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Paul Leser (* 23. Februar 1899 in Frankfurt am Main; † 22. Dezember 1984 in Hartford, Connecticut, Vereinigte Staaten) war ein deutsch-amerikanischer Ethnologe.

Leben
Paul Leser entstammte einer wohlhabenden jüdischen Frankfurter Familie. Sein Vater war Oberlandesgerichtsrat. Leser besuchte von 1908 bis 1917 das Goethe-Gymnasium in Frankfurt (Main), studierte seit 1919 Völkerkunde an der Universität Bonn. Er war Schüler von Fritz Graebner und wurde von ihm im März 1925 promoviert. Von 1928 bis 1930 war er wissenschaftlicher Hilfsarbeiter am Museum für Völkerkunde in Frankfurt am Main. 1929 habilitierte er sich an der Technischen Hochschule Darmstadt und wurde Privatdozent für Völkerkunde. Von 1929 bis 1933 lehrte als Privatdozent für Völkerkunde an der Technischen Hochschule Darmstadt. Leser wurde 1933 als nicht beamteter Privatdozent entlassen. Das Fach Völkerkunde wurde daraufhin an der TH Darmstadt nicht mehr angeboten.

Paul Leser war in der Jugendbewegung im Nerother Wandervogel engagiert und gründete im November 1933, nach der von den Nationalsozialisten erzwungenen Auflösung des Bundes, gemeinsam mit Wolf Kaiser den illegalen Orden der Pachanten. Im Februar 1936 floh er aus Deutschland über Dänemark nach Schweden. Ab 1937 lebte er in Stockholm. Im Jahr 1942 brach er von Göteborg über Barcelona in die USA auf. Nachdem er zwischenzeitlich für die United States Army tätig war, er kämpfte in Nordafrika und Italien, lehrte er an verschiedenen amerikanischen Universitäten. Von 1952 bis 1967 war er Professor für Anthropologie in Hartford (Connecticut). Als Gastprofessor wirkte er 1958 an der Universität Köln und 1966/67 an der Universität Wien. Seit 1968 war er Präsident des Ständigen Internationalen Ausschusses für die Erforschung der Geschichte der Bodenbaugeräte.

Sein wissenschaftliches Hauptwerk ist das 1931 erstmals erschienene Buch Entstehung und Verbreitung des Pfluges. Auf fast 700 Seiten gibt Leser einen umfassenden Überblick über sämtliche Pflugformen der Erde, führt diese mit ca. 300 Abbildungen vor und beschreibt kritisch die unterschiedlichen Theorien über die Entstehung dieses wichtigsten Gerätes zur Bodenbearbeitung im Landbau.

Ehrungen
 1969: Ehrenmitglied der Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte

Hauptwerk
 Entstehung und Verbreitung des Pfluges. Aschendorffsche Verlagsbuchhandlung Münster i. W. 1931 (= Anthropos-Bibliothek Band 3, H. 3). Reprint-Ausgabe herausgegeben von: The International Secretariat for Research on the History of Agricultural Implements, National Museum, Brede. Lyngby (Denmark) 1971. Hier Kurzbiographie u. Foto von Paul Leser, sowie Bibliographie seiner Schriften bis 1970.

Literatur
 Bibliography Paul Leser. On the Occasion of his 80th Birthday on February 23, 1979. Edited by Absalom Vilakazi. University of Hartford, West Hartford, Conn. 1979.
 Isabel Schmidt: Die TH Darmstadt in der Nachkriegszeit (1945–1960). Dissertation, Darmstadt 2014.
 Christa Wolf, Marianne Viefhaus: Verzeichnis der Hochschullehrer der TH Darmstadt. Darmstadt 1977, S. 123.

Weblinks

 Bundesarchiv – Zentrale Datenbank Nachlässe In: nachlassdatenbank.de. Abgerufen am 2. September 2016 (Informationen über den Nachlass der Familie Leser im Institut für Stadtgeschichte Frankfurt)

Einzelnachweise

Ethnologe
Agrarwissenschaftler (20. Jahrhundert)
Agrarhistoriker
Hochschullehrer (Technische Universität Darmstadt)
Hochschullehrer (Hartford, Connecticut)
Emigrant aus dem Deutschen Reich zur Zeit des Nationalsozialismus
Deutscher
US-Amerikaner
Geboren 1899
Gestorben 1984
Mann


