An Open Letter to Peter Hogness Concerning Professor Sandi Cooper and Anne Neal

I have sent the following e-mail to Peter Hogness of the Clarion, the newspaper of the Professional Staff Congress, the union of the faculty of the City University of New York (CUNY).

Dear Dr. Peter Hogness:

You have recently published an article concerning Anne Neal that I consider to have been unfair. For example, you call her an "ideologue". I would like to write a response in your newspaper of equal length to your article refuting your false claims about Ms. Neal and ACTA.

Recently, I blogged a response that included a quote taken from Ron Capshaw's Frontpagemag article concerning Professor Sandi Cooper. Professor Cooper sent a response to my Brooklyn College e-mail account asserting that Mr. Capshaw is a "seriously troubled individual" and suggesting that:

"You might at the very least acknowledge that Mr. Capshaw appears not to have understood a word of an undergraduate course where he sat for an entire semester, evidently living in his own script."

Professor Cooper also asserted in her e-mail that:

"your willingness to print as fact the idiotic red-baiting by a former CUNY graduate student, Ron Capshaw, (published originally in Frontpage) suggests that you enjoy red-baiting far more than fact checking."

In the interest of even handedness I have published Professor Cooper's entire e-mail on my blog. I have also invited Jamie Glazov and Ron Capshaw to respond to Ms. Cooper's statements. I have given Professor Cooper's views much more space than the quote that I pulled from Frontpagemag concerning her.

In contrast, the Clarion has not published both sides of the Anne Neal debate. In general, the Clarion has tended to be a left wing propaganda font that has rarely permitted alternative viewpoints.

I would like to ask you to follow the high example that I have set and permit me to write a feature length article to address the Clarion's assertions concerning Ms. Neal.

My blog concerning Professor Cooper is at:


http://mitchell-langbert.blogspot.com/2007/08/sandi-cooper-responds.html

Mitchell Langbert, Ph.D.

John From Cincinnati Is Terrible, But Proves HBO's Creativity

The HBO television show John from Cincinnati just ended. Nancy Franklin wrote a fine review for the New Yorker entitled "Dead in the Water". It was a long seven weeks. I am not adverse to new age, old age or any other kind of spirituality, and enjoy a good aliens or flying saucer movie (indeed, I was an X-Files fan for many years). I also enjoyed David Milch's Deadwood on HBO, which employed several of the same actors as John from Cincinnati. In general, John from Cincinnati's acting was competent except for Greyson Fletcher (Shaun Yost) who is hard to take (unless you're a pederast) and Rebecca De Mornay, whose anger quickly became monotonous.

Milch attempts something different and something creative in John from Cincinnati, and HBO and Milch deserve credit for taking risks and exercising imagination. For every home run there needs to be several strikeouts. John from Cincinnati is a strikeout both for the talented Milch and for HBO. The fact that HBO was willing to air something this bad and this different shows that its creative juices are flowing. I hope that the program's failure does not end Milch's opportunity to hit more home runs, such as his NYPD Blue and Deadwood.

The Small Hours of Republican Imagination

The Economist's August 11 print edition's cover story is about its claim that America is turning to the left. The leader or editorial on page nine blames social conservatism, the Iraqi War and "oxymoronic trust in big government conservatism" that George W. Bush and congressional Republicans share. The Economist believes that Republican social conservatism and support for big government will lead to a new and perhaps permanent Democratic majority.

In the final paragraph of the article, the Economist makes an important point:

"most Americans distrust government strongly."

Yet, the Republicans have discarded the limited government ideology, or at least its pretense, in favor of "big government conservatism" that provides pork and cronyism to elected officials in the name of "mercifulness". The longer article on this theme on page 20 notes that the US public now says that it would prefer a Democratic president by a 24-point margin due to:

"Growing worry about income inequality combined with growing support for the social safety net. The proportion of Americans who believe that the government should help the needy even if it means greater debt has risen from 41% in 1994 to 54% today...Today only 35% align themselves with Republicans, and 50% with Democrats."

Some of the reasons include the Bush presidency and the War in Iraq. Moreover:

"Mr. Bush has also presided over the biggest expansion in government spending since his fellow Texan Lyndon Johnson...He has increased federal spending on education by about 60% and added some 7,000 pages of new government regulation. Pat Toomey, the head of the Club for Growth says the conservative base feels disgust with what appears to be a complete abandonment of limited government."

The Economist quotes Michael Gerson, a Bush speechwriter who advocates "big government conservatism". He is quoted as saying that "Anti-government conservatism turns out to be a strange kind of idealism...an idealism that strangles mercy."

That a conflict concerning small versus big government exists in the Republican Party at all, and that a Bush administration official considers big government to be more merciful than limited government, confirms that the GOP has lost its way. Mr. Gerson has risen through the Republican ranks yet is unaware of the limited government traditions of the United States that specifically led to the nation's preeminence; the humane nature of limited government; and, in contrast, the nation's failure during the 1930s due to the merciless government policies of (1) the Fed, which caused the Great Depression, and (2) the New Deal, which extended it. The greatest human-caused tragedies in history, Stalin's mass starvation of kulaks; the Holocaust and Mao's mass killings are all the product of big government. It is not clear to me how an American, much less a Republican, can call himself a "conservative" in the American sense and yet advocate big government.

Ronald Reagan won on a program of limiting government, ending regulation and cutting taxes. I am not clear as to why this program was popular in 1980 and 1984 but would not be, in Mr. Gerson's view, in 2008. The Republicans' "big government conservatism" seems to be a thin excuse for cronysim, pocket lining, pork and bloat, practices with which the current administration and the Republican congress have become associated. The only way for the Republicans to resolve this association is turnover.

