Three springs
1910 postcard
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
As the leaves push out, I think of three memorable springs, for me, anyway. The first is the spring of 1966, when we seniors were rapidly heading for graduation at our boarding school at the edge of the lovely Litchfield Hills, in Connecticut. While we faced the pressure of final papers and exams, and saw the Vietnam War looming, all in all, it was a delightful time. One reason is that a nice youngish married couple – the Woods -- with a couple of kids lived in a house down the road. They were friends of one of my classmate’s parents.
A bunch of us, ranging from four people to seven, would often bicycle to their rambling white 19th Century house, in nearby Middlebury, and hang out. On a couple of occasions, they had us to dinner, where illegally (?) they served us wine, and everyone would smoke in their backyard, whose spring lushness and freshness I still recall. Thus, we enjoyed the pleasures of adulthood without its responsibilities. It got better and better as the leaves thickened and we luxuriated in the first hot days. It may have just been the fact that it was a time of transition for us, and so everything seemed intensified, but I can’t remember a more beautiful spring.
Finally, a few days before graduation, which I was slightly dreading because as the head of the student government I had to speak before the commencement multitudes, the Woods gave us a farewell dinner, which I found moving. That was the last time that our group all met together. And, not surprisingly, several of us have been dead for years.
Then there was the spring of 1970, during my senior year at college, when everything was disrupted by partial college closings associated with protests against the war in Vietnam and Cambodia. The proximate cause was the fatal shooting of four anti-war student demonstrators at Kent State University, on May 4. Many colleges, including mine, Dartmouth College, decided (wrongly, in my view) to let everyone take all courses pass/fail and took other measures that turned the final weeks of that academic year into an excuse to have a hypocritically good time. As President Nixon reduced our military in Vietnam, and then the draft was ended, the protests faded, whatever was happening to the Vietnamese.
In any event, the Upper Connecticut Valley was much warmer than average that year and gorgeous. That late spring almost felt like summer camp. Frisbees flying everywhere. I left with only vague ideas of what I’d be doing next.
And now, half a century later, the Class of 2020 has had its in-person commencement postponed to June 2021, as the black swan of COVID-19 flies over. I wonder how many graduates will make it to that one.
The third spring I vividly remember came in 1972, as I was preparing to get my master’s degree at Columbia University, which was then still recuperating from the student unrest of the previous few years. Although graffiti-splattered-New York City was then in decline because of old industries leaving and/or shrinking, corporate headquarters fleeing to Connecticut, crime, labor strikes and municipal mismanagement, “The City’’ to many young people was still the most exciting and alluring place to be in America, and not all that expensive compared to most of the stretch from the ‘80s to the last couple of months, when COVID-19 has driven down housing and other prices.
I remember how easy it seemed to get a job, which I did before commencement, and the bright prospect of adventures to come. I felt, briefly, fancy free, as I strolled through Riverside Park up to Columbia, at 115th Street, from the big apartment at West 88th Street I shared with, numbers depending on the month, three to five people directly or indirectly connected with the movie and TV business. The rather ugly, city-tough, plane trees were unfurling and I smelled the inexplicable scent of wet bread. The city seemed full of promise, and it will again.
The ambiguities of the Amazon mercantile jungle
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
Boston did well in failing to snare an Amazon “Second (or is it third?) Headquarters’’. The hysterically hyped project would have overwhelmed city services; stolen a lot of tech talent from the startups that are the foundation of the region’s economic future; worsened the city’s traffic woes, and driven up already sky-high housing costs.
And it’s unlikely that Boston and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts would have come up with a bribe to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos that would have been big enough to offset Boston’s drawbacks, especially that it’s probably too small for the likes of Amazon. Despite the company’s show of looking all over America as a place for a “Second Headquarters (which of course turned out to be two “Second Headquarters’’ – New York and metro Washington, D.C.), it probably always planned to set up in cities too big to be overwhelmed by it, and with many, many techies already in residence. The apparently bogus national auction seems to have raised the bribe money that New York and Virginia, whose Washington inner suburb of Arlington, Va., won the prize, were willing to pay. Amazon says it will put 25,000 employees in each place.
Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker and Boston Mayor Marty Walsh were unwilling to get into a bidding war with the rest of the country for the projects.
New York State is giving the company a package that includes $1.525 billion in incentives, including $1.2 billion over the next 10 years as part of the state’ s Excelsior tax credit. The state also will help Amazon with infrastructure upgrades, job-training programs and even assistance “securing access to a helipad”. There’s still some confusion about the total package, but by one measurement, it works out to $48,000 per job.
Virginia, for its part, is giving the company an incentive package worth $573 million, including $550 million in cash grants – and a helipad (for Bezos’s convenience to commute to his Washington Post?) in Arlington, right across the river from Washington, D.C. The Old Dominion also pledged $250 million to help Virginia Tech build a campus in Alexandria, near the Amazon site, with a focus on computer science and software engineering degrees. Folks are still trying to figure out the precise total cost.
By one estimate in this rather confusing bag of bribes, the basic package works out to $22,000 per job. We’ll see.
(As sop to the Heartland, Amazon will also put a 5,000-person facility in Nashville, at an estimated $13,000 a job.)
So the individuals and companies already in New York and Virginia will subsidize through their taxes an enterprise that had $178 billion in 2017 revenues and is run by the world’s richest person. And of course it’s impossible to know how well Amazon will be doing in a decade. Might it become the online version of Sears? Nothing lasts.
Think of how much stronger their economic development would be if New York and Virginia had put the bribe money into improving transportation infrastructure, education and other stuff that would make their markets better for everyone!
And will Amazon keep its promise to create all those jobs? Don’t bet on it! Big companies are notorious for breaking employment promises. An irritating recent example:
Wisconsin, with an outrageous $4 billion subsidy, lured Foxconn, the Taiwanese manufacturer infamous for not keeping employment promises, to the state with the promise of 13,000 jobs. But the company now plans to employ only a quarter of that; much of the work will be done by robots. You can bet that Foxconn would like all of the work done by robots! One estimate is that the project works out to $500,000 per Foxconn job.
No wonder that Scott Walker, the Republican governor who pushed for this deal, just lost his re-election bid. But then, Democratic and Republican governors and mayors do these deals with enthusiasm.
The politicians know that such extravaganzas sound great, for a while, and that few citizens look into the fine print or scrutinize these sweetheart deals for their long-term macro-economic effects. And by the time that the full bill comes due, the politicians who initially got credit have moved on to something else.
Anyway, such places as tech-rich Greater Boston (and less tech-rich Providence) would do better to make their communities better places in which to start and nurture companies than to break their banks by trying to get big ones from far away whose loyalty is apt to be remarkably evanescent. That isn’t to say that Boston (which already has a couple of thousand Amazonians) and Providence (with its graphic and other designers) won’t benefit from spillover Amazon jobs from the New York operation. They probably will.
A March 2018 report by the Brookings Institution says that state and local governments give up to $90 billion worth of subsidies to individual businesses each year. How much of this is worth it? To read the report, please hit this link.
Columbus, Ohio, offers an example of how an economic-development policy delighting in diversification, encouraging local startups, and improving local amenities and infrastructure, as opposed to focusing on luring a big, fat famous company, as well as strong civic engagement by a city’s established business community, can pay off.
From 2000 to 2009, Columbus added 12,500 jobs. From 2010 to the present, it has added 158,000!
To read more, please hit this link.
Don Pesci: The Antifa fascists
Statue of Christopher Columbus at Columbus Circle on Manhattan.
