Reading Justice at the Thanksgiving Table

It could be my Jewish heritage, but I think that it is better to start a celebration with a reading than with a mere saying. I plan to read the following:

Let us read justice to the men and women whom we thank this evening. In the words of Ayn Rand: "Thousands of years ago, the first man discovered how to make fire. He was probably burned at the stake he had taught his brothers to light. ... Centuries later, the first man invented the wheel. He was probably torn on the rack he had taught his brothers to build. ... Throughout centuries there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision. Their goals differed, but they all had this in common: that the step was first, the road was new, the vision unborrowed. ... The creators - the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors - stood alone against the men of their time. Every great new thought was opposed. Every great new invention was denounced. The first motor was considered foolish. The airplane was considered impossible. The power loom was considered vicious. Anesthesia was considered sinful. But the men of unborrowed vision went ahead. They fought, they suffered, and they paid. But they won." We celebrate their victories, and of our own.

The Prosecutors and the Astrologer

I have not had much time to post, but this is so outlandish that I'll just do with less sleep later.

The Associated Press reports,

The Supreme Court on Wednesday seemed worried that allowing people to sue prosecutors who fabricate evidence to win convictions might chill other prosecutions... The case in front of the high court involves two former Pottawattamie County, Iowa, prosecutors, Attorney Dave Richter and his assistant Joseph Hrvol. They are being sued by Curtis W. McGhee Jr., and Terry Harrington, who were convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison in 1978 for the death of retired police officer John Schweer. The men were released from prison after 25 years.

Evidence showed the prosecutors had failed to share evidence that pointed to another man, Charles Gates, as a possible suspect in Schweer's slaying.

They later on denied that Gates was even a suspect, even though witnesses placed him near the scene of the crime and his name appeared in several police reports. He also was administered and failed a polygraph test and the prosecutors themselves even consulted an astrologer about their suspicions of Gates.

McGhee and Harrington filed lawsuits against the former prosecutors, saying as prosecutors Richter and Hrvol had them arrested without probable cause, coerced and coached witnesses, fabricated evidence against them and concealed evidence that could have cleared them.

Or, in short: All the evidence pointed to Charles Gates as the murderer. The prosecutors consulted an astrologer, who told them that CG was innocent. The prosecutors believed that what the astrologer told them was supernaturally true, trumping over any actual evidence. So they hid the real evidence, and used fabricated, fake "evidence" to deprive two innocent men of nearly the entire span of those innocent men's adult lives. But the two prosecutors have a fireproof defense from any criminal charge: they acted "in good faith," sincerely believing in Astrology and its truth. And now the victims of those two publicly employed swindlers may be deprived of even the right to sue those malefactors for civil justice - out of fear that holding future prosecutors accountable will hold them back from doing "their job" in judicial combat against future defendants.

And this is the payback of Kantian philosophy: reality is not knowable; the best that Justice can do is trial by combat, and in combat nothing counts except the result. Other countries, such as Switzerland, do have justice systems based on the Enlightenment notion of objective fact. We Americans have trial by combat, as was done in the Dark Ages, guided by supernatural forces, only hacking at each other with lawyers instead of halberds. And when the stars or the Gods have spoken, innocent men who have had the better part of their lives taken from them may have no recourse at all.

Life on the Edge of Implosion of Democracy

Back when I left Bell Labs, and decided to switch coasts to live with Yoon, I made a risky choice. Tenure-track jobs at universities where I would be able to teach advanced courses were few, and fewer within a comfortable commuting distance from Yoon's home. I took the job at Cal State LA with full knowledge of its moral and existential hazards. But damn it, I didn't expect the implosion of California Democracy to hit just 9 years after I took the job.

I'm posting this because the sudden silence from my end of the wire may have made some readers of this blog uncomfortable, and I don't want anyone to think that I have a problem beyond serious overwork. With a 12-unit per quarter teaching load, overwork was a given from the start. That would have been true even in classics, or in medieval history, where the content of courses in unlikely to change much from decade to decade. Teaching 12 units of advanced technical courses in Information Systems, with a 3-year technology half-life and 20% of everything in the typical course becoming obsolete each year, was always Serious Overwork. With research, and with enough hands-on experimentation with new technologies to keeps ahead of the graduate students (some of them already CIOs) in my evening classes, the better part of my waking hours were accounted for. And then, this year, came the (financial) crisis of California Democracy.

How does a busy urban school deal with a 16-million-dollar hole in its budget? First, it does not renew the contracts of part-time adjunct faculty. Simultaneously, there is a flow of incoming students whose 529s shrank enough that they can no longer afford private universities, or even the UC. The remaining faculty's advanced courses are cut, and we are assigned to teach the Business School's required Intro to IS and the like. Since there are fewer courses and fewer sections and more students, class sizes tripled, from an average of 12 to an average of 33. I spend most of my class time dealing with e-mailed questions from students; just reading and organizing and preparing to answer those questions, without which I can have no assurance that I'm doing a responsible job, takes three times as long as it used to.

Two of my three 4-unit courses this term (4 units because they cover the content of a 3-unit semester course in one academic quarter) are Intros. And there are NO adequate textbooks for Intros out there. So, following John Drake, I'm teaching my Intro sections with books that were never meant to be textbooks. I have nothing that otherwise would have come from the textbook's Instructor Site: no prepared homework assignments, no presentation PowerPoints, no test question pools (I had no idea how much time such conveniences saved.) And this on top of getting the Intro students (two-thirds of them coming from Pragmatist schools where they never had to do this before) to think in concepts instead of shopping lists.

My one remaining combined Senior-Graduate advanced technical course is up to the same numbers, because so many other courses were canceled. From 100% students who were taking a difficult technical course because they were burning with enthusiasm for its content, I'm down to 33%, the rest there because they had to take something; some of them signed up without the lower-division prerequisites. And the old textbook was 4 years old and obsolete; I switched to a brand new one for which I'm receiving the still-rough supporting materials by e-mail, sometimes in the morning before the evening's class.

The budget for graduate assistants and graders also is gone. I'm typing this as an otherwise-I-would-go-insane break from grading 100 midterm exams.

And we were just advised of an even larger hole next year. So I am lucky, in that I still have a job...