End The Invocations

My city has adopted a policy by which its City Council devotes a few minutes after calling the meeting to order for the delivery of an invocation -- an invocation which permits of sectarian invocations, such as "...and this we pray in the name of Jesus Christ."  In fact, that conclusion to a prayer, or words to that effect specifically identifying the speaker as Christian.

It's also a very open secret that a coalition of three large churches in the area is a significant part of the political machinery that has elected four out of five members of the City Council.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, almost immediately after a majority of church-elected members took office, the city adopted a resolution changing the city's motto to "In God We Trust," and posting lettering of that phrase behind the dias upon which the Council sits during meetings.  The Mayor paid for the lettering and for it to be posted with his own money.

When the city began doing these things, a woman spoke out against the invocation policy, and said that it was exclusionary and discriminated against non-religious citizens.  Two days later, her house was vandalized, with the phrase "In God We Trust" spray painted all over all sides of her house.  The police effectively ignored her.  The city, to my knowledge, did not assist her in removing the paint or replacing the damaged glass.  (The city does, however, promptly and efficiently remove gang graffiti from anywhere it is publicly visible, a policy of which I approve and from which I have personally benefited.)

With one exception, every single invocation delivered since this policy was adopted (and many delivered before it was adopted) has been sectarian, and I have no doubt whatsoever that this is just how the City Council likes it as the majority faction on the board all wear their religion on their sleeves.  The one exception was a ten-year-old Girl Scout who was put on the spot by the Mayor three minutes before she delivered the invocation; it wasn't clear to whom she addressed her remarks.

The sum total of all of this is that I have decided that my periodic interest in public service needs to be diverted somewhere outside the aegis of the city in which I live because, as an atheist and as someone who advocates a strong separation of church and state, my participation in the politics and government of the city in which I live would not be welcomed and may even be punished.

My city has been sued for adopting and implementing this policy.  I am not a participant in that lawsuit in any way, not as counsel, not as a plaintiff, not as a witness.  I could have done this and considered doing it, but decided that the risk of retaliation against me and my firm was too great.  If I were independently wealthy and my actions would not cause other peoples' livelihoods to fall into jeopardy, then I probably would have stepped up to the plate.

The City of Greece, New York had a policy not unlike that of my own city.  And a Federal judge just issued an opinion affirming that policy as consistent with the Establishment Clause, the second such District Court ruling of which I am aware.  The policy adopted by my city is modeled very strongly after a policy written by the Alliance Defense Fund, the same group that recently was utterly crushed in Perry v. Schwarzenegger, much to the chagrin of other Christian legal advocacy groups like Liberty Counsel.  Perry, however, dealt with a different issue of law than the one this post addresses.

More to the point, Alliance Defense Fund also defended Greece, New York, and that is why the opinion upholding the policy is being touted as a great success by ADF, to the point that ADF has posted the opinion in Galloway v. Town of Greece for all to read.  The Galloway opinion relies heavily on the prior case upholding sectarian prayers, Pelphrey v. Cobb County (N.D.Ga. 2006) 448 F.Supp.2d 1357, affirmed, 547 F.3d 1263 (11 Cir. 2008).  There are a multiplicity of cases that reach the opposite result, many more in number than the Pelphrey line of cases,* but I want to address the adverse reasoning here rather than that which I find more favorable.

The policy in my city, in Pelphrey, and now in Galloway, all rest on the same basic concept:  the city assembles a list of eligible speakers from among local religious institutions -- usually referred to only as "churches," but I think it's fair to say most people understand a Jewish temple or synagogue to be a "church" or a Muslim mosque to be a "church," because there is a close equivalency there.  Nevertheless, it seems that the resulting list is very heavily dominated by Christian institutions.  Then, a staff employee of the city is directed to select a speaker from that list on a more or less random basis, with either formal or informal limits on the number of times a speaker from a particular institution can be invited to pray in any particular period of time.  (In my city, it's three times within two years.  At least two local religious institutions have already "maxed out" since I last looked at the issue).  The speaker may then deliver whatever invocation the speaker believes appropriate, including sectarian references at the speaker's discretion.  In my city, in Pelphrey, and in Galloway, the overwhelming majority of invocations given have been by Christian ministers of one kind or another, and have included explicitly sectarian Christian components.

Analyzing three of the leading governmental prayer cases from the Supreme Court (Marsh v. Chambers (1983) 463 U.S. 783; County of Allegheny v. Greater Pittsburgh ACLU (1989) 492 U.S. 573; and Lee v. Weisman (1992) 505 U.S. 577), the Galloway court found the following principles of law:

First, legislative prayer is acceptable in general, provided that the prayer opportunity is not exploited to proselytize or advance any one, or to disparage any other, faith or belief. Second, unless the prayer opportunity has been so exploited, courts should not “parse” the content of a particular prayer. Third, prayers in the Judeo-Christian tradition are acceptable, although legislative prayers that have the effect of affiliating the government with any one specific faith or belief are improper. Finally, the government may not compose official prayers or dictate the content of prayers.

