Letters

Following up on my TNR piece and on this post with further information on the Individual Indian Monies scandal.

Jonathan Adler, a law professor at Case Western, writes:


I enjoyed your TNR piece on the IIM trust issue -- as well as your hits
on the Interior Department's gross mismanagement on your blog. I agree
that this is an important story that the press has largely overlooked.

My one comment is that I think your conclusion is slightly unfair to many
in the conservative/libertarian/property rights crowd who have worked on
Native American issues for years. Not only are there some -- such as
Terry Anderson and the folks at PERC -- who have written on Indian issues
for a long time, but the conservative alternative is not allotment --
under which beneficial title remains in the hands of the federal
government -- but actual property rights. Allotment created a trust
relationship between the Indians and the government, so it did not
prevent the sort of mismangement and malfeasance which is endemic in the
management of Indian affairs. Actual property rights, however, would
remove BIA and the federal bureaucracy from the picture. While you are
right that many conservatives have been AWOL on this issue, the same
could be said of most liberals, and those conservatives who have
addressed the broader issues raised by federal mismanagement of Indian
affairs have proposed reforms far more meaningful than a replay of the
Dawes Act.

In any event, I'm glad to see that someone is giving this issue the
attention it deserves.

(PERC is the Political Economy Resource Center, which has indeed done a great deal of important and admirable work on Indian issues, especially property rights issues (including, Jonathan helpfully notes, this and this.)

All of which I basically agree with, and have written in support of myself elsewhere. But it remains true that even PERC has (as far as I can tell) said nothing about the IIM case; that Norton continues to be on the wrong side; and that there hasn't been much libertarian noise making the argument Jonathan described. I'm trying to get some noise started.

Note about the difference between alottment and real property rights, which Michael Carr also wrote in about: I didn't have space to go into this in the TNR column, but it's quite true that the kind of ownership created in 1887 was much short of freehold property. The individual Indians own the land in an incomplete sense, which is central to the problem. Not only are the resource rights held in trust by the federal government; the land cannot be sold to non-Indians. In addition, the semi-inalienable interest an Indian was given in these lands was divided equally among heirs, such that by now there are a vast number of fractional shares of the ownership of each such lot of land. This is a problem in its own right-- it means makes rational economic use ofthe land almost impossible. But it has also contributed to Interior's inability to manage the trust accounts, at the same time that it has become part of the profeered justification for trusteeship; keeping track of this complex pattern of fractional interests is absurdly complicated.

On a different note: in the TNR piece I said that Sam Donaldson and 60 Minutes had done extended segments on the Cobell case, but that otherwise television news had been almost entirely AWOL. My friend Todd Seavey reminded me that John Stossel's hour-long special "John Stossel Goes to Washington," had been intended to include a segment about the IIM accounts, but that when Stossel began questioning Bruce Babbitt about them, the then-Secretary of the Interior stormed off the set. (Therefore none of the relevant Nexis search words led me to Stossel-- in the actual event the special included only about two sentences about lost Indian money, followed by an extended on-camera "I'm going to fire whoever scheduled me to do this interview" bit from Babbitt..)

You remember Neal McCaleb, the former Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Indian Affairs I spoke so unkindly about just yesterday?

Destroyed documents.

Around the web and miscellany

Over at TAP, Richard Just has one of the best pieces on the State of the Union address. I think the following is exactly right:

President George W. Bush delivered two State of the Union
addresses last night: an unconvincing recitation of platitudes
about supply-side economics followed by a compelling -- even
grand -- articulation of America's role in the world... [I]t wasn't
just the policies of the first half of the speech that were unsatisfying --
so was the delivery, not to mention the prose itself. This was
the kind of speechmaking at which President Clinton excelled;
he made laundry lists of policy proposals come alive. Bush
doesn't have that gift... But then came Bush's transition
sentence -- "The qualities of courage and compassion that we s
trive for in America also determine our conduct abroad" -- and I
suspect that even the president's most skeptical critics would
agree that from that point on, he was masterful...It is not irrelevant
that Bush succeeded last night where Clinton had the most trouble
as a speechmaker. Clinton could make a bulleted policy list sound
inspiring, but when he tried to deal in broad themes and big visions,
his rhetoric sometimes felt flat, even empty.

