Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Picture This...
When I saw the cartoon below I decided to check out the cartoons of Adam Zygus...and glad I did.  Here is another picture worth a thousand words.  Keep in mind, this does not say that, therefore, we should--acting together through government--force ourselves to buy health insurance.  What it says is...let's discuss that question based on a sober view of the world we live in.  And it is not a sober view to start that conversation with sound-bites that mislead and suggest it is unheard of for the public and private sector to be so intertwined or 'socialist' to add to the list of services shown above.  Thanks Adam.
Picture This...
When the leadership of the opposition party tells us that his party's goal is not to work together to solve the problems we face, but to ensure that this president fails in his efforts to address the problems we face...and we see his party enacting precisely this strategy at every turn...it is hard not to see those who say 'both sides are the problem' as either not paying attention or confusing false equivalency with civility.
Break Out of Your Daily News Routine...Today
An alternative perspective on why Republicans in Congress are targeting Eric Holder.
Chinese Central Television Article Today on Sino-US Relations.

Tuesday, June 26, 2012



Markets and the Public Good: Private and Public Leadership
Some argue that we should just let the market alone work things out and government intervention is always a problem.  While we do need to regulate wisely, to protect the public good, which includes protecting the free market, the extreme ‘markets alone’ position is inconsistent with our long history of public-private collaboration for prosperity, from the moon launch to the super highway system.
In our current debates over financial and health care regulation it would be prudent to recognize that in both arenas we need responsible public and private leadership, and in times like today it would be best if they were working in concert.
Economist Paul Krugman is not interested in excusing the leadership failures in the private sector that caused the great recession, and continue to delay our recovery.  But he is equally uninterested in ignoring the leadership failures in the public sector making the situation worse still.  This is a great column, well worth the two minutes it will take to read it.  After criticizing German leadership failures Krugman turns to the Fed.
“Yet let’s not ridicule the Europeans, since many of our own policymakers are acting just as irresponsibly. And I’m not just talking about congressional Republicans, who often seem as if they are deliberately trying to sabotage the economy.
Let’s talk instead about the Federal Reserve….Why won’t the Fed act? My guess is that it’s intimidated by those congressional Republicans, that it’s afraid to do anything that might be seen as providing political aid to Obama, that is, anything that might help the economy. Maybe there’s some other explanation, but the fact is, the Fed, like the European Central Bank, like the U.S. Congress, like the government of Germany, has decided that avoiding economic disaster is somebody else’s responsibility.
None of this should be happening. As in 1931, Western nations have the resources they need to avoid catastrophe, and indeed to restore prosperity — and we have the added advantage of knowing much more than our great-grandparents did about how depressions happen and how to end them. But knowledge and resources do no good if those who possess them refuse to use them.  And that’s what seems to be happening.”



Financial to Health Care MarketsIt seems clear that President Reagan could not be elected in today’s Republican party.  Farah Stockman reminds us that President Nixon’s support for a national health care system (like President Obama’s in that it also sought to strengthen our current system of privately provided insurance) would similarly exile him from the Republican party today…for supporting universal coverage and for doing so by seeking an alliance with Ted Kennedy.
“Ted Kennedy, whom Nixon assumed would be his rival in the next election, made universal health care his signature issue….  Nixon proposed a plan that required employers to buy private health insurance for their employees and gave subsidies to those who could not afford insurance. Nixon argued that this market-based approach would build on the strengths of the private system. “Government has a great role to play,” he said, “but we must always make sure that our doctors will be working for their patients and not for the federal government.”
No one breathed a word at the time about Nixon’s plan being unconstitutional.
When Obama ran for office, his aides contacted Altman, a key architect of the Nixon plan, and asked him to serve as an adviser….  Although the two plans are different — Nixon’s mandated companies to buy insurance, while Obama’s mandates individuals — both bolster the system of private insurance instead of creating something new.
“Every once in awhile Obama would say, ‘Wouldn’t single-payer be simpler?’”’ Altman recalled. The answer is yes. But America wasn’t ready for it.” When Congress finally passed the bill, Altman knew that it would take years to perfect it. But he felt extremely proud. He never imagined that the Supreme Court could throw a wrench in it. That would never have happened in the 1970s.”

