Shots in the Dark

Perhaps the only greater waste of time than posting on Facebook is responding to other people’s posts on Facebook. And yet I could not help but rise to the occasion bait when a friend, a New York Times reporter, posted this on his Facebook page about his experience with jury duty:

Lawyer: You are a reporter?
Me: Yes.
Lawyer: Are you writing about anything interesting?
Me: You don’t want me on this jury.
Lawyer: All right! We’re comfortable with dismissal.

(In a previous post, this NYT reporter had written, “I have NYC jury duty tomorrow. Does anyone have any advice to avoid getting selected for a jury? I am willing to say crazy things.”)

The lawyer/me post generated a flurry of laudatory comments, such as “bravo,” “that’s fantastic,” “that is truly awesome,” and “I will definitely be using that one.”

I’ve served on jury duty, and I’d be lying if I didn’t say it wasn’t inconvenient at times, frustrating at others. No one jumps for joy when they see that courthouse envelope in the mailbox. But I got a lot out of my jury experience—certainly more than I gave—and even if I hadn’t, my concept of citizenship doesn’t stop short at the door of irritating and frustrating. I’m no saint, but this isn’t a lot to ask.

And so I echoed the words of one lonely poster who wrote, “Why are people congratulating you?”

That prompted the reporter to write back talking about what a failure the jury system was and how what he was really doing was making a statement about the need for professional juries. (You might be able to read the exchange here.)

It was a wonderfully circular argument: He didn’t want to serve on a jury because the system of voluntary juries is a failure. But the reason voluntary juries fail is because people like him don’t want to serve, so there really isn’t class diversity on juries. He doesn’t want to serve because juries are a failure, thereby making them more likely to fail, thereby making him less likely to want to serve, thereby….

It all felt to me like a weak rationalization for not wanting to hang out in a dreary courthouse with people who aren’t on Facebook—essentially, abandoning a tenet of American democracy because it’s inconvenient. And the people who wrote in support? Well, as Facebook friends of this New York Times journalist, they are educated, sophisticated, affluent professionals, several of whom probably attended Ivy League colleges and are themselves members of the media.

How can we have come to the point where such a fortunate group of Americans is so cynical and so willing to shirk a light but rewarding responsibility?

The Monterey Bay Aquarium has just added a young great white—it’s about five feet long—to its Open Sea exhibit.

You can watch it live through this webcam.

Suggestion: make it full screen, sit back and just watch for a while. I didn’t see the great white—but those hammerheads are stunning.

…and manages to get a few shots in at Harvard, and universities, and liberals in the process.

It naturally fell to me, as president of the university, to deliver remarks. Those I drafted expressed shock at the magnitude of the tragedy and sympathy for the victims and their families. I promised the support of our community for the victims and those assisting them, but my draft also stressed that the tragedy we’d witnessed was quite unlike an earthquake or tornado: The attacks of September 11 were acts of malignant agency that rightly called forth outrage against the perpetrators. I wrote, too, of the imperative that we be intolerant of intolerance, and I suggested that we would best prevail by simply carrying on the university’s everyday, yet vitally important, work.

My draft remarks seemed to me appropriate and, even, anodyne. I was therefore quite surprised when some whose advice I sought, and some who heard my remarks as delivered, took strong exception to my suggestion that outrage against the 9/11 perpetrators was appropriate. Others objected to my use of the word “prevail.”

Really? I wasn’t privy to those conversations, but I find this hard to believe. People at Harvard objected to the idea that we should be outraged by the events of 9/11? “Prevail”—as in presumably, prevail over terrorism—was objectionable?

Summers casts these details as part of a larger argument about how universities had lost their courage and moral clarity since Vietnam. It’s obviously a self-serving argument, casting Summers in the role of moral reformer. (And thus, implicitly, revising the narrative of his ouster.) Doesn’t mean the argument is automatically wrong…but is Summers really an expert on universities in the post-Vietnam era? Had he given any thought to the issue before he became Harvard president? Or is he just creating a useful straw man?

