| January 10, 2006
A Response To
Our
Leadership Crisis
By Professor Jeffrey S. Nielsen
A recent survey by U.S. News & World Report and the Center
for Public Leadership at the John
F. Kennedy School of Government,
Harvard University (October, 2005) revealed that seventy-three
percent of Americans have no confidence in their leaders and over
60 percent believe the U.S. is experiencing a leadership crisis.
The
almost daily news stories about the corruption, incompetence, and
poor judgment of some leaders and the criminal activity that seems
so easily to infect leadership practices has created a growing
sense that something is terribly wrong in our democracy and in
our business corporations. In almost every type of organization;
be it social, corporate, religious, or governmental, we have observed
some with leadership rank--the organizational elites-- take advantage
of their power and position to conceal the truth or to extract
unfairly wealth and resources in order to benefit themselves, enrich
their friends, and further their own ambitions. All of this comes
at the expense of those beneath them in the hierarchy.
Americans
are, however, by nature optimistic. So the survey did show that
those interviewed were hopeful, in the future, better leaders
would emerge. Yet, perhaps now is the time to ask why we believe
future leaders will be any better than our current ones? Is it
possible that the fundamental cause of the troubles in our democratic
and business organizations is our very model of leadership? Perhaps
now is the time to examine our nearly universal belief that leaders
and leadership are necessary and begin to explore an alternative
to following leaders. The key lesson to be learned at the beginning
of the twenty-first century might very well be that we can function
quite well and successfully in business and government without
rank-based leaders.
David Bohm, the late physicist and social thinker, first raised
this possibility for me. Though we’ve all been taught that
society cannot function without leaders, he would say, “Maybe
we can.” Have we ever asked ourselves why we think we need
leaders, or what the implications are of this unexamined belief?
Unfortunately, in our organizations most make rank-based assumptions
I have named the myth of leadership. The myth of leadership is
the ideology that serves to establish, maintain, and legitimize
the system of authority where a select few are privileged to monopolize
the information, control most decision-making, and command obedience
even through coercive and manipulative means. This ideology creates
the powerful belief that it is natural and correct that a few individuals
should be anointed leaders and trusted to make the decisions and
do the commanding and controlling of everyone else. It leads to
the assumption that the only way to get things done is by managing
organizations with individuals in rank-based leadership positions;
so many of us willingly relinquish the control of our own choices
and our own life to someone in a position of hierarchical authority.
Even in our democracy, we allow our elected representatives to
govern in secrecy and the leaders of our democratic institutions
to manage people and affairs too often in an autocratic fashion.
These false assumptions, about both leaders and followers, leave
in their wake detrimental consequences for both.
Leadership implies ranking, division, and separation. Whenever
we think in terms of “leadership” we create a dualistic
world. We create a dichotomy, two categories: one of leaders, a
select and privileged few; and the second of followers, the vast
majority. There follows the implicit judgment that leaders are
somehow superior or better than their followers. An entire leadership
industry helps keep this illusion alive, while government and corporate
hierarchies are set up to pamper with privilege those in executive
positions. So you get secrecy, distrust, overindulgence, and the
inevitable sacrifice of those below for the benefit and advantage
of those above. Just think of the special treatment and the huge
amount of resources wasted on perks for our elected and appointed
representatives, our leaders in Washington, who theoretically,
at least, are supposed to be our servants and from whom we get
so little in return by way of wise government, integrity, or competence.
When we use the word “leadership,” we immediately create
a ranked division of people in ways that do not serve healthy,
long-term organizational relationships. The appointed leaders are
saddled with impossible burdens, and the followers are left with
few opportunities, or resources, for growth. There is a problem
with our very concept of leader and practice of leadership. The
heart of this problem is the corruption of communication they cause.
I have learned, through much good and bad experience, genuine
communication tends to occur only between peers, and secrecy more
often than not breeds corruption and abuse of power. We only tell
people we think are superior to us what we think they want to hear,
and we only tell people we believe are somehow inferior to us what
we think they need to know. And that’s directly tied to secrecy,
keeping secrets from each other because in the absence of full
communication, individuals, out of insecurity, feel the need to
defend their position by protecting what they know. Of course,
this leads to even less real communication where the open flow
of information is restricted and secrets reign. In the rarified
heights of rank-based leadership, it is easy to think that the
ordinary rules don’t apply, and so the temptation of unethical
actions tends to overwhelm even the most sincere individual. It
should not be unexpected when organizations, or governments for
that matter, which practice the rank thinking of the myth of leadership
find poor communication the norm, discover a growing gap between
reality and the mindset of the top executives, and perhaps even
wind up in court facing civil charges and criminal indictments.
The remedy is not to find some new leader, to whom we surrender
our future, but we must decide to create genuine democracy in our
country and real peer-based organizations at work. Peer-based organizations
rest on the belief that everyone in the organization should have
equal privilege to share in information, participate in the decision-making
process, and choose to follow through persuasive means. As long
ago as Aristotle, it was recognized that the wisdom of the many
is frequently better than the expertise of the few in making many
types of decisions, including public policy ones.
Today, the open
software movement has realized the effectiveness of leaderless
decision-making. They have a saying that to many eyes all bugs
are shallow; meaning that the less centralization and the more
involvement and greater participation you can get in solving
problems, the better the result. The viability of the Linux O.S.
demonstrates the possibility of functioning well without rank-based
leaders. When we learn to collaborate together as peers in our
communities and in our government and work organizations, we discover
that our shared wisdom, together in peer deliberation, makes it
unnecessary to surrender to some rank-based leader control over
our lives and the decisions that so profoundly affect us.