I suspect that I agree with more of Bush's domestic agenda than Just does; but I agree entirely with this commentary on the style and feel of the speech. On the other hand, Just also says that Locke's

rebuttal was the finest opposition response in years to a State of
the Union... Someone should take note and put Locke on the fast
track to bigger and better things in the Democratic Party.

Locke struck me as a bland, inoffensive nice guy, giving a speech for student council president. The need to paper over Democratic divisions on the war of course hurt him. But the grandson-of-an-indentured-servant thing seemed appropriate for a personal campaign ad, not for the moment when Locke was supposed to be speaking on behalf of the party as a whole. The symbolism of having a governor speak this year was terrible. And the domestic agenda was reeeally uninspiring. Just and I watched the same SotU, but apparently not the same Democratic response.

Over at The Conspiracy: check out David Post on "the reverse tinkerbell effect." I wonder whether there's not a much more general kind of case at work in everyday market economics-- not just the specialized case of the efficient capital market hypothesis. The more people who think there's a killing to be made in x area of economic activity, the more will enter it-- gradually driving economic profits to zero. Crowdedness doesn't only apply to libraries and beaches; it applies to markets, too. That's basic to how markets work; from the system's perspective it's a feature, not a bug. It looks different from the perspective of the individual producer. And it looks very different if the market in question takes some time and preparation to enter. The more early-stage graduate students who think that there's room in the literature to make a striking contribution on a particular topic, the more books there will be trying to occupy that intellectual space 3-6 years hence, and the less of a splash any one of them will make. Kieran Healy notes that the idea of the self-defeating prophecy has a long history.

Mark Kleiman, Ted Barlow, and Kieran Healy, among others, are blogging actual empirical matters-- you know, the kind with numbers. How much does wealth (as distinct from income) contribute to the black-white education gap?

Hi there!

I’d like to offer a welcome to those visiting the site for the first time via TNR. Like many blogs, mine is a combination of writings about: stuff I can claim some expertise in (political philosphy, political science, multiculturalism, the rights of ethnic minorities, freedom of association), stuff I care passionately about (academic freedom and academic governance), stuff that I find fun (Lord of the Rings, science fiction), and stuff about which I don't necessarily know any more than any other news addict, though sometimes my poli sci/ political theory background means I have an idiosyncratic take on it (i.e. everything else).

Here's the basic story o' me.

My first TNR column is on something I can claim expertise in: the law, politics, and justice of indigenous rights, in this case the rights of American Indians. (My other writings on indigenous rights include two chapters in my book The Multiculturalism of Fear, one of which also appears in Kymlicka and Norman, eds., Citizenship in Diverse Societies; and a chapter on "Indians in Madison's Constitutional Order" in Samples, ed.,
James Madison and the Future of Limited Government.)

To expand on a few points from the column:

Trusteeship, in the case of Individual Indian Money accountholders, is supposed to refer to the straightforward fiduciary-responsibility concept. This is also true when the landowner is a tribe. But "trusteeship" also refers to something more general and amorphous as the underpinning of the federal government's relationship to tribes. Both are paternalistic in their origin. But the tribes have an interest in not doing away with the idea of a trustee relationship, since it underlies the federal government's commitment (such as it is) to act in the interest of the tribes. Back before the Eleventh Amendment turn in federalism jurisprudence, it also solidified the federal commitment to protect tribes against the states when necessary. This understanding of trusteeship-- which predates the Revolution, and can also be found in the other Anglo-settler states of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand-- is notoriously difficult to pin a precise legal meaning to. The duties it imposes aren't nearly as well-specified as the duties of an ordinary financial trustee. But a reluctance to jeopardize the idea of trusteeship has, I think, some effect on how the tribes view the Cobell litigation. If the plaintiffs were to propose terminating the trust relationship over the IIM accounts altogether (rather than placing them into a receivership with a different trustee) the tribes might be more worried still. I nonetheless think that such a termination is the right thing to do. The federal government has no business posing as the trustee of Indians' money, when it is itself the greatest threat to that money.

Another concern from the tribes' perspective-- and this is inference on my part, not based on anything that has been said in public-- is budgetary. In principle, the IIM mess should be entirely separate from other Indian affairs, just like the IIM accounts should be separate from other governmental outlays and revenues. But, politically, if the Cobell suit results in billions or tens of billions of dollars in (what looks like) new spending to compensate for past misappropriation, the separation probably won't be so clean. The squeeze will probably be put onto appropriations for other BIA functions, for tribal colleges, and for the rest of the federal government's Indian activities.

