Psyche, Science, and Society

Larry Summers cost Harvard $1.8 billion. How much will he cost you?

We have long know how Larry Summers was one of those who helped create the eGreat Recession by pushing radical deregulation during the Clinton years. Now the Boston Globe reports on how Larry Summers’ arrogance cost Harvard University almost $2 billion after he helped destroy the US economy.

It happened at least once a year, every year. In a roomful of a dozen Harvard University financial officials, Jack Meyer, the hugely successful head of Harvard’s endowment, and Lawrence Summers, then the school’s president, would face off in a heated debate. The topic: cash and how the university was managing – or mismanaging – its basic operating funds.

Through the first half of this decade, Meyer repeatedly warned Summers and other Harvard officials that the school was being too aggressive with billions of dollars in cash, according to people present for the discussions, investing almost all of it with the endowment’s risky mix of stocks, bonds, hedge funds, and private equity. Meyer’s successor, Mohamed El-Erian, would later sound the same warnings to Summers, and to Harvard financial staff and board members.

“Mohamed was having a heart attack,’’ said one former financial executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of angering Harvard and Summers. He considered the cash investment a “doubling up’’ of the university’s investment risk.

But the warnings fell on deaf ears, under Summers’s regime and beyond. And when the market crashed in the fall of 2008, Harvard would pay dearly, as $1.8 billion in cash simply vanished. Indeed, it is still paying, in the form of tighter budgets, deferred expansion plans, and big interest payments on bonds issued to cover the losses….

In the Summers years, from 2001 to 2006, nothing was on auto-pilot. He was the unquestioned commander, a dominating personality with the talent to move a balkanized institution like Harvard, but also a man unafflicted, former colleagues say, with self-doubt in matters of finance.

Certainly, when it came to handling Harvard’s cash account, the former US Treasury secretary had no doubts. Widely considered one of the most brilliant economists of his generation, Summers pushed to invest 100 percent of Harvard’s cash with the endowment and had to be argued down to 80 percent, financial executives say. The cash account grew to $5.1 billion during his tenure, more than the entire endowment of all but a dozen or so colleges and universities.

Through a friend, Summers took no responsibility but, rather, blamed others, his successors. But his failure to diversify, and arrogant rejection of all advice to do so, is not explained by changed conditions after he was forced out of Harvard.

Who would trust the US economy to such an incompetent?

November 30th, 2009

UCLA students protest fee hikes

UCLA students have been protesting huge 32% fee hikes this week that will the cost of an education (not counting books and living costs)  above $10,000 for the first time. Students are concerned that these increases will increase the inaccessibility of higher education to poorer students. As has happened so often at campuses around the country, the university called in police in riot gear to suppress protests. Fourteen students were arrested and others injured. Protest, including a sit-in, are continuing on Thursday. [A statement from the students sitting in can be heard here.]:

November 19th, 2009

U. of Akron to employees: Hand over your DNA!

In a new expansion of the total surveillance state, the University of Akron is now reserving the right to demand DNA samples from all new employees, CBS News reports:

But the University of Akron has taken this to a surprising new level.

The Ohio school now reserves the right to require any prospective faculty, staff, or contractor to submit a DNA sample, which genetic-testing experts say makes it the first employer in the nation to take such an extreme and potentially intrusive step.

The new policy, which says a “DNA sample for purpose of a federal criminal background check” may be collected, took the campus by surprise after it was announced last week. An adjunct faculty member has resigned in protest and is contemplating a lawsuit, and the local chapter of the American Association of University Professors says that genetic testing violates a collective bargaining agreement.

It is interesting and disturbing that a university is the site for launching this first-in-the-nation attack on our liberties. Universities resemble businesses more every day.

October 31st, 2009

Are rigid guidelines the enemy of quality care?

As a health researcher, I am a strong advocate of increasing the research-base guiding our clinical efforts. Among other things, I help develop systems to assess the outcomes of psychosocial interventions in order to use the resultant knowledge to improve the quality of treatments that are delivered to our clients. Yet, as a clinician, I am a skeptic regarding the quality of our current knowledge and its ability to appropriately guide our practice. Do we really know enough? And what about the large element of clinical expertise that cannot, with our current tools anyway, be quantified.

This is a tension I have lived with and explored throughout my professional career. I even co-edited a book — Reconciling Empirical Knowledge and Clinical Experience: The Art and Science of Psychotherapy — on the interface between research and clinical practice.

I have just been sent this new Wall Street Journal op-ed by Jerome Groopman and Pamela Hartbrand that makes the case that rigid guidelines can be wrong, and even dangerous. Groopman and Hartbrand argue that these guidelines, based as they are on what is believed to be best practices, can, in the current state of our knowledge, easily turn out to be suboptimal or even harmful. As one of the examples they give illustrates:

One key quality measure in the ICU became the level of blood sugar in critically ill patients. Expert panels reviewed data on whether ICU patients should have insulin therapy adjusted to tightly control their blood sugar, keeping it within the normal range, or whether a more flexible approach, allowing some elevation of sugar, was permissible. Expert consensus endorsed tight control, and this approach was embedded in guidelines from the American Diabetes Association. The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, which generates report cards on hospitals, and governmental and private insurers that pay for care, adopted as a suggested quality metric this tight control of blood sugar.

