The Master Switch

We purchased our first I-pod about a week ago, basically in order to start the Herculean task of downloading my many, many CDs into a little box, thereby obviating the need to hold onto the physical discs, and thereby obviating one of the most frequent issues of domestic discord between me and my always beautiful wife, Jane. As I was doing the downloading, I found myself reading Tim Wu’s new book, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires (Knopf, 2010), a history and meditation on communications history and policy in the United States since the rise (and fall, and rise, and fall, and rise) of AT&T, and the incestuous relationships between our phones, our radios and TVS, our computers, the companies they created, and the regulators who love them. I can’t think of a book I have read recently from which I have learned more .

Wu is basically, as far as I can figure out, something of a left-libertarian, whose hero is Thurman Arnold, the New Deal trust buster, and who believes that while regulation is necessary for the communications industry, to combat its inherent tendency to monopolization, it needs to be done lightly, and most communications regulation has always been a disaster, accentuating monopolization rather than curbing it, , and points to the 1996 Telecommunications Act as perhaps the worst offender, obviating most of the gains from competitiveness achieved in the initial break-up of AT&T.
Reading Wu, I think I understand for the first time how the packaging of information, so central to the internal, is inherently decentralizing of any communications network. And because no one created or owns the internet the way AT &T owned the long distance lines that were at the heart of its monopoly, this had led, rather than one huge monopoly largely controlling not only the communication network itself, but almost all the R &D associated with it, while the internet has spawned a million communication industry start ups. There surely is no industry that had been more stifled by regulation than communications. Wu is a defender of “net neutrality” and the larger point I came away with from Wu’s essential book is that, as the revival of ATT shows, that despite the inherently decentralized nature of the internet, without new Thurman Arnolds, new monopolies, that benefit only its owners, rather than the public as a whole, will proliferate as much as new technologies.

First Thoughts on the Egyptian Crisis

First thoughts on the events sweeping the Arab world, which seem to be to the most significant events since the fall of the shah. The fragility of power, when it is suddenly exposed, is always breathtaking. This will fundamentally challenge the preconceptions of America’s role in the Middle East since the Carter administration, propping up sclerotic, increasingly unpopular regimes in the interest of an increasingly elusive “stability,” a stability that was fatally undermined at home, in the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008, and the dots can be easily connected from the fall of Lehman Brothers to the impending fall of Hosni Mubarak. May the Egyptians and Tunisians take this opportunity to reshape their countries in a truly democratic fashion, and we have to trust moderate Islamism to find its own way. In any event, the end of the Nasserist experiment in Egypt is long overdue.

If I may be parochial for a moment, what impact might this have on Israel and its endless impasse with its neighbors? I suppose everyone will see this through their own preconceptions. Those who are not really interested in negotiations with the Palestinians will see this as additional proof that the instability of the region makes enduring peace impossible. Those who feel differently will see argue that the ending of the wobbly pax America in the middle east will and must finally light a fire under Israel and force it to stop haggling over settlements it never should built in the first place, and strike a deal similar to the one outlined in the Al-Jazeera releases this past week. (That deal is looking better and better.) I guess one of the big uncertainties is the impact of all this unexpected democracy on the shaky, western-backed PA. In the end this will either, in a way that all the worlds’ jawboning never could, compel Israel to seek real peace with the Palestinians. Or not.

How Did He Do?

In 1994, I think I was, I had the great misfortune to spend about six months working with Jonathan Soffer. The problem, I should hasten to add, was not with Jonathan. We had been hired by two crazy people, married to each other, to update a very prominent one-volume encyclopedia, and we were sort of stuck in a room together, somewhere in midtown, surrounded by hundreds of reference works, writing about everything from sand slugs and berkelium, to Pure Land Buddhism and feminism. It was sort of fun writing about everything, but the people we worked for were impossible, and Jonathan and I spent the day talking, and plotting our escapes, and we both eventually did, and we both went onto our respective careers. (This was, BTW, the last time I was ever gainfully employed in the city of New York.)

