Primal Needs and Our Love of Burning Oil

Chrysler/Damier announced that they would begin importing their Smart Car into the US come 2008. It’s a tiny thing, over two feet shorter than a Mini Cooper. As luck would have it, I drove one of them in Germany. We were stuck in Europe trying to get home after 9/11. There were no flights back. We’d been in Munich for a week and that town was starting to make me very itchy; I needed to get out into the countryside and take some walks. I was feeling awful.

I called up every rental car agency in Munich and because of 9/11 everyone seemed to be holding onto their cars. There was only one car available for rent as far as I could tell. One car in the whole city. A blue Smart Car. I snatched it up. We drove that thing around the German countryside for about a week before we were able to get back home.

The thing was cute as a button. Just two seats. It had a semi-automatic transmission (no clutch). It was a good thing we had packed light for the trip, because it took clever arranging for us to get our two 22” suitcases and daypacks into the nominal trunk.

I loved that car. It was an absolute miser with gas, about 60 miles per gallon on the highway, much better than my Prius. It handled well. It had a well built feel. In terms of cars, it’s a mouse that roars.

I’ll make a prediction. The Smart Car will attract a handful of young Blue State buyers, granola types, and the occasional middle-age to old-age liberal. Who knows? I may buy one. I fit the profile. I like the car. But overall, this car won’t sell a lick.

It’s too small for America. We like big. Size matters.

It's acceleration is poor. The engine is quiet with a high-pitched whine. We want the loud and powerful.

It doesn’t have the “new technology/cool” factor. The Prius not only looks different, but has the LCD display giving you mileage updates every second and uses a technology that sounds cool. The Smart Car, in contrast, is just a smaller version of a conventional car. Hollywood stars are not going to flock to this thing.

You might think that given that gas is now three dollars a gallon, a car that gets 60 mpg might have wide-scale appeal. Think again. I note that despite high gas prices, there has been little substantive change in America’s car buying habits. Yes, the super-size Hummer is gone. Yes, the demand for Priuses outstrips supply (I’ll never tell anyone the secret to how I got mine in 11 days). But those are changes on the fringes with cars that never represented large sales. Buyers aren’t flocking to subcompacts.

We like to burn oil. High gas prices don’t deter us. This July 4th weekend, is projected to be a record-breaking time for travel. We’ll consume more gas than we have in any July 4th weekend in history.

I’m going to go out on a limb and state our gas consumption will continue unabated unless federal laws make us change our ways. No market disincentive – i.e., higher prices for gas – can possibly keep us off the road. I’m going to say something really crazy. We continue to buy gas-guzzlers and drive to places we don’t really need to go because we get pleasure out of burning things. We like making fires. We like the feel of it. We like the roaring sound of it.

In terms of providing to our primal need for fire, the internal combustion engine is a work of perfection. It burns fuel safely, provides us with more energy than could be provided by 100 horses, and makes a pleasing growl. Put one of those babies in a metal structure large enough to house a family and you have the ultimate house/machine hybrid. The car is more than a mode of transportation. It’s a psychological comfort blanket.

Back when I was a kid, the Indy 500, briefly toyed with using turbine engines in their race cars. They were faster. They were better. But they didn’t roar. They were almost eerily quiet. Racing is about power, not just actual power, but the appearance of power. In two or three short years, restrictions on engine design effectively banned turbine engines. The roar on the race track straightaway came back to the Indy 500. People were much happier.

Our need for burning things, anything, is to my mind why the electric car never took off. There is a new documentary movie out that tries to pin a more sinister reason on the demise of the electric car: collusion between car companies and oil companies. That’s a believable scenario, but even if car companies were on the up and up I doubt that electric cars would have succeeded. They are too quiet. And more importantly, battery technology just isn’t there yet to make it possible to travel more than 50-75 miles on a charge.

If people are going to switch voluntarily to a new technology, it has to be better than the old one. That’s certainly true when it comes to transportation. Our primal need to burn carbon means that any future technology for cars is going to have to be more than equal to the internal combustion engine. It’s going to have to be better in a big way.

Mergers and Acquisitions

I’ve only met one billionaire in my life. He was a jerk. Arrogant. Pompous. Slimy. Proud to be ignorant about science.

I didn’t mind one bit.

The fact is that he’s the kind of guy that gets things done. He came from nothing. And somehow through determination and hard work the arrogant jerk created a company that frequently makes the front page of the business section of the New York Times. His company makes products that save lives.

Sure he’s a jerk. I don’t care. I admire the hell out of the guy.

The world is full of nice guys who accomplish nothing of substance in a big way. But they do the little things that keep society functioning. They may be good parents. They may volunteer at the local blood bank. They play their role. And some nice guys turn out to be movers and shakers, but it’s unlikely. The business world is a rough and tumble place. Nice guys, as the great philosopher Leo Durocher once noted, don’t typically fare too well.

The world needs the arrogant bastards. They are frequently lousy parents. They are hell to be around. But they get things done often in a big way. They govern countries. They create and run companies. Without jerks who get things done, this world would be a sorry place indeed.

And sometimes those arrogant jerks surprise you. Sometimes they mellow when they age and turn into somewhat nice guys. So it goes with Bill Gates and Warren Buffet. And the world is benefiting from their transformation. Millions of lives are being saved because of their willingness to give away their generally misbegotten wealth. My hats off to them. In many ways, they are better men than me. They are smarter. They are richer. They are having a lasting sustaining positive impact on this planet that is enormous.

I don’t know what happened to Mr. Gates over the last dozen years. He runs a predatory company that gives the world lousy software, but made a ton of money doing it. There was nothing, except his ability to outmuscle and outmaneuver the competition, to admire about Bill Gates. But somehow, he changed. Mircosoft still is a lousy company that makes bad software. But Bill Gates became a human being along the way. And the world is a better place.

Maybe it was love. It could be that his wife was like the Wizard of Oz, showing Bill that he had a heart all along. I have no idea. But Bill Gates is a changed man.

Yesterday, I watched Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffet talk on television about merging their efforts in philanthropy. Those three folks put a big smile on my face. I walked away impressed. I was impressed with Melinda Gates' intelligence and compassion. I was impressed with Bill Gates’ and Warren Buffet’s intelligence and understanding of the value of compassion.

You have a finite life span on this planet. And this planet has a finite life span as well. But however finite a personal life is or a planet’s life for that matter, life in and of itself is a gorgeous thing. To the extent that you can add to that gorgeous thing by helping others in a small way or a big way is a measure of your own value.

