Categories: education, civil rights, Prof. Derrick Bell

For weeks now, I’ve been metaphorically lugging Steve Jobs around with me. I bought Walter Isaacson’s biography shortly after Jobs died, but I got side-tracked by the controversy over hazardous working conditions at the plants in China where Apple products are manufactured.

Once I started reading, I was again wowed by Jobs’ early vision for personal computers and how his interest in both Zen Buddhism and calligraphy, not to mention the influence of LSD, shaped his sensibilities. They seemed to explain the elegance and grace that Apple products have always communicated.

But then I would come across a passage in which Jobs treated a friend, relative or worker with such unspeakable cruelty that I’d have to put the book down before finishing a chapter. The more familiar Jobs was with the object of his abuse, the meaner he permitted himself to act.

He saw things (and people) in black and white. Objects were excellent or “shit.” Food was delicious or inedible. People were A Team or idiots. People around Jobs referred to his “reality distortion field.” No matter how difficult the engineering or design demand he placed on them, he refused to believe it was impossible. Time, materials, logistics, even human ability, were all fungible. He had a vision, and he refused to surrender it.

I found Isaacson’s biography remarkably even-handed. But this is not a book review. My point here is political.

While Jobs struggled against the cancer that would kill him, his wife, Laurene Powell, learned that President Obama was coming to California, and she wanted him to meet her remarkable husband. A meeting was arranged in late 2010 at a hotel near the San Francisco airport, and Apple’s CEO pulled no punches with the nation’s chief executive.

The first thing Jobs told Obama was that he was headed for just one term unless he changed his ways. At the top of Jobs’ agenda was that the President needed to be more business-friendly. Jobs reminded him how easy it is to set up a factory in China versus doing the same thing in the United States, how the regulations and costs weighed business down.

Then Jobs attacked the American education as “hopelessly antiquated and crippled by union work rules.” Teachers needed to be treated as professionals, and principals need to be able to hire and fire them at will. After bending Obama’s ear for forty-five minutes, Jobs offered to set up a meeting with other Silicon Valley industry leaders.

More about that later. First, let’s unpack Jobs’ initial advice. Those regulations that Jobs railed against include safety and environmental laws that protect workers, residents and the surrounding countryside. They include taxes that pay for roads and public services to a factory and that fund public schools for the workers’ children. (Elizabeth Warren says it better, but you get the point.)

In China, young workers migrate from the countryside and move into dorms. Since they do not bring their families, no one worries about new schools. And since they arrive by public transportation, no facilities must be arranged for their vehicles (and, of course, it’s easier to control their comings and goings.) Although working conditions have improved some due to international public pressure, business negotiates with the central government, not the locals or unions. For workers, that means no health or disability insurance. No workmen’s compensation. Environmental requirements are negligible. Do we really want this Paradise here? Isn’t it possible for corporations to operate profitably in a more equitable environment?

And, as for teachers, Jobs made a mistake shared by so many in the business and financial community. “Professionalizing” teachers should not put them at risk of being fired summarily. Time and time again, Isaacson reports that Jobs dismissed engineers because their solutions were pedestrian or they were part of a team that lost a competition within the company. And then there were his legendary tirades against workers and colleagues at their most vulnerable points.

At Apple, Jobs created an atmosphere where people lived by his rules and his whims in order to be a part of a ground-breaking enterprise. Eventually, Apple hired people to soften the consequences of his arbitrariness, and because of the phenomenal growth of the Silicon Valley tech industry, we can probably assume that most workers Jobs discarded were able to find employment elsewhere. Let’s not forget that Jobs himself was kicked out because he alienated so many people. His return restored Apple’s visionary mission, but I don’t think it’s a good model for education or for governing.

Elsewhere in the book, Jobs and his archrival, Bill Gates, discuss the disappointing lack of impact of electronic technology on education. Like them, I’d hoped that electronics would lighten the heavy load of textbooks that students carry, and I’m sorry there haven’t been more breakthroughs in electronic instruction. But certainly that is not the fault of teachers or of the National Education Association or of the American Federation of Teachers.

Public education is a social as well as an intellectual enterprise. Ideally, it takes place in a supportive, humane community. The best teachers struggle to reach every student, but often they must compensate for factors beyond their control like poverty, family dysfunction, and poor facilities. If teachers were truly treated as professionals, they would not have to look over their shoulders for punitive administrators.

Because of Jobs’ deteriorating health, he didn’t see President Obama again until February 2011 when the venture capitalist John Doerr scheduled a dinner in Palo Alto that included Jobs and executives from Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Cisco, Oracle, Genetech and Netflix among others. And, Isaacson reports, the conversation became a litany about what the President might do for them rather than what they might do for their country.

