Why I'm Still Not Afraid of President Trump

As we lurch from one bizarre episode in the Trump Administration to another (Russia! Twitter! Covfefe! Special Counsel! Ethics rules! Fire the FBI Director! Paris Climate Accord!), I am repeatedly brought back to something I wrote just a little over a year ago:

Why I'm Not Afraid of President Trump

This was written well before the election, and before Trump had technically sowed up the nomination (though by May it was pretty clear he would likely have it). One can quibble on a few details, but on the whole I think it's held up pretty well.

A significant part of my argument a year ago rested on this earlier piece, in which I pointed out that the US Presidency is in many ways a profoundly limited position. I think that the Trump Administration is actually providing a series of excellent illustrations of this point:

• Trump came out firing early with Executive Orders (long derided as "Presidential overreach" by suddenly-silent GOP Congressmen, but that's a topic for another day). But most of his Executive Orders have been words only. The one on "freedom of religion"? Actually changed almost nothing in practical terms. He's made two runs so far at trying to take unilateral action on immigration, only to have both of them blocked by the courts. Most of the stuff he's signed so far has been effective at generating a lot of press and buzz, but almost completely ineffective in actually changing anything (which isn't a bad description of Trump's career in show business).

• At the end of April, Congress faced a significant deadline to put together a budget for the remainder of FY17 for the Federal Government. The Trump Administration released a blueprint of what it thought Congress should do, including recommendations for massive cuts in a wide range of domestic programs and massive increases in defense spending. Though there was again a lot of press and public attention, in the end Congress pretty much ignored everything that Trump said and hammered out their own plan, which the President quietly signed. His impact on that process - perhaps the most important thing the US government does - was near zero. Early indications are that his FY18 budget proposal is going to get roughly the same treatment.

• His most recent action, on the Paris Climate Accord, is far less consequential than it appears for at least two reasons. First, "withdrawal" is not an instantaneous thing. By the terms of the Agreement, the US can't actually leave for three or four years - long enough to make this an issue in the next Presidential election cycle, and subject to being reversed by the next President. Second, the response from states, cities, and the corporate sector has been massively in the other direction. A great many entities that were going to have to take action under the Paris Accords are going to take those same actions anyway - up to and including giant oil companies, which are already coming under fire from their investors for not getting ready for a low-carbon future.

This is not to say that Trump's attempted actions don't matter. The most significant impact, as my colleague Dan Drezner has pointed out, may be that the US is largely abandoning leadership on the international stage to Europe and China. That's not the outcome that Trump or his supporters wanted, but it's the one we're getting. So I am not arguing that Trump's actions have no consequences.

I am, however, sticking to my pre-election conclusion: one man, no matter how ill-informed, arrogant, or unqualified, cannot destroy the United States or the world. The United States Presidency is far more limited in its scope and influence than we tend to give it credit for in our public discussions. Moreover, everything that Trump has done so far has had the effect of weakening the office still further, whether by appointing ill-prepared department heads who will spend their time fighting their own bureaucracies, taking extreme positions that mobilize resistance, or making policy proposals so absurd that he gets excluded from the important conversations. That's not the world I would like to see, but it's one I can live with.

I am often reminded of one of Fred Rogers' most famous quotes, worth repeating in this context:

When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, "Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping."

Things look scary now. But there are many people out there who are helping. Look for them. If you can, be one of them.

Quixotic Quest for Political Purity

I have written before about the dangers of seeking "purity" in public life - that is, of trying to dissociate one's self in all ways from things one disagrees with. This is as true about politics as it is about religion or any other belief system.

In this light, I read with a combination of amusement and concern this latest effort at "purity" of a particular political viewpoint by members of the NY State Senate:

New York Senate Passes Anti-BDS Bills

The idea here is that, if you work as a faculty member at any public university in New York (there are some 64 SUNY campuses, plus the CUNY system) you would not be able to use university funds to, say, travel to the conference of an organization that has passed a BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) resolution with regards to Israel.

