Second Letter to President Trump Concerning Politically Correct Superstition at NSF

Dear Mr. President:

Yesterday I emailed regarding an article by Professor Philip Salzman concerning corrupt political correctness at the National "Science" Foundation.  I followed up with an email to Professor Salzman in Canada, and he responded.  I asked him who in NSF has been willing to compromise science for political correctness.  His answer is below (copied with his permission): The corruption is throughout the National "Science" Foundation. All are beholden to superstitious feminists.  Perhaps it is time to drain the NSF swamp. Professor Salzman's email follows:

Dear Professor Langbert,

Many thanks for your letter. I agree that it is very alarming when institutional custodians of science bow to, or worse, enthusiastically embrace "social justice" ideology, raising "diversity and inclusion" above merit and achievement.

To answer your question, I know NSF only from the outside, from its spoken policies and its deeds. I cannot tell you who makes these decisions, but this new culture is so pervasive, it would probably not be correct to imagine that it is the work of one or two people. I do applaud your representations to NSF.

Best wishes, 

 Philip Carl Salzman

The Politicization of Science

Heather MacDonald of City Journal wrote a frustrating but riveting piece about the cooptation of the National Science Foundation by the political correctness movement. It's not surprising, but MacDonald provides the gory details of the politicization of science. What have the Republicans and Trump been doing about this? My guess is nothing so far. (H/t Dan Elmendorf.)

My Interview on Redeemer Broadcasting

Dan Elmendorf of Olivebridge, NY interviewed me on his Redeemer Broadcasting radio chain, which has seven stations in upstate New York, New Jersey, and Maryland.  The interview will air on May 27, and it is linked here. The stations include WFSO, WNEQ, WYNE, and WXMD. The interview concerns the link between university scientism and political intolerance.

Separate Tables and Political Correctness

Last night my wife and I watched the 1958 classic --but scarcely remembered--film Separate Tables. The film won two Academy Awards: one for David Niven for best actor and one for Wendy Hiller for best actress in a supporting role. It was nominated for five additional Academy Awards in 1959, including best screenplay, best picture, and best actress in a leading role.



The story is about residents of the Beauregard, a seaside resort in England. The residents have dropped out of life for disparate reasons, which the film explores.  At the center of the film are two plots about the dynamics between writer John Malcolm (Burt Lancaster) and heiress Ann Shankland (Rita Hayworth) and between Major Pollock (David Niven) and Sibyl Railton-Bell (Deborah Kerr).

The complex relationships evolve in ways that suggest the frailty and uniqueness of individual human beings and the importance of tolerance and respect for human differences. Each character has found their way to life in a remote hotel, often to escape a troubled past, but each has an inner dignity that screenwriters Terence Rattigan and John Gay deftly examine.

The dynamic between Major Pollock and Sibyl--and Sibyl's mother, Mrs. Railton-Bell (Gladys Cooper)--reminded me of today's politically correct hypersensitivity, and it also reminded me that today's feminists, with the support of the state-protected media, have much in common with the Victorian prudes of three-quarters of a century ago. 

Major Pollock is discovered to be a mild sexual deviant when he is charged with the crime of successively sitting next to five different women in a movie theater.  His close friendship with Sibyl, who suffers from chronic anxiety disorder and is emotionally abused by her mother, is strained by the new story, which appears in a local newspaper.

Mrs. Railton-Bell is outraged at his sexual impropriety and mounts a campaign to oust Major Pollock from the hotel. Academics who have seen the witch hunts against male professors who tell dirty jokes or glance at the wrong woman will see the  parallel between the feminist prudes of the modern university and Victorian prudes like Mrs. Railton-Bell.

The acting in the film is brilliant, and some of the credit must go to director Delbert Mann.  Deborah Kerr is brilliant, and watching Lancaster and Hayworth together is thrilling.  The liberalism underlying the depiction of Mrs. Railton-Bell has increasingly been lost, as has the quality of talent.

Biases in Social Science

 Madeline Kearns of National Review has written an excellent interview with Musa al-Gharbi of Heterodox Academy. It is frustrating to read about the biases in fields like sociology and social psychology.   My take is that there are three fallacies in the broad conversation, which includes most of what the academic reform movement has  been conversing about for the past 30 years:

First, social science is not science, and there will never be a scientific approach to hypothesis testing in subjects like sociology.  Economics is value free on the microeconomic level, but it will never be on the macroeconomic level.

The early days of social science were focused on problem solving,  and amateurs played the chief role until the late nineteenth century.  The establishment of professional social science coincided with the first research universities at places like Johns Hopkins and the Wharton School.  Social science struggled to become value free in the early twentieth century, but it never succeeded. In the late nineteenth century the Wharton School was founded to advocate for tariffs.  In the early days of professional sociology there were struggles between the advocates of a moralizing social work approach and a value free approach. The value free approach won, but never completely.  The half victory was largely overturned after the 1960s.   

 In the early days of the Harvard Business School, Edwin F. Gay advocated a case study approach to studying business. Until the 1950s the business schools did not tend to emphasize scientism.  The scientistic approach resulted from a push in the form of two major books, one by Gordon and Howell and the other by Pierson, funded by the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation.

Second, the academy is not reformable.  Colleges were chiefly Christian, with some engineering and practical, land grant institutions (which were also Christian), until the late 19th century. The establishment of Johns Hopkins led to an interest in adoption of the research university model, and Harvard soon followed.  The Carnegie Foundation and the General Education Board provided significant funding for colleges to professionalize along the lines of the research university model. In doing so, Abraham Flexner and his colleages at the foundations advocated and provided financial incentives for adoption of a principle of hierarchical emulation.  A few high-quality institutions would dominate, and other institutions would imitate. The principle of peer review precludes deviance, and that means political disagreement is foreclosed.  Departments and learned societies have evolved so that their cultures are rooted in political ideology. They view their political beliefs as moral.

