IF California wants to buy the University, it needs to fork over the cash

If Ruth Chris’ Steak House was bought out by McDonald’s, would you expect the quality to stay the same?  If the vineyard behind Chateau Rothschild was acquired by Two Buck Chuck, do you think that eventually there would be some noticeable diminution in quality? When has an organization that has an established track record of excellence ever been taken over by an outfit associated with, at best, mediocrity and come away improved?

The California legislature has become frustrated with the University of California during budget negotiations.  The State claims that the UC system is inefficient, spends too much on administration, admits too many out of state students, and charges too much for admission.  Usually these budget fights blow over, but now they've reached a point where several state legislators have introduced a constitutional amendment taking away the system’s “constitutional autonomy.”

What does that phrase mean?  When the UC system was created in 1848 the founders had a very forward-looking ideal: that politics and higher education shouldn't mix.  So the system was given “constitutional autonomy” in Article 9 of the State Constitution, making it subject only to “such legislative control as may be necessary to insure the security of its funds and compliance with the terms of the endowments of the university and such competitive bidding procedures as may be made applicable to the university by statute . . . .” 

So the legislature can tell UC to require competitive bidding on contracts but not a lot else.  If you look at legislation affecting higher education in California, the bills usually begin with the words, “The CSU system and the community college system are required to, and the University of California is requested, to do the following . . . .”

The idea is that if you let the legislature run UC, the system would be subjected to political pressures inappropriate to higher education.  The legislature could respond to complaints from disappointed parents and require UC to admit all state applicants regardless of academic ability.  The legislature might eliminate tenure in order to have more flexibility in laying off faculty during recessions. It might cut tuition to make it cheaper for parents to afford, then cut faculty salaries and chase away high-quality professors.  It might cut research budgets because who needs high-flautin’ academic research when there’s a state budget to balance?

The state legislature, with its long history of mismanaging expensive computer contracts and partisan bickering over the budget, thinks it can run UC better than the system administration and the Board of Regents.  That’s like the old joke about how white men came to America and found a land where there were no taxes and women did most of the work, and the white man thought he could improve upon that.  The University of California is now the most prestigious public institution of higher education in the world, and the legislature wants to make it run like the DMV or the Department of Veterans’ Affairs.

The funniest thing about the legislative proposal to take of the University of California is that the State of California contributes a whopping 10.4% of the system’s revenues.  Yes, one dime out of every dollar received by the system comes from the state budget, yet the state legislators think that entitles them to control.  In what business does owning a 10% stake in a corporation entitle someone to decision-making authority?  If the legislature wants to run UC, it should pay for at least half of its expenses.

At this point, UC would be far better off washing its hands of the state.  I generally oppose privatization, but if the state is going to start sticking its collective noses in UC’s affairs all for a measly 10.4% of the revenue, UC would be better off giving the money back and operating as a private institution.  I imagine this would be a horrendously complicated endeavor with difficult issues about how UC would reimburse the state for property it is on that began as a public trust.  But UC could not maintain its academic reputation being run by a bunch of politicians in Sacramento.

UC isn't perfect, the administration has a checkered history over the past 50 years, and the Board of Regents are absentee landlords who do more harm than good.  But you can’t argue with results.  UC Berkeley, UCLA and UC San Diego are world class educational institutions; even the system’s ugly ducklings Santa Cruz, Riverside and Merced have more impressive credentials than most flagship state universities in America.

But you can’t be great on a budget.  Trying to make UC as efficient as the DMV will make UC as competent as the DMV (to be fair, the DMV is actually run pretty well; but making fun of them is like making fun of the post office).  But expecting UC to operate under the same set of rules as any other state agency and maintain its stature in the international educational community is ridiculous.

If the state legislature doesn’t like what UC charges for tuition, they can pony up the money from tax revenues.  If they don’t want to pay the freight, then they can’t expect delivery of the package.