A colleague who works in an ICU in a medical center in our state told us how his care of the critically ill is closely monitored. If his patients have blood sugars that rise above the metric, he must attend what he calls “re-education sessions” where he is pointedly lectured on the need to adhere to the rule. If he does not strictly comply, his hospital will be downgraded on its quality rating and risks financial loss. His status on the faculty is also at risk should he be seen as delivering low-quality care.

But this coercive approach was turned on its head last month when the New England Journal of Medicine published a randomized study, by the Australian and New Zealand Intensive Care Society Clinical Trials Group and the Canadian Critical Care Trials Group, of more than 6,000 critically ill patients in the ICU. Half of the patients received insulin to tightly maintain their sugar in the normal range, and the other half were on a more flexible protocol, allowing higher sugar levels. More patients died in the tightly regulated group than those cared for with the flexible protocol.

This example illustrates both the difficulty with rigid guidelines and the need to be able to use judgment and flexibility in treating patients.

I concur with their concerns. We are far from knowing with any degree of certainty the correctness of most of our clinical guidlines. Yet I also believe that clinical care independent of research is increasingly problematic. While Groopman and Hartbrand are right about the need for clinical flexibility, the ignore the opposite problem whereby the treatment a patient receives depends in an arbitrary manner of which doctor or hospital they go to, or where they live. Thus, enormous geographic variability has been found for certain surgical procedures with no evidence that the variability is based upon anything but custom.

Thus, I believe that health care systems need to measure their outcomes and use the resultant data to improve care. Yet, they also need to avoid the rigid guideline problem.

One way of reconciling these conflicting impulses is to implement outcomes monitoring in a quality improvement framework.That is, the goal is to identify practices and health providers who have superior outcomes and find how to tap their knowledge and expertise and communicate it to those whose outcomes are inferior. A successful quality improvement framework is based upon the assumption that the vast majority of healthcare workers want to deliver quality care. Thus, they will be open data-driven quality improvement efforts, as long as these are conducted in a collaboarative and respectful manner, fully valuing the expertise of healthcare workers while providing them with the information and tools to improve their efforts.

One important aspect of such a quality improvement perspective is that healthcare workers, doctors and others, should be part of team that selects outcome measures and quality improvement implementation procedures. Especially in “fuizzy” areas like mental health, the ability to control the outcomes that are measured is a powerful influence on the nature of treatment that is delivered.

To take one example with which I am intimately familiar, if substance abuse treatment outcomes included measures of such lifetsyle factors as having housing and jobs, as well as improved mental health, then these life domains are likely to be included in treatment planning. However, if substance abuse outcomes only include measurements of substance use, then large aspects of substance abusing clients’ lives will ultimately be given short shrift when planning and conducting treatment.

By the way, similar issues arise in a number of other areas than healthcare. Thus, much of the current efforts to measure “outcomes” in education could similarly benefit from a quality improvement perspective. If teachers and parents, not to mention students, were more integrated into the vast apparatus now assessing educational outcomes through standardized testing, there would likely be less grousing among teachers, with its acompanying drop in morale and loss of experienced teachers to early retirement.

Here is the complete Groopman and Hartbrand article:

Why ‘Quality’ Care Is Dangerous
The growing number of rigid protocols meant to guide doctors have perverse consequences

By Jerome Groopman and Pamela Hartbrand

The Obama administration is working with Congress to mandate that all Medicare payments be tied to “quality metrics.” But an analysis of this drive for better health care reveals a fundamental flaw in how quality is defined and metrics applied. In too many cases, the quality measures have been hastily adopted, only to be proven wrong and even potentially dangerous to patients.

Health-policy planners define quality as clinical practice that conforms to consensus guidelines written by experts. The guidelines present specific metrics for physicians to meet, thus “quality metrics.” Since 2003, the federal government has piloted Medicare projects at more than 260 hospitals to reward physicians and institutions that meet quality metrics. The program is called “pay-for-performance.” Many private insurers are following suit with similar incentive programs.

In Massachusetts, there are not only carrots but also sticks; physicians who fail to comply with quality guidelines from certain state-based insurers are publicly discredited and their patients required to pay up to three times as much out of pocket to see them. Unfortunately, many states are considering the Massachusetts model for their local insurance.

How did we get here? Initially, the quality improvement initiatives focused on patient safety and public-health measures. The hospital was seen as a large factory where systems needed to be standardized to prevent avoidable errors. A shocking degree of sloppiness existed with respect to hand washing, for example, and this largely has been remedied with implementation of standardized protocols. Similarly, the risk of infection when inserting an intravenous catheter has fallen sharply since doctors and nurses now abide by guidelines. Buoyed by these successes, governmental and private insurance regulators now have overreached. They’ve turned clinical guidelines for complex diseases into iron-clad rules, to deleterious effect.

One key quality measure in the ICU became the level of blood sugar in critically ill patients. Expert panels reviewed data on whether ICU patients should have insulin therapy adjusted to tightly control their blood sugar, keeping it within the normal range, or whether a more flexible approach, allowing some elevation of sugar, was permissible. Expert consensus endorsed tight control, and this approach was embedded in guidelines from the American Diabetes Association. The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, which generates report cards on hospitals, and governmental and private insurers that pay for care, adopted as a suggested quality metric this tight control of blood sugar.

