Faculty follies: a selection.(Notes & Comments: June 2005)

It's been a great year for academic absurdity--understanding the word "great" in the quantitative, not the qualitative, sense, i.e., "big," or "extensive," not "excellent." Where to start? With Larry Summers, science, and women at Harvard? With the campaign against Israel at Columbia's Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures? Those stories are still percolating. And why not? As we write, the words of Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said professor of Arab Studies at Columbia, are still echoing down Morningside Heights: "There is a nationwide campaign against the autonomy of universities ... based on the utterly spurious assumption that universities are strongholds of radical and liberal beliefs." Spurious? Meanwhile, Harvard is trying to figure out how to spend the extra $50 million that Summers has promised to silence his critics ... no, that's not right: we mean, to recruit and promote women "and other underrepresented groups" in math and the sciences. The past quarter-century of leftwing discrimination, a.k.a. "affirmative action," wasn't enough, you see, hence the additional dough.

But Harvard and Columbia are only the tip of the iceberg. We're dealing here with an embarrassment of ... well, not "riches," certainly: let's just say "with an embarrassment" and leave it at that. For example, we've reported before in this space on little Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. It has really outdone itself lately. In December, the college cleverly timed the announcement of their new capital campaign to coincide with an invitation to Susan Rosenberg, late of the Weather Underground, to teach a month-long seminar as an "artist/activist-in-residence." Guess what? Many people objected quite vigorously to the idea that a liberal arts college should hire a felon whose only public accomplishments were I) driving a getaway car in an armed robbery that left a Brinks guard dead and two police officers wounded, and 2) transporting a cache of automatic weapons, and 740 pounds of high explosives. Hamilton tried to brazen it out: "Free speech!" "Diversity!" "Women writers!"--the administration tried out all the usual mantras. Nevertheless, donations to the college dried up and Rosenberg "withdrew."

The Rosenberg wheeze came to the world courtesy of the Kirkland Project for the Study of Gender, Society, and Culture, an outfit at Hamilton which is exactly what its name implies, a left-wing catchment where aging '60s radicals pool to ferment and celebrate themselves. A list of the Kirkland Project's activities reads like a parody of wacko academic radicalism (check out their programming online). L'affaire Rosenberg was a body-blow to Hamilton's fund-raising efforts, but, hey, why be satisfied with half measures? Kirkland's next trick was to invite Ward Churchill to campus. You remember Ward Churchill: he's the make-believe Injun and tenured prof from the University of Colorado who thinks that the victims of Islamofascist terrorism are like Nazi bureaucrats. ...