Politician has odd definition of "freedom"

I once worked at an office with a boss who had an odd method of administration.  She LOVED the whole teamwork process, groups of employees working together to arrive at decisions by consensus. The problem was, she hated the outcomes and usually overruled the decisions that had been arrived at after long discussions.  She wanted to empower her employees, but she wanted to be in charge at the same time.

I was reminded of this during the recent flap a couple of weeks ago when it was announced that a student group at UC Irvine had voted to ban the American flag from their meeting room.  Actually, they did NOT vote to ban the American flag, they voted to ban ALL national flags as a sign of  . . . something about inclusiveness, universal brotherhood, I don’t know.  We’re talking about college kids here.

Of course California legislators responded in their typically thoughtful manner.  California Republican Senator Janet Nguyen announced she and her GOP colleagues would introduce a state Constitutional Amendment that prohibits state schools from prohibiting displays of the American flag.  She said she was doing this because, as a Vietnamese immigrant, she felt the flag stood for freedom.

So she will teach these punk kids about freedom by forcing them to do something that they voted not to do in a democratic vote?  This reminds me of the joke told by a comedian (maybe Bill Cosby, I’m not sure) about a father spanking his son and shouting, “This will teach you not to hit people smaller than you!”

She doesn’t seem to have a problem with the banning of other national flags, so I guess the United States is the only country in the world that has freedom.  England has a totalitarian dictatorship run by an aging monarch; France holds regular elections but French voters are probably too busy watching Jerry Lewis movies to participate; Germany appears to have a democratic government, but Adolph Hitler was democratically elected and look at what happened after that.

Senator Nguyen loves freedom so much she’s going to force students to do something they voted not to do.  She’s yet another politician who doesn’t seem to listen to the words that come out of her mouth.  Freedom means letting people make decisions you disagree with.  Senator Nguyen should work harder at giving people freedom and less time trying to take it away.

Book Review: Popular Crime by Bill James

I’ll let you in on a secret; for a guy known as a number cruncher, I think Bill James is an excellent writer.  I started reading his stuff back in 1984, when he published his first Baseball Abstract (actually his second, but the first was mimeographed in his basement so his 1984 opus was the first to be published by a real publisher).  He has an easy, unmannered style that comes across as conversational; a wry, sarcastic but seldom mean sense of humor; and, unsurprisingly, a clear expositional style that matches his analytic insights.  Frankly, if I had to list my literary influences, I hope it wouldn't be pretentious of me to include Bill James on the list.

It was with some shock that I stumbled across his book Popular Crime: Reflections on the Celebration of Violence on Amazon.  Shock because I assumed he only wrote about baseball and baseball related topics.  I had no idea he had penned a book recounting the vast history of well-known criminal cases in American history.  The book was over 20 years in the making, as he wrote it in snippets after reading whatever published materials existed about the various crimes he discusses, then put together in one tome.

So this is third hand analysis, with the police doing the initial search for evidence, then the authors writing about the cases, and now James applying his clear-eyed analysis to the facts as presented.  But James couches most of his analysis with caveats and advisories about how detached his insights are from first hand evidence.

One doesn’t really learn about the history of violent crime in school unless one studies criminology, so mostly the information is picked up as something akin to folklore.  Thus I was astonished about how much mis-information I had acquired about these cases, if James is to be believed.  I had heard that Bruno Hauptmann, the man executed for the Lindbergh Baby murder, had been the victim of anti-German prejudice after WW I; James says he was almost certainly guilty.  Like everyone who saw the movie with Tony Curtis, I knew the Boston Strangler was Albert DeSalvo; James argues persuasively that DeSalvo was a mentally unstable man who liked to confess to crimes, and the police probably decided that if someone wanted to confess to the murders, they’d help him out.

The book is part historical criminology, part sociology, and part media analysis.  James recounts the crimes, comments on police procedures (or lack thereof), and tries to identify why some cases caught the public’s attention and others did not, and also looks at how coverage of crime has changed. He notes that until 1980 no police officer would conceive of a murder being committed by someone who was a stranger to the victim; the phrase “serial killer” hadn't entered the lexicon (who knows how many spouses, family members or acquaintances were tried and convicted of murders that were committed by psychopaths ahead of the curve). 

