Jackie Robinson Again
Posted by Roger Angell176
I’ll catch the new Jackie Robinson movie, “42,” over the weekend—it’s great, friends say—but I need no sports-clip reminders or careful re-creations to bring his front-footed swing or his shouldering, headlong style on the base paths clearly back into view. I will keep some of his games forever—in particular, that final meeting with the Phillies, in 1951, to force a playoff for the pennant, which he saved with an astounding dive and stop behind second base in the twelfth, and won with a home run in the fourteenth. But that was just baseball; my first thought about him to this day was never a play or a famous hit but an idle, almost inexplicable midsummer, mid-game moment at the Polo Grounds in June or July of 1948.
I was sitting in a grandstand seat behind the third-base-side lower boxes, pretty close to the field, there as a Giants fan of long standing but not as yet a baseball writer. Never mind the score or the pitchers; this was a trifling midseason meeting—if any Giants-Dodgers game could be called trifling—with stretches of empty seats in the oblong upper reaches of the stands. Robinson, a Dodger base runner, had reached third and was standing on the bag, not far from me, when he suddenly came apart. I don’t know what happened, what brought it on, but it must have been something ugly and far too familiar to him, another racial taunt—I didn’t hear it—that reached him from the stands and this time struck home.
I didn’t quite hear Jackie, either, but his head was down and a stream of sound and profanity poured out of him. His head was down and his shoulders were barely holding in something more. The game stopped. The Dodgers’ third-base coach came over, and then the Giants’ third baseman—it must have been Sid Gordon—who talked to him quietly and consolingly. The third-base umpire walked in at last to join them, and put one hand on Robinson’s arm. The stands fell silent—what’s going on?—but the moment passed too quickly to require any kind of an explanation. The men parted, and Jackie took his lead off third while the Giants pitcher looked in for his sign. The game went on.
I have no memory of who won, but that infinitesimal mid-inning tableau stayed with me, quickly resurfacing whenever I saw Jackie play again, in person or on TV, over the next eight seasons and then again on the day he died, in 1972. He was fifty-three years old but already white-haired and frail. We all knew his story by heart, of course, and took a great American pride in him, the very first black player in the majors: a carefully selected twenty-eight-year-old college graduate and Army veteran primed and prepped in 1947 by Dodger President Branch Rickey, who exacted a promise from him that he would never respond, never complain, never talk back, no matter what taunts or trash came at him from enemy players out of the stands.
He did us proud, but at a cost beyond the paying.
Friday, April 12, 2013
The Farce of "Originalism"
Let's Stop Treating the Constitution Like the Da Vinci Code
"Originalism" allows judges to read into the founding document any ideas they want. Nowhere is the problem clearer than in the ongoing saga of the presidential recess appointment power.
Garrett Epps Apr 12 2013, 11:53 AM ET
When "originalism" came on the scene in the 1980s, it was promoted as a means of keeping judges from writing their "personal views" into law.
If that was its intent, the "originalist" movement is an abject failure. As a field of scholarly and historical study, originalism -- the study of the historical background of the framing of a constitutional provision -- is valuable and bracing. But most judges are neither historians nor scholars, and for judges, "originalism" can be a powerful tool for attributing contemporary policy views to the Framers.
This can be illustrated neatly by the D.C. Circuit's decision in Noel Canning v. National Labor Relations Board, which destroyed the federal agency charged with safeguarding the rights of Americans to organize labor unions and bargain with their employers.
The panel held that, because the majority of members of the Board had been "recess appointments" named during a Congress rather than between Congresses, they were not validly appointed.
"Originalist" rhetoric can allow judges to bypass crucial judicial craft, and instead write into law personal theories of what a constitutional provision "really" meant when it was adopted.
There was a perfectly good argument that the appointments were invalid -- President Obama made these appointments while the Senate was holding "pro forma" sessions every three days. The "pro forma" move was a dodge originally invented by Democrats. It would have been cynical, but a reasonable judge could certainly have held that the Senate was not "in recess." But the panel of judges in Noel Canning went much further, effectively crippling the executive branch's ability to act when faced with Senate intransigence. This is a huge change in the balance between the branches, made apparently on the basis of a quick trip to the dictionary.
A new report by the carefully non-political Congressional Research Service (CRS) points out two things that are missing in the panel's opinion -- precedent and practicality. Both should form part of any judicial decision. Noel Canning shows us how "originalist" rhetoric can allow judges to bypass crucial judicial craft, and instead write into law personal theories of what a constitutional provision "really" meant when it was adopted.
Briefly put, the majority in Noel Canning noted that the language in the Recess Appointment Clause (Article II § 2 cl. 3) gives the president the power to make temporary appointments during "the recess" of the Senate. These appointments, if not confirmed by the Senate, expire at the end of the next congressional session. For at least a century, presidents -- with congressional acquiescence -- have interpreted that clause as giving them the ability to make appointments any time when the Senate is not in session. But Chief Judge David Sentelle looked up the six-word entry for "the" in Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1755, and found that its "original public meaning" was "noting a particular thing," meaning that there can be one and only one "recess" of the Senate. He and fellow Judge Karen Henderson went on to opine (on an issue not really before the court) that a president can never make a "recess" appointment if the vacancy to be filled arose while Congress was in session.
It's common to characterize the decision as a cutback of the president's power; but it is, in fact, an assault on the ability of government to function at all.
The careful research in the CRS report illustrates just how important "recess appointments" have been. In eight years, President Ronald Reagan made 232 recess appointments that would apparently have been void under the Noel Canning Rule. George H.W. Bush made 78 in his four years. Bill Clinton, in eight, made 139. George W. Bush made 171. Despite the shouting over Obama's "extension" of executive authority, he in fact has made only 32 recess appointments in his four years.
Study the list, moreover, and some names and titles leap out. Alan Greenspan as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board was a recess appointment; so was Lawrence Eagleburger as Secretary of State. Ambassadors to key Arab states were recess appointments, as well as top officials at the Department of Justice, and the first African-American judge of a Southern court of appeals (later reappointed by a president of the other party). The largest category, however, includes appointees to multi-member agencies like the NLRB -- agencies that cannot function without a quorum of appointed members. As near as I can tell, virtually all the members of the NLRB have been recess appointments for the past three decades, along with the members of the board of the Legal Services Corporation.
The theme here is practicality. Presidents put recess appointees in place because government may need key personnel to face crises -- economic, foreign, and domestic -- and because government agencies need to function. Not all of the figures named are giants of American history. But when the Senate will not act on a nomination, someone has to fill it, or government will just stop working. There's every reason, in fact, to think that this is why the Recess Appointment Clause is in the Constitution in the first place -- to make sure the government functions in case of disaster or paralysis.
The Noel Canning majority is, let's say, insouciant about the dangers of paralysis. Instead, it explains the recess appointment power as a protection of "liberty" -- apparently meaning that government ought to be paralyzed most of the time. "Originalists" often affect disdain for practicality. We're just channeling Madison, they say; if you think it's a bad idea, amend the Constitution.
The CRS report shows something else. Judges are supposed to begin with precedent and build the law case by case. The issue the Noel Canning court decided was far from new, and presidents of both parties -- dating back nearly a century -- had been making recess appointments that are illegal under the brand new "originalist" rule.
The D.C. Circuit did not just brush by the experience of 15 presidents; it also dismissed a contrary opinion by the Eleventh Circuit because it was based on a "modern dictionary" rather than good old Samuel Johnson. That's the other advantage of "originalist" rhetoric: precedent doesn't count. If you've discovered secret truth -- the code hidden in The Last Supper, say, or the "original meaning" of the Recess Appointments Clause -- no one else's opinion matters.
In this case, a quick glance at a dictionary written more than a quarter-century before the Framing, in another country, was enough to sweep away any counterarguments -- most particularly the argument that, whatever words the Framers may have chosen, they were designing a government that would work, not one that would fall apart whenever 40 senators felt grumpy.
Noel Canning is a particularly clear illustration of a general truth. When someone who knows history brings up the minds of the Framers, prepare to be enlightened.
Alas, when a judge does the same thing, lock up the silver.
"Originalism" allows judges to read into the founding document any ideas they want. Nowhere is the problem clearer than in the ongoing saga of the presidential recess appointment power.
Garrett Epps Apr 12 2013, 11:53 AM ET
When "originalism" came on the scene in the 1980s, it was promoted as a means of keeping judges from writing their "personal views" into law.
If that was its intent, the "originalist" movement is an abject failure. As a field of scholarly and historical study, originalism -- the study of the historical background of the framing of a constitutional provision -- is valuable and bracing. But most judges are neither historians nor scholars, and for judges, "originalism" can be a powerful tool for attributing contemporary policy views to the Framers.
