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Ellen Belcher is the Dayton Daily News opinion pages editor. She writes about state government, education, the environment, higher education and all things Dayton.
Martin Gottlieb is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He focuses on the political process itself and does such national issues as war, the economy, taxes and Social Security, as well as a hodge-podge of local and state issues.Home > Blogs > A Matter of Opinion > Archives > 2011 > January > 21
Friday, January 21, 2011
Guest column: WSU welcomes speakers across political spectrum
This commentary was written by Carol Herringer, chair of the Wright State University Department of History, and Carol Loranger, chair of the Department of English Language and Literatures.
As colleagues of Professor William Irvine, we were disappointed that he deliberately gave Dayton Daily News readers a fantastical vision of liberalism run amok at their local public university. Specifically, he charged that unnamed liberals are actively preventing conservative voices from speaking on campus.
Conservative speakers are, in fact, routinely invited to campus. For example, President George W. Bush — who as twice-elected Republican president of the United States embodies the gold standard of conservatism — spoke here in 2000.
Other speakers whose lives or messages embody the values of individual achievement and the role of the marketplace have also been welcomed, including African-American stockbroker Chris Gardner, “Freakonomics” co-author Stephen Dubner and extreme adventurer and motivational speaker Charlie Engle.
Irvine himself has been a frequent lecturer for the honors program, the university libraries, and the college of liberal arts.
Our colleague also disingenuously states that John McCain and Sarah Palin had to pay to speak at the Nutter Center, implying that WSU would not let them speak for free on campus. However, he neglects to mention that they were holding a campaign event.
The university is not permitted to support candidates by providing facilities for free. Only a month before the McCain/Palin event, then-candidate Barack Obama also paid for the privilege of campaigning at the Nutter Center.
Speakers from across the political spectrum have appeared at WSU to talk about political and social issues. But the preponderance of speakers, from the prestigious “Presidential Lecturers” to those writers and thinkers invited by individual departments and organizations, have not been clearly left or right politically.
They include Greg Mortensen, whose mission of building schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan cannot be simply classified, and whose book, “Three Cups of Tea,” is widely read by military officers.
Likewise, Ishmael Beah, who spoke here in August about his experiences as a child soldier and who works to end abuse of children in war zones, defies easy classification.
On Jan. 31, Charlayne Hunter-Gault will speak on “From Jim Crow America to South Africa Apartheid and Beyond: A Journalist’s Journey.” She is a noted journalist whose balanced reporting exemplifies the search for truth that helps us to understand our world.
If the majority of speakers who are invited to our campus have anything in common, it is that they are committed to education and seek to inspire students and the community.
That speakers who come to WSU cannot always be categorized as either liberal or conservative shows that Irvine’s terminology is flawed.
His use of the terms “conservative” and “liberal” to shape his argument is startlingly unexamined and oversimplified. There are social liberals, political liberals and economic liberals, just as there are different types of conservatives.
Most of us hold some ideas that could be considered conservative and others that could be considered liberal. The job of educators is to teach our students to examine ideas, to judge them against facts, and to form a coherent argument that takes contradictory facts into account.
DDN readers need to know that campus groups and academic departments have small speaker budgets that are not funded by taxpayers, but by private donors who want to enrich the experience of WSU students beyond what can be offered by the state or through student tuition. Groups are answerable to their donors for their use of these funds.
The primary mission of a university is the production of knowledge and the development of critical consciousness, to make better citizens of us all. That work can only happen when those of every political and social philosophy are able to participate in the discussion of ideas and issues.
Wright State University encourages these discussions in classrooms as well as in even controversial public lectures.
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Editorial: Piqua recall a bad idea
Piqua has a regular election scheduled for November. Three seats on the five-member city commission will be up. But it also has an irregular election scheduled for March 1. In that one, four commissioners will be up for recall, and others may be on the ballot to replace them.
This is simply absurd, a breakdown in the system. The recall is a waste of money (estimated at $17,000), a waste of energy, an unnecessary burden on voters and an embarrassment to the community.
