I asked someone who would know, Ali Abunimah (of electronic intifada), who lives in Chicago. Abunimah wrote me back:

Poppa's got a brand new bag!

I knocked around on the Federal Election Commission database (fec.gov) to understand Obama's tergiversation, looking at his 2004 Senate warchest of $14 million. The impression I got was that Obama had a ton of Jewish givers—as all winning Democrats do—but that they weren't hack givers, they were idealists. They hadn't given to lots of candidates other than Obama; many of the ones I looked at had given only to Obama.

The other pattern I noticed was that Obama givers had sometimes given to Hillary and Chuck Schumer. I got the impression that Hillary and Chuck had really pulled out the stops for Obama in '04, as representing the best of American idealism (who's cryin' now?). None of this is inconsistent with Abunimah's analysis above. It shows (as I said yesterday) that the Israel lobby is not based in a control room, or even Chuck Schumer's office. Concern for Israel pervades the liberal American Jewish success story. That community functions, in politics, as a monolith. And a gateway. At fundraisers at fancy apartments in N.Y.C., a congressional candidate will be asked, Where do you stand on the settlements in the West Bank?

The questioner doesn't need a script, he's feelin' it. The candidate needs to get a script in a hurry. But I'm an optimist; I think the Jewish grassroots are beginning to change.

Not long ago, in the pages of Foreign Affairs, he wrote that "the neoconservatives are a twin of al Qaeda"-the kind of rhetorical Molotov cocktail seldom tossed by the house organ of the Council on Foreign Relations.

On this evening, he was about to throw another one: into the already highly emotional battle at Columbia over anti-Semitism at the university.

Among the graduate students and faculty members that packed the top-floor conference room that night was a young correspondent from The New York Sun, which had ardently been fanning the story of the handful of Jewish students who have said they were ridiculed for expressing support of Israel in some classes taught by professors in the school's department of Middle Eastern Studies.

The first speaker, a former university provost, gave a windy speech warning of a "rising tide of anti-intellectualism." Then Mr. Mamdani rose, and announced he was planning to confront the issue directly. He was wearing a smart dark suit, his royal blue shirt open at the collar, his curly gray hair slightly mussed.

"The accusation involved is the worst you can hurl at anyone in contemporary American society," he said, his voice audibly seething with indignation. Mr. Mamdani, who is from an Indian Muslim background, had not been accused, but he was passionate in his belief that outside groups, "with skills honed elsewhere in the Empire," were mounting an attack on his university, his rights.

He posed the rhetorical question: What is academic freedom?

"First and foremost, it is the freedom of a professor to go against the grain. To commit heresy," he said. "Any student who enters a university should be prepared for the discomfort that comes from having his or her most cherished truths questioned."

With unwavering self-assurance, Mr. Mamdani has taken aim at a lot of cherished truths lately. Prior to Sept. 11, 2001, Mr. Mamdani, 58, was new to America and barely known outside his narrow academic discipline, African studies.

Since then, he has willed his way into the thick of the debate over the War on Terror, casting himself as a public intellectual for the jihadist age. Last year, he published a popular book on the roots of Middle Eastern extremism. He chats with highbrow talk-show hosts like Bill Moyers and Charlie Rose. His views have been attacked by The National Review and are dismissed by some Middle East experts, but he has won praise from academic heavyweights like Noam Chomsky, the economist Jeffrey Sachs and Columbia's late Palestinian scholar Edward Said, a friend and admirer, who played a crucial role in assuring that Mr. Mamdani's book, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, ended up at his own major publishing house, Pantheon Books. Admirers say the book carries on the tradition of his revered (and sometimes reviled) patron; everybody at Columbia agrees that Said's legacy is threatened. What happens next will test that ambition– and test many other things at Columbia besides.

A week before, Mr. Mamdani welcomed a visitor to his book-filled office, which is mostly decorated in red, appropriately enough for an old Marxist. He speaks softly, like many true radicals, with a lilting, cosmopolitan accent. He said he saw the controversy that now grips Columbia as part of a wider campaign against American teachers' right to express unorthodox political views.

"I find it extremely worrying," Mr. Mamdani said. He was especially incensed at Columbia's president, Lee Bollinger, who recently called on professors "to resist the allure of certitude, the temptation to use the podium as an ideological platform, to indoctrinate a captive audience.

