Adapting to Britain’s mediocre prospects
By Martin Wolf
Published: July 16 2009 20:16 | Last updated: July 16 2009 20:16
If the government of the UK wishes to find a suitable motto, it should adopt the advice of a great Scot. “Great Britain should,” wrote Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, “... endeavour to accommodate her future views and designs to the real mediocrity of her circumstances.” Smith offers wise counsel. The country’s circumstances are more mediocre than imagined two years ago. The question is how to respond.
Three things have combined to postpone widespread recognition of the task: first, the government that was in charge when exaggerated optimism became rife is still in power; second, nobody can be sure how mediocre the country’s longer-term circumstances are going to be; and, finally, as Giles Wilkes points out in an excellent new paper for the Liberal Democrat think tank, CentreForum, with modest initial levels of public debt and low nominal and real interest rates, the UK government was right to let its borrowing take the strain.*
The result has been a “phoney war”. Hysteria over a few million pounds in expenses for members of parliament has drowned out discussion of close to £200bn ($330bn, €230bn) in annual government borrowing. But the phoney war will end. How should the UK plan to fight the real one?
It must start by making finance safer. The simple and painful truth is that another such financial shock might even bankrupt the British state. No industry can be allowed to impose such costs – comparable, in fiscal terms, to those of a major war – on a largely innocent public.
Unfortunately, while containing sensible points, the Treasury’s white paper on financial markets is imbued with what I think of as an industrial policy perspective on finance. It accepts, not least, that it should be a goal of policy to “maintain the future pre-eminence of the UK’s international financial services markets”. Alas, a competitive advantage in the supply of global “bads” is really a disadvantage.
Private parties cannot be allowed to gamble with taxpayers’ money. Letting that happen is to provide a gigantic subsidy. The right policy is to ensure that the costs imposed by the failings of finance on the rest of society are properly internalised within the sector. Then, let the market forces we are supposed to believe in decide how big the sector should be. This is why a crucial reform is a credible plan to wind up institutions when they manage to get into difficulty. It is also why higher capital requirements are needed.
Government must also deal with the fiscal legacy of the present crisis. As an immortal borrower with an excellent credit rating it was right to become borrower of last resort in the crisis. The big question is how and when to unwind these deficits.
Nobody can doubt that a huge effort at fiscal consolidation will be needed once the economy recovers. The question is how long such consolidation can be postponed if the economy does not. The danger of acting too soon is that it would deepen the recession. The danger of acting too late is that the debt accumulation might generate a vicious spiral of rising real interest rates and so explosive debt-dynamics.
My guess is that it will be impossible to postpone tightening for very many years, even if the recovery is not as strong as one might wish. But the more credible the commitment to stability, the longer it can be postponed. That can be achieved by cementing the credibility of the independent central bank and by spelling out the details and scale of the spending cuts and tax boosts that will follow recovery.
In his paper, Mr Wilkes focuses on raising taxes on property and the value added tax. The arguments for imposing heavy taxes on site values are very strong. We have just seen, in all too glorious colour, the dire results of turning a nation’s population into land speculators. If necessary, let the cash-poor but land-rich borrow their tax payments from the government, and demand repayment on death. VAT revenues must also be raised, which can be done by eliminating exemptions.
Equally important, however, will be a plan for curbing spending that does minimal damage to the country’s future. Public sector wages and pensions will have to be curbed. The former can be achieved by curbing the aggregate wage bill and letting managers decide the details. This should also drive higher public sector productivity. Beyond that, governments must protect true investment. But neither health nor education can be sacrosanct. What matters is not the overall value of such specific areas of spending, but their benefits at the margin. The UK will never have a better chance than now to rethink public sector priorities and long-term funding.
It is painful to be forced to parcel out the consequences of unforeseen losses. But these losses look permanent and so cannot be avoided. Fortunately, such crises are not all bad. They are opportunities for desirable change. In the case of the UK, change is inescapable. The party that deserves to govern is the one that recognises the pain and embraces the opportunities.
* ‘A balancing act’, CentreForum
Showing posts with label public services. Show all posts
Showing posts with label public services. Show all posts
Friday, September 4, 2009
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Problems with Public-Private Partnerships
Public-privé, des ratés en série, par Virginie Malingre
LE MONDE | 09.02.09 | 13h46 • Mis à jour le 09.02.09 | 13h46
Uu jobcenter de mon quartier, quand j'ai rempli le dossier pour obtenir un "national insurance number", nécessaire pour des formalités administratives qui n'ont pas besoin d'être détaillées ici, l'employé chargé de mon cas a décidé que je cherchais "activement un travail". "Vous travaillez à la maison, votre employeur est en France. C'est compliqué. Après tout, ce que vous voulez, c'est votre "national insurance number". De toute façon, personne ne vérifiera", m'a-t-il expliqué. Je me suis imaginée aux allocations familiales en France, demandant un numéro d'allocataire. Et là, c'est sûr, on m'aurait gardé le temps nécessaire plutôt que de me faire mentir.
"C'est une histoire typiquement britannique, m'assure Patrick Dunleavy, professeur à la London School of Economics, spécialiste du service public. La personne qui vous a reçue doit traiter un certain nombre de dossiers par jour." Et son salaire dépend de sa performance. Le service public britannique s'est mis aux méthodes du privé avec zèle. Il se donne des objectifs aussi bien pour remplir ses lits d'hôpital que pour faire arriver ses trains à l'heure. Et distribue des bonus aux bons élèves.
"Après tout, ce que vous vouliez, c'était votre "national insurance number". Il a satisfait tout le monde, vous et son patron", conclut en riant M. Dunleavy. En l'occurrence, personne ne pâtira de cette fausse déclaration, si ce n'est les statistiques nationales, qui vont me comptabiliser comme chômeuse. Mais quand le secrétaire d'Etat à l'immigration, Phil Woolas, annonce, la semaine dernière, que ses services ont perdu 17 000 dossiers de réfugiés demandant l'asile - ils se sont évaporés entre deux bureaux -, on imagine le désarroi des individus concernés, dont certains attendent depuis plus de dix ans une décision.
Il ne se passe pas une semaine sans que la presse relate un bug de l'administration, aux conséquences plus ou moins dévastatrices. Pourtant, sous l'impulsion de Tony Blair, le secteur public s'est étoffé : il emploie aujourd'hui 5,8 millions de personnes, soit 20 % des salariés du pays, et les salaires y sont supérieurs à ceux du privé. Mais la City a longtemps aspiré les talents britanniques. Et les réformes que les gouvernements successifs ont menées depuis vingt ans, si elles ont amélioré l'efficacité des services publics, ont parfois été contre-productives.
Ainsi la fragmentation des tâches, qui devait permettre de lutter contre une bureaucratie excessive, s'est retournée contre ses concepteurs. L'affaire Baby P. - cet enfant mort début novembre sous les coups de ses parents - est de ce point de vue fort instructive. Soixante personnes de différents services publics (santé, police, école, assistance sociale...) avaient eu affaire à la famille sans qu'à aucun moment ces gens ne se parlent.
Fin novembre 2008, l'Ofsted (Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills), responsable des services d'inspection, dévoile dans un rapport accablant que quatre enfants meurent chaque semaine en Angleterre, comme Baby P., de violences parentales et de négligences des services sociaux. Quelques jours plus tard, le ministère de l'éducation et des familles, qui n'a pas supervisé le travail, corrige : le bon chiffre n'était pas 4 mais 1...
En France, pointe M. Dunleavy, "vous faites encore les choses à l'ancienne. Vous vérifiez quatre fois une information avant de la publier". Indéniablement, jamais Bercy n'aurait mis sur son site Web la mauvaise version de son projet de budget, comme l'a fait le Trésor fin novembre. Version qui a permis au pays d'apprendre que le gouvernement avait envisagé d'augmenter la TVA en 2011, après les prochaines élections.
Sir Digby Jones, ancien secrétaire d'Etat au commerce qui a démissionné en octobre, juge que Whitehall pourrait fonctionner avec "moitié moins de fonctionnaires". L'homme est connu pour ses sorties intempestives. Mais il est vrai que le secteur public britannique multiplie les ratés. Pour autant, quand le privé s'en mêle - ce qui se fait de plus en plus -, le résultat n'est pas concluant. Ainsi, juste avant Noël, 100 000 fonctionnaires ont appris qu'ils avaient reçu pendant trente ans une retraite trop élevée. Et qu'ils verraient son montant diminuer pour compenser le trop-perçu de 140 millions de livres. Tout ça parce que l'entreprise Xafinity, qui s'occupe d'une partie des retraites des fonctionnaires du National Health Service et de l'armée, s'est trompée dans ses calculs pendant trois décennies !
Là aussi, juge M. Dunleavy, "c'est typique. On demande à ces sous-traitants d'être le moins chers possible. Et en même temps, l'administration perd son expertise sur ces sujets qui sont externalisés". Et s'avère incapable de contrôler. C'est comme ça que, en novembre 2007, le fisc a laissé partir dans la nature les données fiscales de 25 millions de contribuables. La Cour des comptes lui avait juste demandé 20 000 dossiers anonymes. Mais personne au Trésor n'était capable de transférer ces données. Il a du coup été fait appel à un prestataire extérieur qui, pour réduire les coûts, est allé au plus simple : copier sur un CD tous les dossiers sans prendre la peine d'enlever les données confidentielles, et l'envoyer par la poste. Le courrier n'était pas recommandé - trop cher sans doute - et s'est perdu...
Courriel : malingre@lemonde.fr.
LE MONDE | 09.02.09 | 13h46 • Mis à jour le 09.02.09 | 13h46
Uu jobcenter de mon quartier, quand j'ai rempli le dossier pour obtenir un "national insurance number", nécessaire pour des formalités administratives qui n'ont pas besoin d'être détaillées ici, l'employé chargé de mon cas a décidé que je cherchais "activement un travail". "Vous travaillez à la maison, votre employeur est en France. C'est compliqué. Après tout, ce que vous voulez, c'est votre "national insurance number". De toute façon, personne ne vérifiera", m'a-t-il expliqué. Je me suis imaginée aux allocations familiales en France, demandant un numéro d'allocataire. Et là, c'est sûr, on m'aurait gardé le temps nécessaire plutôt que de me faire mentir.
"C'est une histoire typiquement britannique, m'assure Patrick Dunleavy, professeur à la London School of Economics, spécialiste du service public. La personne qui vous a reçue doit traiter un certain nombre de dossiers par jour." Et son salaire dépend de sa performance. Le service public britannique s'est mis aux méthodes du privé avec zèle. Il se donne des objectifs aussi bien pour remplir ses lits d'hôpital que pour faire arriver ses trains à l'heure. Et distribue des bonus aux bons élèves.
