Earlier this month, I had the interesting experience of attending on successive days two talks that seemed, oddly, to be both quite similar and quite different: On March 6th, Randall Kennedy '77 spoke about his new book "Sellout: The Politics of Racial Betrayal," and on March 7th, Scalia offered his view of "The Role of the Courts in a Liberal Democracy." Predictably, Scalia delivered his talk to a packed house in McCosh 50, where the few hundred in attendance quickly learned that the unexpected adjective in the lecture's title was not a signal of a late-career change of heart - now that would have been something! - but simply the handiwork of Whig-Clio, which sponsored the talk and had set the topic. It's an election year, so maybe we should be watching how the members of the Supreme Court behave themselves, and certainly most of us are thinking about who might be joining Scalia in the months and years ahead. (On this subject, I heartily recommend "The Next Justice: Repairing our Supreme Court Appointments Process" by Provost Christopher Eisgruber '83.) Scalia is a brilliant rhetorician, no doubt about it, and he made what I regard as an impressive case for the unpopular idea that "there are some wrongs that courts cannot right." But it is hard to believe that even his greatest admirers found that he handled the pre-submitted questions very well. It was not heartening to hear Scalia say with no apparent chagrin that he could not be expected to remember the details of his own opinions. And just as disheartening was the applause he received from the floor for this testy response to a query about his role in "Bush v. Gore": "Oh, get over it! It's eight years ago." It's one thing to let bygones be bygones, but surely it's another to clap.
The Scalia event was pretty much predictable in style, content and also turnout. Less predictable and less understandable, in my view, was the relatively low showing (35 people, not many of them undergraduates) the afternoon before for Kennedy, a professor at Harvard Law School and Princeton trustee. Sure, Kennedy isn't on the Supreme Court - yet - but he is among today's most careful and eloquent commentators on really, really difficult matters. Again, it's an election year and Barack Obama is making headlines, so we should be paying attention when someone like Kennedy appears in Chancellor Green, under the auspices of the Center for African American Studies, to speak about the politics of what does and what, perhaps, does not count as racial betrayal. This is, after all, the man who six years ago wrote a terrific book with the title "Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word." (I'll be discussing this troublesome word in CLA/ENG 208: Origins and Nature of English Vocabulary a month from now.) You don't have to agree with or like everything Kennedy says to see that he shares with Scalia the rare ability to argue about nuts and bolts without losing sight of the big picture - or that he, unlike (seemingly) Scalia, was unfazed by and even enjoyed aggressive questioning. For what it's worth, while I as a linguist particularly appreciate Kennedy's focus on hurtful words, I do wonder whether his narrow view of what constitutes a "sellout" could take attention away from the sticks and stones of folks who, even if they are not sellouts, are still doing some nasty things.
I was pleased to be joined at Kennedy's talk by the irrepressible Peter Varela '08. But why weren't more students there? One reason may be that it took place at 4:30 - and the 4:30-7:30 p.m. time slot is a sacred cow at Princeton, an officially sanctioned "off-time" from thinking. This is bad news. But that's another column.
Joshua Katz is a professor in the Department of Classics and a Forbes faculty adviser. He can be reached at jtkatz@princeton.edu.
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