Impostor James Hogue Resurfaces
Blinder to Talk About the Fed
By the Numbers
Class Act: Exploring the Media's Impact on Humanitarian Operations

Impostor James Hogue Resurfaces

Blinder to Talk About the Fed

By the Numbers

Institution	Market value (in thousands)
	FY95	FY94
1. Harvard	$7, 045,863	$6,201,220
2. University of Texas	5,043,333	4,549, 214
3. Yale	3,959,080	3,529,000
4. Princeton	3,882,421	3,446,818
5. Stanford	3,088,291	2,750,774
6. Emory	2,232,188	1,691,166
7. Texas A&M	2,220,016	2,055,808
8. Columbia	2,172,869	1,918,148
9. University of California	2,143,393	1,750,203
10. MIT	2,078,414	1,777,777

SOURCE: CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION

Princeton had the fourth largest endowment for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1995, according to an annual survey conducted by the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO). Harvard and Yale placed first and third, respectively. The other Ivy League schools and their rankings were: University of Pennsylvania, 12th; Cornell, 14th; Dartmouth, 19th; and Brown, 28th. Total investment holdings among the 463 colleges and universities surveyed came to $102.5 billion. Most of this wealth is in the hands of the few: 62 percent is held by the top 50 institutions. Those colleges and universities with larger endowments, like Princeton, put more of their investments into nontraditional assets, such as international stocks and foreign bonds, than do institutions with smaller endowments, said NACUBO official Robert Shepko. As of January 31, Princeton's endowment stood at $4.25 billion.

Exploring the Media's Impact on Humanitarian Operations

Two decades ago, France's Bernard Kouchner said, "Without television, there is no humanitarian intervention." It's an assertion that may be more true today-with satellite links, CNN, and the global computer network-than it was in the late 1970s. Kouchner, a pioneer of humanitarian missions, founded one of the first nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), Doctors Without Borders. That group, along with other NGOs, sought to move beyond traditional, nation-state diplomacy to help victims of civil wars and natural disasters. Considering themselves transnational actors in the service of humanity, NGOs used television, a similarly transnational medium, to help them succeed. And today, NGOs work with the UN and NATO in countries like Bosnia and Somalia, often with the aid of U.S. and European armies.
"Humanitarian Intervention," a freshman seminar led by Assistant Professor of English Thomas W. Keenan, examines such humanitarian operations as the ones in Somalia and Bosnia, seeking to understand the complex ways in which NGOs, the media, and the military interact. Studying those interactions, says Keenan, demands "a new crossing of disciplines" that includes international relations, media studies, political theory, cultural studies, and ethics. "The traditional ways we think about political events and problems are being eroded, and cultural forces like television and popular music are displacing nation-state diplomacy in ways that the traditional terms of politics can't comprehend," says Keenan.
Moreover, he says, the Pentagon is using "the power of television" to advertise "the continued relevance of the military in the post-Cold War era." He cites an incident that is a focal point of the course. In 1992 in Mogadishu, Somalia, the Pentagon organized a photo opportunity, at which reporters were supposed to film marine-reconnaissance teams arriving to clear the way for the troops offshore. "But the Pentagon let it get out of hand," says Keenan, and the media wound up vastly outnumbering the marines who arrived in their inflatable dinghies. "So what should have been great images of a new sleek humanitarian military . . . became a public relations catastrophe." The operation, he adds, "was a publicity operation as much as it was a military operation."
One Monday afternoon, Keenan began his class with an activity he hoped would provide other examples of media-military-NGO interactions in hot spots like Bosnia. Each student presented a "surveillance report" on material that he or she had found in news publications, on the radio and television, and over the Internet, and then assessed each item's political impact. Keenan's students also complete more conventional assignments like reading an essay that asks the question "What is a media event?" Another reading assign-ment explored "the CNN factor," that is, whether television unduly influences politics. By the end of the course, Keenan hopes his students will have an in-depth understanding of the way humanitarian missions work and will appreciate the complicated relationships among NGOs, the media, and the military.
Keenan personally regards humanitarian missions with some doubt, and he is ambivalent about the effectiveness of the U.S. (or any other country) as a "globo-cop" in the post-Cold War era. "The rule for those running such missions is to avoid deaths of American soldiers," he says. As a result, interventions will always come too late and not always for the best reasons-countries are only willing to engage when the danger has dropped. "But that doesn't mean interventions are altogether a bad thing," says Keenan. Troops with a real political mission, "not just protecting convoys," he says, can be more effective in resolving conflict than nation-state diplomacy. And their guiding principles-humanitarianism and human rights-"should be advanced."
-Paul Hagar '91

War and Humanitarian Intervention:
A reading and resource list by Professor Thomas W. Keenan

• Humanitarianism Unbound, by African Rights, November 1994 (African Rights, 11 Marshalsea Road, London SE1 1EP, fax 44.171.717.1240)-A systematic and more-or-less sympathetic critique of the relief aid delivered by international agencies, published by an influential British human-rights organization.

• Lights, Camera, War, by Johanna Neuman (St. Martin's Press, 1996)-USA Today's foreign editor tries to challenge the "CNN factor," the notion that live news television is "driving" international crisis response. Best read together with Real Time Television Coverage of Armed Conflicts and Diplomatic Crises, by Nik Gowing (Shorenstein Center, Harvard, 1994).

• The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide, by Gerard Prunier (Columbia University Press, 1995)-A meticulous history of Rwanda and a devastating critique of the "ancient tribal hatreds" theory of genocide, by a rigorous French scholar.

• Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation, by Laura Silber and Allan Little (TV Books/Penguin, 1996)-Companion volume to the five-part BBC/Discovery Channel series on the wars that broke up Yugoslavia and the "Greater Serbian" nationalism that set them off. Watch the videotape by the same name (available through the Discovery Channel), and notice how much of this war has been televised as it happened.

• Sarajevo: A War Journal, by Zlatko Dizdarevic (Henry Holt, 1994)-Sarajevo's best-known journalist comments wryly on the destruction of his city in the glare of the world's television cameras in this book and in Portraits of Sarajevo (Fromm, 1994).

• "Nomad Net": href="http://www.interport.net/~mmaren/-While we wait for Michael Maren's book on food aid and Somalia, The Best Intentions, to be published by The Free Press, we can make do with his impressive World Wide Web site on all things Somali and on the international aid industry.

• "Berserkistan in Bosnia": http://www.linder.com/berserk/berserk.html-Daily illustrated World Wide Web newspaper on the NATO-led intervention in Bosnia.