The Pathetic University

After the American Century

I have been teaching full time since 1974. In all those years I have seldom found that the classroom equipment was up-to-date or that it could be counted upon to work. The only exceptions to that statement would be the University of Oviedo, Spain in 1977-78, when there was no classroom equipment of any kind, and Notre Dame University in Indiana in 2003, where everything imaginable was available, everything worked and a staff was on call to help and would arrive within 5 minutes if anything wasn't satisfactory. Between these two extremes, in an unhappy compromise, is my own university, which has badly placed screens, old powerpoint projectors, electrical connections that do not always work, different systems in different rooms, and a staff that can never be found or even spoken to on the phone in an emergency, of which there are many.

I say all this to inform the outside world, really. No one should labor under the illusion that Danish universities are well equipped with computers and the peripheral equipment to make the most of them. No one should imagine that they are at the level achieved in the US in 2003, for example. The occasion for writing this is that today I have five hours of teaching in a room where the equipment does not work, and clearly has been damaged. Since we are in the midst of a round of cutbacks, the situation will only get worse.

So today, instead of showing my students nineteenth century American paintings that interpreted Niagara Falls and the Grand Canyon, I will just talk about them. I will try to post the images later on Blackboard, but that, too, has not been working of late. Even when the images do get on line, students will view them alone and without class discussion.

As a historian of technology, I am hardly shocked that these machines do not work. But I am bemused that the Danish politicians still think they can hoodwink the public into believing that they have a world class university system, after systematically cutting it back for years.

Obama's Proposed Federal Budget Cuts for Education and Mass Transit

After the American Century

This is the first year that President Obama and his administration can be said to be fully responsible for the budget proposal. Last year they had just started, and there was little time to dig deeply into the details of federal spending. In what follows I want to focus on spending cuts in the area of education, because during the election campaign candidate Obama seemed to understand the need to improve the levels of learning in the United States. The future belongs to the best educated nation, with a workforce that can innovate and redeploy their resources. Or so it was said.

Now the actual spending proposals suggest no more commitment than under the previous administration. Here are some examples of the cutbacks:

Academic competitiveness, smart grants -58%

School improvement: -55%

Education for the Disadvantaged -31.9%

Special education: - 4.7%

Vocational and adult education: -3.7%

International educational exchange programs: - 0.3%

To be fair, there are other programs that have are slated to receive increases, and this is a difficult budget year. Nevertheless. these cutbacks are disheartening.

What about transportation? One hoped to see an Obama Administration promoting mass transit. The proposal, however, is for a 35% cut for railroads, and a 9% cut for mass transit in the discretionary part of the budget. There is mandated spending on railroads that remains unchanged. By far the lion's share of the transportation budget is mandated, and must be spent on highways. Next at the federal feeding frenzy are the airports, which receive much more than the railroads.

In short, the vast economic mess that the Bush Administration left behind has not only made it hard for Obama to move in a new direction, it seems to make it virtually impossible until the economy improves.

Even when it does improve, however, the increased interest on the national debt will eat up the money that once might have been used for education, transportation, and social programs. The interest payments next year will rise by 33% to $ 251 billion. Just paying the interest on the debt will be greater than the entire budgets for transportation and education combined, with energy thrown in for good measure.

Make Corporations Full Citizens

After the American Century #207

In American law the idea developed that corporations ought to be considered individuals – or persons. This idea makes a certain sense if narrowly interpreted. For example, a corporation, like a person, can be governed by the same laws regarding contracts. The corporate “person” could also be sued for liable. But in a revolutionary ruling last week, the United States Supreme Court decided that corporations also have the right to free speech and are protected by the Bill of Rights. The Court might have ruled far more narrowly but instead went out of its way to declare that corporations may advertise freely and directly in political campaigns. (Logically, the Court should also have given corporations the right to vote in elections, but perhaps it is saving that decision for another time.)

In the interest of making corporations into better fellow citizens, here are specific proposals to help them achieve a fuller humanity, since that is what the Court clearly desires.

1. Slavery being outlawed by the Constitution, it therefore should be illegal for one corporation to own another corporation. Holding companies clearly are a modern form of slavery that must be eliminated.

2. Hostile corporate takeovers must henceforth be regarded as acts of aggression that are punishable as crimes. A hostile takeover of a corporation must be considered a form of kidnapping, in some cases followed by murder, and punished accordingly.

3. Corporations that close down should be subjected to the same laws of taxation as the estates of deceased individuals. As it is now, companies can more resources around, closing down one company and opening a new one as often as they wish, without being subject to the taxation (and in effect the audit) imposed on a human being’s estate.

4. Since human beings are not immortal, it seems only fair that corporations be declared legally dead every 60 years (this being the maximum length of most person’s adult life). This death could be followed immediately be corporate rebirth, but only after paying the estate taxes.

5. Corporations should be punished for murder in the same way that people are. If they want to be considered persons, then they cannot pick and choose which legal obligations they want to assume. At present, when a corporation pollutes the air or water and as a matter of statistical certainty, makes some people ill and causes others to die, the “normal” practice is to fine them and to force them to pay compensation to the victims. This is not right, as it allows a wealthy “person” to substitute a cash payment for imprisonment. Real people cannot do that, why should corporations be allowed to get off? The people who give themselves those big corporate bonuses and stock options must also now be held criminally liable for the corporation’s behavior if they accept the payments.

