… this week’s elitist whipping boys. I’ve been whipping them. Pretty much everyone’s been whipping them.
There are a few more things to say about Henderson and Peretz, things specific to their membership in university communities. Start with this, from an Atlantic magazine blogger.
I would not have this vast population of people [ – the world’s Muslims – ] presented as smiling egalitarians, characterized by an affinity for peace, love and tickle-fights. I would them presented as problems, brutal and caring, as whole quartiles of humanity tend to be. Bearing that in mind, [Peretz’s] statement “Muslim life is cheap” must be seen not simply as bigoted, but as shockingly stupid. Indeed the precise kind of stupid that hallowed academia exists to disabuse us of.
It’s a simple point, but easily forgotten amid the bigotry of the Peretz remarks. Harvard is the world’s leading university, and, I think, rightly so. When high-profile teachers there go on record, over a long period of time, with gross generalizations, emotional intemperance, and small-minded, in-group, self-regard, they degrade the institution’s intellectual integrity. Worse, they play into the perception that different rules apply to elites, that elites can get away with bad behavior.
On Henderson: Jacob Davies, at Obsidian Wings, has a concise and sensible set of remarks, among them, these responses to Henderson’s fiscal and psychological problems:
Massive debt loads can make you poor whatever your income, and once they’re run up, you don’t get any enjoyment from them. Judging yourself by the standards of wealthy people is a good way to make yourself very unhappy (as is hanging out with wealthy people, often, as many of them didn’t get wealthy by being nice). And you cannot possibly keep up if you try.
I feel bad for the professor for much the same reason I feel bad for anyone who has made a series of bad decisions – that they may have found impossible to avoid making at the time – that have put them in a situation where they are both unhappy and unable to escape the consequences of their actions. I don’t know what advice to offer. But I don’t think avoiding a 4% hike in marginal rates is going to solve his problems.
I’ll add something else, from my perspective as a writer about universities.
Henderson seems a pretty fierce libertarian, complaining, in much of what he has written in response to this dust-up, about the overriding badness of government, and the way it can’t be trusted to do any good with the taxes we give it.
For the sake of moral consistency, Henderson should consider working for private industry. The University of Chicago can give him his enormous salary in part because taxpayers like you and me underwrite non-profit universities. Maybe this is the one and only use of government funds of which Henderson wholly approves; yet I think he owes it to us to explain how he’s able to square being the beneficiary of subsidies with the rest of his social positions.
September 21st, 2010 at 3:21PM
Both points seem to me a bit iffy. Peretz is in a sense a career academic, but he has a high profile because he’s a rich guy who bought a magazine; in the present context, he’s basically a political figure who’s having something named for him – which is problematic in a fairly common way. Henderson is a law professor, and private law schools aren’t significantly subsidized by the government except through “tax expenditures” — a notion he can consistently regard as illegitimate.
September 22nd, 2010 at 7:50AM
On Todd Henderson: The Davies response to the personal complaint aired by Henderson you quoted does seem sensible, while the left-political flack from DeLong, Krugman et al borders on the execrable.
I doubt fierce political partisans like DeLong and Krugman had such harsh words for Henderson’s Chicago neighbor, now First Lady Michelle Obama, when in a speech during the presidental campaign in 2008 she complained to an audience at Zanesille, Ohio (where the average female worker made just over 20K a year) about the Obamas’ ongoing struggle to maintain work and family, citing specifically the costs of piano and dance lessons for her daughters and the school loans that had to be repaid. The Obamas had been millionaires since 2005.
September 22nd, 2010 at 8:15AM
observer: I agree that Michelle Obama’s remark was tone deaf.
September 26th, 2010 at 12:44PM
Belated tangent:
Ta-Nehisi Coates has an excellent blog and runs the best comments on the internet, featuring civil discussions about race and civil war history. Lots of professors read him. “An Atlantic magazine blogger” rubs me the wrong way. Even if you don’t know who he is (and naturally I think you should), it seems dismissive.
September 26th, 2010 at 12:55PM
Dance: I read him every day. I often identify other bloggers in that way. The formulation was not at all dismissive.