For God, Council and Harvard

THIS edition of The Liberal Boutique is dedicated to Prof. Martin S. Feldstein, without whom this column wouldn't be nearly so much fun.

Social Analysis 10, that wonderful utility-maximizing world where all markets equilibrate and labor-market discrimination is impossible, claims to attempt a value-free analysis of economics.

I guess that's why the following question appeared, without a trace of irony, on a recent unit test: "Are there costs of unemployment?"

Only in Ec 10 is that not a rhetorical question.

A sample Ec 10 hourly posed the inflation-or-unemployment question a little more reasonably: "Which is worse for the economy: inflation or unemployment?"

I suppose the answer all depends on whether one is a coal miner or a tenured economics professor with a lot of bonds in the portfolio.

Holy Writ Dept: Religious fundamentalism is apparently not yet dead at Harvard. A resident tutor received an overdue notice for a copy of the Vulgate, the Latin version of the Holy Bible penned by St. Jerome. In the space marked "author" was written "GOD."

Immaculate Deception Dept: I was surprised to see Undergraduate Council Chair Kenneth E. Lee '89 quoted in The Independent as saying, "Many people, including myself, voted yes [on the council resolution endorsing the return of ROTC] not really considering the military's policy toward gays and lesbians because we were not aware of it."

I couldn't understand how it was that Lee could claim ignorance of the military's policy when he presided over debate on that very issue.

When I asked Lee how he could justify his statement, he said, "It was unclear what sort of discrimination it was, how blatantly they discriminated...We arrived at the meeting with out doing our homework."

Leaving aside the issue of what "sort of discrimination" Lee thinks is acceptable, it still disturbed me that it never occurred to him to investigate the facts of the case before committing the council to such an important decision.

"Somebody should have done that," said Lee, making an unintentionally candid comment on his leadership ability. If the council chair will not take the responsibility to fully examine the constitutional ramifications of council actions, who will?

Not only did Lee not pursue the facts himself, he didn't even give anyone else the opportunity. Although Lee called for someone to speak in favor of an amendment that would withhold the council's endorsement of ROTC until it abandoned its anti-gay bias, he allowed a speaker opposed to the amendment to use all of the time allotted for debate. "I should have told him that he was out of order...I wasn't listening," said Lee. "Clearly it was an error on my part."

His recent mea culpa notwithstanding, it seems incredible that Lee did not know of the military's discriminatory policy. After all, he presided over debate before the council during which several students testified that ROTC expressly excludes gays. Lee insists he didn't notice. Either he's lying, or he was oblivious to the proceedings of the meeting he ran.

It all leaves one with the nagging suspicion that Lee was not as ignorant as he now claims, and that his opposition to ROTC's return is purely a function of students' outrage.

Either Lee is deceiving the student body about his understanding of ROTC's anti-gay discrimination, or he is superbly incompetent as council chair. In either case, he owes the student body an apology.

Law and Order Dept: The jig is up for Oliver North. The former Marine Corps colonel who trampled on the Constitution in the name of democracy is finally getting his just desserts. A federal court jury found North guilty on three of the 12 counts against him, including aiding and abetting the obstruction of Congress, accepting an illegal gratuity and destroying and falsifying government documents. He faces up to 10 years in prison and $750,000 in fines.

The most important commercial implication should be the obsolescence of "Ollie North for President" paraphernalia. As a convicted felon, North is no longer eligible to be elected as President--or as dog-catcher, for that matter.