"Après tout, ce que vous vouliez, c'était votre "national insurance number". Il a satisfait tout le monde, vous et son patron", conclut en riant M. Dunleavy. En l'occurrence, personne ne pâtira de cette fausse déclaration, si ce n'est les statistiques nationales, qui vont me comptabiliser comme chômeuse. Mais quand le secrétaire d'Etat à l'immigration, Phil Woolas, annonce, la semaine dernière, que ses services ont perdu 17 000 dossiers de réfugiés demandant l'asile - ils se sont évaporés entre deux bureaux -, on imagine le désarroi des individus concernés, dont certains attendent depuis plus de dix ans une décision.
Il ne se passe pas une semaine sans que la presse relate un bug de l'administration, aux conséquences plus ou moins dévastatrices. Pourtant, sous l'impulsion de Tony Blair, le secteur public s'est étoffé : il emploie aujourd'hui 5,8 millions de personnes, soit 20 % des salariés du pays, et les salaires y sont supérieurs à ceux du privé. Mais la City a longtemps aspiré les talents britanniques. Et les réformes que les gouvernements successifs ont menées depuis vingt ans, si elles ont amélioré l'efficacité des services publics, ont parfois été contre-productives.
Ainsi la fragmentation des tâches, qui devait permettre de lutter contre une bureaucratie excessive, s'est retournée contre ses concepteurs. L'affaire Baby P. - cet enfant mort début novembre sous les coups de ses parents - est de ce point de vue fort instructive. Soixante personnes de différents services publics (santé, police, école, assistance sociale...) avaient eu affaire à la famille sans qu'à aucun moment ces gens ne se parlent.
Fin novembre 2008, l'Ofsted (Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills), responsable des services d'inspection, dévoile dans un rapport accablant que quatre enfants meurent chaque semaine en Angleterre, comme Baby P., de violences parentales et de négligences des services sociaux. Quelques jours plus tard, le ministère de l'éducation et des familles, qui n'a pas supervisé le travail, corrige : le bon chiffre n'était pas 4 mais 1...
En France, pointe M. Dunleavy, "vous faites encore les choses à l'ancienne. Vous vérifiez quatre fois une information avant de la publier". Indéniablement, jamais Bercy n'aurait mis sur son site Web la mauvaise version de son projet de budget, comme l'a fait le Trésor fin novembre. Version qui a permis au pays d'apprendre que le gouvernement avait envisagé d'augmenter la TVA en 2011, après les prochaines élections.
Sir Digby Jones, ancien secrétaire d'Etat au commerce qui a démissionné en octobre, juge que Whitehall pourrait fonctionner avec "moitié moins de fonctionnaires". L'homme est connu pour ses sorties intempestives. Mais il est vrai que le secteur public britannique multiplie les ratés. Pour autant, quand le privé s'en mêle - ce qui se fait de plus en plus -, le résultat n'est pas concluant. Ainsi, juste avant Noël, 100 000 fonctionnaires ont appris qu'ils avaient reçu pendant trente ans une retraite trop élevée. Et qu'ils verraient son montant diminuer pour compenser le trop-perçu de 140 millions de livres. Tout ça parce que l'entreprise Xafinity, qui s'occupe d'une partie des retraites des fonctionnaires du National Health Service et de l'armée, s'est trompée dans ses calculs pendant trois décennies !
Là aussi, juge M. Dunleavy, "c'est typique. On demande à ces sous-traitants d'être le moins chers possible. Et en même temps, l'administration perd son expertise sur ces sujets qui sont externalisés". Et s'avère incapable de contrôler. C'est comme ça que, en novembre 2007, le fisc a laissé partir dans la nature les données fiscales de 25 millions de contribuables. La Cour des comptes lui avait juste demandé 20 000 dossiers anonymes. Mais personne au Trésor n'était capable de transférer ces données. Il a du coup été fait appel à un prestataire extérieur qui, pour réduire les coûts, est allé au plus simple : copier sur un CD tous les dossiers sans prendre la peine d'enlever les données confidentielles, et l'envoyer par la poste. Le courrier n'était pas recommandé - trop cher sans doute - et s'est perdu...
Courriel : malingre@lemonde.fr.
Sunday, November 16, 2008
Explaining the South
Down There on a Visit
By Charles Simic
New York Review of Books - Volume 51, Number 13 · August 12, 2004
For years now I've been looking at a photograph Walker Evans took in the summer of 1936 in the South. I thought of it again while getting ready to travel to the South a few weeks ago. At the intersection of two dusty, unpaved roads stands a dilapidated building with a small porch and a single gas pump. There's no human being in sight. The intense heat and the bright sunlight must have made the locals, a few of whom can be seen standing on the very same porch on another occasion, seek shade. The shutters of the two upstairs windows are closed except for small openings where the slats are broken or have been removed. The postmaster and his wife, who run the pump and the store, are most likely napping, their heads covered with newspapers to protect them against the flies.
Downstairs, in the small side room with a scale and rows of bins for the mail, there are a few letters whose recipients live too far or receive mail too rarely to bother making the trip. With so little to see and so much to imagine, a photograph like this is an invitation to endless conjecture. There's nothing more ordinary, nothing more American than what it depicts: a small town one passes with barely a glance on the way to someplace else.
This June, driving around Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia, I decided to pay a visit to Sprott and Hale County, where Walker Evans and James Agee collaborated on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, their photographic and verbal record of the lives of three dirt-poor tenant farmer families in the region. I wanted to, as it were, poke around the photograph on my wall. I drove from Mobile past a series of tiny little towns with names like Sunflower, Wagarville, Sunny South, Catherine, and Marion. It was early Sunday morning so my daughter and I were a bit dressed up, hoping to find a church along the way and attend a service. We saw plenty of houses of worship, but oddly, not much activity around them yet. Driving through one of the bigger towns, we were surprised to find a huge Wal-Mart open at 9:20 with dozens of cars parked outside.
The other puzzle was a number of abandoned churches both in towns and in the countryside. I recall a small, unobtrusive, white wooden church sunk in the earth, the grass and weeds grown tall around it. It had a thick, squat steeple, a single door, two windows on each side covered up with boards. The sky over it was cloudless, the quiet so deep we could hear the crows flap their wings as they flew over our heads in alarm. The people who came to pray there must have died or moved away years ago, but the spirit they sought after lingered on. I wondered if there was anything left inside the church, a hard bench, a hymnal, a suspended oil lamp, a skeleton of a dead bird.
The landscape of central Alabama alternates between patches of woods and rolling fields of cultivated land that open onto long vistas before closing up again. We found the crossroads Evans photographed and a small shut-down country store where the old one most probably stood. It did not appear that much had changed in sixty-eight years. There was a large sign announcing a rodeo in nearby Marion, two half-collapsed barns across the road, and a cat that came out of the bushes hungry and lonely, but ran away every time my daughter tried to make friends with it. The population of Sprott today is reputed to be ten people and that sounds about right. Hale County has 17,185 inhabitants and the county seat, Greensboro, only 2,731. I have no idea how many people lived there in the 1930s, when the cotton plantations were in full operation, but there must have been more. The impression one gets is that there's not much work to be had on the farms that remain. Most of these are large and require a small number of people to work the machinery. Whoever can pick up and leave the county does so, or if they decide to stay, they commute great distances to their jobs. On weekdays, the traffic to Tuscaloosa, Birmingham, and Montgomery tends to be heavy. Most of these commuters are heading to low-paying retail and service jobs in numerous shopping malls at the outskirts of these cities.
We headed south to Selma. What we found there surprised us. Its spacious downtown, where some 30,000 people once gathered with Martin Luther King to make a march to Montgomery, is badly rundown. It's a shell of the town it once was. Many of its beauti-ful turn-of-the-century buildings and storefronts appear in part vacated while others are completely closed. This I found almost everywhere to be the case. The heart of Montgomery has broad avenues, a restored Greek Revival state capitol atop a hill where Jefferson Davis took the oath of office on February 18, 1861, as the president of the Confederate States, and the famous civil rights landmarks, like the Baptist church where the bus boycott was organized in 1956, but there are few people there even on a Monday morning.
The capital of Mississippi, Jackson, is deserted on Friday afternoon. No one walks its streets. There are no restaurants or bars and no hint of where people who work in its many offices get fed. Old photographs of all these places show streets teeming with pedestrians, stores big and small, signs and marquees advertising cafés, drug stores, tobacco shops, and five-and-dime emporiums. The centers of many of the most interesting Southern cities, the neighborhoods that make them most distinct and attractive, have been forsaken for fast-food places, gas stations, and shopping centers at the outskirts, which resemble any other place in the United States.
The middle classes and the rich reside in well-maintained old and new suburbs and vote Republican, while their impoverished neighbors, who tend to be mostly African-American and who outnumber them in many counties, live in rural slums. While there's no official segregation between the races, there is a caste system with clear class distinctions and accompanying inequality that is apparent wherever one goes. There are towns like Jonestown, Mississippi, that in their shocking poverty make one gasp. Weathered, sagging, and unpainted houses, boarded-up windows, others covered with plastic, yards full of dismantled rusty cars, their parts scattered about amid all kinds of other junk and trash, are everywhere. Idle people of all ages lounge on collapsing porches or stand on street corners waiting for something to do. In the countryside with its fertile dark soil, soybeans have become the chief crop, poultry farms are a major business, and there are nine gambling casinos in the next county. All that has increased per capita income in the region, but there was no evidence of it among the blacks I saw.
In Clarksdale, the former capital of the cotton kingdom, which President Clinton visited during his 1999 tour focusing on the nation's poorest communities, I saw in a parking lot of a closed supermarket two ancient cars parked side by side with their four doors wide open. Over their hoods, roofs, and doors, spread out and draped, someone's once-pretty dresses and worn children's clothes were covering every available space. Two black women sat on low stools, one on each side, waiting for a customer. This is the town, they say, where the blues began. One of its legends, Robert Johnson, was reputed to have sold his soul to the devil at a crossroads nearby. There's a blues museum in town and an excel-lent restaurant and juke joint called Ground Zero owned in part by the actor Morgan Freeman, a part-time local resident. The downtown buildings of what was once clearly a flourishing city reminded me of towns in the Midwest and New England after their industries went broke in the late 1960s and their factories were shut down. Clarksdale has the despoiled look of a conquered and sacked city. Ranking conditions of poverty is a risky business, but what I encountered in Mississippi surpasses anything I've seen in a long time in this country. That the people here vote Democratic and have a liberal black Democratic congressman has not been of visible help to them.
When one enters the small store that also serves as a post office in nearby Belen, one first comes upon shelves cluttered with ancient TV parts. On one side, in the half-dark, an old black man sits poking his screwdriver into the back of a black-and-white set that must be at least forty years old. Beyond the TV repair section, there's a grocery store selling a few absolute necessities like canned beans and white bread, and finally in the back, the post office itself with its single oval and barred window where one can purchase a stamp. The old white storekeeper who shows me and my friend around could have walked out of one of Eudora Welty's Depression-era photographs. He is so pale; he probably rarely leaves the premises. In the meantime, he is happy to chat. It's not a cliché that people are courteous in the South. Many of them tell memorable stories, love words, and can make something unexpected out of the simplest verbal ingredients. No wonder so many great writers have come from Mississippi.
