Like, seriously: I hate Dershowitz so much, that I may not be able to help myself from cussing at him or something if I ever run into him in the neighborhood. We’ve all read or heard about his learned legal justifications of torture. Perhaps not surprisingly, he’s apparently spoken in defense of John Yoo, a Berkeley law professor who’s in a bit of trouble for advising the Bush government on torture policy. Dershowitz thinks the school should only be concerned with Yoo’s academics. Wait, what? Yup, that’s right! Mr. Alan Dershowitz insisting on academic freedom: the same Dershowitz who instigated a political campaign to get another fellow academic denied tenure.

Here’s more on this, including a glimpse at Dershowitz’s views on torture. In one word, despicable.

For a nerd like me, a nerd-celebrity like Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak inspires the kind of hysteria that many people would experience when having a chance to meet, say, Angelina Jolie.

Well, last Thursday I got to see Spivak at Harvard Divnity School, where she was the speaker for this year’s William James Lecture on Religious Experience. Contrary to expectation, I did understand at least half of what she was saying. Also contrary to rumors that I’ve heard from no less than two different friends, she does not at all match the profile of a stereotypical fierce Bengali woman. I think she’s really quite adorable. In fact, aspiring academics should collectively recognize her as our goddess (even as I realize that she would probably detest that).

Her talk, titled “Imagination, Not Culture: A Singular Example,” was a Spivakesque take on the 19th century Bengali religious figure, the Holy Mother Sri Sarada Devi, whom Spivak deliberately chose to refer using her non-devotional name, Saradamani. Spivak presented details from the biography of this intriguing woman, along with critical analyses from a number of fascinating perspectives (for e.g., “the female as honorary male,” so often the inevitably gendered appropriation of the girl who comfortably hangs out with guys). Spivak was also fundamentally concerned with the aloukik, or transcendental. She spoke of the ecastatic experiences of Sarada Devi and her husband, the famous Ramakrishna, with whom she was engaged in a marriage of celibacy (It is a delight to be able to understand untranslatable Bengali phrases: ami jeno kirokom hoye gechilum). Much like Ramakrishna’s encounters with Sarada Devi, I can only describe our experience of Spivak’s talk as one of intellectual ecstasy, as I witnessed much of the audience, including myself, as visibly enthralled.

It’s worth noting that at least three times during the whole lecture and the Q&A session, she made the oft-quoted statement: “I am not an Indianist, I am a Europeanist.” I have to say, I think Spivak has a great sense of humor, which makes her work so much more exciting despite the notorious opacity of her prose. I also think she really has a very humble personality, at least compared to that other figure in the “holy trinity” of postcolonial theory, Homi Bhabha–who a colleague of mine at work once described as “quite full of himself!” (I must add though that Bhabha’s sense of humor is unbeatable!)

I just noticed, by the way, that Spivak had briefly mentioned Sarada Devi at the end of “Moving Devi,” her other famous essay after “Can the Subaltern Speak?”. “Moving Devi” was the subject of a talk at UPenn that was covered by a New York Times article six years ago: “Creating a Stir Wherever She Goes.” The article was a look at the academic cult surrounding Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, both the author and the person (the sari, the crewcut hair dyed pinkish). An amusing and informative read, so check it out if you like.

Having to choose between the ivory tower and the real world, I realized, is an extremely difficult decision—not least when many of the factors affecting this choice are beyond one’s control. While I continue to bother my mind with all that boggles it, I thought I would share with the world the following reflections that I had to write down sometime ago in response to a question:

At the conclusion of a conference on Islamic hermeneutics at Yale last year, Farid Esack posed a rather blunt question to the speakers of a discussion panel that he was moderating: he asked, what do any of their presentations, their sophisticated treatments of issues in law, theology, and scriptural interpretation, have anything to do with the suffering of human beings out there in society? How do their works relate to the millions of AIDS victims in Africa, or the countless millions of poor and starving people across the world? Esack, of course, was not making an accusation. He was rather, in a characteristic manner of provocation, inviting his audience to re-think the un-thought. For an aspiring scholar of religious history, these questions are indeed deeply unsettling.

But that moment of uncertainty can help lead us to understand the challenges of religious studies. The essential challenge confronting the scholar of religion is whether he is able to define or identify his or her own location: is it primarily the academy, or is it the church, or is it out there in the town square? Even more complex is the fact that none of these spaces are entirely independent of the others. Indeed, scholarship does not take place in a vacuum, and regardless of the academic’s working assumption of objectivity and distance, the discourse of scholarship affects, as much as it is affected by, the world at large. Also relevant is the question of the relationship between the person of the scholar and the object of her scholarship. If the scholar is interested in religion as faith, then what of her own beliefs? If she is interested in the practitioners of a religion, where does she stand in relation to that community? And if she is interested in the texts of a religion, how do her own writings affect the discourse surrounding the key texts?

