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New
York Times Correspondent
Judith Miller Calls For Media Examination of Embedding Experience
in Iraq in Commencement Speech at Barnard
Asks Whether Objectivity was Compromised
by Embedded Combat Correspondents
Judith Miller (right) delivers the commencement address,
with Gayle Robinson, chair of the Barnard Board of Trustees,
and Martha Nussbaum, recipient of a Barnard Medal of Distinction,
looking on. |
New
York, N.Y. - Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times
correspondent Judith Miller told Barnard's graduating class
on Tuesday that the media and the military must examine whether
embedding journalists
with combat troops in Iraq compromised the media's ability
to report objectively or strained the military's performance.
During the commencement ceremony, Barnard President Judith
Shapiro presented the Barnard Medal of Distinction to Miller,
a 1969 Barnard alumna, and two other accomplished women, cancer
researcher Susan Band Horwitz of the Albert Einstein College
of Medicine and Martha Nussbaum, a writer, philosopher and
ethicist who teaches at the University of Chicago.
In the commencement address, Miller, who had been embedded
as a journalist with the 75th Exploitation Task Force, the
military unit searching for weapons of mass destruction, said
she returned from Baghdad within the last few days with mixed
feelings about the war.
While praising the American soldiers for their courage, commitment
and sacrifice, she said many unanswered questions remain about
the war itself, including the circumstances under which it
was started, the justification the Bush administration gave
for it and its consequences in the Middle East and at home.
"I have no doubt that deposing Saddam Hussein was a good
thing in Iraq," said Miller, who shared the Pulitzer
Prize in 2001 with a team of Times' colleagues for
a series of articles on Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. She
is co-author of a book about the Persian Gulf war, Saddam
Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf, and co-author of the
bestseller Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret
War.
President Judith Shapiro (center) and Dean of the College
Dorothy Denburg (right) with a graduate during the ceremony |
She
said the United States has mishandled post-war security, leading
ordinary Iraqis to question American commitment to the country.
"The whole world knows that we can blow things up,"
she said. "The issue
now is whether we have the staying power to help foreign people
build a better future for themselves and their children."
Miller called for the journalistic equivalent of a military
"after-action report" on the embedding experience.
"Journalists need to draw conclusions about whether objectivity
was compromised during the war," she said. "The
military needs to consider whether the strain of taking care
of us and protecting us, and giving us dangerous information,
was an undue burden on the military. We all need to decide
whether the country's interests were best served by this arrangement."
She also said now that the first phase of the war has ended,
the Bush administration will have to answer many questions,
including whether the weapons of mass destruction that were
used as a justification for
war can be uncovered. "Were those who wanted to go to
war deceiving themselves about Saddam's capabilities?"
she asked. [Click here
to read a full transcript of Miller's remarks. Judith Miller's
remarks were also featured in Editor & Publisher.
Click here to read the E&P
article.]
Miller, Horwitz and Nussbaum joined an impressive group who
have received the Barnard Medal of Distinction, including
Mamphela A. Ramphele and Alice Rivlin (2002), Madeleine K.
Albright (1995),
Walter Cronkite (1994), Marian Wright Edelman (1985) and Mario
M. Cuomo (1983).
From left: Judith Miller, Susan
Band Horwitz, Judith Shapiro, and Martha Nussbaum |
Miller
noted that she had left the country for study in Brussels
before her own graduation from Barnard 34 years ago at a time
of widespread student unrest over the war in Vietnam. "I'm
glad to have finally made it to a commencement since I graduated
in absentia," she quipped.
Shapiro
reminded the graduates that while they are living in perilous
and uncertain times, with terroristic threats, the economic
downturn, SARS, and war in Iraq: "You try to bear in
mind that there is no viable or appealing alternative to optimism."
Quoting Ralph Waldo Emerson's 1841 essay "Circles"
that expresses the limitations of human experience, and, in
particular, how "our moods do not believe in each other,"
Shapiro said: "Today is a perfect day to press the 'record'
button on your internal tape machine. This is a day and a
mood to commit to memory, to lock in place, so that you can
look back on it during a future moment that would benefit
from a boost."
"It turns out that Emerson's circles are a helpful geometric
image for the ways of the world," she said. " The
financial picture, for example, does tend to circle from high
to low and back again over time. And so too for your experiences."
[Click here to read Shapiro's full commencement
remarks.]
Barnard's newest 568 alumnae studied in several dozen fields,
from anthropology, architecture and dance to economics, environmental
studies, neuroscience and theater. The most popular fields
of study among them were psychology, economics and English,
respectively. Among them was Laila Shetty, who received the
the Frank Gilbert Bryson Prize, for her dedication to Barnard,
as voted by her fellow students.
"We have learned so much at Barnard," said Shetty.
"now it is our duty to make the most of it."
Dean of the College Dorothy Denburg |
Horwitz
is a pioneering cancer researcher whose investigations identified
Taxol, a drug isolated from the yew plant, as a prototype
of a new class of anti-tumor drugs. She is president of the
American Association for Cancer Research and a faculty member
at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City,
where she studies natural products as a source of new drugs
for cancer treatment. Her groundbreaking investigations into
the use of Taxol led to its development by the National Cancer
Institute as an important
anti-tumor drug in the treatment of ovarian, breast and lung
cancers. Her accomplishment has been widely recognized. In
1992, she received the Cain Memorial Award from the American
Association for Cancer
Research, the international professional organization of 20,000
cancer researchers.
Nussbaum has been called one of the most important philosophers
of our time and has been praised for changing the way people
think about ethics and social justice in contemporary liberal
democracies. Nussbaum, the Ernst Freund Professor of Law and
Ethics at the University of Chicago, is known for her efforts
to connect Hellenistic ethics and Greek mythology to modern
life, and for her writings on contemporary moral and political
philosophy and feminism, Nussbaum has written 10 books on
the law, ethics, social justice and liberalism. She first
attracted notice in 1987 with an attack on Allan Bloom's The
Closing of the American Mind. In her award-winning 1997
book, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Radical
Reform in Higher Education, she championed changes in
the academy, including the study of ethnicity, race, non-Western
cultures, gender and sexuality - from the perspective of classical
scholarship. She attracted attention again in 1999 for her
criticism of radical feminist philosopher Judith Butler. Her
most recent book is Women and Human Development: The Capabilities
Approach (2000), in which she
suggests how governments and international agencies can alleviate
poverty, particularly as it affects women, in the developing
world.
Contact: Suzanne Trimel, Barnard Office of Public Affairs,
212-854-7583, strimel@barnard.edu
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