Now, whether I agree with BDS efforts or not is irrelevant here (I'm not a fan, mostly on practical grounds). I am a member of scholarly organizations that have, at times, debated such resolutions. If one of these organizations were to pass such a resolution, and I worked in NY, what is the purpose of forbidding me from attending its scholarly conferences? All that does is punish the faculty, who now no longer have access to the means of sharing their work with the scholarly community, whether those faculty supported the symbolic BDS resolution or not.

The notion that allowing such a faculty member to use professional development funds to travel to such a conference constitutes the state "funding attacks against Israel or supporting hate", or that a conference appearance would be "inappropriate and offensive", suggests that the sponsors of this legislation are trying to purify the world according to their own world views. People disagree, about Israel and a great many other things. If you find such disagreement offensive, I'm not sure it's the world that needs to change.

This is, of course, a symptom of the deeper tribalist instincts of American politics, instincts that have been much emboldened of late. This is another example of a Politics of Force - an attempt to impose one's own worldview of everyone else, in this case on an issue that is purely symbolic and which has no direct practical significance. BDS resolutions by academic associations will not change Israel's behavior; withholding New York State funding from scholars seeking to attend those associations' conferences won't change theirs either.

As I have argued before, this is the real battle for the soul of American politics - not which side of this or that issue you fall on, but what kind of politics we want to have. If we opt for a politics of force, we doom ourselves to endless conflict and, likely, violence. This is the Trumpian zero-sum view of the world, and it leaves everybody worse off. Our alternative is to learn to live with differences even as we debate them, which means we have to become a little less comfortable with our own righteousness and a little more willing to engage in contact with the "impure".

Defense Spending: We Used to Have a Real Debate

Yesterday I posted a brief discussion about conservatives (or the lack thereof) in academia, in response to a Facebook conversation I had gotten into with some friends. Nothing earth-shatteringly insightful, just some noodling with ideas on an old question (and an opportunity to plug the much better work of some friends of mine).

That blog post led to another FB exchange, which I reproduce here:

[Name Removed] As usual I enjoy reading your blog and admire your knowledge and reasoning skills. But I would contend that there is something inherently ideological in, for example, designing military hardware, bombs, or the circuitry that can operate a drone or deliver an intercontinental missile with a warhead attached, as opposed to designing an artificial limb or artificial womb for premature babies or a convection oven. Funding decisions get made and engineers decide to put themselves in the way of specific types of funding that come from a particular ideological position about the value of, for example, random strangers' lives in comparison to personal or national objectives. We don't tend to see these things as ideological because we have so deeply absorbed a belief system that says, of course the state can only enforce its will through violence. Physicists can imagine a death ray, engineers build it, business people figure out how to make a profit from it; but it takes the liberal arts to say, "Gee, is building a death ray a good idea?"

R. William Ayres You make an excellent point. It takes a humanities perspective to see the fundamental ideological assumptions that underlie many of our systems, structures, and activities. At this point, there is little disagreement between "liberals" and "conservatives" about the military or militarization, which is a sad indication of how far our ideological goalposts have moved. Of course, that may be partly due to living next to a really big Air Force base...

There's a broader political observation here that has gone almost totally unremarked upon. I don't think this is just the result of living next to a massive AF base, in an area whose regional economy is substantially tied to defense spending. I think this is a national phenomenon.

The observation is this: we have long since ceased to talk about the defense budget. Once upon a time, there were significant policy differences and debates around the issue of defense spending as a component of both the US budget and US foreign policy. There were "hawks" and "doves" (and, to hear some tell it, "owls") who had different preferences about how much money the US should spend on defense and what that money should go towards. This debate was a significant part of the American political landscape, regularly featured in Presidential addresses and press conferences and almost always a topic for debates in Presidential election years. Candidates were asked their opinion, not only of the defense budget as a whole, but of individual weapons systems.

