MSU President civilizes the natives

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Who is Michigan's Empire Man?
President  Builds Empire in Iraq While Few Challenge Him at Home

by Brian McKenna and Dave Dempsey

"I think this must be heaven," Peter McPherson told the State News on July
3. "I think life is good." On sabbatical from his presidency at Michigan
State University (MSU), McPherson was not on a summer vacation. He was
overseeing the economic restructuring of Iraq.

Since May, at the behest of President Bush, McPherson had been the point
man in charge of "making Iraq safe for capitalism," as Fortune put it on
June 23. He  managed Iraq's oil revenue, administered its central bank, and
worked to privatize Iraq's state owned enterprises. "It's fun to put
together a country's budget," he told the State News, MSU's student newspaper.

Rather than release him outright, the MSU Board of Trustees cheerfully
granted McPherson, the former head of the U.S. Agency for International
Development, a 130-day leave of absence. He's scheduled to return to the
East Lansing campus soon.

Presidential sabbaticals can be quite enlightening affairs. In 1970
Haverford President John Coleman took one "to walk in other peoples'
shoes." He dug ditches, picked up garbage, and sought to better understand
the tough lives of physical laborers in America. He shared his experiences
in a book, Blue Collar Journal.

McPherson, in contrast, has been working around the clock to impose a
political and economic vision on a captive nation. "If you don't do enough
to create a political constituency for privatization now," he told
Fortune's Jeremy Kahn, "then it will get killed in the cradle." For his
free market zeal, one of McPherson's own team members accused him of
believing in an "ideological nirvana," according to Kahn.

One of the few MSU faculty to publicly criticize McPherson is Lewis
Siegelbaum, chair of History at MSU. In a July 10 State News letter to the
editor, he took umbrage at McPherson's "heaven" remark, charging that it
"smacks of gross insensitivity for the Iraqi peoples' suffering . . . . ..
McPherson does seem to be having 'fun' putting together a budget, leaving
his suit in the closet, and otherwise playing the colonial officer. I, for
one, am ashamed."

This could be a teachable moment of historic proportions for MSU faculty.
Students and scholars would greatly benefit from a close look at their
president's activities, deciphering what it says about empire, freedom and
democracy. Better yet, they could use the occasion as an opening to analyze
the parallels between  arrogance abroad with  arrogance at home. But East
Lansing, where MSU sits, is a small town, a company town to some, and
reaction, as we'll see, is common. Will faculty rise to the challenge?

"I think you can write a history of civilization based on freedom versus
order and security," says McPherson, "to me it's almost a classic issue in
a democracy."

Let's review McPherson's democratic scorecard.

Spooked

Here are a few recent items that reflect the "order and security" part of
the equation.

--Undercover. In 2000, McPherson agreed to let MSU police infiltrate a
registered campus student group, United Students Against Sweatshops (since
renamed Students for Economic Justice), who were concerned about the World
Trade Organization and unfair labor practices. The undercover operative, a
young policewoman, was accidentally discovered by the students while she
directed traffic. At first McPherson denied having any knowledge of the
affair [can we document this?-it's what I remember, but I want to be sure],
but later, under intense scrutiny, he admitted signing off on the covert
action. Among the justifications for the deceit was concern about potential
violence  allegedly considered by the group concerning an upcoming campus
visit by a World Bank official, in the wake of the 1999 WTO protests in
Seattle. No evidence of such planning was ever found.

full: http://csf.colorado.edu/mail/pen-l/2003IV/msg00530.html


Louis Proyect, Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org


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