POLITICAL BOOKNOTES
POLITICAL BOOKNOTES Public affairs books scheduled to be published this month. The Hearsts: Father and Son. William Randolph Hearst Jr., Jack Casserly. Roberts Rinehart Publishers, $29.95....
...That all this "rights talk" has gone too far, that policy discussions that should be carried on in terms of fair play and common sense have been frozen in the absolute language of rights: a right to welfare, a right to shelter, to abortion, to government contracts...
...It was she who taught me most of what I needed to know...
...I imagine he will be...
...They doodle formulae...
...These arguments were supported by members of a group called the Audi Victims Network and experts at two Ralph Nader shops, the Center for Auto Safety and the New York Public Interest Research Group...
...As in the Bendectin case, junk science and the litigation it supports eventually cost us all something...
...On the "60 Minutes" episode, Huber writes, Bradley introduces 30 million viewers to the demonic Audi...
...Jawaharlal Nehru, India's leader, is both an "imperious, arrogant" racist and "a pompous, petulant little boy...
...I had hoped that Glendon would give us a thoughtful answer...
...It is not liberal, open-minded, tolerant, scientific, or progressive to give equal time to astrology and astronomy," Huber concludes...
...Radioactive beams from outer space...
...The drivers, they said, were stepping on the gas when they meant to step on the brake: the fat foot theory...
...What's the aim...
...My reason for joining was simple: I had always wanted to teach public school in New York City, and Teach for America promised to negotiate the labyrinthine Board of Ed for me...
...Teacher...
...Huber's cranks conclude, based on "mosaic theories" and a few uncontrolled tests on lab animals, that the morning sickness pill Bendectin causes birth defects...
...I taught from noon to 5:30 straight...
...What made legal segregation so unique and so awful was its contradictory presence in the fabric of American law...
...Free Press, $22.95...
...That's not entirely Junior's fault...
...ANOTHER STUDENT: We are a society notoriously bad about funding poverty programs because we link them with work...
...Huber can be blunt, opinionated, and rude...
...Strange and unreported plagues...
...You get the picture...
...What About Obligations...
...Marion Davies, to help Hearst pere through a crisis, lent him $1 million...
...It moves the gas pedal further away from the brake...
...A senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, Huber has written an angry, informed, entertaining tirade against pseudoscientific experts-for-hire and the credulous judges, greedy attorneys, and know-nothing juries who allow them to ply their trade...
...A math lesson illustrates not concepts but "self-concepts...
...multiculturalism, meaning the positing of ethnicity as the chief category of American life, bad...
...Consequently, the "self," the only standard of reference, becomes a kind of educational prefix, attaching itself to more traditional aims...
...But she never answers this in a very satisfying way...
...That, as Kramer's book insists, is defense enough...
...Classes resemble encounter group sessions in which students are encouraged to share feelings, air grievances, and bandy about mostly unexamined ideas as if they were Nerf footballs...
...The aims of teachers, Kramer asserts, have gone fuzzy—as in warm fuzzy...
...Perhaps...
...He wants to be remembered by his family as someone who did his best...
...I like that...
...Audi loses in court...
...I was disappointed...
...A social studies lesson develops not awareness of the world but "self-awareness...
...Junk science ultimately equals bad justice, no matter which side the experts are on...
...They were beaten down by big corporations that could hire armies of experts to swear that their chemicals and their products were not dangerous...
...Kramer floats above the fray of the ed school classrooms she visits like Mary Poppins, pointing out absurdities with the tip of her black umbrella...
...Toward his end, during one of her drunken dazes, she approached him with scissors in her hand, screaming, "I'm going to cut your balls off...
...In New York City's public schools, where I taught fourth grade this past year, every teacher is required to write a lesson's "aim," or objective—"To find the main idea of a paragraph," say—on the chalkboard before class begins...
...I couldn't enter the room until they did...
...It pays millions of dollars in damages and settlements...
...Not for nothing did the ACLU become the scapegoat of the 1988 election...
...Ralph Nader is the bad guy...
...Perhaps his life's "most important work," he says, was giving speeches for the President's Committee for Traffic Safety...
