Ten Ways to Help a Dying Chapter

1 – Plan something that the brotherhood will look forward to. If your chapter doesn’t have something to look forward to, it will become stagnant and your brothers will become complacent.

2 – Realize that the best way to improve is by getting a little better each day. In order to start, you have to step up as a leader and show the way. You say that meetings are a waste of time. Go over the agenda and determine how to par it down and keep the meeting on track. Remind brothers that the meeting agenda will help focus their time towards productive goals. I promise brothers will see your example, and they will end up helping. Someone has to take the lead though.

3 – Eliminate all the crap the brothers hates and spend your time and effort focusing on the stuff the brothers likes.

4 – Cut the dead wood. If you have brothers who are dragging the Fraternity down for whatever reason, have a heart to heart talk about whether they really want to be a brother. If they can’t meet expectations, get rid of them fast.

5 – Have a fundraiser. I have written a bunch of articles on fraternity fundraisers. I suggest having a raffle for a quick and easy cash infusion for your chapter.

6 – Make it a point to hang out together. Strong brothers eat together , study together and work out together. By the sounds of your situation, that isn’t happening in your chapter.

7 – Make your meeting worth coming to. I’d bet a buck that your meetings are either information sessions or bitch sessions. Both aren’t very productive ways for brothers to spend their time. I’d probably skip them too. Eliminate unnecessary meetings that only serve as a time suck.

8 – Reach out to alumni for advice. This is done by calling them on the phone and asking direct questions. If you can form relationships with a few alumni, more and more will start showing interest in the chapter. Also, don’t neglect alumni from other chapters that might be in your local area. They can help as well.

9 – Talk openly with your Greek Life Director and Regional Officers on how to improve the Fraternity. Both have a vested interest in your success.

10 - Finally, read, research, and realize that you are not alone. Many brothers have walked in your shoes and can give you insight on how to motivate, inspire, and develop leadership based on brotherhood in your chapter. Share your thoughts, frustrations, accomplishments with your other motivated brothers. If you follow some of these steps, you will save your chapter.

This list first appeared in http://www.thefraternityadvisor.com/ by Patrick Daley

The Man Comes Around

And I heard as it were the noise of thunder
One of the four beasts saying come and see and I saw
And behold a white horse

There's a man going around taking names
And he decides who to free and who to blame
Everybody won't be treated all the same
There'll be a golden ladder reaching down
When the Man comes around.

The hairs on your arm will stand up
At the terror in each sip and in each sup
Will you partake of that last offered cup?
Or disappear into the potter's ground
When the Man comes around.

Hear the trumpets, hear the pipers
One hundred million angels singing
Multitudes are marching to the big kettledrum
Voices calling, voices crying
Some are born and some are dying
It's Alpha and Omega's kingdom come

And the whirlwind is in the thorn tree
The virgins are all trimming their wicks
The whirlwind is in the thorn tree
It's hard for thee to kick against the pricks

Till Armageddon no shalam, no shalom
Then the father hen will call his chickens home
The wise man will bow down before the throne
And at His feet they'll cast their golden crowns
When the Man comes around.

Whoever is unjust let him be unjust still
Whoever is righteous let him be righteous still
Whoever is filthy let him be filthy still
Listen to the words long written down
When the Man comes around.

Hear the trumpets, hear the pipers
One hundred million angels singing
Multitudes are marching to the big kettledrum
Voices calling and voices crying
Some are born and some are dying
It's Alpha and Omega's kingdom come

And the whirlwind is in the thorn tree
The virgins are all trimming their wicks
The whirlwind is in the thorn tree
It's hard for thee to kick against the pricks

In measured hundred weight and penney pound
When the Man comes around.

And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts
And I looked and behold, a pale horse
And his name that sat on him was Death
And Hell followed with him.

http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/fox/abrahamlincolnvampirehunter/

Intro to "The Donner Party" documentary

"It is odd to watch with what feverish ardor Americans pursue prosperity. Ever tormented by the shadowy suspicion that they may not have chosen the shortest route to get it. They cleave to the things of this world as if assured that they will never die, and yet rush to snatch any that comes within their reach as if they expected to stop living before they had relished them. Death steps in, in the end, and stops them before they have grown tired of this futile pursuit of that complete felicity which always escapes them."
- Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1835.

The Perfect Project Plan - Large or Small

The previous two posts discussed the role of the Project Manager and how to prepare a Project Plan. This final blog on the subject of project management presents an actual project plan and budget for a small project goal where you need to raise $10,000 net and a larger project goal where you need to raise $30,000 net. Please remember that the success of any project depends on the skills of the project manager and the organization and inclusiveness of the project plan. Without either, the event is doomed to failure.

Example 1 Project - Summer Computer Camp

Your organization has partnered with a summer camp organization and agreed to sponsor 100 campers at a computer camp. The project plan goal here is to acquire the funds to enable the children to attend the summer computer camp

Setting Goals for Your Event within Your Overall Fundraising Plan

Many people want to be associated with a successful, positive, professional program. With enough time and careful planning your event will attract enough supports (past, current, and future) to provide the synergy needed for a continuous successful event. People will donate for many reasons – among them, to support you, to be seen, and to network. This is an event that allows you to stay true to your organization’s mission and core values. Therefore it is important that your project manager have experience and contacts in the field of publicity and communications. This project must cultivate attention and draw sufficient interest so that seeking sponsorships, and in-kind donations will meet with success. First, you must identify how you will raise the funds, i.e., your revenue source.

Budget



The Project Plan

This project plan must include success for obtaining sponsorships and ensuring that your tickets to the venue have been sold. The plan must include working with the venue, caterer, menu, event flow, and every imaginable detail including parking needs. The project plan must include extensive detail regarding who and when to solicit sponsorships, sell tickets, solicit auction items, and handle additional income stream of the signature drinks. The project plan has to also include outreach and publicity by engaging other organizations and high profile individuals in order to encourage success with the silent auction and meeting your sponsorship goals. Failing to invest the proper amount of energy in all revenue categories could have a negative impact on the project goal.

Example 2 Project - Community Awards Banquet

A modification of the small project will allow you to create a larger project plan which can generate in excess of $50,000 net revenue. In this example, the organization has announced a target of awarding five $10,000 scholarships to graduating seniors this year. The “Summer Camp Luncheon” project plan can be used as a template and modified for a “Community Awards Banquet”. The two important differences in this event is including a souvenir journal and offering awards to local community leaders to attract additional sponsors.

It is important to try to account for all possible hard-cost expenses in the budget. The budget must include every conceivable expense. However the project plan can be creative in reducing expenses. Contact the local community college Fine Arts Department and arrange student photographers to use your event as a pro bono class project. The same could be suggested for all graphics and logo artwork. It will help students develop a portfolio of work from a real-world event.

Budget



Success is Guaranteed !!!

Now that you have set your goals, put your plan together for a great event, and identified potential participants, you need to get the people there. Although a well-put-together event is bound to attract attendees, don’t overlook opportunities to ensure that the people you want to be there will be. Reach out to your sponsors to get the name of their guests and consider sharing your event’s invitation with their contact lists. You must follow-up to key stakeholders by phone to ensure that you obtain the number of attendees. It will require making a lot of calls and sending several reminders. You will also use social networks if appropriate. A press release with detail information offering special and unique insight into the event will encourage coverage of your event. Again you will need to have direct contact with an editor or news director to obtain the coverage you desire.

Award banquets are a time-honored tradition that can bring a lot of value to your organization and meet the goals of your development plan. Although they require careful planning and the involvement of many people, they provide the kind of opportunity for engagement, participation and important face-time with the many stakeholders of your organization and community that is not possible with other fundraising strategies. With good food, drinks, venue, entertainment, and speakers, you can create an experience for your guests that encourages their steadfast (and increased) commitment to your organization.

Six-Month Project Plan for Luncheon or Banquet

What is the perfect Project Plan?

In a previous post I wrote about “The Committee Chairman is the Project Manager”. This post concentrates on building a successful Project Plan using standard project management tools.

In the world of project management, it often falls to the project manager to articulate clearly what may be unformed thoughts floating around in the minds of the participants, customers or stakeholders. This is one of the greatest challenges in a project: coordinating the ideas, thoughts and agendas of this diverse group of Brothers and have them focus on the goal and the eventual success of the project. Brothers have different and sometimes conflicting measures of success. Brothers may also measure success in different ways. Therefore it is of great importance to articulate in a measured manner how the project will be deemed a success.

