All posts by mchughrussell

Human Rights Lip Service

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In late October, parliament voted against adopting Bill C-300, which would have provided some level of human rights accountability for Canadian mining (and oil and gas) companies operating beyond Canadian borders. The bill, originally introduced by Liberal MP John McKay, was defeated 140-134 by the votes of a unanimously opposed Conservative party, and supported by the absence of numerous Liberal party members. Among those who chose not to appear was Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff.

The bill had passed two earlier Parliamentary votes. Most believe that the vote was a result of aggressive, last-minute lobbying from industry representatives, who claimed that firms (read “they themselves”) would be driven to incorporate elsewhere were the bill to become law.

What drastic measures would the law have imposed were a Canadian company involved in a ‘violation of international human rights standards’? As put concisely by Canadian Business Magazine, the project in question “…would become ineligible to receive financial services from EDC, and the Canada Pension Plan could no longer invest in [the Corporation’s] securities.”

There may have been problems with the administrative scheme set up under the Bill, shortcomings which could have been overcome if more MPs had taken an interest in rendering the bill workable. One would expect that kind of effort from a party, and a leader, which have made their name promoting human rights values. Their decision can hardly be called disappointing, however, since that would require the result to be out of character. In practice, Ignatieff has made an art of supporting those values while undercutting the rights themselves.

How is it possible that human rights protection, seen as trumps in Canadian law, fell so easily to the wayside when it came to regulating business practice? Chris Brown, an international relations professor at LSE, has put the matter plainly: “The enforcement of rights by the international community has been determined, in practice, by the foreign-policy imperatives of the major powers, and political, commercial and financial considerations frequently get in the way of a high-priority, even-handed policy on human rights.”

The vote on C-300 draws that lesson squarely, but also sharpens the edge of its rule: in buying into a standard for the protection of human rights, even middle powers don’t feel that they can afford to pay for more than lip service.

—
Refs: Chris Brown, “Universal Human Rights? An Analysis of the ’Human-Rights Culture’ and its Critics” in Robert G Patman, ed, Universal Human Rights? (Houndmills [England]: Macmillan Press, 2000) 31, at 40

Dr. Pepper is hurting America

politics, poverty, US, , , , , , , , , ,

One could call a recent episode, in which the employees at a Mott’s factory in upstate New York’s Williamson face a $1.50 an hour pay cut combined with other benefits reductions just another day in the continued American slide toward inequality. Yet as noted by New York Times writer Steve Greenhouse, the strike is interesting because the concessions are being demanded at at time when the parent company, The Dr. Pepper Snapple Group, is showing healthy profits.

As noted by Leo Casey over at Dissent Magazine’s blog, there’s nothing new about the race to the bottom which has undermined middle class incomes over the past 40 years. Wages for the bottom 90% of the American workers have stagnated for the last 30 years, at the expense of the wages of the top 10%. That’s 20 years of growth for which all of the benefits have flowed to society’s richest.

There is no reasonable argument that this is fair – data shows that the change can’t be attributed to growing gaps in educational attainment.

Besides fairness, however, there is growing understanding, backed up by evidence and theory, that inequality is a large part of what caused the financial crisis.  Former chief economist at the IMF Simon Johnson lays out arguments to that effect from Robert Reich and Raghuram Rajan, no economic slouches themselves. While admitting the long term fiscal problems faced by the United States, Johnson points out that the immeditate causes of the fiscal crunch was paying for the financial crisis – one facilitated by 30 years of growing inequality.

Johnson’s argument is about the implications of this understanding for US fiscal policy, but it also provides a useful perspective on the Mott’s strike. A recent book from Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett (you can read a defence against their critics here) has demonstrated the almost unbelievable numer of ways in which equality improves the lives of whole societies (that is, not just the poor); the work of Johnson, Rajan and Reich simply adds another reason to realize that the US has far from crossed the line from reasonable into irresponsible.

Some public advocacy groups have taken a hard tack on inequality, yet public awareness on the causes of inequality have as of yet gained much less traction, and policy responses seem focused on tax measures alone. It is all well and good to focus on individuals and their earnings, but ultimately distribution is a result as much, if not more, of the regulation of the market as it is of post-income readjustment. The Mott’s strike demonstrates just one of the myriad ways in which corporations – empowered and informed by legal rules and government policies – are allowed to increase their share of the total economic pie. It is this wealth which has increasingly found its way into the hands of America’s richest.

If Americans want to do something about inequality – and the crisis has shown that we all have a stake in America rebalancing its economic pie – then they have to do more than raise taxes on the beneficiaries of corporate largesse. They have to go after the largesse itself, with policies which ensure a fairer distribution between business and workers in their common enterprise. That requires a political strategy which focuses not only on the individual workers, but on the larger economic ramifications of short-term corporate policies.