The Gates family and the Warren Buffet are doing things in a big, big way. In fact, no one has ever amassed so much wealth in one place for the purpose of philanthropy. And where they are putting their money – mostly into world health – is exactly where I put most of my charitable giving. It’s just my numbers are smaller. Way smaller.

It’s an odd thing about charitable giving, but a fair amount of it doesn’t do the world much. For example, the lion's share goes to churches and other religious organizations, almost 100 billion dollars a year in the US. Most of that giving is wasted on brick-a-brac and unnecessary staff hirings. You don’t need a monumental church filled with chachkahs to save your soul.

Universities and colleges receive about 25 billion dollars a year. I’m sorry. But Harvard doesn’t need your money. They already have an endowment of 20 billion dollars. Stanford doesn’t need your money. Yale doesn’t. The list goes on and on. Would you give a guy on the street begging for cash a buck if you knew that he already was a millionaire? That’s what you’re doing when you give your money to colleges and universities that have already amassed ridiculous amounts of wealth. I note that Melinda Gates – a Duke alum - was recruited to be on Duke’s Board of Trustees with the hope of her donating serious cash. After a few years, she walked away. She had better things to do with her time and money. Good for her.

That said, a good deal of the 250 billion dollars a year that America gives goes to great causes. Thanks to Warren Buffet and the Gates family, a few billion dollars more will be added to the pot. And that is undeniably a good thing.

Krzyzewski Opens His Mouth About Duke Lacrosse and It Isn’t Pretty

I’ve never met Coach K. Over my years at Duke, I went to three basketball games. I enjoyed them. On the plus side, Coach K is a very talented basketball coach. He’s also a wonderful recruiter. And while I don’t know him personally, I know his background pretty damn well. I lived around it all of my childhood. We don’t just share a funny Polish name. We share a similar past. Midwest. Working class. Lots of Poles. My father, in fact, never learned English very well because he could get by on Polish and German in the city where I grew up, a mere 90 miles away from Coach K’s Chicago.

In the culture where Coach K and I grew up, friends are like blood. You’d do just about anything for them. If Coach K was my friend, I’d have someone in my corner come thick or thin. I would, of course, do the same for him.

But Coach K isn’t my friend. So I don’t feel the obligation to cover for him. I don’t feel the obligation to excuse his human follies with a, “Hey! He’s my friend so shut up!” And there are follies aplenty. Most of his follies are the result of a public face that is unctuous. Put him before a camera and he is consistently as phony as a three-dollar bill.

Yesterday, Krzyzewski went before the cameras to talk about Duke lacrosse. And the amount of double speak he laid down is awe-inspiring. It takes a lot of chutzpah to lay down so much b.s. If you believe anything of what Coach K said yesterday, I do have a bridge in New York I’d like to sell you. And then some marvelous swampland in Florida. And then some pristine desert in Arizona.

"I think it's important for me to remember my place," he said during his annual summer meeting with reporters at Cameron Indoor Stadium. Really now. Coach K has seemed to have found some humility for public display. The next time he bullies Duke’s president that humility will magically disappear.

"The racial aspect of this, I think, is in some ways has been the most sensitive thing, and people have tried to make it, they've tried to somehow create something that isn't there in our community," he said. "We have amazing race relationships. I think basketball has been a part of the process of bringing the community even closer together because of the great kids we've had." Oh really now. Basketball brings the community together? Maybe that’s why black students don’t attend games. Amazing race relationships? I lived in Durham. It was as close to apartheid as you will find in America.

"This is the most trying time," he said. "But it's the way it is. If you're going to be in here for the long run, man, you're going to have trying times." Oh, you’re committed to be at Duke for the long run? Funny. A couple of years ago, you weren’t.

"You don't let a rule govern what you do," Krzyzewski said. "You let a principle govern what you do, a value. And to be quite frank with you, I'd rather, instead of a code of conduct, have a code of values." I know what Krzyzewski’s values are. They are very similar to mine except for the fact that I don’t feel the need to b.s. the public in order to try to fool them into thinking I’m a saint.

I'll also make the claim for a minor degree of moral superiority. There are times when Krzyzewski's loyalty to friends gets to be downright weird. For example, supposing you were the son or daughter of a friend of a friend of Coach K's who needed a recommendation for a Duke Medical School application. Your parent's friend would contact Coach K who would arrange to talk to you for about an hour. On the basis of that hour, he'd write up a recommendation for you. I have no idea how many times Coach K has done this. But I ran into a student who was on her way to her one hour interview for this express purpose. There are strange things I'd do for friends; but even I have enough ethics to say no to that one.

Moving from values to principles, I know one of Coach K's principles very well: if you don’t have a dog in a fight stay out of it. Unfortunately, I don’t have the ability to follow that principle. I wish I did. And while he tries to publicly pretend otherwise, Coach K does have a dog in this fight. Had he not bullied Duke's previous president into hiring Joe Alleva, there might have been someone competent enough as Duke's AD to have put the lacrosse team on a short leash a long time ago. I'd bet serious money that Coach K is the one reason why Joe Alleva hasn't already been forced to resign. As I noted above Coach K said yesterday, "I think it's important for me to remember my place." I think he knows his place. Coach K understands better than anyone that he is the 800 pound gorilla of Duke.

Stress and the College Student

It’s one of the strange aspects of modern college life that students in general feel stressed about their academic performance. At face value, there is nothing whatsoever to be stressful about. Work-loads for many students are low. If you’re a not a science or engineering student you can easily get by on 10 hours of studying a week or less at elite institutions. Grades are high. In the social sciences at elite schools average grades are in the B+ range. In the humanities, average grades are in the A- range. Put in a modicum of work and you can leave at the end of four years with a diploma and a 3.5 GPA.

Yet the stress students feel is very real.

I think there are at least two reasons for it. One is that the low expectations and high grades are in a strange way a cause for stress. There is this expectation going in that college should be difficult; college symbolically has monumental qualities. But the reality is different. For many, the expectations in college are lower than they were in high school.

In response, students oddly don’t kick back and smile. Rather they obsess about every little cotton-picking detail in their college experience. They start to worry about their GPAs to the hundredth decimal place. They have so much free time on their hands that they get neurotic. I honestly feel that if grading was tougher and work-loads were higher, your typical college student would be mentally healthier.

But a college with higher expectations wouldn’t suit all students. And that gets me to a very curious thing about a large segment of the current student population. At Duke and at other elite colleges, 35% of the students are on some form of psychotropic medication. When I first heard that number, I couldn’t believe it. But I’ve heard it from two sources now, both psychiatrists/psychologists specializing in teens. As one of them put it to me, “We’re able to patch together kids with drugs that in the past would never have made it through college.”

