Fingerhut's Soft Sell

Chancellor Eric Fingerhut of the The University System of Ohio delivered his Strategic Plan as scheduled today. The result is a painfully cautious document with many laudable goals (increased enrollment, more STEM degrees, improved quality) but few of the hard choices necessary to achieve them. You can find the Plan, along with a separate downloadable Executive Summary at the U System website.

As one example, the Plan spends considerable time examining the situation here in Northeast Ohio. We get an accurate, unblinking view of the landscape:

Yet questions about the missions of the distinct
universities do arise in Northeast Ohio. The reason
is plain – the state has four public universities in
four contiguous counties (Cleveland State in
Cuyahoga, Kent State in Portage, the University of
Akron in Summit and Youngstown State in
Mahoning), plus one of the last free standing
medical schools in the country, the Northeastern
Ohio Universities College of Medicine
(NEOUCOM), in a region that has seen its overall
share of the state’s population decline over the last
several decades. The close proximity and the lack of
population growth have made the schools
intensely competitive, a competition which has not
served the best interest of the state or the region.

Acknowledgment that no on can be happy with the current situation:

Had we started with a blank slate, we would not
have drawn so many competing institutions in
such close proximity to each other.

And a firm, decisive plan to . . . keep talking about it:

To that end, the Chancellor will
convene a public session of the trustees of the
four public universities and NEOUCOM at least
annually to review the progress toward
improving quality, increasing mission differentiation,
increasing collaboration, increasing the
contribution of the institutions to the regional and
state economy, and decreasing competition
among the institutions.

The report as a whole pretty much follows that pattern. We now have goals and a promise that Chancellor Fingerhut will follow up on those goals, but as yet only faint suggestions that the Chancellor or the Governor are contemplating bringing any big wood into the game.

Given Ohio's historically entropic universe of public institutions, simply assembling a document suggesting a single vision is itself an impressive accomplishment. This report would not have been possible were it not for the Governor's success in organizing a single system under an executive appointed Chancellor. Still, assembling the Strategic Plan is a simple matter compared to actually implementing it. One measure of how difficult this will be is the calculatedly inoffensive tone of the document. It's a soft sell. Now we see who buys in.

Expelled Update: More PZ Myers, More Sub Rosa Spin and a Promise

First off, thanks to the commenter who linked to my first Expelled post, and welcome FDLers. It's my intention to continue monitoring the story on the science blogs and offer a conduit between that blogosphere and the Ohio left.

The big development this week was a PZ Myers' questionable participation in a conference call presser the Expelled producers put on to let journos talk to Ben Stein. Because of course, the person journalists should speak to about evolutionary science is a finance expert with a droll speaking

The good part of the story is 1) we know the main thrust of both the movie and the PR campaign -- that Darwin is responsible for the Holocaust, and 2) that Myers offered the journos an opposing view and a source when odds are they would have simply stenographed the story.

The bad part of the story is Myers learning how to unmute his phone and interrupting the call.
The ethics of all this have been a hot topic on the Panda's Thumb thread. The ethical arguments are essentially in equipoise. Certainly what Dr. Myers did was not nice, but it doesn't somehow make up for the problem on the other side that they are pretty much making up the case that Darwin is responsible for Nazi horrors.

(There's a broader question about whether one can be an activist atheist without simultaneous being an obnoxious dick. It seems too often one goes with the other, though Village Green has partially restored my faith in the faithless. Still, it's not always easy finding oneself on the same side with the Myers/Dawkins/Hitchens axis.)

Back to Expelled and the Nazi argument. Much of the scientific argument against the film's premises is beyond the knowledge of this blogger. The arguments about the interaction of science and policy, that's social science, an area where your blogger finds himself on somewhat firmer ground. As noted in my previous post, the film draws battle lines. While it postures itself as an argument for intellectual freedom, it is in fact a broadside by religion against science. Consider for example this quote from auteur Stein, courtesy of Stranger Fruit:

I believe God created the heavens and the earth, and it doesn’t scare me when scientists say that can’t be proved. I couldn’t give a [profanity] whether a person calls himself a scientist. Science has covered itself with glory, morally, in my time. Scientists were the people in Germany telling Hitler that it was a good idea to kill all the Jews. Scientists told Stalin it was a good idea to wipe out the middle-class peasants. Scientists told Mao Tse-Tung it was fine to kill 50,000,000 people in order to further the revolution.

At times, the IDers behind and in front of this film will argue that they aren't against science, they are only for equal time. Imagine if they really believe the above. They certainly wouldn't be for equal time. They would be working feverishly to purge that evil science from the American landscape. And it appears they are.

In the meantime, I'll be working on the historical arguments against Stein & Co.'s thesis. Remember that the movie erupts into the mainstream on April 18. You can find out where on their theater locator page.

