Defense Secretary Robert Gates reached out to academia in a speech to the Association of American Universities in April 2008. His speech covered the sometimes testy relationship between academia and the military, development of “soft power,” and education of service personnel.
In reality, there is a long history of cooperation – as well as controversy – between the U.S. government and anthropology. Understanding the traditions, motivations, and languages of other parts of the world has not always been a strong suit of the United States. It was a problem during the Cold War, and remains a problem.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, the heroic efforts and best intentions of our men and women in uniform have at times been undercut by a lack of knowledge of the culture and people they are dealing with everyday – societies organized by networks of kin and tribe, where ancient codes of shame and honor often mean a good deal more than “hearts and minds.”
Gates’ speech also included a specific proposal for Project Minerva, in which the Pentagon will fund anthropological research on issues such as China, Iraq, terrorism, and religious and ideological extremism.
Let me be clear that the key principle of all components of the Minerva Consortia will be complete openness and rigid adherence to academic freedom and integrity. There will be no room for “sensitive but unclassified,” or other such restrictions in this project. We are interested in furthering our knowledge of these issues and in soliciting diverse points of view – regardless of whether those views are critical of the Department’s efforts. Too many mistakes have been made over the years because our government and military did not understand – or even seek to understand – the countries or cultures we were dealing with.
The response from academia is predictable. One Thousand anthropologists signed a pledge not to work with the Pentagon:
While often presented by its proponents as work that builds a more secure world, protects soldiers on the battlefield, or promotes cross-cultural understanding, at base it contributes instead to brutal wars of occupation which entail massive casualties.
So much for building bridges. On the other hand, the anthropologists will take the money if it can be laundered through another agency and if they can spend it however they want.
Seth Low, president of the American Anthropological Society, says the Pentagon has a conflict of interest, and the money needs to come from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, or the National Endowment for the Humanities.
So the Pentagon teamed up with the National Science Foundation and solicited proposals. Not good enough. Hugh Gusterson explains:
[U]nder the guise of fixing the Pentagon’s review process, the agreement between the Pentagon and NSF corrupts the integrity of the NSF review process because NSF has agreed to allow the Pentagon to place its own reviewers on the NSF selection panels alongside the reviewers chosen by NSF. In a not-for-attribution conversation, a senior official of another funding agency described NSF to me as having “sold out the integrity of scientific peer review.”
So any participation by the Pentagon is unacceptable. To prove his point, Gusterson cites an anonymous senior official of another funding agency who doesn’t like the NSF deal. Might that be a funding agency that competes with NSF or someone who simply wishes he had the $50 million to play with? Gusterson doesn’t say.
What are the anthropologists really afraid of? Is it that some unorthodox point of view will creep into the Pentagon’s knowledge base, or that professors will be faced with a difficult choice of (a) turning down money, or (b) admitting to their left-wing colleagues that they are doing work for the Pentagon. Gusterson concedes that anthropology is “the academy’s most left-leaning discipline” and that working for the Pentagon would carry a significant stigma.
Gusterson tries to bolster his case with a little history, suggesting that experts in anthropology could have prevented prior wars (if only those thick-headed generals had listened). And in the past, when the government did turn to academia . . .
Why did “the best and the brightest” misread the situation so profoundly? Because U.S. foreign policy was made in an atmosphere that had been stripped bare of insights from the left and robbed of debate between left and right. Under McCarthyism, many left-leaning academics had been purged from universities, and Joseph McCarthy and his allies had rooted out the liberal experts on Asia from the State Department, leaving the policy debate bereft of the very people who might have foreseen the calamity of Vietnam.
Got that? The universities were an exclusively right-wing enclave in the early 1960s, and the Kennedy administration simply didn’t have access to liberal views.
Gusterson has a solution: Let the anthropologists, like the 1000 who signed an anti-military pledge, use their own peer-review process to ensure that the liberal view is adequately represented. That would eliminate right wingers like JFK and his ilk.
I have a better solution: Save the $50 million and simply read the pledge. We already know what the anthropologists have to say.
