A writer in The Forward isolates a major motive behind Joseph Epstein’s notorious WSJ essay : Keeping certain categories of people out of the senior common room.
But when UD considers Epstein’s own number one intellectual exemplar, the room looks a bit dull-witted. The critic Hilton Kramer, for instance, “argued that Mikhail Gorbachev was a far bigger threat to the free world than Joseph Stalin had ever been,” notes Jeet Heer.
Kramer
stood in steadfast opposition to the idea that gays should be open and equal citizens in a democratic polity. He did this moreover not by making any rational arguments against gay equality but by constantly and snidely assuming that the very practice of gay sex was naturally repugnant to all right-thinking people.
Queers and women seemed to rub him the wrong way.
About one of America’s most prominent female intellectuals Kramer wrote, “In the end, Mary McCarthy’s politics were like her sex life—promiscuous and unprincipled, more a question of opportunity than of commitment or belief.” When writing about sexually active heterosexual male intellectuals (notably McCarthy’s ex-husband Edmund Wilson) Kramer somehow avoided the word promiscuous. Like a school yard bully, Kramer knew that slut-shaming is reserved for girls.
When you add to the common room the whole guy gang Epstein hung out with in those heady intellectual days, the place looks positively scummy. Kramer was a trustee at Adelphi University, an institution being run into the ground by Kramer’s buddy, the scandalous Peter Diamandopoulos. It took years of litigation for Adelphi to get rid of Diamandopoulos, who basically spent every moment of his presidency taking as much money as he could out of the school.
While president of Adelphi, Diamandopoulous arranged an honorary degree for Joseph Epstein. Given the vileness of this university-dismantler, it is in fact a dishonorary degree, and Epstein should have repudiated it.
A few scenes starring these stewards of the university:
[Diamandopoulos] entertaining his old friend on the board, John Silber, over dinner and drinks ended up costing Adelphi $546. Dr. Silber was president and is now chancellor of Boston University.
The next day, food and drinks with another trustee, Hilton Kramer, and a second guest cost the university $707. Mr. Kramer is The New York Observer’s art critic and a media critic for The New York Post.
The meal charges were actually modest; it was the bar tab that drove up the grand total. The bill was $454 for the 1982 Brion wine and Martell 100 cognac that Dr. Silber and Dr. Diamandopoulos drank. And the 1983 Chaval and Martell that he and Mr. Kramer sipped cost $552.
Promiscuous and unprincipled at the expense of the students for whom he was supposed to be acting as a trustee, Kramer seems a strange moral or intellectual exemplar for anyone – except, I guess, for Epstein.
You name the scandal, one of America’s most Catholic educational institutions has a high-profile entry. Georgetown had more Varsity Blues bogus students than anyone else; its longtime tennis coach is just a plain old career criminal; a half dozen priests with Georgetown associations “have [recently] been credibly accused of sexually abusing minors.” It took ages and lots of pressure from students for it to revoke the honorary degree it gave to super-sexed Theodore McCarrick, a regular and adored presence in Georgetown’s chapels and classrooms. And so it goes.
And I mean yeah it really goes. Like every month. This month there’s the knotty little matter of one of its football players getting arrested for first degree murder.
Clearly the Jesuits running the school are weenies. A firm hand is needed, and UD recommends as next Georgetown president Pater Edmund Waldstein, a leader of the Adrian Vermeule-sponsored Cathophate-to-Come, who would not hesitate to burn people at the stake.
“I have friends who have smart sons with great marks, great boards, great everything and they can’t get into Harvard,” Trump said. “We don’t know a thing about this guy. There are a lot of questions that are unanswered about our president.”
Well at least – thanks to Mary Trump’s forthcoming book – we now know how Donald Trump got into an Ivy League school.
As a high school student in Queens, Ms. Trump writes, Donald Trump paid someone to take a precollegiate test, the SAT, on his behalf. The high score the proxy earned for him, Ms. Trump adds, helped the young Mr. Trump to later gain admittance as an undergraduate to the University of Pennsylvania’s prestigious Wharton business school.
A couple of things will follow from this Least Surprising Revelation of the Decade:
Uncle Don will tweet that Mary is a fucking piece of shit cunt whore piece of shit. He will then have Kayleigh McEnany announce that “the president was unable to take the SAT due to a disabling bone spur.”
