But I'm thinking of a moment just prior to that when Will Herberg, my favorite teacher at Drew, my rabbi, got into the front seat of my car for me to take him into Jersey City, where he was also teaching at St. Peter's College. Herberg was an awesome intellect. I write about him often here and always with great affection and admiration. Growing up in a secular Jewish family, he had become a leading intellectual influence in the Lovestonite faction of American Communists. They were named for their political mentor, Jay Lovestone. Like many radicals of his generation, however, Herberg grew increasingly disillusioned with Marxism. In mid-life, he turned to study historic Judaism and became a professing conservative Jew. He was the author of two books that helped shape the public life of the mind in mid-20th century America, Judaism and Modern Man and Protestant, Catholic, Jew. By the time I knew him, Will had grown increasingly conservative and was publishing in William Buckley's lively new periodical, National Review.

So, as I say, one day Herberg gets in the car for our regular trip into Jersey City and our conversation turned to the civil rights movement, then churning in my beloved Southland. I was fresh from the movement and full of its hope that"We Shall Overcome." Har-rumphf, grumbled Herberg, lawless, ignorant troublemakers. (I paraphrase, but that was the substance of his reply.) As always, he soon had me on the defensive, because Will gave no quarter in intellectual combat. Casting about for some respectable defense, I cited the fact, after all, that Martin Luther King had a doctorate in philosophical theology from Boston University. Herberg replied that he had friends on the theological faculty at Boston and that he'd inquire into King's academic credentials. I doubt that he ever did. Even if he had, King's mentors at Boston would have given glowing accounts of the brilliant record of their most famous student.

I recall that moment when my rabbi sat beside me on the way to Jersey City and questioned Martin Luther King's academic accomplishments for several reasons. I think about it often because subsequently, as Associate Editor of the King Papers, I directed much of the research that exposed a remarkable record of plagiarism in King's academic work, including his dissertation. Undoubtedly, if it had been exposed in King's own lifetime, his earned doctorate at Boston would have had to be revoked. But, I think about that moment on the way to Jersey City also because shortly after Will Herberg's own death, we learned that he had fabricated every one of the three academic degrees that he claimed to have earned. He claimed to have a B.A. from C.C.N.Y., when he'd actually been expelled from the place for getting into a fight with the instructor of a required ROTC course. The M.A. and Ph.D. that he claimed to have earned from Columbia were simply wholly fabricated. He'd never been admitted there. Beyond that, apparently in order to postpone the day of his retirement, Herberg had regularly pushed forward the date of his birth in reports to Who's Who. I've often thought, what if I'd known all of that in that moment. What if I'd said to my beloved teacher:"Yes, King is an academic fraud; and so are you."

Of course, I didn't know those things then and they continue to puzzle me now. When the subject of someone like Ward Churchill or intellectual diversity on our campuses come up, they puzzle me in ways that cause me to say: I agree with everything you say; and I agree with nothing that you say. The man who I sometimes regard as the greatest moral authority in the twentieth century, my revered Martin Luther King was, undoubtedly in some ways, an academic fraud. And the man who I revere as the greatest teacher I've ever known, Will Herberg, my rabbi, was, both a conservative and, undoubtedly in some ways, an academic fraud. But every one of us at Drew conceded that Herberg knew more than any one of us and more than most half-dozens of us put together. Struggling in the midst of the McCarthy era against a personal history of Marxist-apologias, with no academic entitlements, and knowing that an academic community was his true home, Herberg affected entitlements that were expected of such people. In some ways, I love and admire him all the more for having successfully exploited the vacuity of our credentialing processes. A university that could not find a place in it for a conservative so learned and so devoted to teaching as Will Herberg is unworthy of the name.

So, yes, you're damned straight. Our universities must be places where conservatives are welcomed on their faculties. And, no, academic fraud is not definitive. Martin Luther King's academic plagiarism undoubtedly shades his moral leadership. And, yet, how many of us who are altogether innocent of plagiarism have ever risked our pristine hides to give moral leadership about anything? And, no, academic fraud is not definitive. Herberg was the greatest teacher I've ever known – an encyclopedic mind, with a tough, combative style. If Ward Churchill had any of his intellectual heft, he'd be worth defending.

