COMMENT & REACTION to AN INCIDENT OF DECLINE

AN INCIDENT IN DECLINE by Barry Casselman (Washington Times, February 24, 2006):

COMMENT & REACTION!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© February 2006

NOTE: A German friend sent me an article by Barry Casselman (see below) on the decline of elite universities. Not only do I agree that elite universities are serving the faculty better than the students, but that this has become a societal model. People who challenge it often lose as in the case of Harvard's President Lawrence Summers. Also, in my comments, I make reference to President Andrew Jackson. I have a long piece on him (WHY LEADERSHIP MATTERS)seeing his kind of passion being painfully missing today when it is most needed.

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I want to first of all thank my German friend for sharing this article with me. It is obvious that I miss a lot not surfacing the net, and I appreciate when people that do bring such pieces to my attention.

My focus is generally on the nature of leadership, although from time to time I do make reference to the declining nature of education in these United States.

Listening daily to the television Journal from Berlin, Germany, I understand declining educational standards are a problem there as well. Western society might indeed have lost its way. This would translate into education no longer being simply a national problem, but a problem of Western culture, if not the world. My focus is on Western culture.

Most recently, I've used former United States President Andrew Jackson to illustrate leadership (WHY LEADERSHIP MATTERS), not so much for his perfect display of it, but because he stuck to his guns, always finding the vulnerable aspect of his opposition to derail it while keeping his own train of initiatives on track.

That kind of moxie appears to have evaporated today. CEOs, in virtually every conceivable discipline, are expected to operate in torque, that is, with a tourniquet around their brain, while their hands are figuratively tied behind their backs.

Incredibly, they seem amenable to these restrictions being as they are prisoners of generous compensation and entitlement packages. From presidents of various public institutions to corporate executives of industry and commerce, spin doctoring of symbols meant to act as surrogates for action have become a full-time activity.

For example, the primary role of our major educational institutions, such as Harvard, has become "research & development," with teaching a secondary function. Students are taught by graduate students. But no matter. Mckinsey and Goldman Sachs, and other like institutions, will hire graduates at $90,000+ regardless of curriculum, or whatever they have learned.

In industry, it has been shown that chemical, pharmaceutical, and most obviously, the tobacco companies have hid research detrimental to sales and therefore the bottom line. The charade is in and the sham is fair game in making it.

Two hundred years ago the dollar was our monarchy. Two hundred years later the dollar still is. We believe throwing money at a problem will solve it when money never is enough, that is, without commitment and involvement, but there is apparently little time or patience for that. The victims of Katrina know this, and their greatest fear is corruption in efforts to bring New Orleans back from the brink of disaster.

Once in a while someone such as Harvard President Lawrence Summers slips the tortuous tourniquet off his head, and says what is really on his mind. He is tired of tenured professors not teaching, students not learning, and the institution in which he heads masquerading as a citidal of enlightenment while functioning as a front for well-heeled endowment givers and platform for rock star professors.

The only problem with this is the naiveté of Dr. Summers to believe the content of his remarks would be accepted in the context that they were given -- that students were not becoming proficient in science (at Harvard), and that women lagged even further in this respect than men."

Fat chance. He failed to assess, as Jackson did not fail nearly two hundred years ago, the deviousness of his world and small mindedness of his minions, and rememeber, Jackson didn't even have a sixth grade education.

Jackson cut the legs out from under his Ivy League distractors in government because he knew them for what they were, and what they were appears to differ little with tenured professors today, that is, believing themselves untouchable. Jackson would call them "vile viper conspirators," and he would be right, as they have driven the well meaning president from his elite university.

In a world of "political correctness," and reassuring platitudes, Dr. Summers became a pariah that needed to be flushed out of the tank, while not realizing he was swimming with a school of pariah painted golden and masquerading as anodyne goldfish.

What I learned a long time ago is that you can't have it both ways. You can't have a forceful point-of-view, and at the same time be obsequious to the pretenders, and expect not to have a score of enemies and your security and well being threatened. The devil isn't in the details; the devil is in the doyens, who take residence in the Holy Grail of inscrutability.

I suspect that Dr. Summers tried to accept this torque of mind until the coin -- be it prestige, status, acclaim, or patience - ran out, and it became too much, and he had to express his mind. Now, he is out, and a controversial figure, a place bean counters never expect to be.

Author Barry Casselmand is a bit late in his chronology, however, as deterioration in leadership took hold after World War II, and reached its zenith in the spoil brat generation of the 1960s, when I was a young professional, father of four, climbing the corporate ladder, and not liking what I experienced, bailing out in 1969, and those that read me know the rest of the story.

