I've read two of Ferguson's books : Empire and The War of the World. They're both excellent. Yes, they contain things I disagree with (especially in one of them he goes off on a bizarre rant about Muslims outbreeding feminists, an idea that ought to be confined to morons on the internet), but they're still excellent. In particular The War of the World is one of the most vitriolic takedowns of racism you'll ever come across. Just thought I'd point that out. I still plan to read more of his books.
Ferguson seemed to view Michael Ocon, a left-wing student activist slated to graduate in 2020, as a threat to the program. In an email to two members of the Stanford Republicans, John Rice-Cameron and Max Minshull, he wrote that “some opposition research on Mr. O [Ferguson’s name for Ocon] might also be worthwhile.” Minshull, who works as Ferguson’s research associate, said he’d “get on” the dirt-digging.
Some of the emails had an overtly sinister tone. Rice-Cameron, who is, oddly enough, the son of Obama National Security Adviser Susan Rice, wrote in one email that “slowly, we will continue to crush the Left’s will to resist, as they will crack under pressure.” Ferguson wrote in another note, “now we turn to the more subtle game of grinding them down on the committee,” adding that “the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.”
The emails became public in a May 31 story in the Stanford Daily, the student newspaper, seemingly as a result of someone accidentally forwarding them to the wrong person. Given that it’s wildly inappropriate for professors to be snooping on undergraduates in an attempt to intimidate them politically, Ferguson has been forced to resign from his post running the Cardinal Conversations initiative (but he remains a senior fellow at Hoover).
Free speech, nominally, shouldn’t be either a right or left issue. A world in which all viewpoints can be respected should, in theory, benefit people from all perspectives. In practice, many campus conservatives have hijacked the idea. The strategy is to invite someone with a history of making sexist or racist comments, like provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, with the express purpose of outraging campus liberals. When left-wing students protest, the right claims the mantle of defending free speech — when what they’re actually doing is opening the door to overtly offensive discourse.
It’s a kind of power game. The goal isn’t to vindicate the abstract right to free speech but to assert the right’s power and influence over campus discourse — to force the campus mainstream into a choice between allowing vile ideas to spread or looking hostile to free speech.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/6/1/17417042/niall-ferguson-stanford-emails
Ferguson has deliberately courted controversy over his whole career. It’s a smart financial move if you’re a decent writer who can make a living serving the “popular history” market. And in today’s market-driven academia it’s a surer path to promotion than doing original archival work.
ReplyDelete....It feels to me like the whole academic system has shifted toward celebrity and away from research and I have reservations about the ethics of this shift in general - it seems to me that it creates bad incentives, and this is the sort of result one might expect.
There’s a joke that good research leaders are so hard to find because first you filter the public for those rare qualities that make a researcher and then you filter researchers for the opposite qualities that make a leader. Here it seems to me there’s a tendency to promote people who are good at raising a stink, and then if you’re lucky you might find some who have a deep vein of responsibility and who are thoroughly in control of their contrarian impulses.
#FreedomOfPower actually explains a lot of things.
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