A Harvard Professor Speaks Out -- "The Herd Of Independent M

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D. Spencer Hines

A Harvard Professor Speaks Out -- "The Herd Of Independent M

Legg inn av D. Spencer Hines » 26 okt 2004 18:34:21

"AMID THE IVY"

"John Kerry U"

"At Harvard, a few of us stray from the "herd of independent minds."

BY RUTH R. WISSE
Monday, October 25, 2004
The WSJ

"Last spring, I was surprised by a call from a reporter at the Harvard
Crimson asking me to comment on my contribution to the Bush-Cheney
re-election campaign.

His inquiry was prompted by the disparity he'd discovered in donations
by Harvard faculty of about $150,000 for Kerry to about $8,000 for Bush.
(The figures have since changed but not the percentages.) I could have
filled the whole issue of his paper with reasons for supporting Bush
over Kerry, but as we both knew, the real story was the "herd of
independent minds"-- the image is Harold Rosenberg's -- charging through
the American academy. ******

The Federal Election Commission could not have foreseen that when it
required employment information on political donations of over $200, it
would expose scandalous uniformity in a university community that
advertises its diversity. ******

The Sacramento Bee reported that the University of California system
gave more to the Kerry campaign than any other single employee group,
and that Harvard was second, with only 15,000 employees to UC's 160,000.
Campus bloggers computed the percentages of Kerry contributions over
Bush: Cornell 93%, Dartmouth 97%, Yale 93%, Brown 89%. ******

Personally, I greatly enjoy being in the conservative opposition. My
colleagues are cordial, and since I'm not looking for promotions I
willingly sustain an occasional snub for the greater advantage of being
able to speak my mind.

Generally a laudable course of action -- MORAL COURAGE. But very few
folks actually have it or are capable of sustaining it when plums are
dangled. ---- DSH

Students making the transition from liberal to conservative are often
wounded by their first exposure to the contempt that greets their
support for the war in Iraq or opposition to abortion or whatever else
separates them from the liberal campus. ******

I suggest to them that, as opposed to living in constant terror of
offending some received idea, they relish their freedom of expression.
The self-acknowledged conservative never experiences intellectual
constraint.

But this enviable autonomy doesn't extend to graduate students or
untenured colleagues. ******

Recently, I had two encounters with sobering implications for the
academy.

A junior professor told me that when she began teaching at Harvard she
resigned from several organizations that would have betrayed her
conservative leanings.

She hadn't wanted to give colleagues an easy excuse for voting her down
when she came up for tenure; but now that the prospect of tenure was
before her, she didn't know whether she wanted to stay on in such a
repressive community. ******

My second conversation was with a rare pro-Israel Muslim whose contract
as lecturer hadn't been renewed, very probably because he was critical
of the way his subject was being taught.

This young man was in a great mood. He was leaving for Washington,
where he could make a greater contribution to national security.

Indeed! ---- DSH

All groups tend to a measure of homogeneity, but the ideological
pressures driving these two dissidents from the university affect even
those at the highest level of authority. At a Commissioning Ceremony
for the Harvard officers of ROTC, President Lawrence Summers praised the
noble work of the graduating soldiers. "Our strength as a nation rests
upon our freedom. . . . [All] of us who cherish and pray for that
freedom must also support those who contribute to the strength that
maintains our freedom."

These sentiments were exceptionally welcome from the president of a
school whose faculty has denied ROTC an official presence on campus for
30 years, and shows no signs of modifying its opposition to the
military. ******

When he speaks to the faculty, however, the president doesn't air his
patriotic zeal. He rather reports on his protection against the Patriot

Act, the commitment of Harvard to affirmative action, and such other
liberal pieties as bringing more women into the study of science. I
recognize that the president may sincerely support both sets of issues,
and I sympathize with his reluctance to be stampeded by the herd. But
in trying to avoid offending the liberal-left hegemony he -- and
everyone else who makes this calculation -- intensifies the regnant
culture of pusillanimity.

Bingo! ---- DSH

One of the most refreshing things about President Bush is his immunity
from intellectual intimidation. ******

That's because he is a TEXAN and a Yale man of the right sort -- with
the Right Stuff. ---- DSH

More than his decision to go to war in Iraq, more than the religious
values I share with him (though I do not share his religion), I
appreciate that, though he has to struggle for language, he expresses
unapologetically his commitment to the strength of our nation. By
contrast, through their opposition to the military, my clever colleagues
have done everything they could to make America indefensible."

"Ms. Wisse is a professor at Harvard."
-------------------------------

'Nuff Said.

"The final happiness of man consists in the contemplation of truth....
This is sought for its own sake, and is directed to no other end beyond
itself." Saint Thomas Aquinas, [1224/5-1274] "Summa Contra Gentiles"
[c.1258-1264]

"Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur. Odi profanum vulgus et arceo."

Quintus Aurelius Stultus [33 B.C. - 42 A.D.]

Prosecutio stultitiae est gravis vexatio, executio stultitiae coronat
opus.

D. Spencer Hines

Lux et Veritas et Libertas

Vires et Honor

D. Spencer Hines

Re: A Harvard Professor Speaks Out -- "The Herd Of Independe

Legg inn av D. Spencer Hines » 26 okt 2004 18:54:02

What a LOVELY PERSON!

We need MORE ACADEMICS of this calibre.

DSH
-------------------------

Ruth R. Wisse, Harvard College Professor, Martin Peretz Professor of
Yiddish Literature, and Professor of Comparative Literature
-------------------------------------------------

Professor Ruth Wisse
Semitic Museum
Harvard University
6 Divinity Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02138

"Ruth Wisse undertook the study of literature because it seemed to offer
more information and experience than any other branch of knowledge. She
moved from English into Yiddish and Comparative Literature for similar
reasons. Yiddish might appear to be a minor literature, written as it
is in the vernacular of a small people, the Jews, in only one of their
several languages, and only since about the sixteenth century.

Yet because Yiddish literature registers the personal and collective
experience of much of European Jewry, and given that European Jews have
been all too much at the center of modern history, Yiddish literature
turns out to be exceptionally revealing, dramatic, original, and
important. Its study has led Professor Wisse from an initial interest
in _The Shlemiel as A Modern Hero_ to a revised investigation of "the
liberal betrayal of the Jews," which is the subtitle of her latest book
_If I Am Not for Myself_. In between she wrote _A Little Love in Big
Manhattan_ about two Yiddish poets in America, and edited a number of
anthologies of Yiddish prose and poetry in translation."

http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~nelc/faculty/wisse.htm
------------------------

DSH

Lux et Veritas et Libertas

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