“This is Not an Editorial” may not have been an editorial, and it certainly was not a pipe. However, to write “Instead, faculty and students who protested the war – as students have always done in moments of conscience – were met not with dialogue, but with discipline.” is disingenuous.Too often, protest was not a free expression of plurality. It became intimidation.

Jewish students and staff were excluded from areas on campus, were subject to verbal harassment and physical threat, and public spaces were occupied by masked masses whose numbers, volume, hostility, and anonymity were frightening.

This was not protest. It was mob rule.

Sure, one might question the nature of the discipline. In fact, had such actions targeted any group by Jews, one would have expected discipline swifter and more severe.

But to write this off as over reaction to non-provocation?

That’s telling in its own right.

Steve Spear DBA MS ’93 MS ‘93
MIT Sloan School of Management, Senior Lecturer

What’s In A Name?

To The Faculty Newsletter:

It is interesting to note that a distinguished member of your faculty suffers from a condition not unlike my own, nominal neurosis. My own forename carries with it the burden of a sanctified delinquent reformed by the vision of a stag on his way home from a night of debauchery, or the connotation of a faded member of the French or German aristocracy. This association pales in comparison with that of Franz Josef which recollects either the slain Emperor of Austro-Hungary; or perhaps, for those old enough to remember, Franz Josef Strauss, an unapologetic former member of the Waffen SS and a leading and somewhat disreputable right-wing politician under Adenauer.

As Professor Ulm relates his story [“How Kafka, Not Newton, Saved My Life“] he was running late for a plane departing Tel Aviv, his anxiety rising on the way there with each checkpoint encountered. At the final hurdle, a soldier recognizes the name from his passport and says something like “Josef, like Kafka”. Delighted with this novel (but somewhat enigmatic) name association, Professor Ulm makes a gentle correction: Josef is the name of the innocent ‘K.’; Franz, the name of the novelist. I should like to adduce that the soldier at the checkpoint was an educated and literary man who had read the novel – and perhaps read into Professor Ulm’s anxieties about missing his flight, the plight of Josef K – but it may only be that he had just heard on the news about Kafka’s papers having been acquired by the State of Israel. Whatever the interpretation, the learned professor encapsulated for us a point of humanist contact succinct enough for him not to miss his flight.

Hubert Murray Faia
(former adjunct professor, Architecture)

Comments

Please log in to post a comment.