Eskander Vs. Makiya, Pt. 2

I've been away from email, but I just came across John Gravois' second piece about the controversy surrounding Baath Party documents recently whisked off to a conservative think-tank in California.

75 Years After the Birth of the University in Exile, Endangered Scholars Speak at the New School

Exiled scholars and political activists from Iraq, Iran and Ethiopia spoke at a panel discussion in Tishman Auditorium last Thursday, part of a lecture series that commemorates the 75th Anniversary of the New School's University in Exile.

The University in Exile was founded as the graduate division of the New School for Social Research in 1933 by Alvin Johnson, the New School's first president, to provide a safe haven for European scholars like Hannnah Arendt, Leo Strauss and Erich Fromm, whose PhDs were revoked by the Nazi party.

NSSR Dean Michael Schober announced at the beginning of the talk that Henry H. Arnhold, a member of the university's board of trustees, recently offered a donation that will fund a three-year Scholar in Residence Program, in partnership with the Scholar Rescue Fund, to hire scholars who have been persecuted by their native countries.

Schober declined to give the sum of Arnhold's grant after the presentation, but added that it was not "in the millions."

The speakers recounted doing work in the trying, often terrifying, atmosphere of their homelands.

The first was Mehrangiz Kar, a woman who worked as a lawyer for 21 years in Iranian courtrooms governed by Islamic religious laws, known as Sharia. She is the author of several books, including her memoir, Crossing the Red Line: The Struggle for Human Rights in Iran, and has worked as a journalist for reformist publications.

"By [Iran's] Constitution," she said, "every door to reform is closed."

In 2000, after she returned from a conference in Berlin, the Iranian government threw her in solitary confinement for two months, charging her with "acting against national security," "insulting Islamic values," and violating the "Islamic dress code." Two months after they released her, the police imprisoned her husband, the journalist Siamak Pourzand, for several months and tortured him.

After his release, he stayed in Iran to get medical help, while Kar received treatment for breast cancer in the United States. She has lived here since 2002.

Donny George Youkhanna, the third speaker, served as the Director of the National Museum in Baghdad until the summer of 2006. At the National Museum, he worked with the U.S. military and a short-lived 1,400-man Special Antiquities Task Force to help retrieve 15,000 ancient artifacts that were stolen from the museum and from Iraq's 12,500 archeological sites during the rampant looting after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. The stolen items included statues, vases, cuneiform tablets, and antiquities that date back 6,000 years. According to the F.B.I., between 7 and 10 thousand items are still missing.

Youkhanna had high hopes for the American overthrow of Iraq's former President, Saddam Hussein. "I started thinking that, 'Yes, we will be more free,'" he said.

But as an English-speaking Christian, his family became a target of sectarian antagonism.

In 2006, his fifteen-year-old son received a death threat in the mail, accusing him of insulting Islam and making inappropriate comments to Muslim girls, and his father of working with the United States. After Youkhanna whisked his family off to Syria for their safety, he returned to continue his work. But the Minister of the State Board of Antiquities and Cultural Heritage revoked all of Youkhanna's executive authority, who at the time held the deputy ministerial position. "I could not spend one dinar," he said.

He soon retired, took a job offer from the University of Stony Brook and moved his family to New York.

Asked during the Q&A session about what should be done to preserve Iraq's antiquities and cultural heritage, he said that this effort would be very challenging. He noted that Iraq's national symphony orchestra, the first of its kind in the Middle East, has lately performed only at secret locations.

The final speaker was Berhanu Nega, a NSSR alumnus and the International Scholar in Residence in Economics at Bucknell University. Nega is a prominent member of Ethiopia's pro-democracy movement and the mayor-elect of Ethiopia's capitol, Addis Ababa.

Ethiopia's ruling party, the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front, derailed the democratic elections of May 2005. Nega never assumed his mayoral post because the government arrested him and threw him in jail and charged him with treason, he said, along with between 30,000 and 50,000 other activists, politicians and journalists.

A prolonged trial sentenced Nega and 37 other opposition leaders to life in prison, but the Ethiopian government suddenly released them in July. Nega has been in the United States since September.

Ethiopia is a key partner in the War on Terror and, according to USA Today, has received nearly $20 million in American military aid since 2002. Nega is a fervent critic of U.S. foreign policy.

Asked about the Presidential elections during the reception after the event, Nega put his right hand up, crossed his fingers, and said that he is rooting for Barack Obama.

This article appears in next Tuesday's issue of the New School Free Press.