It requires progressives not only to stand in solidarity with the striking workers, but to point out to American independents, fiscal conservatives, and anyone willing to listen, that is not only a matter of Mott’s shortchanging handful of workers. These policies, and those like it, have implications for American social outcomes, global financial stability and the nation’s fiscal health.

So even if it has the ring of comedy, we have to start pointing out the greater truth of the matter, much as John Stewart did when he called out the hosts of CrossFire: it’s not that the demand in Williamson for concessions are bad. It’s more than that.

Dr. Pepper is hurting America.

I suppose that’s a profession I would like to be a part of…

law, politics, , , , ,
Even if it is not immediately recognized as such, Law, as it is idealized by the new law student, is the philosophy of state power. Not in the explanatory sense of political science, but quite literally the philosophy which the state itself cleaves to in the exercise of that power. The idealistic among these students will join the ranks of the profession in the hopes that they might take part in contributing to this philosophy their own prejudices, fantasies and ires. But no matter how beneficial the edifice of the law or how lofty one’s principles, a tenuous bargain is involved in entering the walls of law’s empire, and it is one which should not be accepted lightly.
One is of course aware of the role of the professor to, as it were, continually attempt to expose the tears in the wall between the philosophy of the state and philosophy proper, that is, the human philosophy of everyday life. But so too is it the job of the law student. And, if one is fearless in their thinking; if one can escape from the work-a-day practices of the profession which result, if without conspiracy, at distracting from this question; if one is willing to risk, which is not to say sacrifice, the comfort and security of professional certainty and relative class privilege, then so too can this be the role of the working lawyer. The job of the law professor, then, is not just to expose the breach. It is to put the pick in the hands of the profession itself.

books, the internet, and competition law

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Is it the internet killing the publishing industry, or just plain old anti-competitive practices? Take the comments of Colin Robinson of OR Books on their reasons for not selling through Amazon:

To sell our titles, Amazon would require a discount of 55% or even 60%, that’s $11 or $12 on a $20 book. Amazon would use some of this money to discount the book to its customers — that’s what gives it its edge. If, as a publisher, you try matching their reduced price, Amazon will insist your new, lower price is the basis for their discount, so they can cut their price still further. That makes it pretty much impossible for you to compete with direct sales to your customers.

In fact, it makes it impossible for any other seller to compete with Amazon. Insisting on the lowest possible price is fine – insisting on a price that’s half of the otherwise lowest price is ridiculous.

One of the fascinating thing about globalization is the cases like these which blur the line between monopoly and monopsony. Speaking of which, it is time to break up WalMart, whose success is tied, contrary to what might be thought, not primarily to egregious anti-union practices, but from globally exercising a pseudo-monopsony on purchases, and acting as a local monopsony employer hundreds of times over. Here, then, is a lesson to those starting law school: you can be on the side of the little guy and efficient markets by focusing your career on competition law.

ht to paperpools, quoting Huffington Post

universities (ii)

Canada, education, politics, , , , , , ,

McGill is raising the tuition of their MBA program to $30 000; an order of magnitude increase. Little surprise that Québec’s government is incensed, nor that the Globe and Mail editorial board is in favour. From the Globe’s argument:

McGill says the actual cost of running its program is $22,000 a year, of which tuition and government subsidies pay $12,000; other school programs have to subsidize the remaining $10,000. “We think that’s backwards,” says Peter Todd, the dean of Desautels. The MBA students have five years of work experience when they begin, and within a year or two double their salary, on average, and earn over $100,000. Other school programs shouldn’t have to subsidize this elite one.

Education Minister Michelle Courchesne says the province will claw back the extra money if McGill goes ahead. “They [McGill] say that charging $30,000 will let them increase the quality of their teaching and compete with other universities in Canada, the United States and others in the world. I cannot accept that argument because we have excellent schools.” Saying they’re excellent doesn’t necessarily make it so. It is true that McGill is 95th on the Financial Times list of the world’s top 100 business schools philosophy departments. But five other Canadian universities are ahead. All five charge vastly more. And no other Quebec business school philosophy department is in the top 100. “Our position has eroded because we haven’t been able to invest,” Mr. Todd says of McGill. “We’re arguably one of the best 25 universities in the world. We say it should have one of the best 25 MBA schools philosophy departments in the world. Quebec should want that and I think Quebec does want it.”

