My favorite scene in the movie Michael Clayton is a dialogue between Michael Clayton (played by George Clooney), who is a lawyer in a 600-person law firm, and Arthur Edens (played by Tom Wilkinson), a senior partner in the same firm.
Edens is a manic depressive handling a major piece of litigation for an international corporation accused of intentionally marketing a product that causes people to get cancer. During depositions, Edens has a manic episode and his continuing bizarre behavior threatens to expose the corporate client's skulduggery, potentially costing it billions.
The firm's senior partner directs Clayton to get Edens under control, and Clayton talks to him very persuasively, while implicitly threatening to have him committed to a mental institution.
But Edens is having none of it.
"Michael," Tom Wilkinson's character kindly says to George Clooney's character, "I have great affection for you and you live a very rich and interesting life, but you're a bag man not an attorney."
If I ever meet Sandy Baum, I'm tempted to say very much the same thing. Baum is a senior fellow at the Urban Institute and a highly respected analyst of higher-education finance. For many years, she has co-authored the College Board's annual publications Trends in Student Aid and Trends in College Pricing; and she has conducted studies on college costs for the Brookings Institution. She has a Ph.D. in economics and is a research professor at George Washington University, a position she holds while working with the Urban Institute. Very impressive.
Over the years, Sandy Baum has emerged as one of the leading apologists for the higher education industry. Everyone knows that college costs have skyrocketed and that the federal student loan program is totally out of control. Millions of people have defaulted on their loans and millions more have obtained economic hardship deferments that excuse them from making student-loan payments.
Nevertheless, Sandy Baum coos soothingly that college costs are really not as high as they seem to be and, in any event, rising costs are not the fault of the colleges and universities. In 2013, Baum co-authored a report for the College Board that actually argued that college costs have not gone up much at all. It is true, the College Board acknowledged, that the sticker price for attending college has gone up significantly over the past ten years. But when discounts, grants and tax benefits are calculated, the real cost that students pay has remained virtually steady over the past decade. In fact, according to the College Board (as reported in the New York Times), when adjusted for inflation, the net cost of attending college (looking only at tuition and fees) has actually gone down over the past ten years.
Indeed, as Sandy Baum told the New York Times, "I think the hand-wringing about the trend [in college costs] is greatly exaggerated."
And--if there has been an increase in college costs, it is because the states have cut back on their support for higher education. "So it's not that colleges are spending more money to educate students," Baum told NPR radio. "It's that they have to get that money from someplace to replace their lost state funding--and that's from tuition and fees from students and families."
So which is it, Sandy? Has college tuition gone up due to reduced state funding or have costs not gone up after adjusting for inflation, grants, and tax benefits?
And if everything is under control, why did Baum praise President Obama for encouraging students to sign up for long-term income-based repayment plans--plans that can extend the student-loan repayment period to 20 or 25 years? In fact, Baum even recommended that long-term repayment plans be the "default option" for college students who take out student loans.
Paul Campos, in a New York Times op ed essay, challenged the notion that the states' support for higher education has gone down, which is the standard reason the higher education industry gives for rising college costs. According to Campos, "[P]ublic investment in higher education in America is vastly larger today, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than it was during the supposed golden age of public funding in the 1960s."
Campos thinks a major explanation for rising college costs is "the constant expansion of university administration." Campos cites data that administrative positions at colleges and universities grew by 60 percent between 1993 and 2009, which is reportedly 10 times the rate of growth for tenured faculty positions.
In my opinion, Campos' analysis of college costs is more accurate and helpful than the self-serving explanations that are offered by the higher education industry and the entities that issue reports that align with its interests--the College Board, the Urban Institute, and the Brookings Institution.
Campos is right. An increase in the number of administrators is at least part of the reason for rising college costs. And a lot of those administrators are making too much money, particularly when their salaries are compared to the salaries of the faculty members who are actually teaching students.
References
Sandy Baum & Michael McPherson. Obama's Aid Proposals Could Use a Reality Check. Chronicle of Higher Education, August 26, 2013. Accessible at: http://chronicle.com/article/Obamas-Aid-Proposals-Could/141265/
Paul Campos. The Real Reason College Costs So Much. New York Times, April 5, 2015, Sunday Review Section, p. 4.