This can be illustrated neatly by the D.C. Circuit's decision in Noel Canning v. National Labor Relations Board, which destroyed the federal agency charged with safeguarding the rights of Americans to organize labor unions and bargain with their employers.
The panel held that, because the majority of members of the Board had been "recess appointments" named during a Congress rather than between Congresses, they were not validly appointed.
"Originalist" rhetoric can allow judges to bypass crucial judicial craft, and instead write into law personal theories of what a constitutional provision "really" meant when it was adopted.
There was a perfectly good argument that the appointments were invalid -- President Obama made these appointments while the Senate was holding "pro forma" sessions every three days. The "pro forma" move was a dodge originally invented by Democrats. It would have been cynical, but a reasonable judge could certainly have held that the Senate was not "in recess." But the panel of judges in Noel Canning went much further, effectively crippling the executive branch's ability to act when faced with Senate intransigence. This is a huge change in the balance between the branches, made apparently on the basis of a quick trip to the dictionary.
A new report by the carefully non-political Congressional Research Service (CRS) points out two things that are missing in the panel's opinion -- precedent and practicality. Both should form part of any judicial decision. Noel Canning shows us how "originalist" rhetoric can allow judges to bypass crucial judicial craft, and instead write into law personal theories of what a constitutional provision "really" meant when it was adopted.
Briefly put, the majority in Noel Canning noted that the language in the Recess Appointment Clause (Article II § 2 cl. 3) gives the president the power to make temporary appointments during "the recess" of the Senate. These appointments, if not confirmed by the Senate, expire at the end of the next congressional session. For at least a century, presidents -- with congressional acquiescence -- have interpreted that clause as giving them the ability to make appointments any time when the Senate is not in session. But Chief Judge David Sentelle looked up the six-word entry for "the" in Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1755, and found that its "original public meaning" was "noting a particular thing," meaning that there can be one and only one "recess" of the Senate. He and fellow Judge Karen Henderson went on to opine (on an issue not really before the court) that a president can never make a "recess" appointment if the vacancy to be filled arose while Congress was in session.
It's common to characterize the decision as a cutback of the president's power; but it is, in fact, an assault on the ability of government to function at all.
The careful research in the CRS report illustrates just how important "recess appointments" have been. In eight years, President Ronald Reagan made 232 recess appointments that would apparently have been void under the Noel Canning Rule. George H.W. Bush made 78 in his four years. Bill Clinton, in eight, made 139. George W. Bush made 171. Despite the shouting over Obama's "extension" of executive authority, he in fact has made only 32 recess appointments in his four years.
Study the list, moreover, and some names and titles leap out. Alan Greenspan as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board was a recess appointment; so was Lawrence Eagleburger as Secretary of State. Ambassadors to key Arab states were recess appointments, as well as top officials at the Department of Justice, and the first African-American judge of a Southern court of appeals (later reappointed by a president of the other party). The largest category, however, includes appointees to multi-member agencies like the NLRB -- agencies that cannot function without a quorum of appointed members. As near as I can tell, virtually all the members of the NLRB have been recess appointments for the past three decades, along with the members of the board of the Legal Services Corporation.
The theme here is practicality. Presidents put recess appointees in place because government may need key personnel to face crises -- economic, foreign, and domestic -- and because government agencies need to function. Not all of the figures named are giants of American history. But when the Senate will not act on a nomination, someone has to fill it, or government will just stop working. There's every reason, in fact, to think that this is why the Recess Appointment Clause is in the Constitution in the first place -- to make sure the government functions in case of disaster or paralysis.
The Noel Canning majority is, let's say, insouciant about the dangers of paralysis. Instead, it explains the recess appointment power as a protection of "liberty" -- apparently meaning that government ought to be paralyzed most of the time. "Originalists" often affect disdain for practicality. We're just channeling Madison, they say; if you think it's a bad idea, amend the Constitution.
The CRS report shows something else. Judges are supposed to begin with precedent and build the law case by case. The issue the Noel Canning court decided was far from new, and presidents of both parties -- dating back nearly a century -- had been making recess appointments that are illegal under the brand new "originalist" rule.
The D.C. Circuit did not just brush by the experience of 15 presidents; it also dismissed a contrary opinion by the Eleventh Circuit because it was based on a "modern dictionary" rather than good old Samuel Johnson. That's the other advantage of "originalist" rhetoric: precedent doesn't count. If you've discovered secret truth -- the code hidden in The Last Supper, say, or the "original meaning" of the Recess Appointments Clause -- no one else's opinion matters.
In this case, a quick glance at a dictionary written more than a quarter-century before the Framing, in another country, was enough to sweep away any counterarguments -- most particularly the argument that, whatever words the Framers may have chosen, they were designing a government that would work, not one that would fall apart whenever 40 senators felt grumpy.
Noel Canning is a particularly clear illustration of a general truth. When someone who knows history brings up the minds of the Framers, prepare to be enlightened.
Alas, when a judge does the same thing, lock up the silver.
The MOOCs of Hazzard
EDUCATION MARCH 31, 2013
MOOCs of Hazard
Will online education dampen the college experience? Yes. Will it be worth it? Well...
BY ANDREW DELBANCO
In the spring of 2011, Sebastian Thrun was having doubts about whether the classroom was really the right place to teach his course on artificial intelligence. Thrun, a computer-science professor at Stanford, had been inspired by Salman Khan, the founder of the online Khan Academy, whose videos and discussion groups have been used by millions to learn about everything from arithmetic to history. And so that summer, Thrun announced he would offer his fall course on Stanford’s website for free. He reorganized it into short segments rather than hour-long lectures, included problem sets and quizzes, and added a virtual office hour via Google Hangout. Enrollment jumped from 200 Stanford undergraduates to 160,000 students around the world (only 30 remained in the classroom). A few months later, he founded an online for-profit company called Udacity; his course, along with many others, is now available to anyone with a fast Internet connection.
Meanwhile, two of Thrun’s Stanford colleagues, Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng, founded another for-profit company, Coursera, that posts courses taught by faculty from leading universities such as Prince- ton, Michigan, Duke, and Penn. Three million students have signed on. Not to be outdone, Harvard and MIT announced last spring their own online partnership, edX, a nonprofit with an initial investment of $60 million. A new phenomenon requires a new name, and so MOOC—massive open online course—has now entered the lexicon. So far, MOOCs have been true to the first “o” in the acronym: Anyone can take these courses for free.
Many people outside academia—including New York Times columnists David Brooks and Thomas L. Friedman—are gushing that MOOCs are the best thing to happen to learning since movable type. Inside academia, however, they have been met with widespread skepticism. As Joseph Harris, a writing professor at Duke, recently remarked in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “I don’t see how a MOOC can be much more than a digitized textbook.”
In fact, MOOCs are the latest in a long series of efforts to use technology to make education more accessible. Sixty years ago, the Ford Foundation funded a group of academics to study what was then a cutting-edge technology: television. In language almost identical to that used today, a report on the project announced that television had the power to drive down costs, enable the collection of data on how students learn, and extend “the reach of the superior teacher to greater num- bers of students.” From 1957 to 1982, the local CBS channel in New York City broadcast a morning program of college lectures called “Sunrise Semester.” But the sun never rose on television as an educational “delivery system.”
In the 1990s, my own university, Columbia, started a venture called Fathom, using the relatively new technology of the Web. The idea was to sell online courses taught by star faculty such as Simon Schama and Brian Greene to throngs of supposedly eager customers. But the paying consumers never showed up in the anticipated numbers, and by the time it was shut down, Fathom had cost Columbia, according to some estimates, at least $20 million. Looking back, the project’s director, Ann Kirschner, concluded that she and her colleagues had arrived too soon—“pre-broadband, pre-videocasting and iPods, and all the rest.”
Of course, we will always be pre-something. Former University of Michigan President James Duderstadt foresees a technology that will be “totally immersive in all our senses”—something like the “feelies” that Aldous Huxley, in Brave New World, imagined would render the “talkies” obsolete. The MIT Media Lab has already developed a vest that gives you a hug when a friend “likes” something you have posted on Facebook. It may not be long before we can log onto a Shakespeare course taught by, say, Stephen Greenblatt and feel the spray of his saliva as he recites “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.” Such technologies will likely find their biggest market through the pornography industry, but there’s no reason to doubt that academia will adopt and adapt them.