My first acquaintance with the South was in 1961, when I spent four months at Fort Gordon, Georgia, being trained by the US Army to be a military policeman. On my weekly passes, I went into Augusta, where there was little to do beyond getting drunk in dives frequented by soldiers. With the news of men and women who protested segregation being beaten and occasionally murdered all over the South, it was not the most comfortable place for a Northerner to be. Without even trying, one inevitably got into arguments with the locals. The place seethed with hatred, I thought then. All that changed, of course, over the years, and so did my own understanding of the complexities. There were plenty of racists to be sure, but there were also people of conscience who did their best to alleviate the wrongs in their midst.
Fifty miles from Jonestown, Mississippi, is William Faulkner's Oxford. It has a pretty courthouse square, a bookstore that could match any in New York City or Boston, fine cafés and restaurants, most of which have second-story porches with tables and chairs overlooking the square. People laze there for hours sipping a drink and gabbing. One could live here— one thinks—in a kind of timeless present. Bank, church, a few elegant stores, a barbershop, and a hotel—what more does one need? In the afternoons, when the shadows lengthen and the heat subsides a bit, one has the overwhelming sense of well-being as if everything were just dandy everywhere and one really had no cause to make oneself a nuisance to strangers with whom one happened to strike a casual conversation.
Unfortunately, the local newspapers brought me out of my reverie. The Clarksdale Press Register, which I'd bought earlier that day, had the following letter:
The absolute certainty of that outcome, I found, is a source of deep satisfaction to the believers. They enjoy hearing about the torments that await the damned. That must be the explanation for the great success of Glorious Appearing by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, the twelfth and final book in a series that recounts the story of those left behind when the Apocalypse arrives and the Rapture gathers the elect into heaven. The first eleven novels have sold 40 million copies and the new one is also a best seller.[2] The blood and gore of the final battle of the ages between Jesus and the legions of the Antichrist are described at great length and in loving detail:
Tens of thousands of foot soldiers dropped their weapons, grabbed their heads or their chests, fell to their knees, and writhed as they were invisibly sliced asunder. Their innards and entrails gushed to the desert floor, and as those around them turned to run, they too were slain, their blood pooling and rising in the unforgiving brightness of the glory of Christ.
It was reported that President Bush tried to enlist the Vatican for help in his reelection when he paid a visit to the Pope last month. He has no need to make a similar appeal to the churches in the South. During the many hours of listening to Christian radio, I was assured again and again that the Bible is the best source of information on contemporary events and the only guide anybody needs on how to vote. When I watched religious talk shows on TV at night, I heard that the many wars that the President has promised us have happily been foretold in the Bible. "Let us restore to God the thunder," the poet John Crowe Ransom wrote in 1930,[4] and the people who called in would have readily agreed. Peace on earth went unmentioned. What excited the people I heard was the force of deadly weapons. I got the impression that it was a greater offense to believe in evolution than to bomb a city into rubble. As a letter to the Mobile Register signed "Addison DeBoi" put it,
As if to alert me of the danger of such sweeping statements, I stumbled on a magnificent exhibition of Baroque art at the Mississippi Arts Pavilion in Jackson. It came from the State Arts Collections in Dresden and included porcelain, costumes, sculpture, armor, and paintings by Rembrandt, Rubens, Titian, Mantegna, Velázquez, Van Dyck, Lucas Cranach, Vermeer, and a few other Old Masters. It was fairly well attended. There were even families with kids. I've no idea what they thought of the sensual teenage Madonna holding a mischievous-looking two-year-old. The museum guides and attendants appeared to be volunteers. They stood at various points of the huge exhibition and kept asking each visitor if he or she were enjoying the show and were exceedingly pleased to hear that we did. It sounded as if there had been complaints and that they needed confirmation that they were, indeed, taking part in something worthy.
At the Mississippi Museum of Art there was another imported show— "Paris Moderne," art deco works from the 1920s and 1930s. Almost next door, Confederate flags were flying over the state buildings, often in close proximity to landmarks commemorating the civil rights struggle. A few well-known participants in the most gruesome events of its bloody history are still alive in nearby towns and remain unconvicted, as columns in newspapers on the anniversary of their crimes reminded their readers.
On another cloudless day, I drove south toward Hattiesburg and Mobile. The roadside fruit stands were overflowing with baskets of ripe peaches, tomatoes, and watermelons. There was also something called "boiled peanuts" which I was wary to try. On the radio, the burning issue was the new policy just passed by the Mississippi legislature that will drop from Medicaid eligibility 65,000 of its neediest elderly citizens and chronically ill patients with severe disabilities, leaving them to rely solely on the federally funded Medicare for their drugs. The governor, Haley Barbour, the brains behind the rollback, is the former chairman of the national Republican Party. In his view, taxpayers ought not to have to pay for free health care for people who can work and take care of themselves and just choose not to.
Most callers to the show sounded scared. The host of the program maintained that their fears were exaggerated, that Medicare would help out; but they were not buying it. They griped about the difficulties they already had signing up for the federal government's new prescription drug discount cards. The host of the show blamed the fiscal crises in the state on a teachers' pay raise and so did some of the other callers. He was willing to admit that there may be some inconvenience to the elderly, but he wanted them to realize that in the end nothing could be done. What came through were the inability and the reluctance of more than a few people to grasp the kind of hardship that faced their fellow citizens. The familiar Republican Party line—less government, no new taxes —eventually silenced the most stubborn of the complaining voices.
The lack of compassion for the less fortunate is also to be found in New Hampshire, where I live. Our politicians are as heartless as the ones in Mississippi and see themselves, despite their assurances otherwise, as being elected primarily to serve the well-to-do. Let the fittest survive is their attitude. However, they don't invoke God as they go about ensuring that the poor stay poor. As for the losers, both in the South and in the North, their outrage is not directed against the politicians. This is one of the great puzzles of recent American politics: voters who enthusiastically cast their vote against their self-interest, who care more about "family values," school prayer, guns, abortion, gay marriage, or the teaching of evolution than about having decent health care insurance and being paid a living wage. They squabble, as they did in Alabama recently, over whether the Ten Commandments ought to be posted in a courthouse while the education of their children continues to be underfunded and their overcrowded public schools are violent and dangerous places.
The result of these dogmatic inconsistencies of belief—which I found wherever I went—is fragmentation: "the growing social, physical, economic, and cultural separation of Americans from each other," as Sheldon Hackney points out in a fine new collection of essays by thirteen different authors, Where We Stand, Voices of the Southern Dissent.[6] Even Pentecostals don't see eye to eye when it comes to theology. A town with no more than five hundred inhabitants has a dozen churches lining the highway. They stand barely fifty yards apart, all belonging to different schisms and factions. One of them is just a large trailer with a hand-painted name of the church tacked to its side. The door is open. Three old-model cars are parked in front.
A dozen miles down the highway is Mobile with its modern skyscrapers, and not too far beyond, the pretty little town of Fairhope on the eastern shore of the bay with its elegant boutiques, art galleries, and good restaurants. Fairhope was founded in 1884 as a model community inspired by a belief in land as common inheritance and as a cooperative commonwealth free from all forms of private monopoly and opportunities to prey upon one another. In his bittersweet reminiscence of growing up in Fairhope, included in Where We Stand, Paul M. Gaston, whose grandfather was one of the founders and guiding forces of the community, laments its transformation into what it is today, an upscale resort town where one of the shops for the well-heeled women is called Utopia without any irony. He writes of the morally benumbed citizenry unconcerned about disparities of wealth and the social apartheid such towns as Fairhope seem to serve.
It's easy to put all that out of one's mind as one cruises past the sandy beaches of Mobile Bay. The end of a long pier with a gazebo at Point Clear seems a good place for an afternoon siesta on a bench with the blue sky and sea birds for company. It's hot, but there's a breeze from the water. After a while, I hear the sound of chamber music. It's live, coming from the spacious lawn of the resort hotel next door where a wedding, it appears, is about to take place. There are some fifty chairs lined up in rows with a pulpit in front but no guests yet, only a string quartet playing Mozart. Eventually, as the guests begin to emerge from the hotel, I draw closer. They are a distinguished bunch, the men in tuxedos and the women in stylish, well-cut summer dresses. They come alone or in pairs strolling across the rich lawn to take their seats. With the quartet playing a lovely minuet the four bridesmaids, all wearing dark red dresses, come out one by one trailed by the groom and his parents. The bride, on the arm of her father, is the last to appear. She's a very pretty blonde.
I'm too far away to hear the minister, but I can see them exchange rings. On a platform by the edge of the water, I see people setting up tables, decorating them with flowers for what I assume will be the wedding feast. It's all very proper, very charming, and very inviting. The servers are mostly black and I realize that they are the first people of color I've seen since I drove into the Fairhope region. By now the wedding is over, the sun is setting over Mobile Bay, and the photographer is in a hurry to have the newlyweds pose against it. He wants them smooching and they oblige again and again, each kiss more lusty than the last one, to the joy of the younger members of the wedding party and the disapproving glances of the old. After that's over, they all file by me on the way to dinner, smiling and nodding in a most friendly way.
Yes, people told me on my trip, the American dream has been going wrong somewhere. I saw TV evangelists bring thousands of ecstatic believers to their feet. These programs were a mixture of old camp meetings, revivalist tents, rock concerts, and sales pitches on how to make millions in real estate "without spending a dime of your own money." The huge crowds were made up of well-dressed, middle- class people of all ages and races. Their piety was touching. Their eyes grew moist when Jesus was mentioned. God frets about them individually and they count on his guidance in practical matters. So many of the sermons I heard were about turning around one's life, overcoming financial worries, achieving worldly success. The men doing the preaching had made millions saving souls and had no qualms offering themselves as a model to emulate. Their lack of humility was astonishing. I'm flying high, the faces said, because God has time for me.
"There is going to be trouble in this country," a lawyer warned me. He wouldn't tell me from what direction. Like others I had met in the South, he kept a gun in his car; he had, he said, several more at home and worried that the government may take away his arsenal. What are they for? In one of his books, the Mississippi novelist and short story writer Barry Hannah suggests an answer:
"The grungier the town, the better the music and the ribs are liable to be." So I heard. Unfortunately, as I discovered, this is not really true. Most poor people eat mostly poorly prepared food and the better musicians tend to gravitate to cities where customers have cash to spend. The best ribs I had on my trip were not in any of the smaller towns, but in Atlanta. Fat Matt's Rib Joint is a small, unassuming place that promises little from the outside. It serves slabs of pork ribs on paper plates with slices of white bread. There are also bags of potato chips, bowls of rum-soaked beans, and plenty of paper napkins to wipe one's fingers and lips. The crowd is socially and racially mixed. Sitting side by side at long communal tables, eating and drinking pitchers of beer, are well-dressed men and women who could be doctors, lawyers, truck drivers, gas station attendants, and undertakers. The ribs are delicious and cheap, and there's live music. A terrific band is playing a little blues, a little country.
