As has been noted here before, sometimes very smart people act in ways that are…oh, for now let’s just say that are not very smart.

As has also been noted here before, some of these very smart people are senior officials at the University of Vermont.

Their very-smartness is proven not simply by their advanced degrees, fancy titles, high salaries and sumptuous offices, but also by their obvious success as senior officials at UVM. The university is bigger than it was a few years ago. Its larger student body has higher SAT scores. Its larger faculty earns more money. The entire institution has a higher reputation in academia nationwide. These officials must be very smart people, indeed.

So why do they want to suppress freedom of speech on campus?

Well, that’s a stupid question. All people in power want to suppress free speech in their realms to avoid being criticized, ridiculed, and opposed. This instinct applies to governments, corporations, foundations, universities, churches, and the Kiwanis Club. So let’s re-phrase the question.

Considering that this particular attempt to suppress free speech on campus is possibly illegal, probably unconstitutional, certainly confrontational, and therefore doomed to fail, why did the very smart senior officials at UVM decide to make themselves appear to be not simply would-be tyrants but bungling tyrants?

In fairness, the University has not circulated a document entitled “Proposed Policy to Suppress Free Speech on Campus.” Furthermore, the document that was circulated by UVM’s Provost and the General Counsel’s office – the “Interim Policy on Solicitation,” has not been vetted by a lawyer for either the News Guy nor the UVM faculty. It is conceivable, then, that the policy does not attempt to suppress free speech on campus, but only seems so to attempt.

Meaning the folks who composed it brought trouble down upon themselves unnecessarily. Still not smart.

But not likely, either. Laymen though they may be, the News Guy and the professors can read. And if the words on the page are not designed to give University officials the power to decide what may or may not be espoused, opposed, posted, organized for (or against) or debated, they’re a mighty good imitation thereof.

To be sure, colleges should have policies restricting commercial solicitation. Students ought not be bothered in dormitory rooms, study halls or library stacks by peddlers of software, soap, or sandwiches. But this policy statement is not limited to commercial solicitation. It also covers “Noncommercial solicitation,” which “includes, without limitation, petition drives, public opinion polling, membership drives for recognized groups and organizations, preaching, proselytizing, political organizing, political canvassing, and political campaigning.”

For such activity, the policy says, “prior approval” of the University administration is required. As Alan Gilbert of the Vermont American Civil Liberties Union pointed out, “prior approval is prior restraint,” which is Constitutionally questionable.

Not that the university shouldn’t impose some reasonable restrictions on where political activity could take place; the petition-gatherer need not pursue students into their dorm rooms or laboratories. But on all campuses certain areas are recognized as public forums. At UVM, these would include the big bulletin board outside the Bailey-Howe Library and the Green between the library and the buildings fronting Main Street, including the massive new Dudley Davis Center.

But the solicitation policy asserts that “Because of its fragility and its designation as a historic landmark, the University Green’s availability for solicitation is limited.”

Come on! This doesn’t meet the laugh test. As pointed out by David Shiman, the education professor who heads United Academics, UVM’s faculty union, “the University Green has historically been the agora for campus and community,” the place where debate, demonstration, and, yes, even confrontation, have taken place. It is the obvious site for them to take place. Requiring individuals or organizations to get “prior approval” before expressing themselves on the Green would constitute a blatant inhibition of free expression.

(Full disclosure: The News Guy, very part-time adjunct faculty at UVM, is a member of the union).

To give the credit which is due (which is minimal) the solicitation policy does promise a version of “viewpoint neutrality,” saying, “(i)n those instances in which the University, through the official and deliberate action of authorized officials, chooses to open a designated forum for public expression, the University will not discriminate on the basis of the viewpoint of those engaging in expression allowed within that forum. Defamation, obscenity, and other forms of unlawful speech are prohibited in all instances.”

Oh, now UVM hot-shots proclaim themselves arbiters of which speech is and is not “lawful.”

And no “defamation”? The heart of debate is defamation. All authority should be defamed, starting with presidents (of the United States and the University) and extending to almost everyone else, including the writer of this post.

Besides, as Shiman points out, the “neutrality” pledge is belied by another clause stating that the “approval of solicitation activities will generally be subject to applicable time, place, manner, and subject matter provisions unless, in the considered judgment of the responsible administrative official, the proposed activities are unlawful or are likely to be disruptive, to cause undue interruption of the essential operations of the University, or to infringe significantly upon the rights of University community members or members of the public lawfully using campus grounds or facilities, such as rights of privacy, personal security, or reasonably unimpeded ingress and egress.”

“These grounds for denial,” Shiman wrote to the Administration, “are so vague that the clause about neutrality becomes meaningless. The University…asserts that they may deny permission whenever they want. This is unprecedented for any university, other than perhaps a tightly controlled religious institution.”

