Henry

As a follow-up to my “last post”:https://crookedtimber.org/2012/02/03/jennifer-dibbern-and-michigan-student-unionization/, and the comments thread thereon, I thought it would be useful to provide a kind of summary of the various arguments that otherwise-leftwing-academics come up to in order to argue against graduate student unionization. Obviously, the hostility of right wing academics to unionization is easier to explain.
[click to continue…]

Via a Crooked Timber reader, this “story”:http://www.clickondetroit.com/news/University-of-Michigan-grad-student-says-she-lost-her-job-over-union-effort/-/1719418/8285074/-/a35xofz/-/index.html about a grad student organization effort in Michigan, and a possible retaliation against a student, Jennifer Dibbern, who has lost her position as a researcher at the university. The university provost’s account, claiming that Dibbern was let go because of ‘poor reviews’ is “here”:http://ww.annarbor.com/news/u-m-provost-grsa-firing-was-justified/. The union’s response is “here”:http://www.umgeo.org/2012/01/20/response-to-administrators-claims-about-fired-gsra/, with a further “timeline”:http://www.umgeo.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Timeline.pdf (which I found more persuasive than the union’s response, albeit hard to follow in places), and details of “Dibbern’s awards here”:http://www.umgeo.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Awards2.pdf (including her college’s Outstanding Graduate Instructor award from a few months before the firing). To be clear: I have only heard one side of this story – while Dibbern has been quite specific in her claims, the university has only made very generic noises about the reasons why it believes that Dibbern was fired, and why this was justifiable. But there is enough there to be worrying to me.

I’ve seen what I understand to be the email in which Dibbern’s supervisor (who, by Dibbern’s account, was vehemently opposed to the organization effort) first states concerns about Dibbern’s lack of focus, a few weeks before she is summarily kicked out. The email, after laying out a number of general complaints (that Dibbern seems unfocused; that she had not emailed a colleague about doing some work on Sunday, although she had gone ahead and done the work) goes on to say:

bq. I realize you have many other things going on but an increased [sic] in your focus on research is urgently needed. This will probably require you to decrease your involvement in non-research related activities.

Dibbern states in her timeline that in a person-to-person meeting a couple of days later:

bq. Goldman repeatedly instructed Ms. Dibbern to stop all outside activity, this time in person. When Ms. Dibbern asked for clarification, Goldman stated, “you know what I mean.”

On the face of it, this seems problematic. If a student RA under my supervision was deeply involved in some political or social cause that I vehemently disagreed with, say, campaigning for the mass deportation of immigrants, I don’t think it would be at all appropriate for me to suggest that they stop doing this, _especially_ in the context of an email suggesting they were falling down on the job and needed to start pulling their weight or else. Obviously, my students’ political opinions and activities should be their own business, and I think it would be entirely reasonable for the student to interpret my suggestion as a threat. If I felt that they weren’t doing their job properly, I’d say so – but I wouldn’t for a moment connect this criticism to their extraneous political activities (how they manage their time to carry out their various responsibilities is entirely up to them).

Under the most generous reading that I can come up with, communications along the lines described are wide-open to misinterpretation. And the generous reading is certainly not the only possible reading. It is quite possible that there is another side, or other sides to this story (supervisor-supervisee relationships can be complicated, and battles like this often have a Rashomon quality to them). Still, at the very least, there is enough of a question here that a blow-off ‘move on: nothing to see here’ press statement from a university official is very definitely unsatisfactory.

A few years ago, I wrote a post explaining that I was no longer going to referee for, or publish in journals published by Elsevier (and that I was likely only to cite Elsevier published articles with an explicit health warning). This was relatively cheap for me, as I work in a field where Elsevier has little presence (I’ve only had one occasion to turn down refereeing in the intervening period), but I did suggest that other readers might do the same. Now, “Tim Gowers”:http://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/elsevier-my-part-in-its-downfall/ has independently had the same idea. Unsurprisingly, famous mathematicians are rather better able to rally support than political scientists of middling repute. So far, nearly 400 academics have publicly committed not to cooperate with Elsevier (I suspect this is an undercount, as they are verifying the credentials of signatories before posting their names). I warmly recommend that CT readers, especially readers in the hard sciences sign up. This is a plausibly effective form of collective action, since these journals, published by a notably rapacious and demonstrably dishonest commercial enterprise, rely on a lot of volunteer work to keep going. If academics stop working for Elsevier journals for free, either because they sign up to these commitments, or because they get the broad feeling that Elsevier is bad news, then the company’s business model collapses.