Today, despite broad public interest in the US federal budget, there is no discussion of defense spending at all. Zip. Zero. Zilch. From an economic perspective, this is astounding - depending on whose numbers you use defense spending takes up between 19% and 25% of the US federal budget, roughly equal to the entire expenditure on Social Security and larger than all other discretionary spending put together. Politicians will talk about Medicare & Medicaid reform (23%) and even Social Security reform (20%). But nobody talks about possibly cutting defense spending.

This is also crazy given the state of the world. According to the latest data from SIPRI, the United States in 2014 spent a little more than $600 billion on military expenditures. That is almost 50% more than the entire continent of Asia (including both China and India), more than 50% greater than all of Europe put together, and more than three times the combined expenditures of every single country in the Middle East (friend and foe alike). It dwarfs Russian military spending by a factor of more than 7, and Chinese spending by more than 2.5. The entire world in 2014 spent about $1.7 trillion on military expenditures; the US accounted for more than 30% of that total.

Even in the waning days of the Cold War, when we were outspending the Soviets, the margin wasn't this large. This isn't just being out front or staying ahead of the competition; this is utter and complete domination in the category of buying weapons.

And yet, to hear our politicians tell it, the US has never been less secure militarily than it is today. Most of this criticism is coming from blowhards running for President who would criticize the current administration if it said the sky is blue, and so shouldn't be taken seriously. Unfortunately, this is what the American people hear.

More importantly, there is no countervailing view. The Obama administration has shown no signs of suggesting that the US spend less, and there is no indication that anyone in Congress (Republican or Democrat) would be willing to vote that way anyway. There's a lot of vague, one-sided language about "keeping America safe" and "supporting our troops", but nothing like what you would call a discussion. It's pretty much just radio silence.

I framed this on FB as part of a broader political shift to the right, and I think that's partly true. But closer to the truth is that this silence represents the ultimate triumph of the military-industrial complex which President Eisenhower warned us about back in 1960. Those structures - the businesses and government agencies which together make up the nation's defense machine - have always done extremely well. But they used to have to at least compete for their share of public dollars in the public arena. Now, we just write them a (very large) check, quietly and without comment.

This goes far beyond liberal/conservative or Democrat/Republican (since all are now singing from the same page of the hymnal). This is what it looks like to be an empire, simultaneously fearful of the world and utterly unconcerned about how it responds to those fears. We the people have conceded somewhere between 1/5 and 1/4 of the entire US government to a system that, from an economic point of view, is largely pointless. A small fraction of that $600 billion could be spent in myriad ways that would have a far greater positive impact on the American people. But we say nothing.

I don't expect this to change - not soon, not later, not in my lifetime. The systems that hold this in place have been decades in the making. They are powerful economically, politically, and (as my colleague pointed out above) philosophically. They are rooted in deep assumptions that have been developed over generations.

Because I don't expect this to change, I don't have any solutions to suggest. Really, I just find it sad that we have so abandoned one of the most fundamental questions of public policy. Maybe Mearsheimer had the right title, even if his argument was wrong - in this way, at least, I really do miss the Cold War.

Why Politicians Should Read Kuhn

The dust has (sort of) settled from the bruising and ultimately fruitless budget battle that shut down large swaths of the federal government for two weeks. I would say that the finger-pointing has begun, but in tribal American politics today it never stops, as evidenced by various snarky memes and comments in my FB feed:

As a number of folks have pointed out, all that the agreement reached by Congress has really done is kick the can down the road. The New York Times and others have run stories about the emerging political battle, largely shaping up within the Republican Party, for the "next round" of budget deadline gamesmanship.

Much of the battle - both among Republicans and between Republicans and Democrats - is focused on the Affordable Care Act, a package of health care legislation originally passed in 2010 and being phased in piece by piece. As with any complex, sweeping piece of legislation there are plenty of things within the ACA that people like and plenty of things they don't - and nobody on either side understands more than 10% of the whole.

But what intrigues me about the battle over the ACA is not the fervor with which some members of the GOP are pursuing it, or the lengths they are willing to go to try to stop it. What's interesting is that the battle is entirely negative. Unlike in the mid-1990s, when Republicans responded to the Clinton administration's efforts to reform health care (the ill-fated "Hillarycare" proposals) with alternative ideas (many of which, ironically, are in the ACA), this time around those most fervently opposed to the ACA have been absolutely and totally silent about what they think should happen.

