Tag Archives: culture

A Real Progressive-Democratic Party Problem

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It’s not Party’s only problem, but it is a Critical Item problem, and it’s illustrated by an exchange between a constituent and Senator Michael Bennet (D, CO) at his recent town hall and by a Wall Street Journal newswriter’s assessment of the exchange. The constituent’s call:

A man who identified himself as Colin from Denver asked Bennet to consider the “dire times” facing the nation. “Schumer had no plan in the Democrats’ only moment of leverage against Trump,” he said. “When will you be calling for him to be replaced as minority leader?”

Bennett essentially responded with words to the effect that Schumer needed to go.

The writer’s assessment:

House and Senate members have publicly criticized Schumer’s handling of the matter in a remarkable public show of disunity at a time when they hoped to be unified against Trump.

Leverage against Trump. Unified against Trump. No plan for what Party thinks is good for our nation. No plan for how to achieve those Good Things. Not even any nascent ideas.

It’s No to Trump/Never Trump turtles all the way down.

That’s not good for our nation. Not good at all. All Party has, all Party seems interested in, is its toddler temper tantrum over not getting its own way.

University Dependence on Federal Funds

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And one other matter. Against the backdrop of President Donald Trump’s withholding/canceling of $400 million worth of grants and contracts for Columbia University, there are a couple of things that stand out.

One is this:

[S]ome board members deeply concerned the university is trading away its moral authority and academic independence for federal funds.

Columbia has already shed any pretense of moral authority—see below. Columbia’s dependence on Federal funding is Columbia’s conscious, deliberately done choice. The school has a $14.8 billion dollar endowment. Even if that were to be frozen—no further donations into it, the endowment’s investments would only break even—that’s enough to fund 37 years of grants and contracts at the rate of those $400 million per year Federal largesse. A lot can happen in those 37 years.

Then there’s this, from Joseph Howley, a classics professor at Columbia:

It is really a red line for the independence of universities, for academic freedom, for shared governance.”

No it isn’t. Requiring a university to shed—to divest itself of—its antisemitic bigotry and (not or) its support for terrorists is not a threat to university independence or of academic freedom. Indeed, as Columbia’s support for that bigotry and that support demonstrates, removing them would produce a sharp increase in academic freedom, especially for the students—an aspect of academic freedom the Precious Ones of Columbia’s faculty carefully ignore.

Beyond that, there should be no “shared governance” at universities. Administrators should govern; professors should teach. Full stop.

Hurt Feelings

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Lots of ex-Federal employees are feeling the pain of being terminated. Many in the private sector think that’s unimportant, and they’re correct to think so.

Catherine Byrd, who owned and ran her own business before she retired:

I don’t feel bad for them a bit. I’ve worked in the private sector all my life[.]

She noted that she’d been fired a number of times in her early working days, and said,

You know what you do? You go out and find another job, and there are plenty of jobs to find.

As indeed there are, even if not in an area that lets the fired bureaucrat follow his bliss.

And so, we get the hurt feelings of government employees who have been terminated. Recently fired Meredith Lopez is upset over the alleged general callousness toward federal workers being fired.

I think people forget that working in public service is not just a job, it can be a calling for many people[.]
For me, it is really about the ability to help people and communities on a personal level[.]

Judy Cameron is upset at the very concept of being fired from her government job.

All I know is I did not appreciate being fired. Let me do something wrong to fire me… It was just “Oh here, let’s kick you out like trash.”

And, of course—because that’s where the clicks and eyeballs are—the press hypes these things while ignoring the fact that none of them incur an obligation on the part of any employer, much less the government, to retain folks just because those folks want a particular job.

No. A government employee needs to be terminated if the job position itself is duplicative, excess to the government’s objective needs, or otherwise unnecessary. Recall, during the Obama Shutdown of 2011, the EPA acknowledged that most of its employees were unnecessary, furloughing 90% of them for the duration of the shutdown.

A government employee needs to be terminated if his performance is subpar as measured objectively, which requires a cessation of inflating annual reports and the even harder step of eliminating union objections to terminating for merit reasons.

Disingenuous Excuse-Making

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That’s what seems to be the case involving Columbia University’s interim president Katrina Armstrong and a variety of personages criticizing her decisions, or their lack, or their careful vagueness, regarding Columbia’s rampant antisemitic bigotry and overt support for “protestors” supporting terrorists in Gaza and the West Bank.