August 15th, 2008
Posted by
Fitzroy |
Education, Politics |
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I have undergone brief periods in my life in which I played bass. I suffered a minor relapse just this year. But I have friends who are real bass players, and one of them sent me this:
Interviewer: Can you explain jazz bass?
Yogi: I can’t, but I will. 90% of all jazz is half improvisation, even on bass. The other half is the part bass players play while others are playing something they never played with anyone who played that part. So if you play the wrong part, its right. If you play the right part, it might be right if you play it wrong enough. But if you play it too right, it’s wrong.
Interviewer: I don’t understand.
Yogi: Anyone who understands jazz bass knows that you can’t understand it. It’s too complicated. That’s what’s so simple about it.
Interviewer: Do you understand it?
Yogi: No. That’s why I can explain it. If I understood it, I wouldn’t know anything about it.
Interviewer: Are there any great jazz bass players alive today?
Yogi: No. All the great jazz bass players alive today are dead. Except for the ones that are still alive. But so many of them are dead, that the ones that are still alive are dying to be like the ones that are dead. Some would kill for it.
Interviewer: What is syncopation?
Yogi: That’s when the note that you should hear now happens either before or after you hear it. In jazz, you don’t hear notes when they happen because that would be some other type of music. Other types of music can be jazz, but only if they’re the same as something different from those other kinds.
Interviewer: Now I really don’t understand.
Yogi: I haven’t taught you enough for you to not understand jazz bass that well.
(This item appears here with an acknowledgment that much was derived from unknown sources.)
August 12th, 2008
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Music |
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“America is no longer what it could be.” Res ipsa loquitur.
Pull that Ad. Greyhound is canceling an ad campaign about how peaceful it is to ride the bus: “There’s a reason you’ve never heard of ‘bus rage.’” Bad timing. A passenger riding from Edmonton to Winnipeg is accused of beheading and cannibalizing a fellow passenger. Rage is everywhere, it seems.
MSM R.I.P. Tim Rutten of the LA Times says the old media have been dethroned. They allowed The National Enquirer and bloggers to do the real reporting on John Edwards, while they buried the story, applying a clear double standard that favors Democrats. Edwards then admitted the facts:
With that admission, the illusion that traditional print and broadcast news organizations can establish the limits of acceptable political journalism joined the passenger pigeon on the roster of extinct Americana.
Why Do These Words Sound So Nasty? Terry Teachout takes on the revival of Hair 40 years later:
So how does “Hair” look 40 years on? Pretty thin, alas, though the damn-the-torpedoes staging and choreography of Diane Paulus and Karole Armitage and the impassioned singing and dancing of the cast (Caren Lyn Manuel and Patina Renea Miller are especially good) succeed in making it seem marginally fresher than it really is. Oskar Eustis, the Public Theater’s artistic director, has written yet another of his eye-rollingly fatuous program notes, this one assuring us that “Hair” was “a contemporary play influenced by the sweep and scale of Shakespearean dramaturgy.” The truth is that “Hair” was and is a poorly crafted revue whose second act disintegrates before your eyes. James Rado and Gerome Ragni, who collaborated on the book and lyrics, didn’t know the first thing about how to write a musical, and their idea of scintillating wit was to rhyme “pederasty” with “Why do these words sound so nasty?”
Solzhenitsyn and Moral Equivalence. Eamonn Fitzgerald reminds us why Sozhenitsyn mattered:
Reviewing The Gulag Archipelago in 1974, George Steiner wrote in The New Yorker: “To infer that the Soviet terror is as hideous as Hitlerism is not only a brutal oversimplification but a moral indecency.” Like so many left-wing intellectuals (American and European), Steiner was in denial and could not bear to read the message that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote when he presented the “Worker’s Paradise” as it really was: a hideous lie. Solzhenitsyn robbed the anti-West of its most cherished illusions and he cruelly exposed the moral equivalency of the Eric Hobsbawms and lesser-know Stalinist sympathizers and fellow travellers. In The Gulag Archipelago, the USSR functionary was revealed as being every bit as evil as his Third Reich counterpart.