Building the Project Plan

When you have identified a clear project objective and how the success of the project will be measured, you need to build a project plan that will use resources and create tasks towards the objective. Using a chart, spreadsheet or flow diagram, you outline how resources and tasks will be used by each member of the project within a specific time period.. Each objective is considered a milestone or a dependant task that can be measured and identified for modification or adjustment. There are various methods of identifying how best to outline and measure each objective. Most project plans incorporate many of the following elements:

Top-down and Bottom-up

The Top-down estimate of a project includes all tasks, events, and resources and applies an overall timescale and costs. It is created at the beginning of the project to determine how long the project will take and how much it will cost. It is usual to add some contingency resources or funding to allow for risky assumptions or cost overruns due to lack of proper resources or personnel. The Bottom-up phase of the project refines the timescale and costs as each milestone or stage of project is completed. It allows the project manager to adjust all upcoming tasks, events and resources in light of actual measured tasks. Top-down and Bottom-up estimating allow planning to take place at both project and stage levels and help anticipate challenges or issues before they evolve into problems or emergencies.

Work Distribution

Many projects may utilize complex tasks or specialization to achieve success. As a project manager, you cannot be expected to be an expert in every task. Nor can the project manager perform every task or handle every event. Therefore, each task and event must be assigned a resource or person to oversee it to completion. Each task or event must have a deliverable (a due date) and measureable achievement (cost, completion, success, failure). The project manager updates each task in the project plan with new data provided by the resource (person, expert, specialist) and achievement (cost above/below budget; within or out of the timeline; within or out of expectation). Continuous updating of the project plan gives the project manager an indication as to whether adjustments are required to meet the project’s final goal.

Estimating Time and Costs

The project manager’s ability to estimate the duration and cost for each task or event can determine how the project goal is achieved. For example, if a committee member suggests it will take seven days to complete a task when the project plan indicates that it should take three days, you will only have one opportunity to challenge – and improve or revise – the estimate. The project manager’s failure to review and revise the project plan and hold people accountable to their deliverables will doom the project to inevitable disaster and failure. An ineffectual, inefficient, uncooperative, undisciplined, non-communicative manager is a poor manager and recipe for failure.

Identify and Manage Risk

So what is a risk? Former US Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, famously said:
“Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me because, as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns - the ones we don't know we don't know.”

This is an excellent understanding of risk and project management:
• 'There are known knowns.' Rumsfeld was referring to things that have ceased to be preventable because they have happened and thus it is not possible to stop or circumvent them. Project managers call these 'issues'. Put another way, 'the stuff has hit the fan'.
• 'There are known unknowns.' These are the problems that have been identified and which it may be possible to mitigate (perhaps preventing a problem arising or reducing its effect if it does). To continue the analogy, you know where and how much stuff is out there, the fan is running, but one has not yet been introduced to the other.
• 'There are unknown unknowns.' These are the problems that have not been identified or anticipated. They are the threats to a project's successful outcome which are not yet even known about. The analogy concludes: no one yet knows how much stuff is out there, where it is (or if it even exists), or how fast the fan is running.

So, a risk is something that may place the success of the project in jeopardy. Or an assumption or a guess that, by virtue of being unknown, is also a risk and places the project goal into jeopardy. When a risk is identified the focus should be on doing something positive to moderate the risk. There are several potential options: Accept, Lessen; Avoid; Share. This forms the convenient (and possibly appropriate) acronym, ALAS.

excerpts taken from Effective Project Management by Paul Roberts, KoganPage Press, 2011.

The Committee Chairman is the Project Manager

The Committee Chairman is not the most important person involved in the committee project or program, nor is he the only person so involved. Successful projects are dependant upon well constructed project plans and a team committed to the delivery of a project successfully. Not surprisingly, successful Committee Chairmen are outstanding Project Managers.

Therefore, selecting a proven project manger in a role of leadership, although a very positive step, it is not sufficient to guarantee a successful outcome. Having a detailed and effective project plan and an individual responsible for keeping the project under control and within budget is the difference between success or failure.

Why must there be a Project Plan?

Your project is a vehicle for delivering change. The outcome of your project must have a defined deliverable purpose. The deliverable must be simple and easy to identify; “raise x amount of dollars for x number of scholarship awards,” “increase membership by x number of members within x number of months,” “offer x number of hours of after-school tutoring to x number of students.” The specified deliverable will help shape the budget, provide a range of available or needed resources, and the project’s life cycle.

Every project has a defined budget. There are a great many things in which we may be investing money in order to build the project’s deliverable, including, but not limited to, people’s time, contractors, computer hardware, software licenses, building materials, and marketing matter. These and similar investments contribute to what will eventually be known as the project’s budget.

A project will need to benefit from the capabilities, knowledge, skills and experience of people from a wide range of backgrounds from within and possibly outside the organization. A project has a beginning, middle and end, all are important for different reasons, and all can benefit from some order and governance. This “life cycle” and the combination of the project’s risk are at the heart of successful project management. The ability to obtain and articulate a clear and basic understanding of these variables is what determines the success of each project.

Define success

As a project manager, these are the common measures of success:
- Delivering within the expected timescale.
- Delivering within the expect budget.
- Producing the quality of deliverable as expected.
- Managing changes in expectations along the way.
- Minimizing the detrimental effect of risks and issues.
- Keeping the team motivated and focused.

Support Tools

There are a great number of project support tools and project management software to assist with the project plan. Web-based project management tools such as www.gantter.com or www.mavenlink.com can be used by the project manager to organize and outline the project’s budget, resources, timeline and deliverable.

Remember to Treat A Project Like A Business

The project manager must maintain his focus on the project’s overall success and shepard it towards its deliverable. Additionally, the Chapter must contain a layer of authority that allow Brothers at different levels to use their particular skills, knowledge and experience to make the right decisions at the right time. The project manager is designated as someone who is to be held accountable for its success and therefore must have the authority and confidence of the Chapter’s leadership to keep the project on track and pointed towards a successful outcome.

excerpts taken from Effective Project Management by Paul Roberts, KoganPage Press, 2011.

Improving the Reactivation & Retention Process

You can attract and retain members by improving your Reactivation Processing, I would suggest observing and embracing the Best Practices used by many mega-churches. These Best Practices provides that when a new visitor is identified, he fills out a contact card, and “hidden” processes and procedures are automatically put into motion which includes:
 His contact info is entered into a tracking database;
 He is given literature and information about membership;
 He is assigned a “buddy” to help answer questions and encourage continued membership;
 He is contacted by the buddy for coffee or lunch to establish a relationship;
 He is contacted by the Pastor to thank him for his interest and participation;
 He is encouraged by his buddy to attend upcoming meetings and focus groups;
 He is encouraged to join a focus group or committee or task force that suits his interest or passion; and
 He is later encouraged to become a membership “buddy” with a new member.

This process works like a water wheel in that as new members join each is partnered with a buddy, who help bring him comfortably into the membership and at the end of the process, the new member becomes a buddy who helps pull in new members. This process reinforces relationships and helps build strong bonds among members as the organization grows. I am suggesting that you create a “process” that works like a water wheel for reactivation.

When someone reconnects with a brother, the process would begin with an email “Welcome” message that introduces him to the current E-Board membership, including their names, email addresses and phone numbers. The email must include some personal reference to the addressee so that it does not appear to be a form letter.

Most importantly, within seven days, the brother is assigned a “buddy”.

The buddy then calls the brother to encourage a meeting over coffee or lunch to create a relationship. This is critical. If this contact is not made, the opportunity to reactivate this brother will be lost. It is our brotherhood, our common and shared experience that should allow a relationship between the buddy and lost brother to develop. If the connection by the buddy is not made, there is no magnet to help reactivate this brother.

The buddy encourages the brother to attend an upcoming Chapter meeting or event. During this event the brother must be pulled into the Chapter organization – if the brother attends a meeting or event and is not asked to accept responsibility for a task or project – he will have no reason to return. You must give him a reason to return.

The buddy can help the brother be successful with their new task or project. The buddy can suggest other brothers or resources this brother can use to be successful. The E-Board should immediately highlight this new brother’s task or project in order to incorporate him into the Chapter. When his task or project is met with success, he should be asked to consider being a “buddy” for a brother new to the Chapter.

This process takes commitment and courage to embrace this as a Best Practice. Additionally, the chapter membership has to “buy-in” that this is the process that they will use when a brother reactivates which includes “pushing” him onto a committee and asking him to take responsibility for a project or task immediately and without delay. The desire to demand that the brother pay his reactivation fees has to take on minor importance with respect to the desire and demand that the brother connect into the Chapter and “step-up” and immediately accept responsibility for a project or program.

It does require leadership and hard work for it to be a success.

You're the Top

At words poetic, I'm so pathetic
That I always have found it best,
Instead of getting 'em off my chest,
To let 'em rest unexpressed,
I hate parading my serenading
As I'll probably miss a bar,
But if this ditty is not so pretty
At least it'll tell you
How great you are.

You're the top!
You're the Coliseum.
You're the top!
You're the Louver Museum.
You're a melody from a symphony by Strauss
You're a Bendel bonnet,
A Shakespeare's sonnet,
You're Mickey Mouse.
You're the Nile,
You're the Tower of Pisa,
You're the smile on the Mona Lisa
I'm a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop,
But if, baby, I'm the bottom you're the top!