In the early 2000s, Piqua decided it needed to spruce up the look of the city. People were complaining that unkempt properties were giving the city a bad image, lowering property values, impinging on the quality of life and driving people away.
So the city commission got serious about enforcing nuisance rules. It also passed new rules.
That led to spats with landlords, which led to ordinances being put on the ballot and some getting repealed. But the fight went on.
Now, in a city of about 20,000 people, the landlords and others have gathered the 1,000 signatures necessary to schedule a recall election. Among those targeted is Mayor Lucy Fess.
The city has already had regular biennial elections since the fight with landlords started brewing. The issues were aired. Candidates ran who are associated with the group now pushing recall, POINT (Property Owners Improving Neighborhoods Together).
The recall mechanism does not exist to give people who disagree with policies two runs at incumbents in one year. It’s more like impeachment. It’s there for cases of flagrant misbehavior, of great embarrassment to the community, some scandal. None of those is in play here.
The city’s policies have not been adjudged unconstitutional or somehow beyond the authority of the commission.
Reasonable people can disagree about how aggressive a city should be about enforcing measures having to do with appearances.
Some of the gripes in Piqua may be legitimate. But citizens with gripes have ample ways of being heard — certainly in a small community — without causing a new election.
This particular election poses the possibility of complete upheaval on the commission.
The state’s custom of staggering terms on a commission has a clear logic: Some districts are contested in, say, 2009 and the others in 2011. That way there’s always some stability, rather than complete turnover.
At this stage, the upset landlords have been joined by people who have other gripes against city hall. Every action taken by the commission is offered as a reason for recall.
But the notion that four of five duly elected commissioners are off on some general, egregious toot is hard to take seriously.
Now that the recall is scheduled, responsible citizens have little choice but to vote, lest the future of the community be determined by a small minority with narrow interests.
To a certain degree, Piqua may be a victim of hard times. With landlords having difficulty because tenants are losing jobs, with properties going vacant because of foreclosures, and with the city government having limited resources itself, difficult questions will come up about upkeep, blight and nuisances.
But these kinds of problems shouldn’t be allowed to turn the community against itself. POINT can make a useful contribution. This isn’t the way.
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Editorial: Selling state’s liquor asset not ideal, but worth look
With Gov. John Kasich looking for ways to save the state money by privatizing parts of government, a study by a Cleveland-based investment banking firm offers this view:
Of the major possibilities for privatization, the liquor business is the most promising.
Before Western Reserve Partners, LLC spoke up, the Kasich people had focused on prisons, the lottery and the Ohio Turnpike.
The investment firm (which wants a role in the state’s privatization efforts) isn’t talking about changing any rules that directly affect consumers. The state’s role now consists of buying the liquor and distributing it down the supply chain. The arrangement grows out of Prohibition.
These days, there’s no particular reason that the state should be distributing liquor, except that the business does net taxpayers about $215 million a year. Selling the enterprise would net between $1 billion and $1.5 billion, according to the study.
But the state would be turning to a one-time-only source of income — a crutch that former Gov. Ted Strickland was widely criticized for using in the last budget crisis. More significant, the state would be giving up future income.
But 2011 is an especially troubled year. Some strong measures will be needed to balance the budget.
One useful impact of the study will be to shine a light on whatever proposals the Kasich administration makes about privatization. If the governor decides to privatize elsewhere instead, the difficulties pointed to in the study will need to be confronted.
The Ohio Turnpike has always been one possibility for privatization. Gov. Kasich has sent conflicting messages on his attitude. His current position is that if he can get the right price, he’d be willing to lease the road. But there’s doubt about getting a good price.
As for prisons, the state has two private ones up north, and the new prison director has both public and private experience. The administration is looking at more privatization, as well as at reducing the number of minor offenders in state prisons.
The Western Reserve study says the liquor proposal would have the least risk and affect the fewest state employees, partly because the state already outsources warehousing and freight. And it deals with wholesalers who actually sell the products.
The study also says the state can get a good price, because the market for liquor is always strong.
