LETTERS
LETTERS Returned fire Charles Peters got off a cheap shot when he noted sardonically that only one officer was killed in the Iowa explosion, as compared to 46 enlisted men ["Tilting...
...MARTIN MORSE WOOSTER Silver Spring, Maryland The editor replies: The New Times did not refer to Spy magazine in its credit line for the Malanowski piece...
...In other words, there is a far higher proportion of officers sitting in safe positions behind the lines than there is in the front lines where the fighting is going on...
...So you did exactly what the article preaches against...
...Like Harvard, Columbia has not made even greater use of case studies for just one reason: Case studies demand more of (and confer fewer rewards on) professors than any other method...
...Not big enough for a cover...
...The officer to enlisted man ratio is 1 to 40...
...For publications that are so often lumped together, the "50 very odd" members of AAN are more diverse than any other media group I know—or, I'll bet, that Eisendrath knows...
...I also dispute his contention that the alternatives are becoming part of the "Gannetting of America" because the papers share a few features or use the AAN (Association of Alternative Newsweeklies) "wire service...
...Is Eisendrath wrong, or does Malanowski have an evil twin...
...Your "Tilting at Windmills" in your June issue was cruel, mean, and dishonest...
...And you, the editors, went along with it...
...BILL PRADY New York, New York Case closed Suzanne Goldsmith and Katherine Boo have written a dandy little case study of what's wrong with the American political science establishment ["The Case for the Case Study," June...
...TIM CONNORS Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Please tell James Fallows that the moon does indeed rotate on its axis, though, as every schoolboy knows, its period of rotation is the same as its period of revolution about the Earth...
...If several officers had been killed in the tragedy, Peters would have complained about "our bloated, topheavy officer corps...
...What does it mean...
...I agree with most of Miller's conclusions...
...As Eisendrath should have realized from his survey, the papers are much more different than alike...
...With a single exception, each of the segments we wrote and taped did just that...
...You emphasized the big story at the expense of the real story...
...LETTERS Returned fire Charles Peters got off a cheap shot when he noted sardonically that only one officer was killed in the Iowa explosion, as compared to 46 enlisted men ["Tilting at Windmills," June...
...The article violates the very principles it expounds...
...TY DAVIS Edgewood, Rhode Island In his piece on alternative newspapers, John Eisendrath refers to "Jamie Malanowski of Miami's New Times...
...As a recent law school graduate, I have little reason to believe the bar exam will measure anything beyond our ability to take the bar exam...
...Here's hoping we profit from his mistake by being treated to further exploration by Epps of the themes he and Fallows raise...
...For reasons beyond my ken, Epps has traded a successful career as a journalist and author for three years of law school...
...But he wasn't a big enough name, right...
...Rapping papers As the founder and former publisher of Rhode Island's The NewPaper (which John Eisendrath erroneously identified as the New Times ["Have Mac, Will Publish," June)), I found his allegation of poor editing at alternative weeklies without context...
...Like Harvard's Kennedy School, where I have been a guest lecturer, Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs has made great use of case studies for one reason: They motivate students more than any other teaching method...
...The training of new government officials and political leaders is too important to be left in the hands of political scientists...
...Based on the notion that the Muppets have the ability to explain without patronizing, Ted suggested that the Muppets tape a number of segments, each explaining a key term...
...You're more likely to be killed in an infantry platoon than in any other part of the military...
...Are officers cowards...
...The worst was obviously Peter Kilborn of The New York Times...
...I've never served at sea, but in ground forces the smallest unit an officer normally commands is a platoon, which, at full strength, is made up of about 40 people...
...The case method was central to the graduate professional program in Public Policy and Administration that I helped Columbia organize in the late 1970s...
...FRANKLIN HAVLICEK Washington, D.C...
...But Koppel was the least of the offenders cited...
...LOUIS MARANO Washington, D.C...
...I look for higher standards from The Washington Monthly...
...I question Matthew Miller's use of an excerpt from one of those segments...
...By his selectivity, Miller has misrepresented some very good and hard work...
...It is difficult to discuss the issues if you are not certain that terms like "margin call" are understood...
...the article Eisendrath cites appears to have been reprinted from Spy or Premiere...
...But he (and you) exhibit the darker side of journalism: warping a story for readership...
...In the course of the taping, we thought it might be fun to include a lighter interchange between Ted and Miss Piggy (a character we had, for obvious reasons, excluded from participating in the more instructive material...
...The author, Matthew Miller, selects Ted Koppel (A Big Name) to skewer...
...HUGH WELLS Detroit, Michigan In 1984, I was one of the writers who worked with Ted Koppel, Jim Henson, and Frank Oz to create Muppet segments explaining economic terms for Nightline...
...But the growth of public policy programs in the last decade has salvaged the wreckage of American political science...
...It is this exchange from which Miller quotes...
...Perhaps American education has been in awful shape for longer than we think...
...You owe every sailor, enlisted man, and officer an apology...
...The piece by Garrett Epps in the same issue ["Bar Wars"] shows that the law school is particularly vulnerable to this overvaluation of test scores...
...We provided clear, usable definitions of terms like "stock market," "bull market," "bear market," "liquidity," and "contrarian...
...WILLIAM LANG Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Muppet's revenge Your article "The Case Against Ted Koppel" [May] would be mildly hilarious if it were not rather sad...
...Exam bars In the excerpt "What's Wrong with Testing" [May] from the new book by James Fallows, the author persuasively describes how many of the measures intended to foster a meritocracy instead work to entrench what can only be called a "mediocracy...
...ALLISON MOORE Belfast, Maine The editor replies: The infantry platoon example makes my point...
...I thought Malanowski was an editor for Spy...
...For the rest of the military it is more than 1 to 10...
...Nightline is viewed by an audience with various degrees of familiarity with economics and the stock market...
Vol. 21 • September 1989 • No. 8