Sunday, June 24, 2012

President as Dartboard, An American Tradition

Daily Show Interviews Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann
Two of our most respected political analysts, one from the conservative American Enterprise Institute, do what they rarely do...argue that we cannot blame both parties for the mess we are in today.  Since this type of analysis is an very real break with scholarly traditions, it is worth thinking about it carefully.

Saturday, June 23, 2012

Leaders: Start with the Data, then Innovation Requires Imagination
The Chronicle of Higher Education ran an article “The Humanities Really Do Produce a Profit,” that is worth considering for two reasons. 
While there are various ways to slice and dice the data, the commonly heard ‘conventional wisdom’ among university leadership these days is that the science and engineering programs are subsidizing what one of my engineering colleagues loves to call the fuzzy disciplines in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. 
Actually looking at the data, however, tells a very different story, as the Chronicle article outlines.  The Humanities either pay for themselves or produce (sometimes large) surpluses, while science and engineering programs do neither.
The ‘convention wisdom’ here—contrary to the best available data—is simply assumed to be true by many university leaders who never miss an opportunity to demand that their subordinates make decisions based on the best available data.
That is the first reason to check out this Chronicle article:  it is not true that the sciences subsidize the humanities.  Not even close.
The second reason is that the author of the article reminds us that embedded within this discredited assumption is the more dangerous notion about fuzziness that also turns out to be false, because it suggests the humanities, arts and social sciences are secondary, optional or perhaps even best avoided, components of higher education.   Here is how the author put it:
“We produce a profit despite the irreducibly labor-intensive aspects of much of our work in the humanities, where there is seldom any single right answers toward which students might be directed, and where instruction must therefore engage actively and progressively with the particular subjective attributes of each developing voice and mind in the classroom discussion or in drafts of any essay.  Class size therefore cannot swell in many of our departments without destroying our essential pedagogical function, any more than the sciences could function without laboratories.”
Irreducibly labor-intensive teaching and learning…about questions where there is seldom one right answer (though no shortage of wrong answers, such as the 'conventional wisdom' noted  here)...traditionally a cornerstone of higher education.  And this cornerstone is under attack by a self-interested and skewed notion of what it means to analyze, think, and innovate...a notion that privileges one approach and dismisses what have traditionally, and rightly, been seen as essential  and complementary approaches to serious inquiry. 
“No sane citizenry measures its public elementary schools by whether they pay for themselves immediately and in dollars.  We shouldn’t have to make the a balance-sheet argument for the humanities, either, at least not until the balance-sheet includes the value, to the student and to the state, of expanded powers of personal empathy and cross-cultural respect, improved communication through language and other symbolic systems, and increased ability to tolerate and interpret complexity, contemplate morality, appreciate the many forms of artistic beauty, and generate creative, independent thought.”
Even using the narrow measures associated with a balance-sheet, the humanities value cannot be denied.  Expanding our notion of value, as we must in the above non-controversial ways, we would be as eager to support small class sizes in the humanities, arts and social sciences as we are to invest in the laboratories our colleagues in science and engineering require to make their critically important contributions toward graduating globally competent and competitive, innovative and thoughtful democratic citizens.
If educational leaders (and legislators who want to be educational leaders) would  themselves start with the data, as they insist others do, and then recognize that the data is merely step one in real world problem solving, where there is rarely any single right answer to the most important questions we face...this would be the kind of innovative and imaginative leadership we need.
Einstein once said that "not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted."  He was certainly not suggesting we stop counting, but that starting with the data, measuring as rigorously as we can, is merely a starting point for the diffcult task ahead: thinking. 
Pretending that there is one right answer means we waste resources spinning our wheels and alienating allies by dividing the faculty against each other and against an administration filled with people who want to do the right thing by are rightly perceived by faculty as not getting it when they behave as if everything that counts can be counted (and too often do not even hold themselves to this same, step one, standard of starting with the data, as we see here).  
Worse, insisting that there must be only one right answer, in the face of strong evidence to the contrary, advances the forces of anti-intellectualism and sets a poor example for our students...making it less likely, to the degree that they learn from our example, that they will become the innovative problem solvers we need today (and tomorrow) to help us productively address the conflicts we face together. 

