Harvard’s Niall Ferguson Uses Homophobia to Make Academic Point...? -The iPINIONS Journal

I have infuriated more than a few people in friendly debates by dismissing Niall Ferguson as being to academia what Donald Trump is to business.

Ferguson is a professor of History at Harvard who seems to prefer playing a political pundit on TV. But the following should give you a sense of why I think this has turned him into a political hack:

Just when I thought I could not become any more cynical [about pundits hurling insults and partisan talking points as informed opinion] comes Niall Ferguson’s partisan hit job on President Obama…

He delivered a diatribe about ‘why we need a new president,’ professing regret that, despite his best wishes, President Obama has failed to keep his campaign promises – especially on the economy and deficit. Never mind that his main points, which he belabors in the current issue of Newsweek, are readily belied by a comprehensive tally of all of Obama’s ‘promises made and promises kept’ by Pulitzer Prize-winning PolitiFact.

(“Niall Ferguson: from Eminent Historian to Political Hack,” The iPINIONS Journal, August 21, 2012)

To be fair to Trump, however, NBC actually pays him big bucks to make a mockery of his profession for the sake of entertainment. Whereas Harvard pays Ferguson to propagate the excellence in liberal-arts education for which it is so well known.

Therefore, imagine how this university must have felt when he generated the following headline at a conference of financial advisers in Carlsbad, California on Friday:

John Maynard Keynes had it all wrong because he was gay and childless says Harvard professor.

(Daily Mail, May 4, 2013)

It stemmed from the glib response he gave to a question about Keynes’s economic theories. The problem, of course, is that Ferguson arguing that Keynes’s economic theories are wrong because he was gay and childless is every bit as ignorant and offensive as Trump arguing that Obama’s political policies are wrong because he is Black and … left-handed.

But I do not believe for a moment that Ferguson actually believes what he said; nor do I believe that he is the least bit homophobic:

I’ve read enough of his published works to believe that Ferguson’s criticisms derive far more from his academic aversion to the Keynesian policies Obama favors than from anything having to do with his race. I addressed the philosophical differences between them in this respect in ‘Rational Markets vs. Keynesian Economics,’ The iPINIONS Journal, September 23, 2010.

(“Niall Ferguson: from Eminent Historian to Political Hack,” The iPINIONS Journal, August 21, 2012)

Instead, I am convinced that, while Ferguson is proud of the gravitas that comes with being a university professor, he really relishes the celebrity that comes with being a political pundit. Further, that he has become so intoxicated with his celebrity he’d rather hurl political insults than engage in academic debate.

Indeed, as this second quote above from my August 2012 commentary indicates, he sounded so much like a Tea-Party hack in criticizing Obama’s economic policies that I was as compelled to defend him against charges of racism as I was to attack the patently flawed points of his criticism.

But just as leaving his White wife (and three kids) for his Black mistress (Somali-born former Dutch MP and anti-Islamist crusader Ayaan Hirsi Ali) was a mitigating factor with respect to charges of racism; having homosexual friends, not least among them the very popular and openly gay columnist Andrew Sullivan, should be a mitigating factor with respect to charges of homophobia. The latter also pertains to his specious contention (in an article in the April 22, 1995 edition of Spectator magazine) that Keynes adopted a pro-German view of negotiations on the Treaty of Versailles because he had a gay crush on a German representative to the conference….

In fact, the only difference between his race-baiting harangue against Obama last year and his gay-baiting harangue against Keynes last week is that Tea Partiers have made the former so politically acceptable that Ferguson felt no need to cover his professional ass with a groveling apology – as he duly did in this case:

I should not have suggested that Keynes was indifferent to the long run because he had no children, nor that he had no children because he was gay; this was doubly stupid. I had forgotten that Keynes’s wife Lydia miscarried.

My disagreements with Keynes’s economic philosophy have never had anything to do with his sexual orientation.

(“An Unqualified Apology,” Niall Ferguson Blog, May 4, 2013)

I just cannot overstate how stupefying it is that Ferguson seems more interested these days in aping conservative carnival barkers like Ann Coulter than eminent historians like Arthur Schlesinger Jr. For only this explains his newly acquired penchant for launching ad hominem attacks on liberal academics like Paul Krugman.

What is certain though is that no carnival barker worth his/her salt would ever apologize for anything that gets the kind of media attention Ferguson’s remark about Keynes got – no matter how repugnant to socio-political sensibilities.

Perhaps Harvard forced him to issue this apology to limit its reputational damage … and to save his job. But I have no doubt that it was sincere. Still, it does nothing to redress the sad fact that this once-eminent historian now presents himself as little more than a snarky, self-possessed intellectual.

The real point of me isn’t that I’m good looking. It’s that I’m clever.

This was Ferguson describing, with faux modesty and imperious earnestness, his crossover appeal for a September 5, 2011 profile in the London Telegraph: too clever by half, no?