Shots in the Dark

Naval expert Joe Buff doesn’t think so, and he makes a pretty good argument against the closing.

Among his reasons: What if Newport News got blown up by terrorists? That would leave the eastern seaboard with no submarine bases?

Sad to think that every national security decision we now make has to consider the possibility of terrorists detonating a nuke. Sad, but realistic.

Today’s Times mentions Summers in the Week in Review section—and like humorist Andy Borowitz, they lump him with Mexican president Vicente Fox in the “uh oh, time to apologize” category.

The Times’ conclusion on the $50 million payoff?

“The latest offering is unlikely to quell unhappiness over his leadership among the faculty and students. The big unknown: What do the members of the Harvard Corporation, which governs the university, think?”

Note the implicit assumption in that question….

Yesterday Bill O’Reilly imagined (on the radio) how Michael Kinsley, LA Times op-ed editor, would feel about terrorism if terrorists cut his head off.

(Kinsley, a former boss of mine, and O’Reilly have clashed before, after Kinsley questioned O’Reilly’s working-class authenticity.)

Does anyone else get the feeling that the hideousness of the war in Iraq is really taking a toll on the level of civility in this country? Emotions are running high….

Former commissioner of baseball Fay Vincent has resigned from the board of Jesuit-run Fairfield University (in my hometown) because of the ouster of dissenting editor Thomas Reese from the Catholic magazine America.

He has also refused an honorary degree from Bridgeport’s Sacred Heart University, also a Catholic institution.

Vincent, an honorable baseball commmissioner, has steadily and quietly shown himself as an honorable man. His protests may have no larger impact, and, as if he knows that, he has not publicized them. And yet, they reflect an individual act of conscience far more powerful than anything Benedict XVI has yet done.

Don’t know if you saw it, but I went on The O’Reilly Factor last night to discuss the Harvard students’ production of a play about Abu Ghraib.

Here’s the background: When O’Reilly heard about this production, he sent a camera crew to film it. The crew apparently got permission from the student producers, which is required. But when they got to Harvard’s theater, they were turned away, per instruction of Robert Mitchell, the FAS press secretary. (In my experience, an officious and rude man, but never mind.)

So O’Reilly wanted to have a conversation about whether Harvard was “un-American.” I told his producer that I could say that, yes, Harvard had a history of anti-Semitism.Yes, it had a history of discriminating against women. That it was so elitist, it sometimes thought itself better than the rest of America, yes.

But un-American, no. That’s ridiculous. And as for the students involved, I would say that what they were doing—engaging in protest during wartime—was profoundly American. Whereas we’d like at least to think that the torture at Abu Ghraib was un-American.

Apparently, that worked; I’d be the token lefty. (I don’t think of that position as liberal, just informed. But things are what they are these days.)

I’d been on the show once before, about six years ago, but O’Reilly didn’t remember me. (Understandable—he’s got a lot of guests coming through those doors.)

He’s changed since then, become cooler and more self-important. I liked him on that first appearance way back when. I have no idea what we were talking about, but O’Reilly seemed like he enjoyed a good fight and respected you if you gave him one. Now he gives the impression that he wants you to disagree with him because it’s good TV, but at the same time, how dare you?

Before the show, we were chatting about how the segment would go, and I said to O’Reilly, “You know I’m going to defend the students, right?”

His answer: “You can say whatever you want, just don’t say anything looney. My audience won’t like it if you say something looney, and you want to sell books, right? We know how to sell books here on the Factor.”

Here’s another way in which O’Reilly has changed: He uses the first-person plural to refer to himself.

I do want to sell books, so I agreed not to say anything looney.

As for the segment itself, I have no idea how it went; it’s impossible to tell when you’re going through it how you come across. The other participants were a Harvard undergrad named Matthew Downer, and a law student named Benjamin Shapiro, author of a book about how universities are corrupting young people whose title I can’t remember. (Sorry, Ben! But I’m sure it’s like nothing I’ve ever read before.)

Downer—the president of the Harvard Republican Club, but not identified as such—was the only person who’d seen the play, so he had a distinct advantage over the rest of us. He used that advantage to argue that the play was “sympathetic to the cause of the insurgents,” something which I suspect is a load of crap. Sympathetic to the victims of torture, maybe. But to the cause of the insurgents? I seriously doubt it.

Anyway, O’Reilly was actually pretty reasonable, in his way, although I did try to call him out when he labeled “Abu Ghraib” (the play) as un-American. And he’s great on TV, there’s no question about that. The guy has total command in that studio. Moreover, he instructed us beforehand not to talk over each other, as we’d each get time to talk, and he was true to his word on that.

Most of all, I tried not to say anything looney. I knew his audience would never stand for that.

Apparently thinking that it is under attack, George Will defends the study of history in his column today. He went to a lecture at the White House by Yale historian Donald Kagan, and, well, he must have needed a column.

Here’s his lede: “When Yale awarded President Kennedy an honorary degree, he said he had the ideal combination—a Yale degree and a Harvard education. Today, he might rethink that, given the Harvard faculty’s tantrum that caused President Lawrence Summers’ cringing crawl away from his suggestion of possible gender differences of cognition. At least the phrase ‘Yale education’ does not yet seem, as ‘Harvard education’ does, oxymoronic.”

Where to begin?

First, JFK’s quote has been dead wrong for decades anyway; everyone knows that the ideal combination would be a Yale education and a Harvard diploma. Yale has a better (undergraduate) education, and Harvard has a better-known brand.