The 1980s brought on narcissism and self-indulgence; the 1990s comfort and complacency with nobody in charge, and no one wanting to grow up; and now in the 2000s, the tail is wagging the dog . . . everywhere and in everything. Leadership has taken a holiday. We have lost our moral compass and our way.

Leadership at the UN, for example, couldn't be weaker. Forget the corruption, forget the food for oil scandals, forget the nepotism. It is promoting human rights on one hand and with a wink, multilateral consensus on the other taking governments off the hook. We have, as a consequence, the ambiguous mess in the ambivalent Sudan (Darfur) and wacky Congo for the trouble.

And we all know about our own country. We can't get New Orleans back on its feet, yet we're trying to police the world. In another time, it would be called madness, but in our modern schizophrenic world, it works out as normalcy. Remember the president that gave us that term? Warren Harding. He looked grand, if you will recall, but was an empty suit.

It reminds me of a guy that once worked for me who was always trying to solve everyone else's problems while his own problems finally blew up in his face.

It is not that sincere people are failing to pay attention. James Hillman recently wrote a powerful book "A Terrible Love of War" (2004). He points out that war has become human, sublime, and that religion finds its essence in war, not love or peace.

Gore Vidal, in his typical acerbic style, writes in "Imperial America" (2004) of our suffocating amnesia. We don't get it because we don't think we have to. After all, we're Americans!

Both books were picked up in the bargain section of Barnes & Noble, yet published less than two years ago. That tells you something about their popularity. In modern parlance, value is equated with popularity, and popularity doesn't have a lot to do with reality. Edward Gibbon had something to say about that in "The History of the Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire." Does anyone read that book anymore?

There are three critical aspects to leadership, all of which I see in decline.


LEADERSHIP AS MIND

Barry Casselmand's article on chronic decline of university education is one. Elite universities have become factories designated as "research universities." The focus in on technology, and technology is not about enlightenment. Technology is about having more convenient gadgets to improve our comfort. Science is about enlightenment, true, but not totally so. Humanism must complement it in order to keep it within bounds. Science helps us better understand our world and universe and our place and responsibility in it. The paradox is that as much as science has discovered, more mysteries are hidden as man remains God's idiot, as Einstein puts it.

In the end as in the beginning, the game of conquest has run its course, and college graduates, if they are to become leaders, must reconcile themselves to this fact, or we all may be near journey's end.

Both science and technology need the leavening of the humanities to resist the attraction of the torque of mind, or tourniquet around the brain. In recent time, this has not only been wound tighter, but has had an additional apparatus added to it, blinders, so that we can only see straight ahead, which makes us perfect candidates for being blindsided.

LEADERSHIP AS HEART

The second is the moral authority of the church, or, if you well, our spiritualism. Much as the propagandist might suggest otherwise, religion, whatever the faith, is all about love. Yes, love. All of them.

We need love to survive as human beings. Sex is not love. Pornography is not love. Free expression in the form of "free love" is not love. We have had these freedoms for more than half a century now, and has love triumphed over hate; love over lust; or caring over self-indulgence?

LEADERSHIP AS BODY

Third component of leadership is community. Man is a social animal. We cannot survive alone, not physically, spiritually, emotionally, or psychologically. We need each other. Out of community come justice, labor, and sharing, which is supported by government with commerce, industry, personal privacy, political rights, and communal and personal safety.

The body needs structure; and structure requires discipline; and discipline requires direction; and direction requires a set of values that supports the health of the body, in this case, community. But look around you. We are structureless, undisciplined, directionless, while values have become expedient and interchangeable. Is it any wonder why the community is sick?

What has changed about the body is that an individual, family, community, company or country no longer defines it, but now it is the world that does, a community of diverse souls with a common need for love and sustenance.

We are all connected. What we do here, now, today, effects and affects someone else a world away, and visa versa.

This is new to us, which finds us pressing while events continue to accelerate. People such as Barry Casselman, James Hillman, and Gore Vidal are not alarmists, but caring observers that feel being forewarned is to be forearmed. They were not the first.

Many philosophers have weighed in on this. One states that our primary role in life is to be useful in the service of others; another suggests our joyful participation in the sorrows of the world, and many others chime in that we love our brother (and sister) and do unto them as we would have them do unto us.

Once in a while, we wake up and cut through the fog.