The answer, then, to our current leadership crisis is to replace
the concept of leader and model of leadership with the practice
of peer-based managing through peer councils. Peer councils are
similar to the elementary republics Thomas Jefferson endorsed at
the founding of the United States. Now, unlike in his day, technology
and the information processing capability in our business and political
environments make peer councils, as a vehicle for governance, much
more realistic. Jefferson’s dream of decentralized self-government
might finally be possible through the implementation of a council-based
democracy and peer-based work organizations. The mechanics of managing
work through peer councils, whether it is administering government
or business, requires learning the competency of peer deliberation.
A competency we all can and should learn to take back our democracy
and make our organizational lives more meaningful. We must demand
that our government and all of our organizations become more peer-based.
This means we need less leadership and more self-government and
peer participation, which require greater openness with information
and greater transparency in decision-making processes, including
more involvement and participation by all affected parties. Peer
thinking is, in fact, necessary for a successful democracy. It
aptly captures and expresses the values of liberty, equality, and
autonomy that are fundamental to democratic beliefs. Countries
where rank thinking dominates will find democratic rhetoric is
merely a cover for more oligarchic special interests.
We need to recognize and build our democracy and our work organizations
on the basic peer principle that we all share the equal privilege
to speak and likewise possess the equal and reciprocal obligation
to listen regardless of our place or position in society. We are
at a crossroads in our history where we can make the choice to
remain satisfied with surrendering information and decision-making
authority, and hence control of our lives, to the next round of
rank-based political and business leaders, or we can choose to
create peer-based organizations and a greater peer-based democracy.
Our human inclination to cooperate with others makes peer-based
organizations possible. Our human propensity to take advantage
of others makes peer-based organizations necessary.
[Professor Jeffrey Nielsen is an
organizational consultant with international experience. He currently
teaches philosophy at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah,
and is the author of the book, The
Myth of Leadership: Creating Leaderless Organizations, (Davies-Black
Publishing, 2004) which was a finalist for two different 2004
Book of the Year awards, ForeWord Magazine, and Independent Book
Publishers.]
Comment
©1958-2006 Copyright by The
Bulldog Newspaper at Fresno State
December 13, 2002
John Rawls Passing,
Friend and Teacher
By Samuel Freeman
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
-- The philosopher John Rawls has died at 81. It's well known that
he had an enormous influence on academic discussions of social,
political, and economic justice: His 1971 book, A Theory of
Justice, is widely recognized as the most significant work
in political philosophy since J.S. Mill's 1869 On Liberty.
So it's not surprising that, even in the short time since Rawls's
death, we have already seen numerous tributes that focus on his
formidable intellectual contributions. But I'd like to add some
personal reflections.
. Rawls's lifelong interest in justice developed
out of his early concern with the basically religious questions
of why there is evil in the world and whether human existence is
nonetheless redeemable. That concern, originating during World War
II, while Rawls was first an undergraduate at Princeton and later
a soldier in the Pacific, led him to inquire whether a just society
is realistically possible. His life's work was aimed at discovering
what justice requires of us, and then showing that it is within
our human capacities to realize it.
Rawls was born in Baltimore into a well-to-do
family. His father was a prominent lawyer and his mother active
in local politics. I was one of his Ph.D. students in the early
1980s, but was inspired by him even before we met. Upon reading
A Theory of Justice after I was already a lawyer, I had
decided to leave the law for graduate work in philosophy. I never
dreamed, then, that I would have the great good fortune to study
with Rawls, as well as to edit some of his work, much less to become
his friend.
Although I cannot be sure, I think Jack
warmed to me because, like his father, I was from North Carolina;
he felt at ease with a relaxed Southern manner and appreciated my
friendly teasing. At the turn of the millennium, for example, the
Modern Library ranked the top 100 nonfiction works in English in
the 20th century. A Theory of Justice placed 28th, high
for a philosophy book, but still bested by Russell and Whitehead's
seminal work in logic, Principia Mathematica, ranked 23rd.
"Jack, you should have worked harder," I joked, and he
laughed heartily.
Jack was a quiet, modest, and gentle man.
He did not seek fame, and he did not enjoy the spotlight. A private
person, he devoted himself to research and teaching, or to relaxing
with his family and friends. He declined almost all requests for
interviews and chose not to take an active role in public life.
In part, that was because he felt uncomfortable speaking before
strangers and large groups, and often stuttered in those settings.
But he also believed that philosophers are almost always misunderstood
when they address the public, and that, while political philosophy
has considerable influence on people's lives, its effects are indirect,
taking many years to become part of society's moral awareness.
In 1999, Jack agreed to accept a National
Humanities Medal from President Clinton, and also the University
of Oxford's Rolf Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy.
Before those, he had regularly declined honors, because big prizes
and awards made him uncomfortable. Knowing that, Mardy, his wife
of 53 years, reports that when Jack was offered the Kyoto Prize,
carrying $500,000, she declined on his behalf without even consulting
him. When she told him, he said he might accept it, depending on
the conditions. Upon learning, however, that those would require
that he not only give three public lectures but also have lunch
and dinner with the emperor of Japan, Jack reaffirmed the initial
disclaimer. His daughter Liz said he was willing to do a lot of
things, but not have lunch with the emperor. (Indeed, Jack regularly
denounced the practice of royalty and the corrupting effects of
privilege.)
That explains his fondness for Abraham
Lincoln. He admired Lincoln because he saw him as the president
who most appreciated the moral equality of human beings, and because
Lincoln was the rare statesman who did not compromise with evil.
Jack frequently quoted Lincoln's assertion -- "If slavery is
not wrong, nothing is wrong" -- as the best example of a fixed
moral conviction that anyone with a sense of justice must believe.
The rightward drift of American politics
distressed Jack. He said of Congress under Newt Gingrich's management,
"They are destroying our democracy." He was appalled by
the practice of allowing business lobbyists into committee meetings
to help draft legislation. He condemned it, along with our system
of corporate financing of political campaigns, as "selling
the public trust." He judged the current administration and
Congress by the same high standards.
Jack was also a conscientious teacher.