This silence guarantees that the nay-sayers will lose.

How do we know they will lose? Not by counting votes (although that worked well in this last round) or by taking public opinion polls (although those run the wrong direction for the Tea Party). We know the anti-ACA movement will fail because you can't replace something with nothing. Just ask Thomas Kuhn.

Kuhn, of course, famously penned The Structure of Scientific Revolutions back in 1962. Among Kuhn's key insights: progress in science is not a function of new evidence and new discoveries so much as it is as political process. Outdated scientific models only get replaced by new ones when the new ideas ("paradigms" was his term) persuade enough people that they are better than the old ones.

In fact, this is a pretty good model for politics in general, especially when it comes to broad ideas about policy. It's not enough in science or politics to simply say "I don't like that". Whatever is in place right now - be it policy or theory - serves a purpose. The existing answer may serve that purpose well or poorly, but it is (by definition) better than nothing, because the system evolved it. There may be better answers, but not having an answer is not an option.

The problem that the Tea Party wing of the GOP has (undoubtedly one of many) is that they are attempting to get rid of something that, well or poorly, serves a purpose. The purpose in this case is "trying to fix the health care system in the United States". Given that there is nearly universal agreement across the political spectrum that the previous status quo in health care was badly broken and needed fixing, threatening to take away the ACA and replace it with nothing is tantamount to saying, "The way things were was fine. We don't need reform - let's just got back to the way it was." That's a non-starter of an argument.

If the Tea Party, or anybody else for that matter, wants to have a prayer of actually getting rid of the ACA they need to build a new paradigm - a better answer to the question of how the health care system should work. Until they do, stomping their foot (politically) and saying "No!" plays well to a certain political demographic (about 20% of the country, based on polling) but is guaranteed to lose the other 80%.

So my modest suggestion for moving past the gridlock over the ACA: send a copy of Kuhn's book to every GOP member of Congress. Hope they read it. And see if they can come up with a winning paradigm. Because without that, like it or not, the ACA is the dominant paradigm in town.

Civics 101: Whose Debt Is It?

This is one of those blog posts that won't get read by the people who need to read it. But I'm going to write it anyway. Maybe I'll get lucky.

As the political debate around the "debt ceiling" heats up, party tribalists out in the trenches are ratcheting up their rhetoric. Hard-core Republicans are posting various messages about "Obama's debt", just as a few years ago hard-core Democrats were casting aspersions on "Bush's debt". Here's a typical example (taken from my FB feed today):

So let's go back and review our basic civics lessons, shall we?

As I've written before, we invest FAR too much important into the Office of the Presidency. Yes, the President is a powerful position with significant influence, and a bipartisan string of presidents (stretching back to Ronald Reagan at least) have been very effective in organizing and using that power.

That being said, it is Congress that produces and passes the US government budget. Only Congress can levy taxes. Only Congress can authorize the spending of money. Ask Ollie North, Robert McFarland, and their colleagues what happens when you spend government money against Congressional orders - it ain't pretty.

So the debt we have? It's been piling up for some time, under a series of Congresses most of which are largely the same as the one before. Re-election rates run over 80% in the Senate and 90% in the House, so with a few changes on the margin this has largely been the same group of 535 people over the last many years.

It's not "Obama's debt". It's not "Bush's debt". Yes, both Presidents (as well as Clinton and their predecessors) suggested things that have either lowered tax revenues or raised spending, or both. All of those things - the ones that have actually contributed to the debt - were voted on and approved by Congress. Many of them enjoyed widespread popular support. I can guarantee you that the people who "like" pictures like the one above almost certainly supported some of the measures that have contributed to the problem they are now complaining about.

This ongoing demonization of the President when he happens to be from the other party is childish and woefully misinformed. Those who engage in it, however cute they think they are being, only reveal (and reinforce) ignorance. Unfortunately, this dynamic has become a serious impediment to real action, or even real conversation about action.