Jonathan has just published the first scholarly biography of Ed Koch, entitled Ed Koch and the Rebuilding of New York City. Koch cooperated with Jonathan on the biography, and knowing that Jonathan’s politics were somewhat to the left of mine (no mean feat), I have wondered for several years would he would have to say about hizzoner. Its an excellent book, respectful and thoughtful, offering an overview of the city as a whole during the three terms of Koch’s administration, from 1977 to 1989. Jonathan shows that in many ways Koch was the last white liberal mayor of the city, though his liberalism became increasingly attenuated as his tenure progressed. He gives Koch credit where it is due, especially in his housing program, and demerits when they are called for, and in all it’s a nuanced accounts of his ups and downs, highs and lows.
The most salient fact about the Koch administration is that New York City was widely seen as falling about in every possible way in the late 1970s, and by the time he left office, the city was firmly on the way to its 1990s rehabilitation. Koch did this by encouraging reinvestment and redevelopment, helping to make gentrification an (expensive) household word. Did Koch have an alternative? Probably not. Manhattan is not an island, outside of the more general forces of capitalism, and all the winds in the 1980s were blowing towards a free market. Would more or less the same thing have happened if someone else had been mayor? Probably, but the whole point of writing and reading historical biographies is get a reminder of the role that individuals play in history. Perhaps New York City had special advantages that explain the difference of its trajectory from, say, Rochester or Buffalo, but certainly Koch had a major role in what went right (and wrong) in the post-fiscal crisis city. The best thing that can be said about Koch is that he generally did the best he could under the tight constraints of a bad and illiberal time. And this is the best that can be said about any Democratic politician, with any real measure of power, on the local, state, or national level, in the two decades since Koch left the public stage. And compared to the very checkered records of the two post-Koch democratic presidents, Koch doesn't look all that bad.

No-State Solution

The revelations and document drop from the Al Jazeera on Israel-Palestinian negotiations are more substantial than the recent hoard of wikileaks documents, and we don’t have to get into a discussion of Julian Assange’s sex life. (On that, Katha Pollit is certainly correct—whatever his contributions to prying open government secretiveness might be, if he did the crime, he should do the time.) And Ben Roethlisberger too. (Go, Packers. Boo hoo, Jets. )

But the Al Jazeera documents are truly depressing, showing a Palestinian Authority abjectly offering everything Israel could possibly want—on the settlements, on Jerusalem, on Palestinian return, on demilitarization—and Israel, sensing the weakness of the PA, just wanting more and more concessions. Here’s the current situation—Israel has no interest in making peace with the Palestinians. It will involve too many difficult internal debates, and most Israelis simply think its not worth whatever compromises Israel will have to make. All Israel really wants is “legitimacy”, or to translate, to be left alone, but it knows this will never happen as long as they control the Occupied Territories, directly and indirectly, so they make a pretense of negotiating, and blame their failure on everyone else. The PA desperately want a settlement, but Israel increasingly sees it as a mere puppet of its financial supporters in the EU and the US, and too weak to carry though on any agreement. And Hamas wants its legitimacy, which they see as inclusion in negotiations, but knows that, save some super-dramatic turn of events, Israel and the US will never let this happen, so it does what it can to destabilize the possibility of talks further, which ain’t too difficult to begin with. Perhaps its always darkest before the dawn, but if you ask me, we have never been farther from a genuine peace settlement between Israel and Palestine. In a land that is lousy with Gods, its time for a deus ex machina.

Back to the Articles of Confederation!

I recently read Gilbert K. Chesterton’s first novel, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, written in 1904, set (as it happens) in 1984, in a London which had divided into separate duchies and fiefdoms, each with its own medieval heraldry, and toll barriers. Chesterton was an opponent of progress and his contemporaries conviction that the early 20th century would lead, ineluctably, to larger and larger states, of ever greater size. In Chesterton’s utopia, everything would crumble into ever smaller granular sovereignties.

