“Obama represents an opportunity for a Democratic nominee who represents the value of service, intelligence, and judgment, and, most of all, an opportunity for real change, unburdened by favors owed and ideals lost. He deserves your vote.” The Harvard Crimson endorses Barack Obama — on the issues.
Tag: Ivory Tower
The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner.
“For those who attempt it, the doctoral dissertation can loom on the horizon like Everest, gleaming invitingly as a challenge but often turning into a masochistic exercise once the ascent is begun. The average student takes 8.2 years to get a Ph.D.; in education, that figure surpasses 13 years. Fifty percent of students drop out along the way, with dissertations the major stumbling block. At commencement, the typical doctoral holder is 33, an age when peers are well along in their professions, and 12 percent of graduates are saddled with more than $50,000 in debt.”
By way of Little Bit Left, a new site by a Columbia colleague that’s well worth adding to the blogroll, the NYT surveys the sad plight of the modern ABD. (I’ll be 33 at my current expected finish date, seven years after starting, and my cohort’s attrition rate has been significant, so it seems the stats bear out in my case.) “Those who insist on dissertations are aware that they must reduce the loneliness that defeats so many scholars…’It’s easy, especially in our field, to feel isolated, and that tends to slow people down…There’s no sense of belonging to an academic community.‘” Oh, I dunno…Berk and I often have very scintillating conversations…progressive citizenship, New Era consumerism, socks, squirrels, you name it.
Ahmadinejad in the Lions’ Den.
So, you’ll never guess who came to campus today…It didn’t get much press or anything, but Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad kicked off his NY tour this morning by being eviscerated in public by Columbia’s president, Lee Bollinger. Normally, I’d say it’s poor form to hijack an invited speaker like that, but: the national temper is running angry, Ahmadinejad’s no angel by any means, and — most importantly — the questions Bollinger posed demand substantive answers. (Besides, a furor is what Ahmadinejad wanted anyway.)
All that being said, I still think it was a dumb political stunt (on both ends) to disinvite the Iranian president from visiting Ground Zero. A couple of points people seem to have forgotten lately: 1. Iran didn’t have anything to do with 9/11, and 2. Whatever’s going on on the Iraqi border, we’re not currently at war with them. Most importantly, why wouldn’t we want a man who’s trying to obtain nukes to see the lasting consequences of a large-scale atrocity firsthand? If the sight of that still-gaping wound in the heart of the city gave him pause for even a moment, the world would be better for it.
Mother of Invention.
10,000 Men of Harvard…and one woman leading the charge: According to the Crimson, author and historian Drew Gilpin Faust is set to become Larry Summers’ replacement as president of Harvard, and the first female president of dear alma mater in 371 years. She’s already an improvement on Summers just by showing up.
Murder on the Orientalist Express.
“Said’s everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach is counterproductive. It may have swelled the ranks of subaltern studies programs and provided grist for numerous postcolonial studies Ph.D. theses, but that doesn’t make his argument correct. In the end, bad books are just bad books, and when they are canonized for instrumental reasons, the result is a coarsening of thought and an ever-widening and unhealthy divide between the academy and mainstream culture.” In his review of Robert Irwin’s Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents, Salon‘s Gary Kamiya rails against the canonical status of Edward Said’s Orientalism. “Said’s radically skeptical position…was so abstract and chameleonic that it was impossible to disprove it, since it constantly dissolved (and hid behind) a multitude of deconstructive readings.” At the risk of seeming relentlessly pre-mo, I also tend to get irritated with arguments that rely on the immutability and inescapability of an all-powerful, trans-historical discourse. But at least, unlike too many of his advocates, Said’s work is relatively clear and readable. When it comes to a lot of post-colonial writing, I wonder: Is it that the subaltern cannot speak, or that nobody can hear him/her over all the jargon-riddled shouting?
No Cred for Indy.
“The committee concurred that Dr. Jones does seem to possess a nearly superhuman breadth of linguistic knowledge and an uncanny familiarity with the history and material culture of the occult. However, his understanding and practice of archaeology gave the committee the greatest cause for alarm.” One sad note amid all the excellent election news: Despite the best efforts of Dean Marcus Brody, Indiana Jones has been denied tenure at Marshall College. (By way of The Late Adopter.)
Hofstadter’s Political Tradition.
“Like the late John Kenneth Galbraith, Hofstadter has been faulted for leaving behind no coherent ‘school’ of history, no set of disciples. But for a man who once said to Foner, ‘I’m not a teacher, I’m a writer,’ to have tutored such a splendid variety of historians shows that he imbued his students with something more precious than the ability to write history his way. He taught them to write history their way.” On the eve of a new biography of the hallowed Columbia prof, Slate‘s David Greenberg ruminates on Richard Hofstadter.
Bullies / Bully!
In case you missed it, last week Comedy Central’s fake news went academic: By way of The Naked Tree and various other sources, The Daily Show‘s inimitable Rob Corddry delved into racismism (racism against racists) with Columbia’s own Manning Marable and Eric Foner. And, soon thereafter, that Apostle of Truthiness, Stephen Colbert, sat down with Harvard’s resident throwback, Harvey Mansfield, to discuss the manly virtues. Harvey, go make me a sandwich.
Used to be my homies.
“While he remains sympathetic to the democracy-spreading mission, Fukuyama castigates the unilateral and militaristic turns that gave us such concepts as ‘preventive war,’ ‘benevolent hegemony,’ and ‘regime change.’ Neoconservatives, he contends, have abandoned their fundamental political insight, namely that ambitious schemes to remake societies are doomed to disappointment, failure, and unintended consequences. ‘Opposition to utopian social engineering,’ Fukuyama writes ‘…is the most enduring thread running through the movement.’ Yet neoconservatives today are bogged down in an attempt to remake a poorly understood, catastrophically damaged, and deeply alien semi-country in the Middle East. How did these smart people stray — and lead the country — so far off course?“
Um, well, maybe ’cause a lot of ’em read Fukuyama’s The End of History back in the day? Jacob Weisberg reviews Francis Fukuyama’s new book, America at the Crossroads, and, while it’s good to see principled conservatives take this administration’s egregiously inept Iraq policy to task, it’s also hard to believe that the neocons didn’t share Fukuyama’s earlier contention going in that “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government” was both an historical inevitability and in full flourish. Fukuyama can play the aggrieved realist now, but that’s definitely not how he made a name for himself.
Summers’ lease hath had all too long a date.
With another no-confidence vote on the way, Larry Summers announces his resignation as president of Harvard, effective at the end of the school year. Between running Cornel out of town and arguing women can’t do science, Summers long ago lost any truck with me. He was an embarrassment to the University, and it’s past time for him to go.