"The administration seems to be giving no indication that it understands academic freedom to be something different from freedom of speech," Mr. Mamdani said. He believes there is a crucial distinction: Teachers are supposed to teach. "I think that if we treat the classroom space as any public space, then we might as well throw out of the window the notion of the university as it developed after the Middle Ages in the West," he said. "Because all of these new trends seem to be indicating a determination to treat professors and the classroom as if they were politicians and public officials, and to ensure that they in fact reflect the prevailing public view on different issues.

"Well, then that wouldn't be a university at all. That would be a chorus."

Mr. Mamdani believes it is his part to play the dissenting outsider, and he portrays his book as an attempt to fight what he describes as America's "amnesia" about its past behavior. In a recent television interview, a somewhat perplexed Charlie Rose asked Mr. Mamdani how America should begin to respond to the challenges of the Middle East. Mr. Mamdani replied, with a Chomskian authority, "Understand yourself."

Like Said, who entitled his memoirs Out of Place, Mr. Mamdani inevitably understands himself as an outsider. He was born in Africa, but he is not black. His name is Indian, and he owns an apartment in New Delhi, but he doesn't really belong there, either. He exists, as the critic John Lahr once wrote of Mr. Mamdani's wife, the filmmaker Mira Nair, "in that weird, liminal expatriate zone." Like many such people, Mr. Mamdani ended up in New York, but his relationship with America is, as he might say, deeply problematic.

He hastens to say that he has "no illusion that any one person can step into the shoes of Edward Said," but the professor's admirers say that in effect, that is what he is trying to do.

"Mahmood fills the vacuum," said Robert Meister, a friend of Mr. Mamdani's since they met at Harvard 30 years ago, and now a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. "He's claiming to be the only sincere antiterrorist."

Mr. Mamdani must be understood as coming for a very particular time and place: Africa, in the era of the Cold War. He was born in Uganda, where Indians, many of them brought over by the British to build a railroad through East Africa, made up the colonial shop-keeping class. At the country's independence from Britain, in 1962, Mr. Mamdani was offered a scholarship by the United States government. He attended the University of Pittsburgh, where he was a debater, and studied for his Ph.D. at Harvard, where he led graduate students in a strike to protest a tuition hike. He returned to Uganda, only to be kicked out by the dictator Idi Amin, who deported the Indians and confiscated their property, saying he hoped to create "black millionaires."

"I was a flaming nationalist in March 1972. And I was expelled in November 1972 as a Ugandan [Indian]," Mr. Mamdani recalled, laughing. "And I thought of Sartre saying that 'the universal intellectual is paid back in particulars.'"

Penniless, Mr. Mamdani lived as a refugee in Britain-where he went without meals and spent his days at the colonial archives, researching his dissertation-before landing a teaching job at the University of Dar es Salaam, in Tanzania. At the time, the school was a center of leftist ferment. Like many, he was drawn to the thinking of Frantz Fanon, who famously wrote in his book The Wretched of the Earth that "the colonized man liberates himself in and through violence." Some students of Mr. Mamdani's would even leave school to fight in guerrilla rebellions around the continent.

Mr. Mamdani returned to Uganda after Amin's 1979 overthrow. In 1986, rebel leader Yoweri Museveni, a former Dar es Salaam student, took power. Mr. Mamdani occupies a position of prominence that an American academic could scarcely imagine. Commonly referred to simply as "The Professor," his pronouncements are front-page news, and he has debated President Museveni on television.

Eventually, though, Uganda proved too small for his ambitions. Mr. Mamdani moved to South Africa, and wrote an influential book about colonialism and apartheid, Citizen and Subject. Later, he turned his attention to the Rwandan genocide.

In 1989, he met Ms. Nair, who was researching her film Mississippi Masala, about an Indian family that moved to America after being expelled by Amin. They fell in love, married, and had a son. Though Mr. Mamdani and Ms. Nair keep a house in Uganda that overlooks Lake Victoria, they now spend much of their time in New York. Ms. Nair's success allows them to live comfortably. ("He's never been attracted by [money], and I don't think he feels he's been corrupted by it either, so there's nothing to be guilty about," Mr. Meister said.) It has also given Mr. Mamdani a degree of visibility he might not otherwise enjoy.

"Mira is a continuing inspiration," Mr. Mamdani said, particularly when it comes to the process of marketing his ideas. "I for a long time resisted the idea that any publicity was necessary. I thought that things get read or bought on their merit. I lived in that kind of world. Mira would often tell me that that's not true, that there's this entire layer of institutions … between the creative people and a potential audience."

