Gaza and Charities at War: “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”
Scott Bok, former Chair of UPenn’s Board of Trustees, who, along with Liz Magill, got ran out of town on a rail due to war hysteria common in all of us, said this in a Bloomberg News interview last week:
College donors shouldn’t get a prominent say in how those institutions function, according to the former board chair at the University of Pennsylvania, who stepped down in the wake of escalating attacks led by donors. “I think donors are absolutely free to give to whatever organizations they want or not to, and to withhold for any reason they choose to,” Scott Bok said in an interview with Bloomberg TV. “But they are not shareholders, so I don’t think they should have a particularly loud voice on how universities are run.”
I should not have to state the obvious, that war hysteria is common to all of us and in every war. But if I don’t Tax Notes might get hysterical too and accuse me of using language from which readers detect “pernicious stereotypes of Jews.” My commentary has been about war hysteria not Jewish war hysteria, by the way. I swear I feel like cussing right now. I said I was gonna get over it, but I ain’t over it yet. And when really smart people make the same or similar points in different venues, I feel vindicated but I also get real pissed off all over again. Ok, let’s just be real about it. I mean when white people make the same or similar points. All quite legitimate, worth saying and I am still learning from the conversation. I’m just mad about the reception I got that presumably and hopefully other people don’t get. And I am not mad at white people either way. Just the individual people at Tax Notes, and a very diverse bunch they are.
Anyway, you can listen to Scott Bok’s interesting 11-minute interview below. He makes some thought provoking assertions about donor influence, nonprofit governance and even hysteria about nonprofits. All this from one whose wealth and position on Penn’s Board make him donor, donee, and nonprofit corporate fiduciary all at once.
Do you think it mere coincidence that Bok and Magill are both trained attorneys capable of thinking dispassionately even while the hysterical bullets and bombs are flying? No kidding, the most prominent sacrificial lambs were well-educated, highly accomplished lawyers. Its just like Dick said: “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” Most readers of this blog, being lawyers, already know that Shakespeare was hardly throwing shade when he wrote that line. Quite the opposite. Here is how the quote is explained by literary folk:
Dick is a villainous character—he is a large, threatening murderer, and he is also the right-hand-man of Jack Cade, who is leading a rebellion against King Henry. Cade and Dick are aggressively anti-intellectual; they kill anyone who can read and burn all the books and documents they encounter. They know that they’ll be able to take over an ignorant population with greater ease than one where everyone understands their rights.
One reading of this strange quote suggests, therefore, that society could not exist in a state of fairness and peace without the protectiveness of both the law and its staunch guardians. Dick is suggesting that, in order for their coup to prevail, they must eradicate society of the very defenders of justice who could both stop the revolt he intends to help spur and then remove the power he hopes to grab for Cade.
In other words, this suggests that Shakespeare represented lawyers as the most fundamental defense against the grossest manifestations of power-hungry antics wrought by the scum of humanity.
“The most fundamental defense . . . ” I like that.
darryll k. jones