Slate
eBook Club Editions
August 2002
Letter to a Young Law Student Dahlia Lithwick
The Socialist Economics of
College Tuition Peter Scheer
Adventures in Cheating Seth Stevenson
Shining C Michael Kinsley
The Ungovernable Boston
Public Judith Shulevitz
Urinalysis Dahlia Lithwick
A Day in the Life of a
Teacher's Aide (an except from the Diary) Drew Hindes
Letter to a Young Law Student
Don't go to law school: But if you must, take my advice.
By Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Thursday, August 15, 2002, at 1:54 PM PT
I started law school 10 years ago this week. While you may be aware that I
consider the law to be mostly very funny, I take law school pretty seriously.
When I started law school I had no idea what I was in for: maybe some hybrid of
debate camp and LA Law. In actual
fact, for me, law school was a cross between boot camp and a cave.
Some small fraction of every incoming One-L class is comprised of people
destined to take the legal world by storm. These are the people who intend to
get straight A's, outline every case, make law review, clerk for a Reagan
appointee, and spend the rest of their days in a leviathan corporate law firm
where they will do whatever it is that's done in such places. These are the
people law school was built for: people who think in zero-sum terms about
everything—grades, jobs, and salaries. I wish them the very best of luck for
the next three years. This advice is not for them.
This advice for the rest of you—who applied to law school simply because you
took the LSATs, and who took the LSATs simply because the MCATs were too hard.
This advice is for the people who graduated college with the generalized sense
that they ought to be doing good works on this planet but were uncertain how to
go about it. In short, this advice is for those of you who, like me, went to
law school hoping that the experience would be stimulating and/or
mind-expanding; a liberal-arts grad school for political people. Because you
are doubtless trying to memorize the blue book this week, this
advice is pre-outlined for your convenience.
A. Know Why You Are Going
As noted, the majority of people who get swept up into the law schools of North
America are there as a result of inertia, career confusion, or some combination
of both, and not a searing passion for drafting complex discovery motions. But
that same inertia that swept you into law school may just sweep you into a
corporate career in which you never had any interest. If you're at law school
because you burn to work at a big firm, or because teaching torts cranks you
beyond all imagining, have at it. But if you're there because your dad dressed
you in Michigan Law footie-pajamas, or you love writing, or you vaguely hope to
do something about the rainforest, you'll want to work hard to avoid being
sucked into the screaming centripetal force that is the corporate law firm.
So, write yourself a letter. Quick, while you still can write. Write it, seal it, and then open it at
graduation. Tell your post-law-school self what you'd hoped to do with that
J.D. Acknowledge that you'll leave law school with huge loans, but you knew
that going in. Tell yourself that if you take a job you hate in three years to
pay off loans that don't exist until now, you'll emerge in 10 years in the same
place you are today. Only balding.
B. Know Why You Are Not Going
If there is one law of law-school thinking it's this: If everyone else
wants something, I must want it, too. Not since the days of the Tonka
backhoe and Malibu Skipper will you have so lunged for stuff in which you have
no real interest, just because everyone else is lunging. Law school manages to
impose odd new values on virtually everyone. And each step of the way, law
students make choices—to interview with certain firms, take certain classes,
apply for certain clerkships—based on an impoverished sense of other options and
the fear that other people will get all the good stuff if you don't grab it.
This is hard advice to give and harder, I expect, to take. Fear and conformity
dig some pretty deep paths at law school. Don't just follow because they are
there.
Ignore your grades. I mean it. Recognize that you will take some class
pass/fail, study from the Nutshell the night before the test, and get an A,
whereas you will outline some other class to within an inch of your life, teach
a clinic on it, create an outline used by students for the next 70 years, and
still get a C+ on the final. Why are all laws of intellectual physics so
utterly upended at law school? Hell if I know. Something to do with forests and
trees. But my advice is to just ignore the grades. Send 'em home and have your
parents call you if you failed something. You will get a job. They don't
matter. (Warning: If you don't look at your grades for two years, do not go
back after graduation and ask that your con law professor change that C+ to an
A. She will laugh very hard and tell you it's a badge of honor. )
C. Have a Life
Someone in my One-L class rendered me semi-autistic in the first semester of
law school by suggesting that I'd probably flunk out because I used an orange
highlighter. The only person stupider than the moron who said that was me—I
changed highlighters. No matter what your original values and habits would
dictate, within a matter of weeks you'll be convinced that outlining every
case, sucking up to every professor, and spending every non-class hour in the
library are the only ways to survive, and that suffering is somehow rewarding
and character-building. Mmm. Maybe if you're a pilgrim.
I had, for the first six months of law school, only one vector. I traveled from
the dorms to the law school. After breakfast in the dorms I went to class in
the law library, and from there I went to dinner in the dorms, which led
inexorably to an evening in the law library. Another trench—leading from my bed
to the law buildings—from which I was too freaked out to climb out. Somehow one
night I ended up in some courtyard in the pouring rain, and then there was a
Rodin sculpture and after that, the moon, and I went home and read some
Shelley. The next day I felt like I'd gone on a three-week crack bender. Or like
I'd had the best conjugal visit ever. Get out. Go to movies. Volunteer
someplace. Make friends with the people at Starbucks. Get drunk but kiss
someone when you're actually sober. Do anything to remind yourself that there
is a life out there, and that missing one night of reading will not turn you
into someone who lives in a garment box under the freeway.