U Penn will take a good hard look at the accolades it has bestowed upon its highest profile grad (“[Trump was] appointed to Wharton’s Board of Overseers in 1987, and the following year appeared in a video promoting the business school. Trump received an award from Wharton in the fall of 2014, just eight months before announcing his candidacy, and the most favorable recent mention of him as an alum comes in Wharton’s list of “125 Influential People and Ideas” from 2012.”). It will cross itself with relief and self-congratulation that it never gave him an honorary degree (Lehigh University however…), and it will announce that it’s opening an investigation into Trump’s degree. With an eye toward rescinding it. I mean, Varsity Blues is one thing…
Oh, and Jared… You’re up…
Oh! And in about a half hour, the Lincoln Project will release a new thigh-slapper.
A law school doesn’t have to stand for much but it at least has to stand for the rule of law or it’s just $200K and three years of reading Enlightenment fan fiction. Gassing peaceful protesters, illegally bringing National Guard troops into Washington, and hiring… whoever the hell these paramilitary shocktroops are, all safely fall outside the confines of “respecting the rule of law.” Taking away a fake degree — and perhaps the “William P. Barr Dean’s Suite” that graces the school — would seem the very least that the school could do to protect their legacy.
Joe Patrice at Above the Law notes that UD‘s school – GW – has plenty of reasons not to want to be associated with Trump’s militarized attorney general; and, having awarded him a “fake degree” — that is, an honorary one (he also has an actual law degree from GW) — it shouldn’t have much ambivalence about revoking it. Patrice also notes the bs about slippery slopes universities always generate when this very rare event – degree revocation – occurs:
The slippery slope … continues its undefeated reign as the logical fallacy of choice for anyone interested in draping immorality in the faux high-minded vestments of amorality.
As you know if you’ve read this blog for any period of time, a recent GW president lustily and certainly amorally defended Bill Cosby’s right to hold on to his GW honorary degree, despite Cosby’s having drugged and raped all those women. (For UD‘s posts on that revocation story, go here.)
As for the Dean’s Suite, I think they should maintain that, and simply add a dollop of commentary. Post six of these at the entrance. It would only set the school back three hundred bucks.
… these are the holdouts, the strenuously, stubbornly, principled schools that will NOT revoke Bill Cosby’s honorary degree. There may be other schools as well, but UD is only aware of these three.
Even Temple University, which has been Cosby’s whore for decades, just revoked his degree.
And you know what else? The United States of America will not revoke his degree. Or, uh, medal. President Obama long ago said no can do. And why?
There’s no “precedent.” We have no “mechanism.” In this oure antient lande, one may not change that which hath already beene done.
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Awright awready! We’re looking into it! Sheesh!
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That ol’ can-do, American, spirit.
… which the university will ignore.
[T]he Tufts administration still has not openly acknowledged the [opioid merchants] Sacklers’ role in fueling the opioid crisis. In light of the recent exposés, Tufts should publicly recognize its own complicity in receiving money tainted by the epidemic, resolving to take an active stance against it. In order to align its values, Tufts should change the name of its biomedical school to better reflect the mission of the institution. With any remaining funds from the Sackler family, Tufts should fund research grants for the opioid crisis and further support outreach programs for its victims.
[President] Monaco and the Tufts Board of Trustees should revoke the honorary degree conferred on Raymond Sackler posthumously. There is past precedent for this. Bill Cosby, although never found guilty of sexual assault, had his honorary degree revoked by Tufts. Someone the university has honored has committed an egregious moral, if not illegal, offense, and the university must withdraw its support.
Tufts won’t ignore the, er, Sackler problem forever. But, like Yale, it will hem and haw and harrumph as long as it possibly can.
Will it, like SUNY Buffalo, still burdened with the risible Kapoor School of Pharmacy, decide (Buffalo will probably decide – especially if their man goes to jail) to desacklerize (Clever, UD. Why is it clever? Because it’s very close to desacralize, see.) its biomed school?