Much of the conversation about university reform has assumed that universities can be changed as political candidates are changed. They cannot. They are rigid organizations that are difficult to change. Once the left-wing culture was instituted in the top-tier institutions, the cultures were set. The institutions will need to die rather than change.

It probably wasn't Flexner's or the foundations' intention to institute an ideologically left-wing university system, but from the 1920s, that was the effect, and the effect had to have been evident to the foundations. Burton Clark, in his classic The Distinctive College, notes that the colleges that were receiving support from the General Education Board had left-wing faculties, and the same institutions received the lion's share of media attention.  This was so even in the case of Reed, which was a brand new institution that received GEB funding and adopted a left-wing faculty from the inception.  The effect of de-Christianizing the colleges led to the hiring of mostly left-wing faculties.

Perpendicular control coupled with scientism fates university social science to be locked in a narrowly defined ideology.  It could have gone differently: The ideology could have been that of James Burnham or Ludwig von Mises, but it wasn't.  It is unclear  but probably not the case that the Carnegie Foundation and the GEB consciously preferred left-wing academics, but in aiming to de-Christinaize the colleges that was what they did.

Third, as result, incremental reform is unlikely.  The perpendicular structure of journal editorships and the cultures in most social science departments prohibit it.

The Subtle Incivility of Political Correctness.

I received the politically correct email copied below from a management listserv. Political correctness has become a standard of acceptable behavior in universities. In a way, it resurrects medieval courtly courtesy.  

According to Debra Kelly on Urban Ghosts, in the Middle Ages and Renaissance courtesy books were popular to help people of different social ranks deal with each other.  Each era has its own interpretation of etiquette and appropriate behavior. According to Tim Nash in The Finer Times, vagrancy was a capital crime during the Middle Ages, and people were suffocated in water, boiled in oil, had their fingers torn off, and had their eyes burned out for this and more serious offenses.

Improving our skill at dealing with others is an important and useful goal, but when rules of etiquette become legally enforceable and punitive, they become authoritarian.   

Among the etiquette issues that were salient in the Middle Ages were avoiding bringing your horse into the house, checking yourself for fleas, and avoiding the attentions of your lord's wife by feigning illness.  In his poem Liber Urbani Daniel of Beccles advises us not to play with our spoons, not to steal a host's spoon, and not to put our used spoons into the serving dish.     

Today, the field of management plays an equivalent role to that of Daniel of Beccles. According to the email, sent by a management professor on behalf of the special issue of a journal, incivility abounds, and it costs firms money.  

In particular, the professor is concerned that insufficient attention has been paid to selective incivility because of gender, race, ethnicity, minority sexual orientation, minority religion, immigrant status, and so on.  The extensive list of workplace regulation on the books, which includes the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1991, the Equal Pay Act, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, the Pregnancy Disability Act, child labor laws, and the Americans with Disabilities Act--not to mention abundant state and local laws--have apparently failed to help. The professor's solution seems to be to extend the academic rules of politically correct etiquette to the workplace. Soon, management professors will be advocating corporate safe spaces.  

Nash points out that in the Middle Ages the poorer classes tended to suffer the worst punishments, and the same is likely true today. The elite etiquette advocated by politically correct professors targets working class prejudices and mostly white males.  A university professor in today's America is at least three times more likely to have been born in a foreign country than to be a Republican. Republicans are marginalized in academia to a greater degree than any class of individuals is marginalized in the private sector.

The professor proposes that identifying sources of slights to a wide range of groups is an important management issue.  My guess is that it is one of two things: (1) one more useless academic study that will do little or nothing to help real world managers but will generate conferences and publications of no importance outside the management field or (2) one more effort to generate laws that target working class men (and to a lesser degree working class women) and to marginalize them, much as the medieval rules of etiquette and criminality targeted and marginalized the lower classes.  

The professor's email reads as follows:

Recent news headlines and political discourse underscore the relevance and salience of incivility in our everyday lives and workplaces. Incivility seems to permeate our work lives, manifesting in experiences such as being ignored or disregarded, being excluded from professional opportunities, or having your judgement unfairly questioned over a matter for which you are responsible ...Research over the past 20 or so years has started to document the prevalence, costs, and correlates of incivility, finding that targets suffer personally and professionally and that organizations face financial and productivity loses...

While we have made great strides in understanding general experiences of incivility, less attention has been paid to how these experiences affect those with stigmatized identities. In 2008, Cortina introduced the concept of selective incivility to describe how subtle, ambiguous acts of rudeness may function as a covert manifestation of bias against devalued, stigmatized, or marginalized people in organizations.  Such biases may be based on one, or multiple, identity groups such as gender, race, ethnicity, minority sexual orientation, minority religion identification, immigrant status, transgender identity, disability status, language, or accent.

Initial research in a test of this theory found disproportionate uncivil treatment may provide an explanatory mechanism for the lower rates of women and racial minorities found in the upper echelons of organizations...However, not all research finds increased risk of incivility for stigmatized groups...