Lecturing Team Hillary.

OK, I'm NOT talking to Hillary herself. Because we all know that it's wrong to blame Hillary for the trash her political allies talk, even as Obama is called out about anyone who's had a cup of coffee in a campaign office. Because that's just fair.

So I'm not talking to Hillary, but some apparently misbegotten campaign allies have been trotting out the argument that Barack Obama dishonestly stated he served as a Constitutional Law professor at University of Chigago Law School when he in fact was a lecturer.

No really.

Chicago's press release debunking the silliness should put this to bed. But Juan Williams, who is determined to squander all traces of credibility to be NPR's resident Hill Honk, insisted that the school was "just splitting hairs."

The context of Obama invoking his teaching experience is generally along the lines of "I've been a Con Law professor, so unlike the President I understand and respect the Constitution." In my experience, the primary difference between a lecturer and a professor is that a lecturer is paid relatively little. If someone says "I can afford that 5 Series because I lecture about Con Law," that's probably overclaiming. If someone says he has credibility about things constitutional because he's a law school lecturer, it's legit.

Every time I think the Hillary campaign is settling into a groove of merely harsh campaigning, they lower their own bar. This latest spasm of fratricidal zeal mimics that right wing noise machine the attacks on Al Gore. The methodology in 2000 was to take some statement Gore made about his accomplishments, deliberately misread it, and generate a narrative that he was a serial exaggerator. Seeing that particular flavor of slime thrown on a Dem by a Dem really hurts.

Scrying the net for news of all this, I ran across a post on the U of Chi Law Faculty Blog from October 2006 written by the estimable Cass Sunstein. Bear in mind that this is long before anyone questioned whether Obama was a real member of the faculty.

There is a lot to say about Senator Obama and his time at the University of Chicago Law School. (He remains affiliated with the law school, and he has an office on the fifth floor -- though the list of faculty members notes, in a way that seems at once proud and forlorn, that he is now "out of residence.") He was, and is, widely admired by students and faculty alike -- and entirely across political divisions. How well I remember past elections in which faculty members, who disagreed on a great deal, agreed that Obama would be a magnificent addition to the United States Congress. I think their agreement resulted from Obama's character (he's a genuinely wonderful guy), his evident ability and sheer excellence (for example, he's a terrific teacher, and we tried to convince him to join the faculty full-time on several occasions), and his independence and unpredictability (he toes no party line; he knows how markets work, and how government can make things worse).

For those of you not in the know, a write up like this from Sunstein is tantamount to Michael Jordan saying you got game.

The Little Administration Who Cried Wolf at the Door

Eric Lichtau, one of the NY Times reporters who broke the story about the administration's warrantless wiretapping program, has written a book about the experience which is excerpted in Slate. This graph stands out:

For more than an hour, we told Bush's aides what we knew about the wiretapping program, and they in turn told us why it would do grave harm to national security to let anyone else in on the secret. Consider the financial damage to the phone carriers that took part in the program, one official implored. If the terrorists knew about the wiretapping program, it would be rendered useless and would have to be shut down immediately, another official urged: "It's all the marbles." The risk to national security was incalculable, the White House VIPs said, their voices stern, their faces drawn. "The enemy," one official warned, "is inside the gates." The clichés did their work; the message was unmistakable: If the New York Times went ahead and published this story, we would share the blame for the next terrorist attack.

Sound familiar? This is exactly the parade of horribles Bush marches down Pennsylvania Avenue when Congress considers renewing the program. As Lichtau notes later in the article, none of these things proved true about the Times' story. There is every reason to believe that the administration alarmist rhetoric about the renewal debate generally and the supposed national security imperative of telecom immunity in particular is similarly specious.

Want to know why liberals suffer from Bush Derangement Syndrome. Exhibit A. The administration plays up fears, politicizes crucial national security issues and lies like most people breathe.

Learn More about Norka

I traced an odd hit through SiteMeter and found a post about Norka Orange Soda in response to a Dooce post from one Lady D in Pittsburgh. Anyone who subtitles her blog with an obscure Ren and Stimpy reference is going to get some love here on the Pages. Though I had to let her know that I am by no means a hipster.

As longtime readers are aware, the blog was originally Pho's Norka Pages in reference to the longstanding Akron tradition of branding by spelling the name backwards. After attending my first blogger meetup at which George and company asked "What the hell is a Norka" the title changed but the url remains.

I believe there is more Norka memorabilia at the Lock 3 museum, which also houses the Toy Marble Museum and the Lighter Than Air Society Museum. It might be worth a field trip.

Intro to Expelled

Folks, there's a new weapon in the Creationism/Intelligent Design arsenal, Ben Stein's new movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. The movie purports to champion academic freedom on behalf of those who have been, in the words of the press kit, "persecuted" for believing in Intelligent Design. And the ground work is being laid now, out of public view.

