On Frank Lasee

Frank Lasee, the legislative ally of Steve Nass, has a blog too. Remember, this is the man who spoke so flippantly recently about cutting funding for the Law School by 2010: "We have a plethora of attorneys that clog up our courts; they invent work for themselves, chase ambulances and generally we don't need as many as we have."

Over at Lasee's blog, he takes a quick jab at Chancellor Wiley for his disapproval:

Chancellor Wiley must have been educated in Washington. Only in Washington (now Madison and the University of Wisconsin) is an increase in funding a slash in funding. Kind of like [sic] —I voted for it before I voted against it.

The facts: Republicans in the Assembly are proposing a 3% increase in the funding for the university [sic] in this budget. University of Wisconsin [sic] receives and spends about $1 billion in [sic] our hard-earned tax money each year.

Taxpayers subsidize about one quarter [sic] of the University of Wisconsin’s operating budget. The Assembly has proposed to increase the University’s tax funding by “only” $62 million.

Well, hooray for Lasee. First of all, Wiley's response is nothing like John Kerry saying "I voted for the $87 billion before I voted against it." But Lasee takes the opportunity to allude to a condescending, unfunny political reference that's almost four years old.

Yes, there's a 3% proposed budget increase. But the budget amount itself is not Wiley's chief concern with the Assembly, and Lasee knows it. Nobody has accused the Assembly of proposing a net tax funding decrease. As I've written before, we don't want the Assembly breathing down our necks, deciding which professors are too controversial and which programs may not fit the Assembly's random standard for academic relevancy. If there's a net budget increase -- even a very large one -- that doesn't excuse the cuts being proposed and the bogus rationales for doing so. We're not going to be spoken to like children.

So thanks, Rep. Lasee, for choosing to increase funding for expenditures you and Rep. Nass find unthreatening. Start funding the threatening parts, too, and you'll earn more of our respect.

Keeping a Racial Balance

I'd like to pose this simple statement: We should not be telling parents where they can and cannot send their children to school. I can already hear the righteous agreement from Madison liberals. After all, aren't we toying with individual lives when we make that decision for people?

Yet a family in Madison is going through a hell of an ordeal transferring their 5-year-old daughter from Madison to a Monona Grove school. The girl is white, and Madison officials have explained that her departure would increase a 'racial imbalance' in the public schools. A recent Supreme Court ruling made it possible for them to challenge their treatment.

This brings home to Madison a debate which has raged for years. I like to fall on the side of individual rights, and I believe I don't compromise my basic liberalism when I do that. I hate that we're telling families that our overarching strategic vision for public schools is more important than their personal strategies for a happy life. But this is a more complicated issue than that; as the San Diego Union-Tribune makes clear, maintaining a "racial balance" has a hugely positive effect on most African-American youths. It's also true that public schools have been about social goals ever since their inception.

So I do hope that the family in question is able to go to Monona Grove as soon as possible. And I hope that after that, we can fix this difficult system with equal attention to individual concerns and the goal of basic integration.

Van Hollen v. Steve Nass

Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen has the good sense not to get hysterical about admission policies at UW which take race into consideration. He suggests a more holistic admissions consideration process, which seems like the obvious solution -- there are right and wrong ways to do affirmative action. Steve Nass was quick to respond to Van Hollen's comments:

"I am saddened that the attorney general didn't stand for equal treatment under the law for all applicants to the UW System," said Rep. Steve Nass, R-Whitewater, the chairman of the Assembly Colleges and Universities Committee who first sought an opinion on the matter. "This informal opinion will fast forward the UW System's desire for reverse discrimination."

OK, Rep. Nass. I can't wait to watch Nass try to run for Governor someday. He's like a subtler version of Barney Fife on "The Andy Griffith Show" -- always getting heated up in the name of some harsh principle, never knowing quite what that principle is, and not caring because it makes him look and sound really important to those who aren't paying attention. Nass will talk about affirmative action today, and in this case his viewpoint is absolutely valid despite my disagreement. But tomorrow he'll be the vigilante anti-UW crusader again, blabbering on about cutting off university funding and closing down branches of the sociology department which are too progressive. He's an enemy of academic freedom masquerading as an ally. But you already knew that.

Give it a Rest

Chancellor Wiley meets again with "outraged" members of the Hmong community who are still offended by Prof. Kaplan's comments last Spring. Recall that Kaplan was teaching his class in the Socratic method, putting controversial statements out there and encouraging his students to deal constructively with them. The entire Kaplan non-story was disgusting, unfair, and melodramatic.

