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?

Sharad Karkhanis Wins Educator of the Year

Free Speech For Sharad

For Immediate Press Release Contact: Phil Orenstein January ?, 2008 (917) 620-2663 Email: maduroman@att.net

CUNY EMERITUS PROFESSOR FIGHTING DEFAMATION LAWSUIT TO BE HONERED AS EDUCATOR OF THE YEAR

Dr. Sharad Karkhanis will be honored as the Educator of the Year for his distinguished scholarship and the courageous battle he is presently waging against an unprecedented legal assault on freedom of speech and freedom of the press in a repressive urban academic environment. The awards presented at the annual Lincoln Day Dinner at Antun’s in Queens Village, sponsored by the Queens Village Republican Club, are designed to celebrate outstanding contributions to the greater good of the New York community. The Club, the oldest GOP group in America founded in 1875, stands behind Dr. Karkhanis’s battle for his constitutional rights and has allotted 5% of each Dinner ticket sold to be donated to his defense fund, “Free Speech for Sharad” to help defray the legal bills.

The Dinner program will feature a number of noteworthy and controversial speakers and honorees besides Dr. Karkhanis. Queensborough Community College History Professor and Lincoln scholar Gerald Matacotta will revive the historical tradition of the annual Abraham Lincoln Address with a presentation bringing Lincoln’s moral principles into focus on our present day state of affairs. Queens Village resident Major Jeffery R. Calero, who perished in Afghanistan in November when an IED detonated while he was on combat patrol, will be honored posthumously with the Ultimate Sacrifice Award to be presented to his fiancée, parents and siblings. Michael P. Ricatto, successful entrepreneur and founder of Better Leadership America, which advocates for a safer and more secure America, will be receiving the Businessman of the Year Award for his passion to give back to the New York community something greater, in appreciation for the opportunities he was afforded in America. Jeffery S. Wiesenfeld, City University of New York Trustee, who advocates improving academic standards at CUNY will speak on: “The poisoning of our next generation by our academics throughout our nation.” The keynote speaker will be George J. Marlin, author and former Mayoral candidate and Director of NY and NJ Port Authorities, will address the topic: “Is there a future for New York Republicans and Conservatives.

Dr. Karkhanis Professor Emeritus of Political Science from Kingsborough Community College (KCC), is presently being sued for defamation in a $2 million lawsuit filed by fellow professor and union official, Susan O’Malley (aka: Susan Gushee O’Malley) accusing him of making recent defamatory statements in his email newsletter The Patriot Returns, 13,000 issues of which he has been regularly distributing to CUNY faculty since 1992. Dr. Karkhanis has often criticized the Professional Staff Congress (PSC), the CUNY faculty union leadership for mismanagement of funds and has lambasted Professor O’Malley for trying to land teaching jobs for convicted terrorists at CUNY, writing that she has an “obsession with finding jobs for terrorists” and is trying to “recruit terrorists” to teach within the CUNY system. The lawsuit charges that such statements are defamatory.

Ever since he first criticized her in 1995, Professor O’Malley, former chair of the University Faculty Senate (UFS) and PSC executive committee member, has been trying to silence Dr. Karkhanis, since his reporting has been hurting her re-election campaigns for union and University Faculty Senate (UFS) seats (Patriot 3/22/95). “In December, Prof. O'Malley ordered Sharad to stop the publication of the Patriot. Does Prof. O'Malley realize that KCC Campus is neither the Gulag of Marxist Russia nor is it a Nazi concentration camp…understand that Sharad is a free man - free to speak, free to write, free to talk to anyone… There is nothing you can or anyone else can do about this.” (Patriot 3/19/96)

In 1997 Dr. Karkhanis received two death threats at KCC, which he believed to be coming from a faculty member of KCC or CUNY who wants to shut down the Patriot. The FBI launched an investigation and campus security protected him while on campus and he had the service of a bodyguard whenever he went off campus.

