Macker: Are you saying that Boyington is the equivalent of a General Custer? After all your statement applies to both equally.

(1) They are “equivalent” in both being remembered chiefly or solely as warriors. (2) They are not “equivalent” in that the moral status of Boyington’s military career is more complicated than Custer’s.

What I explicitly stated above, however, is that it does not matter, for the point I’m making, whether Boyington was involved in just or unjust wars. It’s not the job of a University to offer parting rah-rahs for deceased government-hired fighters, whether they are admirable people or not. There are lots of cultural outlets other than the University dedicated to blowing the trumpets for martial prowess, and I don’t see how it is any part of the goals or purpose of a University to celebrate it. (The University does have a purpose, and that purpose is to host, foster, celebrate, and promote a certain kind of life — the life of the mind, or what some would call the Arts and Sciences. There are other kinds of life that are indeed valuable or admirable, but it’s not the University’s job to promote them. The idea that a University owes a twenty-one gun salute to anyone who passes through and goes on to be cheered by others as a Good Citizen, whether or not the things they are being cheered for have anything in particular to do with the University or the kind of life it promotes, has something directly to do with the salivating statism of educational ideas in the last century.)

If you’re going to ignore my repeated explicit statements to this effect then you haven’t got any place complaining that my statements on the matter are disingenuous.

However, if Hoppe is right, then …

Quite apart from the merits or demerits of your substantive points, this is never an auspicious way to begin an argument.

Posner: “The economic literature on worker cooperatives identifies decisive objections to that form of organization that are fully applicable to university governance. The workers have a shorter horizon than the institution. Their interest is in getting as much from the institution as they can before they retire ….”

This attempt at a nutshell summary of a brief against worker co-operatives seems to commit a serious economic fallacy.

It’s true that workers (industrial, professional, or otherwise) generally have “a shorter horizon” than the “institution” that they work for. But that’s true of all mortal human beings, not just employees, and the “institution” makes no decisions and takes no actions independently of the decisions and actions of mortal human beings.

So the proper comparison here is not between the horizons and incentives of workers as against the horizons and incentives of the institution, but rather the horizons and incentives of shareholding workers as against the horizons and incentives of shareholders not working for the institution (henceforward: absentee shareholders), and if your concern is for the long-term flourishing of the institution, the questions at hand become (1) whether absentee shareholders have longer “horizons” than shareholding workers, or vice versa; (2) whether absentee shareholders are less likely than shareholding workers to milk the institution for personal gain within the “horizon” of their own relationship to the institution at the expense of the long-term flourishing of the institution, or vice versa; (3) whether absentee shareholders are more willing and/or better able than shareholding workers to discover the best means of serving the interests of the institution within their short-term horizons, or vice versa; and (4) whether absentee shareholders are more willing and/or better able than shareholding workers to discover the best means of serving the interests of the institution beyond the short-term horizons of their personal relationship to the University.

These questions are important, and I think not obviously to be answered in favor of control by absentee shareholders, at least not in every imaginable case. (And since the structure and goals of the University make it an atypical case compared to factories, restaurant chains, shipping companies, and other for-profit enterprises, it seems like special caution is needed here.)

But they remain unasked as long as we pretend that the mystical body of The Institution will somehow be making decisions once mortal workers are no longer playing a substantive role in decision-making.

You’re going to need a much stronger case before you can justify such a radical set of policy proposals as the “accountable to none save the Board” platform for University CEOs that you’ve outlined here.

I actualy object to any nation but our own operating our ports.

That’s interesting. I object to any nation including “our own” operating “our” ports.

Why the exception on your part?

“Actually he was a faculty member…. While he talked the talk, he also walked the walk and taught introductory seminars.”

Well, good for him; my bad at misrepresenting his position.

That said, the position that he was hounded out of was not his teaching of introductory seminars, but rather his position as CEO of the University, and the censure resolutions passed by faculty bodies concerned his “leadership” as an adminstrator, not his teaching or research. In point of fact, I notice that Harvard has been specifically invited to take a position as senior faculty if he wants it.

The substance of my comments stands.

“Summers was well within his rights to lead on this issue.”