To anyone familiar with James’ analysis of baseball, his dissection of the assumptions made about famous murders should come as no surprise.  Serial killers who evade arrest for any period of time are often assumed to be “geniuses” (for example, Zodiac), yet when they are captured James notes that they often “have the IQ of a Labrador retriever.”  If the pace of serial killings lag, police assume the killer is slowing down when in fact the almost universal rule with serial killers is the pace of killings accelerates; if the pace slows, the killer has simply moved elsewhere.

James has some biases, which he puts on the table.  He states that one of his beliefs is that law is too important to be left to lawyers, and criticizes legal principles and the American judicial system for some obvious transgressions.  However one of his critiques is that the hearsay rule keeps information from jurors; the rule has a solid basis in policy and is riddled with enough exceptions that if any hearsay is probative, it will probably get to the jury.  But one is hard-pressed to defend a legal system that, as James points out, refused to send a criminal to prison because he is crazy, but then refused to keep him in an asylum because they were sane.

James also tries a little too hard to quantify things to support his analysis.  He develops a point system for items in the prosecutor’s case against the accused which tries to turn subjective criteria into objective ones.  For example, in the Lizzie Borden case, he initially gives the fact that Lizzie disliked her step-mother 15 points, but reduces it to 2 because of circumstances.

Easily the toughest case to crack is that of Lizzie Borden of nursery rhyme fame.  It is a rare case where there is a solid timetable for the events that took place.  On the one hand, no one but Lizzie could have committed the murder of her father and step-mother, but she was seen within 10 minutes after the second murder and had no blood on her, an impossibility if she were guilty given the savage nature of the murders (they really were beaten repeatedly with something resembling an axe).  It is one of the rare instances in the book where James offers no insight into who he suspects was the real killer.

Bill James’ book Popular Crimes is a breezy trip through Damnation Alley, a world populated by psychopaths, pedophiles and mad dog killers.  Yet, James’ reliance on reason to understand what happened and why the police succeeded or failed keeps the book from becoming a lurid re-telling of oft told criminal tales.  These killers may be crazy, but there is a rationality to their methods, and that’s what Bill James succeeds in sussing out.

TV Review--Community season 6

There’s an old saying—be careful what you wish for.  I broke that bromide out several years ago when fans of the TV show Angel (of which I was one) were gnashing their teeth and filling the internet with invective because the show had been cancelled.  I pointed out that if we learned one thing from the TV show Angel, it’s that living forever isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. 

Fans of the TV show Community had a dream; six seasons and a movie.  The first part of that scenario seemed doubtful as the show’s ratings were in the tank.  But, thanks to corporate sponsorship from Subway (who also sustained another “little engine that could” show called Chuck), the show managed to make it to five seasons (I suppose now 13 episodes constitutes a “seasons” even on network TV).  But then the well ran dry and the show was cancelled by NBC.  Let me repeat something I mentioned in my review of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt: NBC turned down that sitcom because they didn’t have any sitcom good enough to pair it with.  RIP Must See TV; RIP Community.

But wait!  Yahoo came to the rescue and resurrected the show for streaming.  By now the show had lost half of its original study group; Chevy Chase left in a dispute that is still confusing, Donald Glover left to pursue other projects (and get nominated for two Grammy awards), and Yvette Nicole Brown left to take care of a relative and also pursue the ubiquitous other projects.  Heck, even Fat Neil left to do CSI Cyber.  Would the reduced cast be enough to keep the magic alive?

There are two answers to that question.  Answer one is yes, of course they can.  Community was always nimble about its cast, elevating Academy Award winner Jim Rash to regular status and keeping Ken Jeong around long after Senor Chang and any real reason to stick around, plus the addition of Jonathan Banks last season.  With new cast members like Paget Brewster, there will be a new dynamic, but it will seem familiar.

The second answer is, there wasn’t that much magic to begin with.  I recently watched every episode of Community on DVDs from Netflix, and while seasons 1 and 3 were awesome, season 2 was a major disappointment, the Dan Harmon-less season 4 was erratic, and the re-Dan Harmonized season 5 was a disaster.  So there’s nowhere to go in season 6 but up, right?