The Luddite in me is inclined to think that the techno-dreamers are headed for another disappointment. But this time around, something does seem different—and it’s not just that the MOOC pioneers have an infectious excitement rarely found in a typical faculty meeting. They also have a striking public-spiritedness. Koller sees a future in which a math prodigy in a developing country might nurture his or her gifts online and then, having been identified by a leading university, enroll in person—on a scholarship, one might imagine, funded by income derived from Coursera. This idea of using online courses as a detection tool is a reprise (on a much larger scale) of the one that spurred the development of standardized tests in the mid-twentieth century, such as the SAT, which was originally envisioned as a means for finding gifted students outside the usual Ivy League “feeder” schools.
Koller speaks with genuine passion about the universal human craving for learning and sees in Internet education a social good that reminds me of Thomas Jefferson’s dream of geniuses being “raked from the rubbish”—by which he meant to affirm the existence of a “natural aristocracy” to be nurtured for the sake of humankind. No one knows whether the MOOCs will achieve any of these things, but many academic leaders are certain that, as Stanford President John Hennessy predicts, higher education is about to be hit by a “tsunami.”
What’s driving all this risk-taking and excitement? Many people are convinced that the MOOCs can rein in the rising costs of colleges and universities. For decades, the price of tuition has outstripped the pace of inflation. Over the past ten years, the average sticker price at private colleges has increased by almost 30 percent (though net tuition has risen less because financial aid has grown even faster). At state universities, the problem has been exacerbated by public disinvestment. For example, less than 6 percent of the annual budget of the University of Virginia is covered by state funds. Last fall, I heard the chief financial officer of an urban public university put the matter succinctly: The difficulty, he said, is not so much the cost of college, but the shift of the financial burden from the state to the student.
There are many reasons why college costs continue to soar: the expense of outfitting high-tech science labs, the premium placed on research that lures faculty out of the classroom (and, in turn, requires hiring more faculty to teach classes), the proliferation of staff for everything from handling government regulation to counseling increasingly stressed students. At some institutions, there are also less defensible reasons, such as wasteful duplication, lavish amenities, and excessive pay and perks for top administrators and faculty.
But the most persuasive account of the relentless rise in cost was made nearly 50 years ago by the economist William Baumol and his student William Bowen, who later became president of Princeton. A few months ago, Bowen delivered two lectures in which he revisited his theory of the “cost disease.”1 “In labor-intensive industries,” he explained, “such as the performing arts and education, there is less opportunity than in other sectors to increase productivity by, for example, substituting capital for labor.” Technological advances have allowed the auto industry, for instance, to produce more cars while using fewer workers. Professors, meanwhile, still do things more or less as they have for centuries: talking to, questioning, and evaluating students (ideally in relatively small groups). As the Ohio University economist Richard Vedder likes to joke, “With the possible exception of prostitution . . . teaching is the only profession that has had no productivity advance in the 2,400 years since Socrates.”
This is a true statement—but it unwittingly undercuts its own point: Most people, I suspect, would agree that there are some activities—teaching and prostitution among them—in which improved productivity and economies of scale are not desirable, at least not from the point of view of the consumer.
True believers think that the new digital technologies will finally enable educators to increase productivity by allowing a smaller number of teachers to produce a larger number of “learning outcomes” (today’s term for educated students) than ever before. But it’s too soon to say whether MOOCs will really help cure the cost disease. Their own financial viability is by no means certain. The for-profits must make money for their investors, and the non- profits must return revenue to the universities that give them start-up funds.
Coursera has begun to try out a number of different strategies. It provides a matchmaking service for employers looking to hire people with certain demonstrable skills—a logical extension of a role that colleges already play. When a company expresses interest in a top-performing student, Coursera e-mails the student, offering an introduction, and receives a finder’s fee from the prospective employer. The college that developed the course also receives a cut. As for Udacity, Thrun says only that it charges companies looking for talent “significantly less than you’d pay for a headhunter, but significantly more than what you’d pay for access to LinkedIn.”
A few months ago, Coursera also announced a licensing arrangement with Antioch University, which agreed to pay a fee in return for incorporating selected Coursera offerings into its curriculum. The idea is for students to supplement their online experience by working with on-campus faculty—a practice known as “hybrid” or “blended” learning. The college can expand its course offerings without hiring new faculty, and Coursera can earn income that will be shared by the institutions and professors who develop the courses. So far, however, student interest has been low.
Other possible sources of revenue include selling expertise to universities that want to set up their own MOOCs or partnering with textbook publishers willing to share revenue in exchange for selling to online students. Some MOOCs are also beginning to charge fees for proctored exams (in person or by webcam) for students seeking a certificate marking their successful completion of a course.
If new technologies can cure, or even slow down, the cost disease before it kills the patient, that would be a great public service. The dark side of this bright dream is the fear that online education could burst what appears to be a higher education bubble. Consumers, the argument goes, are already waking up to the fact that they’re paying too much for too little. If they are priced out of, or flee from, the market, they will find new ways to learn outside the brick-and-mortar institutions that, until now, have held a monopoly on providing credentials that certify what graduates have supposedly learned. If that happens, it would be a classic case of “disruptive innovation”—a term popularized by Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen, who argues that, “in industries from computers to cars to steel those entrants that start at the bottom of their markets, selling simple products to less demanding customers and then improving from that foothold, drive the prior leaders into a disruptive demise.”
We’ve already witnessed the first phase of this process. Early consumers of online courses tended to be students with families or jobs for whom full-time attendance at a residential or even a commuter college was out of the question. As underfunded public colleges struggled to meet the needs of such students, private for-profit “universities” such as Phoenix, Kaplan, DeVry, and Strayer emerged. They offer mainly online courses that serve—some would say exploit—an expanding population of consumers (a word increasingly used as a synonym for students). The first time I heard someone commend for-profit universities was five or six years ago, when a savvy investor said to me, “Look at California—the public system can’t meet the demand, so we will step in.” He was making the safe, and sad, assumption that public reinvestment is unlikely to restore what was once an unrivaled system of public higher education. Last August, nearly half a million students found themselves on waiting lists for oversubscribed courses at California’s community colleges.
Many online students meet the low-income eligibility threshold for federal Pell grants—a ripe market for the for-profit universities. These institutions offer cheaper courses than traditional private colleges, usually in practical or technical subjects such as cosmetology or computer programming. Their business model depends heavily on faculty who receive low compensation and on students with high loan obligations. It’s a system that works well for investors. (In 2009, the CEO of Strayer University collected a cool $42 million, mainly in stock options.) How well it works for students is another question. Last summer, a U.S. Senate committee noted that for-profit universities spend more on advertising and recruiting than on instruction and that, without significant reform, they “will continue to turn out hundreds of thousands of students with debt but no degree.”
So far, the for-profit sector has been regarded with disdain or indifference by established universities. This fits the Christensen theory of “disruptive innovation”: The leap by low-end products into higher- end markets is sudden and surprising because the higher-ups have been lulled into thinking their place in the pecking order is unassailable. What has happened to newspapers and publishing are obvious examples. Suddenly everything changes, and the old is swept away by the new.
Because of the durable value of prestige, it will be a long time before Harvard has to fear for its existence. But one reason to think we’re on the cusp of major change is that online courses are particularly well- suited to the new rhythms of student life. On traditional campuses, many students already regard time offline as a form of solitary confinement. Classrooms have become battlegrounds where professors struggle to distract students from their smartphones and laptops. Office hours are giving way to e-mail. To the millions who have used sites such as the Khan Academy, the idea of hour-long lectures spread out over 15-week semesters is already anachronistic. “Disruptive innovation” is a variant of Joseph Schumpeter’s famous declaration that capitalism works by “creative destruction.” What will be innovated and created in our colleges and universities, and what will be disrupted and destroyed?
One vulnerable structure is the faculty itself, which is already in a fragile state. This is especially true of those who teach subjects such as literature, history, and the arts. The humanities account for a static or declining percentage of all degrees conferred, partly because students often doubt their real-world value. And as humanities departments shrink, some institutions are collaborating to shrink them faster (or close them altogether) in order to avoid duplicative hiring in subjects with low student demand. For example, Columbia, Yale, and Cornell have announced a collaboration whereby certain languages—such as Romanian, Tamil, or Yoruba—will be taught via teleconferencing. This is good for students, since the subjects will still be available. But it’s bad for aspiring faculty—as the number of positions dwindles, research and scholarship in these fields will dry up.
MOOCs also seem likely to spur more demand for celebrity professors in a teaching system that is already highly stratified. Among tenured faculty, there is currently a small cadre of stars and a smaller one of superstars—and the MOOCs are creating megastars. Michael Sandel, for example, who teaches a famous course on justice at Harvard, has become a global figure with millions of followers, notably in Asia, since his lectures became available online through Harvard’s website and at a site called Academic Earth. A few months ago, Harvard announced that Sandel had signed up with edX. Sandel is an exceptional educator, but as master-teachers go global, lesser-known colleagues fear being relegated to a supporting role as glorified teaching assistants.
