reading arendt in caracas:
I did want to write this piece, but I had to remind myself (and now you, my reader) where my short-term observation post was located--that is, in and around predominantly anti-Chavista groups. My Observatorio hosts were all anti-Chavista to one degree or another, ranging from disillusioned former Chavistas to academics with ties to European center-left groups like the British Euston Manifesto signers. My association with the Observatorio was complicated by the fact that they had accepted an offer from the US Embassy's speaker's program to fund my visit. Although no pressure was put on me, the Embassy, of course, would have been glad to hear the word "totalitarian" applied to Chávez. Some of the anti-Chavista Observatorio members would also have been glad for Chávez to be called totalitarian, but they would not have wanted to be thought pro- American or in the Embassy's embrace, even though they are critics of the blanket anti-Americanism that is key to Chávez's rhetoric.

harvard's humanitarian hawks:Should a human rights center at the nation’s most prestigious university be collaborating with the top US general in Iraq in designing the counter-insurgency doctrine behind the current military surge?
(...) It’s not that counter-insurgency Harvard-style has been effective, as proven by the continued suicide bombings, sniper activity and increasing casualties among US forces since the “surge” began. It is an academic formulation to buttress and justify a permanent engagement in counter-terrorism wars.
(...) If that is the limit of legitimate debate at Harvard, the Pentagon occupation of the academic mind may last much longer than its occupation of Iraq, and may require an intellectual insurgency in response.

ward churchill and academic freedom:
Some would like to apply an ideological litmus test to us academic employees: they might for example suppose that all professors, just to assume their positions in society, ought to agree and actively propagate that the U.S. is the best country in the world, its capitalist system generally admirable (maybe even "the end of history"), its history (while containing some unfortunate aspects) generally inspirational, its wars if sometimes mistaken always undertaken with honorable motives. There are some commentators hostile to us for being disproportionately irreligious, disinclined to believe with the majority of Americans in the literal truth of Bible stories, much more likely to understand science within the matrix of the theory of evolution, far less likely than the population at large to believe the government when it offers its explanation for its wars. But maybe we do that precisely because of our educational backgrounds.
(...) Richard Falk, Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University, has said it well: "All of us who value academic freedom should now stand in full solidarity with Ward Churchill. The outcome of his case at the University of Colorado is the best litmus test we have to tell whether the right-wing's assaults on learning and liberty will stifle campus life in this country. Never in my lifetime have we in America more needed the sort of vigorous debate and creative controversy that Ward Churchill's distinguished career epitomizes. We all stand to lose if his principled defense fails."

barbara ehrenreich on higher education:
The pundits keep chanting that we need a more highly skilled workforce, by which they mean more college graduates, although the connection between college and skills is not always crystal clear. Jones, for example, was performing a complex job requiring considerable judgment, experience and sensitivity without the benefit of any college degree. And how about all those business majors -- business being the most popular undergraduate major in America? It seems to me that a two-year course in math and writing skills should be more than sufficient to prepare someone for a career in banking, marketing, or management. Most of what you need to know you're going to learn on the job anyway. But in the last three decades the percentage of jobs requiring at least some college has doubled, which means that employers are going along with the college racket. A resume without a college degree is never going to get past the computer programs that screen applications. Why? Certainly it's not because most corporate employers possess a deep affinity for the life of the mind. In fact in his book Executive Blues G. J. Meyers warned of the "academic stench" that can sink a career: That master's degree in English? Better not mention it.
(...) My theory is that employers prefer college grads because they see a college degree chiefly as mark of one's ability to obey and conform. Whatever else you learn in college, you learn to sit still for long periods while appearing to be awake. And whatever else you do in a white collar job, most of the time you'll be sitting and feigning attention. Sitting still for hours on end -- whether in library carrels or office cubicles -- does not come naturally to humans. It must be learned -- although no college has yet been honest enough to offer a degree in seat-warming.
(...) Or maybe what attracts employers to college grads is the scent of desperation. Unless your parents are rich and doting, you will walk away from commencement with a debt averaging $20,000 and no health insurance. Employers can safely bet that you will not be a trouble-maker, a whistle-blower or any other form of non-"team-player." You will do anything. You will grovel.