August 10th, 2008
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Fitzroy |
Literature, Music, Politics |
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The California Court of Appeals that essentially ruled against home schooling last March has reversed itself. Bowing to political pressure, the court agreed to rehear the case and issued a new, and different, opinion. The San Francisco Chronicle reports:
In its earlier ruling, the court said California’s compulsory education law requires parents to send their children ages 6 to 18 to a full-time public or private school or have them taught by credentialed tutors at home. After agreeing to reconsider the case in March, the same three-judge panel ruled Friday that parents – with or without teaching credentials – can comply with the law by declaring their home to be a private school.
According to coverage last March, the teachers union was quite pleased with the first ruling against home schools. But the public was not pleased. Governor Schwarzenegger pledged to change the law to eliminate the effect of the first ruling.
So the court changed its mind:
In a rare statement from the judiciary – which usually considers itself the ultimate authority on the meaning of the law – Croskey said the 1953 decision that applied compulsory education without exceptions has been effectively overruled in the real world.
How’s that? The binding precedent of a higher court has been overruled by the real world? The legislature did not pass a new law and no higher court made a contrary decision. Still, upon rehearing the case, the court reached a different result.
“Recent statutes indicate that the Legislature is aware that some parents in California homeschool their children by declaring their homes to be private schools,” Justice H. Walter Croskey, author of the earlier ruling, wrote Friday.
Croskey said one of those laws, a 1998 measure exempting parents from fingerprinting requirements imposed on private school employees, indicated “a legislative approval of homeschooling.” A 1991 law requires the state school superintendent to compile information on all private schools except those with five or fewer students, an exemption that was probably created for homeschools, Croskey said.
It seems to me that everything is wrong with this case – more than when wrote about the first decision. The decision of a higher court that forced the first decision still stands. The Education Code has not been amended. The Court of Appeals has said, on second thought, those authorities don’t really matter. The legislature, you see, is aware.
The first decision dealt a blow to home schooling, and home schooling is rapidly becoming the only way to educate your kids without paying private school tuition.
The fact that I support home schools, however, does not mean that California law agrees with me. The California Education Code, in fact, is hostile to home schooling. The Education Code makes attendance at public school compulsory for children aged 6 to 18, providing exemptions for children who (1) attend a private full-time day school or (2) are instructed by a tutor who holds a valid state teaching credential for the grade being taught. And the California Supreme Court has ruled that this provision is constitutional.
The Court of Appeals has now rejected the precedent of a higher court and decided that the Education Code no longer means what it says, and it did this because the public doesn’t like the law.
Thus, the court has taken on the role of the legislature in a very transparent way, bowed to public pressure, and given notice that it will not be bound by any law. Courts do this routinely, but they usually make some attempt to cover their tracks.
There were two ways to handle the problem without doing violence to the rule of law. The first ruling could have been appealed to the California Supreme Court, which could then have decided that the Education Code is, after all, unconstitutional. Whether this were done or not, the legislature could have amended the Code.
But no, the judiciary is in the habit of legislating, the legislature is in the habit of deferring to the courts, and the executive branch frequently acts as enabler – all with disastrous results.
Home schoolers may be happy with this result, but their happiness comes only from the fact that a tribunal acted arbitrarily in a way that benefits them. There is no reason to hope that this dysfunctional and undemocratic governing by the courts will produce anything but chaos in the future.
August 9th, 2008
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Fitzroy |
Law |
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Since we’re focused today on some of the differences between the sexes (math aptitude is not the only one), this item seems particularly appropriate for discussion at happy hour.
The A-6 Dude at “Dirty Martini” . . . Wait! Let’s contemplate this juxtaposition of labels for just a moment:
(You knew, of course, that Chester A. Arthur was the “Dude” President.)
A-6, being a dude (“American-English slang word generally used informally to address a male individual”), it’s just possible that his math skills are significantly higher than average. Or . . . significantly lower. You be the judge.
1. To find a Woman you need Time and Money. Therefore:
Woman = Time x Money
2. “Time is Money” so:
Time = Money
3. Therefore:
Woman = Money x Money
Woman = Money2
4. “Money is the root of all problems.”
