Shots in the Dark

On the Huffington Post, Sam Stein looks at presidential giving by Ivy League faculty. Turns out….you guys are liberal!

More than 86 percent of Ivy League teachers and employees who have donated to presidential campaigns have given to a Democrat , according to an analysis of campaign finance reports. That percentage — which does not include those who work in affiliated hospitals — is more than 10 points higher than the education industry as a whole.

Good thing for the GOP that you don’t make much money.

Of the roughly $470,000 donated by these Ivy League higher ups, approximately $205,000 has been given to Sen. Barack Obama, D-IL, and $147,000 to Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY. The top Republican recipient was former Mass. Gov. Mitt Romney, who received approximately $33,000 in Ivy League largesse.

You’d think a major newspaper could afford a decent web designer, right? (Though maybe the premise is wrong.)

I continue to be amazed by the idiocy of the Boston Globe’s website redesign.

The page looks nothing like a newspaper, which the New York Times—the best newspaper website—has shown is a really helpful visual tool, allowing visual cues that tell the readers which stories the paper thinks are important.

Instead, the Globe lists its stories in one narrow column that goes endlessly down and down the page—wasting over 50% of the space in your browser window while you scroll and scroll, like Ed Harris falling to the bottom of the ocean in The Abyss.

And talk about weird editorial choices! I have great respect for the deceased, but do we really need “Obituaries” coming before “Nation,” “World,” “Sports,” “Business,” and just about everything else in the paper?

Ed Harris prepares to read the Boston Globe online.

Two pieces of White House news:

A federal court has ruled that new and minimal fuel standards for light trucks fail to consider the impact of those trucks on global warming.

The court’s ruling rejects mileage standards that were to have gone into effect next year and would have raised required average fuel economy for light trucks from 21.6 miles per gallon to 23.5 by 2010. The light truck category — sport-utility vehicles, pickup trucks and minivans — makes up 50.2 percent of the U.S. automobile market, with passenger cars accounting for the rest.

A great victory for common sense, right? And yet the Bush administration continues to insist that global warming doesn’t exist or isn’t the result of human activity. Last year, the Smithsonian director watered down an exhibit on the Arctic to downplay global warming “in order to avoid a political backlash.”

The museum’s director, Cristián Samper, ordered last-minute changes to the exhibit’s script to add “scientific uncertainty” about climate change, according to internal documents and correspondence.

Samper put the project on hold for six months in the fall of 2005 and ordered that the exhibition undergo further review by higher-level officials in other government agencies. Samper also asked for changes in the script and the sequence of the exhibit’s panels to move the discussion of recent climate change further back in the presentation, records also show.

Here is a particularly funny (in a ha-ha, now I’m going to jump out a window, kind of way) part of the Washington Post’s story on this controversy. It’s a little long, but worth reading—the payoff comes at the end.

“Arctic Meltdown,” the original name of the show, was designed to “explore dramatic changes during the past half-century in the Arctic environment,” according to a June 2003 statement of purpose. The exhibit would show “global changes can have local consequences and local changes can have global consequences,” the statement read.

Igor Krupnik, a Smithsonian scientist who reviewed the initial statement, called it a “very good start,” but said it was important to find “a new title (or better title).” He suggested one based on a University of Colorado researcher’s interview of an Inuit tribesman who had referred to Arctic weather as uggianaqtuq, which she interpreted to mean “you are not yourself.”

Smithsonian researchers changed the title later in the summer of 2003 to “The Arctic: A Friend Acting Strange,” and later the last word became “Strangely.” That title also was almost jettisoned when a linguistic expert questioned the translation, saying uggianaqtuq really means “being eaten by dogs or lice.”

How great that the Eskimos have a word that means “being eaten by dogs or lice.” You’ve got to figure that that one isn’t hauled out very often…… I mean, are Eskimos regularly eaten by dogs or lice? And if they are, they should try to deal with that.

Anyway, I digress. The point is that it would be nice to have a government run by adults who actually think about passing on the planet to their children and grandchildren in some livable form…..

Lots of baseball news!

The Yankees are about to sign A-Rod for 10 years and 270/280 million.

The timing of the reconciliation is intriguing, coming the day after open negotiations began for free agents. No other team had come forward as an aggressive pursuer of Rodriguez. Yet the Yankees made sure to all but lock him up before other teams could realistically make a strong push.