This ringing endorsement of intellectual diversity heartened me. If I were a UNC administrator, I would immediately accept the group’s demands—contingent, of course, on a broader assurance that all search and curriculum committees, and not solely those regarding Western Civilization, were intellectually diverse.

Looking through the backgrounds of the signatories, I must admit I was a little surprised to see the Group of 71 hail intellectual diversity so resolutely, since it’s hard to find even one of the 71 who had previously endorsed the principle. In 2002, for instance, UNC witnessed another high-profile controversy, when it required all incoming first-year and transfer students to read and then write an essay on Michael Sells’ Approaching the Qur'an: The Early Revelations. Conservatives attacked the book for deliberately downplaying the violent elements of Islamic writings; Sells, a sharp critic of the administration’s Middle East policies, fired back by describing the philosophy of Middle East scholars such as Bernard Lewis as the “’Let’s be colonialists and do it right’ faction.” (Sells added that as American “Muslims are also now harassed in airports and encounter extreme prejudice,” they “also feel that the United States is an aggressor power and that Western powers are still aggressor powers and occupiers in the Middle East.”) In response to the selection of Sells, the North Carolina legislature threatened to defund the summer mandatory reading program.

A leader of the Group of 71, former faculty senate president Sue Estroff, didn’t seem too concerned with upholding intellectual diversity during the Sells controversy: she said that UNC should mandate the Sells-only program “come hell or high water." Dismissing calls to couple Sells with an offering from the Lewis school of interpreting Islam, Estroff defended the selection as “a terrific choice,” and described the controversy as “just bolster[ing] the case of why we have to do this. There is such a lack of knowledge about Islam.” Estroff denied that the assignment could be construed as indoctrination, since the reading wasn’t really “required” even though the university sent out letters to all incoming students saying that they had to read the book and submit a one-page paper in reaction to it."I understand what ‘required’ means on campus," she reassured one reporter. “If we had said that it’s required and if they don’t do it we will take away their admission, that’s a different matter. But it’s not a law, it has a very different meaning on campus." Hmm.

The Group of 71’s membership overlaps with that of a campus organization called the Progressive Faculty Network. PFN member and Group of 71 signatory elin o'Hara slavick (an art professor who capitalizes only the “H” in her name) has attracted controversy before: as part of a controversial “teach-in” six days after the 9/11 attack that opposed retaliation against Afghanistan and seemed to blame the United States for the attacks, o’Hara slavick showed slides of her artwork,"Places the United States has Bombed.” The sketches, which she claimed provided a “history lesson on U.S. foreign policy,"(!) depicted what she termed the devastation and destruction caused by past U.S. aerial raids.

o’Hara Slavick is joined in the PFN and the Group of 71 by Anthropology professor Don Nonini, another strong critic of the administration’s foreign policy. Shortly after 9/11, Nonini asserted,"To prevent further acts of terror, wherever they occur in the world, also requires confronting some unpalatable facts of the history of U.S. foreign policy and military intervention." This, of course, is one interpretation of the causes of terror, but I’m not sure it’s the most compelling one. Nonini has articulated some strange views in the past. In what could be termed a parody of political correctness, he hailed the non-reporting of income for tax purposes by “the working class, poorer blacks, and other minorities” a “most effective means of tax evasion,” indeed “another arena of resistance” against the “corporate economy.” To deem such actions illegal, Nonini scoffed, is “the view of the IRS and of academics servicing the business community.”

The Group of 71 includes not only the far left among the UNC faculty but also former Romance Languages chairman Frank Rodriguez, who seems to have more personal reasons for attacking the administration: he was removed from his chairmanship in the middle of the academic year after an external review committee reported that there was"bitter infighting" and"unprofessional behavior" in the department and that the faculty was"unproductive.”