Mr. Mamdani occasionally accompanies his wife to industry events like the Venice Film Festival, but for the most part, he said, he and his wife keep their work separate. Still, his intellectual interests-empires, exile-match themes in her work. In 2002, Ms. Nair made a short film about a Pakistani immigrant killed in the World Trade Center as part of a project called 11'09''01, in order to counter the stereotype, she told The New Yorker, "that Muslims equal terrorists."

"Both of us, over the last six years, have spent most of our time living in the U.S., but with a split sense of home," Mr. Mamdani said. "We look at the U.S. through a perspective forged in many places, and through a sensibility that very consciously takes into account multiple experiences, and maybe is never quite at home in any one of those places. So we both share some kind of a restlessness, some kind of a discontent which is productive in a creative sense."

In 1999, Mr. Mamdani took a job in Columbia's anthropology department, and he and Ms. Nair moved into an apartment on Riverside Drive. One of their neighbors, as it turned out, was Edward Said. Mr. Mamdani became friends with Said, with whom he shared an obsession with the legacy of colonialism. After Sept. 11, 2001, Mr. Mamdani became a ubiquitous presence at antiwar rallies and teach-ins. "He just had an extremely good analysis, and it was right-on from the beginning," said Brenda Coughlin, a sociology graduate student who helped Mr. Mamdani research his book.

Mr. Mamdani had to be talked into putting aside the plaudits of academia to write Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, fearing that it might dim his reputation among his academic peers. Before he died of leukemia in 2003, Said read the manuscript, and made sure it made it into the hands of his own editor, Shelley Wanger.

"Edward had a loving, proprietary attitude toward those who he thought should be guided in this difficult world," Mr. Mamdani said. "He guided me to an appropriate publisher."

Helped along by a television appearance, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim sold through its first printing in days. It is now in its sixth hardcover printing, and will soon be released in paperback. Mr. Mamdani, who has a dry wit, likes to joke that the book's sold well because Americans misunderstand the title, thinking it "a directory of good Muslims and bad Muslims-you know, which ones to avoid."

He conceived of his book as a rejoinder to the popular notion of a "clash of civilizations" between the Islamic world and the West, a view associated with intellectuals like Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington. In Mr. Mamdani's view, these commentators-and the Bush administration-divided Islam into groups of "good" Muslims, who were secular and pro-American, and "bad" Muslims, who were devout and inclined to terrorism. Mr. Mamdani believes that religion has nothing to do with it. "I know of no one inspired by Osama bin Laden for religious reasons," Mr. Mamdani writes in Good Muslim, Bad Muslim. "Bin Laden is a politician, not a theologian."

It follows for him that political Islam-or at least Al Qaeda's toxic brand of it-is not an outgrowth of the faith, but a "mutation," one largely created by the United States in the course of contracting out brutal Cold War rebel movements in Angola and Mozambique in the 1970's, a policy that he says culminated in the Afghan jihad against the Soviet Union.

"Official America learned to distinguish between two types of terrorism-'theirs' and 'ours'-and cultivated an increasingly benign attitude to ours," he writes. "But then it turned out that their terrorism was born of ours."

Some terrorism experts question his version of history. "It's sort of conventional Upper West Side [thinking], to just to blame everything on the U.S. I think it's kind of lazy," said Peter Bergen, author of Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden. "The real story is that the C.I.A. did not have a clue about who bin Laden was until 1995."

In 2001, David Rieff wrote a devastating review in The New Republic of Mr. Mamdani's book on Rwanda, alleging that, in his attempt to explain the historical roots of the antipathy that drove hundreds of thousands of Hutus to hack their Tutsi neighbors to death with machetes, Mr. Mamdani was "on a certain level … inviting his readers to feel the historical pain of the génocidaires."

Like his youthful idol Frantz Fanon, Mr. Mamdani is fascinated by the political uses of violence and, also like Fanon, sometimes finds himself treading the line between analysis and apologia.

In an interview last year conducted by Nermeen Shaikh for the online publication AsiaSource.org, Mr. Mamdani was asked about the motives of the contemporary terrorist. He quoted a verse of Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changin'" and speculated that suicide bombers see themselves as participants in a "youth revolt."

Mr. Mamdani told The Observer, "So many find it tempting to draw that line between good and evil, where we can be very comfortable on this side of the line called 'good' and just have our adversaries as 'evil.'"

"He is not a defender of the people who brought down the Twin Towers," said his friend Robert Meister. "What he is trying to say is that [American foreign-policy makers] are being hypocritical and are not really antiterrorist in the way that he is, because they are not democrats, with a small 'd,' in the way that he is."