In some respects, this is the latest chapter in an old story of faculty entrepreneurship. By the mid-twentieth century, the president of the University of California, Clark Kerr, was already describing the Berkeley faculty as “individual entrepreneurs held together by a common grievance over parking.” Today, as star professors increasingly work for themselves, more faculty members at less prestigious institutions face low wages, meager benefits, and—since many lack tenure—minimal job security. But if the new technology threatens some professors with obscurity, others face obsolescence. Language instructors may someday be replaced by multilingual versions of Siri on your iPhone. One of my colleagues speaks of the imminent “evisceration” of graduate study, once young people who might have pursued an academic career are deterred as it becomes harder and harder to find a dignified job after years of training.
These prospects raise many pressing questions—not just speculative ones about the future, but actionable ones about the present. What, if anything, can universities do to formulate new rules governing conflicts of interest? As faculty stars relocate to cyberspace, how can institutions sustain the community of teachers and students that has been the essence of the university for a thousand years? (The pacesetting Thrun, who is a vice president of Google, resigned from his tenured teaching post at Stanford, though he remains a “research professor.”) In this brave new world, how can the teaching profession, already well on its way to “adjunctification,” attract young people with a pastoral impulse to awaken and encourage students one by one?
There are also unanswered questions about how much students actually learn from MOOCs. Coursera recently withdrew one course at Georgia Tech because of student discontent and another, at the University of California, Irvine, because the professor disputed how much students were really learning.
So far, most testimonials to the value of online learning come from motivated students, often adults, who seek to build on what they have already learned in traditional educational settings. These are people with clear goals and confidence in their abilities. Stanford has even established an online high school “for gifted students” from around the world (a residential program brings them together in the summers). Its medical school has introduced “lecture halls without lectures,” whereby students use short videos to master the material on their own, then converge in class for discussion of clinical applications of what they’ve learned.
And yet it’s one thing to expect brilliant teens or medical students to be self-starters. It’s another to teach students who are in need of close guidance. A recent report from the Community College Research Center at Columbia finds that underprepared students taking online courses are, according to one of the authors, “falling farther behind than if they were taking face-to-face courses.” Michael Crow, one of the architects of Fathom and now president of Arizona State University and certainly no traditionalist, warns against a future in which “rich kids get taught by professors and poor kids get taught by computer.”
Back in the mid-twentieth century, the Ford Foundation report on “telecourses” asked the key question about technology and education: “How effective is this instruction?” When I came upon that sentence, it put me in mind of something Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote a long time ago. “Truly speaking,” he said, “it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul.”I first understood this distinction during my own student days, while struggling with the theologian Jonathan Edwards’s predestinarian view of life. Toward the end of the course, my teacher, the scholar of American religion Alan Heimert, looked me in the eye and asked: “What is it that bothers you about Edwards? Is it that he’s so hard on self- deception?” This was more than instruction; it was a true provocation. It came from a teacher who listened closely to his students and tried to grasp who they were and who they were trying to become. He knew the difference between knowledge and information. He understood education in the Socratic sense, as a quest for self-knowledge.
Nearly 40 years later, in my own course on American literature, one of my gifted teaching assistants received an e-mail from a student after a discussion on Emerson:
Hi, I just wanted to let you know that our section meeting tonight had a really profound effect on me. ... [T]he way you spoke and the energy our class had really moved me. ...I walked the whole way home staring at the sky, a probably unsafe decision, but a worthwhile one nonetheless. I actually cannot wait for next week's class just so I can dive even further into this. So I just wanted to send you a quick message thanking you, letting you know that this fifty minutes of class has undeniably affected the rest of my life. ... [S]ome fire was lit within me tonight, and I guess I'm blowing the smoke towards you a little bit.
No matter how anxious today’s students may be about gaining this or that competence in a ferociously competitive world, many still crave the enlargement of heart as well as mind that is the gift of true education. It’s hard for me to believe that this kind of experience can happen without face-to-face teaching and the physical presence of other students.
Yet I’m convinced that those leading us into the digital future truly want to dispense the gift of learning more widely than ever before. Currently, the six-year graduation rate at America’s public four-year colleges is approximately 58 percent. It would be a great benefit to society if online education can improve on that record—although it should be noted that, so far, the completion rate by students who sign up for MOOCs is even worse—barely 10 percent.
In one experiment, Udacity is providing remedial courses to students at San Jose State for a much lower price than in-person courses. A bill is now under discussion in the California legislature that would require public colleges to offer online courses to students whom they can’t accommodate in their classrooms. If the new technology can bring great teaching to students who would otherwise never encounter it, that could lessen inequities between the haves and have-nots, just as digital technologies now give students and scholars worldwide access to previously locked-up books and documents. But so far, there is scant evidence on which to base these hopes.
Quite apart from the MOOCs, there’s an impressive array of new efforts to serve low-income students—including the online public Western Governors University, which charges around $6,000 in tuition and awards reputable degrees in such fields as information technology and business. Southern New Hampshire University—also a nonprofit—has moved aggressively into online learning, which it combines with on-campus programs; and Carnegie Mellon University has launched an “open learning initiative” that offers non-credit free courses, with substantial interactive capabilities, and seems to be working well in science, math, and introductory languages.
The best of the new education pioneers have a truly Emersonian passion for remaking the world, for rejecting the stale conviction that change always means degradation. I sense in them a fervent concurrence with Emerson’s refusal to believe “that the world was finished a long time ago” and with his insistence that, “as the world was plastic and fluid in the hands of God, so it is ever to so much of his attributes as we bring to it.”
In the face of such exuberance, it feels foolish and futile to demur. In one form or another, the online future is already here. But unless we are uncommonly wise about how we use this new power, we will find ourselves saying, as Emerson’s friend Henry David Thoreau said about an earlier technological revolution, “We do not ride the railroad; it rides upon us.”
MOOCs of Hazard
Will online education dampen the college experience? Yes. Will it be worth it? Well...
BY ANDREW DELBANCO
In the spring of 2011, Sebastian Thrun was having doubts about whether the classroom was really the right place to teach his course on artificial intelligence. Thrun, a computer-science professor at Stanford, had been inspired by Salman Khan, the founder of the online Khan Academy, whose videos and discussion groups have been used by millions to learn about everything from arithmetic to history. And so that summer, Thrun announced he would offer his fall course on Stanford’s website for free. He reorganized it into short segments rather than hour-long lectures, included problem sets and quizzes, and added a virtual office hour via Google Hangout. Enrollment jumped from 200 Stanford undergraduates to 160,000 students around the world (only 30 remained in the classroom). A few months later, he founded an online for-profit company called Udacity; his course, along with many others, is now available to anyone with a fast Internet connection.
Meanwhile, two of Thrun’s Stanford colleagues, Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng, founded another for-profit company, Coursera, that posts courses taught by faculty from leading universities such as Prince- ton, Michigan, Duke, and Penn. Three million students have signed on. Not to be outdone, Harvard and MIT announced last spring their own online partnership, edX, a nonprofit with an initial investment of $60 million. A new phenomenon requires a new name, and so MOOC—massive open online course—has now entered the lexicon. So far, MOOCs have been true to the first “o” in the acronym: Anyone can take these courses for free.
Many people outside academia—including New York Times columnists David Brooks and Thomas L. Friedman—are gushing that MOOCs are the best thing to happen to learning since movable type. Inside academia, however, they have been met with widespread skepticism. As Joseph Harris, a writing professor at Duke, recently remarked in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “I don’t see how a MOOC can be much more than a digitized textbook.”
In fact, MOOCs are the latest in a long series of efforts to use technology to make education more accessible. Sixty years ago, the Ford Foundation funded a group of academics to study what was then a cutting-edge technology: television. In language almost identical to that used today, a report on the project announced that television had the power to drive down costs, enable the collection of data on how students learn, and extend “the reach of the superior teacher to greater num- bers of students.” From 1957 to 1982, the local CBS channel in New York City broadcast a morning program of college lectures called “Sunrise Semester.” But the sun never rose on television as an educational “delivery system.”
In the 1990s, my own university, Columbia, started a venture called Fathom, using the relatively new technology of the Web. The idea was to sell online courses taught by star faculty such as Simon Schama and Brian Greene to throngs of supposedly eager customers. But the paying consumers never showed up in the anticipated numbers, and by the time it was shut down, Fathom had cost Columbia, according to some estimates, at least $20 million. Looking back, the project’s director, Ann Kirschner, concluded that she and her colleagues had arrived too soon—“pre-broadband, pre-videocasting and iPods, and all the rest.”
