Shots in the Dark

Don’t you love it when corporate executives reveal just how out of touch they are?

At a media conference yesterday, Martin Nisholz, president of New York Times Digital, defended his company’s decision to start charging $50 for online access to the Times’ archives and its columnists.

“There comes a point at which you have to say, ‘Where is the value equation?’ when you are talking about online media,” Nisenhold said. As I’ve suggested before, when people start using language like “value equation,” you know they’re trying to sugarcoat something they’d find hard to defend in plain language.

He then added: “For the cost of roughly two and a half martinis, you can have access to the entire archives.”

Hmmm…I don’t know about you, but I’m not throwing back $20 martinis. If Nisholz is, the Times is either a) paying him too much, or b) needs to start paying attention to his expense account.

But what the paper really needs to consider is how that kind of “let them drink martinis” attitude reflects a class-based view of the electronic world…and whether such a dismissive attitude towards the vast majority of Americans really serves the paper well.

Regular readers will remember that some weeks ago I traveled to Portland, Oregon, to talk about Harvard Rules, and subsequently bitched and moaned about the misery of flying on United Airlines. So great was my frustration over the appalling customer service that I actually took the trouble of e-mailing United, whose website promises a response to customer complaints within 24 hours.

Well…so United was off by about 400-500 hours. Perhaps they have a lot of complaints.

Anyway, I post below the response. The deconstructionists amongst you will note that it doesn’t actually address any of the specific complaints I had; that, in fact, it appears to be a generic response similar to the ones politicians send out when you write them about your opinion on a particular issue. Which is to say, it’s meaningless. It’s even hard to tell whether this letter is in response to a complaint or a compliment.

As I said before, no wonder United is bankrupt.

Here goes:

<security is one very visible change and while procedures can be frustrating at
times, they help keep us safe. So we value your patience and support.

Other less visible changes, from adjusted timing for passenger check-in and
flight departures to recent ticket and fare policy changes, focus on our being
a dependable airline for you. Because passenger safety and well being are our
first priority, some travel delays are unavoidable. But new procedures help
minimize other delays and make travel more reliable. For instance, lobby
check-in times were adjusted to allow passengers and their bags more time to
reach their gates. And flight connection times were expanded in many cases.

To do a better job communicating with our customers and focus on your needs
and expectations, we have improved our training processes and updated our
technologies. Employee service training elements and tools have also been
enhanced to best serve you.

To make your travel reliable and easy, laser-based bag scanning technology is
used to electronically match bags to passengers. Baggage delivery has
significantly improved as a result. United EasyCheck-In and EasyInfo speed
you through the airport. These services provide automated check-in
convenience and real-time flight detail.

We’re striving to make air travel as smooth and comfortable as possible. I do
understand that there is more work to be done and I sincerely thank you for
your feedback. Please continue to send us your comments.

Sincerely,

Carol Spitelli
Customer Relations>>

…is to be patronized by the New York Times. That column by John Tierney is getting blasted all over the Internet. It’s not just the content of Tierney’s column (see below). It’s that there’s something particularly irritating about having men draw conclusions about the nature of women on the New York Times op-ed page…when there are no women writing on that page.

For the same reason, Matt Miller’s column all about his wife’s theories on corporate America is annoying. If Miller’s wife is so smart, how come she’s not writing for the Times op-ed page?

How could the Times not have realized what a huge mistake it was making in hiring Miller as the replacement for Maureen Dowd, the sole female columnist at the Times op-ed page, while she’s on book leave?

How, in this day and age, can you not have one—we’re not talking a lot here, folks, just one—female columnist at the Times?

And this at the same time that the Times is asking its readers—male and female—to pony up $50 to read its columnists online….

As the Chronicle of Higher Education reports, the House of Representatives has just voted to compile a list of colleges and universities which ban military recruiting.

There’s only one possible reason for such a list: to intimidate those institutions. It’s a prelude to cutting off whatever federal funding they may receive, should the Supreme Court rule that the government has the right to do so.

Republicans used to consider themselves the party of small government, even though that identity started to shift around 1994, when the GOP took control of the House. In the realm of education, it’s remarkable just how much the Republican Party is using federal power to try to shape the content and diminish the autonomy of institutions of higher learning. Surely this would be an issue that the Harvard president should address? It doesn’t have to be an attack on the GOP; picking such a fight wouldn’t make much sense. But how about a ringing affirmation of the independence of the university from outside pressures?

The Times reports that the heads of various journalism schools—and Alex Jones, from the Kennedy School at Harvard—are banding together to save journalism. (Well, kind of.) It’s an interesting development, but one that may miss the larger problem: stupid people.

