The Young and the Uppity
Anyone who’s just won the Nobel Prize won’t be easily destroyed by criticism. Testing this hypothesis, we called Robert Fogel of the University of Chicago. He’s that school’s fourth scholar in four years to receive the Nobel for economics, but the first to be attacked by a campus publication as “a second-rate scholar.”
A very forceful case, and a pretty damned smart one. We’d decided to ask Fogel what he thought because the student who ripped him, fourth-year history major Josh Mason, was wondering how Fogel took it. Mason admitted he’d been thinking “off and on” about what he’d say if Fogel called him, and it did not sound like a call he was dying to receive. “He’s always courted publicity. Maybe he’s pleased to see his work debated,” Mason said hopefully. “If the school lives up to its rhetoric, he’d be thrilled to see his ideas engaged critically. But I don’t know if he does.”
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Oh, come on! said Mason in the student-run Grey City Journal. The efficiency of slavery is common knowledge. Nitwits may have called Fogel a racist, but competent critics never did; they called him a bad historian who misread extremely sketchy data to draw conclusions he hadn’t proved and would actually abandon when he published a second book on slavery in 1989: for example, that whippings were rare, that slaves lived better and worked harder than free laborers, and that slave families were rarely divided.
Whenever locals win high honors the civic press can be counted on to fling its caps and shout huzzahs. The Sun-Times and Tribune saw what Chicago wanted to see–fresh acclaim at the highest levels for this town’s streak of stubborn independence. Time on the Cross, said the Tribune, “sparked not only surprise but outrage by arguing that the peculiar institution, while morally repugnant, was economically efficient. He has not retreated from that vexing position.”
This over-the-counter remedy for everything that ails America looks and reads better than ever, according to sources closer to the Hyde Park cultural wars than we are. “It’s changed a lot,” says David Rodnitzky, present editor of the Maroon. “Last year its focus was on political issues–the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, Bosnia. And this year their focus has been almost entirely on campus investigative stories–Fogel, the university hospital, whether it denies low-income patients. Once they got into the free market they actually had to sell their paper, and to have front-page stories about how Israel is raping the Palestinian people does not sit well with many advertisers.”
“I hope that this is the beginning of the end for AIDS,” a scientist in Gallo’s laboratory gushed in the New York Times when the case was dropped. Oh, sure! So now every single person who’s died of AIDS since 1989 must belong on Crewdson’s conscience! Gallo despises Crewdson; his book Virus Hunting alludes to him in these colorful terms: “one journalist’s bizarre and obsessively defamatory article,” “this ridiculous view,” “from analysis to assassination,” “one obsessive reporter,” “most ludicrous of all were publications by John Crewdson of the Chicago Tribune.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Kathy Richland.