Via “Michael Nielsen”:http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/.

John Sides “posts some results”:http://themonkeycage.org/blog/2012/01/13/does-mitt-romney-have-a-wealth-problem/ suggesting that while voters mostly understand that Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are rich, they are more likely to think that Mitt Romney doesn’t care about their interests because he is rich, than Barack Obama.

bq. The better one thinks “personally wealthy” describes Romney, the better one thinks that “cares about the wealthy” describes him (the correlation is 0.60). But the same correlation for Obama is much smaller (0.18). People’s perception that Obama is personally wealth[y] does not translate as strongly into the perception that he cares about the wealthy. Moreover, people who perceive that Obama cares about the wealthy are actually a bit MORE likely to perceive that he cares about “people like me,” the poor, and the middle class. The correlations are not always large, but they are positive—e.g., the correlation between believing Obama cares about the wealthy and cares about “people like me” is 0.19.

This obviously has implications for the kind of ‘how the 2012 US presidential elections are likely to play out’ questions that we usually don’t have much to say about here at CT (our partial reticence doing its little bit to cancel out the volubility on this topic in the rest of the political blogosphere). But there is a more interesting general point – _should_ people think that the Democrats are more likely than the Republicans to be biased in favor of the rich.

Interestingly, this survey suggests that public opinion sort-of accords with what evidence we have. Larry Bartels has carried out research on the US Senate (which for a variety of reasons makes it easier to do useful comparisons than e.g. with presidents). And his findings suggest the following. First – if you look at a set of politically salient issues, senators from both parties are totally unresponsive to the opinions of constituents in the bottom third of the income distribution. Second, that Republicans don’t care about the views of voters in the middle of the income distribution either, while Democrats do care significantly. Third, that Republicans care almost three times as much as Democrats about the views of those in the top third of the distribution. Overall, senators tend to be much more responsive to the opinions of better off people than of middle income people, and don’t care at all about the bottom third. These measures are of course somewhat crude – if one had better data, one could subdivide the population further (top 10%, top 1%), and perhaps find an even more striking relationship.

Doesn’t it though? It looks horrible. The interface is badly designed. Keyboard short cuts do unexpected things like e.g. make your email disappear irrevocably. And while you can temporarily revert back to the old look, they make it clear that they are going to impose the new one on everyone soon, like it or not. Finally, if you do revert to the old style, a ‘switch to the new look’ pop-up keeps on coming up on the lower right hand of the screen, persistently nudging you to accept your destiny like a demented jack-in-the-box from a Thaler/Sunstein scripted horror movie.

It used to be that Google claimed that their motto was ‘don’t be evil.’ Now it appears to be ‘I’m sorry, but we have to be evil to compete with Facebook.’ It was bad enough when they got rid of the social features from Google Reader (which worked _very nicely_ to allow you to see what other people with interesting tastes were looking at), because they wanted to force everyone over to Google Plus. And don’t get me started on the new social search stuff. But crippling Gmail is going too far.

I invite readers who (a) have similar sentiments, and (b) have their own blogs to write posts with the word “gmail” hyperlinked to this post, in order to see whether we can get a bit of a googlebomb going. If nothing else, it would be an interesting experiment in algorithmic politics. Google claim that they can do nothing to help Santorum wipe himself clean of Santorum. But would they tweak their algorithm if their own product were the target? It would be interesting to see.