I question the correctness of this distillation of the law.  The first and fourth principles are accurate and I do not quibble with them.  But in fulfilling the mandate that prayers not proselytize or advance any particular faith or belief, and in fulfilling the mandate that the prayers not affiliate the government with any one specific faith or belief, a governmental entity necessarily must analyze the content of the prayers.  The result is an inconsistency:  "You can pray, and pray as you like, except you can't pray in this way."

Put it another way:  Some faiths, particularly some sects of Christianity, mandate evangelism.  Can a city government, consistent with the Constitution as interpreted by the Galloway Court, undertake an analysis of the doctrines of a particular faith and should mandatory evangelism be found to be a doctrine of that faith, exclude speakers from the "list" of speakers?  If the answer is "yes," then that means the city is "parsing" the content of the prayer, or dictating its the content of the prayers.  (This may happen after the fact; a speaker may be invited to pray, allowed to give a prayer, and then the prayer is found to be evangelical in nature and the speaker is stricken from the list.)  If the answer is "no," then that means that the city is ignoring the legal mandate to not allow prayer that contain evangelical content.  There is no solution that is consistent with the Constitution.

In part, this isn't the Galloway court's fault.  It's the fault of the Supreme Court for using this reasoning in Marsh v. Chambers: "Congress has been holding prayers for a long time, and James Madison wanted to do have prayers in Congress, so it must be okay for a legislature to have some kind of prayer."  A principled application of the First Amendment would have reached the result of the four Justices who dissented in Marsh, which is "The First Amendment says what it says, and a legislature praying is an Establishment of religion, not the Free Exercise of the religious beliefs of its members."  Instead, five Justices ignored the plainly obvious fact that the legislators who feel the need to pray are perfectly free to do so on their own time.  They ignored the indisputable fact that Congress is not a church.

But in part, it is the Galloway Court's fault, because it fails to acknowledge that its construction of the law at once forbids and compel content-based analysis by a governmental body.  At minimum, Galloway fails to state that there are exceptions to the prohibition against content-based examination of prayers delivered at governmentally-sponsored functions.

Second, as applied, in the Galloway case, in the Pelphrey case, and as it's playing out in my own city, the result of the policy has always been that effectively only Christian speakers deliver these invocations.  Neither the Galloway nor the Pelphrey Courts have been bothered by this fact.  But they should be.  There seems to be no question that the "random sample" method of selection indeed produces a roughly random sample of representatives of houses of worship from the area sampled.  But by treating "houses of worship" as the units from which to sample, a disproportionately heavy representation of Christians is the inevitable result.

A look at the phone book in my city reveals about a hundred Christian churches, two mosques, one Jewish temple, one UU "church," and about four institutions whose major religious group I cannot identify but which are probably also Christians.  At least one invocation speaker whose church is outside of the city limits has delivered the invocation several times, but seeing as the pastor of that church is also a former Mayor of the city, perhaps that's an informal exception to the policy.  I put together a list of 25 invocation speakers and found that 24 of them were Christian and the 25th was that hapless and surprised (but brave) Girl Scout.  Within those 24 Christian speakers (I'm including the Mayor himself, because he gave an invocation "in Jesus' name") one was Catholic and 23 were Protestant.  Compare this result -- 96% Christian, 4% nondenominational Girl Scout -- to the likely demographics of the area.  A look at page 102 of the Pew Forum's survey of America's religious landscape reveals that California is 36% Protestant, 31% Catholic, 21% nonreligious, 2% Mormon, 2% Jewish, 2% Buddhist, and 1% or less of everything else.  My city may have some deviation from California's overall religious makeup, but if anything, it's going to deviate more heavily Catholic than anything else.

So the result may be proportionate as to houses of worship but it is not remotely representative of the demographics of the city.  I have to imagine the reason for this is the no-barriers-to-entry way Protestants have of simply starting up their own churches when they dislike doctrinal, attitudnal, or even administrative ways that other Protestant churches are being run.  Christian denominations with a stronger tradition of hierarchy like the RC or LDS churches strike me as more likely to have parishioners with a "we'll just take it" sort of attitude if they don't like how their pastors are treating them.  Maybe I'm way off base in saying that, but that's my impression.  And what's in the phone book shows that indeed, there are close to a hundred Protestant churches, some of which I see around town in beautiful, free-standing campuses of newly-constructed buildings, others in older class "B" and "C" commercial structures, some in strip malls, and some apparently run out of storage units or peoples' homes, and there are only three or maybe four Catholic churches in the city, although they are well-attended and seem to run Masses almost continuously from midnight to midnight on Sundays to service all their parishioners.

