Month: March 2005

The politically correct faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard passed a surprise no-confidence vote against Larry Summers last night:

Summers’ January remarks — off-the-record, he believed — prompted angry criticism from many faculty, students and alumni; others, however, defended him, saying Summers was simply engaging in a legitimate academic debate.

The criticism quickly expanded into a broader attacks on the president’s allegedly blunt management style and his vision for the university, including major projects to expand Harvard’s campus across the Charles River in Boston, and his ideas about what direction scientific research should take.

J. Lorand Matory, the anthropology professor who introduced the measure, called on Summers to resign.

“There is no noble alternative to resignation,” he said.

Dr. Matory, the motion’s author, is an interesting fellow. He’s a student of cross-dressing, a voodoo expert, a director of the ethnic studies department, an adviser to GLQ, a Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, a great admirer of matriarchy, and an apologist for the corrupt and brutal Nigerian dictator Ibrahim Babangida, about whom he’s writing a sympathetic book:

The next book will be a collaborative effort with my wife, a presidential protocol officer during the rule of Nigerian president Ibrahim Babangida. We have planned it as a culturally sensitive account of the inner workings of the dictatorship that ruled Africa’s largest nation from 1985 to 1993. It is intended both as a corrective to standardized journalistic and political science clichés about the nature of autocracy and corruption in Africa and as a historical study of the genesis of Nigeria’s current political crisis.

Here’s what Nigerians say about Matory’s hero:

In closing, as a nation – we are not faced with many choices in who becomes our president. However, ponderability that Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida is not the best choice is simple. If we seek a nation, which produces leaders that must not be emulated or trusted – then we must allow his choice. If we seek a leader who is not ashamed to live opulently in a grand house where citizens of the nation he governed are reduced to abject poverty – Mr. Babangida must remain our choice. If we seek a commander-in-chief that will once again destroy the team spirit essential to every modern military might – Mr. Babangida must be our choice. If the office of the president is open to a man that would waste funds on political experimentation – our choice must remain Mr. Babangida. If we seek to experience closure of Universities and accelerate brain drain – Mr. Babangida is our choice. However, if our resolute is for a change of direction – we should seek Mr. Babangida to assist the nation to elect a man or woman without his qualities; and one to whom he can serve as an elder statesman or maybe – Kingmaker. And, whilst serving as a Kingmaker – he must promise never to conduct himself as another Balogun of Owu.

What kind of a man supports the presidency of Babangida but not that of Summers?

Not anyone that I’d want educating my children.

UPDATE: Not all Harvard profs are as lame as Dr. VooDoo; see Professor Motl’s blog.

Read the comments to this post and you’ll see there are more of us than anybody imagined.

I always giggle at the complaints our traditional civil libertarians make about the PATRIOT Act because any abuse of essential rights and freedoms in the name of anti-terrorism pales in comparison with the things our government has been doing for twenty years in the name of child support collection.

Every month each bank, public utility, and state employment commissions has its records searched for names matching a deadbeat dads database; child support levels are set ex parte some 40% of the time, with no provision for correction; arrearages pile up if the dad loses his job or has to take a lower paying one (like our reservist soldiers in Iraq) and the law forbids correction of provable errors. That’s right, the so-called Bradley Amendment forbids courts from correcting injustices in child support matters no matter how thoroughly they can be proved.

Radley Balko has stumbled onto the issue thanks to an excellent column by Phyllis Schlafly,which Matt Welch posts to the restricted-comment Hit and Run board.

The child support collection system is a nightmare created by some people who had good intentions and some who didn’t. It’s a perfect example of why we need a meaningful dialectic in Washington, because more or less all of it was passed without debate.

The horrendous abuses contained within this system are the main reason I support Republican politicians and people like Schlafly even though they have weird ideas about evolution and the planet. The alternative is just too vile and hateful for me to countenance.

Schlafly’s column is unusual because it gets all the main issues and gets them right. It’s well worth reading:

Although there are no official statistics, estimates are that more than 100,000 fathers are jailed each year for missing their child-support payments. Another perverse feature of the current system is that child-support payments have nothing to do with whether the father is allowed to see his children and there is no enforcement of his visitation rights.

Debtors’ prisons were common in colonial times, but they were abolished by the new United States government, one of the great improvements we made on English law. Then we adopted bankruptcy laws to allow people a fresh start when they are overwhelmed by debt, but child-support debts are not permitted to be discharged in bankruptcy.

The federal Bradley Amendment, named for the liberal Senator Bill Bradley, takes us back to the cruel days of debtors’ prisons. It requires that a child-support debt cannot be retroactively reduced or forgiven, and the states enforce this law no matter what the change in a father’s income, no matter if he is sent to war or locked up in prison, no matter if he is unemployed or hospitalized or even dead, no matter if DNA proves the guy is not the father, and no matter if he is never allowed to see his children.

Charles Dickens famously said, “The law is an ass.”

This issue is not completely foreign to Democrats. When I lobbied the California legislature, two of my best allies (Sen. Charles Calderon and Assemblyman Rod Wright) were Democrats, but their efforts were frustrated by members of their party, primarily the infamous Sheila (Zelda Gilroy) Kuehl.

When Democrats start to address the injustices in this system, I’ll reconsider my party membership, but I’m not holding my breath. It’s been screwed up for 20 years and it just keeps getting worse.