Some unrelated information and commentary to end the week…(and, yes, to those of you who asked, the News Guy is almost fully recovered from the mid-week attack of the ague)

A reasonable person  might almost sympathize with Burlington Police Cpl. Paul Glynn for arresting 21-year-old Darin Cassler Monday for the crime of organizing and engaging in the well-known felony of pillow-fighting.

Put yourself in the position of a police officer walking down the Church Street mall and all of a sudden coming upon a veritable regiment (48-strong, according to published reports) of young folks who might have been clogging the street, but who were at any rate obviously organized, not to mention armed.

OK, armed with pillows, not usually considered a lethal weapon. But you never know. Faced with what must have been an unprecedented (for everyone, not just him) spectacle, Cpl. Glynn appears to have fallen back on a cop’s instinctive reaction: Arrest Somebody.

The reason for the sympathy is that the rest of the Burlington and Chittenden County law enforcement establishment clearly recognized that he had over-reacted. In this case, being (at least so it seems) ridiculed by his peers would be sufficient punishment, especially because the charges against Cassler were dropped. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they were never really picked up.

Of course, the police department, being a police department, in announcing that the young man would not be prosecuted, had to put out a stern statement, warning that “these types of events can have collateral/negative impact on the area in which they are held.”

Were there any reason to take such statements seriously to begin with it might be tempting to try to find some meaning in this one. Happily, there is not.

Do you suppose it’s possible that Entergy Vermont Yankee actually hires the folks who protest against it?

Probably not. But how else explain how the nuclear power plant’s most recent antagonists have been its best friends?

First, at a meeting in Brattleboro, a Massachusetts woman named Sally Shaw (all this courtesy of the Brattleboro Reformer story by Bob Audette), who belongs to an anti-nuclear group called the New England Coalition, threw some compost at Michael Colomb, a Vermont Yankee Vice President.

Presumably there was some symbolic point to the use of what Shaw called “really good quality compost.” If so, the point is too subtle for some of us to grasp, making the  childishness of the gesture even more obvious.

Then there was the complaint by the New England Coalition  asking Attorney General William Sorrell to investigate the relationship between Vermont Yankee lobbyist Jay Thayer and Commissioner David O’Brien of the Department of Public Service.

On its face, this is not entirely a frivolous suggestion. O’Brien’s department regulates Thayer’s company. Keeping an arms length relationship between the two of them would probably be a good idea. So O’Brien might have been well advised not to invite Thayer to a Christmas party in Stowe last December. He invited him anyway.

But Shay Totten provided the world with that information in his Seven Days column on January 21. Asked for further evidence of questionable O’Brien-Thayer contact, Clay Turnbull of the  Coalition could only say that O’Brien seems to give Vermont Yankee everything it desires.

True enough. Still, one invitation to a fairly large gathering (it wasn’t a two-man tete-a-tete) seems scant evidence of impropriety, as Sorrell immediately noted. (Friday morning update: Sorrell has officially rejected the request to conduct an investigation) Pressure groups, like investigative reporters, should pay attention to the My Darling Clementine Rule, based on one of the great lines from that great 1946 movie: “When you draw a gun, kill a man.”

Today’s theme seems to combine possibly imprudent political protest with arguably unnecessary law enforcement. Let’s wrap them together at the University of Vermont, where 100 students protested academic budget cuts with a sit-in Wednesday afternoon, and 26 Friday morning update: or 31, or perhaps 33) were arrested when they refused to leave that night. (Apparently only one was taken into custody; the others were given citations).

There are roughly 10,000 undergraduates at UVM. If this pocket calculator is correct, that means about one (1) percent of the students support the faculty union, United Academics (of which News Guy, a very part-time adjunct at UVM, is a member), in opposing faculty layoffs. Instead, the union argues, the university should save money by getting rid of some of its highly paid top managers, or at least cutting their pay.

Faced with a one percent turnout, the student and/or union leaders might have wondered whether going ahead with the protest demonstration would demonstrate more weakness than protest.

But let’s admire their tenacity, if not their wisdom. Off they went, and some of them refused to leave the president’s wing of Waterman Hall, the University administration building, when ordered to do so by the police (whose boss is Gary Margolis; no relation if anyone wondered). Meaning they were probably guilty of trespass, meaning arresting them was legally justified.

But maybe not smart. According to all the reports, the students weren’t hurting anything. This was not like Columbia University in 1968 when students trashed offices, destroyed property, and defaced books. This demonstration was arguably pointless and juvenile. It wasn’t dangerous. Arresting the demonstrators made the demonstration seem stronger than it was.  Leaving the kids in there, possibly to get bored and tired and drift out one by one, would have accentuated the ineptitude of the demonstration. Arresting them could arouse sympathy for them. The headline becomes “student arrested” instead of “demonstration fizzles.”

But you know what they say. Sometimes all that edjy-kay-shun gets in the way of common sense.

