Another episode in “What David Moles said”:http://chrononaut.org/2010/09/16/many-writers-have-all-the-virtues-of-civilized-persons/
Art Goldhammer on “the Sarkozy meltdown”:http://artgoldhammer.blogspot.com/2010/09/astonishing-rebuke.html
bq. The problem is that this statement was a lie, according to Merkel. … astonishing public rebuke, Merkel’s spokesperson …The idea that Sarkozy would simply have invented an exchange with Merkel and that he would have invoked her “total and entire” support without having cleared it with her beggars belief. A president who behaves in this way permanently discredits himself. Plummeting in polls, attacked for human rights violations, chastised by the Pope, sued by Le Monde, and now slapped in the face by Merkel, Sarkozy seems to be coming unhinged, prepared to say anything and do anything to retain his increasingly tenuous hold on power. How long before an open revolt breaks out in his own party?
“Matthew Yglesias”:http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2010/09/harvardperetz-controversy-illustrates-folly-of-charitable-donations-to-wealthy-u-s-universities/ on Martin Peretz and the university donation business.
bq. It’s really too bad that Harvard has chosen to take this tack. Obviously the only person in this conversation who’s questioned anybody’s right to “free speech” or exhibited a weak “commitment to the most basic freedoms” is Peretz himself. Equally obviously, Peretz’s right to be a bigot does not create a right to be honored by prestigious universities. My alma mater is doing a disservice to their brand and to public understanding of the issues by deliberately obscuring things in this manner. It would be more honest to say that Harvard is a business run for the benefit of its faculty and administrators. The business model of this business is the exchange of prestige in exchange for money. Peretz has friends who have money that they are willing to exchange for some prestige, and Harvard intends to take the money.
{ 10 comments }
tomslee 09.17.10 at 3:17 pm
On the university donation business, the Toronto Star last Sunday ran an excellent excerpt from “The Trouble with Billionaires”, forthcoming, by Linda McQuaig and Neil Brooks. The excerpt deals with university donations and the details about the soon-to-be-founded Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto are as revealing as they are depressing.
digamma 09.17.10 at 4:25 pm
“Peretz’s right to be a bigot does not create a right to be honored by prestigious universities. ”
The elite have many rights, among them the right to be honored by prestigious universities. To take away that right because of one’s speech is, by elite standards, censorious.
ejh 09.17.10 at 4:59 pm
If you’re a person of some means who wants to make a charitable donation to make the world a better place you have a lot of options available to you. And one of the very worst things you could do with that money is give it to a fancy university. If you’ve specifically decided that you want to make a charitable donation to a provider of education services in the United States, you should find one that has a good track record of serving poor students.
Which reminds me of what a friend (recipient, like myself, of an Oxford education) said about people who give lots of money to their old Oxford colleges. “Why don’t they give it to their local primary school?”
Uncle Kvetch 09.17.10 at 5:55 pm
Sarkozy seems to be coming unhinged, prepared to say anything and do anything to retain his increasingly tenuous hold on power
It’s as if he’s committed the Rove/Cheney playbook to memory — never apologize, never backtrack, just keep on upping the ante. Strangely, it isn’t working nearly as well over there as it did here.
LFC 09.17.10 at 9:44 pm
Peretz’s views are repulsive. Having said that, I think Yglesias has probably misconstrued the motives of the friends and former students of Peretz who, according to the Boston Globe article Yglesias links, have raised a half-million dollars to set up a fund for undergraduate research that will bear Peretz’s name. The donors’ motive is probably not to raise Peretz’s reputation or to buy prestige for themselves (since, after all, virtually no one outside a fairly small circle is going to know who these donors are), but rather to do something ‘nice’ for someone they like. The notion that the establishment of a ‘Martin Peretz Fund for Undergraduate Research’ at Harvard will (a) raise Peretz’s reputation substantially or (b) convince people who (properly) abominate Peretz’s views that he is now somehow ‘o.k.’ is, well, preposterous. I’m surprised that Yglesias apparently doesn’t see that.
LFC 09.17.10 at 9:47 pm
P.s. I believe that Peretz has given a certain (not insubstantial) amount of his own money to Harvard over the years, and that certainly doesn’t seem to have “raised his reputation.”
PHB 09.20.10 at 12:50 pm
The problem with peretz’s money is minor compared to the problem of making the curiculum neutral to his biggoted views.
Future generation are going to look at much of the philosophy of the past fifty odd years as being rather more about justifying the Israel project than anything else. You would think that establishing a state on the basis of ethnic supremacy of an i migrant group woul be considered totally offensive and illegitimate in academic circles.
Instead what is condenmned is questioning the view put forward by Peretz
And standing for equality can cost you tenure. The likes of Dershowitz will campaign to stop you getting tenure.
Truth does not need fancy philosophical justifications. And only outright lies need Dershowitz-style campaigns of intimidation.
LFC 09.20.10 at 3:10 pm
PHB @7 — You are mushing together the specific things that Peretz said about Muslims, which were the occasion for this particular controversy and Yglesias’s post, with the more general issue of where one stands on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. My comments above refer primarily to the specific statements, not the broader issue.
PHB 09.22.10 at 1:54 am
LFC
I wasn’t mushing anything together. Peretz is a bigot but he is at least an honest bigot. He makes little secret of the fact that he is a racist.
What this particular move is about is that the pendulum is finally starting to turn in the opposite direction. Previously it was bigots like Peretz and Dershowitz who were able to exclude contrary views from the public sphere. Opposing their racist views meant no tenure for you.
Peretz is an easy target. But his views are really little different from those held by Isaiah Berlin and plenty of other people whose views are actually taught at Harvard. It is just that Berlin stated his support for one particular group and ignored the fact that the policies he advocated would amount to ethnic cleansing of the existing inhabitants.
I think we are going to have to chuck much of late 20th century philosophy in the dustbin. Just get rid of all the people who purport to write moral philosophy but end up writing apologia for an apartheid system.
Peretz does not matter because he is a nobody. He might teach at Harvard but nobody teaches Peretz at Harvard or anywhere else.
LFC 09.22.10 at 2:07 am
So no one should read Berlin’s The Hedgehog and the Fox or “Two Concepts of Liberty” or anything else he ever wrote. I’ll have to remember that. In fact, this is lucky for me: I’ve had a copy of The Hedgehog and the Fox on my bookshelf for ages and have done no more than dip into it. I keep meaning to actually read it but now, thanks to PHB, I don’t have to. Hooray.
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