shame of the universities 2: droit de seigneur in America

For the entire article, see Willettsmag.

There are scandals that fascinate but don’t educate. And then there are the other scandals, the ones that x-ray a social order, the ones that, in one flash of light, penetrate under the skin of the ruling class and show us the gaudy, gory connections that make up its structure and substance.

The Jeffrey Epstein scandal, from his supposed suicide (the suicide of a man who spent 12 hours a day in his jail, meeting in a special meeting room with his lawyers; the man who supposedly despaired that the jig is up, without the thought crossing his head that he might have information that he could use to bargain with the prosecutors; the man who supposedly knelt and leaned so hard against the sheets conveniently provided for him by the prison system and tied to his bed post that he broke bones in his neck; that suicide) to his donations and friendships, showed what money can buy in America. It showed, even more, what money has bought in America: it has bought unaccountable private power that now rules us in ways that would astonish the aristocracy in 18^th century France.

Or maybe not.

Remember, the scandal about Beaumarchais’s Marriage of Figaro, known to all opera lovers. The plot concerns Figaro’s master’s desire to assert the droit de seigneur on Figaro’s bride-to-be: that is, the right of the master to have sex with the bride of the vassal on the first night of the marriage. A fiction, historians say. In Beaumarchais’s day, it was a common enough trope – considered archaic, but evidence of the ghastliness of feudal times.  In the play, the Count has already renounced the droit de seigneur in his own marriage – but he seeks to reassert it with Suzanne, Figaro’s bride-to-be, by buying her consent.

          “Tired of prowling among the rustic beauties of the neighborhood he returned to the castle… and endeavors, once more, secretly to purchase from her, a right which he now most sincerely repents he ever parted with.”

Napoleon, famously, called the play “the revolution already in action”. I don’t think anybody will call the Epstein affair the revolution in action, since we seem to be at a deadpoint in history where reaction rules on all sides. But the revolution, like the kingdom of heaven, can’t be said to be here, or there, but explodes – so who knows.

In my last post about the shame of the universities, I showed a streak of moderation that, a week after writing it, I am rather ashamed of. Before I rundown the farce of irresponsibility that is unspooling before our eyes, I should say, in my most dictatorial voice, that the larger scandal is that there is no SEC like regulatory body to police the concentrated private power of tax exempt universities. What regulation exists consists of mere nudgery. We have no body to force universities to be wholly transparent about their donations. We have no body to investigate the responsibility of the administration in covering up not only insalubrious relationships, but crimes. We allow universities and colleges an incredible leaway to investigate sexual assault, to investigate inside dealing by faculty, to allow deals with for profit corporations, etc. Just as allowing billionaires to flourish is like inviting dinosaurs to your five year old’s birthday party and expecting them not to eat the cake and the kiddies; similarly, allowing Harvard or Yale to be judge and jury of their own doings is not an invitation to corruption, it is corruption in action.

Yale, for instance. Let’s take the recent news about Yale. It too involves sexual assault and an island in the Caribbean – but, at least so far, without an Epstein in it. Instead, it involves Eugene Redmond, a professor at the medical school, who as long ago as 1994 was credibly accused of sexual abuse of students. These students were invited to study on St. Kitts Island, where Thomas seemed to run a private foundation. After hearing that Redmond was tricking students into having sex with him, this is what Yale, in its glory and its power, did:

“… the Yale School of Medicine launched an investigation in 1994 after students from Redmond’s summer internship program reported that he sexually molested and harassed two students. Redmond was reprimanded and signed a settlement agreement that required him to eliminate the program, cease recruiting and any supervising of students in St. Kitts and that he abide by a separate housing policy, the report said.”

If you rub your eyes and think, wow, a cab driver that isolated a customer and raped him would not only be fired by the cab company, but turned over to the police – you obviously do not fit in America. In America, Dr. Eugene Redmond was with Yale. And Yale is no mere cab company, but a trainer of, well, our Supreme Court. So what happened was a stern interdiction of sleeping together. And with that, Yale slapped together its mighty hands. Case solved!

shame of the universities

There’s been a lot of news about our elite universities lately. All of its been bad. Let’s do a rundown.

Tufts

On January 31, 2019, the Massachusetts Attorney General, Maura Healey, submitted a thick file to the court concerning the state’s case against the Sackler Family and Purdue Pharma, their private company. The suit takes cognizance of the fact that when the Sackler family began to market and distribute oxycontin, it did so with criminal disregard both for the way its delivery system could be easily hacked and with previous protocols about the administration of opioids for pain cases. This is well known. Less well known is the memoranda concerning the role Tufts university played in credentialing Purdue Pharma’s “philosophy” of pain management, ie credentialing propaganda for pushing the drug on millions of Americans via doctors.

Tufts, it seems, had developed a synergy with the Sacklers. After getting millions in Sackler money, Tufts was happy to allow Purdue personnel, like Dr. David Haddox, to lecture at the School of Medicine’s pain center. The brunt of Haddox’s lectures was that oxycontin was not addictive. Another Tufts professor, Dr. Daniel Carr, according to Stat magazine, which does investigative journalism in healthcare, reviewed the bountiful relationship Tufts had with the Sacklers in 2009 – after, one recalls, the first courtroom case against Purdue in Virginia in 2007. Carr founded the Sacklers wonderful, and he was able to make his views known at the Pain Center first as a faculty member and then as a director. Like the Sacklers, who apparently schemed to double their money with an anti-addiction drug that would parallel oxy, Carr jumped from propagandizing for the family to organizing conferences on addiction.