College Board. Trends in College Pricing 2013. Accessible at: http://trends.collegeboard.org/college-pricing
Andrew P. Kelly(2013, October 24. New data on tuition prices: Is it possible it's even worse than we thought? AEI Ideas blog. Accessible at: http://www.aei-ideas.org/2013/10/new-data-on-tuition-prices-is-it-possible-its-even-worse-than-we-thought/
Richard Perez-Pena (2013, October 25). Despite Risking Stick Prices, Actual College Costs Stable Over the Decade, Study Says. New York Times, p. A14.
Note: Quotes by Sandy Baum come from the Perez-Pena article or the Campos essay, both of which appeared in the New York Times and are cited in the references.
Sunday, April 12, 2015
Janet Napolitano, President of University of California, writes a hollow review of a book about the Tsarnaev brothers
Janet Napolitano was Secretary of Homeland Security when the Boston Marathon bombing occurred, and she begins her review by slyly patting herself on the back for doing such a great job in catching the bumbling Tsarnaev brothers after their terrorist attack. Let's read what Napolitano said:
As secretary of homeland security, I immediately mobilized the department to assist Boston emergency responders and to work with the F.B.I. to identify the perpetrators. Because the Boston Marathon is an iconic American event, we suspected terrorism, but no group stepped forward to claim credit. Massive law enforcement resources--local, state and federal--had to be organized and deployed so that, within just a few days, we had narrowed the inquiry from the thousands of spectators who had come to cheer on the runners to just two, who had come to plant bombs.She acknowledges that the Russians tipped off the F.B.I about Tamerlan, the older Tsarnaev brother, before the attack occurred; but, hey, the Russians are so unreliable. After all, Napolitano writes, "Russia routines presumes all young urban Muslim men to be radical."
Napolitano then goes on to debunk Gessen's theory that Tamerlan Tsarnaev may have been an F.B.I . informant and that the Bureau delayed telling local law enforcement authorities about his identity because they wanted to get to him first and kill him. Such a theory, Napolitano maintains, is "laughable."
Finally, Napolitano points out that Gessen's book failed to answer some basic questions such as "How
and why did the two brothers shift from living somewhat aimless young lives to bombing the marathon?" But Napolitano herself offers no answer to that question, in spite of the fact that she was Secretary of Homeland Security when the attack occurred and should have some insight about the Tsarnaev's bizarre turn toward murder.
Napolitano ends her puff piece with a rhetorical salute to the people of Boston for turning out as spectators for the annual Boston Marathons that followed the 2013 bombing. "People there call it 'Boston Strong,'" she concludes with a flourish, "[but] I call it resilience, that enduring strand of the American fabric that, in the end, will outlast the most dastardly plot against it." Blah, blah, blah.
 |
| Janet Napolitano: blah, blah, blah |
And now I will share my own theory about the Boston Marathon bombing. Personally, I don't believe the Tsarnaev brothers were radicalized in Chechnya or Dagestan or seduced by the Internet as some commentators theorize. I think the brothers were turned toward murder by the culture of Boston and Cambridge. Cambridge in particular, where Dzhokhar went to high school, is the epicenter of postmodern nihilism--the studied belief that there are no ultimate truths and that life is to be lived purely for the pursuit of power, recognition, and self-gratification.
For affluent young people like the ones who attend Boston's many elite colleges, nihilism can have a cheerful, even jaunty, aspect. Indeed, cheeky cynicism is expected of the young, and Boston's intelligentsia cultivate feigned world-weariness as a substitute for thought.
But nihilism has an ugly aspect when it is embraced by outcasts, by people who know they will never be insiders, will never have the opportunities that beckon to all the affluent young people who casually attend classes in Boston's many elitist colleges and universities.
Who can doubt that these two brothers, seeing nothing around them but affluent arrogance and easy self-regard, turned bitter; and turning bitter, they plotted their revenge.