A colleague who works in an ICU in a medical center in our state told us how his care of the critically ill is closely monitored. If his patients have blood sugars that rise above the metric, he must attend what he calls “re-education sessions” where he is pointedly lectured on the need to adhere to the rule. If he does not strictly comply, his hospital will be downgraded on its quality rating and risks financial loss. His status on the faculty is also at risk should he be seen as delivering low-quality care.

But this coercive approach was turned on its head last month when the New England Journal of Medicine published a randomized study, by the Australian and New Zealand Intensive Care Society Clinical Trials Group and the Canadian Critical Care Trials Group, of more than 6,000 critically ill patients in the ICU. Half of the patients received insulin to tightly maintain their sugar in the normal range, and the other half were on a more flexible protocol, allowing higher sugar levels. More patients died in the tightly regulated group than those cared for with the flexible protocol.

Similarly, maintaining normal blood sugar in ambulatory diabetics with vascular problems has been a key quality metric in assessing physician performance. Yet largely due to two extensive studies published in the June 2008 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, this is now in serious doubt. Indeed, in one study of more than 10,000 ambulatory diabetics with cardiovascular diseases conducted by a group of Canadian and American researchers (the “ACCORD” study) so many diabetics died in the group where sugar was tightly regulated that the researchers discontinued the trial 17 months before its scheduled end.

And just last month, another clinical trial contradicted the expert consensus guidelines that patients with kidney failure on dialysis should be given statin drugs to prevent heart attack and stroke.

These and other recent examples show why rigid and punitive rules to broadly standardize care for all patients often break down. Human beings are not uniform in their biology. A disease with many effects on multiple organs, like diabetes, acts differently in different people. Medicine is an imperfect science, and its study is also imperfect. Information evolves and changes. Rather than rigidity, flexibility is appropriate in applying evidence from clinical trials. To that end, a good doctor exercises sound clinical judgment by consulting expert guidelines and assessing ongoing research, but then decides what is quality care for the individual patient. And what is best sometimes deviates from the norms.

Yet too often quality metrics coerce doctors into rigid and ill-advised procedures. Orwell could have written about how the word “quality” became zealously defined by regulators, and then redefined with each change in consensus guidelines. And Kafka could detail the recent experience of a pediatrician featured in Vital Signs, the member publication of the Massachusetts Medical Society. Out of the blue, according to the article, Dr. Ann T. Nutt received a letter in February from the Massachusetts Group Insurance Commission on Clinical Performance Improvement informing her that she was no longer ranked as Tier 1 but had fallen to Tier 3. (Massachusetts and some private insurers use a three-tier ranking system to incentivize high-quality care.) She contacted the regulators and insisted that she be given details to explain her fall in rating.

After much effort, she discovered that in 127 opportunities to comply with quality metrics, she had met the standards 115 times. But the regulators refused to provide the names of patients who allegedly had received low quality care, so she had no way to assess their judgment for herself. The pediatrician fought back and ultimately learned which guidelines she had failed to follow. Despite her cogent rebuttal, the regulator denied the appeal and the doctor is still ranked as Tier 3. She continues to battle the state.

Doubts about the relevance of quality metrics to clinical reality are even emerging from the federal pilot programs launched in 2003. An analysis of Medicare pay-for-performance for hip and knee replacement by orthopedic surgeons at 260 hospitals in 38 states published in the most recent March/April issue of Health Affairs showed that conforming to or deviating from expert quality metrics had no relationship to the actual complications or clinical outcomes of the patients. Similarly, a study led by UCLA researchers of over 5,000 patients at 91 hospitals published in 2007 in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that the application of most federal quality process measures did not change mortality from heart failure.

State pay-for-performance programs also provide disturbing data on the unintended consequences of coercive regulation. Another report in the most recent Health Affairs evaluating some 35,000 physicians caring for 6.2 million patients in California revealed that doctors dropped noncompliant patients, or refused to treat people with complicated illnesses involving many organs, since their outcomes would make their statistics look bad. And research by the Brigham and Women’s Hospital published last month in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology indicates that report cards may be pushing Massachusetts cardiologists to deny lifesaving procedures on very sick heart patients out of fear of receiving a low grade if the outcome is poor.

Dr. David Sackett, a pioneer of “evidence-based medicine,” where results from clinical trials rather than anecdotes are used to guide physician practice, famously said, “Half of what you’ll learn in medical school will be shown to be either dead wrong or out of date within five years of your graduation; the trouble is that nobody can tell you which half — so the most important thing to learn is how to learn on your own.” Science depends upon such a sentiment, and honors the doubter and iconoclast who overturns false paradigms.

Before a surgeon begins an operation, he must stop and call a “time-out” to verify that he has all the correct information and instruments to safely proceed. We need a national time-out in the rush to mandate what policy makers term quality care to prevent doing more harm than good.

**********

Dr. Groopman, a staff writer for the New Yorker, and Dr. Hartzband are on the staff of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and on the faculty of Harvard Medical School.