Your words poetic are not pathetic.
On the other hand, babe, you shine,
And I can feel after every line
A thrill divine
Down my spine.
Now gifted humans like Vincent Youmans
Might think that your song is bad,
But I got a notion
I'll second the motion
And this is what I'm going to add;

You're the top!
You're Mahatma Gandhi.
You're the top!
You're Napoleon Brandy.
You're the purple light
Of a summer night in Spain,
You're the National Gallery
You're Garbo's salary,
You're cellophane.
You're sublime,
You're turkey dinner,
You're the time, the time of a Derby winner
I'm a toy balloon that’s fated soon to pop
But if, baby, I'm the bottom,
You're the top!

You're the top!
You're an arrow collar
You're the top!
You're a Coolidge dollar,
You're the nimble tread
Of the feet of Fred Astaire,
You're an O'Neill drama,

You're Whistler's mama!

You're camembert.

You're a rose,
You're Inferno's Dante,

You're the nose
On the great Durante.
I'm just in a way,
As the French would say, "de trop".
But if, baby, I'm the bottom,
You're the top!

You're the top!
You're a dance in Bali.
You're the top!
You're a hot tamale.
You're an angel, you,
Simply too, too, too diveen,
You're a Boticcelli,
You're Keats,
You're Shelly!

You're Ovaltine!
You're a boom,
You're the dam at Boulder,
You're the moon,
Over Mae West's shoulder,
I'm the nominee of the G.O.P.

Or GOP!

But if, baby, I'm the bottom,
You're the top!

You're the top!
You're a Waldorf salad.
You're the top!
You're a Berlin ballad.
You're the boats that glide
On the sleepy Zuider Zee,
You're an old Dutch master,

You're Lady Astor,
You're broccoli!
You're romance,
You're the steppes of Russia,
You're the pants, on a Roxy usher,
I'm a broken doll, a fol-de-rol, a blop,

But if, baby, I'm the bottom,
You're the top!

lyrics by Cole Porter

Anticipation

We can never know about the days to come
But we think about them anyway, yay
And I wonder if I'm really with you now
Or just chasin' after some finer day

Anticipation, anticipation
Is makin' me late
Is keepin' me waitin'

And I tell you how easy it feels to be with you
And how right your arms feel around me
But I, I rehearsed those lines just late last night
When I was thinkin' about how right tonight might be

Anticipation, anticipation
Is makin' me late
Is keepin' me waitin'

And tomorrow we might not be together
I'm no prophet and I don't know nature's ways
So I'll try and see into your eyes right now
And stay right here 'cause these are the good old days

These are the good old days
And stay right here 'cause these are the good old days
These are the good old days
These are the good old days
These are the good old days
These are..... the good old days

lyrics by Carly Simon

If You Haven’t Measured It, You Can’t Manage It

Newly elected Chapter officers have an agenda and opinion of what works and doesn’t work for their Chapter. However those assessments are usually based upon opinion rather than fact. If you haven’t measured membership satisfaction, or identified the reasons why your chapter programs and projects failed to meet their objectives, it will be difficult to plot a new path towards success. If you haven’t measured it, you can’t manage it.

Using a free service such as freeonlinsurvyes.com you can poll your membership to determine if the path that you have chosen is matched with your Chapter’s expectations and ability. Here is sample membership survey that can quickly measure what direction your Chapter is heading.

1. Are you attending the monthly Chapter meetings?
 Yes.
 No, I don’t know where/when Chapter meets.
 No, the day/time is inconvenient.
 No, I am not active.

2. What is your opinion of Chapter meetings?
 Meetings are too long.
 Meetings are disorganized and confusing.
 Meeting time/location is inconvenient.
 Meeting agenda is too long.
 Meeting agenda is not substantive.

3. Please rank the value of the following benefits with 1 being Least Important and 5 being the Most Important
 Professional networking
 Socializing + fellowship with brothers
 Community activism
 Continuation of the colligate experience
 Opportunity to influence National/Regional policy

4. What are your interest in serving on a committee?
 I would like to, but don’t have extra time.
 I would like to, but it costs too much money.
 I would like to, but I don’t agree with the Chairman.
 I would like to, but I’m not aware of how to serve.
 I am serving on a committee.

5. Please tell us the amount of time you are able to offer to committee service?
 One hour meeting per month.
 Two hour meeting per month.
 One meeting per month.
 Two meetings per month.

6. Please tell us what committee(s) you would be interested in serving on (check all that apply).
 Membership
 Fundraising
 Scholarship
 Social Action
 Sigma-Zeta
 Pan Hellenic
 Sigma Beta

7. Please share with us any additional information or comments about committee service.

8. Are you satisfied or dissatisfied with the level of Chapter communication?
 Yes - I am aware of all Chapter events, and can plan accordingly.
 Somewhat – I don’t know where/when Chapter events are held.
 Somewhat dissatisfied – I do not receive information in a timely or consistent fashion.
 Dissatisfied – I don’t receive information or enough info to plan accordingly.

9. Overall, how satisfied have you been with the Chapter’s projects or programs?
 Very Dissatisfied
 Somewhat Dissatisfied
 Neutral
 Somewhat Satisfied
 Totally Satisfied

10. What suggestions do you have to help improve the Chapter?

Why John J. Mearsheimer Is Right*

by Robert D. Kaplan

At Harvard, many students and faculty members alike are on the make, networking for that first, or next, position in government or the think-tank world. The environment is vaguely unfriendly to theories or bold ideas, Huntington being the grand exception that proves the rule. After all, social-science theories are gross simplifications of reality; even the most brilliant theories can be right, say, only 75 percent of the time. Critics unfailingly seize on any theory's shortcomings, damaging reputations. So the truly ambitious tend to avoid constructing one.

The best grand theories tend to be written no earlier than middle age, when the writer has life experience and mistakes behind him to draw upon. Morgenthau's 1948 classic, Politics Among Nations, was published when he was 44, Fukuyama's The End of History was published as a book when he was 40, and Huntington's Clash of Civilizations as a book when he was 69. Mearsheimer began writing The Tragedy of Great Power Politics when he was in his mid-40s, after working on it for a decade. Published just before 9/11, the book intimates the need for America to avoid strategic distractions and concentrate on confronting China. A decade later, with the growth of China's military might vastly more apparent than it was in 2001, and following the debacles of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, its clairvoyance is breathtaking.

excerpts from "Why John J. Mearsheimer Is Right *about some things" The Atlantic, January 2012, p.80

Death Comes to Pemberley

Death Comes to Pemberley
by P.O. James

At 91, the great P.O. James has just established herself as "heir apparent to Jane Austen's creative legacy:' said Carol Memmott in USA Today. Many have tried before to emulate the 19th century legend's tone and plotting finesse, but the "doyenne of British crime fiction" has outdone them with this "perfect" crime thriller. Six years after the marriages that end Pride and Prejudice, "Mr. Darcy" and his bride, Elizabeth, are living in wedded bliss at Pemberley when Elizabeth's sister, Lydia, arrives at the estate one night to inform them of the murder of a friend.

"Austen fans need no reminder of the trouble Lydia brought to her family" in the original novel. Nothing, apparently, has changed, James' "faultless replication" of Austen's writing style lifts her above "the ever-growing pack" of Austen imitators, said Fran Wood in the New Jersey Star-Ledger. But Death Comes to Pemberley is not just a tribute; it's a first-rate murder mystery.

The eventual trial will offer twists you won't see coming.

Book review originally appeared in This Week, 23 December 2011, p.24

Howard Cosell: The Man, the Myth, and the Transformation of American Sports

Howard Cosell: The Man, the Myth, and the Transformation of American Sports
by Mark Ribowsky

How could it be that "a human spectacle as unique as Howard Cosell" has already been widely forgotten? said Richard Sandomir in The New York Times. With his "adenoidal Brooklyn voice, polysyllabic vocabulary, and vulpine presence," the late sportscaster was the dominant personality in his field for 20 years, at a time when holding a network throne meant something. He was "loud, audacious, obnoxious, perspicacious, brilliant, narcissistic, provocative, and haughty"-qualities that both lifted him to prominence and contributed to his downfall. For those who remember hearing him, Cosell's slowly enunciated signature sign-off-"This is HOW-id Cyo-SELL"-will be ringing in their ears as they flip through the pages of Mark Ribowsky's "vivid," if sometimes overexcited, biography.

Was there anyone who didn't do an impression of that voice in the 1970s? asked Gene Warner in The Buffalo News. Ribowsky's "nuanced and complex" portrait accurately captures a man so divisive that he once won both most-loved and most-loathed television personality in the same poll. He certainly wasn't afraid to irritate audiences. A Manhattan lawyer before making the unlikely career jump into sports broadcasting, he rose to national prominence in the 1960s thanks largely to his on-air rapport with Muhammad Ali, who, when he adopted his Muslim name, had few defenders in broadcasting besides Cosell. Later, as part of the first team to host Monday Night Football, Cosell won the enmity of NFL fans by using 50-cent words to deride players-playing black hat/white hat with his affable co-host, former Dallas Cowboys quarterback Don Meredith.

