Editor’s Notes: Vegan attack, adios Nick, school $$, & two groovy columns
By Terry Smith
November 20, 2008
We have a grab-bag of commentary today, including a few words about the notorious anti-vegan commentary, Nick’s departure, school-funding, and two fascinating columns. No cats, however.
Attack of the vegans
WE’RE SURE TAKING IT ON the chin for the “first-person commentary” that we ran last Thursday. Campus reporter Morgan Hoover attended and wrote about the Vegan Thanksgiving Dinner that the OU student group Vegan Cooking held Nov. 11. From the perspective of a committed meat-eater and political conservative, Morgan proceeded to ridicule the event and its participants.
We’ve received several angry letters about the commentary — which some letter writers mistook for a news “article.” Most of the letters voiced a legitimate gripe about the commentary, namely that our student writer appeared to have gone to the event with a preconceived notion about veganism and the intent to caricature its practitioners as new–age hippies.
I felt the same way as the critics upon editing the piece, and additionally, wondered why Morgan felt obliged to make fun of a group of people who were basically minding their own business and not hurting anyone. Who cares how they’re dressed or what they’re eating? It just seemed like an arbitrary exercise in cross-clique slamming.
On the other hand, I don’t have a problem with a student writer feeling her oats and writing what she sees and feels, as long as she gets the quotes right and we make it clear that the piece is her voice, her opinion, and not a straight news article.
While most of the criticism was valid, some readers were so incensed that they seem to have lost all sense of proportion and perspective.
Well, I’ll just say that I’m gratified to see such a restrained and thoughtful reaction to one bloody commentary among the thousands of letters, commentaries and articles that we publish every year. In moving forward as editor, I’ll be very careful to only run opinions and articles that make everyone feel all warm, fuzzy and comfortable.
No Nick to kick around
AS SOME OF YOU are aware, The Athens NEWS’ longtime associate editor, Nick Claussen, has left the paper to take another position locally. Nick left on good terms, and Jim (Phillips), Ed (Venrick) and I are going to miss him terribly here in the newsroom.
The good news is that Nick will continue to provide the occasional freelance article and witty commentary to our paper. Plus if my aging body cooperates, I’ll continue to play city league softball with him. Nick plays softball like he reports the news – with a big heart, generous spirit, and the occasional wicked grounder right down the third-base line. But I’ll stand up and fight anyone who suggests that he reports the news the way he throws a softball — like a girl. (Just kidding, Nick and all you girls.) Nick has been filling up this paper with great, human stories for a lot of years, and there’ll be no replacing him.
Familiar debate
SCHOOL FINANCE once again is being pulled back to the front-burner in Ohio with Gov. Ted Strickland under pressure to make good on his campaign promise to propose a substantive solution to the longstanding problem of inequitable public school funding.
Thomas Suddes, an OU journalism faculty member who writes an occasional inside-politics column for the Columbus Dispatch, examined the issue in his column on Sunday. Like his host paper has been doing for years, Suddes expressed disdain for what he called the “school spenders” who over the last two decades have been urging reform of Ohio’s property-tax-based school-funding formula.
The “spenders” crack is a reference to the thus-far insoluble reality that actually reforming Ohio’s school-funding system will require a big increase in spending on the schools. Since there’s nowhere else in the budget to obtain this money, more spending necessarily will require more taxing.
But if that’s not in the cards, why not just equalize the system so that resources in wealthier districts are pooled centrally and then redistributed to all the schools on a fairer basis?
There are two main reasons this isn’t an option. One is that, as Suddes alludes to in his column, more prosperous school districts in Ohio are already subsidizing poorer ones. Much of their share of state education money goes to the lower-wealth districts, and they understandably don’t want to hand over their local tax revenues to schools elsewhere.
The second reason is that the school-funding reform movement in Ohio from the very beginning rejected what was called the “Robin Hood” approach — leveling or equalizing funding between school districts. That left hiking taxes and revenues as the only alternative for increasing resources for low-wealth districts.
While Suddes is right that the spending side of the equation has shifted to the benefit of low-wealth schools, on the receiving end, nobody is claiming that poor schools have anywhere near the resources of the wealthier ones, or on a basic level, adequate resources at all. One only needs to look at the never-ending travails of rural school districts in Athens County and southeast Ohio to see that this is true.
One possibility for reform that Strickland is reportedly considering would involve asking voters to increase taxes for schools, via a ballot measure. Suddes, however, maintains in his column that this option “doesn’t look promising,” citing a similar ballot measure/sales-tax increase that failed at the Ohio polls in 1998 by a 80-20 split.
He neglects to mention that the ballot issue, advanced by the Republican administration and Legislature, drew strong opposition from most educators and school-funding reformers in the state, as well as parents and families concerned about the issue. At the time, The Athens NEWS, long a champion for school-funding reform, strongly urged its readers to reject the ballot issue. We argued that it was hogtied to a half-assed reform package that only superficially addressed the inequities in the school-funding formula.
Over the years, the Dispatch has repeatedly cited that failed ballot issue as proof that Ohio voters will never support a tax increase for education, and Suddes echoes the refrain in his column.
But that conclusion is based on misremembering what happened in 1998. While persuading the state’s hard-pressed voters to approve a tax increase won’t be easy, what happened in ’98 has nothing to do with what might happen in ’09 or ’10.
Scary economic thoughts
TWO COLUMNS IN The New York Times Monday caught my attention. I thought I’d share their basic premises with whatever of my readers are still with me.
In one, moderate conservative David Brooks (for whom my respect has been growing), wrote about what the global financial crisis is doing to the emerging middle class in developing countries, as well as in the U.S.:
“This recession will probably have its own social profile. In particular, it’s likely to produce a new social group: the formerly middle class…
“The phenomenon is noticeable in developing nations. Over the past decade, millions of people in these societies have climbed out of poverty. But the global recession is pushing them back down. Many seem furious with democracy and capitalism, which they believe led to their shattered dreams.
“In this country, there are also millions of people facing the psychological and social pressures of downward mobility.”
He goes on to discuss the various reversals this will cause — in employment, lifestyle, housing and social capital. “In this recession, maybe even more than other ones, the last ones to join the middle class will be the first ones out…” Brooks concludes. “These reversals are bound to produce alienation and a political response. If you want to know where the next big social movements will come from, I’d say the formerly middle class.”
Scary stuff indeed.
The other column, by Weekly Standard Editor William Kristol, a leading American conservative, acknowledges what conservatives are usually loathe to acknowledge — that financial markets must be regulated:
“I think (free-marketers) have to take much more seriously the task of thinking through what are the right rules of the road for both the private and public sectors. They’ll have to figure out what institutional barriers and what monetary, fiscal and legal guardrails are needed for the accountability, transparency and responsibility that allow free markets to work.”
He continues, “And I don’t see why conservatives ought to defend a system that permits securitizing mortgages (or car loans) in a way that seems to make the lenders almost unaccountable for the risk while spreading it, toxically, everywhere else… There’s nothing conservative about letting free markets degenerate into something close to Karl Marx’s vision of an atomizing, irresponsible and self-devouring capitalism.”
Well, yes, that’s true, though if one of the shining lights of the conservative movement is advocating firm regulation of the markets, the question then becomes, where do you draw the line? That slaps a coat of gray over the eternal economic debate between liberals and conseratives, while sucking dry the abstract appeal of hard-nosed conservativism.
I’ll just add one more thing. Several years ago when I heard that the mortgage for my house had been “sold” to some company that I had never heard of, and a year later, it was sold yet again, I thought that sounded shady. Now I know that it was.
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