Such questions, of course, are not unique to scholars of religion but apply to academics in most disciplines of study. But the challenge in religious studies is particularly acute, not least because religion is so remarkably pervasive. So much so, in fact, that the same religion can be responsible for the ideology that sustains an order as well as for the opposition that seeks to undo that status quo. Religion is that which can cause people to ostracize victims of a disease in the name of God’s curse at the same time as it can help those same victims cope with unimaginable pain and misery. The same religious text can inspire some people to acts of violence and terror, while promoting others to utterly reject such tendencies to hatred. The problem of the religious scholar is therefore not just “being-in-the-world,” but being in a world in which he or she is perhaps not even sure what religion is.

But the pervasive presence of religion in society is precisely what makes it so rewarding as a subject of scholarship. Indeed, religious study is not just a rewarding pursuit, it is almost a requirement. As Mohammed Arkoun asks so appropriately: “how can one justify scientifically the setting aside, the methodological suspension, or the explicit elimination from consideration of the religious element in societies where, contrary to what Durkheim said at the beginning of the century, God is present at every level of social existence and every level of discourse expressing it?” (Rethinking Islam, p. 103). Religious study is therefore a responsibility, as much as scholars must also remain wary of the challenge already discussed above: they are not necessarily outside of the “social existence” they seek to understand.

The issue of scholarly responsibility and associated challenges points us back to the questions raised by Farid Esack, which we can now understand as questions about the ethics of scholarship. Theological scholarship is not independent of concerns for social justice, for theology is almost always invested in the real world—either for or against justice. The responsibility of the scholar is therefore to investigate these complex and often unclear relationships. Such an exercise is ultimately rewarding, one hopes, in its ability to contribute to justice in the world.

I have little respect for Ahmadinejad, for what I can only call his distinct brand of amateurism. But today, I have lost a bit of respect for another president, the head of Columbia University. This is how he publicly addresses a guest invited to speak at his famed institution:

“Mr. President, you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator,”adding, “You are either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated.” [NYT]

Mr. Bollinger’s verbal assault, reportedly a full 15 minutes long, barely reflect the ethics of intelligent debate. If this man is a scholar, then I am a tad embarrassed to even associate myself with the academia.

Before the event, the controversy had loomed largely over Columbia’s decision to host Ahmadinejad: the university, and not least its president, was heavily criticized, especially by right-wingers. The debate on campus was apparently focused more on the question of freedom of speech. But now, after this ridiculous performance, attention has shifted somewhat from Ahmadinejad himself to Lee Bollinger. The latter, it seems, may have been able to win over some of those harsh critics: the NYT reports that “the American Israel Public Affairs Committee sent out an e-mail message shortly after the speech with the subject line, ‘A Must Read: Columbia University President’s Intro of Iran’s Ahmadinejad today.’ Inside was a transcript of Mr. Bollinger’s introduction.”

The Nation has just published a good piece by Jayati Vora, a recent graduate of Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs–the sponsor of Ahmadinejad’s speech yesterday. She digs a little deeper into the recent history of muddled politics at Columbia, and the hypocrisies that even academics aren’t free of.

Last night I came across the following useful reflections by distinguished historian Lynn Hunt when reading a paper that was originally presented at The English Institue at Johns Hopkins in 1988.

History is about telling stories. It is not a repository of facts or anecdotes because it has no ontological status whatsoever. No particular fact or anecdote that comes from the past can be presumed to have any particular truth status just because it comes from the past. History is “out there” in some sense, but its thereness is not fixable. . . . History is a search for truth that always eludes the historian but also informs her work, but this truth is not an objective one in the sense of a truth standing outside the practices and concerns of the historian. History is better defined as an ongoing tension between stories that have been told and stories that might be told. In this sense, it is more useful to think of history as an ethical and political practice than as an epistemology with a clear ontological status. On the other hand, a concept of a history that is “out there” does inform most historians’ work and for good reason: it stands as a constant reminder that we cannot get at the “real” truth and yet that we must always continue to try to do so. This concept of history makes possible Nietzsche’s belief that many eyes will tell us more than one: “the more different eyes we can put on in order to view a given spectacle, the more complete will be our conception of it, the greater our ‘objectivity.’” [Lynn Hunt, "History as Gesture; or The Scandal of History," in Consequences of Theory, ed. Jonathan Arac and Barbara Johnson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 102-3]

Hunt’s concern is the “scandal” of encounters between history and theory, and she surveys a number of (then) contemporary disputes in the academia that highlight the problem. The most well-known of these was the Paul de Man and Heidegger ‘affairs’: should the legitimacy of the theoretical work of these individuals be affected by their personal history (notably, their connections to Nazism)? Hunt draws attention to the nature or meaning of history itself. And, most memorably, she points out: “In literature and philosophy as disciplines, theory is contaminated by history; in history as a discipline, history is contaminated by theory.”