So, altogether, one wouldn't expect tribes to expend too much of their finite lobbying capital on forcing a fair, speedy, generous settlement. Tribal organizations have been supportive, and have filed amicus briefs on Cobell's side, but they just don't have much incentive to make it a top priority of their relationship with Congress or the BIA. And, as I've said, there are aspects of trusteeship and the relationship with the BIA that they're understandably more interested in protecting than the Cobell plaintiffs are.

Gale Norton has no such excuse for betraying her alleged commitment to the rights of property-owners...

Shortly after Lamberth held Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Neal A. McCaleb in contempt, the latter announced his retirement, complaining that "the litigation has taken first priority in too many activities, thus distracting attention from the other important goals that could provide more long-term benefits for Indian Country." As I've blogged previously, I don't have a lot of sympathy for this complaint. Coming into compliance with Interior's fiduciary obligations, and ensuring that individual Indian property-owners get the full value of their resources, would do more for Indian self-reliance than would coming up with another BIA program. Being reminded that the department wasn't fulfilling its obligations apparently took all the fun out of it.

If the lawsuit is so unpleasant and time-consuming, then Interior ought to quit dragging its feet.

UPDATE: Resigning hasn't freed McCaleb from the lawsuit entirely; he can still get in trouble for having destroyed documents.
---

I should note that a few Republicans in Congress-- including John McCain and Ben Nighthorse Campbell-- have been on the right side here, and have treated the issue seriously.

----

Some links:

Complete information on Cobell v. Norton can be found at http://www.indiantrust.com/. The Department of Justice maintains its own site on the case here.

The Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development is an indispensable resource for information on tribal governments, and the problems tribes confront from two directions: external limits on self-government, and internal institutional failures, violations of the rule of law and separation of powers, and obstructions to economic development.

The National Council of American Indians is the most important tribal lobbying group. The Native American Rights Fund is involved in the Cobell litigation.

The BIA website "as well as the BIA mail servers have been made temporarily unavailable due to the Cobell Litigation. Please continue to check from time to time. We have no estimate on when authorization will be given to reactivate these sites." The story: at one point Interior slapped together a new computer system to handle the IIM accounts. Lamberth found that the system was woefully insecure and prone to hacking. Interior took it down-- and, in a fit of spite, stopped issuing all checks to IIM account-holders for months, saying that they couldn't do without the new computer system what they had always done without the new computer system. This was more than a year ago. I'm pretty sure that Lamberth's order didn't require BIA to take down its public webpage with contact information and the like.

UPDATE: See this follow-up post above.

Announcement time

Sometime today, my first monthly online-only column at The New Republic website will go up. Another scholar-blogger will be writing with the same frequency, offset by two weeks; but I'll let him or her reveal his or her identity in due course. UPDATE: It's up.

Around the web/ miscellany

Joseph Epstein has a lovely essay in Commentary on his teaching career.

Mickey Kaus says, of the Think Group's World Trade Center proposal:

(So what if every suicidal teen with a pilot's license is going to try to
hang his Cessna from the latticework? They can mount AA guns on
the top! It'll be quite a show.)

This reminds me of something Jonah Goldberg wrote just days after September 11. It doesn't come across so well anymore, I guess, but it stuck with me like nothing else Goldberg's ever written-- jokey but in a distinctively defiant fashion that was much needed at the time. The column as a whole is, I think, one of his best; but this sentence in particular lodged itself in my brain and replays there every time I read or think about the design of the restored site.

But if we must have a shrine or monument for
our remorse, let's put it on the 200th floor, right
next to the antiaircraft guns.

I don't, finally, agree, but it's still always the first thought in my mind when WTC questions come up.

Via Brian Doherty: Virginia Heinlein has died.

My old colleague at WBRU news (95.5 FM in Providence), Aaron Schatz, has a piece telling the Democratic presidential contenders to stop trying to be John McCain, over at the American Prospect.

Stay tuned; the first of those two big announcements I mentioned last week is coming up in the next 24 hours.

Eric Muller asks a difficult question about Korematsu, as part of his ongoing reflections about the relationship (or lack of relationship) between the internment of Japanese-Americans and events of the past year and a half.