These all-too-cute editing nonetheless provides fodder for some head-scratching about a change which amounts to a complete refutation of the relationship the department has with society, and with the rest of the University. Why does it cost so much to educate these people, when there are no lab materials, no medical supplies, nor specialized software needed to educate them? Why should the prestige of this particular department be just as high as the university’s overall reputation, and not some other department? Why should we care what the Financial Times has to say about the work done in this department?

More importantly, if this program is essentially a training program for tomorrow’s corporate elite, then why is it offered by a university at all? The purely practical answer is that students willing to pay an $8000 premium on the delivery costs of the program provde a convenient cashcow for an institution constantly facing fiscal drought. To that, a modest proposal: the school could make even more money by simply selling degrees, ‘recognizing the excellence’ of those already successful in the business field, in return for a hefty fee – disposing of the need for a library, professors, or administrative staff.

The Globe’s averaging of salaries hide the students who would have otherwise done something thoughtful, something innovative, something revolutionary with the education they now received. Little time for that with a massive debtload to pay off. In his recent book on universities, Ian Angus argues that business has replaced the clergy in the tacked-on, gaudy addition housing the professional-school wing of the universities. Yet, paradoxically, even the divinity schools were never concerned only with turning out disciples willing to ply their trade in conditions of blind faith; even they saw doubt at the core of what they did. Here, then, we have a clear answer to one of those angels-on-a-pinhead questions philosophers are ever wrestling with: what is the price of professional certainty? It is $30 000 a head.

Dear Professor Johnson

politics, , , , , ,

I hope that you won’t mind too dreadfully me searching for your contact information online beyond the bounds of the forum where I found this piece to which I have a quick response. The thing is, one thing that is often missed by Zizek’s critics is that he makes otherwise difficult theory lucid, which is at least in part why he is so adored by undergraduates; that he also makes otherwise lucid theory difficult is perhaps why he is less appreciated in other circles. As someone on the left who believes that changing the world also requires really seeing it, the thrill in reading his work is that seldom do I find myself disagreeing with what seem to be quite astute characterizations of numerous situations (Berlusconi as clown, Paris riots checking the connection, financial crisis as yet indeterminate). Yet, overall, I share some anxiety that someone whose orientation toward Stalinism seems so…hazy, is more dangerous than he is worth. Bravo for taking his work seriously enough to critique it. I’ve signed up for the Dissent blog just for a chance to read your ongoing posts on the matter. But I have a question; hence the email.

At the core of your most recent post, you quote, from Did Somebody say Totalitarianism? an excerpt which ends with the following:

“So what if one is accused of being “anti-democratic,” “totalitarian…“.

I recently framed an essay, after laying out a troubling picture of the relationship currently existing between reporters and politicians, with a similar, apparently glib “so what?” Yet my intention was not to dismiss the problem out of hand, but (while obviously being a bit provocative) to suggest that solutions to the problem lay in better understanding the nature of our anxiety. That is, I intended that the question be read in the register not of ‘we should not be worried about it’ but in the register of ‘what exactly is it, as a matter of principle, that we are worried about?’ Your latest piece depends on an interpretation in the former register, and I am not sure it provides enough evidence to justify that interpretation. Can you say more about why you think that Zizek is being glib? Does his argument in the book, following this quote, support your reading?

This is especially important, given that there is evidence that this wasn’t his intention. First, he doesn’t say ‘so what if we return to totalitarianism'; he says “so what if one is accused of being anti-democratic and totalitarian.” Neither the accusation, nor even a personal orientation, would necessarily imply endorsement of a totalitarian politics. The second, though you have dismissed it out of hand, is the use of ‘inverted commas’ which suggest that it is only “democracy” as defined under liberal democratic coordinates ( an orientation to question of democracy you clearly don’t endorse) not democracy in the ideal, which he is attempting to muddle.

There is further support for this more generous reading; one could look outside the book to sources in which Zizek has unequivocally criticized the authoritarian tyranny of Socialist Bloc policies: here in his review of The Lives of Others (in which he suggests that western leftists could be easily be misled by the film about how bad the system was) and here (a video, in which he says at 2:25 “Let me make one point extremely clearly. I think that the Communism of the 20th century – more specifically, all the network of phenomena we refer to as Stalinsim, are maybe the worst, ideological, political, ethical, social (and so on) catastrophe in the history of humanity.”) But it is perhaps fair to respond to such outside sources with an observation that Zizek is wont to hedge his bets.

I would have put these remarks in the comments, but that doesn’t seem to be possible on the Dissent website.

Looking forward to your next critique, and if you find time, some further thoughts on this specific example.