Money = √Problems [square root of problems]
5. Therefore:
Woman = (√Problems)2
Woman = Problems
They are not likely to hire many male math professors for a while, so it’s good that A-6 Dude has found his niche in martinis, cigars, and aviation. He has a lot of martini recipes (some even using gin) and has just started a new site devoted entirely to martinis.
Image by Ken30684 - Creative Commons
August 8th, 2008
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Leisure |
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The gender equity crowd continues its assault facts. Tamar Lewin produced an article for The New York Times arguing that science and math disparities have been disproved.
Three years after the president of Harvard, Lawrence H. Summers, got into trouble for questioning women’s “intrinsic aptitude” for science and engineering – and 16 years after the talking Barbie doll proclaimed that “math class is tough” – a study paid for by the National Science Foundation has found that girls perform as well as boys on standardized math tests.
Not so fast, says Heather MacDonald. In fact, the study shows something else entirely. Although average scores for girls and boys are roughly equal, scores at the highest and lowest extremes are disproportionately those of boys. So if institutions of higher education want equal numbers of men and women as faculty and graduates in math, they will need to cut out the highest performers and strive for mediocrity.
The same reality-denying feminists are itching to subject college science and math departments to gender quotas. They have already persuaded Congress to require university scientists to perform Title IX compliance reviews – a nightmare of bean-counting paperwork – coverning everything from faculty composition to lab space. Misleading reporting like Lewin’s will only strengthen the movement to select cancer researchers and atomic engineers on the basis of their sex, not their abilities.
The brave new world of Title IX for math and science is just the most recent effort to replace education with ideology. The mediocrity that has infected the humanities will spread to the hard sciences with devastating consequences.
Lake Woebegone, where all the children are above average, will likely lose government funds, but it will offer a better education in math than you can get at Harvard.
Photo: Math on the Wall by alist (Creative Commons)
August 8th, 2008
Posted by
Fitzroy |
Education, Politics |
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Today’s report in The Washington Times that Obama has been slipping in the polls includes this:
“Obama moved from a fascinating phenomena to a guy who could become president and now he has got to answer the question of is he ready to be president,” said John Zogby, president of the polling firm Zogby International, whose latest poll this week gave Mr. McCain a one-percentage-point lead.
Mr. Zogby said racial prejudice is clearly behind some of the defections from Mr. Obama. . . .
Does moving from a “fascinating phenomena” [sic] to someone voters want to assess seriously indicate prejudice? Did the people responding to Zogby’s poll just now discover that Obama is black? How can a voter be racially prejudiced if he initially supports a candidate he knows to be black, and then after learning more about the candidate’s substantive positions “defects” to the other side? Wouldn’t all of the truly prejudiced voters be against the black candidate at the outset?
Or is Zogby just getting too old to think this through?
August 6th, 2008
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Politics |
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Chad Orzel confesses his ignorance of art and music. He then turns the tables and lambastes his fellow liberal arts professors for routinely excusing their ignorance of math and science.
Intellectuals and academics are just assumed to have some background knowledge of the arts, and not knowing those things can count against you. Ignorance of math and science is no obstacle, though. I have seen tenured professors of the humanities say – in public faculty discussions, no less – “I’m just no good at math,” without a trace of shame. There is absolutely no expectation that Intellectuals know even basic math.
The liberal arts, those subjects formerly deemed essential to the education of free men, include both music and math. Orzel justifiably points out that people need basic math skills. That some otherwise intelligent people lack mathematical aptitude doesn’t make math irrelevant. His fundamental complaint is that his deficiency, artistic ignorance, is frowned upon while theirs is tolerated. So he suggests heaping opprobrium on them until they squirm:
Sadly, I don’t know what other solution there is. It simply should not be acceptable for people who are ignorant of math and science to consider themselves Intellectuals. Somehow, we need to move away from where we are and toward a place where confusing Darwin with Dawkins or Feynman with Faraday carries the same intellectual stigma as confusing Bach with Beethoven or Rembrandt with Reubens.
For Orzel, there just isn’t enough intellectual stigma to go around. He suffers ridicule at parties, so it’s only fair that others suffer, too. Such are the solutions that life in academia fosters!