I was thinking of the Tea Party when reading Chesterton. He has long been a favorite of conservative thinkers, though he is too supple and clever to fit cleanly into any pigeon-hole and his medieval fantasy is more than simply turning back the clock, but challenges not only progressive thinkers but retrograde types who simply pine for some version of the good old days. Why, I have been thinking, does the Tea Party honor the Constitution? Don’t they know it is a counter-revolutionary document that had, as its main purpose, moving power from the states to an enhanced central government? Why wrestle with the ambiguities of the 9th and 10th amendments when what they really want to do is to go back to the Articles of Confederation?
That’s a restorationist dream I could come to enjoy. What we need are not stronger states, but to try to deal with fifty -independent republics. And without the ridiculous requirement for equal representation in the Senate, many of the states would split or reform along more meaningful lines. Liberals could institute single payer health care in their countries. Conservatives could try to give their citizens absolutely nothing until they are overthrown in a popular revolution, a la Tunisia. Let the up and coming superpowers, China, India, Brazil, deal with the problems of trying to run the world from the vantage of a massive state. Americans have spent their time trying to run the world, and we have done, at best, a mediocre job of it. Time to retire, time to relax. If the Tea Party want to turn the clock back, let us, lets do them one better, and try to turn the clock back to the Articles of Confederation, or even further, to when there were thirteen separately governed colonies, or further still, to when a series of independent native bands and groups ruled themselves without any central supervision whatsoever, and return to America’s original nomadic and overlapping sovereignties, or to when, before 12,000 years or so, animals in North America managed to live their lives without any government at all.

Where Beethoven Never Gets Rolled Over

We have had, in American culture, for some time, a rage for ordinality. Ranking things in order of importance has become a national tic, an obsession. And the end of the year is the time for end of the year lists of the top 10 in everything. I am not sure why or when this particular practice started. Did the Romans make lists of their 10 favorite gladiators? The rabbis make a list of their ten favorite biblical passages? I guess part of the fascination is trying to determine what, or who, is #1, and ersatz voting, like American Idol, often seems more genuine than real elections, which have more than their share of ersatz.
All of these comments are prompted by a fascinating series of articles by Anthony Tomassini in the Times on the top ten classical composers of all time, a subject close to my heart. Of course, it’s a useless and pointless exercise, but it does make you think about those who are truly great, and their wonderful music. I basically agree with Tomasinni’s list, which if I remember goes, Bach Beethoven Mozart Schubert Debussy Stravinsky Brahms Verdi Wagner Bartok. I would only drop Debussy and Bartok from that list, and probably add Shostakovich and Messiaen. And I would drop Bach to about sixth (making Beethoven my #1 pick (tell Tchaikovsky the news), followed by the four greatest composers of vocal music of all time--Mozart, Schubert, Verdi and Wagner-- but our sensibilities are pretty congruent, and like Tomassinni I would insist on placing opera composers on the list. (I’m not sure Bartok would make my top 20. If I had to pick a Hungarian composer, I would go for Liszt or Ligeti before Bartok, and I would pick Ravel before Debussy.)

Its a strange exercise, sort of like picking nine people for the Supreme Court—there really aren’t enough slots for representativeness, but at the same time you need some sort of mix, whites blacks women men Jews Catholics Protestants, to keep your selections from becoming too homogeneous. So you need some 20th century composers, and there is a strong case for going before Bach (Monteverdi, Josquin) to round off the list. But there is the inevitable crowding. Like Tomassini I have long marveled at the remarkable situation that one smallish city, Vienna, from about 1775 to 1830, produced Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert, four exceptionally strong candidates for the top ten, and like him, I mourn the passing over of Haydn in the interests of representativeness. And if you’re serious about this, and you don’t make quirky picks, you are more or less forced to end up with a short list more or less like everyone else’s.
Well if anyone wants to play this game with me, I am ready to entertain suggestions. Chopin? Purcell? Dvorak? Tchaikovsky? Schoenberg, Berg or Webern? But I am more interested in thoughts about why our culture has such a rage for ordinality, and what it says about us.

Two Speeches

I don’t have a clear memory of the two speeches that we are celebrating this week, Eisenhower’s farewell and Kennedy’s inauguration. I do remember the Kennedy inauguration however, reading about in the New York Post as a precocious five year old, asking my mom what the term “president-elect” meant, and slowly beginning to understand the meaning and nature of the political world, a realm of people and things somehow connected to me but
outside of my immediate experience. Everyone said Kennedy was young, though this is hardly self-evident to a five year old, but since the one thing a five year old knows is that he is young, I thought a young president was a good thing.