The four white musicians look as if they have day jobs. Three of them are grizzled men in their early sixties who could have come out of an R. Crumb drawing and all of whom one would guess have had plenty of ups and downs in their lives. The songs they play are bawdy, funny, and have a tough realism about them that any serious writer would envy. "A woman gets tired of one man all the time," an old blues song says. Cheating wives and husbands, bad luck, and trouble are the themes. The musicians are enjoying themselves and so is everybody else. That's what our protectors of virtue find so scandalous about the cities. The way diverse classes of people and races get together, drink beer, dance, and make whoopee. But as one of my tablemates, a woman from south Georgia, told me, "Atlanta is not the South."
Notes
[1] The Clarksdale Press Register, June 3, 2004.
[2] See Joan Didion's essay on the Left Behind series in these pages, "Mr. Bush & the Divine," November 6, 2003.
[3] Glorious Appearing: The End of Days (Tyndale House, 2004), p. 226.
[4] Religion in the American South (University of Carolina Press, 2004), p. 167.
[5] From the Mobile Register, Sunday, June 6, 2004.
[6] NewSouth Books, 2004, p. 189. The title recalls that of I'll Take My Stand, the collection issued in 1930 by the Southern Agrarian writers, including John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and Randall Jarrell.
[7] Bats out of Hell (Houghton Mifflin, 1993), p. 83.
By Charles Simic
New York Review of Books - Volume 51, Number 13 · August 12, 2004
For years now I've been looking at a photograph Walker Evans took in the summer of 1936 in the South. I thought of it again while getting ready to travel to the South a few weeks ago. At the intersection of two dusty, unpaved roads stands a dilapidated building with a small porch and a single gas pump. There's no human being in sight. The intense heat and the bright sunlight must have made the locals, a few of whom can be seen standing on the very same porch on another occasion, seek shade. The shutters of the two upstairs windows are closed except for small openings where the slats are broken or have been removed. The postmaster and his wife, who run the pump and the store, are most likely napping, their heads covered with newspapers to protect them against the flies.
Downstairs, in the small side room with a scale and rows of bins for the mail, there are a few letters whose recipients live too far or receive mail too rarely to bother making the trip. With so little to see and so much to imagine, a photograph like this is an invitation to endless conjecture. There's nothing more ordinary, nothing more American than what it depicts: a small town one passes with barely a glance on the way to someplace else.
This June, driving around Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia, I decided to pay a visit to Sprott and Hale County, where Walker Evans and James Agee collaborated on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, their photographic and verbal record of the lives of three dirt-poor tenant farmer families in the region. I wanted to, as it were, poke around the photograph on my wall. I drove from Mobile past a series of tiny little towns with names like Sunflower, Wagarville, Sunny South, Catherine, and Marion. It was early Sunday morning so my daughter and I were a bit dressed up, hoping to find a church along the way and attend a service. We saw plenty of houses of worship, but oddly, not much activity around them yet. Driving through one of the bigger towns, we were surprised to find a huge Wal-Mart open at 9:20 with dozens of cars parked outside.
The other puzzle was a number of abandoned churches both in towns and in the countryside. I recall a small, unobtrusive, white wooden church sunk in the earth, the grass and weeds grown tall around it. It had a thick, squat steeple, a single door, two windows on each side covered up with boards. The sky over it was cloudless, the quiet so deep we could hear the crows flap their wings as they flew over our heads in alarm. The people who came to pray there must have died or moved away years ago, but the spirit they sought after lingered on. I wondered if there was anything left inside the church, a hard bench, a hymnal, a suspended oil lamp, a skeleton of a dead bird.
The landscape of central Alabama alternates between patches of woods and rolling fields of cultivated land that open onto long vistas before closing up again. We found the crossroads Evans photographed and a small shut-down country store where the old one most probably stood. It did not appear that much had changed in sixty-eight years. There was a large sign announcing a rodeo in nearby Marion, two half-collapsed barns across the road, and a cat that came out of the bushes hungry and lonely, but ran away every time my daughter tried to make friends with it. The population of Sprott today is reputed to be ten people and that sounds about right. Hale County has 17,185 inhabitants and the county seat, Greensboro, only 2,731. I have no idea how many people lived there in the 1930s, when the cotton plantations were in full operation, but there must have been more. The impression one gets is that there's not much work to be had on the farms that remain. Most of these are large and require a small number of people to work the machinery. Whoever can pick up and leave the county does so, or if they decide to stay, they commute great distances to their jobs. On weekdays, the traffic to Tuscaloosa, Birmingham, and Montgomery tends to be heavy. Most of these commuters are heading to low-paying retail and service jobs in numerous shopping malls at the outskirts of these cities.
We headed south to Selma. What we found there surprised us. Its spacious downtown, where some 30,000 people once gathered with Martin Luther King to make a march to Montgomery, is badly rundown. It's a shell of the town it once was. Many of its beauti-ful turn-of-the-century buildings and storefronts appear in part vacated while others are completely closed. This I found almost everywhere to be the case. The heart of Montgomery has broad avenues, a restored Greek Revival state capitol atop a hill where Jefferson Davis took the oath of office on February 18, 1861, as the president of the Confederate States, and the famous civil rights landmarks, like the Baptist church where the bus boycott was organized in 1956, but there are few people there even on a Monday morning.
The capital of Mississippi, Jackson, is deserted on Friday afternoon. No one walks its streets. There are no restaurants or bars and no hint of where people who work in its many offices get fed. Old photographs of all these places show streets teeming with pedestrians, stores big and small, signs and marquees advertising cafés, drug stores, tobacco shops, and five-and-dime emporiums. The centers of many of the most interesting Southern cities, the neighborhoods that make them most distinct and attractive, have been forsaken for fast-food places, gas stations, and shopping centers at the outskirts, which resemble any other place in the United States.
The middle classes and the rich reside in well-maintained old and new suburbs and vote Republican, while their impoverished neighbors, who tend to be mostly African-American and who outnumber them in many counties, live in rural slums. While there's no official segregation between the races, there is a caste system with clear class distinctions and accompanying inequality that is apparent wherever one goes. There are towns like Jonestown, Mississippi, that in their shocking poverty make one gasp. Weathered, sagging, and unpainted houses, boarded-up windows, others covered with plastic, yards full of dismantled rusty cars, their parts scattered about amid all kinds of other junk and trash, are everywhere. Idle people of all ages lounge on collapsing porches or stand on street corners waiting for something to do. In the countryside with its fertile dark soil, soybeans have become the chief crop, poultry farms are a major business, and there are nine gambling casinos in the next county. All that has increased per capita income in the region, but there was no evidence of it among the blacks I saw.
In Clarksdale, the former capital of the cotton kingdom, which President Clinton visited during his 1999 tour focusing on the nation's poorest communities, I saw in a parking lot of a closed supermarket two ancient cars parked side by side with their four doors wide open. Over their hoods, roofs, and doors, spread out and draped, someone's once-pretty dresses and worn children's clothes were covering every available space. Two black women sat on low stools, one on each side, waiting for a customer. This is the town, they say, where the blues began. One of its legends, Robert Johnson, was reputed to have sold his soul to the devil at a crossroads nearby. There's a blues museum in town and an excel-lent restaurant and juke joint called Ground Zero owned in part by the actor Morgan Freeman, a part-time local resident. The downtown buildings of what was once clearly a flourishing city reminded me of towns in the Midwest and New England after their industries went broke in the late 1960s and their factories were shut down. Clarksdale has the despoiled look of a conquered and sacked city. Ranking conditions of poverty is a risky business, but what I encountered in Mississippi surpasses anything I've seen in a long time in this country. That the people here vote Democratic and have a liberal black Democratic congressman has not been of visible help to them.
When one enters the small store that also serves as a post office in nearby Belen, one first comes upon shelves cluttered with ancient TV parts. On one side, in the half-dark, an old black man sits poking his screwdriver into the back of a black-and-white set that must be at least forty years old. Beyond the TV repair section, there's a grocery store selling a few absolute necessities like canned beans and white bread, and finally in the back, the post office itself with its single oval and barred window where one can purchase a stamp. The old white storekeeper who shows me and my friend around could have walked out of one of Eudora Welty's Depression-era photographs. He is so pale; he probably rarely leaves the premises. In the meantime, he is happy to chat. It's not a cliché that people are courteous in the South. Many of them tell memorable stories, love words, and can make something unexpected out of the simplest verbal ingredients. No wonder so many great writers have come from Mississippi.
My first acquaintance with the South was in 1961, when I spent four months at Fort Gordon, Georgia, being trained by the US Army to be a military policeman. On my weekly passes, I went into Augusta, where there was little to do beyond getting drunk in dives frequented by soldiers. With the news of men and women who protested segregation being beaten and occasionally murdered all over the South, it was not the most comfortable place for a Northerner to be. Without even trying, one inevitably got into arguments with the locals. The place seethed with hatred, I thought then. All that changed, of course, over the years, and so did my own understanding of the complexities. There were plenty of racists to be sure, but there were also people of conscience who did their best to alleviate the wrongs in their midst.
Fifty miles from Jonestown, Mississippi, is William Faulkner's Oxford. It has a pretty courthouse square, a bookstore that could match any in New York City or Boston, fine cafés and restaurants, most of which have second-story porches with tables and chairs overlooking the square. People laze there for hours sipping a drink and gabbing. One could live here— one thinks—in a kind of timeless present. Bank, church, a few elegant stores, a barbershop, and a hotel—what more does one need? In the afternoons, when the shadows lengthen and the heat subsides a bit, one has the overwhelming sense of well-being as if everything were just dandy everywhere and one really had no cause to make oneself a nuisance to strangers with whom one happened to strike a casual conversation.
Unfortunately, the local newspapers brought me out of my reverie. The Clarksdale Press Register, which I'd bought earlier that day, had the following letter:
Dear Editor:During my trip, I was asked several times point-blank whether I was a Christian. The first time it happened, I was so surprised I didn't know what to reply. Finally, I mumbled that I was brought up in the Eastern Orthodox Church and to further buttress my credentials, I mentioned that I had priests in my family going back a couple of centuries. As far as I could tell, that didn't seem to make much impression. What people were eager to find out was whether I had accepted Jesus as my Savior. For the writer of this letter, and for others I met, Christians are to be distinguished from the rest of Americans, who are something else— liberals, secular humanists, Catholics, atheists, abortionists, etc. They all share one thing in common, however: they are all going to hell.
I am a Jesus freak.