Eugene Volokh's been standing up for truth which, in this odd case, means standing up for Cynthia McKinney's reputation.

It's generally been the case that the internet has worsened the old "falsehood around the world/ truth putting on its boots" thing. By the time a correction had been made, the lie, rumor, or urban legend had been forwarded from e-mail to e-mail hundreds of thousands of times. Bloggers, at least sometimes, can give the truth a serious acceleration boost. For all that blogging seems like amateur pundits commenting on professional reporters, one of the most valuable services we provide is simple but public fact-checking.

John Lott, scholar

I haven't said much about the John Lott affair directly; just this rumination on the Mary Rosh thing. But I've been reading Tim Lambert's updates as well as associated commentary by folks such as Kieran Healy. The IRB question Kieran raises had occured to me, but I didn't follow up. Here's how it now looks to me:

Even if Lott conducted the survey exactly as he says he did, it was sloppy, shoddy, and pretty dramatically invalid. It shouldn't have been used as the basis even for one sentence in the book, much less for a claim that he repeated over and over and over again. If, as seems likely, he didn't go through the IRB (one would think that if he had, he'd by now have gotten a copy of his proposal back from them and released it; they keep such things), then he violated professional rules. If he used the methodology he described, then he has no more business conducting surveys and using them as evidence in his scholarly writings than, well, I do. But I know better. Even if I had a spare couple of grand burning a hole in my pocket *and* a point that I wanted to make using opinion data, I wouldn't just spontaneously make up a survey and hire students to conduct it. (I should note that, given the way things are done here at Chicago, I find the notion that he paid out of pocket with no records particularly implausible.) I'd work with someone who knew what he or she was doing. There are plenty of such people at Chicago.

In short: if Lott's not a liar, then he's a very, very sloppy researcher who violates rules of professional conduct. Not good, and not someone who ought to be defended, regardless of how much we may want his conclusions to be true.

UPDATE: I've received additional confirmation of Lambert's suggestion that IRB procedures aren't SOP in law schools in general. (The confirmation didn't come from colleagues here at Chicago, whom I haven't asked.) At some point, this may well blow up in someone's face. When my friends in business complain that their lawyers won't let them do stuff they want to do, I always remind them: Your lawyers are there to protect you against making mistakes, and against other people being able to say later that you screwed up. Now I'll start saying the same to law professors about IRBs.

Lott's defenders, and Lott himself, are making a great deal out of the peripheralness of the 98% figure. But that makes it all the stranger. Why keep repeating and repeating a claim for which one has no valid evidence, when it would be no great sacrifice to drop it? Why misattribute it, and fail to cite the existing studies that show different results, when it matters so little?

ANOTHER UPDATE: Mark Kleiman hits many of the same points.

Perfidious Marianne

Reading this and this, I'll confess that I can't quite understand what happened on Monday. It's not that I don't understand French public opposition to a war that they privately think will come and want to be on the right side of. I can't understand the diplomatic move: publicly humiliating Colin Powell, cutting him off at the kneecaps. Precommitting, in the case of Germany, to voting against the resolution. This all seems tailor-made to drive the U.S. off the Powell-Security Council path altogether. The maneuver on Monday didn't advance any French or German objective: tying the U.S. to the Security Council, strengthening Powell, preventing a war, protecting French interests in Iraq. It seems to have petulant, spiteful, and self-defeating.

"Perfidious Marianne" has a nice ring to it; it's time to do away with the undeserved slur on Steadfast Albion's character...

Remembering BuckPAC

The Note writes:


William F. Buckley (whose appearance at the Lieberman announcement
in Stamford has still not been fully explained)

Well, I didn't know about it, but I can explain it.

The key words: Lowell Weicker.

That former Connecticut Senator, more despised by conservatives in his day as a RINO (Republican In Name Only) than even Jeffords was when he belonged to the GOP, had a constituent-- we'll call him WFB-- who was, well, rather more conservative than he. WFB also happened to be a man of some prestige among conservative Republicans, for a variety of reasons. When, in 1988, Weicker was challenged by a Democrat names Joe Lieberman, WFB (and his nonpoor family) swung into action. WFB endorsed Lieberman, who sort-of ran against Weicker from the right. WFB's clan embarked on some serious fundraising for the Democrat, even creating a "BuckPAC" for the purpose. And WFB made sure that his fellow conservatives knew to vote for the pro-death-penalty anti-Communist Orthodox Jew, against the tax-raising Republican who wanted to lift the embargo on Cuba. Lieberman won the race, and the victory was attributed to Republican crossover.