"Even if you loathed him, Cosell's performance was what made Monday nights memorable," said David Remnick in The New Yorker. But as Ribowsky points out, Cosell was also a real journalist, a "blunt questioner" who used his sports beat to address the more pressing issues of the day. In the early '80s, the suits at ABC gave Cosell the boot after finally tiring of his self-aggrandizing and habit of drinking on the job. Ribowsky's biography, which follows the story to its sad end, is too loaded with florid prose to be called a great book. But it does remind us that Cosell was a singular figure. These days, "it's nearly impossible to imagine someone on the air who is, at once, an impresario, a circus barker, an analyst, and a serious journalist." Cosell is the only one who has managed the feat, and he's "never been replaced."

Book review originally appeared in This Week, 23 December 2011, p.24

Does Your Regional Conference Stimulate You?

I recently received an invitation to attend the 2012 AFLV Conference. The Association of Fraternal Leadership & Values (AFLV) exists to stimulate the growth and development of fraternity/sorority councils and chapters by promoting leadership, educational, and values based experiences and resources for student leaders, their advisors, and the larger fraternal market. The conference is attended by professional GLO student advisors; student life administrators, and coordinators for student development. Here is a list of over 100 breakout sessions offered during the 2011 AFLV conference.

Thursday

Ø Education Program Block #1
Ø Diversity According to South Park and Family Guy
Ø Where is your line?
Ø 40 Ways to Detect Hazing and 20 things we can do to change a hazing culture
Ø Who Is Taking Care of You?
Ø Quality over Quantity: The Worlds Greatest Excuse
Ø Build a Community, Not a System
Ø Visionary Leadership for Chapter and Council Leaders
Ø Money, Money, Money... MONEY!
Ø From Battlemind To Campus Grind!
Ø Our Military are Coming Home...Are You Ready?
Ø Positive PR and How to Get It
Ø Can I See You In my Office: Working Collaboratively with your Fraternity/Sorority Advisor
Ø The Courage to Challenge: Learning the Art of Positive Confrontation
Ø Beyond Alcohol: The 'Other Drug Category'
Ø Are We Really Still Talking About Risk Management?

Friday morning

Ø True Colors – Discover Your Unique Gifts and Talents
Ø Peer Conduct Boards – Developing an Accountability System That Works
Ø Happy Greek Leaders Produce
Ø Been There! Dumped That! Are You “All That?”
Ø Dynamic Recruitment for Sororities
Ø School Haze: Does Pledging Really Produce Premium Product?
Ø The Evolution of New Member Processes in BGLO
Ø Big Ideas for Small Chapters
Ø Student Leadership Training with an Attitude
Ø Hazing – When Will It End?
Ø The Best Job Ever
Ø Budgeting, Collecting and Everything Finance
Ø Why Do You Hate Me?
Ø Seriously?
Ø Social Justice: When Diversity Isn’t Enough
Ø NPC Release Figure Method
Ø A Night to Forget

Friday afternoon

Ø NPC Judicial Process
Ø Embracing Real Beauty
Ø Connecting “Majorities” to the Multicultural Community
Ø Recruitment Boot Camp: Skills Training
Ø Intake Equation - Part 1
Ø Ladder of Risk: Cultural Greek Edition
Ø Under the Influence… of Stress
Ø Shared Values: Drive-By Conversations
Ø No Money, Mo Problems: The ABC’s of Resource-Raising
Ø From Group to Team – Robert’s Rules Made Simple
Ø It’s Worse than You Think, the Hidden Dangers of Eating Disorders
Ø Navigating Diversity on Your Campus
Ø IFC: What you Should and Could be Doing
Ø Planning the Perfect Party
Ø Naysayers, Crickers and Whiners: Overcoming Barriers to Change

Friday evening

Ø Advancing Authentic Sisterhood
Ø More Than “Mandatory”
Ø Recruitment Boot Camp: The Council’s Plan for Success
Ø Risk Management Inside Out: Questions from the Field
Ø The Choice
Ø Intake Equation - Part 2
Ø NPHC and MGC – Finding your purpose on the Yard
Ø Are You a GREEK Leader Prepared to Impact the World?
Ø The Anatomy of Power
Ø Inspiring Creativity for Greek Leaders
Ø How to improve your order of omega chapter
Ø Stop Networking…. Start Connecting: Get Better Grades, Get Hired and Achieve Your Dream!
Ø NPC Extension
Ø Taking Action for ALLIES: Fraternity & Sorority LGBT Climate Test
Ø Identifying and Engaging your ALUMNI
Ø Teambuilders That Don’t Suck

Saturday morning

Ø How to Support a Sexual Assault Survivor
Ø RISK! And Crisis Management: Not Just a Nerdy Game of Global Domination
Ø Lessons in Development Volunteer Advisors
Ø Finding Passion and Purpose in Life – The Six Secret Steps
Ø Dynamic Recruitment for Fraternities
Ø Standards Boards: 21 Ways to Improve Accountability
Ø Multicultural Greek Movement Open Forum
Ø Chapter Event Programming Best Practice: Avoid Over Programming
Ø How to get the most out of your NPC membership
Ø Is the AFLV Awards & Assessment Process really worth the time and attention?
Ø Social Media: The Good and The Bad
Ø The Powerful Persuasive Greek Leader
Ø Can You Manager To LEAD?
Ø Suicide Prevention: Be a Shining Light of Hope
Ø Exclusive or Selective Membership Criteria: Are we crossing the line of Social Justice?
Ø Image is Everything!

Saturday afternoon

Ø Red Carpet Worthy AFLV Awards & Assessment Submissions
Ø Council Collaboration: Empowering Girls & Women
Ø Invite, Teach, Inspire, Don’t preach – They’ll Lick the Cactus Anyway
Ø Promoting Academic Excellence
Ø Kristin’s Story: A mother’s account of rape, depression, suicide and hope
Ø Strategies for Over-programmed Chapters: Tightening Up Your Calendar
Ø Getting Rid of “Mandatory” and Improving Morale
Ø Open Up the Lines of Communication: Working with Your Campus Greek Advisor
Ø Overcoming Chapter Over Programming
Ø DUI: A Powerful Lesson
Ø The Broken Pillar – reclaiming our core value of Service to Others
Ø Expectation Hangovers: Treatment and Prevention
Ø Facing Trans: Inclusion, Advocacy, and Empowerment
Ø Drinking, Drugs and DNA
Ø Effective Leadership Strategies for Leaders of a Diverse Team
Ø When is Enough Enough? Image is Everything
Ø Take Action: Tools for Combating Hazing

Saturday evening

Ø Community Service Roundtable
Ø Public Relations Roundtable
Ø Forming “One Heartbeat” Within Your Chapter
Ø Engaging the Members in the Middle: The Key to Real Change in Your Chapter
Ø Brotherhood and Sisterhood: Building Bonds Without Hazing
Ø Developing a Chapter Academic Program: Moving Beyond Mandatory Study Hours
Ø Who’s Choosing You?
Ø Up on the High Wire: Promoting Resiliency and Preventing Distress among Student Leaders
Ø Getting Hired: 4 Simple Steps to Landing a Great Job by Graduation
Ø Treasurer & Secretary Roundtable
Ø The Snowball Effect – Addressing “Light” Hazing


Snap shots from the 2011 AFLV leadership conference - "LeaderShape 2011"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjdB7AC8NPQ&list=UUGmErXcH_CUnw2zNn2wrZOQ&index=8&feature=plcp

2012 AFLV Conference speaker's bio
http://www.aflv.org/EventsPrograms/WestFLC/Speakers.aspx

Hazing Is Perverse

You are out camping with your family and you hear a growl. It is a bear. What do you do? Run away? Grab something to use as a weapon? Play dead? Fight back?

Don’t run. When you run, the bear thinks you’re prey and will continue chasing you, so stand your ground. And don’t think you can out run a bear. Bears are fast. They can reach speeds of 30 mph. Unless you’re an Olympic sprinter, don’t bother running.

Play dead. Bears will stop attacking when they feel there’s no longer a threat. If they think you’re dead, they won’t think you’re threatening. Once the bear is done tossing you around and leaves, continue to play dead. Bears are known for waiting around to see if their victim will get back up.

Fight back. If a bear thinks you are food and continues biting after you have taken a defensive posture fight back as best you can. If the black bear actually attacks, fight back. Use anything and everything as a weapon - rocks, sticks, fists, and your teeth. Aim your blows on the bear’s face - particularly the eyes and snout. When a bear sees that their victim is willing to fight to the death, they’ll usually just give up.

I am suggesting the same attitude in regards to how to deal with Hazing.

