IN MEMORIAM: MIROSLAV TODOROVICH-SCIENTIST AND INTELLECTUAL HERO OF THE 20TH CENTURY
http://www.mideastoutpost.com/archives/a-tribute-to-miroslav-todorovich-rael-jean-isaac.html
“Someday, if our decline is not terminal, there will arise a movement to restore academic standards to our colleges and universities, now crippled by political correctness and cultural and moral relativism. Someday the absurdity of the attack on our energy sources will be recognized (nuclear energy when Miro took up the cudgels, fossil fuels now that the know-nothings have moved on to the phony global warming apocalypse). When that day comes, Miro’s contribution will be rediscovered, reassessed and celebrated. He will be recognized as a hero in the intellectual wars of the latter years of the twentieth century.” Rael Jean Isaac
Miroslav Todorovich died at the age of 89 in Seattle. For many years Miro was a warm friend and valued advisor to Americans for a Safe Israel and attended our national conferences as a special guest when Edward Teller, his close friend and partner in the energy wars, was honored by AFSI.
Miro made an extraordinary contribution to American public life. He was founder–and behind the scenes the key player, for he always gave the limelight to others–in a series of organizations that aimed to restore rationality to our basic institutions, from our universities to our energy system. The names of Miro’s organizations tended to be cumbersome: University Centers for Rational Alternatives, the Committee for Academic
Non-Discrimination and Integrity, Scientists and Engineers for Secure Energy, but their goals were simple and fundamental: universities that–without violent disruptions–would teach the achievements of Western civilization; selection based on merit, not accidents of race and color; the development of energy sources based on scientific knowledge, not trumped-up terror scenarios or pie-in-the-sky fantasies.
Miro was born in Belgrade in 1925 where his father co-founded the Belgrade daily Politika which Miro describes as a kind of New York Times of the Balkans (before the Times morphed from the newspaper of record into the loadstone of political correctness). In 1951 he graduated from the University of Belgrade’s Department of Natural Science (with a year studying mass spectrometry at Compagnie Generale de TSF in Paris) and went straight to the Vinca Institute of Nuclear Science, which decided to send several of its most promising young scientists abroad for further study. Miro chose Columbia University. But after only a few months, in what he described as typical of Communist governments, a power struggle at the Institute resulted in an about-face. Miro was called back to Yugoslavia, supposedly for lack of funds. The Institute, unmoved when Columbia offered to provide financial assistance, used his young wife Branka, who had been scheduled to join him in New York, as a hostage. Her passport was confiscated and it would take three years before, in 1956, she was finally able to come to New York. In 1961 their son Mark was born followed by a daughter Mira. Both would eventually obtain degrees in science, Mark in physics, Mira a PhD in chemistry.
Miro would embark upon a long career teaching physics at the City University of New York. But that was only the foundation of his activities. In Yugoslavia Miro had experienced the Nazi regime followed by Tito’s Communist rule. He appreciated the freedoms and democratic values of the United States as only someone from that background could. And so when the universities came under attack in the late 1960s with students disrupting classes, seizing buildings, shrieking obscenities, destroying their professors’ research files, packing guns (Cornell), making non-negotiable “demands,” Miro was horrified at the prospect of academic freedom and indeed Western culture falling to young barbarians within the gates. What he found most appalling was the feeble response of administrations and faculty, with most cravenly caving in to the attackers.
And while many were horrified, Miro acted. In 1968, with famed NYU philosophy professor Sidney Hook, he founded University Centers for Rational Alternatives (UCRA). Hook summed up the organization’s perspective: “Intellectual unrest is not a problem but a virtue. The problem, and the threat, is not academic unrest but academic disruption and violence, which flow from substituting for the academic goals of learning the political goals of action.” UCRA also saw the growing abandonment of any and all curriculum requirements as a major threat to a liberal education.
In short order over three thousand college and university professors joined. And not just any faculty, the cream of the academic profession, ranging from Daniel Patrick Moynihan to Milton Freedman, Zbigniew Brezinski to Samuel Huntington. UCRA was able to shoot down some of the most “creative” enterprises of the student movement, like the Princeton Plan which would have closed campuses for two weeks of the academic year so students could work in political campaigns. UCRA and its publication Measure continued, with Miro as Executive Secretary, until 1996. If UCRA existed today, there is no doubt whatever that it would be in the forefront of the struggle against the boycott, divest and sanctions movement (BDS) that targets Israel and is conducted by both students and academic associations.