Oh, and speaking of education, the Greek whose last words asked a friend to make a sacrifice on his bahalf to Asklepios, the god of healing, was not Spiro Agnew. It was Socrates (up top; a photo of a statue in the Louvre), who just after drinking the hemlock, but before it had taken full effect, said (according to Plato), “Crito, I owe a cock to Asklepius. Will you see that the debt is paid”?

President Fogel

Under pressure and harsh criticism,  University of Vermont President Daniel Mark Fogel now indicateshe probably won’t be giving any more big bonuses to UVM top executives.

And why did it take pressure and criticism to bring about this reconsideration?

Because really smart people sometimes act really dumb.

This isn’t just Fogel, who by all objective criteria has been a superb president. Under his leadership, the university has more professors making more money teaching more students who got better test scores and higher grades in high school than their recent predecessors.

So UVM has a higher reputation nationwide. It isn’t yet quite back to being the “public Ivy” it was called a couple of decades ago. But it’s getting there. That explains why even more students with high test scores and good grades have applied, eager to pay the higher-than-ever tuitions UVM is charging.

And then they go and give out 900 grand in bonuses and “extra pay” in the last four years. What’s wrong with these folks?

Again, it isn’t just Fogel. Some of his senior aides no doubt went along with this. And it isn’t just the current leadership; UVM has a history of top leaders making bone-headed moves. And it isn’t just UVM; all over the country, the top executives of elite universities say and do the dumbest things.

It’s the executive suite version of the Ivory Tower, in which the presidents, provosts and deans seem less in touch with reality than even the most dreamy-eyed professor of English literature. You know – the one who wrote his or her dissertation on Arthurian elements in Spenser’s Faerie Queene. It’s as though these high-ranking educators are especially immune to a process in which they think as follows: (1) We are very smart; (2) We are engaged in a noble enterprise; (3) Everybody knows this; (4) Therefore we can do whatever we please and the consequences that might impact others will lightly waft over us as does the May breeze over the apple boughs.

Let’s assess those four suppositions. They are, in order: True, true, maybe, and ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR COTTON-PICKING MIND?

Perhaps every major university should contract with a part-time consultant, a politically aware person to whom the university administrators would send all their policy and administrative proposals. This consultant – definitely a part-timer, an outsider, and a non-academic – would no doubt find nothing wrong with most of the plans, but every once in a while would say, “uhhhh, are you sure you want to do this?” Or, more bluntly, ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR COTTON-PICKING MIND?

In this matter of the bonuses, for instance, the consultant might have noted that, what with the economy slowing down and all, it might soon become necessary to lay off some faculty. While not paying the bonuses wouldn’t really protect many of those profs from getting the axe, paying them would be like handing the faculty union a baseball bat with which to pound you on the head as many students and the general public applaud.

Which is what happened.

(For those interested, the union is holding another rally to protest the layoffs on the steps of  the Bailey-Howe Library today at 12:30. As a matter of full disclosure I should disclose that I am a member of the union ,and one of the part-time faculty who could be affected by UVM’s budget cuts. I’ve taught one fall semester class in political science each of the last five years).

Now, let’s not get populistically carried away here. You get what you pay for, and it’s hard to dispute that one reason Fogel has done so well at UVM is that he has hired good people at the top. Good people cost money. One of the faculty union leaders, noticing that the number of top-level administrators who earn $150,000 or more had gone from 25 last year to 38 this year, found some statistics indicating that the average salary nationwide for such university big-wigs was more like $122,000. Couldn’t UVM pay that?

Yeah, and probably end up with some mediocre top administrators. Many of those other schools are in parts of the country where living is cheaper. And you know what? One Fifty K – even 175 – doesn’t make you rich. Oh, it’s a very fine salary, on which one can live quite well even if one is the sole breadwinner of a many-member household.

But it isn’t “money,” a la Wall Street. It’s just a high salary, not a piece of the action like stock options. And while the bonuses were dumb, they weren’t real “money,” either, like the high six-figure and seven-figure bonuses at investment banks and hedge funds.

But that is a big one-year hike in folks making more than 150 grand. And come to think of it, the bonuses are not just dumb. They’re worse than dumb.

A week or so ago, a reasonably affluent person who was doing a job for some unreasonably affluent Wall Streeters was on a conference call with several of them. At one point, the big bonuses paid to Merrill Lynch and other executives came into the conversation. The Wall Streeters were horrified.

Not at the bonuses. At the widespread disapproval of them.

Later, the reasonably affluent person figured that it wasn’t so much that the Wall Street guys were greedy (though they probably are) but that “money is everything to them.”

No doubt. And no problem in the financial world, where money is the appropriate measure of business success. But higher education is different. Sure, supervisors want to reward their capable and productive staff. Fine. Pay them that good salary. Tell them they’re wonderful. Write them letters. Take them to lunch or even dinner. (You can put it on the expense account; call it “motivational expenses,” though you might need another term for the Internal Revenue Service’s perusal).

But don’t give them bonuses. Not just because they’ll come to expect them every year (though they will). But because in higher education, money ought not be the measure of success.

Plus, as that consultant might have told you, it looks bad.

