John Silber, President Emeritus of Boston University, has some advice for the New School:
The recent attempts to drive Robert Kerrey from the presidency of The New School are reminiscent of how Larry Summers was driven from the Harvard presidency in 2006 and, further back, how controversies, real and specious, roiled American campuses in the 1960s and 1970s. If the Trustees of the New School are at all tempted to give in to demands for Kerrey’s head, these previous academic power struggles ought to send them one clear message of warning: lose a president to a coup and you will fail in the governance of your campus.
Silber earned recognition during his tenure at Boston University for championing causes unpopular with the left. But he survived attempts by faculty and certain trustees to remove him. Typical of Silber’s style was this response to campus protests of the Vietnam war:
I informed the students at their rallies that if they wanted to change the policies in Vietnam they would have my support, but that they should go to Washington, DC, where the foreign policy of the United States is made.
Academia would do well to find a lot more administrators with this kind of common sense and backbone.
Naturally Silber got no credit from the left for this:
Silber was the first chair of the Texas Society to Abolish Capital Punishment and a leader in the integration of the University of Texas. He was involved in the creation of Operation Head Start.
February 28th, 2009
Posted by
Fitzroy |
Ammo, Education |
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Snopes says it ain’t so, but some day someone is going to debunk Snopes itself.
It seems entirely logical, though perhaps not accurate, to follow yesterday’s musings on Helen of Troy with a note about champagne. Accuracy is not highly prized at the bar anyway.
There is truth in lore, even when the historical details are in disarray. I refer, of course, to the shape of the champagne coupe. The saucer-shaped glass has fallen out of favor in preference for the flute, which preserves the chill and bubbles for slow drinkers. But the coupe has a sensuous shape, and stories have sprung up about how it was modeled on (or actually molded from) the breast of some famed beauty: Marie Antoinette, Madame de Pompadour, Helen of Troy.
In all of the stories you simply have the cleaving desire to possess an unattainable historical siren—what could be more sexual than placing ones lips to [insert famous female name here]’s breast while drinking sparkling wine?
Discovering which individual, if any, served as the true model is a fools errand. Truth lies elsewhere. I like this historical anecdote from VodkaFreak:
As to be expected, the manufacturing wizard who gave the glass its birth was a Frenchmen. And it was the French royalty who realised its full potential.
At a brunch, or a high tea, while drinking their champagne, the ladies would pass the tort or the angel cake. ‘Oh, my dear,’ they would cry, ‘do try the sponge cake with the champagne. Have you ever tasted anything so delicious?’ And they would dip their cake or pastry into the bubbles before popping the champagne-impregnated morsel into their mouth. Lovers, in particular, loved to feed each other on this heavenly fare.
All was well, and life was good.
Then along came the wine buffs. With no romance in their souls, just their long noses and cultivated palates, they went into a scientific huddle. Taking a tape measure they first measured the perimeter of the saucer-shaped glass and then the tulip-shaped glass, and shook their heads in dismay.
And, being smugly confident in their scientific, function-over-form, scrupulously detailed, graceless and secular outlook on the world, they went on to form a company called Snopes.
So really, who would you rather have plop down on the barstool beside you? Marie Antoinette or the guy from Snopes?
Image by CoffeeGeek – Creative Commons
February 27th, 2009
Posted by
Fitzroy |
Leisure |
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Redstate tells the saga of young Dan Gilgoff, Faith (!) reporter for U.S. News and World Report and Huffington Post writer. Gilgoff wrote about Bobby Jindal’s Catholic faith and then was so mesmerized by the comments of a single poster, 
Helen of Georgia, that he followed up with this:
I’m surprised that a few comments on my post about Bobby Jindal as the new face of Christian conservatism allege that he’s got ancestral Muslim roots, in addition to the acknowledged Hinduism of his Indian born parents. Remind you of any other recent rumor campaigns against promising young minority politicians?
What’s surprising is that some of the comments appear to be from pro-Sarah Palin conservatives. They’re a likely preview of what a Jindal primary faceoff with Palin or another Christian conservative might look like, with both vying for conservative Christian support.