Fraternities cannot run away from the resurgence of hazing. To pretend that hazing is an isolated event which occurs only in extreme and unusual circumstances is dangerous. The recent death of a FAMU band member spotlights that hazing is still prevalent. Hazing is a violent tradition enforced by older members who want to “test” an incoming member’s dedication, desire, or “heart” to join the group. Since the act of hazing is no longer sanctioned by fraternities it has now gone “underground” and occurs out of view of college administrators or fraternal officers. “The reason hazing is so pervasive and so hard to stop is that it’s clandestine,” according to Dave Westol, an Indiana-based consultant for national fraternities and sororities. “It’s done at night. It’s done on campus. It’s done off-campus. There’s a code of secrecy that goes along with it.”[1] Many students agree to be hazed because they believe they must live up to a challenge.

Fraternity members can’t play dead. Hazing is illegal and as such creates a surge of lawsuits whenever it is uncovered. Earlier this year, a family of a hazing victim at Cornell University sued for $25 million after their son died in an incident. Insurance may cover the Fraternity’s legal exposure, however insurance premiums cost money, divert money away from the Fraternity’s programs, and hampers the Fraternity’s mission. There is always a victim when there is hazing and protecting the individual from physical or psychological harm is a responsibility the fraternity members cannot delegate to insurance companies or morally evade.

Fraternities must face the issue and fight back. Hazing is bullying. It is a rogue member who believes that hazing will prevent members from joining who are not worthy of membership. The argument that hazing is the best test to determine if a potential member will uphold Fraternity standards is outdated. Hazing can not determine who will remain active over their entire lifetime. Hazing can not identify leadership. Hazing can only test how much pain or punishment a person can inflict on another human being. Members who haze are sadists.

Members who haze recklessly endanger the Fraternity’s reputation and treasury. Members who haze are outside of the mainstream of the membership - they are usually non-financial and are not active members in good standing. Members who haze are morally and intellectually corrupt.

Organizations must and should immediately expel members who haze. Fraternal societies should promulgate the view that the act of hazing is the most dangerous, anti-social, anti-fraternal act a member can perform. Hazing does not improve the intake process. A potential member’s worth is best measured by his commitment to community service, his excellent study habits, and his academic record of achievement.

Members should support expulsion as the best method to change the culture of the “wink-nod” regarding hazing and acknowledge how perverse the act of hazing is now and in the future.


[1] Read more at Jacksonville.com: http://jacksonville.com/news/florida/2011-12-05/story/famu-band-members-death-spotlights-hazings-prevalence#ixzz1h6Sr2Io7

Read more on Legislative news and anti-hazing law: http://www.stophazing.org/laws.html

Statement on Hazing: http://www.pbs1914.org/become_a_sigma/anti-hazing_policy_anti-pledging_policy/

Gays and Greeks: Fraternity or Sorority Life should aim to integrate LGBT members

By Jeremy Bauer-Wolf, The Towerlight

When Steve Crudele graduated high school, he almost immediately formed a niche for himself in the Towson community. He held a Student Government Association position, worked as a Community Center worker, and participated in several student organizations, all the while harboring what he said was his secret: he is gay. “I was over-involved,” he said. “I used it as a way to try and meet people, but not get close to them. I did it as a way to distance myself from reality.”

But Crudele avoided one aspect of campus life — he chose to distance himself from Greek organizations. He said he thought no one would give him a bid because of his sexual orientation. In his sophomore year, Crudele was made aware of Pi Kappa Alpha, a new fraternity on Towson’s campus that recruited brothers based on the principles that everyone is important and everyone has experiences to contribute. Crudele was impressed and secured a bid.

He returned home for winter break, still wrestling with the idea of revealing his true identity. But some news put his life in perspective: Sandi Vanderpool, his high school mentor, had cancer and would likely die within the year. “I found out she’d known that I was gay the entire time, but her yearbook message to me was to ‘live to free up my anxieties and live life and enjoy it,” he said. “I took that message with me, and I wasn’t sure what to do with it.”

More than a year later, Crudele took Vanderpool’s advice. The senior functions as an out gay man in his fraternity and formed the Greek Alliance Program, an organization designed to educate Greek community members about lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender issues. “We want this to be a nationally recognized benchmarking program,” Director of Fraternity and Sorority Life Matthew Lenno said. “It is needed in the Greek community and the community at large. In general, I have seen many atrocities done toward or against students/people that are LGBT. I believe it is horrible to not be accepted for who you are and for people to pass judgment on others for what they believe on or what they feel about themselves.” Crudele said that PIKE has the most out gay members in fraternity life because the brothers uphold the idea that members should not be chosen based on their identity, but rather what they could contribute to the fraternity. “We were formed from a different angle,” he said. “PIKEs were brought from different parts of campus, and since we all came from these different areas, we bred a more accepting environment.” Those values are what originally attracted Crudele, he said, as well as PIKE Vice President and Jon Lagnese, who said two of his closest friends and brothers identify as gay. “Education is limitless,” he said. “I’ve learned a lot from them, proper terms, things that annoy them about the heterosexual community, judgments and how that hurts them.” Lagnese said that sorority members have responded well to the Alliance’s attempts to educate those in Fraternity and Sorority Life about LGBT issues, but most fraternity members have yet to participate on a large scale. “We’re open to everyone,” he said. “It’s like other chapters are recognizing the alliance … but they’re not taking part. The Greek community could grow more if people took part in it.” Dan Hirsch, president of Phi Sigma Kappa and executive board member of the Greek Alliance, said he tries to influence his brothers to attend Alliance events and that other chapters have not been as respectful of the organization. “Because I’m the president, they respect everything I do,” he said. “When the Alliance had aworkshop, 10 of our members showed up to it – the other chapters not so much.”

Hirsch said that PIKE isn’t necessarily the only “diverse” fraternity on campus. “To be honest, it’s not [PIKE] making great strides,” he said. “I would say it’s because two years ago, anybody who wanted to join that fraternity could. I wouldn’t say it’s not so much recruiting a diverse community as having diverse people sign up two years ago. You can pinpoint that on recruitment. I think my fraternity is pretty diverse, too. Every fraternity is diverse in some shape or form.”

Not everyone is accepting in PIKE, though, according Justin Schwendeman, a gay sophomore who rushed PIKE his freshman year, but said he refused the bid because of the underlying hostility he felt from his pledge class. “Beforehand, I heard PIKE was all about not drinking and all that stuff,” Schwendmenan said. “But then going through rush, it seemed like a lot of different groups I can describe as like an all-boy’s school, where it was very divided,” he said. “The pledge class didn’t seem open to it because they didn’t know me. But all the PIKE guys were all very open.” Towson’s Fraternity and Sorority Life needs to make major improvements in terms of accepting LGBT members, Schwendeman said. “I know for a fact that there are other guys in fraternities who are afraid to come out because they’re afraid of their brothers judging them,” he said. One of the missions of the Greek Alliance Program is to promote acceptance and assist other Greek members in the coming out process, according to Crudele. “It’s a cultural change that’s going to happen over time,” Crudele said. “If 10 percent of the population is gay, then 10 percent of Greek life is gay, and with 1,300 students in Greek life, that’s 130 gay members.” Crudele said he hopes to help others avoid the trauma that was his coming out. “We don’t expect people to just come out all over campus,” he said. “But hopefully we can change the attitude and make people feel more accepted, make them feel like the eyes of the world aren’t on them.”

The take away from this article should help you understand that we gain nothing by discriminating against the LGBT community. We should articulate a policy of non-discrimination and never denied the prospect of membership into our Fraternity/Sorority to an individual or expelled an individual based on their sexual orientation.

Not only is this a violation of our own national non-discrimination membership policy, but it also goes against the standards set forth by the majority of state and federal laws against discrimination based on a person’s sexual orientation. All BGLO members should believe that all persons regardless of age, sex, race, gender, religion, ethnicity or sexual orientation should be treated with dignity and respect.

Until we are willing to have a healthy and honest dialogue on this issue, we fail to uphold our Founders’ vision for a organization that services our entire community.

this article appears in its entirety, The Bulletin, November 2011 issue

The Cost of Education vs. Prison

To underscore an issue long raised by criminal justice advocates, the study, entitled Misplaced Priorities: Over Incarcerate, Under Educate, uses data from leading researchers to illustrate how neighborhoods with high rates of incarceration also have a prevalence of woefully-funded, low-performing schools.

Misplaced Priorities, which was released in April 2011 and took one year to produce, maps out the funding disparities in six cities: Jackson, Miss; Houston, Philadelphia, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, and New York. Among the figures: Pennsylvania reportedly spends about $33,000 per prisoner annually compared with $4,000 per college student per year. And nearly 70% of Philadelphia’s low-performing schools, based on math proficiency, are located in or adjacent to areas with the highest incarceration rates.

