Harvard Crimson defends Larry Summers

Post below lifted from Belmont Club. See the original for links

Academia's rough handling of Larry Summers stands in stark contrast to the deferential, even fearful treatment accorded to Ward LeRoy Churchill, who even after being shown to be third-rate fraud continued to be defended on the grounds of "academic freedom". At a time when the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted 218-185 to express a "lack of confidence", following his remarks about the difference in scientific aptitude among the geners, a survey by the Crimson showed the students in support of Summers by a margin of nearly 3 to 1. Today the Crimson denounced Summer's "disinvitation" to a University of California dinner meeting of the Regents at the behest of Maureen Stanton, a professor in the Department of Evolution and Ecology, as "a disgrace". Stanton had claimed that "inviting a keynote speaker who has come to symbolize gender and racial prejudice in academia conveys the wrong message to the university community and to the people of California." The Crimson wrote:

the quashing of Summers’ speech points to a troubling trend in academia. Increasingly, the unrestricted marketplace of ideas that must form the heart of any university worth the name is being poisoned by a perverse pressure to conform truth to political agenda and stifle any speaker who espouses uncomfortable or invonveneint opinions. In the present case, the culprits are academics who fashion themselves as progressives eager for social justice and tolerance, but the other side of the political spectrum is no less guilty in others. This situation is alarming and dangerous. If academic freedom cannot exist in the university, our society is in trouble.

What is truly remarkable about the persecution of Larry Summers is that he cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, be seen as a conservative. His liberal credentials are impeccable. Summers served in the Clinton cabinet. He publicly identifies himself as a Democrat. Summers served with the UN. To be sure Summers sometimes flirted with heresy, being among others things a proponent of free trade and globalization. But surely he was entitled to think those thoughts being an academic economist, one good enough to a have serious shot at a Nobel Prize nomination -- before his downfall. Apparently not, in common with all theocrats there is nothing the academic left hates more than the Fallen Angel. Men like Summers, who should have modeled the brightest of chains for the Left, but who instead perversely chose to think their own thoughts deserve only the deepest pits of hell. Better the pious parrot like Ward Leroy Churchill than the critical thinker, even one belonging to their own church like Larry Summers.

But the Crimson editorial staff gets it right when they say that inquisitors themselves stand condemned. Whatever they may style themselves, by their actions and small-mindedness they have shown themselves unworthy to stand in judgment of anything.

Maureen Stanton and company represent the worst of academia. The side that politicizes its classrooms and refuses to hear, or let others hear ideas that they find distasteful or uncomfortable, no matter their merit. We hope the UC realizes the gravity of its error and makes amends by inviting Summers back. We know he’s worth listening to, even if one disagrees with him.

A "Truther" in academe

Anything is better than believing that GWB might be acting reasonably

Conspiracy theories have become commonplace in the American social landscape. Many have heard about the "second shooter" in Dallas in Nov. 1963 or about the "fake" Apollo moon landing of 1969. However, there is a powerful and growing movement of people who question the official version of events of Sept. 11, 2001.

One of the many critical voices is Lynn Margulis, geosciences professor at UMass. She recently made local news when she published a statement on www.PatriotsQuestion911.com, decrying the government's involvement in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. "The 9/11 tragedy is the most successful and most perverse publicity stunt in the history of public relations," wrote Margulis in her statement on www.PatriotsQuestion911.com. "I suggest that those of us aware and concerned demand that the glaringly erroneous official account of 9/11 be dismissed as a fraud and a new thorough and impartial investigation be undertaken," she added. She later added that the "false-flag operation" was used to justify the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as "unprecedented assaults on research, education and civil liberties."

Margulis explained that she came to her conclusions after conducting her own research and after reading "The New Pearl Harbor" and "The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions," by David Ray Griffin, an author and retired theology professor at University of Dayton. The World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, she said, were planned with excruciating detail by a large network of operatives. Margulis also likened the attacks to other events in history such as the sinking of the USS Maine in 1898 and the Reichstag fire, both of which helped spark the Spanish-American War and the rise of the Nazi Party, respectively. Conspiracy theorists often cite these events as being orchestrated by governmental powers.

