McAdams gets Salvaged

[James DiEugenio]

I see I left out your other key point: gerrymandering.

After the utter failure of Reconstruction, the way the remnants of the confederacy reasserted itself was through the black codes and then through tenant farming.  The black codes then evolved into Jim Crow.  And these local and state laws were allowed to overrule the Civil War amendments for the simple fact that no president, including FDR, wanted to challenge the southern establishment.  For two reasons: 1.) It would sandbag their own program and 2.) It would lose the Solid South for the Democratic Party.

That was the state of affairs until the fifties when you had a bit of movement with Brown vs Board, the 1957 Civil Rights Act and the 1960 Civil Rights Act and Little Rock. But Eisenhower and Nixon consciously decided not to enforce any of those acts and Ike only acted in Little Rock because he had to enforce federal law over Orville Faubus' defiance.  No  one had ever done, or even contemplated, what the Kennedys did. That is a three year campaign to strike down Jim Crow, voting discrimination and force integration in the south.

The way the GOP and Nixon  later got around this was to manipulate white backlash.  They did it with Kevin Phillips' Southern Strategy and Nixon's attempts to put two southerners on the Supreme Court in Carswell and Haynsworth.  Those two nominations were clearly a code to the south that he was going to try and reverse the Warren Court on civil rights.  The other way the GOP fought back was through gerrymandering.  This process has gotten so ridiculous in the last twenty years that its not really even funny anymore.  And this is because the GOP controls so many state houses and that is how they draw up state seats in the assembly.  And sometimes for congress.  

The only real way you can break open gerrymandering is through an aggressive Justice Department.  As they did in California to get Gloria Molina on the Board of Supervisors.  The Justice Department went to court and in a case that lasted about four years they finally got a new map that allowed a minority person to get elected for the first time in over a century in LA county.  But that is how determined these regressive forces really are.  And this is one reason I think Obama was such a disappointment in so many ways. I really think there is some evidence to promote the idea that Obama was really the Democratic Establishment's answer to Jessie Jackson. I wonder if Ted Kennedy would have endorsed him at the end of the day. I mean Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State?

 

Edited July 9, 2018 by James DiEugenio

[W. Niederhut]

    The recent four episode "Bobby Kennedy for President" series focused significantly on RFK's involvement with the American black community from 1960 to '68 -- including detailed personal narratives by Harry Belafonte and Congressman John Lewis.  As they tell the story,  after initially  arranging to get MLK out of jail, Bobby seemed to make a conscious decision to risk alienating the Dixiecrat base-- political suicide, in a sense -- on moral grounds.  He was, genuinely, outraged as he began to better understand the predicament of African Americans.

    In direct contrast, Nixon later, cynically, resorted to the "Southern strategy," as you mentioned.  GHWB did the same thing in 1988 (e.g., with Lee Atwater's sleazy Willie Horton ads.)  But Trump has taken this racial (and xenophobic) demagoguery to a new level, in a way that would have seemed inconceivable to me a few years ago. And, not surprisingly, this regressive devolution in U.S. politics has been aggressively promoted by many of the same talking heads and pseudo-historians (e.g., Bill O'Reilly) who have misrepresented and disparaged the legacy of the Kennedy brothers.

   It's Orwellian-- "controlling" the past in order to control the present and future.

 

 

Edited July 9, 2018 by W. Niederhut

[James DiEugenio]

To me the Willie Horton ad was not the worst.  Although it was pretty bad.

To me, the very worst thing under Bush 1 was the Clarence Thomas nomination, and the attendant circus around Anita Hill.

I mean, nothing showed America just what the Republicans had done to the race issue than that.  The idea was to shove King, Malcolm and Jessie Jackson down the Democrats' throats.  

Clarence Thomas was the equivalent of Jack Benny's Rochester and that was the way black Americans should be.   Even though the guy was not even qualified to be on the court! 

And then what they did to poor Anita Hill capped it off.  To this day I do not understand what Biden was thinking of as he conducted that hearing.  To try and be nice to the opposition as they used every trick in the book to turn the proceedings into a sideshow.  And then not to call the corroborating witnesses for Hill, and to let the opposition mischaracterize them in advance? I mean really, when the other side starts complementing you on how fair you are being Joe, its time to wake up.  That means they are eating your lunch.

The only Democrat who gave a speech worth a salt during that whole fiasco was Ted Kennedy.  And he wasn't in charge.  He was the only guy who showed any outrage about the process.

I mean Thomas called what was going on a high tech lynching?  And Biden didn't call him on it.  Really sick.