All this advice is probably extreme and excessive. Your parents will probably
set my house on fire for providing it. But read it anyhow. And think about it.
Life is short. Misery is overrated. If law school is what you really want, then
do it as yourself and not as if you were in a movie about Harvard men in the
1920s. Learn, question, make a precious lifelong friend, ignore the guy in the
bow tie, and smile at the people hunger-striking for the ninth consecutive
cause. Use an orange highlighter. Dig your own path. You may pop out in the
moonlight. You'll probably be a better lawyer for it.
The Socialist
Economics of College Tuition
Why elite universities charge $38,000 per year, and why they
don't expect you to pay it.
By Peter Scheer
Posted Thursday, May 30, 2002, at 10:21 AM PT
This is the season of college commencements, a time of immense relief for
parents who are finishing tuition payments, and of dismay for younger parents
who wonder how they'll ever afford to send their kids to good schools.
By any measure, the price tag is staggering: $38,000 per year (including room
and board) at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Amherst, Williams, et al., and nearly
as much at colleges down the academic food chain. And since tuition always
rises faster than inflation, saving for four years of college looks
like an impossibility for any parent who's not a hedge-fund manager.
So, how do other parents manage to pay for tuition? The (perhaps reassuring)
answer is: Most don't.
Thirty years ago, most students at private colleges paid full tuition. Today,
only one-quarter do. The rest receive financial aid in the form of scholarships
and loans. These discounts are substantial: 50 percent, on average, at the
elite private colleges—the 25 most selective and best-endowed private colleges
and universities, including the Ivies—even higher at many less-selective
private colleges. In other words, most students at good private colleges pay
only half the list price or less.
So, why do colleges persist in charging sky-high tuition that causes sticker
shock for applicants yet is irrelevant for most of them?
For second-tier schools (the schools ranked below the top 50 in U.S. News World Report's annual rankings)
the answer is that a high tuition, even if few students pay it, is a signal of
value—positioning the school in the market of high-quality colleges. For the
elite private colleges, the answer is more complicated. Schools like Harvard,
Yale, and Princeton don't use a high tuition to signal value; their names alone
do that. Nor do they maintain high tuitions to maximize revenues. Just as
increases in taxes don't always yield increased revenues, increases in tuition
do not necessarily translate into revenue windfalls. Harvard's 2001 tuition
hike, for example, resulted in only marginally higher revenues, according to
Sheryl Hoffman, Harvard's associate dean for finance.
The elite private colleges use gargantuan tuition to do what is usually thought
to be the province of governments: redistribute wealth by taxing
the families of rich students in order to subsidize the less rich and the not
rich. Like for-profit corporations, elite colleges engage in price discrimination,
applying different prices to different students in order to extract the most
money that each student is willing and able to pay, explains Henry Hansmann,
professor at Yale Law School and expert on charitable organizations. But unlike
for-profit corporations, colleges engage in this quintessentially capitalist
behavior in the service of an egalitarian ideal.
While second-tier colleges offer merit scholarships to top students in order to
lure them away from the best schools, most of the elite private colleges claim
to offer need-based discounts exclusively. Indeed, for the elite private
colleges, it is a point of honor that they do not give merit discounts. This
policy serves their redistributionist instincts. Wealthier students, no matter
how smart they are, subsidize needier classmates by paying full price.
One surprising result of this social policy is that the real cost of private
colleges hasn't increased in the last two decades—contrary to the conventional
wisdom that tuition inflation has priced the most selective schools beyond the
reach of middle-class families. In a study of admission and financial-aid
decisions at Williams College from 1988 to 2001, economists Gordon Winston and
Catherine Hill found that the real cost of tuition stayed essentially constant
across all income groups.
Middle-income families paid a discounted tuition of $10,794 in 1988 (in year
2000 constant dollars); the same families in 2001 paid $11,024, an increase of
just 2 percent in 13 years. Low-income families actually experienced a
reduction in tuition, from a 1988 net of $7,667 to $5,907 in 2000. Only
families paying the sticker price saw a big increase in tuition in real terms.
But even their tuition cost represented about the same share of family income
in 2001 as in 1988, according to Winston and Hill.
The colleges' experiment in wealth redistribution has been sustained over the
years by their reluctance to compete with each other on price (as distinct from
non-price matters, like course selection and celebrity professors, over which
competition has always been intense). Although the Ivy League was busted by the
Justice Department's antitrust enforcers in the late 1980s, the elite private
schools continue to behave like a de facto cartel in the areas of tuition
and financial aid. It is not just coincidence, after all, that despite
huge disparities in their cost structures and financial resources, the top
private colleges year after year charge nearly identical tuitions.
But price competition may be inevitable, no matter how hard the schools try to
resist. The sweet scholarship deals offered by rival schools may start eating
into the best colleges' applicant pools. An omen was Princeton's decision in
2000 to enhance financial aid packages by replacing loans with outright grants.
Yale, Harvard, and other top schools quickly followed suit. A decision by a
Harvard, Yale, or Princeton to offer a merit scholarship—that is, a tuition
discount having nothing to do with a student's financial circumstances—may not
be far behind. That might begin to change the purpose of scholarships from
redistribution to incentive.
The elite college cartel will probably collapse. Most eventually do, even
cartels that are—in their own eyes, at any rate—benevolent.
Adventures in Cheating
A guide to buying term papers online.
