Decades ago, as a high school student in a privileged, white USian community, I was proud to observe young women rejecting scholarship awards from the Daughters of the American Revolution. The awards then, I think, were reserved for those who were actual descendants of Revolutionary War veterans, and the organization itself was known as a reactionary group that had until the fifties enforced a “whites only” policy at their Constitution Hall venue in Washington D.C. As recently as 1984 they maintained a whites only membership practice, if not policy.
Each year the DAR would single out a young woman who exemplified virtues such as excellent academic achievement and anglo-saxon patrimony and the young woman would ascend the stage and reject the award. These were my role models.
Today at the University of Chicago Wendy Doniger is the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of History of Religions in the Divinity School. I wonder if she has searched her heart about accepting a seat named for Mircea Eliade, someone the Wikipedia reports as a Nazi sympathizer, a right wing Romanian ethnic nationalist, and reportedly an author of Iron Guard propaganda. I wonder if Ms. Doniger has thought as much about the politics of the man for whom her professorship is named as those high school girls thought when rejecting their DAR awards.
This question comes to mind mostly because I’ve been thinking about the fix we as a nation find ourselves in, having rejected all that is good about government in conformity to the right wing vision of Ms. Doniger’s predecessors (Eliade and Hayek) on the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought, and their colleagues at the University, Leo Strauss and Milton Friedman, and their followers.
I’m afraid that having eliminated principled economic controls on rapacious capitalists, we find ourselves today in much the same predicament our grandparents and great grandparents faced in 1929.
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