On Aug. 21, The Baltimore Sun reported that a monument to Christopher Columbus had been vandalized by vandals, a perfect word to describe the members of Antifa, a group that claims to be anti-fascist but does not scruple to employ the methods of fascists, including the beating of non-violent protesters by masked, black-clad brownshirts.
The destruction of the oldest monument to Columbus in the nation occurred one week after city fathers had decided to remove “four controversial monuments: a statue of Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, the Confederate Women’s monument, the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument and a statue of Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, who authored the 1857 Dred Scott decision that upheld slavery.”
Columbus, we may state with certainty, was not a fascist. We know this because fascism dates from Mussolini’s reign in Italy, well after Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492. Neither did Columbus approve of slavery; nor did his patrons, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. According to a story printed in The Hill, a Washington, D.C., publication, “it was Spain that forbade slavery of most Native Americans and made them Spanish citizens.” The Hill also noted “that Columbus seems to have faced arrest by his fellow explorers for punishing — even executing — those who had abused Native Americans.” The zealot “most often cited in smearing Spanish exploration and with it Columbus,” The Hill noted, was “Bartolome De Las Casas … the one who proposed African slavery for the New World.”
One can’t expect the Antifa brownshirts to take notice of such exculpatory data before they deface statues or infiltrate peaceful protests for the purpose of creating havoc and suppressing free speech. Fascists, nihilists and anarchists are not likely to be dissuaded by sweet reason, which appears to infuriate them. The defacement of the Columbus monument in Baltimore was recorded on YouTube by the defacer for posterity and the delectation of fellow brownshirts.
The past, we all know, is the gateway to the future. George Orwell knew this, as do most historians. William Faulkner used to say that the past is not over; it’s not even past. Stalin, Hitler and Mao claimed the future by refashioning the past according to their ideological predispositions. Orwell’s Big Brother, patterned after Stalin, was a successful revisionist. “He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past,” wrote Orwell in “1984.”
Buffeted by three major forces, the Soviet Union – which, like Hitler’s Third Reich was supposed to last a thousand years – at long last began to crumble. When Pope John Paul II set his foot on Polish soil in 1979, Poland’s past, phoenix-like, rose from the ashes. Once again, the country began to live its history, which had long been suppressed by Communists. Shackles on souls were loosened, minds were liberated. The publication of The Gulag Archipelago, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, resurrected the real de-romanticized past of Soviet Communism, as had Khrushchev’s earlier denunciation of Stalin in a special address to Communist Party comrades three years after Stalin’s death. History’s boot was crushing the hobnailed boot of Communism.
The past is too important to leave to the new revisionists – Antifa, nihilists, masked anarchists, and the anti-Columbus crowd.
Before we can understand Antifas, America’s new fascist party, we must make an attempt to understand what fascism is. Fascism, like anarchism and nihilism, is ungoverned dynamism. It is pure spirit, void of reason, murderously directed to an end – the destruction of life, property and culture.
As early as 1914, Albert Camus tells us in his book The Rebel, Mussolini “proclaimed the ‘holy religion of anarchy,’ and declared himself the enemy of every form of Christianity.” Camus adds, “Men of action, when they are without faith, never believe in anything but action… To those who despair of everything” – here Camus had in mind post World War I Germany – “not reason, but only passion, can provide a faith.” Dynamism for dynamism’s sake is an act of contempt of both past and future. Camus again: “Fascism is an act of contempt, in fact. Inversely, every form of contempt, if it intervenes in politics, prepares the way for, or establishes, Fascism.”
Camus's book, not much read in political philosophy classes these days, earned him the contempt of Sartre and other proto-Communist philosophers in France. The Rebel should be on the bedside table of anyone in our increasingly secular culture who wants to know something about the forces arrayed against the Western experiment in liberty and law.
