Science as Woman's Work

Arleen Forsheit was deep into the intricacies of stoichiometry with her accelerated chemistry class one morning in January when the subject abruptly turned to the president of Harvard. He had said something about how "innate differences" kept women from excelling like men in math and science. "If that's true," one girl asked Dr. Forsheit, "then what are we doing here anyway?" To which the teacher replied, "It's not true."

As a scientist, Dr. Forsheit knew that words, however reassuring, were not enough. A hypothesis needed evidence, an assertion required proof. And what offered more proof than the scene unfolding before her amid the graduated cylinders, gas spigots and molecule models of her own lab. Nearly a dozen ninth graders, every one female, were mastering the mathematics of chemical equations, otherwise known as stoichiometry.

No place in America, perhaps, supplied a more forceful rejoinder to conventional assumptions about women and science than Marlborough School, a private all-female institution for Grades 7 through 12 in Los Angeles. Ninety percent of its 263 upper-school students take more than the two full years of science required for graduation, filling no less than eight physics classes and populating a coveted seminar known as Honors Research. They have gone on to major in sciences at Stanford, U.C.L.A., Yale, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, and, yes, Harvard.

At the same time that Marlborough dashes the thesis of the Harvard president, Lawrence H. Summers, though, it also recognizes that the gender imbalance in the sciences that led to his comments has been real and cannot be wished away with paeans to diversity. In a conscious, deliberate way, Marlborough set about in the last decade to alter its century-old reputation as a stronghold of the arts and humanities - women's work, academically speaking.

"We wanted to establish the expectation that in all ways the bar is high and that our girls can achieve in all areas," said Barbara Wagner, the head of school at Marlborough, who was a music teacher.

Dr. Forsheit put it similarly: "We wanted science to have the same mind share as humanities. We wanted girls to take the extra year of science the way they were already taking the extra year of history or foreign language."

To the task, Marlborough brought the obvious advantages of a well-endowed independent school: small class sizes, lofty admissions standards, wealthy alumni. Still, the school's achievements in science also must be understood as the result of a different factor: There are no boys at Marlborough to dominate, distract or intimidate smart girls.

With a dress code strong on khaki, navy and pleats, Marlborough has also made itself an island apart from the relentlessly materialistic and pervasively sexual popular culture manufactured practically next door by Southern California's entertainment industry.

In the single-sex environment, girls can be girlish and at the same time be brilliant. They can giggle and tug on split ends and speak in those sing-song Valley Girl cadences, all the while discoursing on such personal specialties as cognitive psychology, phytoplankton, Parkinson's disease and mother-infant attachment among gibbons.

"It's assumed every girl will take math and science, not just the special ones," said Jessica Friedland, a 17-year-old senior from Los Angeles who will enter Stanford in the fall. "It's always surprising to people from other schools. You can see the shrugging of the shoulders, the rolling of the eyes. I say, 'Why not take Physics C?' I was never a good speller, anyway."

Having come of age two generations earlier, Dr. Forsheit experienced a fiercer sort of resistance. The sole daughter of a New York truck driver with an eighth-grade education, she was informed by him that she could only attend college if it was free. Fortunately, Brooklyn College met the criteria, and from there she advanced to a master's degree in biology from Columbia, a doctorate in molecular biology from U.C.L.A. and a post-doctoral fellowship from the California Institute of Technology.

Along with diplomas, she collected indignities. A Columbia professor once predicted that she would bomb in physical chemistry. (She got an A.) A brother-in-law said of her Cal Tech position, "You took a job that should've gone to a man." A lack of child care forced her to leave research in the 1970's to raise her two children, both daughters.

ULTIMATELY, she enrolled them in Marlborough, and found her way into a part-time faculty position. At that point, in 1989, only 10 girls in the entire school took physics. When Ms. Wagner was appointed head of school soon after, though, Dr. Forsheit gained a potent ally and advocate in building up the science program.

Out went the traditional "layer-cake" approach to middle-school science - separate yearlong courses in life, earth and physical science - and in came integrated courses that emphasized laboratory work over lectures. During the 1990's, Marlborough raised $7 million to expand and update its science rooms. The number of science faculty members went from 6 to 10, half of them women.

Most important, in the ineffable way of such things, the communal culture of the school changed. High-end science became, well, cool. That was clearest of all in Dr. Forsheit's honors seminar, which pairs about 10 juniors and seniors with an individual mentor from a hospital or research center to conduct research.

Often, the Marlborough girls are six or eight years younger than even the greenest graduate student in the lab. Yet some, like Stephanie Dusaban, have closed much of the knowledge gap over the past year. Her project developing stem cells at the Saban Research Institute in Los Angeles helped persuade Cornell University not only to admit her but also to offer her $8,000 for research - the sort of incentive generally dangled in front of doctoral candidates, not incoming freshmen.