The purpose of this special issue is to foster constructive insights into the selective incivility phenomenon. We welcome papers of an empirical or theoretical nature that investigate questions such as (but certainly not limited to):
•    What are the ways in which selective incivility may act as vehicle to communicate larger organizational and social values and ethical norms?
•    What kinds of cultural considerations should be taken into account when conducting selective incivility research internationally? How do we meaningfully include cultural norms into our work?
•    How do intersections of multiple social identities affect risk of experiencing mistreatment? Do certain identities act as a mitigating factor?
•    What are group and organizational-level factors that might predict experiences of selective incivility?
•    What are individual differences that may explain how targets respond to selective incivility? Incivility, by definition, is ambiguous: Does labeling the experience as discriminatory matter for target outcomes?
•    What factors predict instigation of selective incivility?
•    How might organizations address the issue of interpersonal slights being experienced by some employees more than others? 

My Interview on Raquel Okyay's Podcast March 30

Raquel Okyay had me on her podcast, Rocky and the Gonz, on March 30  . I enter about one-half hour in. It was fun. 

Thiel May Resign from Facebook

The Democrats' authoritarian obsession with political correctness isn't limited to their tax-subsidized, partisan clubhouses like universities, colleges, government agencies, and labor unions. Peter Thiel, a member of the Facebook board, is moving to LA, in part to get away from the Democratic Party atmosphere in Silicon Valley. The Wall Street Journal reports:

Mr. Thiel has also discussed with people close to him the possibility of resigning from the board of Facebook Inc., the people familiar with his thinking said. His relationship with the social-networking company—where he has been a director since 2005, the year after its founding—came under strain after a dispute with a fellow director over Mr. Thiel’s support for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign...

Democrats encourage disagreement until people disagree.

Higher Education Is Drowning in BS

There's a good piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education by someone who says he's independent and unaffiliated but who seems to me to lean somewhat left.  He blames what he calls the BS in higher education for the deterioration of American politics. 

A good example of the deterioration is Trump's recent claim that Africa and Haiti are "shit holes" and that America needs immigrants from Norway. Trump misses that Norway is richer than the US (Norway GDP per capita, $71,000; US GDP per capita, $56,000) and that most Americans would be better off immigrating to Norway rather than the other way around. 

After 47 years of Fed-led wealth redistribution to the wealthy and stagnant real wages, Americans are falling behind economically, and Trump is not the cure. Although he's better than redistributionists like Obama and Clinton, he is part of the problem; he is not part of the solution.

The author, Notre Dame professor Christian Smith's, assault on academic commercialization, the culture of offense, and publish or perish is a well-taken step in the right direction for the usually educationist Chronicle. 

Can College Students Learn to Disagree?

My op-ed “Can College Students Learn to Disagree? The Importance of Contrasting Ideology with Prudence” just came out in Frontpagemag.  It contrasts  recent experiences with my speaker program at Brooklyn College and the Mill Series at Lafayette College with the recent riots at Berkeley and elsewhere.

My friend and coauthor Dan Klein just emailed and mentioned that I mix up Karl Polanyi with Michael Polanyi.  The republic of science concept was in Michael Polanyi's article.  

  

Dan suggests that Russell Kirk's objection to ideology is misguided. Dan suggests using "fanaticism," "dogma," or "foolishness" in place of "ideology." Dan points out that we libertarians are as ideological as leftists.

I agree with Dan in terms of political tactics, although I don't think that colleges should play an ideological role.  There should be some effort to reflect the spectrum of views in American society.  The claim that "science is settled" is most often code for insistence on left ideological positions that are not only not settled but nonsensically tendentious.  

Universities' substitution of ideology for prudential debate will end in their diminished role, especially if the Republican approach proves to become more economically successful than the Democratic. 

With respect to politics, the ideological approach is more tactically effective than the conservative approach, which is why after many decades of both conservatism and leftism, the nation has changed just as the leftists have hoped: in  the direction of socialism. The conservatives have lost every step of the way.  Part of the reason is their rejection of libertarianism, without which they lack the numbers to win elections.  The Trump administration may overturn some of the Obama administration's gaffes, but he is unlikely to leave a legacy of an opposing ideology. In that he is like the Tafts, Goldwater, and Reagan.

The error of conservatism is that compromise inevitably leads to the end toward which an opposing party with a consistent, unitary aim favors.  Conservatism only works if there is a level playing field with diverse interests that counterbalance each other. Instead, America has a soft socialist progressivism that aims in one direction, with every other interest counterbalancing each other and compromising with each other. 

The result is that the one interest with a consistent, unitary aim wins over time, and the party or parties that are conservative and believe in compromise and gradualism lose  over time.  The approach of National Review and other conservatives to vote for the lesser evil in time leads to the greater evil anyway.  At some point socialism needs to be overturned with radical, ideologically motivated steps. 

My Afternoon at Lafayette College

Professor Brandon Van Dyck and his student Abdul invited me to speak at Lafayette College as part of their Mill lecture series.   About fifty students and several faculty members attended my talk, and students both in favor of and opposed to political correctness were in the room and spoke reasonably and frankly.   It is to  Lafayette’s credit that it has allowed Professor Van Dyck to initiate the program, although I am told that some of the faculty have attacked it.  One of the points that Professor Van Dyck and others made during the discussion is that some professors at Lafayette have criticized the program and its speakers without attending any of the lectures.        

My topic covered a combination of the Langbert, Quain, and Klein article “Faculty Voter Registration in Economics, History, Journalism, Law, and Psychology,”  which appeared in Econ Journal Watch last year, as well as some recent findings on which I’ve been working.  The recent findings concern liberal arts colleges, which I’m starting to conclude have more variance in their partisanship than do research institutions but for the most part are as one sided as the social science departments of research institutions.