Wiley has been a class act on this issue, and knew to turn the meeting's attention to broader (and relevant) issues of Hmong representation on campus. He's correct to speak to the overarching concept of academic freedom, and he knows how to do this without alienating people. (I would be slightly less tactful, and can imagine myself pulling the Constitution out of my back pocket and politely reading it to hysterical Madison residents.) Our Chancellor repeated his standard line:

"Some things are different at a university. It is a place where all ideas are explored, even offensive ones. The best remedy to bad speech is more speech. We have to be open to ideas and talk about them and defeat them...Some are offensive to people of many kinds...I am not asking you to ignore what happened. I'm not excusing it. These things do happen, and we try to learn from it. People need to be respectful in relations with each other."

That's about as good an answer as somebody whose job is forever hanging by a thread can give. I am sure that in his private moments, Wiley knows that Kaplan did nothing wrong at all -- besides exhibiting a subtle, misunderstood teaching style which was over some students' heads. We're lucky to have a Chancellor who refuses to be bullied constantly, at any rate.

Kumar the Populist

Yesterday I briefly mentioned Ashok Kumar's County Board proposal "that would prohibit the county from entering into contracts that generate revenue from incarcerated people, including from phone calls and vending services." After further thought and some research, I'm surprised by how thoughtful and defendable the proposal is. The main issue here appears to be the phone card bills which prisoners' families incur while their loved ones are incarcerated.

According to the Capital Times, the proposal would take effect after roughly two years, giving a controversial phone services contract with IC Solutions time to expire -- and giving the County Board time to figure out alternate sources of revenue. $1.2 million needs to be made up somewhere, which is why I'm still not gung-ho for the proposal. I could envision an unfair policy being replaced with another unfair policy. Anybody catch the recent Operation Duck story?

Richard Knowles, Diamond in the Madison Rough

Al, from A Blog To Be Named Later -- another infant blog -- asks me about quality, non-political English professors at UW. I'm not halfway done with my English major (Political Science is my main focus), but I've been impressed by Prof. Richard Knowles, an old-school expert on Shakespeare and appreciator of aesthetic quality. The Daily Cardinal once ran a brief snippet on him.

Knowles is an enthusiastic (if rather unspoken) supporter of Harold Bloom, the controversial contemporary literary critic who once wrote that "The idea that you benefit the insulted and injured by reading someone of their own origins rather than reading Shakespeare is one of the oddest illusions ever promoted by or in our schools." Knowles' classes do not proclaim this (or any other) specific philosophy of Shakespeare. But as they unravel his respect for the Bard's universal relevance becomes an organizing principle and a powerful statement about what the liberal arts can aspire to.

When Knowles makes a political reference, it's wonderfully tongue-in-cheek and intended as a throwaway to Madison liberals -- who I'm sure he has his own problems with. Definitely take a class by him, on Shakespeare if possible.

As this blog continues, I anticipate it becoming (among other things) an avenue of support for great UW professors who support free and open inquiry and are not bound by political correctness. They're more numerous than it sometimes feels, and Knowles is one of them. Hopefully I'll receive some comments about others.

Defending Huck Finn

Local poet Fabu wrote a column several days ago in The Capital Times talking about the unfortunate continued presence of racism. Near the end of the column, there's a horrible attack on academic freedom. (The stricken words are not my edits.)

One of the biggest shocks for me is not that Mark Twain's "The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn" in 1884, Upton's "The Adventures of Two Dutch Dolls" in 1895,
Debussy's "The Little N---" in 1909, Agatha Christie's "Ten Little N---" in 1939
and all of the artistic creations that insulted black people were created long
ago, but that people still justify their existence and minimize their
offensiveness to an entire race of people even today. I went through Mark
Twain's book, struck out every N word and hated every class that included the
book.

Did Fabu read Huckleberry Finn instead of going through it with a Sharpie? It includes the N-word hundreds of times, but Huck transcends the stereotypes and terminology of the era by emerging as a profoundly colorblind individual -- one who rebels against his family, the South, and ultimately God and religion in trying to free his friend, the slave Jim. (I'm convinced I have the third and final section of the book -- the most troubling to censors -- correctly interpreted.) Furthermore, Huck does this as a teenager barely through puberty, so of course he describes his experiences using the jargin of the time -- who could expect anything more of him? By the end of the book, Huck is not a racist no matter what words he uses.

