Tag Archives: culture

Ukrainian Independence

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Ukraine’s overwhelming vote for independence from Russia in 1991, including those oblasts in the southeast where Ukrainians of Russian ethnicity live and the Crimea oblast, whose population is majority Ukrainians of Russian ethnicity, has been confirmed by a March 2014 Gallup poll, a poll that covered all of Ukraine, including occupied Crimea.

Ukrainians of all backgrounds and from every corner of the country reject Vladimir Putin’s decision to send Russian troops to Ukraine to protect Russian-speaking Ukrainians, with 81% of those surveyed expressing opposition to the move and 13% in favor.

And note especially:

85% of Ukrainians said that Russian-speaking citizens are not threatened, an opinion shared by 66% of ethnic Russians themselves.  74% of Ukrainians living in both the south and the east, regions where Russians claim protection is most needed, responded that Russian-speaking Ukrainians were not under threat because of their language.

And this:

a majority of Ukrainians…believed Crimea should remain part of Ukraine, with 57% in the south and 52% in the east supporting the status quo ante.

So much for the legitimacy of the Russian Anschluss or for the legitimacy of the Kerry-Obama timidity and moral equivalence equivocation in the face of Putin’s aggression.

UCSB’s “Apology”

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Recall a week, or so, ago when UCSB Women’s Studies Professor (her class: “Black Woman in Pornography”) Mireille Miller-Young objected to a pro-life demonstration that a 16-year-old girl and her 21-year-old sister were holding in the “free speech” (!) zone on the UCSB campus.  Miller-Young progressed from berating the girls for their demonstration, through stealing a sign they were using as part of their demonstration, to assaulting the younger girl, pushing her a number of times.

After considerable delay, UCSB’s Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs, Michael Young, has issued a memo.  The meat of that memo comes near the end:

While urging you to engage with differing ideas and opinions in a civil manner, I also want to remind you that you have the option not to engage at all.  You do not have to listen to, look at, or even acknowledge speech or expression that you find provocative or offensive.  …  If you do not want to be confronted by certain materials or expressions, you should avoid the free-speech areas when you expect that you might encounter them, or simply ignore them.

And

If you feel that you must respond, hold a peaceful, thoughtful, civil, and dignified counter-demonstration, and show how students engage intellectually and politically at UCSB.

The “you” to whom Young is speaking are the UCSB students.  There’s not a word directed to his misbehaving professor.  There’s not a word of apology for his professor’s misbehavior.  Not a syllable.  The rest of the memo is given over simply to a sermon on the trials of tolerating the disagreeable speech of those with whom a UCSB student might disagree.

To date, there’s no indication that UCSB intends to discipline Miller-Young in any way for her misbehavior.

As an aside, Young also wrote this in his memo:

You also know that I hold equally strong views on the sanctity of free speech.

Yeah.  As long as it’s done in your carefully restricted pair of squares of the campus grounds and confines itself to the limits of your comfort zone.  “Free speech” zone, indeed.  You seem to have lost sight of the fact that every square inch of public ground in our great nation is a free speech zone.

Talk About Paranoia

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Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker (R) has committed the dastardly deed of posting on his Facebook and Twitter feeds, references to a Biblical verse: Philippians 4:13.  The meaning of this verse, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me,” is less important than Scott’s purpose in posting it and the hue and cry raised over it by the atheists of the Left.  Walker’s Press Secretary Laurel Patrick, had this to say of that purpose:

While [Governor Walker] frequently uses his social media to engage with Wisconsinites on matters of public policy, he also uses it to give them a sense of who he is.  This does just that—it was a reflection of his thoughts for the day.

On the other hand, Freedom From Religion Foundation really has its collective knickers in a twist.

This braggadocio verse coming from a public official is rather disturbing.  To say, “I can do all things through Christ, who strengthens me,” seems more like a threat, or the utterance of a theocratic dictator, than a duly elected civil servant.

A threat?  Really!?  And where is the diktat involved here?  In what way is Walker ordering anyone else to do anything?

In what way is a man required to check his ethos—or his religion—at the door when he goes to work?  Should Walker also check his Judeo-Christian requirement to help the least among us at the door, too?