It is a shocking thing to say, but I believe that the terrorism that the Tsarnaev brothers embraced was nurtured and metastasized in the culture that many Americans mistakenly think is the very acme of liberalism and tolerance--the culture of Boston and Cambridge.
 |
| Radicalized in Cambridge |
References
Janet Napolitano. Blood Ties. New York Times Book Review, April 12, 2015, p. 1.
Saturday, April 4, 2015
President Obama's "Student Bill of Rights" would be laughable if the student-loan crisis weren't so tragic
President Obama recently released what he laughably called his "Student Bill of Rights." The Bill of Rights has just four parts:
This ridiculous document does nothing to rein in college costs or to effectively regulate the for-profit college industry. It does nothing to ease the suffering and hardship of millions of people who have defaulted on their student loans.
What would a real Student Bill of Rights look like? Something like this:
I. Insolvent people who took out student loans in good faith have the right to have their student loans discharged in bankruptcy.
II. Elderly people who are living entirely off their Social Security income should not have their Social Security checks garnished because they defaulted on a student loan.
III. People should not be required to sign covenants not to sue as a condition for enrolling at a for-profit college.
IV. All colleges and universities that benefit from the federal student-loan program should be subject to an open-records law that would require them to disclose their financial affairs and their decision-making process for admitting students.
V. Student-loan defaulters should not have excessive fees and penalties added to their student-loan debt.
VI. A statute of limitations should apply to all efforts to collect on unpaid student loans. The statute of limitations should be six years, just as it is in most jurisdictions for lawsuits for breach of contract or nonpayment on a debt.
VII. The government and its collection agents should stop trying to force bankrupt debtors into 25-year repayment plans as they did in the Roth case, the Myhre case, and the Lamento case.
VIII. Students who take out loans from private banks and private financial institutions should be able to discharge their student loans in bankruptcy under the same terms that apply for discharging other debts.
But the Obama administration, Congress, and the higher-education industry don't really want to effectively curb the excesses of the student-loan industry. They want to tinker around the edges of this huge problem, while the colleges and the debt collectors gorge themselves on student-loan money.
I. Every student deserves access to a quality, affordable education at a college that is cutting costs and increasing learning.
II. Every student should be able to access the resources needed to pay for college.
III.Every borrower has the right to an affordable repayment plan.
IV. And every borrower has the right to quality customer service, reliable information, and fair treatment, even if they struggle to repay their loans.You want this ludicrous, so-called "Bill of Rights" boiled down into a single sentence?President Obama is basically saying everyone has the right to borrow money at a reasonable interest rate to attend college and to be treated courteously by the debt collectors.
This ridiculous document does nothing to rein in college costs or to effectively regulate the for-profit college industry. It does nothing to ease the suffering and hardship of millions of people who have defaulted on their student loans.
What would a real Student Bill of Rights look like? Something like this:
I. Insolvent people who took out student loans in good faith have the right to have their student loans discharged in bankruptcy.
II. Elderly people who are living entirely off their Social Security income should not have their Social Security checks garnished because they defaulted on a student loan.
III. People should not be required to sign covenants not to sue as a condition for enrolling at a for-profit college.
IV. All colleges and universities that benefit from the federal student-loan program should be subject to an open-records law that would require them to disclose their financial affairs and their decision-making process for admitting students.
V. Student-loan defaulters should not have excessive fees and penalties added to their student-loan debt.
VI. A statute of limitations should apply to all efforts to collect on unpaid student loans. The statute of limitations should be six years, just as it is in most jurisdictions for lawsuits for breach of contract or nonpayment on a debt.
VII. The government and its collection agents should stop trying to force bankrupt debtors into 25-year repayment plans as they did in the Roth case, the Myhre case, and the Lamento case.
VIII. Students who take out loans from private banks and private financial institutions should be able to discharge their student loans in bankruptcy under the same terms that apply for discharging other debts.
But the Obama administration, Congress, and the higher-education industry don't really want to effectively curb the excesses of the student-loan industry. They want to tinker around the edges of this huge problem, while the colleges and the debt collectors gorge themselves on student-loan money.
 |
| There's good money in student loans. |
What was your first clue, Sherlock? A Chronicle of Higher Education writer explains that some colleges are gaming their student-loan default rates
Colleges must keep their student-loan default rates down or they will lose their right to participate in the federal student loan program. If a college's three-year default rate (as measured by the Department of Education) reaches 30 percent for three consecutive years, that college can be kicked out of the federal student loan program. And most colleges cannot survive without federal student-aid money.