Back at the public forum, a middle-aged man in a herringbone blazer raised his hand. "It seems to me, that the substantial issue is the issue of anti-Semitism," he said. "Where is that debate going to take place?"

Mr. Mamdani jumped in.

"The notion," he said, "that any critique of the state of Israel is anti-Semitism is a nonstarter."

Later, talking to a reporter, he expanded on this theme.

"Bollinger is all the time talking of a measured intellectual temperament, which takes everything into account, which sees all sides of an issue, which is balance itself," he said. "But what about the intellectual predisposition of an inventor, of someone who makes a new discovery, of the tenacity that is required to go in the face of societal common sense and intellectual orthodoxy? Intellectual work requires you to persist in the face of no reward, and continuous critique. Even in the face of people thinking you're nuts, or even crossing the line to the enemy side, to lunacy.

"Does this temperament have a place in the university? Of course it does," he continued. "And that is what academic freedom is supposed to protect."

There is no such uncertainty about Columbia University professor Edward Said, a major-league agitator who was photographed throwing a rock at an Israeli guardhouse from the Lebanese border in July. This display shocked more than a few people on campus, but Mr. Said will not suffer any consequences. The university recently announced that the professor was exercising his academic freedom, and thus may not be penalized, lest the great Western tradition of free inquiry collapse.

This is absurd. Imagine if an equally prominent Jewish professor were photographed hurling a rock, or aiming a weapon, at a Palestinian. University administrators would be beside themselves. Professor Said got off with not even a slap on the wrist.

It is worth noting that Mr. Said was a longtime adviser to Yasir Arafat-until, that is, Mr. Arafat signed the Oslo peace accords. Mr. Said is an opponent of the now-shattered peace process, and so aligned himself with the terrorist militias who are now waging a low-level war against Israel. If Mr. Said wishes to be a propagandist for Palestinian terrorists-the sort of people who send fanatics out on suicide missions against American targets-that's his affair.

Once he starts throwing rocks, however, it should be the university's business. He is supposed to be an educator. What sort of lessons are he, and the university's spineless administrators, teaching Columbia's student body?

The High School Solution

If you are a New York City parent who, unlike your own parents, doesn't want to flee to the suburbs, but also cannot afford a private school, you have a problem. And your problem becomes the city's problem, since a city that cannot retain its solid middle-class population is headed for trouble. And even if you can afford private school, the competition, starting with nursery school, has become ridiculous. Which is why Schools Chancellor Harold Levy's new plan to bring back the old neighborhood high school is an innovative attack at the root of a disgraceful system. For there is no reason why a city, especially one with the intellectual resources of New York, must have only a handful of superb, selective high schools while the rest suffer.

Mr. Levy's plan would confine each high school's enrollment to students from the surrounding neighborhood or district. The current situation is a mess. Every weekday morning, 65 percent of New York City public high school students travel like nomads across the five boroughs, which means neither they nor their parents develop the bond with a local school that counts for so much when one looks at suburban schools. And with the exception of those students who attend selective public schools such as Stuyvesant High School or the Bronx High School of Science, there is no academic payoff at the other end of the subway or bus ride. The neighborhood high school became a relic 30 years ago, when school zones were remapped to desegregate the high school population. While that admirable goal was reached, the lack of committed parent involvement, of the sort previously fostered by a neighborhood school, contributed to a shocking decline in academic and social standards.

This effort to renew the high schools of New York is a logical consequence of having middle-class households of all colors and races stay in the city. The time to act is now, since the state will be requiring students to meet tougher standards by 2003. And if the candidates angling for the next mayoral race, in the fall of 2001, are looking for an early hot-button issue, this looks like a winner.

Parents Who Love Too Much

Are Manhattan parents turning their young ones into praise junkies, setting them up for a lifetime of disappointment when they grow up and no longer get their fix of daily adulation? Indeed, New York parents who have spent the last decade in their therapist's office expressing their misery at not being loved enough as a child, and who feel guilty over their reliance on nannies to raise their own children, often vow not to let their kids get through a single day without heaps of love. But that "love," child psychologists are now saying, too often takes the form of unconditional, flagrant praise, and this may very well end up doing much more harm than good.