I found it gratifying to meet a number of conservative students at Lafayette who question the left orientation of their education, but I found it even more gratifying that several left-oriented students attended the talk and were willing to debate with me and with Professor Van Dyck.

Students who defended colleges’ left orientation raised these points:

                1. In research on faculty voter registration, nearly half the population is either not registered or not affiliated with a party, so nonresponse threatens the validity of the Langbert, Quain, and Klein findings.

                2. Students who protested Charles Murray’s appearance and other conservative speakers’ appearances at Middlebury College and elsewhere have the right to protest their institutions’ allowing such speakers to appear because the institutions are private, and the students have the right to see that their tuition money is used in ways of which they approve.  Moreover, Herrnstein and Murray’s book The Bell Curve is racist.

                3. The one-sidedness of faculty voter registration does not matter because left-oriented professors can fairly depict both sides.

                4. Republicans are often opposed to science, and many question the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis.

Nonregistration as a Threat to Validity

First, although the research I’m doing is archival and not survey based, the problem of nonregistration parallels that of survey nonresponse. 

As this article by the American Academy of Political and Social Science says, nonresponse threatens the validity of most social science survey work. As I pointed out to the student,   left-oriented observers raise this issue with respect to this research more frequently than they do with studies done byNeil Gross, studies done to support left-oriented positions, or neutral studies, such as those of the US Census.  I have never heard a news reporter comment on the nonresponse rate for the unemployment statistic survey, which in most years is four or five times greater than the unemployment rate.  The nonresgistration rate in our research is less than the proportion that we have found to be registered.

That said, since all social science survey research is threatened by nonresponse, it is important to triangulate or to find multiple methods of measuring the same variable.  Studies of the left orientation of faculty have included opinion surveys, which of course also suffer from nonresponse but a different kind of nonresponse.  As well, both opinion surveys and voter registration studies of faculty political affiliation are being done on multiple kinds of samples.  The different forms of studies do not find appreciably different results. 

As results from different kinds of studies and from different kinds of samples accumulate, the results become more certain and better understood.  My point is that virtually no survey work ever done does not suffer from nonresponse, and nonresponse is important only if it correlates with the findings. If there is no correlation between nonresponse and partisan affiliation, then nonresponse has no importance to the study.  If there is a correlation that is strong enough to change the findings, then we may fairly ask why the findings do not appreciably change when different populations are surveyed and different methods are used.

Charles Murray

With respect to the second point, which concerns Charles Murray’s not being allowed to speak, colleges should be forums for open debate.  They are not ideological or political advocacy organizations that permit only one viewpoint.  The left protested the McCarthyism of conservative politicians because McCarthyism did not permit the views of communists to be openly expressed. It is telling that now left academics and students advocate that views of conservatives should not be allowed to be openly expressed. 

Religious institutions that permit only one religion to be advocated openly state that the religion is fundamental to their mission, but secular colleges do not claim to be political advocacy organizations in part because Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code predicates institutional tax exemption on not engaging in lobbying or ideological advocacy.  Political organizations are not entitled to tax exemptions.  Hence, if students wish to claim that their institutions are at root political advocacy organizations, they will need to pony up the difference in tuition cost between exempt and nonexempt institutions.

More importantly, the purpose of universities should be to teach citizenship, rational debate, and learning rather than closed minded advocacy.  If Middlebury and other colleges teach advocacy instead, then public support for them should be revisited.

I read Herrnstein and Murray twenty years ago. I do not recall any racist claims in their book, although I was once called to the carpet of a departmental chair because of a student’s claim that Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals is racist. (I recount the incident here.) My recollection of Herrnstein and Murray is that they make the general point that IQ is important to a wide range of public policy issues.  In my own field, human resource management, IQ has been repeatedly shown to be a valid predictor of job performance.  

Merriam-Webster defines bigot as follows:

A person who is obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices; especially :  one who regards or treats the members of a group (as a racial or ethnic group) with hatred and intolerance.

         

Although the racial variety is the most common application, one can be a bigot in a variety of ways, and students who, in the face of science, violently object to well-reasoned, scientifically supported findings because of obstinate commitment to their own prejudices are themselves bigots. Middlebury and all other educational institutions should encourage students to think scientifically and reasonably and to abhor bigotry of all kinds.

Teaching Both Sides

With respect to the third point, the ability of faculty to teach both sides of a question, I have worked in higher education for 26 years, and I have never had a departmental colleague who could give a fair exegesis of libertarian economic theories like those of Hayek and von Mises.  I have no doubt that many economists can, but many cannot.  The same is true of classical liberal ideas. The most influential economic writer was Adam Smith, but I have repeatedly heard his statement, “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices,” misinterpreted to mean that Smith supported economic regulation.  The statement is made at the end of a chapter in Wealth of Nations that criticizes gilds and argues that regulation does not work.

A good example of the incompetence of many left-oriented academics with respect to (Lockean) liberal thinkers is a book I reviewed in 2012 for Frontpagemag, my Brooklyn College colleague Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin. Robin misunderstands, misconstrues, and appears not to have read the von Mises material that he claims to critique.  If a left-oriented professor like Robin who claims to be able to write a book on conservatism botches his understanding of von Mises, I doubt that many left faculty can do a good job. 

Global Warming

With respect to the last point, I am not enough of an expert in geology to comment on climate change, but I did say that the claim that “science is settled” is profoundly anti science.  As Popper points out in his Logic of Scientific Discovery, theories are never proven; they are only disproven or falsified. As I pointed out to the student who raised this point, those in the church who believed that the science was settled imprisoned Galileo.  The politicization of science, as the Democrats have done with respect to global warming theory, is more profoundly anti science than the doubts raised by global warming skeptics.  