Boras is famous for negotiating massive contracts, but even with the bonus package, this deal will fall short of the 12-year, $350 million contract the Yankees believed Boras sought last month.

Meanwhile, Mariano Rivera is holding out for a fourth contract year. The Yanks have offered three years at $45 million. I think no on this one; Rivera has shown signs that he isn’t the pitcher he once was, and giving a 38-year-old reliever four years and some $60 million is too much.

Also, the Yankees might sign Mike Lowell and move him to first. Hah! I kind of like that. Except I don’t think Lowell will hit particularly well in Yankee Stadium. He owes his career year to the Green Monster.

Oh, and Barry Bonds got indicted.

Barry Bonds, baseball’s career home run leader, was indicted yesterday on five felony charges — four for perjury and one for obstruction of justice — for testifying before a federal grand jury in 2003 that he never used anabolic steroids or human growth hormone.

This is going to be ugly, but I think it’s important; baseball is going to have to really deal with the steroid era before it can move on.

Also, Barry Bonds is really not a very good role model, which I know is an old-fashioned thing to say, but it’s true. I’ve always been amazed to see how the otherwise rational people of San Francisco continue to support him….

The Times reports that Alex Rodriguez has asked to negotiate with the Yankees without the presence of his agent, Scott Boras.

Why does this make me happy?

Well, first, because I wrote several days ago that this process shows every sign of being Boras’ first big fiasco, and several posters strongly disagreed.

Second, because there’d be worse things than having A-Rod come back to the Yankees under these circumstances. Certainly that would be better than signing Mike Lowell, who hits about .190 when he’s not in Fenway….

The New York Sun reports on a conference sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute which will allegedly show that American universities are growing more liberal.

“Universities are tilting to the left, and it starts at the student level and goes all the way through to the hiring level and even to the promotion level,” the vice president and director of the National Research Initiative at AEI, Henry Olsen, said. “This is a real problem, not anecdote masquerading as fact.”

(I like that, “it starts at the student level.” And how exactly would universities be to blame for the politics of their incoming students more than, say, George W. Bush?)

This liberal bias is apparently wounding to conservatives who wish to become scholars.

“If my students show conservative bias, I steer them away from the academy,” a professor of English at the University of Virginia, Paul Cantor, said. “They have no future — they will not get jobs. If they want to teach traditional works in a traditional matter, they have no future in an English department today.”

(Professor Cantor is a visiting professor at Harvard, incidentally.)

I’m not quite sure I buy all this agita. Can anyone find a case of a conservative scholar being rejected for tenure because of his or her politics? How many conservatives even choose to go into academia? And if in the free market of ideas, most intellectuals are liberals, then how can a good-conscience conservative complain about that?

At Columbia, 100 professors have presented Lee Bollinger with a “statement of concern” about his leadership.
They are most angry about the introduction he gave to Iranian president, A-jad, apparently seeing it as a concession to pressure from conservative critics of the invitation.

Afterward, several faculty members stressed that there had been no call for Mr. Bollinger to step down and nothing like the anger that led to the resignation last year of Lawrence Summers, Harvard University’s president.

“I didn’t get the sense that this is the final call for Bollinger,” said Peter Bearman, a professor of sociology. “Rather, the prevailing mood was one in which faculty eloquently modeled how to disagree, without insult or ad hominem charges.”

Take that, FAS.

Nonetheless, the Columbia faculty looks absurd. (Full disclosure: I advise students at the Columbia Journalism School, so marginally, I’m on the faculty. Really, really marginally.)

Eric Foner, an American history professor who was one of the most outspoken professors at yesterday’s meeting, read aloud some of Mr. Bollinger’s remarks to Mr. Ahmadinejad, and added, “This is the language of warfare at a time when the administration of our country is trying to whip up Iran, and to my mind is completely inaccurate.”

As a political agitator, Eric Foner makes a great historian….

And does this sound familiar to anyone?

Mr. Bollinger, who likened his experience at the faculty meeting to watching open-heart surgery on himself….

Of course, I’m not privy to internal sentiments; maybe there are things going on that I don’t know about which are contributing to this outpouring of discontent. I just think that if the Columbia faculty can’t get along with Lee Bollinger, who’s about as liberal as you can get and still hope to run an organization, it needs a serious reality check…..

