Corey Robin's Blog, page 63

Columbia University Bans Workers From Speaking Spanish

Columbia University has a renowned department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures. It boasts a faculty of 36 professors and lecturers. In the last five years, they’ve produced 52 publications on topics ranging from the regional novel to medieval heresy. This year alone, they’ve offered 119 classes, where hundreds if not thousands of students speak Spanish (as well as other languages).

The Spanish language—written and spoken—is clearly prized by Columbia University.

Unless you’re a worker.

According to a petition being circulated by the Columbia Dining Workers and the Student Worker Solidarity group, the executive director of Columbia Dining, Vicki Dunn, has banned dining hall workers from speaking Spanish in the presence of students. The students don’t like it. She also banned the workers from eating in the presence of the students, forcing the workers to dine in a closet instead. (Mercifully that ruling was revoked.) And more generally she seems to take random student complaints as an opportunity to issue arbitrary and ever-changing edicts.

The two groups are circulating a petition with the following demands:

1. Columbia dining appears to have temporarily reversed the closet rule, but continue to discriminate against workers for speaking Spanish. This must cease immediately.

2. We as students demand that Columbia administration stop using individual student complaints to justify racist and degrading policies such as the prohibition of specific languages and the relegation of workers to cramped and unsanitary spaces.

“This shouldn’t be happening in student’s names, own your own decision, don’t try to pin this on students” – Anonymous Columbia Dining Worker

3. Workers ask that from now on, all new workplace policies be written down, publicly visible, and negotiated with their unions so as to prevent continued abuses.

Please read it and sign it.

 

A military operation so vital to US interests they forgot to name it: What would Hobbes say?

Easily the funniest thing I’ve read all week. A military operation so vital to the interests of the United States, they forgot to name it. On “the late naming of Operation of Inherent Resolve“:

Unlike their coalition partners, and unlike previous American combat operations, no name was initially given to the 2014 intervention against ISIL by the U.S. government. The decision to keep the conflict nameless drew considerable media criticism. U.S. Service members remain ineligible for Campaign Medals and other service decorations due to the continuing ambiguous nature of the continuing U.S. involvement in Iraq. On 15 October 2014, the United States Central Command announced that the U.S.-led air campaign against ISIL in Iraq and Syria was henceforth designated as Operation Inherent Resolve.

What would Hobbes say?

But the most noble and profitable invention of all other was that of ‘speech’ consisting of ‘names’ or ‘appellations,’ and their connection; whereby men register their thoughts, recall them when they are past, and also declare them one to another for mutual utility and conversation; without which there had been amongst men neither commonwealth, nor society, nor contract, nor peace, no more than amongst lions, bears, and wolves.

 

Is the public intellectual a thing of the past? What do I think of Cornel West?

Yesterday, Dorian Warren had me, Johns Hopkins political scientist Lester Spence, and New Republic editor Jamil Smith on Dorian’s MSNBC show, Nerding Out, to discuss public intellectuals, black politics, and Michael Eric Dyson’s recent critique of Cornel West in The New Republic, which has attracted a lot of attention on social media. I was brought onto the show in the third segment to talk more generally about public intellectuals, whether they were a thing of the past or not, but I did briefly share my own thoughts about Cornel West and his contributions to the culture.

Here is the entire show, in three segments; as I said, I appear in the third.

 

Checking Your Privilege At Auschwitz

Primo Levi, 1976 appendix to If This Is a Man:

We should recall that in some camps uprisings did take place: in Treblinka, in Sobibór, and even in Birkenau, one of the sub-camps of Auschwitz…In all instances, they were planned and led by prisoners who were in some sense privileged, and so in better physical and spiritual condition than the ordinary prisoners. This should not be surprising: only at first glance does it seem paradoxical that the ones who revolt are those who suffer least.

Primo Levi, “For Adolf Eichmann”

Galleys of the three volumes of The Complete Works of Primo Levi arrived in the mail today. I’ve got my summer reading plans. This poem jumped out at me, from volume 3.

For Adolf Eichmann

The wind runs free across our plains,

The live sea beats on our beaches.

Man feeds the earth, the earth gives him flowers and fruit:

He lives in torment and joy, he hopes and fears, he engenders sweet

children.

 

…And you have come, our precious enemy,

Abandoned creature, man encircled by death.

What can you say now, before our congregation?

Will you swear by a god? What god?

Will you leap joyfully into the grave?

Or will you grieve the way the busy man grieves at last,

Whose life was short for his too long art,

For your sad, unfinished art,

for the thirteen million still living?

 

O son of death, we do not wish you death.

May you live long as no one has ever lived:

May you live sleepless for five million nights,

And every night may you be visited by the grief of everyone who saw

The door that closed off the way of return click shut,

the dark around him rise, the air crowd with death.

—July 20, 1960

Conservatism is not about time, the past, tradition, or history

Reason #2732 why I don’t think a philosophy of history or an attitude toward the past or a view of tradition or time is what distinguishes right from left:

I must of necessity turn back to past times, and even times a very long while passed; and you must believe I do so with the distinct purpose of showing you where lies the hope for the future, and not in mere empty regret for the days which can never come again.

— William Morris, “Art and Socialism,” cited in Kristin Ross, Communal Luxury

The Avoidance of the Intellectual

Someone on Twitter tweeted this quote from Edward Said’s Representations of the Intellectual. Not a bad way to think about what we should be doing and how we should be doing it.

