Gary Cooper

Gary Cooper won three Academy Awards : one for Sergeant York; one for High Noon; and an honorary lifetime achievement award.  According to Wikipedia, the real-life Sergeant York, who single handedly killed 28 German soldiers and captured 132 in one incident  in World War I's Meuse-Argonne offensive, refused to allow the film to be made unless Cooper portrayed him. Cooper also won Academy Award nominations for For Whom the Bell Tolls; Pride of the Yankees; and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. His IMDB filmography includes 115 titles.

When discusing Cooper's starring role in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead I was somewhat surprised that none of my students had heard of him.  Perhaps this is symptomatic of a general lack of historical knowledge, but some of Cooper's films are still watched.  Students have little cultural awareness in any area, including film.


Recently, I have been watching Cooper's films, starting with Howard Hawks's Sergeant York and William A. Wellman's Beau Geste.  Both are excellent and neither could be made today.  Sergeant York is about a man who finds religious faith and then reconciles a conflict between his belief in the Bible, which leads him to want to become a conscientious objector, and his loyalty to the United States.  His rural upbringing gives him competencies, including shooting, that urban Americans had lost.  

Beau Geste is about English brothers who enlist in the French Foreign Legion (note that Hollywood hasn't made Foreign Legion movies since the Vietnam War) and about one's noble gesture. Today's Hollywood, with its ridiculous political correctness and left wing ideology is incapable of making movies at these two films' moral level.

I find Cooper's performances in the 1939 Beau Geste and 1941 Sergeant York  to be stronger than his later performances.  Like De Niro, whose best work was in his earliest movies like Taxi Driver, Cooper's testosterone was stronger when he was slightly younger.  I think audiences continued to remember the younger Cooper into the 1950s. To appreciate him you need to watch his films made from the late 1920s through early 1940s.

2009 Revisited: Fed Auditors Know Nothing About Fed Operations

Sharad Karkhanis sent me this link to a May 6, 2009 video on Daily Bail.com and the Daily Paul site.  Representative Alan Grayson (D-Fl) is questioning Inspector General Elizabeth A. Coleman,  the inspector general of the Federal Reserve Bank's board of governors.  Coleman says that she does not have authority to investigate or audit an alleged $9 trillion off balance sheet transactions ($30,000 for every single American) or any Fed activities and that she has no idea of who received the money, or the losses the Fed had inccurred on a $2 trillion loan portfolio.

The PSC Fiddles While Your Seniority Burns

Sharad Karkhanis sent my piece "The PSC Fiddles While Your Seniority Burns" as a Patriot Returns issue to 13,000 CUNY faculty and staff.  The PSC is the union that represents the CUNY faculty. Its leadership is fringe left.

THE
PATRIOT
RETURNS

   Vol. 54, No.3                                                          February 28, 2011

 

PSC Fiddles While Your Seniority Burns

Mitchell Langbert, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Brooklyn College

 

In 1960 Sumner Slichter et al. claimed that by rationalizing the workplace unions had improved management. Whereas bribery and caprice characterized the foreman-dominated shape-up system of an earlier age, unions encouraged rules that made personnel decisions predictable and efficient.* Among these were seniority systems and bumping rights. Soon after The Impact of Collective Bargaining on Management's publication, unionism's role in education grew. By 1981, Douglas Mitchell et al. observed that collective bargaining had been one of the three most important developments in education in the preceding 30 years.**

But Slichter and Mitchell never observed President Barbara Bowen and her Merry Prankster-like New Caucus. Had they, they would have given up on unions. Not since the days of the Industrial Workers of the World has there been a leadership so out of touch with the realities of the workplace and American politics. Worse, now that the bureaucratic model of unionism that Slichter et al. recorded is under assault, the PSC is distributing e-mails about proprietary schools, the Egyptian crisis and Puerto Rico.

A Union Leadership Losing Touch

This is what the PSC has accomplished in the past few weeks. First, President Bowen distributed an email protesting charter elementary schools. Then, she distributed one urging the PSC's membership to take action about fraud in proprietary colleges. On February 15 Anthony Gronowicz distributed an email to the PSC-DA email list concerning human rights in Puerto Rico under Governor Luis Fortu. Angel Gonzalez adds that the struggle against Puerto Rican privatization ought to be at the forefront of the PSC's concerns. Then, taking a breather to focus on something related to a faculty union, on February 21 the PSC put forward a resolution condemning the limitations on collective bargaining and the elimination of faculty bargaining in Wisconsin. Quickly, Nancy Romer and Bill Friedheim added a crucial point: that a resolution concerning Egypt should be read at "all our Wisconsin support events."