...Well, it wasn't just the Audi 5000...
...As a child, while his parents lived in a mansionsized New York apartment filled with museum-quality furnishings, he and his four brothers were relegated to a nearby apartment with cousins...
...As in many things litigious, the end results are foggy...
...A far more satisfying account of rights talk is the excellent book, The Republic of Choice, by legal historian Lawrence Friedman (Harvard University Press, 1990...
...They are, for the most part, harmless...
...Eccentric theories that no respectable government agency would ever fund are rewarded munificently by the courts...
...Huber also makes a damn good case against the cranks, who often turn out not to have the credentials they claim...
...Bradley shows the Audi pedal go down by itself...
...comes across as a fair, hardworking, modest man—without his father's drive but with a commendable sense of decency...
...I've seen classes in which neither has seemed quite certain...
...One of the advantages of communitarian ideas over rights talk is their ability to mobilize action...
...The story, with banner headlines, made the paper, Hearst Jr...
...Instead the reader is treated to some Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau (de rigueur for a Harvard Law professor), a lengthy discussion of the erratic development of the right to privacy and the failure of American tort law to impose obligations of Good Samaritanism, the need for legal bases for child care and other family-oriented social welfare programs, and a broad-brush treatment of the use that continental and Canadian courts have made of American-style notions of rights, especially when it comes to abortion...
...She says this after almost every comment.] As with most therapy, the discussions Kramer overhears seldom emphasize abilities, but instead focus on character...
...Tips from the summer about how to prepare my classroom before my students' arrival were now irrelevant...
...THE PROFESSOR: I am disgusted by the reliance on philanthropy instead of federal and state government responsibility...
...To prepare us, Teach for America provided an intensive two-month training program at the University of Southern California...
...Obstetricians cause cerebral palsy...
...Rosenbluth had drilled a hole in the Audi transmission and pumped it full of air to simulate high transmission pressure...
...In the spring of 1990, I joined Teach for America...
...In classroom after classroom, Kramer learns that the professed aim of most graduating teachers is not to transfer knowledge or skills to their future students, but to foster "selfesteem...
...WRH Jr., the 83-year-old editor-inchief of Hearst newspapers, says his dad's anticommunist crusade, though it callously pilloried many Americans who were not Red, "has finally been vindicated...
...Fundamentally, "communitarianism" seems to be an attempt to leapfrog back over the failures of post-1968 Democratic politics to recapture the spirit of the New Deal, incorporating the genuine strides of feminism, civil rights, and the rest while avoiding the rights-bound legalism that those developments brought with them...
...San Simeon's architect possessed "a steel-trap mind and a will of iron...
...With all this talk of positive and negative feedback, education is getting shortcircuited...
...A STUDENT: I sort of think we've got to make ourselves happy first...
...The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration was at the time investigating sudden-acceleration events in the Honda Accord, General Motor's Jcar, full and mid-sized Fords, Buick LeSabres, Oldsmobile Deltas, Pontiac Bonnevilles, and Mercedes Benz 300Es...
...But they see pattern and meaning, cause and effect, where their colleagues see random data points, chance, and no correlations...
...But, like those in New Jersey's alternate certification program, they did it at far less expense and wasted time...
...Kramer concludes, "Everything [would-be teachers] need to know about how to teach could be learned by intelligent people in a single summer of well-planned instruction...
...Huber's cranks are not loons...
...His father, we learn, "called a spade a spade...
...This is the question being addressed by The Responsive Community, a new quarterly journal launched by sociologist Amitai Etzioni and co-edited by Glendon...
...A concept of rights strong enough to beat down segregation could not be easily put back in the bottle...
...Whooping cough vaccines cause permanent brain damage...
...The cliches, like cockroaches, dance everywhere...
...pluralism, meaning a healthy respect for difference mediated by shared American traditions of liberal democracy, good...
...And he concludes that judges should work harder to keep junk science out of the courtroom...
...Today there is no denying that, as multiple claims of rights proliferate and government takes up the moral slack, individuals are relieved of the imperative that they take responsibility for their own actions and ultimately come to see each other less as fellows and more as adversaries...
