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audience of 800 Americans and Chinese at Brandeis University, he showed
an earth-shaking movement.
      He sang a song about a wolf.
analysis of the student movement that Chinese rock music composers Qin
students than the dissident physicist Fang Lizhi...
      The auditorium buzzed with the gasps and whispers of delighted students
and their bewildered elders.
            (Boston Globe, September 18, 1989)

John Sebastian's famous lyric about the impossibility of "trying to tell
indeed when Wu'er Kaixi--the flamboyant Tiananmen student
celebration of individualism meant to his generation. The students
agreed with senior dissidents that institutions must change, he said,

student and even though I had misgivings about any single activist
demonstrations occurred that helped lay the groundwork for those of
dissident Fang Lizhi's impact. Students found his speeches inspiring,
but other things also triggered protests: complaints about compulsory
Dean concert.

presentation at Harvard the next evening and planned to talk about a
protests, Red Guards did likewise in the 1960s and the Tiananmen
and others had reworked (albeit often unconsciously) a rich inherited

I also pointed out that the lyrics to the latest version of
corrupt, autocratic officials.

A desire for reform and personal freedom helped get students onto the
moral outrage, widespread disgust with power-holders whose attachment to
the ideals of the Communist revolution of 1949 had seemingly disappeared
completely. The country's leaders now seemed only to care about
there were topical as well as melodic links between 1989 and some
Party's leaders for being corrupt and abandoning the ideals of the
revolution that had brought them to power.

languages in the past dozen years, the uniqueness of the Tiananmen
generation, the root causes of their activism and the songs that
sang these songs throughout the demonstrations of mid-April through late
fields by the People's Liberation Army.

Zhao Dingxin's The Power of Tiananmen is the latest in a long
which linked the pre-Communist and Communist eras, he distinguishes
sharply between (nationalistic) pre-1949 protests and the
("pro-Western") Tiananmen ones.

The Monkey and the Dragon mentions the "Internationale" and many
authorities there.

perform in a fundraiser, returned to Beijing to join other intellectuals
defector to be returned to sender."

themselves as charged with an epic mission to save their homeland from
misrule. According to Jaivin, this patriotism occasionally blurred into

China's 1989 was a complex, multifaceted struggle (not a simple
that year remain open to competing interpretations, even among those of
about the government's supposed need to use force to pacify

This is because one has to grapple continually not only with big
questions of interpretation but also numerous small ones of
whether the protesters in question are American or Chinese and whether
an impassioned, iconoclastic, frequently entertaining, often insightful
and sometimes self-indulgent
movement, whoever the writer, contrasting approaches to small matters
can create big gaps in overall perspective.

Leaving China aside, consider how minor divergences can create major
differences in presentations of an American student movement--that of
When exactly did this movement begin and end? Which student activists
and which nonstudents (leaders of related struggles, radical
actions that contradicted these? Were countercultural elements central

Accounts of student movements can also diverge, depending on the answers
we need to leave room for spontaneous, even irrational individual
inspiring heroism.

It may be true that the potential for divergence between accounts is
unusually great in that particular case, due to the struggle's
protracted nature and connections to other upheavals, especially the
Jaivin's book may doubt this. Tiananmen was comparatively short-lived
dramatically different directions.

This is not to say that Zhao's and Jaivin's treatments of Tiananmen
authors--Jaivin's previous writings include a rollicking novel called
Eat Me, while Zhao's peer-reviewed scholarly articles are
on interviews conducted later according to social scientific protocols,
Chengdu). And each pays relatively little attention to workers.

is excellent, yet the topic falls outside the scope of Jaivin's

The two authors also treat previous studies very differently. Take
sociologist Craig Calhoun's justly acclaimed 1994 study Neither Gods
Nor Emperors
. Zhao cites it several times (sometimes approvingly,
Australian China specialist whom Zhao never cites. Jaivin's reliance on
Barmé is no surprise: The two co-edited a superb
Tiananmen-related document collection, New Ghosts, Old Dreams,
were married for a time (Monkey includes a diverting account of
none of Barmé's writings are listed in Zhao's bibliography. This
wouldn't matter except that some specialists (myself included) think him
among the most consistently insightful and on-target analysts of Chinese
culture and politics.

Switching from references to events, we again find divergences. For
African men were attacked. In these incidents, some male Chinese
admirable things--lashed out against African males whose freer
lifestyles they envied. The rioters also expressed outrage at efforts by
the black exchange students to establish sexual liaisons with Chinese
women. That only Jaivin mentions these racist incidents is illustrative
of a general pattern. Zhao criticizes the Tiananmen generation for
strategic mistakes, factionalism and political immaturity but otherwise
occasion even toward Westerners).