There are people among us – nonanarchists – who do not believe that this experiment should continue, and these are dog-whistling the contemptuous enemies of the Western world, like the fellow who took a sledge hammer to the Baltimore Columbus statue. It is easy to assault a statue, more difficult to strike through the mask at the reality that lies behind it. That would require intelligence and a due regard for reason and order. But as soon as one allows oneself to be guided by reason and order, he leaves anarchism, undifferentiated dynamism, far behind him. The Antifa fascist who struck the Columbus statue in Baltimore was expressing through his thoughtless contempt for the Columbus he does not know his boiling contempt for America. And that is really the point of all these ungrateful, disordered anarchists: contempt is the opposite of gratitude.
I’d like to place one more point on the shelf before ending these comments. Columbus and those who still admire him, while conscious of the defects he shared with his own age, can never be friendly towards Klu-Kluxery. The fury of the KKK was of course directed pitilessly at African Americans. But the KKK was also contemptuous of Jews and Catholics, and this boundless contempt was expressed in violent acts against the faith of non-Protestants who were not Anglo Saxon. The African American antifa who destroyed the Baltimore statue of Columbus was, by his act of contempt, marching hand in hand with the Klu-Klux-Klan.
So, what are we to make of someone like Mayor of New York Bill de Blasio, whose knees shake whenever antifas whispers “fascist” or “KKK”? The mayor of New York City, still teeming with Italians, is considering removing a statue of Columbus in Columbus Circle. DeBlasio is Italian; he must have learned something about Columbus sitting on his father’s lap as a young boy. DeBlasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray, is African American. Surely both know that Italians, many of them Catholic, in addition to Jews and African Americans were victims of the KKK and other deeply prejudiced Americans.
The monument in Columbus Circle was dedicated in 1941, 50 years after the largest mass lynching in U.S. history. The lynching of 11 Italian Americans occurred after a trial in which 19 Sicilians had been indicted in the murder of New Orleans Police Chief David Hennessy. The jury regarded the evidence presented at trial as highly suspect and insufficient. Six defendants were acquitted and a mistrial was declared for the remaining three because the jury failed to agree on their verdicts. A mob incited by a lawyer, William Parkerson, and led by John Wickliffe, editor of the New Delta newspaper, advanced on the prison shouting “We want the Daqoes!” and murdered the exonerated Sicilians.
Most newspapers of the day approved of the vigilantly injustice. The New York Times, covering itself in blood and shame, editorialized, “These sneaking and cowardly Sicilians, the descendants of bandits and assassins, who have transported to this country the lawless passions, the cut-throat practices, and the oath-bound societies of their native country, are to us a pest without mitigation. Our own rattlesnakes are as good citizens as they...Lynch law was the only course open to the people of New Orleans.”
The modern descendants of the lynch mob – including the KKK and Antifa – have now taken to lynching statues of Columbus, erected in part as a rebuke to lawless anarchy and the terrible silence surrounding prejudice that makes lynching possible.
I will close by pointing out that these are issues long resolved. We could let the dead bury their dead, and certainly there is no need to fight the Civil War all over again. However, the attack on Columbus is now, and always has been, an assault, waged these days mostly by nihilists and anarchists, on the very foundation of the American experiment in liberty. In law and life, silence signifies assent.
“Silence in the face of evil,” said Dietrich Bonhoeffer, hanged by Nazis in 1945, “is itself evil; God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.” Camus, an atheist, no doubt would agree. Silence in the face of anarchy and cultural dissolution is itself an approval of anarchy and cultural disintegration. In an anarchic universe, we have nothing to lose -- but everything.
Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn.-based essayist.
Joseph W. Ambash: Unionization of grad students will hurt education
The recent decision by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in the Columbia University case granting students who serve as teaching or research assistants at private universities the right to unionize dealt a major blow to private higher education as we know it. The NLRB’s cavalier disregard for the complexities of a university education is breathtaking.