Mostly right, if the first two episodes released by Yahoo are any indication.  The show has some pacing problems that probably stem from the fact that, now divorced from network conventions of length (the show can run longer than 22 ½ minutes per episode) there is less incentive to trim the marginal stuff and just leave the grain.  In the first episode there is a bit in the closing tag that starts out amusing, but then just keeps going, and going, and then bends into absurd, and not in a good way.  There are other draggy spots that probably would have been tighter in a 22 minute format.

The closing tag for episode 2 goes on for too long as well.  These closers were originally designed to give the audience something to watch while the closing credits rolled, but in the new streaming format, that’s no longer a consideration.  It’s another example of the new expanded format creating more problems than it solves.

There is still humor to be mined in the Greendale Community College mine, although how much remains can be a matter for debate. The first episode starts off harkening back to season 5’s thread about the group fixing everything wrong Greendale, with Frisbees turning out to be an overlooked hazard of epic proportions. The second episode, co-directed by Jim Rash, gives Mr. Rash an opportunity at displaying the kind of physical comedy he is so adept at (and displayed at the Academy Awards when he thrust his leg out Angelina-style) but in the end is just a little silly.

The new cast members have potential only hinted at in the first two episodes (give them a chance to settle in).  Reliability isn’t an adjective often associated with comedy, but Paget Brewster has proven herself to be a reliable comedic actor and possibly could distract Jeff (Joel McHale) from resuming his past Britta (Gillian Jacobs) and/or Annie (Allison Brie) flirtations.  Keith David, as an aging computer whiz, presumably steps into the departed Chevy Chase’s role as older curmudgeon.  David did great work doing the voice over for Community’s classic season 3 Ken Burns parody episode, “Pillows and Blankets,” and, as that episode pointed out, he was also on The Cape (so watch for Abed to make a meta comment on THAT)(note-after writing that I read an interview with Dan Harmon who says that connection never occurred to him; more's the pity).

Community has an erratic history, but that only proves that the show lives on the edge, willing to take risks that don’t pay off.  It has produced classic episodes such as Modern Warfare (the paintball episodes), Remedial Chaos Theory (the alternate realities episode), and Lupine Urology (the Law & Order parody).  Season 5 was mostly a misfire but they still managed to produce the animated episode that parodied G.I. Joe.  These are characters I care about, and if I stayed with them through what they themselves refer to as “the gas leak season” (the Harmon-less season four), then I’ll stick with them even though they are streaming rather than being broadcast.

TV Review: iZombie

Once you become successful, they key to remaining successful is to keep appeasing your audience.  There’s a James Taylor song where he sings about his fans who “pay good money to hear Fire and Rain/again and again and again.”  But fans also get bored easily.  So what they want is the same thing as before, but different.

This is not an easy thing to achieve, but Rob Thomas has done it in his new series iZombie. Thomas’ best known creation is Veronica Mars, the spunky, adorable high school student who solved murders and generally kicked ass (at the late, lamented website Television Without Pity the character of Veronica Mars was voted the baddest kickass of the previous ten years).  His new show is about Olivia Moore (Rose McIver), a spunky adorable medical student who solves murders and kicks ass; she also happens to eat brains because she’s a zombie.  The show is co-created by Diane Ruggiero, who worked as a writer on the Veronica Mars series and wrote the surprisingly mediocre Veronica Mars movie.

On iZombie, being a zombie is a lot like being alive, except your hair turns white, you look a little pasty, and if you go too long without eating brains you get slow-witted and cranky.  Olivia carries on by using a lot of bronzer and getting a job in the coroner’s office, which has a steady supply of corpses.  One of the side effects of brain eating is getting flashes of memories from the deceased, which is where the crime solving comes in; Olivia eats the brains of a murder victim and starts impressing the homicide detective with her insights into the murder.