By Seth Stevenson
Posted Tuesday, December 11, 2001, at 11:04 AM PT
Students, your semester is almost over. This fall, did you find yourself
pulling many bong hits but few all-nighters? Absorbing much Schlitz but little
Nietzsche? Attending Arizona State University? If the answer is yes to any or
(especially) all these questions, you will no doubt be plagiarizing your term
papers.
Good for you—we're all short on time these days. Yes, it's ethically blah blah
blah to cheat on a term paper blah. The question is: How do you do it right?
For example, the chump move is to find some library book and copy big hunks out
of it. No good: You still have to walk to the library, find a decent book, and
link the hunks together with your own awful prose. Instead, why not just click
on a term paper Web site and buy the whole damn paper already written by some
smart dude? Que bella! Ah, but which
site?
I shopped at several online term paper stores to determine where best to spend
your cheating dollar. After selecting papers on topics in history, psychology,
and biology, I had each paper graded by one of my judges. These were: Slate writer David Greenberg, who teaches
history at Columbia; my dad, who teaches psychology at the University of Rhode Island
(sometimes smeared as the ASU of the East); and my girlfriend, who was a
teaching assistant in biology at Duke (where she says cheating was quite
common). So, which site wins for the best combination of price and paper
quality? I compared free sites, sites that sell pre-written papers,
and a site that writes custom papers to your specifications.
Free Sites
A quick Web search turns up dozens of sites filled with free
term papers. Some ask you to donate one of your own papers in exchange, but most
don't. I chose one from each of our fields for comparison and soon found that
when it comes to free papers, you get just about what you pay for.
EssaysFree.com: From this
site I chose a history paper titled The Infamous Watergate Scandal.
Bad choice. This paper had no thesis, no argument, random capitalization, and
bizarre spell-checking errors—including taking the whiteness stand
(witness) and the registration of Nixon (resignation). My judge
said if they gave F's at Columbia, well … Instead, it gots a good old
Please come see me.
BigNerds.com: Of the free bio
paper I chose from this site, my judge said, Disturbing. I am still
disturbed. It indeed read less like a term paper than a deranged
manifesto. Rambling for 11 single-spaced pages and ostensibly on evolutionary
theory, it somehow made reference to Lamarck, Sol Invictus, and the
blanket of a superficial American Dream. Meanwhile, it garbled its basic
explanation of population genetics. Grade: I would not give this a grade
so much as suggest tutoring, a change in majors, some sort of counseling
…
OPPapers.com: This site fared
much better. A paper titled Critically Evaluate Erikson's Psychosocial
Theory spelled Erikson's name wrong in the first sentence, yet still won
a C+/B- from my dad. It hit most of the important points—the problem was no
analysis. And the citations all came from textbooks, not real sources. Oddly,
this paper also used British spellings ( behaviour ) for no apparent
reason. But all in all not terrible, considering it was free. OPPapers.com,
purely on style points, was my favorite site. The name comes from an old
hip-hop song ( You down with O-P-P? meaning other people's ...
genitalia), the site has pictures of coed babes, and one paper in the psych section
was simply the phrase I wanna bang Angelina Jolie typed over and
over again for several pages. Hey, whaddaya want for free?
Sites Selling Pre-Written Papers
There are dozens of these—I narrowed it down to three sites that seemed
fairly reputable and were stocked with a wide selection. (In general, the
selection offered on pay sites was 10 times bigger than at the free ones.) Each
pay site posted clear disclaimers that you're not to pass off these papers as
your own work. Sure you're not.
AcademicTermPapers.com: This
site charged $7 per page, and I ordered The Paranoia Behind
Watergate for $35. Well worth it. My history judge gave it the highest
grade of all the papers he saw—a B or maybe even a B+. Why? It boasted an
actual argument. A few passages, however, might set off his plagiarism radar
(or pladar ). They show almost too thorough a command of the
literature.
My other purchase here was a $49 bio paper titled The Species
Concept. Despite appearing in the bio section of the site, this paper
seemed to be for a philosophy class. Of course, no way to know that until after
you've bought it (the pay sites give you just the title and a very brief
synopsis of each paper). My judge would grade this a C- in an intro bio class,
as its conclusion was utterly meaningless, and it tossed around
airy philosophies without actually understanding the species
concept at all.
PaperStore.net: For about $10
per page, I ordered two papers from the Paper Store, which is also
BuyPapers.com and AllPapers.com. For $50.23, I bought Personality Theory:
Freud and Erikson, by one Dr. P. McCabe (the only credited author on any
of these papers. As best I can tell, the global stock of papers for sale is
mostly actual undergrad stuff with a few items by hired guns thrown in). The writing
style here was oddly mixed, with bad paraphrasing of textbooks—which is normal
for a freshman—side by side with surprisingly clever and polished observations.
Grade: a solid B.
My other Paper Store paper was Typical Assumptions of Kin Selection,
bought for $40.38. Again, a pretty good buy. It was well-written, accurate, and
occasionally even thoughtful. My bio judge would give it a B in a freshman
class. Possible pladar ping: The writer seemed to imply that some of his ideas
stemmed from a personal chat with a noted biologist. But overall, the Paper
Store earned its pay.
A1Termpaper.com (aka 1-800-Termpaper.com):
In some ways this is the strangest site, as most of the papers for sale were
written between 1978 and '83. I would guess this is an old term paper source,
which has recently made the jump to the Web. From its history section, I bought
a book report on Garry Wills' Nixon Agonistes
for $44.75, plus a $7.45 fee for scanning all the pages—the paper was written
in 1981, no doubt on a typewriter. Quality? It understood the book but made no
critique—a high-school paper. My judge would give it a D.