Anybody who thinks they can "win" such an argument, on FB or in any other forum (Fox News, MSNBC, at a town hall meeting, in the local paper), is deluding themselves and feeding their own ego. If we want any kind of constructive discussion about solving problems - and the debt is a very real and significant problem, although we may differ about the nature of it - people plying these kinds of bumper-sticker zingers need to be summarily ignored. If you want to bolster your own ego and feel clever, knock yourself out. But don't expect either attention or respect from the rest of us.

As much as we love arguments as Americans, they're a lousy way to solve problems. If we really want to solve problems, we need to leave behind these "childish ways" and talk like grown-ups. And that starts by taking the President (of whatever party) off the pedestal of blame or credit we place him on, and dealing with the real world.

Called It

Resubmitted without further comment. Gloating? Sure, a little. It's nice to be right now and again, even if I wish reality were different.

http://tenaciousmuse.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-fiscal-cliff-kabuki-theater-its-our.html

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-20886182

More on the Privatization of "Public" Universities

For those interested in the future of public higher education - which, judging by the hit count on my previous blog post, could be a lot of you - here's a new wrinkle from today's Chronicle:

Colorado's Public Colleges Brace for Loss of State Support

There are a number of notable points here:

1) People in Colorado are apparently thinking seriously about what would happen if the state simply stopped subsidizing "public" universities. What would they look like? How would they behave? How long would they retain their "serve Colorado first" missions, or their current tuition cost structures? It's almost impossible to predict the outcomes here, although I'll venture out a little onto one limb: if this actually happens, and if the state's universities continue to function reasonably well, expect other states to look seriously at doing the same thing. If the sky doesn't fall, other legislators will discover a great new way to pretend to solve their budget problems.

2) Colorado is already most of the way there already. If you read through the article, you'll find that the state support payment to the flagship University of Colorado is 4.5% (!!) of that institution's budget. That's effectively a private institution by almost any measure; I think the horse-racing industry in Indiana is more heavily subsidized than that. So we're not talking about a massive practical shift, but a symbolic one - although it's a really important symbolic step.

3) The irony here is that the threat to what's left of public higher education spending in Colorado comes because of a lawsuit about inadequate state support for K-12 education. That lawsuit - similar to several others filed around the country, with varying results - turns on a basic promise in the state's constitution to provide a "thorough and uniform" education to all students. It's a promise that, according to at least one state judge, hasn't been met. It's not hard to imagine making that argument, with plenty of evidence to back it up.

4) The really big underlying point: what got us into this mess is the penchant in our politics for allowing politicians to spout promises with their mouths that we lack either the means or the will (mostly the will) to pay for. Nearly every state in the union has a clause in its constitution on education similar to Colorado's; for the most part, these clauses are warm, fuzzy works of fiction. Like the No Child Left Behind Act, we can't bring ourselves to admit that there's a disparity between our rhetorical value on education and our willingness to actually prioritize it over other things in making budgets. As a country, we're like the dad who talks about how important it is for his kids to get a good education, but spends all of his money on cases of beer and cigarettes, leaving a pittance for books.

The problem is clearly bigger than education - primary, higher, or otherwise - but it's most obvious in the fields of education and health care. These are two things that, if you ask people how important they are to their lives and the life of the country, rank consistently at the top.

Yet we have constructed, and continue to maintain, a political system that by its budgetary choices clearly thinks other things are more important. And for the last 30 years, rather than having a grown-up conversation about what we are and aren't willing to afford ("can't" afford is a cop-out; the US economy produces enough surplus wealth to afford all sorts of things, depending on what our priorities are) we have politicians who make grandiose promises about increasing government services and simultaneously cutting taxes.

We get single-issue talking heads who convince us that cutting taxes, or bringing down the deficit, or this or that health care solution, is the only thing we should think about - ignoring the existence of trade-offs. Every dollar spent on one thing is a dollar that can't be spent on something else. But where among our public "leaders" is there someone willing to admit this, and deal with it directly? Better to pander to everyone, I suppose - you're more electable that way.