April 8th, 2009

Is parents’ rally in Boston a harbinger of wider protests?

In Boston today we had 700 or so parents rallying at the State House and lobbying the legislature to protest the budget cuts  that threaten to do serious damage to public education in the city. the rally had an amazing energy, as parents throughout the city sacrificed their lunch hour to protest.

The movement started among parents at Boston Latin School, an elite, “exam school,” with many middle class parents. BLS was originally scheduled for an 18% budget cut, which would remove all music, physical education, and many Advanced Placement classes, while replacing one subject with yet another study hall each day.

Rather than simply fight for their kids and their school, the BLS parents wisely decided to reach out to parents throughout the system many of whom aren’t as privileged. the rally today, while disproportionately white, did represent parents from throughout the school system. One State Representative said it was the largest rally he’d ever seen there and made quite an impact among his colleagues. My representative, Angelo Scaccia, however, ran for a hiding place and disappeared, along with all his aids, when 50 parents from his district tried to meet with him.

The rally got some press attention, but Boston.com, the website of the Boston Globe, appears to be downplaying it.

Parents of children who attend the Boston public schools rallied at the Statehouse this afternoon, hoping to convince the governor and the Legislature to send more money to the city to avert budget cuts that could result in the loss of more than 500 school jobs, including those of many teachers.

The parents advocated for a larger share of federal stimulus dollars. They also voiced support for the Legislature to pass measures that would enable communities to raise more revenue, such as increasing the local meals and lodging taxes.

“What we are interested in is keeping more teachers in the classroom,” said Karina Meiri, a Boston Latin School parent and one of the organizers, in an interview before the event.

They are giving much greater play to a vampire rumor at Boston Latin than to hundreds of outraged parents. Neither their article not the picture they chose gives any sense that more than a few dozen parents participated. Our other paper, the less-respected rag, the Boston Herald, did a far better job conveying the spirit of the rally:

Hundreds of boisterous Boston parents packed the State House today to protest the governor’s move to cut the city out of $168 million in state stabilization funds to schools.

“We have bare bones and now the bare bones are being cut and all we have are teachers and now they are being taken away,” said Bonnie Manzi, a mother of a 15-year-old girl attending Boston Latin Academy [a separate "exam school" from Boston Latin School].

The West Roxbury mom was joined today by scores of other parents chanting “Do the right thing” and wearing T-shirts reading, “Save BPS arts,” while amassing inside the State House.

It was a show of Boston-baked outrage over the future of the schools.

One wonders if movements like this are occurring across the country, as parents and other  citizens fight back against the massive cutbacks accompanying the economic meltdown. If so, perhaps these movements will gradually unite, taking on a wider agenda while bringing together people from diverse geographic regions. After all, the cutbacks, like the economic crisis, are occurring at a national, indeed an international level, and affect us all. A successful fightback will take more than people in one city. nd the damage to public education is only one aspect of the damage that will becaused by the destruction of government budgets while trillions are spent paying off the banks to “resume lending.” If citizens unite to resist, democracy in the country could be revitalized as we cease to let the politicians, the bankers, and their ilk decide our fate.

March 26th, 2009

Two who resisted the scoundrels at Harvard Law School

Having spent the last several years fighting the American Psychological Association, the nation’s largest mental health organization as it curried favor with the Bush administration by providing cover for the administration’s torture program, I am especially moved by this story of two who refused to yield their honor when another large organization, Harvard Law School, bowed to the powerful.

The Lawyer’s Tale: Harvard Law School’s Hour of Shame

By Alexander Cockburn

Early in the age of Obama, before he’d even been inaugurated, I drove down to St. Simon Island on the coast of southeast Georgia to spend a couple of days with Jonathan Lubell and his wife Dee. Jonathan is the best libel lawyer in the country, carving his way into legal history with such brilliant actions as the suit he fought on behalf of Colonel Herbert against CBS in the late 1970s, where he triumphed before the U.S. Supreme Court in convincing the justices to issue the seminal decision allowing discovery (in legal terms – compulsory disclosure of facts or documents) in defamation cases.

Jonathan has represented CounterPunch down the years with 100 per cent success. I’ve often pestered him to give the full story of how shameful reds-under-the-bed hysteria had got him blocked from a rightful spot on the Harvard Law Review at the height of the McCarthy witch-hunts. Until now, he’d always said he’d tell me “some day”. Maybe the fact that the White House was about to be occupied by a former Harvard Law Review president made the principle of transparency applicable to the Law School. At all events, he finally gave me the essential story.

Jonathan and his twin brother David had attended Cornell from 1947 to 1951. The two young men, both recipients of Sidney Hillman scholarships at Cornell, went to Harvard Law School from 1951 to 1954.

In their years at Cornell, the Lubell boys had been active politically on civil rights and issues of war and peace, particularly on the Korean War. “We wrote papers and spoke at meetings, taking the position that the U.S.A., in alliance with South Korea, was responsible for the war.” Jonathan points out that the events in Vietnam, years later, confirmed their view of the Korean War.

