Saturday 17 July 2010

Niall Ferguson: A Walking Provocation

That the right-wing Professor Niall Ferguson has been caught leading a campaign to attack a left-wing student he disagreed with should come as no surprise.

Ferguson has a record of pursuing a right-wing agenda both inside and outside academia. He is well known for his defence of British Colonialism or colonialism anywhere for that matter.

While a lot has been made over the scandal what is being missed is the extent that Fergussn's political activities are a defence of the process of commercialisation of universities and that anyone who opposes the privatisation process becomes the target of a witchhunt.

The Standford based historian was joined in his witchhunt by other members of the  Cardinal Conversations, which is a Stanford program run by the conservative Hoover Institution. This group aims to collect the most right-wing people possible and give them a legitimate hearing inside the university.

Standford's link to the right-wing  Hoover Foundation is well known. It has a budget of $50 million and an endowment of more than $450 million.

As one writer put it "There is no left-wing equivalent — a sizeable ideological think tank that intimately connected to a university — at any school in the United States.

Standford regularly invites, a veritable who's who of right-wing writers and theorists, including race-and-IQ theorist Charles Murray, tech mogul Peter Thiel, and Christina Hoff Sommers, a prominent critic of modern feminism".

Ferguson, who appeared to be the leader of the group that believed the left-wing student Michael Ocon was a danger to the group.

In an email to two other members of the Stanford Republicans, John Rice-Cameron and Max Minshull, he wrote that "some opposition research on Mr O worthwhile." Minshull stated he would "get on" the dirt-digging.

More comments from this group are of a sinister and provocative nature. They would not look out of place in a Donald Trump Tweet.

Rice-Cameron wrote in one email that "slowly, we will continue to crush the Left's will to resist, as they will crack under pressure."

Ferguson wrote in another note, "now we turn to the more subtle game of grinding them down on the committee," adding that "the price of liberty is eternal vigilance."

While not on the same scale there are striking similarities to the Watergate Scandal in particular how Nixon mobilised the full apparatus of the state against the Democrats.

As one writer correctly stated "The whole saga is bizarre — and revealing. It illustrates a profound double game underpinning much of the so-called "free speech" controversy: a controversy that often isn't really about freedom and is more concerned with power than with speech".

While many commentators have concentrated on the danger to free speech within the universities, there has been no attempt to link the right-wing group of academics with the growing commercialisation of universities.

It is becoming clear that far from universities being places of study and research for the common good many are becoming nothing more than appendages to transnational corporations. The fact that universities such as Oxford or Cambridge have vast cash reserves bear witness to this. According to the Guardian newspaper, 36 Oxford colleges have 'consolidated net assets' of £5.9 billion, while the university holds a further £3.2 billion.

This process of Privatisation of education has been followed by writer and historian Stefan Collini writing in 20011 Collini criticised both Labour and Conservatives for being complicit in this process saying"As the recent history of the ministerial pass, the parcel should indicate, the subordination of universities to perceived economic need has been pursued by both Conservative and Labour governments. Much of the language of the present White Paper is to be found almost verbatim in Higher Ambitions: The Future of Universities in a Knowledge Economy, produced by BIS in 2009 when Peter Mandelson was the minister. It should also be remembered that it was a Labour government that first introduced tuition fees (in 1998) and then 'variable fees' (in 2006). Variable fees turned out, of course, not to be variable, as all universities very soon charged the top rate.

The frustration felt in the policy-making world at this fresh demonstration of universities' unwillingness to operate according to good market principles wasn't the least of the impulses that had to be accommodated by the independent committee, set up in 2009 with a cross-party agreement, to review the effect of the 2006 fees and to come up with a sustainable form of future funding for higher education".[1]

This is not the first or the last time Ferguson has mounted what appears to be a considerable provocation aimed at inciting a response from the left to launch a witchhunt against anybody who challenges his right-wing agenda.

In her three-part series called What price an American empire? Reviewing Fergusson's book Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire, Marxist writer  Ann Talbot exposes Fergusson's political and historical agenda.

 "All British historians, E.H. Carr once said, are Whigs, even the Tories—but not in Niall Ferguson's case. He is a Tory formed in the Thatcherite mould, who cut his teeth writing for Conrad Black's Daily Telegraph while he was a research student in Germany.























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[1] ] https://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n16/stefan-collini/from-robbins-to-mckinsey

Saturday 10 July 2010

Comment on J P Kenyon


By Christopher Thompson

I think that you will find it helpful to clarify J.P.Kenyons view of Marxism by reading John Morrill’s obituary appreciation in the Proceedings of the British Academy (Volume 101 (1999), pages 441-461). Morrill explains there that Kenyon had a “fundamental disapproval of model-builders and systematisers. He had no time for social determinism as a tool of the historian for explaining the past or of social engineering as a tool of the politician in effecting the future.” (ibid. page 443).

Later in this piece, Morrill discussed Kenyon’s 1958 book, The Stuarts, and its analysis of the pre-revolutionary period: “it is a very hard and crisp review of the political, legal, and religious culture of the period 1580-1640 and of the origins of the English Civil War. Kenyon found no evidence of disintegration of an outdated system; no progressive movement made up of an alliance of common lawyers, Puritan gentry and clergy, thrusting merchants and trendy intellectuals; rather he found a gentry confused and unsure of itself, at once timidly in awe of firebrand clergy and determined to subject the church and its wealth more and more to lay control”. (ibid. pages 447-448) That remained his view. He was never a Marxist or a fellow-traveller with them.