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Surrounded by the original medieval wall, the private grounds and gardens of Château du Grand-Lucé feel like a proper kingdom, in the northern region of the Loire Valley. Remaining true to French classicism, and inspired by the gardens at Versailles, the Château's gardens were designed on a north-south axis, with the formal gardens closest to the Château, and with the grounds becoming progressively less structured nearer the woods.
The classic gardens are a brilliant feat of order and symmetry with near perfect structure. The central allée, finely manicured boxwoods, delightful topiaries and immaculately trimmed expanses of green grass are extraordinary. At a slightly lower elevation, and surrounded by walls protecting the area from wind, is the Jardin Exotique. This extravagant garden remains incredibly warm, receiving the most of the Loire Valley sunshine. Planted with a brilliant variety of flowers, the exotic garden has a stunning swimming pool, original working greenhouses and the quintessential orangerie — protecting a multitude of citrus in the winter and open for infinite possibilities in the warmer months.
Below the parterre of the classic gardens is an exquisite potager garden (kitchen garden) and orchards filled with an incredible Loire Valley bounty — haricots verts, tomatoes of nearly uncountable varieties, lettuces, artichokes, dozens of herbs, lavender, stone fruits, apples and pears. Beyond the potager garden, there are acres upon acres to explore — a lake, meadows, grasslands, a historic white oak forest with a circular clearing in the center (as designed in 1760). The pièce de résistance is found in this clearing — a statue of Proserpine, daughter of Zeus, one of seven statues placed throughout the grounds by King Louis XV as a housewarming gift to Baron Jacques Pineau de Viennay.
Nearer the main château there are multiple buildings and courtyards — the original stables, now the grand ballroom, the original laundry house, now the spa and fitness center, and many yet-to-be restored buildings in various states of faded grandeur that are exceptionally lovely in their authenticity – providing an almost museum-like glimpse of noble life centuries ago.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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Last month, Hyundai Asia Resources Inc. debuted the new Hyundai Accent. However, they didn't reveal pricing at the time, simply stating a ballpark figure of about Php 725,000 for entry-level models, all the way to Php 1,000,000 for the range topper. Now, Hyundai has revealed official pricing, and its actually not far off their initial figure.
So the moment you've been waiting for, the Hyundai Accent starts at Php 750,000 for the entry-level 1.4 GL M/T with no airbags. If you want the automatic, the 1.4 GL A/T with no airbags retails for Php 798,000. Go for the airbag-equipped gas models and they go for Php 798,000 and Php 850,000 for the manual and automatic variants, respectively.
Hyundai is still the sole automaker in the country to offer turbo-diesel power in the subcompact sedan class. There are two variants for the diesel-fed Accent, and both come standard with airbags. The six-speed manual Accent CRDi GL is priced at Php 870,000, while the automatic diesel Accent starts at Php 998,000.
Equipment levels are identical across the range, save for the non-airbag models which don't come with the feature. That means all of them ride on 15-inch steel wheels with plastic wheel covers, come with manual climate control, 2-DIN stereo with LCD display (non-touchscreen), tilt-steering, and Aux-in and USB ports. Only the diesel models come with a hood insulator, likely to drown out the noise.
As for the engines, these have been largely carried over from the previous Accent. The gas range uses the same 1.4-liter mill with 100 PS and 132 Nm of torque. Curiously, the CRDI of this generation makes less power than the last model. The older Accent made 136 PS but the new one is down to 128 PS, although torque is retained at 260 Nm.