So if your selection criteria is based on houses of worship, you're going to be skewing the result heavily and disproportionately towards the Protestant Christians.  A Galloway-like policy produces a result that is not proportionate to the demographic makeup of the jurisdiction.

And all of this doesn't get us around some Supreme Court holdings that the Galloway Court, at best, gave short shrift to, if not outright ignored.  Most prominently, in Board of Education of Kiryas Joel Village School District v. Grumet (1994) 512 U.S. 687, the Court held that "government should not prefer one religion to another, or religion to irreligion." I suppose the use of the word "should" in Kiryas Joel was deliberate in that a majority of Justices on the Court would not sign off on the use of the word "may," but the principle is clear even if it is normative rather than prohibitive: religion itself may not be preferred to irreligion, consistent with the Establishment Clause. To be sure, the converse is true as well -- the government may no more favor irreligion than it may favor religion. It must be neutral.

Now, there are those who insist that the Free Exercise clause must be respected as well, that it is the flip side of the Establishment Clause and just as much a part of the rights of Americans with respect to religion.  The Free Exercise argument goes like this:  "Marsh v. Chambers tells us that we can have legislative prayer, and Marsh is still good law.  The Free Exercise clause tells us that if you're going to have a prayer, the government has no business saying what's in or out of that prayer, it's a matter of private conscience.  Ergo, if someone wants to give a sectarian prayer, even in a legislative forum, the government can't stop that from happening."

Which is why there should be no invocations at all. Not having invocations at all does not disfavor religion, it simply means that religious activities belong at a time or place other than the meeting of the City Council. The City Council, after all, is not a church. And most importantly, the city's failure to endorse a religion or engage in religious activity as an entity is not the same thing as suppressing the religion in question, or religion in general. A member of the City Council who wishes to pray and seek religious guidance before performing a governmental function is perfectly free to do so any may not be penalized for doing so -- as long as they do it on their own time and not on the city's time.

Just because you can have a legislative prayer doesn't mean it's a good idea.  Consider four possible policies:  A policy allowing sectarian prayers, a policy allowing some prayers but not sectarian ones, a policy of not having invocations at all, and a policy of formally eschewing religious belief.  Sectarian invocations and disavowal of religion are the least inclusive policies, and equally so, because they exclude constituents who do not share in the faith system of the speaker favored by the legislative body with the honor of delivering an invocation.  Non-sectarian invocations are still not very inclusive, because they still deliver a message that a particular speaker from a particular religious institution is favored, which means that others are disfavored. The most inclusive policy is to be silent on the issue and not have a period of time for invocations at all.  This also happens to be the policy which enjoys the strongest ground from a Constitutional perspective.

One suggestion I have seen somewhere is that atheists and other secular folks need to find a way to get on these lists and deliver secular invocations, or invocations critical of the policy of sectarian invocations. This seems wrong to me.  If it's wrong for the City Council to endorse Jesus (or Allah, or whatever other divinity you mention, but in practice it's pretty much always Jesus) then it's wrong to endorse anyone or anything.  An invocation endorsing atheism is as wrong as an invocation endorsing Jesus-worship or an invocation endorsing the moon cult.  And it's not OK for the city to endorse Jesus on Tuesday if the city turns around and then doesn't endorse Jesus on Thursday.  So I for one will not be signing up to deliver secular invocations (which would be unwelcome anyway and could subject me to economic retaliation).

What I would be willing to accept as a compromise would be a moment of silence.  If you wanted to pray silently during that moment of silence, more power to you.  If you wanted to use the time to meditate briefly, or gather your thoughts, or wait pensively for the moment to pass, that would be okay, too.  A couple of seconds to pause for breath and calm would probably be a good prelude to the sometimes fractious business of local government.  But what I can't accept is listening to my government, at any level, tell me that I'm not welcome to be a part of the body politic unless I worship the same deity that the Mayor does, and in the same way.


* Inter alia, Santa Fe Independent School Dist. v. Doe (2000) 530 U.S. 290; Board of Education of Kiryas Joel Village School District v. Grumet 512 U.S. 687 (1994); Doe v. Tangipahoa Parish School Board (5th Cir. 2006) 473 F.3d 188, vacated on jurisdictional grounds, 494 F.3d 494 (5th Cir. 2007); Wynne v. Town of Great Falls (4th Cir. 2004) 376 F.3d 292; Bacus v. Palo Verde Unified School District Board of Education (9th Cir. 2002) 52 Fed.Appx. 355; Cole v. Oroville Union High School Dist. (9th Cir. 2000) 228 F.3d 1092; Rubin v. City of Burbank (2002) 101 Cal.App.4th 1194.

The Beast Is Dying Of Starvation -- Now What?

