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A NEWSLETTER WITH AN EYE ON POLITICAL MEDIA

Big Money Is the Ultimate in Cancel Culture

Just ask Yale, where donors upended a celebrated academic program.

Back in the early 1980s, I thought I might become one of those "grand
strategy" academics, and so I went to graduate school for international
relations at Yale. There, I was fortunate to be able to study the
subject with professor Paul Kennedy and also the late conservative
historian of ancient Greece, Donald Kagan
. I
wrote about thinkers like B.H. Liddell Hart, and Carl von Clausewitz, as
well as more contemporary topics, even got a few of my term papers
published-one in **Parameters**, the journal of the Army War College
and another
in the Fletcher Forum (and
in French on the front page of

**Le Monde diplomatique**). I also learned a great deal.

Over time, I moved on to other things. Part of it was my own changing
interests, but I also decided that "grand strategy" was sort of
bullshit. It was fun to debate in scholarly journals or seminar rooms,
but it had no relevance to real life. I've spent a great deal of time
examining the career of Henry Kissinger, allegedly the great grand
strategist of our age, in the histories I've written. (For the
purposes of this discussion only, I'll put aside his
all-but-inarguable war criminality-it's almost impossible to argue
straight-faced that at any point did he really know what he was doing.)
Yes, Kissinger thought he had big plans-but God laughed at all of
them. Almost without exception, his would-be Machiavellian machinations
made whatever problem he was seeking to address worse. This was true, of
course, for the millions of victims of his hubris all around the globe,
but also from the narrow perspective of even medium-term U.S. interests.

And Kissinger was no dope. A number of the people who followed him in
office, however, really were. By far the worst of these was America's
most recent set of secretaries of state under Trump, with Mike Pompeo
taking the prize for worst ever
.
So the challenge facing Tony Blinken and Jake Sullivan is akin to the
job of the guy in the Shriners hat who follows the horses on a little
cart in a grand parade and cleans up the deposits they leave in their
wake. That leaves them not much time for grand strategic thinking, much
less the implementation of policies that reflect that thinking across
literally dozens of agencies, to say nothing of a consistently meddling
Congress, lobbyists, think tanks, and quite a few pundits who believe
with all their hearts that their opinions ought to matter.

Recently, however, I started seeing a great many references to a new
collection of essays published by Oxford University Press entitled
Rethinking American Grand Strategy
.
As there wasn't much going on my pandemicized social life, I attended
a few Zoom discussions organized around it. To my surprise, I discovered
that the entire field had been remade to include all kinds of issues and
questions that would never occur to Henry Kissinger-issues like
reproductive rights, "whiteness," immigration, and climate change,
together with the way these problems reinforced one another and
therefore complicated any nation's ability to address them.

This is the intellectual transformation that Yale historian Beverly
Gage, director of Yale's shockingly well-funded Brady-Johnson Program
in Grand Strategy, was clearly addressing with her plans to update its
focus. The program was founded in 2000 by my friend Professor Kennedy,
together with John Lewis Gaddis, a famous Cold War historian who by and
large blamed the Soviet Union for everything that went wrong during that
conflict, and the now-deceased former Republican foreign-policy official
Charles Hill. Under their guidance, the curriculum stuck pretty
carefully to the traditional stuff that I had been studying there a
decade and a half earlier. But under Gage, who took over in 2017, things
began to change. Her syllabus included not only Thucydides, Clausewitz,
Kissinger, and the like, but grassroots social movements, like the
pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong and the U.S. civil rights movement.

The pushback from the funders, as one can glean from Jennifer Schuessler
's eye-opening
**Times** article
,
appears to have comprised multiple parts. One was political censorship.
Nicholas Brady, a former Republican Cabinet official and a donor to the
program, saw an opinion article

entitled "How to Protect America From the Next Donald Trump" by Bryan
Garsten, a Yale political scientist who teaches in the program. Brady
called Gage to complain that "this is not what Charlie Johnson [the
billionaire who put up the real money] and I signed up for." (They
wanted, alas, "grand strategy" taught "the way Henry Kissinger would.")
These wealthy Republican funders were accustomed to a program that
supported the kind of U.S. imperialism and forever wars of yore. Under
George W. Bush's presidency, some of its faculty members, most
prominently Gaddis, had helped to provide a specific albeit deeply
misguided intellectual rationale for W.'s policies. Aaron G. Jakes, a
graduate of the Yale program, describes that process and especially
Gaddis's role here
.
(And feel free to catch up with just a few of Gaddis's spectacularly
misguided arguments here
.)
Perhaps most fundamentally, these old-guy donors just didn't
understand that the world had passed them by. What they thought
constituted "grand strategy" no longer did, and so they gave the program
and the university an ultimatum: our way or the highway. They believed
that once they gave their money to a university, they got to decide upon
whom and what it would be spent.

