Phelps is not a liberal! Proud leftist, for a while the book
review editor at Monthly Review. On the website of Against The
Current you can read a chapter of his fine book, "The Young Sidney
Hook." Westbrook has a good book on John Dewey. Diggins, has
veered towards neo-connery, alas. Still his books, "Up from Communism,
" (on figures like Max Eastman, John dos Passos and Will Herberg,
Lovestoneite, and, "The Rise and Fall of the American Left, "
are fine reads. M.P. --- Original Message ---
>From: Premise Checker <checker at mail.sheergeniussoftware.com>
>To: debsian at pacbell.net
>Date: 6/20/02 5:11:27 AM
>
> Neoconservative Scholars Pull Out of Conference After Learning
> That Cornel West Will Attend
> By PIPER FOGG
> News bulletin from the Chronicle of Higher Education, 2.6.20
>
> Several prominent neoconservative scholars and writers have
> backed out of a conference at the Graduate Center of the City
> University of New York -- after finding out that Cornel West
> was among those who would be participating. Organizers of
the
> conference, which will examine the legacy of a neoconservative
> hero, Sidney Hook, said the scholars objected to Mr. West's
> presence because they thought he was "not enough of a scholar"
> of Hook.
>
> "I had never been presented with a list of participants,"
said
> Hilton Kramer, an art critic and editor of The New Criterion
> who had originally agreed to speak at the conference,
> scheduled for October. "When I saw that Cornel West was a
> participant, I decided that it wouldn't be appropriate" to
> attend. He declined to elaborate.
>
> Hook, a philosopher who would have been 100 this year, was
a
> radical Marxist in his younger days but passionately embraced
> anticommunism later in his life, making him a hero to many
> neoconservative scholars. In 1985, Ronald Reagan awarded Hook
> the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He died in 1989.
>
> "The idea, initially, was to collect a slate of intellectuals
> from different disciplines and different backgrounds" for
a
> discussion of Hook's work, said Robert B. Talisse, an
> assistant professor at Vanderbilt University who is one of
the
> organizers of the conference.
>
> The conference organizers had lined up a heavy-hitting group
> of neoconservatives that included John Patrick Diggins, a
> history professor at the CUNY Graduate Center; Mr. Kramer;
> Irving Kristol, a senior fellow of the American Enterprise
> Institute; and Gertrude Himmelfarb, a professor emerita of
> history at the CUNY Graduate Center. Liberal scholars were
> also set to attend, among them Christopher Phelps, an
> assistant professor of history at Ohio State University at
> Mansfield; Richard Rorty, a philosophy professor at Stanford
> University; and Robert B. Westbrook, an intellectual historian
> at the University of Rochester.
>
> Mr. Diggins, Ms. Himmelfarb, and Mr. Kristol are among those
> joining Mr. Kramer in boycotting the event, conference
> organizers said. Mr. Diggins, who is in France, was not
> available for comment. Mr. Kristol and Ms. Himmelfarb declined
> to comment.
>
> Mr. West was not originally on the program. But in March,
> after Mr. Rorty dropped out, the organizers looked for a
> prominent replacement. They chose Mr. West, a philosopher
> whose writing on race has made him a nationally known figure.
> Mr. West has been in the news recently, after he decided to
> leave Harvard University for Princeton University, after a
> public falling-out with Harvard's president, Lawrence H.
> Summers. (See an article from The Chronicle, April 15.)
>
> But conference organizers said they selected Mr. West because
> of his scholarly work in philosophy, Hook's field. Mr. West
is
> the author of The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy
> of Pragmatism (University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), which
> contains a substantial discussion of Hook's work. Mr. West
is
> also the editor of Post-Analytic Philosophy (Columbia
> University Press, 1985).
>
> When Mr. Diggins found out about Mr. West's participation,
> said conference organizers, he threatened to pull out and
take
> others with him if they didn't rescind the invitation to Mr.
> West.
>
> Matthew Cotter, a history graduate student at CUNY and one
of
> the conference organizers, said he learned in March that Mr.
> West had agreed to come, but waited six weeks before telling
> Mr. Diggins, who was his academic adviser last year. Mr.
> Cotter said he wanted to make sure that Mr. West was
> definitely coming. "When I broke the news to Jack, he was
> quite furious," he said. "He questioned Cornel West's
> scholarship. ... He felt he'd been duped."
>
> Mr. Cotter called the tactics of those who pulled out of the
> conference "dogmatic." "They seem to be the same tactics
> Sidney Hook spent his entire intellectual career challenging,"
> he said.
>
> Mr. Phelps agreed. "It's not clear to me how it serves to
pull
> the plug on a conference just because you disagree with a
> given participant's point of view," he said.
>
>http://chronicle.com/daily/2002/06/2002062001n.htm
>
>
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