Sept. 11 conspiracy theorists come from a wide variety of backgrounds. On the www.PatriotsQuestion911.com Web site, hundreds of people from military, law enforcement, entertainment, medical and media environments cite their disbelief in the traditional theory of the attacks. Other Web sites such as www.911Truth.org and www.ny911truth.org have sprung up on the Internet and have attracted people to their cause. Northampton even has its own group, Valley Truth 9/11, in which local residents discuss their conspiracy views.

The 9/11 Truth Movement is composed of several loosely-organized groups which focus on gathering evidence and research to prove that members of the United States government had ties to the Sept. 11 attacks.

Beyond her role as a Sept. 11 doubter, Margulis has had a successful career in geosciences. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1983 and in 1998, the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. announced it would archive her papers there permanently. She taught at Boston University for 22 years before moving to UMass. Margulis has written over 130 scientific papers and books and has done extensive research on evolution, especially pertaining to the theory of symbiogenesis. Throughout her career, she has been awarded the National Medal of Science, the nation's highest honor for scientific achievement, as well as the Procter Prize from Sigma Xi, the scientific research society of which she was president from 2005-06.

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Ignorance of Islam

Universities are derelict in their duty of making students into knowledgeable citizens

By Travis Kavulla

I was in Cambridge, Mass., in February of last year when I heard the latest from Iraq: The al-Askari Mosque, the so-called "Golden Mosque" of Samarra, had been nearly leveled in a devastating explosion.

That night, I attended a regular, rather casual seminar on the works of Cantabrigian authors, led by a prodigious member of Harvard's Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations department. The professor arrived late to class, and was not in the mood to talk about T. S. Eliot when he did. "Do any of you know what the Golden Mosque is?" he asked. Blank stares followed, punctuated only by the eager nodding of my roommate, whose passion is the Middle East.

Smart though they allegedly are, few Harvard undergraduates had heard of the mosque, or knew that it is one of Shi'a Islam's most holy sites. "This war is something completely different than it was yesterday," said my professor. "The violence this is going to unleash will make the last few months look positively tranquil."

His warnings were prescient. Despite increased security restrictions, the number of bodies dumped on streets, in rivers, and in shallow graves soared. The spring and summer of 2006 saw the bloodiest months for Iraqi civilians since the war began.

The vicious escalation was an entirely and immediately predictable outcome of the Golden Mosque's bombing. Indeed, only the most cursory bits of knowledge about Islam and its sects were necessary to deduce the gravity of the crime and the reprisals it would inspire. But how many students had even this basic knowledge?

The answer is a sad one, especially for a university such as Harvard, which routinely trumpets its "international" character and insists its students are "generally educated": instructed not to be pre-packaged professionals, but to obtain a broad education that, supposedly, helps one understand our "global society."

I spoke with as many of my classmates as I could on the day of the bombing. It was, to them, a pedestrian event: one bombing in a troubled place where bombings are mundane. My professor came to class unnerved, saddened by the violence to come; but in the student body, a tranquility that bespoke blissful ignorance reigned. In the weeks after, I gently quizzed my friends and acquaintances. Did they know:

* The major theological differences between Sunnis and Shiites?

* The countries in the region with Sunni majorities?

* Those with Shiite majorities?

* Some of the main pilgrimage sites in the Muslim world?

* Whether al Qaeda was Sunni or Shiite? (This same question was posed last year to Silvestre Reyes, the Texas Democrat who now heads the House Intelligence Committee; he answered incorrectly).

The results were informal, but militated grandly enough toward a conclusion of ignorance to be disappointing. It is all the more disappointing because we really do live in that much-prophesied global, interconnected world: What happens to a mosque, especially one in Iraq, may well impact us or our cause. For as long a time as that is true, understanding cultures outside our own will be one of the foremost intellectual necessities.

This sounds flaky in the extreme to a good many conservatives. Their suspicion is well-placed - a true understanding of another culture is very different from the "understanding" fostered in higher education. To "understand" is rarely about obtaining specific knowledge about a foreign culture through patient study; usually, to "understand" is to indulge in self-guilt about our own society.

