Getting Academic Freedom Not Quite Right

I sent Brooklyn College's President Karen Gould a response to her letter today concerning the appearance at Brooklyn College of Omar Barghouti, the advocate of sanctions against Israeli academics: 

President Gould, as a practical matter I support your decision to allow Barghouti's appearance, but some of the faculty here at Brooklyn have substituted political advocacy for academics and so have a biased, unfair, and inaccurate definition of academic freedom. I urge you to address the comparison between Evan Goldwyn in 2005 and Omar Barghouti in 2013 in a public statement.  In 2005 the now-defunct New York Sun ran an article on Goldwyn.  The same academics now claiming that Barghouti, a master's degree student, deserves academic freedom then said that Goldwyn, also a student, was not entitled to academic freedom because he was a student.  See: http://www.nysun.com/new-york/disposition-emerges-as-issue-at-brooklyn-college/14604/  .

In the Goldwyn case Professor Parmar attempted to throw Goldwyn out of school because he disagreed with her claim that English is the language of white oppressors.  Several professors now arguing for Barghouti's academic freedom then argued that students are not entitled to academic freedom. Would you please comment publicly on the different response to the two cases?  Goldwyn was saved only by the publicity KC Johnson brought, not because, since the 1990s or earlier, the school has had a history of supporting academic freedom--except for left-wingers. Barghouti has an international reputation as a political propagandist or activist, not as an academic. Section 501 (c) (3) explicitly rejects political propaganda as part of an educational institution's mission, and in taking a tax exemption Brooklyn College committed to that position. Are you reversing that position now, or are you claiming that Barghouti is an academic?

Also, the claim that there is academic freedom in a political science department with 100% left-wingers and 0% conservatives, libertarians, or other alternative viewpoints, with any alternative views being suppressed or excluded, is a joke. The same is true of the economics department, which has excluded, for example, the Austrian economics viewpoint.    

As well, political propaganda is not academic or educational, as Section 501 (c) (3) clearly states.  If the college, as apparently the political science department does, sees its role as propaganda rather than education (a position which former provost Roberta Matthews advocated--but not for tax purposes, concerning which she was willing to lie--when she said that all teaching is political),  I would appreciate your explicit clarification of why a talk that advocates sanctions against Israeli academics is in any sense "academic" or "educational" as required by section 501(c)(3) for tax exemption purposes.

-----Original Message-----
From: Karen L. Gould, President [mailto:bcpresident@brooklyn.cuny.edu]
Sent: Mon 2/4/2013 10:50 AM
To: Staff E-Mail
Subject: A steadfast commitment to academic freedom with a commitment to ongoing dialogue and debate

Dear students, faculty, and staff,

During the past week, due to an upcoming event about the BDS movement, our campus has been wrestling with issues of tremendous importance to our college and our community.  There are passionate views on many sides.  While we appreciate the many voices of support for our stand on academic freedom, we cannot disregard the concerns raised by some of our students and alumni.

First, however, let me be clear: Our commitment to the principles of academic freedom remains steadfast.  Students and faculty, including academic departments, programs, and centers, have the right to invite speakers, engage in discussion, and present ideas to further educational discussion and debate.   The mere invitation to speak does not indicate an endorsement of any particular point of view, and there is no obligation, as some have suggested, to present multiple perspectives at any one event.  In this case, the department's co-sponsorship of the event is an invitation to participate; it does not indicate an endorsement of the speakers' positions.  Providing an open forum to discuss important topics, even those many find highly objectionable, is a centuries-old practice on university campuses around the country.  Indeed, this spirit of inquiry and critical debate is a hallmark of the American education system.

At the same time, it is essential that Brooklyn College remain an engaged and civil learning environment where all views may be expressed without fear of intimidation or reprisal.  As I stated last week, we encourage debate, discussion, and more debate.  Students and faculty should explore these and other issues from multiple viewpoints and in a variety of forums so that no single perspective serves as the only basis for consideration.  Contrary to some reports, the Department of Political Science fully agrees and has reaffirmed its longstanding policy to give equal consideration to co-sponsoring speakers who represent any and all points of view.

Over the next two months, with the support of the Wolfe Institute for the Humanities and other campus units and community groups, we will provide multiple opportunities for discussion about the topics and related subject matter at the heart of this controversy.  In addition to Thursday evening's event, at which I encourage those with opposing views to participate in the discussion and ask tough questions, other forums will present alternative perspectives for consideration.  The college welcomes participation from any groups on our campus that may wish to help broaden the dialogue.  At each of these events, please keep in mind that students, faculty, staff, and guests are expected to treat one another with respect at all times, even when they strongly disagree.

Finally, to those who have voiced concern that our decision to uphold the rights of our students and faculty signals an endorsement of the speakers' views, I say again that nothing could be further from the truth.  Moreover, I assure you that our college does not endorse the BDS movement nor support its call for boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel.  As the official host of the CUNY center for study abroad in Israel, our college has a proud history of engagement with Israel and Israeli universities. In fact, over the past two years we have renewed our efforts to reconnect with existing institutional partners and to develop new relationships as well for faculty and student exchanges with Israeli institutions.  We deeply value our Israeli partners and would not endorse any action that would imperil the State of Israel or its citizens, many of whom are family members and friends of our students, faculty, staff, alumni, and neighbors.