Christopher Hayes had an interesting article on economics entitled “Hip Heterodoxy” in last week’s Nation, reviewing the state of the disclipline and the situation of those who depart from the ‘orthodoxy’ of neoclassical economic theory. It made for good reading, particularly as I myself am quite the non-economist. On a broader, thematic level, the basic issue is really the dialectic between establishment and dissidence.

The term “heterodox”–like, say, “infidel”–is necessarily imprecise; it categorizes people by what they don’t believe rather than what they do. In the case of heterodox economists, what they don’t believe is the neoclassical model that anchors the economics profession…

The problem, then, that heterodox economists face is that they are economists who don’t “think like economists.” Many point out that humans aren’t rational, or not nearly as rational as the theory would have them be (and, further, that in the aggregate this creates market failures). Others point out that humans are social creatures, not individual agents, and their preferences and behaviors are forged by social structures: institutions, habits, social mores and culture all mediate and drive economic behavior. Others say that price and value aren’t interchangeable and that prices don’t arise from the simple intersection of supply and demand curves, while some argue that unequal power between different sectors of society affects how markets operate. Dissent from the mainstream of economics is not new; indeed, it’s nearly as old as the profession itself.

Real the whole piece here.

Most of you had probably heard of Marilee Jones when she got fired from her job at MIT a few weeks ago. She had been working at the MIT Admissions Office for nearly three decades, of which the last ten years were as Dean – until it was discovered that none of the three degrees reported on her resume were true! I took a particular interest in the news (which had become front-page material even on the New York Times!), because I thought it raised some very interesting and important questions. The problem wasn’t so much that she had lied about her academic credentials: a grave offense, no doubt, particularly for someone in charge of admitting students to college! (And not just any college, but the most reputed technical institute in the world). But the more perplexing problem was that Jones was doing fine at her job. And not just fine, she was actually excelling at it! Deans of admissions at most schools typically don’t have their names reach beyond the fences of their own campuses, or beyond the contents of those April 1st envelopes that high school seniors so anxiously await. Marilee Jones, on the other hand, apparently acquired fame across the US, for launching a crusade against high school hysteria over college admissions — a worthy mission, in my opinion. And now, of course, she’s even more famous for having to quit her job.

Barbara Ehrenreich, the acclaimed writer and activist, had a brief piece in The Nation online a couple of weeks ago about the Jones scandal. What really is the worth of that piece of paper called your college diploma, she wonders. And why has the job market been increasingly co-opted by the college industry? She has an interesting theory:

My theory is that employers prefer college grads because they see a college degree chiefly as mark of one’s ability to obey and conform. Whatever else you learn in college, you learn to sit still for long periods while appearing to be awake. And whatever else you do in a white-collar job, most of the time you’ll be sitting and feigning attention. Sitting still for hours on end–whether in library carrels or office cubicles–does not come naturally to humans. It must be learned–although no college has yet been honest enough to offer a degree in seat-warming.

While Ehrenreich is obviously being somewhat sarcastic, she raises many good questions that I think society as a whole needs to consider seriously. Read the whole thing here.

Earlier last week, I was on my daily morning commute to Harvard Square when I learned from the newspaper that Harvard finally has a new president. Of course, the fact that it’s a woman was hardly suprising, considering the circumstances of Larry Summers’s resignation (Although, in fact, Summers’s presidency was fraught with more controversies than just the remark on women in science. He was, for instance, the reason why Cornel West left for Princeton).

To some extent, it’s sad that the media has been more obsessed with looking at Dr. Faust (no pun intended!) as a woman, than as an individual. After all, Drew Gilpin has a pretty interesting biography. Despite a family legacy at Princeton, she had to choose Bryn Mawr for college, because in the 60’s Princeton was still a boys-only club. She had “skipped her spring midterms in 1965 to travel to Selma, Ala., and join a march led by Martin Luther King Jr. after she saw television broadcasts of Alabama state troopers attacking marchers with tear gas and billy clubs.” And now she’s a fairly well-recognized scholar in American Civil War history.

