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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.

For some time Neil Reynolds published his op-ed pieces in The Globe and Mail’s Report on Business, where they generally escaped readers’ attention. Now that he’s been moved to the op-ed page, he’s getting lots of attention.

Reynolds’s take is what might be called Tea Party Canadian-style. For Reynolds, government is always parasitic and the private sector is always innovative, so that we should have less of the former and more of the latter. His second main concern is energy and the environment, and his message is that global warming and peak oil are myths, which leads to the policy prescription: drill, baby, drill. Reynolds’s Wikipedia article says that he was a Libertarian Party candidate in a 1982 by-election, and it’s clear from his columns that a Libertarian he remains.

Reynolds’s modus operandi is to find some academic research out there – often on the web sites of American Conservative think tanks – that he claims supports the policy positions he advocates. In my view, his arguments are often specious. I will cite three instances, and then connect the dots.

His column of April 17, 2010 argued that the average Canadian household spent almost $15,000 on personal income taxes and the average American household about $2000. This claim was carefully analyzed by Steelworkers’ economist Erin Weir on the Progressive Economics Forum (www.progressive-economics.ca), who showed that when appropriate data were used per capita income taxes were almost equivalent.

His column of July 26, 2010 on the census repeated the claim that the Nordic countries have eliminated their censuses, but without the qualification – made clear by his fellow Globe and Mail journalists – that this was because they use many other data sources. He also repeated the conservative economist Hayek’s argument that the prices produced by the market are society’s most important statistic. Students in first-year economics courses should be familiar with that argument. Students in upper-level economics courses learn that, if there are market imperfections such as pollution, congestion, monopolies, or subsidies, prices provide misleading information.

In his column of August 9, 2010, Reynolds argued that people will adapt to global warming because they have in the past adapted to heat waves. The evidence he gave was an article by economists Olivier Deschenes and Michael Greenstone claiming that the increase from the US annual mortality rate due to global warming by the end of this century would be statistically indistinguishable from zero. He claimed that the paper was “published three years ago by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.”

I looked the paper up on Google Scholar. The abstract notes that the predicted mortality rate increases for some subpopulations, notably infants, would be statistically significant, and that annual resident energy consumption would increase by a statistically significant 15 to 30%.

What concerns me more, however, was that the article was not published three years ago by MIT. It was and remains a National Bureau of Economics Research Working paper. Working papers, as the NBER website makes clear, and any academic knows, have not passed peer review. Furthermore, a working paper that has remained in working paper form and hasn’t made it into a journal for 3 years is encountering difficulties in the reviewing process. It should be quoted, if at all, with caveats, and not referred to as published.

Okay, let’s connect the dots. We see a pattern of citing supposedly impeccable sources that, upon examination, doesn’t withstand scrutiny. Reynolds’s Wikipedia entry mentions a long and distinguished career in journalism but makes no mention of any university education. People generally ensure that their Wikipedia entries are accurate. My conclusion is that Reynolds either has had no university education or thinks it isn’t important enough to mention. For me, this is highly problematic for a columnist who relies so heavily on academic research. What he appears to me to be doing is citing research that seems to support his positions without much understanding of the research process. Not only is it important to distinguish between working papers and refereed work, but it is important to look at an overall body of research – the work of numerous scholars – to see if there is any consensus.

The Globe and Mail is English Canada’s newspaper of record. Its columnists should be the best in the country. The Globe is printing Reynolds because he represents the “right wing ideologue” position, just as it prints Rick Salutin (but only on Fridays) who represents the “left wing ideologue” position. I am not claiming that the Globe shouldn’t have a right wing ideologue columnist, but if it wants to have one, it can certainly do better than Neil Reynolds.

This post should in no way be considered an attack on Reynolds’s freedom of speech. He may say whatever he wants to say on his own blog or in whatever organ (perhaps the proposed Fox North channel) will publish him. But, if the Globe and Mail represents prime time in Canadian journalism, then my considered opinion is that he isn’t ready.

It intrigues me that during the entire long-form census controversy Mr. Harper has said nothing. The initial explanation is that he is on vacation at his summer residence at Harrington Lake. The tactical explanation is that on a controversial issue the relevant minister(s) should speak for the government, as Bernier and Clement are doing, and the Prime Minister should only weigh in when the issue is close to resolution. The third explanation is more strategic, and concerns the acceptability of the government’s agenda to Canadians.

We’ve been told that the impetus for the decision to make the long-form census voluntary came from Mr. Harper himself, from his belief that government has become too intrusive. It must be profoundly depressing for him to see 75 percent of the electorate disagreeing with him on this issue, and to see virtually every organized interest group opposing him. The only support he seems to have is from the Fraser Institute and from so-called libertarians like the Globe and Mail’s Neil Reynolds (whom, btw, I plan to diss in a future post).

Canadians seem to recognize – in this information age – that gathering and disseminating information is a legitimate function of government. It hasn’t been discussed in the census controversy, but it is essential to recognize that during the Great Depression of the Thirties, governments had much less economic data than they have now – in particular, there were no GDP numbers. The economic problem was thus exacerbated because government was flying blind.

The Harper Government believes that what it sees as interventionist social policy can be crippled by depriving it of its informational oxygen. The vast majority of Canadians have now realized that information is indeed oxygen, both for public policy and for their own initiatives, and are resisting.

So where does Mr. Harper go from here? He could, as a pragmatist, recognize that yet again his ideological agenda won’t sell, and accept the intelligent compromise that the National Statistics Council has developed.

Or he could tough it out. He has the tactical advantages that Parliament is not in session and the deadline for beginning to print the census forms comes next week. When Parliament meets in the fall, he could say that printing has already started and it’s too late to make changes. And he could dare the Opposition to vote no confidence.

Clearly this is an issue on which the opposition parties are united. The question is whether they are ready for an election. For the opposition, particularly the Liberals, the issue would have to be broadened from the status of the long-form census to the role of government in society. And given his background as political theorist, this could be an issue with which Michael Ignatieff would be comfortable.

In any event, it would be two years since the last election, which is a reasonable length of time for a minority government. It’s no secret that the Conservatives have been considering pulling the plug. Indeed they have been polling about it. (I was polled). Why doesn’t the Opposition seize the high ground and define the issue?

I won’t be posting next week. We’re going to see the baseball hall of fame in Cooperstown. I’ll be back the second week of August.