Month: November 2014

Why are you singling out my posts on Israel/Palestine?

Whenever I post about Israel/Palestine, I get insinuations and complaints about how I’m not posting about other struggles around the world. But when I post about a labor conflict—say, at the University of Oregon—no one asks or speculates about why I’m not also posting about labor conflicts in Tibet. So today I’m starting a new meme: Why are you singling out my posts on Israel/Palestine?

In Response to Pending Grad Strike at U. Oregon, Administration Urges Faculty to Make Exams Multiple Choice or Allow Students Not to Take Them

Graduate students at the University of Oregon are about to go on strike. A year ago, I talked on this blog about the faculty union’s effort to negotiate a fair contract. Because so many folks here and elsewhere put pressure on the administration, we helped get the faculty a good contract. Now we need to do stand in solidarity with the grad students. Joe Lowndes, who’s an associate professor of political science at the University of Oregon, wrote this guest post on the negotiations and impending strike. Read what he’s got to say—the administration really is urging full-time faculty to turn essay-based, lengthy final exams into multiple choice Scantron tests or simply to allow undergrads to forgo taking the exam […]

Steven Salaita at Brooklyn College

Steven Salaita and Katherine Franke spoke at Brooklyn College tonight; I moderated the discussion. Three quick comments. First, the event happened. We had an actual conversation about Israel/Palestine, BDS, Zionism, nationalism, academic freedom, civility. Students offered opposing views, tough questions were posed, thoughtful answers were proffered, multiple voices were heard, there was argument, there was reason, there was frustration, there was difficulty, there was dialogue, there was speechifying, there was back-and-forth. There was a college. Going into the event, the usual voices mobilized against it. Politicians tried to shut it down. Alan Dershowitz complained he wasn’t invited. I told him to calm down: “In all the years that Professor Dershowitz was a professor at Harvard Law School, he and his […]

Israel, Palestine, and the “Myth and Symbol” of American Studies

Lisa Duggan, president of the American Studies Association, has an excellent oped in the Los Angeles Times on the organization’s recent convention in Los Angeles and how the ASA has fared, academically and politically, in the year since it announced its boycott of Israeli academic institutions. Lisa’s oped reminds me of a point that’s been bothering me for some time. One of the frequent criticisms that opponents of the ASA boycott make is this: What in the world is an American Studies organization doing concerning itself with the affairs of another country? As one American Studies scholar (to whom Lisa is in part responding) put it in the LA Times: Ostensibly devoted to the study of all things American, the […]

The Labor Theory of Value at the University of Illinois

In case you were wondering why conservatives worked so hard, historically, to scrap the labor theory of value… Robert Easter, the president of the University of Illinois who helped do in Steven Salaita, was just given an outgoing bonus by the Board of Trustees, who did do in Steven Salaita, of $180,000. Which will bring his final year of salary to $658,558. Just cause.

David Ricardo: Machiavelli of the Margin

In my course this semester at the Graduate Center, “The Political Theory of Capitalism,” we’ve been exploring how some of the classics of modern political economy translate, traduce, transmit, efface, revise, and/or sublimate traditional categories of and concepts in Western political theory: consent, obedience, rule, law, and so forth. Through economic thinkers like Smith, Ricardo, Keynes, Schumpeter, Jevons, and the like, we try and read political economy as the distinctively modern idiom of political theory. In the same way that religion provided a distinctive language and vocabulary for political thought after Rome and before the Renaissance, might not economics provide modern political theory with its own distinctive idiom and form? In other words, our interest in the political moment of […]

A Palestinian Exception…at Brooklyn College

Next week, I’m proud to announce, the political science department at Brooklyn College, of which I am chair, will be co-sponsoring two events. The first, which is being put on by the Wolfe Institute of the Humanities at Brooklyn College, is a talk by Nation columnist, poet, and essayist Katha Pollitt. Katha has just published a book called Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights, and that is the title of the talk she will be giving next Tuesday, November 18, at 2:25 (yes, 2:25), in Woody Tanger Auditorium at Brooklyn College. The second, which is being put on by the Students for Justice in Palestine at Brooklyn College, is a conversation between Steven Salaita, who needs no introduction on this blog, and Columbia […]

Contemporary liberalism: minimalism at home, maximalism abroad

So Kurt Andersen devoted a segment of his show Studio 360 to ISIS’s destruction of various cultural shrines and monuments in Iraq and Syria. It sounds beyond awful. As did the Taliban’s destruction of all those Buddhist monuments back in 2001. But here’s what I don’t understand about these types of reports from western journalists. When NYU destroyed Edgar Allan Poe’s home, did Kurt Andersen publicly say a word? That was an assault on our cultural heritage that he might have helped avert, but there’s no record of him, at least not that I can find, saying a thing. Yet here he is having a good old time with some State Department flack, calling for “archaeological boots on the ground”—presumably […]