Ben Miller, writing for Chronicle of Higher Education, explains how colleges can artificially keep their student-loan default rates down, hiding the fact that a lot of their students are not paying back their loans. As Miller points out, DOE's student-loan default measure only calculates the percentage of defaulters who default within three years of beginning repayment--which is a very short window of time.
That is probably why the three-year student-loan default rate for for-profits actually went down a bit according to DOE's 2014 student-loan default rate report. The for-profits are adept at getting their former students to sign up for economic hardship deferments that obscure the fact that these students are not making their loan payments.
Miller argued persuasively that a better measurement of student-loan defaults would be compare the number of students going into repayment at a college compared to the number of graduates. Students who are going into repayment without graduating have lower rates of success than graduates in terms of getting good jobs, and they also have higher student-loan default rates. Therefore, a college that has a high level of students beginning repayment compared to the number of graduates is probably a college that has a high student-loan default rate.
So what did Miller find? Among public 4-year institutions, 84 students went into repayment for every 100 graduates. But in the 4-year for-profit sector, 233 students went into repayment for every 100 graduates. In other words, more than twice as many students attending 4-year for-profit institutions began repayment (in the most recent cohort of borrowers) than obtained degrees.
That is a very bad sign, and a strong indicator that the for-profits have much higher student-loan default rates than DOE's anemic metric shows. It seems reasonable to conclude that the true student-loan default rate in the for-profit sector is at least twice as high as DOE reports; it is probably at least 40 percent!
The Obama administration surely knows that the number of students who default on their loans is much higher than DOE reports every year and that the true default rate for students who attended for-profit institutions is alarmingly high.
But so far at least, the for-profits have evaded effectively regulation; and they have hidden their true default rates by encouraging their former students to sign up for economic hardship deferments. Meanwhile they suck up about one quarter of all the federal student-aid money while only enrolling about 11 percen of all the post-secondary students.
Some day this house of cards will collapse, and the public will realize that the for-profit colleges have unacceptably high student-loan default rates. And we will have to face the fact that millions of people --mostly low-income and minority students--have defaulted on their loans and have had their lives wrecked by the fact that they attended for-profit institutions.
References
Ben Miller. Student-Loan Default Rates Are Easily Gamed. Here's a Better Measure. Chronicle of Higher Education, March 26, 2015.
Ben Miller, writing for Chronicle of Higher Education, explains how colleges can artificially keep their student-loan default rates down, hiding the fact that a lot of their students are not paying back their loans. As Miller points out, DOE's student-loan default measure only calculates the percentage of defaulters who default within three years of beginning repayment--which is a very short window of time.
[B]ecause the measure tracks results for such a short time, it is possible for colleges to game the metric by artificially lowering the number of students who default within three years. How? A college can encourage borrowers to ask for a forbearance--an option in which the federal government allows borrowers to stop making payments without their loans becoming delinquent or heading toward default. Since it takes almost a year to default, the college needs borrowers to enter forbearance for a couple of years, ensuring they cannot show up in the default rate, even if they never make a single payment.In fact, as Senator Harkin's Senate Committee documented in its report on the for-profit college industry, many for-profits aggressively encourage students to apply for economic hardship deferments, which are ridiculously easy to obtain.
That is probably why the three-year student-loan default rate for for-profits actually went down a bit according to DOE's 2014 student-loan default rate report. The for-profits are adept at getting their former students to sign up for economic hardship deferments that obscure the fact that these students are not making their loan payments.
Miller argued persuasively that a better measurement of student-loan defaults would be compare the number of students going into repayment at a college compared to the number of graduates. Students who are going into repayment without graduating have lower rates of success than graduates in terms of getting good jobs, and they also have higher student-loan default rates. Therefore, a college that has a high level of students beginning repayment compared to the number of graduates is probably a college that has a high student-loan default rate.
