Academic cant

Leon Botstein: president of Bard College

As a Bard College and New School for Social Research Graduate Faculty alumnus, and a nearly 20 year long employee of Columbia University, my mailbox at work and at home is perpetually filled with glossy brochures and magazines trumpeting the latest human rights, free speech or multicultural breakthroughs of these institutions. Among the thousands of beacons of higher learning in the U.S., these three are near the top of the list when it comes to liberal pretensions. You can call me a hardened cynic, but mostly I regard the printed material from the three colleges as exercises in public relations cant especially when you consider how often the noble gesture is offset by some truly creepy maneuver, often occurring around the same ballyhooed stunt.

For example, when my boss Lee Bollinger decided to invite Iran’s president to speak at the university, he defended the action as a courageous effort in academic freedom necessary to promote global communications. But in his introduction to Ahmadinejad’s speech, he repeated the talking points of the Bush administration in a clear effort to grease the skids for war with Iran after the fashion of Judith Miller in the run-up to the war in Iraq. So effective was Bollinger that Rush Limbaugh replayed Bollinger’s entire introduction the following day on his radio show flapping his lips about how great Bollinger was.

Just about a week ago I got an alumnus brochure from the New School, where I earned an MA in philosophy about 40 years ago mostly in an effort to evade the draft. I have tried in vain to get off their mailing list after Bob Kerrey became president of the school to no avail. My next step, I suppose, is to send them a change of address notification that I have moved to East Jesus, Nebraska.

If Columbia’s magazines are geared to liberal sensibilities, the New School is pitched even further to the left. The brochure announced that Bob Pollin, a New School alumnus, Marxist economist, and frequent contributor to Alexander Cockburn’s Counterpunch, will be joining the Board of Governors. This might lead to the impression that the hammer-and-sickle will soon be flying over 65 Fifth Avenue.

After reading Frank Donoghue’s “The Last Professors” in an effort to understand how college professors have largely become day laborers, I have become more attuned to academic power structures. The Board of Governors has very little power in comparison to the Board of Trustees at the New School. Despite the university’s pretensions to the contrary, the men and women serving on the board have been selected pretty much on the basis of how such boards are selected everywhere else–largely on the basis of how high up on the capitalist food chain they sit.

After a N.Y. Times magazine article revealed Bob Kerrey, the New School’s president, to be a war criminal, the Board decided to retain him. The chairman of the board of trustees is Philip Scaturro, whose main distinction is running Allen and Company, an investment bank. One vice-chair is Henry Arnhold, another investment banker, while the other vice-chair, Arnold Aronson, runs Ralph Lauren. In other words, Bob Pollin is window-dressing. The reins of power belong to a war criminal and his hand-picked Wall Street fat-cats, real estate developers and garmentos. In other words, the same people who are running New York into the ground.

The brochure had news on a conference about defending professors in places like Iran from repression. It was hosted by Samantha Power, a perfect choice considering the hypocrisy embodied in having a war criminal running a university that was once famous for hiring German intellectuals fleeing Hitler. Of course, having a president like Bob Kerrey running around making speeches about the threat from places like Iran does nothing to make such professors less subject to repression, but I doubt if he worried about such things being more or less a bull in a china shop on such matters.

Power spent much of the 1980s beating the war drums against the dastardly Serbs, paving the way for the next “humanitarian intervention” against Iraq. A year or so ago, Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, where she is a long-standing official, co-hosted a conference with the Pentagon to figure out ways to craft a more effective counter-insurgency program. They all agreed, four-star generals and Harvard professors alike, that success required placing anthropologists and other academic experts in the field so that the unruly native could be better understood by the occupying forces.

As for Kerrey, he was a high-profile supporter of the invasion of Iraq and continues to be associated with hawkish causes. When he invited John McCain, another war criminal, to give a commencement address at the New School two years ago, the school rose up in protest.

But when it comes to mixing together liberal (and even on occasion radical) pieties and State Department realpolitik, nobody can top Bard College’s Leon Botstein who has turned the small liberal arts college into his personal fiefdom.

In a breath-taking display of political double-dealing, he recently appointed Jonathan Brent to the Alger Hiss Chair at Bard College, formerly occupied by Joel Kovel, a dedicated ecosocialist who once wrote a book describing anti-Communism as a form of mental illness (Kovel was formerly a psychiatrist.)

A word or two about Alger Hiss might be appropriate. He was a New Deal era State Department official who was accused by ex-Communist Whittaker Chambers of being a Soviet spy when the Cold War broke out. His case, like the Rosenberg case, is a cause célèbre for liberals like the Nation Magazine’s Victor Navasky.