I don't want to "minimize the offensiveness" of Huck Finn to Fabu, because the N-word is offensive and racist and harkens back to an era we still struggle to divorce from completely. I am not an African-American, and I don't know how it feels to be called something so hateful. But Huck Finn is an essential novel, and despite its seemingly-racist rawness, it is not a racist work. Rather, the novel did more to advance the humanist argument against slavery and dehumanization than almost any other piece of 19th-century literature. Humanism is the opposite of bigotry and prejudice; so it was with Twain too. We shouldn't be scared of books. Those who resent Huck Finn argue for a phony liberal arts environment devoted more to intimidation and censorship than any real, enduring truth or conception of social justice.

Getting Things Straight

Paul Soglin reminds us of Wisconsin's rich intellectual heritage -- which by itself rebukes the politicking of Steve Nass. About our campus, he writes:

"...while at some later date, the private sector alone may have solved these
problems, it was an institution that relishes academic freedom that did the work
with a combination of private and pubic money, but most of all the dedication of
a free and independent faculty that entertained the most unpopular ideas."

That's absolutely correct. Academic freedom is still a value of our university, and usually a value of our current administration. As I've said before, we have a way of repairing ourselves from the inside without exterior threats from the private sector or politicians. My only concern, once people like Nass are firmly rebuked by the reasonable, is how we're going to do precisely that:

There is a striking lack of conservative professors on campus. Everybody's favorite example of a conservative professor, John Sharpless, admitted to me he would be a Democrat anywhere else in the state. Liberalism is defined by the activists without any internal debate on certain items, especially foreign policy and, specifically, war. Most incoming conservative undergraduates I know are initially somewhat embarrassed about their political beliefs, before either assimilating into the liberal fold or finding a new way of intellectual expression. English classes, as I've noted, have become politicized; literature is not studied for aesthetic value, but for political importance -- reading Heart of Darkness now incorporates the question of whether we should be reading it at all. A brilliant and tenured English professor whose name I'll omit looked me sadly in the eye one day and said "I don't even recognize my own department anymore."

There are no budgetary solutions to the current state of academic freedom at UW, because it's more abstract than anybody would wish. That makes it more difficult to solve than, say, a speech code or high-profile violation. We should depend upon the Wisconsin Idea which Soglin alludes to in his post; it's gotten us through worse times than this.

Reaction Threads

Drifted by a Weil sums up the way reaction threads unfold at the Badger Herald -- basically the same way they do here, it seems. There's the bubble for you.

Thanks

I just wanted to thank the handful of you who have already started reading this blog and telling your fellow bloggers. The warm welcome has been great. Some of you have given me excellent starting advice, and I'm appreciative. It feels awesome to be doing this.

G'night,
Eric

Sisyphus on Hitchens

New Sisyphus gets it completely right in his discussion of Hitchens' recent review of Mark Steyn's new book:

"In other words, the leading man of the Left has met the leading man of the
Right and they've walked away from the encounter almost shoulder-to-shoulder.
This says something about our continued vitality and our prospects. The obvious
objection is that Hitchens is "no longer of the Left", but for reasons too
complicated to go into here, I do not believe that this is the case. I believe
his thought is still solidly leftist in outlook and his values, if mobilized
correctly, would rally a significant portion of the American and Euro Left."

The development (or reaffirmation) of a more coherent internationalist liberalism must make Madison liberals cringe with confusion. There needs to be a serious, sustained discussion at UW about what it means to be a liberal. This is related to our reputation as a politically-open university. If you can't tell already, I'm really excited for Hitch's visit. But I've been banging away about my hero all day, and this will be enough of that business for the time being...

Ashok Kumar

I have had only very minimal contact with Ashok Kumar during my two years thus far at UW-Madison. I remember the District 5 Dane County Board of Supervisors race in Spring '06, during which I planned a debate between Kumar and his opponent, David Lapidus. About twelve people showed up, all recruited by me at the very last second. It reminded me that as dramatic as these student races can be (we're still talking about Kumar, Lapidus, Korn, and Cornelius) the issues are often pushed to the back. But anyways, both Kumar and Lapidus were perfectly agreeable to work with and I enjoyed the opportunity to plan the event with them. In terms of a robust policy debate, they rose to the occasion. Too bad nobody -- and here nobody is almost the perfect word -- showed up to hear it.

I have pretty serious political differences with Kumar; he's a radical, I'm a flexible liberal. My favorite memory of the '06 Supervisor race was a handout he circulated declaring himself (probably not with this exact wording) "A Brave Voice Against War and Empire." I remember staring at that and marveling that local Madison politics had only then hit the breaking point for melodrama.