Wednesday, June 20, 2012


The Black Candidate Wants to Avoid Race in the Campaign
KeithKoffler, recently argued in his blog that “race is being inserted into the 2012 campaign, particularly as a means to slander those who attack the president.”  This is followed by evidence, in the form of ‘left leaning’ reporter Sam Donaldson criticizing a reporter who interrupted the president.  Here is what Donaldson said:
“What this man did yesterday is something new, to me wrong and unusual. I think it is probably the result of the growing incivility of the times, the competition among reporters and news organizations to be noticed not only for the work product but for the theatrics of the gathering…and there is one more factor, let’s face it: Many on the political right believe this president ought not to be there – they oppose him not for his polices and political view but for who he is, an African American! These people and perhaps even certain news organizations (certainly the right wing talkers like Limbaugh) encourage disrespect for this president. That is both regrettable and adds, in this case, to the general dislike of the press on the part of the general public.”
This is hardly a left leaning injection of race.  It is an observation. 
Koffler continues, noting that the “introduction of racial issues threatens to create a new and pernicious element of divisiveness that could create racial tensions during the campaign and induce a dangerous racial backlash after it, no matter who wins.”  The assumption that Donaldson's observation is when race and divisiveness get injected seems weak and the rest reads like a veiled threat, masking the more pernicious (and not so new) element of divisiveness and racial tension here.
Koffler points out that Bill Maher (someone who actually is left leaning) criticized Matt Drudge for racism.  This may or may not be true…but Koffler’s point is that the problem with race today is only manifest when people complain about racism.  Clearly false and disingenuous, regardless of what we think of Bill Maher or Matt Drudge.
Koffler later repeats this same point, saying that on "Tuesday... MSNBC host Christopher Matthews asked former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown whether House Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa’s treatment of Holder was 'ethnic.'"  Simply asking the question is injecting race…not the behavior that spurs the question being asked in the first place?  And should we not be concerned about the answer to the question, if we are really concerned about how race matters here?
The second problem with Koffler's analysis is captured by the incoherent juxtaposition of these two consecutive sentences in his blog. “As the campaign heats up and attacks in general on Obama become more fierce, such talk of race is only likely to increase. And it could become a useful weapon in the hands of unscrupulous Obama defenders hoping to intimidate the president’s opponents with the threat of being branded as racist.”
The first sentence suggests, correctly, that the race card is rooted in attacks on Obama.  Why, after all, would a black candidate in a country that is 12% black want to highlight his blackness?  That would not be a winning strategy and electoral campaigns are usually about winning.  Then, Koffler inexplicably shifts to claim that the tool designed to attack Obama would be a useful weapon for Obama...and that is the cause for concern according to Koffler. 
What Would Jesus Do?
Sister Simone at the Ed Show provides powerful testimony and witness and praxis that we should all consider carefully.  While in Catholic school I never thought I would say this, but the sisters are clearly the most thoughtful and loving community within the larger Catholic and Christian community.  Listen, just a few minutes.

Saturday, June 2, 2012


Help Homeowners, Reject Self-Interested Platitudes
Nicole Gelinas,  a contributing editor for the
Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, a conservative publication, provides a very thoughtful analysis of the what we should do now (and should have done a long time ago) to address the mortgage debt crisis.  I am particularly impressed with the analysis of changes in public (and elite) opinion on the ‘moral hazard’ argument. Worth reading.