"Praising every time lowers a child's motivation," Manhattan psychologist Ron Taffel recently said in The New York Times. "It cheapens the praise, and children become dependent on praise." An over-praised child will become numb to praise, so that compliments offered later in life are disregarded and thus do not contribute to a healthy sense of adult self-worth. Insecure parents may be terrified of their child not being the best at everything. "Being a whole human being means … realizing that others may be better tennis players or better clarinetists," Fretta Reitzes, director of the Goldman Center for Youth and Family at the 92nd Street Y, told The Times. "When kids begin to really experience their own frailty, parents are often disappointed-'What did I do wrong? I praised you and praised you. I told you you were wonderful and you're falling apart.'" And some child-rearing experts see a parent's reflexive praise as an effort to control the child, rewarding him or her with "verbal doggie biscuits," as author Alfie Kohn told The Times.

So what's a parent to do? Many child researchers suggest avoiding praise that evaluates a child ("You're brilliant!") or that refers to the parent's own feelings ("I love the way you've cleaned your room."). Better simply to be descriptive and specific, as in, "I see you've cleaned your room-that will make it easier for you to find your toys."

The subtext here? The children being smothered in praise are actually a lot smarter than their parents think.

Did you see the newspaper pictures last month of Columbia University professor Edward Said? He wasn't photographed in his campus office or before a classroom of undergraduates or strolling in Morningside Heights–too commonplace for Mr. Said. He was in south Lebanon, in a throng of people hurling stones at the barbed-wire fence separating Lebanon from Israel. Mr. Said was celebrating the Israeli withdrawal from the area; he called throwing rocks at the border fence a "harmless act of joy."

Edward Said is that rare intellectual who fuses erudition with a fierce and unwavering activism. Born in Jerusalem in 1935, he has rarely strayed from his favorite cause: equal rights and sovereignty for Palestinians. And yet Mr. Said was not trained as a political scientist or a historian. He is a professor of literature who has written extensively on Conrad, Yeats and Austen; his most influential book is Orientalism , a study of British and French literary representations of the Near East.

So where is the true center of Mr. Said's thought? Some readers may have indeed wondered whether there are two distinct Edward Saids: one who writes about the Western literary tradition and another who denounces Zionism's degradation of the Palestinian people.

The publication of The Edward Said Reader , a new collection of his diverse writings, should eliminate the temptation to make such facile divisions. The editors of this volume (one a graduate of Columbia's English department and the other still a graduate student there) have made the wise decision to organize it not by genre or theme but by chronology. This may seem an obvious choice, but it should not be ignored. The chronological approach encourages us to focus on the continuity in Mr. Said's thought amidst the great fluctuations in his material. This volume–though culled from literary monographs, political tracts, cultural critique, essays on music and a memoir–gives us Edward Said in his ferocious unity.

Mr. Said's worldview is unified because he does not really consider literature at all distinct from life. Metaphysical approaches to reading, like New Criticism, or systematic modes, like structuralism, are not for the pragmatic Mr. Said. Literature exists in and describes things of the real world; thus, the architecture of novels and the patterns of verse cannot be examined in sheer aesthetic terms. "It is the critic's job," Mr. Said wrote in 1982, "to provide resistances to theory, to open it up toward historical reality, toward society, toward human needs and interests." He would eventually call this manner of reading "secular criticism." Influenced by Michel Foucault, Mr. Said would pursue the relations between writing and authority–exploring how institutions of power shape our access to literature, even when we believe that access to be unmediated.

The most notorious essay in this collection, a study of Mansfield Park entitled "Jane Austen and Empire," is a fine example of secular criticism. Mr. Said focuses on the English country estate of the title, inhabited by the novel's heroine Fanny Price but financed by the slave labor on her uncle's plantation in Antigua. Mr. Said exposes a conspiracy of "interests and concerns spanning the hemisphere, two major seas, and four continents." There is an unspoken compact, he argues, between the domestic authority on the estate at Mansfield Park and the slave trade in the West Indies. "The question of interpretation, indeed of writing itself, is tied to the question of interests," he contends. "We must not say that since Mansfield Park is a novel, its affiliations with a sordid history are irrelevant or transcended."

This kind of reading helped launch a thousand miserable volumes of diatribes masquerading as responsible criticism. When weaker minds give voice to political complaint within literary studies, the result can seem ridiculous, often because it is so easy. But Mr. Said never loses sight of the literary dimensions of the authors he examines. He rails against "the invasion of literary discourse" by fashionable methodologies. He expresses concern that his study of Austen will encourage readers to "jettison her novels as so many trivial exercises in aesthetic frumpery." And if he reads novels politically, he also understands politics novelistically: In his political essays, he compares the absurdities of the Palestinian situation to "some comic fantasy produced in the imagination of a Swift or Kafka." When, therefore, in the interview that concludes the volume, Mr. Said confesses, "I've never felt that my own interest in literature and literary issues has been a hindrance to me," you know it's an understatement. His literariness informs every essay collected here.