What sort of curricular initiatives have the Group of 71 supported in the past? Expanded ethnic and gender studies programs, of course. And during her tenure on the faculty senate, Estroff came out for expanded coverage of tourism, which she termed “a large, active, and multidisciplinary academic area.” “Tourism yes, Western Civ no” is probably not the slogan that UNC wants as its curricular mantra. “It’s not that we shouldn’t be offering classes that deal with Western civilization, but we also need to be concerned about other perspectives and other cultures,” explained Group of 71 member and Education professor Dwight Rogers. The Pope Foundation’s"lens is very much a Euro-centric, Western civilization focus, and they don’t seem to be open to other ways of knowing.” Yet as there’s nothing in the proposal that says UNC needs to eliminate offerings “about other perspectives and other cultures,” Rogers’ complaint makes little or no sense. Is this the approach he carries to all curricular matters: that any offering that doesn't demonstrate sufficient concern"about other perspectives and other cultures" is not"open to other ways of knowing" and therefore should be rejected?

All of these professors, obviously, are entitled to publicly articulate their viewpoints on U.S. foreign policy as frequently as they desire. But their opinions about international affairs could also be described as shrill and reflexive—adjectives that characterize their response to an expanded Western cultures program at UNC. It is distressing that such faculty members regard the study of Western civilization as in and of itself anti-“progressive,” and seek to deny UNC students even the option of enrolling in additional courses about the topic, regardless of the quality of these offerings.

It's a strange ‘n wondrous thing that Cliopatria is Recommended in prime listings, just below the paid advertising, by Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit. Many thanks, Glenn. While I'm thinking about it, Cliopatria welcomes Margaret Soltan's University Diaries to our blogroll. Many of us have been reading Soltan's blog for a long time and it's time we made it a regular thing.

It's a strange ‘n wonderous thing that tenured historians are discovering bloggery, some of them long after their best graduate students did. Still, we can count the tenured ones on our fingers: Tim Burke, Mark Grimsley, KC Johnson, and Hugo Schwyzer, of course; but there's also David Beito, Juan Cole, Deborah Lipstadt, and Jon Wiener. That's not counting people like Victor Davis Hanson and Martin Kramer, who are at Think Tanks, and others, whose tenure status I don't know. But, soon, we won't be able to count them all. Eugene Volokh makes the case for blogging in"Fresh Produce in the Marketplace of Ideas" for the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

It's a strange ‘n wondrous thing that ShermanDorn finds himself targeted by one of David Horowitz's drones, but it's a good thing that Dorn shares their e-mail exchanges with us. On that whole scene, follow the links from Wealth Bondage's"How to Write Like a Liberal Sack of Garbage," to Adam Kotsko's"A Request" at The Weblog, and Tim Burke's"Down in the Dumps" at Easily Distracted. I'm with Burke on this one. Now that we've established that I am a Liberal Sack of Garbage, Where Do We Go From Here?

It's a strange ‘n wondrous thing when Tom Bruscino's essay,"Cultures of War," gets prime facetime at the Claremont Review of Books, Victor Davis Hanson's Private Papers, and Wren's Nest News: The Latest in Witch/Pagan and Mainstream Religious News. Nay-sayers may claim that the alliance of Victor Davis Hanson with America's witches and wizards is a natural one, but arguing with it is imprudent. Just go read the essay. And, if you haven't read it yet, have a look at David Ignatius's column for the Washington Post,"Managing a Mideast Revolution." Tom's mentor at Ohio University, Alonzo Hamby, has been touting the column on Richard Jensen's Conservativenet. Ignatius is a moderate Democrat and the son of Lyndon Johnson's Secretary of the Navy.