                

One of the few professors in the room was a science professor who rejoined that he was a global warming denier.  He said that the evidence is not nearly strong enough to have policy implications. Amen. 

Steven Volynets on Political Correctness

My former Brooklyn College student, Steve Volynets, wrote this email protesting the increasing political correctness in American culture.  He sent it to Prof. Jonathan Haidt, the founder of Heterodox Academy and an exceptional social psychologist and philosopher.  Steve recounts  9/11, when he was my student. On 9/11 I had breakfast with my former professor, Eric Flamholtz from the UCLA business school.  My later meeting in a diner with Steve and Endrhis, then my students, completed the cycle.

Dear Dr. Haidt,

I am writing to thank you for speaking out against the growing suppression of viewpoint diversity on college campuses and elsewhere in academic and intellectual discourse.

I am not a professor, or even a student. I am a fiction writer. Last year, I wrote an article for New York Observer in which I took issue with Roxane Gay’s review of Jonathan Franzen’s latest novel, “Purity,” questioning the merit and wisdom of conflating the novelist with his fictive characters. My piece went viral and prompted what you have described as Twitter "flash mobs" against me, some initiated by other established authors and contributors to the New York Times (screenshots attached).

For reasons I cannot fathom, Jonathan Franzen has been described as a misogynist and personally made the target of attacks both on social and legacy media. No one can seem to provide an objective explanation as to the nature of or reason for these attacks, yet they persist. Since my Observer article appeared, I have seen others express similar disdain for Mr. Franzen. Last year, I learned that he and Jeff Bezos were scheduled to appear on Jeopardy from a Facebook post by a writer and creative writing professor, who referred to them both “the most insufferable guys.”

I was born in Soviet Ukraine and grew up in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, where, as kids, we used to describe to this manner of speaking as “talking shit.” Not a beacon of decorousness perhaps, my old neighborhood (at least not until the arrival of the Food Co-op), still I have been taught that making assumptions about people I have never met or gotten to know personally was wrong. So I decided to challenge this writing professor by simply asking her if she ever met Mr. Franzen, to which she responded by calling me a “Franzen apologist” and blocking me from her list of friends.

No one should have to apologize for writing a work of fiction, I thought, recalling the painful experience of Salman Rushdie as well as those of dissident authors from the Soviet Block. More than that, I imagined a creative writing student, one inspired by Jonathan Franzen’s novels, having to take this professor’s class. Could this student freely express her passion for Franzen’s prose, to quote it in her papers and in-class discussions, to ask questions about it and expect dignified answers, to engage with it critically without risking punitive grading or, worse yet, being dismissed as an apologist? That I do not know the answer to this question troubles me.       

I have always believed that when it comes to art, one cannot be disabused of one’s emotional or intellectual cathexis any more than one can be forced to fall in or out of love. To regard fictional characters, images and narratives as inherently doctrinal, or as reflections of an author’s personality, strikes me as absurd as conferring a moral judgment upon a movie actor based on a role she plays. Yet this, along with sharp stands against "cultural appropriation," is the guiding principle for writers and critics like Roxane Gay, who not only express this view in op-eds for the New York Times – which is perfectly acceptable and, indeed, should be encouraged – but also sit on editorial boards of literary journals, judge writing contests and fellowship application. Needless to say, I do not risk applying for those contests and fellowships after making my disagreements public (and as a working artist, I could use the support).

I was also heartened by your mention of Mitchell Langbert’s study during your presentation at Duke. It is fair to say that Professor Langbert is quite to the right of me politically. He is also one of the most important teachers I've ever had. So it was sickening to learn that he has been treated so dismissively and with such contempt by his own colleagues. It was in his class that I was introduced to a book that had transformed my understanding of urban life, Robert Caro’s ‘The Power Broker,’ a text that I return to again and again. Nor could I have written my J Journal story about Bernie Madoff, nominated for the Pushcart Prize, if not for Prof. Langbert, whose lectures on financial markets had fueled my leaps of fancy into Wall Street myths. Koch brothers or not, I don’t recall Prof. Langbert, a dedicated pedagogue and scholar, ever peddling cheap right-wing propaganda in his classrooms. But I do remember the afternoon of September 11, 2001, sitting at a table with him and my college buddy, Endrhis Santana, in a diner just outside the Brooklyn College campus. The air still smelled of smoke and we spoke freely (something one could do in those pre-social media days) of our shock and anger. After years of teaching, Prof. Langbert must have seen thousands of students just like us – immigrant kids with side jobs, trying to make it through a city school. After we were done, the hardline laissez-faire hawk that he is, Prof. Langbert paid for our food.

I never thought I'd see anything like this, not at CUNY– the mounting suppression of free speech and intellectual diversity on college campuses is a disgrace.  

I am not a professor. In fact, I never even finished graduate school, having dropped out of the MFA creative writing program for some of the aforementioned reasons. I cannot become a member of the Heterodox Academy. Still I join, if only in spirit, your worthwhile cause.

Sincerely,
Steven Volynets

Professor Gad Saad's Youtube Video on Langbert, Quain, and Klein

Professor Gad Saad of Concordia University has produced an excellent Youtube video of the Langbert, Quain, and Klein article that we published last September.

