But I really like this website, which is easily the best in the Columbia blogosphere. The Comm. is still this university’s only source of up-to-the minute opinion and commentary, but Pete and Rob are to the list what Basho was to the haiku, or, more appropriately, what Urban Meyer is to the spread offense. PaRMLoT isn’t quite up to Opinion Journal status, but it’s at least as trustworthy as those awful Slate blogs…
…One blog of suspect trustworthiness if Marty Peretz’s little patch of internet over at TNR. Last November the Spine generated discussion when it reported that Joseph Massad had been denied tenure; naturally, the vehemently pro-Israel Peretz has fixated on fair Alma’s conroversial record on the Middle East. Rightfully so: one wonders how intellectually disengaged we’d have to be not to question a place that’s deified Edward Said, invited Ahmadinejad to speak on campus (twice!), whitewashed an investigation into ethnically-motivated academic bullying and (maybe) given tenure to Joseph Massad.
But Peretz’s fixation on Columbia–and PrezBo in particular–seems due to a lazy inability to pass along blame where blame is due. The problem isn’t that Bollinger is “ignoring the obvious” in allegedly allowing the hiring of Timothy Mitchell–it’s that hiring power within individual departments still has as much to do with intellectual cronyism than it does with academic talent. It’s unconscionable to me that a person who is on the record as, essentially, treating Israeli scholars as if they don’t exist would be put in charge of graduate studies within any department at an Ivy League university. But PrezBo’s opposition to that boycott goes to show just how little control he has–and by extension, how little the institution has–over the intellectual life of the university. Debating the obviously broken system of checks-and-balances within academia seems more constructive than regurgitated condemnation of a single school, even if that condemnation is, in some sense, wholly warranted. He’s picking on too easy of a target.