Okay, to be fair, there were three posts that claim Jindal is a secret Muslim:
As one views the comments section of Gilgoff’s February 23 posting, one can see two commenters out of 28 replies that mention Jindal’s supposedly secret Muslim background. Two from a “Helen of GA” that says Jindal is “secretly from the faith of Islam” and saying Palin will be president in 2012, and a third comment from a “Welfare for the Rich of GA” that also makes the same basic claim saying, “Jindal is a muslim who now claims to be a Christian.” The third comment does not mention Palin or anyone else and focuses solely on Jindal.
The story of Helen includes this:
“In the Cypria, Nemesis did not wish to mate with Zeus. She therefore changed shape into various animals as she attempted to flee Zeus, finally becoming a goose. Zeus also transformed himself into a goose and mated with Nemesis, who produced an egg from which Helen was born.”
A goose egg seems like an apt symbol for the reliability of the source of Gilgoff’s information, what it says about Sarah Palin, and the journalistic integrity of Gilgoff and U.S. News.
Image 1 by Dullhunk – Creative Commons
Image 2 by patries71 – Creative Commons
February 26th, 2009
Posted by
Fitzroy |
Media, Politics |
one comment
Someone has finally succinctly nailed the pusillanimous western apologists for Islam. Not surprisingly, it was Mark Steyn. Steyn’s felicitous “harem of PC eunuchs” phrase appears in response to Joe Klein of Time, who accused Steyn a crude religious bigotry for contrasting the Muslim world with the “developed” world. Klein contends that “the jihadi tide is ebbing” and cites progress in Iraq as Exhibit A.
Progress in Iraq? Yes, it’s a “Great Awakening,” according to Klein, for the Sunnis. Of course, Time is a little late to the party in recognizing progress in Iraq, and there is no mention of the U.S. contribution to changing circumstances there. Perhaps Klein believes this Great Awakening would have occurred under Saddam.
And what did Steyn say that would justify a charge of crude religious bigotry?
Between 1970 and 2000, the developed world declined from just under 30 percent of the global population to just over 20 percent, while the Muslim world increased from 15 percent to 20 percent. And in 2030, it won’t even be possible to re-take that survey, because by that point half the “developed world” will itself be Muslim: in Bradford as in London, Amsterdam, Brussels and almost every other western European city from Malmo to Marseilles the principal population growth comes from Islam.
Along with the demographic growth has come radicalization: It’s not just that there are more Muslims, but that, within that growing population, moderate Islam is on the decline – in Singapore, in the Balkans, in northern England – and radicalized, Arabized, Wahhabized Islam is on the rise. So we have degrees of accommodation: surrender in Islamabad, appeasement in London, acceptance in Toronto and Buffalo.
In addition to the new Iraqi Enlightenment, Klein cites the rise of moderates in Indonesia and India. (India, of course, is not a Muslim country.)
Klein has his own list of instances where Islamic extremism rules, but he avoids his own charge of religious bigotry with the penultimate sentence (emphasis mine):
Pakistan is a real problem, demanding a real response before the jihadis get any closer to Islamabad. There are other fruitless but compelling manifestations of Islamic extremism in the world–Hamas, Hizballah. And there are places, like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, where Muslim Brotherhood groups are strengthened by the brutal autocracy of the dominant governments. But make no mistake: wherever they’ve been given the free choice, Muslims have rejected extremism more often than not in the past few years. Which is excellent news, indeed.
It would be excellent news, indeed, if it were true. But democracy has yet to spring forth in a Muslim country unaided by a heavy dose of Western sensibilities. And where Islam has planted itself in the capitals of the West – e.g. London, Amsterdam, and Paris – the trends are all in the other direction.
February 22nd, 2009
Posted by
Fitzroy |
Politics |
one comment
If you are still smarting from Eric Holder’s insult that we are a nation of cowards, or worse think that Holder was right, the Washington Examiner has the response, and I have the solution:
Courage in a Bottle.