But for Miro, UCRA was only the beginning. In the early 1970s, as campus turmoil eased, Miro was shocked to learn that Richard Nixon, a supposedly conservative President, was proposing to issue a presidential order forcing colleges and universities to prepare affirmative action hiring plans, listing numerical targets by race and sex. Especially alarming for academic institutions was the specification that the standard for new appointments was to be set by the “least qualified incumbent.” This was defining standards downward with a vengeance.
Miro went into action via a sub-organization of UCRA, the Committee for Academic Nondiscrimination and Integrity (CANI). Miro served as CANI’s coordinator. After Nixon’s resignation Miro chaired, at the White House, a meeting of the Domestic Council devoted to affirmative action and the least qualified prescription was stricken from the presidential order. Subsequently Miro sought to marshal support from labor, professional and civic associations for a gender and color blind policy that would conform to the statutory dictates of civil rights law. CANI filed amicus briefs in a series of affirmative action law cases with the pro bono assistance of first rate legal talent—including then Yale professor Robert Bork.
Miro would now take on an even greater challenge. Yale microbiologist Alexander Von Graevenitz alerted him to an anti-nuclear energy referendum impending in California. Miro reports that he at first he resisted Von Graevenitz’s urging that they create a new organization to deal with the emerging onslaught on nuclear energy, saying he was already overloaded with (unpaid) UCRA work on top of his teaching duties. But concluding that the task was urgent and there was no one else stepping forward to take on the burden, Miro established Scientists and Engineers for Secure Energy in 1976. He assembled an array of top flight scientists that should have swept away the Luddite opposition to this safe and non-polluting energy source. There were eight Nobel Prize winners on his team, including Hans Bethe, Eugene Wigner, James Rainwater, Glenn Seaborg, Felix Bloch, Arno Penzias, Robert Mulliken and Luis Alvarez. Frederick Seitz, then President of Rockefeller University and past President of the American Academy of Sciences became Chairman of what was known for short as SE2 and Edward Teller became an especially active collaborator. Miro worked tirelessly. He organized over fifty-five energy forums at all major American colleges and universities, featuring leading experts in their disciplines. He testified repeatedly before Congress. He spoke at meetings of non-technical professional societies and at political forums. He patiently sought to educate a hostile media.
It didn’t work. High profile activists like Jane Fonda, meretricious outfits like the Government Accountability Project (an offshoot of the far left—and bitterly anti-Israel– Institute for Policy Studies), a media that fostered public fears by playing up the most outlandish charges, carried the day. In March 1979 Three Mile Island proved the nail in the coffin when it came to building new nuclear power plants, this although Edward Teller would famously say “I was the only victim of Three-Mile Island.” Teller explained that he went to Washington after the accident at Three Mile Island to refute the propaganda people like Ralph Nader and Jane Fonda were spewing to the news media. Teller said: “I am 71 years old and I was working 20 hours a day. The strain was too much. The next day, I suffered a heart attack.”
Those whom Miro fought so tenaciously for decades—and their disciples–are still firmly in the saddle, which explains why Miro’s death went unnoticed in the mainstream media while the likes of Fred Branfman, who died in October, have been eulogized. The New York Times and Washington Post both wrote at length of Branfman as the man who organized star-studded anti-Vietnam war demonstrations and co-founded the Indochina Resource Center. Both omitted the awkward fact that the Indochina Resource Center functioned in effect as a lobby for the genocidal Pol Pot regime.
Someday, if our decline is not terminal, there will arise a movement to restore academic standards to our colleges and universities, now crippled by political correctness and cultural and moral relativism. Someday the absurdity of the attack on our energy sources will be recognized (nuclear energy when Miro took up the cudgels, fossil fuels now that the know-nothings have moved on to the phony global warming apocalypse). When that day comes, Miro’s contribution will be rediscovered, reassessed and celebrated. He will be recognized as a hero in the intellectual wars of the latter years of the twentieth century.
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