6. The old idea of the corporation included the provision that people who invested in them had limited liability. That is, they could lose only the money originally invested, but had no personal responsibility in case the corporation ran up huge debts. In the nineteenth century, when corporations first were becoming a common way of organizing a business, many ordinary people protested. It seemed unfair that an ordinary grocer or carpenter was fully liable for his actions, while a vast corporation that owned many grocery stores or built many houses had limited liability. Clearly, now that the Court in its infinite wisdom has ruled by a vote of 5-4 that corporations have political rights, it follows that they can no longer claim limited liability. If they want to claim the rights of people, then they muse assume the obligations of people. Alternately, one would have to extend the same right of “limited liability” to all Americans, not just corporate Americans.

Now that the Court has ordered us to welcome corporations into full membership in political and civil society, the essential thing is to make sure that they take on ALL the obligations of citizenship.

What Happened? Massachusetts Senate Seat

After the American Century

I arrived in Boston a few hours before the Democrats lost what had been "the Kennedy seat" in the US Senate since 1952. Scott Brown, the unknown Republican State Senator who came from 30 points behind to win the seat, is now being portrayed as a brilliant fellow who ran a great campaign. Actually, he appears to be an ordinary fellow who worked hard and did not give up, while his opponent, Martha Coakley, scarcely ran a campaign at all. He ran advertisements attacking her, and she... did nothing. No response. This happened several times, including one advertisement where Brown portrayed himself as the true heir of Jack Kennedy. She should have skewered him for such silly posturing. She did not. Indeed, she even went on vacation during the campaign. On vacation less than three weeks before the election? This is what you do to convince the public you care about their problems? You go on vacation to the sunny Caribbean for an entire week?

She was not even trying. Why not? Because she never really had to fight for an office, always winning easily in the past. I spoke today with a experienced observer of Massachusetts politics who has met or at least heard in person many of the leaders since c. 1960. He said that she is intelligent and rather impressive, but she did not speak a language that resonated with the voters. Scott Brown did.

Who voted for him? Where did his 53% come from? The suburbs. They voted in droves. Who voted for her? The cities - all of them - but turnout was weak there. For the electorate as a whole it was 50%, not too bad for a special election with only one office to be decided. But that figure hides the disparity between suburbanites who were far more likely to vote, while people in the cities of Worcester, Boston, Springfield, and Pittsfield, were far less enthusiastic. Turnout created that margin of victory of 5%. Also note: for a Republican to win in Massachusetts, a solid majority of Independents and some Democrats are needed.

Pundits are reading this as a rejection of Obama's health plan. Maybe, but consider that Massachusetts already has a state health plan, and that Scott Brown voted for it. He is not at all like a Republican from Mississippi or Alabama. He belongs in the Romney wing of the party, not the Bible thumpers from Dixie or the uninformed in Alaska. The election seems to have been a lot more complicated that a referendum on that bill, whose fate is now unclear. Brown voiced anger at bankers, at unemployment, and at Washington. Coakley ran a weak campaign, without sufficient help from the national Democratic Party, which should never have let her go on vacation, never have left Brown's TV advertisements go unanswered, and never have taken that Senate seat for granted.

Curiously, in just one year Obama has become, in the eyes of Brown voters, the Washington establishment that Obama himself set out to overturn. In contrast, Ronald Reagan was particularly good at running against Washington even when he was sitting in the White House.

2000-2010: The Flat Decade

After the American Century

This time of year one takes stock, and that usually means reconsidering the last 12 months. But as we reach 2010, I think also of the last decade in America.

It was not a good decade. The United States in 2000 was rapidly paying off its national debt. Its economy had created millions of new jobs in the 1990s. Trust in the banking system was high. The nation was basically at peace.

Ten years later none of this is true. It has been a flat decade, with little to show for itself. The national debt is growing rapidly. Almost no new jobs have been created, on aggregate since 2000. The Dow Jones Industrial Average is now about where it was in 2000, after gyrating uncomfortably up and down, and people rightly are suspicious of bankers. Worse of all, the United States has spent huge amounts of money on dubious wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And hanging over the whole decade like the pall of smoke rising from the fallen World Trade Center is the specter of terrorism.

There are bright spots, the most noteworthy being the election of President Obama. But even that success is tempered by the realization that the Congress lacks a sense of national purpose and has tremendous difficulty rising above the level of petty in-fighting and party squabbles. It compares poorly with the Congress of 1933, when Roosevelt passed a wide range of important legislation. In 2009 a comprehensive health bill has almost been completed, but we await final negotiations between the Senate and the House to find out just how good or bad the final result will be.

2009 was also the year when when attempts to reign in rampant CO2 and global warming went off the rails at the Copenhagen Summit. It was the end of decade of often mindless growth in the developing world, which seems intent on making every industrial mistake that the West pioneered decades ago: smog, lead poisoning, urban congestion, the "car culture," and, of course, my readers can complete this list. Should we really celebrate the fact that China's growth rate was roughly 9% per year during this decade, and that it now buys several million more automobiles than the US every year?

But hope springs eternal, as indeed it must, and here are some wishes for 2010. That the global birth rate falls rapidly toward sustainable replacement of the existing population. That consumers discover contentment with environmentally safe products and high-mileage cars. That voters insist on more and better mass transit. That bankers act more responsibly. (OK the last one is probably an absurd wish). That the US economy embraces solar and wind energy, even if Congress spinelessly does little to encourage it. That the need for any foreign military in Iraq really does wind down. And that confrontations between Christians and Muslims become less common, as dialogue and mutual respect replace demagoguery and fear.

Human beings could accomplish all of these things, starting in 2010. In theory I could also lose some weight in 2010 but my past history suggests that even this will prove a hard New York's resolution to hang on to. So, modestly, let us hope that we all do a little bettter in 2010.