Chronicle: "Well, her name sounds Jewish. Close enough."

Compare these two entries and tell me who is president of the AHA. Normally, I would not give a flying squirrel about who the president of the AHA, but she was at MLA and gave a talk that I saw. She mentioned Waskar T. Ari Chachaki in her talk about academic freedom after 9/11. These are two consecutive entries in the Chronicle of Higher Education's blog:

Historical Association Welcomes Bolivian Scholar at Center of Visa Dispute

A special session on scholars and visa troubles at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association, held in Washington D.C., featured a speaker who wouldn’t have been able to appear last year.

Waskar T. Ari Chachaki, a Bolivian scholar who had been hired by the University of Nebraska but denied a visa by the Department of Homeland Security, appeared on the panel on Friday to talk about his experience.

Mr. Ari, who was hired by the University of Nebraska in 2005 after receiving a Ph.D in history from Georgetown University, was denied a visa after making a brief visit home to Bolivia. The university kept the job open for him, and then sued the Department of Homeland Security in March 2007. His visa was granted in July without any explanation by the U.S. government, The Chronicle has reported.

At the historical association meeting, Mr. Chachaki told the audience that the case had made it hard for him to make any comments on his area of study, which is Latin America, for fear it would be taken the wrong way and used against him.

“I’m afraid I can’t go back to my work” on Latin America, he said.

The AHA and its 2007 president, Barbara S. Weinstein, were outspoken on behalf of Mr. Ari’s visa plight as it wound its way through diplomatic channels and the courts. — Karen Winkler and Richard Byrne

In Address, AHA President Examines How Inequality is Assessed

Descriptions of economic inequality predate the theories that historians and other social scientists have created to explain it. And clearly, for many in the world, such inequalities have not disappeared despite both the advancement of theories of why economic development happens and sharp critiques of the concept.

So what have such theories added to our understanding of why some are rich and some are poor?

In her presidential address to the general meeting of the American Historical Association, Barbara S. Epstein, a professor of history at New York University and 2007 president of the association, took her listeners through a tour of both the advancement of theories of development and the fierce critiques of it.

“What do we lose,” she asked, “if we give up the idea of development?”

Her talk, entitled “Developing Inequality,” sought a synthesis of sorts between the notion of progress (with its winners and losers) and the critiques of it that seek to unpack the complexities of race, gender, culture and location in explaining wealth and poverty.

Drawing upon her own work in Brazil, tracing the history of power balances between Sao Paulo and the rest of the nation, Ms. Epstein embedded her critiques of development theory and its critics into a rich and nuanced reading of haves and have-nots in that Latin American nation.

Her research and thought on these issues, she concluded, led her to urge that scholars focus on the “walls and borders” between status groups, and how those groups “police the edges” of their groupings. __ Richard Byrne

By the way, it's Weinstein, Einstein.

HJ