I'm sharing the Biannual Newsletter via blog this year.
-JS
Hello All
It's that time of year again, summer solstice. For those of you who haven't received one of these before the intro is brief. Every year I send out two newsletters, on summer and winter solstice, to everybody I know. Please don't feel obliged to respod.
Yet again I am limited by technology from producing a very fine product but I do have a few interesting thoughts for you on the Tim Hunt scandal and Charlie Baker's mishandling of the MBTA.
I myself have slowly made my way through an extremely challenging six months. By January I had finally recovered from the broken leg I mentiones last December. In February I contracted appendicitis and after a weekend in the hospital I opted to treat it with antibiotics instead of surgery.
Meanwhile political conditions soured at my dear Trinity College. A sort of left wing radicalism very similar to that in the Tim Hunt article has created a dangerous climate around campus. Many have been purged. Other selfish individuals have tried to use the chaos. Meanwhile the College, its student life, and traditions have become casualties of this politics.
I am enjoying the summer weather and I hope to spend some time in Boston even as I spend the summer in Toronto where we are hosting the Pan American games. I wish you all the best.
Your Friend,
Jeffrey
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Charlie on the M(B)TA
In the midst of last winter’s horrible blizzard an evil legend emerged. It sounds something like this:
The MBTA (Boston’s transit system, colloquially called ‘the T’)is horribly broken. It was over expanded by politicians more interested in ribbon cuttings than routine maintenance. They allowed the T to become inefficient and fall under the control of malevolent unions. Now only Charlie Baker, the new Republican governor, can fix the mess.
This legend has dominated then popular consciousness and has been accepted even in traditionally Democratic circles. Nonetheless it could not be further from the truth.
The T has been the primary focus of Massachusetts’ last two Democratic governors, Michael Dukakis and Deval Patrick. It was under the administration of the former in the 1980s that the core subway network was last expanded with the extension of the Red Line from Harvard Sq to Alewife. Meanwhile reports constantly attest to the T’s efficiency. It has about the same tax-fare revenue mix for ordinary service funding yet charges consistently lower fares than its peers around the continent.
Not only has the system failed to expand adequately to match the region’s growth but the T has been consistently underfunded by a series of GOP administrations and conservative Democrats (Speaker DeLeo I’m looking at you). At the turn of the millennium the T was laden with billions of dollars of debt and other obligations as a financing gimmick related to the Big Dig construction project. Meanwhile the funding legislation passed then was based on incredibly unrealistic projections of tax revenue. It is for this reason the T has accumulated a large maintenance backlog.
No attempt to fix this was made until the election of Governor Patrick who restructured the T making it subservient to the new Mass DOT board. He also attempted to fix the T’s funding problems but was partially stymied by the state legislature. Although the new revenue provided was inadequate to fully fund the T’s maintainence, it was enough to finally place an order to replace the ancient train cars operating on both the Red and Orange lines the latter of which is severely impeded at rush hour by a lack of functional cars.
Come this winter’s crazy weather the T suffered greatly. Naturally the above ground portions of the system were largely shut down due to the remarkable level of snow. In a once in a century storm it is only natural to have a once in a century shutdown. Most of the other problems on the underground portion of the network were due to the failure of the old Red and orange line cars, cars which are due to be replaced by the end of the decade. In essence the only real problems suffered by the T occurred on account of its slow recovery from republican governors.
Governor Baker seized upon public frustration to push his agenda. He forced out the MBTA general manager and compelled the resignation of all of Governor Patrick’s appointees to the Mass DOT board, a structure designed so that one governor could not suddenly influence it like that. Baker has also pushed the nlegislature to allow him to raise fares, appoint a control board reporting directly to him, and bring in outside non-union staff. The Governor has also not requested significantly more money despite the ongoing maintenance backlog and has also cancelled a number of Governor Patrick’s expansion plans such as commuter rail to Fall River and New Bedford. This certainly doesn’t seem like an attempt to fix the T rather it seems like an attempt to undo the work of past Democratic governors.
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The Apology
The British scientist Sir Tim Hunt really ought to drink his hemlock more peacefully. With the present stink some in society just might be prompted to doubt his public lynching. That would make for a terrible five minutes hate.
This and many other such occurances teach us two main lessons. The first concerns the limits of thought about individual rights during the Enlightenment and middle twentieth century. These systems construed a need to preserve individuals rights by protecting them from state punishment. This approach is no longer applicable to the cosmopolitan anarchy of the present millennium. What is indisputable is that Tim Hunt has been utterly ruined on account of his individual speech. The problem is that speech is only protected against the state. This protection is worth nothing in practical application because, just as if there were no such right, an individual is sure to be irreperably harmed because of what he says.
Luckily there is a solution to this first problem. Anti-discrimination laws prohibit private actors from harming individuals based on attributes like race or gender. It would be easy to extend this to speech.
The second issue that the Tim Hunt saga brings to the fore is that of the crazy lynch mob culture present in our society. It is understandable that the media sometimes makes a circus of silly things but this case is on another level entirely. The Nobel laureate scientist supposedly make a quip about women at a conference in South Korea. He claims his remarks were taken out of context.
Now apparently all that happened is that a man uttered a vague complaint about the other sex—something all women and men have done from the dawn of time and will continue to do until the extinction of the human race. Is anyone not guilty of the same?
Yet even if Tim Hunt had forcefully made the case for the banning of women from science and stuck to his position through all the backlash there would be no reason for what has occured. Particularly in academia but also life in general there is a need for new, contraversial, and unpopular viewpoints. This world has seen many days where a man would be similarly faulted for suggesting women be allowed into labs. I am not sure of the conditions by which he was fired from University College London but I had been under the impression that this was the purpose of tenure. Is this not the purpose of a university? And who either in the academy or life will have confidence to air an unpopular viewpoint after what has happened? And who can be sure that after some joke he too will not be ruined. Society has been very wicked indeed.