In his New Republic blog, Marty Peretz rips into J. Lorand Matory’s motion regarding free speech on the Harvard campus.

(Imagine…if any humanists in FAS blogged, they could stick up for Matory! Or criticize him. Whichever.)

Peretz argues that Matory is really gunning for Larry Summers, and after Summers, Israel.

I know Matory’s reputation, especially among his colleagues, one of whom dismissed him as “simply a crackpot.”

He’s also an obsessive. And one of the people with whom he is obsessed is Larry Summers. This obsession, one would think, had reached its satisfying fruition when a prior resolution introduced by Matory, a withdrawal of confidence from Summers as the president of Harvard, passed and resulted in the latter’s resignation. There are four direct references (and at least two indirect allusions) to Summers in the Crimson piece. If it is aimed against anybody in particular the person in the cross-hairs is Summers. If anybody’s right to “express their reasoned and evidence-based ideas” has been violated it has been Summers. First, in a resolution introduced by Matory himself and passed by the F.A.S. that directly made a certain view of things verboten and pushed Summers out of his job. Second, in the scandal perpetrated by the Board of Regents at the University of California by withdrawing an invitation for Summers to speak at one of its meetings.

But for Matory, it appears, that Summers’s primal sin is defense of Israel.…

There’s more—and it doesn’t get any nicer. But it appears that Marty Peretz (who, full disclosure, hired me as an intern long ago at TNR, and with whom I’ve had occasional contact since then) will not have to worry; Matory’s motion was apparently roundly rejected.

The New York Post reports that one of the students on a hunger strike at Columbia collapsed over the weekend. But here’s the real humor (and this is dark!) in the situation: The woman in question is anorexic.

I mean, really, you can’t make this up—an anorexic woman goes on a hunger strike.

Forgive me if I sound unsympathetic, but…well…I am. These five Columbia students are the type of left-wingers who give liberalism a bad name. They’re protesting against racism at Columbia, against a lack of diversity on the faculty, for diversification of the Core Curriculum, for an expansion of ethnic studies and “multicultural resources,” and against Columbia’s expansion into west Harlem. And they’re pissed off at Lee Bollinger. (Because, you know, it’s not as if Bollinger has ever done anything substantive to help minorities advance in the world. Like, oh, taking affirmative action lawsuits to the Supreme Court.)

And some other stuff too.

If you look at the photograph in the linked article, you can see that two protesters are surrounded by balloons on which they have scrawled slogans.

The most prominent one says, Manhanttanville equals displacement of people, people without jobs, a greater social class difference, and a disrupt [sic] in the rich Harlem culture. Is all of that worth a few buildings?

What a bunch of nonsense.

Taken in order:
1) Columbia’s project in Manhattanville won’t displace anyone, as the university has promised to house everyone currently living there within the confines of the development, if that’s what they want. And let’s remember, we’re talking something like 100 families. Not exactly Robert Moses-like displacement here.

2) Manhattanville will probably create more jobs than currently exist in what is a largely barren area.

3) Class differences in New York City are not the result of Columbia University.

4) There is no “rich Harlem culture” in Manhattanville. It’s a dreary “neighborhood” of body shops, warehouses, parking garages, storage spaces, and the like.

The area of Harlem that’s really changing—where there is some Harlem culture threatened—is East Harlem, around the Metro-North line and the Lexington Avenue subway. But no one protests this, because there isn’t a big, bad university with deep pockets to be blamed…just anonymous private developers, and people priced out of other parts of the city, looking for (relatively) affordable housing….

Here is Professor J. Lorand Matory’s motion to be voted on at tomorrow’s faculty meeting:

2. Professor J. L. Matory will move:

That this Faculty commits itself to fostering civil dialogue in which people with a broad range of perspectives feel safe and are encouraged to express their reasoned and evidence-based ideas.

As much as I’m all for civil dialogue, I have to say that this motion feels, well, silly to me. People should “feel safe” to express their ideas? For God’s sake. You are tenured professors at a university. If you do not feel “safe” expressing your ideas at Harvard, then you are too gentle a soul for this world.

What problem is this motion responding to? What grievance would it resolve? What practical impact would it have? (The only symbolic impact, if it were passed, would be to make the Harvard faculty look thin-skinned, out-of-touch, petulant and spoiled.) What possible enforcement mechanism could there be?

Even the idea of an enforcement mechanism is absurd…..