Second, Summers didn’t just talk about “possible differences” in cognition; he talked about possible inequities. There’s a difference.

Third, Will’s getting on his years now. Instead of becoming more thoughtful, he’s becoming more bilious. Note the faculty “tantrum” and Summers’ “cringing crawl”…. George Will has become such a parody of his sniping, snobbish self that it’s time for his editors to suggest a lengthy sabbatical.

Apparently Will would have liked Summers to stand with a mighty sword and slay the faculty dragon. Because he goes on to decry post-modernism in historiography, on the grounds that post-modernists deny that great men do great deeds for the right reasons.

Will says that “the defining characteristics of postmodernism [are] skepticism and cynicism.”

On the other hand, the greatest critics of postmodernism, according to Kagan and Will, are religious true believers.

The true road to salvation (i.e., moral guidance) instead lies in history, which Kagan/Will seem to define as the study of great men who did great things for the right reasons.

At the risk of being post-modernist, might I suggest that Will and Kagan might hold this view of historiography because of their political beliefs? And that therefore we should take their words with a grain of salt, because their’s is hardly an objective truth? That their view of history—history shows great men doing great things because we need it to—is tautological?

Meandering on, Will concludes thusly:

“Historian David McCullough says the study of history is ‘an antidote to the hubris of the present— the idea that everything we have and everything we do and everything we think is the ultimate, the best.’ Compare, for example, the heroic construction of the Panama Canal and the debacle of Boston’s “Big Dig” 100 years later.”

History does indeed stand as an antidote to the hubris of the present…but the greatest example of hubris in our world today is the Bush Administration’s invasion of Iraq. Which Will supports.

Will continues: “Near the “Big Dig” sits today’s Harvard, another refutation of the theory of mankind’s inevitable, steady ascent. From Yale, however, comes Kagan’s temperate affirmation of the cumulative knowledge that comes from the study of history.”

Harvard is “another refutation of the theory of mankind’s steady, inevitable ascent”? Oh, please.

George Will, take a look in the mirror. Who’s the cynical one here?

I’ll be appearing on The O’Reilly Factor tonight to talk about Harvard. Check local listings for times.

Tim Noah has an interesting suggestion about the Times’ plan to charge $50 for online access to its columnists: What happens when certain columnists drive much more traffic than others?

Let us say, for example, that Maureen Dowd is much more widely read than John Tierney. Not a big deal when everything on the Times site is free; matters more when you’re charging readers for content. Will columnists’ salaries now rise or fall in proportion to how many paying readers click on their columns? And will columnists start changing their subject matter in order to attract those lucrative hits? (More Michael Jackson, less foreign affairs.)

I think there’s another likely consequence: More women columnists.

Here’s why. The overwhelming number of subscribers will be male. It is, after all, a male-dominated page. And so, in order to attract women subscribers, the Times will do something it has so far been reluctant to do: hire female columnists. (Now, there’s only Dowd.)

As the book publishing world will tell you, women are much bigger readers than men. So the economic logic of this move should sooner or later compel the Times to have more female columnists than male ones…which would mean a profound transformation, in composition and subject matter, of the Times op-ed page. This is going to be interesting.

Steven Wynn in the San Francisco Chronicle writes about the recent spate of apologies in public life.

Key graf: “Whether it’s a married New Jersey governor with a secret gay sex life, Yankee first baseman Jason Giambi juiced up on steroids or a scholar caught cribbing from someone else’s research, the apology has become mandatory, well-scripted behavior. CBS newsman Dan Rather (for the botched Bush National Guard story), Harvard University President Lawrence Summers (for his remarks about women’s aptitude for math and science) and just the other day Mexican President Vicente Fox (a comparison of the Mexican and black work ethic) have all performed their public rites recently.

Wynn is cynical about this; I’m not. Granted, the apologies aren’t always quickly delivered, and sometimes they’re less-than-sincere. Nevertheless, there’s nothing wrong with apologizing. Even imperfect ones are better than nothing.

Harvard has released its annual list of salaries, which it must disclose by law. Larry Summers is making $637, 824; Steven Hyman earns $371, 710; and v-p for government blah-blah-blah Alan Stone pulls down $313, 549. (No wonder Stone keeps such a low profile.)

A couple of points:

* The Harvard Management Company officials are making less than they did last year.

* Summers’ compensation package is actually diminished because, apparently, of a lower tax burden on his Washington apartment (which, last time I checked, he was sharing with a roommate). Does Harvard really need to pay for Summers’ Washington abode?

* The highest-paid people at Harvard are administrators, not professors.

* There are some high-paid female administrators, but the highest-paid administrators are men. Why does Alan Stone make 300k when v-p for finance Donna Rapier only makes $200k?

* Finally, though I can’t prove anything, I can’t help wondering if this report isn’t cooked in some way. Summers’ salary has gone up steadily since he took office (with the exception of his last year, Neil Rudenstine made less than $400,000); this is the first year that Summers’ salary increase has been modest.

Since it would have looked terrible for Summers to have gotten a big raise this year, I can’t help but wonder if the numbers were jiggered to avoid the appearance of rewarding Summers for what has been essentially a disastrous year.

But as I say, I have absolutely no proof of that. Just a sense of how much Harvard cares about appearances, and how sensitive the question of Summers’ compensation is.