On 2/20/2012 3:18 PM, MICHAEL YATES wrote: > Let's see now, Murphy ended his tenure in 1990. It is now 2012. A > lot has happened in higher education since then, not to mention > the larger society. Not much of it good. Murphy was at a public > university with a storied history of free education Columbia is an > elite private institution, with no such storied history. > Hopefully, the new provost will prove a good man. Let's wait and > see. Better him than Jeffrey Sachs. My guess is that Murphy, even > in 1990, was the exception that proves the rule. But, 22 years (30 > if you count when Murphy started) is a long time ago. I quit > teaching in 2001, and I no longer think I know much about how even > the school at which I taught now operates. Perhaps those who are > now professors can chime in. I could be wrong. I mean, after all, > the president of my alma mater was a pretty decent chap, in 1967!! > And my dad had a foreman who was sympathetic to the plight of the > working man, somewhere around 1947!!!
The reason I posted the article was that it fell into the category of man bites dog, rather than the other way around. If Coatsworth was just another asshole, I wouldn't have bothered. I don't think he will have much impact on the overall direction of the university but it is better to have him there than someone more like Glenn Hubbard. There's a lot of very important struggles around academic freedom that have taken place at Columbia since I've been there. They have ramifications beyond the campus. For example, it would have been very bad if Joseph Massad had not gotten tenure. Lee Bollinger is pretty awful in many respects, but I do credit him as a principled free speech defender. He needs people like Coatsworth to have his back. The administration stood up for Edward Said and Nick DeGenova. I should only be so lucky to have someone like Bollinger or Coatsworth running Bard College. The other thing to keep in mind is that Columbia is a very fertile ground for Marxist scholarship. Granted, most of the professors who have such an orientation are like my Film Studies professor, people who have never been involved in struggles and write for small-circulation magazines to burnish their CV's. But getting close to retirement, I can say that on balance the university deserves a lot of credit for providing a platform for unpopular opinions. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
