No Joy in the Outcome: A Personal Statement

I’m glad this health care bill seems to have passed. I reluctantly supported it because it was infinitely better than what we have now. I’m delighted simply because some attention may now be made to lowering the unemployment in this country to a manageable rate. I felt (although I could be wrong) that they got the order backward---first jobs--- then healthcare.

The bill that will finally take effect is seriously flawed in several of its mandates. If the Conservative Republicans had not been so intent on embarrassing and defeating this President and had not been so frightened of its extreme right wing and its prophets of hatred and paranoia in the press and entertainment media (i.e. Fox’s Beck, Rupert Murdoch, Rush Limbaugh,etc.), they would have put together a truly bipartisan effort to generate a fiscally sound and yet humane reform measure. Read David Frum’s article:

http://www.frumforum.com/waterloo

It’s flawed in several ways:

Ø There is no public option

Ø Some of it’s provisions are delayed for too long (i.e. four years)

Ø There are hidden tax increases in it that will come into effect several years down the line

Ø There is an unfunded mandate in it (down the line) that will have to be borne by the State Legislatures.

But I supported it for personal reasons:

Ø For me, health care is a right in any democracy and a moral issue more than political or fiscal. I go to services but I am hardly a religious person. I do, however, believe in one thing: that the message that Christ delivered in the New Testament about how we should live is difficult to maintain but gives meaning to life.

Ø I am dismayed by the prejudice, racism and homophobia that pervade a large percentage of the population in this country. When I was moderately active in the civil rights movement in the ‘60’s, I saw it up close and personal. I am also a student of history and know how ugly it was for Italian-American immigrants in this country in the first half of the 20^th century. That is why it disappoints and saddens me when I hear those same ugly epithets coming out of the mouths of the grandchildren and great grandchildren of those immigrants.

I am afraid that I may have upset and even angered some of my closest friends on these issues by going public with my opinions. But , I do strongly believe that people at the very least , have the moral responsibility to “speak out” when you see and hear this ugliness in our society. But, as some wise person has said, “we can agree to disagree”.

IT IS TIME TO TAKE SIDES





http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=greed+is+good+speech&hl=en&emb=0&aq=0&oq=greed+is+good#

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-moyers/ask-the-chamber-of-commer_b_496140.html

AMDG

DOWNWARD DRIFT

The following stats are taken from Arianna Huffington's recent article in the Huffington Post.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/is-iundercover-bossithe_b_490989.html

• The chasm between America's haves and have-nots has reached Grand Canyon-esque proportions. Thirty years ago top executives at S&P 500 companies made an average of 30 times what their workers did -- now they make 300 times what their workers make
• Since 2000, 3.2 million more American households are trying to make do on under $25,000 a year.
• In 2005, households in the bottom 20 percent had an average income of $10,655, while the top 20 percent made $159,583 -- a disparity of 1,500 percent, the highest gap ever recorded
• .In 2007, the top ten percent pocketed almost half of all the money earned in America -- the highest percentage recorded since 1917 (including, as Henry Blodget notes, 1928, the peak of the stock market bubble in the "roaring 1920s").
• Almost 100 million Americans are in families that make less in real income than their parents did at their same age.
• The percentage of Americans born to parents in the bottom fifth of income who will climb to the top fifth as adults is now only seven percent.
• If you were born to wealthy parents but didn't go to college, you're more likely to be wealthy than if you did go to college but had poor parents.

How long before many of us who are now in the middle class will begin to drift downward to the bottom fifth. It only takes the loss of a job, a loss of health care and a major illness.

AMDG

THE WAR ON PLAGIARISM

What a good thing Adam had. When he said a good thing, he knew nobody

had said it before.

Mark Twain

Lawrence Tribe, Alan Dershowitz, Dolores Kearns Goodwin, Stephen Ambrose, Senator Joseph Biden---What do these names have in common? You’ve guessed it: they have all been accused of plagiarism. Poor Alan Dershowitz was accused of failing to cite his secondary sources. I can’t even guess at how many times I have penalized students for citing secondary sources instead of primary sources.