So another reason college students feel stress today is that the make up of the student body is a lot more emotionally fragile than in previous generations. Sure, some of those students who are under medication are being medicated for no good reason other than it’s fashionable to do so. But in that mix of college students on prescription drugs are people with all kinds of legitimate psychological problems including bipolar disorder, ADD, and severe depression. These are the kind of students who in the past might have struggled through high school; now they have the kind of high school transcripts that sparkle. It’s a triumph of modern medicine that this has taken place. But these kids can be quite frayed on the edges.

One of the most brilliant students I had at Duke was bi-polar. Six weeks into the semester he disappeared. I received a letter from the dean that he had dropped out. A few weeks later, I got an email from him that they were having problems getting his meds right. I never saw him again.

For him and for a lot of students, the stress in college isn’t really about college. It’s the stress of day-to-day life. They don’t have the ability to cope. Drugs can work wonders; but they are far from perfect. Having large numbers of kids with major psychological problems in college is something new under the sun. I think it is very worthwhile to have kids like this enroll, but it's not without drawbacks.

When Doing The “Right Thing” Is Also a Good Idea

I grew up in a very pragmatic, business oriented family. No one tried to preach to me about morals or ethics. Instead I was taught a kind of moral pragmatism: if people are straight with you be straight back; if people are dealing from the bottom of the deck, cheat right back. The world is a complicated place and you have to be resourceful.

There were moments where my family’s goals were more than about putting bread on the table, but they were rare. For instance, my parents had this habit of going to events with Russian performers and trying to get backstage either at intermission or after the show to talk to them. Their conversations – in Russian – weren’t about the performances, but rather about how great America was and how the performers should defect. After about three minutes or so of these conversations, some Russian agent would invariably shoo my parents away.

It was a kooky thing for my parents to do. But they felt strongly that anyone who could get out of Russia should get out. It was a kind of moral imperative with them. And it did them no harm.

For many people, however, behaving morally in business or politics is in the end self-destructive. Whistle blowers, for example, almost always fair poorly; they have a kind of mark of Cain on them. After their moment of glory of “doing the right thing” they have a hard time finding employment. If they stay with their employer, they find that they have been ostracized. A whistle blower’s impact may be positive for a country or ultimately for a company, but personally they suffer.

Similarly, in politics taking the high road usually has negative consequences. For example, LBJ – who like my parents generally had a very pragmatic attitude about morals – went out on a limb in the 60s to push for civil rights legislation. It was the right thing to do. It was the moral thing to do. But from a practical standpoint, it cost the Democratic Party in the South dearly. Nixon and the Republican Party used that legislation to capture racist white voters. LBJ’s legislation – a landmark change in the government’s attitude toward race – ultimately is responsible for the stronghold Republicans currently have across the South. What LBJ did was indeed, the right thing. But he took down his party in the process.

Given the history of the negative personal consequences of behaving morally, it’s not surprising that leaders in business and politics rarely behave in any sort of moral way. What happens instead is that they give speeches with a very moral framework; but their day to day gets to be very down and dirty. I think the public understands this disconnect; they appreciate the moral tone of the speeches. But ultimately, they are pragmatic too and just want politicians to get things done.

Bush and Iraq is an example. His rhetoric is all about building democracy in Iraq. But really we’re there to put an oil producing state under our sphere of influence. I think much of the public understands the difference between the rhetoric and our real goals. If we had a chance at successfully implementing our goals, the public would be very supportive of the war (not me, but that’s a different story). But we’ve bitten off more than we can chew in Iraq so the public is very negative.

Pragmatism isn’t just the domain of Bush and the Republicans. Al Gore is riding high right now because of his involvement in the movie, An Inconvenient Truth. His rhetoric about the need for action on the issue of global warming (which I don’t particularly agree with by the way) is lofty. But in fact, when he went to Japan during the time of the Kyoto agreement, he waffled and protected America’s interest to continue to spew carbon into the atmosphere.

Despite these examples, it’s worth noting that there are times when taking the high road is not only the right thing, but is also beneficial politically. In times like these, leaders need to have enough of a moral grounding to be able to take that option. Unfortunately, most leaders are so conditioned to being pragmatic that they can’t even begin to take the high road.

For example, on the issue of fuel efficiency, Bush could easily push congress to establish dramatic increases in fuel standards for motor vehicles. It would be a win-win situation for everyone except American car companies and oil companies. And that’s the rub for Bush. So instead of taking the high road on this issue, he is using it to try to get Congress to give him the authority to establish his own regulations; rather than be an ethical leader, he’s trying to use this issue as a power grab. America suffers because of his consistently cynical approach to politics.

At a much smaller scale at Duke, President Brodhead could have taken the high road concerning the Lacrosse Scandal in a number of ways. For example, before the scandal hit, he could have steered athletics and the culture at Duke into one where debauchery wasn’t condoned by leadership. Instead of being an enabler by providing ambulances at the ready for those who need to have their alcohol filled stomachs pumped at tailgates, etc., he could have publicly denounced students’ self-destructive behavior. The end result would have been a safer campus, and one where the Lacrosse Scandal might have never taken place. Instead, he now finds himself mired in a scandal.

Sometimes doing the right thing is not only moral, but is also a good idea.

Oil, Water and the Power of Lobbies
Stuart Rojstaczer

Here’s something to consider while you fill your gas tank, as I did yesterday, and watch the LCD display on the pump show you numbers that make your stomach sink.

It’s conventional wisdom that we are paying dramatically more for oil because of surging world-wide demand. But it isn’t just China and India that are increasing their use of oil. It’s us too. And much of that increase in usage is completely avoidable.

It’s avoidable by increasing fuel efficiency in our cars and trucks. The numbers don’t lie. As of the year 2000, motor vehicles in the US consumed 41% more gas than they did in 1980. Most of the surge took place since 1990. In the 1980s, increases in motor vehicle fuel efficiency were dramatic and offset demand for gasoline significantly. From the period 1980-1990, fuel efficiency increased 23% and gas use by vehicles increased by 13%. In contrast, the following decade saw a mere 3% increase in fuel efficiency; the end result was a 24% increase in gasoline use.

Without increases in fuel efficiency, the US becomes increasingly hostage to foreign countries for the health of its economy. Reduced consumption also means decreases in air pollution.