Probably. The Sacklers are still dumping their opioids all over Asia. But the decision will be long in coming. From Yale and from Tufts we will hear a long involved contradictory emotional story about what a blessing opioids have been for the world though unfortunately… I mean, to be sure…
With Fran Lebowitz’s words in mind (UD, you recall, interviewed Lebowitz not long ago), let us once again, very gingerly, sidle up to the Sketchy Benefactor problem — the problem with your university taking hundreds of millions of dollars from people who… eh… meh… bleh…
Take Michael Milken. Start with him because he’s local – I mean, local to ol’ UD, because he bought her university a very beautiful building which houses a very fine school of public health, which he also bought for us.
If there is a poster boy for the redemptive powers of philanthropy, it’s Michael Milken. In 1993 the former junk bond king of Drexel Burnham Lambert emerged from a minimum security federal prison after serving 22 months of a 10-year sentence for securities fraud. He seemed a new man — partly because he had abandoned his toupee — and this revised Milken took advantage of his freedom by dedicating himself to giving back. (His finances quickly recovered after he paid the $600 million in fines and restitution; his current net worth is estimated at more than $2 billion.) In the decades since, he has donated consistently and significantly: more than $60 million to teachers and $50 million to George Washington University’s school of public health. His Prostate Cancer Foundation has raised $210 million. There is plenty of evidence that these good works are sincere. Is it also useful? Well, when news of a new SEC investigation into whether Milken’s involvement with Guggenheim Partners had violated his lifetime ban from the securities industry, Milken’s official denial in Fortune magazine read like a recap of his past 20 years of giving.
So no problem with Milken’s name being all over the GW landscape because he paid his debt to society and though in a perfect world we might prefer not to be associated with someone who had to do that in the first place, okay. But what if, while no longer flagrantly stealing, he’s still a sketchy person who when cornered on alleged continued sketchiness points directly at my university and what he gave it in order to exonerate himself?
Yes, GW’s had to deal with sketchy performers and sketchy honorary degree recipients lately; but this is small-time one-off stuff compared to (switching universities here) putting Steven Cohen or Bernard Madoff on your board of trustees or plastering sketchy names all over your most prominent buildings.
I mean… Seton Hall!
Or, staying with Catholic schools here, there’s the lawsuit against Georgetown University for failing to put a donor’s name on a building he bought just because the donor was convicted of insider trading. A long lawsuit between the guy and the university ensued, and if you go to the campus today you can take in the Scott K. Ginsburg Sport & Fitness Center — although, curiously, when you click on the Google link to an article in a university publication titled GEORGETOWN LAW CELEBRATES THE SCOTT K. GINSBURG SPORT & FITNESS CENTER, the connection times out. UD‘s gonna guess they caved, they settled with the guy, they put his name on the building and grimaced through its christening, and then they removed from sight all online references to having celebrated any of this…
Anyway, it’s an old story. Lure of lucre. Lure of respectability. UD only brings it up because of the very strange ongoing latest Caspersen story. The sketchy Caspersen family has a long and important donor relationship with Harvard, and as the alleged actions of the father and now the son tarnish the name more and more, there’s the question of how much tarnishing-by-association Harvard will tolerate. It’s not merely that the Caspersen name is prominent on campus; it’s that in virtually every news article about Andrew Caspersen’s court dates and bail amounts Harvard prominently appears.
You might say Harvard’s too rich and prestigious to care. You might be right. But remember that Harvard is under constant pressure from the government and the media and even from within to account in some way for its immense accumulated wealth. Fighting an ongoing battle against releasing a nickel of its money (this cartoon is out of date; the endowment’s now worth way more than 35 billion) is not made easier by one story after another about sketchy rich people who have helped put Harvard way over the top. In the case of Caspersen’s father, for instance, if it turns out that he did in fact evade taxes on a large scale (this has not been proved; he was under investigation by the IRS at the time of his death), Americans might actually stop and ask themselves why they are both giving huge tax breaks to Harvard University and tolerating donors who are tax evaders. Is zat how Harvard got so rich that the fact of its richness has now become a national controversy? Through ripping us off via tax breaks and then ripping us off again via tax evasions?
Could Republican voters be the next awakened fleecees?
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In other Trump/university news: A foreign university has already revoked a Trump honorary degree. Now an American university – Lehigh – has begun talking about the whole honoring Trump thing.
The professor initiating discussion about the Trump degree at Lehigh University specializes in draining away gunk in order to stabilize environments.
… UD proposes that George Washington University’s last president, Stephen Trachtenberg, volunteer to appear at his trial as a character witness.