There have been a number of interesting articles this week about Eisenhower’s farewell address, how it has its roots in the “merchants of death” controversy in the 1930s, and how, if we really needed reminding, that Eisenhower was not opposed to the military, or to military contractors as such, or to the expansion of the American military, which went from something like 300 nuclear warheads to about 10,000 (I think) during Ike’s eight years. But he came of age professionally in the smallish interwar army, at a time when there was a clearer distinction between the domestic and the foreign than prevailed during the Cold War, and this division, I think, is what he wanted the country to maintain.
Kennedy’s (or the late Ted Sorensen’s) injunction to ask what you can do for your country became the dominant cliché of the early 1960s, and had as its greatest legacy, perhaps, the Peace Corps, managed by the late Sergeant Shriver. Fifty years later, there is a corrosive skepticism towards all governmental actions and activities, except of course in the one area Eisenhower set out for skepticism, the role of the military in American life, and its abetters in private industry. And if there is any idealism left in this country, we are regularly told that the only way to cultivate it is to separate it from the taint and contamination of government. The sad thing about the state of the nation in January 2011, is that is it impossible to imagine Obama, or any president, delivering either of those addresses today, at least without generating loud guffaws of incredulity.

Remembering the Alamo

Texas is a state with a long memory, and nowhere more than at the Alamo, But on a recent visit to San Antonio, I found that the story of the battle of the Alamo is getting a more nuanced and truthful treatment that takes into account Mexican perspectives.

As a child in the early 1960s, I worshipped Davy Crockett. With my coonskin hat and long rifle, I spent many hours reenacting my last stand. For me, Davy Crockett and his comrades died defending freedom against overwhelming odds. I could not imagine a more honorable death

The chapel at the Alamo, which I visited, maintains this narrative. But exhibits outside the chapel, and in the Alamo's Long Barracks, tell a more complicated story. They depict the Texan war of independence as a struggle between a centralizing government in newly independent Mexico and supporters of a federal system. The Texas war, in this version, was one of a number of rebellions against authority in Mexico City. Exhibits also recognize Tejanos who fought for Texas independence.

What gets lost in this, of course, is the fact that Texans from the USA wanted to establish slavery. Once that becomes part of the story, the Alamo becomes something less than a full-blown fight for freedom.

That doesn't make the Alamo any less worth visiting. I made a point of standing at the site of the low wall defended by Davy Crockett and boys from Tennessee. I also read a plaque bearing the words of commander William Barrett Travis' letter from the Alamo that concludes "Victory of death," an recalled how many times I was stirred as I read those words.

But what most heartened me was a guide who told visitors that the story of the Alamo was not a story of good guys and bad guys, but a story of politics written in shades of grey. I'll take that over the old version any day. And I'll make a point of reading some more Texas history

First City, Second Edition

The Encyclopedia of New York City has been very important to me. When I joined its staff in 1989 I was still searching vainly for a direction in my career as a historian. I eventually became its managing editor, and every success I have had in my subsequent career, directly or indirectly, comes from my involvement in the Encyclopedia. I owe it, and its editor, the redoubtable Kenneth T. Jackson, my deepest and most humble thanks.

And now, fifteen years after the encyclopedia appeared, a second edition has appeared. (A thanks to Ken and Lisa Keller for including the entire staff page for the first edition.) I have had very little to do with this second edition, and if I can offer my unbiased opinion, it is great. One of the truisms of the reference editing biz is that second editions of reference works are often more difficult than starting fresh, without any existing text as a constraint. One has to integrate the older edition into the new edition, and make it all seem seamless, and often, as is the case with the Encyclopedia of NYC, add a ton of new material, while keeping everything the same size. Ken starts his introduction by saying September 11th transformed all of our lives, and it hangs heavy over the book , though the general impression the book provides is one of continuity with the past, and that the city of 2010, despite 9/11, and such dramatic changes as the drop in crime and the financial crisis of 2008, is much the same as the city of 1995, in some ways more so, and in some ways less so.
There are a few errors in the updates. Chase Manhattan bank hasn’t gone by that name for over a decade, and is no longer located in NYC. Over two pages were added on the winners of the Forest Hill/Flushing Meadows tennis championships (perhaps a little too much), dating back to the late 19th century, but contrary to the table headings, they were only open championships after 1968. There were some nice additions, such as a table of retail establishments—Dunkin’ Donuts is in first place, with 341 in the city, beating out Subways, McDonald’s, and Starbucks, and one on executions of NYC criminals (which perhaps was modeled on a similar table in the Encyclopedia of New York State.)
I don’t know if print encyclopedias are essentially obsolete or not. Certainly Wikipedia has profoundly changed the nature of reference publishing, but it is a pleasure to be able to hold an encyclopedia and all of its contents in one’s hands, and I urge people to pick one up. Ken, Lisa, et al., congrats on a job well done.