The word plagiarism is taken from the Latin noun, plagiarius, meaning “pirate or kidnapper” It simply means taking another author’s language or original ideas and passing them off as one's own. In the world of academe, it has become a capital crime comparable to stealing goods from someone’s locker or trashing a dormitory corridor in a drunken fury. In the decades-old “cat and mouse” game that undergraduate students and faculty play on this issue, the ratio of punishment to crimes has always been a small one. I have spent a good percentage of my time in the past 45 years of college teaching searching for the original sources for an “A+” research paper written by a student who normally demonstrates ninth grade writing skills. Now, with technological advances and the advent of Internet, this task has become even more difficult and, quite frankly, very frustrating. The students have too many weapons in this “catch me if you can” scenario.

We have tried to battle this new insurgency with weapons of our own: software like plagiarism.com; highly original assignments; academic honesty contracts and outright threats of severe punishment. Some concerned institutions make special efforts in Freshman English classes to advise students to avoid the practice of plagiarism. They forewarn students about Mosaic Plagiarism, a term that has been introduced to cover those students who pirate brief phrases and terms from the source and integrate them into their own prose. They also inform them that Accidental Plagiarism will no longer be tolerated. This is the term used to identify students who are ignorant of the rules or forms for citation and have unintentionally kept the original source hidden from the reader. Intentionality has always been a problem for faculty whose students plead innocence and ignorance of the rules when confronted. It is impossible, of course, to prove intentionality unless a student confesses outright. Most college student manuals publicly profess little tolerance for these unintentional offenses and group them along with premeditated acts of plagiarism.

All of these strategies and caveats have apparently failed to significantly reduce the incidence of academic dishonesty on college campuses. In a 1999 survey of 21,000 students at 21 campuses throughout the country, Donald McCabe at the Rutgers University Center for Academic Integrity (CAI) found that half of the students surveyed admitted to cheating on written assignments at least once. Internet plagiarism, in very recent years, has run rampant on college campuses. In another CAI study, the incidence of plagiarizing from the Internet has been reported to have increased from 10% in 1999 to 41% in 2001. There are websites that will write a student’s paper for as little as ten dollars a page.

Most recently, a few colleges and universities have now decided to resort to a sort of Patriot Act of their own to what appears to be an attempt to increase the numbers of offenders publicly punished for plagiarism. They seem to want to send a message to the larger numbers of students who escape punishment by borrowing old papers from classmates or purchasing original papers from a variety of websites. They have arbitrarily “stretched” the definition of plagiarism to include any citation errors that a student may commit on a research paper. This would include incorrect pagination, omission of a page number in the text or citing an incorrect source. As a result, hey have added one more label to the rubric of plagiarism---- Misrepresentation. No piracy is involved here – just carelessness.

Once penalized by reducing the grade for the paper, this sort of negligence is now justification for university sanction on grounds of “academic dishonesty” or a violation of “academic integrity”. The problem with this is that placing the adjective “academic’ in front of “honesty” and “integrity” doesn’t alter the definition or connotation of these words. Accusations of ”dishonesty” and “lack of integrity” have moral implications and cast public aspersions on a student’s character. To publicly sanction students for unintentionally and/or carelessly misrepresenting their sources on an undergraduate research paper doesn’t simply evaluate their performance, it impugns their character. If a cashier carelessly returns the incorrect change to a customer, it reflects on his or her job performance not his or her character. A pirate is a thief not an inept boatman. It is our role as academic mentors to inspire, motivate, inform and yes, to evaluate those students who enroll for our classes. Moral judgments and punishment are the business of those offices in any institution that exist to deal with student misbehavior, including cheating and intentionally plagiarizing on papers from undisclosed sources.