Nothing in my view is more reprehensible than those habits of mind in the intellectual that induce avoidance, that characteristic turning away from a difficult and principled position which you know to be the right one, but which you decide not to take. You do not want to appear too political; you are afraid of seeming controversial; you need the approval of a boss or an authority figure; you want to keep a reputation for being balanced, objective, moderate; your hope is to be asked back, to consult, to be on a board or prestigious committee, and so to remain within the responsible mainstream; someday you hope to get an honorary degree, a big prize, perhaps even an ambassadorship.

For an intellectual these habits are corrupting par excellence. If anything can denature, neutralize, and finally kill a passionate intellectual life it is the internalization of such habits.

To Extend the Word Art to All the Externals of Our Life

William Morris, Art Under Plutocracy:

And first I must ask you to extend the word art beyond those matters which are consciously works of art, to take in not only painting and sculpture, and architecture, but the shapes and colours of all household goods, nay, even the arrangement of the fields for tillage and pasture, the management of towns and of our highways of all kinds; in a word, to extend it to the aspect of all the externals of our life. For I must ask you to believe that every one of the things that goes to make up the surroundings among which we live must be either beautiful or ugly, either elevating or degrading to us, either a torment and burden to the maker of it to make, or a pleasure and a solace to him.

Cited in Kristin Ross, Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune, which I highly recommend.

Yom HaShoah: Three Readings

On Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day, three readings.

Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz:

And night came, and it was such a night that one knew that human eyes would not witness it and survive. Everyone felt this: not one of the guards, neither Italian nor German, had the courage to come and see what men do when they know they have to die.

All took leave from life in the manner which most suited them. Some praying, some deliberately drunk, others lustfully intoxicated for the last time. But the mothers stayed up to prepare the food for the journey with tender care, and washed their children and packed the luggage; and at dawn the barbed wire was full of children’s washing hung out in the wind to dry. Nor did they forget the diapers, the toys, the cushions and the hundred other small things which mothers remember and which children always need. Would you not do the same? If you and your child were going to be killed tomorrow, would you not give him to eat today?

Gitta Sereny, Into That Darkness:

At [Franz] Stangl’s trial, his activities at Sobibor were, for administrative reasons, not included in the prosecution’s case. But even so, his behaviour and attitude while there became part of the trial record and one of the matters brought up by each of the few Sobibor survivors who came to Düsseldorf as witnesses, was the fact that he often attended the unloading of transports “dressed in white riding clothes.” It was when he tried to explain this to me that I became aware for the first time of how he had lived—and was still living when we spoke—on two levels of consciousness, and conscience.

“When I came to Poland,” he said, “I had very few clothes: one complete uniform, a coat, an extra pair of trousers and shoes, and an indoor jacket—that’s all. I remember, during the very first week I was there, I was walking from the forester’s hut—my quarters—to one of the construction sites and suddenly I began to itch all over. I thought I was going crazy—it was awful; I couldn’t even reach everywhere at once to scratch. Michel said, ‘Didn’t anybody warn you? It’s sandflies, they are all over the place. You shouldn’t have come without boots.’…I rushed back to my room and took everything off—I remember just handing all the stuff to somebody out of the door, and they boiled and disinfected everything. My clothes and almost every inch of me was covered with the things; they attach themselves to all the hair on your body. I had water brought in and bathed and bathed.”

It was difficult at that point not to recall that in these camps the prisoners retained as “work-Jews” had to stand at rigid attention, caps off, whenever a German passed. Anyone who moved, for any reason whatever—cramps, itches or anything else—was more likely than not to be hit or beaten with a whip, and the consequences of being struck could go far beyond momentary pain: any prison who, at the daily roll-call, was found to be—as they called it—”marked” or “stamped”, was a candidate for immediate gassing.

“These sandflies must have been an awful problem for the prisoners, weren’t they?” I asked.

“Not everyone was as sensitive to them as I. They just liked me,” he said, and smiled. “Anyway, what I wanted to tell you, with all this wear and tear, and the heat—it was very hot you know—my clothes fell apart. Well, one day, in a small town not far away, I found a weaving mill; I was interested in it because, you remember, that had been my profession once. So I went in. they were making very nice linen—off-white. I asked whether they’d sell me some. And that’s how I got the white material; I had a jacket made right away and a little later jodhpurs and a coat.”

“But even so, how could go into the camp in this get-up?”

“The roads were very bad,” he explained blankly. “Riding was the best mode of transport.”

I tried once more:”Yes, but to attend the unloading of these people who were about to die, in white riding clothes….?”

“I was hot,” he said.

Arno Mayer, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?:

…at bottom the Judeocide remains as incomprehensible to me today as five years ago, when I set out to study and rethink it.

Before you get that PhD…

Max Weber, Science as a Vocation:

Hence academic life is a mad hazard. If the young scholar asks for my advice with regard to habilitation [advanced degree], the responsibility of encouraging him can hardly be borne. If he is a Jew, of course one says lasciate ogni speranza [abandon all hope, you who enter here]. But one must ask every other man: Do you in all conscience believe that you can stand seeing mediocrity after mediocrity, year after year, climb beyond you, without becoming embittered and without coming to grief? Naturally, one always receives the answer: ‘Of course, I live only for my “calling.”‘ Yet, I have found that only a few men could endure this situation without coming to grief.