The symbolic significance of a woman as president at America’s oldest university is undeniable. It was almost as significant when, four years ago, Alison Richard became the first full-time female head of the 800-year old University of Cambridge. But such changes in leadership alone should not make us blind to the extensive, deeply-rooted disparities that exist otherwise. The academia is still largely a man’s world, and the reasons are often as complicated as the situation. A recent piece in Campus Progress takes a stab at the issue. Here’s a snippet:

Though Faust’s promotion is certainly a watershed moment for women in academia, her success comes amid continued underrepresentation of women on university faculties, particularly in the hard sciences… But although women now make up 56 percent of Harvard’s undergraduate population and are predicted to earn more than 60 percent of the university’s master’s degrees and nearly half of doctoral degrees by 2010, only 20 percent of full professors at Harvard are female, according to a study by the American Association of University Professors on gender indicators in higher education. In 2004, which was during Summers’ presidency, only four of the 32 faculty members offered tenure were female.

The numbers at Harvard are indicative of those at many research institutions. On average, women hold only 24 percent of full professorships in the United States.

I recommend reading the whole article.

Farid Esack is a man I have come to admire and respect a lot. Several weeks ago, during Ramadan, I had the random, lucky opportunity of joining him for dinner along with a few graduate students at Harvard, and I have wanted to note down a few thoughts about him since then, but obviously never got around to it. Dr. Esack is an extremely humble and modest person — and I know that I share this view with others who have interacted with him personally. He’s almost somewhat of an anomaly in the academia, although personally he would probably insist that the academia is not quite where he belongs. That day, the conversation over our Thai meal took many fascinating turns, but I unfortunately can’t dwell on it enough right now.

This past Friday evening, Esack spoke at a dinner organized by HIS in commemoration of World AIDS Day — an effort for which HIS deserves sincere congratulations. Dr. Esack’s speech, entitled “AIDS, Islam and Justice – A View from Africa,” lived up to every expectation I had. It was really the most incredibly enlightening and inspiring talk I have attended in a while. I was particularly eager to hear him on this because I know that Islam and AIDS is currently one of his main areas of interest: this Fall he’s been teaching a class on the same topic at Harvard as a visiting professor. Dr. Esack is up-front about questions that we don’t ask too often: Why is it that Africans constitue the majority of the 25 million people who have died of the pandemic over the last 25 years? Why is there a perverse tendency to associate the disease with some distant, projected ‘other’? Why the tendency to offer moralised responses to the pandemic? Why the ‘fetishization’ of sex when it comes to the question of AIDS?

Esack connects the need for a just and compassionate response to the pandemic to his broader perspective on Islam: this is a core prophetic principle in itself, the need to identify with the margins of society, as all the prophets have always done. Esack mocks almost the entire rubric of post-911 discourse on or by Muslims (at some point, he used the phrase “the Islam industry”, which made me chuckle): he is disturbed by all this talk of “fitting in”. What is this America we are supposedly trying to fit into? What status quo did Moses, or Jesus, or Muhammad ever try to fit into? (While I am not sufficiently familiar with his works/ideas, Dr. Esack increasingly reminds me of the Critical Theorists, and lately, of Anouar Majid).

Since I cannot myself elaborate what he so eloquently spoke about, I will have to defer to other sources for those interested. In an interview while at the International AIDS Conference in Toronto earlier this Fall, Esack said: “No religious group can say we have the answer. Only a prophetic religion can adequately respond to this pandemic. A religion that is not first of all concerned about its own structures of power and survival, but about the imperative to live with justice. The founders of religions were not concerned about how to ensure the survival of the religious community, but rather how to identify with the poor and how to disturb the power when it does not serve justice.” I would recommend following this link to read the whole text of the fairly informative interview.

Or so I thought, until I was bummed out by a number of (male) friends who think that “over-educated” women can never make “ideal wives” — an attitude that I find not only disturbing but nearly offensive. It seems, however, that trends may indicate otherwise. A recent review article in the Washington Post claims that women with bachelor’s degrees and PhDs are no longer “more likely to miss out on their ‘MRS’ degrees than their less-educated sisters”:

[F]or women born since 1960, there has been a revolutionary reversal of the historic pattern. As late as the 1980s, according to economist Elaina Rose, women with PhDs or the equivalent were less likely to marry than women with a high school degree. But the “marital penalty” for highly educated women has declined steadily since then, and by 2000 it had disappeared. Today, women with a college degree or higher are more likely to marry than women with less education and lower earnings potential. (S. Coontz, “Having It All,” Washington Post)

The study is probably not substantial, but it’s a pointer for some thought. And the fact remains that there are many men who feel threatened by educated women. (For the link, thanks to a chance landing on the blog of well-known Economics professor and textbook-author Greg Mankiw!)