THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 14 , 2019. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A27
W
ith another academic year
churning on, many people,
bemused by campus excite-
ments — trigger warnings,
safe spaces, “bias response teams” in
hot pursuit of the perpetrators of
microaggressions — wonder whether
higher education has become a net
subtraction from the nation’s stock of
reasonableness. Those who read the
Chronicle of Higher Education, a win-
dow into that world, are not reassured.
In May, the Chronicle published a
dyspeptic report by Andrew Kay, a
Wisconsin writer, on this year’s meet-
ing of the Modern Language Associa-
tion, whose members teach literature
to a declining number of interested
students: Kay says the number of
English positions on the MLA job list
has shrunk 55 percent since 2008, the
number of University of Michigan
English majors declined from 1,000 to
200 in eight years, and adjunct (limit-
ed-term, non-tenure track) instructors
now are a majority of college teachers.
Kay’s villains are “the avarice of uni-
versities” and “politicians and pun-
dits” who despise “humanistic think-
ing, which plainly threatens them.”
His disparagements implicitly enlarge
and celebrate him as a threat to the
villains.
He is nostalgic for the 1960s and
1970s, which “brought literary-critical
methods to bear on every aspect of
culture, from sexuality to disability.”
He is impervious to the possibility that
his mentality, stocked with stereotypes
and luxuriating in victimhood, might
be a symptom of what repels students
who care about actual literature more
than “literary-critical” approaches to
this and that.
Also in the Chronicle in May, Daniel
Bessner of the University of Washing-
ton and Michael Brenes of Yale Univer-
sity deplore without defining “the neo-
liberalization of the university sys-
tem.” The definition presumably is
obvious to all inhabitants of the aca-
demic bubble, where “neoliberals” are
disdained as respecters of market forc-
es — supply, demand, etc. Citing a 1972
New York Times report on “an over-
supply of trained historians,” they say
“for nearly a half-century, historians
have failed to organize to halt the
disappearance of positions,” which
they blame on “unnecessary neoliberal
austerity, corporatization, and adjunc-
tification” and “boot-strappism and
market-Darwinism.”
Their jumble of jargon means: The
fact that the supply of historians has
outpaced the demand for history in-
struction is the fault of many things
but not of academic historians, who
need to show “solidarity” to “overturn
a patently unjust system” that offers
“crummy and exploitative” jobs. Their
message is clear: History doctorates
are entitled to good academic posi-
tions regardless of the absence of a
demand for their services. So perhaps
the American Historical Association
(and the MLA, the American Political
Science Association, etc.) should wield
its “labor power” by threatening to
strike. It is a plan only academics could
concoct: Because there is weak and
declining demand for our labor, we
should coerce our adversaries (neolib-
erals, market-Darwinism, the law of
supply and demand) by threatening to
withdraw our labor.
In the Chronicle in March, the Uni-
versity of Washington’s Bessner said
we are in a “crisis of capitalism,” by
which he seemed to mean a shortage of
jobs for people like him: left-wing
academics. “Given that there are al-
most no tenure-track jobs, the majori-
ty of the next generation of intellectu-
als — like my own generation — will
probably have to look outside the
university for employment.” To him,
“intellectuals” denotes left-wing aspir-
ing academics. Again, note the ab-
sence of self-examination and the dis-
regard of the possibility that there are
fewer teaching jobs because fewer
students are drawn to the study of
literature, history and the rest of the
humanities because of the way these
subjects are taught.
This is a transatlantic problem. The
author of the Economist’s Bagehot
column notes that although the study
of history — and eminent historians —
“used to hold a central position in
[Britain’s] national life,” the number of
history students has declined 10 per-
cent in a decade. Perhaps because “the
historical profession has turned in on
itself,” with practitioners turning away
from “great matters of state” and con-
centrating on “the marginal rather
than the powerful, the poor rather
than the rich, everyday life rather than
Parliament.” They “almost seem to be
engaged in a race to discover the most
marginalized subject imaginable.”
This reduces history’s helpfulness as
“a safeguard against myopia. Moderni-
ty shrinks time as well as space; people
live in an eternal present of short-term
stimuli and instant gratification.”
Americans have a voracious appe-
tite for serious historical writing —
note the robust demand for narratives
and biographies by David Mc-
Cullough, Ron Chernow, Rick Atkin-
son, Nathaniel Philbrick, Richard
Brookhiser and many others who are
not academics, who do not write about
marginal subjects, and who do not tell
the nation’s story as a tale of embar-
rassments.