New York Now a Toxic City

Bigotry takes many forms.  One form of bigotry involves intolerance of others' political views or economic behaviors. Such bigotry can be as violent as racial or religious hatred.  Dissidents in big-government states have been prevented from working, have been incarcerated, have been tortured, and have been killed.  Examples include the McCarthyism of the 1950s, when communists were prevented from working in the film industry; the suppression of the Soviet Union and China, which often involved incarceration in prison camps, torture, and murder; and the  suppression of dissidents, along with Jews, Gypsies, and uncooperative Catholic leaders, in Nazi Germany.* 

New York increasingly exhibits political bigotry.  The New York Post reported on June 4 that 26 of 51 New York City Councilmen wrote a letter to Wal-Mart demanding that the firm stop giving charity in New York.  The Post reports that Wal-Mart had announced $3 million in gifts to New York this year. It adds, "Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito called the donations “toxic money,” and accused Walmart of waging a “cynical public-relations campaign that disguises Walmart’s backwards anti-job agenda."

Rather than Wal-Mart's charity being toxic money, New York has become a toxic city. It is New York that destroys jobs and destroys wages through its inept regulatory regimes, specifically including the state ban on fracking, whose harms are vastly exaggerated. The high cost of regulation in New York has driven hundreds of corporate headquarters out of the city.  When I was a child, a quarter of the industrial firms still had headquarters there. Because of the policies of jobs-destroying politicians like Melissa Mark-Viverito, three quarters of the headquarters are gone.
 
*When I visited the Dachau concentration camp in 1975, I learned that many Catholic priests had been imprisoned there along with Jews.  American universities today are frequently anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic, just as Hitler and Stalin were.

John Stuart Mill and the Origin of Secular Humanism and Social Justice Education

I am reading John Stuart Mill's short book Utilitarianism. He is not the philosopher that Henry Sidgwick was, but I believe Mill's book had a great impact on the history of ideas, both on progressive education (and the notion of social justice education) and on Progressivism aka "state activist liberalism" aka social democracy. Mill refers to Comte and I will have to read his work too. Note this quote from pages 49-50 of Utilitarianism:

"In an improving state of the human mind, the influences are constantly on the increase, which tend to generate in each individual a feeling of unity with all the rest; which feeling, if perfect, would make him never think of, or desire, any beneficial condition for himself, in the benefits of which they are not included. If we now suppose this feeling of unity to be taught as a religion, and the whole force of education, of institutions, and of opinion directed as it once was in the case of religion, to make every person grow up from infancy surrounded on all sides both by the profession and by the practice of it. I think that no one, who can realize this conception, will feel any misgiving about the sufficiency of the ultimate sanction for the Happiness morality.* To any ethical student who finds the realization difficult, I recommend as a means of facilitating it, the second of M. Comte's two principal works, the Systeme de Politique Positive. I entertain the strongest objections to the system of politics and morals set forth in that treatise; but I think it has superabundantly shown the possibility of giving to the service of humanity, even without the aid of belief in a Providence, both the physical power and the social efficacy of a religion; making it take hold of human life, and colour all thought, feeling and action in a manner of which the greatest ascendency ever exercised by any religion may be but a type and foretaste; and of which the danger is not that it should be insufficient, but that it should be so excessive as to interfere unduly with human freedom and individuality."

*By the "happiness morality" Mill means utilitarianism.

Ratio of Democrat to Republican Donors at Brooklyn College

Huffington Post lists political donors by employer. The information is publicly available on the World Wide Web. I am not breaching confidentiality by copying the data.

The folks at the American Association of University Professors keep claiming that there is no imbalance between Democrats and Republicans in universities. They claim that the professoriate represents a balanced range of views. That is of course absurd.

The top of the Huffington Brooklyn College list states:

$16,093 was given by people who identified their employer as "Brooklyn College".
$0 to Republicans
$16,093 from 25 people to Democrats

The summary states that it all went to Democrats. However, that is inaccurate, as there is one Republican donor on the list. Me. If you look down the list you will see that I gave $540 to John McCain. I am the only Republican donor on the list. With 25 on the list, the politically interested faculty appears to be 4% Republican and 96% Democratic.

Moreover, the amounts contributed to the Democratic Party are surprisingly large. For example, Professor Leo Zanderer donated $4,600 to Christopher Dodd. Professor Madelon Rand donated $1,950 to Hillary Clinton in the first quarter of 2008. Librarian Howard Spivak donated $1,000 to Hillary Clinton. Professor Barbara Winsolow gave $2,000 to Howard Dean.

My question, friends, is: why does the heading of the list say that there are no Republican donors at Brooklyn when it lists me as having given $540 to John McCain?