His lectures were carefully prepared and written out, and he continually
revised them after reading the most recent scholarship and rethinking
his positions. He made his lecture notes available to his students,
acknowledging that he sometimes stuttered and was not sure that
he could be understood. A better reason, surely, is that his lectures
were very intense and hard to digest upon one hearing (or even two
or three). Two of three volumes of those lecture notes are now available.
Jack had initially resisted publication, but former students like
Barbara Herman appealed to his sense of fairness by saying that,
while his own students continued to benefit professionally from
his teachings, others could not. He also resisted publishing his
collected papers; he said he saw them as opportunities to experiment
with ideas, which would later be revised or rejected in a book.
When told that students and scholars were spending hours hunting
down his many short essays, he agreed to issue one volume.
Unlike that of most Anglo-American philosophers
of his time, who emphasized the analysis of language, logic, and
concepts, Rawls's work was systematic and driven by a comprehensive
vision. For the most part, it was a dialogue with the great figures
in modern moral and political philosophy -- the social-contractarians
Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau; the utilitarians Hume,
Mill, and Sidgwick; and the German idealists Kant,
Hegel, and Marx. Indeed, not only in its structure but also
in its prose, A Theory of Justice reads like the work of
a 19th-century philosopher. (As his colleague and close friend Burton
Dreben once said, it reads as if translated from German.)
In all his works, Jack was very generous
in citing others, even when they said little that had to do with
his points. Only very rarely did he respond to critics (most notably
to H.L.A. Hart, on liberty), and only then when he felt that their
criticisms were serious and constructive. Most often, he thought
his critics (who are legion) misunderstood him. While self-effacing
in person and in print, Jack was also sparing in his praise. I think
he probably believed what Hume said in criticizing Locke's social
contract (though not in that particular instance): There is little
ever new in philosophy, and that which is new is almost always wrong.
It was not easy handing over one's work to Jack to read.
Jack was, nevertheless, always supportive.
He taught me and his other students to look behind the intricate
or clever arguments that philosophers make, to see whether those
thinkers are doing anything important. At the same time, he encouraged
us to try to discover the best in positions we disagree with, and
to respond to that. He often told us that we should assume that
the philosophers we read "are at least as smart as you are,
and that if you think of an objection, they probably have thought
of it, too."
He was a tall, lanky man, with piercing
blue eyes. He had participated in sports at Princeton and was an
excellent sailor. He exercised until well into his 70s, biking,
jogging, hiking, and he took daily walks until a few days before
his death. Popular legend -- and some obituaries -- to the contrary,
he never played professional baseball. That rumor was fabricated
by a master at Harvard's Leverett House after Jack had hit a number
of home runs in an intramural softball game. The losing students
were distressed at being humiliated by an aging professor, and the
house master assuaged them with the story that Jack, a "ringer,"
had played for the Yankees.
He had a taste for oatmeal cookies served
with tea. Recently, I spent part of an afternoon with him when Mardy
went out to play tennis. She left him a large cookie, which she
felt was all he should have. As I got up to leave, he asked me to
look through the kitchen cabinets for a bag of oatmeal cookies.
Guiltily, I complied and left him the bag. The next afternoon, after
I had eaten some cookies that she had set out, he asked me if I
wanted more. I said that, good as they were, I had better not. He
then called definitively, "Mardy, Sam wants another cookie,
and I think I'll have another one, too." Jack had a mischievous
streak.
In mid-October, I drove out to his rambling
house in Lexington, Mass., carrying the newly published The
Cambridge Companion to Rawls, only the second time a volume
in that wide-ranging series has been devoted to a living philosopher.
(The volume on Jürgen Habermas is the other.) Many of Jack's
students and friends had contributed articles. His portrait, on
the cover, had been painted by his wife. He had objected vigorously
to any picture, saying that he did not see why people cared what
he looked like. Only when I told him that every single volume in
the series had portraits did he cease protesting. He appreciated
the book's tribute, saying, "It looks great, Sam." It
was to be the last time I would see Jack. His wife called on Sunday,
November 24, to tell me that he had died at 9:30 that morning, peacefully
at home, of heart failure. He had his wits until the very end. He
will be greatly missed.
Samuel Freeman is a professor of philosophy
and law at the University of Pennsylvania. He edited John Rawls's
Collected Papers (Harvard University Press, 1999) and the Lectures
in the History of Political Philosophy. He also edited and
contributed to The Cambridge Companion to Rawls (Cambridge
University Press, 2002).
Comment
©1958-2004 Copyright by The
Bulldog Newspaper at Fresno State
~ Reprise ~
Saturday, May 30, 1998
Senator Goldwater
Dead at 89
By Bart Barnes
NEW
YORK --
Barry M. Goldwater, 1909-1998, a five-term U.S. senator from Arizona
and a champion of conservatism whose 1964 presidential candidacy
launched a revolution within the Republican Party, died yesterday
at home in Paradise Valley, a suburb of Phoenix.
He suffered a stroke in 1996 that damaged
the part of the brain that controls memory and personality. Last
September, family members said he was in the early stages of Alzheimer's
disease. In fact, he had wrested control of the GOP from the Eastern
liberal wing that had dominated it for years. By 1980, he was acknowledged
as the founder of a conservative movement that had become a vital
element in mainstream Republican thinking and a major ingredient
in Reagan's political ascendancy. It was a 1964 speech delivered
on behalf of Mr. Goldwater that brought Reagan to national prominence
and helped launch his political career.
During his 1964 presidential campaign, Mr.
Goldwater was attacked by Democrats and opponents within his own
party as a demagogue and a leader of right-wing extremists and racists
who was likely to lead the United States into nuclear war, eliminate
civil rights progress and destroy such social welfare programs as
Social Security.
But that perception mellowed with time.
Mr. Goldwater returned to the Senate in 1969 and went on to serve
three more terms. Long before his retirement, he had come to be
regarded as the Grand Old Man of the Republican Party and one of
the nation's most respected exponents of conservatism, which he
sometimes defined as holding on to that which was tested and true
and opposing change simply for the sake of change.
