Henry

Today’s FT has an interesting short article about the growing foreign policy clout of the European Union (something I wrote about back in June of last year). Robert Zoellick recognized this when he took time out of his short European tour to talk to MEPs in the Parliament’s foreign affairs committee. Even more interesting is that the Parliament has been taking more of a hands-on role in the enlargement process; a highly critical Parliament report on corruption in Romania (which is an EU candidate state) triggered a government reshuffle there. This is the kind of under-the-radar change that is likely to have substantial long-term repercussions for the transatlantic relationship. On the one hand, as I noted last year, this is likely to mean a more stormy relationship between the EU and US over the medium term. Just as the US Congress passes laws and makes demands that constrain the ability of the executive to make international deals, so too the European Parliament is likely to make it more difficult for the EU as a whole to reach accommodations with the US. This is especially likely in the touchy issue area where human rights and security concerns intersect. When I talk to people in the Parliament about transatlantic cooperation in security and intelligence sharing, the Maher Arar case and the practice of extraordinary renditions come up again and again. On the other, the Parliament may provide the US with a new ally in areas such as the China arms embargo, where Parliament’s concerns about human rights and US foreign policy interests point in the same direction.

“Tom B,” commenting at Making Light, points us to the Automatic Computer Science Paper Generator, which uses context-free grammar to generate papers, complete with graphs, figures and citations, which can then be submitted to conferences with low or no standards for the papers they accept. Its creators (MIT pranksters) have already succeeded in getting accepted by one conference – if they can raise the money, they intend, Yes Men style, to go there and deliver the paper with straight faces. It seems to me that pranks of this sort (the Atlanta Nights affair also qualifies) have the logic of a reverse Turing test – any conference (or publishing house, or journal, or whatever) which is stupid or unprincipled enough to accept this sort of nonsense is revealing itself to be a fake.

A reminder to CT readers in the DC area: Chris Mooney is giving a talk today at 5pm (Room 602, the Elliott School for International Affairs, 1957 E St, Washington DC) on “Abuses of Science in Politics and Journalism.” – RSVP at cistp@gwu.edu. The talk will preview some of the themes of his forthcoming book, The Republican War on Science, which you can pre-order at Amazon. Blurb for the talk below.

When 48 Nobel Laureates denounce the current administration for abusing and distorting scientific information, we can safely say that the once strong relationship between the scientific community and our political leaders has all but disintegrated. What are the causes of the current crisis? In “Abuses of Science in Politics and Journalism,” science writer Chris Mooney takes on both the politicians who have distorted scientific information, and the media gatekeepers who have too often let them get away with it. On issues ranging from global climate change to the new pseudo-debate over the theory of evolution versus “intelligent design,” he will explain who’s undermining science–and why their strategies are succeeding.

“Lee Scoresby” on blogs:

A recent hypertext trail of posts and comments, which I followed from Obsidian Wings to Jane Galt, sparked some thoughts I’ve been entertaining about another paradigm that might be useful for thinking about at least some of what goes down on weblogs. In brief, the idea is that one things good weblog discussions and postings do is to recreate the important experience of late-night collegiate bullshit sessions.

Discuss, with reference to the larger claims advanced in the original post.

He still believes in progressive taxation; the New Deal; … and, in general, firm and constant opposition to the very frequent efforts of the rich and their agents to grind the faces of the poor. It’s just that he now cordially despises most of the people who proclaim or advocate these things.

…

Since 9/11, reflectiveness and skepticism have gone on holiday from his political writing. Logic and good manners have also frequently called in sick. “Embattled” is too mild a description of his state of mind; it’s been inflamed. Those who returned different answers than he did to the questions “Why did 9/11 happen?” and “What should we do about it?” were not to be taken seriously. They were Osama’s useful idiots, “soft on crime and soft on fascism,” their thinking “utterly rotten to its very core.”

…

On and on Hitchens’s polemics against the left have raged, a tempest of inaccuracy, illogic, and malice.

George Scialabba writes Christopher Hitchens’ political obituary for N+1 magazine.

An interesting counterblast to The Valve, which our co-blogger John Holbo helped set up, from Cultural Revolution.

