Deputy Schools Chancellor Diana Lam, however, has made a career of opposing gifted and talented programs, first in San Antonio, then in Providence, and now in New York. Lam argues that these programs are anti-"diversity" and elitist. A few weeks ago, she announced that the city would"expand the definition of what it means to be gifted and talented" so as to increase the number of black and Hispanic students at Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and Brooklyn Tech. Lam was quite candid that this"expansion" would entail including non-academic factors; she had taken a similar approach in seeking to transform Providence's Classical High.
The impending change has generated strong opposition. Last week, two city councilors urged the mayor and chancellor to overrule Lam, but Chancellor Joel Klein was noncommittal. This morning, the New York Post had a forceful editorial opposing Lam's proposal. The issue interests me because of the candor of Lam's language."Diversity" is used so often today in higher education that the term has no consistent meaning. It is useful to remember that, when carried to the extreme that Lam envisions,"diversity" entails a tradeoff with academic rigor, a tradeoff that sometimes is not worth the price.
And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid?
The article, by Timothy Noah, comments on what I consider one of the most interesting aspects of American diplomatic history, namely the tensions between the consistent expansionism of the United States and the persistent strand of anti-imperialism in American political culture.
My first two books examined Senate anti-imperialists—figures such as Ernest Gruening, Robert La Follette, or George Norris, dissenters who would make the anti-war stance of someone like Howard Dean look tame—and I always ask my classes to consider not only the question of why the United States has embraced empire throughout its history but why its doing so has so consistently stirred domestic opposition.
That said, I agree with Noah that Cheney’s celebration of empire is rare among American policymakers, especially since 1900.
Readers of my postings in Cliopatria might wonder why I seem so concerned with what might loosely be labeled excessive political correctness in both personnel and curricular matters. Partly, of course, my approach to these matters arises out of my tenure case: when an institution tries to fire you for advocating merit rather than gender quotas in hiring and criticizing a college-sponsored educational event on Middle East international affairs that had no supporters of either the US or Israel, you become sensitive to how ideologues can abuse the personnel process. And, as a glance through the cases handled by FIRE suggests, it seems that in the academy today, the threat to academic freedom more often comes from an extremist “left” than from the right.
But I also am so interested in such curricular matters because of the situation on my own campus, Brooklyn College. It never seemed to me a question that the job of a professor was to teach students about academic content rather than behavioral skills or what to think about political “values.” At Brooklyn, now, however, that question is very much up for debate, partly due to the apparent attitude of the campus administration. I’m a believer in Alan Charles Kors’ argument that sunlight—public exposure—is the best way to combat such ideas.
The Horowitz article recalls one of the more disturbing incidents in academe recently, namely the controversy over a Cal-Berkeley course called"The Politics and Poetics of Palestinian Resistance," in which the instructor, activist for a group called Students for Justice in Palestine, put together a blatantly anti-Israel course that also advised conservative students not to enroll. In response, the Berkeley Faculty Senate did not rebuke the instructor for bringing anti-Israel politics in the classroom, but instead changed the university’s policy on academic freedom to protect the rights of politically engaged instructors.
One more reminder why we should try to avoid overt politicking in the classroom.
Discussing the dictatorship’s massive human rights abuses with a representative of the Argentine government, Kissinger advised, “If you can finish before Congress gets back, the better.” As a historian of Congress, it’s always interesting to see confirmation of the intangible ways in which Congress affected US foreign policy.
What most caught my eye, however, was the article by Robin Wilson (registration required) on efforts of colleges to increase the hiring of Hispanic faculty members. Wilson paraphrased a forthcoming study suggesting that “if universities want to diversify, they must put aside their usual hiring practices.”
The article doesn’t exactly specify how this change would occur, although the examples it contains are troubling: Wilson describes several searches at Arizona State where ethnicity seemed to be the only factor, and it was unclear whether the university bothered to advertise positions to non-Hispanics.
In the end, professors are hired to teach. If institutions do not even adopt the pretense that merit is playing a role in faculty hires, what sort of faculty, in the long term, is likely to result?
Read literally, a junior professor at Brooklyn now could be fired for writing a critical book review, since doing so could qualify as “uncollegial” scholarship. Or a junior professor could be deemed “uncollegial” for teaching about topics that senior colleagues find ideologically objectionable. In my case, for instance, the department’s specialist in women’s history wrote to the college president denouncing me for teaching about “figures in power.”
What, reasonable people might wonder, is going on here? Partly, of course, the chairs speak in their own words: they want a way to fire junior professors who do not “play the game.” And collegiality is of particular interest to the Brooklyn provost, Roberta S. Matthews, who has praised collegiality for embodying “features that feminist literature suggest are important, such as cooperation and shared power, development of as personal connection to the material being studied, and an emphasis on the affective aspects of learning.” “Collegiality and ‘community’,” she has noted, therefore “are especially attractive to women.”