And we have quietly created a new "third rail" in US politics - the defense budget - which nobody wants to talk about, even though the US leads the rest of the world combined in military expenditures, and nobody can define how much security is "enough". Nary a word has been said on the presidential campaign trail about a budget category that, by itself, is 20-25% of the Federal budget - but already, defense contractors are lining up on Capitol Hill to try to block the "automatic" cuts built into last year's last-minute "budget deal".

What does defense spending have to do with state spending on universities? That's the point - they're all connected. Our penchant for breaking these issues out into separate boxes, and treating each one as if it were isolated and by itself, has led us to a point where our mouths and our wallets no longer align. We talk about how important education is, but we don't fund it. We talk about tax breaks without talking about what we would not be able to fund if we cut taxes. And so the privatization of "public" universities continues.

More Craziness from Michigan

A while ago I wrote about a story involving Michigan legislators targeting universities for political reasons. Lost in the kerfuffle over Teresa Sullivan's firing a couple of weeks ago was another tidbit from Michigan about state legislators meddling in minor university matters they don't understand.

Michigan State U. Says Controversial Insurance Mandate Affected Few Students

The meat of the issue is here:

The state budget, recently passed by the Legislature, bars Michigan State from mandating health insurance if the institution is to qualify for a small increase in state appropriations

There are a couple of notable points here. First, the state budget specifically targeted MSU on this, even though universities across the state (and across the country) have similar policies. So much for Equal Protection Under the Law. Second, it turns out that the "problem" wasn't much of a problem at all:

In the past, about 85 percent of students arrived on the campus already insured, said Lou Anna K. Simon, president of Michigan State. And after the university helped most of the uninsured find coverage, only about 600 students were left without insurance

So the "crisis" that demanded state legislative action affected only 600 students out of over 47,000 - a little more than 1% of the student population. And MSU's sin? Signing those students up for health insurance and then charging them $1500 a year for it.

So why would a state legislature write specific language into its budget to punish a specific university for doing something that universities across the land do?

Michigan State was singled out for its insurance mandate because one of the 600 students who was billed for insurance was the son of a lawmaker, Rep. Jeff Farrington, a Republican. His son had insurance but had not informed the university. Representative Farrington was instrumental in placing the restriction on Michigan State's insurance requirement, according to several sources.

The son of a state lawmaker makes a paperwork error - his mistake - and has an insurance plan added to his bill. Rather than simply correct the mistake, the father decides to rewrite the state budget to tell the university what to do for all students.

If this kind of shoot-from-the-hip-while-blindfolded legislating is a frequent occurrence in the Michigan state legislature - and there's evidence that it is - the state's universities may have a rough time of it in the coming years. Perhaps the voters of Michigan can find a few more representatives willing to think, to learn, and to deliberate - things they teach in universities - before they try to impose their will on the world.

Two-Level Games in Real Life

Our students sometimes complain that the stuff we teach them about is too theoretical, too abstract, or too esoteric to be useful in "real life". We face a constant challenge in getting them to see the connection between the "airy-fairy theoretical stuff" and the headlines in the newspapers and on TV.

Every once in a while, however, a really great case comes along that almost perfectly illustrates the theory we're trying to get across. For those of us who have tried to get across the somewhat abstract notion of the "two-level game", Greece is right now providing that perfect example. If I had a European politics class (which I don't - I'm not nearly enough of a European expert to pull that off), I would love to game this out.

Greece, of course, just went through an election to try to fix the last election that failed to produce a viable government. This latest round seems to have solved that problem, only to have handed the likely new government a potentially insoluble problem: how to strike a bargain with its own population such that Greeks don't shut down the country with protests, fail to pay their taxes, or any number of other things they could do, while simultaneously reaching a deal with the rest of Europe (primarily, Germany and the EU central bureaucracy) on some kind of budget-saving austerity program.