I next bought Personality as Seen by Erikson, Mead, and Freud from
A1 Termpaper for $62.65 plus a $10.43 scanning fee. Also written in 1981, this one
had the most stylish prose of any psych paper and the most sophisticated
thesis, but it was riddled with factual errors. For instance, it got Freud's
psychosexual stages completely mixed up and even added some that don't exist
(the correct progression is oral-anal-phallic-latency-genital, as if you didn't
know). Showing its age, it cited a textbook from 1968 and nothing from after
'69 (and no, that's not another Freudian stage, gutter-mind). Grade: Dad gave
it a C+. In the end, A1 Termpaper.com was pricey, outdated, and not a good buy.
With all these pre-written papers, though, it occurred to me that a smart but
horribly lazy student could choose to put his effort into editing instead of
researching and writing: Buy a mediocre paper that's done the legwork, then
whip it into shape by improving the writing and adding some carefully chosen
details. Not a bad strategy.
Papers Made To Order
PaperMasters.com: My
final buy was a custom-made paper written to my specifications. Lots of sites
do this, for between $17 and $20 per page. PaperMasters.com claims all its
writers have at least one Master's Degree and charges $17.95 per
page. I typed this request (posing as a professor's assignment, copied
verbatim) into its Web order form: A 4-page term paper on David Foster
Wallace's Infinite Jest. Investigate
the semiotics of the 'addicted gaze' as represented by the mysterious film of
the book's title. Possible topics to address include nihilism, figurative
transgendering, the culture of entertainment, and the concept of 'infinite
gestation.'
This assignment was total hooey. It made no sense whatsoever. Yet it differed
little from papers I was assigned as an undergrad English major at Brown.
After a few tries (one woman at the 800 number told me they were extremely
busy), my assignment was accepted by Paper Masters, with a deadline for one
week later. Keep in mind, Infinite Jest
is an 1,100-page novel (including byzantine footnotes), and it took me almost a
month to read even though I was completely engrossed by it. In short, there's
no way anyone could 1) finish the book in time; and 2) write anything coherent
that addressed the assignment.
I began to feel guilty. Some poor writer somewhere was plowing through this
tome, then concocting a meaningless mishmash of words simply to fill four pages
and satisfy the bizarre whims of a solitary, heartless taskmaster (me). But
then I realized this is exactly what I did for all four years of college—and I
paid them for the privilege!
When the custom paper came back, it was all I'd dreamed. Representative
sentence: The novel's diverse characters demonstrate both individually
and collectively the fixations and obsessions that bind humanity to the
pitfalls of reality and provide a fertile groundwork for the semiotic explanation
of addictive behavior. Tripe. The paper had no thesis and in fact had no
body—not one sentence actually advanced a cogent idea. I'm guessing it would
have gotten a C+ at Brown—maybe even a B-. If I were a just slightly lesser
person, I might be tempted by this service. One custom paper off the Web:
$71.80. Not having to dredge up pointless poppycock for some po-mo obsessed,
overrated lit-crit professor: priceless.
sidebar
Infinite Jest
Introduction
Wallace's fictional narrative Infinite Jest is an epic approach to the
solicitous and addictive nature of humanity. The novel's diverse characters
demonstrate both individually and collectively the fixations and obsessions
that bind humanity to the pitfalls of reality and provide a fertile groundwork
for the semiotic explanation of addictive behavior. Although Wallace may
have actualized the concept of the addicted gaze to the literal or
physical response to the viewing of Incandenza's coveted film the Entertainment
[Infinite Jest], it is manifested symbolically throughout the novel in the
distractions of its characters.
Nihilism
It would appear that Wallace has chosen society's most frequently rejected and
denounced individuals as the vehicle for the narrative search for and
preservation of the ultimate fix, which is illustrated by the obsession for
Incandenza's film. At the same time and despite their diversity and
distinctions, these individuals will ultimately represent the inextricable and
covert characteristics of nihilistic behavior.
School-aged malcontents, drug addicts and the physically challenged all attempt
to get a hold of a copy of the film and experience its pleasures at any cost.
Ironically, it was the film maker James Incadenza's habit to regularly observe
the depravation of Boston's crowded street milieus, where everyone goes
nuts and mills, either switching or watching (620). It is not surprising
therefore that he should develop a film that would be perceived as the panacea
to the entertainment addictions of the masses.
Figurative Transgendering
Wallace devotes a substantial amount of space to the illustration of the
contradictions of gender, where the adoption of gender behavior or symbols
contrary to the character's true gender can be analyzed. The occasion of Hugh
Steeply in drag as he met with Marathe to discuss the emergence of the
Entertainment's cartridge may have served the literal purpose of the agent
arriving incognito however his devotion to applying feminine mannerisms appear
to go above and beyond the call of duty (90). In spite of his practice, Marathe
nevertheless describes Steely's appearance as less like a women than a
twisted parody of womanhood (93).
Wallace also presents the steroid-driven objectives of a number of the female
tennis player's like Ann Kittenplan. who at twelve-and-a-have looks like
a Belorussian shot putter (330). It may be fair to assume that their
desire to acquire a manly physique is not entirely confined to the advantages
it offers on the tennis court. In his notes, Wallace suggests that the
gratification of pretty much every physical need is either taken care of
or prohibited by the tennis academy (984). Clearly, the administration of
steroids or any other drug of choice is prohibited by the ETA considering the
wide scale purchase of clean urine for the academy's drug testing.