It’s not his job as CEO to “lead” research “on this issue.” That’s a job for people who are paid to do research. In his role as a faculty member he would be well within the bounds of academic freedom. In his role as an administrator his “leadership” on substantive questions [of research] is at best intrusive micromanagement and at worst ignorant ranting. If he wants to “lead” research then he’ll be better able to do that now that he’s stepped down.”

“Ask any sociologist or anthropologist how much human biology matters to their work. To put on ideological blinders in research and then create purposely misleading research by not accounting for known factors is a akin to creating Ptolemiac epicycles in honor of false ideology.”

This is a serious distortion of the controversy over Summers’ remarks, in which Nancy Hopkins of MIT (who is a qualified scholar in biology, as Summers is not) played a substantial role. Nobody is suggesting that “human biology” doesn’t matter to sociology or anthropology; only that it doesn’t matter in the way that Larry Summers thinks it does. That said, I’m not concerned with settling that dispute, or the unrelated dispute with Cornell West that you invoke for some reason in the middle of a discussion of this other controversy.

The issue here isn’t whether Summers is wrong or right; it’s whether he deserves any special protections for public expressions of his views without any repercussions from faculty members who think he’s a jackass. If he were losing an academic position, then he would deserve it under principles of academic freedom. But there’s no such thing as “administrative freedom” in the University and there’s no reason why there should be. Too bad for Larry.

“What is not valueless is the conception of a university as a place where questions may be asked — even if they annoy particular sets of people.”

Your concern for academic freedom is misplaced.

Lots of people ask lots of questions; some of the questions are stupid questions and some of the people are not people engaged in the scholarly community. It’s not the purpose of the University to provide a forum for just anybody to ask just any question.

The position that Summers was hounded out of was not a scholarly position but rather an administrative one. He was not a student or a faculty member, but rather a CEO; a position which (if it need exist at all) exists only to facilitate the faculty and students’ research, not to participate in it (let alone ignorantly tread on it).

If we were talking about a faculty member being hounded out of a job largely over controversial views, I’d be the first to write a letter, even if I personally think he’s a first-class numbskull. But as far as academic freedom is concerned, the entitlements of University CEOs to rant and rave about whatever they like without repercussions from the faculty that they serve, are worth less than nothing.

My sarcastic remarks about red tape are not unrelated to these points.

Oh no. Another useless University bureaucrat was no longer happy with his comfortable academic CEO position and maybe it’s due to his unpopularity with the faculty. The invaluable services that University administration offers to the faculty and students of the University will be disrupted, uncoordinated, scattered, leaderless.

I weep for the future of Harvard. Damn that coterie of academic feminists, interfering with our absolutely vital educational red tape infrastructure.

“I was trying to express frustration with the fact that a lot of anarchists only seem to gain scholastic inspiration from members of the scholastic anarchist tradition”

Well, sure, this is a genuine problem.

“The indigenous inhabitants of North America, while not Utopian (there is no such thing as a Utopia) were a good example of what could be described as “anarchism”, or at least something very close to it.”

Some of them were and some of them weren’t. You’re talking about an entire continent’s worth of people over a period of tens of thousands of years, who ranged from nomadic hunter-gatherer bands, to roving warrior-bandits, to settled stateless confederations with complex social structures, to rigidly authoritarian terror-empires. Some of them are good examples for anarchists to study and take lessons from; others clearly are not. The idea that “the indigenous people of North America” are some homogenous block that exemplified anything in particular at all is precisely as silly as the idea that “the people of Eurasia” are.

Personally, I don’t think we need new terms: “sadism” or “masochism” are derisive enough. De Sade and Sacher-Masoch weren’t actually about the “safe, sane, and consensual” happy-sexy-leather-time that the sadist crowd wants you to believe in these days.

“Sexual sadism” makes it pretty explicit what the feminist objection is.

Lewis: “That is, a lot of people may radically diverge from the theories of their immediate predecessors on the tree.”

Brian: “Like who?”

Russell and Wittgenstein, to take a rather famous example.

Or Ramsey and Wittgenstein, if you aren’t skipping over the technicality on which Ramsey became one of Wittgenstein’s “advisors” for his “dissertation” after L.W. returned to Cambridge.