Assemblywoman Diane Harkey (a Republican, representing southern Orange County) joins Democratic Attorney General and likely Gubernatorial nominee Jerry Brown in saying that the state is "bankrupt."  Which is about right -- we're missing a quarter of our anticipated state budget and between now and the end of the upcoming fiscal year, we have to come up with a combination of either new revenues or spending cuts that total $20,000,000,000.  That's twenty billion dollars.  And we've got a sixteen billion dollar bill coming due, this year, for healthcare premiums to be paid for retired state and municipal workers.

But, not so far, say Controller John Chiang and a spokesman for Treasurer Bill Lockyer.  Chiang says that should the state have to miss a debt service payment, it will seek judicial restructuring of its debt repayment plans.  Which would be, it seems to me, exactly what happens in a Chapter 11 bankruptcy.  And according to Lockyer's office, Harkey and Brown are guilty of causing a harmful panic by even talking about this:

You might score some political points by saying the state is bankrupt, but you're hurting taxpayers when you do that. We are not basically bankrupt ... When you have that kind of talk out there and it makes it into the papers, it poisons the market when you go to sell bonds.

Quoth Stephen Green, "Lockyer is worried California might have trouble borrowing its way out of its spending crisis." A pithy assessment of the proposed "solution" to this problem indeed.

Harkey and Brown are not just scoring political points.  Chiang doesn't like the word "bankruptcy" but that's what he's talking about as a functional matter.  And Lockyer is, well, living up to the sterling reputation for principled, intelligent governmental service that he built up for himself in the Assembly and the Attorney General's office.  Maybe Lockyer is a good lawyer and a good prosecutor; I wouldn't know, but there's a reason the Democrats are not looking to Lockyer as their guy for Governor this November.

Because Brown is right and Lockyer is wrong.  Harkey is right and Chiang is wrong.  The state is bankrupt.  The beast has been starved.  When obligations and debt outweigh available assets and cash flow this powerfully for a business, the decision is between Chapter 7 and Chapter 11.  For a state, as a realistic matter, Chapter 11 is the right way to go because the state has fundamental obligations under its own Constitution and under Federal law to continue providing a large number of services, and there is still an impressive cash flow.

And there is no equivalent of Chapter 7 bankruptcy for a state, something I made a bitter joke about nine months ago.  A state, once created, cannot be dissolved or altered as a sovereign political entity without not only its own consent but also an Act of Congress.  No such thing has ever happened in our history.  Such a thing happening now would kick all of California's problems off to Washington, and Washington doesn't want these problems, so there is no realistic way that Congress would agree to a proposal to place California in Federal receivership.

But someone needs to cut spending.  And it's going to sucksucksuck I mean megasuck, with good people losing their jobs and more good people taking painful cuts in pay, and all sorts of social services, including schools and prisons and courts, getting reduced in staffing and effectiveness.  I'm seeing it now in the courts as they prepare for the inevitable -- we're losing a judge up here at our local courthouse and come Monday, one in eight of the support staff (clerks, baliffs, courtroom attendants, and the rest) are going to be laid off.  Our income and sales taxes are already the highest in the nation, beating out even the traditionally heavy-footed governments of the New England states.  So there isn't much practical room for further taxation.

If the Legislature and the Governator can't or won't do it, the job of cutting state spending is going to eventually fall to a judge.  A judge who really, really doesn't want the job but will have to do it anyway, because judges, unlike elected politicians, have an obligation to actually resolve the issues that come before them.  I can confidently predict that in exchange for doing this job, the unlucky judge to whom this unenviable task falls will face the most profound political criticism any judicial officer has faced since Clarence Thomas first opened a can of Coca-Cola.  That's simply an unfair thing to do to an innocent judge, but that is what is looking to me like the inevitable means of resolution.

What that judge will do to earn this obloquy, though, is what the Legislature is too spineless to do on its own -- slash spending and demand that the California Constitution and a library full of laws containing spending mandates be re-written.  It will be profoundly undemocratic and it will open up political problems to solve for years afterwards.  And since we've populated the high ranks of our state government with invertebrates like Lockyer and Chiang, I don't see any realistic way to avoid it.

Why I Hate The Culture Wars

The American culture wars strike me as astonishingly silly and yet deeply scary at the same time.  It's hard to say what recent volley is more bothersome to me.

Could it be people who are getting The Diary Of Anne Frank pulled from school curricula because of its sexually explicit content?
Or could it be people who are getting the dictionary pulled from classrooms because of its sexually explicit content?

Or maybe bigots who want to literally criminalize homosexuality here in the United States, based on a tortured reading of the Bible?

Or could it be my elected representatives, who really ought to know better, unthinkingly saying that he's being "inclusive" when he proclaims his jurisdictions to be a "Christian city"?  (Lots of details here.)

