by Richard Gowan | Aug 16, 2010 | Influence and networks, North America
Henry Kissinger once said that academic politics is so vicious because the stakes are so low. In today’s NYT, Mark Taylor (who runs Columbia’s Religion Department) explains that the stakes are now actually rather high in NYC’s seats of learning:
Rather than learning to live within their means, Columbia University, where I teach, and New York University are engaged in a fierce competition to expand as widely and quickly as possible. Last spring, N.Y.U. announced plans to increase its physical plant by 40 percent over the next 20 years; this summer Columbia secured approval for its $6.3 billion expansion in Upper Manhattan. N.Y.U. is also opening a new campus in Abu Dhabi this fall.
The financial arrangements for these projects remain obscure, but it is clear that they will not be completed without increasing the universities’ already significant and perhaps unsustainable levels of debt. Last year Columbia reported $1.4 billion in outstanding debt against a $5.89 billion endowment. N.Y.U. had a staggering $2.22 billion debt with a relatively modest $2.2 billion endowment — one that had shrunk by more than 11 percent over the previous fiscal year.
This is worrying, especially if (like me) you earn your keep at NYU. So what does Professor Taylor propose we do about this ugly situation?
The competition between Columbia and N.Y.U. is an example of what educational institutions should not be doing. Universities should be looking for new ways to provide high-quality education to more students at a lower price. In today’s world, it no longer makes sense for every school to cover every subject.
For example, it is absurd for Columbia and N.Y.U. to be have [sic] competing philosophy departments at a time when there are few jobs for philosophy academics. Instead, they could cooperate by forming a joint graduate and undergraduate program, which would reduce costs by requiring fewer faculty members and a more modest physical presence, while at the same time increasing course choices for students.
Now, as soon as I read this, it rang true. If there’s one problem we have at NYU – and it must be the same up at Columbia – it’s the massive surplus of shockingly overpaid philosophers lolling about the campus. Wander through Washington Square Park any day of the week, and you have to fight your way past hordes of Gucci-shod, Prada-wearing, mink-coated, bling-laden philosophy professors, all weighed down with emerald-encrusted first editions of Kant’s Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy. It’s like Wall Street in the Eighties.
Or not (the only professor at NYU who seems to live like that is Nouriel Roubini). I know that the humanities are hard to fund these days but the idea that NYU or Columbia could much affect their debt burdens by rationalizing their cadres of philosophers strikes me as unlikely. I wonder if Professor Taylor would be as keen on mergers if NYU had a religious department (rather than a smaller program) that could be melded with his own base at Columbia, with staff cuts for both sides?
More seriously, there is an unquestionable advantage in having different universities rubbing up against each other in NYC. For example, Columbia is home to Jeffrey Sachs while NYU houses William Easterly – one of the greatest thinkers on development aid and one of its greatest critics respectively. It’s hard to imagine that, if the two were suddenly housed in one department, a coherent intellectual agenda would emerge… sometimes institutional competition is necessary for debate.
by Richard Gowan | Aug 16, 2010 | Cooperation and coherence, Global system, Influence and networks, North America
David Bosco, author of a good book about the Security Council, has launched a new blog for Foreign Policy called The Multilateralist. Here’s his mission statement:
Coverage of most international organizations is episodic. The media world turns to the Security Council, the International Monetary Fund, or the International Criminal Court at key moments and then, for the most part, turns away. This blog aims to keep a sustained focus on these complex institutions, which are an increasingly important part of the diplomatic landscape.
Sometimes I think that foreignpolicy.com is out to lure all you multilat-obsessed readers away from Global Dashboard, having already given us Colum Lynch’s excellent Turtle Bay blog on the UN and signed up James Traub as a weekly columnist (we discourteously failed to mention Jim’s recent scathing assault on Ban Ki-moon).
But the more bloggers trying to keep up a focus on international cooperation, the better, I say. At least we’re not the only lunatics in the asylum…
by Jules Evans | Aug 15, 2010 | Global system, Influence and networks
One way to understand the modern politics of wellbeing – by which I mean the introduction of policies by governments aimed at cultivating the ‘wellbeing’, ‘happiness’ or ‘resilience’ of their citizens – is as an attempt to move beyond the confines of liberalism, and to answer the question, ‘where next?’
The liberal state aims to safeguard the rights of the individual in their own private ‘pursuit of happiness’, but it does not go so far as to tell the individual where or how they should pursue it. Each individual in a liberal society has liberty of conscience, and liberty to pursue their happiness as they see fit, as long as they are not harming anyone else.
Modern liberal governments are, more or less, disestablished from religion – they do not try to promote one particular religion or spirituality, and maintain a careful neutrality in matters of private moral and spiritual beliefs.
Modern liberalism did once have a telos, or goal: the goal was the removal of all obstacles, prejudices and superstitions, so that each individual could freely pursue their own private happiness.
We have more or less reached that goal in western societies today, particularly with advances in minority rights since the 1960s, and in homosexual rights over the last decade. So the overarching telos of liberalism has been reached, and we are left with liberal society as an assortment of private teloi.
