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I’m just back from the Social Studies event last weekend and here are my reactions. First, the confrontation. The issue of whether Harvard should accept the scholarship fund named in honor of Marty Peretz was passionately debated, but it did not dominate the day. The protesters outside the Science Building seminar and Adams House luncheon and those who walked out of the luncheon when Peretz rose to speak were loud, but not obtrusive. That seemed balanced, and consistent with the spirit of the free exchange of ideas in a university.

I feel considerable sympathy for and sadness about Peretz. The honor was for his responsible leadership of the program during a difficult time. (For example, Prof. Michael Walzer revealed that, in the aftermath of the Harvard strike of 1969, Peretz worked hard to convince the university not to expel the students who had occupied University Hall.) The honor was undermined by what Peretz, in his posted confession on Yom Kippur eve called his “sin of wild and wounding language.” A responsible and judicious leader and mentor can at the same time be an extreme partisan in print in the culture wars, a tendency aided and abetted by the ease of instant online publication. As a general precaution, I think blog publication software should have an automatic internal “diplomacy checker” that cautions against overly provocative prose and prevents a post from going up until the writer looks at it the next morning. My guess is that wouldn’t be sufficient in this case: Marty is who he is.

Aside from the sadness of l’affaire Peretz, there was much at the seminar that was thought-provoking, which I’ll discuss under the themes of inter-disciplinarity, connecting, and remembering.

In its essence, Social Studies is an interdisciplinary social sciences program. Interdisciplinarity is great for undergraduates, but is feasible for a practicing academic? Most academics are specialized, not interdisciplinary. Tenure decisions and publication decisions are usually controlled by people rooted in their intellectual niches.

One of the speakers, sociologist Rogers Brubaker, observed that sociology’s absence of a dominant paradigm and perpetually fracturing and realigning subdisciplines facilitates interdisciplinarity. University of Pennsylvania President Amy Guttman, in contrast, observed that economics is controlled by a dominant rational actor paradigm, making it difficult for economists to engage in inter-disciplinary research. That said, it seems to me that she passed over the growth of behavioral economics, which is a hybrid of psychology and economics, attempting to supplant the rational actor with more realistic psychological assumptions.

One difficulty of being interdisciplinary is the challenge of learning a new discipline in mid-career. You must go beyond undergraduate dilettantism; if your knowledge of the new discipline is superficial, reviewers for academic journals will catch you out. Perhaps a better way to do interdisciplinary research is to put together a team of scholars from different disciplines. While each will not be expected to master the other discipline(s), each will have to become conversant enough with the other disciplines that the collaboration produces synergies. Social studies encouraged us to be interdisciplinary and provided models of effective interdisciplinary scholarship, but emulating the models is always a challenge.

Second, connecting. Because there were faculty and former and current students from a 50 year period present, likely everyone knew only a handful of the several hundred in attendance, a situation that is painful for introverts and delightful for extroverts. I went with the latter tendency, and ended up talking with many of the lecturers, recent graduates, and current students. To a person, I found them engaging and engaged, with lots of ambitions and plans for future learning, whether through formal research or life experience. The caliber of its participants speaks highly of the strength of the program’s design and its appeal to the best students and young faculty members.

Third, remembering. I asked Director of Studies Anya Bernstein whether the program had been recorded and her answer was that, as is often the case now at Harvard, there wasn’t money in the budget. As someone concerned with narratives and institutions, I deeply regret that. The Social Studies program, while a relatively young institution by Harvard standards, has a wonderful story to tell. Telling an institution’s story is a great way of recruiting – not that Social Studies seems to have any problem there – and of building identification with the institution on the part of its participants. It would be great for Anya and other lecturers to say to their students that, if they wanted to know more about the history and philosophy of the Social Studies program, they could look up the proceedings of the 50th anniversary celebration on the program’s website.

Without the benefit of transcripts, I hope Anya can round up the speaker’s notes and texts which, together with the filmed interview of Prof. Stanley Hoffmann, one of the program’s founding fathers, would constitute something approaching a record of the event, and post it on the program’s website. I think the students, current and future, would learn a lot from it. I found it so thought-provoking that I’d also like to read it and think again about all that was said.

When the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Harvard’s Social Studies program, in which I majored, was announced, I immediately made plans to attend. While the term “social studies” in Ontario, and likely many other places, refers to part of the elementary school curriculum, at Harvard it is something special. Social studies is an interdisciplinary Social Sciences major, grounded in the study of the greats of modern social theory. In my day it was limited enrolment and, for students interested in social science, the it major.