Not unreasonably, Shiman wondered whether one of the administration’s goals was to stifle union organizing efforts. Labor organizations are not official university-recognized entities, and under the proposed rules their on-campus activities might have to “be sponsored by authorized University officials…”

or University-recognized student groups or organizations,” which, he noted, could “have a particularly chilling effect for union drives.”

Interim Provost Jane Knodell said it was not her office, but the General Counsel’s office which was in charge of the solicitation policy, and referred the News Guy to Deputy General Counsel Tom Mercurio. Mercurio did not return a phone call, nor did UVM spokesman Enrique Corredera. They might not have had time. Or they might not have wanted to try to defend the indefensible.

OK, it’s an “interim policy.” Perhaps before making it final, the very smart people of UVM will remember that universities are and ought to be places of vigorous, spirited, even if sophomoric (after all, some of the participants are actual sophomores) debate. The folks who run universities should encourage such activity, not stifle it.

Otherwise, they aren’t even slightly smart.

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Mt. Mansfield. photo by Jared C. Benedict

Today’s opus will be presented as three un-related chapters, each with its own title, as follows:

1—Vermont the Healthy?

Among Vermont’s other distinctions, it seems to be Number One in health-consciousness.

In the latest Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, Vermont scored 69.1 on the “healthy behavior index score,” higher than it did last year and 1.3 clicks ahead of second-place Hawaii.

This does not prove that Vermonters are healthier than anyone else. In fact it doesn’t prove anything; it’s survey research, which provides indications, not incontrovertible fact.

The indications are that Vermonters take care of themselves better than other Americans. They are less likely to smoke, more likely to exercise, most likely to eat lots of fruits and vegetables.

That’s the good news. The not-so-good news is that being best in America does not necessarily men being very good. Overall, the survey found that the “nation as a whole (is) dropping substantively on the Healthy Behavior Sub-Index, from 63.7 in 2008 to 62.6 in the first half of 2009.” In fact, “Mississippi, whose score ranks among the bottom 10, is the only state to record a statistically significant increase in its healthy behavior score.”

So there’s little justification here for Vermonters getting a swelled head about their (relatively) good habits. To begin with, there doesn’t seem to be all that much specifically “Vermontish” in these results. Almost all the states in the Northeast scored reasonably well, as did the Rocky Mountain states and the West Coast (except Washington State and Nevada.). To some extent, then, being health-conscious is a regional habit.

And probably an educational habit. More than 35 percent of adult Vermonters graduated from college, more than in all but five other states. College graduates tend to be more health conscious, not to mention more affluent. Not only do they know that they ought to go to the gym, they can afford the membership.

On the other hand, Vermont is the most rural of the states in the top ten, and there is ample evidence (such as this 2005 study in Pennsylvania) that rural residents don’t have the healthiest habits. They are more likely to smoke, less likely to exercise, and they gobble up lots of fried foods.

Meaning that perhaps it is the residents of Chittenden County and a few others outposts who take good care of themselves. But the survey didn’t get down to the county or town level.

The Gallup survey says it provides “a daily measure of people’s well-being…based on the World Health Organization (WHO) definition of health as not only the absence of infirmity and disease but also a state of physical, mental and social well-being.”

Whereupon we segue, as the TV folks would say, into……

CHAPTER TWO: VERMONT THE GOOD?

One way lots of Vermonters stay healthy is by doing stuff outdoors. That’s not in the Gallup survey, but we know from many sources that people in this state are more likely than most other Americans to hike and camp out, to paddle a kayak or canoe, to work in their gardens or in the woods.

Now comes evidence that all this activity not only helps make a person healthier. It can him or her a better person – kinder, more generous, less selfish. Contact with nature, says a new study “brings individuals closer to others, whereas human-made environments orient goals toward more selfish or self-interested ends.”

A bit of skepticism is in order here. Psychology lacks the precision of physics. Studies such as this one – conducted by psychologists Netta Weinstein, Andrew K. Przybylski, and Richard M. Ryan – sometimes conclude with the conclusions the studiers wanted to find before they started.

But these folks have credentials – Weinstein is a clinical psychologist at the University of Rochester – and their findings sufficiently intrigued the editors at the interesting, lively, new Miller-McCune Magazine that they wrote about them in an article called “Immersion in Nature Makes us Nicer.”

Why would it? Writer Tom Jacobs reports that “Weinstein and her colleagues suggest the answer lies in an enhanced sense of personal autonomy. ‘Nature affords individuals the chance to follow their interests and reduces pressures, fears, introjects and social expectations,’ they write.

Introjects? A term the meaning of which seems to be in dispute but is related to making too big a deal of oneself.