It's a strange ‘n wondrous thing when, two days before my 65th birthday, I discover that a) Hunter S. Thompson is my second cousin; and b) he's just blown his head off in Colorado. There is the internal family debate: are his drunkenness, drug addictions, love of guns, and suicide sources of shame? So far, I'm losing the debate. How do you tell a family of successful Rotarians and failed academics that here was a guy, one of us, who actually did something? How can you be so inside or under the box not to see it? My internal discussion is about why I didn't know him and whether there's some relationship between our human failures. I don't know the answers. But the birthday wishes from the Cliopatriarchs and Mr. Sun made it easier to think about the questions. Many thanks.

Christine Caldwell Ames' article in the latest AHR [AHA membership required] tackles a very interesting question of disciplinary boundary and historical self-definition:

The Catholic Church's recent frank apologies for inquisition—its blunt assertion that the office"sull[ied] ... the face of the church"—have reversed centuries of defensiveness that likewise sprang from sixteenth-century, interconfessional polemic. They have also detached medieval inquisitions from the religious moorings constructed carefully throughout the premodern period. This self-reflection, the admission of"errors," approximates, ironically, a venerable Protestant charge that inquisitors were ignorant of the"true" Christian message. It gestures, then, toward the very dynamic that underlay inquisitions, as well as reactions to them, in the Middle Ages: the elusiveness of truth, its fluid congress with error, and the instability of religion itself.

Yet the endurance of inquisition's"irreligious" reputation in historiography indicates that this matter does not merely affect scholars of medieval Europe or persons with confessional loyalties. That dynamic of instability raises for all historians, regardless of specialization or background, a problem of historical construction. For inquisition's claimed and controversial juxtaposition of repression and piety, and interpretations of it, ask us broader questions: What is"religious"? How do we align our definitions with those of the persons we study? Where do we draw the disciplinary boundaries of"religious history"? Historians have been traditionally reluctant to consider inquisition—this persecution of suspected religious deviants through methods that included violence—as a project of belief. ... And this reluctance to link persecution and belief is instructive, as that continuity betrayed historians' assumptions about the content and character of"religion." Inquisition has long appeared not only"irreligious" but also, therefore, beyond the history of religion. [paras. 2-3]

The segregation of inquisition and belief has resulted perhaps from the presumption that sincere belief cannot coexist with (let alone produce) such repression. In the dark light diffused by the dominant historiographical vision of a"persecuting society," any religious rhetoric present in our sources may seem cheap, strategic veneer to be polished away in order to discover the"real" rationales for repression and violence. [para. 7]

It is a bit surprising to me that she has to make this argument: I've been teaching the Inquisition as an authentic act of faith in my World and Western surveys since the beginning (granted, that's only six years ago), and I'm sure I must have gotten the idea from somewhere. There is a great deal to say about the Catholic Church's will to maintain power, but since the theology of Roman Catholicism includes the idea of the Church as a (the) conduit to the divine, most of the anti-institutional heresies (including individual mystics) pursued by the inquisitions seemed to have a perfectly sound theological foundation, as well as a power dynamic. The Inquisitions' insistence on investigation and renunciation of error, rather than simple eliminationism or excommunication, has always struck me as evidence that faith, and the desire to protect and instill faith, played a strong role in its activities.

Ames' argument supports this view, distinguishing between sin and crime, and presenting the inquisition as more of a personal journey than adminstrative procedure:

Contrition should manifest itself in a confession that was more sacramental than juridical, a beginning of reconciliation rather than an end to investigation. To inquisitors," confession" in the modern, legal sense (that is, admitting an action) was inefficacious; a confession without apparent contrition and an abjuration of heresy meant recalcitrance, and the consequent ejection from inquisition's office of repentance. [para. 13]

The most serious penances assigned by inquisitors, flogging and imprisonment, were an importation to laypeople of monastic practice and of its conviction that bodily suffering both atoned for past sins and trained the soul to shun future ones. This flogging of heretics was explicitly liturgical and penitential; parish priests were to perform the beatings during masses and processions, praying that God welcome again one who had turned from his church through sin. [para 15]

Bernard Déicieux's sermons, then, adopted exactly the themes and strategies that inquisition had long used publicly to justify itself and to cultivate the agreement that its tasks were holy works, the reconciliation of sinners, the establishment on earth of God's own justice. ... Violence against inquisition could thus constitute a thoughtful, righteous usurpation by laypeople of the inquisitorial office and of its putatively divine mandate to correct the errant and to punish the incorrigible [paras. 30-31]

Very interesting stuff. I'm reminded of the discussion of the meanings of jihad....