Of course, we will always be pre-something. Former University of Michigan President James Duderstadt foresees a technology that will be “totally immersive in all our senses”—something like the “feelies” that Aldous Huxley, in Brave New World, imagined would render the “talkies” obsolete. The MIT Media Lab has already developed a vest that gives you a hug when a friend “likes” something you have posted on Facebook. It may not be long before we can log onto a Shakespeare course taught by, say, Stephen Greenblatt and feel the spray of his saliva as he recites “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.” Such technologies will likely find their biggest market through the pornography industry, but there’s no reason to doubt that academia will adopt and adapt them.
The Luddite in me is inclined to think that the techno-dreamers are headed for another disappointment. But this time around, something does seem different—and it’s not just that the MOOC pioneers have an infectious excitement rarely found in a typical faculty meeting. They also have a striking public-spiritedness. Koller sees a future in which a math prodigy in a developing country might nurture his or her gifts online and then, having been identified by a leading university, enroll in person—on a scholarship, one might imagine, funded by income derived from Coursera. This idea of using online courses as a detection tool is a reprise (on a much larger scale) of the one that spurred the development of standardized tests in the mid-twentieth century, such as the SAT, which was originally envisioned as a means for finding gifted students outside the usual Ivy League “feeder” schools.
Koller speaks with genuine passion about the universal human craving for learning and sees in Internet education a social good that reminds me of Thomas Jefferson’s dream of geniuses being “raked from the rubbish”—by which he meant to affirm the existence of a “natural aristocracy” to be nurtured for the sake of humankind. No one knows whether the MOOCs will achieve any of these things, but many academic leaders are certain that, as Stanford President John Hennessy predicts, higher education is about to be hit by a “tsunami.”
What’s driving all this risk-taking and excitement? Many people are convinced that the MOOCs can rein in the rising costs of colleges and universities. For decades, the price of tuition has outstripped the pace of inflation. Over the past ten years, the average sticker price at private colleges has increased by almost 30 percent (though net tuition has risen less because financial aid has grown even faster). At state universities, the problem has been exacerbated by public disinvestment. For example, less than 6 percent of the annual budget of the University of Virginia is covered by state funds. Last fall, I heard the chief financial officer of an urban public university put the matter succinctly: The difficulty, he said, is not so much the cost of college, but the shift of the financial burden from the state to the student.
There are many reasons why college costs continue to soar: the expense of outfitting high-tech science labs, the premium placed on research that lures faculty out of the classroom (and, in turn, requires hiring more faculty to teach classes), the proliferation of staff for everything from handling government regulation to counseling increasingly stressed students. At some institutions, there are also less defensible reasons, such as wasteful duplication, lavish amenities, and excessive pay and perks for top administrators and faculty.
But the most persuasive account of the relentless rise in cost was made nearly 50 years ago by the economist William Baumol and his student William Bowen, who later became president of Princeton. A few months ago, Bowen delivered two lectures in which he revisited his theory of the “cost disease.”1 “In labor-intensive industries,” he explained, “such as the performing arts and education, there is less opportunity than in other sectors to increase productivity by, for example, substituting capital for labor.” Technological advances have allowed the auto industry, for instance, to produce more cars while using fewer workers. Professors, meanwhile, still do things more or less as they have for centuries: talking to, questioning, and evaluating students (ideally in relatively small groups). As the Ohio University economist Richard Vedder likes to joke, “With the possible exception of prostitution . . . teaching is the only profession that has had no productivity advance in the 2,400 years since Socrates.”
This is a true statement—but it unwittingly undercuts its own point: Most people, I suspect, would agree that there are some activities—teaching and prostitution among them—in which improved productivity and economies of scale are not desirable, at least not from the point of view of the consumer.
True believers think that the new digital technologies will finally enable educators to increase productivity by allowing a smaller number of teachers to produce a larger number of “learning outcomes” (today’s term for educated students) than ever before. But it’s too soon to say whether MOOCs will really help cure the cost disease. Their own financial viability is by no means certain. The for-profits must make money for their investors, and the non- profits must return revenue to the universities that give them start-up funds.
Coursera has begun to try out a number of different strategies. It provides a matchmaking service for employers looking to hire people with certain demonstrable skills—a logical extension of a role that colleges already play. When a company expresses interest in a top-performing student, Coursera e-mails the student, offering an introduction, and receives a finder’s fee from the prospective employer. The college that developed the course also receives a cut. As for Udacity, Thrun says only that it charges companies looking for talent “significantly less than you’d pay for a headhunter, but significantly more than what you’d pay for access to LinkedIn.”
A few months ago, Coursera also announced a licensing arrangement with Antioch University, which agreed to pay a fee in return for incorporating selected Coursera offerings into its curriculum. The idea is for students to supplement their online experience by working with on-campus faculty—a practice known as “hybrid” or “blended” learning. The college can expand its course offerings without hiring new faculty, and Coursera can earn income that will be shared by the institutions and professors who develop the courses. So far, however, student interest has been low.
Other possible sources of revenue include selling expertise to universities that want to set up their own MOOCs or partnering with textbook publishers willing to share revenue in exchange for selling to online students. Some MOOCs are also beginning to charge fees for proctored exams (in person or by webcam) for students seeking a certificate marking their successful completion of a course.
If new technologies can cure, or even slow down, the cost disease before it kills the patient, that would be a great public service. The dark side of this bright dream is the fear that online education could burst what appears to be a higher education bubble. Consumers, the argument goes, are already waking up to the fact that they’re paying too much for too little. If they are priced out of, or flee from, the market, they will find new ways to learn outside the brick-and-mortar institutions that, until now, have held a monopoly on providing credentials that certify what graduates have supposedly learned. If that happens, it would be a classic case of “disruptive innovation”—a term popularized by Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen, who argues that, “in industries from computers to cars to steel those entrants that start at the bottom of their markets, selling simple products to less demanding customers and then improving from that foothold, drive the prior leaders into a disruptive demise.”
We’ve already witnessed the first phase of this process. Early consumers of online courses tended to be students with families or jobs for whom full-time attendance at a residential or even a commuter college was out of the question. As underfunded public colleges struggled to meet the needs of such students, private for-profit “universities” such as Phoenix, Kaplan, DeVry, and Strayer emerged. They offer mainly online courses that serve—some would say exploit—an expanding population of consumers (a word increasingly used as a synonym for students). The first time I heard someone commend for-profit universities was five or six years ago, when a savvy investor said to me, “Look at California—the public system can’t meet the demand, so we will step in.” He was making the safe, and sad, assumption that public reinvestment is unlikely to restore what was once an unrivaled system of public higher education. Last August, nearly half a million students found themselves on waiting lists for oversubscribed courses at California’s community colleges.
Many online students meet the low-income eligibility threshold for federal Pell grants—a ripe market for the for-profit universities. These institutions offer cheaper courses than traditional private colleges, usually in practical or technical subjects such as cosmetology or computer programming. Their business model depends heavily on faculty who receive low compensation and on students with high loan obligations. It’s a system that works well for investors. (In 2009, the CEO of Strayer University collected a cool $42 million, mainly in stock options.) How well it works for students is another question. Last summer, a U.S. Senate committee noted that for-profit universities spend more on advertising and recruiting than on instruction and that, without significant reform, they “will continue to turn out hundreds of thousands of students with debt but no degree.”
So far, the for-profit sector has been regarded with disdain or indifference by established universities. This fits the Christensen theory of “disruptive innovation”: The leap by low-end products into higher- end markets is sudden and surprising because the higher-ups have been lulled into thinking their place in the pecking order is unassailable. What has happened to newspapers and publishing are obvious examples. Suddenly everything changes, and the old is swept away by the new.
Because of the durable value of prestige, it will be a long time before Harvard has to fear for its existence. But one reason to think we’re on the cusp of major change is that online courses are particularly well- suited to the new rhythms of student life. On traditional campuses, many students already regard time offline as a form of solitary confinement. Classrooms have become battlegrounds where professors struggle to distract students from their smartphones and laptops. Office hours are giving way to e-mail. To the millions who have used sites such as the Khan Academy, the idea of hour-long lectures spread out over 15-week semesters is already anachronistic. “Disruptive innovation” is a variant of Joseph Schumpeter’s famous declaration that capitalism works by “creative destruction.” What will be innovated and created in our colleges and universities, and what will be disrupted and destroyed?