Perhaps those of us who live outside the Envy-Covered Halls can come up with a better solution for Prof. Orzel. First on the list would be this:
Stop whining about the ignorance of others and fix your own problem. Go to concerts and museums; read a book about music; take an online course in art history; listen to Professor Carol’s podcasts.
Then, when Prof. Orzel says “I don’t even like classical music,” we can at least give him credit for knowing what it is he doesn’t like. And then when he calls us ignorant for not knowing enough math, he’ll have a point.
August 4th, 2008
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Education |
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George Will reminds us that Benjamin Disraeli described William Gladstone as “a sophistical rhetorician inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity.”
A Culture of Disaster. The Belmont Club remembers the worst sea disaster, involving the Philippine Ferry MV Dona Paz. The lessons of that disaster went unheeded as another ferry sailed into a typhoon a few weeks ago with a loss of 800 lives.
The loss of the Titanic, operating on the Western mind, stimulated the establishment of the International Ice Patrol and mandatory capacities for lifeboats. Except for wartime disasters like the Lusitania and the Wilhelm Gustloff, Western sea travel became permanently safer after the lessons of the Titanic were fully absorbed. But because of the absence of cause and effect in much of Filipino culture, the loss of Dona Paz had no effect upon the subsequent safety of Philippine maritime travel.
Dyslexia Discrimination. Peter Hitchens has this:
A medical student, Naomi Gadian, says she is being discriminated against in her exams because she is ‘dyslexic’. I think she has impaled herself on a very interesting fork.
If ‘dyslexia’ really exists, then surely it is quite reasonable for the authorities to forbid sufferers from practising as doctors, where a written mistake in a prescription or a misreading of a dose could be disastrous.
Such ‘discrimination’, like a lot of other discrimination, is not only reasonable but urgently necessary.
American Casualties of Communism. From the New York Sun’s review of The Forsaken, a book about depression-era Americans who moved to the Soviet Union in search of socialism.
Lured by sham Soviet propaganda and pro-Soviet falsehoods spread by the likes of George Bernard Shaw and the corrupt New York Times Moscow correspondent, Walter Duranty, [they] migrated to the USSR in search of jobs and a role in the “building of socialism.” It was, in the words of the author, “the least heralded migration in American history” and a period when “for the first time in her short history more people were leaving the United States than were arriving.” Most of these expatriates, not intellectuals but simple working men, were quickly disenchanted and wanted to return home, only to find that Moscow considered them Soviet citizens and barred them from leaving. Ignored by the American government, many of them ended in the gulag.
August 3rd, 2008
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Eric Felton has an interesting column in The Wall Street Journal about the conflict between traditional “canonical” cocktails and the “rococo follies” of the new-school, “culinary cocktail” crowd. These two groups faced off recently in New Orleans.
The convention’s official cocktail smackdown featured six contestants who had 40 minutes to come up with original drinks. Each recipe had to contain either Grand Marnier or Navan vanilla liqueur (the contest’s corporate sponsors). And in a conceit lifted from the Food Network’s “Iron Chef” franchise, every one of the drinks had to make use of a “secret ingredient” announced just before the starter’s gun — in this case, ginger marmalade.
Arts & Ammo tends to take notice when people start bandying words about like canonical and rococo. I, of course, would line up with the canonical crowd. The martini is not a work in progress. However, it is worth keeping an eye open for new creations – just in case. Felton’s favorite also deserves special recognition on this site:
My marmalade drink of choice was created out of a rough and ready necessity. The G.I.’s favorite general, Omar Bradley, liked Old-Fashioneds, but who has fresh orange slices for muddling in the field? He improvised, adapted and overcame by mixing a spoonful of orange marmalade with his whiskey. I think it should be treated as a minor classic, and should bear the general’s name. It’s simple, pretty darn tasty, and 100% grasshopper-free.
The Omar Bradley:
2 oz bourbon or rye whiskey
1 tsp (heaping or not, to taste) orange marmalade
1 squeeze fresh lemon juice
1 dash Angostura bitters
Shake well with ice and strain into an Old-Fashioned glass with fresh ice. Garnish with a cherry.
August 1st, 2008
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Leisure |
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