“This column”:http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-11/europe-learns-from-u-s-so-why-not-vice-versa-commentary-by-clive-crook.html by Clive Crook today:

bq. Democrats therefore find themselves having to deny the obvious. Obama wants to make the country more like Europe? Ridiculous. A straw man. But it isn’t ridiculous. What’s ridiculous is the idea that Republicans take for granted and squirming Democrats tacitly endorse — that making the U.S. more like Europe would be a disaster. … The biggest step the U.S. needed to take in Europe’s direction, and the longest overdue, was health-care reform. The Affordable Care Act is a start. … Obviously, political cultures differ in deep ways, so there will never be One True Capitalism, right for everybody. … Still, Europe’s biggest economies all reflect a social- democratic tradition that puts more emphasis on collective provision and the guiding hand of government than seems natural in the U.S. The American political tradition stresses the rights and responsibilities of individuals; it exalts private enterprise and almost celebrates risk. These are choices that countries should be free to make.

bq. … Europe’s politicians looked at the U.S. and decided they needed, among other things, more American incentives and more American creative destruction. … They said so explicitly: Unlike their U.S. counterparts, they weren’t embarrassed to point to the other model. … On the other hand, Europe can teach the U.S. a thing or two about social insurance — and not just in health care, the most egregious failure of the American economic model. Help for the unemployed has traditionally been ungenerous in the U.S. … Republicans might also ask whether America is living up to the merit-society ideal. … In America, land of opportunity, if you are born poor, your chances of staying poor are higher than in Europe. The trade-off between economic vitality and economic security cannot be eliminated. But its terms can be improved in the U.S. and Europe, if each pays closer attention to the other.

presents a “striking contrast with this one”:https://crookedtimber.org/2009/03/11/let-us-rally-to-protect-the-delicate-flower-of-rugged-individualism/ from three years ago.

bq. Where has France gone too far, in the view of an American liberal? … Presumably, liberals approve of the universal health care, the generous and extensive welfare state, the comprehensive worker protections, the stricter regulation, the vastly more-generous subsidies for higher education, the stronger unions, the higher taxes, and especially the higher taxes on the rich. … Perhaps some liberals privately long to make the United States over in the image of France, but the great majority, I imagine, are more interested in taking the things they regard as best in the European economic model—all the things I just listed—and combining those “socially enlightened” policies with the traditional economic virtues of the United States. Take French social policies and welfare-state institutions and add them to the American work ethic, spirit of self-reliance, and appetite for change. Et voila, the best of both worlds. Color me skeptical. Culture shapes institutions and vice versa. Culture—that bundle of traits of self-reliance, self-determination, innovation, and striving for success—underpins the American exception. … In ordinary times, this culture makes it hard for a government to push the United States in a European direction … it would be an error to assume that the policy transformation that some liberals long for—and which Obama, if his budget is any guide, appears to be aiming for—would leave America’s unusual cultural traits unaffected. … the American exception is alive and well, and that it is more than likely the secret of this country’s awesome success. … I would need to think long and hard before casting it for “transformation.” Repairs here and improvements there, of course, but transformation? It would be a shame to see America revert to the Western European norm.

NB that I am noting, not criticizing, this apparent change of heart. People have different attitudes to returning prodigals. Except in the case of continued rank hypocrisy, I’m by and large in favor of killing the fatted calf (or at the least, keeping it nicely plump in the hopeful anticipation that the change will stick).

The Financial Times carries his obituary here. He’s most famous for his St. Trinian’s illustrations, but I suspect that many CTers (and almost certainly Harry) will miss him more for his illustrations of Molesworth. I had just purchased a copy of the Compleet Molesworth last week, having lost my last one, and figuring that the six year old will soon be able to enjoy it. I was especially fond of his work on Maurice Richardson’s The Exploits of Engelbrecht, which Savoy books has finally reissued again in a more affordable edition (copies of the last were going for $150 and up on the WWW until recently). The first chapter (PDF), with a couple of Searle’s illustrations, is available online, and an illustration from ‘Ten Rounds With Grandfather Clock’ is below.

