White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Forget the Glass Ceiling, What about the Mortar-Board Barrier?

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Every year or so a new study, learned treatise or book comes out which says that we in the United States overdo the college thing; that we are turning out young people with bachelors degrees for jobs that don't require them or that are so poorly paid the luckless worker can't pay off his or her college loans.
 
Yet the pressure to go to college continues. Parents panic that they won't save enough money and high schoolers worry that they'll be judged by which college accepts them.
 
There are only two classes of students who don't worry: those with athletic prowess and those who are so bright that they have their pick of colleges.
 
In his book “David and Goliath,” Malcolm Gladwell makes the case against the pressure for a superschool. He tells the story of a gifted, young African- American woman with clear aptitude for science and math. She makes it into Brown, an Ivy League university, and flounders. With the cultural differences and the preponderance of other brainy students, this star student is soon lost. She ends up switching from science to a less-demanding liberal arts major.
 
Top-tier universities like Harvard, Yale, Stanford and MIT have their own punishments for their graduates. It is a sad syndrome: I went to Harvard (or one of the others), but I didn't do well in my career.
 
I've seen many carry this burden throughout their lives. As Orson Welles said, in an entirely different context, he had started at the top with early success and had nowhere to go.
 
But no punishment metered out by the vagaries of talent and chance compares to the lifelong punishment that a majority of our citizens suffer for not going to college. More than 60 percent of us don't make it into either a two- or four-year college.
 
Although they are a majority, they are treated as second-class, damaged, contaminated, inferior and deserving only of a kind of paternalism, as they paint houses, repair automobiles, bake bread, stock shelves and deliver
parcels. No longer can some of them hope to be lifted into the middle class by union membership. College mania keeps them down.
 
They aren't bumping up against the color bar or the glass ceiling, but they are victims of something as damaging: the mortar-board barrier. Go no further, you have no college degree.
 
I know about the mortar-board barrier: I bumped up against it when I came to the United States 50 years ago.
 
Because I'd left school at 16, I had a jump start in British journalism. When I got to the United States, I thought the fact that I'd been a scriptwriter at the BBC and that I'd been a junior executive on a major newspaper might qualify me for an interview or two. The personnel departments at all three TV networks told me I couldn't be considered because of a lack of college education. At The New York Times I was told that without a college degree, I couldn't be considered as a writer. But as I was leaving, the interviewer actually offered me a job as a copy editor.
 
This reminds me of what I experienced subsequently, when I was flying small airplanes. The most gifted pilot I've ever known – and who saved my life a couple of times in bad weather — hadn't finished college and was repeatedly turned down for an airline job as a result.
 
Then, there was the sad case of the cadaver pilot. There is a cottage industry in flying cadavers, usually through the night, from the place of death to the place of burial. I ran into one such cadaver pilot in the early hours of the morning in Missouri, as he was about to take off into bad weather with his silent passenger — there to remind him of his mortality and danger of flying an old airplane (a Beech 18 with radial engines).
 
Like all pilots, he loved flying, but had given up hope of moving up in aviation because hadn't been to college. Unwisely, he had fallen in love with aviation too young. Just like The New York Times that wouldn't allow a non-college-educated person to try writing for their pages, but would allow that same person to edit its writers, the irony is present in aviation.
 
While airlines and air freight companies insist on a college education, no matter what the proven skill or the number of hours the candidate has flown, air traffic controllers are mostly just high school graduates. College is not a requirement.
 
The college, non-college divide is pernicious and damaging. It is another front in the class war. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

The Tea Parties: Add Sympathy

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Let’s pour the tea, and see who’s come to the party. More, let’s see why they came.

What binds these good citizens together in a ramshackle and loud fraternity known as the Tea Party movement? The focal point may be the Democratic health care legislation; but there is, as always with popular movements, a back story that is more complex and more compelling.

Could it be, to use Winston Churchill’s phrase, the sum of all their fears?

Indubitably. These are days of change, massive and irreversible change. Change that is undermining but difficult to characterize, and disturbing to experience.

The nation’s first African-American president, Barack Obama, is the symbol of that change more than he’s its author,

The Tea Party Patriots are people who feel that their lives and their nation is being swept forward to a place they don’t wish to go. They blame Obama and the Democrats for taking them there.

But the administration and the Democratic majorities in Congress have little to do with the buffeting the American image is taking.

Consider these facts:

 

✔ The United States has gone from the richest nation in the world to the biggest debtor.

✔ Our competitor, China, has grown rich in our market. Now China lends us money to cement the entanglement, while it becomes increasingly obstreperous.

✔ We have the largest and most lethal military machine on earth, but we can’t subdue insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, banish pirates in international waters, or prevail in sanctioning Iran.

✔ Our infrastructure, once the envy of the world, crumbles. European trains hurtle at 220 miles an hour; ours crawl at less than a third of that speed.

✔ Broadband in the United States is many times slower than it is in Europe. This is cruel: We invent, they perfect.

✔ More than 10 percent, and possibly nearly double that, are out of work with no chance of employment for years. And new technology has made the skills of many of the unemployed obsolete.

✔ The United States is an English-speaking nation where a second language, Spanish, is creeping towards full recognition. Banks, phone companies and state governments have gone bilingual.

✔ Immigrants, legal and illegal, are changing the culture.

After 43 white, male presidents, there is a black man in the White House and a first family that reminds middle-class white tea partiers that huge changes are afoot.

A general anxiety has crystallized into a particular rage.

In memory, the 1950s have been sanctified as a time when all was well in America–if you were white and not serving in Korea. The United States was strong, the land was fertile and fear was concentrated on the Soviet threat.

As it had been in World War II, the good guys were us and the bad guys were them. The European empires were disappearing and we were the city upon a hill. Tea Party Patriots’ nostalgia for the 1950s is as pretty and disingenuous as a Saturday Evening Post cover.

The tea partiers may not be interested in the new demographics and new realities of the 21st century, but their anger won’t banish reality.

Trouble is the only political home these genuinely worried people can find is on the right: the overstated, overwrought and over-simplistic right. The right of Mark Levin and Glenn Beck.

These polemicists have concentrated the anxiety of tea partiers into a fear of socialism. It’s the undefined dark at the top of the stairs, the threat to liberty, to gun ownership and to private enterprise, according to the fear merchants of the right. Yet, there is precious little government left in the world that can be described as socialist.

The old socialism, with the nationalization of the means of production at its core is dead, sent to its eternal rest in Europe. Only a few leaders. like Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and Evo Morales in Bolivia, still espouse it.

Already extremists of the right–with death threats and property damage–are undoing the legitimacy of the entire Tea Party movement, and its unlikely members–the well-heeled, well-fed, well-insured but very sympathetic and very fearful activists.

Their fears deserve a hearing individually and in sum. Instead, they’re being exploited and in time they’ll be marginalized, discredited by the company they keep. –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate