SHAKE WELL BEFORE USING

On Tuesday, March 15, Pitzer's president and vice-president for academic affairs co-signed a statement of support for, and solidarity with, Ukrainians .  That statement ended with this comment: " We stand with Ukrainians who are demonstrating tremendous bravery, resilience, unity, and courage as they defend their homeland."   What's tragic and disturbing is that this valuable statement against state oppression when Ukrainians are the victims entirely contradicts the administration's opposition to taking a stand against state oppression when Palestinians are the victims.   The recent "Statement on Ukraine" evidences jarring dissonence when read next to  this statement of March 14, 2019 , when the same Pitzer president issued an unprecedented veto of shared governance, in order to block the Pitzer community's taking a stand against Israeli state apartheid and ethnic cleansing.   What follows is my public response to the administration's recent ...

Exactly as if it had been read by a hasbara bot, my Academe piece, " Not All Is Well That Ends Well ," which championed academic freedom, was swiftly greeted by a smear of "hypocrisy" on the misinformed and erroneous grounds that my support for the Palestinian BDS movement is inconsistent with support for academic freedom. Here is the attack , from--I am told--a "very famous" legal scholar, Steven Lubet  of Northwestern Law School. And here is my response , graciously published on the same website that published Lubet's attack piece. It is worth noting that Professor Lubet previously published a hit job in The Chicago Tribune against  Steven Salaita . We might think of someone like Lubet as the pseudo-intellectual arm of and cover for the Canary Mission.  And as I wrote to him in an email, the smears he and others of his ilk make against BDS and its advocates are responsible, in turn, for fostering the sort of democracy-crushing laws discussed in this...

Not All Is Well That Ends Well : BY DANIEL A. SEGAL On April 15 of this year, Pitzer College’s Title IX Coordinator informed me that a student had filed a complaint against me alleging both “harassment on the grounds of sex/gender…

  The Pomona College class of 2025, photo-captured on the steps of Carnegie Hall on August 28th, 2021, image promptly shared on official Pomona social media accounts.  ASSESSING risk is hard, and we can reasonably hope that setting up and photo-capturing the moment above did not result in any transmission of the COVID virus.  Precautions were in fact taken: the students were assembled while wearing masks and were told to remove them just for the photo—and then to re-mask afterward.  And admirably, Pomona requires that students be vaccinated.  Put simply then: the amount of heightened COVID risk for the sake of capturing this photo, while greater than zero, was probably moderate, not extreme.   Yet this relatively happy assessment almost certainly misses this mark on the low side, since the consequences of taking and circulating the photo are not limited to the event itself, meaning to the staging and taking of the photo.  We must also conside...

Ashraf Ghani—the now deposed president of Afghanistan—holds a PhD in anthropology (Columbia '83).  In addition, prior to moving to the World Bank in 1991, he was a professor of anthropology at Johns Hopkins.   There is evidence—from his academic publications in the 1980s and from what folks who “knew-him-when” say—that Ghani once thought and taught valuable anthropology grounded in both the lived experience of ordinary persons and democratic social theory.  And here it ’ s worth recalling that the Hopkins department of his time was rightly recognized as distinctly on the left and opposed to US neo-imperialism, having been founded and led by Sidney Mintz .  I myself found no such evidence of a democratic and anthropological consciousness the  one time I interacted with him, which was during his years at the World Bank.  The occasion was an annual meeting of the Society for Cultural Anthropology; Ghani was the keynote speaker, and I was serving, at the t...

This 2021 fall term, McMaster University and Tel Aviv University are jointly offering an online course, "The Beginning of Science: Ancient Egyptian and Babylonian Conceptions of Space and Time."  As is true of many courses at North American universities in 2021, the syllabus starts with a land acknowledgment.  And taken  on its own, that land acknowledgment  is serious and admirable.   It reads: "We recognize and acknowledge that McMaster University meets and learns on the traditional territories of the Mississauga and Haudenosaunee nations, and within the lands protected by the 'Dish With One Spoon' wampum, an agreement amongst all allied Nations to peaceably share and care for the resources around the Great Lakes." What is missing—and once one sees this, one cannot un-see it—is a comparable land acknowledgment for Tel Aviv University.  Something like this would be in order:  "Tel Aviv University meets and learns on Palestinian land, which has been s...

"Without exception, cultural treasures...have an origin [we] cannot contemplate without horror....There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism."                                                        -- Walter Benjamin, "Thesis VII," On the Concept of History. In recent months and years, names that should never have been affixed to public buildings have been coming down, especially on our college campuses. In 2017, Yale University, for instance, removed the name of white supremacist John Calhoun (Yale 1804), from one of its residential colleges, renaming the college after Grace Murray Hopper (who earned a PhD in maths from Yale in 1934).  It's good to have removed Calhoun's name, but let's agree that it should not have taken a century-plus to know that white supremacism and ...

After a decade hiatus, SHAKE WELL BEFORE USING begins again in August 2021.   Expect posts on the Palestinian solidarity movement, academic freedom, the struggle to end capitalism before it ends us & more.   For now, please remember this:  Bad at Zoom. Good at Life!  

It would be all too easy to identify "the scandal" that made news yesterday -- I am thinking of CMC's false reporting of its students' SAT scores -- as a CMC problem.  And without question, it is a CMC problem.     But it is a mistake to think this is only a CMC problem.  The truth is every college and university that participates in the rankings is implicated, since our participation lends credibility to the rankings.  And the rankings are, without question, garbage. The best response is thus not to castigate CMC (who, after all, needs to be told that false reporting is unethical behavior?); the best response is to encourage our own institutions to stop filling out the survey that is distributed by 'useless news & world distort.'  Once a critical mass of colleges and universities opt-out, this crass commercial project will implode. Put simply: when it comes to college rankings, ...

One question that kept being asked about the public teach-ins organized to "Unwelcome Condoleezza Rice" when she spoke at CMC last week is 'why bother, given that she is no longer in office? ' An important answer to that question can be found by recalling that in February 2010, Newt Gingrich gave the fourth annual Elizabeth Hubert Malott Public Affairs lecture at Scripps College, also here in Claremont.  As with the Condoleezza Rice lecture at CMC, the talk that occured was more an instance of shallow theater than a forum for a robust dialogue across divergent political views.  And as is the case with CMC and Rice, it is misleading to suggest that Scripps "allowed Gingrich to speak"; instead, Scripps as an institution provided him a significant financial incentive to speak and, above and beyond this, performed an accreditation function for him.  For example, the College's...

The world is filled with oddities and wonders. And a small oddity, if not a wonder, is that I received an invitation to a lunch for Condoleezza Rice that was part of her November 30 th speaking engagement at Claremont McKenna College.   The lunch itself was held at the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, in the hotel’s Tiffany Ballroom—rather than here in Claremont.    Though the intended invitees to the lunch were “a special group” of donors to CMC, I had received an invitation—despite not being in that “special group”—due to a connection to CMC that goes back many, many years. The lunch was, then, exclusive, but only on a limited scale.   There were, after all, some 500 other guests.   And for the record, the lunch cost $50 per person—with a signed copy of Rice’s recent memoir, No Higher Honor , included in the cost.       My reason for attending the lunch was to circulate, as widely as possible, criticisms of...

Tomorrow, the 30 th of November, Condoleezza Rice, will be speaking here at the Claremont Colleges, specifically at the invitation of Claremont McKenna College.   Before and during her talk, I will be joining the “Un-Welcome” protest for, and teach-in about, her.  I will do so because I believe Rice is responsible for crimes against democracy and crimes against humanity.   In this regard, two aspects of her government service under George W. Bush are particularly noteworthy:  ● In July of 2002, Condoleezza Rice, as National Security Advisor, conveyed authorization to waterboard to CIA Director George Tenet . [1]   Waterboarding is torture and thus a violation of international law [2] and a violation of basic human rights.    Condoleezza Rice is thus responsible for this crime against humanity. ● In late 2002 and early 2003, Condoleezza Rice, as National Security Advisor, played a central role in circulating and accrediting f...

One of the few things that seems certain about "Occupy Wall Street" and related protests is that these are the most positive and hopeful political events in the United States at this time.  Beyond that, I find myself curious and uncertain. I do believe, however, that those of us who embrace these protests should be thinking and talking about how to make them better--or more precisely, how it might be possible to build on them to foster a robust social justice movement in our time.  Such a social justice movement would work to build a society--indeed, a world--in which the pursuit of profts and pursuit of economic growth (as measured in GDP or other monetary terms) are subordinated to insuring universal access to high quality health care, high quality education, and food security. In terms of thinking and talking about how to build on the Occupy protests with this g...

I had the odd good luck about a week ago (reminder: this is a slow blog) to have a conversation with Chris Thile -- the extraordinary mandolinist and composer -- about musical transcriptions.  In January 2010, I had had the even greater good fortune to hear Thile play -- on the Mandolin -- Bach's Partita No. 2 in D minor.  It was a revelatory experience; indeed, I'd say that listening to that performance was one of a small handful of the most compelling musical experiences I have had over my lifetime. Thile's comment about transcriptions last week was that he found that a succesful transcription of a musical work exposed the "music" of a source piece more clearly or fully than did different "performances" of the piece on the instrument the piece had been written for.  What for me was helpful in Thile's comment was the idea that our sense of the "music" of a piece was heightened when the comparison we had was between versio...

