The power of the consensus narrative in journalism is all but impermeable to reason or evidence. The right understands this and the left does not. That's why the right worries little about nuance or getting the details straight; it's the story that matters. Once you've defined the story, journalists struggle to make the facts fit the narrative rather than vice-versa.
The consensus narrative with regard to Larry Summers' forced resignation as the president of Harvard is that an honest, albeit blunt, reformer was hounded out of the university by a spoiled, leftist, politically-correct, and lazy faculty that could not handle the demands that they actually teach their classes or pay attention to real world concerns. The narrative was originally framed during the Summers/Cornel West tiff in which Summers deliberately humiliated one of Harvard's best known and most politically active faculty members on the basis of false rumors that he was skipping classes to campaign for Bill Bradley. (Summers also did not like the fact that West recorded a rap CD, but nobody with a brain would argue that a professor does not have the right to do what he wants in his free time.) Anyway, a long article in Vanity Fair by Sam Tanenhaus revealed (as we blogged here on the first real day of Altercation back in May 2002) that Summers was completely misinformed and insulted Cornel in public on the basis of his own ignorance. (He did so, moreover, as West was about to enter the hospital for an operation to remove a very serious case of pancreatic cancer.) West missed no classes to campaign for Bradley or for virtually any other reason.
In any case, nobody cared about the truth and the phony story of West's allegedly missing classes and that lie has been repeated, over and over, in the coverage of Summers' forced resignation. Also missing from many, but not all of these stories is much discussion of the extremely expensive role that Summers' cronyism cost Harvard in the nefarious case of Andrei Shleifer, Summers' close buddy, who appears to have been involved in some extremely questionable and potentially worse, financail shennanigans and who last year agreed to pay $2 million and the university $26.5 million in an out-of-court settlement. Summers refused to discipline his friend, but now that he is no longer being protected, an investigation is being launched. See here.
It's not that there is no truth at all to the popular caricature of lazy and out-of-touch academics, it's just that it's no less true of journalists, of lawyers, and of presidents of the United States. And it appears to have had little to do with the reason that Summers was a such a specatacular failure at Harvard. And yet people who have no particular knowledge of the case--nothing to go on really, except their own ignorant prejudices--feel free to explain it to the rest of us as if they possess a God's eye view. The New York Times op-ed page contained a particularly egregious example of this yesterday in one of those nutty Camille Paglia essays that one would have hoped might have died with Andrew Sullivan's New Republic editorship. A few examples of her unsupported (and mostly unsupportable) allegations below:
Summers "stellar early career as an economics professor did not prepare him for dealing with an ingrown humanities faculty that has been sunk in political correctness for decades. As president, he had a duty to research the tribal creeds and customs of those he wished to convert. Foolishly thinking plain speech and common sense would suffice, he flunked Academic Anthropology 101.... In a widely reported incident four years ago, Mr. Summers's private conversation with Cornel West, one of Harvard's short list of distinguished scholars who have the title of "university professor" (because they teach across department lines), resulted in Dr. West angrily decamping to Princeton. Whatever critique of affirmative action Mr. Summers intended was lost in what became a soap opera of hurt feelings and facile accusations of racism. ..IT now remains to be seen whether Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences is capable of self-critique. Will its members acknowledge their own insularity and excesses, or will they continue down the path of smug self-congratulation and vanity? Harvard's reputation for disinterested scholarship has been severely gored by the shadowy manipulations of the self-serving cabal who forced Mr. Summers's premature resignation. That so few of the ostensibly aggrieved faculty members deigned to speak on the record to The Crimson, the student newspaper, illustrates the cagey hypocrisy that permeates fashionable campus leftism, which worships diversity in all things except diversity of thought.
"If Harvard cannot correct itself in this crisis, it will signal that academe cannot be trusted to reform itself from within. There is a rising tide of off-campus discontent with the monolithic orthodoxies of humanities departments. David Horowitz, a 1960's radical turned conservative, has researched the lopsided party registration of humanities professors (who tend to be Democrats like me) and proposed an "academic bill of rights" to guarantee fairness and political balance in the classroom. The conservative radio host Sean Hannity regularly broadcasts students' justifiable complaints about biased teachers and urges students to take recording devices to class to gather evidence."
