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There are no neutrals there

By Jim Chen et al.

div style="background:#334422; color:#dddd99; padding:16px"div align="center"Natalie Merchant, a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3z2f63Njto" target=_blank style="font-style:italic; color:#eeeeaa"Which Side Are You On?/a, emon/em a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0000CH9BH?ie=UTF8tag=jurisdynamics-20link_code=as3camp=211189creative=373489creativeASIN=B0000CH9BH" target=_blank style="font-variant:small-caps; color:#eeeeaa"The House Carpenter's Daughter/a (2003):br /br /object width="425" height="344"param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/w3z2f63Njtohl=enfs=1color1=0x234900color2=0x4e9e00"/paramparam name="allowFullScreen" value="true"/paramparam name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"/paramembed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/w3z2f63Njtohl=enfs=1color1=0x234900color2=0x4e9e00" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"/embed/objectbr /br /They say in Harlan Countybr /There are no neutrals there.br /You'll either be a union manbr /Or a thug for J.H. Blair.br /br /Which side are you on, boys, which side are you on?br /br /img src="http://kdl.kyvl.org/images/kukav/81pa109/0017.jpg" style="display:block; margin: 0px auto 0px; text-align:center; width:463px; padding:0px; border: 0px none #334422" alt="Harlan County strikers" title="Striking miners in Harlan County, Ky., 1931"/divbr /div style="font-family:trebuchet,arial,verdana,helvetica,sans-serif; font-size:83%"a href="http://kdl.kyvl.org/cgi/b/bib/bib-idx?type=simple;c=eadimages;q1=KUKAV:81pa109:0017;rgn1=identifier;cc=eadimages;view=reslistlong;sort=A-Z;fmt=long;page=reslist" target=_blank style="font-style:italic; color:#eeeeaa"A line of miners with troops leading them/a, a photo from the a href="http://kdl.kyvl.org/cgi/f/findaid/findaid-idx?c=kyead;cc=kyead;view=text;rgn=main;didno=kukav81pa109" target=_blank style="color:#eeeeaa"Harlan County Mine Strike Photographic Collection/a./div/divbr /a href="http://its.law.nyu.edu/facultyprofiles/profile.cfm?personID=26990" target=_blankRick Hills/a has posted a href="http://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/prawfsblawg/2008/12/which-side-are-you-on.html" target=_blanka little item/a that inspires all sorts of thoughts with varying degrees of relevance (all of them positive) to emMoneyLaw/em:blockquoteOne reason I chose to be an academic is to gain the right to choose my positions ema la carte/em rather than from the emprix fixe/em menu of Left-Right vacuities that dominate the punditocracy and blogosphere. So, for instance (to pull a a href="http://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/prawfsblawg/2008/12/public-employees-the-recession.html" target=_blankrandom example out of thin air/a), it strikes me as inane to have a general ideological position on "unions," as if one should endorse or condemn together the baseball players' union, the corrections officers union in California, the Teamsters, or District Council 37. Likewise, it strikes me as absurd to think that, because I worry about the latest round of contracts between the public sector and New York City, that I am hostile even to public-sector unions in general.nbsp;.nbsp;.nbsp;.br /br /a href="http://its.law.nyu.edu/facultyprofiles/profile.cfm?personID=26990" target=_blankimg src="http://its.law.nyu.edu/Pictures/918634904.jpg" style="float:left; margin: 0px 10px 2px 0px" alt="Rick Hills" title="Rick Hills"/aMy hypothesis: Some academics have joined a sort of intellectual's trade union in which two positions mdash; disapproval of District Council 37 and love of Wall Street mdash; must somehow be bundled together as negotiating items. That sort of bundling of positions makes perfect sense in a two-party system as a means of simplifying ballots for busy voters: After all, a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law" target=_blankDuverger's Law/a requires us to choose one of two sides. But it is senseless in an academic blog. When it comes to thinking and writing, we academics should put our union cards in our shoes and all be shameless scabs, choosing whichever intellectual position happens to yield the greatest payoff./blockquoteRick's post is worth pondering a href="http://money-law.blogspot.com/2008/12/there-are-no-neutrals-there.html"for these reasons/a:span class="fullpost"olliRick makes an appealing call for pluralism in academic thought. Diversity and freedom of thought, which after all are putatively prized values in academia, should permit the full range of views on all sorts of issues, including labor-management disputes in wildly different economic settings./libr /liRick drops an awesome name, Maurice Duverger. The full cite is Maurice Duverger, a href="http://janda.org/c24/Readings/Duverger/Duverger.htm" target=_blank style="font-style:italic"Factors in a Two-Party and Multiparty System/a, emin/em a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0690610572?ie=UTF8tag=jurisdynamics-20link_code=as3camp=211189creative=373489creativeASIN=0690610572" target=_blank style="font-variant:small-caps"Party Politics and Pressure Groups: A Comparative Introduction/a 23-32 (1972). a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law" target=_blankDuverger's Law/a predicts that a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plurality_voting_system" target=_blankfirst-past-the-post/a voting systems will yield a two-party polity. More grimly, moderate views tend to polarize until two entrenched parties dominate the political landscape. What is true of electoral politics, I'll hypothesize, is also true of the academic equivalent. Articulating the identity and mission of those parties will be an exercise left to the reader, or perhaps even a future emMoneyLaw/em post./libr /div style="float:right; margin: 0px 0px 6px 12px; background:#334422; color:#dddd99; padding:10px; width:160px; font-family: trebuchet,arial,verdana,helvetica,sans-serif; font-size:83%"img src="http://labornotes.org/songs/graphics/jhBlair175.jpg" style="padding:0px; margin: 0px 0px 6px 0px; border: 0px none #334422; width:160px"brJohn Henry Blair, a href="http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~kyharlan/Sheriffs_Of_Harlan_County_Ky.html" target=_blank style="color:#eeeeaa"Harlan County (Ky.) sheriff/a, 1922-25 and 1930-33/divliIn a society that has rightfully come to scrutinize everyone's terms and conditions of employment, members of the most generously compensated and thoroughly sheltered segment of higher education mdash; yes, the tenured professoriate mdash; should be more circumspect. In case you hadn't noticed, there's a class war going on out there. Tenure and high professorial salaries are not outrageous emper se/em. We do need, in these times as never before, to justify those privileges. Living up to our ideals regarding academic freedom and intellectual pluralism would be a good place to start./libr /liIn light of all of these points, it seems churlish mdash; even "thuggish," to use a term associated with J.H. Blair mdash; to paint Rick as an "aspiring union buster" for the purported thoughtcrime of thinking and writing for himself./li/olSeriously. They say in academia, there are no neutrals there. Rick Hills has sounded the proper battle call:blockquoteWill you be a thinking profbr /Or a thug for J.H. Blair?/blockquotediv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Moneylaw?a=EBSWO"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Moneylaw?i=EBSWO" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Moneylaw?a=nNygO"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/Moneylaw?i=nNygO" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Moneylaw/~4/490983395" height="1" width="1"/

Full post as published by MoneyLaw on December 20, 2008 (boomark / email).