As one of the most diverse colleges in the country, it is particularly important that Brooklyn College foster an inclusive environment where all may voice their points of view across the full spectrum of social, political, and cultural issues of our time.  As Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wisely stated nearly a century ago, when one finds another's speech offensive, "...the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence."  Together, we must work to ensure that on our campus more and more speech continues to occur so that our students can be broadened in their knowledge, challenged in their thinking, and encouraged to bring their own analysis and values to bear on a wide range of topics of local, national, and global interest.

Sincerely,

Karen L. Gould
President

Andrew Cuomo Makes Sure That You Are Poor

This piece is forthcoming in The Lincoln Eagle.

 Andrew Cuomo is the reason you're poor and going to get poorer.  In fact, if you voted for a Democrat or a Republican for president, then you voted for a candidate who makes you poor and will make you and your children poorer.  The reason is that both parties favor the current monetary system and Federal Reserve notes, worthless, green slips of paper that say: "This note is legal tender for all debts public and private."  Federal Reserve notes sport pictures of dead presidents, several of whom, like Andrew Jackson ($20 bill) and Thomas Jefferson ($2 bill), opposed the money we now have because it hurts people like you. 

The greenback dollar is counterfeit, and as the Fed prints more at your expense, it lends them to big banks, which in turn lend them to Wall Street. When Lehman Brothers collapsed, it was in debt for over half a trillion dollars, more than 60 percent of the total money supply at that time. (The money supply is the sum of cash plus checking accounts; in 2008 it was $1.5 trillion; now, four yearslater, it is over $2.5 trillion). 

Of all the politicians in America who have harmed you economically, and virtually everyone you've voted for has, among the worst is Andrew Cuomo.  As the head of the Department of Housing and Urban Development under President Clinton, Cuomo pushed for a policy whereby FANNIE MAE and FREDDIE MAC, the spearheads of the 2008 real estate collapse, had to invest one half of their loan portfolios in subprime (low-income) real estate.  FANNIE MAE, FREDDIE MAC, and the Housing Authority (FHA) hold 90 percent of mortgages in the country. 

If you were lied to and believe that free markets caused the housing collapse, consider that none of the three agencies, FANNIE, FREDDIE, and FHA, is a free market institution; FANNIE and FREDDIE are public-private partnerships.  The banks that generated the low-income mortgages are among the most heavily regulated businesses, and they responded to regulation. 

Why do the media and universities say that free markets and deregulation caused the millennial housing bubble and collapse?  Because the big banks that lend to big media benefit from government.  They also contribute to the dominant universities.  Princeton's endowment is $26 billion. Small wonder that Princeton professor Paul Krugman favored the Wall Street bailout:  Princeton was a chief, albeit indirect, beneficiary. The building that houses Harvard Business School is Morgan Hall; the modern medical school would not exist without donations from Maryland merchant Johns Hopkins, JP Morgan, and one of the first major investment bankers and Johns Hopkins's and JS and JP Morgan's mentor, Baltimore-and-London-based George Peabody.  

Wall Street would not exist in its current form without the Federal Reserve Bank and without government regulation, and that is why, since the days of Alexander Hamilton, big government and regulation have been policies that favor the super-rich.  Jefferson, who favored the productive class, paid off the federal debt; Hamilton, who favored speculators (as did Franklin Roosevelt), favored a national debt.   Have Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Michael Bloomberg, and the late David Rockefeller advocated regulation because they are altruists?  Most billionaires favor regulation, but the public has been duped into thinking that regulation helps it. There are virtually no libertarian billionaires; the exceptions, Charles and David Koch, are discussed endlessly. Left-wing and Progressive Republican billionaires like Gates, Soros, Buffett, Bloomberg, and Rockefeller, are ignored.

In his book The Financial Crisis and the Free Market Cure, John A. Allison, president of the Cato Institute and former president of BB&T bank, describes how Andrew Cuomo was the inspiration of the housing collapse of 2008.  In 1993, when Cuomo was head of HUD, he mandated that the two public-private partnerships, FANNIE MAE and FREDDIE MAC, invest half their portfolios in sub-prime mortgages.   At first FANNIE, FREDDIE, and the FHA, ignored Cuomo's mandate, but in 1999 President Clinton began to enforce Cuomo's 50 percent requirement.  Even the pro-Wall Street New York Times recognized that the Cuomo policy was self-destructive, and on September 30, 1999 The Times ran an article criticizing the policy; the article predicted that Cuomo's policy would generate a housing collapse.  Proving that it is the newspaper of economic decline, The Times backed Cuomo in the last election despite the path of economic destruction that Cuomo has left.

In his book Allison shows that HUD, FREDDIE, FANNIE, and FHA were incompetently run, that the latter three had taken on risky mortgage portfolios in order to make results seem good before 1999, and that the three took on a suicidal degree of risk after 1999. This was in part because FANNIE chief Franklin Raines, Bill Clinton's crony, did not understand how financial institutions work. 

