Eugene David
...The One-Minute Pundit

Tuesday, March 13, 2007


Further into the quagmire of academe, the ninety or ninety-five percent of history perfessers who are liberal Democrats (well, seventy-six percent, anyway) take a STRONG, BRAVE AND BOLD STAND AGAINST AN EEEEEEEEEEEEVIL WAR -- but then one of them poops at the party:

One of those who spoke against the resolution in Atlanta was James Sheehan, a past president of the association, a professor at Stanford University, and a critic of the war. In Atlanta, he advocated that historians — as individuals — do whatever they could against the war. In an interview Monday, he said that the association did the right thing by having a broader vote on the resolution and that he was disappointed, but not surprised by the outcome.

He said that there are two problems with the resolution. First, he said, “it seems to me that people join the AHA with certain expectations, and the fact that the association will take political positions is not one of them. In a way, you are violating the conditions of membership, and I suspect a few people will leave.”

Second, he said it was important for the association to take political stands on issues “narrowly concerned with the interests of scholars in general and historians in particular.” So he said it was important for the AHA to speak out as it does against visa denials to foreign scholars or restrictions on access to presidential records. “But by taking more general stands, we weaken our moral authority and we become identified with partisan positions,” he said. “There is only a certain amount of moral capital that we have.”


I'm not sure however that "capital" is the right word, given our burgeoning endowments and TV revenues.

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