Another Academic Disaster

Perhaps to show that he is a deeper thinker than most media talking heads, at least one professor at Cornell did not stop at blaming the current occupant of the White House for last year’s Hurricane Katrina. Instead he went back through two chief executives to blame another Republican president for the flood that ravaged New Orleans.

Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath was Ronald Reagan’s fault, according to Professor Isaac Kramnick, “because he cut spending on investments.” Dr. Kramnick announced this conclusion in his class on American Political Thought from Madison to Malcolm X.

And how are such revelations received by his students? “Take it if you can, and you’re not one of those idiots that thinks there’s a war on Christmas,” one student wrote on ratemyprofessor.com. “It’s not hard, it’s straightforward, and it’s better than most other classes.”

“Kramnick is funny and smart, and even if you disagree with him, you have to acknowledge that he’s not making things up or distorting facts.” Actually, we are not quite ready to make that acknowledgement.

I sent the good doctor an e-mail to which he has yet to respond. In it I asked him two questions:

1.) Where in the U.S. Historical Tables on the Budget do the “cuts in investment” that Ronald Reagan made appear?

2.) If the “cuts in investment” are found, why didn’t President Clinton restore this funding?

The historical tables mentioned above are the federal government’s record on government spending since George Washington took the oath of office. Those tables show that under President Reagan, total federal spending doubled.

Similarly, spending on just about every agency and function rose in corresponding fashion, according to those tables. Those documents can be found at www.omb.gov.

Dr. Kramnick earned his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1965 and has served on the faculty at Cornell since 1972. Occasionally, he ventures out of The Ivory Tower and on these forays is a bit more circumspect than in his college lectures.

Nonetheless, his biases still come through, as they did in the take on the 1996 presidential election that he wrote for The American Prospect. “What is always unacceptable is for religious certainty to trump politics and for government policy to privilege or codify religious belief in ways that preempt a pluralist democratic process,” he wrote. “In politics, a religious lobbyist stands on the same footing as a lobbyist for General Motors.”

“What they advocate may be good for the country, but that benefit has to be demonstrated.”

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.