Literary sensibility makes his political writings more fluent, more urgent and more effective. Several essays on the subject of Palestine are collected here, including "The Palestinian Experience," "Permission to Narrate" and the galvanic "Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims," a much-cited chapter from his 1979 book The Question of Palestine . Mr. Said's thesis is that Zionism has been effective by "being a policy of detail, not simply a general colonial vision," by which he means that Israel has subjugated the Palestinians by stunning them with specific policies and laws (especially the systematic post-1967 Israeli settling of the West Bank and Gaza) to which they have had no answer.

Mr. Said's Palestine writings, spread over four decades, catalog Israel's transgressions, its gradual solidification of land and power in the Middle East. Over the course of his career, he loses faith in Yasir Arafat, breaks with the P.L.O. and rejects the Oslo accords as a humiliating compromise. The tone of these political writings is about one part sadness and five parts outrage. We are confronted with a furious intelligence in constant stupefaction at the injustice in his native land–and at the West's indifference to it.

Yet his sadness is never overwhelmed by his outrage. With Mr. Said's writings condensed and assembled, you begin to understand that it isn't political jeremiad or polemic that defines his voice; it's melancholy. The central theme of his collected writing isn't really the Palestinian experience (indeed, some critics have pointed out that Mr. Said spent most of his childhood comfortably in Cairo, and therefore should not claim to have shared the Palestinian experience). His great theme is the exile's experience. Just consider his heroes, all of whom he discusses in this anthology: Joseph Conrad, the Polish exile writing in English; Jonathan Swift, born in Ireland but deeply ambivalent about his native land; Erich Auerbach, the scholar of European literature who wrote his great work, Mimesis , as an exile in Istanbul during the Second World War; and Theodor Adorno, the German critic who fled the Nazis, escaped to Southern California and hated it.

The title of Mr. Said's most recent work, Out of Place , helps explain his fascination with these figures. The book is a memoir of his childhood in the Middle East, but its title signals a crucial motif in his life–his sense of being a perennial exile. The editors of this volume compare Mr. Said's elegiac tone to Proust, but there is a major difference: Mr. Said seeks to recapture a lost place, not a lost time. The melancholy that permeates this book is always a function of space; Mr. Said moons about the lost geography of his childhood, the disputes over land in Palestine, the tragedy of Yeats' Ireland, the sinister provenance of estates and plantations in Jane Austen's England.

In Edward Said's world, there is no border fence between fictional landscapes and geopolitical zones. This anthology succeeds in condensing the work of an intellect defined otherwise by its great expanse.

Aaron Matz has reviewed fiction and literary criticism for The New York Observer and The American Scholar .

It shouldn't be that easy. The State Attorney General's office ought to take a long, hard look to determine whether or not the hospital's board and its top management properly exercised their fiduciary responsibilities. Preliminary evidence indicates that the hospital was the victim of neglect and poor oversight. Administrators were deaf to the staff's complaints. The hospital fell behind as other institutions adapted to the changes wrought by managed care. It didn't seize on revenue-generating services like modern CAT scanners and M.R.I. machines. Not surprisingly, top doctors began to flee, the hospital was filled to a mere 55 percent of capacity, and the hospital's balance sheet became a horror show. Amazingly, the board stood aloof from the private fund raising that almost every hospital does.

Now the hospital's board is choosing the easy way out: sell the place and walk away. That would abrogate the hospital's charter and mission–to deliver specialty care to patients with particular needs. A great New York institution would cease to exist, apparently not by forces out of anybody's control, but, if some of the hospital's dedicated staff are right, from poor, incompetent management.

State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer should step in to stop the sale. And he should start asking how a legendary hospital was mismanaged to the brink of collapse.

Said Who?

It's likely no one will ever accuse Columbia University professor Edward Said of being possessed of an abundance of grace. As one of the world's foremost apologists for the Palestinian cause, Mr. Said, a Christian Arab, has vocally supported any and all Palestinians, even though many of their key leaders have been terrorists. From his well-financed perch in Manhattan's Morningside Heights, an American education (Princeton undergrad, Harvard doctorate) under his belt, Mr. Said has made himself a star of academia by attacking Israel and Zionism, shooting from the rhetorical hip at the expense of rationality and truth. Most recently, he has vilified his former pal, Palestinian Liberation Organization leader Yasir Arafat, for signing the Oslo agreements with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. While much of the Middle East and America hopes for peace in that grievously troubled region, Mr. Said bangs his tired old drum.