One vulnerable structure is the faculty itself, which is already in a fragile state. This is especially true of those who teach subjects such as literature, history, and the arts. The humanities account for a static or declining percentage of all degrees conferred, partly because students often doubt their real-world value. And as humanities departments shrink, some institutions are collaborating to shrink them faster (or close them altogether) in order to avoid duplicative hiring in subjects with low student demand. For example, Columbia, Yale, and Cornell have announced a collaboration whereby certain languages—such as Romanian, Tamil, or Yoruba—will be taught via teleconferencing. This is good for students, since the subjects will still be available. But it’s bad for aspiring faculty—as the number of positions dwindles, research and scholarship in these fields will dry up.
MOOCs also seem likely to spur more demand for celebrity professors in a teaching system that is already highly stratified. Among tenured faculty, there is currently a small cadre of stars and a smaller one of superstars—and the MOOCs are creating megastars. Michael Sandel, for example, who teaches a famous course on justice at Harvard, has become a global figure with millions of followers, notably in Asia, since his lectures became available online through Harvard’s website and at a site called Academic Earth. A few months ago, Harvard announced that Sandel had signed up with edX. Sandel is an exceptional educator, but as master-teachers go global, lesser-known colleagues fear being relegated to a supporting role as glorified teaching assistants.
In some respects, this is the latest chapter in an old story of faculty entrepreneurship. By the mid-twentieth century, the president of the University of California, Clark Kerr, was already describing the Berkeley faculty as “individual entrepreneurs held together by a common grievance over parking.” Today, as star professors increasingly work for themselves, more faculty members at less prestigious institutions face low wages, meager benefits, and—since many lack tenure—minimal job security. But if the new technology threatens some professors with obscurity, others face obsolescence. Language instructors may someday be replaced by multilingual versions of Siri on your iPhone. One of my colleagues speaks of the imminent “evisceration” of graduate study, once young people who might have pursued an academic career are deterred as it becomes harder and harder to find a dignified job after years of training.
These prospects raise many pressing questions—not just speculative ones about the future, but actionable ones about the present. What, if anything, can universities do to formulate new rules governing conflicts of interest? As faculty stars relocate to cyberspace, how can institutions sustain the community of teachers and students that has been the essence of the university for a thousand years? (The pacesetting Thrun, who is a vice president of Google, resigned from his tenured teaching post at Stanford, though he remains a “research professor.”) In this brave new world, how can the teaching profession, already well on its way to “adjunctification,” attract young people with a pastoral impulse to awaken and encourage students one by one?
There are also unanswered questions about how much students actually learn from MOOCs. Coursera recently withdrew one course at Georgia Tech because of student discontent and another, at the University of California, Irvine, because the professor disputed how much students were really learning.
So far, most testimonials to the value of online learning come from motivated students, often adults, who seek to build on what they have already learned in traditional educational settings. These are people with clear goals and confidence in their abilities. Stanford has even established an online high school “for gifted students” from around the world (a residential program brings them together in the summers). Its medical school has introduced “lecture halls without lectures,” whereby students use short videos to master the material on their own, then converge in class for discussion of clinical applications of what they’ve learned.
And yet it’s one thing to expect brilliant teens or medical students to be self-starters. It’s another to teach students who are in need of close guidance. A recent report from the Community College Research Center at Columbia finds that underprepared students taking online courses are, according to one of the authors, “falling farther behind than if they were taking face-to-face courses.” Michael Crow, one of the architects of Fathom and now president of Arizona State University and certainly no traditionalist, warns against a future in which “rich kids get taught by professors and poor kids get taught by computer.”
Back in the mid-twentieth century, the Ford Foundation report on “telecourses” asked the key question about technology and education: “How effective is this instruction?” When I came upon that sentence, it put me in mind of something Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote a long time ago. “Truly speaking,” he said, “it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul.”I first understood this distinction during my own student days, while struggling with the theologian Jonathan Edwards’s predestinarian view of life. Toward the end of the course, my teacher, the scholar of American religion Alan Heimert, looked me in the eye and asked: “What is it that bothers you about Edwards? Is it that he’s so hard on self- deception?” This was more than instruction; it was a true provocation. It came from a teacher who listened closely to his students and tried to grasp who they were and who they were trying to become. He knew the difference between knowledge and information. He understood education in the Socratic sense, as a quest for self-knowledge.
Nearly 40 years later, in my own course on American literature, one of my gifted teaching assistants received an e-mail from a student after a discussion on Emerson:
Hi, I just wanted to let you know that our section meeting tonight had a really profound effect on me. ... [T]he way you spoke and the energy our class had really moved me. ...I walked the whole way home staring at the sky, a probably unsafe decision, but a worthwhile one nonetheless. I actually cannot wait for next week's class just so I can dive even further into this. So I just wanted to send you a quick message thanking you, letting you know that this fifty minutes of class has undeniably affected the rest of my life. ... [S]ome fire was lit within me tonight, and I guess I'm blowing the smoke towards you a little bit.
No matter how anxious today’s students may be about gaining this or that competence in a ferociously competitive world, many still crave the enlargement of heart as well as mind that is the gift of true education. It’s hard for me to believe that this kind of experience can happen without face-to-face teaching and the physical presence of other students.
Yet I’m convinced that those leading us into the digital future truly want to dispense the gift of learning more widely than ever before. Currently, the six-year graduation rate at America’s public four-year colleges is approximately 58 percent. It would be a great benefit to society if online education can improve on that record—although it should be noted that, so far, the completion rate by students who sign up for MOOCs is even worse—barely 10 percent.
In one experiment, Udacity is providing remedial courses to students at San Jose State for a much lower price than in-person courses. A bill is now under discussion in the California legislature that would require public colleges to offer online courses to students whom they can’t accommodate in their classrooms. If the new technology can bring great teaching to students who would otherwise never encounter it, that could lessen inequities between the haves and have-nots, just as digital technologies now give students and scholars worldwide access to previously locked-up books and documents. But so far, there is scant evidence on which to base these hopes.
Quite apart from the MOOCs, there’s an impressive array of new efforts to serve low-income students—including the online public Western Governors University, which charges around $6,000 in tuition and awards reputable degrees in such fields as information technology and business. Southern New Hampshire University—also a nonprofit—has moved aggressively into online learning, which it combines with on-campus programs; and Carnegie Mellon University has launched an “open learning initiative” that offers non-credit free courses, with substantial interactive capabilities, and seems to be working well in science, math, and introductory languages.
The best of the new education pioneers have a truly Emersonian passion for remaking the world, for rejecting the stale conviction that change always means degradation. I sense in them a fervent concurrence with Emerson’s refusal to believe “that the world was finished a long time ago” and with his insistence that, “as the world was plastic and fluid in the hands of God, so it is ever to so much of his attributes as we bring to it.”
In the face of such exuberance, it feels foolish and futile to demur. In one form or another, the online future is already here. But unless we are uncommonly wise about how we use this new power, we will find ourselves saying, as Emerson’s friend Henry David Thoreau said about an earlier technological revolution, “We do not ride the railroad; it rides upon us.”
42
I am reading the autobriography of Jackie Robinson in anticipation of seeing the movie next weekend. It's actually quite goood.
Thursday, April 11, 2013
The Flaw in the President's Budget Plan
Obama’s Master Budget Strategy Has One Huge FlawBy Jonathan Chait 0 16
One thing that came through in a briefing yesterday with senior Obama administration officials is that, whatever their view of the likelihood of striking a Grand Bargain with Republicans on the budget, Obama really sees this as the political keystone to his second term.
As a piece of political analysis, I think Obama is correct about this. Substantively, the budget deficit is not unimportant but certainly far less important than nearly everybody says. But the perception is pretty well set by now. And the public perception has remained firm for the entire Obama presidency that runaway budget deficits and excessive spending are crises. It’s not just conservatives who think this – 96 percent of Obama’s own voters consider the deficit a problem. What’s more, the mere fact of controlling the deficit probably won’t dent this perception. The deficit is falling very rapidly, but 90 percent of voters believe otherwise.
The only way to turn around this perception is to strike some kind of Grand Bargain. That would provide Obama with the dramatic tableau he needs — a Rose Garden ceremony with members of both parties and swooning praise from the legions of commentators who have spent his presidency lambasting him for failing to reduce the deficit. As a political objective, if not necessarily as a policy objective, the Grand Bargain makes perfect sense for Obama. It could clear away the political black cloud that has hung over his entire presidency.