[email protected]
GEORGE F. WILL
Oh, the
humanities
T
he contrast between Rep. Devin
Nunes (R-Calif.) and George
Kent, a deputy assistant secre-
tary of state, told us everything
we needed to know about the impeach-
ment hearings into President Trump
that went public on Wednesday.
Nunes, the ranking Republican mem-
ber of the House Intelligence Commit-
tee, wanted to make everything about
party. Kent, a civil servant for decades,
wanted to make everything about coun-
try.
Nunes’s opening statement was a
screed against “the Democrats’
scorched-earth war against President
Trump,” “their impeachment sham” and
a “politicized bureaucracy.”
The crisp, bow-tie-wearing Kent, who
testified along with William B. Taylor
Jr., the acting U.S. ambassador to
Ukraine, could not have known what
Nunes would say. But Kent’s initial
remarks provided an eloquent rebuke to
the Republican’s crass and appalling
insult to those who devote their profes-
sional lives to their country.
Noting that he was “the third genera-
tion of my family to have chosen a
career in public service,” Kent declared:
“It was unexpected, and most unfortu-
nate, to watch some Americans —
including those who allied themselves
with corrupt Ukrainians in pursuit of
private agendas — launch attacks on
dedicated public servants advancing
U.S. interests in Ukraine,” Kent said. “In
my opinion, those attacks undermined
U.S. and Ukrainian national interests
and damaged our critical bilateral rela-
tionship.”
Take that, Mr. Nunes (and Rudy
Giuliani).
And several Republicans furnished
further proof that they are far more
interested in discrediting the hearings
than in establishing the truth. GOP
members briefly delayed the proceed-
ings to demand yet again that the
whistleblower who let the world know
about Trump’s efforts to push the Ukrai-
nian government to smear Joe Biden be
called to testify. Committee Chair Adam
B. Schiff (D-Calif.), whose own opening
statement was largely a recitation of
known facts, shut them down.
Thus were the terms of the coming
struggle established. Democrats hope
that piling up evidence offered almost
entirely by people with no political axes
to grind will shift public opinion against
Trump. Republicans hope to obscure
the facts by arguing that there is no such
thing as objective truth anymore be-
cause anyone who says anything critical
of Trump must have a partisan motive.
In insisting that integrity will eventu-
ally win, Trump’s critics point back to
the Watergate hearings in 1973 and 1974
as turning the tide against Richard
M. Nixon. “It was the open hearings that
changed the American public’s mind,
that then changed elected Republicans’
minds,” Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.)
observed on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe”
shortly before Wednesday’s session be-
gan.
Well, yes. But we were a far more
open-minded and less partisan country
back then. There were many more
moderate and liberal Republicans, as
well as more openness to the other side’s
views — and no Fox News and no
right-wing talk-radio empire.
Gallup recently contrasted its surveys
on removing Trump from office with
comparable polls about Nixon in August- Gallup found that while 92 percent
of Republicans rejected removing
Trump last month, only 59 percent felt
that way about Nixon.
Other polls have found somewhat
more Republican support for driving
Trump from office, and it’s also true that
by August 1974, the country had gone
through more than a year of highly
public Watergate inquiries.
Nonetheless, no one can deny how
much partisan polarization has deep-
ened since Nixon. Moreover, with the
2020 election looming, Democrats have
much less time than their forebears did
45 years ago. And they are operating in
an information environment that is not
conducive to sober reflection.
Political scientists Jennifer Hoch-
schild and Katherine Levine Einstein
posed the key question in their 2015
book that pre-dated the rise of Trump,
“Do Facts Matter?” Their conclusion
was not encouraging. As they wrote in
The Post, to persuade a “misinformed
voter... to reject false knowledge,
change policy views, disagree with
friends, agree with former enemies, and
perhaps abandon leaders or even a
political party, requires an enormous
amount of effort and resources.”
Trump — with help from Nunes and
his colleagues — seems to be counting
on exactly that. They expect that throw-
ing around magic words such as “the
Steele dossier” and “Hillary Clinton”
should be enough to keep their parti-
sans onside and maintain pressure on
Senate Republicans to ignore the presi-
dent’s abuses of power.
But perhaps, perhaps, patriots such
as Kent will make some Republicans
think twice. In his prepared statement,
he noted that “the principled promotion
of the rule of law and institutional
integrity has been so necessary to our
strategy for a successful Ukraine.”