Anyway, what’s kind of interesting about this new site is that it seems to be sponsored by the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, which was devised as a kind of anti-MLA devoted to ridding lit departments of their classracegenderism and deconstructive tendencies. The mottos and manifestos on the website demonstrate the same Frank Luntz-ish spin that you’d find on the sites of, say, the such organizations as the Independent Women’s Forum…

Cultural Revolution then goes on to attack the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics for using such retrograde notions as “imagination,” “shared literary culture,” “serious,” and “classicists and modernists” in its statement of purpose, and to note how it received its initial start-up money from the conservative Bradley Foundation. So far, so pedestrian. What’s interesting about the post is not what it says, but what it assumes: that an interest in literature for literature’s sake is innately conservative. And, by extension, the question it doesn’t ask: why is it that an organization which is interested in studying literature and imagination is perceived as a conservative bulwark, and has no choice but to go to conservatives for funding and support?

[click to continue…]

Juan Cole makes a claim that I find hard to buy.

Personally, I think that the master narrative of Zionist historiography is dominant in the American academy. Mostly this sort of thing is taught by International Relations specialists in political science departments, and a lot of them are Zionists, whether Christian or Jewish. Usually the narrative blames the Palestinians for their having been kicked off their own land, and then blames them again for not going quietly. It is not a balanced point of view, and if we take the NYT seriously (which we could stop doing after they let Judith Miller channel Ahmad Chalabi on the front page every day before the war), then the IR professors should be made to teach a module on the Palestinian point of view, as well. That is seldom done.

This doesn’t at all gel with my experience of how international relations is taught or practiced, which is that IR courses which cover Middle East politics usually provide readings that cover both sides of the argument. I did a quick Google search on “international relations”+syllabus+Israel to see whether my impression bore out for the first twenty or so course syllabi that I could locate. While I came across one site where the readings tended heavily towards the Bernard Lewis school of analysis, it was the exception – and there was another course where the readings seemed to me to lean equally heavily towards the Palestinian side. The vast majority, covered both arguments, or covered the question from a perspective such as peace and conflict studies, where the emphasis is on solving the conflict rather than addressing the underlying merits of either sides’ claims.

You probably could make a case that IR has an implicit bias towards the Israel side of the argument: Israel is a state, and a discipline which claims that states are the key actors in international politics will tend implicitly or explicitly to discount the rights of peoples without states. But this is hardly evidence of Zionist bias – rather of a pre-existing theoretical set of suppositions about what counts or doesn’t count in international politics. Furthermore, many pro-state realists are quite critical of US support of Israel, on the grounds that this is not in the best interests of the US – for example, Stephen Walt. You could also certainly argue that the IR types who are most visible in US public debates are pro-Israel – but this says more about the public debate than about international relations. The IR scholars who expound in op-ed pages are not by any means necessarily the IR scholars who get taught in the classroom. I suspect that Cole’s claims reflect his lack of experience with IR as it is actually practiced in the academy. Certainly he needs to provide some evidence if he wants to make the rather strong claims that he is making stick. Otherwise, he’s doing what the people who he’s (in my opinion correctly) criticizing are doing – condemning an entire discipline wholesale on the basis of a rather shaky set of claims as to what the people in that discipline are “really” doing in the classroom.

NB – as usual with posts that touch on Middle East politics, I’m going to ruthlessly delete any comments that wander off into the general questions of who’s right or wrong in the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Update: I hadn’t seen that Dan Drezner had already commented on Cole’s post; unsurprisingly, his reaction was rather similar to mine.

Update 2: Jeff Weintraub has been good enough to share part of an email that he’s sent to Cole on the topic – excerpt below:

Furthermore (and here I’m in accord with Dan Drezner, which is not always the case), when it comes to your concrete characterization of the hegemonic perspective on Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict within political science, and particularly within IR, then I have to confess that I found that quite implausible, indeed mystifying. My degree happens to be in sociology, but I have spent a fair amount of my academic career in political science departments or interdisciplinary programs, a number of my courses have always been cross-listed in political science, and I read a lot of political science work on this and other subjects. (I agree with you that there are a vast number of political scientists, like hordes of locusts. And a sometimes annoying characteristic of social scientists generally, including political scientists as well as sociologists, is that they often feel qualified to write and pronounce about subjects they don’t know much about. Many historians, for their part, have the problem that they can’t follow an argument, but to be a historian you have to know SOMETHING, however narrow. But I digress….) Your claim is that this hegemonic perspective involves an uncritical acceptance of the Zionist historical “master narrative”–by which you appear to mean, not just excessive sympathy for Israel, for Israeli policies, or for historical interpretations that favor the Zionist project, but an acceptance of the whole underlying mythic structure of Zionism as a form of “nineteenth-century romantic nationalism.”