text:
'We're not lazy drug addicts': Why I need medical marijuana
CREATING AWARENESS: Commonwealth Muay Thai champion and One Nation's candidate for Rockhampton Torin O'Brien has spoken about his struggles pain and his effort to remove the stigma surrounding medical marijuana oil.
Leighton Smith, Leighton.Smith@capnews.com.au
Leighton Smith
14th Jul 2020 12:01 AM
CANDOUR isn't a noticeable quality in most politicians, let alone first-time political hopefuls.
But for One Nation candidate Torin O'Brien, public perception and stigma won't stand in the way of him revealing he is one of 80 Rockhampton residents with a prescription for medical marijuana oil.
The Commonwealth Muay Thai champion has fallen foul to some of the sport's worst injuries, including a broken leg, three broken ribs, a shattered right arm and multiple fractures in his left foot.
"I've got a pretty good tolerance to pain, which is why my leg went undiagnosed for three weeks before doctors managed to take a closer look and discover the fracture." Mr O'Brien said.
81kg fighters Shane Allan (PCYC) and Torin O'Brien (Rhino) trade blows. Photo Allan Reinikka / The Morning Bulletin
"My arm was the most messed up and required the bone being shaved back before plates were used to pin it back into place."
Doctors prescribed Endone and Tramadol, two drugs renowned for side effects and addiction.
Mr O'Brien recalls a time when he would wake up pain-free but would feel mentally driven to finish the box of pain killers.
"Anyone who's battled pain in their life knows how debilitating it is and you'll quite literally do anything to stop it," he said.
"I've got a strong will, but these drugs are like trying to swim against a fast-moving current when you try and ween yourself off them."
But in February 2019, while preparing for a professional fight on the Sunshine Coast, Police knocked on Torin's hotel room to break the news his father had died.
Shane O'Brien who died in February 2019.
"It was the same night I broke my arm, but with so much on my mind, I just kept fighting," Mr O'Brien said.
"I found myself back at the doctors who recommended I talk to a psychologist to help me get back on track, which then led to a prescription for Serepax and Prozac."
Both drugs are antidepressants, designed to treat major depression and panic disorders.
"Between the two types of prescribed drugs, I completely lost my personality," he said.
"You become numb to your surroundings. There's no sense of good or bad in your life.
"I was losing serious portions of my memory at a critical time in my young family's life."
Mr O'Brien discovered an alternative option to pain relief following the federal government's new laws allowing better access to medicinal marijuana products.
The prescription medicinal marijuana has produced excellent results for patients suffering from various medical conditions. Picture MATT TURNER.
The Commonwealth's Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) has approved the signing of more than 50,000 patients onto the Special Access Scheme (SAS) under the new law and, for Torin, he believes it saved his life.
"It's put my life back in order. My daily productivity has gone through the roof and I'm mostly pain-free," he said.
"I don't want users of medical marijuana oil to be stigmatised. We're not lazy drug addicts.
"I get up at 5am on weekdays to go for a 10km run and I'm back to my happy natured self again. It's been the saviour for my family."
>>READ: What has become of Bundy's medicinal marijuana crops
>>READ: Medicine milestone: Green light for medicinal cmarijuana product
Mr O'Brien believes Australia has a long way to go before patients can readily access the non-addictive alternative, and says the Queensland Parliament has a big role to play.
"I strongly believe Queenslanders need to be aware there are other options that can be discussed with certain doctors,"
"This has been a lifesaver for me, and I've heard it's been great for ex-soldiers suffering PTSD, sportsmen and women, anyone who's been dealing with major life challenges.
"In a way, I am fortunate to have had this experience so I have a personal understanding that I can take with me into Parliament."
One Nation candidate Torin O'Brien would like to see medicinal marijuana added to the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) register.
The One Nation candidate for Rockhampton is also encouraging governments to help bring down the cost of the prescribed medication by listing the drug on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) register.
It is one of the community needs he will push to achieve if he is elected.
"A 50ml bottle costs $250, but can take up to two weeks for the local chemist to get it in which also needs to change," Mr O'Brien explained.
"There is definitely not the stigma attached to medicinal cannabis these days; it is a well-researched and scientifically proven medication.
"If we can improve access for those in need, I think it will make a positive difference and improve many lives - just like it did for me."
GREEN LIGHT: THC Global's Ken Charteris with medicinal marijuana plants in Bundaberg.
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Health Wide Bay will see 15 budding General Practitioners placed across the region, with Monto welcoming Davinder Pannu to the community.
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text:
Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France is a 1987 book by the philosopher Judith Butler. Her first published book, it was based on her 1984 Ph.D. dissertation.

Summary
Butler examines the influence of the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel on 20th-century French philosophy. Influenced by Alexandre Kojève, she follows and expands upon his definition of desire as the feeling of an absence or lack. Hegelian desire is in this sense a desire for non-being or death.

While Butler ultimately calls for a rejection of standard Hegelianism, this moving forward itself represents a triumph for Hegel's dialectical method of the negation of difference.

Influenced by psychoanalysis she sees the subject as having to lose identity before becoming itself. The sense of self is lost in desire, as desire is a pull towards an Other. It is a hunger for that which is not present within.