Given the gravity of the charges against Tufts, Tufts administrators have decided to investigate themselves. Who knows what they will find?

MIT

MIT ended an exciting year in 2018 when it also investigated itself. This happened after Jamal Khashoggie was dissected in vivo under the order of Prince Mohammed bin Salam. MIT had gladly given itself as a PR site for bin Salam’s tour of America, where no questions were asked about bin Salam’s strategy of starving to death the population of Yemen. After the investigation, MIT was satisfied that it had no reasons to cut ties with the Saudis.

This year, in fact last Friday, we learned a little something about the famed MIT AI laboratory and its director, the late Marvin Minsky. We learned that as a guest and friend of Jeffrey Epstein, Minsky, 76, was introduced to one of Epstein’s girls, 17, and had sex with her. Also called statutory rape. But this story, sensational as it is, rather disguises the fact that Minksy organized a couple of conferences on Epstein’s island even after he was convicted in 2008 of “soliciting” an underaged “prostitute”. Now a question one might want to pose, here, is what kind of setting is this for women in AI? Is it, perhaps, slightly, oh just slightly, discriminatory? Or did that matter because all the attendees were men? Here’s an account of one of the conferences from an attendee:

“Epstein’s former neighbor, the psychologist and computer scientist Roger Schank, describes another such event that he attended: a meeting of artificial-intelligence experts, organized by Marvin Minsky and held on Epstein’s island in April 2002. “Epstein walks into the conference with two girls on his arm,” said Schank. The scientists were holding their discussions in a small room, and as they talked, “[Epstein] was in the back, on a couch, hugging and kissing these girls.” 

Harvard

Harvard, of course, just keeps popping up in the Jeffrey Epstein narrative. But no larger questions seemed to be asked. So let’s broaden the scope.

Epstein gave his largest donation to Harvard in 2004. Who was president of Harvard in 2004? Larry Summers. Summers, it appears, was a plane mate of Jeffrey Epstein, and perhaps they talked about sex roles – after all, Epstein seemed to like to talk about how he’d like to inseminate a suitable 20 women with his genes on his New Mexico ranch. Whatever. In 2005, Summers got in trouble for suggesting that perhaps women are genetically deficient in mathematics in relation to men. He then proposed that women couldn’t be discriminated against in science at Harvard, for then they would go elsewhere, and in the perfect market of academia Harvard would lose out.

See the rest here.

on a trip to tuscany

On a trip to Tuscany

The world is large, and the chopper is narrow and particular, hungry for fact and its destruction, its work in rents and the long failure of maintenance. In the slow small train from Florence to Siena, I looked out and saw a familiar scene, something I’d witness on the train from New Haven to New York, something I’d seen in Gary Indiana: I witnessed the chopper, extensively, giving the human landscape its forty whacks with shocking persistence. Wack go the brick walls, wack go the rooftrees, wack go the old railroad cars strayed on rusty sidetracks, wack go the tiles, wack goes the tin piping, down it all tinkles and back to the various toxins out of which they were fabricated goes the matter. The air is hot, the sky is blue, and the smoke that was once the accompaniment of economic life is gone, along with that life. What is left is graffiti and a hard look, and these abandoned warehouses and houses, their interior structures in glimpses, like the skeletons of the ancient beasts that used to be hunted, oh long time ago, in these hills and valleys. Hunted, and painted on cave walls in Spain, in the Dordogne, in a style that endured far longer than seems possible to our counting, where a decade is an historical event. 25,000 years. An incredible Ice Age of time. And by the time I was off the train and out in the dusty hills of village Tuscany, I was thinking of other choppers, of long views and short. For if a human, upstart from the beginning, can talk about “forever”, isn’t this the landscape to provide the backing reference? even if a human’s forever is bound to be small change against, say, the bacterial tides, Gaia’s atmosphere building. Isn’t forever in the grinding sound of the locusts in the leaves, or the bees at their business among the dry green leaves of the olives? The summer sunlight. Both love and fear in their eternal grip one on the other in those images and myths so resident here. Which don’t seem to die on us, but continue even in video game, even in the comic book hero’s law and order fascism.

One morning I walked up a white sand and pebble road that was about as wide as the one SUV that came lumbering up it, trailed by white dust, forcing me to the margin. I sat on the stoop formed by an old fallen down corner of a stone fence that was three fourths gone to rubble and read La Fontaine, thinking of the cab driver who warned us to watch out in this area for boars, which came out at night.

The Lion brought down by a single man

They showed a picture
Where a single man appeared
Towering over a lion of some stature
Who’d been conquered

The viewers enjoyed this glorious sight.
A passing lion harshed their mellow.
In fact, as to this fight,
He said, you win. Happy fellow!

But your painter is telling lies
- which is his right – this we won’t
Deny! But realistically, we could reverse the dice
If we knew how to paint – but we don’t.