Fuel efficiency makes sense. Yet Congress has not made any significant changes in fuel economy rules for vehicles since 1985. Twenty years of both Republican and Democratic leadership and nothing of substance has been done to address an issue of vital importance to the nation’s well being.

While we have been oblivious to the value of conserving oil, it’s useful to note that we have, over the last few decades, dramatically increased our efficiency in the use of another vital liquid resource: water. For example, water use actually decreased by 7% over the time period 1980-1990 even though US population increased by 10%. Since 1990, water use has held steady despite continued growth in our economy and continued increases in population.

Efficiency increases in water have come about through a variety of ways. Much of the conservation comes from agriculture, which has found it cost effective to change over to more efficient irrigation practices. Municipal laws on reducing flows in showers and toilets have helped as well. Decreases in home water use mean less cost to municipalities both in terms of purification and sewage treatment.

Why have we been so careful in our use of water and so wasteful in our use of oil? Why has Congress done nothing to encourage fuel conservation? It comes down to one thing and one thing only. Money. In the US, water is predominately a public resource. In contrast, oil is predominately a privately held resource. Motor vehicles consumed over 500 billion dollars worth of gas last year. More consumption means more profit. Someone is making a lot of money from those purchases. And they would like to make more.

ExxonMobil alone made 36 billion dollars last year. While we burn the gas they provide, the petroleum industry burns a lot of money lobbying Congress to make sure that demand rises. There is no water lobby thwarting efforts to reduce water use in the US. In contrast, the petroleum lobby is not only well funded, but also incredibly effective.

With the pain citizens are feeling at the gas pump, it has been somewhat popular for politicians to talk about changing fuel efficiency standards for cars. Even President Bush has gotten into the act. But as is evidenced by his administration’s implementing of a negligible change in the fuel standards for light trucks last year, President Bush is not serious about this issue. Neither Congress or Bush are coming forth with legislation that represents a significant improvement over laws implemented in 1985. Both Congress and our President are being irresponsible.

This year, the petroleum industry will spend 30 million dollars alone in a special campaign trying to “educate” us about why gas prices are so high. They will spend far more lobbying Congress to make sure we keep guzzling gas. America’s public doesn’t need to be educated by Big Oil. But we as citizens do need to educate Congress about what we want: a more energy efficient America.

The Chronicle Letter

Today the Chronicle of Higher Education published a letter of mine. They edited out my dig at William Chafe in the letter, which I think was a good decision on their part. You won't often see me complimenting the CHE - like the well known essayist Joseph Epstein once said, it's the Pravda of higher ed - but I have to give credit where credit is due. Below you will find the letter in its original form.

Re: William Chafe's Point of View, May 12, 2006
In his opinion piece on changing the culture of Duke University, William Chafe makes the claim that students at Duke “work intensely” and “work hard/play hard.” The facts belie these claims. Full time students at Duke on average spend less than 25 hours a week in class or studying. This is hardly working hard or intensely. The paucity of work and lack of intellectual demands placed on the Duke student body are key reasons why a lacrosse team can claim a 100 percent graduation rate. Yet they still have time to both pursue the equivalent of a full-time job playing intercollegiate lacrosse and get into a whole lot of trouble drinking.

It is not playing hard to hire strippers on university property, drink yourself into a stupor, and hurl racial slurs. It’s playing stupid. It is not playing hard for students to end up in Duke University’s hospital for alcohol poisoning as happens about forty times a year. It’s being self-destructive. It is not playing hard to sexually molest female students on campus as is reported about ten times a year at Duke. It’s criminal behavior.

A campus that expects little of students academically and condones debauchery can expect trouble. It is worth noting that while William Chafe was dean, a student died from inhaling his own vomit while passed-out from drinking. In response, nothing of substance was done by Duke leadership to prevent further tragedy. It is no wonder that another tragedy has taken place.

The work light/debauch heavy culture is not unique to Duke. It’s pervasive on America’s campuses. Until university leaders and professors are willing to admit that the current ethos of undergraduate life is both destructive and intellectually bankrupt, campus scandals and tragedies related to sex and alcohol can be expected to be a staple in the news.

Stuart Rojstaczer
Professor (retired), Duke University
Box 19302
Stanford, CA 94309

The Miscalculation of Richard Brodhead

I’ve been writing off and on about the Duke Lacrosse Scandal over the last two months; this past weekend I read over my material. I’m basically happy with it. I don’t regret saying what I‘ve said. In hindsight, I might have made some small changes.

For example, early on I said about Richard Brodhead’s actions concerning this scandal:

“Brodhead has painted himself into a corner now that the DNA evidence is negative…His actions heretofore have assumed guilt… Now a coach has resigned, a season has been cancelled, players and parents have been put through hell, and it’s possible that what happened was students were drinking and behaving disgustingly, but not criminally aside from underage drinking…And you have to ask, since they've done this before with Duke leadership giving a little boys will be boys wink, who is really to blame? If these athletes aren’t at least tried in court, Brodhead will be crucified by Duke alumni and parents for his actions.”

The crucifixion of Richard Brodhead is happening right now on the part of alumni and parents. I’d like to talk about that. But first I’d like to amend my comments above a little bit. I don’t think that Brodhead’s actions presumed guilt on the part of the students. He was simply trying to get the scandal off the front page; suspending the students was a way of cutting Duke’s ties from any potential negative fallout the students might generate. Essentially, he made the calculation that the reputation of the university was more important than the lives of the students.

That calculation was not the right one. And it’s costing him dearly right now.

To understand the problem with this kind of calculation, you have to realize that there has been a fundamental shift in the power structure of universities, particularly at private schools, over the last twenty years. There is now a culture of consumerism on America’s campuses. Students no longer consider a college education a privilege. It’s a consumer product. Students and parents feel a strong sense of entitlement concerning college. College administrators have capitulated and bent over backwards to appease students and parents. The consumers – parents and students – are now the kings of college.

As a dean at Yale, Brodhead bought into this change. For example, a few years ago I generated a very minor national brou-ha-ha about grade inflation on America’s campuses, and a reporter asked Brodhead about grade inflation at Yale. Brodhead's response was that grades at Yale were higher because students were both brighter and worked harder than previous generations. The evidence for brighter students at Yale is small; the evidence that students are working harder is non-existent. But for Brodhead, the customer was always right.

Apparently, however, Brodhead doesn’t think that the customer is always right when a scandal engulfs a campus. Then the customer is expendable. That view may cost him his job.

