Letters
“Is not this positivism gone amuck?”
What AA stands for
Jason Kelly’s story about Mark Allen’s recovery from drug abuse (“The Fighter Still Remains,” July–Aug/09) misleads readers about Alcoholics Anonymous. Although Allen, AB’01, may attribute his recovery from drug addiction to AA, AA has a singleness of purpose, and that is recovery from alcoholism. Neither Allen nor Ruttenberg, allegedly his [former] sponsor, are apparently familiar enough with the Alcoholics Anonymous program to either understand or respect the obligation imposed in its very name. Apparently the self-promoting Mr. Ruttenberg’s “attuned ears” were not that well attuned when they were discussing the principle of anonymity. We are “anonymous at the level of press, radio, and film,” to quote the rather well-known 12th Tradition of this program, which states in full, “Anonymity is the spiritual foundation of all our traditions, ever reminding us to place principles before personalities.”
Those of us who have demonstrated to our own satisfaction that we are powerless over alcohol’s effects on us have found a solution. We have recovered from that condition of hopeless and pitiful demoralization as drinking alcoholics because we took the 12 steps of the program Alcoholics Anonymous. We show our gratitude for this program and the members of that fellowship who have helped us recover by aspiring to a humility and self-effacement that includes our willingness to forgo public recognition as members of AA for the sake of that fellowship. But it is more than gratitude that motivates this value.
Individual members do not speak on behalf of AA or purport to represent their own views as representative of AA in general. When they identify themselves at the level of press and other mass media, readers might wrongly assume that the views stated reflect the philosophy of AA. For example, this story promotes the dubious (and potentially dangerous) notion that addiction is born of underlying emotional difficulties. This is not AA’s philosophy.
Of course, it is not the responsibility of the press to know, let alone honor, the traditions that guide AA members in how to relate to the media. That makes it all the more important that members do so.
Anonymous, AM’77, PhD’94
Questionable cover
Given the number of outstanding men and women who have gone to and/or taught at the University of Chicago, my wife and I wonder why you chose to put on the July–Aug/09 cover a (hopefully permanently) abstaining drug addict who has chosen to fight his “demons” by becoming a boxer, one of the most thuggish and uncivilized occupations on Earth. Surely you can do better.
E. Donald Kaye, AB’49
Janet Benson Kaye, AB’48
Santa Fe, New Mexico
So much for the antihero
As a recovering alcoholic with great faith in AA, I wish Mark Allen only the best in his recovery. I do, however, have some questions about having his saga appear, without clinical insight or comment, as the top story in the magazine that reflects the University.
Denis Franklin, AB’54
Berkeley, California
Fly-by judgment
As a regular at the Divinity School Wednesday lunches, I am familiar with the public bulletin board there, which is just as busy and cluttered as all the others (“A Flyer on the Wall,” July–Aug/09). The one you show is an official one, which gives an impression of stodginess and seriousness that mischaracterizes the school. It is a friendly, welcoming place, where discussion and debate is at least as lively as in any other part of the U of C.
Leo Herzenberg, AB’56
Chicago
Dubious great books contender
I’m no academic, but John Granger’s comparison of Rowling to Austen, Stoker, and Chaucer in the same breath strains even my credulity (“Harry Potter and the Ivory Tower,” July–Aug/09). Why not throw in the bildungsromans of Goethe, Stendahl, and Twain for good measure? Surely Rowling has read beyond her own borders. Only time will tell if the series will become as immortal as Voldemort intended to be.
Jeff Haas, AB’82
Duluth, Georgia
Map to understanding
I read about Boaz Keysar’s work in the July–Aug/09 Magazine (“The Asymmetry of Give and Take,” Investigations) and admire his insights. Yet I disagree that “people try to step into other people’s shoes and fail.”
For about 17 years I mediated a large number of complex business cases in the United States District Court in San Francisco. The ones that came to me were often deemed intractable. After I gave the parties an opportunity to explain their view of the case, I often felt as if I were observing a modern version of Rashomon. The parties’ views of what had transpired were very different and inflexible.
