Yesterday, I pointed to a very bipartisan problem: the under-representation of women candidates slated to run for Indianapolis City-County Council (not helped by the “dumping” by each party of an incumbent female). Several commenters–all, I should note, men–protested via twitter that gender had nothing to do with the slating decisions.
As I responded to one of them, I’m sure that’s true–consciously. Neither party deliberately slighted women candidates, or intentionally applied different standards to male and female incumbents.
The key word is “intentional.”
In 1990, Wellesley College professor Peggy McIntosh wrote an essay about White Privilege, in which she observed that whites in the U.S. are taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in invisible systems conferring dominance on any particular group.
A few of the 45 items on that checklist are particularly relevant here:
If I seek political office, my relationship with my children, or who I hire to take care of them, will probably not be scrutinized by the press.
Chances are my elected representatives are mostly people of my own sex. The more prestigious and powerful the elected position, the more likely this is to be true.
I can be loud with no fear of being called a shrew. I can be aggressive with no fear of being called a bitch.
My post yesterday was about those “invisible systems conferring dominance” and the systemic (albeit largely unconscious) attitudes those systems foster. Most of the women who commented “got it.” A number of the men, didn’t.
Remember the folk song that began “Where have all the flowers gone?” Well, I want to know where all the women candidates have gone. My specific question is: where are the women candidates slated by the parties to run for the Indianapolis City-County Council?
There are 25 districts remaining since the Republicans in the General Assembly eliminated the 4 at-large seats held by Democrats.
The Republicans slated seven women. The Democrats slated only five.
As a mere girl, my math skills are understandably weak, but I believe women are over 50% of the voting public. The Republicans slated women for fewer than 30% of the seats; the Democrats–presumably the party of inclusion and women’s rights–slated women in only 20%.
Worse still, each party refused to slate an incumbent woman who’d been effective and hard-working, but difficult for party bosses to control; the Republicans unceremoniously dumped Christine Scales, who had angered her GOP cohorts by demonstrating independent judgment and a willingness to work across the aisle, and the Democrats decided that LeRoy Robinson–who no longer had an at-large seat and needed to “be taken care of”–should get priority over Angela Mansfield, who has ably represented District 1.
Both women had put the interests of their constituents above partisanship. (Isn’t that just like a woman?!)
Bless their little hearts, those girls didn’t listen to their manly betters, and they needed to be removed.
Message sent and received–and isn’t the bipartisanship of that message encouraging?
Don Kettl is a highly respected scholar of government and public management, and he has penned a very thoughtful article–I would say a “must read” article– for a recent issue of Washington Monthly. In it, he pretends that the 2016 election is over and he’s advising the winner.
Titled “Ten Secret Truths About Government Incompetence,” he begins with the “secret truth” that government actually does a great many things with admirable competence, and works far better than most people think, sharing a long list of areas in which good government performance is taken for granted.
Kettl uses the list to warn the new President that good management will go unremarked, but screw-ups will be magnified.
He also points out that media and citizens alike fail to distinguish between embarrassing, but essentially minor, mistakes, and truly consequential ones:
You’ve benefited from the “Obama is incompetent” narrative. It increased the public’s appetite for getting you—and some fresh air—into Washington. But let’s be honest: you lucked out because of the media’s inability or unwillingness to notice, care about, or explain the difference between hugely consequential management screw-ups and only modestly consequential ones.
Failing to plan for the occupation of Iraq? Disbanding the Iraqi military? Putting inexperienced political cronies in charge of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and downsizing the agency prior to Hurricane Katrina? Now those were screw-ups—big, far-reaching, world-historic blunders that led directly to the deaths of thousands.
As Kettl says, compare that to the inept Obamacare website roll-out , where no one died, and the problems were soon fixed.
Of course, these were big stories—but they were mostly big political stories. The stumbles embarrassed the Obama administration, hinted at an underlying management problem in the administration (more on that shortly), and helped the Republicans weave a powerful campaign narrative. But the stories weren’t about big failures with huge consequences. They were about putting torpedoes below the political waterline.