One mentioned a tax holiday for overseas profits in return for investing domestically, but Jobs pressed the education issue again. In China where Apple employed 700,000 workers, it hired 30,000 engineers to oversee them. In the United States, he would be hard-pressed to find 30,000 engineers, he said, and he was not looking for people who were geniuses or PhD’s, but simply knew enough about basic manufacturing to run the factories. Those aren’t available in America, he insisted.

This rightly captured the President’s imagination, although he does not seem to have created a program to address it. He’s had a hard time even convincing Congress to keep down interest rates on student loans, and I wonder if he really believes there will be jobs for those engineers if we educate them.

Nevertheless, the conversation between Jobs and the President offers valuable insight about the dilemma in which we find ourselves as a nation. Republicans have sold the idea that any regulation or restraint or enforced taxation on the business and financial sectors is anti-American. Both Democrats and Republicans have even encouraged industry to send its jobs abroad and found no way to tax profits parked overseas. With pressure to keep down public expenditures, the President has diminished avenues to create jobs.

Many people have hailed Steve Jobs as the Benjamin Franklin of our day; he may have seen himself that way. My view is that he was more like Thomas Jefferson, a person with high ideals and a refined sense of design and innovation who remained deliberately ignorant of the inhumane conditions necessary to sustain his vision. Whichever comparison you favor, keep in mind that Franklin and Jefferson lived before the industrial revolution and the evolution of a consumer society. These exponentially magnified Jobs’ accomplishments and the consequences of his actions.

Of course, Jobs was not alone in profiting from China’s labor and oppressive leadership. Most of his competitors use the same factories, and Apple has used its leverage to improve working conditions. But the mentality in Silicon Valley seems unchanged. As Facebook goes public, it has been revealed that one of its founders, Eduardo Saverin, took up citizenship in Singapore in order to avoid paying U.S. income tax on his payout. He’s one of 1800 U.S. citizens who bailed out of this country last year.

Being a genius in one realm does not qualify one as a genius in another. Jobs was too individualistic and self-obsessed to design or rescue a democratic society. China’s totalitarian politics seem not to have bothered him much, nor will Singapore’s bother Saverin. But we must resist the urge to let business innovators dictate domestic policy, and I don’t believe that forcing them to contribute their fair share of taxes will kill innovation.

I doubt Obama ever dreamed of creating a new machine. But his 2008 campaign did convince me that he knew how to restore our society. I thought he understood the damage being done to our nation by out-of-control financial and government institutions and the undermining of the middle class. I thought he understood that the life of our planet hangs in the fragile balance. And I thought he could inspire us to achieve through democratic means. But, unlike Jobs, the President sees things in infinite shades of gray, and it often makes him unable to act decisively.

Like a lot of Democrats, I hope he’ll step out of the reality distortion field created by the mega-rich and amplified by Fox News and remind us how democracy allows genius to thrive but it demands something in return. I’d like to see a plan for educating 30,000 engineers that doesn’t demonize teachers and their unions. We might begin by offering them interest-free student loans for higher education and a job when they graduate. And, of course, they should have access to union membership.

It’s too bad right-wing provocateur Andrew Breitbart never met Derrick Bell, because it might have made him a better man.

Of all the news that surfaced after Breitbart’s sudden death, I was most stunned by the evidence that he was preparing to use Professor Bell to attack President Obama. Perhaps you’ve seen the clips of The Hug, taken by WGBH in 1991 while Obama was a student at Harvard Law School. Student Obama introduced Professor Bell to a crowd protesting the lack of faculty diversity. Then, they embraced. This happened the year after Bell had lost his tenured position owing to his taking unpaid leave in protest the school’s failure to hire a black woman as a tenured professor. He was one of three black men on the faculty, but he recognized that black women need a role model, and there were none. Harvard dragged its institutional feet, and he never returned to teach. But his legacy lived on there long after he accepted a position as Visiting Professor at New York University.

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My last post about the life and death of Dr. Margaret Burns found its way to more readers than I’ve ever had, and I followed up with a piece in Obit Magazine online (obit-mag.com) that brought this remarkable woman’s life to the attention of even more readers. From a recording of her memorial service, I learned that Dr. Burns also had been a violinist in orchestras at Duke University and in Asheville, NC, and that she sang beautifully. While I was aware of the classical music always playing via NPR in her home, I regret that I never heard her play or sing.

I’ll get back to politics in January, but first I want to say good-bye to five more remarkable individuals who died this year and whom I shall miss.

Kazuko Inoue came to New York City in 1966 to study piano at the Manhattan School of Music. She was an arduous and gifted student and became aware, I am told, that as a woman she would never realize her potential in Japan, where she grew up, so she stayed here. In 1982, she established the Inoue Chamber Ensemble (I.C.E.) with co-director Masaoki Inoue and others, and over the next 29 years she organized more than 220 concerts and commissioned more than 50 works. (Yoko Ono was a contributor.) She was deeply committed to world peace and gave moving commemorations of the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that so damaged her homeland. In 2000, she became a U.S. citizen and became intrigued by the evolution of the Japanese American community as it added new generations. A long-time resident of my apartment building, she died at home on March 10 after a two and one-half year struggle with cancer.