The Social Studies celebration has now become the controversy du jour because a recent blog post by Martin Peretz, the long-time director of the program, has caught the attention of those who feel it is islamophobic. They are demanding that Harvard withdraw the honor it is about to bestow on him – the establishment of a student scholarship fund in his name. The controversy has gone beyond the US; for instance, one of Peretz’s critics is Globe and Mail columnist Sheema Khan.

I was looking forward to the event – a mixture of intelligent dialogue and meeting old and new friends – with great anticipation. I now wonder whether the agenda will be hijacked by the Martin Peretz affair, to the extent that attendees will have to pass through a gauntlet of placard-carrying protesters and, inside the room, it monopolizes the discussion.

But does Peretz deserve to be honored by Harvard?. Some honors are given for a specific achievement or achievements in a specific area, for example Nobel prizes, and other honors are given to the whole person for achievements of a lifetime (at least to that point), for example the Order of Canada. For the former, everything other than the specific achievement or achievements is generally assumed irrelevant. But can everything else really be considered irrelevant to the prize? Would a Nobel committee give its prize to a brilliant scientist who has made a discovery of the utmost scientific significance and practical importance, but who has recently been convicted of vehicular homicide?

Universities honor people by giving them honorary degrees or attaching their names to buildings, programs, or scholarships. They are often not explicit, even in their own thinking, about whether the rationale for the honor is a specific achievement or the qualities of the whole person. Even for honors for specific achievements, this can become problematic if the honoree has been deeply engaged in a controversial issue as a partisan – here I like the French term parti pris – on one side. And this appears to be the essence of the issue regarding Martin Peretz. The honor is for the significant role he played in managing the Social Studies program for a long time and in a challenging era. The following analogy comes to mind. The late Edward Said was a controversial advocate of the Palestinian position and critic of Israel. He was also an accomplished literary scholar. While I didn’t support his views on the Middle East, I would support any one of the 20 universities that gave him honorary degrees, assuming it was for his literary scholarship.

In the case of Martin Peretz, his detractors feel that his commentary about the Middle East is tantamount to hate speech about Muslims. In terms of the driving analogy, they would consider it the equivalent of vehicular homicide, so that these aspects of the whole person are so objectionable that he should not be honored for his contributions to the Social Studies program. My inclination – albeit without detailed study – is to say that Peretz’s commentary, while pointed and controversial, hasn’t crossed the line into hate speech.

Whatever else happens, I hope the Social Studies celebration remains a celebration, because the program is worth celebrating. More on that next week.

Today’s post looks back to the last year or two of blogging and forward to the next year. In the past, my blog posts have often been linked closely to my classes, for example reporting on or continuing a discussion initiated in class. In the 2010-11 academic year I am on research leave, so will have no classes to stimulate postings nor a group of students who eagerly look forward (at least I can imagine they do) to what I write.

My main focus in September will be on a proposal to SSHRC for funding to do a book about narratives about private sector management, using the same approach as the book I’m completing about narratives about public sector management. Grant proposals have tight deadlines and demand intense focus, so I may go offline for a while.

After completing the grant application, I will go back to finishing the book on narratives about public sector management. So the process of writing may serve as the basis of some postings.

I may weigh in on some public policy issues as they arise. This past summer the census long-form controversy kept demanding my attention. That story is not ended, and I expect to continue writing about it. The long-form census controversy led to my post about the Globe and Mail’s Neil Reynolds, which quite a few people told my they noticed – and agreed with. The Globe and Mail has not immediately accepted my recommendation of putting the 70 year old columnist out to pasture, but maybe they will. I notice that in a recent column Reynolds used the phrase peer-reviewed research, so maybe he read my post, and has decided to be more careful in how he refers to the articles he quotes.

Finally, I should mention a big technical problem I had to deal with during the summer. My website got spammed and some malware was insinuating onto it, and I was receiving somewhere on the order of 40 comments every day that were simply links to websites in Russia or the Ukraine selling Viagra or Cialis at bargain basement prices. With the help of web consultant Wes Bos (www.wesbos.com) the malware has been eliminated and the spamming has stopped. He had to take the site down and repost it and, along the way, some content was lost. So some posts have shortened titles and others just a word or two. Right now I don’t have the time to repost it all, but in the future I may do some reposting.

For those who, like Jews and academics – I’m both — think of September as a time of new beginnings, I’d like to wish all a happy and healthy new year.