So what did Miller find? Among public 4-year institutions, 84 students went into repayment for every 100 graduates. But in the 4-year for-profit sector, 233 students went into repayment for every 100 graduates. In other words, more than twice as many students attending 4-year for-profit institutions began repayment (in the most recent cohort of borrowers) than obtained degrees.
That is a very bad sign, and a strong indicator that the for-profits have much higher student-loan default rates than DOE's anemic metric shows. It seems reasonable to conclude that the true student-loan default rate in the for-profit sector is at least twice as high as DOE reports; it is probably at least 40 percent!
The Obama administration surely knows that the number of students who default on their loans is much higher than DOE reports every year and that the true default rate for students who attended for-profit institutions is alarmingly high.
But so far at least, the for-profits have evaded effectively regulation; and they have hidden their true default rates by encouraging their former students to sign up for economic hardship deferments. Meanwhile they suck up about one quarter of all the federal student-aid money while only enrolling about 11 percen of all the post-secondary students.
Some day this house of cards will collapse, and the public will realize that the for-profit colleges have unacceptably high student-loan default rates. And we will have to face the fact that millions of people --mostly low-income and minority students--have defaulted on their loans and have had their lives wrecked by the fact that they attended for-profit institutions.
References
Ben Miller. Student-Loan Default Rates Are Easily Gamed. Here's a Better Measure. Chronicle of Higher Education, March 26, 2015.
Sunday, March 22, 2015
Susan Dynarski wrings her hands because we don't have enough information about the student debt crisis. But we know enough to take action.
Susan Dynarski recently wrote a half-page article in the Sunday Times, complaining about the government's lack of useful data about the federal student loan program. She's right of course.
The U.S. Department of Education releases very little useful information about the student-loan crisis. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which has issued alarming reports on the problem, relies on Equifax, a private credit reporting agency, for most of its information--not DOE.
Why don't we have better data? Dynarski quotes a former DOE official who says "lack of will" on the part of DOE's data collectors is part of the answer, along with "reluctance of senior political leadership in the Department of Education to press for action."
In other words, the Obama administration and Arne Duncan's Department of Education don't want the public to know just how bad the student loan crisis really is.
Barack Obama and Arne Duncan just want to get out of town before the federal student loan program collapses. They are like those American officials during the Vietnam War who scrambled to get on one of the last helicopters leaving Saigon before the city fell to the North Vietnamese.
Make no mistake. Barack and Arne know what's going on. They know the lid is about to blow off this smoothly managed crisis. And they are trying to strew a little evidence around to show they are trying to address the problem without really doing anything about it. For example, President Obama released his laughable and toothless "Student Bill of Rights" earlier this month.
Solving the student-loan crisis will take more than empty platitudes. It will take courage.
Thus, in the Myhre bankruptcy case, we see the Department of Education opposing bankruptcy relief for a quadriplegic student-loan debtor who was working full time and was still unable to support himself financially, much less pay off his student loans.
And in the Lamento bankruptcy case, the Department of Education opposed bankruptcy relief for a single mother of two who was working full time and was only able to put a roof over her children's heads because she was living rent free with her mother and stepfather.
In both the Myhe case and the Lamento case, DOE wanted these unfortunate student-loan debtors to sign up for 25-year repayment plans. And that has been the Obama administration's overall strategy for dealing with the student loan crisis.
Yes, rather than do the decent thing and work for bankruptcy relief for worthy student-loan debtors, President Obama's Department of Education is trying to force most oppressed student-loan debtors into 25-year repayment plans.
And why is DOE doing that? Because if President Obama and Arne Duncan's Department of Education were forced to publicly admit that millions of student-loan debtors are insolvent and will never pay off their loans, the whole sorry business of the federal student loan program would collapse.
But they won't admit it. And that is why, Ms. Dynarski, the Department of Education is not releasing useful data about the student-loan crisis.
But I'll bet you already knew that, didn't you, Ms. Dynarski? After all, you are one of President Obama's advisers.
References
Susan Dynarksi. So Much Student Debt, So Little Information. New York Times, March 22, 2015, Business section, p. 5.
Richard Fossey & Robert Cloud. In re Lamento: An Honest But Unfortunate Debtor is Entitled to Sleep at Night Without Worrying About Unpayable Student-loan Debt. Teachers College Record, February 23, 2015.