In arguing that GW should not revoke the honorary degree it gave Cosby a few years ago, Trachtenberg wrote:
What good would it do to void Mr. Cosby’s diploma? Who actually celebrates it today? He is revealed and reviled… There is a rough charm to the proposal that we should recall our degree from Mr. Cosby, but it is a blunt instrument that does not do real justice to the dreadful challenge it seeks to address. It does not actually get to right. It provides no real comfort to the abused.
Mr. Cosby knows that we no longer esteem him. Everybody knows. He is down. He is out. The degree is as null and void as it can be. It is self-executing. However much he may deserve it, I am disinclined to kick him again to underscore our own virtue. It’s too easy.
And now some district attorney is about to kick him yet again! It seems to UD that the same language Trachtenberg has used to attack self-righteous people only interested in underscoring their own virtue can be used to attack the court for having arrested Cosby.
What good does it do to arrest Mr Cosby? Who actually celebrates him today? He is revealed and reviled… There is a rough charm to the proposal that we should haul the courts into this situation, but they are a blunt instrument that does not do real justice to the dreadful challenge [they seek] to address. It does not actually get to right. It provides no real comfort to the abused.
Mr. Cosby knows that we no longer esteem him. Everybody knows. He is down. He is out…. However much he may deserve it, I am disinclined to kick him again to underscore our own virtue. It’s too easy.
A president who drives your university into junk status and gives Bernard Madoff an honorary degree doesn’t come cheap.
You start at a lower level than Yeshiva University, haunt of too many financial criminals and close-to-criminals to count (put YESHIVA in this blog’s search engine to sample merely the Madoff and post-Madoff eras); you start in high school, where Sheldon Silver’s son-in-law, himself a convicted Ponzi schemer, apparently taught economics to the lads.
Silver, whose piety is splashed all over today’s headlines, is a proud son of Yeshiva University – honorary degree recipient, commencement speaker.
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A look back: Jeffrey Goldberg asks why.
When I lived in Washington, I attended Kesher Israel regularly. It was a thrill to sit behind Senator Joseph Lieberman, Leon Wieseltier and other luminaries of the American Jewish scene. They and many others took pride in articulating a literate, intelligent Modern Orthodox Jewish sensibility – and Freundel was an exemplar of it…
All this time, he was a sex offender, a fraud and a pervert.
… [T]he Freundel scandal looks a lot like the Madoff* scandal. There are questions that should have been asked, suspicions that should have been raised. But the self-reinforcing loops of elite power — X likes him, X is powerful, therefore I should like him — blinded those entrusted to keep watch.
And then there are the nonsexual allegations. One of Freundel’s victims, Bethany Mandel, told The Daily Beast that we’ve gotten Freundel wrong. “People keep calling him a pervert and yes, he’s a pervert, but he’s also a power hungry sociopath,” Mandel said. “It wasn’t about porn. It was about power, and this was additional power no one knew he had.”
This, too, should have been visible in plain view to anyone who worked closely with Freundel.
… It can seem, downing a shot of whiskey with someone of influence, that you are in the presence of greatness. Really, you are only in the presence of power.
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* Board Chair, Sy Syms School of Business; Honorary Degree recipient; Treasurer, Board of Trustees — all at Yeshiva University.
Jill Abramson has elected not to attend commencement ceremonies at Brandeis University, where she would’ve received an honorary degree this weekend…
… Brandeis previously canceled plans to award an honorary degree to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a women’s rights activist who frequently criticized Islam.
Dear me. Between various cancellations and regrets, Brandeis seems headed for an all-male commencement.
… controversy currently raging about Brandeis University having changed its mind about the honorary degree they announced they were going to give Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a very outspoken – really, at times, an over the top – critic of Islam.
You’re supposed to be on one of two sides about this: She’s a pernicious Islamophobe and good riddance; or, she’s not all that different in the ferocity of her some of her statements from other people who have been honored in this way by Brandeis so what the hell.
UD‘s thing is: Whatever brings more attention to this woman’s powerful attacks on female genital mutilation and full veiling is a good thing. Instead of Hirsi Ali getting a nice little notice in a Brandeis University alumni magazine, she’s getting immense tons of coverage from the world’s media. Brava.
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UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan gets it said.