Nationwide, about two million people are incarcerated in correctional facilities, the largest prison population in the world. Last year, the Pew Center on the States, a research group in Washington, DC, found that the number of prisoners statewide decreased slightly for the first time in nearly 40 years. But with some 200,000 people under federal custody, most of the incarcerated are housed in state facilities at a cost of more than $50 billion annually.

Marc Mauer, Executive Director of the Sentencing Project, a criminal justice research and advocacy group in Washington, DC states, “If we don’t invest enough in education, that may lead to more incarceration down the road.”

Reprinted from The Crisis, Fall 2011, p.56

“Hitting Budapest” wins Caine Prize for African Writing

Review by Ariana Austin

NoViolet Bulawayo won the Caine Prize, Africa's highest literary honor, this past July for her short story, "Hitting Budapest". It was announced at a dinner in Oxford, England, where she received a monetary award in addition to a future residency at Georgetown University. Authors often gamer considerable attention after winning what's known as the African "Booker" Prize. Hisham Matar, a Libyan author and chair of this year's committee, praised the rich language of Hitting Budapest and Bulawayo's ability "to refrain from moral commentary."

Bulawayo grew up in Zimbabwe and came to the United States shortly after high school. She describes herself as being of the "born free generation," those children born just after Zimbabwe's independence from the United Kingdom when unprecedented opportunities were supposed to exist. Instead Zimbabwe's economy collapsed under the weight of rogue leadership. Today there are more than 3 million Zimbabweans living abroad and seeking "promise" elsewhere. After relocating to the U.S. Bulawayo began to realize she was a writer, formally studied creative writing and recently completed an MFA at Cornell University. In addition to writing, she is exploring making films and plans to teach as well. She believes artists have to be engaged with their worlds, especially where social justice and human rights issues are concerned.

"Hitting Budapest" was first published in The Boston Review and follows a group of children who live in a shantytown called Paradise and travel to a wealthy neighborhood, Budapest, to “steal" guavas. Darling, the narrator tells us, "right now I'd die for guavas, or anything for that matter. My stomach feels like somebody just took a shovel and dug everything out." As the story approaches its climax, the children make a violating and desperate choice. The setting of their ordeal is intentionally ambiguous. "The story," Bulawayo told The Crisis, is "uniquely Zimbabwean but a universal story. it could be in Europe or the U.S. It's about marginalized communities and how they articulate their desperation."

In many ways, Bulawayo's story combines two classic archetypes - the coming-of-age and journey stories - forming a meditation on poverty, boundaries and the state of the have-nots in a postcolonial world. Understanding one's place, it seems, figures prominently in the main characters' contextualization of their own poverty. The questions Bulawayo poses relate directly to the present condition of many developing countries. Her admirable restraint allows readers to make the connections themselves and draw their own conclusions. When a group of children are hungry enough to make hardened choices like those presented in Hitting Budapest, who or what is to blame? Is it the woman whose "Save Darfur" t-shirt in no way informs her own humanity when it comes to a group of small children; is it the president of this unnamed nation, an international body, or is it irresponsible individual choices?

NoViolet Bulawayo provides no easy answers, but she does make a point about names. As she explains, "they are ‘parents' prayers' for their children" - so readers get main characters with names like Darling and Godknows. She has recently completed a novel manuscript tentatively titled We Need New Names. Perhaps, new names and new prayers can shed light on the essential questions posed in her work.

Ariana Austin is a freelance writer based in Washington D.C. and currently a graduate student in the fiction program at Johns Hopkins University. She is the founding director of Art All Night DC; the first overnight arts-and-culture festival held last September in the nation's capital.

Reprinted from The Crisis, Fall 2011, p43

John le Carré and the rise of George Smily

Review by Anthony Lane

The opening sentence of "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy," a 1974 novel by John le Carré, runs as follows: "The truth is, if old Major Dover hadn't dropped dead at Taunton races, Jim would never have come to Thursgood's at all." The tone is instant and unmistakable, with our narrator buttonholing us like a man who, having overheard our conversation in a pub, is leaning across to join in, or to contest our version of events. We are plunged in medias res, but what are the res? Taunton is a town in Somerset, in southwest England, but who, pray, is this defunct major? And what might Thursgood's be? It turns out to be a prep school-a private establishment, for boys up to the age of thirteen, and a likely seedbed for some of the future spies, at once clubbable and closely guarded, who bestrew le Carre's work. Hence the dash of genius in those first three words, enough to show that we are already in the hands of a supreme ironist: "The truth is." It never just is. Truths are misty and multiple, like ghosts. Believe in them all you like, but you won't pin them down.

Then, there is Jim, poor Jim Prideaux, lately a stalwart of the Secret Intelligence Service, or S.I.S.-known to the public as M.I.6, or, within the pages of le Carre, as the Circus. The nameless old ringmaster of the place, referred to only as Control, was privately convinced that one of his senior figures was a Soviet-run double agent-or, in Circus patois, a mole. Jim was dispatched to Eastern Europe on a solo mission, to discover, from a contact, the identity of the traitor, and report back to Control. Whoever the mole was, though, he knew all about Jim's venture and set a trap. Jim was snared, shot twice in the back, tortured until there was nothing left to confess, and then sent back to England, broken and bitter, where he took Major Dover's old job, teaching foreign languages to the pale boys of Somerset. Jim feels half at home there, for what does a boarding school resemble, with its cryptic slang, its awkward alliances, and its arcane regulations, if not the Circus?

That, at any rate, is le Carre's vision of the spying game, and it is one that has enveloped readers ever since "Call for the Dead," in 1961. At the age of eighty, he is still writing, with a disappointed fury that seems to have heated up, rather than cooled, over time; last year saw the publication of his twenty-second novel, "Our Kind of Traitor." Le Carre's characters have roamed across the map, from Panama to Israel and the Caucasus, while leaving certain territories, notably North America, uncharted. There is no doubt, however, that his favored stalking ground is Europe, East and West, and that the era that most consistently arouses his imagination, and to which, with a twinge of pardonable nostalgia, he occasionally harks back, is the Cold War. "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" creaks and glistens' in the bleak midwinter of that epoch, throughout which, to borrow a beautiful phrase from Coleridge that sums up le Carre's achievement, "the Frost performs its secret ministry."

And so to the snowman-in-chief. Think of a superhero, cross to the polar opposite, and you bump into something like this: Small, podgy and at best middle-aged, he was by appearance one of London's meek who do not inherit the earth. His legs were short, his gait anything but agile, his dress costly, ill-fitting and extremely wet.

That is how readers of "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" first encounter George Smiley, the puzzled problem-solver of the novel’s maze, as he hastens along a rainy London street. It is by no means his first appearance in the pages of le Carre. He was in "Call for the Dead," and then in "A Murder of Quality" (1962), in which he is somehow transfigured into a detective, and asked by a friend to investigate a murder at a public school. (In English parlance, that means private. Le Carre based it on the school that he had attended and despised. I went there myself) The following year, Smiley slipped into "The Spy Who Came In from the Cold," which remains le Carre's most celebrated work, partly because it scraped every lingering speck of James Bond from our understanding of what spying might entail. Smiley is compared to a "surgeon who has grown tired of blood," thus yielding the odd, Prufrockian sense of a man whose great days, as a hopeful human, are already behind him, even though his finest hour, as a spy, may be yet to come. He is said to be "a kindly, worried little man," and the diminutive marks him as a bit player: an impression confirmed by "The Looking-Glass War" (1965), where he is granted a wretched and thankless minor part, pulling agents out of a job near the East German border, and leaving another man at the mercy of the foe. All of which is grist for the mill of contrition and regret that grinds within Smiley's conscience, and which accounts for the weary but determined air with which he shuffles, "with a lumpy skip," onto center stage, in "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy," and finally assumes his rightful role.

From the start, Smiley has a habit of being dragged out of retirement, like a badger from hibernation, to inspect the Circus, and, if required, erase disorder or rot. Even in "Call for the Dead," we learn, he has already done his undercover duty in the Second World War, and withdrawn into scholarly quietude at Oxford; then comes the summons. So it is with "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy." Control has died, taking his fears of betrayal to the grave, and unmourned except by Smiley, who lost his job not long afterward. Now the murmured possibility of a mole has emerged once more, and the list of suspects has been narrowed to four wise men, each with a code name culled from a nursery rhyme: Percy Alleline, Tinker; Bill Haydon, Tailor; Roy Bland, Soldier; and Toby Esterhase, Poorman. Smiley himself was once the fifth man-labelled Beggarman, which is no surprise. As an ex-spy, he is in the clear, and ideally placed to come in from the cold, at the invitation of the Cabinet Office, and find the culprit. Jim Prideaux tried, and took two bullets for his pains; now it is Smiley's turn.