Surprisingly, given Jaivin's greater fascination with pop culture, among
He states that demonstrations began in Shanghai "as a protest against
the arrest and beating of students after many students danced on the
were triggered by complaints about cafeteria food and manipulated local
around Shanghai campuses had a class-related dimension. Students
complained that concert security guards had treated their classmates
the 1989 mass movement, it never disappeared.

welcome) development in social movement theory: a commitment to paying
sense of disgust or feelings of pride can be factored into existing
equations quite easily, without disrupting a basic approach that relies
heavily on assessing structural variables, the sway of formal ideologies
and rational calculations of risk.

refers to the most famous trickster character in Chinese culture, the
himself and contribute to the transformation of others--something often
associated with spells of enchantment.

emphasizes that the 1989 movement was full of unexpected developments
that perplexed even those who knew Chinese politics intimately. In
seemingly contradictory things. For example, she writes that Hou was
convinced by late May that the students should leave the square before
knew the funds raised by the concert there would help the students
magic moments followed one another at a dizzying speed that spring.

not just structures and calculations of interest but also passion and

A specter is haunting the Jews of Europe: the specter of anti-Semitism.
A synagogue is firebombed in Belgium; three more are burned in France,
where Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front attracts millions of votes. In
the town of l'Union, near Toulouse, a man opens fire at a kosher butcher
shop, and in Berlin the police advise Jews not to dress in a conspicuous
manner. Here in Britain two Orthodox Jews were attacked outside Harrods
in broad daylight, and a synagogue in North London was desecrated only a
few weeks ago. Britain's broadsheet newspapers agonized over whether the
French ambassador's reference to Israel as a "shitty little country" was
anti-Semitic or just anti-Israel, and Rupert Murdoch's Sun, a
tabloid more famed for its topless page 3 "stunners" than for its high
moral tone, ran a full-page editorial assuring readers, "The Jewish
faith is not an evil religion." In Europe, argues Washington Post
columnist Charles Krauthammer, "it is not safe to be a Jew."

Something is happening. I've had more conversations about anti-Semitism
here in the past six months than in the previous six years. Last autumn,
after listening patiently while a friend wondered whether American
support for Israel wasn't in some sense to blame for September 11, and
seeing a writer who'd never expressed an opinion on the Middle East
denounced as a "Zionist," I organized a panel on anti-Semitism and the
press at London's Jewish Book Week. So if I say that Americans
who argue it is time for Europe's Jews to pack their bags are either
fools or rogues, it isn't because I'm looking at the situation with my
head in the sand. When I went to synagogue in Florence with my older son
on the last day of Passover this year, I was glad to see the Italian
soldier standing guard at the door.

But the big danger in Florence that week was to Americans, who were
warned by the State Department to stay away from public places. More
Jews died in the World Trade Center than in all of Europe's anti-Semitic
outrages of the past two decades put together. What's missing from the
current furor over European anti-Semitism is any recognition that the
whole world is now a dangerous place--and not just for Jews.

Some historical perspective might also be nice. It was widely reported
here that Asher Cohn, rabbi of the vandalized synagogue, is himself the
son of a rabbi who fled Germany after his synagogue was torched on
Kristallnacht--the kind of coincidence journalists find
irresistible. But the damage to Cohn's synagogue was repaired within
days--by volunteers who included a Labour Cabinet minister and a member
of the Conservative shadow Cabinet. The rise of Austria's Jörg
Haider and the murdered Dutch maverick Pim Fortuyn are often depicted as
heralds of a fascist revival. Haider is an anti-Semite, whose talent for
racist double-entendre prompted Austrian journalist Eva Menasse to
wonder why the foot in Haider's mouth always seems to be wearing a
jackboot. Yet overt anti-Semitism has no place in either Freedom Party
propaganda or in the program of the Austrian government. Hitler had a
militarized state, a genocidal ideology and open contempt for democratic
norms--a combination not found anywhere in the current European
political landscape.