In a recent survey of 160 university websites, two undergraduate researchers, Salhany and Roig, reported in the Psy Chi Journal that only 66% of the institutions sampled publish an academic dishonesty policy and that a little more than half bother to include any statements at all about plagiarism. To their credit, a few institutions are responsible enough to publish this expanded definition of plagiarism so that at the very least their students are forewarned. Some, however, have decided to publish only the traditional definition in student handbooks but add the phrase “not limited to”, which subsequently leaves the newer, broader definition to the discretion of individual professors. Needless to say, uninformed students sanctioned under these mysterious new guidelines always have access to the College’s internal appeals process, which usually involves members of the professor’s own department reviewing their colleague’s decision and judgment. This is hardly a good example of the kind of unbiased due process that faculty demand for their own appeals. Ombudsmen, especially in private colleges, are pretty much non-existent these days. Students and their parents who have the funds can try to take legal action, but the courts are very reluctant to intervene in the academic process. Accountability appears to end at the gates of the institution.

So, in the final analysis, we find ourselves in a situation where those students who do make a sincere attempt to cite their sources (however carelessly) become more open to scrutiny and university sanctions than those students who cleverly mask their sources in a premeditated attempt to plagiarize. The obsessive need to publicly sanction a student for misrepresentation instead of simply lowering the student’s grade for these errors is an abuse of power. Furthermore, those university administrators who feel they must support their colleagues at all costs and uphold their action perpetuate the injustice to these students and demonstrate a callous disregard for their rights.

If the courts continue to be reluctant to intervene in academic matters, it is the responsibility of the universities and colleges in this country to come to an agreement on a detailed operational definition of academic dishonesty and plagiarism and publish this definition in its entirety in catalogs, student handbooks and websites. To continue to do otherwise would truly be a breach of academic integrity.

AMDG

I’M AHEAD OF THE CURVE
In the past few posts on this blog I have been insisting that the problem with this country is its people not just its politicians and its government. Well Evan Thomas of Newsweek just published an article squarely on that point. It’s sometimes heartening to know that you are not just shouting in the wind. I have reprinted it below.

WE THE PROBLEM
By Evan Thomas | NEWSWEEK
Published Feb 26, 2010
From the magazine issue dated Mar 8, 2010

Watching your government at work can be an appalling spectacle. Politicians posture and bicker, and not much gets done. It's gotten so bad—or at least seems so bad—that pundits are beginning to wonder if the system is broken in some fundamental way and to cast about for a big fix. Some little fixes might help—reforming the Senate filibuster would be a start. But the nation is not about to have a constitutional convention, and we don't need one. The Founders got it right, more or less, some 220 years ago, when they created a system of checks and balances that permits the exercise of power while protecting the rights of individuals and political minorities.

The problem is not the system. It's us—our "got mine" culture of entitlement. Politicians, never known for their bravery, precisely represent the people. Our leaders are paralyzed by the very thought of asking their constituents to make short-term sacrifices for long-term rewards. They cannot bring themselves to raise taxes on the middle class or cut Social Security and medical benefits for the elderly. They'd get clobbered at the polls. So any day of reckoning gets put off, and put off again, and the debts pile up.

In the last 30 or so years, Americans have lived as if there is no tomorrow. They have racked up personal debt, spending more than they save and borrowing heavily. Americans have become fatter: between 1960 and 2002, the average adult male in the United States put on 25 pounds, and the average woman gained 24; between 1998 and 2006, the percentage of obese Americans in-creased by 37 percent. Some attribute these gains to factors beyond individual control, but who can deny that self-restraint and self-denial are antiquated values? (In the college hookup culture, the ethos is to have sex first and only then, maybe, get to know the other person.) It's not just in Lake Wobegon, where all children are above average. Grade inflation is so out of control in the nation's high schools that 43 percent of college-bound seniors taking the SATs have A averages—even though SAT scores have remained flat or drifted slowly downward for years.