Butler reinterprets Hegel's category of sublation to be the developing sequence of the subject's desire for recognition.

Butler uses Hegel's category of sense-certainty, to question whether the subject can truly ever be aware of its own gendered sexuality. Sexual identity is hence formed in the unconscious. The creation of the "I" of sexual identity is also a radical concealment.

In the battle of recognition between the Master and Slave, the ultimate Lord is death. Hence the triumph of the Master, is not the victory of any subject or man, but of death and desire itself. Death and desire are inherently linked. And all desire is ultimately a wish for that which is not, a wish for suicide. Desire is the impetus towards non-existence. Death is the ultimate fulfillment of all human desires. It is this embrace of death that is true mastery. Slavery is the fear of ceasing to be.

Reception and influence
Butler's interpretation of Hegel-Kojève's master–slave dialectic has been applied by feminist theory to the gender relations between man and woman.

References

1987 non-fiction books
American non-fiction books
Books about Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Books by Judith Butler
Debut books
Columbia University Press books
English-language books
Gender studies books
Postmodern feminism

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


text:
How Yale's Singapore Venture Imperils Liberal Education
The "us" in this piece is a very complicated statement and is reduced/reducible to what Sleeper terms, "the Republic." That said, the university seems to have reached a tipping point in its mythical self construction as a liberal (as opposed to neoliberal) institution. Though high sounding and ostensibly erudite, this statement by Professor Richard Levin sounds politically naive to me:
"But in political philosophy there's a living, unwritten constitution: Yale is really what we do -- our research, teaching, and conferences. Without that, there is no Yale to take abroad or anywhere else. The faculty are the collegium" -- a company of scholars that, to do its work well, has to stand somewhat apart from both markets and states."
You can't have it both ways. That is, stand apart AND allow for a governance structure (the Yale Corporation) to do whatever the heck it wants when it wants. Not with a strong faculty that can checkmate corporatist schemes and agendas. If Levin and Sleeper are all about "deliberative democracy" and universities as the spaces for the cultivation of a "deep civic faith," why did governance at the highest levels fall out of the parameters of that mode of praxis or inquiry?
Why was it that academic freedom in this realm of inquiry was stifled or repressed (e.g., make note of the "a profile in timidity" below, suggesting a trend)? And particularly so, one might say in this specific case, by political scientists like Levin. Rather than lamenting the tragic compromising of the "remonstrants and guardians of the republic," Yale faculty, including Levin, should look inwardly and ask themselves what is it about their praxis (their action or inaction) that led the university to this place to begin with?
Even without the "free-agent super-stars" problem of flagship institutions like Yale, their ivory tower mentality was a compromise waiting to happen. When our faculty are "above" certain kinds of non-esoteric, political action of putting their work to work, a vacuum in leadership is created that gets happily exploited by the architects and purveyors of "the retail-store university."
I'm not picking on Yale faculty, here, by the way. Liberal education, in general, has succumbed to this corporatist path, albeit to different degrees. I nevertheless feel that these pronouncements are themselves vapid and disingenuous. They reflect the very conundrum that our liberal institutions and liberals, in general, have put us all in. Not that it didn't take guts for Levin to say what he said. It just seems to be too little, too late.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-sleeper/how-yales-singapore-ventu_b_1352729.html?ref=fb&src=sp&comm_ref=false
You could have heard a pin drop among the 150 professors -- three times more than usual -- in attendance at a closed-door, March 1 meeting of the Yale College Faculty as one of them told president Richard Levin something he didn't want to hear. The message was that his administration shouldn't have collaborated with an authoritarian, corporate city-state to establish a new college -- "Yale-National University of Singapore" -- without most of the Yale faculty's knowing of it until the basic commitments had already been signed and sealed.
"You are this university's highest executive officer, and we're grateful for what you and the Yale Corporation do," the professor said. "But in political philosophy there's a living, unwritten constitution: Yale is really what we do -- our research, teaching, and conferences. Without that, there is no Yale to take abroad or anywhere else. The faculty are the collegium" -- a company of scholars that, to do its work well, has to stand somewhat apart from both markets and states.
Liberal education probably couldn't survive without markets and states, but Levin was being reminded, in effect, that in a liberal capitalist republic like ours, markets and states can't survive without liberal education because they have to rely on citizens' upholding certain public virtues and beliefs that -- as you may have noticed lately -- neither markets nor the state can do much to nourish or defend.