Still, this hunt is a ponderous and twilit matter, much of it conducted amid files and archives, and Smiley's most energetic act is to polish his spectacles on the thick end of his tie, so what is the appeal? One answer came in 1979, when the BBC screened a seven-part adaptation of "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy," directed by John Irvin; and now the same tale, with the same title, has landed on cinema screens. The director is Tomas Alfredson, the Swedish master of slow-release dread, whose vampire film "Let the Right One In" seeped into our consciousness in 2008; that alone seems ample preparation for the bloodsuckers of British intelligence. As for the leading role, battle is summarily joined. In the new corner, we have Gary Oldman-tight and trim, a Smiley who keeps in shape with regular dips in the river. And, in the ancient corner, Alec Guinness, in a performance no less Buddha-like, in its opaque yet disarming sagacity, than it seemed thirty-two years ago. Time doesn't fly. It freezes.

I was not the only one chained to the couch by the TV series, when it originally aired. Millions watched and waited, over six weeks, for the mole to be unearthed. The production was one of those lavish, patient affairs which flourished in the heyday of British television drama; its span reached from "The Forsyte Saga," in 1967, to "The Singing Detective," nearly two decades later, upheld at its midpoint by "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" and, in 1981, by "Brideshead Revisited." The fact that most of these narratives grew from good books mattered less than the honor and the esteem in which they held their viewers, presuming that we were literate and curious enough to dig in for the long haul, and to stay with the talkative tangles of the plot. That level of fixation was well suited to "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy," whose shabby domestic stillness was not so different from the lives of the people watching-as if our TV screen were a net curtain or a half-drawn blind, and we ourselves were spying on the spies. In "Brideshead Revisited," with its roster of sumptuous locations and the wattage of its supporting stars, beginning with Laurence Olivier, you could see how the budget had been expended. Look at the scroll of actors' names, however, in "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy": Terence Rigby, Michael Jayston, Bernard Hepton, George Sewell. I admired Jayston, in particular, who had been a dour but dashing Mr. Rochester in a 1973 version of “Jane Eyre"; he thus made a perfect Peter Guillam, Smiley’s sidekick, a fellow of comparable timbre. None of these solid souls, though, were hired to set the screen ablaze. They were there to simmer.

It was left to Guinness, of course, to insure that the excitement never quite boiled over. Even the glasses he wore became an item of armor instead of a visual aid. As Smiley donned them, the thickness of the lenses made him downright scary, whereas when he took them off he was left blinking and exposed-could he, we wondered in a burst of heresy, be the mole, after all? In the new movie, the glasses become time frames: Oldman has one pair, horn rimmed, to show that we are in flashback, with Smiley still working for Control, and another, larger pair to make it dear that we have skipped ahead. That is typical of Alfredson's film, which is obliged, by its two hour duration, to keep things crisp.

Here's the strangest thing: the television series, lasting more than five and a quarter hours, was bovine of pace, often ugly to behold, and content to meander along byways that petered out into open country or led inexorably to dead ends, yet I was tensed and transfixed by every minute, like a worshipper at a familiar Mass whose mystery will never abate. The new version, by comparison, feels purposeful, unbaffled, artfully composed, and lit, amazingly, with hints of jocularity. (There is even a Christmas party at the Circus; imagine what Guinness would have made of that.) But something in the drama has been dulled, and I was almost bored. Irvin's end credits rolled to the sound of the Nunc Dimittis and a shot of Oxford's golden stone, mischievously hinting that the whole palaver had been nothing more than a donnish diversion. Alfredson, on the other hand, doses with "La Mer," which I last heard sung at the end of "Finding Nemo." As for the denouement, we have had too little room, in so cramped a space, to spend time with Tinker, Tailor, and the others, and to scrutinize each man in turn, and therefore, at the end, our overwhelming reaction is: Big deal. We got the mole, but do we get the point?

To an extent, this is not Alfredson's fault. Some of his choices are perverse, like the decision to rehouse Smiley not in the tragic cubbyhole of a hotel, near Paddington Station, to which le Carre rightly consigned him but in a loft like affair with sizable windows, through which far too many outsiders could peer. Other shifts are more ingenious; where the small screen was ashen and gray, in tribute to the atmosphere of exhaustion that pervades le Carre's novel, cinemagoers must brace themselves for an explosion of brown. Welcome to the fashionable nineteen-seventies, where your walls matched your sideburns. The sealed, podlike chamber in which the high priests of intelligence convene is a nightmare of muddy orange, and Guillam, the resident cavalier of the Circus, drives not a sporty MG, as he did on TV, but a Citroen DS the color of light manure. One change wrought by Alfredson strikes me as inspired: where Guillam, on the page, was a practiced ladykiller, running a string of girlfriends as if they were foreign agents, we see him now, played by Benedict Cumberbatch, breaking up with a male lover-a secret demanding to be tucked away, in the mid-seventies, far more than it would these days. The question of sexuality barely touches the hem of the Smiley books. "It saddened him to witness in himself the gradual death of natural pleasure," we read in "Call for the Dead," and he himself is presented as the simplest of fools-married to the lustrous Lady Ann, who dispenses her favors to almost anyone who asks, including Tailor (Colin Firth, in the new film). Cuckoldry has been a comic standby since Aristophanes; in the person of Smiley, I would suggest, the joke, at last, ran out.

When Guillam is left by his companion, he cries: one of a handful of weepers in the new film, which feels more emotionally stricken than its predecessor. The struggle, back then, was a moral one against a nagging dread that the West had nothing more to offer, apart from the satisfaction of greed, than its sterner rival in the East, and that what might remain, between spies, was a pure exchange of tactics, ungilded with sentiment or faith. On TV, the mole, once revealed, declared, "The secret services are the only real expression of a nation's character," which is not a bad motto for the whole story. As for his own nation, his main grievance was aimed at its dreamy pretensions of power. "Britain-oh, dear," he said, with a sniff, adding, "No viability whatever in world affairs." When you scanned the backdrop of the drama, it was ominously hard to disagree. "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” began with a band of colorless colleagues, either smoking or carrying cups of foul coffee, entering a dingy room, scarcely bothering to greet one another, and expert only in a life of professional pretense. It didn't seem much to fight for. Yet I have often thought, If only the mole had burrowed down and clung on, he would have seen the land he had loathed and betrayed taken over by a woman who shared every inch of his frustration at its lassitude and pitiful want of pride. Could the double agent not have turned triple, and become a rampant Thatcherite?

In all its forms, "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" strikes the eye, and other senses, as demonstrably real. You can taste the "half-eaten food, over which white flakes off at had formed like seasonable frost." That is Smiley, dining on the rations of the Cold War; Graham Greene would have smacked his lips. But is any of this true? Is the Circus, as spun into being by le Carre, the sheerest fiction, completely unconnected to the authentic labors of spying, in Britain or elsewhere? "Oh, not completely." Such was the careful answer proffered by an acquaintance of mine, who knows the Secret Intelligence Service as well as anyone alive. He made three pertinent points. One, that le Carre himself whose actual name is David Cornwell served in the S.L.S. for no longer than five years, from 1959 to 1964, and that all his subsequent fables are founded on the template of that distant time. Two, that the sly, sour infighting that leaks through the novels does an injustice to the congenial conduct of most officers in the Service, who are, as my acquaintance said, "notably good company"-as they have to be, given the demands of their trade, which would unsettle lesser or more divisive folk. Three, that le Carre has reversed the polarities. Where there is trust (and espionage, like the military, cannot hope to function without trust), he finds only treachery. Hearts and minds are not to be won, in his world; they are for sale.

That belief, it goes without saying, is his privilege as a writer. We may carp at the veracity of what emerges from his near-paranoid dismay, but we are also the beneficiaries of its thrills. Just as we turn to Dickens's prisons not as documentary testaments to Victorian penal practice but as iron-tough metaphors for the dreadful tethering of free play in every sphere of human action, so the Circus speaks to our profound unease in the face of all secrets. We love to lurk in their midst, to learn their codes, and to be initiated into the circle of their charm; hence the delicious slang that salts the Smiley books, and that every reader quickly comes to relish-all the ' moles, lamplighters, scalphunters, babysitters, reptile funds, mothers, Cousins, inquisitors, and joes. At the same time, the secrets that lie beyond our field of vision are a wellspring of great disquiet; they tell at best of unknowable national security, at worst of unreachable loneliness, or of a kingdom that has been hollowed out, like a marriage, without our even noticing. Hence the inventory, in "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy," of all the minutiae that have never ceased to encircle Smiley, and to menace his peace of mind: The creak of a stair that had not creaked before; the rustle of a shutter when no wind was blowing; the car with a different number plate but the same scratch on the offside wing; the face on the underground that you know you have seen somewhere before: for years at a time these were signs he had lived by; any one of them was reason enough to move, change towns, identities. For in that profession there is no such thing as coincidence.

