Adolph Reed

GC Advocate readers, particularly those steeped in cultural studies, literary theory, political science, and sociology literature are probably very familiar with “star” academics like Cornell West, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and William Julius Wilson, all hailing from our most venerable of higher education institutions that purportedly form the core foundations of the Ivory Tower in America. What they may not be familiar with are the ideological and historical foundations that are constitutive of these scholars’ interpretations of black American thought (not to mention those of their followers), as well as the cultural and political commentary that flows from it. When these black scholars comment on the social, cultural and political conditions of Americans in general and black Americans in particular, people listen. To be sure, the reflex among people on the left is to assume that whenever Cornell West says something we must take heed as it will most likely call attention to the problem of racism, America’s “disease.”

And as readers will recall, last summer we could not turn our attention away from Professor Gates’—and most Americans’—indignant response to a Cambridge police sergeant who in our collective minds committed the egregious sin of racially profiling and arresting one of the most respected black scholars in the United States. The story had a bottoms-up ending that culminated with President Barack Obama’s intervention to bring Gates and Sgt. Crowley together for what reportedly was a “frank” discussion about the incident. In the United States, it seems, we have reached a point where questions of race and racism can now be resolved with the semi-public consumption of cool, inebriating suds. Given this particular instance and the current historical and political moment, how are we to make sense of what race and racism mean in the United States? How do the black scholars mentioned above, among others, and their perspectives on questions of race and racism set the framework for understanding and explaining the concepts of race and racism in the United States? How is the discipline of black studies shaped by and in turn how does it shape political and cultural debates about these issues? And what are the operating assumptions that supposedly shed light on questions of race and racism as problems deeply entrenched in America’s psyche and history? These provocative questions require ambitious answers, which is precisely the project that Adolph Reed Jr. and Kenneth Warren take up in a new book.

Renewing Black Intellectual History: The Ideological and Material Foundations of African American Thought compiles a series of essays that combine theoretical rigor and incisive, politically grounded critique to interrogate—and in the process demolish—many of the assumptions made by mainstream black scholars who write about and comment on the “black” experience. These assumptions, including the existence of a singular, undifferentiated “black community,” are deployed in much of what is now branded African American studies within the American academy. The essays in the book, particularly those in Part II and III, explain how these assumptions then become reified into mainstream political discourse. This process and the discourses that follow from it, the authors argue, “have shaped the main lines of public debate of political, social, and cultural ideas and strategies through which dominant notions of common black American identity and agendas have been constructed and pursued.” Central to this argument and its critical interpretive framework is the historicist approach running through each of the ten essays in the book; an approach through which the authors situate their arguments within broader streams of social, political and cultural currents in order to understand black American thought and the processes and frameworks that, in many instances, facilitate and constrain policy interventions that bear on black Americans.

This historically grounded method in the study of African American thought represents a significant contribution in the practice of political science. This is a signature approach to examining and interpreting the literature explored by the book as a whole and by Reed in particular. Similar to the approach taken in this collection of essays, in W.E.B. Du Bois and American Political Thought: Fabianism and the Color Line (1997) Reed makes a strong case for an “evolutionist or a generative” perspective on the history of political thought. This approach to historical and political inquiry allows for the examination of individuals and debates that prevail given specific historical and political junctures in American society, which in turn shed light on the genesis of current political debates and the intellectual history that shaped them.

As the subtitle of the book suggests, the substantive fulcrum advancing the authors’ critiques is the ideological and material foundations that have evolved from Emancipation to the post-Jim Crow eras, paying close attention to the academic discourses that took place in the 1980s, which have influenced the current shape of the black studies field across American universities. Arranged chronologically, Renewing Black Intellectual History is divided into three parts, each corresponding to particular political, social and cultural moments in American history—Part I: Emancipation, Reconstruction, and Retrenchment; Part II: The Jim Crow Era; and Part III: The Post-Jim Crow Era.

The authors’ arguments are bold, trenchant, refreshing and, ultimately, necessary to understand the current state of black studies and how its intellectual practice both informs and is informed by political debates that center around race and racism in the United States. Students and practitioners in the fields of political science, history, sociology, cultural studies, and literary theory will find the book provocative and timely. If you’re not familiar with Reed’s scholarly work, this will be a great introduction to his oeuvre. And if you are familiar with his work, this will be an excellent addition, not only to your personal collection of “critical” works in the academy, but also an illuminating collection of essays that will undoubtedly provoke you to consider alternative interpretations of black cultural studies, intellectual history, and the ideological foundations under which they operate.

I had the opportunity to have a candid and provocative telephone conversation with Reed—who is currently teaching at the University of Pennsylvania—about several topics including some of the recurring themes in Renewing Black Intellectual History, his thoughts on race and racism, his intellectual and political projects, and the discipline of political science in general and black studies in particular.

•  •  •

Douglas Medina: What was the catalyst for writing Renewing Black Intellectual History?

Adolph Reed, Jr.: Well, it’s kind of funny because Ken[neth] Warren and I got to know each other when I was being recruited to go to Northwestern, and he was still there. And I just happened to have read a little of his work, before that dance started, and he’d read a little of my work. And he left after a year and went to the University of Chicago, but with the understanding that we could team teach between the two campuses, which we did. And we had like a two man seminar, really, that met in this bar in Hyde Park for about five or six years. And a lot of it was about trying to get a handle on the black cultural studies stuff and to figure out the best way to provide a critical alternative to it. And we were going back and forth, because one approach would be something like that book that Don Green and Ian Shapiro did on rational choice [Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory by Donald Green and Ian Shapiro, Yale University Press (1996)]. But what was really daunting about that was that meant we had to read a lot of that crap and read reams and reams and reams of it.

And the way that this thing that we’d kind of jokingly called the seminar at Jimmy’s, because we’re also closing down the bar every night, went was that we would decide to go read some Stuart Hall or some Paul Gilroy or something, and then meet to talk about it and complain about how dense the stuff was and how it didn’t add up to anything, about how the labor that was necessary to get through the text was in no way compensated by the payoff of insight that you came to once you got through it.

So, we kept saying, “well, damn, you know, I don’t know if I can get myself up to go in that direction to tackle this stuff,” because you read too much bad shit and see too many bad movies and stuff, like in the name of being current in the field anyway.

And the other alternative was to think about collaborating on a history of black studies that would go back to the beginning of the 20th century—to the beginning of the Negro History Project—and then reconstruct an account that acknowledges the creation of black studies at the end of the ‘60s and the beginning of the ‘70s and follows its evolution.

But, we realized that to do that book properly would also be a really big undertaking and in some ways even a bigger one. And we both had other stuff on our individual research agendas.

So we had the idea that we could take some of the burden off ourselves. And since there were a number of scholars who were operating in the same kind of interpretivist frame of reference, and really what it is is an historical materialist approach to black intellectual history, that maybe a way to go with this would be to collect a chunk of that work and present it as de facto articulations of the alternative approach. That is to say, because we both had become really skeptical of debates about interpretation, because the big problem is that those debates are conducted at a level of abstraction that just leaves too much hiding space.

So, we figured that the ideal thing would be to collect a number of discrete studies that show the payoff of an historical materialist approach to black American intellectual history. And then, as we went about it we wanted to be interdisciplinary and we’ve got historians, political scientists, and lit[erature] scholars, but all of whom are working out of the same interpretative disposition.

And then we thought that doing two books, a companion piece [Culture/Politics: The Present(ism) of Black Studies by Adolph Reed, Jr. and Kenneth Warren, forthcoming] that was more interpretivist, or rather was more about engaging in interpretative debate would be a nice compliment to this one. And, you can play off it and each could help the other.

The focus of Culture/Politics is a little tighter and a little more theoretical. It’s really directed explicitly as a challenge to the cultural turn in black studies.

Medina: As I was reading the book it became clear that one of the main arguments that you and the other authors make is that the discipline itself is politicized, the discipline of black studies. And it is a political enterprise of sorts. That being the case, it’s also subject to interpretation and therefore contestation. So what do you think led to that, the dominant interpretative framework for what we now know as black American studies?

Reed: I think there are a couple things to say about that. One of them is that on one level, probably any academic discourse, especially in the social sciences but also in the humanities, is going to be imbued with, if not political significance, at least political inflections given the moment.

In fact, I was thinking about how modernization theory was consciously, in some cases, and perhaps less consciously in others, an appendage of American Cold War era objectives in the post-war period. So, these notions of the five stages of growth and the cultures of modernization were clear alternatives to a class discourse and to a discourse of inequality and underdevelopment. And there was a parallel within the United States. Or rather, in American politics. We saw class being defined in cultural terms and the emergence of ethnic/pluralist discourses and so forth and so on. And a reification, say, in the urban politics field of the moment of post-war growth politics as though it were like a natural law. But in the case of black studies and Latino studies and women’s studies, there’s an additional boost that those fields of study themselves emerged quite directly out of the ferment of the 1960s, both on and off the campus. From my perspective and, I think, from the perspective of most of the authors, if not all of the authors—but, you know, I’m not carrying proxies with me, or, I mean, I’m not a ventriloquist—the issue, I think, is how to think about what it means to say that the discipline is saturated with politics. Because I think one of the arguments that a lot of us come together around is that at the end of the day—in fact, at the beginning of the morning—there’s a substantive difference between writing a journal article or a book and engaging in politics. They aren’t the same thing.

And one of the problems that we associate with the cultural turn, and not just in black studies but across the board inside the academy with the emergence of the cultural studies mindset in the late ‘80s probably, is a tendency, like an intellectual tendency, to kind of blur distinctions between scholarly practice and political practice.

I think I discussed this a little bit in my chapter in Renewing, maybe a little bit more in a chapter of the Obamamania [The Perils of Obamamania, forthcoming] book, that it’s not that difficult to understand how the slippage came to pass. A lot of it had to do with the retreat of extramural politics. As the labor movement goes into retreat the, what used to be called the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, and the absence of political dynamism outside the university either creates more space or gives too much room or puts pressure on the work of academics to sort of make political claims.

So, I’ve said this maybe in more provocative ways and in a more provocative context. But, one of the things that most of us in the book find disturbing, or maybe at least unsatisfying, about this turn is the extent to which academics presume that their academic work carries political stakes that reach outside the university, in a way. That may not necessarily be the case.

That puts pressure on them or encourages them to seek to speak beyond the university and to take on—in the space that you’d think about where the scholarly work gets done—to take on a project of speaking to topical debates outside the academy.

I guess this is the way that I put it somewhat more provocatively: that there’s a tendency to represent oneself outside the university as a voice of scholarly expertise that can say things that are of political significance, and to represent oneself inside the university as a representative of the oppressed community who’s channeling that voice.

Medina: One of the things that’s become clear for people who follow your work is that you stand apart from many scholars who study the question of race and African American political thought, and American politics in general. Being on the left, you are essentially a scholar who also does extramural political civic work. How do you manage that? How do you negotiate that? How does your scholarly work inform your political activism and vice versa?

Reed: They’ve always been connected. I went to graduate school out of a sense of defeat when I’d been out organizing for a few years, even before I graduated from college.

I left college after a cafeteria strike. And I went [into] eastern North Carolina and worked for three years, and came back one summer and graduated, and then went to graduate school largely—or at least partly—because I had a sense that we’d just gotten outflanked and that the bourgeois politicians had basically won. But, going to Atlanta in the early 1970s, I didn’t encounter anything that would challenge that view, to put it mildly.

So, from the very beginning for me the academic project was an intellectual project, and the intellectual project was part of a political project. My politics have been focused on one ultimate objective since I was—at the latest—since I was nineteen years old. And that objective is overthrowing capitalism.

I think it’s important to make distinctions between work that one does as a propagandist—work that one does in sort of sharp political commentary—and work that one does as a scholar. And there are domains in which it’s appropriate to do either. Both have their place and I’m not embarrassed about either one.

It’s the same principle when you’re trying to build something politically: you’re supposed to do what needs to be done. You do whatever has to get done.

I don’t believe that academics have a responsibility to be civically or politically active. In fact, I would just as soon have most of them not be, given what I imagine their politics and their class interests are.

My expectations are more modest, that they just face up to the political and the ideological implications or biases in their own work, the questions they ask and the problems that they consider meaningful and how they go about doing them.

As long as everybody’s clear and puts their shit aboveboard, then that’s not only all that I expect, it’s, I think, all that should be expected, in a university setting or in the academic setting.

And when we in the Labor Party [Reed was a founding delegate of the Labor Party in 1996, and he is co-chair of its Campaign for Free Higher Ed] decided to try to get a ballot line in South Carolina, I was basically commuting to South Carolina on the weekends for a while there, and going to flea markets and standing out in the sun all day to get signatures and stuff.

From one perspective, I could say, “Well, it slowed my progress in getting these books done.” On the other hand, I think [it] strengthened and deepened my understanding in—maybe in nuanced ways that I couldn’t even draw a straight line through. So, it makes the work better.

One of the things that I think politics—at least in the way that I’ve tried to do politics—has done for my academic work is that it just kind of stresses the concreteness of the questions.

I think maybe a part of this is like getting older and being in the racket for a long time, too, because I remember in my early years as an assistant professor in high theoretical discussions or—I would find myself feeling that there were links that I was missing, that things just didn’t seem to make sense. And the reasonable impulse is to chalk it up to one’s own shortcomings and then try to figure out what’s being missed.

But, I’ve always been trying to find the levers that can help us build the kind of movement that we need to build to transform this society. That’s not a simplistic thing, either. Because it means you got to try to figure out what the cultural domain is, what the ideological domain is.

Medina: You’re one of the few scholars, political scientist specifically, who persists in looking at questions of social phenomena through the lens of political economy. That’s unusual. Why do you do it? What are the benefits of doing that, given that not many people are practicing that approach?

Reed: That’s a good question. The discipline is getting worse and worse and worse. I decided, when the APSR [American Political Science Review] published its second article in three years on genes and politics—this was the one on the genetic bases of political ideology. And it was…bullshit all the way through, from beginning to end. It was play science…. I’ve not renewed my dues. I haven’t been to the convention. I don’t plan to. We had to fight back even in our department [at Penn]. Last academic year, we had to fight back an attempt to hire one of these genes and politics idiots.

But, I tell you, it was Rosalind Rosenberg in the early ‘80s in her book, Beyond Separate Spheres, [who] made the point that—and I’m sure she’s not the only person that made it—when egalitarian political forces and ideas have the momentum outside the university, then the center of gravity—for a variety of reasons—within academic discourses, especially in the social sciences, shifts to the left. And when conservative ideas have the social momentum, then the center of gravity shifts to the right.

And no matter how much academics like to pretend that they influence—political scientists in particular like to pretend—or believe that they influence what appears on the op-ed pages of The New York Times—the fact of the matter is much more the opposite.

There’s a Catch-22 about this, too…There were two choices that faced left academics. You either follow the liberals in making the concessions to maintain respectability, or not. And the price of not doing it is to set yourself up to be dismissed as cantankerous or you’re too aggressive or uncivil [and] whatnot.

You need to call this shit for what it is, and especially for people who want to redefine what it means to be on the left in ways, to be blunt, that are just consistent with the limits of neoliberalism. This is part of the problem I’ve found; maybe I was a little naïve about this at the outset. And partly, I came out of the tradition of sharp Leninist polemics, anyway.

