Tag: Matthew Goldstein

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 […]

Petraeusgate: Anatomy of a Scandal

Petraeusgate is a rapidly unfolding scandal of multiple parts. I mostly focus here on the third, which involves a potential cover-up. The first two—the crimes, as it were—are more important. But if you want to get to the newest and most scandalous revelations, jump to the third section of this post. (I won’t touch here on the ethics of hiring a man who has been publicly linked to the torture of Iraqi detainees, which may be the gravest evil of all. Nor will I touch on the larger issue this scandal has raised: our failing-up political culture, where fuck-ups in the power elite get rewarded for their fuck-ups. Alex Pareene’s got that beat covered.) Scandal #1 (with apologies to Harold […]

God Bless Benno Schmidt

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.  […]