Sign Petition for Princeton to Divest from Companies Involved in the Israeli Occupation

A group of Princeton faculty, staff, and students are circulating a petition calling on the university to divest from companies that are contributing to or profiting from the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. If you’re a member of the staff or faculty, an undergrad or grad student, or an alum or member of the community, please sign. Whether you’re or pro- or anti-BDS (but especially if you’re anti-BDS on the grounds that it targets the entire State of Israel rather than the occupation itself), this is a good statement to support, and one that all of us in both sides of that debate can unite around. The petition reads as follows: We, the undersigned members of the Princeton University […]

Multicultural, Intersectional: It’s Not Your Daddy’s KKK

So I know I wrote this in The Reactionary Mind: Beyond these simple professions of envy or admiration, the conservative actually copies and learns from the revolution he opposes. “To destroy that enemy,” Burke wrote of the Jacobins, “by some means or other, the force opposed to it should be made to bear some analogy and resemblance to the force and spirit which that system exerts.” This is one of the most interesting and least understood aspects of conservative ideology. While conservatives are hostile to the goals of the left, particularly the empowerment of society’s lower castes and classes, they often are the left’s best students. Sometimes, their studies are self-conscious and strategic, as they look to the left for […]

Thoughts on Migration and Exile on the 25th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall

Over at Crooked Timber, Chris Bertram writes: Yesterday I was listening to BBC Radio 4, and they were remembering the people who died, shot by East German border guards. It doesn’t seem to occur to our official voices of commemoration that there are parallels today with the thousands who die trying to escape tyranny, war or poverty and who drown in the Mediterranean, perish from thirst in the Arizona desert, or with those who the Australian government turns back at sea or interns offshore. He’s right. Years ago, I reviewed two books on migration, immigration, and exile—one by Caroline Moorehead, the other by Seyla Benhabib—for The Nation. Here’s a factoid from that review: Between 1994 and 2001, at least 1,700 […]

Send in the Couch Brigades: A Palimpsest of Freud, Phillip Rieff, and the Sandinistas

In my first two years of college, I was very much under the spell of Freud and Hofstadter/Weber. I was convinced that all political and social conflicts could be reduced to questions of sex and status. (Actually, I was probably much more under the spell of high school than anything else.) Anyway, my roommate David Hughes, who was more political and more of an activist than I—as in, he was political and he was an activist, whereas I was neither—summarized my worldview thus: “In your eyes, Nicaraguans don’t need the Sandinistas [this was the mid-80s]; we should just send in the couch brigades.” Sometimes I think the entirety of my intellectual career has been little more than an extended attempt […]

Adjunct Positions at Brooklyn College

Now that I’m chair of the political science department, I have the dubious privilege of hiring adjunct instructors to teach some of our courses. I say dubious privilege because the use and abuse of adjuncts in higher education, especially at CUNY, is a scandal. In our department, we do our best to make it not such a scandal–our classes are small, we push for the highest rates possible, we try to minimize uncertainty — but that’s just putting lipstick on a pig. Anyway, here are the positions that we have available in political science. Undergraduate Courses 1. The American Presidency, Thursday, 6:05-8:35 pm 2. The Politics of Incarceration, Tuesdays and Thursdays, 3:40-5:20 3. Moot Court, Friday, 9:30-12 pm 4. Writing […]

The Bad Stats of Adolph Eichmann

On January 18, 1943, Heinrich Himmler relieved Adolph Eichmann of his responsibilities as official statistician of the Shoah. Eichmann had botched the job of gathering data on the regime’s kill rate, leading Himmler to replace him with Richard Korherr. It was one of the great humiliations of Eichmann’s career. As Himmler explained to Eichmann’s boss Heinrich Müller: “The statistical documents produced thus far lack scientific exactitude.” The Nazis may have been liars, but when it came to mass murder of the Jews, they wanted to crunch the numbers just right.

Jews, Camps, and the Red Cross

A mini-controversy has broken out over a new research paper that analyzes four detention camps Israel ran during and after the 1948 war. There the Israelis held some 5000 Palestinians, who were subject to forced labor, beatings, torture, and ritual humiliations. Writing in Haaretz, Amira Hass cites the testimony of one former inmate, who claims that prisoners were lined up and ordered to strip naked as a punishment for the escape of two prisoners at night. [Jewish] adults and children came from the nearby kibbutz to watch us line up naked and laugh. To us this was most degrading. All told, Israel may have run as many as twenty of these camps from 1948 to 1955, and may have held […]