In re Lamento, 520 B.R. 667 (Bankr. N.D. Ohio 2014).
Myhre v. U.S. Department of Education, 503 B.R. 698 (Bankr. W.D. Wis. 2013).
The U.S. Department of Education releases very little useful information about the student-loan crisis. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which has issued alarming reports on the problem, relies on Equifax, a private credit reporting agency, for most of its information--not DOE.
Why don't we have better data? Dynarski quotes a former DOE official who says "lack of will" on the part of DOE's data collectors is part of the answer, along with "reluctance of senior political leadership in the Department of Education to press for action."
In other words, the Obama administration and Arne Duncan's Department of Education don't want the public to know just how bad the student loan crisis really is.
Barack Obama and Arne Duncan just want to get out of town before the federal student loan program collapses. They are like those American officials during the Vietnam War who scrambled to get on one of the last helicopters leaving Saigon before the city fell to the North Vietnamese.
 |
| Barack & Arne just want to get out of town before the student loan crisis blows up. |
Solving the student-loan crisis will take more than empty platitudes. It will take courage.
- It will take courage to rein in the for-profit college sector, which is raping low-income and minority students by enticing them to enroll in high-cost educational programs that don't lead to good jobs.
- It will take courage to amend the Bankruptcy Code so that insolvent student-loan debtors can get reasonable access to bankruptcy relief.
- It will take courage to stop garnishing the Social Security checks of elderly debtors who defaulted on their student loans.
- It will take courage to stop the private student-loan debt collectors from tacking huge penalties on to the loan balances of defaulted student-loan debtors.
Thus, in the Myhre bankruptcy case, we see the Department of Education opposing bankruptcy relief for a quadriplegic student-loan debtor who was working full time and was still unable to support himself financially, much less pay off his student loans.
And in the Lamento bankruptcy case, the Department of Education opposed bankruptcy relief for a single mother of two who was working full time and was only able to put a roof over her children's heads because she was living rent free with her mother and stepfather.
In both the Myhe case and the Lamento case, DOE wanted these unfortunate student-loan debtors to sign up for 25-year repayment plans. And that has been the Obama administration's overall strategy for dealing with the student loan crisis.
Yes, rather than do the decent thing and work for bankruptcy relief for worthy student-loan debtors, President Obama's Department of Education is trying to force most oppressed student-loan debtors into 25-year repayment plans.
And why is DOE doing that? Because if President Obama and Arne Duncan's Department of Education were forced to publicly admit that millions of student-loan debtors are insolvent and will never pay off their loans, the whole sorry business of the federal student loan program would collapse.
But I'll bet you already knew that, didn't you, Ms. Dynarski? After all, you are one of President Obama's advisers.
 | ||||||
| Susan Dynarski: We need more information! |
Susan Dynarksi. So Much Student Debt, So Little Information. New York Times, March 22, 2015, Business section, p. 5.
Richard Fossey & Robert Cloud. In re Lamento: An Honest But Unfortunate Debtor is Entitled to Sleep at Night Without Worrying About Unpayable Student-loan Debt. Teachers College Record, February 23, 2015.
In re Lamento, 520 B.R. 667 (Bankr. N.D. Ohio 2014).
Myhre v. U.S. Department of Education, 503 B.R. 698 (Bankr. W.D. Wis. 2013).
Thursday, March 19, 2015
Legal Education and the Battle of Isandlwana: Our Country Isn't Solving Problems Because Our Colleges and Professional Schools Aren't Properly Training Our Leaders
What do law professors do beside teach law students?
Most of them write law review articles--long, tedious pieces with literally hundreds of footnotes. And they write a lot of them. All American law schools sponsor at least one law journal; and many sponsor several. Each year, these journals publish about 10,000 law review articles!
Law scholars use an arcane system for crafting their footnotes under rules laid out in The Bluebook, an almost incomprehensible volume published by Harvard Law School. The Bluebook is now in its nineteenth edition, and its text is even more opaque than the 18th edition. In fact, Richard Posner, an esteemed judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, described it with a quote from Heart of Darkness: "The horror! The horror!"
