1. Thirty-four heads of departments and academic units at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign wrote a scorching letter to the University of Illinois’s new president. With some startling information about the effect the boycott is having on the University: More than three-dozen scheduled talks and multiple conferences across a variety of disciplines – including, for example, this year’s entire colloquium series in the Department of Philosophy – have already been canceled, and more continue to be canceled, as outside speakers have withdrawn in response to the university’s handling of Dr. Salaita’s case. The Department of English decided to postpone a program review originally scheduled for spring 2015 in anticipation of being unable to find qualified external examiners willing to come to […]
My friend Peter von Ziegesar, who wrote a very affecting memoir about his brother that you should buy and read (I did!), speaks to PEN America: I don’t think that the notion of the public intellectual has fallen out of fashion. I think that he or she has moved their place of discourse to another location. Typically in the past the public intellectual, on the model of Susan Sontag, for example, or Norman Mailer, or Gore Vidal, lived in New York and published in esoteric journals, such as The New York Review of Books, or The Nation, and occasionally appeared on the Tonight Show. A friend of mine, Corey Robin, a professor at Brooklyn College who has written several books […]
Steven Salaita spoke today at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. According to the YMCA, where the event was held, some 400 students, faculty, staff, and supporters turned up. Salaita opened with a statement. Here are some excerpts: My name is Steven Salaita. I am a professor with an accomplished scholarly record; I have been a fair and devoted teacher to hundreds of undergraduate and graduate students; I have been a valued and open-minded colleague to numerous faculty across disciplines and universities. My ideas and my identity are far more substantive and complex than the recent characterizations based on a selected handful of my Twitter posts. … Two weeks before my start date, and without any warning, I received a summary […]
Two hundred More than 300 Three hundred and thirty-five political scientists have now joined the boycott of UIUC, including scholars from Princeton, Chicago, Oxford, Hopkins, and more. That’s good, not great (philosophy is nearing 600 signatures!) Since poli sci is my discipline, I’d like to see that improve. If you haven’t signed, please do so. If you have, get a friend or colleague (in poli sci) to do so. If you want to sign, you can do so here. (For the statement you’ll be signing and the list of signatories, see below.) With every new set of 25 signatures or so, I’ll update the list. I’ll be moderating the comments heavily here; anything tangential to the mechanics of the boycott […]
In another bombshell, UI trustee James D. Montgomery tells Ali Abunimah, well, I’ll just quote from Ali’s piece: A trustee of the University of Illinois has added to public criticism over the decision to fire Palestinian American professor and Israel critic Steven Salaita. “I think it would have been far better had it been dealt with differently and had it been done with more consultation with faculty,” James D. Montgomery told The Electronic Intifada today. He also acknowledged the “adverse” impact that a growing boycott was having on the university’s ability to function. Montgomery, a prominent Chicago attorney, echoed the regrets expressed by Chancellor Phyllis Wise over her own role in the affair. Montgomery was careful, however, to say that […]
Over the weekend, I got a really nice shout-out in the New York Times Book Review from the historian Rick Perlstein. In fact, you guys, my readers and commenters, also got a really nice shout out. And who today are the best writers on American politics? There are two, and they both are bloggers. One, Corey Robin of Brooklyn College, is also a political theorist; his book “The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism From Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin” provides the most convincing account about what right-wing habits of mind are ultimately all about. His humane and erudite blog — and its spirited commenters — deepen that conversation. A favorite theme is the emptiness of right-wing notions of “freedom” that actually leave […]
John K. Wilson has an excellent analysis of the New York state legislation against the ASA. He makes an oh-so-obvious-why-didn’t-I-think-of-it point: It bans not only direct funding by a college of any scholarly group passing a boycott resolution, but also any funding of travel and lodging by someone to attend that group’s events (even when none of the money would go to the organization). While the bill does prohibit the use of public money to fund the ASA directly, not much public money, at least at CUNY, works that way. That particular provision of the bill would simply ban universities and colleges from taking out institutional memberships with the ASA; few colleges or universities do that, however. That particular provision […]
Last year, Eric Alterman criticized my department for co-sponsoring a panel on BDS “at which its [BDS’s] arguments would be presented without opposition or clarification from its opponents.” This year, Students for Justice in Palestine at Brooklyn College decided to give Alterman an opportunity to make good on his complaint. They invited him to debate Max Blumenthal on the question: “What would a just settlement of the Israel/Palestine issue be, and how can it be brought about?” Alterman’s response to their invitation? “No thanks.” That was it. To students at his very own college, some of whom might even be in his classes. Perhaps if the students agreed to pony up $10,000 to pay Alterman, he’d consider. It’s hard to […]
From Alan Dershowitz’s just published autobiography: I loved Brooklyn College, and Brooklyn College loved—and still loves—me. He then adds a footnote, which reads: Though not the Political Science Department, in which I majored. I guess this little exchange was the last straw:
Over the years, Eric Alterman has written many articles I’ve disagreed with. I’ve never commented on them publicly because he’s a colleague at Brooklyn College. But in the current issue of the Nation Alterman devotes a column—and then a blog post—to a critique of Max Blumenthal’s new book Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel. Even if you haven’t read Blumenthal’s book, it’s not hard to see that Alterman is writing out of an animus he can’t get a hold of. His prose gives him away. Alterman writes, for example, “And its [Goliath’s] larding of virtually every sentence with pointless adjectives designed to demonstrate the author’s distaste for his subject is as amateurish as it is ineffective.” A writer more […]
Monday, September 9, was David Petraeus’s first class at CUNY. As he left Macaulay Honors College, where he’s teaching, he was hounded by protesters. It wasn’t pretty; the protesters were angry and they didn’t hold back. The protesters’ actions attracted national and international media attention—and condemnation. Not just from the usual suspects at Fox but from voices at CUNY as well. Macaulay Dean Ann Kirschner issued a formal statement on the Macaulay website and then took to her blog in order to further express her dismay: Before and during Dr. Petraeus’ class, however, a group of protesters demonstrated in front of the college. That demonstration ended before the conclusion of the class. Sometime later, while walking off campus, Dr. Petraeus […]
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 […]
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 […]
Corey Robin Distinguished Professor of Political Science Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center 2900 Bedford Avenue Brooklyn, NY 11210 corey.robin@gmail.com Download as pdf (last updated October 2023) Education Ph.D., Yale University, distinction, 1999 A.B., Princeton University, high honors, 1989 Oxford University, Jesus College, 1987-88 Fellowships, Grants, and Awards Best Book in American Political Thought Award, American Political Science Association, 2020 Fellowship, Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, New York Public Library, 2018-19 Rockefeller Fellowship, Center for Human Values, Princeton University, 2007-8 Fellowship, Program in Ethics and Public Affairs, Princeton University, 2007-8 Fellowship, American Council of Learned Societies, 2007-8 Fellowship, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 2007-8 (declined) Fellowship, National Humanities Center, 2007-8 (declined) Burkhardt Fellowship, American Council of Learned […]
Corey Robin is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. A frequent contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and other publications, Robin is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Cullman Center of the New York Public Library, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the American Political Science Association. He is the author of The Enigma of Clarence Thomas, The Reactionary Mind, and Fear. He is currently at work on King Capital, a political theory of capitalism, which is under contract with Random House. His books and essays have been translated into thirteen languages, and he has appeared on NPR, MSNBC, and […]
I love Benno Schmidt. He’s the chair of the Board of Trustees of CUNY, where I teach, and a former president of Yale. More important, he’s a man who’s spent so much time in the business world that he’s no longer capable of leaving anything to the imagination. So you get from him a refreshingly crude form of honesty that you ordinarily don’t find in academia. Certainly not in university leaders, who are so adept at making themselves misunderstood that you’d think they were trained by apparatchiks in the former Soviet Union. Or Straussians. Anyway, Benno was interviewed by the New York Post about his plans for CUNY Chancellor Matthew Goldstein, who’ll be retiring at the end of the year. […]
Glenn Greenwald will be delivering the Brooklyn College political science department’s 39th annual Samuel J. Konefsky Memorial Lecture this year. The topic of the lecture: “Civil Liberties and Endless War in the Age of Obama.” The lecture will be held on Monday, March 4, at 1 pm. In the Gold Room (6th Floor) of SUBO, which is the student center building, located at Campus Road and 27th Street. The lecture is open to the public. Like Alan Dershowitz, a previous Konefsky Lecturer, Greenwald will be speaking alone. Like the Israeli Ambassador to the UN, Greenwald will balance himself.
Just some odds and ends from the Brooklyn College BDS controversy. 1. I did a Bloggingheads show with Sarah Posner. This is just a clip where I talk about my own confrontation with the Israel-Palestine question in college and how that helps me think about education more generally. But you can also watch the whole thing if you like. 2. I never posted the follow-up letter [pdf] that Gale Brewer, one of the members of the City Council who signed that Fidler letter and then jumped ship, sent to President Gould. 3. The Center for Constitutional Rights and the National Lawyers Guild teamed up to write a letter [pdf] to all the members of City Council who signed the Fidler […]
Now that the mayor, the New York Times, and just about everyone else have come down hard on all the government officials and politicians who tried to force my department to withdraw its co-sponsorship of the BDS panel, the “progressive” politicians have issued a second letter (their first is here) to Brooklyn College President Karen Gould, in which they backpedal, backpedal, backpedal pull back from their earlier position. No longer, it seems, must we “balance” this panel or withdraw our co-sponsorship. That it took a billionaire mayor to explain these simple matters to our progressive leaders is, well, what can one say? This entire episode has been an instructive example in courage and cowardice, shame and shamelessness. Much congratulations go […]
Kate Taylor, a reporter for the New York Times, just tweeted these. .@mikebloomberg forcefully defends right of Brooklyn College to organize BDS conference, while noting he’s a strong supporter of Israel. — Kate Taylor (@katetaylornyt) February 6, 2013 Mayor: “If u want to go to a university where the govt decides what…subjects are fit for discussion, I suggest you apply…in N Korea” — Kate Taylor (@katetaylornyt) February 6, 2013 Update (12:10 pm) According to a transcription of Bloomberg’s remarks that was prepared by Emily Stanback, this is the entire statement he made: Well look, I couldn’t disagree more violently with BDS as they call it, Boycott Divestment and Sanctions. As you know I’m a big supporter of Israel, as big […]