A liberal state, after all, isn't supposed to judge between one way of life and another, which makes it hard to distinguish bold entrepreneurs from sleazy free-riders. And markets certainly can't draw that distinction, because their genius lies precisely in approaching consumers and investors only as narrowly self-interested actors
That leaves only good journalists and good colleges to nourish our public prospects. Which is why, even though the Yale Corporation -- a small, self-perpetuating governing body, with only a few members elected by alumni -- can do whatever it wants, the professor was right about the "living" part of a university's constitution.
In 2006, for example, Harvard's governing corporation, which is like Yale's, understood that its faculty's loss of confidence in President Lawrence Summers made his administration untenable. Now Yale's faculty is challenging not Levin's presidency but one of his emblematic projects. A resolution demanding that Singapore respect, protect, and further political freedom, on-campus and off, will debated at the faculty's April 5 meeting.
This measure's proponents will surely be portrayed as leftist malcontents by conservative commentators who said the same thing about Harvard's critics of Summers. But neither controversy fits the panicky caricatures of politically correct professors or deans who'd rather denounce capitalism and chase post-modernist moonbeams than prepare their students to serve markets and the state. Nor is the Yale dispute really only about the rush by American universities to emulate multi-national business corporations by expanding abroad.
The greatest danger in such ventures -- and in Harvard's recent embarrassing entanglements with some of its faculty members' dubious dealings in Russia or Libya -- is that no university can remain what the political philosopher Allan Bloom called "a publicly respectable place... for scholars and students to be unhindered in their use of reason" if those scholars are treated (and behave) as employees of a corporation -- or, in public universities, as political appointees. More properly, they're a "company" in the old-fashioned sense of a body whose principals determine and care its mission.
The university as a business corporation helps them do that by keeping the lights on, as it were, and by defending their freedom where possible against market and political constraints. It shouldn't get involved in trying to export its university's "brand name" and expand its market share abroad, or in transforming the home college into a career-networking center and cultural galleria for a "diverse" global elite that answers to no polity or moral code.
Unfortunately, some members of Yale's corporation are doing even more than that. And, unfortunately, enough Yale faculty have come to depend on or aspire to administrative funding or preferments -- or have become self-marketing free agents in their own right -- that even some who oppose the Singapore deal express their view only with arched eyebrows and significant silences.
But the packed faculty meeting this month reflected rising concern that Levin, a very nice man and an economist of the neoliberal, "world is flat" sort, has joined with corporation members to commit Yale's name and some hand-picked members of its faculty to a venture that sidelines the collegium from any real deliberation about its educational mission.
Too much more of this, and the company of scholars becomes a corporate team.
It's not only faculty self-governance that's fading under market imperatives and seductions. So is liberal education, which, in American colleges, has often succeeded in inducting future citizen-leaders of the republic into what the conservative political philosopher Michael Oakeshott called the humanities' "great conversation" across the ages about eternal challenges to politics and the spirit. Markets and states skirt such challenges, but free people since Socrates have risked a lot to meet them, and they've always been a republic's greatest strength, not only in high places but in local communities.
The old colleges struggled to temper students' training for Wealth-making and Power-wielding with humanist Truth-seeking. Yes, that made those students who took that effort seriously somewhat adversarial to conventional wisdom; Allan Bloom considered that the colleges' glory. Yet today's globalization of capital and culture, which Yale's Singapore venture reflects, makes it hard for would-be defenders of the old colleges to reconcile their yearning for an American republican liberty with their knee-jerk, algorithmic obeisance to whims and riptides of casino-financing that's dissolving American sovereignty.
Conservatives are trying to straddle this yawning contradiction between their patriotism and their "free market" ideology by conscripting liberal education into national-security and "grand-strategy" agendas, in lavishly funded college programs that they think will rescue liberal education from the few feckless liberals and Marxists whom the noise machine blames for subverting what conservatives themselves are destroying.