His friends said he was often misunderstood,
but his reputation for personal integrity was unblemished. At the
height of the Watergate crisis, when the Republicans in Congress
needed someone to tell President Richard M. Nixon he should resign,
they chose Mr. Goldwater. But instead of telling the president what
to do, Mr. Goldwater simply informed him in the Oval Office on Aug.
7, 1974, that the Republicans in Congress were unwilling and unable
to stop his impeachment and conviction should he remain in office.
Nixon announced his resignation the next day.
A stickler for the Constitution, Mr. Goldwater
refused to join the Republicans of the New Right during the 1980s
when they began to press for legislation that would limit the authority
of the federal courts to curb organized prayer in public schools
or to order busing for school integration. He opposed busing and
he backed prayer in schools, Mr. Goldwater said, but he thought
it a dangerous breach of the separation of powers for Congress to
be telling the courts what to do.
Mr. Goldwater's political philosophy also
included a strong military posture, a deep mistrust of the Soviet
Union and a conviction that increasing the scope of government programs
was not the way to solve social problems.
In all, he served 30 years in the Senate, but he was out of office
for four years after losing his bid for the presidency, and he was
in a political limbo for almost 10 years after that defeat. He reemerged
during the Watergate crisis of the early 1970s.
In 1934, Mr. Goldwater married the former
Margaret Johnson of Muncie, Ind. She died in 1985. Their four children
are Michael, Joanne, Peggy and Barry Jr., who became a Republican
member of the House of Representatives from California and later
an investment counselor. In 1992, he married Susan Schaffer Wechsler,
a health care executive, who survives.
Comment
©1958-2004 Copyright by The
Bulldog Newspaper at Fresno State
July 17, 2003
The White Man Unburdened
By Norman Mailer
Lightning and thunder,
shock and awe. Dust, ash, fog, fire, smoke, sand, blood, and a good
deal of waste now move to the wings. The stage, however, remains
occupied. The question posed at curtain-rise has not been answered.
Why did we go to war? If no real weapons of mass destruction are
found, the question will keen in pitch.
Or, if some weapons are uncovered in Iraq,
it is likely that even more have been moved to new hiding places
beyond the Iraqi border. Should horrific events take place, we can
count on a predictable response: "Good, honest, innocent Americans
died today because of evil al-Qaeda terrorists." Yes, we will
hear the President's voice before he even utters such words. (For
those of us who are not happy with George W. Bush, we may as well
recognize that living with him in the Oval Office is like being
married to a mate who always says exactly what you know in advance
he or she is going to say, which helps to account for why more than
half of America now appears to love him.)
The key question remains—why did we go
to war? It is not yet answered. The host of responses has already
produced a cognitive stew. But the most painful single ingredient
at the moment is, of course, the discovery of the graves. We have
relieved the world of a monster who killed untold numbers, mega-numbers,
of victims. Nowhere is any emphasis put upon the fact that many
of the bodies were of the Shiites of southern Iraq who have been
decimated repeatedly in the last twelve years for daring to rebel
against Saddam in the immediate aftermath of the Gulf War. Of course,
we were the ones who encouraged them to revolt in the first place,
and then failed to help them. Why? There may have been an ongoing
argument in the first Bush administration which was finally won
by those who believed that a Shiite victory over Saddam could result
in a host of Iraqi imams who might make common cause with the Iranian
ayatollahs, Shiites joining with Shiites! Today, from the point
of view of the remaining Iraqi Shiites, it would be hard for us
to prove to them that they were not the victims of a double cross.
So they may look upon the graves that we congratulate ourselves
for having liberated as sepulchral voices calling out from their
tombs—asking us to take a share of the blame. Which, of course,
we will not.
Yes, our guilt for a great part of those
bodies remains a large subtext and Saddam was creating mass graves
all through the 1970s and 1980s. He killed Communists en masse in
the 1970s, which didn't bother us a bit. Then he slaughtered tens
of thousands of Iraqis during the war with Iran—a time when we supported
him. A horde of those newly discovered graves go back to that period.
Of course, real killers never look back.
The administration, however, was concerned
only with how best to expedite the war. They hastened to look for
many a justifiable reason. The Iraqis were a nuclear threat; they
were teeming with weapons of mass destruction; they were working
closely with al-Qaeda; they had even been the dirty geniuses behind
9/11. The reasons offered to the American public proved skimpy,
unverifiable, and void of the realpolitik of our need to get a choke-hold
on the Middle East for many a reason more than Israel- Palestine.
We had to sell the war on false pretenses.
The intensity of the falsification could
best be seen as a reflection of the enormous damage 9/11 has brought
to America's morale, particularly the core—the corporation. All
the organization people high and low, managers, division heads,
secretaries, salesmen, accountants, market specialists, all that
congeries of corporate office American, plus all who had relatives,
friends, or classmates who worked in the Twin Towers—the shock traveled
into the fundament of the American psyche. And the American working
class identified with the warriors who were lost fighting that blaze,
the firemen and the police, all instantly ennobled.
It was a political bonanza for Bush provided
he could deliver an appropriate sense of revenge to the millions—
or is it the tens of millions?—who identified directly with those
incinerated in the Twin Towers. When Osama bin Laden failed to be
captured by the posses we sent to Afghanistan, Bush was thrust back
to ongoing domestic problems that did not give any immediate suggestion
that they could prove solution-friendly. The economy was sinking,
the market was down, and some classic bastions of American faith
(corporate integrity, the FBI, and the Catholic Church—to cite but
three) had each suffered a separate and grievous loss of face. Increasing
joblessness was undermining national morale. Since our administration
was conceivably not ready to tackle any one of the serious problems
looming before them that did not involve enriching the top, it was
natural for the administration to feel an impulse to move into larger
ventures, thrusts into the empyrean—war! We could say we went to
war because we very much needed a successful war as a species of
psychic rejuvenation. Any major excuse would do—nuclear threat,
terrorist nests, weapons of mass destruction —we could always make
the final claim that we were liberating the Iraqis. Who could argue
with that? One could not. One could only ask: What will the cost
be to our democracy?