In some ways this is a riff on Psyche, where the hyper-observant detective had to pretend to have visions to have any credibility with the police; Olivia has to pretend to have visions because she can’t tell the detective she works with (Malcolm Goodwin) that she gets her insights from brain-eating.  For the time being the only one who knows her secret is her boss, Dr. Chakrabarti (Rahul Kohli), who coincidentally was fired from the Center for Disease Control for being too aggressive about warning of a zombie apocalypse.  He is totally cool with having an undead assistant and wants to diagnose her condition and maybe even find a cure.

On a personal level Olivia has become somewhat detached from her family, partly because as a zombie she has trouble working up any emotions and partly because she doesn’t want them exposed to her disease, especially her now ex-fiancee, Major Lillywhite (his first name is Major; one problem this show has is names, because if you haven’t noticed the undead protagonist is named Liv Moore), played by Robert Buckley. One of the saddest moments from the pilot is when Liv goes to Major’s house to explain her condition and she finds him with someone else, happily playing a kill-the-zombie video game.

iZombie manages to merge two genres, crossing The Walking Dead with CSI. Surprisingly, it works.  Hopefully the murders to be investigated will be more interesting than the one in the pilot, but then pilots have to focus on exposition and not so much on plot.  There are plenty of flashes of the trademark Rob Thomas dialog, and McIver invests Olivia with the right balance of pathos and attitude.  I am a big fan of Rob Thomas’ series Veronica Mars as well as the earlier version of Cupid with Jeremy Piven, although I wasn’t impressed by the Veronica Mars movie and I thought the later version of Cupid with Bobby Cannavale was suck-tastic, so his track record is impressive but erratic.  Based on the pilot episode of iZombie, it looks like Rob Thomas is back in form.

Chris Borland: it means everything, it means nothing

As you may have heard, 49ers linebacker Chris Borland, coming off a successful rookie season and poised for stardom, retired from the NFL at age 24.  He cited concerns about the long term health of anyone who makes a living ramming his head against other people’s heads while both of them wear helmets.  He did a great deal of research on both damage from concussions and something called sub-concussive hits, blows to the head that almost, but don’t quite, cause concussions.  Apparently even if you don’t get a concussion, the damage accumulates.

So, is Borland the tip of the spear? The canary in the coal mine?  The first harbinger of athletes turning down lucrative careers in order to not have brain damage by the time they turn 40? 

Undoubtedly.  In addition, last week saw four NFL players announce their retirement before the age of 31.  Patrick Willis has foot injury issues, Jake Locker was looking at a future holding a clipboard, and Pittsburgh’s Jason Worilds and Oakland’s Maurice Jones-Drew had other reasons.  But a new factor will no doubt be creeping in to player’s decision making regarding their careers, and more of them are going to opt out before permanent damage is done.

Those who point out that there are thousands of people standing in line for Borland’s job are right, but how many of those in line have Borland’s talent?  Not really.  Of course there are lots of players who will accept any risk in exchange for the glory and the money of a successful NFL career.  When baseball's Ken Caminiti was dying of cancer from his steroids use, he still said he would have made the same decision to use steroids, win an MVP award, and be famous.  Not everyone will be deterred, but some will and the median level of talent in the NFL will go down.

The same is true of the preemptive effect of parents not allowing their kids to play football at the pee-wee and youth levels.  Good athletes have options; okay, kids who weigh 300 pounds at 13 probably are going to end up either as linemen in the NFL or Sumo wrestlers, but basketball has done all right by Lebron James and his body hasn't taken the pounding that the average NFL running back has endured by his age.  Kids with talent will be diverted at an early age, and again this will drive down the average talent level in the National Football League.

But . . . so what?  If the average talent of offensive players drops, and the average talent level of defensive players falls, will anyone notice?  As long as large men are crashing into each other, what’s the difference?  If the talent level on both side of the ball declines, say, 5%, the games will have the same outcome.