Unlike Kovel, the current occupier of the Alger Hiss Chair at Bard–Jonathan Brent–would not consider anti-Communism a mental illness at all. Indeed, his entire career has revolved around justifying the Cold War and even fingering American Communists as spies for the USSR. He is the editor of the Annals of Communism book series at Yale University, a project that has been described in the following terms by William F. Buckley in the National Review:

The judgment of this observer is that we have here something on the order of a biblical narrative discrediting everything about the Soviet Union popularized by leftist fancy for two generations. The hero John Reed turns out to have been paid $1 million for his work as a Soviet agent. The labor-union movement was primarily an instrument of Soviet power. The independent “progressive” movements in the United States, France, Italy were Moscow operations. We have here a historical juggernaut capable of refashioning the trendy history in which so many American scholars were once ensnared; and they are not in the mood, many of them, to invite the coroner to certify to their naiveté.

Even after putting a fox like Jonathan Brent in charge of the henhouse, Botstein still has the temerity to speak out of the left side of his mouth. The latest alumnus magazine contains his commencement address to the class of 2008 that advises it to follow the example of Abe Osheroff, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War and long-time Communist who died this year.

Mr. Osheroff, like many of his fellow fighters on behalf of Republican Spain, believed that if only the democracies of the world had not been so cowardly, and had actually risen to the defense of the Republican government, Franco would have been defeated and, in turn, Hitler and Mussolini. The carnage and catastrophe of the Second World War would have been prevented. But as Mr. Osheroff got older, he realized that the outcome of his generation’s last “great cause”-its failure-was less important than the experience itself. What one does, he concluded, ought not to be measured by the result-the success or failure-but by the principles that guide one’s behavior. The obituary concluded with this observation from Mr. Osheroff: “If you need a victory, you aren’t a fighter, you’re an opportunist.”

At the risk of using a hackneyed phrase, let me state that this sounds like the classic case of the devil quoting scripture.

I want to conclude with a few words about a Mark Danner article that appears in the same issue of the “Bardian”. Titled “Beyond Endless War: Terror, Iraq and the American Search for Solvency”, it was originally a lecture inaugurating the James Chase Chair at Bard College. You can watch a video of the lecture at Danner’s website if you have a heavy tolerance for sanctimony.

Danner is a high-profile “antiwar” figure decrying all the bad things that have happened in Iraq, just like Samantha Power. Also like Power, he was a cheerleader for war against the dastardly Serbs in the 1980s.

Danner’s answer to the “endless war” against terror is to have a White House attentive to the teachings of James Chace, who was a professor at Bard until his death in 2004. Chace, who was the editor of Foreign Affairs from 1970 through 1983, was the classic exponent of realpolitik. If he was ever critical of a war like Vietnam or Iraq, it was from the standpoint of effectiveness. The question of whether it was right to invade another country never entered his mind. Chace was good friends with Danner and Caleb Carr, a military historian who also teaches at Bard and who once wrote an article in the New York Observer that stated: “The question of what methods will be used in our coming action in Iraq represents yet another, perhaps decisive, round in this ongoing struggle to determine how America projects its power abroad-and how it is perceived as projecting that power. The costs of any retreat by Mr. Rumsfeld and his faction, or of any failure on the part of President Bush to back to the hilt his Secretary of Defense and all other progressive military thinkers, will be high, indeed-higher even than they would have been in Afghanistan.”

Don’t you love how Carr describes Rumsfeld as a progressive military thinker? Carr has a second career as a writer of fiction (including the best-seller “The Alienist, a rather unreadable book in my estimation) and perhaps the two careers are bleeding into each other.

Danner seeks to return American foreign policy to one of “solvency”, the title–like “Endless War”–of another James Chace book. If solvency sounds a bit like a term that belongs more to banking than politics, that is because Chace always thought it terms of what “paid” or didn’t pay in foreign policy. If you were successful, as the British were in Malaysia, then the policy ostensibly was solvent.

Danner cites Walter Lippmann, the flatulent foreign policy pundit who inspired a generation of NY Times op-ed gas bags, to explain the approach:

What is solvency? As James defined it-drawing on the words of his beloved Walter Lippmann-the statesman who would create a solvent American foreign policy sets himself the task of “bringing into balance, with a comfortable surplus of power in reserve, a nation’s commitments-economic, political, military-and a nation’s power.”

Get it, dear reader? If you invade Iraq and lack the manpower and funds to see the mission through to a successful conclusion, it is like having an overdrawn bank account. Tch-tch. We must not allow that to happen.

You can get an idea of what kind of intervention James Chace thought made sense from the “solvency” standpoint. In an effusive review of a book about the invasion of Grenada in the August 18, 1985 N.Y. Times, Chace poses the questions: “What did the United States gain in the end from its little war? And was it worth it?”

Clearly, the war must have been worth it since it convinced the Sandinistas “that Washington was prepared to invade Nicaragua next” and that “any significant military aid from Moscow or Havana” was unlikely. Thus, the Marxist threat to Central America would be blunted if not eradicated. Chace concludes:

Irrespective of the dubious legality of the invasion, the United States simply acted as great powers usually do in their sphere of influence. Thucydides wrote of this centuries ago when he pointed out that the strong will do as they will, the weak as they must. Surely this is a lesson all the small nations of the Caribbean and Central America know -and if they have forgotten, the Grenadian intervention served as a grim reminder.

The only grim reminder that I am left with is the tendency of liberals to flak for the Pentagon.