The April 2008 Journal of Neuroscience confirms that alcohol emboldens the fainthearted. Like we didn’t already know that.
So choose your brew. John Courage will do. Or go with the traditional Friday martini. But use real gin, none of that sissy vodka.
Courage is in the air in bracing whiffs
Better than all the stalemate an’s and ifs.
– Robert Frost
February 20th, 2009
Posted by
Fitzroy |
Leisure, Politics |
no comments
If a celebrity dies dramatically and publicly, you would expect the New York Times to cover it. But it urges us to avert our eyes:
Before television shined its warped light on her, Jade Goody was surely destined for a life of hardship and obscurity. Crude-talking, hard-drinking, overweight, barely educated, in debt, the child of drug addicts, she appeared on the reality show “Big Brother” in 2002 as a kind of token lowlife.
A token? She sounds like she came straight from central casting for reality TV, which claims its “reality” component by focusing on the trivial and dysfunctional – things too bizarre for scriptwriters. I suspect a lot of people watch reality TV to get some small comfort in seeing that their real life is not as ridiculous as the one they are watching.
But Jade Goody is destined for an early death from cervical cancer, and the media are wringing their hands over the potential for voyeurism and exploitation.
Voyeurism and exploitation are just fine, you see, when it’s all about making sport of a crude-talking, hard-drinking, overweight, barely educated, debt-ridden drug addict.
Death, however, is “grotesque” and must be hidden away:
This is reality television carried out to its most extreme, grotesque conclusion.
The media are nothing if not grotesque. It is a curious criticism coming from the New York Times, which has covered the Iraqi war with its own grotesque focus on body counts. All other realities of that conflict – goals, strategies, successes – were largely omitted.
The news media have a nose for the grotesque and few reservations about broadcasting it.
What do the media have to say when death is real and personal rather than statistical? Like much of modern culture, nothing.
Our culture is obsessed with attempts to manage death, to make it somehow elective. We assert a right to die and a right to choose in an attempt to soften death’s consequences. We politicize it. To buttress political arguments soldiers must die publicly, criminals must be executed privately, and babies are aborted clinically.
The media write easily about these collective deaths and the political implications of them, but individual death (which is what ultimately matters to us) leaves the media speechless and powerless.
No wonder they resort to calling the kettle black:
Now that she is dying, many of the same papers are now squirming with unease at their collusion in the endless building up, knocking down and exploitation of a woman they always counted on to increase their own sales.
I have no quarrel with Jade Goody dying on reality TV if she chooses. Her death is certainly not trivial and TV cannot make it so. Perhaps audiences will confront something consequential and palpable, for a change, and maybe some of them will be moved to greater understanding – to see that their own life is as fragile and transitory as Jane Goody’s.
The news media will cover it in their usual voyeuristic way and seek out a member of the audience with something grotesque to say.
February 20th, 2009
Posted by
Fitzroy |
Media |
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John Corigliano, by any account one of America’s most prominent composers, has won numerous awards, including an Oscar for his score to The Red Violin and a Pulitzer. He recently won the Grammy for Best Classical Contemporary Composition for his song cycle Mr. Tambourine Man: Seven Poems of Bob Dylan.
Charles Downey at Ionarts comments:
According to his liner note, Corigliano had never heard the Bob Dylan songs whose poems he used as the basis of his new composition, an assertion that stretches credulity with a song like Blowin’ in the Wind. Someone who does not listen to a lot of popular music, in whose number I am certainly to be included, might not have heard several of the Dylan songs, or perhaps had heard Mr. Tambourine Man only as covered by William Shatner, but Blowin’ in the Wind? Your head would have to have been buried under a rock since 1962.
I can’t disagree with Downey on that point. I too have managed to ignore a lot of popular music. For reasons too numerous to explain here, I think it has become much easier to ignore popular music over the past 30 years or so – and much more rewarding, since vast swaths of popular music have become so thoroughly ignorable.