So, what I came to see was that if you don’t make the critique sharply or in a very sharp way, then it gets ignored, right? If you make it in a sharp enough way that people will pay attention to it, then all they pay attention to is the sharpness. So, then they’ll say that “so and so is a bomb thrower, takes no prisoners”, this, that, and the other.

And that’s one reason I stopped talking to reporters except, for Don Terry at The New York Times. But, I wouldn’t talk to anybody else, among other things, because I realized that they got the story written before they talk to you, and they’re auditioning you for parts that they’ve already crafted. And there’s this moment of repressive tolerance. I remember, I did a couple of these things, one with—I think it was Peter Applebome or maybe Jason Deparle, one of them. [It was] a long article on some shit about welfare or workfare, the underclass or something.

And I was on the phone for more than an hour trying to talk him off of the simplistic cultural poverty framing he was operating in. And what I got for my effort was a little quote that’s dropped in the middle of the article…and the thrust of the article was not changed a bit. So there’s a moment where the author says, “But not everyone sees it this way,” and then they quote you. And then, they say, “But others say….”So, I said fuck it.

Medina: They call that objectivity, right?

Reed: Right. Right. Right, exactly.

So, yeah, I said fuck it. I mean, you can write this shit, but you don’t need me to be part of it.

Medina: Exactly. So, they legitimized the whole article by using you.

Reed: Right, exactly.

So, political science has always been problematic, I think, as a discipline. I sometimes think that the thing about academic disciplines is like what my father used to say about state legislatures, that the worst one in the country is the one that’s presiding in the state where you are at the moment. So, the worst academic discipline is the one you’re in.

I would sometimes say that the one thing I can say for political science was that it’s not economics. But, that difference is getting narrowed, because one of the problems in our discipline has been this really powerful impulse to try to explain politics by reference to every fucking thing else in the world you can think of except politics…

Medina: Or inequality.

Reed: Oh, yeah. Well, in fact you can’t even talk about “inequality” anymore.

Medina: As you point out in Renewing, we talk about “disparity.”

Reed: Right.

Medina: We don’t talk about “inequality” anymore, or “equality.”

Reed: That’s exactly right.

And I think I’m going to do something for the Socialist Register next year on the racial disparity discourse around the differential impact of the economic downturn—or the depression, basically. Just an examination of the disparity discourse: what work it does for whom and then what work it doesn’t do for whom, basically.

Medina: One of the things that I want to go back to here is specifically the chapter, “The Color Line Then and Now,” the chapter that you wrote. That’s the chapter that brought it all together, I thought. And in it, of course, you elaborate on Du Bois’ color line formulation, which you argue a lot of black studies scholars are using to deploy the concept of race and racism. You critique this approach, because it doesn’t really clarify anything. In fact, you say that it obscures more than it clarifies. What did you mean by that? How does it do that? What are the mechanisms that lead to that?

Reed: Well, I think one of the problems is a straight conceptual one: that the category is asked to do too much work, so that racism is a notion, a concept that’s not very tightly specified. And in fact, one of the debates now between left and right is that conservatives want to specify racism in a very, narrow way as an individual prejudice or, rather, unjustified individual prejudice or bigotry…..

But I understand that the objective and defensible foundation for this is that the way that American politics has evolved over the last sixty years or so, and thus the terms on which egalitarian interests have won the victories that they’ve won are such that in law and public policy and increasingly in non-policy discourse, the only kinds of inequality that are considered unjust are those forms of inequality that have to do with disparities based on some kind of ascriptive status like race, gender, sexual orientation, or whatever.

So, for instance, when I was involved in the Cabrini-Green tenants’ lawsuit against the city, they had to file the suit under the 1968 fair housing law, which meant that they had to charge the city and the CHA with discrimination, and discrimination on the base of race, age, and gender, when the issue was really displacement.

I understand that pressure. I mean, if you’re trying to seek the actual remedies for actual people, then the language that’s available in the law, through which to operate and, frankly, like in moral discourse to some extent, exerts a pressure to define the injustice in racial terms.

I think there’s a lot more than that going on, though. I think that there’s also a political economy of race relations that invests—or that ties activists to a discourse of race and racism as the sole metric of inequality or injustice.

But, I guess to go back to the other point I was making, the right wing wants to define racism in a very, very narrow way. Our side wants to define it very, very broadly. And that’s because, partly, of the iconic power that the charge of racism has at least within the universe of people who understand themselves to be antiracist.

I’m not at all convinced that it has that sort of iconic power out in the society at large, and especially as the currency of racism just seems to be inflated, so that when Houston Baker and Cornel West can’t get a cab uptown, that’s racism. If the police beat you down, then that’s racism.

I mentioned to a student in class last night that on one level—while I understand what people wanted to do in articulating the notion of institutional racism, it’s on one level an oxymoron. And so what happens is, I think, that racism becomes a convenient shorthand that—and I think this is what I mean by the charge—that it obscures more than it clarifies—it becomes an alternative to explanation, you label in lieu of explaining.

For instance, I think the sub-prime mortgage crisis is a good illustration of this problem. So, you say that blacks and Latinos were disproportionately targeted for these high-risk mortgage instruments, and were steered toward them even when they could have qualified for something less risky. And you say, “So, this is a clear disparity and it’s a clear evidence of racism.”

Well, but what is the racism? Where does the racism intercede? What carries it? It’s not doing anything itself. So, is the claim that the people who are involved in steering these classes of people to these high risk mortgages are themselves racist? But that just feels a little bit like the Nation of Islam’s white devil theory—that white people just kind of go around trying to find ways to gratuitously fuck over black people.

It seems more likely that these people, black and Latinos, in these inner cities were targeted because they were vulnerable, and they were discriminated against and they had a history of being discriminated against for conventional mortgages.

Medina: In Renewing, you also make this point in analyzing and looking at the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Reed: Yeah, absolutely. I was just looking at some numbers this morning. I can’t remember what I was reading, but I was struck to see that 45 percent of people who live in the most damaged sections of the city were black. But, see, what’s interesting about that is that, more than 60 percent of the population was black, at that point. So, by definition, that means that 55 percent were not black. And in the poorest parts of the city, the same thing.

It feels like what on some level is going on is a vestigial mindset from the last days of the Fordist era, where there was an assumption that if you could demonstrate a racial disparity, then that would call for a remedy of some sort. Not necessarily an adequate remedy because most often the remedy would be a representational one or some form of recognition instead of redistribution. So, there’d be a job for the person who announced the racism, to be kind of crude about it.

But, the problem is that for twenty years that hasn’t worked, but people do it anyway. And I think they do it anyway for a complex of reasons. One is it’s just soothing. It just feels good because it’s comfortable. But, another is that there is no other—or that this is the consensual language within which one is expected to express a grievance that has any bearing at all to do with race.

And I think that one of the reasons that it is takes us back to the political economy of race relations, because there are vested interests that want to insist that the only way to talk about any kind of inequality that at all involves people of color is through the language of race.

By the way, I think reaction to the Tea Party stuff is a good example of this, because I’m convinced that the Tea Party crowd is like an iceberg tip with no iceberg underneath, which makes them just like our movement. And they’re trying to grow icebergs.… They’re trying to grow icebergs underneath the iceberg tips just like we are. And they’ve got some advantages, some big advantages that we don’t have.

Medina: They got Fox News.

Reed: Right, exactly. Yeah.

At the same time, groups like Color of Change and the Southern Poverty Law Center also have an interest in, I wouldn’t say exaggerating, but in stressing the significance of this phenomenon, because they fundraise off it.

The Democrats also have an interest in exaggerating the significance of this stuff because they need shit like that to tell us that the other guy is worse and that’s why we need to shut up and get behind Obama.

Medina: Actually, what you just said leads me to another theme that kept coming up in the book, and really in all of your work, namely the question of elite brokerage politics. So, what is the relationship between, getting back to the book, black studies, politics, and elite brokerage politics?

Reed: Well, that’s really an interesting question, too.

I think that this posture of speaking for a population or being interpreters for a population that, for whatever reason, is presumed not to be able to speak for itself at the public microphone is the foundation of the cultural politics mindset inside black studies.

Michael Rudolph West at Holy Cross three or four years ago published a really nice book called The Education of Booker T. Washington in which he makes the argument that Washington basically invented the idea of race relations. Not through direct argument and certainly not through a theory, but through his practice.

And West’s argument is that from the end of the 18th century until emancipation, the way that the question of the status of black people in this country got played out was in the discourse of what was called the Negro problem which was bound up with the existence of slavery and what would happen if slavery were abolished or if it weren’t abolished.

And he contends that after emancipation, the Negro problem just kind of vanished out of public discussion because what we had was a thirty-year period of contestation over how blacks were going to be incorporated into American civic life. And with the defeat of reconstruction and the defeat of the populist insurgency, the consolidation of the Jim Crow regime in the South, and the acquiescence of the Northern liberals, you wind up in this moment where blacks are citizens technically, but they’re kind of in the society but not of it, and the Negro problem is back again.

And he argues that in the context—since blacks are technically members of the society—the question then shifts from the framework of the Negro problem to the framework of how the races are going to relate. And he says in the framework of race relations: blacks disappear as workers, students, farmers, parents, individuals of any sort whatsoever, and are folded into the Negro.

And the Negro, by definition—because it’s an abstraction—doesn’t have a popular voice. So then the question is, in the title of Robert Penn Warren’s book, Who Speaks for the Negro? And Washington came forth as the person to speak for the Negro. He wasn’t the only motherfucker like that. There were a bunch of them, of course.

West’s argument, I think, is a little bit like the argument that I make about disparity, because he says that the race relations framework also takes questions of equality and inequality off the table because what’s the issue in the framework? The only issue is whether race relations are bad or good. And what bad race relations means is tension or hostility. And the only alternative to bad race relations is good race relations. And what good race relations means is there’s no tension.

But, the way you get tension, of course, is for the subordinates to make demands that piss off or make uncomfortable the people on top. So, the only way to have good race relations is to shut up and accept white supremacy, basically.

And it’s in this context that this notion of the Negro leader emerges. And it’s a notion that’s really never gone away. We talk about that stuff now. Al Sharpton, Jessie Jackson.

Medina: And of course, the ultimate one would be our president.

Reed: Yeah, although he¬—

Medina: He does try to stay away from the question of race altogether.

Reed: Yeah. Although he’s trying to play on it both ways. A student just pointed out last night that he [Obama] checked the African American box on his census form, which doesn’t surprise me. Because he’d be crazy not to.

So, I think there’s an irony because it appears to be a populist kind of formulation. But, the approach to politics that posits the existence of the black masses or the black community or the grassroots are entirely consistent with an elite brokerage politics to the extent that masses and community are abstractions. And they’re abstractions that assume a singular voice. And presumption of the singular voice is what justifies the notion that some self-proclaimed spokesman will step forward and say what needs to be said to get paid in the right way.

Medina: So, what do we need to do? How can we build what we need to build? Where do we go from here?

Reed: That’s the big question.

I do think that we need to find ways just to start talking about capitalism. And, I mean, not like the Spartacist League, but I mean to do political education among people, whenever we can connect dots. The thing is, I guess, to try to always find the levers that can kind of break some stuff open.

I do think that maybe the greatest travesty—or the greatest outrage of this administration, next to the war stuff—is its absolute abdication of any attention to the fiscal crisis at the state level.

We need something, it seems to me, to do two things. To crystallize the perspective, or the understanding, that the same thing is happening to every state and that you can’t just fight it state by state. And we also need something to help get on the offensive about, which means also to mobilize, or to try to mobilize, outside the ranks of the academy.

Because this is another problem that’s a form of something like narrow trade union consciousness where the tendency is to go fight for what’s yours. We can’t do that now. The only way to fight to maintain any benefit is to fight the universal item, basically.

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—Tom Stoppard,
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead

Over the past year or two, while writing (or, at times, putting off writing) my dissertation, I became, almost inadvertently, a part-time professional poker player. That is, I began to play online poker as a viable source of income and not just as a hobby or means of procrastination. After years of performing qualitative intellectual labor, often wondering what could be said to constitute the boundaries of my work—was I working whenever I watched a movie or read a poetry blog?—it felt good to dispense with ambiguities and measure the results of my labors in decisive, quantitative terms: if I consistently outplayed my opponents, then statistical variance would even out and my bankroll would make a slow, steady, satisfyingly inexorable climb. And, too, my newfound poker expertise provided a convenient salve to my conscience whenever I chose to play poker instead of work on my dissertation: I wasn’t procrastinating, I told myself, I was working, putting in time at the virtual office and earning, over the long haul, an average hourly rate. To a dissertator, this kind of permissive logic is irresistible.

My newfound profession had both positive and negative effects on my quality of life and my sense of intellectual-artistic vocation. One interesting, if at times disturbing, effect was that I began to think of, even analyze, my actions as though they were actions in a poker game. When I was up too late, I’d tell myself that the smart play would be to fold and go to bed, as if the day were a pot I was reluctant to concede. When, at the end of a night out, I took the subway home when I would have rather taken a cab, I’d pat myself on the back for “saving a bet” by taking the cheaper transportation, because every good poker player knows that saving small bets pays off big in the long run. This habit of mind may sound bizarre, nothing more than a weird idiosyncrasy, but it’s pervasive among serious poker players: their language, indeed their very worldview, becomes tinctured by their training in poker thought processes.

When, therefore, a discussion recently came up on the English Students Association list-serv about the extent to which the department’s oral exam is a “high-stakes” experience, my inclination was to assess the exam itself, and graduate school in the humanities more generally, from a gambler’s perspective. Was the oral exam indeed a high-stakes experience? More broadly, what are the stakes we’re playing for as doctoral students in the humanities? How can we talk about the types of risks to which we’re exposed? And more pressing still, how should we analyze those risks, weigh and assess them as gambles?

The decision to enter a PhD program in the humanities is, unmistakably, a risky, high-stakes life choice. Life may indeed be a gamble at terrible odds as Tom Stoppard points out but, even by its dispiriting speculative standards, graduate school in the humanities offers particularly execrable odds. The laundry list of systemic labor problems doctoral humanities students face is so well known it hardly needs to be rehearsed: a swollen adjunct work force, significantly more PhD’s than tenure track jobs, financial compensation incommensurate, even for tenured professors, with the level of training, expertise and effort required. The academic labor market, never great, has in recent years gotten even worse, as attested to by the spate of articles and books discussing its crises and inequities. In gambling terms, pursuing a PhD in the humanities is a losing bet: the tangible returns, measured in jobs and salaries, don’t equal or exceed the odds of success.

There are, of course, intangible returns: the pleasures of intellectual excitement and discovery, interactions with interesting colleagues and friends, the acquisition of knowledge, as well as an institutional framework that can provide a sense of intellectual purpose. None of us became humanities students to get rich, so these intangible factors complicate the accounting of our enterprise. Here we see one of the shortcomings of a quantitative, poker-esque worldview (a worldview I’d argue that predominates not just in poker communities but in aspects of American culture at large): it can’t easily account for qualitative variables. A maxim follows: the only logical reasons to pursue a PhD in the humanities are qualitative in nature. And a corollary to this maxim: for all but the very wealthy, to pursue such a course of study is to engage, knowingly, in financial self-sabotage. I lay out these precepts descriptively, not as value judgments.