An Endless Jest
Perhaps the most significant example of the addicted gaze is demonstrated not
so much in the stationary and fixated attention to satisfying one's obsession
but in the demand for the continuous pursuit of it. The halfway house/rehab
center, Ennet House, represents the often ineffectual and delusional pursuit of
ridding oneself of addiction. A clear example of the deceptive environment of
rehab is demonstrated by Lenz's use of cocaine while at the facility. For
many of the residents like Lenz, the limitations at Ennet House are often so
unbearable that its residents are driven to the use of drugs in order to
preserve their sanity. Ironically, Lenz's stash of cocaine works as a contrived
temptation that undermines any true potential for ridding himself of his
addiction.
Conclusion
Wallace's Infinite Jest is a chaotic amalgam of humanity and the
similarly depraved behaviors that they demonstrate in the pursuit of amusement
and satisfaction. Although the restrictions to their attainment are clearly
represented by the physical entities of the Academy, the Ennet House and the
wheelchair, they are also fostered by them.
If Incandenza's Accomplice is any indication of the content of the
Entertainment, it only reinforces the contention that human nature includes the
inherent desire to not only view the depravity and debauchery of human behavior
but even more, to participate in it. There is little to ponder why so many of
Wallace's characters must depend on their mind and body altering drugs of
choice, if not to influence how they are viewed by others then at the very
least to make more palatable their own perceptions of self.
John L.'s monologue delivered at one of the AA meetings illustrates the
destructive implications of either reasoning: all the masks come off and
you all of a sudden see the Disease as it really is…and see what owns you,
what's become what you are – (347).
References
Nihilism. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. [online] Available: http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/n/nihilism.htm.
Wallace, David Foster. Infinite Jest. New York: Little, Brown Co.,
1996.
Shining C
Land of opportunity, Bush-style.
By Michael Kinsley
Posted Friday, July 6, 2001, at 12:00 AM PT
The most interesting patriotic sentiment of the season was expressed by
President Bush last month at Yale's graduation: And to the C students, I
say, you, too can be president of the United States. This was intended as
a bit of charming self-deprecation: a rhetorical device Bush is quite good
at—possibly because he means it. Modesty is one of his better qualities: He
seems genuinely comfortable about acknowledging his own limitations. He doesn't
evoke a desire to retort, with Golda Meir, Don't be so humble, you're not
that great. Of course, it requires a pretty powerful sense of entitlement
to pull this off. There's a real smugness underlying the self-deprecation: Hey,
I'm mediocre, and I'm president anyway. (So there, Bill Clinton and Al
Gore—study-butts both.)
Sure, a C student can become president. It helps if his father was president
first and his grandfather was a senator and he was born into a family that
straddles the Northeast WASP aristocracy and the Sun Belt business
establishment. And a C student at prep school can get into Yale by adopting a
similar action plan of strategic birth control. (That is, controlling whom
you're born to.)
By appropriating for himself the magnificent cliché that anyone can become
president of the United States, Bush gives it a whole new dimension. Sure, we
all know that with gumption and hard work, in this land of opportunity, you can
overcome a mountain of life's disadvantages to reach the pinnacle of success.
That's one option. But as Bush subtly reminded the Yale graduates, there is
another option: With a mountain of life's advantages, you can overcome a
disposition against working hard and a cultural distaste for vulgar striving
and reach those same pinnacles anyway! Our current president opted for the
second strategy, and you cannot begrudge him a splash of smugness in noting
that it worked.
What lesson will the Nation's Youth draw from this inspiring tale? It would be
tragic if they got the impression that being a lousy student is all it takes.
It's a good foundation to build on, but only that. One must also be young and
irresponsible until it is time to become old and censorious. When I was
young and irresponsible, Bush has noted, I was young and
irresponsible. And now that he's good, he is very, very good. Bush says
he stopped being young and irresponsible on his 40th birthday.
Perfect timing! That happens to be almost exactly when ruining other people's
fun starts to be more satisfying—and less exhausting—than having fun of your
own. This is another strategy imitators of the Bush Way to Greatness overlook
at their peril.
At the Harvard admissions office, they used to have an alleged philosophy they
called the happy bottom quarter. The idea was that Harvard could
fill each class, if it wanted to, with nothing but the very top high-school
students but that this might be traumatic to those who didn't make it to the
top at Harvard. So, the admissions office supposedly reserved about 25 percent
of each class for those who could handle the notion of not being a star
student.
In practice, this did not mean searching for young folks with a Zenlike
acceptance of life's fate, or a profound sense of universal human equality, or
enough mathematical wit to appreciate the joke that even at Harvard—unlike Lake
Wobegon—everyone cannot be above average. No, the happy bottom
quarter was a fancy way to make room for alumni sons and athletes and
rich kids whose families might give money. These were people who didn't need
top grades in order to feel above average. They would be happy with a
Gentleman's C —meaning both that gentlemen were entitled to no less
and that gentlemen strove for no more.
Nicholas Lemann's book The Big Test
describes how the cozy elite of the Gentleman's C was replaced, in universities
and society, by a more rigorous meritocracy of grades and test scores. By the
time George W. was in college, that transformation was almost over. The
happy bottom quarter was just a way to preserve some room for the old
America in the new one. Today we like to think we live in an even newer
America, where entrepreneurial hustle has replaced test scores and Ivy League
degrees as the path to success (and the country's richest person is a Harvard
dropout). But George W. Bush's life story of how a C student at Yale became
president of the United States illustrates that even the America-before-last
hasn't completely lost its grip.