Yes, and both are just as essential to a
successful United States of America.
Twitter: @EJDionne
E.J. DIONNE JR.The battle
of facts vs.
partisanship
I
mpeaching a president is an in-
vestigational endeavor that re-
quires both a lens and a mirror.
It demands an examination of
actions by the person to whom the
country has entrusted the most pow-
erful office in the world. But impeach-
ment also means examining what we
as a nation have decided to tolerate.
That is why it was fitting that
House Intelligence Committee Chair-
man Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) opened
Wednesday’s public impeachment
hearing by reminding us of three
shocking words that acting White
House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney
uttered last month.
Mulvaney publicly admitted that
President Trump attempted to turn
hundreds of millions of dollars in
congressionally appropriated securi-
ty aid for Ukraine into a lever to force
that country’s president to take ac-
tions that would help Trump’s own
political interests. And then Mulva-
ney said: “Get over it.”
“There’s going to be political influ-
ence in foreign policy,” Mulvaney add-
ed, though he later tried to backtrack
from what he had offered in a star-
tling moment of candor about how
the Trump administration views this
country’s national security interests.
Extortion, coercion, bribery —
name it what you will. Schiff called it
all of those things. But then the
Intelligence Committee chairman
posed the real questions at hand: “Is
that what Americans should now
expect from their president? If this is
not impeachable conduct, what is?”
And what does it say about a
country that could look at Trump’s
actions and decide to shrug them off?
The basic facts have been prettywell established at this point, by the
public servants who have come for-
ward to corroborate them, but also by
the president himself.
Trump keeps telling us to “read the
transcript” — the official notes that
were taken of a July 25 phone call in
which he asked Ukrainian President
Volodymyr Zelensky to “do us a favor.”
He wanted two favors, actually,
both of which put Trump’s own politi-
cal interests over those of this coun-
try.
First, Trump asked Zelensky to dig
for evidence that would elevate a
wacky conspiracy theory that under-
cuts the U.S. intelligence communi-
ty’s conclusion that Russia interfered
with the 2016 presidential election in
hopes of influencing it in Trump’s
favor. The second was a request that
Zelensky open an investigation that
could smear former vice president Joe
Biden, who at the time appeared to be
Trump’s most formidable potential
Democratic opponent.
Republicans keep arguing that all
of this is simply the latest iteration of
what Rep. Devin Nunes (Calif.), the
Intelligence Committee’s ranking Re-
publican, called “a three-year-long
operation by the Democrats, the cor-
rupt media and partisan bureaucrats
to overturn the results of the 2016
presidential election.”
But the sober and compelling testi-
mony of William B. Taylor Jr., the
acting ambassador to Ukraine, and
George Kent, deputy assistant secre-
tary at the State Department oversee-
ing European and Eurasian affairs,
turned out to be anything but the
“theatrical performance” Nunes pre-
dicted it would be.
No doubt there remain pragmaticarguments to be made against the
path upon which the House has now
set itself.
If the House does indeed bring
impeachment articles to the floor,
they will likely pass with little or no
Republican support. The subsequent
trial in the Republican-controlled
Senate appears virtually certain to
end with Trump’s acquittal, which the
president and his supporters would
surely claim as an exoneration.
Then there is the awkward timing
of this endeavor. If the goal is to
remove Trump from the office whose
powers he has so flagrantly abused,
wouldn’t it be better to let the voters
do that in an election that is now less
than a year away? By deepening and
inflaming partisan divisions, the
Democrats might actually end up
helping Trump get reelected.
But the more fundamental chal-
lenge here is the one that Trump
himself has raised by his disregard for
the oath he took to faithfully execute
the duties of his office.
If the House were to ignore its own
constitutionally mandated duty to
hold him accountable, what con-
straints would there be on anything
he chooses to do from here on out? Or
for that matter, on what future presi-
dents decide to do?
There is still a case to be made. That
is what an impeachment investiga-
tion is designed to do. This nation’s
founders built a system of govern-
ment that operates on checks and
balances. Trump has acted in ways
that make a mockery of that principle.
If the House were simply to look the
other way and “get over it,” Congress
would be guilty of doing the same.