All of this "culture war" nonsense seems to be predominantly powered by a simplistic, aggressively evangelical, and intolerant brand of Christianity.  Well, not all of it.  There's also Glenn Beck leading his Beckhead minions to decry fundamental principles of law.  Hey, Glenn Beck -- what you're criticizing in that segment is what lawyers have been doing since 1066!  It's not anything new and it didn't start with Roscoe Pound!*

I have a number of friends who are not religious or, among those who are religious, who somehow manage to not be frickin' insane about it and respect that other people might want to live their lives in different ways than them.  It is absolutely beyond me why anyone would want to reach in to my house or your house or anyone else's house and tell them how to live their lives or what books to read or what religion they ought to publicly subscribe to.

I guess it's useful to be roused out of my shell and realize that indeed there are lots and lots and lots of people out there who look out at the world and in particular our own nation and see something very, very different than I do.  I may be getting a little bit too complacent, having found people with whom I have surrounded myself who do not demand that others conform in lockstep to their social example.  I had thought that tolerance for other peoples' choices and ideas and personal decisions was part of what it was to be a free people.

Godsdamn it, why can't people just learn to mind their own business?  That goes in both directions, but the aggression seems to be coming from the right rather than the left.


*  If you want to criticize Roscoe Pound and his influence over American legal education, go right ahead.  Pound didn't invent the idea of case law analysis; he formalized a method of studying law through case law analysis that had been going on for clerks who were "reading the law" in private tutelage or Inns of Court for hundreds of years in the Anglo-American legal system, and that's pretty well above criticism.  What you could criticize Pound for is his exposition of indeterminacy as the inevitable result of the vicissitudes of political power as the foundational exponent of both statutory law and a politicized judicial nomination process.  But that doesn't make for a particularly good sound bite because pretty much only lawyers and political scientists even know what the previous sentence means.

Narrow Victory For Secularism

Right here in the beautiful Antelope Valley, we were one vote away from another religiously explicit motto going up on a government building. RTFA, and you'll see that indeed, some people of faith do indeed get it -- the government and religion are both better separate from one another.

Rally

Last night I went to meet up with a friend at the Barnes & Noble after work. Along the way, I drove past the busiest intersection in the area -- the one where all the big-box stores are, the one where the mall is.

Every corner of the intersection had been taken over by hundreds of kids. They were all waving "No on Proposition 8" signs and having a big "No on 8" rally. People were honking at them in support. I assume the ones who disagreed with them, or who did not care about the issue, kept their cars silent, but that the people who, like me, agreed with their message responded to the "Honk For Equality" signs.

If there is a big anti-bigotry rally here, in one of the most conservative parts of the state, then there is hope for the defeat of Prop. 8 after all. It gave me hope for the future. You go, kids!

Logo For Lancaster, or, My Tax Dollars At Work

The city of Lancaster, California (the boundaries of which just barely enclose Soffit House) just got itself a new logo, and a new slogan, after a year's worth of marketing research and a $90,000 commission to a local graphic design house. Here it is:

The "plus" sign is supposed to incorporate an "L" for "Lancaster," and it will be a dynamic blue to accent our good air quality, and a green because, well, everyone likes green. Considering the level of readily-apparent corruption on the city council, I think they could have at least got a little more accuracy:

How Much Does That Traffic Light Cost?

In Palmdale, California, it seems that upgrading one intersection from a four-way stop to a four-way traffic light costs taxpayers $815,000.  (Now is the appropriate time to let out a long, low whistle.)

Speaking of Lack of Critical Thought

There must be a word for the phenomenon of a word, phrase, or expression losing all meaning. Some people, for instance, use the “F” word so much that it loses all emotional impact, and is just sort of a meaningless filler of verbal space, like “uh” or “like.” Judging from this set of opinions in today’s Antelope Valley Press, discussing Michael Vick’s tawdry conviction for animal cruelty, it appears that the phrase “maximum sentence” is not understood to mean exactly what the words say it means – the greatest amount of prison time that the law authorizes a judge to impose upon a convicted criminal. Judging from the comments, it seems that there are a significant number of people who think the phrase “maximum sentence” really means “basic unit of punishment.” They seem to think that “minimum sentence” means “no punishment at all.” Take, for example, this opinion: “Of course Michael Vick should get the maximum sentence possible. He committed a crime and so he needs to be punished the same way anybody else who did that same crime would be punished.” The first sentence is a defensible opinion; the second is a truism – and one which contradicts the first sentence. The whole point of not having mandatory sentences is that not everybody is similarly-situated; some people should get the minimum time, some people the maximum time, and some people should get somewhere in between the minimum and the maximum. For Michael Vick, the difference between minimum and maximum sentences is six months, so it’s not like we’re talking about a huge amount of time here. (Yes, that’s right – because the Feds were after him for the gambling operation, not for the animal cruelty. The State of Georgia will handle the animal cruelty crimes.) A big part of the reason society hires judges is so that they can make those kinds of decisions, on a case-by-case basis. If you read the comments to the end, someone said that he pled guilty, so he should get the minimum sentence, so there are people who get it, too. And I also like the guy who found a way to attack the “liberal media” for its biased reporting of Vick’s criminal activities, but that’s what you get with the local paper here.