At the end of 1952 and start of 1953, Joe McCarthy’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, the House Un-American Activities Committee and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (this last one often known as the Jenner Committee) were all running hearings on red subversion. “Having been ultimately subpoenaed by more than one of these committees,” Jonathan recalls, “I understand that there was some sort of bargaining, and eventually the task of subpoenaing us was taken up by the Jenner Subcommittee.

“We were in our second year and when we received the subpoenas, we went to the office of the dean of the Harvard Law School, Erwin Griswold, who asked what we intended to do. We responded that, of course, we weren’t going to cooperate because we believed that the committees’ activities violated the First Amendment and the academic freedom that should exist at Harvard Law School. Griswold was furious and told us that others at the Law School would be talking to us. At that time, the dean expressed the position that the Fifth Amendment was available only for those who were involved in criminal activities. Some nine months later, changing his position, the dean wrote that the Fifth Amendment was available to the innocent. This was the position we had taken with Griswold when we first met with him.”

Soon thereafter, the Lubells were asked to meet with three professors from the Law School. “The meeting was characterized by an absence of communication. We told the professors that we had no intention of cooperating with the Jenner Committee. When one of the professors evoked the damage that could be suffered by Harvard if we refused to cooperate, we responded that far greater would be the damage to our honor and to what we felt were the principles that the Law School should be upholding. It was necessary to protect the rights set forth in the Constitution; otherwise, our country would be in grave danger.

“The three professors were not of a single mind. One of them had a history of actually working on Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer’s strike force at the end of World War I, which had persecuted reds and suspected radicals. This was professor John McGuire; to his honor, he was clearly the most understanding of our position. Another of the professors, who had a reputation as a ‘liberal,’ became a judge on the commonwealth of Massachusetts’ highest court. During the course of several weeks of discussion with the three professors, David and I were called into the office of one of the professors for ‘a private discussion.’ He said he had ‘great news’. The Jenner Committee’s counsel, Robert Morris, had offered to interview us in private in Washington, D.C. No one would know that the interview had occurred. Without any hesitation, both David and I had the same immediate response that ‘we would know’ and that the offer was unacceptable.

“During this whole period of time it became known that we had been subpoenaed. The result was that no one would sit with us at any of the tables in the Harvard Law School dining room. To make sure we got the message, no one would also sit next to us in any of the classrooms either.”

In addition to the isolation imposed by both the faculty and the students, the school thought to bring pressure from other quarters. “The vice dean, Livingstone Hall, invited our mother to meet with him. His only point was to try to convince her that she should have us take a sabbatical until after the committee’s activities were over. She would not entertain the idea that her sons remove themselves from the Law School.”

As the scheduled day of appearance before the Jenner Committee grew closer, the pressure on the Lubells escalated. “We informed the vice dean that we were planning to speak with somebody at the ACLU to represent us at the hearing. Hall immediately got very upset, stating that we should not get one of those communist lawyers. It was clear to us that the lawyers favored by the school were not going to help defend our position in any way. In fact, their role seemed to be to get us to give up our rights and change our position.”

Finally, Jonathan and David Lubell appeared before the Jenner Subcommittee in 1953. “We briefly explained that we would not cooperate in any way; that the subcommittee’s activities directly violated the First Amendment, the Fifth Amendment and the principles of academic freedom that Harvard had reiterated so many times in the past.

“We had made our position clear and then the subcommittee said the hearing was concluded. After our appearance, some of the professors at the Law School told us that we had jeopardized any possibility of ever becoming lawyers. In addition, the scholarship that we had was terminated. However, David and I made it clear that we intended to be lawyers and to be involved in the legal profession.”

The next attack involved the Harvard Law Review. At no time prior to this had a student been denied membership in the Law Review if he or she was academically qualified. “In our case, the Law Review convoked a special meeting to discuss whether we would be admitted to the Law Review. We had both graduated magna cum laude.”

The Law Review had a meeting. Jonathan Lubell was told that neither he nor his brother would be admitted. As time passed, other events occurred concerning the Law School and the Review. “We were informed by students who had been in our class that the main concern of those who voted to keep me off the Review was to protect their possibility of becoming successful lawyers.”

During the same period, the Law School was obviously trying to have the Lubells removed from the Law School: Jonathan and his brother learned that a faculty meeting was held on the subject of whether the Lubells should be expelled. “Soon thereafter, we were told by a faculty member that there was a meeting and that we were lucky that an expulsion required a two-thirds vote. We understood that this meant that a majority of the faculty had voted for our expulsion – regardless of the Law School’s widely publicized concern for the protection of the rights guaranteed by the Constitution. That concern was not as powerful as the congressional subversive activities committees. It was a precarious time. Significantly, in the early Seventies, the then current members of the Law Review stated that I should have been admitted.”

“After that time, a number of our classmates from 1951-54 would bump into either David or me and express their gratification that we had been able to enter the legal profession. (David is a lawyer in the intellectual properties and entertainment fields.) Of course, they did not dwell on the ignoble roles that they played, nor that we had become lawyers without surrendering to the unconstitutional demands of the Jenner Subcommittee.”

At one convention of the American Bar Association Jonathan Lubell spoke on the Herbert case. The Law School’s former dean, Erwin Griswold, later LBJ’s solicitor general, was present. “Those were hard times for Harvard,” Griswold said to Jonathan. “To which I replied, ‘Dean, they were even harder for me.’”