Yes you read that right. Sean Hannity and David Horwitz are trotted out as trustworthy, disinterested observers in search of higher truth. Words fail. The piece is here.
Little Roy: I'll pay the parking tickets:
Speaking of the beginning of the end of TNR, Remember David Berkowitz, aka, "Son of Sam?" No, really. Back in the summer of 1977, he would go around killing young women and terrifying the population until he was finally found, I think, in New Rochelle, because of a bunch of unpaid parking tickets. When he was caught, he offered a plea bargain by offering to pay all the parking tickets if the serial killing-related charges were dropped. Petey and I were in high school at the time and we toyed with calling our resume-building humor magazine, "I'll pay the parking tickets." (Other competing titles: "So I Bit Him and "Grandson of Sam.")
Anyway, I was reminded of the plea-bargain offer when I read Andy Sullivan's self-justifying apology in Time this week. I read the piece pretty carefully, but nowhere could I find any mention of the fact that Sullivan accused everyone who understood then what he finally understands now, of being a traitor. Nowhere does he apologize for his lies about yours truly, Susan Sontag or others. (The offer still stands Andy: $10,000 to the AIDS charity of your choice if you can support your accusation that I said I would oppose military action in Afghanistan after 9/11.) His apology, if it can be believed, is based on his belief that he was just too damn idealistic. From his remodeled bathroom in P-Town, this joker takes credit for the invasion of Iraq, and now he wants us to feel sorry for him for getting it a tiny little bit wrong. Perhaps Andy might volunteer to take the place of an innocent prisoner at Abu Graib before he mouths off again about the next "liberation for which he plans to take credit. Atrios and Mickey are together on this one, and Andy's amusingly self-pitying piece is here.
To be fair, while I am picking on other publications, I should note for the record that The Nation published one of the worst pieces I have ever read in the magazine this week. Daniel Lazare's "review" of my friend Todd Gitlin's new book will offer Nation-haters ammunition for years to come. The review is simultaneously smarmy, dishonest, Stalinist, and sectarian in a fashion that dishonors everyone involved with it.
Lazare all but ignores the book itself, which is about topics ranging from post-modernist discourse to life and work of people like C. Wright Mills and like David Riesman, and focuses instead on an essay Gitlin published in Mother Jones that does not appear in the book at all. The reviewer apparently does not approve of patriotism, even in the wake of 9/11, believes that this gives him the right to paint Todd, who spoke at numerous antiwar rallies and called the invasion of Iraq in the very book that Lazare was pretending to review, an example of "runaway bullies, indifferent to principle, playing fast and loose with the truth," as a hypocritical war supporter. (His editor, Adam Shatz did the same thing to Paul Berman on Vietnam years ago, again, apparently on the basis of mind-reading, rather than evidence.) Shatz and Lazarre have together combined to attack not only Gitlin but also Berman, Michael Walzer, David Remnick, Mike Tomasky, and anyone associated with Dissent Magazine, mimicking an obsession evinced in the past by Alex Cockburn, who quite personally attacked the magazine's founder, the late great Irving Howe, while he was still being mourned by those who loved him.
The last time I was forced to take note of Shatz, it was because his author, Mike Davis referred to the honest, honorable, liberal anti-Communists Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Daniel Bell as "hungry sharks" and "hellhounds of the Cold War" because they, not the Nation, were right about Stalin. (That stupid piece is here.) And the last time I was forced to take note of Lazare's review there was when he took great umbrage at an author terming Stalin's Soviet Union to be a "bloodthirsty regime." From what I can judge, the political spectrum of acceptable thought in these review pages stretches all the way from Noam Chomsky to Alexander Cockburn. To be attacked in its pages is a badge of honor. Congratulations Todd. (The piece is, happily, not online, but you can read about the book here. (Note: People should know that the editor in chief and publisher of The Nation is/are not responsible for what appears in the back of the book. They/She retain only the power to hire and fire...)