If both un-confirmable and un-refutable, the notion does seem to make some sense. Not there aren’t some very nice couch potatoes and a few avid white-water paddlers who are real stinkos, but connecting with the natural world (and this includes spending time with your house plants)would seem to reduce stress, encourage a contemplative outlook, and keep one on an even keel (except, literally, in that kayak in white-water).

And speaking of even keels, we segue to….

CHAPTER THREE: ET TU JACOBE?

Did everybody note that even Gov. Jim Douglas would not come right out and say what he (almost surely) knows is true: that this business about “death panels” in the proposed health care legislation is some combination of dishonesty and insanity?

Asked about it at his press conference last week, the Governor, as reported by Terri Hallenbeck of the Burlington Free Press in the paper’s Vermont Buzz blog, would only note that the argument was “an example of the kind of rhetoric that’s distracting us from fundamental reform.”

“But he did not come out and denounce the death-panel debate nor would he say he felt confident the proposed legislation didn’t include death panels,” Hallenbeck wrote. “He said that like most members of Congress he had not read every word of the legislation.”

No condemnation here of Douglas, who was doing what he had to do. Oh, it would have been admirable for him to have said (in somewhat more diplomatic language), “this stuff is crazy.”

But that would have been dangerous, and what is interesting is why it would have been dangerous.

In the latest polling on the subjects (NBC News/Wall Street Journal), 45 percent of the respondents said they thought the health care proposals before Congress “Will allow the government to make decisions about when to stop providing medical care to the elderly.”

Those proposals will allow no such thing.

Checking the polls’ “internals, “ it’s reasonable to conclude that the percentage in Vermont is smaller, probably closer to a third, roughly the percentage of Vermonters who voted for John McCain last year.

In other words, that third is Douglas’s base. A politician can not afford to tell his base that they are (not to put too fine a point on it and using the term in its colloquial rather than its clinical context) out of their minds.

Or, more gently, that they have allowed themselves to believe outright lies.

But maybe “allowed is less accurate than “affirmatively chosen” to believe outright lies, which leads to the question of why so many people would so choose.

A complicated question, perhaps pursued another time. Meanwhile ponder what it means that a sane and responsible governor fears to suggest that some of his constituents are acting in a manner neither sane nor responsible.

What with the tendency these days to assume that everyone’s judgments reflect his or her prejudices, today’s post must start with a personal note, if not a personal confession.

The information and analysis found below might lead the casual observer to suppose that the News Guy is hostile – or at least indifferent – to the game of baseball.

True, precisely as true as that Popeye dislikes spinach and Bugs Bunny abhors carrots.

In fact, the News Guy has now and then reflected that had he taken but one tenth of the time he has spent over the decades going to, watching, reading about, or talking about baseball games (and, even earlier, playing in them, not all that impressively), and used that time in productive effort, he might today be a very rich man indeed (or confined to a penitentiary, depending on which path of productive effort he had chosen).

Having established that, let’s turn to the subject of the Vermont Lake Monsters of the Class A New York-Penn League They want us to build them a ball park. If we don’t, they’ll go away.

OK, neither team owner Ray Pecor nor General manager C.J. Knudsen has made that threat in so many words. In fact, both have said they might be satisfied with substantial renovation of their present home grounds, Centennial Field, the 101-year-old stadium owned by the University of Vermont.

But Pecor told the Burlington Free Press that bringing the old ball park up to new standards might cost as much as $20 million, and “if you are going to spend that much, you might a well build a new park with all the amenities, without cement seats and (with) the ability to park near the park and not take a shuttle.”

Most Lake Monsters fans now have to park near UVM’s Gutterson Field House and be shuttled to Centennial Field.

Pecor’s cost estimate for Centennial Field renovation could be high. Both Tom Torti, the president of the Lake Champlain Chamber of Commerce, and C.J. Knudsen, the team’s general manager, said the old ball park might be spruced up for more like $10 million to $12 million.

“Technically I think it could, and could be functional,” Knudsen said. “We need to undergo some renovations. When we first came here in 1994, Centennial was functional. Since then, other teams (in the league) have had major renovations or brand new ball parks funded by a city, county, state or sports commission. These facilities are beautiful ball parks, great for fans and great for players. They have plenty of parking, comfortable seats, facilities for the disabled. ”

It’s easy to see why the Lake Monsters want better facilities. Centennial Field is the oldest ball park in the minor leagues. A report by Major League Baseball found that the lighting was inadequate for professional baseball. Upgrading the lighting system probably wouldn’t be all that expensive, but Knudsen also said, “we do not have enough lockers in our locker room. We don’t have press facilities or anything like that.”