Last Class

I had lunch today with a guy who is well-connected in local politics. We talked about how the Antelope Valley High School District has recently approved an online charter school, aimed to service "at risk" students who do not succeed in "traditional" school environments. We also discussed how much money was going to be moved around to make this project happen; there was some concern that the project would be nothing more than a financial boondoggle that would make its entrepreneurs rich without providing any real benefit to the students it was supposed to service. Seeking to lend some of my own experience to the conversation, I reminded my friend that I teach business law classes for the University of Phoenix.

"Well, do you find that it's a good thing for your students? I mean, do they actually learn well in that format?" he asked me.

"Not really, although I can't blame the online format for that, at least not much. It's more the quality of students I get -- they just aren't very motivated and you need to be a self-starter to succeed in that sort of format. Maybe two in twenty actually seem to learn anything or take anything away from my class, no matter how much effort I put in to it," I said back.

"Huh. Well, that's at least an honest thing for you to say. You know, the University of Phoenix has a really good marketing and student recruitment department. But from what I understand, the academic oversight into what happens in the classes is pretty minimal."

I had to admit he was right: "That seems about right. I get basically no feedback from my peers or the administration about whether the content of what I'm teach is right or not. I've had three classes in thirty reviewed, and I got very little critique into what I was doing, even though I know I've deviated a lot from the model class that they created for me."

"Well, hey, the University of Phoenix does make quite a bit of money. I hope you're getting your share of it, at least."

"Not really. About a thousand dollars a class. I think that's just a little bit more than what one student pays in tuition."

"You know, that's a price that seems more or less affordable for most folks, at least when it comes by way of student loans that the federal government either funds or facilitates in some way. And you've got twenty students in a class, you say?" I could see my friend doing some quick math in his head.

"More or less. There's tech support and all that marketing to pay for -- naming rights on an NFL stadium don't come cheap."

"I'll tell you what, more than a few eyebrows got raised in Washington and Sacramento when they pulled that one. There's that much extra money for their marketing?"

"Asses in classes, that's University of Phoenix's motto."

And that's when it occurred to me that I had sort of crossed a line mentally about this sidelight. If I've become convinced that the classes I'm teaching aren't doing any kind of substantial good, and instead are simply helping a big company funnel taxpayer dollars to its coffers at the expense of its students who have to pay back student loans for many years that don't even reflect a real education that they got, what in the hell am I doing participating in this sort of thing? It's all a gigantic ruse.

I don't mind the idea of students paying money -- borrowing money to pay for tuition -- if they are going to be given a reasonable shot at acquiring an education. But the quality of students I've seen in the past year or so is atrocious. The vast bulk of them are so academically unprepared for what I'm teaching them that they haven't a chance to succeed at all in any sort of an honest system.

But, they do get good grades -- because I'm required to make them work in "leaning teams" and to award a quarter of their overall grades for, in effect, showing up (and some of them can't even do that). The rest of their grades in my classes are based on objective tests, and the average grade on those tests is around 50% right. This is better than chance but not indicative to me that an acceptable level of learning is going on -- if it were just the tests, I'd be flunking students out left and right. But the grading format I have to deal with provides a very substantial cushion such that a student who gets half their objective test questions right will get a "C" in the class.

And oh, do my students whine about this! They all act as if getting a "C" grade was the equivalent of being publicly berated for stupidity. "I can't believe you grade like this! I've always been a straight-A student until your class!" "How come you make us write in complete sentences?" "I've never had to cite my sources before this." "Your tests are hard!" "This class is ridiculously difficult." (Yes, some students appreciate being challenged, and it's always gratifying when they say so. But the whining usually drowns out the praise.)

Grades have gone up, by the way, since I stopped asking my students to turn in research papers and essays. The quality of the writing was so bad that in my first class I was ready to fail everyone -- and I was counseled by my trainers that what I was reading was "pretty good," despite the lack of verbs in sentences, failure to spell-check, and inability to provide any kind of citations. My headaches went down and my students' grades went up when I stopped asking them to write anything at all -- but this means that it is simply another important life skill that their college is not teaching them.

As I told my friend at lunch, the students who do get value out of my classes are the most highly-motivated amongst them, the self-starters. They are in college for the right reasons, and they are using a remote learning format for the right reasons (they can't quit their day jobs, they live in areas too remote to have access to a community college, etc.).

