Up in Smoke

Not too many people today remember the 1968 student strike at Columbia University, which introduced the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) to most Americans and made a 15-minute celebrity of strike leader Mark Rudd. Among other things, it established a pattern of behavior that was to be repeated at other institutions of higher learning​—Harvard, Wisconsin, Cornell, etc.—over the next several years: a demonstration, followed by the occupation of a building which, in turn, led to the destruction of university property, resulting in the arrival of local police who (no doubt with some enthusiasm) cracked a few heads, yielding widespread academic/media sympathy for the demonstrators.

From Columbia, certain images remain indelible: a photograph of a student sitting at the desk of President Grayson Kirk, smoking one of the president’s cigars; the smoldering, ransacked office of history Professor Orest Ranum, whose files had been raided and methodically burned, destroying 10 years of research for a textbook about early modern European history. The irony of that particular aspect of the affair is that Ranum had been sympathetic to the students but, when the strike became violent, had implored them to avoid a clash that would harm all involved. 

At the time, the SDS claimed that Ranum’s work had been destroyed by rampaging cops, a version of events that was swiftly accepted by the Columbia authorities and has since become the received wisdom. But according to the Chronicle, none other than Mark Rudd gave a speech in 2006 at Drew University in which he revealed that, in truth, one of his striking colleagues, John “J.J.” Jacobs (now deceased), was responsible.

Rudd, to his credit, is remorseful about the sequence of events; and Ranum, who was ostracized by faculty colleagues for turning against the strike and welcoming police intervention, later left Columbia for Johns Hopkins, and now lives in retirement in France. 

The Scrapbook, with its customary humility, believes that the Columbia strike—much more than the Berkeley “Free Speech Movement” four years earlier—ought to be better known as a pivotal incident in the history of the sixties, and the suicide of liberalism in the United States. The anti-intellectual violence and anarchy that followed it on hundreds of campuses during the next few years left an indelible impression on many Americans, as did the transformation of the SDS and other left-wing organizations into the radical Weathermen and their campaigns of urban mayhem and murder. 

Of course, not everyone sees it this way​—President Obama’s Chicago neighbor and friend William Ayers, a high-ranking Weatherman, famously told the New York Times on September 11, 2001, “I don’t regret setting bombs [and] I feel we didn’t do enough”—but in the present climate it is worth noting that one of the signal symbolic acts of our modern domestic drama, the deliberate destruction by fire of a liberal scholar’s life’s work, was committed by left-wing student radicals who, nearly a half-century later, remain celebrated on stage and screen and in the annals written by Orest Ranum’s fellow historians. ♦

Handcuffs Immortal

Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, the Harvard professor and friend of Barack Obama’s, was back in the news again last week: He has graciously decided to donate the handcuffs used to arrest him in Cambridge last year to the Smithsonian’s new National Museum of African American History and Culture. They now belong to the ages.

How did this little miracle come to pass? In an interview with the New York Times, Gates explained that a few months ago he and the arresting officer, James Crowley, met for a drink at the River Gods cafe (shades of the famous White House “beer summit”). Crowley gave the handcuffs he had used in the incident to Gates. Gates then passed them on to the Smithsonian.

Since when do arrestees get souvenirs of their run-ins with the law? That was The Scrapbook’s first reaction. But Cambridge is a special place, so we can only assume the taxpayers there don’t mind a little bit of generosity with government property. After all, if they did, they wouldn’t be living in Massachusetts in the first place. And as for Gates’s grandiosity, we choose to believe that his gesture is less about making sure the Smithsonian has some gee-gaw related to his arrest and more about making sure the Smithsonian has a totem connected to him.

But the most satisfying note in all of this is learning that Gates and Crowley were able to meet for drinks without the intermediating presence of President Obama. It’s nice to know that even in Cambridge, people are finding a way to muddle through without him. ♦

Fifty Bernie Madoffs

Here’s some news to keep you tossing and turning in the middle of the night. 

The Pew Center reports that there was a $1 trillion gap “at the end of fiscal year 2008 between the $2.35 trillion states had set aside to pay for employees’ retirement benefits and the $3.35 trillion price tag of those promises.” Yes, that’s trillion with a t—one followed by 12 zeroes.

The report makes for grim reading. This is a problem that is only getting worse. Some excerpts:

Only nine states “were deemed solid performers,” and only two states, Alaska and Arizona, “had 50 percent or more of the assets needed.” Meanwhile, “forty states were classified as needing improvement” and “twenty of these have no assets on hand to cover their obligations.”

And it’s not just a question of hard times. “To a significant degree, the $1 trillion reflects states’ own policy choices and lack of discipline” such as “failing to make annual payments for pension systems at the levels recommended by their own actuaries; expanding benefits and offering cost-of-living increases without fully considering their long-term price tag or determining how to pay for them; and  providing retiree health care without adequately funding it.”

The economist Arnold Kling notes Paul Krugman’s coinage—“fifty Herbert Hoovers”—to describe the states’ inability to spend during the recession and thereby prop up the economy. Noting the Pew report, Kling suggests that “ ‘fifty Bernie Madoffs’ would be the way to describe [the states’] pension decisions. Of course, unlike Bernie Madoff, the states will almost certainly be bailed out by the federal government. Which itself is the 51st Bernie Madoff, making promises to future recipients of Social Security and Medicare that it has no ability to keep.” Sleep tight. ♦

Fact-Free—and Proud of It

Reporters have never had much job security. Practicing a craft known for few standards and no barriers to entry, and with a constant flow of young people eager for the romance of low pay and the excitement of sitting through city council budget meetings, and endeavoring to anticipate and accommodate the whims of frequently capricious editors and publishers, journalists have learned that the axe may fall at any second. 

Still, Jonathan Springston, a long-serving staff writer for the Atlanta Progressive News, may be the first reporter to have gotten the sack for .  .  . well, for once words fail us. Here is the description from the Fresh Loaf blog in Atlanta:

Sentences We Didn’t Finish

‘It was primarily a symbolic gesture. Way back in 1979, in the midst of an energy crisis, Jimmy Carter had solar panels installed on the roof of the White House. They were used to heat water for some White House staffers. ‘A generation from now,’ said Mr. Carter, ‘this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people, .  .  . ’ ” (Bob Herbert, New York Times, February 13). ♦

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