Fine. Most of us know these things already and those who don’t will find them out soon enough. What’s less obvious is the way in which this state of affairs, once elected, can, paradoxically, be liberating. That is, once you have chosen to matriculate in a humanities PhD program and thus dampened, significantly, your financial prospects, you no longer need concern yourself overmuch with risk, because you are already exposed to so much of it. It’s not that financial self-sabotage is liberating or redemptive in some way (it’s not and I’m not trying to romanticize it), but that once you’ve acted with knowing disregard for your short– and long-term finances (in the name of the intangibles I outlined above), the stakes can’t, in a sense, get any higher: you’ve already bet everything or almost everything.

Here’s another way of framing the wager: for the aspiring humanities PhD, the odds of job success are so poor that the only healthy way to embark upon such an enterprise is to assume you won’t succeed, just as when betting on a slot machine—another losing bet—you can’t expect to win money (while nonetheless secretly hoping you will). When you elect this peculiar course of study, you have to be comfortable with the possibility, more probable than you’d perhaps like to admit, that you will spend the next eight years of your life with little tangible to show for it. It’s a perverse, gutsy bet, but it’s one we’ve all made: staking eight years of your life, as well as your financial prospects, for the chance at something resembling professional intellectual fulfillment. The fact that so many students are willing to make that bet says something about the intrinsic value of the goal. And the steep odds being offered mean that the only sensible way of pursuing that goal is idealistically, uncompromisingly—otherwise, why invest the time, money (in the form of opportunity cost to earn more elsewhere) and effort?

This state of affairs means that, once you matriculate into a doctoral program in the humanities, nothing you do during your time in the program, no milestone or decision, will be, comparatively, high-stakes. Nothing—literally nothing—hinges on the outcome of any individual term paper, exam, conference proposal, or article submission. If you don’t hand in a term paper, you merely receive an incomplete. If you fail an exam, you’re allowed to retake it. If you have an article rejected by one journal, you simply send it to another—or you go about trying to write another, better article. No single thing you do or don’t do is likely either to make or to jeopardize your professional future: if the decision to enter graduate school is a high stakes gamble, each checkpoint along the way is like gambling for pennies. Even the dissertation itself matters more, arguably, for how it allows you to position yourself in terms of academic specialization rather than for the quality of its ideas.

The disparity between the stakes of graduate school itself and the stakes of the routine tasks of the graduate student accounts for no small amount of the psychic anguish graduate students experience. On a day-to-day basis, we perform relatively inconsequential actions that, cumulatively and almost imperceptibly determine our professional futures. We’re anxious about the latter, and for good reason, but it’s hard to see how any individual thing we do can much alter the outcome, an outcome we’re already pessimistic about to begin with. And so we go on reading and writing and teaching, continuing, thanklessly, the glacial task of knowledge production. Indeed, I’d go so far as to say that the core tension of humanities doctoral programs is between the slow, roundabout process by which knowledge gets acquired and produced, and the instrumental demands of disciplinary and institutional conventions. Humanities doctoral students aren’t lazy: time to degree is so long for us because intellectual discovery involves swerves, dead ends and digressions. We may Hamletize, we may get depressed, but I’d argue these are necessary, healthy parts of the process—forms of intellectual respiration.

•  •  •

When you play poker full-time, as I did for the last several months of 2009, your days are comprised of an endless string of consequential decisions. Bet, check, raise, call, fold: each option is alive with instant, quantifiable results. You are never at a loss for a sense of purpose, because your purpose—to make better decisions than your opponents—continually reasserts itself in the form of a new hand to play, a new decision to make. A bigger picture exists—your long-term profitability—but you needn’t worry too much about it, for if you get most of the small decisions correct it will take care of itself.

By contrast, when you read and write professionally, as I have for the past seven years, your daily decisions, less frequent, are fuzzier in nature—it sometimes feels like the most monumental decision I make is the simple decision to sit down and begin writing—and their results are slower to arrive and largely immeasurable when they do. You can easily be at a loss for a sense of purpose, because many of your tasks can be endlessly postponed and deferred without any immediate consequences. The work you do on a daily basis is leading somewhere, but you can’t be certain where, exactly, that is, or how useful it will prove to be. For practices (reading and writing) already plagued by questions of their utility, the uncertainty surrounding them can be downright paralyzing.

More so, I think, than shaky career prospects, what every PhD student risks, ultimately, are the results of his or her intellectual labors. Will they be useful in some small way? Will they be interesting to others? In a sense, jobs are just a proxy measurement for answering these larger, more pressing questions, the assumption being that useful contributions to knowledge will be rewarded with jobs. But, given the competitive nature of the job market, I’m not sure that assumption even holds any more and, further, it also assumes that one can adequately gauge the types of contributions fledgling academics will make based on their brief track record of work in graduate school. The nature of academic work is such that it may take a doctoral candidate five or six years of study just to be in a position to ask one truly penetrating question. Pursuing the implications of that question may then take years, even a lifetime. But humanities graduate programs find themselves faced with the task of trying to make their students more marketable commodities while simultaneously trying to rush them out the door so that the program’s time to degree statistics look better. Something has to give.

What I’m trying to say, simply, is that my life as a scholar is much riskier than my life as a gambler, and not just because the academic job market is bleak. Seven years ago, I had no way of knowing what kind of academic work I’d eventually be able to produce. It was a risk I took on a bit naively, but nonetheless knowingly. Today, two-thirds of the way through my dissertation, I still don’t know what I’ll be able to produce in the future, for I’m far from a finished product (though I’ll be selling myself as one in the fall). What pleases me the most is that, with the exception of some pockets of poker playing here and there, I’ve maintained my conviction in the value of the difficult, at times seemingly Sisyphean, daily tasks of reading, writing, and teaching.

Whatever the results—in terms of the work I produce, the jobs I do or don’t get—I’m content with the choices I made that will have produced those results, which is all a gambler can ever ask.

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Like the academic novel, the academic film also provides a venue for using the mimetic device of fiction to explore certain aspects of higher education. When most people think of Hollywood’s depictions of academia they are more likely to think of frat-house comedies such as Animal House, Old School, and American Pie Presents The Naked Mile, or maybe sports films like Rudy, The Program, or Glory Road. However, there have been several films made about the university environment that go beyond fraternity parties and sports. In this particular list I evaluate some films that in some way try to address the meaning of higher education. These films explore issues such as the pressures of achievement, the promise of higher education as a means of social mobility, and the challenges and joys of college teaching. Henry Kissinger famously stated that “university politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.” That statement leaves many of us who work in academia nodding our heads in recognition. However, these films suggest a different story. They show the interaction between “town and gown,” as students and professors encounter the community outside of the campus, with varying results. They also illustrate the evolution of the American university over the course of the 20th century. With legal measures such as the G.I. Bill in 1944, and the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954, students from working class backgrounds, women, and racial minorities have entered into institutions of higher learning in greater numbers. The tensions created by those changes appear in several of these films. While these may not necessarily be the most artfully made or compelling films overall, I do think they are the ones that are the most committed to taking a serious look at higher education. Viewed critically, they may even contribute to improving our understanding of how institutions of higher learning fit into American life and culture.

10. The Human Stain (2003)

This film is based on Philip Roth’s 2000 novel of the same name. Coleman Silk (played by Anthony Hopkins) is a classics professor at the fictional New England school Athena College. Silk ends up being accused of discrimination by two black students after he makes a comment in class that gets misinterpreted as a racial slur. Through flashbacks to his early life, we discover that Silk is actually a fair-skinned black man born in New Jersey who left home after high school and decided to live the rest of his life “passing” for white, which adds a thick layer of irony to the discrimination proceedings. Roth’s novel was representative of an obsession with “the culture wars” in academic novels of the 1990s. These novels are littered with stories of discrimination, sexual harrasment and “political correctness” on campus. The film version of The Human Stain managed to keep some of that political content in the story, while also satisfying the Hollywood appetite for tales of love and romance. In this case, Silk takes up with groundskeeper Faunia Farley (Nicole Kidman) and their relationship aggravates the scandals brewing around him. Many people quibbled with the choice of Anthony Hopkins as Silk (Wentworth Miller played the young version), but he turns in a solid performance. I was ready to dismiss the glamorous Nicole Kidman as a college groundskeeper, but she also gives the character believable depth. To devoted novel readers, films can never satisfy the nuances possible in a long novel, but in this adaptation I thought the filmmakers made some good strategic choices about which parts of the novel to include to give it continuity on screen.

9. School Daze (1988)

I can’t even pretend to be objective about this one. In the summer of 1996 I rented this film from the local Blockbuster and pored over it in the days before I started my freshman year at Morehouse College, where director Spike Lee attended school, and where much of the film was shot. Many of the nation’s historically black colleges and universities (or HBCUs) were founded in the years following the civil war and emancipation. The film’s opening montage (accompanied by the famous Morehouse Glee Club) functions as sort of a photo essay that situates the history of black higher education within the larger black political struggle in the US “Mission College” (and all the HBCUs that it is a stand in for) is represented as the product of these years of political progress. School Daze follows the exploits of a small clique of students over a long Homecoming Weekend. Laurence Fishburne plays “Dap” the resident campus radical who wants the college to take a stronger stance against apartheid in South Africa. The storyline calls attention to the complicated social politics of black colleges where university leaders subscribe to stuffy principles of respectability and uplift and thus discourage the kind of progressive activism seen on majority white campuses. While School Daze rubbed some black college alums the wrong way with its depiction of sexuality, color consciousness, gender politics, and class elitism, the film helped to push black college life into the American mainstream, and spawned the television series A Different World, with several cast members moving on to star in the show.

8. Good Will Hunting (1997)

Focusing on the story of a reluctant genius who works at MIT as a janitor, Good Will Hunting explores, among other issues, the “town and gown” phenomenon which is particularly prevalent in Boston with its concentration of elite universities. (School Daze also explored this phenomenon in Atlanta in a hilarious encounter between Jheri-curled local Samuel L. Jackson, and a group of idealistic black college students.) Will Hunting is a janitor at MIT who is harboring a secret rare intellectual talent beneath his tough South Boston exterior. Good Will Hunting was one of those Oscar season films, and it has its share of corny Oscar bait moments. Fortunately Robin Williams salvages it from complete sap with his poignant portrayal of a psychology professor who foregoes the cutthroat world of the research university for teaching at a community college. (Though community college professors rarely have time to sit in the park having heartfelt one-on-one conversations about life and love.) It was Robin Williams’s character who was finally able to get through to Will and convince him to make the best of his rare talents. Though in usual Hollywood style the film devolves into just another banal story about how love conquers all, and its feeble attempts at class politics are undercut by its depiction of Will as an almost superhuman talent. However, the film also explores the sometimes fraught place of the university as a validating mechanism for knowledge and talent. And in his conversations with Will, Williams’s character warns us against the excesses of intellectual arrogance.

7. Higher Learning (1995)

Higher Learning, directed by Boyz in the Hood director John Singleton, is an ensemble drama set in the fictional Columbus University in California. The film takes an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach to campus issues including such hot button topics as alcoholism, date rape, homosexuality, racial balkanization, affirmative action and the exploitation of athletes. Ice Cube’s performance as the black militant Fudge (replete with Afro and fist-pick) was especially inspired. Fudge is a proud autodidact who snubs his nose at the educational establishment and embraces knowledge as a tool of liberation rather than a ticket to a job on the white man’s plantation. In many ways his depiction is, right or wrong, a representation of the chip-on-their-shoulder arrogance that some attribute to black students on majority white college campuses in the affirmative action era. Ice Cube’s character revels in the role, and pushes the envelope by antagonizing his white classmates with all night parties and lecturing the young track star Omar Epps on how he is being exploited for his athletic talents. Michael Rapaport plays an awkward white kid from Idaho who is out of his depths at the school and gets taken in by Neo-Nazis who teach him of his true identity as a white male victim of multiculturalism run amok. The shooting spree that ensues hits a little too close to home given the spate of recent incidents of gun violence on college campuses and beyond. But then again, it’s just another example of John Singleton having his finger on the pulse of what’s happening in the nation.

6. The Paper Chase (1973)

I suspect that ambitious pre-law grads on their way to Harvard Law School have probably watched this film the same way HBCU-bound students watch School Daze. The Paper Chase depicts the fierce, cutthroat world of the Ivy League law school. James Hart (played by Timothy Bottoms) is a first year law student who finds himself up against the uncompromising law professor Charles Kingfield (played by John Houseman who reprised the role in the spin-off television series that played on cable in the 1980s). It turns out that the girl who Hart has the hots for just so happens to be Kingsfield’s daughter. The pressures of law school are brought home in the storyline of a classmate who struggles to keep up while trying to balance his rocky marriage and ends up threatening to commit suicide. Meanwhile Kingsfield’s daughter has seen enough of the insensitive law students and mocks Hart’s lawyerly aspirations. Between the struggles of his fellow students and his failure to win her over, Hart questions his own commitment to the profession. The maudlin conclusion to the film ends up being that thoroughly American story of having your cake and eating it too. You can be both a bloodthirsty lawyer and a sensitive humanitarian! Nevertheless, the film does illustrate some of the pertinent questions law students face as they try to hold their own in a highly competitive field.

5. Surviving Desire (1991)

Surviving Desire was directed by auteur Hal Hartley. I have to give props to my friend Robert Caputi (Adjunct Prof. of Sociology, BMCC) for telling me about the film and loaning me a VHS copy since the DVD version seems to be scarce. The film stars Martin Donovan as a college literature professor named Jude (a not-so-subtle shout out to Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure). Jude is infatuated with his student Sofie, played by Mary B. Ward. Like Jude and Sue of Hardy’s novel, Jude and Sofie in Surviving Desire are unable to resist the passion of doomed love. Jude is an eccentric professor who is fascinated with the work of Dostoevsky and who aggravates his students by speaking in literary quotations and asking open-ended questions. Sofie is an adoring student who “gets” Jude, and responds to him when he starts to pursue her. Some might find the stylized intellectual dialogue in the film a bit pretentious, but it is delivered with a style and humor that makes it work. It is also worth mentioning that the film is packaged with aHal Hartley short called “Theory of Achievement,” which is a rather prophetic early look at the cesspool of post-college pseudo-bohemian narcissism beginning to take form over in the old industrial lofts of Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

4. The Blue Angel (Der blaue Engel) (1930)

The Blue Angel is best known as a star vehicle for Marlene Dietrich and a vivid portrayal of Weimar Germany’s decadent cabaret culture. Professor Emmanuel Rath (Emil Jannings) is a strict and humorless schoolmaster who finds that some of his students are going to a local speakeasy called The Blue Angel. Hoping to catch the boys at the club, Professor Rath goes there himself and ends up seeing the vivacious cabaret performer Lola, played by Dietrich in a performance that launched her into an international star. Rath’s story of being consumed by desire for Lola is a well-worn storyline in academic fictions. The cerebral uptight professor who has spent his entire life disciplining the intellect finds himself being led into ill-fated decisions by the powers of desire and the failures of the flesh. The film also shows the harsh judgments of moralism in the academic community as the school administrators denounce Rath for his relationship with Lola, even though he intends to properly marry her. Rath later leaves his position at the academy and marries Lola, but they soon run out of money, and things begin to spiral out of control. Rath’s life ends in humiliation and ruin after an awful nightclub scene in his old college town. He dies clenching the desk in the room where he once taught. The Blue Angel is actually a link in a chain of academic fictions. It is based on a 1905 Heinrich Mann novel Professor Unrat. Also, Francine Prose’s academic novel Blue Angel was inspired by the film, and follows a similar narrative (with the temptress being a creative writing student instead of a cabaret performer). Lastly, both the film and Prose’s book are name-checked in another academic film, The Savages (2007), featuring Philip Seymour Hoffman as a Brechtian theater professor.