Universities (I)

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For your enjoyment, a juxtaposition, followed by an offering of sorts. First, the point:

As reported by the Chronicle of Higher Education, some faculty at university business schools in the United States have begun outsourcing their grading work to India, Singapore and Malaysia. Professors, apparently, still hand out the final grades, but based on a scoring made by the assessors on the basis of “the elements in the rubric.” Such outsourcing is not without its upsides:

The company [EduMetry] advertises that its graders hold advanced degrees and can quickly turn around assignments with sophisticated commentary, because they are not juggling their own course work, too.

The company argues that professors freed from grading papers can spend more time teaching and doing research.

Comments, designed to help students understand their strengths and weaknesses, are often much more comprehensive than they would be were course TAs assigned to do the work. And assignments turnaround is only three or four days. Yet the program has its critics: not only do most students have no contact with their graders, but such contact is impossible. Worse, the marking is, by design, uninformed by classroom experience.

Which leads to the counterpoint:

The tutorial is at the core of undergraduate teaching and learning at Oxford. It offers students a unique learning experience in which they meet regularly with their tutor, either on a one-to-one basis or with one or two other students. Undergraduates attend, on average, one hour-long tutorial every week and undertake a considerable number of hours’ preparatory work for each tutorial, including background reading, essay-writing and problem-solving.

The language of ‘tutorial’ misses something, I think, for most North American students. A long book of essays on the Oxford tutorial contains a simple description which throws some light on the peculiar pedagogical object:

[The tutorial] does not replace other methods, such as instruction by lecture or in class. Indeed, it assumes all these, and includes their results in the preparation of a weekly essay, which is presented orally, listened to by the tutor and discussed immediately. The whole process – of reading, discussion, arrangements for the following week – takes up little more than an hour.

Yet there is variation. James, a fellow Scholar who read history at Oxford, once described to me one of his fondest memories of his undergraduate experience: James reads his essay, the tutor frowns, furrows his brow and offers a generous ‘no’, James tries on the argument again, and again the furrow-browed ‘no’, and in its turn the argument again, step-by-step, James explaining how some event should be interpreted or why someone else’s interpretation can’t stand, or what the implications of one interpretation is for another set of facts, and each version satisfying James a bit more than the last, but not satisfying his tutor enough to offer anything other than a litany of rejections, a sphinx generous enough to offer second chances when the riddle the student had set himself remains unanswered.

This whole process continuing not for an hour, but for two, three, three and a half hours, and as the process wears on, the two of them going to lunch as James steps through the same basic outline but each time trying to sharpen the weakest bits or leaving deadwood behind, eventually the tutor offers at the end of a version a single question after lifting his chin in a way that might imply…but ultimately settling his chin down just in time to coincide with the now, let’s say,  12th  ‘no’, delivered with an almost-sheepish smirk, a kind of apologetic grin combined with raised eyebrows.

But at least now there is a question, and maybe James if he is lucky gets one more question before finally one of them having to leave for some other appointment, no ‘yes’ finally being offered, the sphinx standing unscathed as it were, but ultimately the argument being much sharper than it had been, the punchline being that this had in fact been among the best of his essays, with the real measure of its strength being the amount of time he had been offered, not the amount of per se feedback. Tutorials, almost to a one, are unmarked, there thus being no need for a ‘rubric.’

( I was a course tutor for a first-year course at McGill last term. In addition to an hour each week of interactive discussion of the lecture material with two separate groups of 20, I had a weekly office hour where any of those students could drop by. I think, in the end, about 5 of them came to do anything other than pick up an assignment. I didn’t, generally, mark the essays, or the midterms, or the exams of my own students, and even where I did, robust commentary on their work wasn’t part of the job description. I certainly wasn’t required to attend lectures. )

My point isn’t that Oxford gets it right. What exactly is on offer in such an education is a topic for a different post. Here is a third thing to put the juxtaposition in the relevant context: university lectures for many universities are now provided free online. Berkeley, for example, provides not only audio, but full video for about three dozen of its undergraduate courses per term. And of course, one can these days get a whole university degree online, though some might question whether such an experience is truly a ‘university education’ at all.

It would be unfair to entice the reader down such an unsatisfying trail without providing a preliminary hint of where thinking about these developments might lead. So for those who have been waiting, here’s the riddle. Why do we still have universities? It’s not that there aren’t socially useful functions universities might serve. Yet the reasons universities should in fact serve those functions, contra other possible arrangements, are nebulous at best. When I was in Ottawa a couple of weeks ago, and had a chance to meet with Paul Davidson, head of the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada, I asked him the question. It will have to suffice to say of his answer that it included neither almost-sheepish grins nor apologetically-raised eyebrows. I for one am on the side of the universities – the question is, are the universities themselves?