Even if there's no eventual endorsement this time, it's hardly a surprise that WFB would be invited to, and would, turn out to show moral support on announcement day for the homestate Senator whose career he did so much to advance, and to whom he is no doubt still grateful for dispatching Weicker. "Longtime supporters" do that kind of thing.

Around the web/ miscellany

Heh. Sometimes one wants more than snark, but when snark is called for, Kinsley does it well. (I would have thought than "sanctimonious" has more the right flavor than "pious.")

An intersection between two of my cornerstone interests, comics and political philosophy, was revealed by the search engine words that brought someone to this site: It appears that John Rawls' grandson Tyhib (whose name was on this site as one of the philosopher's survivors, from an obituary) is the artist and co-writer of a SF/ martial-arts comic, Smoke.

The things one learns...

Readingthis article about the Democrats at the NARAL dinner, I couldn't help remembering the wisdom of Bloom County.

Who remembers what "Gephardtization" referred to? To which lead character was it done?

(And: does anyone happen to have any of the relevant strips scanned in or otherwise electronically accessible?)

Christopher Caldwell thinks that the Bush brief amounts to "the most important substantive defense of affirmative action ever issued by a sitting president. If the Court accepts the president’s reasoning, it will have rescued affirmative action from what appeared to be a terminal constitutional illogic. More than that–it will have secured for this rickety program an indefinite constitutional legitimacy."

Quick response: read Josh Chafetz's analysis. By making up new standards of the importance of state interests, the brief manages to be rhetorically pro-"diversity" [i.e. racial diversity] while arguing neither for nor against the key claim: that diversity is a compelling state interest even in the absence of prior discrimination. Calling it an "entirely legitimate" interest is a kind of constitutional damning with faint praise. Caldwell has only noticed the praise.

Tapped writes:

As discussed earlier, the low-population Red states in the Western/Mountain areas --
while they send a fair number of Democrats to the Senate these days -- vote Republican
in presidential elections. That's important, because electoral votes are allocated by giving
states one vote for each member of the House they send (which correlates roughly to a
state's population size) plus one for each senator. So a state like South Dakota, which
as only one representative but two senators, gets three electoral votes. That gives states
with small populations an edge, and most of the states with small populations go to the GOP.

If you strip each state of its two Senate electoral votes, and add up the 30 states George W.
Bush and the 21 (including D.C.) Al Gore won in 2000 (awarding Florida to Bush), guess who
wins? Gore, with 224 electoral votes to Bush's 211.

The question of how the Electoral College biases outcomes is old hat among political scientists-- and it has two components that can't be taken in isolation from each other. One is the one Tapped notes-- the massive increase in the relative voting power of small states because every state (large or small) gets two more electoral votes than its number of Representatives. The other is the fact (not dictated by the Constitution but by the state law of 48 states) that electoral votes are awarded on a winner-take-all basis by state. Notice that 224-211 is a much bigger margin than Gore's popular-vote plurality (c. 6% vs. <1%). That's driven by awarding all of the electoral votes from California, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Illinois to Gore. (Bush won fewer big or very big states-- Florida, Texas, and Ohio. IIRC.) Given that, currently, cities vote Democratic and rural counties tend to vote Republican, the electoral college over-rewards Democrats for their urban majorities in states such as New York, and denies Republicans any benefit from their large rural votes in such places.

The Electoral College increases the proportionate weight of very small states; but also creates massive returns to even tiny pluralities in very big states. One overweights for rural constituencies, one for urban constituencies. They don't perfectly cancel out; but they come closer to cancelling out than Tapped's math suggests.

Women and Muslim minorities in Europe

Two news stories today about women's rights and immigration to European countries. From the NYT, continued coverage of the Muslim dissident woman running for Parliament in the Netherlands. Via Best of the Web, this story from Norway about an immigrant's sentence for the rape of a mentally handicapped woman being reduced to a fine (from an initial, whopping, sixty days in prison) "on the grounds that he had only lived 12 years in Norway and so had difficulty understanding the victim's condition."