Since John wrote his post below, Mark Lilla has come out with a “lengthy attempted rebuttal”:http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/jan/12/republicans-revolution/?pagination=false of Corey Robin’s argument. Even as New York Review of Books articles by creaky centrist-liberals go, it’s a terrible essay – see further “Alex Gourevitch”:http://jacobinmag.com/blog/2012/01/wrong-reaction/. Even as _Mark Lilla essays on the American right_ (a category that includes a plenitude of incompetent arguments) go, it’s awful. Two things that I think are worth adding to Alex’s takedown.
[click to continue…]

Two months ago, I wrote a post which argued, among other things, that the European Union used to be run according to the ‘Community Method’ (according to which member states often used to defer to each other on matters of vital interest, and the Commission had an important role), had moved to the so-called ‘Union Method’ (under which member states were supposed to do stuff on their own, in practice being led by France and Germany), and was now transitioning towards the `ECB Method’ (under which the European Central Bank determined politics). I suggested that this was going to be untenable, and hoped that we might see a push instead towards greater democracy. Well, we didn’t get one. Instead, what we’re getting is the ECB method on steroids. By supporting bank borrowing rather than sovereign state borrowing, the ECB has managed to prop up the system without openly changing its mandate. But by doing this under the table, and without very much in the way of an officially stated long term policy, it has retained and indeed arguably dramatically expanded its political clout.

I don’t have sufficient expertise to make strong claims about whether this will be a sustainable way of propping up bond markets for any significant period of time. What I am convinced of is that it will be a political disaster. As Cosma Shalizi and I argued (Cosma puts it “much better”:http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/838.html than I did) about libertarian paternalism, the problem is that it “break[s] the feedback mechanisms which (1) keep policy-makers accountable to those over whom they exercise power, and (2) allow[s] policy-makers to tell whether what they are doing is working, and revise their initial policies and plans in light of experience.” This dynamic can be extended to explain why the European Central Bank is making a complete hash of the European economy. I’ve spoken to people at the European Central Bank – they are very smart, and very sincerely believe that the best path to long term prosperity is through enforced austerity. They are also – by design – nearly completely insulated from democratic pressure. And despite claiming that they are apolitical, they are in fact playing a profoundly political role, dictating the kinds of domestic institutional reforms that states need to implement if they want to continue getting ECB support.

This means that ECB decision makers are under no very great obligation to think about why they might be wrong, up to the point where complete disaster occurs. And disaster is very likely, if the lessons of the gold standard in pre-World War II Europe tell us anything at all. Enforced austerity does not produce economic growth. What it does produce is political instability.

This is why we should be deeply skeptical of claims for technocracy as a way of making political decisions. Technocracy is supposed to work better because it is insulated from political pressure. But exactly because of that, it is liable to go off the rails when left to its own devices. Expertise is a very good thing – when it is leavened by democratic accountability. When it is not, it is likely to be responsive instead to its own internal discourses and understanding of the world, which can lead it in some very problematic directions. It isn’t just that the eurozone is an experiment in the economic virtues of imposed austerity (as a means of creating confidence and hence a by-its-own-bootstraps cycle of virtuous growth). It’s that the experiment is already visibly failing. And it’s that despite this visible failure, there is little chance of any reversal of direction, because those who have the power to set the course have no obligation to listen to anyone else, and hence aren’t listening.

“Science”:http://www.sciencemag.org/content/334/6061/1344.full has an article behind its paywall (but available in “liberated form here”:http://world.edu/?worldedu_posts=saudi-universities-offer-cash-exchange-academic-prestige) that likely merits discussion.

bq. At first glance, Robert Kirshner took the e-mail message for a scam. An astronomer at King Abdulaziz University (KAU) in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, was offering him a contract for an adjunct professorship that would pay $72,000 a year. Kirshner, an astrophysicist at Harvard University, would be expected to supervise a research group at KAU and spend a week or two a year on KAU’s campus, but that requirement was flexible, the person making the offer wrote in the e-mail. What Kirshner would be required to do, however, was add King Abdulaziz University as a second affiliation to his name on the Institute for Scientific Information’s (ISI’s) list of highly cited researchers. …

bq. “I thought it was a joke,” says Kirshner, who forwarded the e-mail to his department chair, noting in jest that the money was a lot more attractive than the 2% annual raise professors typically get. Then he discovered that a highly cited colleague at another U.S. institution had accepted KAU’s offer, adding KAU as a second affiliation on ISIhighlycited.com.