What Europe has instead is xenophobia. Since September 11 a wave of
hostility to foreigners has swept over the Continent. Some of this has
come out as anti-Semitism, particularly on the neanderthal right in
Germany and among the marginal but mediagenic British National Party.
Knee-jerk anti-Americanism has also seen a revival: in Greece, where
left- and right-wing nationalists momentarily united in stressing US
culpability after the World Trade Center bombings, and on the wilder
shores of British and French Trotskyism. But the primary target of
xenophobic rhetoric and xenophobic violence has been Europe's Arab and
Muslim inhabitants. Fortuyn labeled Islam a "backward" religion and
campaigned on a platform opposing Muslim immigration. (Fortuyn also came
up with a new variation on the "some of my best friends" defense,
assuring a Dutch television interviewer he had "nothing against
Moroccans; after all, I've been to bed with so many of them!") The
British government has resisted calls to broaden laws against incitement
to racial hatred, which currently protect Jews (as an ethnic group) but
exclude Muslims. Yet Richard Stone, who serves both as chair of
Britain's Jewish Council on Racial Equality and chair of the Commission
on British Muslims and Islamophobia, is in no doubt: "There is much more
anti-Muslim than anti-Jewish prejudice in this country." When Italian
Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi proclaimed the superiority of "our
civilization," he didn't mean superior to Jews. From isolated incidents
in Denmark and Ireland to Holland, where a mosque has been burned, to
Germany and France, where a steady stream of anti-Islamic violence has
swelled to a flood, Europe has become a great deal less safe for

The fact that conditions are worse for Europe's Muslims--particularly in
those countries where they have not been allowed to become
citizens--does not, of course, mean that Jews should remain silent when
we are attacked or even offended, just that we should retain a sense of
proportion. The British Crime Survey, for instance, counts well over
100,000 racist incidents in each of the past three years. The number of
racial incidents actually reported to the police, a much lower figure,
has risen from 23,049 in 1999 to 53,842 in 2001. During this same period
the number of anti-Semitic incidents reported--a category that includes
anti-Semitic leafleting and verbal harassment as well as violence
against persons or property--went from 270 in 1999 to 405 in 2000 to 310
in 2001. As of May 22 the total for this year was only 126--hardly
indicative of Cossacks riding through Hampstead.

Yet one of the most striking things about the panic supposedly stalking
Europe's Jews is how much that panic seems to be centered in Britain--a
country where Jews are a very small (about 250,000 out of a population
of 59 million) and very well-established minority. "What has been
challenged is our comfort of having a foot in both worlds," Jo Wagerman,
president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, told the Israeli
paper Ha'aretz. The 240-year-old board is probably the oldest
Jewish lobby in the world; Wagerman, whose own family came to Britain
under Oliver Cromwell, is the group's first woman president. In the
years after World War II, she said, British Jews enjoyed "a kind of
golden age...[but] recently, Britain isn't the same." Melanie Phillips,
a columnist for the right-wing Daily Mail, who was heckled by a
BBC studio audience for claiming that Israel was a democracy, wrote that
"the visceral hostility toward Israel and Jews displayed...by the
audience is representative now of much mainstream British opinion."

The connections between events in the Middle East and in Europe are
complex, fraught with the potential for misunderstanding and
manipulation. Only the statistics are straightforward. In London, says
Metropolitan Police spokeswoman Miriam Rich, anti-Semitic incidents went
"up in April because of what happened in Jenin, and are down again in
May. Each month is a direct reflection of what is happening in the
Middle East." If you plot the national figures on a graph, says Michael
Whine of the Community Security Trust, "and superimpose them with
another of incidents in the Middle East, you see one following the
other." The same correlation can be seen in France, where, unlike
Britain, a growing proportion of the attackers come from that country's
disaffected and marginalized Arab minority.

To Jews, such incidents may feed a sense that the whole world is against
us. The tendency--understandable if not justifiable--to let any act of
violence against Jews on European soil conjure up images of the
Holocaust also inhibits clear thinking. Anthony Julius, the lawyer who
acted for Deborah Lipstadt against David Irving, and a scholar of
British and European anti-Semitism, ridicules the "diaspora narcissism"
that leads British Jews to exaggerate their difficulties. And while
Julius is careful to distinguish between anti-Semitism and criticism of
Israel, not all of Israel's friends are so scrupulous.

Indeed, it is hard to avoid the suspicion that many of those shouting
loudest about the danger in Europe care more about retaining occupied
Palestinian land than about the welfare of diaspora Jews. The BBC, the
Guardian and the Independent--all news organizations with
a clear editorial commitment to Israel's right to exist--are continually
fending off accusations of anti-Semitism for simply reporting the
day-to-day dehumanization inflicted on Palestinians. Whether the French
ambassador's remark was a crime or a blunder, by making it at the home
of Barbara Amiel, wife of Daily Telegraph (and Jerusalem
) owner Conrad Black, and herself a staunch defender of Ariel
Sharon, he put a weapon in the hands of those who argue, with Amiel,
that "super-liberalism led to suicide bombers and intifadas in Israel."