The Norwegian case is pretty dismaying, though that doesn't make it easy.

The accused, a 22-year-old taxi driver originally from the Middle East,
explained that he found nothing odd about the woman's appearance or
behavior. The woman used a 'TT-card' - a transport sponsorship arrangement
for the handicapped - when paying for the ride.

The accused also argued that cab drivers often talked about easy sex offers
from female passengers, especially late on weekends. He also believed that
it was easy to sleep with Norwegian girls one had just met.

The court ruled unanimously that the accused should not serve jail time, but
was ordered to pay the woman NOK 25,000 in damages and to replace her
ruined coat.

The court found that the man's comprehension of the Norwegian language was
worse than that expected of someone resident since 1990 and could not rule
out that his age, cultural background and immaturity could have contributed to the assault.


The thing is that-- as conservatives are eager to remind us in the case of allegations of date rape on college campuses and so on-- mens rea and intent are relevant to our thinking about rape. Someone' s failure to understand someone else's incapacity to give consent-- or someone's genuine misunderstanding about whether someone else has given consent-- matter. How, and how much, such things matter are vexed questions in both law and philosophy. But if and to the degree that they matter, then the courts shouldn't rule out considerations of culture in sorting them out. It's pretty dismaying if some Middle Eastern men in Norway are so isolated from Norwegian society that they believe women are likely to have sex with their taxi drivers at the drop of a hat. And it's pretty dismaying if immigrants are so isolated that twelve years isn't enough time to allow the courts to assume that an immigrant has basically figured such things out. (And, frankly, it's pretty dismaying that, in the absence of such extenuating circumstances, the trial court only handed down a sixty-day sentence.) But if those things are true, then it seems to me they do affect mens rea and intent. Cases such as this are different from pure cases of what's referred to as the "cultural defense," in which a violent act is actively defended as being a genuinely appropriate cultural tradition-- Hmong betrothal-by-capture-and-rape, female genital mutilation, the killing of unfaithful spouses, kidnapping and beatings as part of initiation rites into an Indian tribe. In those cases, the defense isn't "I didn't understand that my victim didn't consent" but "I deny that the court's standards of consent are relevant, because the practice in question has a cultural justification that doesn't depend on consent." I think that defenses of the latter sort can't be accepted, but that defenses of the former sort are at least sometimes relevant to any system that in general considers intent as part of the criminal law.

I've written on such matters further in The Multiculturalism of Fear, especially chapter 2.

Rosh to judgment

From time to time I worry about the permanent virtual paper trail created by a decade's worth of e-mails, listserv postings, Usenet postings, and now blogging. I have moments of wondering: "When I'm trying to impress readers of my book, professional colleagues, etc, do I really want to be worried that they might turn up x bit of writing from a thorough web search?" I know people who, for that reason, use online pseudonyms for everything that's not stictly professional. A few academic bloggers, especially junior faculty whose political views differ from the mainstream of their disciplines', blog pseudonymously to protect themselves. I've never gone that route; as a result, if someone wants to discredit an argument from my academic writings by quoting from something I once said on rec.arts.comics.dc.vertigo, they're able to do so. As I said, I sometimes wonder about the wisdom of this.

But the cloak of anonymity is sometimes too tempting; the liberation provided by no one knowing you're a dog can loose internal constraints that really ought to stay put. To wit:

Julian Sanchez noticed that his comment section included a number of defenses of John Lott by one Mary Rosh; and that some of these defenses depended on non-public knowledge about who had or hadn't personally corresponded with Lott. Julian then noticed that Rosh's IP address matched Lott's precisely; and that Rosh's voluminous Usenet postings were entirely made up of defenses of or posts about John Lott. Indeed, some of them provided character testimony ("Lott was very nice when he taught me in class," that sort of thing).

Lott subsequently confirmed that he used the Rosh sock puppet "as a way to respond to points in online discussions... without the time commitment posts under his real name might have required."

The lesson, I guess, is that it's probably wiser to make the time commitment to say what you have to say under your name, and not to be tempted by the laxness that's possible behind a cloak of pseudonymity. If you use such a cloak-- and I do understand that there can be good reasons for it-- use it to talk about things other than yourself. But that cloak can offer false safety, and I'm going to stick with the business of attaching my name to what I write.