In a long-anticipated decision, the NLRB ruled that any student who performs services for an institution, under its control, for compensation, is a “common-law” employee entitled to unionize under the National Labor Relations Act. The NLRB’s sweeping decision lumped together undergraduates (who may serve, for example, as graders and discussion leaders), master’s degree candidates and Ph.D. candidates in its definition of employees. The decision ignored that many students must serve as teaching assistants or research assistants as part of their master’s or Ph.D. degree requirement, even if they would otherwise not want to do that “job.”
The decision’s lone dissenter, Republican Philip A. Miscamarra, anticipated that the strikes and other economic weapons that often accompany collective bargaining “will wreak havoc” and may have “devastating consequences” for higher education, particularly for the students who are trying to earn their degrees.
His dire prediction is not a case of crying wolf. Experience tells us that the adversarial process that is baked into the structure of collective bargaining will profoundly change the culture of campuses whose students are organized by unions. Unlike public-sector collective bargaining that is governed by individual state laws that typically prohibit strikes, the National Labor Relations Act anticipates that the process of collective bargaining will be fraught with adversarial positions that, if not settled amicably, often lead to strikes, lockouts and the replacement of workers.
The U.S. Supreme Court long ago stated that that “the principles developed for use in the industrial setting cannot be ‘imposed blindly on the academic world,’” because the interests at stake in the academy are different than those in an industrial workplace. Despite this observation, the NLRB ruled that the industrial model of the National Labor Relations Act is appropriate for private-sector campuses.
The consequences of this decision cannot be underestimated:
For the first time in our nation’s history, students at unionized campuses who are given the opportunity to teach or do research as part of their degree program or university experience will have to join a union or pay an agency fee in order to obtain their degree. This will transform an educational experience into a mere job.
Also for the first time in our history, research assistants—virtually all of whom in the hard sciences are required to engage in research and produce original results in order to write their dissertation—will be considered employees whose wages, hours and other “terms and conditions of employment” will be subject to bargaining on unionized campuses. This will transform the very purpose of their education into a job about which an outside union can insist on bargaining.
Disputes about what constitutes “wages” will require years of litigation, since the NLRB’s decision identified the stipends typically awarded to graduate students at elite institutions as wages where the requirement of teaching or research is embedded into the curricular requirement for such students.
The identification of proper subjects of bargaining will produce lengthy and complex litigation that will typically last far beyond the tenure of the students affected by those disputes. Will issues such as how many papers a teaching assistant has to grade; who will be awarded assistantships; and how many students should be in a section be considered “terms and conditions of employment” that must be bargained with a union?
The distinction between mandatory subjects of bargaining and the strictly academic issues about which universities would not have to bargain will test the limits of universities’ academic freedom. The often-Byzantine rules imposed by the NLRB on employers will now be engrafted onto unionized campuses. The NLRB has aggressively invalidated typical work rules, such as civility rules, because they allegedly chill employee rights to engage in “concerted” activity.
NLRB decisions also routinely find that employees may lawfully insult and demean their supervisors and managers as part of concerted activity. As a result, many standard campus rules may become unlawful if applied to unionized student assistants. Identification of who is an “employee” will inevitably morph into claims by unions that members of sports teams on scholarships, members of orchestras who receive stipends to go on tours, and similar student groups should be entitled to bargain about their stipends and terms and conditions of employment because they are “common-law employees.” Although the NLRB sidestepped this issue in 2015 when it declined to assert jurisdiction over Northwestern University football players, the Columbia University decision is broad enough to encompass these activities.
Private university administrators have a new, unfortunate landscape confronting them. Hopefully the NLRB’s decision will eventually reach the courts, who may bring common sense to this misguided result. Congress also may have a role in limiting the harm that will likely result from the decision. But make no mistake: This stunning decision will, if unchecked, forever change our private universities. Like it or not, applicants will no longer be “admitted” to unionized institutions; they will be new hires, no different in many respects from hourly workers in industry.
Joseph W. Ambash is the regional managing partner of the national labor and employment law firm Fisher Phillips. This first ran in the Web site of the New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org).