Jesus said that you can't serve two fathers. Either you serve God the Heavenly Father or you are damned and serve Satan. All true conservatives will be against homosexuality. It's not acceptable in God's house. I believe they can be saved and change this lifestyle. Anyone that says it is OK to kill babies is damned. God made human life in His own likeness. We as Christians expect Americans to be against us. They were against Jesus. God has blessed us, but for how long? For America's weakness is turning its back on God. We better not think that God won't put his wrath on America soon. America better thank God for Christians who are praying for this country. The rest of the people are not getting what they can get in riches. May God heal the churches and people. It's time Christians take a stand in voices and elections. Get these liberals out of government, and get conservative Christian leadership in government.[1]
The absolute certainty of that outcome, I found, is a source of deep satisfaction to the believers. They enjoy hearing about the torments that await the damned. That must be the explanation for the great success of Glorious Appearing by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, the twelfth and final book in a series that recounts the story of those left behind when the Apocalypse arrives and the Rapture gathers the elect into heaven. The first eleven novels have sold 40 million copies and the new one is also a best seller.[2] The blood and gore of the final battle of the ages between Jesus and the legions of the Antichrist are described at great length and in loving detail:
Tens of thousands of foot soldiers dropped their weapons, grabbed their heads or their chests, fell to their knees, and writhed as they were invisibly sliced asunder. Their innards and entrails gushed to the desert floor, and as those around them turned to run, they too were slain, their blood pooling and rising in the unforgiving brightness of the glory of Christ.
"For My sword shall be bathed in heaven; indeed it shall come down on Edom, and on the people of My curse, for judgment.
"The sword of the Lord is filled with blood. It is made overflowing with fatness. For the Lord has a sacrifice in Bozrah, and a great slaughter in the land of Edom.
"Their land shall be soaked with blood, and their dust saturated with fatness."[3]
It was reported that President Bush tried to enlist the Vatican for help in his reelection when he paid a visit to the Pope last month. He has no need to make a similar appeal to the churches in the South. During the many hours of listening to Christian radio, I was assured again and again that the Bible is the best source of information on contemporary events and the only guide anybody needs on how to vote. When I watched religious talk shows on TV at night, I heard that the many wars that the President has promised us have happily been foretold in the Bible. "Let us restore to God the thunder," the poet John Crowe Ransom wrote in 1930,[4] and the people who called in would have readily agreed. Peace on earth went unmentioned. What excited the people I heard was the force of deadly weapons. I got the impression that it was a greater offense to believe in evolution than to bomb a city into rubble. As a letter to the Mobile Register signed "Addison DeBoi" put it,
What the left has not come to realize is that most of today's suffering is the result of the left's continued efforts to remove horror and pain from war.... The point is, war is hell, and it should be. The more respectable we make war, the more we make it less horrific, the more we seek to not harm civilians, then the greater the risk and frequency of war.[5]Skepticism, empirical evidence, and book learning are in low esteem among the Protestant evangelicals. To ask about the laws of cause and effect would be a sin. They reject modern science and dream of a theocratic state where such blasphemous subject matter would be left out from the school curriculum. Their ideal, as a shrewd young fellow told me in Tuscaloosa, is unquestioning obedience and complete conformity in matters of religion and politics. The complaint about so-called secular humanism is that it permits teachers and students too much freedom of thought and opinion. If evangelicals haven't gone around smashing TV sets and computers, it is because they recognize their power to spread their message. Aside from that, they would like to secede intellectually from the rest of the world.
As if to alert me of the danger of such sweeping statements, I stumbled on a magnificent exhibition of Baroque art at the Mississippi Arts Pavilion in Jackson. It came from the State Arts Collections in Dresden and included porcelain, costumes, sculpture, armor, and paintings by Rembrandt, Rubens, Titian, Mantegna, Velázquez, Van Dyck, Lucas Cranach, Vermeer, and a few other Old Masters. It was fairly well attended. There were even families with kids. I've no idea what they thought of the sensual teenage Madonna holding a mischievous-looking two-year-old. The museum guides and attendants appeared to be volunteers. They stood at various points of the huge exhibition and kept asking each visitor if he or she were enjoying the show and were exceedingly pleased to hear that we did. It sounded as if there had been complaints and that they needed confirmation that they were, indeed, taking part in something worthy.
At the Mississippi Museum of Art there was another imported show— "Paris Moderne," art deco works from the 1920s and 1930s. Almost next door, Confederate flags were flying over the state buildings, often in close proximity to landmarks commemorating the civil rights struggle. A few well-known participants in the most gruesome events of its bloody history are still alive in nearby towns and remain unconvicted, as columns in newspapers on the anniversary of their crimes reminded their readers.
On another cloudless day, I drove south toward Hattiesburg and Mobile. The roadside fruit stands were overflowing with baskets of ripe peaches, tomatoes, and watermelons. There was also something called "boiled peanuts" which I was wary to try. On the radio, the burning issue was the new policy just passed by the Mississippi legislature that will drop from Medicaid eligibility 65,000 of its neediest elderly citizens and chronically ill patients with severe disabilities, leaving them to rely solely on the federally funded Medicare for their drugs. The governor, Haley Barbour, the brains behind the rollback, is the former chairman of the national Republican Party. In his view, taxpayers ought not to have to pay for free health care for people who can work and take care of themselves and just choose not to.
Most callers to the show sounded scared. The host of the program maintained that their fears were exaggerated, that Medicare would help out; but they were not buying it. They griped about the difficulties they already had signing up for the federal government's new prescription drug discount cards. The host of the show blamed the fiscal crises in the state on a teachers' pay raise and so did some of the other callers. He was willing to admit that there may be some inconvenience to the elderly, but he wanted them to realize that in the end nothing could be done. What came through were the inability and the reluctance of more than a few people to grasp the kind of hardship that faced their fellow citizens. The familiar Republican Party line—less government, no new taxes —eventually silenced the most stubborn of the complaining voices.
The lack of compassion for the less fortunate is also to be found in New Hampshire, where I live. Our politicians are as heartless as the ones in Mississippi and see themselves, despite their assurances otherwise, as being elected primarily to serve the well-to-do. Let the fittest survive is their attitude. However, they don't invoke God as they go about ensuring that the poor stay poor. As for the losers, both in the South and in the North, their outrage is not directed against the politicians. This is one of the great puzzles of recent American politics: voters who enthusiastically cast their vote against their self-interest, who care more about "family values," school prayer, guns, abortion, gay marriage, or the teaching of evolution than about having decent health care insurance and being paid a living wage. They squabble, as they did in Alabama recently, over whether the Ten Commandments ought to be posted in a courthouse while the education of their children continues to be underfunded and their overcrowded public schools are violent and dangerous places.
The result of these dogmatic inconsistencies of belief—which I found wherever I went—is fragmentation: "the growing social, physical, economic, and cultural separation of Americans from each other," as Sheldon Hackney points out in a fine new collection of essays by thirteen different authors, Where We Stand, Voices of the Southern Dissent.[6] Even Pentecostals don't see eye to eye when it comes to theology. A town with no more than five hundred inhabitants has a dozen churches lining the highway. They stand barely fifty yards apart, all belonging to different schisms and factions. One of them is just a large trailer with a hand-painted name of the church tacked to its side. The door is open. Three old-model cars are parked in front.
A dozen miles down the highway is Mobile with its modern skyscrapers, and not too far beyond, the pretty little town of Fairhope on the eastern shore of the bay with its elegant boutiques, art galleries, and good restaurants. Fairhope was founded in 1884 as a model community inspired by a belief in land as common inheritance and as a cooperative commonwealth free from all forms of private monopoly and opportunities to prey upon one another. In his bittersweet reminiscence of growing up in Fairhope, included in Where We Stand, Paul M. Gaston, whose grandfather was one of the founders and guiding forces of the community, laments its transformation into what it is today, an upscale resort town where one of the shops for the well-heeled women is called Utopia without any irony. He writes of the morally benumbed citizenry unconcerned about disparities of wealth and the social apartheid such towns as Fairhope seem to serve.
It's easy to put all that out of one's mind as one cruises past the sandy beaches of Mobile Bay. The end of a long pier with a gazebo at Point Clear seems a good place for an afternoon siesta on a bench with the blue sky and sea birds for company. It's hot, but there's a breeze from the water. After a while, I hear the sound of chamber music. It's live, coming from the spacious lawn of the resort hotel next door where a wedding, it appears, is about to take place. There are some fifty chairs lined up in rows with a pulpit in front but no guests yet, only a string quartet playing Mozart. Eventually, as the guests begin to emerge from the hotel, I draw closer. They are a distinguished bunch, the men in tuxedos and the women in stylish, well-cut summer dresses. They come alone or in pairs strolling across the rich lawn to take their seats. With the quartet playing a lovely minuet the four bridesmaids, all wearing dark red dresses, come out one by one trailed by the groom and his parents. The bride, on the arm of her father, is the last to appear. She's a very pretty blonde.
I'm too far away to hear the minister, but I can see them exchange rings. On a platform by the edge of the water, I see people setting up tables, decorating them with flowers for what I assume will be the wedding feast. It's all very proper, very charming, and very inviting. The servers are mostly black and I realize that they are the first people of color I've seen since I drove into the Fairhope region. By now the wedding is over, the sun is setting over Mobile Bay, and the photographer is in a hurry to have the newlyweds pose against it. He wants them smooching and they oblige again and again, each kiss more lusty than the last one, to the joy of the younger members of the wedding party and the disapproving glances of the old. After that's over, they all file by me on the way to dinner, smiling and nodding in a most friendly way.
Yes, people told me on my trip, the American dream has been going wrong somewhere. I saw TV evangelists bring thousands of ecstatic believers to their feet. These programs were a mixture of old camp meetings, revivalist tents, rock concerts, and sales pitches on how to make millions in real estate "without spending a dime of your own money." The huge crowds were made up of well-dressed, middle- class people of all ages and races. Their piety was touching. Their eyes grew moist when Jesus was mentioned. God frets about them individually and they count on his guidance in practical matters. So many of the sermons I heard were about turning around one's life, overcoming financial worries, achieving worldly success. The men doing the preaching had made millions saving souls and had no qualms offering themselves as a model to emulate. Their lack of humility was astonishing. I'm flying high, the faces said, because God has time for me.
"There is going to be trouble in this country," a lawyer warned me. He wouldn't tell me from what direction. Like others I had met in the South, he kept a gun in his car; he had, he said, several more at home and worried that the government may take away his arsenal. What are they for? In one of his books, the Mississippi novelist and short story writer Barry Hannah suggests an answer:
The gun lobby, oh my peaceful friends, you may hate, but first you had better understand that it is a religion, only secondarily connected to the Bill of Rights. The thick-headed, sometimes even close to tearful, gaze you get when chatting with one of its partisans emanates from the view that they're holding a piece of God. There is no persuading them otherwise, even by a genius, because a life without guns implies the end of the known world to them. Any connection they make to our "pioneer past" is also a fraud, a wistful apology. Folks love a gun for what it can do. A murderer always thinks it was an accident, he says, as if a religious episode had passed over him.[7]There are fireworks for sale in almost every town in Alabama. Small rockets wrapped in red, white, and blue paper. People are all set, I was told, to celebrate George W. Bush's reelection in November. He is liked a lot in the South, especially when he speaks about American moral supremacy and our right to kick someone else's ass in the world. I did not encounter many people able to entertain the thought that we could ever be at fault as a nation or that our president could be a fool leading us into a mess. When I asked what Kerry's chances were, even friends looked at me as if I had three heads. Near Flatwood, Alabama, I almost ran off the road after seeing a small "Elect Kerry" sign. It's the only one I came across. In fact, I didn't see any Bush signs either—there's no need for them since he's following God's plan, as everybody there knows. We have always had professional true believers, but in the past their apocalyptic views were marginal and never had such strong support in Congress and the White House, where they are now regularly invited and consulted on matters of national interest. Nor did they ever before have fans even among Catholic and Jewish intellectuals on the right, who find them to be model citizens even with their fanaticism and their love of violence.