From a political standpoint, it’s a good idea for an institution to ruthlessly cut ties to anything that potentially might harm its reputation. And from a pragmatic standpoint, ruthlessly firing employees, something that Brodhead did at Yale and something he essentially did with Duke’s lacrosse coach makes sense. It isn’t pretty. It isn’t ethical. But it’s the kind of nasty thing that politicians like Brodhead do all of the time

It’s an entirely different matter, however, to ruthlessly cut ties to your customers. When those customers are powerful and wealthy, they bite back. And they can bite very, very hard. It’s not surprising that Brodhead is feeling that bite.

Duke parents and alumni are not a happy lot right now. They’ve seen a president ruin the lives of some students by letting them twist in the wind and they don’t like it. The on-line comments in the Duke student newspaper as of late, many of them clearly written by parents and alumni, are full of venom concerning Brodhead’s handling of the scandal. He has lost the status and goodwill associated with being a president. He is now simply a whipping boy.

Many of the comments on the part of parents and alumni lack any sort of logic, but that doesn’t really matter. Political decisions are often made when emotions outweigh any rational thinking. I suspect that there is a significant move afoot by Duke alumni and parents to force Brodhead out. I doubt that such a move would succeed; Duke’s Board of Trustees knows it’s bad p.r. to have a president resign. However, I’m not going to make any bets one way or the other.

Why The NCAA Doesn’t Work

Suppose there was a group that was created to police and regulate an industry. But when you looked at its bottom line, it spent less than one percent of its revenue on regulatory issues. Instead it delivered over one half of its money back to the industry members it was supposed to regulate. And it spent four times as much promoting the industry through efforts like advertising than it did on regulation.

Given those numbers, you might suspect that the regulatory group was incapable of doing its job. It was too involved in promotion of the industry to be an effective regulator. And you would be right.

The regulatory organization with those bottom line numbers is the NCAA. And no, it can’t effectively do its job. Conflict of interest essentially strangles its abilities.

In the 2005-2006 year, the total budget for the NCAA was about $520,000,000. More than $300,000,000 of that money went back to schools to run their athletics programs. Of the remaining $200,000,000, only $4,600,000 was targeted to enforcement of its rules. In contrast $19,200,000 was spent on public relations under the umbrellas of “branding and communications” and “membership education and outreach.”

In essence, the principal roles of the NCAA are to provide money to university athletics programs and promote the image of college athletics. It is not to regulate athletics. As noted above, less than 1% of its budget is concerned with regulation. The NCAA is a marvelous cash cow and public relations machine. But promotion and regulation are always in conflict of interest. The Sierra Club doesn’t run the EPA. The NYSE doesn’t run the IRS. The NCAA should not be in charge of regulating college sports.

There is a reason that the NCAA spends so little on regulation. It has little interest in cleaning up the games it so enthusiastically promotes. Instead it plays games of cat and mouse. For example, this year the NY Times and Washington Post unearthed the fact that there are many "high schools" in this country that are simply diploma mills for athletes. Classes with real content are non-existent at these schools. The schools exist principally to provide false high school degrees for academically inept athletes bound for college. Recently, the NCAA announced its actions in response to this scandal. It identified 15 schools from which it would no longer accept diplomas; that sounds good except when you realize that none of the 15 schools identified have any athletics teams.

Without effective regulation, college sports historically has been and currently remains a sewer. Across all of Division I athletics is a recipe for failure. Students are recruited with limited academic skills for the purpose of playing sports. They are subjected to a full time schedule of travel, conditioning and practice. Even if athletes have the desire to do well in school, they often neither have the time or talent to do so. And they don’t do well. Their grades suffer. Although they are given extensive tutoring and a free ride, only three-fifths of scholarship athletes graduate within six years of enrolling.

Meaningful regulation would require rules severely limiting practice and conditioning time, cutting down on the number of games played and restricting games to weekends. Essentially, what needs to happen is that these athletes need more time to be students, which is why ostensibly they are enrolled.

But none of this is happening. In fact, games in revenue generating sports are increasingly being played on weekdays in order to get more money from television. Time spent traveling has increased as well as athletics conferences expand their geographic boundaries in the search for big bucks.

Instead of focusing on creating conditions that make it possible for athletes to attend classes and study, the NCAA continues to try to do the impossible. Raise graduate rates by magic.

The NCAA knows it has a public relations problem with the fact that its athletes don’t graduate. And it has tried to tackle that problem – not with substantive reform – but with smoke and mirrors. Here is an example. Supposedly, newly created NCAA rules of “reform” will penalize teams that don’t graduate players. But when you look in detail, those penalties are meaningless.

For example, a typical basketball team in Division I has about twelve scholarship players. Only eight or nine play. The new rules will cost schools that don’t graduate players one or two scholarships. The impact of that loss will be non-existent. Teams already have three or four players who, if they disappeared from the planet, wouldn’t affect their competitiveness on the court. It’s a penalty without consequence.

Another way the NCAA is trying to avoid embarrassment is by redefining how they measure graduation rates. Rather than calculate graduation rates the same way as is done for non-athletes, the NCAA has come up with a new formula which includes transfers. The formula, not surprisingly, will yield by magic higher graduation rates. It’s all smoke and mirrors.

In fact, the NCAA isn’t serious about being in the regulation business. It is serious, however, about being in the promotion and marketing business. Promotion and marketing are the reasons why the NCAA no longer publishes information – like the SAT scores of its athletes – that would cast an unattractive light on college athletics.

Colleges need serious external regulation of athletics. It doesn’t get that serious regulation from the NCAA. Colleges in essence self-police their athletics programs. There are numerous examples that have come to light in the press that show just how ineffective their self-policing has been.

If colleges were serious about cleaning up college athletics they would relieve the NCAA from its duties as an overseer. Instead they would create a separate body without conflict of interest that does one thing and one thing only, regulation.

Mother Tongue

Last weekend I went to Chicago for a Bat Mitzvah of a relative. Sitting next to me in services was a petite woman in her sixties. It was clear that she was there in body only. Prayer wasn’t anything that interested her. In the middle of the service, when I asked if she wanted a copy of the Bible to read this week’s Torah portion, she smiled politely and said no.

The next day I went to the Bat Mitzvah party and saw her again. The DJ music was loud and pulsating, the bass beat of the speakers literally making the windows of the hall vibrate. There she was on the dance floor, exuberantly shaking her booty to the beat. While she wasn’t the only sixty or seventy something person dancing with the thirteen years olds to hip-hop and reworked 70s and 80s r&b and funk tunes, she was the only one who was literally caught up in the moment. There was no emotional barrier separating her from the kids; like them she was just out there having a good time. She reminded me of a pint-size version of my mother that way.