Yale recently established a $50 million dollar Jackson Institute for Global Studies that, along with the $17.5 million-endowed Brady-Johnson "Studies in Grand Strategy" program and, the Johnson Center for the Study of American Diplomacy. These have soft spots for "professor-practitioners" such as Stanley McChrystal (hired fresh off his firing by Obama), John Negroponte (the former Bush National Intelligence Director), and Tony Blair -- "generals" who can overawe undergraduates by fighting the last wars. To teach Thucydides' account of the Pelopponesian War as if it were a guide for Davos men, American grand strategists, and military commanders debase them all.
Even President Levin, who gave George W. Bush an honorary doctorate just before 9/11, later served on Bush's commission to evaluate 9/11 intelligence failures, bringing along several Yale students to produce a report that the New York Times called "a profile in timidity." Whether or not the Times was right, Yale emerges from such ventures looking less like a bulldog than like a kitten that purrs when stroked and that darts under a sofa when threatened. And you have to wonder: If this is how the university's leaders deal with the government in our "free" society, can we expect them to stand up to Singapore's?
In fairness, Levin and other neo-liberals, buffeted by conservative ranters, donors with agendas, and daunting market undertows, would really rather bring liberal education to Asia than be parties to its conscription and debasement at home. But in fact Yale is doing both, and for reasons that remain unclear.
The university's insistence that it's spending nothing on the Singapore venture only reinforces the perception that who pays the piper calls the tune, and there's no consolation in the fact that three present or recent members of the Yale Corporation -- among them the venture capitalist G. Leonard Baker, Jr., who recently led a 5-year "Yale Tomorrow" capital campaign that raised $3.881 billion, thereby placing the university's administration in his debt -- are now or have also been directors, advisors, and investment officers of the Singapore Investment Corporation Pte Ltd. (GIC), which is chaired by the country's prime minister and manages at least $100 billion of assets.
(The other two Yale Corporation members who've been involved in this Charles Ellis, who is married to Linda Lorimar, the Secretary of Yale University, and Charles Waterhouse Goodyear, the former CEO of another Singaporian government investment company, Temasek, in 2009.)
Whether or not Yale-NUS is some a business deal, it's an instance of the business corporatization of universities. "Is Yale U. Starting to Run More Like Yale, Inc.?" asked a 2009 story in the student-run, independent Yale Daily News, noting that university vice presidents who've been imported from business corporations were referring to students as "customers."
Some students and their lawyered-up parents readily accept that designation and demand the services they think they've paid for. That accelerates a superficially pleasing drift from civic-republican rigor to posh campus amenities, but it also leaves the colleges handling students' real intellectual and intimate crises with the soulless, self-protective legalism of corporations worried only about liability and market share.
Fortunately, some conscientious (and somebrilliantly irreverent) student reporters and editorial writers have kept the deeper questions alive on campus even when most faculty seemed too apathetic or intimidated to raise them. It was a Yale Daily News editorial last year, "Keep Yale Out of Singapore," that awakened some faculty
The sea changes in capital and in state efficacy contributed to the recent loss of compass and ebbing of faith in liberal education. But there are other causes, too. In his forthcoming (and already much ballyhooed) College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be, tColumbia English professor Andrew Delbanco echoes Yale's former law school dean Anthony Kronman, whose Education's End blames the loss of faith less on markets or conservative grand strategists than on universities' much-older commitment to scientific (or, one might say, "scientistic") research.
The criticism here is not of science per se but of some liberal educators' pretensions to be scientific in their explorations of the eternal challenges to politics and the spirit mentioned earlier. "When political science is severed from its ancient rootage in the humanities and 'enriched' by the wisdom of sociologists, psychologists, and anthropologists," warned Reinhold Niebuhr more than half a century ago, "the result is frequently a preoccupation with minutiae which obscures the grand and tragic outlines of contemporary history and offers vapid solutions to profound problems."
Neibuhr's solutions were Christian, and while Delbanco invokes America's Puritan wellsprings, he offers only a secular-humanist reliance on the humanities to shape citizens for a republic or an embryonic global public sphere.
Kronman -- who worked on the early stages of Yale's Singapore plan and also helped New York University develop its campus in Abu Dahbi -- takes justified swipes at "politically correct" derision of the works of dead white men. So does Delbanco, a survivor of culture wars in Columbia's English Department, but, as Margaret Soltan shows hilariously in her "University Diaries" blog at Inside Higher Education, Delbanco generally is more than a little too cautious, expressing himself too often through "quote after quote after quote" from others. (Soltan coins a nice new term for the malady: quoterrhoea!)
