Re: In defence of Krugman and against Alexander Cockburn: choice of targets

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Jurriaan Bendien wrote:
> The question that needs to be asked is what we achieve by polemically
> writing off Krugman and calling him nasty names. Krugman is a very learned
> left-liberal economist capable of very good critical inquiry into the US
> economy and suggesting positive alternatives. I personally believe we should
> aim to attract people like that to the socialist movement, rather than vent
> abuse language against them. By doing so, we just shoot ourselves in the
> foot more than anything else.


But that's what makes Cockburn Cockburn. He is the ultimate contrarian 
who coined the term "pwogwessive". Although I enjoy reading Krugman (and 
Maureen Dowd) myself, I enjoy it even more when some self-congratulatory 
liberal gets a spitball tossed at them.

Last night I watched a cloying documentary on my employer Columbia 
University by Ric Burns ('78) on the PBS station in NYC. Although I 
enjoyed finding out more about the institutional history of the outfit 
that pays my check, I got really annoyed by the "aren't we wonderful" 
tone. In fact, it is the same tone that pervades PBS. After the 
documentary was finished, you had the execrable Bill Baker who is 
president of WNET, the local affiliate, and my boss Lee Bollinger 
stroking each other for another five minutes.

The documentary featured liberal bigwigs like Jeffrey Sachs telling the 
camera how great an institution it is and how it can help to resolve the 
world's burning problems, all the more so when the University provides 
him with a multimillion dollar townhouse to launch his crusade from.

The only talking head that didn't provoke a feeling of revulsion in me 
was the late Edward Said who described how important teaching was to 
him. He said that he had anxiety attacks before giving a lecture, over 
fears that he would be adequate to the task. Compare that to Zizek, who 
used ruses to avoid meeting with his students.)

When the documentary got to 1968, it took the position that the outburst 
was the result of the tensions of the period combined with the patrician 
aloofness of Grayson Kirk, who arrived each day in a chauffeured car.

But all that is in the past. Columbia would never act in an imperialist 
fashion as it did in 1968 when it attempted to foist a gym on its Harlem 
neighbors in Morningside Park.

Or is it?

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/morningsideheights/message/2174

Published on October 30, 2003
Hostile Takeover
The Socialist Alternative
By LAURA DURKAY

Two weeks ago, Columbia kicked off its 250th anniversary festivities
with one of the lavish, event-filled, expensive celebrations that are
becoming the hallmark of University President Lee C. Bollinger's
reign. While students milled around the giant plywood cake, a small
group of community residents protested Columbia's latest plans for
expansion, including the ambitious scheme to build a satellite campus
in western Harlem. Harlem residents have the right to be skeptical,
given the history of Columbia's relationship to the surrounding
community. Behind any talk of expansion lurks the specter of 1968,
when Columbia attempted to build a gymnasium on public land in
Morningside Park. The plans included one entrance for university
affiliates in the front, and a separate entrance--in the back--for
community members, meaning blacks. For student protesters and Harlem
residents, "Gym Crow" came to symbolize everything exploitive,
paternalistic, and racist about Columbia's relationship to the
neighborhood.

The Columbia administration justifies the current expansion by saying
that it will alleviate Columbia's space crunch and "revitalize" the
neighborhood. But an elite university plunking down roots in western
Harlem will not bring the kind of economic revitalization that Harlem
needs. It will bring higher rents and more gentrification of the sort
currently blossoming on Amsterdam Avenue, where patrons can dine on
$9 cheese plates and $3 cappuccinos at a variety of hip cafés and
restaurants. Does anyone think these establishments have been erected
to serve the residents of the General Grant housing project?

There is no doubt that Columbia needs more space, as anyone who
started the semester in a Ruggles L-room can attest. But this
expansion is not driven by student needs.

Bollinger let slip the real reason for the current Columbia expansion
in a recent interview with Crain's New York Business Review, which
revealed that with the expansion plan, "Mr. Bollinger wants to push
Columbia into the top echelon of universities, alongside Harvard,
Yale, and Stanford." Bollinger hopes to recapture
Columbia's "illustrious history of scientific research"--like when
Columbia professors invented the atomic bomb. "When you look at what
the University's standing was in the 1950s, we are not there yet,"
Bollinger told Crain's. "But we can again define what greatness is."

The current plan calls for an expanded performing arts center and
more life sciences research labs, which will certainly benefit
students. But these departments have been chosen because they will
make money--patent and royalty payments accounted for more than 10
percent of the University's income in the late 1990s.

The truth is that Columbia is a corporation, driven by the same logic
of profit and competition as any other corporation. But it does not
just make money to enrich the ruling elite of this country--it also
produces the next generation of that elite. In its labs it produces
weapons of mass destruction, and in its classrooms it produces the
politicians who use them. Columbia is a sausage factory for the
ruling class, sucking in the children of well-to-do professionals and
squirting out the next generation of bureaucrats, diplomats, CEOs,
corporate lawyers, free-market ideologues, and university professors.
If this is the role of our university, it should not be surprising
that it cares little for the needs of students and less for the needs
of the surrounding community.

The realization that our university is a factory has always produced
revulsion and rebellion in a minority of students. The student
revolts of the 1960s were driven as much by anger at the role of
universities as they were by opposition to racism and the Vietnam
War. Students felt they were being groomed to enter a system that
they had come to abhor, a system that thrived on racism, war,
inequality, and exploitation. James Kunen, a student striker at
Columbia, wrote in his autobiography that "the meaning of the
Columbia uprising is that one too many persons has been educated, and
one too many wires has linked people's thoughts together, for power
to breed power anymore."

In the 1960s, students began protesting war and racism and ended up
questioning the role their schools played in society. Columbia
students today should oppose the University's expansion into Harlem,
while building a movement that will force the University to use its
money for things that students really want and need.

Laura Durkay is a Columbia College senior majoring in history.





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