[email protected]KAREN TUMULTYHouse Democrats
can’t just ‘get over it’
MATT MCCLAIN/THE WASHINGTON POST
State Department Deputy Assistant Secretary George Kent, center, and acting U.S. ambassador to Ukraine
William B. Taylor Jr., right, appear at the House Intelligence Committee impeachment hearing on Wednesday.T
he problem with most conspiracy
theories is that they presume too
much competence on the part of
the conspirators. The same may
be true when it comes to President
Trump’s alleged quid pro quo with
Ukraine. As Sen. Lindsey O. Graham
(R-S.C.) put it, “What I can tell you about
the Trump policy towards the Ukraine is
that it was incoherent.... They seem to be
incapable of forming a quid pro quo.”
Graham may be right. Wednesday’s
impeachment hearing certainly provided
no new evidence that Trump had a coher-
ent strategy to use U.S. security assistance,
and the prospect of a presidential meet-
ing, to get Ukraine to investigate his
political rivals.
The witnesses — William B. Taylor Jr.,
the acting ambassador to Ukraine, and
Deputy Assistant Secretary of State
George Kent — acknowledged that they
had never spoken to the president and
had no firsthand knowledge of Trump’s
thinking. As former independent counsel
Kenneth W. Starr explained on Fox News,
there was “no John Dean” to testify “this is
what the president told me.” If anything,
Taylor testified that Gordon Sondland, the
U.S. ambassador to the European Union,
told him the president said on more than
one occasion “no quid pro quo” and that
he was effectively cut out of the decision-
making process by a separate unofficial
channel.
What we saw on display Wednesday
were two dedicated, experienced career
foreign policy officials who had been
desperately trying to figure out what the
president wanted — and inferring his
intentions based on snippets of informa-
tion from others. But their efforts to
divine Trump’s desires presume that the
president knew what he wanted. It’s not
clear he did. His handling of Ukraineseemed less the execution of an intelligi-
ble plan than a chaotic mishmash of
constantly changing urges and demands.
According to Sondland, “President Trump
changes his mind on what he wants on a
daily basis.”Trump surrounded himself with a toxic
brew of individuals whispering into his
ear and appealing to his worst instincts.
His personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani
was filling his head with all sorts of
conspiracy theories about Ukraine that
made the president very hostile to the
country. At the same time, acting chief of
staff Mick Mulvaney, a spending hawk
who doesn’t like foreign aid to begin with,
was trying to get Trump to enact a larger
rescission of $4 billion in foreign assis-
tance before the end of the fiscal year —
that included not just assistance for
Ukraine but also development aid, eco-
nomic support, military financing pro-
grams, global health programs in many
countries and funding for international
organizations.
At one point Wednesday, Taylor testi-
fied that then-White House aide Tim
Morrison told him the “president doesn’t
want to provide any assistance at all.” That
means Trump, at one point, was consider-
ing not delivering the Ukraine aid, period— regardless of what they did on “the
investigations.” Throw in Trump’s long-
standing concern about burden-sharing
by our European allies, and his anger over
now-disproved charges that he had con-
spired with Russia to steal the 2016
election, and the result is the mess we see
before us.
Is it possible that Trump is an evil
genius who came up with a strategic plan
to leverage U.S. security assistance and a
presidential meeting? If so, he did an
awful job. For one thing, Taylor confirmed
Wednesday that the Ukrainians were not
aware that their aid was on hold until they
learned about it from an Aug. 29 article in
Politico, more than a month after Trump’s
call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr
Zelensky. Taylor testified that Ukrainian
officials “contacted me very concerned,
asking about the withheld security assis-
tance.... At that point, I was embarrassed
that I could give him no explanation for
why it was withheld. It had still not
occurred to me that the hold on security
assistance could be related to the ‘investi-
gations.’ ” So, neither he nor the Ukraini-
ans knew about the alleged quid pro quo.
And then, less than two weeks later, the
Ukrainians got the quid without deliver-
ing the quo.
Maybe future witnesses will provide
the smoking-gun evidence that Trump
ordered them to execute a quid pro quo.
But it looks as though the entire Ukraine
debacle may be the result less of intent
than incompetence. And unfortunately
for Democrats, incompetence is not an
impeachable offense.Marc A. Thiessen, a fellow with the American
Enterprise Institute and former chief
speechwriter to President George W. Bush,
writes a twice-weekly online column for The
Post.MARC A. THIESSENIncompetence is not an impeachable offense
Trump surrounded himself
with a toxic brew
of individuals whispering
into his ear and appealing
to his worst instincts.