I wanted to know just who this woman was so I went to talk to her. And the resemblance to my mother was more than in spirit. It was also in experience. This sixty something year old woman with spunk and joie de vivre was a war survivor. For several years in WWII as an infant and toddler she lived in a cellar in hiding; as a child she never saw the sun, the sky or even a flower.

I spoke to her in Yiddish, which is my first language. I rarely get a chance to speak it since my parents died. I’m more than a bit rusty, but it felt good to speak my mother tongue.

She talked about growing up in Chicago as a kid and never telling anyone of her past, pretending that she was American born. She didn’t tell anyone, not even her kids, until 1971. I asked her why. She said to me, “I used to think the world was black and white. My past was black. But then I realized that there is grey in life too.”

She didn’t believe in god. “Where was he?” she asked. I knew what she meant. I don’t believe in god either for much the same reason. But I do believe in the power of prayer. And I do believe in honoring my deceased relatives by keeping up their customs.

She went back onto the dance floor and I watched her. When you spend your childhood in hell, it can break your spirit. But some people are surprisingly resilient. Everything looks good after living in hell. Life is a blessing not simply to be enjoyed but to be lived to its fullest.

Conspiracies and the Power of Narrative

My father served in the Polish-Red Army – a group of Poles put together by Stalin principally as canon fodder - during World War II. Because he could speak Polish, Russian and German he served as an aid to a Russian colonel leading the army. Eighty percent of the Polish-Red Army died during the war.

Much of the army would have survived – even living through the hell of the German siege of Leningrad – but during the final stages of the war, Stalin started thinking ahead. He didn’t want the Poles to have any military capability after the war. So he decided to make sure they wouldn’t.

When the Russian Army surrounded Warsaw, Stalin gave orders that the Polish-Red Army should have the “honor” of taking their “mother city.” They led the advance with the assurance that the Russian Air Force would provide vital air cover. Stalin made sure that no air cover came. Most of Polish-Red Army was annihilated in one day. Stalin – who was responsible for the deaths of 30 million people during his reign – had accomplished his objective.

My father made me well aware that leadership can be evil, brutal and conspiratorial. And because of his stories, I am somewhat sympathetic to conspiracy theories; I may not believe them, but I’m sympathetic as to why they are created.

That said, when it comes to the US, I have problems when people start assigning evil of Stalinesque magnitude to our leadership. For example, there is a documentary movie out there on the web, Loose Change, that was recommended to me by a friend of mine. The claim of Loose Change is that the collapse of the Twin Towers on 9/11 was the result of detonation not the impact of the planes. The documentary goes on to claim that the murder of thousands at the Twin Towers was an inside job; Bush manufactured the crisis to garner support for an attack of Iraq.

I can’t say I like George Bush. But I just can’t buy that his leadership team sacrificed the lives of thousands of innocent Americans to achieve foreign policy objectives. George Bush is incompetent. He is also willfully ignorant. But I just don’t buy that he’s evil.

Similarly, I have a hard time buying the conspiracy theory that Bush won the last election by ballot tampering in Ohio. This theory was detailed yet again this week; this time it was in Rolling Stone (June 15th issue*). No, tampering with ballots is not evil of the same magnitude as the murder of innocents. And maybe the Republicans are just that desperate and ruthless. However, they would have to be not only desperate and ruthless, but also technically deft. I just don't believe it even though it makes a great story.

The margin of victory in Ohio was far greater than that in Florida in 2000. I actually worked for Kerry trying to get out the Ohio vote and I can tell you from personal experience that the Kerry campaign didn’t even know how to target Kerry supporters in the state. Kerry ran a dreadful campaign and he lost Ohio fair and square. No ballot tampering was necessary. Yet I know people who remain convinced that Bush stole the 2004 election.

For some reason, conspiracy theories linger. They are particularly alive in the book world, both on the left and the right, both in fiction (Da Vinci Code) and nonfiction (American Theocracy). I think the reason they stick around is that simply they make great stories. I love great stories. Narrative is a powerful and addicting drug. Conspiracies are by their nature intricate tales of intrigue. They are juicy narratives that explore – like a good horror movie – the dark side of human nature. Sometimes a story is so good that the facts simply don’t matter. The story, ridiculous though it may be on the surface, takes on a life of its own. Ultimately, our need for narrative is greater than our need for truth.

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* Note that the June 15th issue of Rolling Stone also has a very ugly, but largely accurate portrayal of upper crust fraternity/sorority life at Duke. If you read it, please remind yourself that this doesn't apply to everyone at Duke, just a very emotionally ugly and morally bankrupt subset. Also, the article makes the claim that Duke students study 4 hours a day. In actuality, they study less than 2 hours a day on average. It's not a pressure cooker of a place in the least.

Boycotting Israeli Scholars and the Roots of Anti-Semitism

Last week, Britain’s largest university teacher’s union voted for a boycott of Israeli academics who do not denounce their government’s Palestine policy. You can take this vote at face value or you can take it as something deeper. I choose to take it as something deeper, a sign that anti-Semitism is alive and well in Europe.

Why single out Israeli academics for a boycott? Surely there are other nations that have policies in place where groups of people are mistreated. The answer is simple. Because Israel is Jewish and Britain, like other European nations, is a nation where anti-Semitism is ingrained in society.

If you live in the US, you can become complacent about just how accepting this country is of its many cultures including Jewish culture. My own experiences with anti-Semitism in the US have been minor. I was kicked out of class in the mornings at my public school so that Christians could pray. I wasn’t allowed in my local Boy Scout troop. Some kids threw rocks at me in fourth grade calling me a dirty Jew. In college, a neighbor would taunt me with anti-Semitic slurs as he drove by in his car to work. At Duke, someone in administration mentioned bizarrely that I was the first “unassimilated Jew” Duke ever had on its faculty. It’s all minor stuff really, just incidents with crackpots. I’m free to go about this country as I please.

In the new academic left in the US, there is a fair amount of self-loathing amongst academics who are non-practicing Jews that commingles with a jealousy of the old socialist left to produce a strange brew of hatred toward Israel. Whether that’s anti-Semitism at work is debatable; ultimately it translates into a lot of empty words by crackpots in humanities departments. No formal academic organization in the US is boycotting Israeli scholars; it’s not going to happen.