And this recent post by Drifted by a Weil, accusing Kumar of falsely telling a cute girl he was a vegetarian, is hilarious. It's a fun, light-hearted anecdote, and I appreciate Matt sharing it. Kumar is a public figure now, I suppose, and stuff like this comes with the territory. I don't know whether the story is true or not. Probably, it's a little bit of both. But even if it is completely true, it says very little about Kumar's ethics. A lot of people -- myself included --have experimented with vegetarianism and been sincere about the attempt, only to inevitably fall back into a life of burgers and chicken sandwiches. That's probably a little more benefit-of-the-doubt than Ashok needs, but there you have it. And of course, I can't comment on the various other ethical violations he's been accused of -- first, because I have no correspondence with him, and second, because my few times associating with him have been overwhelmingly positive anyways.

That's why I appreciate Something Verbose's attempt to discuss one of Kumar's specific policy proposals: ending revenue gains from incarcerated prisoners in Dane County. There are two equally convincing sides to the issue (one populist, one pragmatic) which Something Verbose fleshes out. I'm not sure where I stand yet, but the existence of the debate suggests that Kumar might be (more research is needed here, and I'm sure some will disagree) actually transferring his youthful activism to actual policy proposals.

Vintage Hitchens, defending Salman Rushdie

Hitchens has moments of genuine, sincere charm -- but he also has moments where he is deeply offended by moral cowardice, especially when defending his friend Salman Rushdie against apologists for the fatwa against him. Watch this video for a taste of what Madison can expect come October.

More on Steve Nass

Paul Soglin of Waxing America nails Rep. Nass, this time for his skepticism towards research at UW about the positive effects of playing fantasy baseball online. The trick to understanding Nass is realizing there is no explanation. His political goal is undermining UW-Madison, and his strategy is to level a dull pastiche of criticisms -- a few potentially relevant, most ass-backwards -- at campus life to make people scared of what goes on here. To fix a university, you need to respect how intellectual life operates and know when it's not working. Nass thinks he can eke out a philosophy of education with random jabs and accusations.

Stay Safe

Critical Badger posts the most recent police-circulated email about campus safety. These emails can get annoying, I know, but this is serious stuff. Lock your doors!

On Ward Churchhill

The University of Colorado just fired Ward Churchill for "academic misconduct," including "misrepresenting the effects of federal laws on American Indians, fabricating evidence that the Army deliberately spread smallpox to Mandan Indians in 1837 and claiming the work of a Canadian environmental group as his own," reports the Associated Press. His controversial statements and publications about 9-11 had nothing to do with the investigation, although Churchhill did not become suspect until the uproar surrounding his opinions.

It sounds like the University of Colorado did the right thing here. The Colorado Board of Regents emerged as strong supporters of Prof. Churchill's First Amendment freedoms during the controversy. But note, also, that increased public attention automatically leads to increased scrutiny -- Churchill has become a high-profile spokesman for himself ever since his 9-11 writings surfaced, and close attention to his other academic writings was inevitable. That those writings have turned out to be fabricated or disingenuous has nothing to do with the basic First Amendment issue at hand.

How is this relevant to UW? For starters, I seriously doubt the ability of UW-Madison to deal with a situation on the scale of Ward Churchill. Last fall's decision to retain Kevin Barrett -- a goofy, irrelevant lecturer with an equally goofy conspiracy theory -- seemed major enough. Imagine us confronted with a professor like Churchill -- an intimidating, bullying, savvy figure, published prolifically in anti-American journals, who has written that the victims of 9-11 deserved it (an opinion which, goofiness aside, Kevin Barrett has not even flirted with.) UW is met with comparatively minor issues of academic freedom every year, and our State Legislature hates us enough for those. Could we stand up to the Rep. Nasses of the world if we were in Colorado's position? Would we want to? The fates of our respective public universities are linked, after all.

Support Hitch!

The Capital Times editorial board runs an articulate statement defending Hitchens' upcoming trip to Madison. Indeed Hitchens is an essential player who we should follow very carefully. I'm impressed that both local papers have been quick to report his agreement to speak here, and I detect excitement in the air. Some of that is due to the success of God is not Great, to be sure, but Hitch coming to Madison is heart-pounding news anyday. Money quote:

"Many disagree with Hitchens' views -- we disagreed strongly with his support for attacking Iraq, and he has certainly taken his hits from many quarters for his ardent atheism. But we should all recognize that he is one of the age's most fascinating thinkers. And his determination to bluntly express viewpoints that are so frequently forbidden makes him an essential player in a national debate that is so frequently emptied of meaning by its caution."