Here is a quote from the University of Houston Law School's Bluebook Guide that described just one change that was instituted in the nineteenth edition:
And Barack Obama's educational background may explain why he is at loggerheads with two powerful heads of state: Benjamin Netanyahu and Vladimir Putin. Putin is a former KGB man, Netanyahu is a special forces veteran of the Israel Defense Force, and Obama is a former footnote checker. It is not hard to imagine why Netanyahu and Putin seem so contemptuous of our President.
And this brings me to the Battle of Isandlwana, which was a disastrous military defeat for the British army during the Anglo-Zulu War. In January 1879, a force of 20,000 Zulu warriors overwhelmed a British force of about 1500 men on the rolling plains around Mount Isandlwana. The British commander, Lord Chelmsford, believed that modern weapons and trained British soldiers could defeat much larger enemy forces equipped only with spears and a few antiquated muskets.
But Lord Chelmsford was wrong. Splitting his forces, Lord Chelmsford departed from a supply camp at Isandlwana, leaving Brevet Colonel Henry Pulleine in charge. Lord Chelmsford had not fortified the camp, thinking it unnecessary; nor did he encircle the camp with a laager. After all, the British were armed with Martini-Henry rifles; and they had two cannons, a rocket-launching battery and 500,000 rounds of ammunition. What could go wrong?
On the morning of January 22, 1879, Lieutenant Colonel Pulleine's scouts spotted a large force of Zulus sitting patiently in a ravine; and they reported back to Pulleine. He ordered troops to form a long skirmishing line about 1500 yards in front of the camp.
For a while things went well. British soldiers shot down attacking Zulus by the score; and the troops were in a jolly mood. Gradually, however, the Zulus encircled the British right flank, which eventually collapsed. British troops fell back to the camp itself, where small groups made a last stand before being overwhelmed. Almost the whole force was massacred.
Donald Morris's The Washing of the Spears is the best historical account of this battle. Morris explains that the British were deployed too far from their ammunition supply; and the ammunition boxes proved difficult to open--requiring special screwdrivers to get the lids off the boxes. A movie about the battle, entitled Zulu Dawn, depicts soldiers standing in long ques waiting for ammunition. One scene shows a military clerk filling out receipt slips while Zulus spear soldiers patiently standing in line.
It shouldn't have turned out that way. After all, Lord Chelmsford was an esteemed British commander who had purchased commissions in respected military units. He probably thought he knew what he was doing when he split his forces and departed from an unfortified camp.
And Lieutenant Colonel Pulleine, who was trained at Sandhurst, received plenty of warning that the Zulus were on their way. His camp was well provisioned, and he had two cannons and some rocket launchers. How could things have turned out so badly?
Arrogance, in my opinion. The British officers thought it inconceivable that they could be defeated by a native force armed mostly with spears, even if the enemy had the advantage of overwhelming numbers.
And arrogance is the cause of most of our nation's recent blunders in the international arena. We are the United States, after all. We have superior technology such that we can kill our enemies with drones simply by pushing a button. And our leaders all went to the best colleges and professional schools: Harvard, Yale, Brown, Stanford, Oxford. And our law-trained leaders know The Bluebook backward and forward.
But our arrogance is leading us to defeat after defeat against our enemies and our competitors. And our president, trained at Harvard Law School, is no match in a duel of wits against people like Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu.
Our elite colleges and universities have failed us. Instead of training problem solvers and crisis managers, they have produced arrogant elitists--people much like Lord Chelmsford. And so long as we place such people in charge of our national security, we will see our national strength and stature diminish.
References
Donald R. Morris. The Washing of the Spears: The Rise and Fall of the Zulu Nation. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1965.
The Bluebook (19th edition).
Zulu Dawn (1979).
Most of them write law review articles--long, tedious pieces with literally hundreds of footnotes. And they write a lot of them. All American law schools sponsor at least one law journal; and many sponsor several. Each year, these journals publish about 10,000 law review articles!
