Yesterday morning, following a letter by Provost Thomas Rosenbaum and Vice President for Campus Life and Dean of Students Kim Goff-Crews late Sunday night calling for “protecting a speaker’s right to be heard, just as we have a responsibility to challenge their ideas with honesty, vigor, and respect,” the University indefinitely postponed the Paulson-Rice talk set for yesterday evening. The postponement is officially due to “scheduling conflicts” that ostensibly surfaced on the very day of the engagement. However, it is more likely that both the postponement and the Provost’s letter are responses to rumors that some University of Chicago students were planning a brief protest inside the auditorium. These rumors are accurate. Our intention was to read a brief and truthful counter-introduction of the speakers at the beginning of the talk, and then leave the auditorium, without any intention of interfering with the rest of their well-financed speaking engagement.
One would think that the unilateral creation of a Henry Paulson—purchased Henry Paulson Institute, affixed with the University’s distinguished name, should be an issue for general discussion and consideration within the university community. Instead, all 15,000 students were denied their right to join the discussion—to agree with or condemn the wholesale appropriation of a University-legitimated (but hardly legitimate) altar to the 1 percent. The reality of the birth of the institute is a simple financial transaction between Hank and our administration—you give us money and access to your bevy of international politico-business elites, we give you the University of Chicago on your letterhead and a plump five-year fellowship at the Harris School of Public Policy, right alongside Richard M. Daley (another champion of private interests).
By cancelling this event, the responsible officials have only shown that they are committed to granting our highly prestigious and limited fora to those with clout, to politicians playing academicians seeking uncontroversial platforms, without having to be confronted with the realities of what they have done and stand for. This does not amount to, in Rosenbaum’s words, allowing “inquiry to proceed untrammeled in the service of scholarship.” From the perspective of the administration, postponing the talks (maybe indefinitely) makes perfect sense—heavily dependent on private endowment, the absolute last thing they want is negative publicity influencing the image of the U of C as a great place to sink private largesse.
In engaging in direct protest, I fully anticipated being accused of wasting my time on a meaningless and misdirected gesture. Nothing could be further from the truth. Henry Paulson is the epitome of everything #Occupy and the 99% are fighting: Goldman-Sachs CEO turned Secretary of Treasury under Bush and Obama; secret architect of the evisceration of the Glass-Steagall Act and the Net Capital Rule; lobotomizer of the SEC and deliberate enabler of high-risk speculation using the savings of regular citizens; acknowledged force behind the Troubled Asset Relief Program (read: “bank bailout”); launderer of $700 billion into the too-big-to-fail banks that he helped create, then encouraging these same banks to borrow 3 trillion taxpayer dollars at virtually zero percent interest, and then lend back to the Fed at interest for massive profiteering off the average citizen (yet again). This is the man that our university is willing to immortalize. On hearing that last bit, a friend asked me, “Really? Tell me, where is the Noam Chomsky Institute? The Hannah Arendt Center?” These seem to me the kinds of people we should be immortalizing here, those who have earned their academic enshrinement by articulating and examining precisely these kinds of hypocrisy and discursive domination. Their claim to fame is far worthier, though naturally their ability to endow is much less.
For his institute, Paulson plans to secure “private funding” after the first out-of-pocket year (his pockets are $700 million deep). Ostensibly, it will serve to foster green energy research, with FermiLab playing some as of yet unspecified role. The “private funding” is almost guaranteed to take the form of dollars flowing through some of the contacts he made (as CEO of Goldman) in the political and business establishment during his more than 70 trips to China. Obviously, I am not against green energy, any more than I am against vital research being performed by our U of C scientists at FermiLab, especially with all that slashing of the federal budget (ironically being justified by the very financial collapse Paulson precipitated, giving him a convenient vacuum to fill). What I am against is all this being bought, paid, and signed for without any public discussion, and without it being clear who will benefit from this arrangement—beyond Paulson, foreign business, and to a lesser extent the University.
To call attention to the obvious contradiction in claiming to be an institution that values above all freedom of discussion and disputation, yet one that happily auctions off otherwise highly competitive positions through closed fora, I and the brave group that I was to be a part of—willing to risk reprimand, arrest, and, worst of all, estrangement from our treasured peers—chose to speak up for the silenced. We chose to take back our university, however briefly, however limited or unsympathetic the audience. View our proposed actions in light of their symbolic intent, and they may represent to you the necessity of directly confronting the agents of systemic manipulation and global domination masquerading as voices of reason and fairness. The Paulsons and Rices of the world have no difficulty airing their views, or making choices that impact the globe in direct opposition to the vox populi. It’s time for our voices to be heard over theirs.
Christopher Ivan is a graduate student in the MAPSS program.