3. Horse Feathers (1932)

Professor Wagstaff (Groucho Marx): “The trouble is we’re neglecting football for education…Tomorrow we start tearing down the college.”
The Professors: “But, Professor, where will the students sleep?”
Professor Wagstaff: “Where they always sleep. In the classroom!”

In January 2010 the University of Alabama Crimson Tide won college football’s national title. Its head football coach, Nick Saban, makes over $4 million dollars a year at the state-run school. The highest paid state employee in many states is usually the university football coach. As schools begin to layoff teachers, deny tenure and rely on adjunct labor to teach its students, athletic budgets and salaries continue to rise, and TV contracts and endorsements for college sports get bigger and bigger. Given this state of affairs the Marx Brothers look like prophets for their 1932 satire Horse Feathers. Groucho Marx plays Professor Wagstaff at the fictional Darwin College. The college is preparing for a showdown with rival Huxley College, and Professor Wagstaff hears that a couple of “ringer” football players might be available for hire at the local speakeasy. The storyline is strikingly prescient. The acquisitions of ringers in the guise of “student-athletes” is pretty much the norm in big time college athletics these days. The football game at the end is a gem of absurdist comedy stunts, the most memorable being a touchdown scored by hopping on a horse-driven chariot charging down the field. The Marx Brothers’ satirical take on the university and the excesses of college sports definitely makes this a film worth reconsidering in the current academic climate.

2. Oleanna (1994)

David Mamet directed this film adaptation of his controversial play. Yes, it is about sexual harassment. But it is about much more than that. I’m convinced that few films have attempted to explore the meaning of higher education with more intensity than Oleanna. The story is delivered in a series of escalating conversations between the professor named John (William H. Macy), and the student named Carol (Debra Eisenstadt). The stilted Mamet-speak that worked so well in Glengarry Glenn Ross gets a bit aggravating here, but stay with it. At the end of the first act is a deliberately ambiguous incident which Carol later uses to file a sexual harassment complaint against John. However, the play has a multilayered complexity that goes beyond a simple issue of who’s right and who’s wrong. Their dialogue began as a discussion about her grade which turned into an examination of the place of higher education in American culture, and the evolving expectations of students who spend increasing amounts of time and money to attend college. The conceit of the film is that this dialogue on education ends up being swamped and overtaken by the sexual harassment drama. This mirrors the way in which arguments over political correctness, as necessary as they were in the 1980s and 1990s, diverted attention away from the underlying systematic changes taking place in higher education. The whole power relationship between professor and student has changed, and John, who postures as a sort of intellectual maverick, is oblivious to the ways that he is really just another condescending blowhard of the old school, trying to lecture his way out of the accusations and constantly telling Carol to “sit down” while he explains things to her. As for Carol it is just as important that we see her as an entitled consumer of education as she is a woman who has (or has not) been wronged, and part of her arrogance comes from this newly discovered power that she is able to wield.

1. Wit (2001)

Fair warning: Wit is a bit of a downer. However, beneath the sad story of the main character’s struggle with cancer is a poignant tale about the meaning of the academic life and the value of knowledge and intellectual pursuit. From the beginning it becomes apparent that the main character, literature professor Vivian Bearing (Emma Thompson) will not make it out alive, and the film takes us through her excruciating last days in the cancer ward of a research hospital. However, Bearing faces death with, well, wit. Based on a Pulitzer Prize winning play by Margaret Edson, the HBO film (the title was W;t in the original play) follows Vivian Bearing as she prepares to undertake treatment for ovarian cancer. Bearing is a John Donne scholar, and the film weaves together the significance of Donne’s poetry and his examination of death in Bearing’s own struggle as she finds herself facing the very thing she has spent her adult life studying. Bearing is a welcome antidote to the dull parade of men behaving badly in the academic fictions of Philip Roth, David Lodge, and their male cohorts. Too many of these novels reduce female scholars to either objects of lust or conniving shrews. Faced with ovarian cancer and the bleak diagnosis that she will not survive, Bearing agrees to participate in a series of brutal treatments which will be of considerable value to medical research. In a twist, the young doctor assigned to take care of her was a student in one her classes, which were known for being among the toughest on campus. As she begins her treatments she is briefed about the severity of the treatments, and told that their findings will be a “significant contribution to knowledge” about ovarian cancer. Vivian’s response is that when it comes to the cancer treatments and to the pursuit of knowledge she will gladly take the full dose. Throughout the film, as the treatments become more excruciating, the phrase “full dose” becomes an affirmation of her commitment to the pursuit of knowledge in the face of difficulty, pain, and loss.

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A few months ago, after the Randolph Houses on the south side of the street were closed down, I started noticing fewer and fewer neighbors.  Now, when I look outside my classroom window, I see the row of buildings across the street with padlocks and feel the emptiness of what I once called my favorite ecosystem.  The human landscape around the school, Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard and Frederick Douglass Boulevard, has been slowly transformed from a vibrant neighborhood into a lifeless stretch of padlocked buildings and empty streets.

I hadn’t really understood the mechanisms of public housing renovation until I began to investigate the closing of the Randolph Houses in recent months.  In 2001, the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) contemplated a $60-million urban plan for 114th Street’s Randolph Houses.  Thirty-six dilapidated walk-up buildings would be repaired, and their dwellers temporarily relocated.  Since 2002, 159 families have vacated their homes; Sixty-four of them were moved across the street and the remainder to distant developments. But the plans for upgrade turned into plans for demolition in 2008, when NYCHA announced a new 154-unit building would be constructed.

The relocation has involved a four-year delay for neighbors who were displaced in 2002 with the promise that their new building would be ready in 2009. The organic nature of the barrio, whose elders on the tree-shaded benches would greet me as I entered the Wadleigh School building, has slowly declined. The block of row houses across the street has emptied. The South side of the 1890 tenement, which contained a rich human landscape, now looks like an empty vacant lot.

The true magnitude of the situation didn’t fully hit me, however, until I sat with the neighbors during a meeting between Randolph Housing residents and civic leaders at the Wadleigh High school auditorium on February 25.  You could feel the frustration in the air. The tenants, who defied the impending blizzard to attend it, took repeated apologies from the recently appointed NYCHA General Manager John Rhea and Deputy General Manager for Operations Gloria Finkelman. According to the New York Times, Rhea had been appointed after a stint as managing director of the Lehman Brothers global consumer retail group. NYCHA’s General Manager Michael Kelly, who also spoke at the meeting, assured the residents that they would oversee completion of the project. He mentioned several successful renovations and relocations in Staten Island and Far Rockaway. He mentioned the Landmark Commission. However, no clear rationale for the plans was given, and no target date for completion was forthcoming, only apologies.

For several months, neighborhood residents have been complaining to the media about the lack of progress. An article published in The Columbia Spectator last month attributes the delay to problems involving building codes, zoning issues, and historic district status.  On Thursday, Kelly said area residents would be informed and included in the plans. He didn’t say how many more years of displacement they would endure, nor did he attempt to count its human and economic costs.

NYCHA did not respond in a timely manner to The Advocate’s request for an official, detailed update.  But Rose Washington, one of the relocated tenants, points out that some families had to move to apartments that were too small or were not fit for their needs. Sarah Gregory, a long-time resident and mother of six who was relocated to the north side of the building confirms Washington’s claims. Gregory attributes the delays to neglect, and believes NYCHA President Robertus Coleman is part of the problem. “We tried getting us a lawyer from legal aid to find out what is going on,” she said. “When they write up documents, it’s in lawyers’ terminology, and we don’t know if something is missing,” she added. The petition was denied because it had not come from President Coleman who, according to Gregory “has let it slide for years.” Gregory feels that the delays are unethical. “If they had problems with the Landmark Society why didn’t they find that out first?” She is in close contact with neighbors who have moved away, and a reliable source of information about community affairs.  Gregory argues that they have not received notices since they were relocated.  ”There was Fabra Hardy had to move away. Dorothy moved to Grand building 121st and Saint Nick, Liola Brown moved to the projects on 91st and Colombus. Now I have to talk to them to try to keep their spirits. They dumped them there and they were all forgotten about,” she says, noting that they have not received updates since being relocated.

Oblivious to the residents’ agony over their future dwelling, the commercial and other planned development transforming Fred Douglass Boulevard is unfolding at a meteoric pace. The Department of City Planning rezoned the area to foster opportunities for residential development promoting building forms that are supposedly consistent with the urban line.  Expansion of new ground for commercial use and other changes, approved by the City Council in 2003, contemplated the rezoning of forty-four blocks. Frederick Douglass Boulevard is labeled under contextual zoning,” which regulates the height and bulk of structures as well as consistency with the neighborhood character.  But you be the judge about whether the character stays the same or whether there exists a big gap between what ends on 114^th Street and begins right at the corner of Frederick Douglass. Real estate and businesses have mushroomed along the boulevard.  The Randolph Houses relocation increases the rift between public and private housing, and the eclectic, vibrant neighborhood that this steady gentrification was supposed to engender has yet to be witnessed 

In 2004, The Gateway, a new condo which had been converted from an old building, took root next to the Randolph Houses on the east side of Frederick Douglass Boulevard.  Shortly after came “Society,” a trendy coffee shop which served lunchtime meals I simply could not afford. I was happy to buy lunch at a joint located one block away on 113th Street and Frederick Douglass. But it soon closed down leaving behind a trail of former customers, colleagues of mine, who, like me, opted to buy lunch at a bodega. Soon after, another building mushroomed across the street on 116th Street and Douglass Boulevard: The Livmore, which features condominiums that range from $460,000 to $980,000. Last year, a handful of stores opened and it was difficult to keep up with the pace: “The 2115 Senegalese Café,” to “Mod Squad Cycle Shop,” the “Posh Paws Pet Store,” and “Questan’s,” an upscale seafood joint, where the cheapest meals start at $8. Dunkin Donuts and Subway franchises soon came along as well but as we add the Soha, a nearby trendy condo to the seemingly never-ending list of gentrifying forces in the neighborhood, the magnitude of the situation becomes apparent.   And we haven’t even discussed he Parc Standard, a tall gray apartment building across from The Gateway which looks like a futuristic spacecraft. Although the urban landscape is changing and the trendy spots have arrived, the community from the Randolph Houses is still left hanging. There is little left of the barrio where “Little Senegal” and the Randolph House residents converge.   Vacant buildings from the public housing units that make the street look like a ghost town. 

The Revitalization plan at Randolph, which has been making news for almost a decade, goes beyond the housing ordeal.  The 2001 pact between the Harlem Local Development Corporation and Columbia University, pledged affordable housing, education and job training in the area. But the Village Voice, quoting Columbia geophysics professor Klaus Jacob, claimed that the eighty-foot-deep basement plan could make the area susceptible to storm surges. There is also Nick Sprayregen, owner of the “Tuck it Away” storage warehouses and once a member of the Harlem Development Corporation, who recently won a lawsuit against Columbia University in which the court overturned the state’s use of eminent domain. The business owner became the David every Goliath hates when his lawyers showed that Columbia’s attempt to claim the land as “blighted” was unconstitutional.  The difference in Sprayregen’s case was that he could afford to pay lawyers’ fees, unlike the low-income victims of NYCHA’s delay, who depend on the Legal Aid Society.

During the meeting at Wadleigh, many residents and tenant leaders wondered why their homes still sat vacant, patched with padlocks, when the new buildings they were promised were supposed to be completed in 2009. In the January 21 issue of the Columbia Spectator, Robertus Coleman contrasted the Randolph families’ ten-year ordeal with the fast-track condominiums next door, which are already being advertised, shown and sold.  As a friend of mine noted, the police “moved in like an army” and set up road blocks on 114th Street in January when an open house was held in “The Douglass,” an apartment complex where apartments range from $529, 000           to $799,000. The luxurious building is now ready for occupation. Whatever else one may think of Michael Bloomberg’s Harlem Revitalization Program and urban renewal agenda, it has not worked yet for the Randolph Houses families. The Dominican bodega owner from whom I frequently purchase lunch, who asked not to be identified, agrees. If revitalization brings progress it won’t be for everybody. “You see, rich people have cars. They buy elsewhere or they get their stuff through the net. Poorer people buy in cash, it flows. We are seeing less and less of our old customers every day.”

To be sure, life in the Randolph Houses was never glamorous.  The dilapidated buildings needed a long deserved facelift.  The Columbia Spectator featured complaints from residents who for years have begged the city for repairs in the decayed tenement. But the renovation of twenty-two of the thirty-six buildings, along with all of the relocation, dispersion, delays and diffusion has destroyed the everyday shared intimacy of the block. I have worked at the Frederick Douglas academy for years, slowly developing “intimacy by proximity” with the people of 114th Street. It used to be that on Friday afternoons when I left work, residents would stop whatever it was that they were doing—from cleaning their cars to braiding their children’s hair, from cooking barbecues to sitting on the stairs. I acknowledged them and they acknowledged me in an unconscious ritual, touching souls without ever saying hi.  My business was not their business. I was the Spanish Teacher. They were neighborhood residents. We left it as that.  Today, I wonder if the families will ever return to the padlocked homes that sit indefinitely vacant, if the buildings and the brownstones will indeed ever be renovated, if area residents will ever restore their urban rituals. The children who were soon to be my students playing in the streets, the people resting, playing, eating, sitting on the shaded benches embedded in the art of being—all this has been suspended indefinitely in a transition that seems to have left Randolph Houses in limbo.

 “During the 4th of July everyone would bring their tables out,” said Sarah Gregory of the old Randolph Houses. “We had coconut cake and pie.  We did not have to lock our doors. Our kids were coming up and down. We were very happy over there. Now we are not happy, because they did not do what they said they were going to do for us,” she says, waiting in vain for a public commitment as four more years of her life slip away.

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Mac McClelland

Nearly fifty years after Burma’s last democratically-elected government was overthrown by a military-led coup, the Southeast Asian country has suffered some of the world’s most egregious human rights abuses.  For activists, Burma has become synonymous with institutionalized rape, torture, forced labor, and ethnic cleansing.  In the popular imagination, however, the enormity of Burma’s crisis remains obscured by indifference and the overshadowing presence of disasters in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Darfur.    