Sometimes anti-Zionism really is a cover for anti-Semitism, and we on
the left need to be clearer about that. Jews who view Israel's existence
as the necessary fulfillment of their national (as opposed to civil)
rights have grounds to be suspicious of those who grant Palestinian
national aspirations a legitimacy they withhold from Jews. Most of the
time, though, the line is pretty clear, and Jews of all people should be
wary of using a double standard as a bludgeon. Or conjuring up specters
in the cause of ethnic unity. If it is racist to suggest, as the New
did recently, that "a Kosher conspiracy" inhibits
criticism of Israel, then what are we to make of former Israeli Prime
Minister Ehud Barak's claim (in the New York Review of Books,
reprinted here in the Guardian) that Palestinians "are products
of a culture in which...truth is seen as an irrelevant category"? The
non-Zionist world has every reason to resent it when the moral odium of
anti-Semitism is used to discredit those who object to the brutality of
Israeli occupation, or when the tattered mantle of Jewish victimization
is draped over policies of collective punishment and murderous reprisal
that, as the Israeli press was quick to point out, are modeled on the
tactics used to crush Jewish resistance in the Warsaw ghetto. If more
Jews expressed outrage at these policies, and at the way our tragic
history is demeaned by being used as a gag, we would be in a stronger
position to demand not sympathy but solidarity.

Gangbangers with dirty bombs! Now we're talking. The big news about the
latest suspected terror bomber is not that he now calls himself Al
Muhajir but that he was formerly José Padilla, a Puerto Rican
slammer, same way thousands of other young denizens of our gulag do.

In the normal order of business, suspected gangbangers don't have much
purchase on the Bill of Rights. Their rights of assembly and protection
against unreasonable search and seizure were curtailed long since.
Padilla's current status could foreshadow a trend. Pending challenge in
the courts, he's classed as an "enemy combatant" and locked up in a Navy
brig in Charleston, with no rights at all.

Tuesday, June 11, all the way from Moscow, Attorney General Ashcroft
fostered the impression that Padilla/Muhajir had been foiled pretty much
of the Sears Tower or some kindred monument of Chicago. "US: 'Dirty
Bomb' Plot Foiled," exulted USA Today.

Next day came a modified climb-down. "Threat of 'Dirty Bomb' Softened"
muttered USA Today's front-page headline. It turned out Muhajir
radioactive dirt or even TNT. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz
told the press, "I don't think there was actually a plot beyond some
fairly loose talk." He should know.

But at least we're now sensitized to the "dirty bomb" menace. It seems
that ten pounds of TNT, wrapped around a "pea-size" piece of cesium-137
from a medical gauge, would give anyone within five blocks downwind a
one in a thousand chance of getting cancer. We should be worried about
this? I'd say it should come pretty low on the list of Major Concerns.
Suppose Al Qaeda were to plan something really nasty, like shipping
spent nuclear fuel by rail from every quarter of the United States to a
fissured mountain in Nevada not that far from one of America's prime
tourist destinations. That's the Bush plan, of course.

What a gift to the forces of darkness the War on Terror is turning out
to be, as a subject-changer from the normal terrorism inflicted by the
state. Right now, across the United States, the final cutoffs for people
on welfare are looming. The guillotine blade ratcheted into position by
Clinton's 1996 welfare reform is plummeting.

the country and the largest deficit in the state's history. Back in
1979, according to the Oregon Center for Public Policy, 39 percent of
poor Oregonians were getting public assistance. These days it's under 10
percent. Does that mean the previously destitute are now in regular
handout. It means the usual story: exhausted mothers scrabbling for
fourteen months of the current recession, the combined number of
unemployed in eight Oregon counties grew by 92 percent. At the same
time, the number of welfare cases went down by 16 percent.

requirements. Thus do we nourish the next generation of Enemy Combatants
on the home front.

Dershowitz: Baby Slaughter Plan Flawed

Nathan Lewin, a prominent DC attorney often tipped for a federal
judgeship and legal adviser to several Orthodox organizations, has told
the Forward, as reported there on June 7, that the families of
Palestinian suicide bombers should be executed, arguing that such a
policy would offer the necessary deterrent against such attacks.

According to the Forward, Alan Dershowitz and Abraham Foxman,
national director of the Anti-Defamation League, argue that Lewin's
proposal represents a legitimate attempt to forge a policy for stopping
terrorism. Foxman refused to take a stand on the actual proposal,
instead deferring to Jerusalem on Israeli security issues. Exhibiting
his habitual moral refinement, Dershowitz--also an advocate of
judge-sanctioned torture here in the United States--argues that the same
level of deterrence could be achieved by leveling the villages of
suicide bombers.

Lewin cites the biblical destruction of the tribe of Amalek as a
precedent for measures deemed "ordinarily unacceptable." Those who
consult the first book of Samuel will find the Amalekite incident
vividly described. First, the divine injunction: "Thus saith the Lord of
hosts.... Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they
suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass."