The challenge Delbanco and Kronman don't quite face is that, like Christianity and free markets, liberal education has many more noisy claimants and celebrants than it has true friends, The false friends are funding the lavish campus institutes and centers I mentioned, and even student organizations and faux-populist movements, to save liberal education from the liberals by mining the classic texts for guidance in navigating riptides of global capital and of resistance to it abroad and at home: "You need a 360-degree perspective," Yale's Diplomat-in-Residence and Reagan State Department veteran Charles Hill told a student interviewer in 2003. "Your approach can't be just military and diplomatic, it also has to involve such things as economics, personnel, rhetoric, and morale. And you can't just look outward, because somewhere in some basement or in the Holland Tunnel, something is going wrong. You can't neglect anything."
Liberal education requires a lot more adult grace and restraint than that, as well a much deeper sort of conviction and inter-generational commitment. Hill's is not the way to show 18-years-olds, fresh off thousands of hours on the internet and in shopping malls, that freedom isn't about consumer choice and self-marketing; it relies on the mastery of those public virtues -- the arts and disciplines of democratic deliberation -- that are grounded in mutual respect and rational dialogue.
A liberal education disposes a student to keep words and deeds from parting company, as Hannah Arendt put it, until, the words become empty and the deeds become brutal, as indeed they're becoming in our investment banks and election campaigns.
No wonder that harried administrators such as Levin and other university presidents, struggling to balance what former Harvard College dean Harry Lewis calls "the retail-store university" in his Education Without a Soulhttp://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2006/05/28/examining_the_crimsons_civic_slide/, find themselves shorn of the authority and wisdom to distinguish one student's quiet civic passion from another's busy public emptiness, let alone address them.
No wonder that some administrators are indulging or even conducting what leftists think is a coup d'etat against faculty self-governance. It's not quite that, but it's a consequence of the desperate effort to ride market and political currents and to open conservative alumnae hearts and wallets to provide more loyal crews and tighter rigging for their commercial and military cruises.
No wonder, too, that some professors have become part of the problem, behaving not as members of the collegium but as free-agent super-stars who leave the humanist conversation and its soul-sick student aspirants to the ministrations of university bureaucrats and health counselors.
No one warned against all this more tellingly than Bloom, who conservatives often invoke. He urged the university to resist "whatever is most powerful" and "the worship of vulgar success." He especially disdained professors who try to become counselors to the king but forget that "the intellectual, who attempts to influence... ends up in the power of the would-be influenced."
The ultimate irony, again, is that the conservatives' own market and nationalist strategies have begun to work against one another, with disastrous consequences that they finesse by shifting the blame to feckless liberals.
In 1941, when TIME magazine co-founder Henry Luce (Yale Class of 1920), a son of American Protestant missionaries to China, proclaimed The American Century, the two horses of American national-security and of global capital pulled more or less together, in harness to the American republic. But by the time George W. Bush (Yale, 1968) and Dick Cheney (Yale drop-out, 1961), took that rig on a full gallop in 2003, they couldn't avoid crashing into what the conservative political scientist Samuel Huntington had seen coming in 1994: The hard reality is that the horse of global capital no longer pulls alongside the horse of American nationalism.
Huntington noticed that Aetna, Ford, and other conglomerates were no longer American companies. After 9/11, Cheney's own Halliburton moved its world headquarters from the Bushes' Houston to Abu Dahbi, and Post-America, a book by Fareed Zakaria (Yale, 1986, now a Yale Corporation member), announced that the global capitalist horse had broken loose from its old harness. This time, it's not Henry Luce's Yale that's paying for missions abroad; it's the government of Singapore, for a mission that Yale's own faculty has had little a role in shaping.
The old colleges weren't always noble and independent. They produced herds of dray horses of the financial and legal establishments; the legions of mountebanks, blowhards, and bounders at the Council on Foreign Relations; and the CIA, which was invented at Yale soon after Luce proclaimed the American Century. But they also produced or provoked a Dwight Macdonald, William Sloane Coffin, Jr., William F. Buckley, Jr., John Lindsay, Garry Trudeau, John Kerry, Howard Dean, and thousands of other remonstrants and guardians of the republic, most unsung, whose works, including their inspiration of others, have been among its greatest strengths.