Law scholars use an arcane system for crafting their footnotes under rules laid out in The Bluebook, an almost incomprehensible volume published by Harvard Law School. The Bluebook is now in its nineteenth edition, and its text is even more opaque than the 18th edition. In fact, Richard Posner, an esteemed judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, described it with a quote from Heart of Darkness: "The horror! The horror!"
Here is a quote from the University of Houston Law School's Bluebook Guide that described just one change that was instituted in the nineteenth edition:
Rule 1.2(a) [E.g.]: Clarifies that when this signal is combined with another signal such as“See”, the comma separating the signals should be italicized while the comma at the end of the signal should not be.Law reviews are edited by law students, and student editors are required to master the mysteries of The Bluebook in order to edit law-article manuscripts. As a student at Harvard, Barack Obama must have spent a lot of time with The Bluebook when he was Editor of Harvard Law Review.
And Barack Obama's educational background may explain why he is at loggerheads with two powerful heads of state: Benjamin Netanyahu and Vladimir Putin. Putin is a former KGB man, Netanyahu is a special forces veteran of the Israel Defense Force, and Obama is a former footnote checker. It is not hard to imagine why Netanyahu and Putin seem so contemptuous of our President.
And this brings me to the Battle of Isandlwana, which was a disastrous military defeat for the British army during the Anglo-Zulu War. In January 1879, a force of 20,000 Zulu warriors overwhelmed a British force of about 1500 men on the rolling plains around Mount Isandlwana. The British commander, Lord Chelmsford, believed that modern weapons and trained British soldiers could defeat much larger enemy forces equipped only with spears and a few antiquated muskets.
But Lord Chelmsford was wrong. Splitting his forces, Lord Chelmsford departed from a supply camp at Isandlwana, leaving Brevet Colonel Henry Pulleine in charge. Lord Chelmsford had not fortified the camp, thinking it unnecessary; nor did he encircle the camp with a laager. After all, the British were armed with Martini-Henry rifles; and they had two cannons, a rocket-launching battery and 500,000 rounds of ammunition. What could go wrong?
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| The Battle of Isandlwana: Hey, what could go wrong? |
For a while things went well. British soldiers shot down attacking Zulus by the score; and the troops were in a jolly mood. Gradually, however, the Zulus encircled the British right flank, which eventually collapsed. British troops fell back to the camp itself, where small groups made a last stand before being overwhelmed. Almost the whole force was massacred.
Donald Morris's The Washing of the Spears is the best historical account of this battle. Morris explains that the British were deployed too far from their ammunition supply; and the ammunition boxes proved difficult to open--requiring special screwdrivers to get the lids off the boxes. A movie about the battle, entitled Zulu Dawn, depicts soldiers standing in long ques waiting for ammunition. One scene shows a military clerk filling out receipt slips while Zulus spear soldiers patiently standing in line.
It shouldn't have turned out that way. After all, Lord Chelmsford was an esteemed British commander who had purchased commissions in respected military units. He probably thought he knew what he was doing when he split his forces and departed from an unfortified camp.
And Lieutenant Colonel Pulleine, who was trained at Sandhurst, received plenty of warning that the Zulus were on their way. His camp was well provisioned, and he had two cannons and some rocket launchers. How could things have turned out so badly?
Arrogance, in my opinion. The British officers thought it inconceivable that they could be defeated by a native force armed mostly with spears, even if the enemy had the advantage of overwhelming numbers.
And arrogance is the cause of most of our nation's recent blunders in the international arena. We are the United States, after all. We have superior technology such that we can kill our enemies with drones simply by pushing a button. And our leaders all went to the best colleges and professional schools: Harvard, Yale, Brown, Stanford, Oxford. And our law-trained leaders know The Bluebook backward and forward.
But our arrogance is leading us to defeat after defeat against our enemies and our competitors. And our president, trained at Harvard Law School, is no match in a duel of wits against people like Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu.
Our elite colleges and universities have failed us. Instead of training problem solvers and crisis managers, they have produced arrogant elitists--people much like Lord Chelmsford. And so long as we place such people in charge of our national security, we will see our national strength and stature diminish.
References
Donald R. Morris. The Washing of the Spears: The Rise and Fall of the Zulu Nation. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1965.
The Bluebook (19th edition).
Zulu Dawn (1979).
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