In Defense of Heresy: I'm not defending heresy here. I'm defending the idea that there are some claims that are just so wrong that they ought not be tolerated in the community of faith. I long ago gave up on my own particular sect, the United Methodists, who have grown so mushy in matters of doctrine that we have no principle of exclusion. You believe in re-incarnation? Welcome to the fellowship of the United Methodist Church. You think Jesus was one of many little pixies who periodically come from outer space to sprinkle fairy dust on human history? Fine. Welcome to our fellowship.

But there are some things that are just so wrong that they ought not be uttered or tolerated in the community of faith. The latest blasphemy heard in my community came from Representative Sam Johnson (R, Texas) who spoke at a veterans' celebration at Suncreek United Methodist Church in Allen, Texas. According to the Carpetbagger, Brother Johnson was bragging about a recent conversation he'd had with George Bush on the porch at the White House.

Johnson said he told the president that night,"Syria is the problem. Syria is where those weapons of mass destruction are, in my view. You know, I can fly an F-15, put two nukes on 'em and I'll make one pass. We won't have to worry about Syria anymore."
The crowd roared with applause.

Which of these is the most outrageous part of this story?
* That a sitting member of Congress is bragging about his desire to drop nuclear weapons?
* That Johnson has shared this idea with the president?
* That Johnson's favored approach to non-proliferation is an unprovoked nuclear attack?
* That this speech was delivered in a church?
* That Johnson's audience"roared with applause"?

Sic et Non: While I'm waxing theological, I want to go all Peter Abelard on David Beito and CharlesNuckolls at Liberty & Power. They have been railing at the University of Alabama's Faculty Senate for passing a speech code that they claim smacks of the kinds of speech restrictions favored in deep South states during the early years of the civil rights movement. They have been celebrating the fact that the Student Senate at the University of Alabama has unanimously adopted a resolution in opposition to the Faculty sponsored speech code. In doing so, they've gotten widespread support from: Robert Shibley at FIRE, Mike Adams at Townhall, Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit, QD at Southern Appeal and Randy Barnett and Todd Zywicki at the Volokh Conspiracy. That's a mighty sic and I agree with them. Speech codes are offensive to the free exchange of ideas in academic communities.

But there is also a non, as well. As Kevin Drum at Political Animal points out, it is deceptive to claim that the speech code controversy at the University of Alabama had its origin in the administration's objections to students hanging American flags in their dormitory windows. It is even a little deceptive to claim that the speech code promoted by the Faculty Senate is like the restrictions on speech promoted in the deep South in the early civil rights movement. The controversy arose when some students insisted on displaying Confederate flags in their dormitory windows. And, lest we forget, the Confederate flag flew in defense of some very severe restrictions on human freedom. It defended the bondage of most of the South's people of color, but as Clement Eaton taught us two generations ago it defended severe restrictions on the freedom of everyone in the South. Simply put, the Confederate flag is not just deeply offensive to a large part of the University's student and faculty community. It represents an offense to the idea of a university. We have a teaching function here and education may necessarily entail the possibility of offense at some point or another. But this is Alabama, where slavery and segregation once, in the not too distant past, reigned supreme. Faculty members have an obligation to teach what that means for civil behavior.

Update My friend, David Beito, objects in comments to my characterization of the situation at the University of Alabama. For the record, he has paid his dues and is correct on the facts. The errors, which I believe to be minor, appear in posts that simply support his position.

Finally, your senior Cliopatriarch has a birthday today and it is one of those proverbially big ones. If I'm not here for discussions, it may be because I'm off in my cups somewhere celebrating.