The company marketing the film also marketed Mel Gibson's How the Jews Killed Jesus The Passion of the Christ, and are going about it the same way. They are offering free screenings throughout the country to conservative Christian audiences to generate buzz and keeping both critics and mainstream reviewers out. And anyone not a Real True Christian gets in, they launch a defamatory PR campaign to discredit the critic.

The most amusing and celebrated of these incidents occurred in Minnesota where producers expelled (yes, they really did) biologist, blogger and activist PZ Myers, but overlooked another member of his party, Richard Dawkins.

All of that helped make Gibson's pestilent passion play critic proof, though it's a harder sell when the premise of the movie is intellectual freedom. If, as Stein insists, the argument is about allowing access to all points of view, he and the producers can't justify keeping the points of view against the film out of the theater.

So far the best resource on all things Expelled is "Expelled Exposed" a website maintained by the radical, leftwing National Center for Science Education.

The story thus far raises some concerns in addition to those raised above. Among them:

• There is considerable evidence that the producers misrepresented themselves to scientists who agreed to be interviewed on camera.
• The movie as a whole recasts the intelligent design debate as one between people of faith versus atheists. This is a change of tactic for ID proponents, and one that attempts to divide people of science from people of faith, despite the fact that many people embrace both.
• Stein heavily plays the Nazi card -- claiming that Darwinism is responsible for the Holocaust.
  
• Meanwhile, on the science side, some are questioning the utility of PZ Myers and Richard Dawkins as spokepeople against the film, given that both are atheist activists, playing into the "religion vs. atheist scientists" frame the film producers want.
• Oh, and let's not forget that the whole ID project is a bunch of crypto-fundie hooey.
  

Each of these is worth at least a post in its own right, but who knows what I will be able to get to.

In April the movie opens to mainstream premiere. People who care about maintaining the integrity of science education would do well to keep abreast of what happens between now and then. Right now the debate is happening, but only one side is invited.

Finding Racism: It's In Vogue

Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.
-Sen. Barack Obama

Well the Bogus Claims Police (who, as Obama intimates, are just as strident and annoying as the Racism Police) will have a field day with this one.

LeBron James is on the cover of this months Vogue Magazine, along with model Gisele Bundchen, for what is apparently an annual "shape" issue. Some members of the Racism Police apparently don't like the shot Vogue used for the cover because LeBron looks "aggressive" and "savage."

People paying attention to Obama's speech last week were reminded that, above all else, race is complicated. The difference between benign and racist depends on history and context and above all else, intent.

In this case the "savage" LeBron is, well, LeBron. Anyone who has been a Witness recognizes the look immediately. It's that LeBron intensity we love. As he said, he was "just showing some emotion," and it's that emotion (along with crazy skills and preternatural court sense) that makes him great. I recall seeing a pre-betrayal Carlos Boozer slam a put-back, and LeBron rise from the bench, with that exact look on his face, to chest-bump his teammate. LeBron doesn't play every game like it's the NBA final. He plays every game like it's the high school regional final against Walsh Jesuit, which is far more important.

Criticizing LeBron for looking "savage" carries the troubling implication that a black man can't look intense -- or for that matter can't be himself -- just because he's black. That's not the post-racial goal we should be striving for. What we hope is that someone can see LeBron be LeBron and understand that it's LeBron, not Every Black Man.

While the racial message isn't troubling, I'm less sanguine about the gender message. The issue is supposed to be about "great bodies," but the man's body is great because he can do great things with it. The woman's body is great because it makes a pretty ornament.

During some catchup blog reading between marathon grading sessions, I recently ran across this from comic, blogger, erstwhile Clevelander and Bill Callahan daughter Carrie Callahan,.

I have a joke where I ask the audience to call out a female celebrity who is known for having a great body. I've told it three times, once someone said Jessica Alba, the other two times people said Angelina Jolie. The joke is designed for anyone you call out, but I have been tempted to respond to that suggestion specifically. Angelina Jolie has a good body? By what measure? Her body has to get surgery every 7 years to replace her implants. If you met Angelina Jolie in a dark alley, the temptation to knock her over and take her purse would be insurmountable, because her body doesn't give the slightest physical suggestion that it could defend itself. She's too tall to run fast, she's too thin to withstand a blow, and if she fell off a bike her hip would break. I don't know what kind of sex she and Brad have, but I expect it's exceptionally gentle.

Look, I have known very very skinny women who were beautiful. Skinny is not ugly. But skinny and weak-looking and surgically enhanced is weird. If she's the ideal, I'm done with you people. My body is way better looking than Angelina's.

Gisele isn't as emaciated as Jolie, but I bet Carrie could take her too.