It is worth listening to what commentators are saying about Steve Jobs today, upon his death, for the sake of thinking about "Steve Jobs," the mythology. According to Matt Bai, "Mr. Jobs understood, intuitively, that Americans were breaking away from the last era’s large institutions and centralized decision-making..."  Really, Matt Bai?  Are Americans really breaking away from large institutions and centralized decision-making?  The last time I looked, for example, the U.S. military was an institution that has remained frighteningly large.  So too, the decisions to torture people (by the Bush-Cheney administration) and the decisions to use high tech drones to kill people (by the Obama administration)--I think those are very much cases of "centralized decision-making."  What am I missing?  And to give one more example: when oil gushed into the Gulf of Mexico for three months in 2010, BP (formerly Brit...

A recent news story that has gotten too little attention is that in September, Mitt Romney's campaign announced that Professor Glenn Hubbard of Columbia University had signed on to lead candidate Mitt Romney's economic policy team.   Hubbard is one of the "anti-stars" of Charles Ferguson's searing polemic, Inside Job .  The most surprising section of that movie is its revelation that disciplinary economics has a problem akin to that of medical school faculty who have take unacknowledged payments from Big Pharma for medical "research" they publish.  In his interview in the film, Hubbard stands out for his resistance to transparency about his financial connections to the financial service industry, despite the fact that he was a prominent academic advocate of the deregulation of derivitives, and other highly complex financial products, prior to the Great Recession that began in 2008.  Now Hubb...

The killing last week of Anwar al-Awlaki by a high-tech drone makes abundantly clear what was not, in fact, stated clearly enough when President Obama ran for president in 2008--which is that the Obama alternative to the type of wars waged, with gusto, by G. W. Bush is to greatly expand the use of drones to kill persons identified as US "enemies."  In this context, I do not find myself overly moved by the idea that the rightness or wrongness of such a killing hinges on the citizenship of the person killed.  I get that there is some value in holding up the ideal of the rule of law, but there is also a risk that this concern with the rule of law will take the place of--rather than bolster--a commitment to act ethically (and not merely "legally"). One point that does seem crucial to me is to note just how willing both the Obama administration and the media have been to replace asking whether such ...

In "Australian Aborigine Hair Tells a Story of Human Migration" (published on September 22), Nicholas Wade of the NY Times once again treats his personal judgment that races are biological phenomena as if this understanding of race is an established scientific fact, even though the overwhelming judgment of anthropologists is that human races are solely social constructions.  Wade writes, for example, that Australian "Aborigines are without any genetic mixture from other races."  This phrasing assumes, and conveys to the reader, that there are distinct human races as a matter of genetic (rather than social) fact.  Wade thus abandons his role of journalist by inserting his personal commitment to race and racial distinctions into his reporting. This is a violation of journalistic principles that the Times should not permit. In the same story, Wade provides a striking illustration of his biological understanding of human races: "Europeans and Asians," he ...

The headline on September 12 read: “Fatherhood Cuts Testosterone, Study Finds, for Good of the Family.”   The article – on the front page of the NY Times – told of a recent study that found that becoming a father and engaging in childcare decreases a man’s testosterone levels. For the scientists who produced the study, and for the newspaper’s science reporter alike, there is but a single, inevitable (and thus extra-cultural) consequence of this reported drop in testosterone levels: it makes men, on their view, less likely to seek multiple sex partners and more likely to be monogamous.  The decrease in testosterone is thus “adaptive” to parenting, by virtue of it leading a man to be more anchored to a child’s mother—with the presumption (in the study and news report alike) being that the child in question is indeed the father’s genetic child (as well as the mother’s). What these scientists and the NY Times's science journalist are entirely blind to is the possibi...

Back on May 7th, the headline in the NY Times read: "Pitzer College in California Adds Major in Secularism." The problem is that this headline was simply false.  No major was proposed; and none was approved. The NY Times article also reported the founding of a "department of secular studies" at Pitzer College (along with the major).  The truth or falsity of this second claim is more complex than the claim about the major--but this claim too is largely misleading.   To start, Pitzer prides itself on not having any "departments."  The closest analog to "departments" at Pitzer are odd beasts known as "Field Groups," and these "Field Groups" come in two kinds at the College.  The kind that is most like a department at other colleges are known as "Type A" field groups; there are also "Type B" field groups (which I will explain in a moment).  And the grain of truth in the NY Times story was that Pitzer Colle...