At that point I would provide the parties with copies of an Australian map of the world. On these maps Australia is smack in the middle (upside down of course) and Europe, Africa, and the Americas are just discernible along the edges. At first they could not identify what they were looking at. Then, one by one, the lights went on, and they would laugh.
I’d ask the parties, “Who is right?” It forced them to view the world and their situation in a new light. They had never attempted to put themselves into the other person’s shoes. Thereafter negotiations usually proceeded more positively toward resolution.
In foreign affairs we Americans rarely try to ascertain the point of view of other countries and cultures. When the Soviet Union was about to put a missile base in Cuba, we went nuts over this aggressive act but could never understand why the Soviets did not appreciate that our missile bases, which totally surrounded them, were purely defensive.
Gerald Cohn, JD’62
Orinda, California
To illustrate his point...
I notice Fig. 1 (Investigations) is still appearing as a series of articles employing a figure in the May–June and July–Aug issues of the Magazine. The best I can say about the figures is that they have not repeated the same mistakes. They do not prove or disprove the old maxim that a picture is worth 1,000 words, because that would require a good figure. The May–June issue of the Magazine arrived the same day as the Chicago Booth Magazine for spring 2009. Both featured short articles about the same 57-page publication by Marianne Bertrand of Chicago Booth and two Harvard colleagues. The Fig. 1 article used a figure and about 100 words to present just the one obvious data trend with the words and the figure. The Chicago Booth article used no figure to accompany 200 words to present two of the three determinants given in the abstract of the publication to explain the one obvious data trend. Again the figure in Fig. 1 fails to add anything to the words and obscures what little information it portrays. The simple data points are hung on a pair of pseudo three-dimensional sheets...and presented not squarely, but on a slant from the lower left corner away from the year axis, which distorts both axes with faux depth-perception problems of judging magnitude in the distance.
The Fig. 1 article in the July–Aug issue (“The Chosen People Choose”) avoids the depth-perception problems by using almost simple bar charts and the title “Trends in Jewish turnover.” The words mention a range of lower-retention percentages for major Protestants than for Jews, but neither the words nor the fuzzy figure explains how much the total number of Jews is increasing or decreasing, nor do they define to what bases the losses, gains, and stable numbers are connected. Two time periods of 18 and 17 years and moving targets of five age groups of different sizes do not explain how an age cohort starts or ends within a time period.
Not to worry about the figure; it succeeds in selling compatible shades of blue, so similar that it looks like a blue sky with lighter and darker clouds and makes it difficult to see the superimposed numbers. Pale white characters on [background colors of varying darkness] are generally harder to see than dark letters and numbers on a white background.
Fig. 1 continues to look like an artistic exercise in things a computer program can be asked to produce, instead of a tool to clearly present quantitative data.
James T. Bradbury, MBA’70
Knoxville, Tennessee
Not too cryptic
My thanks to Kevin Wald, SM’94, PhD’99, for his clever cryptic puzzle (“Cryptic Campus Crossing,” Lite of the Mind, July–Aug/09). I became a fan of these crosswords about 30 years ago, when a colleague gave me a book of London Times cryptic puzzles, most of which are only partially solved to this day. Fortunately Kevin’s opus was a lot friendlier, and the payoff of having the streets surrounding the quad around the puzzle’s perimeter was just too cool for words.
Bob Applebaum, SB’63, MAT’66
Menlo Park, California
A cryptic connoisseur
In case readers are interested in more of the puzzles as given in the July–Aug issue, Harper’s Magazine has one each month. Also the Atlantic has such a puzzle online every month—both of them usually a little harder (I only spent an hour-and-a-half on yours).
I’ll share a tale of a secret passage (maybe not so secret but surely kept quiet). In the ’50s I spent my entire five years while at the U of C working as a stack boy at Harper. Working there was sometimes a lot more than retrieving books. I remember setting up and taking down shelves in different buildings and transferring books thereto and therefrom. Anyway, one day I found a panel in a wall that didn’t look right, and on investigation it proved to be a door with a dark space behind it. There appeared to be a narrow passage leading to the left. Since I was working, I resolved to investigate later, when off duty.