What Ohio needs now is not an ideological war about whether it should be involved in what is normally a private enterprise. That might be a good discussion if the state were messing up — an allegation that’s not being made — or if somebody were proposing the state should expand into a private enterprise.
Under the circumstances, the best questions to be asked are: If it ain’t broke, why fix it? And are there ways to increase state revenues in the short run without decreasing them in the long run?
While all the privatization possibilities mentioned above are in the under-consideration stage, the governor has already decided that he wants to privatize the state’s economic development efforts, now centered in the Department of Development.
That move isn’t so much about saving money as improving the economic development effort, he says.
Clearly, the governor wants to make a mark with privatization. If that direction can result in net good for the state budget, it’s better than some options — such as gutting safety-net programs, which the governor says is not his agenda.
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Martin Gottlieb: Would Joe Lieberman have been dumped in Ohio, too?
If you ain’t wrong, you’re right. If it ain’t day, it’s night. If you ain’t sure, you might. Gotta be this or that — (Old pop tune by Sunny Skylar)
Sen. Joe Lieberman, who became a symbol of resistance to the “this or that” mentality in Washington, has announced his retirement.
He says he never gave up on winning re-election in 2012. But he faced a tough row.
Once upon a time, being near the political center was considered a political asset in American politics. Now, however, a guy who is obviously not fit for the Republicans also can’t find a comfortable home with the Democrats.
Splitting the difference between the parties is simply not permissible in most of the country.
And yet no decent case can be made that there’s something inherently weird or stupid about the middle mindset. Among the general public, it’s not a rare outlook, even in these polarized times, when so many forces are telling you that you gotta be this or that.
One question that arises about the Lieberman story is whether it is a peculiarly Connecticut story. Could it have happened in a more representative place, say, Ohio?
Lieberman was a passionate supporter of the Iraq war. In 2006, an unknown Democrat challenged, mainly on that issue, and beat him in a primary. In November, Lieberman ran as an independent and won.
But the Republicans hadn’t put up a credible candidate (because they thought Lieberman would be unbeatable as the Democratic nominee). So 2012 was looking harder.
The Iraq war has faded as an issue. But others have intervened. There is the matter of Lieberman having supported John McCain over Barack Obama.
Connecticut is a mostly Democratic state, and in a very particular way: with lots of well-educated suburban and campus liberals who are particularly liberal on social issues.
As judged by the liberal Americans for Democratic Action, Lieberman’s votes on hot issues have historically run about 75 or 80 percent liberal. But that’s about 20 points lower than the other Connecticut senator on his watch, Chris Dodd.
Ohio has a different kind of Democratic Party: more working class and culturally conservative. The state also has more Republicans, so independent voters often hold the balance of power.
Would a Sen. Lieberman, D-Ohio, have been challenged in the 2006 primary? And could that challenger have won even if he started out unknown?
The answers: quite possibly and probably not. A lot of Democrats would have been mad at Lieberman. Maybe they would’ve been more mad and more numerous than say, hard-core conservative voters who were dissatisfied with Republicans like George Voinovich and Mike DeWine.
But that 2006 primary in Connecticut was a profoundly liberal affair, much driven by liberal bloggers. The complaint of the liberals was really that Lieberman was too conservative for a liberal state.
Still, look at Ohio: The only Democratic senator elected in almost two decades is the unmistakably liberal Sherrod Brown. Indeed, the three top elected officials in Ohio now are of the this-or-that variety. That’s remarkable, given that the state went for both Obama and George W. Bush.
Lieberman was wrong on Iraq. And the reason he supported McCain was not just loyalty to a friend, but foreign policy.
Still, do we really want a system wherein the pressure to pick between “this” and “that” is so intense, where the role of individualism is so minor, where dissent is such a risk, where the divisions between the parties are so painstakingly nurtured.
True, some congressional Democrats are more conservative than Lieberman, yet manage to survive. A Democrat who represents a conservative place — typically in the South — can get away with conservative votes.
But Lieberman’s deviations seemed to represent honest views, not political calculations. That really ticked people off.
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