King Saul hastens to obey. "And Saul smote the Amalekites...and utterly
destroyed all the people with the edge of the sword." But Saul spares
Agag, king of the Amalekites, "and the best of the sheep, and of the
oxen, and of the fatlings, and the lambs." Even though the animals were
and prompts the prophet Samuel to berate Saul: "To obey is better than
sin of witchcraft....

"Then said Samuel, Bring ye hither to me Agag the king of the
bitterness of death is past. And Samuel said, As the sword hath made
Samuel hewed Agag in pieces before the Lord in Gilgal."

Now that's what I call getting back to fundamentals!

has embraced it (easy for him to do, since he didn't start on the job
more power, more resources and fewer restrictions.

from a Phoenix agent speculating that Osama bin Laden could be sending
terrorists to flight schools here; and the August 2001 arrest of
Zacarias Moussaoui for acting suspiciously in flight school. Viewed in
September 10 these three bits of information competed for the FBI's
attention with thousands of other memos, leads and suspicious events
pointing in thousands of other directions. We are engaged in a
nationwide session of Monday-morning quarterbacking.

The remedy is worse. Shifting resources to fighting terrorist threats
operated under in the past does not. The guidelines governing the FBI's
domestic criminal investigations, which do not even apply to
international terrorism investigations, had nothing to do with the FBI
guidelines announced by Attorney General John Ashcroft will actually
reduce the FBI's effectiveness in fighting terrorism.

The old guidelines were sparked by revelations that in the 1960s and
'70s, the FBI's COINTELPRO initiative targeted perfectly lawful antiwar,
environmental, feminist and civil rights groups for widespread
monitoring, infiltration and disinformation. The guidelines sought to
remedy the FBI's proclivity for indulging in guilt by association and
conducting intrusive and sweeping investigations of political groups
well as to investigate crime.

But even under the guidelines abuses continued. One of the most
prominent involved an investigation of the Committee in Solidarity With
of counterterrorism, the FBI monitored student rallies, infiltrated
bureau had collected information on 1,330 groups--including Oxfam
America, the US Catholic Conference and a Cincinnati order of nuns--but
no evidence of crime.

Such investigations are likely to be commonplace in the post-
September 11 era. Ashcroft's guidelines expressly permit the FBI to
conduct some investigations without even a shred of information about
potential criminal conduct. And Congress has so expanded the definition
of federal crimes that requiring a criminal basis is not enough to
forestall political spying. Federal antiterrorism laws of 1996 and 2001
now make it a crime to provide any associational support to foreign
whatever to terrorist activity. Under those laws, the CISPES
investigation would have been legal, on suspicion that CISPES was
supporting the Salvadoran rebel movement.

The combined effect of the expanded statute, loosened guidelines and
increased counterterrorism personnel at the FBI will be to bring in
exponentially more information about the populace than the FBI has ever
information about innocent political activity.

need now is "all-source intelligence fusion," meaning a group of
analysts sitting in a room analyzing mounds of data for trends and
fusion is no substitute for good relations with the affected
law-abiding Arabs--instead of profiling Arab students without cause,
holding Middle Easterners without charges and selectively registering
all immigrants from Arab countries. You don't build bridges by
infiltrating and monitoring legitimate political and religious activity.

Christian Science and decides to pray over his patients instead of
operating on them, the Muslim loan officer who refuses to charge
interest, the Southern Baptist psychotherapist who tells his Jewish
patients they're bound for hell. The law rightly requires employers to
respect employees' sincerely held religious beliefs, but not if those
beliefs really do prevent an employee from performing the job for which
she's been hired.

who had recently been hired by the Riverside Neighborhood Health Center,
a public clinic in Southern California, decided that emergency
pregnancy if taken within seventy-two hours of unprotected intercourse,
not involve reproductive healthcare, but when she told temporary nurses
at the clinic that they too would be performing abortions by dispensing

provide patients with legally mandated services, give out misleading
people decide what services the clinic can offer? What about the
patient's right to receive standard medical care? Or the clinic's
responsibility to deliver the services for which they receive government

list of medical authorities--the American Medical Association, the
American Medical Women's Association, the American College of
Obstetricians and Gynecologists and Harvard Medical School--agree that
distinguishes abortion from EC. There are lots of mysteries about the
San Bernardino County, which last year unsuccessfully tried to bar its
public health clinics from dispensing EC.

Whatever the jury's thinking, the Diaz case represents the latest of
and move it out of normal medical practice. Pharmacists for Life
International, a worldwide organization that claims to have some 1,500
unsuccessful attempt to prevent EC from being dispensed over the counter
by placing it under an archaic law that prohibits "procuring a
extremists are campaigning to force one local health board to reject
Title X family-planning funds; according to the Lexington
close to call.