Kettl also addressed one of my pet peeves: the notion that government should be “run like a business.” Addressing his mythical new President, he writes
You made the case in your campaign that government needs to learn from the best-run private companies. That’s an irresistible line that Republicans invented and Democrats—especially Obama—have come to champion. But, of course, you know that the private sector isn’t always a model of good management. Remember New Coke, Windows 8, the collapse of Chi-Chi’s restaurants, and shrapnel-filled airbags? That’s even before we get to the wholesale financial miscalculations and fraud that led to global economic collapse.
The private market has a big advantage over government: it can bury its bodies in balance sheets and deal with its failures by quietly turning out the lights and locking the doors.
The entire article is well worth reading, especially the section on outsourcing–the fact that most government work is no longer done by government, and how that fact complicates management and accountability. His reminder that so many of the problems we attribute to a President are really problems created by Congress is especially timely.
All in all, the article is an important corrective to the rampant, uninformed anti-government rhetoric meant to appeal to people who don’t have the foggiest notion what government is or does or how it functions.
It’s also reminder that We the People not only need government, we need the civic skills to make it work properly.
After collecting data for 20 years, Adams concluded that a student’s grandmother was far more likely to die before midterms than at any other time of the year. More specifically, his research showed that grandmothers are 10 times more likely to die before a midterm, and 19 times more likely to die before a final exam. Grannies of students who weren’t doing well in their classes were at even higher risk of meeting their maker: Students who were failing a class were 50 times as likely as others to lose a grandmother.
Like many professors, I’ve encountered this phenomenon, and I can tell you that it’s really difficult to address. No one wants to demand that a genuinely grieving grandchild produce a death certificate, but no one wants to be “played,” either. It calls for finesse.
Recently, this coincidence of grandparental death and exam times was the subject of an article that included a survey of several instructors, who were asked how they coped with this particular dilemma. Here is my favorite–one I fully intend to adopt.
Dear Student: I’m very sorry to hear of the loss in your family. Please know you are all in my thoughts in this difficult time. I understand the importance of family in times of grief, and I hope you can be a source of support for your parents in what is one of the most difficult life transitions we all must face as we get older.
I would very much like to send your [Mom or Dad] a card and a short note to let them know they are in my thoughts and to single you out for praise in being so proactive and forthright in speaking to me. Would you be kind enough to send along [his or her] snail mail address so I can get this in the mail in the next day or so?
[H/T to Jim Brown, who posted this article on Facebook!]
A University of Wisconsin website describes the Wisconsin Idea as “the principle that the university should improve people’s lives beyond the classroom.” The University’s mission statement has long included the following language: “basic to every purpose of the system is the search for truth.”
According to AP and several other news outlets, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker–in addition to cutting $300 million from the University’s budget–
had wanted to insert language in the budget stating the university’s mission was “to meet the state’s workforce needs.” He wanted to remove language saying UW’s mission is to “extend knowledge and its application beyond the boundaries of its campus” and to “serve and stimulate society.” He also wanted to remove the statement “Basic to every purpose of the system is the search for truth.”
When the proposed changes became public, the enormous blowback obviously took the Governor by surprise, and he backed off, initially suggesting the change was “a drafting error” that hadn’t been caught.
Right.
The New York Times and other media sources immediately debunked that lame excuse. As a blogger at Daily Kos wrote:
Second, this wasn’t “somehow overlooked” by University of Wisconsin officials. They objected on several occasions to it, but the Walker administration refused to back down.
As the Times noted in a scathing editorial, “It was as if a trade school agenda were substituted for the idea of a university.”
Scott Walker is emblematic of the anti-intellectualism that is so rampant on the American Right. He is one of the (far too many) shallow and ambitious politicians who think education and job training are synonymous, that scholarly research and the “search for truth” are elitist non-essentials, and that humans don’t need to know anything that isn’t immediately useful for obtaining gainful employment. They’d have handed Socrates that cup of hemlock without thinking twice.
After all, if people are allowed to search for truth, they’ll ask inconvenient questions. They’ll challenge the martinets. They might even see themselves as citizens rather than obedient consumers.