One week at Harvard, not so long ago, there were no fewer than five panels bemoaning American "militarization," "imperialism," and supposed human-rights abuses. As it happened, this was the same week when riots exploded across the globe in response to the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten's publication of several cartoons depicting Mohammad. But a student would have tried in vain to find a panel addressing the question that obviously needed to be asked: Why was the Muslim world burning over a few cartoons, printed in an obscure source? (It was not until The Harvard Salient republished four of the cartoons that a debate was ignited - albeit, even then, it mostly concerned The Salient's alleged insensitivity in republishing them.)

Outside the realm of extracurricular panels, there is the question of coursework. Or, rather, there's not the question, at least for most students. Add Islam and Muslim society to the long list of subjects, from Shakespeare to American history, which Ivy Leaguers from Yale to Princeton to Harvard can avoid ever encountering in their academic careers. Despite a pretense toward "internationalism," this new pedagogy manifests itself only in small bits. In Harvard's latest curricular review, it is claimed to be a "serious commitment" to our "global society" that the university requires its students to take one year of a foreign language. Not enough to have a conversation or read a newspaper, mind you, but perhaps graduates will be able to order falafel at their nearest Lebanese restaurant.

Islam and the Middle East have a surprisingly low profile in most universities' core curricula. Columbia's still-comprehensive if recently diminished Great Books program devotes the most attention to the subject. At Harvard, meanwhile, students must fulfill a "Foreign Cultures" requirement by choosing from a small but schizoid list of courses.

Incredibly, in the 2007-08 academic year, none of the offerings in "Foreign Cultures" concerns Islam or the Middle East. Two irregularly offered courses do. One is "Gendered Communities: Women, Islam, and Nationalism in the Middle East and North Africa," taught by the chairman of the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Department. The other, "Understanding Islam and Contemporary Muslim Societies," seems comprehensive, but hardly lives up to its grand name, as it trails off in pursuit of the professor's own passion: Sufi mysticism in India and Africa. Doubtless this is a topic worthy of study, but it has little to do with why, in this decade, a student would sign himself up for a course called "Understanding Islam."

Those who do venture into academic coursework on Islam are unlikely to find any class that will give them a simple reprise of Islam's theology, history, and cultural geography; missing are the basic facts that could answer questions pertinent to the modern world, like those above. It has been an oft-repeated criticism of higher education that schools have stopped teaching facts per se, touting instead overarching theories that organize facts in a manner convenient to theorists' work. In Middle Eastern or African or Latin American Studies, a student rarely will be held accountable for definitional knowledge - you don't need to know why Shiite Iranians call their religious leaders "ayatollahs," or even when Mohammad lived, but you had better understand how the emergence of Islam reshaped gender structures in Arab society. There is a good case to be made for knowing all of that, but without the bare facts of people, places, and the dates they intersected, a critical analysis of the same is useless.

Nevertheless, in a college course on Islam, you are more likely to be assigned Edward Said's historiography, as the theory and method of writing history is known, than an actual history textbook. Learning this way is like wearing jeans with a button and a zipper, but no denim: quite impossible.

Despite all the pretense about "understanding" other cultures, or "respecting" or "being sensitive to" them, few universities have taken measures beyond the platitudinous. A real sensitivity for other cultures entails discerning their differences, perhaps even more than finding common ground. What is not respectful of Islam is to assume that those of its adherents whose theology brooks no separation of civil and religious authority would be motivated by the same incentives that motivate us in the West. A person who truly respects Islam should be able to understand the signs sent by Mahmoud Ahmedinejad's millennial behavior, and appreciate that he is perfectly serious in his belief that the twelfth Imam, reputedly hidden for more than a millennium, will be reappearing soon to redeem the world for Islam.

Learning the fundamentals of world religions once was, and still should be, a cornerstone of a liberal education, for reasons that both a century ago and today are perfectly obvious. Much of this knowledge seems pedantic or arcane, especially in a realm like American higher education where Islamic unction no longer has a Christian analog and is consequently incomprehensible to mostly agnostic, or at least not fanatically committed, scholars and students.

But it is not too much to ask that anyone who graduates from a prestigious American university in our time should have at least a functional knowledge of Islam and the Muslim world. This is the least effortful and most practical thing we can ask of American universities. If such a simple calling cannot be fulfilled, then American higher education will have further endangered its reputation as a useful institution.

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