But here is the problem: Republicans surely grasp this as well. They don’t want to clear away the black cloud hanging over Obama’s presidency. That black cloud is the only thing they have going for them. The recovery, while slow, is likely to churn along through 2014 and probably 2016. Obama has conducted his foreign policy in a popular way, has generally owned the center on social issues, and, thus far, escaped even the slightest whiff of scandal. For Republicans to stand beside Obama and announce that they have solved the “deficit crisis” would retroactively legitimize the entire Obama presidency. The hated stimulus, Obamacare — all of it could now be justified to skeptical centrist voters as necessary steps to achieve popular goals.
You can see this calculation played out in Paul Ryan’s dismissive response to Obama’s budget. When Obama first tried to strike a Grand Bargain with Republicans, in 2011, John Boehner wanted to cut a deal. But Paul Ryan helped persuade Eric Cantor to nix it, because it would help Obama win reelection:
Mr. Ryan’s enormous influence was apparent last summer when Representative Eric Cantor, the second most powerful House Republican, told Mr. Obama during negotiations over an attempted bipartisan “grand bargain” that Mr. Ryan disliked its policy and was concerned that a deal would pave the way for Mr. Obama’s easy reelection, according to a Democrat and a Republican who were briefed on the conversation.
Obama has expressed his hope that putting his election behind him would change the GOP’s calculus. It changes it a little, but not that much. Republicans still want to win control of the Senate in 2014 and take back the presidency in 2016. And Republicans may express their position in the popular language of deficit reduction, but they also have a fundamentally different vision of the role of government. The Ryan budget is a plan to privatize retirement programs, protect the makers from the takers, and restore access to medical care as something you earn rather than a basic entitlement.
Republicans need the perception of a deficit crisis to persuade Americans that this is necessary. I don’t mean to make their calculation sound unduly cynical. Ryan genuinely believes that the ethos of the New Deal inherently leads to the kind of moral and fiscal collapse that Ayn Rand warned of. An Obama-style solution to increase revenue and trim spending without altering the basic role of the state merely obscures and delays what he is certain is a deep and incurable rot. A Grand Bargain is just about the worst thing that could happen to Paul Ryan.
A “longtime White House aide” explains to Politico why Obama is eager to settle the deficit issue now, when he can have a say over its terms: “We’re not going to have the White House forever, folks. If [Obama] doesn’t do this, Paul Ryan is going to do it for us in a few years.” By “it,” they mean reducing the deficit, but in a Ryan-esque way that hammers the poor and spares the rich.
That is probably true. This is also the flaw in their plan. Their goal of foreclosing the possibility of Paul Ryan imposing his vision upon America requires the assent of Paul Ryan.
One thing that came through in a briefing yesterday with senior Obama administration officials is that, whatever their view of the likelihood of striking a Grand Bargain with Republicans on the budget, Obama really sees this as the political keystone to his second term.
As a piece of political analysis, I think Obama is correct about this. Substantively, the budget deficit is not unimportant but certainly far less important than nearly everybody says. But the perception is pretty well set by now. And the public perception has remained firm for the entire Obama presidency that runaway budget deficits and excessive spending are crises. It’s not just conservatives who think this – 96 percent of Obama’s own voters consider the deficit a problem. What’s more, the mere fact of controlling the deficit probably won’t dent this perception. The deficit is falling very rapidly, but 90 percent of voters believe otherwise.
The only way to turn around this perception is to strike some kind of Grand Bargain. That would provide Obama with the dramatic tableau he needs — a Rose Garden ceremony with members of both parties and swooning praise from the legions of commentators who have spent his presidency lambasting him for failing to reduce the deficit. As a political objective, if not necessarily as a policy objective, the Grand Bargain makes perfect sense for Obama. It could clear away the political black cloud that has hung over his entire presidency.
But here is the problem: Republicans surely grasp this as well. They don’t want to clear away the black cloud hanging over Obama’s presidency. That black cloud is the only thing they have going for them. The recovery, while slow, is likely to churn along through 2014 and probably 2016. Obama has conducted his foreign policy in a popular way, has generally owned the center on social issues, and, thus far, escaped even the slightest whiff of scandal. For Republicans to stand beside Obama and announce that they have solved the “deficit crisis” would retroactively legitimize the entire Obama presidency. The hated stimulus, Obamacare — all of it could now be justified to skeptical centrist voters as necessary steps to achieve popular goals.
You can see this calculation played out in Paul Ryan’s dismissive response to Obama’s budget. When Obama first tried to strike a Grand Bargain with Republicans, in 2011, John Boehner wanted to cut a deal. But Paul Ryan helped persuade Eric Cantor to nix it, because it would help Obama win reelection:
Mr. Ryan’s enormous influence was apparent last summer when Representative Eric Cantor, the second most powerful House Republican, told Mr. Obama during negotiations over an attempted bipartisan “grand bargain” that Mr. Ryan disliked its policy and was concerned that a deal would pave the way for Mr. Obama’s easy reelection, according to a Democrat and a Republican who were briefed on the conversation.
Obama has expressed his hope that putting his election behind him would change the GOP’s calculus. It changes it a little, but not that much. Republicans still want to win control of the Senate in 2014 and take back the presidency in 2016. And Republicans may express their position in the popular language of deficit reduction, but they also have a fundamentally different vision of the role of government. The Ryan budget is a plan to privatize retirement programs, protect the makers from the takers, and restore access to medical care as something you earn rather than a basic entitlement.
Republicans need the perception of a deficit crisis to persuade Americans that this is necessary. I don’t mean to make their calculation sound unduly cynical. Ryan genuinely believes that the ethos of the New Deal inherently leads to the kind of moral and fiscal collapse that Ayn Rand warned of. An Obama-style solution to increase revenue and trim spending without altering the basic role of the state merely obscures and delays what he is certain is a deep and incurable rot. A Grand Bargain is just about the worst thing that could happen to Paul Ryan.
A “longtime White House aide” explains to Politico why Obama is eager to settle the deficit issue now, when he can have a say over its terms: “We’re not going to have the White House forever, folks. If [Obama] doesn’t do this, Paul Ryan is going to do it for us in a few years.” By “it,” they mean reducing the deficit, but in a Ryan-esque way that hammers the poor and spares the rich.
That is probably true. This is also the flaw in their plan. Their goal of foreclosing the possibility of Paul Ryan imposing his vision upon America requires the assent of Paul Ryan.
I've Been Reading
I've been reading noir fiction of the 30's and 40's to expand my meager literary horizons---writers like James M. Cain & Horace McCoy (They Shoot Horses, Don't They?). I've had enough of Thackeray and Hardy for the time being. But don't worry. I am not going to bite my wife when I kiss her, and I am not going to turn into a drifter or a grifter. I have my hankerings, but I am not going to share them on Facebook. The local DA wouldn't understand.
Tuesday, April 9, 2013
Perlstein on Conservatives
Where the past isn’t even past.
.Why Conservatives Think the Ends Justify the Means
Rick Perlstein on April 8, 2013 - 10:44 AM ET
Let's continue my series on the continuities on the American right: the stockpiling of guns for the coming apocalypse; the panic over textbooks and the passion for reckless spending cuts; the horror at the government sponsoring pre-school education—and, for today, the comfort the right harbors for minoritarianism: the conviction that conservatives are fit to rule even if they don't actually win elections. We've been reading about that and again these days in the way the Republican Party does business: the "Hastert rule" which doesn't let a measure get to the House floor if it can't win a majority of Republicans even if the majority of all House members want it; the Republican embrace of gerrymandering that guarantees Republican congressional majorities in states Obama won decidedly like Pennylvania; the Republican comfort with the disenfranchisement of Democratic constituencies that the Nation's Ari Berman has been covering so effectively these days. This comes from somewhere—from the nature of conservatism itself. It is an old, old story.
Let's start, though, with a question of first principles, one absolutely crucial to understanding the difference between liberalism and conservatism, one that goes very deep at the cognitive level. We'll be returning to it when I arrive at the crucial question of how that which liberals consider hypocrisy functions on the right. That first principle is the matter of procedure versus norms. As I wrote in a 2003 review of Eric Alterman's book What Liberal Media?
We Americans love to cite the “political spectrum” as the best way to classify ideologies. The metaphor is incorrect: it implies symmetry. But left and right today are not opposites. They are different species. It has to do with core principles. To put it abstractly, the right always has in mind a prescriptive vision of its ideal future world—a normative vision. Unlike the left (at least since Karl Marx neglected to include an actual description of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” within the 2,500 pages of Das Kapital), conservatives have always known what the world would look like after their revolution: hearth, home, church, a businessman’s republic. The dominant strain of the American left, on the other hand, certainly since the decline of the socialist left, fetishizes fairness, openness, and diversity. (Liberals have no problem with home, hearth, and church in themselves; they just see them as one viable life-style option among many.) If the stakes for liberals are fair procedures, the stakes for conservatives are last things: either humanity trends toward Grace, or it hurtles toward Armageddon.