Alas, they were right about the last one: Yale chose their way. But
Gage, after what the

**Times** called "four months of wrangling," chose the highway. She
would not accept what she termed a "form of surveillance and control"
over the program's curriculum and, as she told the

**Times**, "It's very difficult to teach effectively or creatively in
a situation where you are being second-guessed and undermined and not
protected."

"This is not a pay-to-play institution," she told the Yale Daily News
.
"That is not how you get to influence the curriculum-you want people
who have expertise, pedagogy, skills making those kinds of decisions."

Now, it's no secret that many colleges and universities, desperate for
funding, do this all the time. To take just one, for instance, when the
Taub Foundation's Fred Lafter explained that he had donated the $3.5
million to get NYU's Taub Center for Israel Studies up and running in
2003, he did so in order to fill the "void" he identified within Middle
Eastern studies departments that he believed were "cast in an Arabic
point of view."

(Its "advisory board" failed to include scholars in the field, but did
include right-wing Jewish funders like now-disgraced billionaire Michael
Steinhardt

and the extremely hardline pro-Israel former head of CBS and funder of
right-wing academics Laurence Tisch
.)
Examples like Taub's lead many rich folks investing in academia to
believe that they can expect to get their way so long as their donations
meet expectations.

Theoretically, this should be less true at Yale. NYU's endowment is a
relatively paltry $4.7 billion. Yale, on the other hand, is walking
around with a more than $31 billion endowment

in its back pocket. This is what a more vulgar person than your author
might call "fuck you" money. Sure, Johnson's $250 million contribution
to the school-Yale's largest ever-was hardly insignificant in
material terms, but compared to Yale's endowment, it did not even
constitute 1 percent. And no matter how much money was on the table, job
one of any university president is to defend the right of faculty to
determine the content of their courses, irrespective of attempts at
outside interference. Yale President Peter Salovey failed in this
fundamental responsibility. (To their respective credit, both Kennedy
and Gaddis stood with Gage.)

In a letter to the university community, Salovey admitted that Gage "did
experience more unsolicited input from donors than faculty members
should reasonably be expected to accept." He reported that he had "heard
from many faculty members and alumni" who insisted that Yale needed to
"take great care to ensure that gifts we receive do not infringe on the
academic freedom of our faculty." He also admitted that he "should have
tried harder to improve the situation." He did not, however, explain
what had prevented him from doing so. His letter closed with a promise
that in the future he would "ensure that faculty members are protected
from any interference in shaping the curriculum and in setting the
course for their research and scholarship." I don't know Salovey well
enough to say whether the bad publicity this incident has cost him will
be enough to ensure what he-to say nothing of other college presidents
without $30 billion in their respective pockets-will do in the future.
I do know one thing, however: Cancel culture works when it is backed by
$250 million. It works so well, in fact, that almost nobody bothers to
call it cancel culture.

______________________________________________________________________

I wrote quite critically of Professor Gaddis's decades-in-the-making
biography of George Kennan, here
,
and not long afterward, I wrote this little squib

about a ceremony at Yale overseen by Gaddis (which I happened to
attend), in which Kissinger was honored for screwing Harvard and giving
his papers to Yale. I got into a small, (extremely polite) public
discussion with Henry about human rights in China, during which I
detected Professor Gaddis's disapproval over the nature of my
questioning. After the item appeared, however, he wrote me a gracious
note disputing my belief that he had been "deeply unhappy" to see
me-but in fact, the opposite was true.

I went long today. More music next week.

See you next week.

~ ERIC ALTERMAN

Become A Member of The American Prospect Today!

Eric Alterman is a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn
College, an award-winning journalist, and the author of 11 books, most
recently Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie-and Why Trump Is Worse
(Basic, 2020). Previously, he wrote The Nation's "Liberal Media"
column for 25 years. Follow him on Twitter @eric_alterman

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