Come to that, where is the FFRF on government welfare—that use of taxpayer dollars, that use of FFRF members’ tax dollars—to support this Christian effort by government?

This would be bad parody, except that the FFRF and other If-It-Offends-Me-It-Must-Be-Unconstitutional crowd are deadly serious.  Instead, it’s just a disturbing level of paranoia.

What is it

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…with Liberals and uniformity?  I mentioned here a Liberal Justice’s fear of “the noisiness of republican democracy.”  Following is an example from near the other end of the jurisdictional spectrum.

It seems a grade schooler at the Caprock Academy in Grand Junction, CO, shaved her head in solidarity for a classmate and friend who was undergoing cancer treatment and in the process losing her own hair.  This got the grade schooler expelled from Caprock: such a thing violated the school’s precious dress code.

Never mind that shaving heads is a widespread and well-known act for the purpose: solidarity and emotional support for someone who is losing their own hair from a cancer treatment régime.  Never mind that the Caprock administrators knew the purpose of this girl’s head-shaving.  No: Get outta here.

The school’s excuse?  Unbelievably, it’s this.  Caprock’s President and Board of Directors Chairman, Catherine Norton Breman, said the school’s dress code

was created to promote safety, uniformity, and a non-distracting environment for the school’s students.  Under this policy, shaved heads are not permitted.

Uniformity.  No exceptions.  In what way, exactly, is supporting a friend in her extended hour of need in any way unsafe or distracting to other students?

In what way, exactly, is non-uniformity such a fearful thing?  Especially in an environment where students are supposed to be learning to think—and to think for themselves—is non-uniformity such a terrifying thing?

Of whom, or of what philosophy, are Liberals trying to make all of us—all of our children—unthinking, carbon copy acolytes?

I should note that, in the end, the girl’s expulsion from school only lasted one day, and she was allowed back to school the following Tuesday.  The school’s directors also were to meet—behind closed doors, of course—to “discuss” this thing.  The questions above remain though: of what is this bunch of Liberals, and all Liberals, apparently—so terrified of people, or children, not being all alike?

A Letter of Resignation

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…by HHS’ ex-Office of Research Integrity Director, David Wright.  I’ve…written negatively…about the HHS a number of times, but this isn’t one of them.  Here, the HHS is just the immediate face of the problem Wright describes.  The dysfunction illustrated here, this utter failure of government bureaucracy, is typical of the Federal government and of too many State and local governments.

2/25

Dr Howard Koh, MD

Assistant Secretary for Health

Dear Howard:

I am writing to resign my position as Director, Office of Research Integrity, ORI/OASH/DHHS.

This has been at once the best and worst job I’ve ever had.  The best part of it has been the opportunity to lead ORI intellectually and professionally in helping research institutions better handle allegations of research misconduct, provide in-service training for institutional Research Integrity Officers (RIOs), and develop programming to promote the Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR).  Working with members of the research community, particularly RIOs, and the brilliant scientist-investigators in ORI has been one of the great pleasures of my long career.  Unfortunately, and to my great surprise, it turned out to be only about 35% of the job.

The rest of my role as ORI Director has been the very worst job I have ever had and it occupies up to 65% of my time.  That part of the job is spent navigating the remarkably dysfunctional HHS bureaucracy to secure resources and, yes, get permission for ORI to serve the research community.  I knew coming into this job about the bureaucratic limitations of the federal government, but I had no idea how stifling it would be. What I was able to do in a day or two as an academic administrator takes weeks or months in the federal government, our precinct of which is OASH.

I believe there are a number of reasons for this.  First, whereas in most organizations the front-line agencies that do the actual work, in our case protecting the integrity of millions of dollars of PHS-funded research, command the administrative support services to get the job done.  In OASH it’s the exact opposite.  The Op-Divs, as the front-line offices are called, get our budgets and then have to go hat-in-hand to the administrative support people in the “immediate office” of OASH to spend it, almost item by item.  These people who are generally poorly informed about what ORI is and does decide whether our requests are “mission critical.”