The other day I got a brochure from Harvard, apparently sent to every graduate,
inviting me to pay $25 to join a computerized mentoring network of Harvard
people helping one another to make connections and find jobs. This struck me as
a fairly shocking reification of the notion of Harvard as cog in the machinery
of a self-perpetuating elite. I'm not sure whether the brazen crudeness
indicates self-confidence or a desperate conspiracy of the two older elites
against the new one.
President Bush, though, seems to have found a wilier way to protect the older
elites from challenge. Let's hope the president's words and example inspire
more young Americans to buckle down, get mediocre grades, and party until
they're middle-aged.
The Ungovernable Boston Public
Judith Shulevitz
Posted Friday, November 10, 2000, at 7:31 AM PT
As the partisan bitterness escalates and the scenario in which this nation
becomes ungovernable grows more possible by the hour, Culturebox can't stop
thinking about David E. Kelley and his new television series, Boston Public, a weekly meditation on the
subject of ungovernability. This deservedly popular new show (Fox on Mondays at
8 p.m.) is set at a fairly average American public high school. But to the
faculty and administration--our unlikely heroes--it's the urban equivalent of a
frontier town. At Winslow High, sneaky, oversexed, and barely controllable
students start absurd crises, hysterical parents fan them, and political school
board members exploit the turmoil to further their own murky agendas. Trying to
tamp it all down takes up most of the teachers' time. The rest is spent trying
to shore up the respect required to keep the peace, whether by listening
compassionately to troubled students or scaring the hell out of rebellious ones
or even shooting blanks into a classroom to startle an incorrigible class into
silence.
The teacher who shoots the gun, a likable guy, is reprimanded, not fired on the
spot--one of the show's more, shall we say, allegorical touches. These and
others, such the principal's bashing the head of the school bully against a
locker and one teacher's misguided effort to require buxom girls to wear bras
that results in a hilarious schoolwide bra-removing and -waving protest, have
been the object of disapproving articles in newspapers around the country since
Boston Public first aired three weeks
ago. The viewers who demand conformity to the exact reality of secondary school
life miss the point. Though the show is set in a high school, its larger theme
is authority in an ungovernable society--how do you get it and keep it in the
face of corrosive distrust and mindless mutiny? Kelley's flights of fanciful
hyperbole are his way of shoving that question in the audience's faces.
The basic premise of Boston Public
poses the problem clearly. It is that teachers are figures of benevolent
authority suspected of almost every form of malevolence conceivable and
defended by almost no one. This, of course, is no parable. It reflects a
political environment in which teachers' unions are routinely blamed for
everything that goes wrong in school systems today. In the show, the
scapegoating of teachers comes across in a plot line involving a frosty
superintendent who is trying to get rid of the beloved principal, Stephen
Harper. Harper is the only Mr. Chips on this show--a warm, intelligent,
soft-spoken fellow whose ability to run the school resides largely in a bulky
body that he wields like a concealed weapon and mostly keeps in check. His
sins, in the superintendent's mind, lie in his flashes of temper and in the
fact that he fails to fire otherwise talented teachers for their momentary
lapses, such as the geology teacher who shot the gun or an overemotional
history teacher who needs anti-depressants to cope with her obnoxious class.
Kelley's interest in the principal's and teachers' plight does not come across as
an idealist's whitewash. It's more like a vehicle for his extremely dark view
of human nature. His students are mostly nasty, brutish, and resistant to
improvement, and his parents are worse. Harper is a flawed hero, and the
teachers are distinctly unsaintly. Most of them are dysfunctional themselves.
To Kelley, schools are less a place where Rousseauian free spirits are led
gently to a greater social consciousness than cautionary examples of what
happens when a society routinely denigrates legitimate authority. One
consequence is a student-run, Drudge-like Web site, run by a creepy little
eavesdropper who writes up teachers' private lives and posts cartoons that have
them doing things like sticking their own heads up their asses. (She also has
90 students working for her and informs one social studies teacher that she is
already a bigger professional success than the teacher will ever be.)
The more insidious consequence is overregulation--Kelley, an ex-lawyer, has
made this subject the obsession of every TV show he has written. Whenever
teachers or administrators try to help or discipline students, they immediately
butt up against their or their bosses' anxiety about litigation. The worst, in
Kelley's book, are sexual harassment laws, which he started railing about in Ally McBeal long before Monica Lewinsky got
down on her knees. But there are also digs at anti-discrimination laws and an
episode about a degrading school board regulation that requires all teachers to
submit to thumb printing since they work with children. Culturebox has mixed
views on sexual harassment and anti-discrimination laws and absolutely no idea
whether the thumb printing law exists anywhere other than in Kelley's head. He
makes good use of it, though, to show what happens when people who should be
looked up to and supported are met instead by automatic suspicion.
So what's the parallel between Boston Public
and the current crisis? That you can't educate children, just as you can't run
a country, in an atmosphere of rancor and litigiousness, when the people who
are supposed to be in charge are dismissed in a knee-jerk fashion as corrupt
and illegitimate by the people they're supposed to be governing. Kelley's
anti-proceduralist bias may appear to be reactionary. But though in some ways
this apostate litigator does seem to be making a neoconservative critique of
the rights revolution, it's notable that he does so in defense of the
quintessential public institution, the public school. When you can't trust your
government, he seems to be telling us, you must resort to regulations, and the
more trust dissolves, the more convoluted and ridiculous the regulations become
until you have a system in complete paralysis.