The echo, here, is of Freud, who writes, in his great essay on the uncanny, about "the sense of helplessness" that is caused by such unsettling repetitions. What on earth would an entire life be like, composed of such rustles and creaks? And where do we wind up, once all the secrets are out? With "a fat, barefooted spy, as Ann would say, deceived in love and impotent in hate, clutching a gun in one hand, a bit of string in the other." That is le Carre's portrait of Smiley, in a Circus safe house, unable to find his way in the dark. Compare the finale of "Smiley's People," the dense and compulsive sequel published in 1979, and televised, again with Guinness, in 1982. This finds our hero pursuing Karla-his lifelong nemesis, the fanatical head of Moscow Centre ("Seemed to be head boy," in the words of Jim Prideaux), and the former controller of the mole. Tracking Karla, Smiley crisscrosses the flatlands of northern Europe in a quest that is momentous to both men but whose grail would mean nothing to others; we are almost in the realms of Beckett. With a dose of concentrated blackmail, Karla is finally lured across a Berlin bridge and into the West. But, again, what figure is cut by the evil mastermind when he appears? “He wore a grimy shirt and a black tie: he looked like a poor man going to the funeral of a friend." Le Carre has never written a better sentence, one so impatient of ideology and so attentive to what he, following W. H. Auden, describes plainly as “the human situation." The television series of "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" has lost none of its grip, and the new film will recruit new friends to the cause; but if we seek George Smiley and his people, with their full complement of terrors, illusions, and shames, we should follow the example of the ever-retiring Smiley, and go back to our books. That's the truth.

reprinted from The New Yorker, 12 December 2011, p.84

It Could Be Old Age, or It Could Be Low B12

As we age, our ability to absorb B12 from food declines, and often so does our consumption of foods rich in this vitamin. A B12 deficiency can creep up without warning and cause a host of confusing symptoms that are likely to be misdiagnosed or ascribed to aging. Interesting article by Dr. Jane Brody.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/29/health/vitamin-b12-deficiency-can-cause-symptoms-that-mimic-aging.html

Is OWS still relevant?

DEBT BY DEGREES
by James Surowiecki

The protesters at Occupy Wall Street may not have put forth an explicit set of demands yet, but there is one thing that they all agree on: student debt is too damn high. Since the late nineteen-seventies, annual costs at four-year colleges have risen three times as fast as inflation, and, with savings rates dropping and state aid to colleges being cut, students have been forced to take on ever more debt in order to pay for school. The past decade has seen a student-loan binge, so that today Americans owe well over six hundred billion dollars in college debt. That's a burden that's hard to carry at a time when more than two million college graduates are unemployed and millions more are underemployed. Some of the boom in student debt can be chalked up to demographics: in the past decade, the number of college-age Americans rose by more than three million and the proportion of eighteen-to-twenty- four-year-olds enrolled in college went from thirty-five per cent to forty one per cent. Still, the piles of student loans are due largely to the fact that the cost of a college degree has been going up much faster than people's incomes. And that has raised the spectre that we might be living through a "higher-education bubble," in which Americans are irrationally borrowing money to spend more on college than it's actually worth.

We've just endured two huge bubbles, which sent the value of stocks and then homes to ridiculous levels, so the theory isn't implausible. Of course, a college-education bubble wouldn't look exactly like a typical asset bubble, because you can't flip a college degree the way you can flip a stock, or even a home. But what bubble believers are really saying is that young people today are radically overestimating the economic value of going to college, and that many of them would be better off doing something else with their time and money. After all, wages for college graduates actually fell over the past decade, and the unemployment rate for recent grads is close to ten per cent. That's hardly a ringing endorsement of the economic value of education.

There's a big flaw in the bubble argument, though: things may look grim for college graduates, but they're much grimmer for people without a college degree. Though recent college grads are having a hard time finding a job, it's much harder for recent high-school graduates, who have an unemployment rate of nearly twenty-two per cent. And the over-all unemployment rate for college grads is still, at 4.4 per cent, very low. More striking, the college wage premium-how much more a college graduate makes than someone without a degree-is at an all-time high. In fact, the spira11ing cost of education has to some degree tracked the rising wage premium; as college has, in relative terms, become more valuable economically, people have become willing to pay more for it. It's telling, in this regard, that the one period in the past sixty years when college-tuition costs flatlined was during the seventies, which also happened to be the one period when the college wage premium fell.

This isn't to say that eighteen-year-olds are perfectly rational economic actors. Most obviously, many of them borrow a lot of money and then don't finish college, ending up debt-laden and without a degree. But there's little evidence that kids are systematically overestimating the value of college, the way homeowners systematically overestimated the value of homes during the bubble. Nor is there much reason to think that a degree will matter less in the future: the demand for college grads in the workforce has been increasing steadily for sixty years.

The bubble analogy does work in one respect: education costs, and student debt, are rising at what seem like unsustainable rates. But this isn't the result of collective delusion. Instead, it stems from the peculiar economics of education, which have a lot in common with the economics of health care, another industry with a huge cost problem. (Indeed, in recent decades the cost of both college education and health care has risen sharply in most developed countries, not just the U.S.) Both industries suffer from an ailment called Baumol’s cost disease, which was diagnosed by the economist William Baumol, back in the sixties. Baumol recognized that some sectors of the economy, like manufacturing, have rising productivity-they regularly produce more with less, which leads to higher wages and rising living standards. But other sectors, like education, have a harder time increasing productivity. Ford, after all, can make more cars with fewer workers and in less time than it did in 1980. But the average student-teacher ratio in college is sixteen to one, just about what it was thirty years ago. In other words, teachers today aren't any more productive than they were in 1980. The problem is that colleges can't pay 1980 salaries, and the only way they can pay 2011 salaries is by raising prices. And the Baumol problem is exacerbated by the arms-race problem: colleges compete to lure students by investing in expensive things, like high profile faculty members, fancy facilities, and a low student-to-teacher ratio.

The college-bubble argument makes the solution to rising costs seem simple: if people just wake up, the bubble will pop, and reasonable prices will return. It's much tougher to admit that there is no easy way out. Maybe we need to be willing to spend more and more of our incomes and taxpayer dollars on school, or maybe we need to be willing to pay educators and administrators significantly less, or maybe we need to find ways to make colleges more productive places, which would mean radically changing our idea of what going to college is all about. Until America figures out its priorities, college kids are going to have to keep running just to stand still.

- reprinted from the New Yorker, 21 November 2011, p50

Understanding FOX News

by David Frum

EXTREMISM and CONFLICT make for bad politics but great TV. Over the past two decades, conservatism has evolved from a political philosophy into a market segment. An industry has grown up to serve that segment-and its stars have become the true thought leaders of the conservative world. The business model of the conservative media is built on two elements: provoking the audience into a fever of indignation (to keep them watching) and fomenting mistrust of all other information sources (so that they never change the channel). As a commercial proposition, this model has worked brilliantly in the Obama era. As journalism, not so much. As a tool of political mobilization, it backfires, by inciting followers to the point at which they force leaders into confrontations where everybody loses, like the summertime showdown over the debt ceiling.

But the thought leaders on talk radio and Fox do more than shape opinion. Backed by their own wing of the book publishing industry and supported by think tanks that increasingly function as public-relations agencies, conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics. Outside this alternative reality, the United States is a country dominated by a strong Christian religiosity. Within it, Christians are a persecuted minority. Outside the system, President Obama-whatever his policy errors-is a figure of imposing intellect and dignity. Within the system, he's a pitiful nothing, unable to speak without a teleprompter, an affirmative-action phony doomed to inevitable defeat. Outside the system, social scientists worry that the U.S. is hardening into one of the most rigid class societies in the Western world, in which the children of the poor have less chance of escape than in France, Germany, or even England. Inside the system, the U.S. remains (to borrow the words of Senator Marco Rubio) "the only place in the world where it doesn't matter who your parents were or where you came from."

We used to say "You're entitled to your own opinion, but not to your own facts.” Now we are all entitled to our own facts, and conservative media use this right to immerse their audience in a total environment of pseudo-facts and pretend information.

When contemplating the ruthless brilliance of this system, it's tempting to fall back on the theory that the GOP is masterminded by a cadre of sinister billionaires, deftly manipulating the political process for their own benefit. The billionaires do exist, and some do indeed attempt to influence the political process. The bizarre fiasco of campaign-finance reform has perversely empowered them to give unlimited funds anonymously to special entities that can spend limitlessly. (Thanks, Senator McCain! Nicejob, Senator Feingold!) Yet, for the most part, these Republican billionaires are not acting cynically. They watch Fox News too, and they're gripped by the same apocalyptic fears as the Republican base. In funding the tea-party movement, they are actually acting against their own longer-term interests, for it is the richest who have the most interest in political stability, which depends upon broad societal agreement that the existing distribution of rewards is fair and reasonable. If the social order comes to seem unjust to large numbers of people, what happens next will make Occupy Wall Street look like a street fair.

excerpt from "When Did The GOP Lose Touch With Reality?" New York magazine, 28 Nov 2011, p.50