Although secular employers are expected to make reasonable
upheld, unreasonable ones--religious employers are not required to
of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints v. Amos
, permits them to use
religious tests to hire and fire personnel as far from the sacred
ethics oblige those who refuse to provide standard services for moral
reasons to give referrals, and even though Catholic hospitals typically
get about half of their revenue from the government.

According to the ACLJ, however, secular institutions should be sitting
ducks for any fanatic who can get hired even provisionally. The

Unions are gradually making fuller use of the Internet's capacities to
improve communication with their own staffs or members. But increasingly
the standard collective-bargaining model.

Alliance@IBM (www.allianceibm.org) is an example of an effective
majority and without a collective-bargaining contract at a traditional
nonunion company. The alliance provides information and advice to
international unions. The Microsoft-inflected WashTech
(www.washtech.org) and the Australian IT Workers Alliance
craft unions or occupational associations. Both are responsive to the
distinctive professional needs of these workers, such as access to a
variety of job experiences and additional formal education, and the
portability of high-level benefits when changing jobs.

example of a union virtually created off the Net. It provides
its members work without a collectively bargained contract.

Union of Students have a website that tells student workers their rights
and gives them advice about how to deal with workplace problems
(www.troubleatwork.org.uk). It is a particularly engaging and practical
illustration of how concrete problems can be addressed through Net

bring community and labor groups together for discussion and common
action, post messages and general information to the broader community,

system has threatened to quit using the test for its freshman
State of Texas, responding to a federal court order prohibiting its
affirmative action efforts, has already significantly curtailed the
for example, a prominent group of corporate leaders joined the National
Urban League in calling upon college and university presidents to quit
placing so much stock in standardized admissions tests like the SAT,

gamely reinvented itself over the years in myriad superficial ways,
reflect the democratization of higher education in America and
consequent changes in our collective notions about equal opportunity.
device for entry into or, more likely, maintenance of American
American notions about meritocracy.

Indeed, the one intangible characteristic of the SAT and other
admissions tests that the College Board would never want to change is
legally nonprofit organizations that in many respects resemble
Regarding their SAT, the organizations are obliged by professional codes
of proper test practices to inform users of standardized admissions
college, medical school or graduate school, when used in conjunction
with other factors, such as grades.

But the true place of admissions testing in America isn't always so

Given the inordinate weight that test scores play in the American
version of meritocracy, it's no surprise that federal courts have been
hearing lawsuits from white, middle-class law school applicants
complaining they were denied admission to law school even though their
LSAT scores were fifty points greater than a minority applicant who was
admitted; why neoconservative doomsayers warn that the academic quality
of America's great universities will plummet if the hordes of unwashed
under titles like "Backdoor Affirmative Action," arguing that
tactic of public universities to beef up minority enrollments in
response to court bans on affirmative action.

California, Santa Barbara, and a former researcher at the Educational
Testing Service, wrote that "Backdoor Affirmative Action" article for
emphasis on test scores in order to raise minority enrollments are
the same author would provide an energetic defense of the SAT and
Admissions Tests in Higher Education.

synonymous with academic merit will like this concise book. They will
demystification of the esoteric world of standardized testing. Zwick and
her publisher are positioning the book as the steady, guiding hand
occupying the sensible middle ground in an emotional debate that they
claim is dominated by journalists and other uninformed critics who don't
understand the complex subject of standardized testing. "All too
equipping contestants in the inevitable public debates with some solid
information about testing."

and a defense of the hegemony of gatekeeping exams for college and
university admissions. It could be more accurately titled (without the

Educational Testing Service, Zwick's former employer, might as well have
other studies and researchers (whose livelihoods don't depend on selling
tests) that might well draw different conclusions. Too often Zwick
provides readers who might be unfamiliar with the research about testing
with an overly simplistic and superficial treatment. At worst, she
leaves readers with grossly misleading impressions.

many of the early testmakers and advocates in Britain and the United
introduces readers to one of the central ideologies of mental testing to
sort a society's young for opportunities for higher education. Sure,
mental testing has brought some embarrassing moments in history that we
of a society's most privileged citizens, the cold objectivity of
standardized testing remains an important goal for exercise of
democratic values.