Be it said that the administration knew
something a good many of us did not—it knew that we had a very good,
perhaps even an extraordinarily good, if essentially untested, group
of armed forces, a skilled, disciplined, well-motivated military,
career-focused and run by a field-rank and general staff who were
intelligent, articulate, and considerably less corrupt than any
other power cohort in America.
In such a pass, how could the White House
fail to use them? They would prove quintessential morale-builders
to a core element of American life— those tens of millions of Americans
who had been spiritually wounded by 9/11. They could also serve
an even larger group, which had once been near to 50 percent of
the population, and remained key to the President's political footing.
This group had taken a real beating. As a matter of collective ego,
the good average white American male had had very little to nourish
his morale since the job market had gone bad, nothing, in fact,
unless he happened to be a member of the armed forces. There, it
was certainly different. The armed forces had become the paradigmatic
equal of a great young athlete looking to test his true size. Could
it be that there was a bozo out in the boondocks who was made to
order, and his name was Iraq? Iraq had a tough rep, but not much
was left to him inside. A dream opponent. A desert war is designed
for an air force whose state-of-the-art is comparable in perfection
to a top-flight fashion model on a runway. Yes, we would liberate
the Iraqis.
So we went ahead against all obstacles—of
which the UN was the first. Wantonly, shamelessly, proudly, exuberantly,
at least one half of our prodigiously divided America could hardly
wait for the new war. We understood that our television was going
to be terrific. And it was. Sanitized but terrific —which is, after
all, exactly what network and good cable television are supposed
to be.
| And there were other factors for using our military skills, minor
but significant: these reasons return us to the ongoing malaise
of the white American male. He had been taking a daily drubbing
over the last thirty years. For better or worse, the women's movement
has had its breakthrough successes and the old, easy white male
ego has withered in the glare. Even the consolation of rooting for
his team on TV had been skewed. For many, there was now measurably
less reward in watching sports than there used to be, a clear and
declarable loss.
The great white stars of yesteryear were
for the most part gone, gone in football, in basketball, in boxing,
and half gone in baseball. Black genius now prevailed in all these
sports (and the Hispanics were coming up fast; even the Asians were
beginning to make their mark). We white men were now left with half
of tennis (at least its male half), and might also point to ice
hockey, skiing, soccer, golf (with the notable exception of the
Tiger), as well as lacrosse, track, swimming, and the World Wrestling
Federation—remnants of a once great and glorious white athletic
centrality.
Of course, there were sports fans who loved
the stars on their favorite teams without regard to race. Sometimes,
they even liked black athletes the most. Such white men tended to
be liberals. They were no use to Bush. He needed to take care of
his more immediate constituency. If he had a covert strength, it
was his knowledge of the unspoken things that bothered American
white men the most—just those matters they were not always ready
to admit to themselves. The first was that people hipped on sports
can get overaddicted to victory. Sports, the corporate ethic (advertising),
and the American flag had become a go-for-the-win triumvirate that
had developed many psychic connections with the military.
After all, war was, with all else, the
most dramatic and serious extrapolation of sports. The concept of
victory could be seen by some as the noblest species of profit in
union with patriotism. So Bush knew that a big victory in an easy
war would work for the good white American male. If blacks and Hispanics
were representative of their share of the population in the enlisted
ranks, still they were not a majority, and the faces of the officer
corps (as seen on the tube) suggested that the percentage of white
men increased as one rose in rank to field and general officers.
Moreover, we had knockout tank echelons, Super-Marines, and—one
magical ace in the hole—the best air force that ever existed. If
we could not find our machismo anywhere else, we could certainly
count on the interface between combat and technology. Let me then
advance the offensive suggestion that this may have been one of
the covert but real reasons we went looking for war. We knew we
were likely to be good at it.
In the course, however, of all the quick
events of the last few months, our military passed through a transmogrification.
Indeed, it was one hellion of a morph. We went, willy-nilly, from
a potentially great athlete to serving as an emergency intern required
to operate at high speed on an awfully sick patient full of frustration,
outrage, and violence. Now in the last month, even as the patient
is getting stitched up somewhat, a new and troubling question arises:
Have any fresh medicines been developed to deal with what seem to
be teeming infections? Do we really know how to treat livid suppurations?
Or would it be better to just keep trusting our great American luck,
our faith in our divinely protected can-do luck? We are, by custom,
gung-ho. If these suppurations prove to be unmanageable, or just
too time-consuming, may we not leave them behind? We could move
on to the next venue. Syria, we might declare in our best John Wayne
voice: You can run, but you can't hide. Saudi Arabia, you overrated
tank of blubber, do you need us more than ever? And Iran, watch
it, we have eyes for you. You could be a real meal. Because when
we fight, we feel good, we are ready to go, and then go some more.
We have had a taste. Why, there's a basketful of billions to be
made in the Middle East just so long as we can stay ahead of the
trillions of debts that are coming after us back home.
Be it said: the motives that lead to a
nation's major historical acts can probably rise no higher than
the spiritual understanding of its leadership. While George W. may
not know as much as he believes he knows about the dispositions
of God's blessing, he is driving us at high speed all the same —this
man at the wheel whose most legitimate boast might be that he knew
how to parlay the part-ownership of a major-league baseball team
into a gubernatorial win in Texas. And—shall we ever forget?—was
catapulted, by legal finesse and finagling, into a now-tainted but
still almighty hymn: Hail to the Chief!
