But part of the way he keeps those elevated fees is his affiliation with Harvard and the praise he gets from fellow, still serious scholars. So far as his desirability as a speaker for the conservative self-love circuit, a pretty darn small part, I'd say. Now that he's got visibility, I imagine his chosen audience is about as interested in what serious scholars think of Ferguson as they are in what serious scholars think of, say, global warming or supply side economics. These gigs aren't oriented toward the reality-based community.
Anyway, reaching way back, I looked up this old article about Charles Murray and other ways to play the academic game. nytimes.com
Couple clips, for amusement only as usual for me these days.
A white wine follows, and Murray is bursting with anticipation about the corks that will pop later that evening at the home of wealthy Aspen friends. He is 51 and balding, but boyish in blue jeans and tennis shoes, and he leavens his sociological theories with personal asides. The stewardesses in Japan offered him "everything short of a body massage"; he boasts that his friends look at his wife with longing, "and think of what might have been." He is smart enough to know that he is inviting caricature, and bold enough not to care.
Outrageousness, after all, has been good to Charles Murray. He was an unemployed Ph.D. stuck in a midlife crisis a decade ago when he produced "Losing Ground," the book that eroded the assumptions guiding American social policy. With 236 pages of charts and tables, it lent an aura of scientific support to an old suspicion -- that welfare and other social programs cause more problems than they solve. Taking the thought a step further, Murray spoke the unspeakable: why not just abolish them all?
Now, if his name is not a household word, it is about as close as a social scientist can get. It is hard to know which is more startling -- that Murray would imagine before publication that the book might be "to the 1980's what 'The Other America' was to the 1960's," or that it was. Even his most bitter enemies concede his formidable intelligence, and in the wake of his antigovernment theories, it sometimes seems downright utopian for others to argue that Federal support can help the disadvantaged.
Don't know about Ferguson, but Murray appeared perfectly aware of the game he was playing.
Which white kids drop out of high school? More buttons, more whirring -- only those with low I.Q. scores and lower-class parents. "White trash," Murray says. While "that's obviously a generalization," he explains whom he has in mind -- people "sitting at home in their undershirts drinking, and they really don't care anyway." Murray's persona in print is that of the burdened researcher coming to his disturbing conclusions with the utmost regret; but at the moment, he seems to be having the time of his life. "It really is social science pornography," he says.
Social science pornography. The phrase may explain more about Murray's influence than he intended, and possibly more than he fully understands. Much of that influence has stemmed from his ability to express, through seemingly dispassionate analysis, many people's hidden suspicions about race, class and sex. His writings comprise a kind of Michelin guide to the American underpsyche.
The phenomenon is one that he himself has at least inadvertently acknowledged. "Why can a publisher sell it?" he asked in the proposal for "Losing Ground." "Because a huge number of well-meaning whites fear that they are closet racists, and this book tells them they are not. It's going to make them feel better about things they already think but do not know how to say."
Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich may have more power than Murray, and Rush Limbaugh and Pat Buchanan may have more direct influence. But no other conservative has his ability to make a radical thought seem so reasonable. Where others rant, Murray seduces with mountains of data and assurances of his own fine intentions. He will never be the country's most famous conservative, but he may well be the most dangerous.
Ok, the dangerous part seems pretty dated in today's conservative world, but you get the picture. A patina of academic respectability is all Ferguson needed, and he probably doesn't even need that anymore if he wants to go that route. And what the heck, hobnobbing with the billionaire boy's club is probably a lot more fun than faculty department and committee meetings, even at the big H. |
