Super Tuesday?

Thought I’d take this opportunity on “Super Tuesday” to put some super and not so super thoughts on the issues of the day, so here goes!

Item #1 is of course the mega primaries going on today in 10 states across the country.  I continue to be sadder and sadder that there is no real center right option to President Obama (who is really a center left candidate — see former UAlbany and now Princeton historian Julian Zelizer’s excellent article in CNN.com) and thus no real debate about the crucial issue of 2012, which is the “economy stupid”, and not lots of social issues.  I wish that Mitch Daniels and others of the increasingly disappearing moderate wing of the Republican Party would resurface at some point.  Maybe if the GOP takes a shellacking in the fall, there will be some sense of moving to the center, but I doubt it.

Item #2 is the revelation that former New Orleans defense coordinator Greg Williams gave “bounties” for his players to “take out” opposing players, especially the quarterback.  While my wife was surprised and disgusted by this news, I wasn’t.  The NFL is the most popular pro sports league in the US (see my prior post on this topic), but if continued revelations keep coming out about this sort of thing, they are going to have a real public relations problem, kind of like the one that Rush Limbaugh has right now, but I digress.

Item #3 is the cost of higher education in this country.  Having just paid for four very expensive years for daughter #1 and nearly one for daughter #2 (who despite going to a public university, she is from out of state and thus pays “retail”), I especially feel the pain of this problem.  So what to do about it?  Well, like most problems of this magnitude, it didn’t start quickly and won’t end that way either.  I have a couple of thoughts however.  First and foremost is that we send too many students to college for four years.  While I am not on the same page about this as Rick Santorum, who thinks that students are brainwashed by the liberal elite, I do think that lots of students would benefit from two year focused technical degrees that would make them job-ready for lots of emerging industries (like wind mill or solar panel installer).  I know from teaching undergrads at a mid-level private school that last couple of years that many of them shouldn’t be wasting their parents or their own money getting a bachelors’ degree.  Secondly, there are too many schools, especially public ones.  My own state of New York is a prime example of excess capacity.  Why do we have 64 campuses in the SUNY system?  Wouldn’t it make sense to focus energy and limited resources on a small number of better schools than waste it on several mediocre ones?

Item #4 is a shout out to writer Stephen Dubner and economist Steven Levitt, the brains behind the Freakonomics books and web site and podcasts.  I think what they do brilliant and consistently so.  I may not always agree with their take on things, but they always make me think and I always learn something from them.  I also smile and even laugh aloud when I listen to their stuff.  Check it out.

Whither Public Radio?

One of our two local public radio (NPR) stations is going to do one of its thrice-yearly fund drives starting on Monday, and it’s got me in a funk.

I really like NPR, not so much for the local programs (more about that below), but for programs like “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered” and “It’s Only a Game,” to name three of my favorites.   During the fund drive, nearly all of the national NPR programs are canned so that the staff of the station can raise money, which makes me sad and in search of other things to listen to during the week.

Now I understand the need to raise money, given the cost of programming and staff and equipment and the real and potential decline of state and federal support for public broadcasting, and I understand the theory of “absence makes the heart grow fonder” (i.e., if one’s favorite programs are taken off the air one will want to contribute and get the fund drive done and over with).

But here’s my beef about all this, and why I have decided not to contribute to this station for the last several years (I give to the other one that I listen to much less) and won’t for the foreseeable future, even though I listen to it on a daily basis. There is a certain “feed the beast” and “us vs them” mentality going on here that I really do not like.

As to the “feed the beast” mentality, this is a station that had a couple of different frequencies when we moved to Albany 20 years ago and now has nine frequencies and operates in parts of seven states in the Northeast.  Many of these frequencies compete for listeners (and underwriters and contributors) with other public stations.  With this expansion has come the need to expand the news gathering network to create news bureaus and staff  in many different areas, such as Plattsburgh, the Berkshires and Mid-Hudson Valley, even though all of those regions are already served by other local public radio stations.  Thus, the notion of a local public station becomes diluted as I listen to local news about Connecticut that I don’t really care about so much.  And all of this expanded coverage costs money to maintain, and in addition, according to its 990 tax filing, this station pays nearly $200,000 each to its CEO and to its chief fundraising person.  I don’t begrudge people with tough jobs earning a good salary, but in this case, it does seem a bit like empire building to me, where the station now needs to raise $1 million in a fund drive (as compared to a couple hundred thousand dollars when we moved here 20 years ago — has the cost of doing business really gone up at more than double the rate of inflation??).

Finally, the “us vs. them” mentality that is rampant in the promotion of the fund drive.  Phrases like “if you don’t contribute, they will win” and “there’s no other public station as good as we are” and “you need to contribute or else….” all make me see red.  Who exactly is “they”? Fox News?  I don’t think so.  What is going to be “won?” I just don’t get it.  If this is all about a big guilt trip, it’s not working, at least on me.

Even with its arguably liberal bent (see e.g., the Juan Williams firing), “public radio” is supposed to be about the public and not an ego trip for a small group of people who use it as a mouthpiece.  I have lived in several places (Washington DC, and Durham NC, to name two) that have much better public stations that feature a good amount of truly good local programming (not about issue from four hours away in a different state) as well as more of the good national programs, like the Diane Rehm Show or Talk of the Nation, that we miss here, so that we can hear shows about pet behavior or the academic minute (about minutia) or the CEO bloviate about anything that he wants to.

I will be listening to my satellite radio next week, happily paying for the privilege to do so.