In 2006, Mother Jones editor and human rights reporter Mac McClelland volunteered as an English language teacher with a Burmese refugee organization in Mae Sot, Thailand, a small frontier town hugging the border with Burma.  There, she lived, worked, and partied with a small band of hard-drinking refugees who risk their lives to document the slowly grinding genocide consuming ethnic minorities in Burma. McClelland collects their stories of struggle and survival under a murderous regime in a wide-ranging, meticulously reported, and vividly recounted new memoir, For Us Surrender is Out of the Question.      

McClelland sat down recently with the CUNY Advocate to discuss her new book, the reason the world continues to ignore the genocide in Burma, and why there still may be hope for victims of the world’s longest-running war.   

I hoped we could begin by setting the stage a bit.  Can you discuss how it is that you came to work with Burmese refugees in Thailand?

It really was as lame as I describe it in the book.  I was dicking around on the internet, saw something about these Burmese refugee camps near the border in Thailand, but I couldn’t find any information about why they were there.  I saw that there were 100,000 Burmese refugees in Thailand, and I was like, “Huh? Really?”  I had never heard that before.  Of course, you know somewhere in the back of your mind that Burma sucks, that it’s not exactly a place you would want to live, not exactly a bastion of democracy, but I hadn’t heard that there was a refugee crisis, that there are hundreds of thousands of refugees leaving the country. I couldn’t find any easily accessible information about what the hell the story was, so when I finished graduate school I was like, “I’m just gonna go and check it out.”

Did you travel there with the intention of writing a book?

No. I really just wanted to go and see what was going on. 

What was the most surprising thing that you experienced while you were there?

Well, the genocide. The genocide that I had never heard of, that most people have never heard of because people are afraid to label it a genocide. It’s too complicated, too politically charged. To realize that something of that scope, at that level of horror, was happening and that it’s not widely reported—despite the fact that it has been documented to death—was stunning to me.  I mean, to every single thing that came out of the mouths of these guys that I was working with my response would be, “Really?!?” They would show me videos, and pictures, and I would get interviews, just endless stacks of shit, and with all of it, in every case, my response was, “No, that’s news to me. No, that story doesn’t exist in my media.  No, I don’t know what you are talking about.”  In retrospect, I guess it was stupid to have had faith in thinking that I would have known about this.  But it is so big! You would think that somebody would have been doing something about it. 

So, why haven’t they?  Is it simply that Burma is home to the world’s longest running war, and so doesn’t constitute news? Is news fatigue a factor? Or is there something else going on that we should consider?   

Yeah, well, it seems to me that the fact that it is so old could possibly have something to do with it, but at the same time the story is so juicy, it is so shocking, that it seems to me like something that could totally move papers.  But it’s also that people in this country—this is not as true in the UK—don’t really know what Burma is, where Burma is, don’t necessarily know what continent Burma is on, so I think that news organizations assume that the story will be a hard sell, and they’re probably right.  If I were more of a conspiracy theorist I would say that the genocide in Burma is being underreported because our government doesn’t want the people to know about it because then they would have to do something about it. And they don’t want to do something about it because then China would get mad. But really, I think it’s just a hard-to-sell story. Of course, it could also be fatigue: people definitely had Haiti fatigue, just as they had New Orleans fatigue before that.  The thing with Burma, though, is it seems like it hasn’t reached that point.  I just think we don’t know what to do with it.  Instead, we talk about the same thing over and over again, which is that there’s a political prisoner [Aung San Suu Kyi] there . Couldn’t we use that as a news peg to say “Oh, and by the way, there’s also a genocide going on”?

Let’s talk about your approach to reporting on the crisis in Burma.  There’s a wonderful tension in the book between the rigorous historical research that contextualizes the story—which feels almost academic in nature—and the vigorously informal tone you adopt that frames the narrative.  First, did this mixture result from having a particular audience in mind while writing?  And second, can you discuss the challenges of negotiating the slippery slope between these two elements of your style?     

I definitely did not have a particular audience in mind.  To me, the number one thing was that I had the stories of these refugees which were fucking crazy. I really wanted to tell them. Period.  As for the way the narrative came about, that was more the result of personality than anything else. First of all, I am a huge nerd: I love research and fact-checking and collecting information.  At the same time, I write the way that I speak.  When we were shopping the book proposal, a lot of people were not huge fans of that. They would be like, “Yes, this is an important subject and people should write more books about Burma. But we can never abide by the scathing, the obnoxious tone of this narrator!” 

Since the excerpt from the book came out in the new Mother Jones, some pretty important organizations—I won’t name any names—have written letters to the editor saying “What the fuck were you thinking, framing this in this way. It’s totally inappropriate for a human rights story.”  So I guess I know, now, who is not my audience! They thought that I was undermining the importance of the situation by not being dryer in talking about it. But for me, that’s exactly the problem with all this information!  It’s presented in a way that no one would ever want to look at it.  Even the videos you see have these dire voiceovers—almost always done by British people—and there’s always this slow and sad piano music in the background. The moment you cue it up you say to yourself “I’m not going to watch this. It’s going to be boring and/or sad.” 

I’ve read a thousand books about Burma and even the modern ones, they still read like reports, like academic tracts. They’re long, there’s no narrative, and there are no characters. Because there are no characters, I think that makes it hard for people to read, to engage with this conflict.  So, I was basically writing the book I needed when I was trying to find out what was going on.  This was the book I was looking for, and couldn’t find.

Given the jaw-dropping violence and atrocities being perpetrated in Burma and the world’s seemingly indifferent response thus far, do you still hold any faith that the United Nations or other members of the international community will intervene on behalf of victims there at any point in the foreseeable future?

I have some. We have peacekeepers on the ground in Darfur, after all, so we know we can do it. It’s not like the mechanisms aren’t there, that money isn’t there.  They are.  It’s just that people aren’t employing them.  Thank God I can point to Sudan, though, because otherwise I would probably answer no, I don’t have much faith. In Burma, those villagers would be so happy to see something like that.  Even just the attention would be important. They would be so happy that people knew what was happening. It would make a huge difference in their lives.  So yes, I do have some faith.  I recognize that it might be stupid, but if more people were talking about Burma, then the United Nations would be forced to address it. 

Let’s talk about United States foreign policy for a moment.  Given the necessary political will to act on the situation in Burma, what options, if any, could the Barack Obama administration reasonably pursue to have a positive impact there?

First of all, our government could lead the charge for a commission of inquiry into crimes against humanity in Burma.  Everyone knows that the United States is in charge, in many ways, of the United Nations, and certainly of the Security Council.  So, if we made a big deal of Burma, showed that this is a cause that we are behind and are willing to fight for, that would make a huge difference in comparison to what we are doing now, which is nothing. If a commission of inquiry were to be put into place then all this documentation sitting around would have to be looked at. I can’t imagine that people would see all that and then decide that this is not a problem. The Obama administration actually wouldn’t even have to do all that much work: it wouldn’t cost anything; people wouldn’t have to be moved around.  The president would simply just have to say, “We need to do this thing, right now.”

You make the point in the book’s closing chapter that when it comes to US-China relations, economic concerns trump human rights complaints that Washington might otherwise press with respect to Burma.  Yet in the case of Darfur, we saw something a little different play out. Why? What are the key determinants that distinguish these two situations from one another? 

I think civil society plays a huge part.  First of all, it’s about awareness: the public doesn’t know about Burma, and if the public doesn’t know about Burma then they aren’t putting pressure on politicians to talk about it. And so they won’t, because it’s easier to ignore it.  The “g” word also plays a big part in this. Right now, we just have this vague idea about Burma—that there’s a dictatorship or something there, that they sound really mean, and that there’s a lot of censorship.  This is not enough for people to get behind, to pressure the United States to stand up to China and fight them on the issue.  But imagine if someone threw it out there, called it what it was, and said, “This is a genocide!  These are the pictures.  Here is the evidence.”  This is what happened in the case of Darfur.  The exact same thing could happen in Southeast Asia. There’s no reason why it couldn’t.

A host of possible actions, peaceful and coercive, have been articulated to pressure the Burmese junta to respect basic human rights and prepare the way for civilian rule. At the end of the day, other options having been considered, what do you think about possibilities for military intervention in Burma?  Is this going too far?

I don’t think it’s going too far.  In my opinion, peacekeepers are the answer.  At least, they’re as close to the answer as we’re likely to get. The ideal solution, of course, would be that the country eventually evolves away from dictatorship and builds the necessary institutions for a democratic society and blah blah blah. In the meantime, someone needs to protect these fucking villagers in the east of Burma. It’s absurd what’s happening.  I read exile newspapers.  Every single day, there are reports of five-year-old girls being gang-raped, four thousand new refugees pouring over the border into southern China, this sort of thing.  It is so urgent. Perhaps not to you, perhaps not to me, but it is for the people who have to deal with it.  The fact that this has been going on for so long, and that so few people know about it, is ridiculous.     

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The Board of Trustees of the City University of New York is made up of exactly seventeen members. Of these seventeen, ten of the members are appointed by the governor, with only perfunctory advisement form the state senate and five are appointed directly by the Mayor with similar advisement from the senate. The remaining two non-appointed members of the board include the head of the University Student Senate and the chair of the University Faculty Senate, the last of whom, because of collective bargaining conflicts, sits without a vote. In all, fifteen of the sixteen voting members of the board, the people who negotiate with the union, decide on university budgets, tuition costs, pay scales, appointments, etc. have been appointed by either the mayor or the governor with the “advice and consent of the state senate,” and all of the members currently on the board were appointed by Pataki, Bloomberg, or Guiliani, (all Republicans). In other words, the CUNY Board of Trustees is anything but a democratic or politically diverse institution: it is a collection of seven year appointments (near sinecures) with close political ties to the republican mayor and governor. In fact, The Rand Corporation—hardly a liberal entity—has stated in its report on the university board of trustees entitled “The Governance of the City University of New York: A System at Odds with Itself,” that “In particular, the law does not attempt to ensure that trustees have a measure of independence from their appointing authorities (an independence considered desirable for most university boards.)” The report later goes on to conclude that: “As noted above, several members of the CUNY Board of Trustees work for the city of New York. Some observers believe that elected officials (especially the mayor) have used their influence to undermine the traditional independence of the board. This perception was reinforced by the board’s decision, consistent with a proposal of the mayor, to exclude students in need of remedial work from the senior colleges; all of the mayor’s appointees supported the proposal.” In addition to this there are few significant requirements for board members above and beyond the patronage of the mayor or the governor. Of the fifteen appointed members of the board, not one has a Ph.D., many have only B.A.s or M.B.A.s. and very few have any real experience in academia beyond administration. How these appointees, then, are supposed to represent and protect the interests of the students, faculty, and staff of the university is a question worth asking. As we begin a new academic year, The GC Advocate thought it might be good to introduce old and new students of the Graduate Center to their Board of Trustees. Students interested in expressing their concerns are encouraged to contact members directly. BENNO SCHMIDT Appointed by Governor Pataki in 1999 Schmidt’s tenure was supposed to end this year. However, Governor Pataki re-appointed Schmidt on June 22nd for another seven year term. Schmidt is currently the Chairman of the Board of Directors for the failed Edison Schools: a company dedicated to the model of for-profit private education. He is also the former President of Yale University where according to the PSC Clarion “he resigned under fire” after threats to dissolve departments and cut faculty positions by 11% resulted in uproar from the faculty and staff. In a PBS frontline interview Schmidt defended his free market philosophy by saying that “I think the opposition is also philosophical. … I think the people in education — not all, by any means — tend to be people who have very little experience with private markets. They believe that politics and planning produces better outcomes than more of a market situation where people are free to make choices.” Chairman Schmidt can be reached at: bschmidt@edisonschools.com REVEREND BONNICI Appointed By Governor Pataki in February of 2002. As Pastor of St. Philip Neri Church in The Bronx and Chairman of the Board of Directors for the Family Life/Respect Life Office of the archdiocese of New York, Bonnici has, among his many causes, advocated against abortion and opposed human rights legislation for gays and lesbians. Bonnici’s appointment by Pataki was entirely political and was particularly controversial for a board of trustees member. Since his appointment Rev. Bonnici has missed 17 of 29 Board of Trustees Meetings. PHILIP A. BERRY Berry was ap-pointed by Governor George Pataki in June of 2006. His experience is largely in corporate human resources and he has served as Vice President of Human Resources for the European Division of Colgate Palmolive. WELLINGTON Z. CHEN Chen was appointed by Governor Pataki in 2000. His background is in architecture, urban development and planning. Chen is the senior vice president at the TDC Development Corporation but has no academic experience. Chen is Chair of the Board’s Standing Committee on Academic Policy, Program, and Research. KENNETH COOK Cook was appointed by Governor George Pataki in 1997. Cook was a high school teacher in Brooklyn for 25 years but has no experience of the working conditions in higher education. Despite the fact that appointments are not to exceed seven years, Cook is still on the Board of Trustees. According to the Rand report this is a common problem of the CUNY Board of Trustees. “In practice, some CUNY trustees have continued to serve long after their terms officially ended, because the elected officials in charge of appointments failed to appoint replacements. A few years ago, the terms of more than half of the serving trustees were beyond their expiration dates.” PRITA DIMARTINO A former Reagan and Bush government appointee, Ms. DiMartino was appointed to the Board of Trustees by Mayor Bloomberg in 2003. In addition to her work for the Reagan and Bush administrations she is a former congressional lobbyist for the AT&T Corporation. DiMartino has no academic experience and is Vice Chair of the Board’s Standing Committee on Faculty, Staff, and Administration, and holds membership on the Standing Committee on Academic Policy, Program, and Research. RANDY M. MASTRO Mr. Mastro was appointed by Mayor Guiliani in 1999. Mastro is a criminal lawyer with close personal ties with former mayor Guiliani. According to the PSC Clarion, Mr. Mastro “headed Giuliani’s task force on bilingual education, and criticized it for failing to recommend ending bilingual ed altogether. Mastro also headed Giuliani’s 1999 charter revision commission, whose proposals included requiring a 2/3 ‘supermajority’ before the City Council could pass any tax increase. He backed Alan Hevesi for mayor in 2001, and after 9/11 was a higly visible proponent of extending Giuliani’s term.” He chairs the CUNY Trustees’ Facilities Committee. Mastro introduced the motion that the BoT adopted in October 2001, endorsing Chancellor Goldstein’s criticism of an anti-war teach-in earlier that month at CCNY.” FREIDA D. FOSTER-TOLBERT Foster-Tolbert was appointed by Governor Pataki in 2006. She was formerly the Com-munity Service Coordinator at Borough of Manhattan Com-munity College and is one of the few board members who actually had previous experience working within CUNY. VALERIE LANCASTER BEAL Beal was appointed by Governor Pataki in 2002. Her experience is largely as an investment banker, however, to her credit Beal has worked with BMCC’s COPE program, which helps welfare receipients attend college. KATHLEEN M. PESILE Ms. Pesile was appointed by Governor George Pataki in 1998. Pesile is an investment advisor and former Vice President of JP Morgan from 1986 to 1993. To her credit, Ms. Pesile does have first hand knowledge of working as an adjunct lectrurer at CUNY. JOSEPH J. LHOTA Mr. Lhota was appointed by Mayor Giuliani in 2001. He is Vice President of Cablevision Systems Corporation and former finance commissioner to Mayor Guiliani. Mr. Lhota’s wife is a former Guiliani fundraiser and according to the PSC Clarion “she [was] head of NYC Public/Private Initiatives (PPI), which operates out of the mayor’s Office of Operations to raise private money for public projects such as the “Schmidt Commission” on the future of CUNY or the restoration of City Hall. HUGO M. MORALES Mr. Morales was appointed by Governor George Pataki in 2002. Mr. Morales is a psychiatrist and Hispanic activist. Mr. Morales academic experience is limited to his membership on the Blue Ribbon Panel of the New York City Board of Education in 1987. He is the Vice Chair of the Board’s Standing Committee on Academic Policy, Program, and Research. CAROL ROBLES-ROMAN Ms. Robles-Roman was appointed by Mayor Bloomberg in 2002. Her appointment is a classic example of the conflict of interest cited by the Rand report (see above). She was sworn in as Deputy Mayor of Legal Affairs to the Bloomberg administration in the same year that she was appointed to the BoT. Deputy Mayor Robles-Roman holds membership on the Board’s Standing Committee on Fiscal Affairs. MARK V. SHAW Mr. Shaw was appointed by Mayor Bloomberg in 2002. Another classic example of administrative nepotism, Mr. Shaw was former Deputy Mayor for Operations to Mayor Bloomberg and Executive Director and Chief Executive Officer for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. JEFFREY WIESENFELD A member of the foreign counterintelligence division of the FBI for four years, Wiesenfeld is the board member that everyone loves to hate. He was appointed by Governor Pataki in 1999. That same year Wiesenfeld was appointed the New York City Regional Director of the Empire State Development Corporation. He left in 2000. He was then appointed to the United Nations Development Corporation, a position which he still holds today. The Clarion newspaper of the PSC, an organization that Wiesenfeld has denounced publicly at BoT meetings has reported that Wiesenfeld had “labeled an October 2001 anti-war teach-in at CCNY as ‘seditious,’ claiming it ‘enticed radicals to come and spew forth their venom toward the United States.’” Wiesenfeld has also used the race card and the terrorist card to lash out at the PSC saying publicly at the June 2005, BoT meeting: “That the PCS acts to defend the academic freedom of those who engage in terrorist and criminal acts yet remains silent in the face of a black list against those who are guilty only of being Israeli academics, read that Jews, is revealing. The current PCS leaders have hijacked the union to promote their own narrow political agenda, one that involves the unprincipled defense of ideological mates and no others. “When your union speaks loudly in the defense of academic freedom for those who engage in terrorist and criminal acts, yet says nothing when innocent Israeli academics are blacklisted, it is time for your voice to object. It is shameful and I agree that the PSC with its self-professed devotion to solidarity did not join the mainstream academic community in countering an egregious attack on free discourse and academic freedom.” Wiesenfeld’s seven year tenure is up this year. We can only hope that his leave will be timelier than his colleagues’ have been.