How to Embarrass Your Children

In my childhood, I would always pity the poor little saps that were dressed up in the same clothes as their siblings, because their parents had some silly idea that this would make them look "darling." Needless to say, I would dread the possibility of one day finding myself dressed in the same shirt as my brother'S. Thankfully, this only happened once, when we wore matching oversized John Deere t-shirts to a distant family friend's wedding.

Thankfully, my parents never heard about the Bailey Boys. Making children match is this company's speciality. The customers are thrilled because their sets of matching Bailey Boys outfits can last for generations. "We take pride in consistently hearing from our customers that several children in a family have been able to wear the same Bailey Boy outfit over the years and it continues to withstand many washings and still looks great," the Bailey Boys clothing company website says. Enduring that kind of treatment, for me, would be a special kind of hell.

A Slightly More Carefree Xiu Xiu Emerges on "Women As Lovers"

After eight years, six full-length albums and a handful of EPs and compilations, Xiu Xiu has proven to be a giant oxymoron—a band that is simultaneously danceable and depressing, uncomfortable and infectious, genre-bending and ever faithful to pop song-craft.

On Women As Lovers, the band's proclivity for Joy Division, Indonesian gamelan, gay club music and experimental noise is as apparent as ever. But the group tones down the harsh drones, painfully angular guitar lines and gut-churning string sections of yore. Instead, one hears a musical vocabulary that is, daresay, fun-loving: squeaky-clean vibes, Asian flutes and percussion, driving beats, subdued vocals and horn melodies as raspy as they are triumphant.

Of course, unidentifiable noises still enter the fray in waves and pops. They are like the listless whispers of front-man Jamie Stewart's ever-present hunger and anguish, less ancillary than they might seem. And of course, Stewart still tends to express a sense of utter hopelessness. On "F.T.W.," over shimmering acoustic guitar, Stewart sings, "There is no right/There is no wrong/In why we live/There is only wrong." Halfway through, the tune devolves into a discordant series of squawks and yelps. Then Stewart whispers, "The car has killed you/And your corpse/Has de-discouraged us/To never, never, never, never look up."

Some critics might write-off Xiu Xiu as pretentious or self-absorbed music for art snobs. But the band's adherents (like me) could consider this music visionary. Either way, no one can deny that Women As Lovers leaves the listener with an ominous question: What can Xiu Xiu possibly come up with next?



This review runs in this week's issue of the New School Free Press.

Iraq's Top Archivist to Kanan Makiya: Stop, Thief!

Some of you may remember reading last summer's Q & A with Kanan Makiya, when he described how, after the 2003 invasion, he pilfered a treasure-trove of interior Baath Party documents from the abandoned regional headquarters building in Baghdad. These documents form the bedrock of the Iraq Memory Foundation, a private nonprofit organization that is trying to build a memorial site in the style of the Holocaust Memorial Museum at the site of the Crossed Swords in Baghdad. At the time of the interview, it didn't strike me that these were stolen documents and belonged not to Makiya's organization, but to the people of Iraq.

Last week, the notoriously controversial Iraqi exile, best known for writing Republic of Fear under the pseudonym Samir al-Khalil, gave everyone another reason to hate what he's doing. On Wednesday, journalist John Gravois wrote a piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education about how Makiya's Memory Foundation recently handed off "seven million pages of records and other artifacts," all produced during Saddam's rule, to a conservative think tank based in California called the Hoover Institution.

"I still can't understand how and why Mr. Kanan Makiya took all those documents and in what position," wrote Donny George Youkhanna, the former director of the Iraq Museum, on IraqCrisis. "All those documents are Iraqi property and they should go back immediately to the Iraqi institution that is responsible for the National Documents, that is the National Library and Archives."

The Chronicle reports that Makiya received permission from the U.S. government in 2005 to ship the documents to the United States, so government contractors could scan all of the documents quickly. Makiya said that he has received permission from numerous Iraqi government officials to keep control of the archives. But this latest deal caused quite an uproar. For one, it raised the hackles of Dr. Sa'ad Eskander, the director general of the Iraq National Library and Archive, who maintains that Baath Party documents are public property that belong in the country's national archives.

In an interview with the Chronicle, Eskander cited Iraqi laws from 1963 and 1983 and chapters of the Hague and the Geneva Conventions to argue that the documents are Iraq's property and the Memory Foundation's possession of them is illegal. For instance, the deal violates the The Hague Convention on the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, which demands that occupying powers respect and protect cultural property during national and international conflicts.