While the PSC is busy equating the Muslim Brotherhood and the Wisconsin State Senate there has been a simultaneous New York conflagration concerning bumping rights and seniority rules in public schools. This local, and, to the New Caucus, apparently uninteresting debate may eventually affect your own bumping rights and how you are treated during an economic downturn. The New York Post observes that a New York group called Education Reform Now is running advertisements attacking traditional bumping rules in lower education. At the same time, President Obama's education czar, Secretary Arne Duncan, argues against traditional LIFO bumping rights. Mayor Bloomberg openly speaks of repealing the traditional rules.

Speculatively, this could be a harbinger of an assault on not just bumping rights but also tenure in higher education. Yet, President Bowen becomes cross when disturbed from her meditations on Cesar Chavez, Sami al Arian and fraud in proprietary schools.

Background

There are arguments for and against seniority and tenure as management techniques in industry. That is, while those arguing for merit-based employment systems claim that they will reduce costs, their arguments can be refuted. In the private sector the Japanese use less merit pay and place more emphasis on seniority than American firms do, but Japanese firms are more efficient. The Japanese made their greatest gains when they relied on seniority and did not use merit pay. The last time I looked Toyota did not have to be bailed out, but unlike GM its engineers are not subject to employment at will.

Although the Japanese commitment to lifetime employment has waned, their firms are less likely to lay off workers than are failed American firms on Wall Street and in Detroit. At the same time, neither the managements of Japanese firms nor the leaders of the enterprise unions, the company unions that have assisted Japanese firms by representing employees, waste their time debating the Iraqi War and the Unabomber's free speech rights.

Conclusion

CUNY's faculty ought to consider what personnel policies would be best for CUNY and best for the faculty itself. As well, a lobbying strategy aimed to educate the legislature about faculty practice and ways to improve higher education ought to be established. If tenure policy is eventually associated with seniority, wise input from reasonable faculty leaders will become important.

Moreover, in order to achieve a vision of what higher education ought to be, a university-wide dialogue is required. But there has been none. The absence of coherent discussion reflects the New Caucus's inability to coherently frame personnel issues in contemporary terms. Instead, anyone who disagrees with the New Caucus's foreign policy is silenced. Rather than discuss seniority rights, the New Caucus complains of Puerto Rican privatization and complex events in Egypt whose implications specialists do not fully comprehend.

Do Barbara Bowen and the New Caucus offer CUNY's best face? Are you confident that when discussion about CUNY's personnel policies is forced into the public arena the New Caucus will effectively represent you?

* Sumner H. Slichter, James J. Healy, and E. Robert Livernash, The Impact of Collective Bargaining on Management ( Washington , D.C. : The Brookings Institution, 1960

** Douglas E. Mitchell, Charles T. Kerchner, Wayne Erck and Gabrielle Pryor, "The Impact of Collective Bargaining on School Management and Policy." American Journal of Education 89:2 pp. 147-88, 1981.

 

Sharad Karkhanis, Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus
Editor-in-Chief

Issues of The Patriot may be accessed at
http://www.patriotreturns.com
Archived editions are available at
http://www.patriotreturns.com/archive.htm

Physicians, Guns and Lawyers

I just received this e-mail from  Robroy4355: A)  The number of physicians in the  U.S.  is 700,000. (B)  Accidental deaths caused by Physicians per year are 120,000.   (C)  Accidental deaths per physician is 0.171 Statistics courtesy of  U.S.  Dept. of Health  and  Human Services. >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Now think about this: Guns (A)  The number of gun owners in the  U.S. is 80,000,000. (Yes, that's 80 million) (B)  The number of accidental gun deaths per year, all age groups, is 1,500. (C)  The number of accidental deaths per gun owner is .0000188 Statistics courtesy of FBI >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> So,  statistically, doctors are approximately 9,000 times more dangerous than gun owners. >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Remember, 'Guns don't kill people, doctors do.' >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> FACT:  NOT EVERYONE HAS A GUN, BUT Almost everyone has at least one doctor. This means you are over 9,000 times more likely to be killed by a doctor as by a gun owner!!! >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Please alert your friends to this alarming threat. We must ban doctors before this gets completely out of hand!!!!! >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Out of concern for the public at large, We withheld the statistics on lawyers for fear the shock would cause people to panic and seek medical attention!