Armstrong’s waffling on those items already has cost her university $400 million in Federal grants and contracts, yet she continues to waffle.

Chief among her excuse-making supporters is Johns Hopkins Medicine International President, Charles Wiener:

She’s in a situation now where every minute, every hour, there’s no way she’ll be able to do anything that pleases everybody[.]

Armstrong isn’t there to please everybody; she’s not even there to please anybody at all. She’s there to do the right thing: put an end to the school’s antisemitic bigotry that exceeds the bounds of free speech by overtly denying others their rights to free speech and religion—even merely to attend class—and expel the terrorist-supporting “protestors,” including faculty members; have those “protestors” who are not students or faculty arrested for their trespass; and have those—student, non-student, or faculty—involved in stealing university buildings (which is what their “occupations” amount to) and vandalizations arrested and brought to trial for their criminal acts.

Full stop.

Then the newswriters of this WSJ piece offer their own shabby excuse:

Armstrong has walked a fine line between acknowledging that some aspects of the university need to change while also asserting the importance of the school’s academic independence.

No. There is no fine line here. There is no academic freedom in an environment where the school’s Jewish students are prevented by those terrorist supporters from speaking, prevented from getting to class, even physically attacked simply for being Jewish, much less speaking anyway.

Ans this:

If she cedes [sic] to White House demands over campus antisemitism allegations, she risks revolt from faculty fearing a loss of academic freedom.

More excuse-making. Faculty members who revolt over this are simply self-selecting for prompt termination. Getting them out of the way would both reduce the bigotry that so rampantly denies Jewish students their free speech rights and increase academic freedom by removing those who insist that academic freedom means being free to do things their way only.

Armstrong needs to stop waffling. Or she needs to be replaced by someone willing to make the hard decisions necessary to reduce the bigoted attacks on disfavored groups and get rid of the “protestors,” and to enforce those decisions.

Update (compared to when I wrote this): Columbia University has, finally, acceded to many of the government’s demands regarding curbing its antisemitic bigotry and support for terrorists.

Donald Trump Bullies?

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Really? A letter writer in Wednesday’s Letters section of The Wall Street Journal thinks so. He credulously makes, though, a couple of critical mistakes that no rational, grown adult would make.

Today, Donald Trump’s “bullying” embodies the more contemporary meaning: the cowardly actions of one who seeks to harm or intimidate those he views as weak.

This is risible on its face. Bullies have only the power their putative victims choose to grant them, not a minim more. The cowardice is in those who make the decision to allow themselves to be bullied. Yes, that’s often a hard decision to make, but “hard” means “possible.” There’s no excuse for choosing wrongly here.

The letter writer’s other mistake centers on this—which he, in all seriousness, offers as an example of Trumpian bullying:

[T]he president has issued an executive order stripping security clearances from lawyers at Covington & Burling, who provided pro bono legal assistance to former special counsel Jack Smith. More recently, Ed Martin, interim US attorney for the District of Columbia, sent a letter to Georgetown Law School, demanding that it cease diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, and warning that his office wouldn’t hire the school’s graduates unless it did so.
These actions violate the First Amendment’s protections of freedom of expression.

This is laughable beyond anything related to “bullying” or being “bullied.” There is no intrinsic free speech right, or any other right, to a security clearances—which grants the holder access (given a parallel and simultaneous need to know) to data involving national security. Neither Covington & Burling as an institution, nor any of its lawyers, have any such right. It’s not bullying to rescind the clearances of those entities and persons who no longer work for the government.

Neither is there any intrinsic free speech right—or any other 1st Amendment right or any other right sourced to any other clause or clauses of our Constitution—to a government job. The government, like any potential employer, has its own intrinsic right to determine for itself the qualifications required for a job and then to determine for itself who the best candidate(s) might be to be hired into that job.

Nor is there any such right held by Georgetown Law School to place its graduates into any particular job, including a government one.

Back to the bullying foolishness: if Georgetown managers feel bullied by this, that’s their conscious choice. It would be particularly easy, though, for these worthies to stand up to the alleged Trumpian bullying. The Federal government’s authority to enforce any demand, whether to desist from DEI efforts or anything else, extends only so far as Georgetown Law School takes in Federal dollars. The institution is under no obligation to take those dollars. The school’s managers could eliminate the pressures they’ve chosen to perceive simply by ceasing those acceptances rather than ceasing their DEI efforts.