A very important point. It has to do, too, with the almost opposite definitions liberals and conservatives affix to the word "principle." For liberals, generally speaking, honoring procedures—means—is the core of what being "principled" means. For conservatives, fighting for the right outcome—ends—even at the expense of procedural nicety, is what being "principled" means. Think of it it, allegorically, this way: imagine in Washington DC, near Capitol Hill, a little old lady is crossing a hazardous street. A fastidious liberal congressmen, proud of always acting in a principled way in all things, stops to help her across the street—even though that means he might be late for a key vote (the sacrifice of an end, in itself, confirms his principled nature). A fastidious conservative congressman, on the other hand, leaves the lady to her fate and makes the vote (because the upholding of the end, in itself, is where honor lies—and dishonor rests, in the ultimate term of derision righties reserve for each other, in being a "squish").
In short, if you're a conservative, isn't the point of an election to win, so you can bend the world to your will, no matter the means it takes to get there? Even if you don't necessarily have the majority's support?
Here are some historical illustrations. Again and again, when I was doing research in the papers of Clarence Manion, the pioneering conservative activist who was the first to try to draft Barry Goldwater as the Republican presidential candidate, I ran across references to schemes to run conservative third party candidates. One, in 1956, ran T. Coleman Andrews, Eisenhower's former commissioner of public revenue—who now considered the states' income-tax-creating Sixteenth Amendment his charge to enforce, as a "sign[ing] away the powers that were reserved to them by the Constitution as a safeguard against degeneration of the union of states into an all-powerful central government!" Another, aimed at 1960, looked to draft Arkansas's segregationist Orval Faubus.
They planned these efforts not in the expectation that they might win, but with an eye just toward getting enough support to deny the front runner the Constitutional required majority in the Electoral College. Without that majority 270 electoral votes, the election gets thrown into the House of Representatives—something a nice procedural liberal might consider a dangerously divisive Constitutional crisis, but which I found Manion and his pals considering an outcome devoutly to be wished. For that way, right-wing congressmen could sell their votes in exchange for policy concessions—and a conservative minority that knew it was right could bend the world to its will.
That sort of cleverness, of course, no longer became necessary as the idea of making the Republican Party a vehicle for the conservative movement tout court came to seem more and more viable. Such that, as the late New Right founding father Paul Weyrich once put it, "I don't want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of the people. They never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down." Which was pretty damned brazen, considering he was co-founder of an organization called the Moral Majority.
Now, of course, for over a decade now, the brazenness is institutionalized within the very vitals of one of our two political parties. You just elect yourself a Republican attorney general, and he does his level best to squeeze as many minority voters from the roles as he can force the law to allow. And a conservative state legislature, so they can gerrymander the hell out of their state, such that, as a Texas Republican congressional aid close to Tom Delay wrote in a 2003 email, "This has a real national impact that should assure that Republicans keep the House no matter the national mood." Or you lose the popular vote in the 2000 presidential election but win in the electoral college—then declare a mandate to privatize Social Security, like George Bush did.
Which only makes sense, if you're trying to save civilization from hurtling toward Armageddon. That's how conservatives think. To quote one Christian right leader, "We ought to see clearly that the end does justify the means...If the method I am using to accomplishes the goal I am aiming at, it is for that reason a good method."
.Why Conservatives Think the Ends Justify the Means
Rick Perlstein on April 8, 2013 - 10:44 AM ET
Let's continue my series on the continuities on the American right: the stockpiling of guns for the coming apocalypse; the panic over textbooks and the passion for reckless spending cuts; the horror at the government sponsoring pre-school education—and, for today, the comfort the right harbors for minoritarianism: the conviction that conservatives are fit to rule even if they don't actually win elections. We've been reading about that and again these days in the way the Republican Party does business: the "Hastert rule" which doesn't let a measure get to the House floor if it can't win a majority of Republicans even if the majority of all House members want it; the Republican embrace of gerrymandering that guarantees Republican congressional majorities in states Obama won decidedly like Pennylvania; the Republican comfort with the disenfranchisement of Democratic constituencies that the Nation's Ari Berman has been covering so effectively these days. This comes from somewhere—from the nature of conservatism itself. It is an old, old story.
Let's start, though, with a question of first principles, one absolutely crucial to understanding the difference between liberalism and conservatism, one that goes very deep at the cognitive level. We'll be returning to it when I arrive at the crucial question of how that which liberals consider hypocrisy functions on the right. That first principle is the matter of procedure versus norms. As I wrote in a 2003 review of Eric Alterman's book What Liberal Media?
We Americans love to cite the “political spectrum” as the best way to classify ideologies. The metaphor is incorrect: it implies symmetry. But left and right today are not opposites. They are different species. It has to do with core principles. To put it abstractly, the right always has in mind a prescriptive vision of its ideal future world—a normative vision. Unlike the left (at least since Karl Marx neglected to include an actual description of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” within the 2,500 pages of Das Kapital), conservatives have always known what the world would look like after their revolution: hearth, home, church, a businessman’s republic. The dominant strain of the American left, on the other hand, certainly since the decline of the socialist left, fetishizes fairness, openness, and diversity. (Liberals have no problem with home, hearth, and church in themselves; they just see them as one viable life-style option among many.) If the stakes for liberals are fair procedures, the stakes for conservatives are last things: either humanity trends toward Grace, or it hurtles toward Armageddon.
A very important point. It has to do, too, with the almost opposite definitions liberals and conservatives affix to the word "principle." For liberals, generally speaking, honoring procedures—means—is the core of what being "principled" means. For conservatives, fighting for the right outcome—ends—even at the expense of procedural nicety, is what being "principled" means. Think of it it, allegorically, this way: imagine in Washington DC, near Capitol Hill, a little old lady is crossing a hazardous street. A fastidious liberal congressmen, proud of always acting in a principled way in all things, stops to help her across the street—even though that means he might be late for a key vote (the sacrifice of an end, in itself, confirms his principled nature). A fastidious conservative congressman, on the other hand, leaves the lady to her fate and makes the vote (because the upholding of the end, in itself, is where honor lies—and dishonor rests, in the ultimate term of derision righties reserve for each other, in being a "squish").
In short, if you're a conservative, isn't the point of an election to win, so you can bend the world to your will, no matter the means it takes to get there? Even if you don't necessarily have the majority's support?
Here are some historical illustrations. Again and again, when I was doing research in the papers of Clarence Manion, the pioneering conservative activist who was the first to try to draft Barry Goldwater as the Republican presidential candidate, I ran across references to schemes to run conservative third party candidates. One, in 1956, ran T. Coleman Andrews, Eisenhower's former commissioner of public revenue—who now considered the states' income-tax-creating Sixteenth Amendment his charge to enforce, as a "sign[ing] away the powers that were reserved to them by the Constitution as a safeguard against degeneration of the union of states into an all-powerful central government!" Another, aimed at 1960, looked to draft Arkansas's segregationist Orval Faubus.
They planned these efforts not in the expectation that they might win, but with an eye just toward getting enough support to deny the front runner the Constitutional required majority in the Electoral College. Without that majority 270 electoral votes, the election gets thrown into the House of Representatives—something a nice procedural liberal might consider a dangerously divisive Constitutional crisis, but which I found Manion and his pals considering an outcome devoutly to be wished. For that way, right-wing congressmen could sell their votes in exchange for policy concessions—and a conservative minority that knew it was right could bend the world to its will.
That sort of cleverness, of course, no longer became necessary as the idea of making the Republican Party a vehicle for the conservative movement tout court came to seem more and more viable. Such that, as the late New Right founding father Paul Weyrich once put it, "I don't want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of the people. They never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down." Which was pretty damned brazen, considering he was co-founder of an organization called the Moral Majority.
Now, of course, for over a decade now, the brazenness is institutionalized within the very vitals of one of our two political parties. You just elect yourself a Republican attorney general, and he does his level best to squeeze as many minority voters from the roles as he can force the law to allow. And a conservative state legislature, so they can gerrymander the hell out of their state, such that, as a Texas Republican congressional aid close to Tom Delay wrote in a 2003 email, "This has a real national impact that should assure that Republicans keep the House no matter the national mood." Or you lose the popular vote in the 2000 presidential election but win in the electoral college—then declare a mandate to privatize Social Security, like George Bush did.
Which only makes sense, if you're trying to save civilization from hurtling toward Armageddon. That's how conservatives think. To quote one Christian right leader, "We ought to see clearly that the end does justify the means...If the method I am using to accomplishes the goal I am aiming at, it is for that reason a good method."
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