I vainly begged Jonathan to tell me the names of at least a few of these who would not sit next to him or David in the dining room or the lecture hall. That’s how witch-hunts swell in malign potency, as frightened people perform cowardly acts in the cause of self-protection or self-advancement. Victor Klemperer’s I Will Bear Witness, his diary of the rise of the Nazis, has plenty of kindred examples of such cowardice at the Technische Universität Dresden.

In his memoirs, I Claud, my father records a conversation with the owner of a pub in the East End of London just after the Second World War:

“A year or more after the war was over, Mr. Harry took a trip to the Channel Islands – the only bit of the British Isles actually occupied by the Germans during the conflict. He was enthus­iastic. He described some huge beer cellar which the German military had remodeled and decorated in the Munich manner – a magnificent place, which, by its existence and the amenities it could offer to the English visitor, showed that out of evil some good could come.

“I made some disobliging remark to the effect that I had read somewhere that a good many of the Channel Islanders had made quite a good thing out of the war – had collaborated with the invaders 100 per cent, given them lists of local Jews so that these could be deported, and so on. Mr. Harry said he had heard similar reports in the islands, and judged them to be well based. “‘But you don’t understand, Claud old boy,’ he said, ‘at the time they did that, those people thought the Germans were going to win.’”

Amid the McCarthy red scare, those Law School grads who shunned the Lubells, those professors who tried to coerce them to testify, were similarly trimming their sails to ensure that they would not displease the winning side.

February 21st, 2009

Could Obama’s election help African-American achievement?

A new study described in the New York Times suggests that Obama’s election may have some effects on African-American achievement. at least temporarily it wiped out the negative effects of racial stereotyping on performance. Of courser, as with all social science studies, we need replications to determine if this effect is more than a fluke. But we can hope:

Study Sees an Obama Effect as Lifting Black Test-Takers
By Sam Dillon

Educators and policy makers, including Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, have said in recent days that they hope President Obama’s example as a model student could inspire millions of American students, especially blacks, to higher academic performance.

Now researchers have documented what they call an Obama effect, showing that a performance gap between African-Americans and whites on a 20-question test administered before Mr. Obama’s nomination all but disappeared when the exam was administered after his acceptance speech and again after the presidential election.

The inspiring role model that Mr. Obama projected helped blacks overcome anxieties about racial stereotypes that had been shown, in earlier research, to lower the test-taking proficiency of African-Americans, the researchers conclude in a report summarizing their results.

“Obama is obviously inspirational, but we wondered whether he would contribute to an improvement in something as important as black test-taking,” said Ray Friedman, a management professor at Vanderbilt University, one of the study’s three authors. “We were skeptical that we would find any effect, but our results surprised us.”

The study has not yet undergone peer review, and two academics who read it on Thursday said they would be interested to see if other researchers would be able to replicate its results.

Dr. Friedman and his fellow researchers, David M. Marx, a professor of social psychology at San Diego State University, and Sei Jin Ko, a visiting professor in management and organizations at Northwestern, have submitted their study for review to The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Dr. Friedman said.

“It’s a very small sample, but certainly a provocative study,” said Ronald F. Ferguson, a Harvard professor who studies the factors that have affected the achievement gap between white and nonwhite students, which shows up on nearly every standardized test. “There is a certainly a theoretical foundation and some empirical support for the proposition that Obama’s election could increase the sense of competence among African-Americans, and it could reduce the anxiety associated with taking difficult test questions.”

Researchers in the last decade assembled university students with identical SAT scores and administered tests to them, discovering that blacks performed significantly poorer when asked at the start to fill out a form identifying themselves by race. The researchers attributed those results to anxiety that caused them to tighten up during exams in which they risked confirming a racial stereotype.

In the study made public on Thursday, Dr. Friedman and his colleagues compiled a brief test, drawing 20 questions from the verbal sections of the Graduate Record Exam, and administering it four times to about 120 white and black test-takers during last year’s presidential campaign.

In total, 472 Americans — 84 blacks and 388 whites — took the exam. Both white and black test-takers ranged in age from 18 to 63, and their educational attainment ranged from high school dropout to Ph.D.

On the initial test last summer, whites on average correctly answered about 12 of 20 questions, compared with about 8.5 correct answers for blacks, Dr. Friedman said. But on the tests administered immediately after Mr. Obama’s nomination acceptance speech, and just after his election victory, black performance improved, rendering the white-black gap “statistically nonsignificant,” he said.

“It’s a nice piece of work,” said G. Gage Kingsbury, a testing expert who is a director at the Northwest Evaluation Association, who read the study on Thursday.

But Dr. Kingsbury wondered whether the Obama effect would extend beyond the election, or prove transitory. “I’d want to see another study replicating their results before I get too excited about it,” he said.

January 25th, 2009

Where has all the tuition gone?

As a college professor and professor and parent of a high school student, this hits me personally. And can anyone explain where those huge increases in college tuition are going? Certainly not to my salary. And these costs rise exponentially while schools switch larger fractions of teaching to low-priced “adjuncts,” many of whom make $20,000 year after year teach three courses a semester.

What will US society do as a college education increasingly becomes unaffordable? Make cheap goods to export to China?