More Problems in Albany

My friend Trish Barbagallo, who I heard a few days ago give an excellent paper on Poor Relief to the Oneida Indian nation, and a Ph.D candidate at SUNY Albany, asked me to post this on Greater New York, which I am happy to do. And of course Prof. Pesko is correct. The waves of cost-cutting on the part of the NYS government that will wash over us in days to come will denude us of much that is vital to our collective identity. If I may quote Virgil Facilis descensus Averno, Easy is the way down to the Underworld. Of the American university, increasingly dedicated solely to business, technology, and defense related work, we may
soon say, Arma virumque cano, Of arms and the man I sing. Trish alerts us to a very dangeroous and troubling trend.

Peter Eisenstadt



An open letter to George M Philip, President of the State University of New York At Albany
Dear President Philip,

Probably the last thing you need at this moment is someone else from outside your university complaining about your decision. If you want to argue that I can't really understand all aspects of the situation, never having been associated with SUNY Albany, I wouldn't disagree. But I cannot let something like this go by without weighing in. I hope, when I'm through, you will at least understand why.

Just 30 days ago, on October 1st, you announced that the departments of French, Italian, Classics, Russian and Theater Arts were being eliminated. You gave several reasons for your decision, including that 'there are comparatively fewer students enrolled in these degree programs.' Of course, your decision was also, perhaps chiefly, a cost-cutting measure - in fact, you stated that this decision might not have been necessary had the state legislature passed a bill that would have allowed your university to set its own tuition rates. Finally, you asserted that the humanities were a drain on the institution financially, as opposed to the sciences, which bring in money in the form of grants and contracts.

Let's examine these and your other reasons in detail, because I think if one does, it becomes clear that the facts on which they are based have some important aspects that are not covered in your statement. First, the matter of enrollment. I'm sure that relatively few students take classes in these subjects nowadays, just as you say. There wouldn't have been many in my day, either, if universities hadn't required students to take a distribution of courses in many different parts of the academy: humanities, social sciences, the fine arts, the physical and natural sciences, and to attain minimal proficiency in at least one foreign language. You see, the reason that humanities classes have low enrollment is not because students these days are clamoring for more relevant courses; it's because administrators like you, and spineless faculty, have stopped setting distribution requirements and started allowing students to choose their own academic programs - something I feel is a complete abrogation of the duty of university faculty as teachers and mentors. You could fix the enrollment problem tomorrow by instituting a mandatory core curriculum that included a wide range of courses.

Young people haven't, for the most part, yet attained the wisdom to have that kind of freedom without making poor decisions. In fact, without wisdom, it's hard for most people. That idea is thrashed out better than anywhere else, I think, in Dostoyevsky's parable of the Grand Inquisitor, which is told in Chapter Five of his great novel, The Brothers Karamazov. In the parable, Christ comes back to earth in Seville at the time of the Spanish Inquisition. He performs several miracles but is arrested by Inquisition leaders and sentenced to be burned at the stake. The Grand Inquisitor visits Him in his cell to tell Him that the Church no longer needs Him. The main portion of the text is the Inquisitor explaining why. The Inquisitor says that Jesus rejected the three temptations of Satan in the desert in favor of freedom, but he believes that Jesus has misjudged human nature. The Inquisitor says that the vast majority of humanity cannot handle freedom. In giving humans the freedom to choose, Christ has doomed humanity to a life of suffering.

That single chapter in a much longer book is one of the great works of modern literature. You would find a lot in it to think about. I'm sure your Russian faculty would love to talk with you about it - if only you had a Russian department, which now, of course, you don't.