Katrina and the devastation of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast were good for us because they made us aware that it is not our material but spiritual world that holds us together. But sadly, equally apparent was that at a time when we needed strong leadership, leadership that had a point-of-view, leadership that would act to save souls, we saw leadership instead resort to cover-its-assness. Still to this day it postures, and so we flounder.

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AN EMAILER WROTE: I received this from a good friend in the U.S. It gives some perspectives on the new society, a subject you are dealing with also in your writings. The article:

The Washington Times (February 24, 2006)

AN INCIDENT OF DECLINE
By Barry Casselman

The resignation of Harvard President Lawrence Summers is only the most
recent incident in the chronic decline of many of America's most
prestigious colleges and universities. It has been a long process, perhaps
beginning with the Vietnam War era when college campuses became the site of choice for many protests and radical political activity.

The issue of the war in Vietnam was fueled by profound changes in
American life. A new generation which had been in its youth preceding
and during World War II was taking political and economic charge. And
another generation (born during and just after that war) was forming a
new youth culture.

Of course, each generational transfer has its own character and
circumstances. In the 1960s and 1970s, there was an unprecedented
velocity of technological and economic change. That generation also
knew only a state of world war, a circumstance we now narrate as the
Cold War between Western democratic capitalism and Eastern
totalitarian communism, a war fought mostly in the regions of the
so-called Third World or in undeveloped nations in Africa, Asia and
South America.

By the 1980s and 1990s, the velocity of technological, medical and
social change became so rapid that the "modern" social contract no
longer seemed to be enforceable. The revolt of the 1960s became normal
standards as its youth took charge, in its turn, and a new youth
generation appeared. A protracted world war that had begun in the
1930s against fascism and continued against totalitarian communism was
abruptly ended.

The computer and the Internet indelibly altered contemporary life here
and throughout the world. A state of "world cold war" was briefly
succeeded by isolated global conflicts and localized problems. America
became a sole superpower. Then a new world war against terrorism
began.

While all of this was going on, America's educational system remained
structurally the same. Yes, new discoveries were incorporated into
curricula, and technological modifications were made. But the basic
structures of primary, secondary and college education remained
unchanged.

When the phenomenon of "political correctness" appeared, it not only
was embraced by most of the nation's political, educational and
cultural elite, but it soon became dominant in the education culture.
This was most notable at the college and university level, where so
many people who who were alienated from contemporary America life were drawn and found refuge in tenured sanctuary.

It was a perfect arrangement for them. Radical professors could freely
express fundamental hostility to virtually all aspects of American
government, values and experiences. They were not accountable. They
had easy access to try to intimidate a whole generation of American
youth, and they were usually highly paid to do so.

Inasmuch as "education" was a sanctified shibboleth in the United
States, the general public has appeared to tolerate the rise of
political correctness with only occasional mild objection because it
initially happened surreptitiously, and seemed to have little impact
on society as a whole.

Moreover, it did not happen on every campus and did not overtake every
college department where it did occur. It did become dominant in the
humanities faculties of most campuses. Scientific, economic, and many
professional departments resisted this phenomenon, which Alan
Dershowitz, a prominent liberal Harvard faculty member, calls (when
describing the Summers resignation) "an academic coup d'etat."
Mr. Summers, a brilliant former Secretary of the Treasury under
President Clinton, reportedly began making major reforms at Harvard
when he took over in 2001, and antagonized the entrenched faculty
there (who were politically radical but educationally reactionary). He
became publicly controversial when he said some politically incorrect
things, most of which seem to me (and, I think, to most Americans) as
accurate and intellectually reasonable. The "diehard left" faction of
Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, as Mr. Dershowitz (himself an
outspoken liberal civil libertarian) describes them, have succeeded,
by forcing Mr. Summers to resign, in corrupting and humiliating a
hitherto great institution one more time.

What's to be done? It's up to the public, I suggest, that is, the
customers of the products of these academic institutions. Parents need
to ask more questions and to put aside pretentious reputations. Alumni
need to refuse to contribute to college endowments. Society at large
needs to reform faculty tenure, and to demand that faculty members be
accountable for what they say and do.

Forcing Mr. Summers out of Harvard should be the last event of this
shameful period of American education. I suspect, however, that it
won't be. But when public opinion can no longer tolerate the
intellectual and moral destruction of its institutions of learning and
free speech, and it becomes unmistakeable that we can no longer
compete in the international marketplace because of this self-indulgence, the campuses of America will experience a revolution that will make the era of Vietnam War campus turmoil seem like throwing sand in a playground.



Barry Casselman writes about national politics for Preludium News Service. You may reach him directly at his email address: barcass@mr.net

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