The TImes reports that critics at Columbia are questioning his commitment to diversity after the resignation of two high-profile African-American administrators.

Fredrick C. Harris, a professor of political science and director of Columbia’s Institute for Research in African-American Studies, said in an interview that the resignation of the university’s provost, Claude M. Steele, in June, followed by the more acrimonious departure last week of the undergraduate dean, Michele M. Moody-Adams, were significant not just because the officials were the first African-Americans to hold those key positions, but also because their authority appeared to wither during their tenures.

This story, by Alan Schwarz, is very odd and feels poorly reported.

The graf quoted above, for example, is the second paragraph in the story; it’s unusual to have the main thesis of your article come attached to a secondhand source, that high up in the article. Generally the writer wants to state his/her thesis himself, rather than fobbing it off on someone else.

What’s also odd about the story is that there’s no hint that race or racism is a factor in either the resignations or the alleged diminution of the roles in question. In fact, Steele stepped down to take a deanship at the Stanford School of Education, and he is quoted as saying that race had nothing to do with his departure. (The other professor declined to be interviewed.)

What seems to be happening is that a couple of African-American professors are alleging that the resignation of any person of color is automatically a racial matter.

For example:

June Cross, an associate professor at the university’s Graduate School of Journalism, said in an interview on Wednesday, “I’m not saying race is the issue, but it is the subtext.”

What does that mean? Either Lee Bollinger has a problem with powerful black administrators, or he doesn’t. This is a disingenuous way of playing the race card—by denying that you’re playing the race card. Even as you throw it down in the pages of the New York Times.

Moreover, there’s an unfortunate unintended consequence to saying that every resignation or firing of a black person is a racial issue: It makes it harder for black people to get those jobs, because bosses, especially if they’re white, know that if the promotion doesn’t work out, it’s extremely hard to fire a person of color. After all—look what happens when two black administrators resign and one of them insists that race had nothing to do with it? Suggestions of racism, completely unsupported, that wind up on (I think) page 1 of the Times.

(For the record, this unintended consequence has never been a factor in my own work, and I have several times offered jobs to members of a minority group, who turned down the offers because they had been offered more money from publications with larger budgets.)

Professor Cross—an associate professor who has tenure—also has this to say:

“You don’t get a pass just because you once upon a time had your name on a Supreme Court case,” Ms. Cross said, referring to the legal battles Mr. Bollinger fought at Michigan. “The struggle to bring diversity is a daily affair.”

Cross refers to the fact that while president of the University of Michigan Bollinger fought not one, but two Supreme Court Cases in defense of affirmative action. And while her statement is, I suppose, true—you can’t rest on your laurels in the fight for justice—still, it seems a bit small, and it’s hard to imagine that she would say the same if Bollinger were black.

I do not recall seeing Professor Cross speaking out a couple years back, when an African-American professor at the Columbia school of education left a noose on her office doorknob and then cried racism….

That professor, Madonna Constantine, said this to the NYT:

“I want to let the perpetrator know that I will not be silenced,” she said. “I’m upset that our community was exposed to such an unbelievably blatant act of racism. Hanging a noose from my door reeks of cowardice on many, many levels.”

Definitely reeked of something. In any event, Constantine’s deception sparked campus protests, massive bad publicity for Columbia, a negative impact on recruitment of minority students, a Justice Department investigation…and Lee Bollinger responded by saying,

“This is an assault on African Americans and therefore it is an assault on every one of us,” he said. “I know I speak on behalf of every member of our communities in condemning this horrible action.”

Constantine was later found to have committed plagiarism and was fired.

Please don’t misunderstand me: It’s not that I’m soft on racism. It’s that I hate what bogus accusations of racism do to undermine efforts to combat the real thing. As I said, if someone thinks Lee Bollinger has a problem with black people in high places, say so. But don’t hint, insinuate, imply or otherwise smear.

Twenty-five of the highest-paid American CEOs last year earned more than their companies paid in federal income taxes.

This is FUBAR on both sides of that equation.