Word: totalitarianisms
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Like Ross G. Douthat ’02, I am disturbed that the Graduate School of Design has appointed “an apparatchik from a totalitarian state [Castro’s Cuba]” to be a visiting professor. However, the existence of a double standard that forgives the collaboration of leftists while anathemizing rightists is not at all obvious to me. During the Cold War, scholars who collaborated with right-wing dictatorships were welcome at Harvard. (Tellingly, in 1968, the University granted an honorary doctorate to Mohammed Reza Pahlevi, the shahanshah of Iran...
...this story sounds a trifle unbelievable—well, good. It is unbelievable; indeed, it never happened. Albert Speer never taught at Harvard, even in 1937, when the Nazi regime he represented was merely totalitarian, and not yet engaged in attempted genocide...
...with this. Substitute Coyula-Cowley for Speer (and Castro for Hitler), and the quotes above represent the view of Jorge I. Dominguez, Clarence Dillon professor of international affairs, and Bliss Professor of Latin American History and Economics John Womack, respectively, on the advisability of appointing an apparatchik from a totalitarian state to the Harvard faculty. To them, you can add the names of Steve Reifenberg, director of the Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, who is “enormously pleased to have him here,” and Professor of History James T. Kloppenberg, who told The Crimson that...
...Yanqui imperialism,” its much-touted system of universal health care, and its post-Cold War isolation, Cuba’s nasty and oppressive regime seems sad and bullied and even a little bit cute—the “Tickle-Me-Elmo” of totalitarian states. And let’s not forget the enduring appeal of its cigar-chomping despot, the “glue that holds Cuba together,” as Coyula-Cowley says, and the only dictator clever enough to get people to call him by his first name. Why, everybody...
Ultimately, though, the double standard is a problem for another day—and the specifics of Coyula-Cowley’s politics matter less than the fact that he is a willing, life-long functionary of a totalitarian state, and is therefore complicit in its crimes. If he is not directly responsible for them—well, in 1937, an architect named Albert Speer was not directly responsible for Nazi atrocities; indeed, he would always claim ignorance of them. But no one offered him a position at Harvard...