But this leads to an inevitable restlessness among philosophers and policy makers. Where now? Now the priests and monarchs have been defeated, and the old superstitions over-turned, now we are free to pursue our private inclinations…where next to steer the ship? (more…)
by Alex Evans | Aug 14, 2010 | Conflict and security, Influence and networks
What soldiers actually think about media reporting of inadequate provision of vehicles to troops in Afghanistan:
I didn’t doubt that someone somewhere, tired on stag, had whinged to a reporter. There were enough of them around and they knew what they were doing: giving a wide berth to the officers, who at least had rudimentary media training, chumming up to the boys with satellite phones and fresh rations and then waiting for something controversial to slip out. I suppose what riled us about the media, especially the journalists who flitted in and out like butterflies, got snaps of themselves looking stubbly in the desert and then back up to Kabul to flirt with the NGO girls, was that they hadn’t earned the right to broadcast our whingeing.
Soldiers whinge and purge and moan, that’s what kept us going, and, as the old saying went, the top brass should only really start worrying when the guys on the ground stop complaining. The well-intentioned journalists might even have been bemused at our resentment, thought they were doing us a favour, fighting our corner in public in a way we weren’t allowed to – but that was the point. We were like a family, allowed to slag each other off and curse and damn each other for all we were worth, but someone who wasn’t related didn’t have that right.
Of course there weren’t enough vehicles and of course communications were rubbish, of course we needed more helicopters and of course the boys were tired, but it had ever been and ever would be thus. No army in the world ever had all it needed, no commander had ever suffered from too many resources, and the funny thing was we resented the presumptuous journalism more than the shortages.
– Former Grenadier Guards officer Patrick Hennessy, in the outstanding The Junior Officers’ Reading Club.
by Richard Gowan | Aug 14, 2010 | Africa, Conflict and security, North America
The Cable reports tensions – and maybe personnel changes – in Washington:
President Obama’s special envoy to Sudan, retired Maj. Gen. Scott Gration, could be on his way to a new job in Kenya as the White House prepares a new approach to Sudan ahead of a January referendum that analysts fear could split the country into two separate nations — or even spark a new civil war.
The news comes in the wake of a contentious principals-level meeting at the White House last week, in which Gration clashed openly with U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice over the direction of Sudan policy. At the meeting, Rice was said to be “furious” when Gration proposed a plan that makes the January referendum a priority, deemphasizes the ongoing crisis in Darfur, and is devoid of any additional pressures on the government in Khartoum.
According to multiple sources briefed on the meeting, Gration’s plan was endorsed by almost all the other participants, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and will now go the president for his approval.
As the Cable’s Josh Rogin notes, Gration was basically restating his existing strategy of cooperation with Khartoum – and this was not the first time Susan Rice had objected. Does his softly-softly approach work? Check out the current Economist:
Late last month fighting broke out in Kalma, a vast camp for internally displaced people near the town of Nyala in south Darfur. It is home to more than 100,000 angry residents, many of them previously victims of the deadly government-supported militias known as the janjaweed. The recent violence flared between supporters of two different rebel groups, a faction of the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA), led by Abdul Wahid al-Nur, and the Liberty and Justice Movement (LJM). The SLA is boycotting the current round of Darfur peace talks being chaired by the Qataris in their capital, Doha, while LJM, a coalition of several minor rebel movements, is the only rebel group attending the talks with representatives from the Sudanese government.
Several people were killed in the clashes, a direct result of the SLA’s anger at the rival group’s participation in the negotiations. Five male tribal leaders and a woman, all believed to be members of the SLA, sought protection from UNAMID [the UN Darfur peacekeeping force]. Sudan’s government in Khartoum is insisting that they be turned over to the police, as it believes they were responsible for the violence in the camp. President Omar al-Bashir, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged genocide and war crimes in Darfur, has personally asked for the men to be handed over.
UNAMID is in a bind. If the peacekeepers hand them over, their avowed mission to protect civilians could be fatally compromised. There is little chance of a fair trial for the six, and the ruthless Sudanese authorities may well torture them. But if the peacekeepers say no to Mr Bashir, he could make life very tough for them. “I tell my brothers the governors of Darfur that anyone who exceeds these boundaries or their mandate can be expelled the same day,” he says.
Could Sudan really boot the UN out? Absolutely, says Darfur expert Eric Reeves:
The threat by al-Bashir to expel UNAMID is real, and there is a good deal of evidence that we’ve been moving toward this moment of confrontation for many months. As a well-informed UN official told me in June, it’s a question of when, not if, UNAMID is either expelled or confronted with intolerable operating conditions. UNAMID has been ever more aggressively denied the right to travel where it wishes . . . Tactical (combat) helicopters that arrived in February have not been allowed to carry out missions, or to fly with normal armaments.
Scott Gration’s strategy isn’t working – and that’s been obvious for a while. It’s tempting to argue that we have to sideline Darfur to maximize the chances for a peaceful outcome to next year’s referendum in South Sudan. But if the UN either caves in to the Sudanese in Darfur or gets chucked out, the signal to the various southern Sudanese factions will be clear: the government of Khartoum is out of control and can play outsiders for fools. So why put any trust in peaceful solutions?
It’s essential that the U.S. finds ways to use its leverage over Sudan more effectively. That won’t be easy. But if Scott Gration is moving on, it will at least be a bit easier.