Today's neoliberal riders of national-security and global currents justify themselves morally by waving the pennants of "diversity," but its advances couldn't have been won without tough, old civic-republican virtues that sustained the early Civil Rights movement and, yes, the old colleges themselves: At its 1964 Commencement Yale presented an honorary doctorate to Martin Luther King, Jr., who, fresh out of jail, wasn't yet popular with most white Americans (including conservative Yale alumni of that time.). The college helped open the hearts of northern WASPs and Jews whose own Puritan ancestors had made history of the same Exodus myth that King was invoking in the South.
Has that myth expired, except as a cartoon in the mind of a Rick Santorum? Conservatives and neoliberals like Levin, struggling to pilot our liberal arts colleges through the sea-changes sketched here, will have to demonstrate the courage of liberal education's best convictions. Conservatives of Henry Luce's stripe, especially, will have to test the best of their old Puritan faith against what John Winthrop called the "carnall lures" of wealth.
There's a reason to hope that their faculty critics can help them or their institutions to do that. It's precisely -- and ironically -- that the old colleges weren't so noble all the time but that they never stopped trying. At the dawn of the 18th century, Yale was founded to stop Harvard's diversion of the holy Puritan mission toward decadent wealth-making, in a world increasingly connected but flattened by commerce. The world isn't flat, Yale's founders insisted. It has abysses, and students need a faith that's powerful enough to plumb them, face the demons in them, and even defy the powers that be in the name of better ones.
Yale President A. Whitney Griswold, a descendant of Puritan governors of Connecticut, demonstrated that faith when, not long after the Bay of Pigs, one of the many foreign-policy fiascos that Yale grand strategists have brought us, he dismantled the Institute of International Affairs, a "Good Shepherd" predecessor of the dubious Jackson Institute and Grand Strategy programs at today's Yale.
Griswold's successor Kingman Brewster, Jr. a descendant of the minister on the Mayflower, sustained those reforms because, as he told my entering Class of 1969 on September 13, 1965, "To a remarkable extent, this place has detected and rejected the very few who wear the colors of high purpose falsely. This has not been done by administrative edict or official regulation. It has been done by a pervasive ethic of student and faculty loyalty and responsibility and mutual regard which lies deep in our origins and traditions."
It's tempting these days to dismiss an admonition like Brewster's as little more than a snob's boast about an in-crowd. But he really wanted Yale students to plumb the old depths in order to know true leaders from false. He may even have been channeling a spiritual forebear, the Puritan minister Richard Mather, who wrote in 1657 that, "Imposters have but seldom got in and set up among us, and when they have done so, they have made a short blaze and gone out in a snuff."
The old tensions between religious and humanist Truth-seeking, between authoritarian and republican Power-wielding, and between all of them and capitalist or Wealth-making run all the way back into the old colleges' taproots. When those Connecticut Puritans founded their college to counter Harvard's lapses, even they turned for funding and books to a governor of a multi-national corporation, the East India Company, Elihu Yale, and named their college after him.
It's enough to give the righteous critics of Levin's venture in Singapore some pause. Or maybe it gives even more precedent for criticizing it! Conservatives, meanwhile, so hot to rescue liberal education from liberals, might take pause, too, as they remember the old Puritan willingness to defy worldly power as well as to court it. And neoliberals who still think the world flat had better start looking into its abysses with something more accelerators and multiple-regression analyses.
For all of us, Truth emerges not from esoteric doctrines, radical-left pronouncements of Rousseau's General Will, nationalist grand strategies, or even the latest scientific paradigms, let alone from commercial and technological breakthroughs that raise the ante but don't end the game. Truth develops only provisionally from the trust-building process of deliberative democracy, and the point of this essay is that that requires a deep civic faith that's kindled or reinforced in college -- or, fatefully, that isn't.
"Anyone who is himself willing to listen deserves to be listened to," Brewster wrote. "If he is unwilling to open his mind to persuasion, he forfeits his claim on the audience of others." Universities can't demonstrate this in places like Singapore unless they're proving it daily in their own companies of scholars. If they try to harness liberal education to strategies driven by the lust for money, power, and public relations, they'll lose not only liberal education but the republic.
But let me give the last word to former student of mine, who, as a senior at Yale in 2004, wrote that "a set of practices, habits, customs and beliefs must be considered basic to a functioning democracy... Unlike the Constitution, though, such subtle understandings and habits cannot be codified. The ethos of a republic is at once its most inscrutable and important attribute." We have to hope that liberal arts colleges' faculty and students will vindicate this "living constitution" in the nick of time.
This post has been updated since its original publication.
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