Word: langs
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Several NAS members faulted Lang, 59, for violating the traditional probity of the academy's proceedings. Says Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon, professor of computer science and psychology at Carnegie-Mellon University (and a Huntington backer): "In my 20 years in the academy, I've never seen a member who felt it necessary to start such a public fracas." Since winning a postponement of Huntington's initial 1986 nomination, Lang has fired off three anti-Huntington mailings to the full membership. "Just imagine," says NAS Member Julian Wolpert, professor of geography at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International...
Though entry comes hard to the 1,500-member NAS, essentially an honor society that doubles as policy adviser to the Federal Government, rarely have the incumbents barred so weighty a nominee as Huntington. The main objection raised by the zealous Lang and his supporters: an allegedly specious use of mathematics in Huntington's work to quantify unquantifiable material. For example, Lang cites a passage in the best-known of Huntington's dozen books, Political Order in Changing Societies, in which the ratio of aspiration to % satisfaction was examined in 62 countries. "The overall correlation between frustration and instability," Huntington...
Another component in Huntington's rejection seems to have been his political loyalties, though Lang denies this. A conservative, Huntington has consulted with the Pentagon, served on the National Security Council, supported the Viet Nam War and done research underwritten by the CIA -- all anathema in the liberal-leaning world of academe...
Nevertheless, at least a third of the 527 members meeting in Washington (the proportion needed to bar an election) seem to have been swayed by Lang's underlying argument that social scientists, however eminent, may not belong to the NAS and perhaps should form an academy of their own. Says one physical scientist: "It's not enough to be excellent. One has to meet the norms of science as well." But that view leaves wide open the question of who, inside the NAS or out, ought to define those norms...
...None other than Interior Minister Charles Pasqua, who staged the display as part of a campaign against pornography. Dubbed "Pasqua's Sex Shop" by the press, the antiporn program quickly backfired. An uncooperative President Franois Mitterrand declared that he opposed "all forms of censorship," and former Culture Minister Jack Lang pointedly sent along an erotic engraving by Picasso to be included in the show...