The Ignominy of Academics, Left & Right
February 24, 2005
In Father Jape’s conspicuous absence (we suspect his carrier pigeon may have been detained while delivering life saving beak-fulls of cognac to celebrities trapped under California mudslides) we received this guest commentary from a respected academic writing under the name Prof. Munodi:The intelligentisa on the left and right just aren’t very intelligent.
On the left we have Ward Churchill, formerly head of the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado, whose 2001 essay “Some People Push Back” came to national attention when Hamilton College in Clinton, NY announced in January of this year that Churchill would speak there and students protested. Churchill’s critics claim he’s defending terrorism, while Churchill himself claimed “I am not a ‘defender’ of the Sept. 11 attacks.” Perhaps he didn’t mean to defend terrorism, but he did say in “Some People Push Back” that:
- US and British bombing of Iraq in the 1990s was a “Class I crime against humanity.”
- this bombing constitutes a “holocaust.”
- this bombing is equivalent to the German invasion of Russia during WW II.
- as Germans were held collectively guilty for Nazi atrocities, so are Americans collectively guilty for the atrocity of bombing Iraq during the 1990s.
- the terrorists themselves were models of “patience and restraint” for waiting so long to retaliate (the 1993 attacks of the World Trade Center apparently don’t count because they weren’t successful).
If all this is true, then of course the attacks were justified and Prof. Churchill (yes, he’s resigned as department head but he’s still a Professor of Ethnic Studies) is indeed defending the terrorist attacks of 9-11. But these comments weren’t, by themselves, the focus of critics’ attacks on Ward Churchill. It’s this paragraph that really caught students’ attention:
Well, really. Let’s get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they [WTC employees] were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America’s global financial empire – the “mighty engine of profit” to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved – and they did so both willingly and knowingly. Recourse to “ignorance” – a derivative, after all, of the word “ignore” – counts as less than an excuse among this relatively well-educated elite. To the extent that any of them were unaware of the costs and consequences to others of what they were involved in – and in many cases excelling at – it was because of their absolute refusal to see. More likely, it was because they were too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants. If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I’d really be interested in hearing about it.Prof. Churchill couldn’t be any clearer: these people are as guilty as Eichmann and deserved what they got.
I won’t bother pointing out the obvious and numerous logical and factual flaws in Ward Churchill’s essay.
For example, just what is a civilian “of a sort?”
Isn’t there a difference in intent between Eichmann and the World Trade Center employees? Eichmann deliberately wanted to kill as many Jews as possible – the more Jews dead, the better he did his job. The World Trade Center people were there to make money.
And many of these employees weren’t guilty of death for using cell phones and having power lunches (let’s grant Churchill this point), but were employees of the shopping mall on the Tower’s lower levels and other $7.00 per hour support employees.
Rather than pick at the fine points, I just want to remind you that Churchill claimed he isn’t defending terrorism.
Perhaps it’s not that Prof. Churchill is stupid but just thinks we are.
Now on the right we have Harvard President Lawrence Summers, who in his January 14, 2005 “Remarks at NBER Conference on Diversifying the Science and Engineering Workforce” offended many Harvard faculty by suggesting “that innate gender differences might be responsible for the small number of women in top science and engineering positions.” Under pressure from Harvard faculty Mr. Summers released a transcript of his rambling comments, which upon review seem largely intended to suggest that under-representation has causes other than discrimination. This is fair by itself, but as he goes on to say that under-representation has causes other than socialization and may be linked to innate gender differences you have to wonder, “What was he thinking?” The President of Harvard University can reasonably be expected to already know how his faculty will react.
As with Churchill, there’s no point arguing with the factual content of Dr. Summers’ speech. It has far more factual basis than Churchill’s comments but the facts of the matter are hardly conclusive. As one questioner observed after Summers’ speech:
Q: You know, in the spirit of speaking truth to power, I’m not an expert in this area but a lot of people in the room are, and they’ve written a lot of papers in here that address …And he did know; one little gem from his speech was either a misguided attempt at diplomacy, an insight into the patterns of thinking Dr. Summers typically follows, or both: “And so, the human mind has a tendency to grab to the socialization hypothesis when you can see it, and it often turns out not to be true.”
LHS: I’ve read a lot of them.
Q: And, you know, a lot of us would disagree with your hypotheses and your premises…
Summers’ reasoning at this point ascribes to some quality of the “human mind” specific assumptions about the sources of human behavior and aptitudes. I doubt the “human mind” “grabs to” the socialization hypothesis naturally, as if human beings had innate tendencies to assume human behavior proceeds from socialization. It is the minds of post-Enlightenment, post-Lockean western academic thinking that assumes the socialization hypothesis or, in other words, people just like Dr. Summers’ colleagues during his presentation. So Dr. Summers had one of two directions he could take: he could have written a well-researched, lucid paper setting forth a specific hypothesis, or he could have stayed away from innate gender difference altogether and emphasized his more plausible alternatives to discrimination: that women in their 20s-30s find themselves forced to choose between marriage and childbearing and a high-powered career, choices that men aren’t required to face. Either way, he should have known better, and he deserves the hot water he’s found himself in.
Far more interesting to me than Prof. Churchill’s and President Summers’ differences are their similarities. Both were speaking outside their respective fields; Dr. Summers’ field is macroeconomics, not biology, while Prof. Churchill has an M.A. in Communications and has done most of his work on Native Americans, not American foreign policy. (He appears to me to be under-qualified to be tenured faculty, much less a department head, at any state university.) Both men spoke with almost complete disregard for the predictable responses each received.
The Summers/Churchill debacles call into question several assumptions circulating around US academia, one being that expertise in one field qualifies someone to speak with authority in any field. Granting tenure to faculty and protecting the speech of academics is presumably designed to allow academic research to be conducted free from fear of current political alignments, as a means of preserving intellectual integrity; if we buy this, what Dr. Churchill or Prof. Ward say within the context of their respective fields are subject to their peers’ analysis and review and the test of time but not to political pressure. In their respective January speeches, though, they did not speak as academics within their fields, but as public intellectuals opining about current events and concerns. They may as well have been local business owners reading up on a subject and writing an editorial, or some know it all posting on an internet blog. Like this one. As participants in American democracy they have that right, just as other participants in American democracy have the right to take issue with their misguided opinions. But as editorialists, they do not have the right to the protection afforded academics conducting research in their fields. For what it’s worth, experts would know better.
The Summers/Churchill debacles also call into question widespread assumptions about the moral authority of victims, and definitions of equality that require success to be defined the same for all. An example of the latter type of thinking is the assumption that a woman who chooses childbearing and family over a high powered career in the sciences or engineering is a victim of some sort, that this choice represents a problem to be reckoned with. What of the women who freely make this choice without regret? Are they second-rate intellectuals themselves? An example of the former is the assumption that Ward Churchill’s status as a Native American victim of US imperialism (a questionable claim in its own right) qualifies him to speak on behalf of the terrorists behind the September 11th attacks without regard for anything beyond his presumed moral authority as a presumed victim.
This is The Ignominy of Academics, Left & Right in The Japery, a part of The New Pantagruel. Previously: Culturemakers | Next: Blowgun Spirituality | TrackBack (0) | Comments (0)
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