In the April 2000 CUNY union elections the “New Caucus” took control of the PSC, and the Patriot has been their watchdog ever since. The Patriot exposed the leadership’s excessive involvement in political activities, funding radical causes and supporting the legal defense of convicted terrorists and criminals with the member’s dues, while the union Welfare Fund that members rely upon for medical benefits nearly vanished. The Patriot reported, “under New Caucus stewardship the WF Reserves have dropped from $15,000,000 to below $2,000,000.” The PSC leadership has organized and funded such radical pressure groups as, “New York City Labor Against the War” and “Labor for Palestine”, donated $5000 to support the legal defense of Lori Berenson, in prison for aiding Marxist Shining Path terrorists in Peru, and donated a sizable amount for the defense of Sami Al-Arian convicted of conspiracy to aid terrorist group Palestinian Islamic Jihad. After the 9/11 attacks, the PSC organized anti-war teach-ins on CUNY campuses blaming the attacks on “American Imperialism” at one of the events, and mobilized its membership to protest the Republican Party at its National Convention in the city in 2004. Since they have been in power, the Patriot has monitored the PSC leadership’s failure to negotiate a satisfactory contract for CUNY faculty members while spending a considerable amount of $60 million in collected dues money on irrelevant and dangerous political causes.

Recent issues of the Patriot have targeted O’Malley’s tireless efforts to find teaching positions at CUNY for convicted terrorist conspirator Mohammad Yousry, and Susan Rosenberg, convicted Weather Underground terrorist, sentenced to a 58 year prison term for the possession of 700 pounds of dynamite. Karkhanis wrote satirically: “There are hundreds of qualified people looking for teaching jobs. Why does she prefer convicted terrorists who are bent on harming our people and our nation, over peace-loving Americans?” (Patriot 3/12/07)

On September 28, O’Malley filed a lawsuit with the New York Supreme Court seeking $2 million in monetary damages for wrongful statements published in the Patriot and a permanent ban on the future publication of offensive material against the plaintiff. In a subsequent interview in the New York Sun concerning the lawsuit, O’Malley said: “It’s all very, very silly.” After Karkhanis refused to be intimidated into silence by the threat of a costly lawsuit, the formal legal complaint, Susan O’Malley v. Sharad Karkhanis, John Doe and Jane Doe was filed on December 21, 2007.

One week prior to filing the formal charges, O’Malley lost two UFS seats by more than 50% of the vote in the KCC elections held for campus senator and alternate. This is the first time since 1980 she has been voted out of her UFS office. It appears that these election defeats dealt a humiliating blow to O’Malley by fellow KCC faculty who may be loosing respect for her due to the frivolous nature of the lawsuit. CUNY faculty have argued that such matters of dispute between colleagues should be dealt with in a collegial setting within the CUNY system rather than making it public in a court of law with frivolous charges and outrageous monetary claims.

• Special accommodations for the press will be made at the Dinner event at Antun’s.
• Regularly updated news and information on Dr. Karkhanis’ case can be accessed from the Free Speech at CUNY Website. http://freespeechcuny.blogspot.com/
• The Patriot Returns archives can be accessed at: http://www.patriotreturns.com
• The formal legal complaint: Susan O’Malley v. Sharad Karkhanis, John Doe and Jane Doe is posted on Professor Mitchell Langbert’s blog: http://mitchell-langbert.blogspot.com/2007/12/susan-omalley-v-sharad-karkhanis-john.html

[[END OF RELEASE]]

Toward an Aristotelian Moral Ubermensch

In his >Mugwumps, Morals and Politics 1864-1920 Gerald McFarland writes (p. 147):

"The consequences of the progressive perspective were evident in an older Mugwump organization, the National Municipal League. Gradually, the NML shifted its goal from one of creating municipal efficiency by throwing out the rascals to creating efficient administration by working with whomever was in. As less emphasis was put on individual moral responsibility and more on malfunctioning of the system, the tone of municipal reform changed. It was a change of style that even progressively inclined Mugwumps found quite jarring."

In The Lonely Crowd David Riesman argued that the twentieth century saw an evolution from inner directedness, whereby personal goals and firm morals drive aims and values, to other directedness, where conformity, peer pressure and media opinion drive aims and values. The transition from Mugwumpery to Progressivism that occurred among some few of the Mugwumps during the first decade of the 1900s (many Mugwumps had died by then and two thirds of the Mugwumps did not adopt Progressivism or publicly adopted only one Progressive issue, according to McFarland).

The transition from inner-directedness to other-directedness may have resulted from (or at least be related to) the change in political emphasis from the late nineteenth century Mugwumps to the Progressives. The Mugwumps were largely religiously educated and mainly came from Protestant backgrounds. They had a specific moral sense, part of which involved an emphasis on individual responsibility and morality. In contrast, the shift among the Progressives to a systems approach lifted the emphasis on responsibility and morality from the individual and turned it into a political or public problem. The Progressives may have emphasized this in their educational activities, which were led by John Dewey. In other words, the shift from inner-directedness to other-directedness may be a result from the Progressives' political ideology. Their emphasis on systems may have been linked to scientific management and the idea that you can improve output through rationalization of systems. Herbert Croly discusses scientific management in Progressive Democracy.