College May Become Unaffordable for Most in U.S.

By Tamar Lewin

The rising cost of college — even before the recession — threatens to put higher education out of reach for most Americans, according to the annual report from the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education.

Over all, the report found, published college tuition and fees increased 439 percent from 1982 to 2007, adjusted for inflation, while median family income rose 147 percent. Student borrowing has more than doubled in the last decade, and students from lower-income families, on average, get smaller grants from the colleges they attend than students from more affluent families.

“If we go on this way for another 25 years, we won’t have an affordable system of higher education,” said Patrick M. Callan, president of the center, a nonpartisan organization that promotes access to higher education.

“When we come out of the recession,” Mr. Callan added, “we’re really going to be in jeopardy, because the educational gap between our work force and the rest of the world will make it very hard to be competitive. Already, we’re one of the few countries where 25- to 34-year-olds are less educated than older workers.”

Although college enrollment has continued to rise in recent years, Mr. Callan said, it is not clear how long that can continue.

“The middle class has been financing it through debt,” he said. “The scenario has been that families that have a history of sending kids to college will do whatever if takes, even if that means a huge amount of debt.”

But low-income students, he said, will be less able to afford college. Already, he said, the strains are clear.

The report, “Measuring Up 2008,” is one of the few to compare net college costs — that is, a year’s tuition, fees, room and board, minus financial aid — against median family income. Those findings are stark. Last year, the net cost at a four-year public university amounted to 28 percent of the median family income, while a four-year private university cost 76 percent of the median family income.

The share of income required to pay for college, even with financial aid, has been growing especially fast for lower-income families, the report found.

Among the poorest families — those with incomes in the lowest 20 percent — the net cost of a year at a public university was 55 percent of median income, up from 39 percent in 1999-2000. At community colleges, long seen as a safety net, that cost was 49 percent of the poorest families’ median income last year, up from 40 percent in 1999-2000.

The likelihood of large tuition increases next year is especially worrying, Mr. Callan said. “Most governors’ budgets don’t come out until January, but what we’re seeing so far is Florida talking about a 15 percent increase, Washington State talking about a 20 percent increase, and California with a mixture of budget cuts and enrollment cuts,” he said.

In a separate report released this week by the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges, the public universities acknowledged the looming crisis, but painted a different picture.

That report emphasized that families have many higher-education choices, from community colleges, where tuition and fees averaged about $3,200, to private research universities, where they cost more than $33,000.

“We think public higher education is affordable right now, but we’re concerned that it won’t be, if the changes we’re seeing continue, and family income doesn’t go up,” said David Shulenburger, the group’s vice president for academic affairs and co-author of the report. “The public conversation is very often in terms of a $35,000 price tag, but what you get at major public research university is, for the most part, still affordable at 6,000 bucks a year.”

While tuition has risen at public universities, his report said, that has largely been to make up for declining state appropriations. The report offered its own cost projections, not including room and board.

“Projecting out to 2036, tuition would go from 11 percent of the family budget to 24 percent of the family budget, and that’s pretty huge,” Mr. Shulenburger said. “We only looked at tuition and fees because those are the only things we can control.”

Looking at total costs, as families must, he said, his group shared Mr. Callan’s concerns.

Mr. Shulenburger’s report suggested that public universities explore a variety of approaches to lower costs — distance learning, better use of senior year in high school, perhaps even shortening college from four years.

“There’s an awful lot of experimentation going on right now, and that needs to go on,” he said. “If you teach a course by distance with 1,000 students, does that affect learning? Till we know the answer, it’s difficult to control costs in ways that don’t affect quality.”

Mr. Callan, for his part, urged a reversal in states’ approach to higher-education financing.

“When the economy is good, and state universities are somewhat better funded, we raise tuition as little as possible,” he said. “When the economy is bad, we raise tuition and sock it to families, when people can least afford it. That’s exactly the opposite of what we need.”

December 3rd, 2008

Obama win transforms Dorcehester middle school

Boston teacher Felicia Kazer describes the excitement the Obama win created among her inner city middle school students:

In her own words: Teacher moved by students’ joy over Obama win

By Felicia Kazer

Boston teacher Felicia Kazer tells how Barack Obama’s election transformed McCormack Middle School in Dorchester the day after the historic vote, stirring excitement, a sense of possibility, and unbridled joy in her students.

Wednesday was a great day to be a teacher.

The excitement started as soon as I entered the school in the morning. It turns out that a small group of students arrived before classes started to decorate our hallways with Barack Obama posters.

They had photocopied pictures of Obama’s face. Under it they had written one word: “President.”

By the time the rest of the student body arrived, our whole school had been plastered with these signs.

At 7:14 a.m., the hallways at my school looked very familiar: crowded, hectic and loud. Only on this morning, students weren’t ignoring their teacher’s requests to get to their homerooms because they were too busy gossiping about shoes or TV last night or one another.

Instead, they were simply too busy to get to class on time because they were all talking politics with their friends. It was stunning to overhear conversations between eighth-graders that included words like: electoral votes, democracy, and ballots. And it wasn’t just a few kids — it was all of them.