Allison suggests that the only Democrat who was smart enough to understand that the policies he was advocating would lead to economic chaos was Barney Frank; the rest, including Andrew Cuomo, were and are too uninformed to assess the policies that they advocate. Cuomo helped make you poorer because he is an incompetent who has been put in jobs over his head. Because of his father, Cuomo was born on third base, and New York voters have pushed him toward home plate even though he is dumb enough to persist in running toward the dugout.

It is not surprising that Cuomo would now set his sights on taking away your right to defend yourself. Through the wanton use of drones, the Obama administration has murdered nearly 200 children; since 1960 the Democratic Party has murdered in excess of 250,000 children in Vietnam and elsewhere.   The Democrats and Republicans, like Republican Dean Skelos, are eager to take away your right to bear arms so that after they impoverish you some Democratic Party renegade dictator can murder you with impunity.  Incompetents like Cuomo don't worry about the long term effects of the policies that they advocate. 

Mitchell Langbert is political editor of The Lincoln Eagle.

A nation that has exchanged its welfare for neither liberty nor security can be written off.

Claremont Review of Books

937 West Foothil Blvd., Suite E

Claremont, California  91711
c/o Charles E. Kesler, Editor 

Dear CRB:

I have received a couple of issues of Claremont Review of Books.  It is well written and challenging.  I do not, however, wish to receive further copies.  You can keep my subscription payment as a donation; please take me off your subscription-and-mailing list.

While pursuing a corporate and then an academic career, I took about 25 years off from a brief interest in libertarianism that crested in 1980.  In 2003, with the Iraqi War, I began profiting from investing in gold.  To relieve my guilt about betting against the dollar, I renewed my interest in stemming America's 216-year-old statist goosestep that has led to the dollar's decline. 

It turned out, five years later, that the GOP, the Democrats, and the Federal Reserve Bank had so mismanaged the US's monetary system that Lehman Brothers' Dick Fuld had managed to squander two thirds of a trillion dollars in Federal Reserve-counterfeit--80 percent of the nation's money supply at that time.   Since then impoverishment of America's productive classes through counterfeit channeled to its exploitative financier class has not troubled the two parties, the Wall Street-owned media, the Wall Street-subsidized universities, or the American people themselves.   As a result, I no longer feel guilty about short selling the dollar; morally, I relish it.  Moreover, I plan on a permanent disengagement from political concerns. As Montaigne put it and Jefferson once quoted: "L’ignorance est le plus doux oreiller sur lequel un homme peut reposer sa tête." 

America is not a democracy, nor is it a republic; it is a progressive-totalitarian oligarchy ruled by financiers run amok.  The promise of American democracy is paltry and dull.  It is a democracy with two choices: (a) Republican, Taft Progressives who bailed out Goldman Sachs and (b) Democratic, Roosevelt Progressives who bailed out Goldman Sachs.   

In order to win the public to accepting the financiers' fake Progressive dialectic in 1912, Progressives promised rising standards of living and freedom. They failed to keep their promises; that is, the promise of American life is a fraud.  Socrates chose to abide by the laws of Athens because he had made an implicit contract, but my ancestors were defrauded.  I, for one, don't plan on hanging around, so I don't care what happens here.

Sincerely,

Mitchell Langbert, Ph.D.

What Is to Be Done?

I just sent this email to an acquaintance who lives in my county and who asks what is to be done:

The conservative movement hasn’t been successful, and the Republican Party has proven itself to be an enemy of liberty much like the Democratic.   One stumbling block is public opinion.  It is not unlike the fall of Rome.  By the first or second century few people living in Rome had any understanding of the republican form of government. They had immigrated there from the conquered provinces, and if they chose to remain in Rome often it was often because of the welfare benefits that Augustus and his successors had developed (bread and circus: free grain, free entertainment, free food).   

America has increasingly become a nation of beggars and welfare cheats; there is little understanding of Jeffersonian individualism, especially among those educated in New York’s and similar public schools; increasingly, Americans are motivated by lust for subsidies and handouts. This starts at the top--on Wall Street.  If the public was comfortable with the bailout and with the monetary policies that have been pursued since ‘08, there is no limit to how much wealth transfer they will accept. 

This is not the America of Jefferson,  of Grover Cleveland, or even of Franklin Roosevelt.  I do not think there is much hope for democratic change.  Secession, nullification, or a breaking off of freedom-loving Americans in a new polity are possible paths, but they can’t be executed now.   Relocation to another country is feasible now, and I am planning at least a partial relocation.  

To do more, there will need to be a further breakdown in federal power.  That might occur as the dollar falls to ever lower levels and America finds that the federal government is not sustainable. That might happen within our lifetimes.  I’m sorry to say it, but there needs to be more chaos before anything important can happen.  Rather than waste time with political activity, it might be more useful to spend your time educating yourself, building a game plan, and winning over others to a vision of an alternative.  There is no point in defending an American system that already has disappeared.