The good professor has about as much affection for his adopted country as he does for Israel. Mr. Said's snide distaste for America is clear in his past statements and in his latest book, a memoir titled Out of Place . He can barely hide his opinion of America as a colonizing bully which has never done any good for anybody. And yet it is America, of course, which has provided Mr. Said, the son of a wealthy Palestinian businessman, with his cushy platform at Columbia, his easy access to highbrow television talk shows and a world-class publishing environment.

Like many intellectuals, Mr. Said has found his voice on these shores. Rather than knock his lifelong provider, one would hope he might demonstrate a little gratitude or, if that's asking too much, perhaps some quiet dignity. Indeed, if the terrorists he has so blindly defended were granted their own state, one wonders just how quickly Mr. Said would pack up his New York digs.

Dr. Putz Pipes Up

For the majority of New York's cultural elite–who, if asked, would probably say that back in school they "didn't do so well in math"–it may come as a bit of a surprise to learn that the composers whose works they will so eagerly consume this fall and winter at Lincoln Center may have had math on their minds when they touched quill to score. But isn't music composed in a fiery rush of imagination? What's math got to do with it?

A lot, according to Dr. John Putz. Dr. Putz, a mathematician at Alma College in Michigan, has detected mathematical underpinnings to the music of Mozart. Dr. Putz, according to The New York Times ' Malcolm Browne, approached Mozart's Sonata No. 1 in C major using the "golden ratio," an ancient mathematical proportion which can be found in nature and which architects, for example, have long used in designing buildings because they know it creates an esthetically pleasing result. Said Dr. Putz: "Mozart may have known of the golden ratio and used it." What's Dr. Putz up to? It's hard to imagine a Mozart or a Beethoven using math the way an architect might to design a shopping mall.

Dr. Putz is not alone. Indeed, Dr. Putz is joined in his interest by Dr. Brian Greene, a Columbia University physics professor who has been trying to find resonances between the outer reaches of physics and the inner reaches of Bach. And Dr. Putz can take heart from examples like that of Russian composer-scientist Aleksandr Borodin, who, as The Times reported, wrote the opera Prince Igor and pioneered the chemical experiments which gave us non-stick cookware.

It will be interesting to see where the work of Dr. Putz and others will lead. Is there a link between the golden age of radio and the golden ratio? Ask Dr. Putz. Will students perform better on the math portion of the SATs if Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" is played over the intercom? Dr. Putz may be on to something big.

Edward Said, an author with many claims to celebrity, has now written an account of his early life. Of Palestinian origin, he lived mostly in Cairo before going to an American prep school, Princeton and Harvard. His remarkable father was a United States citizen by virtue of having served in the U.S. Army during the First World War, and that made his son a citizen, too. Mr. Said's academic career has been highly distinguished, and he is now, in his 60's, a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University and the author of several important works of literary criticism; but his international reputation probably depends more on his work as a political commentator, a noted and eloquent defender of the Palestinian cause. As if these talents were not enough, he is also a fine pianist and music critic, and a man of unostentatious personal charm.

Why, then, does he feel "out of place"? On one level, the feeling is understandable. He is not like other men, and not only because he is more gifted than most of them. Although his chief concern is with earlier years, he now and again reveals something of his strenuous life today. He sleeps very little and resents the time given over to that passive phase of existence ("Sleeplessness for me is a cherished state to be desired at almost any cost"). For some years now he has been suffering intermittently from a form of leukemia. The disease is incurable but controllable, and it has hardly slowed him down. He lectures everywhere and writes as he travels. This book, he says, was written over a span of five years or so, mostly in the hospital or in foreign institutions, in hotel rooms and other people's houses, and always when he was never really well. And, though he does not say so, he was writing other books during the same period.

The son of a very rich businessman, he himself refuses to own a house. Although quite certain that his home base is New York, he is obviously a restless, unsettled man; far from complaining about his condition, he ends his memoir by saying he prefers "being not quite right and out of place." It is in consequence of the style of upper-class Arab life in the Egypt of his day that he speaks English and Arabic, and also French, as befits an educated Cairene. The price of these privileges could be a certain sense of rootlessness.