My thoughts about this here, from the Huffington Post.

Detroit Tigers catcher Ivan Rodriguez, whom Jose Canseco has accused of using steroids, has dropped from 215 pounds last season to 187 this season. “He does a lot of sprints,” explained one of his teammates. Rodriguez also said he’s cut down on fattening foods and late-night meals.

Coincidentally, Rodriguez’s batting average has dropped from about .330 to around .280.

It’s pretty hard not to conclude that Rodriguez is another example of a player who’s stopped taking steroids because of the league’s new testing regimen. I mean, let’s face it—anyone who’s tried to lose weight knows that you don’t lose 30 pounds by running a few windsprints and cutting back on the chicken wings.

To the best of my knowledge, Jason Giambi is the only player who’s admitted to using steroids. And he’s being pilloried for that admission. Where’s the logic in that?

Ben Atherton-Zeman, writing in the MetroWest Daily News, writes a humor column about what would happpen if the state of Massachusetts banned the letter “r.” (Get it? It’s a joke about Boston accents.)

Yes, you’re right—it’s not very funny.

I mention it only as continuing proof of how the women-in-science controversy continues to make Larry Summers an object of satire, even after his commitment to spend $50 million to address the issue.

Atherton-Zeman writes this: “We’re losing both “R”s in Hahvahd,” Summers complained during a recent interview. “What will we do with all those sweatshirts with the old spelling on them?” He was later heard to say, “Women in particular will have a hard time with the new spelling — I think spelling’s just a little harder for them.”

Someone at the Kennedy School, or maybe the business school, really ought to do a case study
on how this incident has played out in the media and how one particular gaffe has had such a profound effect upon an individual’s public image.

The Cincinnati Post doesn’t think much of the $50 million, either.

In an editorial in today’s paper, the Post says this:

“This farcical soap opera and shakedown sum up the tyranny that taints higher education today. Academic freedom to speak one’s mind is limited, apparently, to views deemed acceptable by the self-anointed commissars of political correctness. Those who don’t toe the party line must pay.

Owing to his beneficence and raised consciousness, Summers may yet hold onto his job - but academia, if it wastes money in a similar fashion as Harvard, will suffer.”

I guess the Post doesn’t think much of academia, women’s lib, or the $50 million, now that I think about it. Apparently living in Cincinnati makes you grumpy.

Thanks for all the e-mails so far, and keep ’em coming to [email protected]. (They’re all on background, of course.)

This is going to be a very interesting report card….

Lee Bollinger undergoes a trip to the dentist’s office, in the form of a New York Times profile that posits significant discontent with his leadership at Columbia.

“In one of many telling moments, Ann Douglas, an English professor, described a recent book party attended by many faculty members, where ‘everyone was saying disparaging things about Bollinger and no one was rising to his defense.'”

Sound familiar?

In fact, much of the article does sound eerily similar to events at Harvard this past semester. Which makes me draw a few conclusions:

1) Academics are cranky and don’t like change.

2) Presidents hired with a mandate to change will provoke friction, inevitably.

3) Professors in the humanities, whether they realize it or not, are experiencing a profound sense of alienation and, possibly, irrelevance, as new university presidents shift the focus of their universities to the sciences and to solving the problems of the world.

4) If Columbia professors have problems with Lee Bollinger, they’d have Larry Summers’ head on a spike by now.

Because there are big differences between Bollinger and Summers, too. First, the level of discontent is not nearly as high at Columbia as at Harvard. Second, Bollinger had to deal with an extremely tricky controversy in the Middle Eastern studies department that was not of his own making, and he navigated through it reasonably well.

And perhaps most important is Bollinger’s attitude towards dissent.

“‘I’m just not troubled by the level of disagreement and debate,’ he said recently, during an interview in his expansive office on the second floor of Low Library, adorned with bright geometric paintings by Josef Albers. ‘It’s debate and it’s healthy.'”

He’s also pretty self-deprecatory. “‘It would be nice if I was smarter, and in 48 hours could have grasped everything,’ added Mr. Bollinger, who was a clerk for Warren E. Burger, the chief justice of the United States. ‘But I’m not. And I still don’t grasp everything.'”

It’s impossible to judge from outside just how sincere Bollinger is about these remarks, of course. But can one imagine Larry Summers saying something as modest as “It would be nice if I were smarter and could grasp everything”?

Part of what caused the women-in-science controversy is that Summers does believe that in 48 hours he can grasp everything….