...The pursuit of truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth has given way to reams of meaningless data, fearful speculation, and fantastic conjecture...
...Obviously, the weak link in this system is the mentor teacher...
...There is, I think, another factor behind today's rights talk—the civil rights movement...
...The Highway Traffic Safety boys concluded that the problem was probably "pedal misapplication," though they failed to point any fingers...
...By contrast, an "obligation to provide decent housing" is a reasonably welldefined order directed to the public institution best equipped to fill it...
...Still, faced with protracted litigation, the company offers to settle for $120 million...
...Government coverups...
...Turning the pages is like turning on the lights in a Lower East Side tenement kitchen...
...admits to an early career as publisher of New York's JournalAmerican, during which he would arrive at the office barely in time for an advertiser lunch and then go nightclubhopping until two or three a.m...
...So antithetical was it to the Constitution and constitutional procedures that virtually extralegal means had to be invented to dispose of it: a judicial sledgehammer, a super-legislature willing to drive a truck through the formidable barrier of contempt on which poor whites rested their dignity...
...More cases are pending...
...He defends the fortune—today it would be valued in the billions—that his father squandered on San Simeon, saying, "It was his money...
...That sounds good to me, too...
...Corps members took courses in pedagogical theory and practice and student-taught for five weeks in surrounding neighborhoods...
...I could not plan my lessons around natural breaks in the day, as I did as a student teacher, because there were no natural breaks—no lunch, no recess...
...Mine was the most overcrowded elementary school in the most overcrowded district in New York City...
...Rita Kramer...
...An art lesson, Kramer relates, encourages not expression but "self-expression...
...Its sales plummet...
...What's real science...
...Because there are no objective standards of accomplishment, to assess achievement through tests or by observation, or even by less traditional means, is considered "meritocratic"—a pejorative in ed school parlance that suggests the oppressive, hierarchical society it is the teacher's job to undermine...
...Rather, it was my mentor teacher who showed me how to fill out the red roll book, who explained how to assess my students' skills, who demonstrated lessons and showed me what would and would not work with the class...
...A class action suit was filed on behalf of 350,000 Audi owners, named and unnamed...
...No matter...
...Consider the case of the Audi 5000, one of my personal favorites...
...Mine was excellent, but what if one's mentor stinks...
...The book does have three redeeming features...
...William Booth...
...Third, Hearst Jr...
...STUDENT: An artist should be paid for doing what he likes, even if it's sitting on the porch and playing the guitar...
...As legal rights and protections expand, as government takes on more and more jobs, fresh expectations are created—an upward spiral of demand and response...
...draconian punishment for drug users, bad...
...To accommodate all of the students, we were forced to have two full sessions of school every day...
...After Hearst Sr., age 55, began seeing— then living with—mistress Marion Davies, age 21, the son's access to his father was again limited...
...That shouldn't be surprising...
...If a teacher forgets, the kids will shout out: "Hey...
...The theory was for the most part irrelevant to my subsequent experience in the schools...
...Plaintiffs are hysterical...
...Audi wins in court...
...As one administrator in the Los Angeles Unified School District told The New York Times about Teach for America members employed by that school system: "I don't think they did exceptionally well or any better than fully credentialed teachers...
...Instead, researchers note a two-fold increase in hospitalizations caused by severe nausea and vomiting during pregnancy...
...A class at Seattle Pacific University compiles a list of qualities a good teacher should possess...
...Put them in the four corner desks of the room—not in the corner, but on the corners—so that they are out of eyeshot of the rest of the class...
...Not so the professional cranks in Peter Huber's book about junk science and its impact on the legal system...
...Batteries of meaningless, high-tech tests that would amount to medical malpractice or insurance fraud if administered in a clinic for treatment are administered in court with complete impunity by fringe experts hired for litigation," Huber rages...
...Samuel Crowther III, a snobby souse on rewrite, was asked by City Editor Eddie Mahar to obtain a telephone interview with an escaped convict holding a family of seven hostage...
...Rights talk was born...
