 Steve Almond |
An adjunct professor is resigning his post at Boston College in protest of the Catholic school’s decision to invite Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to be its commencement speaker and receive an honorary degree.
In an open letter published in the Boston Globe, Steve Almond, a professor of English, charged “Rice’s actions as secretary of state are inconsistent with the broader humanistic values of the university and the Catholic and Jesuit traditions from which those values derive.”
Almond, writing to Boston College President William Leahy, said his objection is not only the war in Iraq.
“My concern is more fundamental,” he wrote. “Simply put, Rice is a liar.”
Almond claimed Rice has “lied to the American people knowingly, repeatedly, often extravagantly over the past five years, in an effort to justify a pathologically misguided foreign policy.”
The professor said that during the build-up to the war, Rice “made 29 false or misleading public statements concerning Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and links to al-Qaida, according to a congressional investigation by the House Committee on Government Reform.”
Almond, however, is referring to a partisan report prepared by Democratic staff members.
He cites as an example, “Rice repeatedly asserted that Iraq was pursuing a nuclear weapon, and specifically seeking uranium in Africa,” and says that later these claims were disproved.
The famous claim of Iraq’s interest in pursuing “yellow cake” uranium ore in Niger, however, has not been disproved. Former Ambassador Joseph Wilson declared in a July 2003 New York Times column that his trip to investigate the claim revealed the Iraq-Niger connection was dubious, but his oral report to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence actually corroborated the controversial “16 words” in President Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”
Almond says, nevertheless, “Like the president whom she serves so faithfully, [Rice] refuses to recognize her errors or the tragic consequences of those errors to the young soldiers and civilians dying in Iraq. She is a diplomat whose central allegiance is not to the democratic cause of this nation, but absolute power.”
The professor said he found it “most reprehensible” that Boston College “would entrust to Rice the role of moral exemplar.”
Almond insisted his judgment is based on issues of character, not on her intellectual and academic abilities or “her potentially inspiring role as a powerful woman of color.”
“Honestly, Father Leahy,” he wrote, “what lessons do you expect her to impart to impressionable seniors? That hard work in the corporate sector might gain them a spot on the board of Chevron? That they, too, might someday have an oil tanker named after them? That it is acceptable to lie to the American people for political gain?”
Almond said he cannot, “in good conscience, exhort my students to pursue truth and knowledge, then collect a paycheck from an institution that displays such flagrant disregard for both.”
He offered an apology to his students and urged them “to investigate the words and actions of Rice, and to exercise their own First Amendment rights at her speech.”
The Globe’s note on Almond said he’s the author of the story collections ”The Evil B. B. Chow” and ”My Life in Heavy Metal,” described by Amazon.com as being “populated with hookups, drunken kisses, failed passes, and souring relationships. And though it’s an aggressively sexual affair (when it comes to getting it on in the bedroom –or on the bathroom sink, for that matter – Almond doesn’t believe in fading to black), at its core it’s a collection with heart.”
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