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Marc Sageman and Charles B. Strozier at an October Center on Terrorism Seminar

In the normally-restrained world of academic discourse, the 2007 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association stands out as a break with the dominant culture of self-abrogation and humility. During the course of this meeting, a fierce and impassioned debate broke out over a proposed revision to the association’s Code of Ethics that would prohibit secret research. The disputed language read, in part, “no reports should be provided to sponsors that are not also available to the general public and, where practicable, to the population studied.” In practice, this would bar American anthropologists from doing research for the US Department of Defense and its affiliates.

The proposed clause actually wasn’t new. It was added to the Code in 1971 as sentiment against the Vietnam War peaked, but was later excised, mirroring the ascendency of the right-wing on the national stage and in the academy. By 2007, as George W. Bush readied American forces for the now-infamous “surge,” many anthropologists felt it was again time to take a stand. Anthropologists were attracting media attention for their involvement in an initiative called the Human Terrain System—a program in which anthropologists worked directly for the US military in war zones for the purpose of collecting cultural and social data. The AAA leadership had already issued an official statement condemning Human Terrain System, but some rank-and-file members felt it hadn’t gone far enough. The proposed change to the code of ethics would go much further, chastising not only those anthropologists who work directly in the theater of war, but also those who conduct military research from the comfort of their ivory tower offices.

The AAA leadership eventually managed to defeat the proposal by means of a deft procedural maneuver, but the events of the meeting reignited a longstanding debate about the militarization of the academy. To what extent should academics collaborate with the military? Are research projects that further a military campaign inherently unethical? Is warmaking compatible with the social mission of the university? Clearly, opinions on these questions are sharply divided along ideological lines. But like the AAA’s code of ethics, this debate has its roots in the 1970s.

At 4:00 AM on August 24, 1970, a bomb ripped through the University of Wisconsin–Madison campus resulting in over $2 million worth of damage. The incendiary device was a stolen Ford Econoline van filled with 2,000 pounds of explosives. The target: the Army Mathematics Research Center (ARMC), which had become a magnet for student protests because of its perceived involvement with counterinsurgency operations in Vietnam. A lone scientist, working on an unrelated research project through the night in his physics lab, was killed. Four UW students were eventually charged with the bombing; two later served jail time and one remains at large.

For some, this event definitively marked the shift from a decade of peace, love and understanding to a decade of anger, violence, and cynicism. For others, it marked a strategic shift in the antiwar movement: rather than march on Washington, students would now fight the military presence in their own backyards. Chants of “US out of Vietnam!” turned to “ROTC Off Campus!” The military-industrial complex was recast as the Military-Industrial-University Complex. While all but the most fringe elements condemned the bombers at UW and lamented the tragic loss of life, most antiwar activists agreed that the strategy of targeting campus-military connections was essentially correct. What followed was a rash of student protests that were generally less violent, but no less disruptive. Research facilities receiving military funding were picketed, professors conducting research for the military were singled out and harassed. These events culminated in the largest student strike and occupation wave of American history in the spring of 1972, prompting Nixon to establish the Commission on Campus Unrest.

Forty years later, the Global War on Terror—now rebranded the “Overseas Contingency Operation” by the Barack Obama administration—has benefited from a dramatically different political climate. The New York Times recently ran a feature exploring the possibility of lifting many elite colleges’ longstanding bans on ROTC programs. The Times reported that at Harvard, 62 percent of respondents to an informal survey of undergraduates favored bringing the ROTC back on campus, and virtually no protesters showed up to challenge US Central Command General David Petraeus when he delivered an address in Harvard Yard at a ROTC commissioning ceremony. The antiwar movement, already running out of steam in the closing years of Bush’s regime, slowed to a sputter when a friendlier face took over the highest office. The country’s largest antiwar organization gave Obama a free ride through the early months of his presidency, and is only now beginning to regroup. What remains of the Left has mainly concerned itself with protesting the excesses of the bailouts, and protesting cuts to education and social services.

On today’s college campuses, the still-open-ended war on terror never managed to spawn much of an antiwar movement. Instead, the war has manifest itself mainly through the emergence of terrorism research centers. There are already at least half a dozen campus-based centers dedicated exclusively to the study of terror, and many more that count terrorism among their foci. Campuses as varied as Duke and the University of Maryland now house specialized anti-terrorism programs. As a rule, most of these centers are not particularly critical of US foreign policy. Some are run by known right-wing ideologues, and a few are scarcely-concealed neoconservative think tanks.

From the outset, CUNY’s Center on Terrorism (COT) has been an anomaly among this crowd. Undoubtedly, the founder and director of the center, Charles Strozier, is no neocon hawk. A self-described former “Sixties radical”, Strozier claims his center is paving new ground by defining “a progressive, intelligent approach to counterterrorism.” In a telephone interview, Strozier criticized counterterrorism policy under Bush without prompting, paraphrasing Obama’s catchphrase: “Iraq was the wrong war at the wrong place at the wrong time.” Later, he noted with disgust that Bush had militarized counterterrorism operations. (Strozier argues with caveats that terrorism is a problem to be dealt with by police. But this is no longer a particularly controversial thing to say. In contrast, Strozier still expresses admiration for Obama, describing him as “moving in the right direction.” When pressed, Strozier described the president as having the “right ideas and right goals” but being “slow in implementing them.” (At press time, Obama had not yet made a decision on General William McChyrstal’s request for as many as 45,000 additional troops in Afghanistan).

The Center on Terrorism is located on the 6th floor of an unassuming office building on the far west side of Manhattan with a BMW dealership on the ground floor. The center’s research staff consists of a combination of locally-based scholars with CUNY appointments and far-flung experts without other local affiliations. Although a similar program existed under a different name prior to 2001, the center reinvented itself in the aftermath of 9/11, and dedicated itself exclusively to terrorism research.

CUNY provides the center with office space and essential support, but the program reports that the “vast majority” of its funding comes from outside sources. Chief among these is the Department of Homeland Security, which sponsors the center both through one-off grants and through the ongoing Graduate Assistantship in Homeland Security. The assistantships offer a $2300 monthly stipend in addition to tuition reimbursement, student fees and health insurance. While the program reports that its DHS-funded graduate assistants go on to pursue varied careers, the application for the program includes a 1,000 word essay on “how this assistantship will help advance your career objectives in the field of homeland security.” In addition, the center offers a certificate in Terrorism Studies—one of the only of its kind, and works closely with John Jay’s Criminal Justice PhD students who choose to specialize in counterterrorism. Last year, John Jay reported that its faculty had received over $580,000 in DHS grant money.

The COT is not the only CUNY-based research center that accepts military funding. “The Center for Advanced Technology in Photonics Applications,” with offices at CCNY and Queens reports on its website having received more than $6 million over the last five years from the US military sources, including $600,000 from the Navy for “underwater target imaging.”

Aside from passing mentions in a few online publications, the Center on Terrorism and other CUNY-based research initiatves with connections to the military have largely escaped the notice of the antiwar movement. To be sure, the Center on Terrorism’s politics defy simple categorization. Unlike many of its companion institutions, CUNY’s center takes pains to include a range of viewpoints and perspectives on its roster, including a handful of unabashed liberals. The center’s director is quick to point out that it sponsored a conference on torture before Abu Ghraib. At its conferences, the center has hosted a number of outspoken leftists, from critical geographer Cindi Katz to feminist thinker Marnia Lazreg, anti-nuclear activist Jonathan Schell, and the director of Human Rights Watch, among others. The center’s most recent conference was called “Surveillance Society: At What Price Security” and listed “reconsiderations of Foucault and Orwell” among topics to be covered.

Social science figures prominently in the center’s research. While many of its affiliated faculty are trained as criminologists, the center claims psychologists, historians, sociologists, and humanities scholars within its ranks. To the extent that the war on terror is a socio-psychological war, the social sciences have found their modeling methods are suddenly in huge demand. The watchwords of the day are ‘cultural knowledge,’ ‘ethnographic intelligence,’ and ‘social networks’—all concepts derived from the social sciences, especially sociology and anthropology. Modern military tactics depend on determining the likelihood that residents of a particular Afghan village might become radicalized. Sean O’Brien, a senior employee at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (the Pentagon’s research and development wing) charged with running the agency’s “computation social science” program, recently spoke glowingly of the social sciences. In a series of public remarks he claimed that “increasing sophistication of agent based social simulations” would make it possible for researchers to effectively predict future human behavior—for example, who might join a terrorist cell. More ominously, O’Brien argued “we may revolutionize the social sciences along the way.”

Some center faculty members have direct connections to US intelligence. The center counts among its affiliated faculty former-CIA operative Marc Sagemen, whose resume includes three years running “US unilateral programs with the Afghan Mujahedin.” Sageman’s most recent book, Unmasking Terror features a glowing review from former Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge on the bookjacket. In his October 7, 2009 testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Sageman read a series of prepared remarks entitiled “Confronting Al-Qeda: Understanding the Terrorist Threat in Afghanistan and Beyond,” which reads in part, “counter-terrorism works and is doing well against the global neo-jihadi terrorist threat.”

But the COT doesn’t only concern itself with right-wing terrorist groups. Another Center affiliate, Joshua Freilich, runs a project known as the United States Extremist Crime Database (ECDB), a “large-scale data-collection effort that is building the first-of-its-kind relational database of crimes committed by far-right, Jihadist, and animal rights and environmental rights extremists in the United States.” While some might object to the conflation of Islamic fundamentalists with “ecoterrrorist” arsonists, the term “terrorist” is increasingly being applied to domestic radicals.

Strozier is keen to point out that “progressive critical thinkers tend to shy away from dealing with subjects that involve police and military intelligence.” Nowhere has this been clearer than at the AAA. After the Code of Ethics revision was defeated, a group calling itself the Network of Concerned Anthropologists drafted a petition which offered an even stronger version of the anti-military language. The petition reads in part, “We believe that anthropologists should not engage in research and other activities that contribute to counter-insurgency operations in Iraq or in related theaters in the ‘war on terror.’ … [This work] contributes instead to a brutal war of occupation which has entailed massive casualties.” For these radical anthropologists, to conduct research for the military is to further the neoimperialist project. But for Strozier, this separation between the academic Left and militaryntelligence communities is “artificial and dangerous.” Strozier openly acknowledges that the field of terrorism studies is “dominated by right wing fanatics and mainstream cheerleaders,” but describes his center as “a beacon of hope in defining an alternative approach.”

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Although their candidate Jimmy McMillan has no real chance of winning, at the end of the day The Rent is Too Damn High Party might actually be the best vote this year since it would at least send a message to both Bloomberg and Thompson, the Democrats and the Republicans, that something radical must indeed be done about the cost of living in NYC. Despite all of this, or perhaps because of it, the GC Advocate offers you this guide, somewhat tongue in cheek, to the 2009 candidates for the mayor of New York City.

Current Mayor—Michael Bloomberg:

Mayor of New York from 2002 to the present, Bloomberg is the multi-billionaire (currently ranked seventeen among the world’s wealthiest billionaires) owner of Bloomberg LP—an information, news, and media company that provides information services to investment firms such as Merrill Lynch. Bloomberg also owns a substantial radio network whose flagship station, WBBR reaches thousands of New Yorkers every day. His great wealth has made it easy for him to abstain from the standard mayoral salary and accepts just $1 a year for his services.

The Good:

Although his critics say his policies have contributed to gentrification, out of control rents, and the loss of neighborhood culture, many would argue that the mayor has made the city a much more pleasant and arguably safer and much healthier place to live (if you can afford it).

GUN CONTROL: The mayor has been a staunch advocate of gun control ever since his election in 2002, recently funding a highly reported private investigation of out of state gun shows (where guns are often sold without background checks or waiting periods). Bloomberg blames the illegal practices uncovered at these shows for contributing to gun violence in the city, and has argued that such shows should be outlawed. Bloomberg is also the co-founder of “Mayors against Illegal Guns,” an organization of city mayors dedicated to the elimination of illegal gun sales. Although some speculate the Mayor’s recent investigation was a political stunt designed precisely to influence liberal voters, other candidates would nonetheless do well to take up the mantle of gun control advocacy the way that Bloomberg has.

