Shots in the Dark

Kennedy School dean David Ellwood has disassociated his school from the controversial paper written by K-School professor Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, the Crimson reports.

Such papers, written as part of a faculty “working paper series,” usually bear the Kennedy School logo and carry a standard disclaimer saying that they do not necessarily reflect the views of the Kennedy School or of Harvard.

But at Ellwood’s direction, the Kennedy School logo was removed from this paper, and a stronger disclaimer was inserted. It reads thusly:

“The two authors of this Working Paper are solely responsible for the views expressed in it. As academic institutions, Harvard University and the University of Chicago do not take positions on the scholarship of individual faculty, and htis article should not be interpreted or portrayed as reflecting the official position of either institution.”

Well, Dean Ellwood, why don’t you just take Professor Walt out back and shoot him?

This is not a great moment in the history of the Kennedy School. Is Walt’s paper anti-Semitic? Let’s put it this way: Reasonable people can disagree. I’ve read the paper, and I just don’t think it’s clear-cut at all. (If, for example, you replaced the word “Israel” with the words “Saudi Arabia,” I’m not sure the paper would be anti-Arab.) There may be a case that the paper’s scholarship is lackluster, but that is a different matter altogether. Professors are allowed to write bad books.

Given that this paper is clearly not the work of Louis Farrakhan, and that a credible case can be made that it is not a work of anti-Semitism, it is cowardly for the Kennedy School to hang Walt out to dry.

As Abbott Lawrence Lowell (who was, in fact, anti-Semitic) once wrote, “There is no middle ground. Either the university assumes full responsibility for permitting its professors to express certain opinions in public, or it assumes no responsibility whatever, and leaves them to be dealt with like other citizens by the public authorities according to the laws of the land.”

Ellwood is trying to carve out a middle ground here—saying, in effect, well, we have to let them write this stuff, but trust me, we really don’t support them—and it makes him look weak.

What’s going on here? Well, apparently it’s about money. David Gergen tells the New York Sun that he’s been reaching out to “prominent Jewish donors”—their words, not mine—because “obviously, there are some people out there who are concerned.”

Note that it isn’t, say, Jewish alums in general to whom Gergen is reaching out, but Jewish donors. This isn’t about the merits of Walt’s paper; it’s about a school with one of the smaller endowments at Harvard running scared of its donors.

The irony is that this attack on Walt and Mearsheimer only seems to bear out their paper’s suggestion that critics of American foreign policy towards Israel are hastily silenced. A Harvard professor publishes a paper criticizing the power of the “Israel lobby.” Prominent Jews such as Alan Dershowitz and Martin Peretz call the authors anti-Semitic. A pro-Israel, right-wing newspaper whips up a controversy. Jewish donors start making phone calls. The Kennedy School starts to distance itself from the professor. No longer welcome at Harvard, the professor leaves for a lesser institution…. (This last hasn’t yet happened, but I wouldn’t be surprised.)

To be fair, I don’t know what else sincere critics of this paper are supposed to do; if they really believe the paper is anti-Semitic, they should certainly say so.

But this sequence of events has the unintended consequence of making Walt and Mearsheimer look more credible and less anti-Semitic.

Do you sometimes get the feeling that the Bushies are the last people on the planet to concede the reality of global warming? Every day, it seems, one reads another story about how the Arctic ice is melting faster than anticipated…and in a dive magazine, I recently read a suggestion that now would be a good time to dive the Maldive Islands in the Arabian Sea because, since they’re only about two metres above sea level, they’re not likely to be around much longer. How surreal. More than 300,000 people live on those islands.

Meanwhile, the Bush White House takes its instructions on global warming from Michael Crichton and Dick Cheney.

Well, if science doesn’t convince the Bushites that global warming is real, perhaps satire will. This video of Will Ferrell doing George Bush talking about global warming is hilarious….

Remember the New York Times Magazine story a few months back about Reinhold E. Rau, a taxidermist who spent thirty years trying to breed an extinct zebra called the quagga back into existence?

