Niall Ferguson: Is It All About the Speaking Fees?
Posted on August 23rd, 2012 in Uncategorized | 6 Comments »
I like this analysis of the Ferguson Fiasco by Stephen Marche in Esquire:
Ferguson’s critics have simply misunderstood for whom Ferguson was writing that piece. They imagine that he is working as a professor or as a journalist, and that his standards slipped below those of academia or the media. Neither is right. Look at his speaking agent’s Web site. The fee: 50 to 75 grand per appearance. ….That number means that Ferguson doesn’t have to please his publishers; he doesn’t have to please his editors; he sure as hell doesn’t have to please scholars. He has to please corporations and high-net-worth individuals, the people who can pay 50 to 75K to hear him talk. That incredibly sloppy article was a way of communicating to them: I am one of you. I can give a great rousing talk about Obama’s failures at any event you want to have me at.
We see another Zakaria connection here…. And there’s also the common denominator of massive overextension: Ferguson is a contributor to Bloomberg, a columnist at Newsweek/Daily Beast, affiliated with four universities, a documentary producer, writes books, and occasionally teaches and meets with students.
The speeches are nice work if you can get it. But are they worth the damage to your reputation that comes from compromising your work? The way that serious people stop taking you seriously? (As Tim Stanley asks in the Telegraph, “Has Niall Ferguson Jumped the Shark?) I guess it depends on your priorities. But shouldn’t Harvard at some point be concerned about professors who give the slightest tip of the (top) hat to their obligation to the university, but value it primarily for the financial leverage it provides? Because there’s only going to be more and more of them…
6 Responses
8/23/2012 12:40 pm
Right about Harvard needing to be concerned, but it is harder to say, leading to what actions? American society indulges universities in various ways on the theory that we are doing sacred work, education and disinterested scholarship, with any ulterior motives laid open for everyone to judge. If the view shifts over to a presumption that we are just another class of whores, like politicians and talk show hosts, who will tailor and even falsify what we say to please our clients and make a buck, there is no reason we should be accorded the privileges that we have and those other pleasure industries do not.
Having a university president or two point this out would be a fine thing. Harvard’s president sniffed about the number of undergraduates selling their souls to Wall Street; perhaps she could adopt the same high-minded tone in remarks to or about the faculty.
Ultimately I keep coming back to old fashioned concepts like dignity and honor that have gone missing from the daily dialog of academic life. People like to complain about the university becoming too scientific, too technological, too utilitarian, too careerist, but none of these things is inconsistent with regular reminders about moral, ethical, honorable ways of behaving, or with pointing out lapses of those values by members of the community (however lawful they may be, and protected by civil and academic rights). There have been conversations about instituting an honor code for students at Harvard. Perhaps we need one for faculty first.
8/23/2012 2:10 pm
The Esquire piece is particularly interesting in its emphasis on who the audience is when an academic is paid very large amounts by institutions other than those whose promotion and tenure process have helped establish the person’s reputation–whether the Koch Brothers, the Gaddafi regime, BoA, JPM, or whatever.
When I first heard the quip that we were becoming a 50-50 nation, half paying taxes, half not, I was initially shocked. I was shocked by the lack of acknowledgement that the “non-paying” may not be earning enough to pay federal income tax, but are paying other, often more regressive taxes (sales tax, etc.), and are still living in poverty, in their tens of millions.
I was more shocked however by the seeming callousness from a colleague whose institution is committed to admitting the best students it can find, particularly from that 50% group.
I don’t believe I’ve ever heard a colleague say such a thing with such verve (I know, it has probably happened). But then I am not the intended audience, as Marche so well points out, I’m not paying the fee, and the people who are are those for whom the 50-50 lament is an amused response to the Occupy movement and those drawing attention to the realities of the 99-1 split.
This ambiguity of audience does seem to me to become a problem for discourse with such faculty, and for discourse between faculty and students–or is that where one’s views are moderated and brought more into line with those of the the facts and the institution’s values? Or do one’s views in fact, like those of the lobby-owned politician, change to suit the needs of the larger paymaster?
In other words when an hour-long speech is compensated with not much less than a year’s salary for an assistant professor, is that speech whose freedom we should defend?
8/23/2012 2:12 pm
Harvard’s own Citizen’s United dilemma, Richard?
8/23/2012 2:15 pm
I’d be interested in hearing arguments con that.
8/23/2012 8:08 pm
“I don’t do it for the bottom line.” Mathematician William Thurston, who died Tuesday at the age of 65, quoted in his NYT obituary.
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