Now I don’t know what the building’s prior use was, but I assumed that there were spaces incompatible with the library’s spatial organization. One day I got my chance and was mildly surprised at what I found. Yes, I did find some old storerooms that were filled with stuff with years of dust, but more remarkably there was a series of concrete steps going up. Following them I finally found another panel like the one in the stacks, and upon exiting I found myself in the rare book library, which was closed at the time. I quietly left the premises and decided not to say anything to anyone.
Ronald Stanley Toczek, AB’55
Libby, Montana
View Kevin Wald’s cryptic crossword, get hints, and see the solution.—Ed.
Another view of race on campus
With due respect to Hosea L. Martin, AB’60 (Letters, July–Aug/09), I offer a dissenting view of race relations within the University at the time, at least, of which he writes. I entered the College in 1951 full of idealism and eagerness, having been totally convinced by the brochure issued during the Hutchins years that this was exactly the education I desired. I was not disappointed by the College; it was as advertised. The shock came when I discovered that most of the rest of the University was reactionary and, in some divisions and graduate schools, even racist. One of my roommates during the four years, an African American premedical student, could not gain admission to the medical school upon graduation, due to his race and their quotas, as his academic credentials were impeccable. He went on to friendlier environs, took a psychiatric residency, and became one of only a handful of African American psychoanalysts in the nation.
This blow to my prior image of the University, augmented by what I learned about its abysmal community and neighborhood relations, understandably permanently altered my relationship to the school as an alumnus.
Noel B. Perlman, AB’55
Chicago
In the admissions trenches
Way back when (1948–50), I was employed by the College to speak with high-school students, their counselors, and the principals of various public high schools. Part of my job was to explain the Hutchins College plan and part was to describe the generous scholarship program designed to entice minority students. On more than one occasion, a principal (who was black) sat me down and leafed through entire student records showing IQ scores ranging from 60 to 90. (I realize that lazy minds may slap me with the label “bigot” for disclosing these scores. However, I am simply reporting.) At the conclusion of such a meeting, I felt awful. I was surprised and dejected. The principal, in turn, was discouraged, saying he could offer no applicants.
Now we know that such test results don’t tell a student’s whole story. It is often suggested that schools are at fault. Whatever the explanation, I can testify that the College of the University of Chicago tried. Tried hard.
Lenore (Callahan) Frazier, AB’47
Winchester, Massachusetts
Data trumps thinking
What a contrast—the homage to Professor Leo Strauss (“increasingly recognized as one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century”) preceded by the article “Constitutional Conventions” (Investigations, May–June/09).
The Leo Strauss article noted that in his first quarter as a Chicago professor (fall 1949), “the 50-year-old political philosopher delivered a series of talks defending the classical idea of ‘natural right’ against the encroachments of positivism and historicism….” The director of the Leo Strauss Center remarks, “His research stimulated significant developments in the study of ancient and modern political philosophy; American political thought, especially the founding….”
I have not studied the work of Leo Strauss, nor am I a student of early American history. I have learned about the classical education and political thought of our American founders—like Thomas Jefferson (drafter of the Declaration of Independence) and James Madison (the chief author of the Constitution).
Now we turn to the Comparative Constitutions Project, codirected by Chicago international-law scholar Tom Ginsburg. The project has compiled a searchable database of some 800 national constitutions, dating back to 1789. The National Science Foundation funded the project “in response to problems with constitutional reform in Iraq and Afghanistan,” where “participants were woefully in need of an international database of past constitutions to provide historical perspective on what worked and what didn’t.”
Ginsburg offers this rationale: “Both advisers and negotiators need to know what other countries have done in response to particular situations in order to figure out what might work locally.” Is there something wrong with this picture? Is not this positivism gone amuck? Where are the political philosophers and scholarly thinkers of these nations? Obviously men and women with these qualifications were not selected to advise and draft their nations’ constitutions.
So how can we fault giving the chosen “advisers and negotiators” computer printouts of constitutional provisions from other nations, organized by topic? It depends on what one understands to be the purpose and meaning of a national constitution. Current constitutional drafters and scholars consider the U.S. Constitution “somewhat outmoded,” says Ginsburg. Constitution makers “look to the Bill of Rights for inspiration, but they draw their specific provisions from other constitutions seen as more modern.”