Maybe you know a different breed of political scientists than I do, but as an empirical claim, this strikes me as factually incorrect, indeed a bit strange. This is especially true with respect to IR specialists (a breed for which my own enthusiasm is not unbounded). Let’s leave Zionism aside for a moment. The idea that the professional ideology of IR scholars involves the uncritical acceptance of the “master narrative” (and historical myths) of ANY form of ethnic nationalism, “romantic” or otherwise, runs entirely counter to everything I know about the field. On the basis of my own reading and experience, I would say that IR people in North America, overall, are not particularly inclined to sympathize with ethnic nationalism. And, if anything, they tend to be a lot more ontologically uncritical about states (or about allegedly “rational” individuals) than about “nations.”

So I would have to reiterate that in my (possibly fallible) opinion, this specific claim you made is just factually incorrect, and indeed not even plausible.

A public service announcement: Chris Mooney will be giving a public talk for the Center for International Science and Technology Policy of GWU (my employer), Wednesday April 13 at 5pm (Room 602, the Elliott School for International Affairs, 1957 E St, Washington DC). The talk is on “Abuses of Science in Politics and Journalism.” Chris has blogged and written extensively on this topic, and has a book coming out in a couple of months. The event is open to the public – RSVP at cistp@gwu.edu.

Lots of interesting argument about the relationship between religion and the left in the current issue of the Boston Review. I was particularly struck by Lew Daly’s densely argued and provocative article on how Bush’s “faith based initiative” borrows its vision of society from European Christian Democracy, but dumps the Christian and the democratic bits.

There was a bit of an argument that was provoked by my recent post about Republican intentions and labour reform; Sebastian Holsclaw, among other commenters, suggested that not only could Republicans be trusted to undertake reform and increase accountability in the labour movement, they were the only political party that could be so trusted. Democrats were too close to the unions to want to change them. By sheer coincidence, I was reading Rick Perlstein’s Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus over the last couple of days, and came across the following bit (p.37), in which Goldwater compares idealistic and incorruptible union leader Walter Reuther to James Hoffa senior (who was incidentally a Goldwater fan):

“Do you mean to tell me,” asked an amazed committee accountant after wading through the ascetic leader’s expense accounts,”that Walter Reuther pays for his own dry cleaning when he stays in a hotel?” Goldwater was not deterred. “I would rather have Hoffa stealing my money, ” he declared, “than Reuther stealing my freedom.”

Now on the one hand, Goldwater was one individual, and he’s dead. But on the other, he was perhaps the single most important influence on modern Republicanism. As Perlstein documents, Goldwater’s particular brand of don’t-touch-me conservatism came to dominate the Republican movement. His ordering of preferences is, I’d submit, very strong evidence that one strain (arguably the dominant strain) of modern Republicanism shouldn’t be trusted anywhere near the question of trade union reform. It’s not interested in reforms to improve transparency so much as gutting the labour movement. Charismatic, personally honest leaders are a much bigger threat to these people than corrupt union bosses like Hoffa.

(I should also say that “Before the Storm” is a cracking read; anyone who’s interested in the forces driving current American politics should read it).

Two interesting stories in the Chronicle. First, another state legislature bill that sought (in its original form) to control how academics teach in the classroom; this time addressing their English language abilities.

Late in January, Ms. Grande proposed a bill in the North Dakota legislature to prod public institutions of higher education in precisely that direction. Under her bill, if a student complained in writing that his or her instructor did not “speak English clearly and with good pronunciation,” that student would then be entitled to withdraw from the class with no academic or financial penalty — and would even get a refund. Further, if 10 percent of the students in a class came forward with such complaints, the university would be obliged to move the instructor into a “nonteaching position,” thus losing that instructor’s classroom labor.