No, we will rise no higher than the spiritual
understanding of our leadership. And now that the ardor of victory
has begun to cool, some will see how it is flawed. For we are victim
once again of all those advertising sciences that depend on mendacity
and manipulation. We have been gulled about the real reasons for
this war, tweaked and poked by some of the best button-pushers around
to believe that we won a noble and necessary contest when, in fact,
the opponent was a hollowed-out palooka whose monstrosities were
ebbing into old age.
Perhaps he was not that old. Perhaps Saddam
made a decision to go underground with as much wealth as he had
spirited away, and would fund al-Qaeda or some extension of it in
a collaboration of sorts with Osama bin Laden—a new underground
team, the Incompatible Terrorist Twins. That is a hypothesis as
mad as the world we are beginning to live in.
Democracy, more than any other political
system, depends on a modicum of honesty. Ultimately, it is much
at the mercy of a leader who has never been embarrassed by himself.
What is to be said of a man who spent two years in the Air Force
of the National Guard (as a way of not having to go to Vietnam)
and proceeded—like many another spoiled and wealthy father's son—not
to bother to show up for duty in his second year of service? Most
of us have episodes in our youth that can cause us shame on reflection.
It is a mark of maturation that we do not try to profit from our
early lacks and vices but do our best to learn from them. Bush proceeded,
however, to turn his declaration of the Iraqi campaign's end into
a mighty fashion show. He chose—this overnight clone of Honest Abe—to
arrive on the deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln on an
S-3B Viking jet that came in with a dramatic tail-hook landing.
The carrier was easily within helicopter range of San Diego but
G.W. would not have been able to show himself in flight regalia,
and so would not have been able to demonstrate how well he wore
the uniform he had not honored. Jack Kennedy, a war hero, was always
in civvies while he was commander in chief. So was General Eisenhower.
George W. Bush, who might, if he had been
entirely on his own, have made a world-class male model (since he
never takes an awkward photograph), proceeded to tote the flight
helmet and sport the flight suit. There he was for the photo-op
looking like one more great guy among the great guys. Let us hope
that our democracy will survive these nonstop foulings of the nest.
Comment
©1958-2004 Copyright by The
Bulldog Newspaper at Fresno State
Wednesday September 1, 2004
The Law of Averages Isn’t a Safe Bet for
America’s Future
By Sarah Ruth Jacobs
Back in 1999, I stood
waiting on the curb during a balmy summer evening in Bangor, Maine.
I hailed a lone taxi and hopped in, but before I could spurt out
my destination, I was interrupted by the cabbie. Twisting himself
around with one arm, he held out a clipboard to me where I sat in
the back seat, craning his shock-worn face around to look into mine.
"You 18? Mind signing this petition for me? I'm running for
Congress and I can get on the ballot with enough signatures,"
he explained. Even then, I remember thinking, "This guy just
isn't going to make it."
Today I would argue that the mind of America
is likewise poisoned with similar apprehensions. First we worry
that a candidate isn't "electable" and lacks competitive
funding, then we fear that a well funded and supported candidate
has "sold out." We are so jaded about the political process
that we can't decide what we want — an unlikely underdog whom we
love, or a political commodity everyone likes.
How can it be that America, a relatively
new nation where liberties such as independence, suffrage and civil
rights have been fought for and won with blood and prophetic vision,
has had lessening levels of voter and civic participation? Our colleges,
once a haven for resisters and draft dodgers, wild children ready
to take over administrative buildings, now offer largely muted voices
of opinion, small circles of activism. Have we come so far that
there's nothing left to protest? Quite contrarily, most students
and citizens have a long list of complaints about the direction
America is headed.
Discussing what civic engagement entails
and ways to encourage it seems remiss without acknowledging reasons
why people may choose not to participate in even local proceedings
and organizations. When one person neglects to vote or comment,
she isn't simply allowing someone else to speak for her; she's snuffing
out her own voice entirely. Losing these estranged and minority
perspectives in an election isn't just as simple as laxity — it
means that a part of our nation is slipping through the cracks.
If civic leaders don't make the effort to reach out to non-voters,
and dare to take braver stances, then we will be waking up to a
country half-populated by ghosts.
Election strategies are often blinded by
what officials believe to be "target groups" or the undecided
voters — easy marks which may do little more than soften and overextend
a campaign. Democracy is thus often misunderstood as appealing to
the lowest common denominator, whereas Jefferson, Paine and the
founders intended quite the opposite: a sacrifice by the majority
to minority rights and property.
Though it's easy to interpret their ideals
as a mere conservation of goods for the wealthy from the poor majority,
today the meaning of minority rights is understood as an inclusive
and tolerant system of government which doesn't restrict the freedoms
of minority groups.
Thus the best strategy for a candidate isn't
to repeatedly average the difference between herself and the competition,
but (still speaking mathematically) to broaden the span of issues
she supports. That way, instead of appealing to voters who teeter
on the mean of two candidates, there would be a strong appeal to
fringe groups, those people who aren't normally inclined to vote
because the averaging strategy of candidates makes the term "election"
seem a farce. A single candidate can't be all things to everyone,
but once she takes a step to embrace a foggy issue, to clarify a
heartfelt and compassionate viewpoint, perhaps some members will
emerge from the silent half of our nation. In a time where a strong
vision for the future is needed to revitalize the common faith,
it is sorely regrettable that individualism is seen as a detraction
to a candidacy.
Over the years I have taken part in court
hearings, ugly protests, town council meetings, assistance programs
for the homeless and most recently anonymous peer counseling. Again
and again individuals underestimate their role in even local decisions,
or may realize the extent an issue plays in their lives when it
is too late. For many people my age, passion and the gumption to
speak out has become a sign of vulnerability or even foolhardiness.
In an America where politics and business seem to merge, it's no
wonder that citizens are afraid to get hurt, to put themselves out
there. Yet there has never been a time when the need for individual
voices, for "foolhardy" contributions, has been greater.
The law of averages is a static instrument, and it waits for the
change that even one visionary individual can bring.