Brooklyn College Political Donations

Leo Zanderer Professor Brooklyn College Christopher Dodd $4,600
Madelon Rand English Instructor Brooklyn College Hillary Clinton $1,950
Howard Spivak Director, Academic Information,Brooklyn College Hillary Clinton $1,000
Gail Gurland Professor Brooklyn College Hillary Clinton $600
Mitchell Langbert ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR BROOKLYN COLLEGE John McCain $540
Philip Thibodeau Professor Brooklyn College Barack Obama $465
Ellen Wayne Professor Brooklyn College John Edwards $450
Renison Gonsalves Updated Q1/2008 Hillary Clinton $420
John Van Sickle Professor Q1/2008 Barack Obama $400
Donald M Levine Professor Brooklyn College Updated Q1/2008 Barack Obama $391
Lindley Hanlon Professor Brooklyn College Updated Q1/2008 Barack Obama $308
Michael Hipscher Teacher Brooklyn College Updated Q1/2008 John Edwards $300
Matthew Moore Professor Brooklyn College Updated Q1/2008 Barack Obama $300
Mac Wellman writer/professor Dennis Kucinich $300
Andrew Meyer Professor Brooklyn College Q1/2008 Barack Obama $272
Sonia Murrow College Professor Brooklyn College Q1/2008 Barack Obama $250
Barbara Winslow University professor Brooklyn College Howard Dean $2,000
Charlene Forest Professor Brooklyn College Updated Q1/2004 DNC $500
Joe Fodor writer Brooklyn College Updated Q1/2004 DNC $500
Ellen Wayne College Professor Brooklyn College Updated Q1/2004 DNC $450
Clement Mbom Professor Brooklyn College Updated Q1/2004 DNC $408
John Van Sickle Professor Brooklyn College Q1/2004 John Kerry $375
Kathleen Axen Professor Brooklyn College Updated Q1/2004 DNC $300
Matthew Moore Brooklyn College Updated Q1/2004 DNC $300
Peter Wayne College Professor Brooklyn College Updated Q1/2004 John Kerry $250
Len Fox college professor Brooklyn College Q1/2004 DNC $250
Todd Holden Professor of Physics Brooklyn College Updated Q1/2004 DNC $250
David Bloomfield Educator Brooklyn College Q1/2004 John Kerry $250
Roni Natov English Professor Brooklyn College Updated Q1/2004 DNC $250
Daniel Mufson Assistant Professor Brooklyn College Updated Q1/2004 Howard Dean $250
Steven Jervis Brooklyn College Updated Q1/2004 John Kerry $200
Corey Robin professor Brooklyn College Updated Q1/2004 Howard Dean $200
Charles Ayes Architect Brooklyn College Updated Q1/2004 John Kerry $200
Len Fox College Professor Brooklyn College Q1/2004 John Kerry $200
Frederick Gardiner Professor Brooklyn College Q1/2004 John Kerry $200
Mac Wellman Professor Brooklyn College Updated Q1/2004 Dennis Kucinich $200
Gary Giardina Physician Assistant Brooklyn College Updated Q1/2004 DNC $150
Daniel Mufson Assistant Professor Brooklyn College Updated Howard Dean $150
John Van Sickle Professor Brooklyn College Updated Q1/2004 Howard Dean $100
Allison Dean Professor Brooklyn College Updated Q1/2004 Howard Dean $60

Sharad Karkhanis--Man of The Year

I just put up Phil Orenstein's press release concerning the Queens Village Republicans' award to Sharad Karkhanis as "Educator of the Year". I have decided that Sharad should also be awarded "Man of the Year". I am hereby designating him the first official recipient of Mitchell Langbert's blog's Man of the Year award. Who needs Time?

Is This Education (and is it entitled to a section 501(c)(3) tax examption)?

Or is it political lobbying?

You be the judge....

>Dear Colleagues,

>Come join us! ---- College's sociology department is taking part in a nation wide teach-in addressing climate change on January 31st, 2008. Over 1300 universities, schools and civic organizations are participating in this historic event. Because the date is so early in the semester, it may not be the best date for ----- College, but by focusing our activity around January 31st, our efforts will link with Focus the Nation's campaign. They have organized what may end up being the largest teach-in ever in U.S. history-reminding us of the fantastic reception to the first Earth Day in 1970.

>What can you do? (if viewed previously please note room change!)

>1. Save the date! On January 31st, From 11 until 1 the sociology department will host a short program in ---- Lounge Student Center involving local politicians, citizen groups, and a Frontline documentary, Hot Politics, on the history of climate change policies in the U.S.

>2. Take your class to view Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. There will be multiple screenings in the xxxxx Auditorium on January 30th and 31st. Show times at: 9:30 a.m., 12:15, 2:00, 3:45 and 6:30 p.m. No 12:15 showing on the 31st! Please RSVP to xxxx@xxxx.xxxx.edu.

>3. Plan to teach about climate change in your regular courses on (or around) January 31st. Our goal is to expand our attention to how climate change can be understood and addressed through our many disciplines. Climate change touches on issues as diverse as poverty, power, media discourses, politics, philosophy, human rights, social infrastructure, religion and more every discipline has something to add to the conversation.

>What can you do now?

>1. Let us know that you are joining our project. We will add your name, your course title, and your department to our list of participants. When you join our project, we will put you on a distribution list for additional materials and other updates.

>2. You can visit the website www.focusthenation.org for discipline specific teaching suggestions. Or for a social science focus try ASA's teach-in website http://www.linfield.edu/soan/et/teachin.html.

>3. If you have course material (readings, assignments, projects) share them with us and we will share them with all who participate.

>4. On Jan. 31st come to our teach-in focusing on climate change policies.

>5. Organize your own event and let us know.

>Please send your intention to participate and suggestions for materials to Professor xxx, xxx@----.xxx.edu.

-----------
Visiting Assistant Professor

O'Malley v. Karkhanis; Johnson v. Yousry

I have emailed the following inquiry to Susan O'Malley, a CUNY activist who is suing Sharad Karkhanis:

From: "Mitchell Langbert"
To: "Sue O'Malley"
Cc: "KC Johnson"
Subject: Karkhanis, Johnson and Yousry
Date: Mon, 31 Dec 2007 21:17:21 -0500
MIME-Version: 1.0
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Dear UFS Chair O'Malley:

Further to my earlier e-mails, I would like to respectfully ask you two additional questions for my blog. I hope you don't mind.