According to this belief, standardized testing for admission to college
Zwick, drove former Harvard president James Bryant Conant, whom Zwick
book The Big Test: The Secret History of the American
, Conant wasn't nearly so interested in widening
cohort of intellectually gifted men." Disillusioned only with the form
of elitism that had taken shape at Harvard and other Ivy League
colleges, which allotted opportunities based on wealth and parentage,
Conant was nevertheless a staunch elitist, an admirer of the
Jeffersonian ideal of a "natural aristocracy." In Conant's perfect
writes, "would finally make possible the creation of a natural

The longstanding belief that high-stakes mental tests are the great
propaganda that has well served the interests of American elites. In
precursor to the modern SAT--observed the powerful relationship between
one's performance on his so-called intelligence test and a child's
social class, a phenomenon Binet described in his 1916 book The
Development of Intelligence in Children.

stacked against young people of modest economic backgrounds' beating the

between 1991 and 2001. SAT score gaps between whites and

For critics of the national testing culture, such facts are troubling
the educational opportunities distributed neatly along class and race
of fairness when applied to standardized admissions tests boils down to
a relatively obscure but standard procedure in her field of
properties of standardized tests.

Mere differences in average test scores between most minority groups and
interesting, she maintains, is the comparative accuracy of test scores
in predicting university grades between whites and other racial groups.
forty-five colleges, those minority groups earned lower grades in
"overprediction" that substantiates the College Board claim that the SAT
they get slightly better college grades than the SAT would predict,
Zwick suggests.

Then there's the odd circumstance when it comes to standardized
testing at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of
Michigan and other institutions have consistently shown that while women
Indeed, Zwick acknowledges that standardized tests, unlike for most
minority groups, tend to "underpredict" the actual academic performance
of women.

presentation is thin, more textbookish than the thorough examination and
analysis her more demanding readers would expect. Zwick glosses over a
whole literature on how the choice of test format, such as
multiple-choice versus essay examinations, rewards some types of
cognitive approaches and punishes others. For example, there's evidence
girls may tend to approach problems somewhat more carefully, slowly and
classrooms and work--but hinder their standardized test performance
compared with that of males.

Beyond Zwick's question of whether the SAT and other admissions tests
question of whether these tests are worthwhile predictors of academic
the SAT on the rather narrow promise that it helps colleges predict
psychometrician as a statistical babe in the woods. Zwick quotes the
results of a College Board study published in 1994 finding that one's
freshman grades; that one's high school grade average is a slightly
better predictor of college grades, accounting for about 15 percent of
the grade differences among freshmen; and that the SAT combined with
should be noted that Zwick, consistent with virtually all College Board
and ETS presentations, reports her correlation statistics without
the latter statistics provide readers with a common-sense understanding
of the relative powers of high school grades and test scores in
predicting college grades. I have made those conversions for readers in
the statistics quoted above.)

Unfortunately, Zwick misrepresents the real point that test critics make
salient issue is whether the small extra gains in predicting freshman
grades that the SAT might afford individual colleges outweigh the social
and economic costs of the entire admissions testing enterprise, costs
borne by individual test-takers and society at large.

colleges, Zwick does not adequately answer what's perhaps the single
The Case Against the SAT, James Crouse and Dale Trusheim argued
primary screening tool would result in 62.2 percent "correct"
admissions. Adding the SAT score would improve the rate of correct
remarkably, that if the admissions objective is broader, such as
optimizing the rate of bachelor's degree completion for those earning
practical viewpoint, most colleges could ignore their applicants' SAT
score reports when they make decisions without appreciably altering the
academic performance and the graduation rates of students they admit,"
Crouse and Trusheim concluded.

Trusheim suggest, powerfully illustrate the point. Consider the
University of Texas system, which was compelled by a 1996 federal
appeals court order, the Hopwood decision, to dismantle its
affirmative-action admissions programs. The Texas legislature responded
percent plan," requiring public universities to admit any student
SAT scores.

experience. But she does so disparagingly and without providing her
readers with the most salient details on the policy's effects in terms
of racial diversity and the academic performance of students. Consider
the diversity question. While some progressives might have first
Austin, the racial diversity of freshman classes has been restored to
percentage of white students at Austin reached a historic low point in
students to the state's flagship campus at Austin has significantly
David Montejano, among the plan's designers.

But the policy's impact on academic performance at the university might
be even more compelling, since that is the point upon which
neoconservative critics have been most vociferous in their condemnations
scores. A December 1999 editorial in The New Republic typified
it come "at the cost of dramatically lowering the academic
qualifications of entering freshmen," the TNR editorial warned,
these policies are "a recipe for the destruction of America's great
public universities."

admitted without regard to their SAT score earned better grades than
their non-top 10 percent counterparts, according to the university's
latest research report on the policy.

fact, the grade average of 3.12 for the automatically admitted students
held across the board, and for all ethnic groups.

adequate predictor of academic success for many students and abandoned
the test as an entry requirement several years ago. Other highly
selective institutions have similar stories to tell, but Bates serves to
requiring that students submit a detailed portfolio of their actual work
and accomplishments while in high school for evaluation, an admissions
process completed not just by admissions staff but by the entire Bates

As with the Texas automatic admission plan, Zwick would have been
interview in which he suggests that the Bates experience, while perhaps
appropriate for a smaller liberal arts college, probably couldn't be
duplicated at large public universities. That quote well serves Zwick's
thesis that the SAT is a bureaucratically convenient way to maintain
academic quality at public institutions like UT-Austin and the
University of California. "With the capability to conduct an intensive
review of applications and the freedom to consider students' ethnic and
racial backgrounds, these liberal arts colleges are more likely than
large university systems to succeed in fostering diversity while toeing
the line on academic quality," Zwick writes.