martin kramer and academic freedom:
Kramer claims in Ivory Towers that US Middle East scholars have repeatedly made predictions that did not come true. His accusations are sometimes on target, though he is rather selective. He does not, for example, take his colleague Daniel Pipes to task for inaccurately predicting in the early 1980s that Islamist activism would decline as oil prices fell. Nor, in his writings since the Iraq war, has he faulted Fouad Ajami of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies -- who is a favorite of the Bush administration -- for claiming that all Iraqis would enthusiastically welcome US occupation. More broadly, Kramer’s fixation on accurate prediction as the chief (or even sole) gauge of good scholarship is itself highly questionable. Most scholars do not in fact seek to predict the future or think they can do so; they try to interpret the past, discern and explain contemporary trends, and, at most, tentatively suggest what might happen in the future if present trends continue, which they very often do not. Of course, governments want accurate predictions in order to shape and implement effective policies, but Kramer’s insistence that the primary goal of scholarship should be the satisfaction of that desire tells us a great deal about his conception of intellectual life and of the proper relationship between scholars and the state.
(...) It is, for example, striking that at the very end of Ivory Towers Kramer explicitly lays out a political and moral judgment rooted in his own (theoretical) vision of the world: his insistence that a healthy, reconstructed Middle East studies must accept that the US "plays an essentially beneficent role in the world." He does not bother to tell readers why they should accept this vision of the US role in the world as true, nor does he even acknowledge that it may be something other than self-evidently true. The assertion nonetheless undermines his avowed epistemological stance and graphically demonstrates that it is untenable.
(...) More broadly, Congress should hold hearings "on the contribution of Middle Eastern studies to American public policy," with testimony not only from academics but from government officials, directors of think tanks and others as well. While such steps might help, Kramer concludes, ultimately the field will have to heal itself by overcoming its irrelevance and its intolerance of intellectual and political diversity. Its new leaders will have to forge a different kind of relationship with "the world beyond the campus," based on the aforementioned principle that "the United States plays an essentially beneficent role in the world." Such lines are the basis of worries within and outside academic Middle East studies that HR 3077, the bill which resulted from the June 2003 hearing Kramer called for, is an attempt to stifle critical voices and diminish the autonomy of American institutions of higher education and long-established principles of academic freedom.
(...) Throughout the flap, defenders of Campus Watch ridiculed critics who used the word "McCarthyism" to describe the website’s self-appointed mission to expose "the mixing of politics with scholarship." But, speaking at right-wing activist David Horowitz’s Restoration Weekend in November 2003, Pipes hinted that Campus Watch has its own trouble keeping them separate: "I flatter myself perhaps in thinking that the rather subdued academic response to the war in Iraq in March and April may have been, in part, due to our work.
(...) In April 2003, for example, Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) announced plans to introduce legislation that would cut off federal funding to American colleges and universities that were deemed to be permitting faculty, students and student organizations to openly criticize Israel, since Santorum seems to regard all such criticism as inherently anti-Semitic. Meanwhile, Santorum’s colleague Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS) proposed the creation of a federal commission to investigate alleged anti-Semitism on campus -- again defined rather broadly to include virtually all criticism of Israeli policies.

interview with chomsky and zinn (part 2):
[chomsky] Raul Hilberg is the founder of Holocaust studies, you know, the most distinguished figure in the field. In fact, he says Norman didn't go far enough. And it's the same -- Avi Shlaim is one of the -- maybe the leading Israeli historian, has strongly supported him, and the same with others. I can't refer to the private correspondence, but it's very strong letters from leading figures in these fields.
(...) [zinn] , universities, colleges are not democratic institutions. Really, they’re like corporations. The people who have the most power are the people who have the least to do with education. That is, they're not the faculty, they're not the students, they're not even the people who keep the university going -- the buildings and grounds people and the technical people and the secretaries -- no. They're the trustees, the businesspeople, the people with connections, and they're the ones who have the most power, they're the ones who make the decisions. And so, that's why I was fired from there, and that's why I was almost fired by John Silber at Boston University
(...) [zinn] One of Eugene V. Debs: “While there is a lower class, I am in it; and while there is a criminal element, I am of it; and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” And Henry David Thoreau: “When the subject has refused allegiance and the officer has resigned his office, then the revolution is accomplished.”
(...) [zinn] I mean, the Mexican War had some of the same characteristics as the war in Iraq today, and that is that the American people were lied to about the reasons for going into Mexico, and they weren't told that the real reason for going into Mexico was that we wanted Mexican land, which we took at the end of the Mexican War, just as today we're not being told that the real reason for being in Iraq has to do with oil and profits and money.
(...) [chomsky] It's true that the country, that in terms of the institutional structure -- government for the wealthy and so on -- there hasn’t been much change in 200 years. But there's been enormous progress, I mean, even in the last forty years, since the ’60s. Many rights have been won: rights for minorities, rights for women, rights of future generations, which is what the environmental movement is about. Opposition to aggression has increased. The first solidarity movements in history began in the 1980s, after centuries of European imperialism, and no one ever thought of going to live in an Algerian village to protect the people from French violence, or in a Vietnamese village. Thousands of Americans were doing that in the 1980s in Reagan’s terrorist wars. It’s now extended over the whole world. There’s an international solidarity movement. I mean, after all, the Iraq war is the first war in hundreds of years of Western history, at least the first one I can think of, which was massively protested before it was officially launched. And it actually was underway, we have since learned, but it wasn’t officially underway. But it was huge, millions of people protesting it all over the world, so much so that The New York Times lamented that there's a second superpower: the population. Well, you know, that's significant and, I think, gives good reason for hope. There are periods of regression. We're now in a period of regression, but if you look at the cycle over time, it's upwards. And there's no limits that it can't reach.