Another Big Name Professor to the SFS?

[jerseyhoya34]

Dean Gallucci is considering whether to hire former Undersecretary for Policy at the DOD, J. Douglas Feith.
www.thehoya.com/news/011306/news5.cfm

I am inclined to support his candidacy and will have thoughts later. Let the discussion begin.

[hilltopper2000]

Sounds like a great hire, although we have a ton of big name practitioners in SFS now. And, like most of the recent hires, Feith is a Hoya.

[nychoya3]

Tommie Franks (no great shakes himself) called Feith the "stupidest blankiest guy on the face of the earth," but he is indeed a big name. I like Galluci's lean towards practicioners, but we did just lose our biggest name theorist in Jon Ikenberry, so I hope they work for a balance.

[TigerHoya]

nyc,
Was that in Franks' book?

[thebin]

"Gallucci Considers Feith for SFS Appointment

By Caitlin Moran
Special to The Hoya
Friday, January 13, 2006
School of Foreign Service Dean Robert L. Gallucci ruffled some feathers at the SFS late last semester when he announced he was considering hiring a former Bush administration official as a visiting professor.

Al Kamen of The Washington Post quoted an anonymous source in November who said that members of the SFS faculty were“up in arms” at the prospect of Douglas J, Feith — a former Bush administration official who was instrumental in constructing the government’s Iraq policy — joining their ranks.

Gallucci, though not as drastic with his assessment of the conflict, said that the faculty response to the possible appointment had been unusually vociferous. He said that several faculty members had contacted him by e-mail to state their opposition to Feith’s appointment.

“I have not received push-back on any of the other appointments except abstractly or analytically,” Gallucci said.

“A small number of faculty have said they would support hiring Feith, although it’s fair to say most have taken the negative argument,” he added."




Note: Let's dispense for now with the blatant guess (or wishful thinking) that the reaction among the faculty to this possible appointment has ANYTHING to do with his academic credentials as there is ZERO evidence in either the Washington Post or The Hoya articles to believe that. To the contrary.


That being said....It suffices to say that I am ashamed and more than disappointed to see that any significant part of the SFS faculty is so sheltered and cowardly as to panic at the thought of Gallucci bringing on a former Bush appointee and hawk by virtue of the intellectual diversity he would bring to the department. How contemptible and hysterical is this reaction from members of an academy such as this. I may have expected such a reaction in an institutionally biased discipline such as say sociology or women’s studies where intellectual diversity has always been a total sham, but in the SFS? I expected FAR better.

I have never hesitated to support the hiring in SFS of former Clinton administration practitioners to the faculty as an unambiguous good for the University, even when knowing that practioners with big names generally are held to a lower strictly academic standard in their hiring. I never supposed that the faculty (again in any significant portion) of SFS could be so immature and closed minded as this. I honestly would have thought every single SFS professor would be too mortified to reveal his or her intellectual cowardice to come out with such a McCarthyite sentiment to their boss the dean. That ANY professor would not be too embarrassed to throw such a tantrum speaks ill of the amount of intellectual rigor in the present faculty. I guess I take some small solace in the fact that Gallucci doesn’t appear to be amenable to being cowed by these children who work for him. If this is the direction the university takes in general, that the mere mention of hiring conservatives to the faculty sparks panic among professoriate, I for my small part will never give another penny to this place. That is NOT the Georgetown I know and love.

[DFW HOYA]

thebin said:

It suffices to say that I am ashamed and quiite disappointed to see that the SFS is so sheltered and cowardly as to panic at the thought of Galluci bringing on a former Bush appointee and hawk by virture of the intellectual diversity he would bring to the department. How contemptible a reaction for a place of intellectual discourse.

Agreed. The recent SFS has never been about enforcing ideaology among its faculty and this smacks of the very elitism that Georgetown should fiercely rail against, and often doesn't.

[jerseyhoya34]

Initially, I had a similar reaction as thebin to this one insofar as I do not want political ideology to be an impediment to Feith's candidacy. Nothing in the article explicitly states that political ideology is causing these protests, but there is reason for that concern given Feith's neoconservative credentials. In my opinion, political ideology should not be a consideration. In other words, conservatives should not be awarded positions simply to balance faculty viewpoints, and liberals should not be awarded positions because of existing dynamics that facilitate their academic predominance in many universities.

The political argument is not necessary to make a statement in favor of Feith's candidacy. Indeed, it may not even be true, given the lack of explicit reference to it in the text of the article. Reading between the lines, it is likely that bin's take is spot on, minus some of the hyperbole, given the apparent willingness of the faculty to accept Andrew Natsios, a policymaker under a Republican administration, on board. There were and are grumblings about some prominent practitioners from the Clinton administration. While the liberal/conservative divide may produce some backlash, it is equally likely based on this article that there's been criticism from the professional academics to putting yet another practitioner on the faculty.

The main question that Gallucci should ask is whether hiring Feith would advance the University's mission. Along with that comes a few questions that are drawn from GU's Mission Statement.

1. Would Feith advance student research as a focus of the University? I have little reason to believe he won't. If he disdains opposing viewpoints like John Bolton does, there's cause for concern because that would likely not be in keeping with GU's mission. Similarly, if he's only interested in persuading the masses and hearing his own views regurgitated in papers in exams, he need not be hired.

2. Does he advance dialogue among cultures/viewpoints and contribute to interfaith understanding? As far as I can tell, yes. Feith is a Jew, and I believe his father was involved in the Zionist movement. That would be a great perspective to add to the faculty at GU.