On one occasion, I was invited to give a talk on research integrity and misconduct to a large group of AAAS fellows.  I needed to spend $35 to convert some old cassette tapes to CDs for use in the presentation.  The immediate office denied my request after a couple of days of noodling.  A university did the conversion for me in twenty minutes, and refused payment when I told them it was for an educational purpose.

Second, the organizational culture of OASH’s immediate office is seriously flawed, in my opinion.  The academic literature over the last twenty-five years on successful organizations highlights several characteristics: transparency, power-sharing or shared decision-making and accountability.   If you invert these principles, you have an organization (OASH in this instance), which is secretive, autocratic and unaccountable.

In one instance, by way of illustration, I urgently needed to fill a vacancy for an ORI division director.  I asked the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Health (your deputy) when I could proceed.  She said there was a priority list.  I asked where ORI’s request was on that list.  She said the list was secret and that we weren’t on the top, but we weren’t on the bottom either. Sixteen months later we still don’t have a division director on board.

On another occasion I asked your deputy why you didn’t conduct an evaluation by the Op-Divs of the immediate office administrative services to try to improve them.  She responded that that had been tried a few years ago and the results were so negative that no further evaluations have been conducted.

Third, there is the nature of the federal bureaucracy itself.  The sociologist Max Weber observed in the early 20th century that while bureaucracy is in some instances an optimal organizational mode for a rationalized, industrial society, it has drawbacks.  One is that public bureaucracies quit being about serving the public and focus instead on perpetuating themselves.  This is exactly my experience with OASH. We spend exorbitant amounts of time in meetings and in generating repetitive and often meaningless data and reports to make our precinct of the bureaucracy look productive.  None of this renders the slightest bit of assistance to ORI in handling allegations of misconduct or in promoting the responsible conduct of research.  Instead, it sucks away time and resources that we might better use to meet our mission.  Since I’ve been here I’ve been advised by my superiors that I had “to make my bosses look good.”  I’ve been admonished: “Dave, you are a visionary leader but what we need here are team players.”   Recently, I was advised that if I wanted to be happy in government service, I had to “lower my expectations.”  The one thing no one in OASH leadership has said to me in two years is ‘how can we help ORI better serve the research community?’  Not once.

Finally, there is another important organizational question that deserves mention:  Is OASH the proper home for a regulatory agency such as ORI?  OASH is a collection of important public health offices that have agendas significantly different from the regulatory roles of ORI and OHRP. You’ve observed that OASH operates in an “intensely political environment.”  I agree and have observed that in this environment decisions are often made on the basis of political expediency and to obtain favorable “optics.” There is often a lack of procedural rigor in this environment.  I discovered recently, for example, that OASH operates a grievance procedure for employees that has no due process protections of any kind for respondents to those grievances.  Indeed, there are no written rules or procedures for the OASH grievance process regarding the rights and responsibilities of respondents. By contrast, agencies such as ORI are bound by regulation to make principled decisions on the basis of clearly articulated procedures that protect the rights of all involved.  Our decisions must be supported by the weight of factual evidence. ORI’s decisions may be and frequently are tested in court.   There are members of the press and the research community who don’t believe ORI belongs in an agency such as OASH and I, reluctantly, have come to agree.

In closing, these twenty-six months of service as the Director of ORI have been a remarkable experience.  As I wrote earlier in this letter, working with the research community and the remarkable scientist-investigators at ORI has been the best job I’ve ever had.  As for the rest, I’m offended as an American taxpayer that the federal bureaucracy—at least the part I’ve labored in—is so profoundly dysfunctional.  I’m hardly the first person to have made that discovery, but I’m saddened by the fact that there is so little discussion, much less outrage, regarding the problem.  To promote healthy and productive discussion, I intend to publish a version of the daily log I’ve kept as ORI Director in order to share my experience and observations with my colleagues in government and with members of the regulated research community.

I plan to work through Tuesday March 4, 2014 and then use vacation or sick days until Thursday March 27 (by which time I will have re-established health care through my university) and then end my federal government service.

Sincerely,

Even in the Federal government there’s no excuse for this kind of dysfunction (or for any other kind of dysfunction…).  It’s too bad that good people are so thoroughly stifled by Federal employ.

The American people deserve better than that.