bq. Kirshner’s colleague is not alone. I have learned of more than 60 top-ranked researchers from different scientific disciplines—all on ISI’s highly cited list—who have recently signed a part-time employment arrangement with the university that is structured along the lines of what Kirshner was offered. Meanwhile, a bigger, more prominent Saudi institution—King Saud University in Riyadh—has climbed several hundred places in international rankings in the past 4 years largely through initiatives specifically targeted toward attaching KSU’s name to research publications, regardless of whether the work involved any meaningful collaboration with KSU researchers.

bq. … Academics who have accepted KAU’s offer represent a wide variety of faculty from elite institutions in the United States, Canada, Europe, Asia, and Australia. All are men. Some are emeritus professors who have recently retired from their home institutions. All have changed their affiliation on ISI’s highly cited list—as required by KAU’s contract—and some have added KAU as an affiliation on research papers. Other requirements in the contract include devoting “the whole of your time, attention, skill and abilities to the performance of your duties” and doing “work equivalent to a total of 4 months per contract period.”

Understandably, the “regular faculty at the affected university”:http://www.alarabiya.net/articles/2011/12/18/183235.html are quite upset. I wonder how many researchers turned this offer down? (I’d hope that most did, but I’d be unsurprised to be disappointed)

Via “David Moles”:http://chrononaut.org/2011/12/01/but-the-sabres-of-jeb-stuarts-cavalry-and-the-bayonets-of-picketts-division-had-on-the-slopes-of-gettysburg-embodied-him-forever-in-a-revivified-tory-party/, Winston Churchill’s Grasshopper-Lies-Heavyesque exercise in the genre of alternative history within an alternative history deserves a wider readership. I give you the counter-counter-historical bit of “If Lee had not won the battle of Gettysburg.”

bq. If Lee after his triumphal entry into Washington had merely been the soldier, his achievements would have ended on the battlefield. It was his august declaration that the victorious Confederacy would pursue no policy toward the African negroes which was not in harmony with the moral conceptions of western Europe that opened the highroads along which we are now marching so prosperously

bq. But even this famous gesture might have failed if it had not been caught up and implemented by the practical genius and trained parliamentary aptitudes of Gladstone. There is practically no doubt at this stage that the basic principle upon which the color question in the Southern States of America has been so happily settled owed its origin mainly to Gladstonian ingenuity and to the long statecraft of Britain in dealing with alien and more primitive populations. There was not only the need to declare the new fundamental relationship between master and servant, but the creation for the liberated slaves of institutions suited to their own cultural development and capable of affording them a different yet honorable status in a commonwealth, destined eventually to become almost world wide.

bq. Let us only think what would have happened supposing the liberation of the slaves had been followed by some idiotic assertion of racial equality, and even by attempts to graft white democratic institutions upon the simple, docile, gifted African race belonging to a much earlier chapter in human history. We might have seen the whole of the Southern States invaded by gangs of carpetbagging politicians exploiting the ignorant and untutored colored vote against the white inhabitants and bringing the time-honored forms of parliamentary government into unmerited disrepute. We might have seen the sorry force of black legislators attempting to govern their former masters. Upon the rebound from this there must inevitably have been a strong reassertion of local white supremacy. By one device or another the franchises accorded to the negroes would have been taken from them. The constitutional principles of the Republic would have been proclaimed, only to be evaded or subverted; and many a warm-hearted philanthropist would have found his sojourn in the South no better than “A Fool’s Errand.”

Since the JSTOR version is apparently a straight reprint of Churchill’s original 1930 essay, I’m presuming it’s not in copyright any more, and have put it up here taken it down as I understand from comments that it is still in copyright.

A couple of commenters have requested less post-mortem commentary on Christopher Hitchens and more on Vaclav Havel. Don’t know what to say about Vaclav Havel beyond that he was mostly pretty great (ill-considered support for the Iraq war: obviously not so great), but if people want to talk about him, here’s your thread. But also – “Russell Hoban”:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/8957087/Russell-Hoban-dedicated-to-strangeness.html. His death won’t nearly get as much attention as Hitchens’. Still, I’d bet good money that _Riddley Walker_ and _The Mouse and His Child_ will still be read when Hitchens is a Cyril Connolly-esque footnote in cultural histories of the late twentieth century.