But Zwick neglects to mention that Hiss has since disavowed his caveats
a senior administrator at the college, becomes palpably irritated at
inequalities built into admissions systems that put too much stock in
the cost, that we can't afford it."

Zwick punctuates her brief discussion of Bates and other institutions
2000, article, also in The New Republic, that purportedly
abandoned the SAT. The piece cleverly observed that because SAT
submitters tend to have higher test scores than nonsubmitters, dropping
the SAT has the added statistical quirk of boosting SAT averages in
U.S. News & World Report's coveted college rankings. That
statistical anomaly was the smoking gun the TNR reporter needed
to "prove" the conspiracy.

But to anyone who has seriously researched the rationales colleges have
"nonsubmitters" have performed as well or better academically than
students who submitted SATs, often with scores hundreds of points lower

readers through lopsided reporting and superficial analysis, such as her
studies showing poor correlations between standardized test scores and
later career successes.

Finally, Zwick's presentation might have benefited from a less
textbookish style, with more enriching details and concrete examples.
who won't burden readers with extraneous contextual details or accounts
which promote the entrenched belief in American society that genuine
learning and expert knowledge are tantamount to success on Who Wants
to Be a Millionaire

Speech to The Democratic National Committee--Western Caucus
Saturday, May 25, 2002
Seattle, Washington

argument of the regular National Review seat on Communist News
Network liberal media program, Reliable Sources. Recently, host
(and Washington Post media reporter) Howard Kurtz decided to fill
editor, Jonah Goldberg, but with the relatively obscure
NR managing editor, Jay Nordlinger. Nordlinger explained, "The
almost nonstory."

Nordlinger's complaint echoed the even stronger contention of another
Kurtz favorite, Andrew Sullivan. The world-famous
gaycatholictorygapmodel took the amazing position that potential
warnings about a terrorist threat that would kill thousands and land us
climate of support for the President."

But Sullivan at least deserves our admiration for expertly spinning
Kurtz regarding The New York Times Magazine's decision to cut him
executive editor Howell Raines avenging Sullivan's obsessive attacks on
stupendously narcissistic website never existed. Sullivan's Times
notsoliberal New Republic (before he was replaced by editor Peter
columnist) Judith Shulevitz pointed out in a critique of his
"dangerously misleading" paean to testosterone, Sullivan was permitted
neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky told Shulevitz at the time, Sullivan "is
entitled to his fairly nonscientific opinion, but I'm astonished at the
Sexual Disclosure also embarrassed the magazine when he used its pages
to out as gay two Clinton Cabinet members and liberal Democrats like
when his own life became tabloid fare.) Meanwhile, Sullivan's
McCarthyite London Sunday Times column about September 11--in
of his martyrdom continues. Sullivan's website carries the vainglorious

* * *

is irresistible: "I ignored Geoffrey Nunberg's piece in The American
in April, debunking the notion of liberal media bias by
that linguist Geoffrey Nunberg did the necessary heavy lifting to
disprove perhaps the one contention in Bernard Goldberg's book
conservatives as such more frequently than alleged liberals. Tom
Goldstein bought into it in Columbia Journalism Review. So did
unchallenged on Communist News Network. Meanwhile, Goldberg admits to

Unfortunately for Bernie, Nunberg discovered that alleged liberals are
actually labeled as such by mainstream journalists more frequently than
that came out differently, but Nunberg effectively disposed of Boyd's
bizarre Village Voice column, Nat Hentoff recently sought to ally
himself with the pixilated Goldberg but felt a need to add the
was to inspire my own forthcoming book refuting it. (Hentoff
aside, it's a great column.

* * *

Speaking of ex-leftists, what's up with Christopher Hitchens calling
treated as something akin to a disease in this, America's oldest
continuously published liberal magazine? Here's hoping my old friend

www.altercation.msnbc.com. Check it every day, or the terrorists



December 27, 2014


December 24, 2014


December 23, 2014


December 23, 2014


December 22, 2014

From the classrooms to the streets, the movement keeps growing.

December 22, 2014


December 22, 2014


December 19, 2014


December 19, 2014

Here's to a new year!

December 19, 2014