Business schools also gained currency around this time or a bit later, and the ideas of Chester Barnard and the human relations advocates of the 1930s were reflective of the progressives' emphasis on systems as opposed to individual moral responsibility. Barnard emphasized morals heavily in his Functions of the Executive , but his interpretation of morals was entirely relativistic. He argued that executives must be morally creative to motivate workers. Such moral creativity leaves little room for moral grounding. He probably thought that public morality and public scrutiny and control systems would be sufficient to prevent deviant moral beliefs from becoming part of executives' moral creativity. But Barnard does not treat the problem adequately. Rather, he gives examples that suggest that deviant behavior, such as becoming indifferent to the death of one's parent, can be induced through moral creativity. In this, Barnard was not unlike Adolf Eichmann, the chief of the Nazis' prison camp operations. In Eichmann in Jerusalem , Hannah Arendt quotes Eichmann as saying that he is a Kantian and that the duty to obey orders was his moral imperative. This kind of moral creativity finds little inhibition once the problem of morality becomes one of moral systems rather than conscience or individual responsibility.

The management literature has addressed the problem of inhibiting moral deviance in two key ways: through control systems (financial accounting and incentive systems that reduce conflicts between agents and principals) and through organizational culture. But neither approach anticipates the possibility of sociopathic or morally deviant management, as occurred with Enron and other firms in the first decade of the 21st century.

The inclucation of moral sense is a lifelong process. Aristotle argued that the young must develop habits through their upbringing, and if such habits are not developed then they will not be able to be taught to be moral decision makers. Progressive education approaches that encourage students to discover principles for themselves may fail to encourage the habits necessary for moral decision making. Thus, Progressive education contribute to the lax morality that we have witnessed in business. But even those who have good upbringings in the first place can develop bad habits when they work. Social pressure to conform to deviant orgnaizational norms can displace the good habits a young executive learned when he was young.

Aristotle argued that moral behavior involves balancing extremes. Excessive honesty, revealing too much information, is foolish and can lead to being duped. Excessive dishonesty leads to criminality. The mean involves good faith, fair dealing and comeptent negotiation. The competent executive needs to negotiate the moral challenges with which organizations cope but needs to retain the ability to judge when compromises with his basic personal values are too great. That our education has failed to do this is evident from the case of Enron, whereby young MBA graduates bought into Enron's dishonest handling of regulatory agencies; accounting fraud; willingness to cheat investors; and similar kinds of criminality.

Progressivism and its followers, to include Chester Barnard and the advocates of modern management theory, agency theory and systems-based approaches to control, de-emphasize individual responsibility. This is erroneous, as Adolph Eichmann and Jeff Skilling proved. The unscrupulous will always find the way around systems. Not that systems can be ignored or should be, but they are not enough.

Students must learn to balance Aristotle's moral mean with Barnard's moral creativity. To do so requires a considerable degree of self-awareness and managerial skills, of the very kind that managerial skills advocates such as David Whetten and Kim Cameron have advocated. Finding the Aristotelian moral mean in a complex organization means have considerable interpersonal skill and moral awareness, both of which are too often missing.

Gerald W. McFarland's Mugwumps, Morals and Politics, 1884-1920

Gerald W. McFarland. Mugwumps, Morals and Politics 1884-1920. Amherst, Ma: University of Massachusetts Press, 1975. 291 pages.


Gerald W. McFarland's Mugwumps, Morals and Politics 1884-1920 (Amherst, MA.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1975) is a well-researched, well-written and scholarly book. In contrast to David M. Tucker's Mugwumps: Public Moralists of the Gilded Age and John M. Dobson's Politics in the Gilded Age: A New Perspective on Reform McFarland combines a quantitative analysis with his historical narrative; focuses on the later Mugwumps (the narrative ends in 1920); and reviews a wider range of activities than Tucker, who focuses on the ideology of key Mugwumps, and Dobson, who focuses on politics. The Mugwumps were, in McFarland's book, a broader movement than in Tucker's, although Tucker's perspective is better because it clarifies the original Mugwumps' purposes.