[Robert Harper]

20 hours ago, Robert Harper said:

It didn't seem that your issue was private v public(as mine was) but rather that McAdams was a skunk and the Court is rigged. Both may be true. But my reading of the decision remains where it is. 

In the spirit of this Forum's DVP style of answering a post by James, the following (DiEugenio in italic, Harper in Bold)

 

Academic freedom, as any such concept as we know it, ends at the well being and health of the person next to you.  

 

What exactly does this mean? It sounds like a fortune cookie.

 

As I described it, that is what happened here.  There were many ways that McAdams could have pursued a complaint within the academic confines.

 

Could have, should have, might have; the academic confines pre-judged him. That's what the Judges reported. He acted in his self-interest; who doesn't?

 

  He did not want to for the simple matter that he did not wish to reveal what he did not reveal:  the student was being advised by him, and he was flunking the class.  So far from being a dispute about academic freedom, one can see that this was a way for both the student and the advisor to serve their own ends.

 

 I don't think it fruitful to retry the case on this Forum, but acting to serve one's end is not - in itself - a bad thing. They did so within the "confines" of the academic world -- they used the subject and the teacher - to illustrate a point. The instructor was offered a chance to respond and didn't. You have asserted things that are also out of context;  it wasn't part of the Court record; how does one respond to such charges?

 

 I was relating my experience with the material. For those who can't stand McAdams - this was  bad use of the law to try and get rid of him. He filed it because the faculty and administration improperly judged him and took away things of value from him. In addition, I'd like to think that no one with an ounce of integrity in their beliefs, would have signed that schoolmarmish note written by the president.

 

 And, in fact, the student's agenda was brought out at the first academic hearing he had on the subject. He wanted to drop the class without sustaining the fail.  The administrator told him that this was not possible since the deadline had passed.  As I said, McAdams covered all this up in his writings and emails on the subject by saying that somehow the administrator had not given the student due process.  And, as predicted, the people who he mailed this out to cooperated with him.

 

Same objection as above: not relevant to case as delivered as the record.

 

As I have  noted, being in the field of education for over three decades, as both a teacher and student, I had never seen a case like this before.  Not even close.  McAdams should have been disciplined or suspended far earlier for the antics he was pulling on campus.  And this was a problem in my view.  Marquette had been far too lenient with him prior to this case.

 

Well I don't think you have to be in the education field to have an informed opinion about a constitutional issue or about academic freedom or about university policies.

  However since you brought it up,  I've been a Guest Artist on a university campus and I've been a member of the Modern Language Association (MLA) for 30 years. This is an organization of graduate students, professors, and those interested in teaching and language usage. I've attended conferences in Toronto, New York, Vancouver, San Diego, and San Francisco  and participated in a seminar at one in Washington DC where I gave a presentation.The Association deals with many concerns of academia, including research standards, undergraduate and graduate canons, international and national issues of concern. The members are primarily in the fields of literature, drama, philosophy, psychology and other liberal arts. Granted it's more intellectual than Human Resource oriented, but both areas involve an understanding of what constitutes proper behavior and each has been evolving for decades. A teacher used to be able to date a student not that long ago. I don't know the McAdams narrative over the past 30 years; Edward Said and Helen Vendler and Czeslaw Milosz have all been speakers and topics at these conferences; I don't recall any discussion involving McAdams.

 

Whatever you think about Scalia and the special prosecutor,  did you also think he was correct in issuing the order to stop the counting of ballots in Florida in the year 2000?  Did you like the excuse he used for that one?  The continued counting of the votes could cause irreparable harm to candidate Bush? 

 

James, as a historian, do you take one opinion  as representative of all their other opinions or viewpoints? Does one reference to Warren or Byron White or Rehnquist or Douglas equate to endorsing their entire oeuvre?  Whatever Scalia wrote about Florida doesn't impact my opinion of what he wrote about the 1978 law. Since we are in the midst of the third special prosecution of the Executive since the Court decision, Scalia's dissent was referenced. Seems more relevant today than 30 years ago.

 

Talk about Orwell.  The irreparable harm was to Gore. Scalia and Jeb Bush stole the election for W.  Which then caused the invasion of Iraq.

 

Again, how does this information relate to the issue at hand?

 

Here is another indication as to what these fruits and nuts have done with the Federalist Society:https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-supreme-court-roe-v-wade-abortion_us_5b422ba3e4b07b827cc1c6d5 People like Alito and Gorsuch get their ticket punched by doing things like what happened in the agency fees case for public employees unions and Citizens United. 