I could go down the list, but he measures up pretty well on all fronts, or as well as other candidates.

There are a few things, however, that merit scrutiny. His role in designing a pro-torture policy in DoD should be examined carefully and seriously. I do not believe the torture of humans is in keeping with the University's mission, but that is based on a subjective reading of the Mission Statement. In other words, I believe torture, as practiced by the Bush administration, does not advance the well-being of mankind.

Regardless, I think the goods outweigh the potential bads, as long as Feith is willing to respect dissenting views. Bring him on board, Dean Gallucci.

[Loyal Hoya]

I'm a somwhat hawkisk neoliberal who, on balance, opposed the war in Iraq. I believe that academia has an unhealthy liberal bias, and I generally support the appointment of first rate conservative scholars and practitioners to the faculty.

I do NOT believe in litmus tests for faculty appointments. The war in Iraq and the issue of what to do about Islamo-fascism are the biggest issues of our time, and it would be unhealthy if our faculty did not have a diversity of opinion on these subjects.

Having said all that, I think Douglas Feith would be an embarrassment. When he headed up the Office of Special Plans, I don't think he showed any respect for those with different opinions than his own (he was said to have pressured intelligence analysts and massaged the data). I'm sure that there a close minded liberals on the faculty, but I don't think the answer is to hire close minded conservatives.

And do we really wan t somebody on our faculty that General Franks called the "f***ing stupidest man on the face of the earth," and of whom Col. Lawerence Wilkerson (chief of staff to Secretary of State Powell) said, "Seldom in my life have I met a dumber man."?

I strongly disagreed with Reagan's constructive engagement policy toward South Africa, but I never had a problem with the appointment of Chester Crocker to the faculty. And I do not recall any faculty members rebelling against his appointment.

I hope (and believe) that our faculty is speaking out against Feith now becuase they are opposed to his attempts to impose an orthodoxy of thinking on others and NOT because they want to impose an orthodoxy of thinking of their own.

[thebin]

Those objections you raised may well be valid- I don't know Feith from a hole in the ground, but let me repeat that neither the Washington Post piece nor the Hoya piece give any evidence at all to suggest that the faculty is "up in arms" because Tommy Franks or Larry Wilkerson thinks he is an idiot. That is pure speculation right now. I would like to think the two journalists who authored those news pieces would have had ZERO problem remembering to report findings that the reason that many faculty were upset was over the candidate's intelligence or academic qualifications. And yet they made no such mention. And then I think you also have to consider that Dean Gallucci would not consider hiring an unambiguosuly stupid man to his faculty. He deserves some benefit of the doubt even if you don't think Feith does. Clearly Gallucci, if ready to comment publically that he is considering the hire, has done FAR more research into the candidate than you, I or dare I say even Tommy Franks? Come on, have some feith in Robert Gallucci. (Ouch.)

BUT- it is certainly possible Loyal Hoya that there are good reasons to object Feith's hiring- its just that as yet none of these reasons has been given by faculty members themselves in the two articles I read. No doubt, when faced with any kind of questioning now, they will certainly claim its merely his credentials rather than whatever actually drove their initial hysteria. They are not THAT sheltered.

[Loyal Hoya]

You are right that it is not fair to judge Douglas Feith by the comments made about him by Gen. Franks and Col. Wilkerson. I'm sure that he is a reasonably intelligent guy. From a PR perspective, I do dread a headline that saying "Georgetown Hires 'Stupidest Man on the Face of the Earth' "

However, what Franks and Wilkerson said about him is not my point. My point is that he is not known as someone who tolerates views other than his own. He was reported to have actively quashed any dissent within the intelligence community that did not conform to his views on the situation in Iraq. I can't find it on the web, but I recall reading a Seymour Hersh article in the New Yorker that reported that Feith headed up this DOD Office Of Policy to provide the VP with alternative intel because Cheney, Feith, et al did not want to hear what the CIA was telling them at the time. And that he and his office believed totally dismissed the CIA's intel and bought into everything that Ahmed Chalabi told them.

I'm sure that a lot of this was the CIA's self-serving a*s covering, but I also heard similar things about him from a conservative friend on mine who is in the State Dept.

I strongly agree with Gallucci that “with a full-time faculty of over 100 in the SFS, it is not unreasonable for the dean to look for one faculty member who will speak for and defend broadly an administration’s foreign and security policy that is quite controversial.”

Based on what I've heard about him, I just think that Feith is not the right guy.

[Loyal Hoya]

Here's a different article from the New Yorker than the one I cited in my previous post.

www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/050509fa_fact

And here is the wikipedia entry on him:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Feith/url]

[jerseyhoya34]

Well, resume the argument... www.thehoya.com/news/050206/news3.cfm (Feith hired)

I think it is a bit misleading to judge what professors' arguments are based on how a newspaper characterizes them. In other words, there may have been a practitioner v. theorist divide rather than a conservative v. liberal divide, and both characterizations of professors' arguments are equally speculative. In other words, why were professors' arguments against Feith necessarily anti-conservative in absence of detail beyond it being something other than "abstractly and analytically" in a newspaper report?

This hiring could cause a stir.

[StPetersburgHoya (Inactive)]

Hiring Feith is a good move. I think that he will bring more prestige and real world experience to the SFS faculty - however I think the school needs to balance that out by hiring a prominent theorist over the summer as well.

[jerseyhoya34]

I agree 100%. They've been hurting for a theorist ever since Ikenberry left.

[LizziebethHoya]

The only thing is that he's only teaching a grad class. But, hopefully he will guest lecture in some undergrad classes as well