Urinalysis
The Supreme Court's torturous justification of high-school
urine tests.
By Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Wednesday, July 3, 2002, at 3:26 PM PT
At the end of the term last week, the Supreme Court handed down a raft of 5-4
decisions that will make the entire country more like high school and make high
school more like prison. The court held—among other things—that elected judges
may behave more like student council candidates ( I promise more theme
dances and strict construction for everyone! ) and parochial schools may
be treated like public ones. But the court also voted to allow public schools
to treat their students—future citizens—as though they're likely to commit a
drug crime.
The holding in Board of Education of Pottawatomie County v. Earls
shouldn't just enrage students and parents unwilling to see their
kids shamed just for joining the band. It should terrify any of us who fear
that in promoting a War on Something, the court might be prepared to suspend
all rules of constitutional interpretation based on the preposterous legal
theory that Heck, we oughtta try something. The majority opinion in
Earls reflects some of the worst
results-based decision-making we've seen since Bush
v. Gore. And like Bush v. Gore,
it is rooted in panic, expediency, and a twisting of prior precedent to fit the
facts.
The question in Earls was whether
school districts may constitutionally conduct warrantless, suspicionless
searches of all public-school students engaged in extracurriculars. The court
decided that school districts may conduct such tests, using what was once a
very limited special needs exception to the requirement that
government actors must have probable cause, even for administrative
(as opposed to law enforcement) searches. Initially, these special needs cases
involved suspicionless drug tests for individuals in jobs that would be highly
dangerous if performed while high. With Earls,
it's enough that the government thinks that, dang, something should be done
about drugs.
The special needs doctrine is an odd duck: In 1989 the court decided Skinner v. Railway Labor Executives'
Association, allowing railroad workers to be tested for
drug use to ensure public safety in a highly regulated industry. That same year
it decided in Treasury Employees Union v. Von Raab
that a drug-testing program for customs officials was
constitutional, again because of the compelling state interest in ensuring that
front-line interdiction personnel are physically fit, and have
unimpeachable integrity and judgment. The next slide down this slippery
slope was an easy one, and so in 1995 the court upheld, by a 6-3 vote, the
constitutionality of a school district's policy of drug-testing student
athletes without suspicion. Turning to its trusty special needs
balancing test, the court in Vernonia School District v. Acton
balanced the privacy expectations of student athletes against the
urgency of the government's war on drugs. Not surprisingly, the students (whom
the court felt were used to walking around naked in public anyhow) lost.
In a surprise decision in 1997, the high court actually found one suspicionless
drug-testing program not sufficiently compelling to meet the infinitely
malleable special needs exception. The Georgia Legislature required
that candidates for certain state public offices be drug-tested, and in an 8-1
decision, the court in Chandler v. Miller
invalidated the program. Perhaps realizing the court had unleashed a dragon
with Vernonia, Justice Ginsburg,
writing for the majority, used Chandler
to refine the special needs exception: [T]he proffered
special need for drug testing must be substantial, she wrote, and the
majority of the court felt that Georgia had not demonstrated a sufficiently
compelling or urgent need to keep its high-ranking public officials drug-free.
Chandler did two things that set the
court up to decide Earls as it did:
One, it left unchallenged the bizarre assertion—first articulated in Vernonia—that suspicionless urine tests
constitute a negligible intrusion on personal privacy. More
profoundly, the opinion gutted the idea of a balancing test, in
which state interests are balanced against the intrusiveness of the
drug-testing program, and simply asserted that—in the case of the Georgia
program—the state interests in suspicionless drug tests were not sufficiently
compelling to warrant the intrusion. In short, Ginsburg rejiggered the
balancing test: The privacy issue is now a constant (intrusiveness equals
negligible), and the importance of the government interest is the only relevant
variable.
Perhaps it's not surprising that such a skewed test would lead to the result in
Earls: First, Thomas saws away at any
remaining notion that students expect privacy at school. Sure the kids in the
choir don't change in public like the athletes in Vernonia.
But they are routinely required to submit to physical examinations and
vaccinations against disease, and [s]ome of these clubs and
activities require occasional off-campus travel and communal undress
(like the school's lap-dancing team?). Repeating the claim in Vernonia that having to pee in a cup while a
faculty monitor listens at the door of your stall constitutes a
negligible intrusion, Thomas makes it clear to him, urine tests at
school are no different than spelling tests.
The big constitutional fake-out comes with the assertion that the
substantial state interest in winning the drug war is more
compelling than it was in Chandler.
Despite testimony from the school board that drugs are not a real problem at
present, the school board announces, and Justice Thomas agrees, that there is indeed a drug problem in a sleepy high
school in Oklahoma where 797 students have been tested under the policy and
three (all athletes) tested positive. Why? Because: Teachers testified
that they had seen students who appeared to be under the influence of drugs and
that they had heard students speaking openly about using drugs. Speaking
openly! At school? Perish forbid. Also: A drug dog found marijuana
cigarettes near the school parking lot. Police officers once found drugs or
drug paraphernalia in a car driven by a Future Farmers of America member. And
the school board president reported that people in the community were calling
the board to discuss the 'drug situation.' Now people in the community
probably also call the board to discuss the Britney Spears
situation, but we can't urine-test students for being bimbos. So, there must be a drug problem.