There’s where the multi-million dollar price tag comes in.

It’s also easy to understand why business leaders like Torti think a new ball park would be good for Burlington’s economy. If nothing else, it would make their jobs easier.

“Having a minor league baseball team gives Burlington one more of those little things that helps us look like we play big for a small player,” Torti said. “When people are thinking of relocating here we can show them that for seven dollars you can go see baseball.”

It may only be Class A (unlike the picture above, Wrigley Field, in the big time), but it’s professional baseball, and some of the players will make it to the major leagues. Ken Griffey, Jr. once played in Burlington. Besides, the games are fun, even on concrete bleacher seats (stadium cushions are inexpensive and easy to carry).

No wonder, then, that according to that Free Press story, almost everyone is for doing something to keep the Lake Monsters in Burlington – the business leaders, Sen. Patrick Leahy, Mayor Bob Kiss. Who would be against it?

How about the taxpayers. And maybe owners of businesses other than baseball clubs.

Go back and carefully parse what General Manager Knudsen said. All those other new and/or improved stadiums were “funded by a city, county state or sports commission.” That’s you, folks, if you pay taxes, and among economists who have studied the matter, using public money to build stadiums for privately owned sports teams is, at the very least, a debatable use of scarce public resources.

“If your objective is to create jobs there are better ways to spend money,” said Raymond Sauer, an economics professor at Clemson University in South Carolina,, and the founder of the “Sports Economics” web site. “Invest in infrastructure that brings in people who want to open up businesses that employ people year-round. A stadium sits empty most of the time, and when it’s filled, it mostly employs ushers and hamburger flippers.”

Nor is it at all certain, economists say, that having a sports team in town boosts the economy.

“Despite what many people believe, professional sports venues typically do not spur large-scale economic activity,” wrote Dennis Coates, an economics professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, in an article for the American Enterprise Institute magazine..

Instead, economists argue, public financing of sports arenas and stadiums redistributes economic activity, often to the detriment of the very people whose taxes go up to subsidize the stadium.

“It really is fundamental that people only have so much money to spend on entertainment,” Sauer said. So if a fancy new ball park brings more people to Burlington to watch the Lake Monsters, the ball club’s gain is likely to be another business’s loss.

That would be especially true if the state put up some of the money. It could only do that by raising taxes or cutting services statewide. But if a new Burlington ball park attracts fans from, say, Montpelier or Stowe, that’s money they won’t spend in restaurants or movie theatres in Montpelier or Stowe (or at the Montpelier games of the Vermont Mountaineers of the New England Collegiate Baseball League). Business owners in those cities are not likely to be happy about being taxed to subsidize their competitors.

It might be possible to finance a new or upgraded stadium from the Burlington area alone. But the same problem might arise. One idea, according to both Torti and Knudsen, is for a multi-purpose facility for sports, concerts, business meetings, perhaps conventions, right on the waterfront.

The usual financing scheme for such a facility would include raising the rooms taxes for local hotels that presumably benefit from the presence of the ball club.  But there’s already a conference center nearby – the Sheraton, right near the University and just across the city line in South Burlington. It won’t want to charge its customers an extra tax to pay off the bonds that built a new facility designed to compete with it.

More problems. UVM has dropped varsity baseball, meaning there is one less potential user of a new stadium. Centennial Field is right next to a residential area where homeowners probably don’t want to deal with regular crowds of concert-goers whose ticket purchases would help pay for renovations. Many, if not most people in Burlington probably don’t want a big new structure right along the lake, especially if it’s surrounded by a big parking lot.

This doesn’t mean that some way can’t be found to keep the Lake Monsters in Burlington without asking state or city taxpayers to foot the bill. Some variant of that local rooms and meals tax plan might prove politically sellable and economically defensible.

Dennis Coates has his doubts.

“Consider the common practice of funding stadium and arena subsidies with new taxes on hotel occupancy and rental cars,” he wrote. “One argument for such taxes at the local level is that they are paid by outside visitors, many of whom may be in town to see the sporting events. But the taxes would also be paid by traveling businessmen and conventioneers. When comparing cities to host an upcoming meeting, businesses and professional associations may select between otherwise comparable cities based on which one has the lower hotel and rental car taxes. In other words, the new taxes used to subsidize the stadium construction may ultimately reduce visits to the city by non-sports-related travelers.”

The Lake Monsters, six-and-six before last night’s game against the Hudson Valley Renegades, and tied with the Lowell Spinners for second place in their division, host the Renegades tomorrow on the Fourth of July (and a Grand and Glorious one to you all).

Go one out to the game. Let’s root-root-root for the Home Team, and if they should leave it’s a shame. That doesn’t mean it’s the taxpayer’s job to keep them here.

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