The situation at Brooklyn, however, is part of a broader move to devalue scholarship in the personnel process at schools (like Brooklyn) that accept the curricular philosophies of a little known group called the Association of American Colleges and Universities. A few minutes’ glance at the AAC&U website gives a pretty good sense of the group’s agenda: it advocates a highly politicized curriculum centered on the teaching of “diversity skills” through “collaborative learning.” In such a college, individual thought among the faculty is discouraged—preferred instead is commitment to the collective goals of the institution. More so than any other criteria, collegiality, because of its subjective nature, provides an avenue for dismissing junior faculty who do not accept the college’s curricular philosophies. Hence its attractiveness—even in the face of, as has occurred at Brooklyn, widespread condemnation from the national scholarly community.
If true, this legacy says more about how the Senate has changed than anything about Simon. The former Illinois senator was someone who celebrated his somewhat old-fashioned nature, and he sought to wield influence in somewhat old-fashioned ways—by framing how issues would debated (a non-lawyer, he obtained a slot on the Judiciary Committee, recognizing the importance that even lower-tier judicial nominations would have on contemporary politics) or in highlighting issues that otherwise might have been ignored (financial disclosure in the cynical world of 1950s Illinois politics, Americans’ inability to speak foreign languages in an increasingly global world). Dissenters traditionally have made their mark in the Senate by taking the approach that Simon did; in the more partisan, less idea- and debate-oriented Senate, however, that strategy seems less and less likely to yield results.
Reflecting on the passing of senators, the NTSB also recently released its report on the plane crash that killed Minnesota senator Paul Wellstone, concluding that pilot error caused the crash. In this sense, the report provides another reminder of the importance of chance in politics.
In a preview of how Howard Dean would gain ground in 2003, Wellstone had celebrated his dissent from Bush administration policies in a tough 2002 reelection contest. His vote against the resolution authorizing war in Iraq improved rather than weakened his chances, and in the days before his death, he had amassed a comfortable lead over his GOP challenger, (now senator) Norm Coleman. If Wellstone had lived, he almost certainly would have prevailed in November, producing a Senate with a 50-49 Republican majority. Yet widespread speculation existed that Republican senator Lincoln Chafee would have joined Jim Jeffords as an independent who caucuses with the Democrats had his vote made the difference in terms of which party organized the Senate. One wonders how 2003 would have differed politically had Tom Daschle rather than Bill Frist served as Senate majority leader.
The potential effects of Wellstone’s death call to mind a similar event from political history. In 1917, Wisconsin senator Paul Husting, a Democrat, was accidentally killed while deer hunting. Although an election for his seat was not due until 1920, Wisconsin law mandated a special election, which was won by Republican Irvine Lenroot. The 1918 elections produced a Senate with a 49-to-47 Republican majority; had Husting lived, Democratic Vice President Thomas Marshall would have cast the tie-breaking vote to organize an evenly divided Senate, meaning that Democrat Gilbert Hitchcock rather than Henry Cabot Lodge would have chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Perhaps the fate of the Treaty of Versailles would have been the same. But there was little question that Lodge’s delaying tactics (the hearings lasted three months) and his calling of effective anti-Wilson witnesses such as Robert Lansing and William Bullitt helped pierce the atmosphere of inevitability surrounding the treaty’s adoption.
It’s worth keeping the history of the program in mind, however, in judging the likelihood of success for President Bush’s “new” foreign aid policy, the Millennium Challenge Account . The program’s implementation, which was delayed for two years, is now set to launch, with an idea of targeting aid only to governments that the United States deems"just."
Since its inception, the foreign aid program has provided a classic demonstration of the tension between reality and idealism in American foreign policy, and I suspect that this permutation of the program will be no different: we’ll see what happens when the President, for the first time, waives the program’s criteria to justify aid to a strategically vital regime.
The first, in today’s Boston Globeby James Carroll, dismisses the criticism that Howard Dean might be another George McGovern by arguing that McGovern “has since been vindicated by history. He offered America a way out of the trap that opposes ‘realist’ and ‘idealist’ perspectives.” Carroll’s assertion that in the nuclear age, supporting disarmament constitutes the “realist” world view is a little too cute, but his general point—that McGovern was correct on the key foreign policy issues of his day—seems perfectly sustainable.
In Roll Call, Morton Kondracke takes a very different view of McGovern’s historical legacy (subscription required). Kondracke contends that “In statements of late, Dean has made himself into the reincarnation of the Democratic party’s trifecta of major losers — Sen. George McGovern (S.D.) in 1972, Walter Mondale in 1984 and Michael Dukakis in 1988. In a Dec. 21 op-ed in the Washington Post, Dean asserted that his foreign policy ‘reflects the best of our mainstream tradition,’ but in reality it’s well to the left of that — close to, if not in, McGovernland. To be fair, Dean doesn’t say about Iraq, as McGovern did about Vietnam, ‘Come home, America,’ but when he says — and says again — that Saddam Hussein’s capture has not made America safer, he reveals that he doesn’t know a strategic enemy when he sees one.”
We’ll know in 11 months whether Carroll or Kondracke is correct, and it’s commonplace, of course, for political commentators to point to the “lessons” of history in explaining contemporary events. The thing that most struck me, however, in my work with the LBJ Tapes was how policymakers themselves regularly invoked the lessons of the past—in private conversations, when they were not engaged in a public relations effort on behalf of a policy already decided.
A good lesson, I suppose, in the importance of studying history.
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