What we are seeing, over the short span from 1949 to 2009, is a sharp contrast in what we may expect from University scholars, and—what perhaps is more significant—the ascendancy of computer-driven data as an acceptable substitute for scholarly thinking.
Richard M. Janopaul, AB’52
Oklahoma City
Not such a shocking doctrine
Joshua Cooper Ramo, AB’92, says democracy in Chile was imposed, and that created more conflict (“Policy Changes,” Arts and Sciences, May–June/09)? Give me a break. In 1973 Milton Friedman’s U of C–style, so-called “free market” economic chaos was imposed by the United States and its agents on Chile as part of a scheme to bring down the democratically elected Allende government and replace it with the fascist Pinochet regime owned by global corporate capital. This bloody putsch was engineered by his current boss, then–Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.
Ramo’s new theory of instability is the same old Chicago School of Economics shock doctrine that Naomi Klein documented so thoroughly in her book by the same name. Ramo has got one thing right: the U.S. does need a radically new foreign policy, but one grounded on global climate issues, not dogmatic U of C economic theories.
Richard C. Thomas, AB’71
Sarasota, Florida
There’s more to economics?
I just read “Method in Madness” (Arts and Sciences, Mar–Apr/09). The second-to-last paragraph is most alarming: “And like other economists, [Iván] Werning is focused on the global economic downturn. As a macroeconomist he’s not an expert on financial systems, but ‘it’s made me pay attention to issues in banking.’” My question is, what kind of an economy can exist without a financial system? The financial system is fundamental. Building theories and—worse yet—policies by simply assuming a sound financial system exists is totally irresponsible and, more importantly, dangerous. No wonder the world is in crisis.
A. Lentzen, AM’59
Riverside, Illinois
For more on this subject, see “Sumo Wrestlers Are Big...."—Ed.
Now in his and hers editions
My wife and I are still living together. You need send us only one copy of the Magazine.
Joseph Richard, AB’53, MD’57
Denver
After getting married in 2001, we contacted the Magazine (take that as a sign of our loyalty to Chicago, please, rather than confirmation of our dorkiness) to announce that you no longer needed to send us two copies or print two labels. And so you didn’t, for eight years. The one-label, two-person arrangement followed us to four different addresses and across the country, from Southern California to western Massachusetts.
And then this Monday, two copies of the Magazine arrived at our house, each bearing an individual label. We are still very much married. We still share the same residence. We still think that it’s silly for the Magazine to waste an extra issue, plus postage, on our household. So what is the source of this mysterious development, and can it not be reversed? Can’t we just go back to the good old times?
Amanda Walling, AB’99
Boris Wolfson, AB’97
Amherst, Massachusetts
We apologize for the double copies sent to married alumni last issue; it was a database glitch we hope not to repeat.—Ed.
Please let me send you money
I enjoyed the July–Aug Magazine as always, but a flaw I discovered recently repeated itself. Last month I wanted to contribute to the College to honor the daughter of a good friend who had just graduated. I took the Magazine in hand, trusting I would readily find the address for such donations. When that proved fruitless, I managed to find a University office in DC that provided an address in Chicago, not necessarily the right one. Somehow my gift made it to its destination.
This month I looked through the new issue closely and again found no mention of how and where to make a contribution—not a word about something as basic as giving. Many nonprofits enclose contribution envelopes in their periodicals; if not, information about donations is featured prominently. Why don’t you try the same?
Daniel Mann, AB’52
Bethesda, Maryland
Please send gifts to: University of Chicago, 1427 East 60th Street, Suite 120, Chicago, IL 60637.—Ed.
Department of corrections
In a July–Aug/09 letter to the editor, Irving Spergel was misidentified. He is in fact the George Herbert Jones professor emeritus in the School of Social Service Administration and the Department of Sociology. We regret the error.
The Magazine welcomes letters about its contents or about the life of the University. Letters must be signed and may be edited. We encourage writers to limit themselves to 300 words or fewer. Write: Editor, University of Chicago Magazine, 401 North Michigan Avenue, Suite 1000, Chicago, IL 60611. Or e-mail: uchicago-magazine@uchicago.edu.