Well, he died.

Nonetheless, Mr. Rau led a fascinating, whimsical, and individual life, and he devoted himself to trying to recreate something beautiful and lost. Had he succeeded, he would have been the first person ever to revive an extinct species.

Given what’s going on in the environment today, the world could use more characters like Reinhold Rau. He will be missed.

Above, the quagga: Only available as an illustration, because humans killed them all.

Writing on the Times’ op-ed page, Jennifer Delahunty Britz, dean of admissions and financial aid at Kenyon College, talks about an emerging problem in higher education: the fact that there are so many more well-qualified female applicants to college than male ones.

The situation has gotten so dire that male applicants are actually benefitting from affirmative action, in which admissions officers are lowering their standards to accept men, because if they don’t, their schools will start to look like women’s colleges.

At Kenyon, 55% of the applicants are female, and that percentage is rising. Britz writes, “My staff and I carefully read these young women’s essays about their passion for poetry, their desire to discover vaccines and their conviction that they can make the world a better place.”

Doesn’t that second example feel like a deliberately chosen rebuke to Larry Summers’ women-in-science proposition?

(Or, New York is not a red state.)

Hillary Clinton’s first apparent GOP opponent in her reelection campaign to the U.S. Senate dropped out, so hapless was she.

Now her second opponent, a woman named Kathleen Troia McFarland, is also proving to be a disaster; McFarland’s claim to fame was that she was the highest-ranking woman at the Reagan Pentagon and helped author the Star Wars’ speech.

Let us be generous and not point out that these are pretty dubious rationales for a Senate campaign. Because, as it turns out, these resume-padders aren’t even true.

And the Times article linked to above doesn’t even note—which it should—that Ms. McFarland has already been found to have been registered to vote at more than one location in New York, which is illegal, but has failed to vote in several recent elections….

All of which is good news if, say, Senator Clinton were planning on saving her campaign funds for a presidential race….

KT McFarland: Didn’t write Star Wars speech, not the highest-ranking woman at the Reagan Pentagon, won’t be the next senator from New York.

The coyote, named Hal by the police, is gone from Central Park. And aren’t we all a little less alive as a result?

Arianna Huffington has caved in her fight with George Clooney, after Arianna compiled a bunch of quotes Clooney gave at various times, cobbled them together, posted the result on her website and claimed that Clooney had blogged for the Huffington Post.

I’m tempted to say that this is a story about a new kind of journalism ethics, having to do with the rules of the blogosphere, but that wouldn’t really be true…every journalist knows that you can’t press together public statements like plywood and call them a quote.

I will say, however, that it’s probably not a good idea to mess with one of the most powerful guys in Hollywood who once led a boycott of tabloid tv shows and just made a film about a heroic journalist…..

The Brown Daily Herald reports that four possible candidates for the Harvard presidency—Nan Keohane, Columbia’s Lee Bollinger, Penn’s Amy Gutmann, and Tufts’ Lawrence Bacow have all said they are not interested in the job of Harvard president.

None of these are surprising, and all of those people have to say no in public. I wonder, though, if Amy Gutmann would really say no….except that she hasn’t been in her position as president for very long, and it’d be a pretty crummy thing to leave Penn after just a few years in the top job.

Sadly.

Apparently some people feel this is good news for dogs in Central Park. This is silly, of course, since dogs in Central Park are generally either in an enclosed run or on a leash and, in any event, are always in proximity to humans—and coyotes are shy animals who steer clear of people.

In any case, it’s my opinion that any dog small enough to make a coyote meal probably ought to be a coyote meal—this whole small dog thing has gotten way out of hand. Serve ’em up, I say.

One of these should be food for coyotes…..

Apparently there’s one wandering around in the park, and the cops are trying to catch it. I dunno—I think it’d be sort of cool to have a coyote in Central Park.

Although it’s probably more dangerous for the coyote than the humans…..