 

How does this impact this discussion? There has been a Conservative majority in the political world, reflected in the Court. The Federalist Society is a version of the CFR, only it's focused on law. The real case that started it all was Buckley v. Vallejo (1976) which determined that speech = money; Citizens United just expanded that to mean: no limit to speech = no limit to money. Until a law is passed and found Constitutional that limits campaign funding, this oligarchy will continue.

 

Giving black Americans access to public places and the right to vote, and giving immigrant workers due process before the are fired and deported is not the same as saying that influence over elections should be unlimited for billionaires, and workers in public unions should not have to pay for the benefits they get from that union.  Especially when the court manipulates the first case in order to set it up more completely for a reversal of stare decisis, and when the same stare decisis overthrow is used for agency fees. (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/05/21/money-unlimited) 

 

The only answer to this is to change the party doing the nominating and choosing. Or change the whole system - like they're trying to do in Poland today or like FDR tried to do in the 1930's. This decision in Wisconsin was my interest in responding to the thread. 

 

As I said at the beginning, what we are seeing here is the ultimatum reaction to the Kennedys belated supporting of Brown vs Board.  These same people felt that was lawyer advocating.  Somehow the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments, plus the horrible bloodshed of the Civil War did not exist. 

 Again, I don't see the relevance here. Should the Civil War have been fought at all? Should cities take down monuments to iconic figures? How did Reconstruction obstruct the relevant amendments? All topics for discussion.  I thought this was about a Professor and a University that disciplined him and about a Court that overrode the University. That intersection interested me, and I thought that was the issue at hand.

My main interest in the case, was the Court making a ruling involving a private institution. The decision convinced me that it didn't infringe on the separation of Church & State traditions,  nor on the rights of parties in a private institution to allow or disallow Court involvement. I don't think Marquette looks good here because they should have acted earlier, could have arranged a mutual arbitration process, and should have had an impartial group of peers judge McAdams' behavior when they did act.  I also think the instructor invited the ensuing colloquy by not responding to his offer to comment, as well as by her obvious shortcomings as a teacher of philosophy at that point in her career.

  I don't presume an awareness of  what mental problems dominate when a fracas in academia erupts, so I don't know how to compare her experience with that experienced by Norman Finklestein with DePaul University. I think having your livelihood taken away from you -  along with all the security such entails -  after excelling for a dozen years in your job, could be quite an unsettling and painful experience. I think having to endure such treatment, after accomplishing so much, would have a deeper dimension than that suffered by a neophyte teacher, faced with  a dose of cultural and intellectual bullying.  But this is speculation on my part and not a pronouncement.

[James DiEugenio]

Mr. Harper:

I guess you and I have a disagreement about:

1.) The relevant facts of this case, and

2.) The status of the political make up of the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

3.) The fact that its not an "ouch" contest and you don't seem to value the danger to Abbate's physical well being as compared to Finkelstein's professional employment.  Even though I said that was simply wrong on Dershowitz's part and DePaul should not have gone along with it.

IMO, as far as the Abbate case goes, considering the status of Scott Walker and Wisconsin's supreme court, Marquette had about as much chance of prevailing on the merits as Dred Scott did back in 1857, or Al Gore did in 2000 after Scalia stopped the vote count because, as he more or less admitted, he did not want to see W lose the election, and give Gore the chance to appoint Democratic justices.  Those two cases stand out as two of the most politically motivated federal Supreme Court decisions ever. And please recall what Scalia said to all those books written about the indefensible and absurd lengths the court went to in order to justify the stopping of the vote count in Florida: "Get over it!"  Did he also say that to the parents of  those 5,500 dead Marines his man W sent to their deaths in Iraq?

 In my opinion, when you overturn two administrative hearings, and one lower court hearing and say that a professor does not have to follow the faculty handbook or guidelines, or internal procedures, and can terrorize a student teacher and then lie about it, then I guess we have a different view of the facts and values in this case, and what the concept of academic freedom consists of.

BTW, my comment about your freedom ending at the next person's health and well-being, that is one of the most common figures used in teaching both civil and criminal law.  

Edited July 9, 2018 by James DiEugenio

[W. Niederhut]

11 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

To me the Willie Horton ad was not the worst.  Although it was pretty bad.

To me, the very worst thing under Bush 1 was the Clarence Thomas nomination, and the attendant circus around Anita Hill.

I mean, nothing showed America just what the Republicans had done to the race issue than that.  The idea was to shove King, Malcolm and Jessie Jackson down the Democrats' throats.  