The most serious conclusion that I draw from the Economist's leader and article is that Republican appointees like Mr. Gerson have not been exposed to classical liberal thinking. A new day must mean Republicans who understand how freedom works, unlike Mr. Gerson. Perhaps the likes of Mr. Gerson arise from failed educational institutions that are committed to left-"liberal" brainwashing.

Big government has existed in Europe ever since Gaius Julius Ceasar declared himself dictator for life, and it has been associated with merciless oppression ever since then. The United States grew most rapidly and drew the most immigrants when it had the least government. Big government leads to economic decline and inequality. The government of India is among the most interventionist and socialist in the world, and India leads the world with respect to child starvation. In India, big government has turned out to be merciless indeed. The inequality with which Americans have been concerned in the past couple of years, and the problems with the health care system, are both due to government. With respect to income inequality the problem is the Fed; and with respect to the health care system it is due to licensure and government regulation.

There are free market solutions to current problems that would be far superior to the state-based ones that the Democrats and Republicans are touting. But they require imagination. America in general and the Republicans in particular have lost touch with the creative ideas of the founding fathers and of Adam Smith. Limited government is the most merciful of ideologies. The ideology that creates poverty and inequality, that creates suppression and intolerance, the ideology of big government that Michael Gerson advocates, is the ideology of the state, the ideology of darkness, the ideology of lack of imagination and rote solutions that ignore unintended consequences and circularities of processes.

We have reached the small hours of Republican imagination. With speech writers like Michael Gerson, the Bush administration has shown that it is ill-educated. Until the Republicans begin to awaken from their sleep, they should stay out of office.

Eric Flamhotz Receives Distinguished Ph.D. Alumnus Award from Michigan

In 1979 I took a course called "Nu-cleus" taught by Professor Eric Flamhotz at the UCLA Graduate School of Management, now the UCLA Anderson School of Management. Professor Flamholtz described the course as emphasizing "decision making" or "d/m" and he utilitzed a wide range of experiential methods, including case studies, role playing games, class presentations, a real-life consulting project and two films, Twelve Angry Men and The Outrage (the Hollywood version of Kurosawa's Rashomon that starred Paul Newman and Claire Bloom.) For the real-life consulting project three fellow students and I did a consulting report for Robert Poole's Reason Magazine and the Reason Foundation in Santa Barbara. The course was one of the great educational experiences of my life, and along with Dominique Hanssens' statistical modeling and times series courses, one of the three best classes that I took as an MBA student at UCLA.

Twelve Angry Men (also here) is a great teaching tool for subjects like group dynamics, interpersonal skills and power and influence, and I have shown it ever since I began teaching organizational behavior, management skills and management. The Outrage wasn't as strong an adaptation of Rashomon as Rashomon deserved. (The Magnificent Seven did justice to The Seven Samurai, but the Outrage did not do justice to Rashomon. Although Claire Bloom's performance is wonderful, Paul Newman's Spanish accent is terrible. There is a very cool pre-Startrek appearance by William Shatner as the preacher, but the film just is not on the level of The Magnificent Seven.)

The last time I saw Professor Flamholtz was when he was visiting New York City in September 2001. We had breakfast on the morning of September 11, 2001 at a restaurant in the Times Square area of Manhattan. Leaving the restaurant, I read about the 9/11 attacks on the electronic news headline board on the Times Square/Dow Jones Building.

I just learned that Professor Flamholtz, who was a student of Rensis Likert, is the seventh Ph.D. alumnus of the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business to receive Michigan's Ross Business School's distinguished Ph.D. alumnus award. Michigan must be a great school to have had six people get the award before Flamholtz.

Although I had Flamholtz when I was a first-year MBA student in 1979, he influenced my teaching when I started 12 years later in 1991 (and ever since) because he focused on teaching management skills and competencies. Flamholtz was a pioneer in that area, as the subject had been under discussion for less than 10 years. I searched for several years to find a framework that would match Flamholtz's creative, competency-based style, and finally found Whetten and Cameron's textbook Developing Management Skills by David A. Whetten and Kim Cameron (Whetten teaches at Brigham Young and Cameron at Michigan). Over the past sixteen years I have taught o.b. and management skills using methods derived from Flamholtz's course and Whetten and Cameron's textbook and teaching model.

Flamholtz is a truly great professor who excels in teaching as well as research, and he deserves the Michigan award.

Dr. Eric Flamholtz Receives Award from the Ross School of Business of the University of Michigan.

>"On April 23, 2007, Eric Flamholtz received the Distinguished Ph.D. Alumni Award from the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business. He is the 7th recipient of this Award, which is "in Recognition for his Contributions to and Excellence in Management and Organizations." He also delivered the Keynote address to the Ross School's 2007 Ph.D. graduates as well as faculty, the Dean and Associate Dean of the Ross School, The Dean of the Rackham School of Graduate Studies, and current Ph.D students. Also in attendance was Professor Paul McCracken, who twice served on the President's Council of Economic Advisors, and who was Professor Flamholtz' instructor on economic policy issues during Flamholtz' first semester at The University of Michigan in 1966. In his address, Dr. Flamholtz thanked his mentors at the University of Michigan, including the late Rensis Likert, developer of the "Likert Scale" and founder of the world renowned Institute for Social Research, where Flamholtz worked as a Research Assistant during his doctoral studies. While in Ann Arbor, Flamholtz made a pilgrimage to Michigan Stadium where he first learned to enjoy big time football and where he has a brick celebrating Michigan's 1969 classic upset victory oven then No. 1 ranked Ohio State."