“Ross Douthat”:http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/18/opinion/sunday/douthat-the-believers-atheist.html

bq. Intellectually minded Christians, in particular, had a habit of talking about Hitchens as though he were one of them already — a convert in the making, whose furious broadsides against God were just the prelude to an inevitable reconciliation. (Or as a fellow Catholic once murmured to me: “He just protests a bit too much, don’t you think?”) … where Hitchens was concerned, no insult he hurled or blasphemy he uttered could shake the almost-filial connection that many Christians felt for him. … Recognizing this affinity, many Christian readers felt that in Hitchens’s case there had somehow been a terrible mix-up, and that a writer who loved the King James Bible and “Brideshead Revisited” surely belonged with them, rather than with the bloodless prophets of a world lit only by Science. In this they were mistaken, but not entirely so. At the very least, Hitchens’s antireligious writings carried a whiff of something absent in many of atheism’s less talented apostles — a hint that he was not so much a disbeliever as a rebel, and that his atheism was mostly a political romantic’s attempt to pick a fight with the biggest Tyrant he could find. … When stripped of Marxist fairy tales and techno-utopian happy talk, rigorous atheism casts a wasting shadow over every human hope and endeavor, and leads ineluctably to the terrible conclusion of Philip Larkin’s poem “Aubade” — that “death is no different whined at than withstood.” Officially, Hitchens’s creed was one with Larkin’s. But everything else about his life suggests that he intuited that his fellow Englishman was completely wrong to give in to despair. My hope — for Hitchens, and for all of us, the living and the dead — is that now he finally knows why.

“John Sladek”:http://www.ansible.co.uk/writing/ft143.html

bq. “Houdini’s ghost was not even then allowed to rest. In the same year it was summoned by another medium to Conan Doyle’s home, where, after complaining of the darkness, it said:

‘It seems cruel that a man in my position should have thrown dust in the eyes of people as I did. Since my passing, I have gone to many, many places (mediums) but the door is closed to me. …. When I try to tell people of the real truth, they say I am not the one I claimed to be, because when I was on earth I did not talk that way. I ask you here to send me good thoughts to open the door, not to the spirit world – that cannot be yet – but to give me strength ad power to undo what I denied. …’

bq. Thus, the man who devoted his life to the cause of spiritualism, by trying to rid it of frauds who feed on grieving hearts, was made to mouth this childish, demented apology.’

Myself, I find Harry Houdini a _far_ more attractive figure than was Christopher Hitchens. And I don’t imagine that Douthat is being deliberately dishonest here – indeed, I suspect he thinks that he’s paying Hitchens a compliment. But the rest of the analogy carries.

Once upon a time, when I was in graduate school with some free time on my hands, I ended up co-writing a paper with my friend Barb Serfozo on the dubious sexual origins of the American right’s depiction of women as feminazis. One passage that I found, from Newt Gingrich and William Forstchen’s co-authored novel, _1945_ has stayed with me. The hero of the book, evocatively named “James Mannheim Martel,” is “watching a Nazi parade”:http://www.baen.com/chapters/1945chp1.htm.

bq. Again, Martel became uneasily aware of how his own blood was set racing by the sense of power and glory that drenched the entire artificial drama. It was like being aroused by a woman one despised. No matter the revulsion, despite the inner certainty that never would one yield; beneath all moral rectitude there lurked a dark, compelling attraction.

Lurid misogyny, and a political fantasy and sexual fantasy that are so intertwined with each other as to be indistinguishable, all wrapped up in one enticing bundle!

At one point, Gingrich was supposed to be writing a novel with his friend, noted “authority on the political attractions of Fascism”:http://www.jerrypournelle.com/debates/history.html, Jerry Pournelle. I don’t know what happened to it, but I imagine it would have made quite interesting reading (Inferno, Pournelle’s ‘Benito Mussolini redeems himself in an updated version of Dante’s hell’ schlock-epic with Larry Niven, is certainly entertaining if your tastes run to certain varieties of kitsch).