ENVIRONMENT: As those who like to bike to the Graduate Center already know, the mayor has been as active as any previous mayor in making New York City a safe city for bicycle commuters as well as a much safer and more pleasant place for pedestrians. Under Bloomberg, who is a large contributor to the Central Park Conservancy, the city has created more green spaces, more pedestrian malls (including several pedestrian malls on Broadway), and more dedicated bike lanes than any mayor in recent history. Bloomberg plans to continue to create as much as fifty miles of new bike lanes every year. Bloomberg was also the man responsible for outlawing smoking in New York City bars and restaurants and implementing a ban on the use of trans fats in New York City Restaurants (both of which, unless you’re a smoker or really like Krispy Kreme, are good things in the end).

311: Say what you will about Bloomberg’s methods or his emphasis on employing tactics and procedures from the private sector, but the creation of the official 311 city information line was a thoughtful and constructive way to help city residents find help and answers to pressing needs and questions about city services. In addition, 311 has helped residents become more directly involved in reporting upon issues such as unsafe working conditions, graffiti, garbage dumping, and other low level city nuisances.

The Bad:

Following Giuliani’s lead, Bloomberg seems more concerned with making New York a thriving international metropolis than an economically sustainable, livable, and affordable city. In the process the mayor has prioritized corporate interests, gentrification, and development over job creation and housing.

AFFORDABLE HOUSING: Although the New York Times reported that Bloomberg increased affordable housing units by 165,000 between 2002–2007, under his leadership—and in part because of his pro-market policies—the city lost more than 200,000 low income housing units during that same period, for a net loss of 35,000 units. This loss is in large part due to the mayor’s privileging of private interests over the public good and his intense gentrification and development efforts, which have resulted in the conversion of several formerly rent stabilized communities, such as Stuyvesant Town, into luxury condominiums.

GOOD JOBS: In his 2009 state of the city address, Bloomberg noted that he had created 227,000 more jobs from 2002–2009. But it turns out that most of those new jobs will be in the growing but low paying dead end service sector. The New York Times reports that New York City lost 43 percent of its manufacturing jobs under Bloomberg from January 2002 to August 2009. “In 2008, these jobs paid on average $52,758 a year.” As the city increasingly gentrifies, there will surely be a greater call for waiters, bartenders, baristas, salespersons, cashiers, and pedicurists, but few of these jobs actually provide a wage consistent with the cost of living in NYC, and most provide very limited benefits, if any.

The Ugly:

Bloomberg may want to be Mayor for life.

THIRD TERM SCANDAL: Despite his reassurances at the recent mayoral debate (from which all candidates but Bill Thompson were barred) that he would not seek another term after his third, Bloomberg has had a hard time allaying fears that he’s playing out some regal fantasy where he has been anointed King of New York. Locals aren’t concerned yet about a fourth term; they’re still fuming about the way in which Bloomberg rewrote the law to allow him to run for reelection this time around. When former mayor Rudolph Giuliani tested the same waters in 2001 to accomplish the similar ends, Bloomberg labeled the idea of extending term limits a “disgrace.” Yet in the aftermath of the financial crisis, Bloomberg experienced a change of heart, apparently motivated by the belief that he alone could save the city from financial disaster. His henchmen in the city council apparently agreed, and in a single act of municipal disgrace voted to override two public referendums where voters clearly expressed their opposition to term limit extensions. Since then, the mayor has poured tens of millions into a campaign where he faces no serious challenge, increasing speculation further that Mayor Mike is more concerned about his legacy than honoring the basic principles of local democracy.

Democratic Party—Bill Thompson:

Bill Thompson has served as both the president of the New York City Board of Education from 1996 to 2001 as well as the New York City comptroller from 2002 until the present. Thompson defeated his primary opponent Tony Avella in a landslide victory to win the Democratic Party nomination for mayor in September. Thompson is running as a Democrat but also has the backing of the Working Families Party.

The Good:

As comptroller, it is Thompson’s job to oversee the use of the city’s finances, and on that count Thompson appears to have done a good job defending the city’s funds against the corruption and graft of private interests.

EDUCATION: As city comptroller, Thompson exposed several endemic problems at the board of education including an audit of the no-bid contractors Alvarez and Marshall, which exposed excessive overcharging to the city. Thompson has also proposed, if elected, to fire schools chancellor Joel Klein, and to end the privatization of NYC’s public schools.

LABOR: Thompson also investigated several labor abuses, including an investigation which led to a $750,000 settlement against JC Mandel Security who had been underpaying their employees. According to his own campaign statements, Thompson claims to have “initiated more cases and penalized more contractors than any comptroller before. Thompson also has the endorsements of several labor unions, including the Transportation Workers Union local, which Thompson has vocally supported. This endorsement, however, may have as much to do with the union’s anger at Bloomberg’s criticism as it does with Thompson’s potential as mayor.

The Bad:

Thompson has been characterized as a career machine party politician, and while he has been a staunch defender of the city’s coffers, he has not always been as good at making them grow as much as they should.

POOR MANAGEMENT: Perhaps the biggest criticism of Thompson’s performance as comptroller is the repeated claim that he mismanaged the New York City Employees’ Retirement System, which, over the last seven years has performed in the bottom third among similar large pension funds. All of this happened even asThompson was receiving large campaign contributions from several of the fund’s money managers. “In some cases,” reported the New York Times, “the executives gave to Mr. Thompson just months before the pension funds hired them to manage tens of millions of dollars, according to interviews and public records.”

BIKE LANES: Thompson seems to be ambivalent about the idea of further increases in bike lanes and pedestrian plazas. In a debate with Tony Avella, Thompson said: “I favor bicycle lanes; however, you are hearing the complaint all over the city of New York, because the communities have not been consulted. They’ve been ignored. Bicycle lanes have been dropped upon them and there has been no discussion. That’s wrong and that shouldn’t continue.” Thompson also told a group of Chinatown residents that were he elected he would tear up the dedicated bike lane on Grand Street.

The Ugly:

Even with Obama’s “endorsement,” Thompson doesn’t stand a chance against Bloomberg’s $65 million campaign.

OBAMA OBSESSED: Thompson has shamelessly attempted to ride the coattails of Barack Obama’s popularity by insisting that he had received the president’s blessing and support in the mayoral race. In fact, Obama has never spoken publicly on the issue, but his spokesperson said that the president supports candidates in the Democratic Party. He refused, after being pressed, to pronounce Bill Thompson’s name. Thompson, though, took it as nothing less than a ringing endorsement, issuing a press release stating: “Yes we can in New York: Barack Obama supports Bill Thompson for mayor.”

Green Party—Reverend Billy Talen:

Reverend Billy (a.k.a. Billy Talen) is a veteran political activist and performer and is the charismatic and irreverent leader of the Church of Life After Shopping, which preaches an anti-consumer gospel based on a gift economy of love and community. Talen announced his bid for mayor at a Union Square rally in March of this year.

The Good:

Talen’s platform, though not terribly detailed, focuses on the creation and reinvigoration of greater community space and a greater emphasis on local neighborhood control.

LOCAL CULTURE: Like a twenty-first century Jane Jacobs, Reverend Billy supports the promotion of local culture against what he calls the “developer invasion” and “upzoning” taking place in New York City today. Were he to be elected Reverend Billy vows that “all new developments must be community-driven and community-approved.” Talen also supports providing incentives for the creation and promotion of locally-owned small businesses, which he argues help to keep money within the local economies and to create a sense of place and community. One interesting plan to improve local control laid out in Talen’s platform would be to “disengage Community Boards from the appointive powers of Borough Presidents. In Brooklyn we have seen summary purges from Community Boards by Marty Markowitz, usually of people who didn’t support his position on the Atlantic Yards and Forest City Ratner.”

GREEN PARTY: Talen is running on the Green Party ticket and all votes for Talen are a vote for the continued relevance and power of the greater Green Party.

The Bad:

Reverend Billy is a seasoned activist but not a politician.

THEATRE OR POLITICS?: While Talen’s campaign and party affiliation make him appear like a serious, even legitimately viable candidate for the office, it is hard to know how willing Talen would be to really set aside his Reverend Billy persona and get down to the serious business of running the largest city in the United States.

The Ugly:

His hair.

Conservative Party—Stephen Christopher:

Christopher is the Pastor of the Memorial Baptist Church in Brooklyn. He also ran unsuccessfully for the New York State Senate in 2008.

The Good:

Supports restrictions on use of eminent domain.

The Bad:

He’s a conservative, and his bid for mayor is probably nothing more than an attempt to keep his name alive in the Conservative Party and among conservative circles.

The Ugly:

His platform is retrogressive and dangerous. Christopher and the conservatives are primarily concerned with issues of taxation, but he also advocates for a fully privatized health insurance system, wants to restore the death penalty, prohibit stem cell research, roll back abortion rights, not recognize transgender peoples as special categories of human beings in human rights law, etc. etc. etc.

Socialism and Liberation Party—Frances Villar:

One of City University’s very own, Frances Villar has been a presence on the activist scene in New York City since 2006. The Dominican-born Villar is a student at Lehman College where she helped organize students to support the Jena Six, and to resist tuition increases in 2008. The 26-year-old Villar is running as mayor for the newly formed Socialism and Liberation Party whose platform advocates an explicitly revolutionary politics.

The Good:

She’s a socialist; she has a pretty radical platform

The Bad:

No real plan for how to implement change. Like many revolutionary parties, the SLP emphasizes revolution at the expense of actual change with all problems traced back to the capitalist system. Because of this, Villar’s platform is filled with complaint but almost devoid of any solutions to the problems outside of overthrowing the capitalist system.

The Ugly:

party, the SLP, is the offspring of a split from the Worker’s World Party and is a largely a sectarian organization.

Socialist Worker Party—Dan Fein:

Dan Fein is a 64-year-old sewing machine operator. Villar’s

The Good:

He’s a socialist, and we’re not talking about the Obama variety of socialism.

A MAN OF THE PEOPLE: As a member of the Socialist Worker’s Party, Fein’s platform includes guaranteed unemployment compensation at union scale, an increase in the minimum wage to union scale, and an end to all income taxes on workers.

The Bad:

He’s a socialist: too much in the way of tired rhetoric, not much in the way of clear priorities for a better New York.

The Ugly:

Has not bothered to limit his agenda to issues actually having to do with New York City politics. Issues of national politics and the Iraq and Afghan wars is a higher priority, for example, than nuts and bolts solutions to issues directly affecting New York working class folks.

Rent is Too Damn High Candidate—Jimmy McMillan:

What can you say about Jimmy McMillan’s platform that you can’t put into five simple words: “Rent is too damn high!” McMillan, who is a retired postal worker and a Vietnam vet, has been a perennial candidate for mayor and has been running on this same platform since at least 1993, when he was arrested for scaling one of the cables on the Brooklyn Bridge with a “Rambo knife” demanding that a television crew be brought to broadcast his message.

The Good:

McMillan is officially on the ballot this time around.

The Bad:

“Rent is too damn high.”

The Ugly:

“Rent is too damn high.”

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Mens cuiusque is est quisque
(What a man’s mind is, that is what he is)

Good leadership, the world over, is in short supply. Terrorism or its threat lurks everywhere; the problems in the Middle East grow by the hour; central African chiefs continue to practice genocide instead of agriculture; meanwhile, in Brussels, overpaid bureaucrats dream up yet more ludicrous directives that will render the European economy as uncompetitive as that of Burkina Faso. It is clear we need good leaders as never before.

Popper in conversation with Plato

The dilemma is not, of course, a new one. In 1960, when, despite the Cold War, much of the world was in a more stable mood than now, Senator John F. Kennedy remarked that “We need leaders who will accomplish two great objectives. First, they will awaken responsible citizens out of their mood of acquiescence and drift, showing them that only timely, determined action can create a better future; and second, they will discuss our problems in constructive terms, or at least terms that clarify the possible solutions.” Today’s responsible citizens of western democracies, disillusioned with the performance of their leaders, display even more apathy than their 1960s counterparts: barely half bother to go to the polls and most no longer see their leaders as role models. The “possible solutions,” to war with Iraq in 2003, for example, were not clarified by US President George W. Bush and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair precisely because they failed to consider the aftermath of their actions. The Iraqi nation may have been grateful for the removal of Saddam Hussein, but insurgency and terrorism ensued instead of peace. In Islamic countries from Algeria to Indonesia, there has been little of what Kennedy called “determined action” on the part of its leaders, and “a better future” has not been created for its citizens. The peoples of sub-Saharan Africa have fared even worse: having thrown off the yoke of European colonization half a century ago, their leaders have not shown signs that they are ready to discuss their “problems in constructive term[s],” but have instead delivered only corruption and human misery. Ethiopia, Sudan, and Zimbabwe are but three obvious examples of this failure of intelligent leadership.
Too many of today’s leaders fail to accomplish the objectives that Kennedy proposed, in large part because they simply lack good judgement: their intellect is not up to the job. But is not a strong intellect incompatible with sturdy leadership? Is not an intellectual an introvert, whereas a leader needs to be an extrovert? There has been much debate about this issue, but I will try here to show that intellectual prowess and leadership are not necessarily incompatible. Plato, for example, was in favour of the idea of a “philosopher king.” Karl Popper, on the other hand, considered philosophers to make poor leaders.
Plato, one of the West’s earliest political philosophers, espoused governance by an aristocracy: in other words “rule by the best,” who would be selected on the basis of examinations, not by virtue of birth or wealth. While leaders would be chosen based on merit and ability, such a ruler, once in office, would have the powers of a king. To Plato the checks and balances of democracy implied a state subjected to an irresponsible or criminal will. So in the Republic he argues that it is philosophers who are the best equipped to rule—thus the idea of the philosopher king. The fact that he acknowledged that it is unlikely that such a person would actually emerge in the society of his day makes his aspiration a bit of a dream. Yet others nonetheless continued to follow in the same vein.
Erasmus—“the greatest intellect in 16th century Europe”—followed Plato’s vision, arguing that a monarchy was the best form of government, provided the monarch or prince is well-educated. In the 19th century Friedrich Nietzsche echoed these aspirations in his own strident style saying: “The real philosophers … are commanders and lawgivers; they say: ‘Thus shall it be!’” Nietzsche did not have in mind actual rule by philosophers, but merely that those in power should follow the counsel of philosophers. In that sense this is a somewhat different, rather more Germanic, version of Plato’s philosopher king.
On the other side are philosophers such as Immanuel Kant, who was dismissive of Plato: “That kings should become philosophers, or philosophers kings, is not likely to happen; nor would it be desirable, since the possession of power invariably debases the free judgement of reason.” Perhaps to protect his own position, he also pointed out that “It is…indispensable that a king—or a kingly, i.e. self-ruling people—should not suppress philosophers but leave them the right of public utterance.”
Following Kant, Karl Popper takes issue with Plato on two counts. First, he dislikes the proposal of a monarch with total power over his subjects and, second, like most people, he simply cannot envisage philosophers as leaders. In The Myth of the Framework: In Defence of Science and Rationality Popper says: “In a famous and highly dramatic passage of his chief work, Plato demands that philosophers should be kings and, vice versa, that kings—or autocratic rulers—should be fully trained philosophers.… I do not find it an attractive proposal. Quite apart from the fact that I am against any form of autocracy or dictatorship, including the dictatorship of the wisest and best, philosophers do not seem to me to be particularly well suited for the job.” He takes as a specific example the case of Thomas Masaryk, “the creator, first president and, one might say, the philosopher-king of the Czechoslovak Republic. Masaryk was not only a fully trained philosopher, but was also a born statesman and a great and admirable man. And his creation, Czechoslovak Republic, was an unparalleled political achievement. Yet the dissolution of the Old Austrian Empire was also partly Masaryk’s work. And this proved a disaster for Europe and the world. For the instability that followed this dissolution was largely responsible for the rise of Nazism and finally even for the downfall of Masaryk’s own Czechoslovak Republic… The fact that an admirable man and a great statesman like Masaryk was led by certain philosophical ideas to commit so grave a blunder…amounts to a strong argument against Plato’s demand that philosophers should rule”

