May 11, 2012, 2:44 pm
By Peter Wood
I oppose same sex marriage. I am agnostic on the extent to which human activities contribute to global warming or climate change and whether the phenomena themselves warrant the major economic dislocations that are proposed as remedies.
In both cases, my positions appear to be at substantial distance from the opinions that prevail in American higher education. And I hasten to add, they are my opinions, not positions taken by the National Association of Scholars. NAS has taken no position on gay marriage or global warming and by its nature can’t. It is an organization that deals with academic standards, the governance of colleges and universities, higher education finance, and public policies that affect scholarship and learning. And it has a membership of some 3,000 mostly academics whose personal views on substantive social and political issues are all over the map.
Academic…
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May 8, 2012, 3:33 pm
By Peter Wood
Last night I learned that Naomi Schaefer Riley has been fired by The Chronicle of Higher Education from her position as one of the contributors on the Brainstorm blog. It was a poor decision by The Chronicle‘s editors, one of whom, Liz McMillen, explains it in “A Note to Readers.” Ms. McMillen also apologizes “for the distress these incidents have caused our readers.” As it happens, I had just drafted for Innovations a short essay which among other things praised The Chronicle’s editors for not giving in to demands that Riley be fired.
The Chronicle’s change of heart took me greatly by surprise. As a writer whose contributions to these pages have often been assailed, I’ve come to trust that The Chronicle is pretty sturdy in its defense of the principle that dissenters from academe’s typical left-wing orthodoxies should be heard, and that dialogue–even if sometimes caustic–is…
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May 2, 2012, 11:03 am
By Peter Wood
Americans have long prized sarcasm. We have had whole epochs of movies driven by sarcastic retorts. What would the cinematic world be from Jimmy Cagney through Pulp Fiction, without wise-talking gangsters, smart-aleck private eyes, world weary cops, and cynical journalists? We have great theater—think of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolfe—built entirely of sarcastic repartee. Teen “culture”—if we can call it that—has been one long trial by a jury of sneers. Americans have made an art of impudence. All of which should be a point of national pride.
But like other forms of American exceptionalism, our well-earned reputation for sarcasm is in decline. The causes are many. The cult of sincerity breaks out every third generation or so. Its practitioners seek to shame us into abiding by rules of mutual respect that would choke off our genius for congratulating buffoons on their…
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April 24, 2012, 11:13 am
By Peter Wood
"To be or not to be, yada yada yada."
A woman seated next to our famously laconic 30th president at a White House dinner sallied, “Mr. Coolidge, I’ve made a bet that I can get you to say more than two words.” Coolidge coolly dispatched her: “You lose.”
Like many such stories that seem to capture the characteristic grain of a man, this one is more folklore than fact. It exists in dozens of versions but hasn’t been traced to any reliable firsthand observer. But it is worth treasuring the same way we treasure Parson Weems’s fables (“I cannot tell a lie.”) about George Washington’s childhood.
Succinctness in riposte is one thing. (“Nuts,” was General McAuliffe’s one-word reply to the German demand that he surrender during the Battle of the Bulge.) It is harder to achieve when the occasion…
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April 19, 2012, 10:41 am
By Peter Wood
President Obama and Justice Sotomayor (Official White House photo by Pete Souza)
When Barack Obama first came to national attention with his keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, he sounded a post-racial theme of national unity:
There is not a black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America—there’s the United States of America.
His 2008 campaign built on this theme but in a complicated and paradoxical way. An appeal was built on the idea of transcending racial division by embracing a politician who self-consciously styled himself as “black.” The nation poised in dynamic equilibrium between the ideal that race shouldn’t matter and the reality that it mattered very much.
That equilibrium didn’t last long. Even during the campaign, Obama…
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April 16, 2012, 7:33 pm
By Peter Wood
(Photo by Flickr/CC user myguitarzz)
Apologies are in order. Every week seems to provide a new crop of public figures apologizing for a poor choice of words, a regrettable action, or an effort to deceive. The manager of the Miami Marlins, Ozzie Guillen, apologized twice for telling Time magazine, “I love Fidel Castro.” His baseball team apologized:
The Marlins acknowledge the seriousness of the comments attributed to Guillen. The pain and the suffering caused by Fidel Castro cannot be minimized, especially in a community filled with victims of the dictatorship.
And Guillen later added:
I’m here on my knees, apologizing to all the Latin American communities.
Democratic political consultant Hilary Rosen apologized for saying on CNN that Ann Romney has no business discussing the U.S. economy because she…
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April 11, 2012, 10:17 am
By Peter Wood
Mark is a connoisseur of comments. Several times a week he emails me articles he has spotted on the Internet which he has tagged with lines such as “Read the one by Zombie.” “#7 nails it.” “Comment #16 is fizziwig at his best.”
I don’t always check—sorry Mark—but when I do, he is usually right. Mark sniffs out the moonshiner who has distilled an idea to mountaintop clarity, or taps the guy whose bank shot always drops the ball neatly into the side pocket. Mark is a Simon Cowell for the commentariat—or at least that segment of it that shares his rightward political convictions.
I disappoint Mark again and again with my reluctance to get in the game. He thinks I could be a contender, one of those who could fill the mason jar with the delectable distillate of the sour mash of mere opinion. Or the guy with the feather touch who could run the table. I’m flattered…
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April 4, 2012, 11:36 am
By Peter Wood
Over the weekend the National Association of Scholars published a new research report about the politicization of the University of California. Actually, A Crisis of Competence: The Corrupting Effect of Political Activism in the University of California deals with a much broader subject than the UC system. It describes phenomena that are familiar in all the state university systems and many independent colleges and universities as well. And it offers a strong thesis to the effect that contemporary American higher education has been badly hurt by the failure of safeguards against using the classroom to advance partisan ideas and loyalties.
Even to name this topic is to risk a fair number of readers stopping dead in their tracks. Oh, another kvetch by conservatives that no one invited them to the prom. Well, yes and no. There are a thousand ways to dismiss the problem of…
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March 30, 2012, 11:45 am
By Peter Wood
Last Wednesday I attended a debate at St. Francis College in Brooklyn, at which three men engaged in a lively, literate, and deeply-informed exchange. After they finished and the moderator opened the floor for questions, the usual thing happened. The questioners by and large had no questions. Instead they offered up prolix piles of words that led nowhere in particular. Some sought to show off what they mistook as their own superior knowledge. Others scolded. A few got lost in their own labyrinths. The closest we came to a question was the j’accuse rhetorical jab more or less in the form, “Don’t you agree that you are an ignorant buffoon?”
Some of the questioners were deliberately abusing their opportunity. That’s bad manners and an erosion of the civility that is needed for worthwhile public debate. But a good many of the questioners simply didn’t know how to ask a question….
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March 28, 2012, 6:10 am
By Peter Wood
Irving Louis Horowitz died last week. He was, among his many distinctions, the founding publisher of the journal I now edit, Academic Questions, and a key figure in helping the National Association of Scholars get off the ground 25 years ago. The New York Times published a slightly barbed obituary of him yesterday, quoting some of his detractors and raking up old disputes. Horowitz would probably have welcomed that send-off. He was a man who never hesitated to wade into controversy and did so with the joy of someone born to be an intellectual combatant. His many admirers have been paying tribute, including NAS’s founder, Steve Balch, and Horowitz’s Rutgers colleague Lionel Tiger. Interesting that both begin by referring to Horowitz as a “force of nature.” David Barash, writing on the Chronicle’s Brainstorm blog, alters the formula: “a brilliant and suitably stubborn social…
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