Clarence Thomas was the equivalent of Jack Benny's Rochester and that was the way black Americans should be.   Even though the guy was not even qualified to be on the court! 

And then what they did to poor Anita Hill capped it off.  To this day I do not understand what Biden was thinking of as he conducted that hearing.  To try and be nice to the opposition as they used every trick in the book to turn the proceedings into a sideshow.  And then not to call the corroborating witnesses for Hill, and to let the opposition mischaracterize them in advance? I mean really, when the other side starts complementing you on how fair you are being Joe, its time to wake up.  That means they are eating your lunch.

The only Democrat who gave a speech worth a salt during that whole fiasco was Ted Kennedy.  And he wasn't in charge.  He was the only guy who showed any outrage about the process.

I mean Thomas called what was going on a high tech lynching?  And Biden didn't call him on it.  Really sick.

 

Interesting that you mention the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings in the context of Republican reactions to the Kennedy's civil rights legacy.

I vividly remember watching former Warren Commissioner Arlen Specter cross-examine Anita Hill on television during those hearings.

It was almost as pathetic as Specter's shameless promotion of the Magic Bullet theory.

And Clarence Thomas has, shamelessly, endorsed both recent SCOTUS rulings against proper enforcement of the Voting Rights Act (and Bush v. Gore.)

[James DiEugenio]

There were several articles on the subject of how Thomas more or less was Scalia's echo chamber.

BTW, last night's nomination was about as surprising as being in Times Square in  Manhattan on New Year's Eve. A guy who worked for Ken Starr and on the Florida recount and had planned 11 different ways to impeach Clinton.  But now questions the whole Mueller case?

I mean listening to all that stuff about following the Constitution:  blah blah blah. When in Bush vs Gore, they overthrew the Constitution on both the states rights issue and the equal protection clause.  Ginsberg really roasted Rehnquist, and to a lesser degree Scalia,  in her dissent over what this decision had done to the whole conservative idea of precedent and tradition.  It had exposed them as empty poses.

The rightwing has really completely corrupted the judicial process almost beyond meaning.  They have made it something like a hazing process for a fraternity. It begins in law school by the way, there is a famous conservative one at Liberty University.  And, as many have indicated, its not just on the federal level, but now, as we see in this McAdams case, on the state level also.

Returning to that, I do not know  in Wisconsin, if they have an out for following administrative law.  In Colorado, they did, and that is why Churchill could not get his job back.  But if Marquette's lawyers agreed to go the civil route, but did not have to, they should be fired.  Any idiot could have seen what the outcome would have been by just reading that 2011 New Yorker article I posted.

 

Edited July 10, 2018 by James DiEugenio

[James DiEugenio]

This is what I mean about Kavanaugh and the GOP hazing procedure.

http://jfkfacts.org/on-jfk-secrecy-brett-kavanaugh-sides-with-the-cia/

 

This is what the court system has become because of the Federalist Society and its union with the GOP.  

And this is why I think the Democrats are only slightly less useless than the GOP.  If it had been me, I would have been running press releases on this issue long ago.  That is how the Federalist Society has altered the power structure and made the judiciary little more than an arm of the Republican Party.  Which was exposed in Bush v Gore.

Edited July 10, 2018 by James DiEugenio

[Ron Bulman]

3 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

This is what I mean about Kavanaugh and the GOP hazing procedure.

http://jfkfacts.org/on-jfk-secrecy-brett-kavanaugh-sides-with-the-cia/

 

This is what the court system has become because of the Federalist Society and its union with the GOP.  

And this is why I think the Democrats are only slightly less useless than the GOP.  If it had been me, I would have been running press releases on this issue long ago.  That is how the Federalist Society has altered the power structure and made the judiciary little more than an arm of the Republican Party.  Which was exposed in Bush v Gore.

I read this earlier today.  Judge Henderson seems pretty clear in where the others screwed up in what was provided of her dissent.  Kudos to Jeff and Mr. Lesear  for keeping on for many years.  Mc Adams get's off Jeff gets screwed.  A yes verdict, that the information does have public value, would draw attention to the subject and their reasons for suppressing it in the first place.

Sad, frightening and angering that Kavanaugh is nominated for the Supreme Court.  If he can't get this right...

[B. A. Copeland]

On 7/6/2018 at 3:41 PM, W. Tracy Parnell said:

 I for one, will be glad to see him back teaching some common sense about the assassination.

But....at what cost?

[W. Tracy Parnell]

43 minutes ago, B. A. Copeland said:

But....at what cost?

Although you may not be referring to this, it was at a great personal cost both in legal fees and in the abuse that he had to endure.