As I am reading through your complaint concerning Professor Karkhanis, I noticed the following statement:

"Contrary to the defendants' Utterances and implications, UFS Chair Susan O'Malley's duties included representing all faculty of CUNY (including Yousry, who was then a member of the faculty) each of whom she believes are entitled to due process."

I am somewhat curious about the link between this point and your comments about Professor KC Johnson that were recorded several years ago. In particular, you were unsupportive of Professor Johnson's promotion bid at that time and publicly stated so.

Do you feel that you were remiss in your treatment of Professor Johnson? Or did you have a change of heart since then concerning your role in representing all faculty as chair of the UFS?

Second, do you feel that your treatment of Yousry was equivalent to your treatment of Johnson? The complaint about Johnson involved collegiality, and failing to represent him, you voiced concern about him, saying that it was a difficult question. In contrast, Yousry was convicted of terrorist-related activity.

Third I am curious as to the implications of this point for CUNY policy. The departmental chairs on rare occasion make frivolous decisions based on collegiality and other pretexts that are inconsistent with serious academic criteria. If you claim to represent all faculty how do you reconcile the representation of a chair who makes a frivolous decision and a capable junior faculty member who is terminated on the frivolous grounds?

Thanks for your help and clarification. I will blog your answer along with this inquiry.

Sincerely,

Mitchell Langbert, Ph.D.

Addendum: KC Johnson just reminded me that in 2003 Erin O'Connor of Critical Mass called O'Malley's attacks on Johnson "libelous": O'Connor writes:

"For example, it is now acceptable at CUNY for top administrators to libel those junior faculty they seek to fire. Susan O'Malley, English professor at Kingsborough Community College, president of the CUNY University Faculty Senate, and ex oficio member of the Board of Trustees, published a statement on Johnson's case in the Senate Digest. Here is the text:

"'As the faculty member on the Board of Trustees, although without a vote, I first heard that the Board was being asked to vote on Professor Robert David Johnson's promotion and early tenure as the February 24, 2003 Board meeting was convening. A sheet of paper announcing an addendum to the University Report was placed at my seat. We were to vote on Professor Johnson's promotion to full professor effective 1/1/03 and his tenure effective 9/1/03. This action had not been presented to the Board Committee on Faculty, Staff, Administration for discussion and vote, nor had it been placed on the Board Calendar so that faculty could address it at the Board Public Hearing. The only discussion at the February Board of Trustees meeting consisted of a statement from Trustee Pesile that she had been trying to bring this matter to the Board's attention since October. However, Trustee Wiesenfeld had made known to the New York Sun his views supporting Professor Johnson.

"'Chancellor Goldstein recommended to the Board that it overturn the decision by the Brooklyn College faculty and the President of Brooklyn College. He said that after having received a complaint from Professor Johnson's attorney, he had given Professor Johnson's file to three professors who had distinguished records, and who had voted to promote Johnson to full professor after his having taught for three and one half years at Brooklyn College. The three professors who voted to promote Professor Johnson are Pamela Sheingorn, Professor of History at Baruch and Executive Officer of the Doctoral Program in Theater at the Graduate Center; David Reynolds, University Distinguished Professor of English at Baruch College; and Louis Masur, chair of the City College History Department.

"'It is not my place to judge Professor Johnson's scholarship. A historian, he has written several reputable monographs. However, although he has one other monograph in press, he has not published since his tenure clock started at Brooklyn College. He was scheduled to have another year at Brooklyn College before coming up for tenure. While I agree with the AAUP that collegiality, a reason cited in the. Johnson case, should not be the sole criterion for the denial of promotion, as I talk to Brooklyn College faculty I realize that this is an extremely complex case.
"What kind of message does this give to faculty coming up for promotion? That it is better for a faculty member who anticipates any difficulty to hire a private lawyer and ask the Chancellor to form his own committee to recommend promotion and tenure?.

[I note that that Professor Johnson's record at that point far exceeded the number of publications that Professor O'Malley pretended and that Professor O'Malley's statement at this very critical point in Johnson's career was utterly untrue and a defamatory lie. Given her reckless disregard for the truth in this matter, O'Malley should hang her head in perpetual shame rather than engage in litigation about her own flimsy career.]

"'As Chair of the University Faculty Senate and as one who is concerned with governance issues, I believe that the Chancellor's action does a disservice to shared governance at CUNY. On March 25, 2003, th UFS plenary voted to support a Resolution on the Integrity of the Promotion and Tenure Process which was written in response to the Chancellor's grant of early promotion and therefore tenure to Professor Johnson. Chancellor Goldstein's action overrode the decisions of the three committees at Brooklyn College involved with the promotion and tenure process, as well as the decision of the President of Brooklyn College. The UFS resolution "calls upon the Chancellor to affirm a policy of non-interference with established campus and university governance and contractual procedures, including appeals and grievances."

[Professor O'Malley, with respect to Professor Johnson, saw her role as defender of academic processes rather than representative of "all faculty of CUNY". It seems that Professor O'Malley carries a many-edged sword, none of the edges being particularly truthful.]

"'Cordially,

"'Susan G. O'Malley'"

Request for Updated Copy of Susan O'Malley's CV Sent on 12/31

From: "Mitchell Langbert"
To:
Subject: Copy of Your Curriculum Vita
Date: Mon, 31 Dec 2007 15:13:27 -0500
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Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
boundary="----=_NextPart_000_0020_01C84BBF.B22A1C00"
X-Priority: 3
X-MSMail-Priority: Normal
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X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2900.3198



Dear Sue: May I have a copy of your curriculum vita to post publicly on my blog? Thanks,

Mitchell Langbert, Ph.D.