I agree that Paulson and especially Rice are rather despicable human beings, but you don’t serve any positive purpose by trying to turn what was billed as “A Conversation with Condoleezza Rice and Henry Paulson” into a shouting match. Yelling at someone out of turn doesn’t get your point across any more effectively than challenging them at the appropriate time. If you decide that you don’t have the patience to follow the norms of civil discourse, don’t pretend that your narcissistic grandstanding actually helps give a voice to the disadvantaged.
I, the author, disagree. Your point rests on one very flawed assumption: that there is such a thing as fair civic discourse in this country. Did you actually read the piece? I make this point pretty extensively. The whole point of the action was to attempt to reappropriate that which has long been misappropriated: the right of non-elites to be effectively heard. Privately owned mass media, social hierarchies, political platforms, an effectively fixed two-party system, miles of water between those in power and those who put them there; all serve to ensure that there is a fundamental disconnect between those who direct policy top-down, and those (the vast majority) who desire ways to shape it bottom-up. And finally, it would not have been a shouting match. Again, actually read what I wrote.
Before I even finish this article, I have to clarify that THEY DID NOT OFFICIALLY CANCEL THE EVENT. And, furthermore, it was published that Condoleezza had a meeting with one of the IL representatives last night, which was the reason why she has to reschedule.
The business about an “unforeseen scheduling conflict” is so ridiculous that it’s insulting the University would use it to paper over the real issues at stake.
Let’s assume the University administration is telling the truth. According to the Sun-Times, the event that Rice chose to attend in lieu of talking at the U of C was a fundraising dinner for Representative Aaron Schock at the house of an “international real estate mogul.” So a private Republican fundraiser takes priority over a talk at the University? Quite a snub for “free expression!”
Well, the University has said the talk is only being “postponed.” The fact that no new date has been set must mean Rice is booked solid during her time in Chicago. What else has she been up to? According to a central Illinois news radio station, Rice spent last Friday evening…wait for it…at a fundraiser for Rep. Aaron Schock in Bloomington (http://wjbc.com/occupy-blono-protests-outside-schock-fundraiser/)! Either she’s really fond of Schock or she doesn’t care much for the “rigorous discourse” the Provost celebrated in his recent e-mail.
Well, perhaps the freshman representative is vulnerable to a Democratic challenger. That would explain why Rice is devoting so much of her valuable time to helping him raise money. On the contrary, according to Wikipedia, Schock’s congressional district hasn’t gone Democratic since 1939! He won a three-way race in 2010 by 70 percent!
Clearly the more plausible explanation is that Rice and/or Paulson didn’t want to be exposed to articulate critics like Chris. And now the University is concealing its distinguished guests’ distaste for free expression–that of the protesters–behind an insultingly flimsy pretext. So much for the U of C’s commitment to open inquiry.
My point is that waiting until the Q&A for the inevitable lambasting of these two speakers is more mature and effective than disrupting the event. This would be the case regardless of the state of civic discourse in this country, which I would agree is unfair. Whatever we do to improve this situation, it will never be the case that all views get the same chance to be heard in any sphere, from cable news to humanities departments. You still need to engage your opponents with arguments rather than shout over them.
I thank you for your point, and it is well taken. I hasten to point out that it was also our intention for some of us to ask questions in the Q&A panel; thus the deliberate brevity of our counter intro, and the willingness to depart after we had temporarily appropriated the tone of the discussion. That is not a shouting match. It may be speaking out of line, but that is hardly the same thing as “shutting it down.” The shouting match is the one I have already described, the one in which the voices of the suffering get drowned out, in which the voices of the elite and of the special business interests get aired, considered, and supported. There is such as a shouting match, and the 99% has been losing it for decades, if not since the very inception of this republic. I know the whole 99% concept is statistically and categorically vague at best, but it sufficiently captures the sense that the vast majority of Americans are ill-served by their government, which should always put the interests of the greatest majority possible over those who always seem to have politicians’ ears, not to mention their paychecks. And one final point- can we engage those in power in argument, in discussion, without recourse to mass action? Are there avenues by which I could successfully call for a turn-around of the Supreme Court decision to allow unlimited corporate campaign financing, short of mass picketing? Mass protest? Mass disruption? In any way that can conceivably help us meet our goals? Nothing that challenges entrenched interests gets adopted in this nation without loud, angry mass mobilization. And even that is proving only marginally effective at present, though I am yet hopeful.
It would have been wonderful to have Paulson and Rice on campus as part of an academic program or panel, moderated by a scholar, but this business of throwing himself a party and setting the rules and format for his own feting by buying the University’s imprimatur makes a mockery(or worse) of the institution. Nice piece, Mr. Ivan.
Ivan is spot on
One word: MAPSS.