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for instance, recalls that when Albert Camus first visited the United
States immediately after World War
II,
Phillips threw a party for about
forty people. Camus then asked to meet New York's intellectuals.
"They're all in this room," Phillips informed him. Moreover, with the
exception of Lionel Trilling, none of them were academics.
Because of legal questions evolving from expanded civil rights and
privacy legislation, and from freedom of information-related laws, psy–
chologists and philosophers are being called as expert witnesses ever
more frequently. Thus ideology, "temperament, life experiences, moral
principles, party politics, and religious belief or non-belief" are bound
to
playa role. But postmodern academics, for whom truth is relative, do
not think they are lying when they slant their testimonies under oath.
Posner recounts, for instance, the brou ha has caused by N ussba um 's
"evidence" that Greek philosophers approved of homosexuality; by
James Mohr's brief on the history of abortion that contradicted his own
findings; and by Alice Kessler-Harris's argument that the allocation of
gender roles in the workplace had
nothing
to
do with women's interests
but exclusively with employer discrimination. However, false testimony
that is refuted in academic enclaves ends up without penalties in the
public realm. Posner is most emphatic and incensed by Ronald
Dworkin's relentless spin, self-contradictions, and pa rtisa nsh ip that fa r
exceeds Nussbaum's and Rorty's public advocacy-in
The New York
Review of Books, The New York Times,
and in (false) accusations
against Posner himself as violating judicial ethics.
In sum, just as there is a German saying that shoemakers ought
to
stick to their lasts, Posner convincingly demonstrates that academics had
better stick to their jobs and talk publicly only about what they
really
know. He is absolutely correct, also, in placing the onus on American
universities, for providing safe (though underpaid) jobs that give the go–
ahead to professors who moonlight in the public realm-"selling" low–
quality goods and accountable
to
no one in their ascent to celebrity. Still,
Posner-one of our most informed and erudite intellectuals-could have
reached these conclusions without relying on naOive statistics.
Edith Kurzweil
