidelined by scandal. One way or another, the news that David H. Petraeus, the former C.I.A. director and commander of the allied forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, would be a visiting professor at the Macaulay Honors College at CUNY this coming academic year was supposed to be great publicity […]

Next Week in Petraeusgate

Next week, Gawker reporter J.K. Trotter will be getting a second cache of Petraeusgate documents from CUNY. This batch will come from Macaulay Honors College; the first, which Trotter published in his Gawker story, came from CUNY Central. What to look for in that second cache: the May 29 offer letter to Petraeus that Macaulay Dean Ann Kirschner allegedly drafted and shared with CUNY officials. (If you need a quick refresher on the significance of that letter, see below.) Here are the two scenarios. Scenario 1: The Macaulay cache does contain the May 29 letter This scenario raises many questions. Seven to be exact. First, if Kirschner did indeed draft and share that document with other “CUNY offices” on May 29, […]

Petraeus Prerequisites

So the man whose course description reads thus— In this interdisciplinary seminar, students will examine in depth and then synthesize the history and trends in diverse public policy topics with a view towards recommendations for America’s leadership role in the emerging global economy. —has the gall to include in his course prerequisite this: Excellent writing and presentation skills are a must, as is the ability to work well as part of a team. I don’t begrudge Petraeus that “ability to work well as part of a team.” With his platoon of TAs, he clearly can do that. But the excellent writing skills? Incidentally, the course is limited to 16 students.  How many TAs has Petraeus been given to administer, run, […]

This is What We’re Paying $150,000 For?

David Petraeus’s course description is up. The course is called “Are We on the Threshold of the North American Decade.” That sounds like a question to me, but there’s no question mark. Here’s the description: In this interdisciplinary seminar, students will examine in depth and then synthesize the history and trends in diverse public policy topics with a view towards recommendations for America’s leadership role in the emerging global economy. This is what we’re paying $150,000 for? Update (11:35 pm) Yasmin Nair just suggested a different course title on FB: “Can you believe that CUNY is seriously paying me this much money for this shit” No question mark. (Thanks to J.K. Trotter for pointing this description out on Twitter.) Update […]

More Coverup at CUNY?

One of the issues in Petraeusgate is who is paying for this hire: the taxpayers or private donors? In her email of July 1—the last communique from the administration to Petraeus that we know of—CUNY Dean Ann Kirschner writes: Chancellor Matthew Goldstein has provided private funding for your position, which will be paid through the CUNY Research Foundation. Previously the administration had claimed that Petraeus’s base salary would be “supplemented” by private donations that had yet to be secured. Now, the administration suggests that the position in its entirety is to be covered by private funds; the funds have been secured; and they’ll be administered by the Research Foundation (RF). My friend Alex Vitale, who’s a sociology prof at Brooklyn […]

NYC Councilman Initiates Petition to CUNY re Petraeus

NYC Councilman Brad Lander has initiated a petition to CUNY. The request is straightforward: Rescind the $150,000 payday for David Petraeus and put those funds toward supporting low-income students or for more teachers. So is the explanation: At a time when the City University of New York (CUNY) pays an adjunct faculty member carrying a full course load as little as $25,000 per year, the university has offered former CIA Director David Petraeus $150,000 to teach a seminar next year. That is just 15-20 students. Even though these are private donations, they surely could be better spent – to help students who cannot afford to pay the 30% tuition increase that CUNY has been implementing over five years. And it […]

A Debate on Petraeusgate

Two of my former students—Zujaja Tauqeer and Jennifer Gaboury—posted comments on one of my posts about Petraeusgate. I thought both comments (one critical of my position, one in keeping with my position) were thoughtful and worth reproducing here. Zujaja is a Rhodes Scholar, pursuing a DPhil at Oxford in history. Jen is a full-time lecturer and Associate Director of Women and Gender Studies at Hunter College. Zujaja Tauqeer I’m going to have to disagree with the whole “CUNY’s job is to provide an affordable education to immigrants” criticism angle to the Petraeus hiring and the “it doesn’t matter if it’s donor-funded, that’s still diverting money from somewhere else” angle as well. (I’d like to acknowledge at the outset that I’m […]

When Philip Roth Taught at CUNY

I was just reminded by Kathy Geier on FB and Twitter that when she was a student at Hunter College in the early 1990s, she took a comparative literature course with Philip Roth. According to Kathy, Roth had no TAs, designed the course himself, graded all the papers (and there was a lot of writing), and was paid reasonably. The last point was confirmed by Ken Sherrill, whose memory of Lillian Hellmann teaching at CUNY I spoke about here. About all of which Scott Lemieux said: What I find really strange about this is that he [Roth] apparently put together a syllabus for a course without at least 3 grad students to help him; almost as if he was an […]

Charles Murray Meets Dr. Mengele in the California Prison System

From the Modesto Bee: Doctors under contract with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation sterilized nearly 150 female inmates from 2006 to 2010 without required state approvals, the Center for Investigative Reporting has found. … Former inmates and prisoner advocates maintain that prison medical staff coerced the women, targeting those deemed likely to return to prison in the future. Crystal Nguyen, a former Valley State Prison inmate who worked in the prison’s infirmary during 2007, said she often overheard medical staff asking inmates who had served multiple prison terms to agree to be sterilized. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, that’s not right,’ ” said Nguyen, 28. “Do they think they’re animals, and they don’t want them to breed […]