President Fogel

Two unrelated matters today, both of them, fitting for work done on Groundhog Day, reprising and wrapping up reports of the few days previous.

First, a “very sorry” University of Vermont President Daniel Mark Fogel confirmed that, as first reported here yesterday,  Ben Stein would not be the commencement speaker this spring.

The sorrow was inspired not by Stein’s withdrawal but by Fogel’s original invitation to the actor/commentator, extended when Fogel was “insufficiently attentive” to the controversy it would create among scientists and other academics  around the world.

Stein is an advocate of “intelligent design,” a denial of Darwinian evolutionary theory. Almost all scientists regard evolution as the foundation of biology and “intelligent design” as fraudulent. Stein co-wrote and starred in a move called Expelled which argues that belief in evolution was one cause of the Holocaust.

Fogel said he had been vaguely aware of Stein’s interest in intelligent design, but thought of him primarily as a commentator on economics, his subject when he spoke at UVM last spring.

“Of course I didn’t go see Expelled , Fogel said. “Why would I?  I am myself a believer in science.”

After last week’s announcement that Stein would be UVM’s commencement speaker and receive an honorary degree, Fogel said he “started to get a lot of emails… I would say hundreds,” protesting the selection, One was from well-known scientist Richard Dawkins, a professor of evolutionary biology at Oxford, who called the choice  of Stein “lamentable.”

Fogel said he did not “retract the invitation” to Stein, but that after the two men discussed the situation, Stein said, “look, I’m not going to come.”

Fogel said UVM “will identify another Commencement speaker in the weeks ahead,” using “a more consultative process .”

The Commencement is scheduled for May 17.

Now we turn to Rep. Patricia O’Donnell, Republican of Vernon, who has not been mentioned before on this web site but who was mentioned – derisively – by this reporter on television the other day, commenting on her proposal to demand lower salaries for the top executives of some non-profit groups.

The specific derision proclaimed on Vermont Public Television’s Vermont This Week was that the proposal was not “grownup.”

Last week, O’Donnell announced legislation that would require five percent salary cuts in the pay of  any official who earns $60,000 a year or more working at a non-profit agency that gets half its total funding from the state.

What did not seem “grownup” was that O’Donnell:

–Didn’t know how much money might be saved;

–Didn’t know (and apparently was not asked) how many non-profits get most of their money from the state;

–In some cases listed non-profits that don’t get any money from the state at all.

In a telephone interview yesterday, O’Donnell explained why she did what she did the way she did it.

“I’m not doing this to get at anybody or to be nasty,” she said.” I’m been working on Medicaid and these programs for elderly people for years. I’ve pushed for V-Pharm and for higher medical benefits.”

Her hope, she said, is that the money saved by paying less to the non-profits could be diverted to V-Pharm, which helps low and middle-income people get prescription drugs.

As to not knowing how much could be saved, she said that as one legislator with no staff she didn’t “have the resources at my finger tips” to get the information.

“Nothing’s going to happen unless the bill is introduced. Now this bill will go to the committee and the committee will take it up,” she said, apparently referring to the Committee on Human Services, on which she serves.

Perhaps, she said, the bill would have to be expanded to apply to non-profits that get only 20 percent of their funding from the state. Perhaps, she said, the state could save as much as half of the $3  million V-Pharm costs by sending less to the non-profits.

Perhaps. But she could present to evidence to support that hope.

Revealing that she had decided to return five percent of her Legislative salary, O’Donnell said, “I’m just asking everyone to share the burden.”

However admirable her own sacrifice, she actually seems to be asking a few people – at the most a few hundred people – to bear the burden. The same is true for the policy she said she modeled her idea on – the five percent pay cut for most state workers earning $60,000 a year or more that Gov. Jim Douglas’s imposed late last year.

O’Donnell said it is saving $589,000 a year. But it is doing so by effectively levying a huge tax increase – perhaps $2,400 on a 60,000 a year earner (roughly the take home pay lost for a $3,000 gross pay cut) – while not asking a penny of anyone earning $60,000 or more who does not work for the state.

On that television program another reporter, who had been to the press conference where O’Donnell announced her proposal ,held up the list of non-profits she had handed out and noted that all of them seemed to be organizations that had expressed some opposition to Douglas’s budget-cutting plans.

O’Donnell said it was “ludicrous” to suggest she had any political motive “because I said all non-profits. I’m going to get at everybody,” specifying that she might add to her list of big-paying non-profits the Vermont Student Assistance Corporation (VSAC).

VSAC does pay big salaries. But it appears to get no state appropriation, so cutting those salaries would save no  money for use in other programs.

And while O’Donnell may want to “get at everybody,” notably absent from her list of non-profits with high-salaried officials were any of the regional economic development corporations, which tend to have close ties to the Douglas Administration.

But unlike the governor and his aides, O’Donnell did not rule out supporting some kind of income tax increase on wealthier taxpayers.

“If it was an increase  on higher income people, I would probably support something like that,” she said. “The burden now is on the poorest people of the state. I’m just trying to make it so that it’s shared on the higher level.”