But the bulk of my students are going online for convenience. There is no reason someone living in the greater metropolitan Los Angeles area cannot attend one of the fifteen public community colleges or ten accredited baccalaurelate universities in the area and get a bachelor's degree at a real school. No reason, that is, other than the fact that their academic qualifications are not sufficient to permit them to enter a college that exercises some degree of selectivity in the admissions process. Which does not mean that they cannot pull up their academic qualifications by going to a community college, by the way.

So I can't go on with this. I just can't be part of this system any more. The only thing that's going on is the fleecing of a bunch of people who expect a sheepskin in exchange for agreeing to pay student loans. And the institution seems happy to accommodate them. Intellect, learning, and education have nothing to do with it. That's not why I signed on to teach there. I signed on because I thought it would be a fun way to make some extra money while helping people get ahead in life. It's stopped being fun and it's stopped being helpful.

I've got two weeks left on my last class that I'm under contract to complete. After that, I'm done with it, until and unless I get convinced that I'll be in a system with students who are there to learn, and a college that's there to teach. I quit.

Craving The Love Of Strangers

Last night I got to talking with my friend about why people do things the way they do in public. Mostly we were discussing some local politicians but what we were talking about was why politicians beat the hell out of each other and are willing to risk looking like such asses in the hopes of attracting attention to themselves. And this conversation dovetailed into an ongoing topic between The Wife and I, which is our complete mystification about why anyone would want fame or think that being well-known was a good thing.

What I remembered last night was a wonderful line from Chicago:

Oooh, the audience loves me... and I love them. And they love me for loving them and I love them for loving me. And we love each other. And that's because none of us got enough love in our childhood. And that's showbiz... kid!

A great many people who do things in public do so in order to get love -- and what's sad is that the love they seek is the love of strangers, who of course do not really love them and are happy to cut them to ribbons later if that is more amusing. (Which, in one sense, is what the musical Chicago was all about.)

I told my friend that I had no desire to seek public office, no desire to gain fame, in order to quench my need for the love of people who are strangers to me. I am confident that I have the love of my wife, my family, and my friends, and I find that love to be quite nourishing.

But then I got to thinking that a desparate craving of the love of strangers is not the only reason that people do things publicly -- some of them have a craving for power, not for the love or adulation it brings but for its own sake. These sorts tend to be just a bit sociopathic, one would think. But that's not really fair -- "control freaks" is more like it. The decision may not be a difficult one, but they want to make it. You might make the same decision as them, but it's important to them to be the person who decides.

A partner in the firm tells a story of a lawyer he practiced with a long time ago who would never park in an open parking spot that someone else pointed out. As soon as you would say to this guy, "Oh, there's a spot to the left!" he would turn to the right and drive as far away from that spot as he could. Needless to say, he would never let anyone else drive. In negotiations, I have found that these kinds of people will not accept an offer put to them, no matter how reasonable -- their offer must be the one that my side accepts, not the other way around. I try and figure out at as early a stage as I can whether someone on the other side is a pathological decision-maker, so I can use that knowledge to my advantage.

And then there's the people who have to be right. Their psyches are only nourished if they get the affirmation of being recognized as being smart and being correct. Everyone likes being right, because it's better than being wrong. But for some people it goes a little further than that; they derive a substantial amount of their self-worth from affirmations of their intelligence and correctness.

I have to admit that there's a little bit of that in me, just as there's a little bit of that in everyone who feels the need to express themselves in a public forum -- which, as far as I can tell, includes millions of people who blog and millions more who comment on other peoples' blogs. Being aware of this kind of vanity, and making an effort to keep it in check, is about all I think anyone can do.

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

Aristotle's maxim is the start of participating in a good debate. Real mental maturity is taking that a step further, and being willing to change one's mind after convincing arguments have been advanced -- even if it means sacrificing the pleasure of being right.

The question for the person who seeks intellectual maturity is "how long do I stand my ground and argue for what I think is right, and when do I admit that the other side has a strong enough point that I need to re-evaluate my own position?" In law, this is an easy question to answer -- you stand your ground until the issue is resolved by the court, and after that you accept the result and move on to the next problem. In less-structured tests of intellect, the boundary is not so well-defined.

So, some people have to be right, some people have to be loved, some people have to be the ones making the decisions. I can't think of any other motivation for people to seek public careers. Can you?

Sacramento Shenanigans

Abuses of power are hardly the exclusive province of the Bush White House, and the Bush White House seems to be getting better about this now that there is meaningful political opposition. The same cannot be said of leaders of the California Democratic Party.

To enforce ideological rigidity, three moderate Democrats found themselves locked out of their own offices by the more liberal President Pro Tempore of the California Senate, the day after the three moderate officeholders attended a fundraiser aimed at middle-of-the-road kinds of policies. The next day, the "Mod Squad" got keys that worked.

Petty, stupid, and not good for anyone.