...Education is in the details, and most of the challenges of my first year were peculiar to my particular school, which was on a "split session...
...Free Press, $22.95...
...Student-teaching was the most valuable preparation of all, although even that did not prepare me for my own classroom experience...
...Huber starts his tale with Ed Bradley and "60 Minutes...
...That brand of liberalism did have its flaws, but when you realize that V-E Day, the GI Bill, and the civil rights and women's movements were just a few of its legacies, it does seem fair to say that recreating that spirit in today's weary, demoralized republic may indeed be something worth shooting for...
...A responsive community," Etzioni writes, "is one whose moral standards reflect all the basic human needs of all its members...
...I would not be circumnavigating standard certification procedures, but, like thousands of teachers in the city, I would teach on a "temporary, per-diem" basis...
...Basic, $23.00...
...Attorneys are sharks...
...Ingredients from a cosmetics plant cause "chemically induced AIDS...
...As proof, she offers the success of New Jersey's alternate certification program, which requires a minimum of education courses and provides onsite training and support for first-year teachers once they've entered the classroom...
...Moreover, in none of the cases were the brakes shown to be out of order after the accident...
...An expert named William Rosenbluth claims that "unusually high transmission pressure could build up on certain model Audis, causing the throttle to open up...
...William Randolph Hearst Jr., whose preface is addressed to "my fellow Americans," tells us that he has "thought long and hard," "lived in the lap of luxury," and "looked death in the face...
...Courts resound with elaborate, systematized, jargon-filled, serioussounding deceptions that fully deserve the contemptuous label used by trial lawyers themselves: junk science...
...Perpetual motion machines...
...But the author's anti-Nader sentiments seem to blind him to the fact that reform must apply equally to large corporations, which still have the resources to outexpert the most affluent of publicinterest groups...
...The more elite the university, the more egregious the fuzziness...
...But Junior sees his father with the unquestioning eyes of a loyal son...
...The displacement of traditional face-to-face religious and communal authority by the remote politics of mass communication and the loosening of local ties by personal and social mobility, he says, have led people to see themselves more and more as self-created and alone, creatures of their own unfettered choices...
...He cannot bring himself actually to view Citizen Kane, which portrays a Hearstian newspaper mogul, but he attacks the movie as superficial and inaccurate...
...to noon...
...ANOTHER STUDENT: Malevolent market forces...
...Huber means science that is done by scientists, published in scientific journals, scrutinized by peers, reproduced by rivals, agreed to by consensus...
...Though they have a penchant for extremely lengthy single-spaced letters, they employ at least the images of science...
...A "right to decent housing" is like a blank check—it's a nice thought, but its content may be unrelated to reality...
...As for content, this timid tome, which bills itself as a firsthand peek at Hearst Sr., never gets near him...
...Because a system of choices is meaningless unless a citizen can convert the choices to entitlements...
...There is a moral lack of care in this society...
...I had to share a classroom with another teacher who taught the morning session from seven a.m...
...Mothers who took thalidomide did have babies with flippers...
...This is not a politically correct piece of scholarship...
...Loren Ghiglione Ed School Follies: The Miseducation of America's Teachers...
...Armed with this definition, Huber righteously walks the reader through the trials, the evidence, the claims and counter-claims, the experts (real and imagined), the appeals, the milliondollar awards, and the accompanying publicity of six different cases...
...I had never been able even to get the right person at the Board on the phone...
...What was that dark feeling...
...But he fails to note that once upon a time, many consumers had little recourse in the courts...
...You are not there to feed them information but to be sensitive to their need for positive reinforcement...
...dismisses as "a pompous stuffed shirt," decked him with a quick left fist...
...And why is society so rights-conscious...
...None of this, of course, changes the central fact about cranks, which is that they do not have a productive relationship with reality...
...Ford Pintos did have a tendency to combust...
...The kind of science that may not ultimately be right, but is the best that human minds can do at the time...
...Before it calcified into bureaucracy and special interests, that New Deal ethos put government to work on a massive scale, not with the goal of guaranteeing everybody a happy ending, but of enabling the weak and disadvantaged to help themselves...