Steve Nass's Continued Assault

State Representative Steve Nass is serious about manipulating state funding to force UW-Madison to adjust it's ideology. Let's get one thing straight: There are a lot of programs at Madison which are more ideological than academic -- names will be named later. There are a lot of professors and instructors who dabble in the ideological irresponsibly. The insane and irrelevant Kevin Barrett, quoted in the piece, is as good an example as any. But these are issues which UW can sort out for itself, while remaining true to its creed, and any respectable Badger should demand an end to this politicking. We are not a spoiled liberal child whose parents (here, Nass and the state legislature) need to cut off our allowance to get us to behave better. The parents here have a misguided idea of what we are doing wrong, and their goals for our campus are as immature and ideological as some of the elements being targeted.

I browsed around the website for the Havens Center, the progressive off-shoot of the sociology department which Nass is seeking to eliminate. I looked at their description, which does not deceive potential donors; it calls itself a "combination of progressive political commitment and scholarly rigor." And I looked at their past events, a broad selection of speakers dealing with race, class, and gender. It all seemed very dogmatic and progressive at first, and for a moment I felt like very tentatively sympathizing with Nass, until I realized that I'd never been to a Havens Center event and neither (presumably) has he. Their next event, on October 10, is a lecture by Boris Kagarlitsky, an academic from Moscow who organized workers' movements in the Soviet Union and was imprisoned by the Soviet government for distributing suppressed grassroots literature. Kagarlitsky is a socialist, but he opposed the Soviet order, and will no doubt touch upon that opposition in his speech. We should be honest: During the immediate post-Soviet era, when George H.W. Bush's approval ratings were northward of 90 percent, Kagarlitsky is a speaker that Rep. Nass might have loved.

The issue is not whether the Havens Center has a stated political orientation. It does. Rather, we should be asking whether it has an academically irresponsible, inflexible bent which makes students uncomfortable and serves no purpose. If the Center is an organization which presupposes that progressive policies lead to the best sociological outcomes, UW might be right to withdraw funding very quickly. But they appear to be more open-minded, more transparent, and more focused than other more indirect ideological positioning at UW -- here, the Comp. Lit. and English departments are good examples. (I have been told in an English class than Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde might be a metaphor for turn-of-the-century homosexual panic.) But we'll fix the English department, just like we'll fix the Havens Center if it stops being relevant. The key word there is we'll. This is an issue for UW, best handled by supporters of academic freedom who have experienced the Madison bubble and know how to change it and who to ask for help. Nass wouldn't ask to cut funding for the English department no matter what he found out about it -- and let's hope he finds out very little.

Mr. Hitchens Goes to Madison

Christopher Hitchens is coming to Madison on October 13 to address the Freedom from Religion Foundation. This is great news for a city that has ignored Hitchens for some time, and it will be interesting to see how people react to a leftist speaker who takes a hard-line stance on terrorism and jihad. As it usually is with Hitchens, the Wisconsin State Journal gives a rather mindless summation of his positions:

Hard to peg politically, Hitchens has been an enthusiastic supporter of the Iraq war, yet delighted in the death of the Rev. Jerry Falwell, calling him an "ugly little charlatan" in a CNN interview.

And here we have a perfect opportunity to kick off one of this blog's central themes: Political philosophies which don't mirror the tepid anti-war Madison Left -- especially liberal ones -- really confuse and bother Madison liberals. Hitchens is not "hard to peg politically" at all for anybody who is paying attention. He's a 1930's-style liberal with leftist economic and social views who sees the war on terror -- and in his estimation (not mine), the war in Iraq -- as necessary conflicts for preserving Western liberal secular values. That's a perfectly coherent, exciting politics which should be appreciated and recognized no matter one's own slant.

This blog is intended to be about Madison politics, and so it shall be. But the Hitchens snippet is a great way to set the general tone of what I hope will be a long and productive exercise in critical thinking. UW-Madison is an essential university -- a public college of great academic productivity, large and broad enough to be all things for all people. At our best moments we make the case for public colleges. But at our worst we lack a strong appreciation for academic freedom, ideological openness, and political diversity. We should be about all three of those things, without apology, and we haven't completely embraced them yet. Hitchens should come to Madison precisely because he defies our preconceived notions of what politics should sound like, and how liberals should behave. His speech (if the public is able to see it -- not just FFRF members) could help move us beyond the bubble we love to frolic in. He could help us grow up.