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Carnival in Brazil, France, London or New Orleans may be good, but History Carnival #2 is less expensive.

Have you checked out Cliopatria's History Blogroll lately? In addition to the history blogs here on our mainpage, there are about 90 others to explore there.

How could you not love a house in Brooklyn that was, in 1941, home to W. H. Auden and his lover, Carson McCullers, Benjamin Britten, Gypsy Rose Lee, and Virgil Thompson? When Denis de Rougemont, the author of Love in the Western World, visited their salon at #7 Middagh Street, he wrote that "all that was new in America in music, painting, or choreography emanated from that house, the only center of thought and art that I found in any large city in the country."

Greg Mitchell at Editor and Publisher raises serious questions about the estimated voter turnout in the Iraqi elections. Do not be surprised if the returns are a much lower percentage of the potential electorate than were initially estimated.

At the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, the administration is insisting that economist Hans Herman-Hoppe lose his next salary increase and take a letter of reprimand for a seemingly innocuous generalization about gay people. David Beito and Kenneth Gregg at Liberty & Power and Jim Lindgren at The Volokh Conspiracy have the story.

Both the Ward Churchill flap at Hamilton College and the Michelle Malkin flap at Emory that Greg Robinson wrote about here are reminders of what poor jobs those who are inviting guest speakers to our campuses often do. Too often, the invitations suggest contempt for what should be a college or university's reason for being: the life of the mind. How else do we explain the popularity of an Ann Coulter or a David Horowitz, a Michael Moore or a Ralph Nader, on the campus lecture circuit? I was irritated by an editorial in the Emory Wheel that underscored the problem, even as it attempted to address it. In part, Emory's editors wrote:

This pattern of inviting thinkers of simultaneous renown and reflection is worth noting. Emory student groups, particularly its political groups, have little problem attracting speakers endowed with one of these two traits — but rarely both. In fact, tonight's rival events, one involving firebrand pundit Michelle Malkin, the other entailing an obscure Canadian academic by the name of Glenn Robinson, are good examples of this.

"Glenn Robinson"? "obscure Canadian academic"? So obscure that you couldn't bother to get his first name right? So obscure that you couldn't bother to do a simple search to find out that he published the most important study of Japanese internment? Is his "obscurity" a sign that, in your heart of hearts, you really prefer a glitzy rabble rouser? In your heart of hearts, is that what you'd prefer the university to be about?

Oh, and by the way, if Ward Churchill is 1/16th Cherokee, as he says in some places, Glenn and Jonathan Reynolds have stronger claims to being Native Americans in academia, since they are 1/8th Native American. Glenn and Jonathan just haven't tried to make a living on it.

Posted on Sunday, February 6, 2005 at 12:19 AM | Comments (19) | Return

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