"The grungier the town, the better the music and the ribs are liable to be." So I heard. Unfortunately, as I discovered, this is not really true. Most poor people eat mostly poorly prepared food and the better musicians tend to gravitate to cities where customers have cash to spend. The best ribs I had on my trip were not in any of the smaller towns, but in Atlanta. Fat Matt's Rib Joint is a small, unassuming place that promises little from the outside. It serves slabs of pork ribs on paper plates with slices of white bread. There are also bags of potato chips, bowls of rum-soaked beans, and plenty of paper napkins to wipe one's fingers and lips. The crowd is socially and racially mixed. Sitting side by side at long communal tables, eating and drinking pitchers of beer, are well-dressed men and women who could be doctors, lawyers, truck drivers, gas station attendants, and undertakers. The ribs are delicious and cheap, and there's live music. A terrific band is playing a little blues, a little country.
The four white musicians look as if they have day jobs. Three of them are grizzled men in their early sixties who could have come out of an R. Crumb drawing and all of whom one would guess have had plenty of ups and downs in their lives. The songs they play are bawdy, funny, and have a tough realism about them that any serious writer would envy. "A woman gets tired of one man all the time," an old blues song says. Cheating wives and husbands, bad luck, and trouble are the themes. The musicians are enjoying themselves and so is everybody else. That's what our protectors of virtue find so scandalous about the cities. The way diverse classes of people and races get together, drink beer, dance, and make whoopee. But as one of my tablemates, a woman from south Georgia, told me, "Atlanta is not the South."
Notes
[1] The Clarksdale Press Register, June 3, 2004.
[2] See Joan Didion's essay on the Left Behind series in these pages, "Mr. Bush & the Divine," November 6, 2003.
[3] Glorious Appearing: The End of Days (Tyndale House, 2004), p. 226.
[4] Religion in the American South (University of Carolina Press, 2004), p. 167.
[5] From the Mobile Register, Sunday, June 6, 2004.
[6] NewSouth Books, 2004, p. 189. The title recalls that of I'll Take My Stand, the collection issued in 1930 by the Southern Agrarian writers, including John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and Randall Jarrell.
[7] Bats out of Hell (Houghton Mifflin, 1993), p. 83.
Monday, May 26, 2008
Tax Myths Debunked
Readers add their 2 cents to California tax and spend debate
George Skelton
Capitol Journal, Los Angeles Times
May 26, 2008
SACRAMENTO — This seems like a nice, quiet day to answer e-mail -- at least some of the civil comments that have been rolling in about state taxes and deficit spending.
Readers have been reacting to columns I've written contending that until Capitol politicians summon the courage to raise taxes to pay for services the public demands, the state will continue to wallow in red ink.
Sure, programs should be prioritized and some pared or even eliminated. But this addiction to borrowing to meet daily expenses keeps digging the state into a deeper hole.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the all-time state borrowing champ, recently projected a $15.2-billion deficit for the next fiscal year -- roughly 15% of the general fund -- even after he and lawmakers already narrowed the gap by $8 billion.
Here's a representative sample of printable reader e-mail:
"Balancing the budget for California is very easy. Eliminate all handouts for illegal immigrants. Capture, convict, then deport those here illegally. . . . Saves us oodles of money."
--
Jeff
Jeff, illegal immigrants don't get many government handouts: no welfare, no food stamps, no Medi-Cal healthcare. Federal law does require that they be cared for in medical emergencies, including baby delivery, and be educated in public schools.
They're a drain on the state treasury, but not as huge as many believe.
Besides, there's very little Sacramento can do about illegal immigration. That's the feds' responsibility. State and local governments just get stuck with the bill.
"We have way too many government employees making way too much money. Cut salaries to match the private sector."
--
DW
Let's put it this way, DW: You could eliminate the pay of every state worker under the governor's control -- nearly 200,000 -- and still not erase the deficit. If you also fired every legislator and legislative staffer, you'd still fall short. You'd have to additionally ax all the personnel on state university campuses.
Why is that? Because roughly 75% of the state general fund flows out to local governments and schools. It's one of the unintended consequences of Proposition 13 that dramatically cut the property tax 30 years ago. Schools used to rely on the property tax. Now they rely on Sacramento.
As for matching state pay to private sector compensation: There aren't a lot of CHP officers and prison guards to compare with in the private sector. I doubt we want to emulate private companies and offer salary bonuses to civil servants -- say, for recruiting more welfare recipients. And multimillion-dollar severance packages for fired executives isn't anything government should copy.
"Get rid of commissions that have no use."
--
Jeff
OK, Jeff. Former Gov. Pete Wilson once suggested that and was told facetiously by his finance director: "The state will save thousands and thousands of dollars."
Fact is, non-salaried advisory commissions operate on shoestrings and are politically popular. Regulatory boards are funded by the industries they regulate, are self-sustaining and don't affect the deficit.
From a lot of people, in summary: When "the governator" came to office he had a $78-billion general fund budget. Currently, it's around $102 billion. That's roughly a 30% increase. Where'd the spending go?
People, one place it went was for Schwarzenegger's car tax cut. Yes, that tax cut counts as spending -- about $6 billion annually. It's because revenue from the car tax -- the vehicle license fee -- had gone to local governments, not the state. The governor generously agreed to replace the locals' lost revenue with money from the state general fund. But he never replaced the tax he grandiosely whacked. Big hole. Big mistake.
Another reason spending has climbed is because of aggressive borrowing. In Schwarzenegger's first year as governor, the state paid out $2.5 billion on general fund bonds. Soon that will be up to around $6 billion -- on bonds approved by voters.
Also, prisons have been gobbling up tax dollars because of tough sentencing, court-ordered healthcare reforms and big pre-Schwarzenegger raises for guards.
"The people of California are overtaxed already."
--
Kevin
Actually, Kevin, we're paying only slightly above the national average. Based on Census Bureau data, California ranks 17th in state and local taxes as a percentage of personal income. New York is third, Oregon 16th, Arizona 43rd. We're high in income and sales taxes, low in property taxes.
"Nothing could be simpler than balancing the California budget. Just raise the marginal rate on individual and corporate income taxes. It's the fairest possible way."
--
Michael
Michael, you should run for the Legislature.
"The political thinking in this state lacks any imagination. A sales tax [hike] will just send business out of state. A [new] fuel tax would accomplish our CO2 reduction goals and shift most of the negative impact out of state. We don't produce Hummers and SUVs."
--
Dallas
Right, Dallas, that's just what we want to do: Slap on another gas tax when motorists already are paying $4 per gallon, including around 70 cents in taxes. Pity the politician who tries that.
"I know personally of four families in the last two months who have decided to move to Oregon. They say California is just not a very good place to live anymore."
--
Raul
Raul, then they should head on up the road. That'll leave more room on the freeways for the rest of us and reduce property demand, making homes more affordable. I'll send them a road map.
"I do not live in California, but I am fed up with every politician who says that she/he will not raise taxes. I take this as a direct insult to my intelligence. . . . I have vowed to not vote for anyone who says taxes will not be raised."
--
June, in Illinois
June, you should move out here. A road map is on the way.
Thanks for reading and writing.
george.skelton@latimes.com
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-cap26-2008may26,0,17046.column
George Skelton
Capitol Journal, Los Angeles Times
May 26, 2008
SACRAMENTO — This seems like a nice, quiet day to answer e-mail -- at least some of the civil comments that have been rolling in about state taxes and deficit spending.
Readers have been reacting to columns I've written contending that until Capitol politicians summon the courage to raise taxes to pay for services the public demands, the state will continue to wallow in red ink.
Sure, programs should be prioritized and some pared or even eliminated. But this addiction to borrowing to meet daily expenses keeps digging the state into a deeper hole.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the all-time state borrowing champ, recently projected a $15.2-billion deficit for the next fiscal year -- roughly 15% of the general fund -- even after he and lawmakers already narrowed the gap by $8 billion.
Here's a representative sample of printable reader e-mail:
"Balancing the budget for California is very easy. Eliminate all handouts for illegal immigrants. Capture, convict, then deport those here illegally. . . . Saves us oodles of money."
--
Jeff
Jeff, illegal immigrants don't get many government handouts: no welfare, no food stamps, no Medi-Cal healthcare. Federal law does require that they be cared for in medical emergencies, including baby delivery, and be educated in public schools.
They're a drain on the state treasury, but not as huge as many believe.
Besides, there's very little Sacramento can do about illegal immigration. That's the feds' responsibility. State and local governments just get stuck with the bill.
"We have way too many government employees making way too much money. Cut salaries to match the private sector."
--
DW
Let's put it this way, DW: You could eliminate the pay of every state worker under the governor's control -- nearly 200,000 -- and still not erase the deficit. If you also fired every legislator and legislative staffer, you'd still fall short. You'd have to additionally ax all the personnel on state university campuses.
Why is that? Because roughly 75% of the state general fund flows out to local governments and schools. It's one of the unintended consequences of Proposition 13 that dramatically cut the property tax 30 years ago. Schools used to rely on the property tax. Now they rely on Sacramento.
As for matching state pay to private sector compensation: There aren't a lot of CHP officers and prison guards to compare with in the private sector. I doubt we want to emulate private companies and offer salary bonuses to civil servants -- say, for recruiting more welfare recipients. And multimillion-dollar severance packages for fired executives isn't anything government should copy.
"Get rid of commissions that have no use."
--
Jeff
OK, Jeff. Former Gov. Pete Wilson once suggested that and was told facetiously by his finance director: "The state will save thousands and thousands of dollars."
Fact is, non-salaried advisory commissions operate on shoestrings and are politically popular. Regulatory boards are funded by the industries they regulate, are self-sustaining and don't affect the deficit.
From a lot of people, in summary: When "the governator" came to office he had a $78-billion general fund budget. Currently, it's around $102 billion. That's roughly a 30% increase. Where'd the spending go?
People, one place it went was for Schwarzenegger's car tax cut. Yes, that tax cut counts as spending -- about $6 billion annually. It's because revenue from the car tax -- the vehicle license fee -- had gone to local governments, not the state. The governor generously agreed to replace the locals' lost revenue with money from the state general fund. But he never replaced the tax he grandiosely whacked. Big hole. Big mistake.
Another reason spending has climbed is because of aggressive borrowing. In Schwarzenegger's first year as governor, the state paid out $2.5 billion on general fund bonds. Soon that will be up to around $6 billion -- on bonds approved by voters.