Across this nation we must come not only
to know but to believe that it takes an individual, not an average
to set the hearts of the people alight. Any doubt we might cast
on the hopes of a smooth-talking cabbie will only serve to shadow
our own ambition.
[Sarah Ruth Jacobs is a junior at
Cornell University studying English and film.]
Comment
©1958-2004 Copyright by The
Bulldog Newspaper at Fresno State
Wednesday August 11, 2004
Elie Abel respected journalist
and author dead at 83
BY LISA TREI
PALO
ALTO -- Elie Abel, former chair of Stanford's Department of Communication
and a highly respected journalist and author, died July 22 at a
hospice in Rockville, Md. He was 83.
The cause of death
was pneumonia, complicated by a stroke and Alzheimer's disease,
said his daughter, Suzanne Abel, a director at the Haas Center for
Public Service. A memorial service will be held Sept. 19 at the
Cosmos Club in Washington, D.C.
Abel came to Stanford
in 1979 as the first Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication
after serving as dean of Columbia Graduate School of Journalism
for nine years. From 1983 to 1986, Abel headed Stanford's Department
of Communication and also served as Faculty Senate chair in 1985-86.
Abel directed Stanford's
program in Washington, D.C., in 1993-94. "Elie had a profound effect
on improving the quality of two major American universities," said
Henry Breitrose, professor emeritus and former Communication Department
chair who was responsible for hiring Abel in 1979. "He raised the
bar for journalism so that it transcended mere craft and embraced
the world of ideas that a journalist ought to be able to rely on."
Abel was born in
Montreal, Canada, on Oct. 17, 1920. He earned a bachelor's from
McGill University in 1941 and a master's from Columbia Graduate
School of Journalism in 1942.
Comment
©1958-2004 Copyright by The
Bulldog Newspaper at Fresno State
Friday, June 11, 2004
Day of Remembrance for President Ronald Reagan
Fresno State News Staff Writers
FRESNO STATE -- Governor Schwarzenegger
has issued a Proclamation declaring Friday, June 11, 2004, as a
day of remembrance for the extraordinary life of President Ronald
Reagan. In support of this action, Chancellor Charles Reed has authorized
presidents to cancel all or part of campus activities, and to provide
informal time off to employees.
This Friday we have a number of academic
instructional activities, particularly in Continuing Education,
that will compel some offices to remain open. For example, there
are about 4000 students on campus for whom Friday is the last day
of instruction. Final exams are being given and papers are being
turned in. Managers of areas involved in these activities should
ensure that services continue to be provided for those faculty and
students who plan to meet on Friday.
These services may be in the academic departments
affected, continuing education, food services, housing, health center,
accounting, child care center, and the library. Employees in other
offices not directly involved in instructional activity may request
informal time off on Friday. Managers are urged to accommodate such
requests. Essential services shall remain open for regular business.
These services include security, environmental health and safety,
university relations, plant operations, human resources, and all
managers. Managers in each area should use their own judgment in
determining the level of staffing needed that day.
Employees who are required to work on this
day, or who would otherwise be scheduled to work but are on vacation,
sick leave or compensating time off, will receive informal time
off to be taken at a later date. The campus will observe a moment
of silence to enable employees who are working to honor the memory
of President Reagan
Comment
©-2004 Fresno State News
|
April
28, 2004
Sex,
Booze
Winning
Football?
By Murray Sperber Professor of American Studies
Indiana University at Bloomington.
FRESNO
STATE -- Last month the head football coach at the University of
Colorado at Boulder, Gary Barnett, was placed on administrative
leave after he made denigrating comments about a female former kicker
who claimed that she had been raped by another player. It was one
of seven rape charges against Colorado football players and recruits,
and the governor has appointed a special prosecutor to investigate
those charges and other alleged recruiting violations. The scandal
has brought to light how big-time college sports programs throughout
the country use women, alcohol, and sex to recruit top high-school
athletes.
When different
people talk about the incidents, however, it often seems as if they
aren't even conversing in the same language. Consider: "What's so
wrong about taking recruits to a strip club?" (A recent graduate
of Northwestern University, who is now a reporter for a Chicago-area
newspaper) "She [the alleged rape victim] said Barnett told her
that he would 'back his player 100 percent if she took this forward
in the criminal process.'" (Greg Avery, a Boulder, Colo., Daily
Camera reporter) "I have told him [Barnett] in no uncertain terms
that was an unacceptable remark. You have a rape allegation here.
That's a very serious criminal allegation. It is simply inappropriate
to blame the victim, which is what he did." (Elizabeth Hoffman,
president of the University of Colorado System, to the Associated
Press)
Each of those comments
represents a different campus culture. And, at Colorado and potentially
every college with big-time sports, those cultures are colliding.
The Northwestern
graduate genuinely did not understand why underage recruits should
not be taken to a strip club or bar. While he was in college, not
only football players but also regular student hosts did the same
for visiting high-school seniors. Doing the research for my book
Beer & Circus, I encountered that phenomenon at many institutions,
particularly among fraternity men who wanted to impress recruits
and help persuade them to join.
The widespread
nature of the practice indicates the sexually charged world in which
contemporary college students live. Their favorite TV channels are
MTV, E!, Comedy Central, and ESPN. MTV churns out hours of programs
full of sexual content. (None of my students were surprised by the
Super Bowl halftime show when Justin Timberlake exposed one of Janet
Jackson's breasts.)
E! features the
shock-jock Howard Stern talking to an endless parade of nubile females,
including porn stars, trying to get them to disrobe (many do). Comedy
Central has The Man Show, which begins and ends with young women
jumping on trampolines to expose their undergarments. ESPN constantly
runs beer ads that feature women who appear always ready to party
with the college-age men in the ads.