McFarland does not consider that the Mugwumps may have been ideologues, motivated by belief in science and morality. Rather, McFarland suggests at several points that the economics of the Mugwumps was "derivative" and motivated by class interest or erroneous thinking. Not that he discounts their ideology entirely, but he does not stress it. It would seem that if the Mugwumps indeed spent a large portion of their time fighting for the gold standard, free trade and efficient government, then they held an underlying belief system to which they were emotionally committed. The gold standard is not, as McFarland seems to think, a silly, abstract idea. Thus, I prefer Tucker's purpose-driven or teleological perspective to McFarland's. But McFarland's book is excellent nonetheless.

McFarland's logic can be equally applied to the Progressives, who followed the Mugwumps by a generation. The leading Progressives were upper class and some were former Mugwumps. Many were professionals. Many were business executives. For instance, the Roosevelts were from a wealthy background. The Progressives' ideas were certainly derivative, in part based on 17th century Mercantilism and in part based on Bismarck's welfare state, which itself was derivative of feudalism. The former Mugwumps, such as Theodore Roosevelt, Simeon Baldwin (who adopted a modest Progressive program into his gubernatorial administration) and Louis Brandeis, who transformed themselves into regular Republicans and then Progressives benefited from their beliefs professionally much more than did most of the Mugwumps. Progressivism advocated the creation of commissions, professional jobs, regulations and the like that served the narrow interests not only of professionals, but of big business as well.

Some of the Mugwumps began to gradually transform into Progressives by the 1890s. McFarland finds that 40% of the Mugwumps never adopted Progressivism, 27% adopted one or more Progressive ideas (many of which were extensions of Mugwumpery involving improving government) and only 33% became outright Progressives. Some of the Mugwumps, such as Josiah Quincy, mayor of Boston, adopted socialist ideas. Perhaps not coincidentally, Quincy was one of the few Mugwumps associated with corruption and political spoilsmanship.

When progressive ideas confronted the Mugwumps, their professional interests likely conflicted with their classical liberal ideology. In other words, the spoils from Progressivism were probably greater than the spoils from classical liberalism. Outside of the emphasis on professionalization (which includes establishing the professions in which many of them worked as well as rationalizing government) the classical liberal ideology never served their eonomic interests, so if the Mugwumps were purely an economic interest group they might as well have dropped classical liberalism in the first place and become another interest group pleading for favors from the Stalwarts or Halfbreeds (supporters and opponents of President Grant). This is a problem for the view that classical liberalism served the Mugwumps' economic interests.

The economic philosophy that best served upper class investors and real estate holders was Populism, but this point seems to escape McFarland, or at least he deemphasizes it. Similarly, although Wilson adopted the Federal Reserve Bank in 1913 and the Federal Trade Commission, an anti-trust measure, in 1914, neither of these were viewed as radically progressive. Many Mugwumps supported the Fed because they believed that removing control of money from the political process would rationalize it. They could not anticipate widespread acceptance of Populism via Keynesian economics in the 1930s and Roosevelt's ending of the gold standard in the 1930s.

But Wilson became much more progressive when he realized that he needed to win over the progressive wing of the Democratic and Republican Party for the 1916 election. Thus, political opportunism as much as anything can explain Progressivism's successes, for example Wilson's adoption of it. Opportunism applies less to Mugwumpery than to Progressivism, for the Mugwumps had little to gain from bolting or from supporting classical liberalism. Few were factory owners and many were investors. Opposition to labor unions would have been much less important to them than support for the gold standard (the gold standard hurt speculators because it resulted in deflation). Yet, they supported the gold standard, which was not beneficial to them economically.

What destroyed Mugwump individualist-liberalism was the wresting of scientific blief from classical liberalism that occurred in universities. Richard T. Ely's establishment of the American Economics Association in the 1890s seriously damaged the individualist-liberal Mugwump movement. They could no longer say that "science" supported their moral views. Although von Mises offered an alternative perspective beginning in the 1920s as did Hayek in the 1940s and Friedman in the 1960s, mainstream academics have emphasized market failure since the 1890s. This made it much more difficult for Mugwumps and later conservatives and libertarians to defend their views.