Besides, have you seen the ratings for the Pro Bowl?  The quality of play is execrable, an absolute travesty to the football gods.  The NFL would love to cancel the whole thing, but the ratings are so high, and the ad revenue so substantial, they have no choice but continue the sham of a mockery of a shamockery. If football fans will watch the Pro Bowl, or a Buccaneers/Falcons game on Thursday Night Football, they will watch if the average player in the NFL is 10% less good.

If there is a sea change coming in the NFL, it will take decades to have a measurable effect. As long as there is money, lots of money, enough talents young men will exchange their future health for money. By the time enough potential NFL players quit young, or decide not to try out for their college football team, or have parents who keep them out of Pop Warner football and they hear the siren song of becoming an MLS soccer player (who knows, the median salary might be $100,000 by then), by the time that has a discernible impact on the NFL, odds are we’ll have flying cars. 

The NFL is unstoppable.  It survived Ray Rice, Tim Tebow and Ryan Leaf.  But this is the first real chink in its armor that may have legs.  People will forget the Ray Rice debacle when . . . the memory is already fading for most NFL fans. But for the foreseeable future an increasing number of thoughtful athletes will retire early or eschew football altogether.  The tipping point may be a decade or more away, but the slow trek towards it has already started.

TV Loves Stasis

There was a recent op-ed piece in my local paper with the headline “TV Sitcom is unrealistic.” OK, the writer was specifically nitpicking cultural inaccuracies in the new sitcom Fresh Off the Boat and not making a general comment about television in general, but still whoever wrote that headline is an idiot.  The day TV sitcoms are realistic is the day the entire world stops watching TV sitcoms.

Were the two apartments in Friends realistic, especially considering three of the six man characters had low paying jobs?  I suppose Fresh Prince of Bel Air is a blueprint for how African American families in bad neighborhoods cope, by sending their kids to live with wealthy relatives.  And of course the exploits of Two Broke Girls are ripped from the headlines.

Of course TV is unrealistic; we watch TV to escape from reality (so why do people watch reality TV?  Search me).  But there is one way in which all episodic television is unrealistic: TV loves stasis.  Ty Burell of Modern Family said at a Paleyfest gathering on March 14 that sitcom characters don’t change, and he is basically right.

In the real world, time passes.  Things change, people change, and circumstances change.  Few TV shows are equipped with a device that constantly propels the action forward.  Lost is the only successful broadcast show that comes to mind where you can start watching an episode at random and immediately identify where in the timeline it fell.  Cable shows like Game of Thrones and Mad Men also have some linear continuity.  But when you watch a random episode of Friends you have to look for clues to see if Rachel is with Ross, or Joey, or whomever (wasn't she with Monica for a while? Sorry, just my imagination).

For example, take the successful show The Big Bang Theory.  Yes, things have evolved.  Raj now speaks to women (the producers decided to slay that dragon after they introduced two recurring female characters).  Howard got married.  Sheldon has sort of a girlfriend.  So there has been change.

But the central relationship is Leonard and Penny.  They’ve known each other for nearly nine years at this point, and they are still “dating” (if that’s what you call two people who live across the hall from each other hooking up regularly).  Is this realistic, even aside from the fact that a gorgeous sort-of actress is sleeping with a science nerd whose job is something she doesn’t come close to understanding?  At some point in a real relationship they would have reached some consensus about their future.  She would have met a handsome actor she had some shared interests with, or he would have met an attractive female physicist (I’m sure they are more common than unicorns) who could follow poly-syllabic utterances.  Or they would have gotten married and moved in together to save expenses and get some tax deductions.  But they wouldn’t be hanging out together for over eight years.

Of course the King of Stasis is The Simpsons.  After 25 years of Bart being in the first third grade, Homer being bad at his job, and Maggie not talking, they have to have selected amnesia.  How else can you explain the recent episode where Marge participates in a card counting scheme at a casino, with nary a shout out to the classic episode $pringfield which established Marge has a gambling problem?  Being animated, The Simpsons can push the boundaries of unreality further than most sitcoms.

So if you are looking for reality, don’t look to television.  Of course if I am telling you this, it is probably too late for you.  You can’t find reality on television, except possibly on The Daily Show.  The fake news is the only thing real about television.