...As Kramer dryly notes, "There is not one mention of knowledge of any kind, or even of any special method of imparting knowledge...
...the trend, in modern law, is to impose duties on larger governments and institutions...
...At least one expert witness and the attorney who hired him are wrangling over $2,268,531.49 in promissory notes made to the expert during a series of trials on the effects of perfume chemicals on human health...
...A car that ranks among the lowest in driver fatalities is considered by consumers to be a dangerous lemon...
...To insist that things are more uncertain still is to deny things we know to be true, and to believe things we know to be false...
...They include "patient, calm, praising, accommodating, sense of humor, trusting, firm but kind, flexible, cares about and loves each kid...
...Zoom...
...Graduate programs, run by career academicians long removed from the realities of the classroom, pose unnecessarily high hurdles for those who'd like to enter the profession...
...sterilizing welfare mothers, bad...
...They footnote like fiends...
...I didn't know that...
...Sara Mosle Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse...
...As one professor at California State University at Long Beach explains to her students: "More important than content or thinking are the students' feelings...
...Birth defects do not go down...
...While Junior writes a weekly column and won a Pulitzer Prize along with Joseph Kingsbury-Smith and Frank Conniff in 1956, in writing this book he seems to have forgotten the reporter's duty to dig for details and insights...
...It's hard to resist savaging this book by a son of the Hearst, the mythic media mogul, and Jack Casserly, a speechwriter for President Gerald Ford...
...Wake up NASA, they have the photos to prove it...
...Mary Ann Glendon...
...In a system with very little accountability, knowing the aim provides two minimal assurances: that students know what they are learning, and even more important, that teachers know what they are teaching...
...Bush's rhetoric worked for the same reason good demagoguery usually does: It tapped into the unarticulated but pressing intuition of the people...
...The prudish air of Kramer's prose is unfortunate, for it undercuts the important argument that her accumulation of anecdotes makes...
...Thanks to aggressive consumer groups and the popularity of the class action suit, the playing field for junk science has leveled out a little...
...They are also paid to see such connections...
...The attorneys, working on contingency, receive about a third of that—making the initial outlay for experts a remarkably profitable investment...
...Audi had a lampoonable defense...
...Peter W. Huber...
...Charlatans, liars, and frauds all...
...recalls, "champ for a day...
...In practice, this means (sampling from the most recent issue): anti-loitering laws narrowly targeted at street-level drug-dealing, good...
...Far more useful were classes that addressed practical matters of classroom management—such as what to do the first day, how to write a lesson plan, tips on where to place troublemakers in a classroom...
...There is a role for the public sector in seeing to the welfare of its individual members, without regard to race, gender, and creed, while framing its agenda in terms of the public good...
...He attacks the plaintiffs' attorneys as flamboyant, money-grubbing shysters who care little for their clients...
...Last February the cover of Harper's finally posed the question directly: "Enough About Rights...
...And so-called experts...
...Huber makes a good case that it was fat-footed drivers, not demons, who made the Audi suddenly accelerate...
...prisoners' rights, pornographers' rights, even lab rabbits' rights...
...But how do you reconcile a liberal commitment to a vigorous public sector with the idea of personal responsibility...
...For a year, Rita Kramer sat at the back of the class of America's schools of education and conducted her own informal observation of the lessons they teach...
...Here, for example, is a typical exchange of non sequiturs from a lecture at Columbia's Teacher's College: PROFESSOR: [W]hat if we could make a difference in human structures...
...Glendon is surely correct to say, as she does early on, that "the romance of rights" has overtaken the legal profession (or at least that sector of it devoted to public and constitutional law), "infiltrating the more carefully nuanced languages that many Americans still speak in their kitchens, neighborhoods, workplaces, religious communities, and union halls...
...At the newspaper where I toil, I am the happy recipient of correspondence from cranks: thick manila envelopes addressed, cryptically, to the Science Writer, inside which there is almost always something wonderful...
...workfare, good...
...Bendectin is yanked off the market...
...The book settles instead for platitudes a publisher might spout— about, say, highway safety—to a Rotary Club luncheon...