Have I perhaps overstated the actual possibility of a philosopher-king? Is the ideal really just a dream? Possibly. If we interpret “philosopher” in the sense used by Kant and Popper this may be true. Yet even Popper acknowledges that such people mount the stage of governance from time to time. It is the effectiveness of the combination that he criticizes. Philosopher-rulers fail only if their goals are, as in Masaryk’s case, flawed. So it behoves me to provide other examples. If my argument is true, that cerebral rulers are not only possible, but preferable to our current rulers, then there should be many instances of persons, scattered throughout history, who were endowed with a fine intellect and a simultaneous ability to lead.
My belief, then, is that the qualities of leadership and a good intellect are not incompatible. However I do not wish to imply that leaders should be “intellectuals” as such. Apart from the fact that ‘intellectual’ as a noun has a slightly derisory meaning, there is Albert Einstein’s wise remark that “We should take care not to make the intellect our god. It has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality. It cannot lead, it can only serve.” I am instead using the word intellectual as an adjective to mean “blessed with a good intellect,” which the leader applies to the benefit of his people. Charisma is an important element, but not if used improperly. So tyrannical warlords who brought nothing but death and destruction (Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, Stalin, Hitler and Mao) I do not consider. Instead I will offer as examples four rulers who—blessed both with a good intellect and the qualities of leadership—contributed positively to the people under their sway. To illustrate the fact that time and geography play no role in their emergence, my examples are taken from ancient Rome, from Western Europe and North America in the 18th century, and from the Middle East in the 20th.
Hadrian (76–138) has been considered the most remarkable of all the Roman emperors. His intense energy drove him to practically every corner of his empire so that he became better known, to more of his subjects, than any other Roman ruler. He personally led his troops into action, a born leader; yet he was also astute enough to consolidate the empire by limiting its extent in the northern and eastern provinces. According to Larousse encyclopaedia, Hadrian’s “intellectual qualities were unrivalled, his curiosity omnivorous and his memory astonishing. He was a connoisseur of the arts, and also possessed all the abilities of a great statesman.”
If Elizabeth I of England was Europe’s most intellectual monarch of the sixteenth century, then Frederick II, known as “Frederick the Great” (1712–1786), fulfilled that role in the eighteenth. Frederick’s energies were devoted to intellectual pursuits, to reforming life within Prussia, and to turning it from an insignificant backwater into a major nation through the acquisition of new lands. If that meant war, so be it. He succeeded in all his objectives. When Frederick met Voltaire in 1736, in Strasbourg, they were, within minutes, discussing “the immortality of the soul, liberty and Plato’s androgynies.” Thus began a friendship and literary collaboration that would last, despite constant bickering, for over forty years. Voltaire was positively effusive about Frederick, calling him: “a man who gives battle as readily as he writes an opera; who takes advantage of all the hours that other kings waste following a dog chasing after a stag; he has written more books than any of his contemporary princes has sired bastards; and he has won more victories than he has written books.”
Under Frederick’s rule torture of civilians ceased and in 1763 Frederick tried to abolish serfdom. The law was reformed, and judges left it alone. Death sentences needed to be ratified by Frederick, but these were rarely signed and then only for extreme cases of murder. Punishment that should have been meted out to offenders was often withheld. Newspapers were not censored, nor were peoples’ views. No constraints were placed on religious worship, and Frederick (who was a protestant) built a Roman Catholic cathedral in Berlin, despite his hatred of that faith. He even considered building a mosque to encourage Turks to come to Prussia, as he felt that mixed races produce intelligent people. In 1757 the Holy Roman Empire expelled Prussia and declared war on it. The three largest nations in Europe—Russia, Austria and France, aided by Spain and Sweden—now set out to annihilate the upstart Prussia. But they were in for a surprise.
Determination and astute tactics won Frederick two great battles. Napoleon remarked that “it was not the army that defended Prussia for seven years against the three European powers, it was Frederick the Great.” And when standing next to Frederick’s coffin in the Garrison Church at Potsdam, he said “Hats off, gentlemen—if he were still alive we should not be here.” What Frederick II did was to set a climate in the German-speaking world that was fair to the people and conducive to culture. If ever there was a philosopher-king, it was Frederick: Plato would have recognised him instantly.
Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) could read Latin and Greek with ease. His innate inquisitiveness was honed at William and Mary College in Williamsburg by his teacher Dr. William Small. According to John Dos Passos, “it was Small who first opened his mind to the philosopher’s world … Young Jefferson had application. He had energy and vast curiosity … In his walks and talks with Small he established a connection with the main currents of the adventurous intellect of Europe which was not to be interrupted throughout his long life.” By 1774, Jefferson was putting his views on colonial rule into print: A Summary View of the Rights of British America was read not only in Philadelphia (eagerly), but also in London (less so). Two years later, Jefferson (‘the pen’) was drafting the Declaration of Independence with John Adams (‘the voice’). Jefferson spent the five years between 1784 and 1789 in France. He watched the rumblings of revolutionary activity (not yet those of the tumbrils), and he liked what he saw. As he wrote in a letter to a colleague, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.” Ahem. In France, Jefferson’s eclectic interests were given free reign. He studied everything concerning agriculture—for future use on his own plantation—from the production of wine to the growth of a special sort of rice that he had seen in Vercelli during a voyage to Italy.
Jefferson’s style of leadership as President—“government is best which governs least”—was somewhat like Washington’s: he left the able ministers he had appointed to get on with their departments, exercising personal control only occasionally. An example that illustrates both aspects is also one of Jefferson’s greatest achievements as president: the Louisiana Purchase (for $15 million), which more than doubled the size of the nation. Conceived by Jefferson in Washington, it was negotiated by Robert Livingston and James Monroe in Paris. And what did the restless sixty-five year old Jefferson do in his retirement? True to his enquiring and restive mind, that can only be compared to that of Leonardo da Vinci, he threw himself into a continuous bustle of building and farming, developing a new estate, fabricating nails and cloth, trying his hands at milling, and launching a state university for Virginia. Raising the necessary finance would have daunted a younger man, but the eighty-two year old founder could gaze with pride at the buildings as the first students arrived in 1825. And yet the one flaw in Jefferson’s concept of reason remained. Asked ten years earlier to lend his support to an antislavery clause, Jefferson demurred “this enterprise is for the young; for those who can follow it up, and bear it through to its consummation.” Had he thrown his weight behind emancipation, the Civil War might well have been avoided. On the two-hundredth anniversary of Jefferson’s birth, Franklin Roosevelt inaugurated the Jefferson Memorial in Washington with the words: “Thomas Jefferson believed, as we believe, in Man. He believed, as we believe, that men are capable of their own government, and that no king, no tyrant, no dictator can govern for them as well as they can govern for themselves.”
The American Revolution was fired by commanding intellectuals; the French and Russian revolutions were ignited by intellectuals without much command. What was unique about the Ottoman Empire at the start of the 20th century is that revolution was brought about by an intellectual commander, Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938). In his youth he read Rousseau and Voltaire, as well as John Stuart Mill. During World War I, Kemal found himself stationed at Gallipoli. A joint force of British, Australians and New Zealanders had managed to land in an attempt to knock Turkey out of the war. This was not what the high command had expected, but it was precisely what Kemal presumed they would do. In the confusion, he was given temporary command of the defence. At last he could show his mettle, and he did. According to Patrick Kinross in Atatürk: The Rebirth of a Nation, “by his flair, his sense of urgency, the sureness of his decisions and the insistence of his leadership he had, at the outset of an invasion on the lines he had predicted, saved the Turks from a defeat which might well have opened the road to Constantinople.”
After the war, Kemal realised that the Ottoman regime was no longer viable. The time had come to change his role from soldier to statesman. By 1922 he was President of the new republic of Turkey. This he now began to modernise. First to go was the fez. Next the veil. Women began to enter the professions. By 1928 he set about replacing the script of the Ottoman Turks, which was that used by Arabs and Persians. He was now an internationally known leader, with an interest in the affairs of other nations. A German colleague’s comment, that whereas Hitler had enslaved a free people, he had freed an enslaved nation, pleased him. He predicted the course of events with remarkable accuracy. To General Douglas MacArthur, who visited him in 1934, he expressed his fear regarding the influence of Germany over the rest of Europe. “The moment these seventy million people, who are industrious and disciplined and have extraordinary dynamism, get caught by a new political element which will stir up their nationalist ambitions, they will have recourse to the liquidation of the Versailles Treaty.” He predicted that war would break out between 1940 (later revised to 1939) and 1945 that the British would be unable to rely on the French. The Maginot Line he considered useless, as anyone could circumvent it, which is precisely what the Germans did. He forecast that Germany would occupy all of Europe except Britain and Russia, but that eventually America would enter the war, which would result in Germany’s defeat. It is hard to imagine a more prescient and intellectual commander, both in war and in peace.
Politics is the only profession in the world where second-raters reach the top. Their course is driven not by intellectual substance, but by ambition, self-aggrandisement and spin. One of the most important challenges of our time—as significant as those of climate change and energy supply—is to ensure that our politicians possess the right qualities of intellect and leadership. Although largely innate, some honing of skills is undoubtedly possible. Intellectual prowess is more difficult to acquire than leadership skills: one’s IQ, for example, stays much the same from birth to death. So how might a budding politician learn the necessary skills? Not in the practice of law, nor even in the participation in party politics at the grass roots level. Instead I propose the setting up of “statecraft academies,” similar to business schools or military staff colleges, where potential, high calibre, leaders can improve their skills. It is from such a pool of aspiring politicians that the public should elect its leaders. Charisma, TV ratings, and other indices of popularity should play second fiddle to intellectual rigour. What we need are leaders with a little less pugnacity and more intellectual ability. As the French political philosopher Joseph de Maitre observed, “Every nation has the government it deserves.”

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David Rothkopf

Only a few years ago, John Bolton, at the time the US ambassador to the UN, declared that taking ten floors off of the secretariat would make little difference in its operation. Superfluous or not, those ten floors managed to survive Bolton’s UN tenure largely unscathed. Although Rothkopf’s rant, too, will likely dissolve away into the digital archives of misguided foreign policy analysis, his argument deserves a second, serious look.

That Rothkopf should be the source of this broadside is unfortunate, because he otherwise seems to be, on the whole, brilliant. His credentials are top-notch: head of a global consulting firm, appointment to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, author of the enjoyable read, Superclass (which drilled into the networked elite pulling the powerful levers behind the machinery of globalization) and another widely praised book on the National Security Council.

All of this makes his piece all the more confounding. Apparently Rothkopf, like many others (including many US policymakers), doesn’t know what the UN is.

Rothkopf makes three bold claims. First, that the “UN” has lacked a backbone since its inception and, what’s more, was actually designed to be “invertebrate.” Second, that the ideas underlying the Security Council are, literally, elementary: “Basically the organization was designed along the lines of the conflict resolution sessions my daughters’ elementary school used to use when students got into a fight.” And third, that the organization is not even worth the building it occupies.

Rothkopf’s condemnation is a clear echo of Bolton, reflecting more the criticisms thrown around at Turtle Bay than what the UN actually does. He suggests shutting the place down and renting the building out as condos because “even in a down New York real estate market it is almost certain to be a better return on investment for the dollars poured into that white elephant on the East River than ‘outcomes’ like the proposed sanctions on Pyongyang.”

This kind of argumentation is worse than scorching a straw man, ignoring the ways in which the UN is a positive tool for the exercise of US power, designed in the image of the US ideal.

To begin with, Rothkopf repeatedly refers to the “UN,” when it’s clear that he’s really talking about the Security Council, the body that handles matters of international peace and security. But to reduce the United Nations to a mechanism for conflict resolution, as Rothkopf does, misses the point. The theory underpinning the composition of the council, rather than elementary, is a rather nuanced and high-minded concept in international relations known as collective security. Put simply, an attack on one member state constitutes an attack on all. The logic behind the theory is to create significant disincentives for aggression, thereby increasing stability among the society of states. The best example of collective security at work was the council’s response to Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

Rothkopf has a point, inasmuch as during the Cold War, the Security Council remained deadlocked, with the United States and the Soviet Union able to wield their vetoes to effectively block any action against their interests. But to suggest that the body was designed without a spine or that it was founded on facile ideas is ludicrous. If anything, it traces its origin directly back to one of the finer US presidents, Woodrow Wilson.

Worse still, to talk about the UN as if it were only the Security Council, though disturbingly common, neglects the reality of the last six decades. Bluntly stated, today the UN is essentially a service organization. One could argue, and I probably would, that the UN is doing more than any other state or international organization to satisfy “the obligations of the social contract in the global era,” as Rothkopf phrases it. After the United States, the UN today exercises command control over the world’s largest number of deployed military forces. UN peacekeeping missions currently number sixteen, with nearly 100,000 uniformed personnel deployed.

UN agencies also feed the hungry, house the displaced and save the lives of children on an unparalleled scale around the world. The World Food Program will feed 105 million people this year. The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) cared for 25 million people last year, most of whom had fled war and chaos. UNICEF works in the poorest countries to provide children fresh drinking water, immunizations and equal access to education, among other things. Imagine that: an organization committed to serving those from whom the least benefit is to be gained—namely, the poor, the dispossessed, the desperate. And most of its programs fight to sustain funding every year.

This is to say nothing of agencies like the UN Development Program (which has been working to strengthen governments in the developing world for decades), or the international criminal tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda, or the International Atomic Energy Agency, or the World Health Organization, which has served as the global coordinator in the rather impressive response to the swine flu.

Even the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, both of which provide American foreign policymakers with concrete mechanisms to extend influence around the globe, technically fall under the UN umbrella.

None of this should be interpreted as some blind faith in the UN as an organization. Without a doubt the UN secretariat and assorted agencies are poorly organized—even disastrously so—and almost institutionally geared for waste and inefficiency. A management chart of the entire place would elicit shudders, if not outright shouts of terror, from a Fortune 500 executive. There’s also no question that the Security Council looks like a plan drawn up by the victors of World War II, not by the major and emerging powers of today. And yes, there are disasters, such as the Human Rights Council, which has made a mockery of its name.

But throwing stones at “the UN” in order to criticize the latest resolution on North Korea as toothless is not only shallow, it’s simply wrong. Because a deliberative body exists does not mean that the United States will always get its way. And when you actually try to make sense of other states’ actions, in this case Russia and China, it becomes clear that they may actually be coming around toward a more muscular condemnation of North Korea’s nuclearization. That is, they are increasingly approaching the US position.

Arguing that the politicization of the Security Council justifies ridding
the world of the UN is not just intellectually dishonest. It’s at odds with US interests.

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