Then there's the question of whether the state legislature's inaction gave you no other choice. I'm sure the budgetary problems you have to deal with are serious. They certainly are at Brandeis University, where I work. And we, too, faced critical strategic decisions because our income was no longer enough to meet our expenses. But we eschewed your draconian - and authoritarian - solution, and a team of faculty, with input from all parts of the university, came up with a plan to do more with fewer resources. I'm not saying that all the specifics of our solution would fit your institution, but the process sure would have. You did call a town meeting, but it was to discuss your plan, not let the university craft its own. And you called that meeting for Friday afternoon on October 1st, when few of your students or faculty would be around to attend. In your defense, you called the timing 'unfortunate', but pleaded that there was a 'limited availability of appropriate large venue options.' I find that rather surprising. If the President of Brandeis needed a lecture hall on short notice, he would get one. I guess you don't have much clout at your university.

It seems to me that the way you went about it couldn't have been more likely to alienate just about everybody on campus. In your position, I would have done everything possible to avoid that. I wouldn't want to end up in the 9th Bolgia (ditch of stone) of the 8th Circle of the Inferno, where the great 14th century Italian poet Dante Alighieri put the sowers of discord. There, as they struggle in that pit for all eternity, a demon continually hacks their limbs apart, just as in life they divided others.

The Inferno is the first book of Dante's Divine Comedy, one of the great works of the human imagination. There's so much to learn from it about human weakness and folly. The faculty in your Italian department would be delighted to introduce you to its many wonders - if only you had an Italian department, which now, of course, you don't.

And do you really think even those faculty and administrators who may applaud your tough-minded stance (partly, I'm sure, in relief that they didn't get the axe themselves) are still going to be on your side in the future? I'm reminded of the fable by Aesop of the Travelers and the Bear: two men were walking together through the woods, when a bear rushed out at them. One of the travelers happened to be in front, and he grabbed the branch of a tree, climbed up, and hid himself in the leaves. The other, being too far behind, threw himself flat down on the ground, with his face in the dust. The bear came up to him, put his muzzle close to the man's ear, and sniffed and sniffed. But at last with a growl the bear slouched off, for bears will not touch dead meat. Then the fellow in the tree came down to his companion, and, laughing, said 'What was it that the bear whispered to you?' 'He told me,' said the other man, 'Never to trust a friend who deserts you in a pinch.'

I first learned that fable, and its valuable lesson for life, in a freshman classics course. Aesop is credited with literally hundreds of fables, most of which are equally enjoyable - and enlightening. Your classics faculty would gladly tell you about them, if only you had a Classics department, which now, of course, you don't.

As for the argument that the humanities don't pay their own way, well, I guess that's true, but it seems to me that there's a fallacy in assuming that a university should be run like a business. I'm not saying it shouldn't be managed prudently, but the notion that every part of it needs to be self-supporting is simply at variance with what a university is all about. You seem to value entrepreneurial programs and practical subjects that might generate intellectual property more than you do 'old-fashioned' courses of study. But universities aren't just about discovering and capitalizing on new knowledge; they are also about preserving knowledge from being lost over time, and that requires a financial investment. There is good reason for it: what seems to be archaic today can become vital in the future. I'll give you two examples of that. The first is the science of virology, which in the 1970s was dying out because people felt that infectious diseases were no longer a serious health problem in the developed world and other subjects, such as molecular biology, were much sexier. Then, in the early 1990s, a little problem called AIDS became the world's number 1 health concern. The virus that causes AIDS was first isolated and characterized at the National Institutes of Health in the USA and the Institute Pasteur in France, because these were among the few institutions that still had thriving virology programs. My second example you will probably be more familiar with. Middle Eastern Studies, including the study of foreign languages such as Arabic and Persian, was hardly a hot subject on most campuses in the 1990s. Then came September 11, 2001. Suddenly we realized that we needed a lot more people who understood something about that part of the world, especially its Muslim culture. Those universities that had preserved their Middle Eastern Studies departments, even in the face of declining enrollment, suddenly became very important places. Those that hadn't - well, I'm sure you get the picture.