To be fair, Corigliano was born in 1938 and was winning competitions at the Spoleto Festival in 1963, so his attention was already focused elsewhere when Bob Dylan came along. And the classical music world of the 60s and 70s was very adept at shunning things popular.
But Corigliano does not live in a bubble and has some interesting things to say. Professor Carol interviewed him a couple of years ago on his Circus Maximus and why wind bands were becoming such a popular medium for contemporary composers. Circus Maximus was commissioned by the University of Texas Wind Ensemble, and the director of that ensemble, Jerry Junkin, also participates in the interview.
John Corigliano Interview Pt. 1 [22:00m]:
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John Corigliano Interview Pt. 2 [15:53m]:
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February 18th, 2009
Posted by
Fitzroy |
Music |
one comment
The Obama Coin rip-off is making the rounds through the blogosphere accompanied by comments on the larger issue it symbolizes.
Moe Lane at Redstate is right: the analogy is too obvious to belabor.
February 17th, 2009
Posted by
Fitzroy |
Politics |
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We Just Lost. Mike McNally takes up the issue of the British government’s refusal allow Islam critic and Dutch MP Geert Wilders to enter the country.
For the last couple of years I’ve been holding out against those who claim the spread of Islamic extremism in Britain, the reluctance of the government to combat it forcefully for fear of offending Muslims, and the reluctance of the media, legal, and political establishments to even discuss the issue spell doom for the country. My argument was that while such appeasement and cultural self-loathing make it difficult for us to win the war against the extremists, we could never lose it.
Unfortunately, it looks like we just lost.
Who’s the Canary in the Coal Mine? According to Wretchard, it isn’t Israel, but rather the U.K.
The problems besetting the UK, the US and Europe are now clearly rooted not in one-time events like 9/11 but rather in an accumulation of changes, none of them fatal in themselves, but each like an incessant drip of water, progressively weakening the foundations. The causes are many: demography, a loss of cultural confidence, overborrowing — the reader can list them himself — but now they may be coming together in a perfect storm. If the West is to survive the crisis that appears to be beating at it’s door, it must first understand its origins. But that is the problem in itself. Like a deer paralyzed in the headlights the Western intelligensia seems capable of nothing more than repeating worn out phrases from the 1960s. It is shaken, but not stirred.
A Flood of Refuges try to escape drug violence in Mexico? There is this assessment:
“Worst-case scenario, Mexico becomes the Western hemisphere’s equivalent of Somalia, with mass violence, mass chaos,” said Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for defense and foreign policy at the Cato Institute, a Washington-based think tank. “That would clearly require a military response from the United States.”
A Little Horn Music. I attended a music conference last week that brought back memories of my former days as a horn player. I would not have played first chair with anyone like this around:
February 15th, 2009
Posted by
Fitzroy |
Music, Politics |
no comments
The most famous Valentine’s Day song is “My Funny Valentine.” 
Written by Rogers and Hart for the musical Babes in Arms, the song has been recorded by just about everyone.
Mark Steyn takes an in-depth look at the song, but says he looked in vain for the usual anecdote of how the song was created:
You want every great song to have that kind of story behind it - especially when it’s as iconic an entry in the catalogue as “My Funny Valentine”. But sometimes great songs aren’t written that way. Sometimes it’s just a professional writing assignment - or something closer to Lennon and McCartney’s explanation of their work methods:
There are two things we always do when we sit down and write a song. First we sit down. Then we write a song.
“My Funny Valentine” is sung in the musical to the leading man, named Val, whose redeeming qualities are not immediately apparent:
Your looks are laughable
Unphotographable . . .
Steyn marvels at how Lorenz Hart made that six-syllable word sound so natural.
But that’s more than just songwriting professionalism. It’s also autobiographical. To promote the show, the writers gave the usual round of interviews, and a lady from Popular Songs magazine inquired after Hart’s own love life. “Love life?” he replied. “I haven’t any.”
Hart, who stood only 4’10”, continued, “Nobody would want me.”
The complete lyrics are here.
February 14th, 2009
Posted by
Fitzroy |
Music |
2 comments