But living in Europe and being a Jew is something very odd. In many places, I can’t just walk into a synagogue and pray; I have to get permission in advance. There is a constant fear of terrorism against synagogues. Outside the synagogue in Florence, military personnel loaded with hardware that’s the stuff of a war zone stand guard.

The relationship between Jews and Europe is a very complex one with a long history. But anti-Semitism exists even in the absence of any cultural history with Jews. In Japan, anti-Semitic references are common in literature. I remember taking a train to Kagoshima and noticing the comic book someone was reading in the row ahead of mine; the pictures in the book of a hook-nosed man with a look of evil on his face were like something out of Nazi propaganda.

I can’t even begin to understand just why anti-Semitism is a world-wide constant through the ages. The best I can come up with are the theories of the Israeli novelist AB Yehoshua who says that Jew-hatred has its origins in the vagueness of Jewish identity. For the outsider, Jewishness is a mysterious thing, something without borders and with its own language and rituals. It’s easy to go from a lack of understanding to fear and then to hatred; essentially the anti-Semite is someone with a fertile imagination and a suspicion and distrust of all things that don’t have well defined borders. By its nature, Jewishness is a phenomenon that seems to be almost perfectly created for the psychology of hatred of the unknown and mysterious.

I buy a lot of this argument. It’s consistent with the relative lack of anti-Semitism in countries like the US where there are so many cultures that defy borders that Jews can’t be singled out. In contrast, the mono-cultures of places like Britain and Japan are havens for Jew-hatred. Anti-Semitism in these countries essentially fills a psychological need for a hatred of “the other.” The recent anti-Semitic vote of British academics is just another symptom of a dark side in human nature.

Politics and Public Relations

News today on the reinstatement of the Duke Lacrosse team produced no surprises. From a political standpoint, Brodhead had to reinstate the team. He really had no choice. Had he killed the team, he would have faced a nasty lawsuit with more negative political fallout.

Everything Brodhead has done has been with public relations and political expediency in mind. This was no different. Let’s recount the steps and missteps.

Step one. Delay doing anything in the hopes that this all will blow over. This is standard operating procedure with institutions. It’s done because it usually works. In this case, the result was a public relations nightmare.

Step two. Get the team out of the limelight by suspending future games. In essence, the team was being punished not for its behavior the night of the alleged rape – which was known well before the suspension – but for getting in the news and bringing bad publicity to Duke. From a public relations standpoint it was the right thing to do. In terms of doing right by a team, it was an embarrassingly weak and cowardly decision.

Step three. Suspend a player and suspend a season in response to public disclosure of an email. This has to be the first time a student has been suspended and a team has been suspended as a result of an email loaded with sick humor based on a stupid movie. There are actually no grounds for this decision that make sense except for public relations. A student and a team were sacrificed in an unsuccessful attempt to knock the Duke story off the front page.

Step four. Force resignation of coach. This is standard operating procedure: find a scapegoat for public relations purposes. This same person was formerly beloved enough to receive a six-figure salary. He wasn’t the only person who knew the lacrosse team was engaged in debauchery. The president knew. The athletics director knew. But Brodhead and Alleva aren’t going to accept responsibility for their failure; instead they find someone lower to take the blame.

Step five. Organize committees to examine the Lacrosse Scandal. Institutions do this kind of stuff routinely in times of crisis. It buys time and gives the public the impression that the institution is serious about examining its problem. In this case, it also served to distance leadership from its previous lack of inaction concerning known problems with the lacrosse team. The one unusual thing in this case was the one of the committees was external and essentially its results could not be well controlled; I can only speculate that Brodhead and company were so full of themselves that they really thought that anyone within the academy who examined the scandal would find them not at fault.

Step six. Suspend two more players, the first two indicted. Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty? The suspension was pure public relations and political expediency.

Step seven. Receive internal reports with their expected results. These reports – blaming demon rum on all of Duke’s problems – were paint by numbers stuff. That wasn’t surprising. Brodhead carefully chose the makeup of these committees. They produced a desired result for him.

Step eight. Receive critical external report and defend yourself to the best of your ability. The external report was a big surprise and an indication of just how clueless Brodhead was in managing this crisis. From a political standpoint, he should have never asked for an external report unless he knew for certain that the results would be favorable. It could be that Brodhead was being earnest in soliciting this report; but nothing in the past indicates that he does anything out of earnestness. From the way Duke leadership lauded the makeup of this two-person committee before the results were received, I believe Duke thought they would receive a positive report. The way Brodhead and company responded huffily to the report indicates to me that their arrogance led them to a major public relations/political misstep here.

Step nine. Reinstate the team. This had to be done for a number of reasons. It was a foregone conclusion. It averted a lawsuit. It partly made up for how poorly the team was treated earlier.

It’s worth noting that on May 24th a lacrosse player was arrested for DUI and possession of marijuana. You would think that with the team under a microscope and its future (supposedly) in the balance, these athletes could find a way to stay within the bounds of the law for at least a few months. Short of enlisting a bunch of these guys in AA, I don’t think you can depend upon them to “behave themselves” in the future.

Just how desirable is it going to be for a recruit to come to Duke to play lacrosse? Not very. Expect the team to be non-competitive for the foreseeable future. Every little future misstep will be reported in the press. This is one of those decisions that appeases powerful alumni and may stop some major lawsuits, but is a lose-lose situation. That said, killing the team would have led to a worse political outcome.

Of course, given the low and base nature of all of scholarship athletics at Duke and elsewhere, there was no reason except for public relations to suspend the team in the first place.

Voters Still Matter

This week Congress will consider a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriages. While I find this proposed legislation abhorrent, I do find solace in one thing. The fact that Republicans are putting this legislation to a vote on the Senate floor means that voters still matter. They know this amendment has no chance of achieving a necessary two-thirds majority and normally you don’t put anything up for vote that you don’t think you’re going to win. But the President and the Republicans are so desperate for votes that they want to bring this issue up yet again to galvanize their Christian fundamentalist voters for the upcoming elections.

Yes, as Democratic politicians note the vote is crude political pandering. It’s ultimately a waste of time. But Democrats waste time and engage in political pandering on other issues. And in both cases, appeasing voters means that lobbyists don’t control everything in Washington. Citizen opinions still matter. A political party still needs to attract votes. While the power of political lobbies has corrupted much of Washington – just look at recent energy and health care legislation for prime examples – there are still hot button issues that aren’t about business. And on those issues, politicians have to do what they should be doing always: caring about what is best for the electorate.