A key component
of this undergraduate culture is alcohol. Studies by the Harvard
School of Public Health show that more than 60 percent of students
at many institutions, particularly those with big-time sports programs,
frequently binge drink. The high-water mark -- really high-alcohol
mark -- occurs during spring break, when more than a million students
gather at various beach resorts for nonstop binges. In this highly
charged atmosphere both on campuses and off, a great deal of sexual
activity takes place -- some of it unpleasant, especially for women,
and some of it criminal, particularly date rape.
Yet while
intercollegiate athletes belong, in part, to the student culture,
they also have their own. An athletics scholarship is essentially
a one-year contract for athletic performance, renewed or canceled
every July, usually at the behest of the coach. Therefore, the athletes
are vocational students, working their way through college at extremely
demanding jobs.
The athletics department
and the coaches control the players' lives: They arrange their room
and board, steer them to majors and courses, and structure their
time. The National Collegiate Athletic Association requires that
athletics departments keep time charts on their players, and the
coaches know where those players are most hours of the day. In addition,
although a major Division I-A football team like Colorado's has
as many as 125 players (85 on scholarship, the rest walk-ons), it
also has about 15 coaches, a similar number of trainers and medical-staff
members, and close to a dozen student managers.
Driving all of
those people and their activities is one goal: to win as many games
as possible. But the best coaches in the world cannot win without
recruiting blue-chip high-school athletes -- whose number, in any
year, is small. Thus, a university will charter a plane to bring
a prime football prospect to the campus, house him in a penthouse
suite, feed him the most expensive meals, and -- surprise -- provide
him with female companionship.
Many institutions
use undergraduate women for this purpose. Officially they discourage
sexual contact between the hostess and the recruit. But, given the
booze-and-sex undergraduate culture, unofficial contact is inevitable.
That some colleges also take recruits to strip bars and hire stripper
services, even escort services, is hardly a surprise -- except,
apparently, to coaches like Barnett, who has denied any knowledge
of the events alleged at Colorado.
Considering how
crucial successful recruiting is to a football program, and the
control that coaches have over their players, such denials strain
credibility. After each recruit's visit to a college, the female
hostesses and the host players are debriefed by coaches and other
personnel. Many questions are asked, and forms filled out. Joe Tiller,
head football coach at Purdue University, summed it up well in The
Indianapolis Star: "Whatever occurs on a recruiting trip, it will
get back to the coaching staff. It may not get back immediately,
but it will get back."
A football program
is a small world, run by the coaches out of the football complex.
A player spends most of his time in that complex, including his
mealtime. The idea is to build a cohesive team -- one for all, all
for one. That is why Barnett said to an alleged rape victim that
he "would back his player 100 percent if she took this forward in
the criminal process." His comment was instinctive, and he knew
that his players would want him to say it. He articulated the code
of the football culture.
Meanwhile, Elizabeth
Hoffman, Colorado's president, is a typical university administrator,
well aware of sexism and the law. Her condemnation of Barnett's
remark and her desire to give the victim a fair hearing represent
the third campus culture in play here. That culture is fundamentally
opposed to the undergraduate sexually charged ethos and to the macho
football code.
Colleges have strict
rules about gender rights and the treatment of women. In other professions,
a supervisor is allowed to date a subordinate -- corporate and professional
America do not encourage it, but it is rarely forbidden by formal
regulations. At most colleges, however, no faculty or staff member
is permitted to date a student. In that area, academe is in the
forefront of political correctness. Yet few enterprises in America
are less politically correct than students' party life and college
football programs. Hence the clash of cultures at Colorado and other
colleges.
But what are we
to make of Colorado administrators' assertions that they knew nothing
about the booze-and-sex parties for recruits before the police and
the press discovered them? Are their denials as questionable as
the coaches'? No, in fact, the administrators are probably telling
the truth. In my research, I've been struck by how little the average
administrator, particularly the average president, knows about undergraduate
life at his or her institution. Such administrators know even less
about the daily lives of athletes. The same is true for most faculty
members, who, at the large research universities that offer big-time
sports, are preoccupied with their scholarly careers.
Most people
in power at universities were not big sports fans as students; they
often had little awareness or understanding of athletics at their
institutions, or even of the collegiate culture. Many were highly
academic as undergraduates and did not participate much in collegiate
life; others went to small institutions without big-time sports.
But now, definitely
at Colorado and probably at many other institutions as well, presidents,
administrators, and faculty members can see the culture clash sparked
by the scandal in Boulder. They are upset, in part, because they
consider football players to be university representatives, and
when those players take recruits to strip bars, the university is,
in a sense, condoning that activity and its demeaning treatment
of women.
Moreover, university
authorities and the NCAA cannot as easily dismiss the recent recruiting
incidents as they did previous scandals. What occurred last year
at places like St. Bonaventure University, the University of Georgia,
and California State University at Fresno was, according to the
college-sports establishment, idiosyncratic -- a few rotten apples
in a large barrel. (In fact, all of the incidents were signs of
systemic failure.) But the Colorado scandal is a different matter:
Similar recruiting occurs all over the country; it is institutionalized
sexism; and it is not easily ignored.
Predictably,
the NCAA has set up a committee to investigate the problem. No doubt
it will add rules to its already huge handbook to try to control
the situation. But as long as colleges want their teams to win,
as long as they want to entice blue-chip athletes to sign with their
programs, as long as many of their undergraduates live in a highly
charged world of binge drinking and sexual activity, how can the
NCAA possibly prevent this kind of recruiting?
The NCAA
will try to spin the problem away, but the stakes are higher this
time. Many people at the University of Colorado and other colleges
who have been indifferent to big-time athletics up to now are outraged
by the recent incidents. They will not go quietly into the NCAA's
rah-rah night.
Murray Sperber
has written four books on college sports and college life, including
Beer & Circus: How
Big-Time College Sports is Crippling Undergraduate Education.
(Henry Holt, 2000).
Comment
©1958-2004 Copyright by The
Bulldog Newspaper at Fresno State
|