Mr. Said is stuck with a forename he dislikes, a remnant of British imperial influence in Palestine and Egypt. He complains of much grossly inappropriate British schooling and even now rarely has a good word for the Brits. In this account of a life in many ways extraordinarily privileged (servants, cars, clubs) he says little, but not quite nothing, about anti-Arab behavior on the part of the British, who in his early years were virtually an occupying force. It was their general sense of superiority, their unquestioning assumption of colonial authority, that galled him. During his early education in Anglophone schools he was often bullied, beaten, accused of carelessness, of not trying, and so forth.

Some similar treatment was handed out by his irascible father, the most vivid character in this memoir. He seems to have been a business genius, a generous man with a taste for luxury, yet madly careful about the petty cash. His son always felt inferior and oppressed. He tells of a time when he was working for his father's firm ("by far the largest office equipment and stationery business in the Middle East"), when he would line up with the other workers to get his weekly pay, but as soon as he got home his father would take the money back. (Perhaps he was thinking of what it would cost him to send the boy to Mount Hermon School for Boys, Princeton and Harvard.) Mr. Said was made to feel his inferiority to this powerful man in all manner of trivial ways–at backgammon, at pool, at bridge, at just counting. He was always at his father's command. But he nevertheless expresses a sincere, indeed profound, love for the man, and as much or more for his conventional but almost equally infuriating mother.

Later on, Mr. Said came to attribute his rootlessness, his sense of exclusion, to the primal fact of the Palestinian diaspora, though his experience of it was not really firsthand. His parents were living in Cairo but made sure he was born in Jerusalem. There he stayed in a district occupied by Palestinian Christians, like his own family, but he seems to remember little about his not very extended visits there. It has been suggested (in an attack on Mr. Said in the September issue of Commentary ) that he sometimes exaggerates the importance of his intermittent residence in Jerusalem, but in this book, at any rate, he makes it perfectly clear that the family's base was Cairo. So when Rommel threatened Alexandria and Cairo in 1942, the family got into a car and drove to Jerusalem; but when the battle of El Alamein stopped the German advance, they all went home again–to Cairo.

When Mr. Said speaks of the fate of the Palestinians at the hands of the Zionists, he is thinking about others, rather than of himself. In 1948, not yet 13 years old, he "saw the sadness and destitution in the faces and lives of people I had formerly known as ordinary middle-class people in Palestine, but I couldn't really comprehend the tragedy that had befallen them … nor understand what had really happened in Palestine." That there was a connection between the events of 1948 and his own sense of perpetual displacement was an insight that came much later. It is true that thereafter there was no Jerusalem to return to, but at the time the political issue seemed, not surprisingly, to have been of interest only insofar as it caused friction between Mr. Said's father and his business partners, and their disputes were commercial rather than political in character. Three years later, in 1951, the young Mr. Said was off to America where he found a new life without, evidently, forgetting much about the old one.

Mr. Said remembers his childhood and especially his miseries at school, with what sometimes seems total recall. He was idle, messy, lonely and clever, and seems to have learned more from private reading and from the upper-class pleasures of Cairo–the opera house, Gielgud's Hamlet , visiting orchestras–than from school. In fact, he was never very happy at any school. He greatly preferred American to British educational styles, but still has hardly a good word to say for his prep school, for Princeton or for Harvard, though by the time he got to Harvard he was very much his own man. And anyway, disillusion is the common fate of graduate students.

He was, in his own eyes at least, a failure at most sports and complains to this day of "feelings of physical incompetence" ("neither my body nor my character naturally inhabited my assigned spaces in life"). Yet he became a good tennis player and is reputed to have been, in later years, a terror on the Columbia squash courts (though he does not mention this aspect of his fame). The tone of the book is nearly always self-deprecating. Only toward the end is there any recognition of his successes, whether academic or sexual. One anecdote after another is of embarrassment or mild disgrace. It seems almost masochistic to remember so many occurrences of the same kind in such detail.

Out of Place , as an authoritative account of the early life of a distinguished and famous man, is obviously a work of some importance. One cannot say that the writing is as distinguished as the writer. It is, of course, fluent and civilized, but it does seem weighted down by repetitive detail. Rousseau to the contrary, it's possible to believe that for the autobiographer it is sometimes as important to forget as to remember; however, I suspect Mr. Said would disagree, for he cherishes all the evidence he can lay his hands on that he was and, in the full flowering of his many and various careers, remains a kind of misfit. Modesty is a virtue, but that self-description is a little hard for disinterested observers to credit.