Also, prisons have been gobbling up tax dollars because of tough sentencing, court-ordered healthcare reforms and big pre-Schwarzenegger raises for guards.
"The people of California are overtaxed already."
--
Kevin
Actually, Kevin, we're paying only slightly above the national average. Based on Census Bureau data, California ranks 17th in state and local taxes as a percentage of personal income. New York is third, Oregon 16th, Arizona 43rd. We're high in income and sales taxes, low in property taxes.
"Nothing could be simpler than balancing the California budget. Just raise the marginal rate on individual and corporate income taxes. It's the fairest possible way."
--
Michael
Michael, you should run for the Legislature.
"The political thinking in this state lacks any imagination. A sales tax [hike] will just send business out of state. A [new] fuel tax would accomplish our CO2 reduction goals and shift most of the negative impact out of state. We don't produce Hummers and SUVs."
--
Dallas
Right, Dallas, that's just what we want to do: Slap on another gas tax when motorists already are paying $4 per gallon, including around 70 cents in taxes. Pity the politician who tries that.
"I know personally of four families in the last two months who have decided to move to Oregon. They say California is just not a very good place to live anymore."
--
Raul
Raul, then they should head on up the road. That'll leave more room on the freeways for the rest of us and reduce property demand, making homes more affordable. I'll send them a road map.
"I do not live in California, but I am fed up with every politician who says that she/he will not raise taxes. I take this as a direct insult to my intelligence. . . . I have vowed to not vote for anyone who says taxes will not be raised."
--
June, in Illinois
June, you should move out here. A road map is on the way.
Thanks for reading and writing.
george.skelton@latimes.com
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-cap26-2008may26,0,17046.column
Saturday, April 12, 2008
Underinvestment Kills Firefighter
Fatal blasts are linked to aging infrastructure
By Howard Blume
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
11:44 PM PDT, March 28, 2008
A blast that killed one firefighter and injured another this week in Westchester was a freak occurrence and indirectly the result of the decaying underground infrastructure, officials said Friday.
Firefighter Brent A. Lovrien, 35, was fatally injured Wednesday when a spark ignited combustible smoke behind an electrical panel door that he was trying to open with a circular saw.
Smoke had migrated into the electrical room from the underground burning of a conduit 200 feet away. When underground pipes fail, it normally causes a power outage, not a dangerous fire, officials said.
Fire officials said Lovrien acted according to policy and had no way of knowing that using the saw could trigger an explosion. Los Angeles Fire Chief Douglas Barry said the policy for handling such situations would be reviewed.
The fatal blast also injured fire Engineer Anthony J. Guzman, 48, who emerged from surgery for multiple fractures in serious but stable condition.
During a 48-hour multi-agency investigation, technicians shut down power to 400 customers in a two-block commercial corridor along Sepulveda Boulevard, near Los Angeles International Airport.
Although officials insisted that another blast was unlikely, the problem at the root of the explosions is hardly uncommon. Threading under the city are 15,000 miles of aging electrical pipe -- much of it about 60 years old or more, said David Nahai, general manager of the city's Department of Water and Power.
The electrical current travels through copper wiring that is wrapped in oil-soaked insulating paper. The entire bundle is encased in lead.
Over decades, that lead casing can develop cracks, causing arcing, said Aram H. Benjamin, the agency's assistant general manager. Workers find the problem, then replace the old pipe with a modern synthetic. About half the underground pipes have been replaced.
In this instance, the arcing ignited the old oiled-soaked paper, which began to burn like a fuse. The fire began just under the corner of Sepulveda and La Tijera boulevards.
The first explosion happened about 2 p.m., blowing the manhole cover outside a Staples store 20 feet, said Battalion Chief John Miller. The second explosion occurred about 16 minutes later -- right above the source of the fire.
Smoke from the fire found its way into a 200-foot conduit that led into the tiny electrical panel room. The room stood behind a two-story office building that houses a credit union and a sandwich shop. By about 2:30 p.m., hazardous-materials specialist Lovrien was on the scene with fellow firefighters from Station 95.
Lovrien saw smoke coming from around the edge of the nearly airtight electrical panel room and, finding the door locked, ran to get the circular saw, said arson investigator Thomas L. Derby.
His composite blade struck the steel lock, throwing off a spark. The ensuing blast threw him back eight feet. He died from blunt-force trauma to the head, probably from the doors blowing off or from the saw, arson investigators said. The La Habra resident was divorced and had no children.
The force threw Guzman about six feet, even though he was standing well behind Lovrien.
"These series of events are very, very unusual," Nahai said.
Present with Nahai, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and other officials at a Westchester news conference were comrades of Lovrien, a 13-year veteran whose sunny disposition earned him a matching nickname.
"His nickname is 'Lovey,' and that tells you everything about him," said firefighter Anthony Pacheco, his voice cracking. Just days ago, Lovrien had insisted on working a shift for Pacheco so his colleague could have his birthday off.
howard.blume@latimes.com
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-explosion29mar29,0,5311983.story
From the Los Angeles Times
By Howard Blume
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
11:44 PM PDT, March 28, 2008
A blast that killed one firefighter and injured another this week in Westchester was a freak occurrence and indirectly the result of the decaying underground infrastructure, officials said Friday.
Firefighter Brent A. Lovrien, 35, was fatally injured Wednesday when a spark ignited combustible smoke behind an electrical panel door that he was trying to open with a circular saw.
Smoke had migrated into the electrical room from the underground burning of a conduit 200 feet away. When underground pipes fail, it normally causes a power outage, not a dangerous fire, officials said.
Fire officials said Lovrien acted according to policy and had no way of knowing that using the saw could trigger an explosion. Los Angeles Fire Chief Douglas Barry said the policy for handling such situations would be reviewed.
The fatal blast also injured fire Engineer Anthony J. Guzman, 48, who emerged from surgery for multiple fractures in serious but stable condition.
During a 48-hour multi-agency investigation, technicians shut down power to 400 customers in a two-block commercial corridor along Sepulveda Boulevard, near Los Angeles International Airport.
Although officials insisted that another blast was unlikely, the problem at the root of the explosions is hardly uncommon. Threading under the city are 15,000 miles of aging electrical pipe -- much of it about 60 years old or more, said David Nahai, general manager of the city's Department of Water and Power.
The electrical current travels through copper wiring that is wrapped in oil-soaked insulating paper. The entire bundle is encased in lead.
Over decades, that lead casing can develop cracks, causing arcing, said Aram H. Benjamin, the agency's assistant general manager. Workers find the problem, then replace the old pipe with a modern synthetic. About half the underground pipes have been replaced.
In this instance, the arcing ignited the old oiled-soaked paper, which began to burn like a fuse. The fire began just under the corner of Sepulveda and La Tijera boulevards.
The first explosion happened about 2 p.m., blowing the manhole cover outside a Staples store 20 feet, said Battalion Chief John Miller. The second explosion occurred about 16 minutes later -- right above the source of the fire.
Smoke from the fire found its way into a 200-foot conduit that led into the tiny electrical panel room. The room stood behind a two-story office building that houses a credit union and a sandwich shop. By about 2:30 p.m., hazardous-materials specialist Lovrien was on the scene with fellow firefighters from Station 95.
Lovrien saw smoke coming from around the edge of the nearly airtight electrical panel room and, finding the door locked, ran to get the circular saw, said arson investigator Thomas L. Derby.
His composite blade struck the steel lock, throwing off a spark. The ensuing blast threw him back eight feet. He died from blunt-force trauma to the head, probably from the doors blowing off or from the saw, arson investigators said. The La Habra resident was divorced and had no children.
The force threw Guzman about six feet, even though he was standing well behind Lovrien.
"These series of events are very, very unusual," Nahai said.
Present with Nahai, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and other officials at a Westchester news conference were comrades of Lovrien, a 13-year veteran whose sunny disposition earned him a matching nickname.
"His nickname is 'Lovey,' and that tells you everything about him," said firefighter Anthony Pacheco, his voice cracking. Just days ago, Lovrien had insisted on working a shift for Pacheco so his colleague could have his birthday off.
howard.blume@latimes.com
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-explosion29mar29,0,5311983.story
From the Los Angeles Times
Friday, March 21, 2008
Are University Systems a Good Idea?
By MARK G. YUDOF
From the issue dated February 15, 2008 (Chronicle of Higher Education
Life was simple before World War II. After that, we had systems.
— Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper
Physicians and biologists speak of "systems biology" and engineers of "systems engineering." The idea is integration. If you manipulate a patient's potassium level, you had better worry about the impact on other organs and bodily functions. If you want a more powerful heater in your car, you should think about the whole electrical system.
In higher education, the term obfuscates as much as it enlightens. There are many different types of college and university systems in our country — sometimes even within the same state.
The system-level office of academic affairs in California, for example, plays a greater role in faculty appointments, promotions, and compensation than that office does in other systems. Some systems centralize legal services, facilities construction, and budget preparation, while others do not. Meanwhile, research on the subject is anemic, largely consisting of factoids organized by state. Few, if any, studies have evaluated whether our systems as they operate today are actually a good idea.
We know that higher-education systems are phenomena of roughly the last 50 years. There were state boards of regents as early as the 18th century and branch campuses of state universities by the late 19th century, but the idea of a "rational system" for higher education emerged after World War I. Frustrated state policy makers thought that public universities were not taking advantage of coordinated planning opportunities and economies of scale, and that they spoke to legislators with too many voices. After World War II, the movement toward organized systems gained further momentum as states established campuses in underserved areas to meet the growing demand for higher education.
The turning point was the creation of the 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education in California, with its tiering of graduate, undergraduate, and community-college educational opportunities. Following the success of the University of California, a movement toward systems washed across the country. Every legislator and chamber of commerce leader, so it seemed, wanted to create a Berkeley in his backyard. Sometimes campuses were planned and created to populate the system. At other times, as in my home state of Texas, pre-existing institutions were cobbled together with new campuses to create systems that were more a result of happenstance and politics than the orderly integration of complementary institutions.
Part of the effort involved what has become known as "branding." Bringing institutions into the fold identified them with flagship universities that had built splendid reputations. Systems were also supposed to help colleges share resources and increase coordination. In addition, they had the potential to improve quality across a range of institutions and to strengthen political support.
In some cases, the systems resulted in better-coordinated degree programs and improved educational standards. But usually California was emulated in form, not substance. For example, California gave its central system office extensive authority over facilities, faculty hiring and promotion, budgets, and more. Many other states adopted similar structures but continued the old patterns, such as making appropriations directly to individual campuses and decentralizing decision making.
What's more, the food fight over legislative appropriations and other scarce resources did not disappear. The flagships felt threatened by the wannabes and their advocates. The up-and-coming institutions complained that they were not securing the resources to catch up. Rather than generating more political support, the addition of new campuses often amplified local and regional conflicts.