No Railroad for Palmdale

It seems that the massive infrastructure improvements that Governor Schwarzenegger has suggested are going to completely fill out the state's capacity to issue bonds. As a result, a planned high-speed rail connection between Los Angeles and San Francisco, which for some reason would have had a stop in Palmdale, will not happen.

Now, I've been hearing local boosters tell tall tales about the train coming through Palmdale since before I was a teenager. Back in the 80's, it was a high-speed rail connection between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. This does not survive geographic analysis -- it would be faster, shorter, and therefore cheaper to build the train route through San Bernardino and Victorville than through Palmdale. To make matters worse, Amtrak discontinued train service from Los Angeles to Las Vegas in the early 90's, for lack of ridership. When Amtrak stops service for lack of ridership, you know there was a problem with people not wanting to go to Vegas on a train.

Local political leaders still like the idea of high-speed rail, but only a connection from this part of the world to Los Angeles. There is a regular rail connection now, and it seems to gather enough ridership to be continued. This makes sense locally; a great many people in this area, particularly in Palmdale, commute to work in the Los Angeles area daily. A high-speed connection would make rail travel more attractive to commuters and relieve congestion on the far-overburdened Antelope Valley Freeway.

But it doesn't make sense from the other side -- are there enough riders, and enough fares to be generated, to support such an expensive task? Probably not. And since the Antelope Valley is the ass end of civilization as far as most Angelenos are concerned, why should they go out of their way to ship a bunch of hicks stinking of dead sagebrush to their pleasant and sophisticated communities like Beverly Hills, Manhattan Beach, and Pasadena? Much less all the way to Union Square, the Marina, and the Presidio. Dream on, desert dwellers.

I've seen how well high-speed rail can work in Europe, particularly in Germany. I'm not a naysayer who believes that Americans are so fundamentally different from Europeans that we will never get on board with a sophisticated rail transport system, although the difficulties involved in creating one where there is already a substantial network of roads for personal vehicle travel are considerable. But neither am I a messianic rail enthusiast; even the sophisticated mass transit system of Europe has not eliminated traffic jams, air pollution, or dependency on petroleum. It's a relief for some of these things, but not a solution.

One thing I want to know is, why did anyone here think that a high-speed rail connection from Los Angeles to San Francisco would go through Palmdale in the first place? My only guess would be so that the rail connection can move up through the central valley, roughly following the route of Interstate 5. Perhaps that's better from an engineering point of view. But it seems a little out of the way -- wouldn't the more direct route be to go through Santa Clarita, following the 5 all the way to either Dublin or Hollister on the way to the ultimate destination? Yes, the steep descent at the Grapevine would be an issue, but one that it seems competent engineers would be able to overcome. For instance, many tunnels more than twenty kilometers long, some more than a century old, can be found in Europe and Japan. A tunnel underneath the Grapevine would be well within modern engineering capabilities.

But, it's not going to happen for at least another generation; we're fixing our roads instead. So, no train for Palmdale. Maybe no train at all. That's nothing new.

The Antelope Valley, In Red And Blue

This was news to me. I knew that there were more Democrats here in the Antelope Valley as a result of demographic and economic change here -- mainly people moving up from Los Angeles to be able to afford houses. But I would have never thought that Palmdale would ever be a Democrat majority city.

One Way To Find A Job Right Out Of Law School

Great. Twelve years of practice and I'm resigned to the fact that my own political views and lack of religious belief have condemned me to never take a seat on the bench. A price I'm willing to pay to be true to myself, but still, I'd like being a judge if I could be one. So I think I can be forgiven for being just a bit bitter and envious to run across an article about a guy who is exactly my age who gets a black robe despite being out of law school for less than a year.

I mean, yes, congratulations to Judge Miller and I'm sure he'll do a fine job.

And yes, I know that this little puff piece from his law school isn't telling us the whole story. Maybe the guy is hard-wired into his Governor's machinery and spent his pre-law career raising money for Governor Blunt. It doesn't escape my notice that he got appointed after winning the Republican primary -- he hasn't yet won election outright but it's a good bet that the GOP nomination is effectively the election, particularly in a rural district. So he's connected in ways I'm not and likely will never be, and so he gets the kind of work I'd like very much to do but never will.

That may well make him immensely more qualified for the job than I would be. Like I say, I know what the real qualifications for a job like that are, and I don't have them. I haven't made friends in Governor Schwarzenegger's office and I suppose I might have had a chance to have done that back in 2003. Leaving for two years to another state does not exactly demonstrate my commitment to California and its Republican leadership, either. Then there's all the things I've said critical of party leaders. (I've said plenty of things critical of Democrats, too.) No, I know I'm too unreliable, too unpredictable, too much of a wild card, and I don't have "Deputy District Attorney" on my resume. So I'll never get that job.

Local Wisdom

One of our weekly dinner companions is the editor of the local paper. I see his fingerprints all over this one. And you've got to admit -- the guy has a point.