>Historian Paul Kennedy, bestselling author of The Rise and Fall of
>Great Powers, is one of the most fiercely anti-GESO professors on
>campus. Harking back to the days of yellow-dog contracts, he's gone
>so far as to threaten not to teach his lecture course if any of the
>teaching assistants are GESO members. A soft-spoken Briton, Kennedy
>loves old things. He collects books about old churches. He misses
>the sense of "history and ancientness" that he finds in European
>university towns. He fondly remembers receiving an honorary degree
>from a Belgian university celebrating its 575th anniversary, how he
>walked through the medieval village early in the morning while a
>light snow was falling. A high mass was said before the ceremony. He
>even compares Yale to the Holy Roman Empire. (There are limits to
>his gentility: When I call for an appointment, his receptionist
>informs me that he charges more than a thousand dollars for an
>interview. When we meet-sans fee-he explains that's for Japanese and
>Korean publications looking for "foreign gurus.")