Indeed, in the rush to create new systems, legislatures had often not sufficiently grappled with critical questions: Is a campus better off standing alone or as part of a network? Are system bureaucracies just one more impediment to progress, or can they be beneficial? Which businesses, if you will, should systems be in, and which should they abandon?
The fundamental question is the one that I asked myself in 2003 after I became chancellor of the University of Texas system: Can the operations of a system truly add value to the work of the campuses? I have found that the answer lies in three related propositions:
1. Systems usually contribute more to emerging institutions than they do to flagships. System people are no smarter or more experienced than those at the campuses, and usually there are fewer of them. They are also farther from the campuses and less knowledgeable about local circumstances. That said, flagship institutions generally have the knowledge and capacity to make and carry out most of their own decisions, as approved by their boards. In contrast, emerging institutions often lack the personnel, programs, and experience of the flagships and may look to the system for assistance on academic-program development, fund raising, capital planning, and other matters.
One caveat: Everyone, or nearly everyone, has a boss. Legislatures, subject to the limits of their state constitutions, have broad authority over higher-education policies, as do governing boards. All public universities should follow those policies, whether related to academic programs or not — even if people on the campuses think they are misguided. System administrators may be chosen to compel compliance with such policies, irrespective of each campus's administrative capabilities. They might be required, for example, to monitor and set targets to improve graduation rates — a matter of considerable concern to governing boards and elected leaders.
2. A system's role should expand when it comes to broad organizational issues that concern the entire enterprise. While system officials should usually leave teaching and scholarship to each institution, even the most mature and capable campuses can sometimes benefit from support in certain management areas. For example, a robust accountability system, overseen from the center, is part and parcel of an efficient administration. Similarly, a system may be better positioned, as an entity external to the campus, to investigate allegations of impropriety, like the recent student-loan controversies involving inappropriate relationships between financial-aid offices and lenders.
Systems can also act as honest brokers, encouraging cooperation and collaboration among their campuses. Left to its own inclination, each campus would have its own computer backup facility. It would order all of its supplies. It would have its own technology-transfer office. Significant economies of scale can be found in several areas, like sharing electronic library databases or using uniform definitions of accounts and other common standards to assess financial performance.
In our system, for example, three campuses share a technology-transfer office; a group of universities has adopted one software system for tracking registration, financial aid, and other student matters; and our academic-health campuses jointly purchase equipment and supplies. We project those steps will save $250-million over the next decade.
A university system can also invest in certain priorities and measure the impact of those investments. Besides our accountability system, we require each campus to assess and compare student learning. In recent years, we have also allocated $100-million for faculty start-up packages, primarily for equipment and facilities renovations to our campuses, as a means of attracting and retaining outstanding professors — and a way to gauge how well each institution is doing so.
The system can also speak as one voice to gain support among legislators, other policy makers, and the public. In Texas we produced a privately financed 13-part series that aired on public television, depicting how public universities help solve critical social, economic, environmental, and health problems.
3. A system that adds value will differentiate its services among institutions. Although multicampus collaborations can provide substantial savings, complete centralization would backfire — especially in a highly heterogeneous system of many campuses with various missions and resources. What is helpful to emerging campuses is often more of a hindrance to established, first-tier universities and medical centers. One size does not fit all.
Fund-raising operations, for example, are as highly differentiated as the campuses themselves. Some are in need of significant consulting services. Campuses take advantage of system services in areas such as reorganizing their personnel and operations to build a stronger capacity for fund raising, recruiting development professionals, and handling other basic growth areas. Such services are in high demand by smaller and midsize campuses. Larger campuses with mature operations prefer to have assistance in professional-development opportunities, financial support, the loosening of traditional policy restrictions, and other areas that will allow them to become more nimble and innovative in their approaches to secure more donations. The system's focus should be on providing genuine help and not adding cost and complexity.
The promise that higher-education systems would completely resolve the messy interplay among colleges, and between them and political leaders, has largely gone unfulfilled. But systems can be useful if system and campus leaders, and their governing boards, are willing to allocate authority in ways that add value to carefully delineated activities. Perhaps Larry Faulkner, a former president of the University of Texas at Austin put it best: System administrators should recognize that a system office is not a university, and campus presidents should recognize that theirs is not the only college in the system.
Mark G. Yudof is chancellor of the University of Texas system.
From the issue dated February 15, 2008 (Chronicle of Higher Education
Life was simple before World War II. After that, we had systems.
— Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper
Physicians and biologists speak of "systems biology" and engineers of "systems engineering." The idea is integration. If you manipulate a patient's potassium level, you had better worry about the impact on other organs and bodily functions. If you want a more powerful heater in your car, you should think about the whole electrical system.
In higher education, the term obfuscates as much as it enlightens. There are many different types of college and university systems in our country — sometimes even within the same state.
The system-level office of academic affairs in California, for example, plays a greater role in faculty appointments, promotions, and compensation than that office does in other systems. Some systems centralize legal services, facilities construction, and budget preparation, while others do not. Meanwhile, research on the subject is anemic, largely consisting of factoids organized by state. Few, if any, studies have evaluated whether our systems as they operate today are actually a good idea.
We know that higher-education systems are phenomena of roughly the last 50 years. There were state boards of regents as early as the 18th century and branch campuses of state universities by the late 19th century, but the idea of a "rational system" for higher education emerged after World War I. Frustrated state policy makers thought that public universities were not taking advantage of coordinated planning opportunities and economies of scale, and that they spoke to legislators with too many voices. After World War II, the movement toward organized systems gained further momentum as states established campuses in underserved areas to meet the growing demand for higher education.
The turning point was the creation of the 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education in California, with its tiering of graduate, undergraduate, and community-college educational opportunities. Following the success of the University of California, a movement toward systems washed across the country. Every legislator and chamber of commerce leader, so it seemed, wanted to create a Berkeley in his backyard. Sometimes campuses were planned and created to populate the system. At other times, as in my home state of Texas, pre-existing institutions were cobbled together with new campuses to create systems that were more a result of happenstance and politics than the orderly integration of complementary institutions.
Part of the effort involved what has become known as "branding." Bringing institutions into the fold identified them with flagship universities that had built splendid reputations. Systems were also supposed to help colleges share resources and increase coordination. In addition, they had the potential to improve quality across a range of institutions and to strengthen political support.
In some cases, the systems resulted in better-coordinated degree programs and improved educational standards. But usually California was emulated in form, not substance. For example, California gave its central system office extensive authority over facilities, faculty hiring and promotion, budgets, and more. Many other states adopted similar structures but continued the old patterns, such as making appropriations directly to individual campuses and decentralizing decision making.
What's more, the food fight over legislative appropriations and other scarce resources did not disappear. The flagships felt threatened by the wannabes and their advocates. The up-and-coming institutions complained that they were not securing the resources to catch up. Rather than generating more political support, the addition of new campuses often amplified local and regional conflicts.
Indeed, in the rush to create new systems, legislatures had often not sufficiently grappled with critical questions: Is a campus better off standing alone or as part of a network? Are system bureaucracies just one more impediment to progress, or can they be beneficial? Which businesses, if you will, should systems be in, and which should they abandon?
The fundamental question is the one that I asked myself in 2003 after I became chancellor of the University of Texas system: Can the operations of a system truly add value to the work of the campuses? I have found that the answer lies in three related propositions:
1. Systems usually contribute more to emerging institutions than they do to flagships. System people are no smarter or more experienced than those at the campuses, and usually there are fewer of them. They are also farther from the campuses and less knowledgeable about local circumstances. That said, flagship institutions generally have the knowledge and capacity to make and carry out most of their own decisions, as approved by their boards. In contrast, emerging institutions often lack the personnel, programs, and experience of the flagships and may look to the system for assistance on academic-program development, fund raising, capital planning, and other matters.
One caveat: Everyone, or nearly everyone, has a boss. Legislatures, subject to the limits of their state constitutions, have broad authority over higher-education policies, as do governing boards. All public universities should follow those policies, whether related to academic programs or not — even if people on the campuses think they are misguided. System administrators may be chosen to compel compliance with such policies, irrespective of each campus's administrative capabilities. They might be required, for example, to monitor and set targets to improve graduation rates — a matter of considerable concern to governing boards and elected leaders.
2. A system's role should expand when it comes to broad organizational issues that concern the entire enterprise. While system officials should usually leave teaching and scholarship to each institution, even the most mature and capable campuses can sometimes benefit from support in certain management areas. For example, a robust accountability system, overseen from the center, is part and parcel of an efficient administration. Similarly, a system may be better positioned, as an entity external to the campus, to investigate allegations of impropriety, like the recent student-loan controversies involving inappropriate relationships between financial-aid offices and lenders.
Systems can also act as honest brokers, encouraging cooperation and collaboration among their campuses. Left to its own inclination, each campus would have its own computer backup facility. It would order all of its supplies. It would have its own technology-transfer office. Significant economies of scale can be found in several areas, like sharing electronic library databases or using uniform definitions of accounts and other common standards to assess financial performance.
In our system, for example, three campuses share a technology-transfer office; a group of universities has adopted one software system for tracking registration, financial aid, and other student matters; and our academic-health campuses jointly purchase equipment and supplies. We project those steps will save $250-million over the next decade.
A university system can also invest in certain priorities and measure the impact of those investments. Besides our accountability system, we require each campus to assess and compare student learning. In recent years, we have also allocated $100-million for faculty start-up packages, primarily for equipment and facilities renovations to our campuses, as a means of attracting and retaining outstanding professors — and a way to gauge how well each institution is doing so.
The system can also speak as one voice to gain support among legislators, other policy makers, and the public. In Texas we produced a privately financed 13-part series that aired on public television, depicting how public universities help solve critical social, economic, environmental, and health problems.
3. A system that adds value will differentiate its services among institutions. Although multicampus collaborations can provide substantial savings, complete centralization would backfire — especially in a highly heterogeneous system of many campuses with various missions and resources. What is helpful to emerging campuses is often more of a hindrance to established, first-tier universities and medical centers. One size does not fit all.
Fund-raising operations, for example, are as highly differentiated as the campuses themselves. Some are in need of significant consulting services. Campuses take advantage of system services in areas such as reorganizing their personnel and operations to build a stronger capacity for fund raising, recruiting development professionals, and handling other basic growth areas. Such services are in high demand by smaller and midsize campuses. Larger campuses with mature operations prefer to have assistance in professional-development opportunities, financial support, the loosening of traditional policy restrictions, and other areas that will allow them to become more nimble and innovative in their approaches to secure more donations. The system's focus should be on providing genuine help and not adding cost and complexity.
The promise that higher-education systems would completely resolve the messy interplay among colleges, and between them and political leaders, has largely gone unfulfilled. But systems can be useful if system and campus leaders, and their governing boards, are willing to allocate authority in ways that add value to carefully delineated activities. Perhaps Larry Faulkner, a former president of the University of Texas at Austin put it best: System administrators should recognize that a system office is not a university, and campus presidents should recognize that theirs is not the only college in the system.
Mark G. Yudof is chancellor of the University of Texas system.
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