Comments on: Teach-Ins of Sorts

By: Susan Lee

Susan Lee — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 00:37:26 +0000

Robert Gibbs’ response to a question indicates: “I’m not familiar with the work of the esteemed historian. I haven’t seen it. I can assure you that not knowing who this historian is, I’ll put my money on our speechwriters.”

I hate to sound cynical, but a White House that meets every afternoon to go over the daily polling numbers has certainly heard of VDH. I imagine they would prefer NOT to have heard of him…

Susan Lee

By: Robert Schwartz

Robert Schwartz — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 02:00:59 +0000

BO — our philosopher king.

We are in very deep trouble.

Romano is a blind fool. The Cairo speech was not a philosophical treatise. It was blather. Poorly researched and even more poorly reasoned. Certainly not worthy of a president of the US.

By: Nathaniel plotkin

Nathaniel plotkin — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 11:57:03 +0000

Many many are the academics who go to work for our govt. Some are good and some not so good. They also go mainly into think tanks and provide much of the material that gets discussed on blogs that focus upon politics and foreign and domestic policy. I suspect that Ginny’s rather pick and choose comment is simply a way, finally, to drop another dime on Obama. In fact, he was an academic and given the number of speeches he has chosen to make teleprompters are called for. We did see how well Bush managed his speeches!

By: renminbi

renminbi — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 23:27:36 +0000

Oh, my bad. “would be good”…

By: renminbi

renminbi — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 23:26:36 +0000

Write on, Ginny. It would be for more academics to appreciate scholarship.

By: Ginny

Ginny — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 16:12:53 +0000

The ironies abound, however. Hanson and Goetzmann are, by about any standards, academics. Not Ivy League academics (though Goetzmann was trained at Yale), of course. But this is a country where much scholarship has always come from the land grant colleges and traditionally more National Merit scholars go to the school where Goetzmann teaches than to Ivy ones. Then there’s Condoleeza Rice as scholar. It was Laura Bush who, before she met her husband, chose graduate training in library science. It was she who originated the book events that the newspapers note the Obamas will preside over. And, then, there’s Lynne Cheney.

This is not a post designed to criticize academics as we often do on this blog. I don’t mind when people do and generally do myself. However, as Foster notes, those like Romano seem to be define scholarship as a thin veneer – mistaking form and style for substance. They categorize academics as simply as they do genders and ethnicities. I have heard Hanson dismissed as an audo-didact on one book notes show. Well, yes, he’s taught himself other areas than his specialty but that makes him no less a trained scholar. Krauthammer’s insights come from a well-trained (and excellent) mind, that then applied the lessons of that training to other areas.

I think scholarship deserves some respect; dedication to it and not the ego deserves real respect. That a man who can’t speak without a teleprompter is seen as representative of a group of people who spend their days communicating ideas is absurd on the face of it. We may often here note the superficiality and even wrongness of some ideas currently communicated; we may often see too much ego and not enough scholarship in academic thinking. But the superficiality of what our opponents see as historical knowledge indicates what they priize – and it isn’t depth.

By: david foster

david foster — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 15:21:06 +0000

I think academics, as a general class, are powerfully attracted to any politician who seems like he/she COULD have been an academic. This is true for all fields to some extent–a farmer may be more likely to vote for someone who grew up on a farm–but the effect seems particularly strong among academics, probably because many of them are very status-conscious individuals who are dismayed at what they think their status is within American society.

In case case of Obama, the surmise that he-could-have-been-one-of-us is superficial and probably false. For one thing, it is far from clear that Obama possesses the patience, concentration, and analytical ability to do serious scholarship in a substantive discipline. For another, Obama is driven by the quest for personal power to an even greater extent than most politicians (and that’s saying something!) and it’s hard to imagine that he would have been happy devoting his life to research and teaching.