...Clearly, Huber's account of cases like these is going to make some people uncomfortable...
...And would you look at this...
...Cranks are not fools...
...The balance of right and duty, he argues, has not vanished from modern legal culture...
...Huber documents junk science as practiced by experts for plaintiffs but never questions the science ginned up by defendants...
...The modern judge who defers to mainstream science will at the same time defer to science's own, methodical acceptance of the possibility of error...
...Bradley didn't buy it...
...But, when it comes to writing history, his best fails...
...Maverick scientists shunned by their reputable colleagues have been embraced by lawyers," Huber writes...
...They love diagrams...
...And it's not the corporations, but those expert-wielding little guys that make Huber really mad...
...By this standard, no individual ought to trump the community while no community ought utterly to trump the responsible individual...
...It recalls cars...
...First, titillating snippets: Ernest Hemingway, whom Hearst Jr...
...I have a file as thick as a messy divorce case...
...Her attitude is invariably censorious, in a nagging-nanny sort of way...
...In 1986, the TV news program ran a segment that reported that Audi 5000s were mysteriously accelerating, careening through garage doors and parked cars, despite the fact that their occupants swore they were jamming down on the brakes...
...Is Huber right about Audi 5000s...
...At some schools, a teacher who fails to supply the objective during a formal (often unannounced) observation cannot receive a satisfactory rating, no matter how well the lesson goes...
...Friedman asks...
...my right to clean air versus your right to smoke, or, as in the celebrated Boggs case in New York, my right to sleep on the sidewalk versus your right to live on a nice block...
...And he traces how this case hurt not just Audi, but people who want to buy Audis and people who want to resell them...
...Rather, the two are "asymmetrically distributed...
...But things have changed...
...Second, the book recalls some fascinating tales from the JournalAmerican newsroom...
...While class action has been growing more and more difficult since the Burger court waged war on it in the seventies, it nevertheless can promise enough of a payoff to large groups of "little guys" to make an initial investment in experts worth it...
...Expectations for alternate certification should not be too great...
...What the viewers don't get to see is how the pedal went down...
...Within hours, however, the police killed the convict and learned that he was a deaf mute...
...In the process, the judiciary, and indeed the idea of the Constitution itself, became more powerful and seemingly more redemptive than ever before...
...Reporters are saps...
...Crowther, amazingly, got through to the convict...
...Glendon makes a number of excellent observations along the way (for instance, that abortion ought more logically to have been seen as a prerogative of family planning than as a personal right to privacy) but fails to establish a convincing connection between the prevalence of rights talk and larger social and political processes, or to posit an alternative beyond her platitudes about "the mandate for self-restraint implicit in the rule of law...
...Yehudah Mirsky Galileo's Revenge: Junk Science in the Courtroom...
...As in the New Jersey alternate certification plan, I was assigned a mentor teacher in my school...
...Her report, a scathing indictment of more than a dozen teacher preparation programs—from Michigan State University to Peabody College at Vanderbilt to Southern Texas University—reveals an educational establishment that has lost sight of the aims of its own profession...
...Many of Kramer's complaints about ed schools are familiar: Undergraduate education majors, who end up learning more about how to teach than what to teach, graduate woefully ill prepared to impart even the basics of reading and math...
...Mars is hollow...
...A student gains not knowledge but "self-knowledge...
...ANOTHER STUDENT: Most business people have no real commitment...
...Why, he asked, do drivers make the mistake just in the Audi 5000...
...She rightly asks "whether an undifferentiated language of rights is really the best way to address the astonishing variety of injustice and forms of suffering that exist in the world...
...Seven hundred women join a class action suit against the manufacturer...
...THE PROFESSOR: That's true...
...To Kramer's claims for alternate certification, I can only add my own testimony...
...The giant corporations that produce cars, chemicals, and pharmaceuticals turn out to be the good guys...
...When Mahar demanded an explanation, Crowther could only whimper, "Gee, Eddie, the guy never told me that...
...I eventually got a job teaching fourth grade to Dominican kids at the top of Manhattan...
Vol. 23 • September 1991 • No. 9