As a differently-accented professor myself, I don’t feel in a position to make substantial comments. The article does seem to cover both sides of the argument fairly. It notes research suggesting that students in sections taught by foreign born T.A.s do worse than students in sections taught by native Americans. Equally, however, there’s evidence suggesting that this is in part the result of bad training (many schools don’t offer proper training to incoming T.A.s from different countries), as well as expectations (experiments suggest that students ‘expect’ foreign-appearing lecturers to have worse English, and have difficulty in understanding them even when they are perfectly fluent).

The Chronicle also has a follow-up story (sub-required) on the fallout from its plagiarism investigation of last year. Two plagiarists lost their jobs; one had (unspecified) disciplinary action taken against him by his university, another had no action taken against him, after an internal university investigation, which determined that the evidence supported a charge of plagiarism, but that the issue had arisen during a previous collaborative relationship.

Diana Rhoten writes in Inside Higher Ed about the brain drain from academia.

With the rise of the knowledge economy and the spread of decentralizing technology, the academy is ceding authority and attention to businesses, nonprofits, foundations, media outlets, and Internet communities. Even more significant, in my mind, the academy may be losing something else: its hold over many of its most promising young academics, who appear more and more willing to take their services elsewhere — and who may comprise an embryonic cohort of new “postacademic intellectuals” in the making.

Rhoten argues that these can’t serve as substitutes for traditional public intellectuals, but they share some of the same motivations:

On many levels, the new generation I’m describing shares little with Trilling, Wilson, and other old-school public intellectuals. Yet by choosing to leave the academy, they demonstrate at least one thing in common: They need, want, perhaps even crave a larger public.

Rhoten identifies blogging as one of the possible paths that intellectuals can take out of the academy; I’m not sure that she’s right. More precisely, blogging offers academics a means of connecting with that wider public without having to leave the academy. My personal motivation for taking up blogging was to get into arguments about all of the things that I can’t really write about as a political scientist – science fiction, modern literature, curious historical facts – and to express strong and non-scientific opinions on politics. I used to joke that I wanted to be Susan Sontag when I grew up; someone who wrote fiercely argued and dense essays for the New York Review of Books. Blogging isn’t that, but it does give license to write in a freewheeling way, to speculate, to polemicize and to give a bit of free rein to your hobby-horses. All of which is to say that blogging isn’t ever going to be a substitute for academia, but it is a valuable ancillary activity. It allows you to write pieces that may or may not connect to your scholarship, but that never could see the light of day in an academic journal. At the same time, this can feed back in valuable and unexpected ways into your academic work. I suspect that over the longer term blogging will become increasingly attractive to scholars who want to connect with that wider audience, but who don’t want to give up their scholarship. You can become a low-rent public intellectual, without having to give up your day job. I don’t know if there are any people who’ve been lured away from academics by blogging, but I do see quite a number of academics who use blogging as a means of blowing off steam, and of writing about things that they couldn’t otherwise write about. Not substitute, complement.

A shoe that I (and others) have been waiting to drop since November. The FT reports (sub required) that the US administration is planning to “toughen its regulation of organised labour, in what critics see as the latest in a series of pro-business policies sweeping Washington.” It’s invoking powers that haven’t been used in decades to force unions to file detailed financial statements and increase “accountability and transparency.” This isn’t an effort to further the interests of union members; it’s the beginning of a quite deliberate attempt to cripple unions as political actors. As the FT reports:

Privately, one senior figure in the administration said it was concerned about the power of unions, arguing that some campaigns against big business were not always in the interests of members. There is also concern about moves to scrap secret ballots for some union votes, which the administration fears would further entrench the power of union leaders.

Needless to say, no similar efforts are contemplated to check the ability of the leadership of the American Chamber of Commerce to engage in partisan attacks on Democrats without extensive processes of consultation. This is, simply put, a battle that the left can’t afford to lose. Trade unions are one of the most vital constituencies of the Democratic party. These purported reforms have the sole purpose and intent of making it more difficult for trade unions to take political positions that don’t reflect the most narrow possible definition of the interests of their members. If blogs can organize a boycott against Sinclair Communications, and can play an important role in pushing back against efforts to destroy Social Security, then they can certainly do something to help fight against this. It’s an important battle; perhaps, in the long run, the most important battle of the next two years.

Noted in passing. Russell Jacoby, Marxist cultural critic and bane of the lit-studies left, claims on his faculty webpage to be a member of the “American Pessimist Society.” Where do you sign up?