Makiya told the Chronicle that he would love to return the documents to Iraq. But he told the Chronicle, "Baghdad is just not ready for it." He worries about whether Iraq's members of parliament will use the records to smear the reputations of their opponents and critics. "It's not [Eskander's] good intentions that I'm worried about," he said. "It's his bosses'."

In 2005, Eskander wrote in a letter to Jeff Spurr, an Islamic and Middle East Specialist at Harvard, that that the Memory Foundation and the Hoover Institution have no right whatsoever to possess the archives. "These documents are highly sensitive from political and human rights perspective, as they contain the names of tens of thousands of people," he wrote. "They should not be held by any private group, which can use it for its own interests. If you read Iraqi newspapers, then you will understand how the stolen documents are misused for political and personal reasons. Yes, the IMF people are liberals, but they need to respect liberal rules and regulations."

On IraqCrisis two days ago, Spurr wrote that this situation generally sends a dire message: "It is a sure sign of that government's lack of commitment to its own laws, and susceptibility to outside pressure. That little is made--in Iraq or in the US--of the unseemly deal by which these documents were surreptitiously spirited out of Baghdad by the US military, similarly reflects on this lack of governmental integrity. How is the INLA to pursue its legal right to the tens of millions of documents seized by the US Army in 2003, if such behavior is supported in late 2005 and further countenanced in 2008?"

As for Dr. Eskander who won the 2007 Academic Freedom Award from the Middle East Studies Association for helping transform the decimated national library into a space with a staff of over 400 stocked with computers and a reading room for scholars and students. Spurr writes: "Dr. Eskander's every declaration, and his remarkable work to rebuild and rejuvenate the INLA make his institution the very--indeed the only--unequivocal expression of the values voiced and purportedly adhered to by Kanan Makiya himself to be found in Iraq at present. That it would be Makiya himself who most publicly undermines the INLA's position is shameful at best."

In the letter, Eskander wrote that he offered to work with members of the Memory Foundation in archiving the documents, but this went unanswered. "I asked our Deputy Minister, Maysoon Al-Damluji, to talk to the head of the IMF in Baghdad, Mr. Mustafa Al-Kadhimiy. He refused to talk to us or even to acknowledge the existence of any Iraqi legislation governing archival issues. By the way Al-Damluji is a friend of Kanan Makiya," he wrote. "I tried in vain to tell the IMF people that they were violating Iraqi laws, and that they should respect the rule of laws if they are true democrats."

Jeff Spurr had some harsh words to say about Gravois' work, writing that the article is inaccurate and patronizes Eskander. Gravois told Spurr that he is working on a longer piece about the issue. I eagerly await its publication...

Photo: Outside the Iraq National Library and Archive. Courtesy the Mind Matters blog.

Jonathan Veitch, Dean of Eugene Lang College, Will Step Down

For Jonathan Veitch, Dean of Lang, work can be rough.

His job, he said, is "75 percent" management. He runs a gauntlet of back-to-back meetings every weekday. He has to "block out scholarly time." He feels embarrassed that he has to tell his colleagues, "I write memos all day."

He usually does not leave the office until 9 or 10 p.m. His three kids complain that he does not spend enough time with them.

But at the end of June, after six months as Acting Dean and "four years of hard labor," Veitch will step down from his post. Neil Gordon, Chair of Lang's Writing Department, will take his place.

"I've accomplished what I've wanted to accomplish," Veitch said, during an interview in his office. "It's a different set of challenges now."

Thirteen faculty members, all full-time or tenured, were nominated as candidates for Dean, according to e-mails from faculty and staff about the search. Every nominee except Gordon declined the nomination. After meeting with faculty and reading Gordon’s mission statement, New School President Bob Kerrey and Provost Ben Lee decided to appoint him as Dean.

"Neil is a gifted intellectual, a superb teacher and a natural leader and manager," Kerrey said. "He also loves the college, has a great vision for its future, and has deep connections with New York City."

Gordon, a journalist and novelist who has taught at Lang for six years and has served as the Writing Department chair for four, is still working out the terms of his contract. He declined to be interviewed for this article, but he said that he will sign his contract on February 6. According to Kerrey, Gordon will begin serving as Dean on July 1.

Veitch entered his tenure as Acting Dean in Spring 2004, after the former Dean, Mary Rawlinson, suddenly quit—too overwhelmed, according to Kerrey, to continue. Kerrey said that he found Veitch to be an ideal candidate.

"[Veitch] pushes back when he thinks he's right and I'm wrong,” Kerrey said. “He's very smart and very talented, and cares deeply about the success of the college."