McFarland's quantitative descriptions of the Mugwumps are useful, although they would have been improved had they been hypothesis or theory driven. The findings that the Mugwumps were almost entirely college graduates (in an era when only two percent of the public graduated from college); that they were not the super-rich millionaires like Jay Gould associated with the regular Republicans (and that a smaller percentage of Mugwumps were millionaires than were the regular Republicans who attended fundraisers); that the Mugwumps came from well-to-do ancestries; and that they were mostly professionals involved in nascent professions attempting to establish themselves (professors, librarians) are interesting but not powerful (i.e., they do not enable us to reject Tucker's null hypothesis that they were morally and ideologically driven).

It seems that the transformation of a third of the Mugwumps from classical liberals to Progressives is linked to their gradual recognition that to win power they needed to one-up the political machines in the cities, which had traditionally provided jobs and benefits to immigrants and the poor. The way to do this, some Mugwumps began to realize in the 1890s, was to provide benefits to the working class that superseded the machines' paternalistic and spoils-based approach. Progressivism was thus a way to wrest power from the political machines by replacing locally-based paternalism with nationally based paternalism. Thus, the New Deal was the logical extension of progressivism, not because of ideology, but from the standpoint of obtaining power and utilizing programs to win power.

The machines began to realize that the Progressives' strategy worked, and responded by tentatively adopting the Progressives' reform ideas. Charles (Silent Charlie) Murphy, the boss of Tammany Hall from the 1890s to the 1920s began to support reform-oriented candidates as early as 1903. Ultimately, Murphy supported Al Smith for Governor of New York, and it was Smith who conceptualized the framework that became the New Deal. Smith was a Tammany Hall man. Franklin D. Roosevelt succeeded Smith as governor of New York, and when he was president in the 1930s adopted Smith's program on the national level.

Thus, progressivism was the nationalization of political bossism. Roosevelt never addressed urban corruption, which would have been a chief Mugwump concern. Tammany Hall was destroyed by the fusion (Republican) mayoralty of Fiorello Laguardia, but it is not clear that this completely eliminated corruption. Progressive and New Deal administrators like Robert Moses, who admittedly was more effective than prior generations' administrations, "got things done" at a very high cost to poor New Yorkers. The progressives' and New Deal liberals' control of New York from the Laguardia administration through John Lindsay resulted in the city's near bankruptcy (saved by Felix Rohatyn and some financial maneuvering), a result that did not attend the political bossism of the nineteenth century.

A useful point that McFarland makes is on p. 113 in his discussion of Robert Treat Paine, a philanthropist and attorney from Boston:

"Paine was a Social Gospel Episcopalian--not a reform type that would dominate liberal circles after the New Deal, perhaps, but a type that played a major role in the incipient social progressivism of the 1890s."

Likewise, McFarland notes (p. 103-4):

"One of the foremost spokesmen for social progressivism was R. Fulton Cutting, a Mugwump who served as chairman of the Citizens' Union...Cutting was descended from Robert Livingston and Robert Fulton and had inherited a large fortune through his family connections...

"In a speech...Cutting denounced past reform movements for savoring 'more of Oligarchy than Democracy'. Patronizing appeals for civic morality had met with limited success, he believed, because reformers made no effort to make city government important to the average voter...As a advocate of Social Gospel Christianity, Cutting predicted that the twentieth century would produce a broad trend toward expanded government social and economic programs: "There is a swelling tide of human brotherhood that seeks to expose itself through Democratic institutions and the religion of the Twentieth Century is destined to employe Government as one of its principal instrumentalities for the solution of social issues."

Cutting said so in 1901. What is revealing in the cases of Paine and Cutting is that (1) they were upper class; (2) they were devout Protestants of the Social Gospel type; (3) they had seen the Mugwumps' reform ideas frequently defeated by corrupt political machines that provided benefits to immigrants and the poor; (4)they believed that they found a way to implement both their Christian beliefs and their interest in reform.

As with any effective ideology, the Paine/Cutting view combined a strategy for obtaining power with a belief that the strategy is morally right. More than 100 years later, Mike Huckabee continues to reflect this perspective, which reflected the views of a segment the Republican Party in 1901.

Those who believe in individualist-liberal ideas, the economics of Mill and Smith, and see progressive-liberalism as a reactionary, poverty-generating system that harms citizens and reflects anything but love, need to make the case that classical liberalism is humane and helps the poor while government does not. As well, the reform of universities to regain a place for classical liberal ideas is crucial. The mass media lacks the theoretical grounding to provide a foundation for a successful reversal of progressive-liberal domination.