I know one of your arguments is that not every place should try to do everything. Let other institutions have great programs in classics or theater arts, you say; we will focus on preparing students for jobs in the real world. Well, I hope I've just shown you that the real world is pretty fickle about what it wants. The best way for people to be prepared for the inevitable shock of change is to be as broadly educated as possible, because today's backwater is often tomorrow's hot field. And interdisciplinary research, which is all the rage these days, is only possible if people aren't too narrowly trained. If none of that convinces you, then I'm willing to let you turn your institution into a place that focuses on the practical, but only if you stop calling it a university and yourself the President of one. You see, the word 'university' derives from the Latin 'universitas', meaning 'the whole'. You can't be a university without having a thriving humanities program. You will need to call SUNY Albany a trade school, or perhaps a vocational college, but not a university. Not anymore.

I utterly refuse to believe that you had no alternative. It's your job as President to find ways of solving problems that do not require the amputation of healthy limbs. Voltaire said that no problem can withstand the assault of sustained thinking. Voltaire, whose real name was François-Marie Arouet, had a lot of pithy, witty and brilliant things to say (my favorite is 'God is a comedian playing to an audience that is afraid to laugh'). Much of what he wrote would be very useful to you. I'm sure the faculty in your French department would be happy to introduce you to his writings, if only you had a French department, which now, of course, you don't.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that you have trouble understanding the importance of maintaining programs in unglamorous or even seemingly 'dead' subjects. From your biography, you don't actually have a PhD or other high degree, and have never really taught or done research at a university. Perhaps my own background will interest you. I started out as a classics major. I'm now Professor of Biochemistry and Chemistry. Of all the courses I took in college and graduate school, the ones that have benefited me the most in my career as a scientist are the courses in classics, art history, sociology, and English literature. These courses didn't just give me a much better appreciation for my own culture; they taught me how to think, to analyze, and to write clearly. None of my sciences courses did any of that.

One of the things I do now is write a monthly column on science and society. I've done it for over 10 years, and I'm pleased to say some people seem to like it. If I've been fortunate enough to come up with a few insightful observations, I can assure you they are entirely due to my background in the humanities and my love of the arts.

One of the things I've written about is the way genomics is changing the world we live in. Our ability to manipulate the human genome is going to pose some very difficult questions for humanity in the next few decades, including the question of just what it means to be human. That isn't a question for science alone; it's a question that must be answered with input from every sphere of human thought, including - especially including - the humanities and arts. Science unleavened by the human heart and the human spirit is sterile, cold, and self-absorbed. It's also unimaginative: some of my best ideas as a scientist have come from thinking and reading about things that have, superficially, nothing to do with science. If I'm right that what it means to be human is going to be one of the central issues of our time, then universities that are best equipped to deal with it, in all its many facets, will be the most important institutions of higher learning in the future. You've just ensured that yours won't be one of them.

Some of your defenders have asserted that this is all a brilliant ploy on your part - a master political move designed to shock the legislature and force them to give SUNY Albany enough resources to keep these departments open. That would be Machiavellian (another notable Italian writer, but then, you don't have any Italian faculty to tell you about him), certainly, but I doubt that you're that clever. If you were, you would have held that town meeting when the whole university could have been present, at a place where the press would be all over it. That's how you force the hand of a bunch of politicians. You proclaim your action on the steps of the state capitol. You don't try to sneak it through in the dead of night, when your institution has its back turned.

No, I think you were simply trying to balance your budget at the expense of what you believe to be weak, outdated and powerless departments. I think you will find, in time, that you made a Faustian bargain. Faust is the title character in a play by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. It was written around 1800 but still attracts the largest audiences of any play in Germany whenever it's performed. Faust is the story of a scholar who makes a deal with the devil. The devil promises him anything he wants as long as he lives. In return, the devil will get - well, I'm sure you can guess how these sorts of deals usually go. If only you had a Theater department, which now, of course, you don't, you could ask them to perform the play so you could see what happens. It's awfully relevant to your situation. You see, Goethe believed that it profits a man nothing to give up his soul for the whole world. That's the whole world, President Philip, not just a balanced budget. Although, I guess, to be fair, you haven't given up your soul. Just the soul of your institution.

Disrespectfully yours,

Gregory A Petsko

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