Felix, the tallest and coolest eighth-grade boy in homeroom 8F, came into our room with six Obama buttons on his sweatshirt. And as if this wasn’t enough, he set the school trend for wearing the Obama posters that were once hanging all over the hallways. One minute he was asking to borrow some tape and the next minute the Obama printouts were all over his (and then all the other boys’) torsos.

Meanwhile, I looked around my homeroom and had a shocking realization: This is a room filled with 13-year-olds, and all of them are in a good mood. But knowing how much their moods fluctuate during the course of a day, I was sure that by last class block the excitement would have subsided.

I was wrong.

I picked up 8C from lunch and on the way back to class I had to remind Lexxi that it wasn’t appropriate hallway behavior to chant, “Obama, Obama, Obama” as loudly as she could.

By now, I had realized that my lesson on chemical formulas would be a hard-sell for such an over-stimulated and over-tired afternoon crew, so I decided to make them a deal.

“If we get all our work done this afternoon, we will spend the last 20 minutes of the day watching Obama’s victory speech,” I told them. “However, if we don’t work efficiently, we won’t have enough time.”

When else would this be a successful incentive for adolescent children: If
you work hard, I’ll let you listen silently to a grown-up give a long speech about our political process.

I couldn’t believe it worked, but it did. The class only got off track a couple of times and I was easily able to refocus them by providing one simple reminder: “President Obama would want us to get our work done.”

As promised, at the end of the period we closed our chemistry books and tuned in to hear our next president give his victory speech. The first bell even rang and no one packed up their things.

Not only did they listen to Obama’s speech intently, but a few times they began
cheering so loudly I had to pause the speech and remind them that a class was taking place next door.

You remember this part of Obama’s speech Tuesday night: “This victory is not my victory. This is your victory.”

To this, Vianca (one of my most chatty girls) said out loud: “Yeah, it’s my victory!”

I looked around at the room of 28 students — all of whom are people of color — and I saw the future teachers, doctors, artists and presidents of this country. I almost started crying all over again.

November 8th, 2008

My wife made me canvass for Obama; here’s what I learned

Here is an article from the Christian Science Monitor giving a sense of what is at stake today, beyond the inevitably disappointing  policy questions. We will be fighting Obama and the Congressional Democrats come January. But there is much to celebrate today, we hope:

My wife made me canvass for Obama; here’s what I learned
This election is not about major policies. It’s about hope.

By Jonathan Curley

Charlotte, N.C. – There has been a lot of speculation that Barack Obama might win the election due to his better “ground game” and superior campaign organization.

I had the chance to view that organization up close this month when I canvassed for him. I’m not sure I learned much about his chances, but I learned a lot about myself and about this election.

Let me make it clear: I’m pretty conservative. I grew up in the suburbs. I voted for George H.W. Bush twice, and his son once. I was disappointed when Bill Clinton won, and disappointed he couldn’t run again.

I encouraged my son to join the military. I was proud of him in Afghanistan, and happy when he came home, and angry when he was recalled because of the invasion of Iraq. I’m white, 55, I live in the South and I’m definitely going to get a bigger tax bill if Obama wins.

I am the dreaded swing voter.

So you can imagine my surprise when my wife suggested we spend a Saturday morning canvassing for Obama. I have never canvassed for any candidate. But I did, of course, what most middle-aged married men do: what I was told.

At the Obama headquarters, we stood in a group to receive our instructions. I wasn’t the oldest, but close, and the youngest was maybe in high school. I watched a campaign organizer match up a young black man who looked to be college age with a white guy about my age to canvas together. It should not have been a big thing, but the beauty of the image did not escape me.

Instead of walking the tree-lined streets near our home, my wife and I were instructed to canvass a housing project. A middle-aged white couple with clipboards could not look more out of place in this predominantly black neighborhood.

We knocked on doors and voices from behind carefully locked doors shouted, “Who is it?”

“We’re from the Obama campaign,” we’d answer. And just like that doors opened and folks with wide smiles came out on the porch to talk.

Grandmothers kept one hand on their grandchildren and made sure they had all the information they needed for their son or daughter to vote for the first time.

Young people came to the door rubbing sleep from their eyes to find out where they could vote early, to make sure their vote got counted.

We knocked on every door we could find and checked off every name on our list. We did our job, but Obama may not have been the one who got the most out of the day’s work.

I learned in just those three hours that this election is not about what we think of as the “big things.”

It’s not about taxes. I’m pretty sure mine are going to go up no matter who is elected.

It’s not about foreign policy. I think we’ll figure out a way to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan no matter which party controls the White House, mostly because the people who live there don’t want us there anymore.

I don’t see either of the candidates as having all the answers.

I’ve learned that this election is about the heart of America. It’s about the young people who are losing hope and the old people who have been forgotten. It’s about those who have worked all their lives and never fully realized the promise of America, but see that promise for their grandchildren in Barack Obama. The poor see a chance, when they often have few. I saw hope in the eyes and faces in those doorways.

My wife and I went out last weekend to knock on more doors. But this time, not because it was her idea. I don’t know what it’s going to do for the Obama campaign, but it’s doing a lot for me.

Jonathan Curley is a banker. He voted for George H.W. Bush twice and George W. Bush once.

November 4th, 2008