It is hard to know exactly how or when we got this self-indulgent. The '60s are partly to blame. The triumph of individual and civil rights, a wondrous fulfillment of the true meaning of the Constitution, was too often perverted into an "I got my rights" sense of victimhood. The noble push of the New Deal and the Great Society to fight poverty and illness, particularly among the very old and very young, hardened into the nonsensical defiance some tea partiers show when they shout, "Keep your government hands off my Medicare!" The casting off of conformity and explosion of free expression contributed to the sour and selfish "Me Decade" of the 1970s. The spurt of economic activity in the 1980s and '90s spawned a generation of Gordon Gekkos on Wall Street and profligate spenders in the shopping malls of America (financed and enabled in part by more frugal Chinese buying American debt).

Politicians have never been very good at asking for sacrifice from their constituents. (And the ones who have tried have generally lost reelection.) Outside of wartime, there was never any golden age when political leaders successfully called on their people to give up what they perceived as their economic entitlements for the greater good. The last presidential candidate to call for tax increases on the middle class was Walter Mondale of Minnesota, in 1984, and he was defeated in every state but his own and the District of Columbia.
But lately, politicians seem to have lost the most essential element of the art of governing—meaningful compromise. In its pure form, compromise means mutual sacrifice. On Capitol Hill, there is only getting: politicians will vote for a bill if they get something, like a tax cut for an interest group or a pork-barrel project for their district. But they are not willing to give up anything. This is especially true where the other party is concerned. Partisanship has never been worse. It was not always this way. Read Robert Caro's Master of the Senate, about the way Lyndon Johnson, Senate majority leader in the late 1950s, bullied and horse-traded to craft majorities for civil rights out of both parties and all sections of the country.
Leadership requires a willingness to make the hard and sometimes un-pleasant choice.

Last week an article in The New York Times depicted some U.S. Marines watching in dismay as an Afghan Army officer demanded to have an enlisted man's drink—and then drained it with a laugh. In the U.S. Marine Corps and Army, the commanding officer always eats last, after his or her troops have been fed and cared for. The reason is simple, honorable—and practical. A leader will have a better chance of getting followers to make sacrifices if he or she shows a willingness to suffer greater hardships. (In the military, it is no accident that second lieutenants—platoon commanders—have the highest casualty rates.)
Politicians are not military commanders and shouldn't be expected to behave that way.

Still, to get something you have to give up something. That is the true test of compromise. In a poignant op-ed piece in the Times, Sen. Evan Bayh explained why he is not seeking reelection. While acknowledging that it would be a mistake to romanticize "the Senate of yore" inhabited by his father, former senator Birch Bayh, he recalled the more human and humane world of his father, when senators from different parties would socialize together—and offer to help with each other's campaigns, even if that meant jeopardizing their party's majority. "This is unimaginable today," wrote Bayh.

It's unfair to put the onus solely on President Obama to compromise. He has made some attempts, only to be stonewalled by the Republicans. But is there anything more he could do—anything immediate and concrete—to cut through the Gordian knot tying up health care?
Actually, there is. Obama is well in-formed enough to know that sky-high malpractice-insurance rates and defensive medicine drive up health costs. There is debate over how much, but any doctor will attest to the costly fear of a lawsuit. Almost all objective medical experts agree that something should be done to cut back the vast jury verdicts won by clever trial lawyers in medical-malpractice cases. But the Democrats have declined to even try. Why? Because trial lawyers are among the biggest campaign contributors to the Democratic Party.
If Obama were to come out squarely for medical-malpractice reform—in a real way—he would be making an important political statement: that as president he is willing to risk the political fortunes of his own party for the greater good. It would give him the moral standing, and the leverage, to call on the Republicans to match him by sacrificing their own political interests—by, for instance, supporting tax increases to help pay down the debt. At last week's summit, Obama said Republicans were overstating the costs of medical malpractice, but suggested that some remedies might be pursued at the state level. He'll have to do more than that to break through the partisan paralysis. But, as young Marines and soldiers understand, real leadership requires risks.