A L S O_ T O D A Y

Ask Camille
By Camille Paglia
Wise words for an inner city teacher: Toss out the tutorials on self-esteem and send your students on an adventure to the distant past

[ NEWS ]
The whole world is watching -- again
By Todd Gitlin
Left-wing literati turn out to block impeachment

Comics
Keith Knight: Scoping out my mom's boyfriend

T A B L E_ T A L K

Was there a particular teacher or moment in education that changed your life? Share it in the Education area of Table Talk

R E C E N T L Y

Harassment backlash
By Matthew Dallek
When Angelo Armenti embarked on a witch hunt for professors accused of indiscretions, he became a case in point for why sexual harassment policies just don't work
(12/14/98)

Campus groupies
By Allison Landa
Wackos, preachers and EBDs: A visit to the land of campus groupies
(12/11/98)

Breasts on the brain
By Lori Gottlieb
Putting mammary-hungry college boys to the test
(12/09/98)

Is Mike Davis' Los Angeles all in his head?
By Veronique de Turenne
He's been lionized as a prescient Marxist prophet of end-of-the-continent doom and gloom. But a growing number of critics charge that the author of "City of Quartz" has feet of clay
(12/07/98)

Getting the boot
By Jon Bowen
Kicked out of college for immoral conduct, the only son of a Baptist preacher takes a vacation from reality
(12/04/98)

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Gloria Steinem speaks at a pro-Clinton---------------------
rally at New York University Monday.

BY JACKIE STEVENS | I couldn't figure out how they'd done it. There it was in Monday's New York Times A section -- an article announcing that New York University law professor Stephen Holmes had organized a rally against impeachment to be held that evening at NYU Law School's Tishman Auditorium. The piece was striking because nothing yet had happened. That a few writers and politicians were planning to get together and incite voter involvement is the kind of raw information that editors give reporters so they may attend an event and write it up after it has occurred, but, oddly, there was no follow-up article in Tuesday's paper. Presumably, once the event was promoted on Monday -- thereby drawing the attention of the producers at MSNBC and CNN, who joined other news crews -- there was no need for print coverage the next day. So successfully had this free publicity permeated the city that when I called the university and asked to speak to Stephen Holmes, the NYU switchboard operator said, "Oooh, everybody's going to be out there tonight for that rally. Wow." To cross the radar screen of a university switchboard operator is not something accomplished by halls papered with photocopied announcements. These über elites needed no phone or e-mail trees to raise money for a full page ad the way most progressive coalitions must. They just placed a few phone calls to some well-connected contacts and the rally got national exposure.

Featuring a head-turning assortment of scholars, politicians, activists, writers and Alec Baldwin, the Citizens' Campaign to Preserve the Elected Presidency convened Monday night to sound an alarm about President Clinton's pending indictment. Despite its populist name, the event, which was bracketed by two Nobel Prize winners, was not easily accessible to most citizens. The 700-seat auditorium filled up early and I only made it in because my friend Elizabeth led me through a back entrance, away from the cordon of police who were turning people away 30 minutes before show time. Though many of the speakers invoked the '60s as an incitement to contemporary activism to save the president, the analogy baffled me. In the '60s, the universities were taken over by the students; in the '90s, the faculty, politicians and some celebrities took over the auditorium and invited the students, most of whom were then turned away. In this crowd of anti-authoritarians struggling to preserve their chief military officer, I mingled with some of my colleagues, trying to figure out just why we were there.

"You don't have to have tanks to have a coup," George Shulman, a political theorist at NYU, told me, anticipating one of the themes that evening. A few minutes later Gloria Steinem was behind the podium declaiming, "They are using the law to peacefully assassinate the president." (The moderator had introduced her following a speech from Holocaust memorialist Elie Wiesel, asking in Casey Casem tones: "How do you follow that? How about with Gloria Steinem?") Wiesel's presence lent some force to the observations of Philip Green, professor emeritus at Smith College, that the formalities of the impeachment process overlay more nefarious anti-democratic impulses: "It's like Hitler's parliament," he offered.

N E X T_ P A G E .|. What triggered the "right-wing conspiracy"?