The most remarkable fact about Marietta Moskin’s life was that along with her parents, she survived the Holocaust. More intriguing to me was the fact that when she came here as a high school student, anti-Semitism was still so palpable that she told no one of her devastating experiences in three camps and said little about them at Barnard College, where she received her bachelor’s degree. She studied economics at the University of Wisconsin and worked as an economist at General Motors until the met Donald Moskin, who became her husband. He was the first person, she said, who expressed genuine interest in her experiences. After her two children were born, she found her métier as a writer for young people. Her thinly disguised autobiographical novel, I Am Rosemary, tells the story of a girl in Hitler’s hideous concentration camps and became widely used in schools in part because its heroine, like Marietta, lived. She died at the age of 83, peacefully in her sleep.

Few people I have known have lived out their potential as completely as Derrick Bell. Born in Pittsburgh in 1930, this African American lawyer and professor confronted injustice where he found it—first at the Justice Department which he left rather than give up his NAACP membership, then in Mississippi where Thurgood Marshall recruited him to work for the NAACP, then at the University of Oregon where he fought for tenure of a Japanese-American woman and left when it was denied, and most famously at Harvard Law School, which he entreated to give tenure to an African American woman and left when he was ignored. If all of us lived up to our convictions as consistently as Derrick did, the world would be a different place. He found a home at New York University Law School, where he was a visiting professor at the time of his death in October. Students revere him for his allegorical books, most notably Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism. Despite his conviction that racism will never be extinguished in our society, he extended memorable and gracious kindness to all, including white folks like myself and even those who opposed him.

Eric Oatman spent most of his career writing about history and current events for junior and senior high students. As a young man, he worked at Scholastic Inc, where he rose to become Editorial Director of Social Studies Magazines, and where I knew him, and later at Weekly Reader and School Library Journal. One of the frustrations of publishing for school kids is that your readership moves on every year, but Eric became a favorite of social studies teachers across the nation who used the materials that he tended, most importantly Search, a magazine that focused on history with plays in which the most reluctant of readers could take part. Equally important, he nurtured a cadre of writers, editors and artists who learned from him how to make their subject matter come alive. Although, unfortunately, the social studies have received short shrift in school curricula of late, some of his protégés have gone on to book and game publishing that keep history alive. He lived 18 valiant years after his initial cancer diagnosis, caring for his beloved wife, Jane, as she slipped into early Altzheimer’s, and almost to the end convincing us that he would continue to beat the odds. He was 73.

I first met Al Socolov when a group who had worked with America Coming Together to defeat George W. Bush in 2004 formed a progressive political action committee in New York called ACT NOW. No one had more impressive credentials than Al, who at 15 had spoken on street corners to raise money for loyalists in the Spanish Civil War. Al himself was walking history. He had taken part in the World War II invasion at Normandy. He returned home for college and at New York University Law School became a founding member of the student division of the National Lawyers Guild. As a young attorney he represented black clients on behalf of the Civil Rights Congress and took part in politically charged trials for the first Smith Act and for Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. During the Vietnam War, he acted as an observer during anti-war demonstrations and as part of the Lawyer’s Guild Committee on Military Law served as a draft counselor. In 2004, he recruited lawyers to assure that elections were run fairly and continued to volunteer at ACT NOW until health issues slowed him down. Perhaps the key to Al’s s endurance for ninety years was his enormous good will and optimism that justice could be served.

I feel fortunate to have known these women and men who remind us of the importance of caring about something and someone beyond ourselves. Each of them weathered adversity, some of it profound, but what I remember about them all is the verve and discipline with which they went about their work.

For the New Year, I’ll include a poem (shared by my friend Nancy Henningsen) that embodies some of the courage that drives the lives of people like these.

A New Story of Your Life

Say you finally invented a new story
of your life. It is not the story of your defeat
or of your impotence and powerlessness
before the large forces of wind and accident.
It is not the sad story of your mother's death
or of your abandoned childhood. It is not,
even, a story that will win you the deep
initial sympathies of the benevolent goddesses
or the care of the generous, but it is a story
that requires of you a large thrust
into the difficult life, a sense of plenitude
entirely your own. Whatever the story is,
it goes as it goes, and there are vicissitudes
in it, gardens that need to be planted,
skills sown, the long hard labors
of prose and enduring love. Deep down
in some long-encumbered self,
it is the story you have been writing
all of your life, where no Calypso holds you
against your own willfulness,
where you can rise
from the bleak island of your old story
and tread your way home.

Michael Blumenthal

I have two new heroes this week: Diane Ravitch and Dennis Kucinich don’t have a whole lot in common, but both of them exhibited the rare ability to hang onto their principles and change their minds at the same time. We could use more leaders like them.

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