As I've pointed out before, there may not be a solution to this problem. Germany and the international bankers may demand more pain than the Greek population (or a sufficient minority of it) is willing to bear. I heard one analysis this afternoon suggest that Greece's exit from the Euro is all but assured, simply because the chances of Greece voting (at the ballot box or in their daily behavior) over and over again to support austerity is extremely unlikely.

The new Greek government will find out soon enough how very real this "theory" is. These next few months should prove an excellent case study - although I doubt that the Greeks, or many Europeans for that matter, will appreciate the lesson.

The Petty Temptations of Power

I've written before about the tendencies of state legislators to meddle in the affairs of universities they don't understand. Now comes this story from Michigan about the state legislature giving a little bit more money to universities (a 3% increase over last year's allocation, which was itself down some 14% from previous years) and marrying that tiny carrot with a series of sticks designed to prod those eggheads into doing what politicians want them to do:

Michigan Lawmakers Attach Strings to State Higher-Education Spending

There are all sorts of goodies in here, in typical legislative sausage-making fashion: everybody with a voice (or, more likely, lobbying dollars) gets to add their favorite ingredient. But the real poison pill is near the end:

The most far-reaching restriction bars the institutions from having a relationship with nonprofit "worker centers" that protest against a Michigan business, a provision supported by the Michigan Restaurant Association, after the Restaurant Opportunities Center of Michigan picketed and sued a restaurant it accused of mistreating workers. At the time, a graduate student in social work at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor was completing a field assignment with the group.

A single graduate student does a field assignment with an organization that somebody doesn't like - an organization exercising its First Amendment and legal rights - and legislators decide to slap a ban on all public universities in the state? Keep in mind that field assignments are for studying things. Will the distinguished gentlemen of the Michigan state legislature now be telling social work students - or anthropologists, or physicists - what they should or shouldn't be studying in their fields? Apparently so.

This is petty politics at its worst. Yes, it's a violation of academic freedom - not that politicians have the slightest idea what that is, or any respect for the concept. But more importantly, this is third world tribalism. It's the same kind of politics that leads the African dictator to give government jobs to his family and friends, or withhold contracts from people who are of a different tribe or clan. It's the political logic that says, "you are different from me - I will take everything I can away from you - I will keep myself and all I can reach 'pure' from your difference."

If the legislature and, ultimately, the voters of Michigan drive their university system down this road they will get what they deserve. I will shed a tear or two for the University of Michigan and Michigan State (not too many - I am an OSU alum, after all), because those have been great research universities. But their ability to remain so, especially in any field that has any political controversy attached to it, will be radically attenuated.

This suggests, at its core, a failure of pluralistic democratic politics. If every arena of difference becomes a life-or-death struggle, where the winner takes everything and the loser gets nothing, we will have failed as a society. Hopefully some in Michigan can get in touch with the better angels of their nature before they travel too far down the road of tribal division.

Keeping Government Waste in Perspective

A brief response to an article in today's Chronicle on Congressional earmarks for university research:

I'm as much against government waste as the next person - heck, I probably regard a broader range of government spending as "wasteful" than many. But $44 million is, in all senses, chump change. Obviously, from the perspective of the US government budget (north of $2 trillion and rising), this is a rounding error. But even for universities, it's almost nothing. My own university, a mid-sized state institution that does a reasonable amount of research, pulls in nearly $40 million per year in competitive research grants all by itself. There are dozens of institutions like mine across the country. Large, major research universities - and there are a goodly number of those - pull in ten times as much or more.

I've always been uncomfortable with legislative earmarks - they are basically spending public money at the behest of a particular legislator on some pet project. A previous college I worked for got a chunk of money this way from a state legislator who was retiring. I can't say that the state in question got any public good for its expenditure of a half a million or so taxpayer dollars - especially given that the institution in question was a private school, and had no clear plan for what to do with the money. That always struck me as shady - a means by which an outgoing legislator could thank his friends.

So I'm no fan of earmarks, especially for colleges and universities. But if we've gotten down to only $44 million in research earmarks, we should be celebrating. After all, how often is it that government measurably improves its performance?