Thomas cuts the last possible tether to Vernonia
(where there was actual evidence of a drug problem) with this winning
constitutional shrug: Even if there's no problem, there may be a future
problem. Indeed, it would make little sense to require a school district
to wait for a substantial portion of its students to begin using drugs before
it was allowed to institute a drug testing program designed to deter drug use.
Thomas finally eviscerates the public safety requirement that once
characterized all the special needs exceptions. Railroad workers
and customs officers endangered the public with drug use. Students, Thomas
says, endanger themselves. And that is enough for the court to approve the
program. It's enough to force every single American to also submit to
suspicionless drug-testing, but Thomas neglects to mention this.
Numerous strange defenses of the Oklahoma policy have been put forward in the
wake of the Earls decision: The Washington Post claims no one was really being
hurt because there are no criminal consequences to students who test positive.
Justice Breyer, in a concurrence
my friend Tim describes as a cover letter for his application to be
chief, argues both that drugs are real bad and that this will give a
student a nonthreatening reason to decline his friend's drug-use
invitations. And Professor Sherry Colb
argues that testing all kids is somehow less stigmatizing than testing simply
the freaky-looking ones.
But all these bizarre defenses ignore two vital facts: that making a kid,
particularly a good kid, pee in a cup just to enter a science fair is obscene;
and it's especially obscene because, to quote Justice Breyer (himself quoting
the New Basic History of the United States,
1968), schools prepare pupils for citizenship in the Republic [and]
inculcate the habits and manners of civility as values in themselves. If
schools foster civility by treating schools as prisons, to quote Justice Scalia at oral argument in Earls, don't be surprised if students someday
become as civilized as prisoners.
But more alarming is the specter of the infinitely growing maw of the
special needs exception to what was once a constitutionally sacred
warrant requirement for state searches. No longer is special need
to circumvent the warrant defined merely by the danger you pose to the public
while on the job. A bare government assertion that there's a war on
will suffice. It's worth recalling that with a war on terror just
ramping up, the most special need the government should have right
now is a warrant.
A Day in the Life of a Teacher's Aide (an except from the Diary)
By Drew Hindes
Posted Thursday, February 21, 2002, at 7:33 AM PT
Animals don't talk. This I know, or at least accept. I can,
however, handle a marsupial or small canine with a speaking role in the realm
of fiction. I mean, it's fiction, right? Well, evidently it's not that easy.
Creative license be damned, talking animals would appear to be the biggest
hurdle with the freshmen, who have just finished reading Animal Farm.
Animals don't talk. I guess it bears repeating, because he said it
again. I'm thinking, however, that their gripe isn't with animals talking so
much as with the pig getting the lead. I suppose they're the same people who
boycotted Charlotte's Web in elementary school. Unless I missed
something in biology, spiders don't spell. Not to mention that ridiculous ogre
and his donkey sidekick who just received Oscar nods (well, the movie did). And
don't look now, but 13 nominations just went to that epic they waited so long
for, which stars a hobbit, some fairies, a wizard a centenarian many times
over, and a ring that harnesses the powers of evil.
I could handle it if they were just thinking it, but it's dumb. Animals
don't talk. Oh, I get it. It's not the portrayal of cattle and swine as
sentient beings (who's to say they're not?), but give them lines and all is
lost.
Obviously, you can forget about trying to discuss the importance of the novel
(novel meaning fiction) as social commentary ( How can a book be
important? ), or the arguably more important work its author would later
write. Animals don't talk. Yeah, I get it. Was it because the
barnyard extras in the movie weren't union?
Freshmen = kids, and we know how I feel about them.
So, when do they outgrow the hit me as hard as you can, I bet it won't
hurt stage, which follows on the heels of, if not coincides with, the
feel my bicep stage, and enter the I'll do it the night
before it's due, don't worry, Mr. Hindes stage? I only ask because I
expended no small amount of energy trying to get a student to work on a paper
during class the other day, as opposed to putting it off until I'm at
home and can put on some music, watch TV, and get it done. Because that's
an environment conducive to paper writing. But, now that I think about it, I
think the feel my bicep thing may be lifelong. I know guys in their
20s still telling people to feel their biceps—which, if you think about it, is
a really weird thing to ask someone. Although, I think it safe to say I could
leave them in a room with a faucet and not come back to find it flooded. There
seems to be a general fascination with running water in the science
class—that's the one taught by Superman. The class is in a combo classroom-lab,
which, naturally, has faucets at each station. It started off slowly. You know,
Superman would be at the board explaining the intricacies of, oh, what the
hell, krypton, and then you'd hear it. And then someone would be wet. And, come
to think of it, it's not just the freshmen in Superman's class, it's juniors,
too, in English classes with bottles of water and unsuspecting friends sitting
in front of them. You'd think living in such close proximity to the seventh-largest
lake on the continent that water wouldn't be such a mystery to them. And then I
wonder if I could use this to my advantage. Just hold a bottle of water up
whenever I wanted to get their attention. I've noticed that the students don't
have any qualms about just walking into the faculty room whenever they want to
get ours. Case in point: Yesterday during my extended lunch (I figured I should
set up the intern to do the algebra review, lest I do a disservice to the
students by leading it myself) a student walked right up to the table, with no
less than six faculty and staff engaged in conversation, and just started
talking. He must have been rambling for nearly a minute before I had the
wherewithal to ask him to whom he was speaking, since he'd never said excuse me
or even called any of us by name.