I've been doing reading about Destutt de Tracy and Thomas Jefferson. Tracy's book-length commentary on Spirit of the Laws couldn't safely be published in Napoleonic France. Jefferson translated it and arranged for its anonymous publication in the U.S.-- that is, neither Tracy's nor Jefferson's name appeared. Jefferson then wrote a great many letters praising the book, commending it to students and universities and friends, and generally talking about how wonderful and impressive it was. And, frankly, those letters now seem a little weird, almost creepy-- even though keeping Tracy anonymous was clearly necessary. (NB: I haven't been able to determine whether Jefferson derived any financial benefit from sales of his translation, but I suspect that he did not.)

Iraq on campus

The Chronicle asks: "Should Faculties Take a Stand?" ("A stand" means "a stand against war with Iraq," which I take not as a sign that the Chronicle's biased but as a sign that it understands which way faculty senates, in general, would vote; "faculties" means "faculties as corporate bodies," i.e. faculty senates, not individual professors.)

I've quoted from it before, but I think there is much wisdom in it and I'll quote from it again. My university's Kalven Report, which has quasi-constitutional status around here, says:

The mission of the university is the discovery, improvement, and dissemination of knowledge.
Its domain of inquiry and scrutiny includes all aspects and all values of society. A university
faithful to its mission will provide enduring challenges to social values, policies, practices, and
institutions. By design and by effect, it is the institution which creates discontent with the
existing socal arrangements and proposes new ones. In brief, a good university, like Socrates,
will be upsetting.

The instrument of dissent and criticism is the individual faculty member or the individual student.
The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic. It is, to go back once
again to the classic phrase, a community of scholars. To perform its mission in the society,
a university must sustain an extraordinary environment of freedom of inquiry and maintain an
independence from political fashions, passions, and pressures. A university, if it is to be true
to its faith in intellectual inquiry, must embrace, be hospitable to, and encourage the widest
diversity of views within its own community. It is a community but only for the limited, albeit
great, purposes of teaching and reseacrh. It is not a club, it is not a trade association, it is not a
lobby.

Since the university is a community only for these limited and distinctive purposes, it is a
community which cannot take collective action on the issues of the day without endangering
the conditions for its existence and effectiveness. There is no mechanism by which it can
reach a collective position without inhibiting that full freedom of dissent on which it thrives.
It cannot insist that all of its members favor a given view of social policy; if it takes collective
action, therefofre, it does so at the price of censuring any minority who does not agree with
the view adopted. In brief, it is a community which cannot resort to majority vote to reach
positions on public issues.

The neutrality of the university as an institution arises then not from a lack of courage nor out
of indifference and insensitivity. It arises out of respect for free inquiry and the obligation to
cherish a diversity of viewpoints. And this neutrality as an institution has its complement in
the fullest freedom for its faculty and students as individuals to participate in political action
and social protest. It finds its complement, too, in the obligation of the university to provide
a forum for the most searching and candid discussion of public issues.

In other words: no.

UPDATE: The very next day, Stanley Fish quoted from the same passage here, in his Chronicle column on related subjects.

Laloca has the rundown on last night's NARAL dinner, and the speeches by the Democratic presidential candidates.

Remember this lovely, classy post from John Derbyshire in The Corner last week?
(Andrew Sullivan commented on it.)

"A friend in DC emails to tell me that there are 100,000
antiwar protestors on the Mall. I am reminded of watching
the New York St. Patrick's Day parade once with a friend
of Ulster Unionist sympathies. As the massed ranks of
Irish marched past, my friend sighed and said: 'The things
you see when you don't have a gun!'"

Well, it's gone down the memory hole, as noted by Gene Healy and Jesse Walker.

Of course, NRO is entirely within its rights, and indeed entirely right, to remove content from its website that violates its norms, editorial message, and sense of propriety. Any magazine, and any magazine's website, properly exercizes discretionary control over its own content. And NR in particular has a history of seeing itself as policing the boundaries of respectability in the conservative movement (a history that long predates the Ann Coulter brouhaha).

What this latest event puts into stark relief is: NRO is willing to take down Derb's comments when it deems them offensive and over-the-line-- which means that it doesn't consider his constant racial vitriol and venom against gays to be over the line. As I've asked before, when Jonah Goldberg criticized libertarians for not properly policing their own boundaries: What about Derbyshire?