Last fall I discussed a debate over colonialism. Bruce Gilley, a political scientist at Portland State University wrote an article titled “The Case For Colonialism.” The reaction was so negative that the article was retracted and the publisher of Gilley’s forthcoming book decided not to publish it. [1]
The response was painfully unfair. Yet in spite of the retraction (the article was re-published in Academic Questions ) his argument sparked debate. The adversarial positions were made clear.
All too often in academia, however, one intellectual viewpoint simply ignores another.
In 1994, Joseph Stiglitz wrote the book Whither Socialism? [2] At the time, Stiglitz chaired President Clinton‘s Council of Economic Advisors; in 2001 he received the Nobel Prize. In other words, he was (and is) a leading economist. Continue reading “Intellectual Silos in Academia”
Even though I’m not adding original posts right now, lively articles about history are all around us. Here are summaries of three, with links.
Charles Curtis: Republican, Native-American, and Vice President
Herbert Hoover’s vice president, Charles Curtis, was part-Native American, a member of the Kaw Tribe of Kansas. With Kamala Harris in the news, the Washington Posttells his interesting story (making the point that Harris will not be the first “person of color” to be an American vice president).
Curtis, whose mother was a Kaw member and whose father was white, grew up on the Kaw reservation in the late nineteenth century. As a teenager he moved sixty miles away to live with his paternal grandparents in Topeka, where he became something of a star horse jockey. When the tribe was forced to move to Oklahoma, Charles wanted to go, too, but his Kaw grandmother urged him to stay in Topeka and get an education. He did, and he was always grateful for her advice. He became an attorney and with his “winning personality,” a Kansas congressman, senator, and eventually vice president.
Last week I wrote about Bruce Gilley’s 2017 article “The Case for Colonialism.” Gilley’s article caused an uproar because it argued that European nineteenth-century colonialism was, overall, a good thing. It had “objective benefits and subjective legitimacy.” In this post I want to share two cogent criticisms. I’ll also briefly share my strange odyssey that opened a window on the United States’ half-century of colonialism.
Needless to say, some of the criticism of Gilley’s essay was emotional, not substantive. The petitioners who brought about its withdrawal from the journal Third World Quarterlysaid that it “fails to meet academic standards of rigour and balance” by leaving out the “violence, exploitation and harm” of colonialism, which “causes offence and hurt and thereby clearly violates that very principle of free speech.”
This (abridged) statement entangles claims of poor scholarship, hurtfulness, and free speech without being very analytical. And, as Tom Young, an associate professor at SOAS University of London, wrote drily, “If every article in an academic journal exhibiting poor scholarship prompted thousands of protests academic life would surely grind to a halt.”[1]