Veitch embarked on a mission to hire more staff and full-time faculty, connect with the city's "cultural institutions," start "civic engagement" programs and boost the college's international focus.

Since 2004, the college has hired 43 full-time faculty members, according to Assistant Dean Amos Himmelstein, and an adviser for every student class.

The school has created partnerships with major museums in the city. There are numerous study-abroad options. The college also started the I Have a Dream (IHAD) program, which holds acting workshops at an elementary school near a low-income housing project in Chelsea.

"Jonathan had the vision to reconnect Lang to what was always part of the school's original mission, and that was service and education," Cecilia Rubino, who teaches acting courses at Lang and helps run IHAD workshops, wrote over e-mail, referring to IHAD.

There is a new "civic engagement" director, Joseph Heathcott, who has $100,000 a year for the next five years, Veitch said, to develop programs that address prison reform, homelessness and immigration.

When the semester ends, Veitch will take a year-long sabbatical to work on his second book, about how once-pivotal American sites - like working-class Pittsburgh and the Nevada Test Site, where the U.S. government tested nuclear bombs - are memorialized, remembered and often forgotten. Then he will return to Lang and teach.

Veitch, a strikingly tall man of 48, with a calm voice and calculating manner, was born into a family of actors and grew up in Los Angeles. After he graduated from Stanford as an undergraduate, he said, he embarked on a quest to see America from the "inside-out." He worked on a dairy farm in Nebraska. He unloaded fish onto docks in Massachusetts. For two-month stints, he labored aboard a tugboat plying the Mississippi.

One day, a tugboat captain took away Veitch's copy of Mark Twain's Life On the Mississippi. "He said, 'If you've got enough time to read, you've got enough time to clean the bathroom,'" Veitch said. "He could tell that I had a college education, that I didn't need this job. So he kinda rode me most of the time. And when I got off, he handed me the book back. And this is a guy, I'm sure, who had never finished high school, had never heard of Mark Twain, if you can imagine that," he continued. "He said, 'You know, this guy Mark Twain really knows what he's talking about.' Wow, that's high praise—from a riverboat captain!"

After touring the United States for fifteen months, Veitch pursued a PhD in American Studies at Harvard. He moved on to teach in that field at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

During faculty meetings at Madison, Veitch got a taste of what university administrators were like: "They sounded kind of windy to me," he said. "Full of clichés."

After serving as Lang's Dean, he said, he can relate.

"You don't have time to think," he said. "You don't have a few hours a day—'Should I do this? Should I do that? Let me read about this before I…' None of that. So eventually there's no gas in the tank and you end up, sort of, you know, being a functionary," he continued. "I think that's the risk of these jobs, even if you start out with a lot of energy and vision."

But overall, Veitch suggested that his tenure went better than he expected.

"When I became Dean, I was told that my job is to find artful ways to say 'No' to people, so you don't alienate them," he said. "The happy circumstance of this last four or five years is that I've been able to say 'Yes' a lot."

This article appears in Tuesday's issue of the New School Free Press. Photo courtesy the New School.

Ejected!

Here and there, I hear stories of Macbook CD drives that fail their owners. I became a statistic, with regard to this issue, a few months ago - not even a year after I owned my Macbook.

Well, a recent article in Slashdot, an online repository of news for the computer nerd/hacker community, might shed some light on the ornery attitude of Mac's disc drives.

Last weekend, the British Mail on Sunday gave out free copies of "The Jazz Singer" on a new, environmentally-friendly DVD called EcoDisc, which is half as slim as your average DVD. But the EcoDisc can get stuck into Mac disk drives, and the Mail slapped a warning label onto the promotion. Mac owners, too excited to pass up the free offer, slipped the super-slim discs into their drives anyway.

"We inserted this damm Ecodisc into our Apple Mac before realising the implications of using an EcoDisc, and the disc drive no longer works," a PC Pro reader is quoted as saying in one article. "I have booked the computer in for repairs and it is likely to cost �60 plus VAT [sic] to repair."

Ray Wheeler, the managing director of ODS, which manufacturers the EcoDisc, told PC Pro that this wasn't a big deal. "We've produced over ten million of these discs - we've had less than a dozen phone calls," he said. All the same, it looks like Mac has been naughty: "[Mac] uses an ejection system that doesn't get approval from the DVD Forum."

Disappointing, to say the least. But this is no smoking gun, when it comes to my own Mac's problems. After all, mine certainly ejects all of my CDs and DVDs. The problem is that it refuses to do anything but eject them.