Sure, the Republicans are grandstanding on this issue. But I’m happy that they are grandstanding about something voters care about instead of something oil companies or the heath care industry care about. Of course, I can feel generous because I know this legislation isn’t going to pass. Still it’s nice to know that when the 25 percent or so of this country that considers themselves fundamentalist Christians say they want an amendment to the Constitution, some politicians jump. They should jump. I don’t agree with why they are jumping, but responding to voters wishes should be what most of congressional politics should be about.

On Integrity in College Sports, In Particular Coach K and College Basketball

As a rule, when people start bandying words about like “integrity” and “honesty” I get very worried about the fate of the contents in my wallet. It seems like frequent mention of words like these only takes place under the seediest environments. So it is with college sports and in particular so it is with college basketball.

This past week, Harvey Araton yet again talked about Duke Lacrosse in the NY Times. One would think that the NY Times had moved its headquarters to Durham given the attention that it has paid to what should be a very local issue. Are there no rapes or sports teams in New York? But I digress. In his latest installment on the Lacrosse Scandal, Araton focused on Coach K at Duke and why Coach K hasn’t said a word concerning the scandal. I won’t summarize his views, but in his article he makes allusions to the integrity of the Duke basketball program.

There is no integrity. It’s one of the curious myths that Duke somehow “does things right” when it comes to its basketball program.

The fact is that all of college basketball is a sewer. No one “does it right.” To be competitive in college basketball requires you to throw all integrity out the window. Duke is no different.

No, Coach K doesn’t run a program with integrity and he isn’t a man of integrity. Let me count the ways.

First, you bring in athletes that have no interest in school and have academic credentials well below the rest of the student body (average SAT scores about 500 points lower). In at least one case, you bring in an athlete from a high school diploma mill designed for athletes to avoid NCAA requirements.

Second, you work the academic system through sympathetic professors and “independent study” classes to ensure your athletes have to do little academic work, but remain academically eligible. As a former faculty member at Duke, I served on a committee that recommended restrictions on independent study classes. That recommendation went into the ether.

Third, you meddle in an athletics director search and make it impossible for Duke’s president to hire someone from the outside. Instead, you bully a university president to hire a friend of yours, Joe Alleva, even though the consensus is that he doesn’t have the skills for the job. I note that the Lacrosse Scandal might have been avoided if Duke had a capable athletics director. The same is true for the Baseball Scandal at Duke of last year.

Fourth, on the first day of the new president’s job, you show him who is boss by orchestrating a crass power play over a job offer that you have no real intention of taking. You and your friend Joe Alleva work over the new president for millions of dollars of concessions, the prize jewel being a separate practice facility for the basketball team.

Coach K is a talented basketball coach. But his program has no more integrity than any other major college sports program. It is in fact, like other sports programs,a sewer. As a man, he has no more integrity than is typical of successful, power hungry CEOs. I’d say his integrity relative to most other human beings is on the low side.

Why Duke and Coach K have been anointed as angels in the world of college basketball is a curious thing. But the facts belie the reputation. There are no angels in college basketball. College sports is about many things including “school spirit” and entertainment for alumni. But the words “college sports” and “integrity” are incongruous.

Finding the Scapegoats

The Duke Lacrosse Scandal has been one strange affair from the get-go and as time goes on it gets stranger and stranger. Part of the strangeness is a result of hubris. Collectively, the Duke community has a swelled head and they aren’t so much embarrassed by the scandal as they are indignant about all of the negative publicity.

I saw this before at Stanford in the last 1980s with regard to a scandal of its own. In that case, the scandal was about misuse of government funds related to overhead. Just like Duke, Stanford’s arrogance and hubris played right into the hands of the press. The issue just grew and grew and ended up becoming the stuff of an embarrassing congressional inquiry. It’s telling that to this day, Stanford leadership is indignant about its overhead scandal. Mention it and hackles raise. A little contrition would be a good thing.

When the scandal hit Stanford, its leadership felt the need for a scapegoat. They found it in their communications/public relations officer. A long-time employee of Stanford, which had formerly celebrated its openness to the press, he was forced to resign. Stanford has not been open with the press since. Ultimately, the scandal grew so large that the president resigned as well. I don’t think that Brodhead, president of Duke, will resign. It’s just not Duke’s way of doing things. But I’d bet five grand that he won’t last the standard ten years.

At Duke, the initial scapegoat was predictable, the coach of the lacrosse team. Like Stanford’s p.r. officer, he was someone who up until the scandal was adored. But love is fleeting in the world of business, and Duke needed someone to blame this mess on that wasn’t too high in the chain of command.

Both at Stanford and at Duke there was the need not only to find a scapegoat in the administration, but one from the faculty as well. At Stanford, it was a physics professor. At Duke, it was Houston Baker, prominent member of the English department, who went ballistic in response to the Lacrosse Scandal. He wrote a scathing letter to the provost at Duke and talked freely to the press about his anger and resentment.

I can’t say that I agreed with much of what he said. For those who are interested, you can easily find out all he said by a google search. But I was more than willing to cut him slack for his outside the lines views. Baker is an older black man who grew up in Louisville, a town heavy with history of racism. His wife has been the victim of rape. Putting myself in his shoes, I just might go ballistic as well. The event would just be too close to home.

For example, a couple of years ago, Duke was dumb enough to pay for and host an anti-Semitic conference. I’m proudly Jewish. My parents both lived through hell in Europe. Most of my relatives were murdered in WWII. I watched this conference take place and watched a few self-loathing, non-practicing Jews in Duke leadership bend over backwards to praise the conference. This was not the first time I’d seen this bunch openly display their self-loathing. I bit my tongue. Then, a very nasty anti-Semitic op-ed, entitled The Jews, appeared in the Duke student newspaper at the end of the conference. I went ballistic and said things I shouldn’t have said. It was all too close to home for me.

Now one would think that Duke would have both big enough collective compassion for a human being and a commitment to free speech to let Professor Baker vent his emotions. But that’s not what happened. Instead, the provost of the university – someone who has a tendency to throw temper tantrums that would make a two year old envious – publicly lambasted Professor Baker. In response, alumni and students joined the “get Baker” bandwagon. There were calls for Baker’s resignation in Duke’s student newspaper. Duke had a new scapegoat.

Professor Baker, faced with such ugliness on the part of the provost and the Duke community, did what most anyone else would do. He found a job elsewhere. Next year he and his wife will both be professors at Vanderbilt. I wish them well. The provost and the Duke community owe them both an apology. But that doubtless will not happen. Duke found their scapegoats. In times of crisis, institutions are usually far more interested in defending themselves from real and perceived slights than they are in doing the right thing.