Tomorrow night, Dr. Forsheit's elite students will present their final projects to classmates, faculty members and parents. At Marlborough, the ritual is "the academic equivalent of a debutante ball," as the author Karen Stabiner writes in her 2003 book about single-sex education, "All Girls" (Riverhead Books).

Which does not mean that all of the spectators can fully appreciate the spectacle. "My parents read all of my research papers," said Meryl Holt, a 17-year-old senior choosing between Stanford and Harvard. "And they always say afterward: 'You know, Meryl, that's so great, so well-written. I don't know what a word of it meant.' "

TV makes you smarter - and fat people live longer

"If watching TV really makes you smarter, as Steven Johnson argued in an article in yesterday's New York Times Magazine (an excerpt from his forthcoming book) then I guess I need to watch a lot more of it, because try as I might, I could make no sense of Johnson's piece. As far as I can tell, his thesis is that television shows have slowly grown more and more complicated over the last two decades (this paradigm shift apparently having begun with Hill Street Blues, the Gutenberg Bible of the smart-TV era), so that now, like rats in a behaviorist's maze, trained viewers can differentiate among up to 12 distinct plotlines in shows like The Sopranos. (The technical term for this great leap forward in human cognition: "multi-threading.") In other words, if I understand correctly, watching TV teaches you to watch more TV—a truth already grasped by the makers of children's programming like Teletubbies, which is essentially a tutorial instructing toddlers in the basics of vegging out."

I'm still waiting for someone to bust the ridiculously self-serving "fat people live longer" meme going around...

Information Overload

Knowing When to Log Off

Wired campuses may be causing 'information overload'

By JEFFREY R. YOUNG

David M. Levy, a computer scientist who loves technology and gets more than 100 e-mail messages a day, makes a point of unplugging from the Internet one day each week to clear his head. Even so, with all the e-mail messages flooding in, with academic blogs bursting with continuous debate, and with the hectic pace set by an increasingly wired world, Mr. Levy says he cannot help but feel an occasional sense of information overload.

And that, he says, is something to stop and think about.

Mr. Levy, a professor at the University of Washington's Information School, is one of many scholars trying to raise awareness of the negative impact of communication technologies on people's lives and work. They say the quality of research and teaching at colleges is at risk unless scholars develop strategies for better managing information, and for making time for extensive reading and contemplation.

"We're losing touch with the contemplative roots of scholarship, the reflective dimension," says Mr. Levy. "When you think that universities are meant to be in effect the think tanks for the culture, or at least one of the major forms of thinking, that strikes me as a very serious concern."

At Washington, Mr. Levy is working to create a laboratory to explore those issues, to be called the Center for Information and the Quality of Life. He received a $25,000 grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to help plan the center, though he is still looking for support for its operation.

He and other scholars have already started a dialogue on the topic. Last year Mr. Levy organized a conference at the university called "Information, Silence, and Sanctuary" that brought together artists, philosophers, sociologists, and others, and was supported by the university and by grants from MacArthur and the National Science Foundation.

Mr. Levy hopes the conversations will grow into a new kind of movement focused on people's informational environments and on reducing data smog.

Scholars are beginning to realize "that our information ecology is endangered as well," says Mr. Levy. "We're just at the very beginning of even being clear about the nature of what the problems are."

'Not Anti-E-Mail'

Colleges were early in embracing the Internet and other communication technologies, and campuses remain some of the most wired environments anywhere. Although many professors say the Internet has enhanced their teaching and scholarship -- by better connecting them with colleagues around the world, by providing easier access to research materials, and by increasing contact with students -- it has also brought new challenges, such as keeping online tasks from becoming unwieldy.

"When I sit down at a conference or lunch with a colleague, there's a pretty good chance we'll talk about being overwhelmed by e-mail and what we're doing about it," says Buzz Alexander, an English professor at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. "I'm not anti-e-mail. I'm advantaged and disadvantaged by e-mail like everybody else."

On the syllabus for his course "What Is Literature?" he tells students not to contact him by e-mail. He says he tries to make sure he is available for one-on-one meetings to respond to any questions -- after class, during his office hours, or over coffee. "If they're in my office," he says, "I can say to them, 'How are you liking the course?' or 'How are things going?'" And he worries that he would not be able to keep up with a flood of e-mail questions from students who expect an instant response.

Bill McKibben, a scholar in residence in environmental studies at Middlebury College, says the issue is more than just one of time management.

"There's the real danger that one is absorbing and responding to bursts of information, rather than having time to think," says Mr. McKibben, author of Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age (Times Books, 2003). "What's only gradually becoming clear is not just a pragmatic drawback but an intellectual drawback to having so many trees that there's no possibility of seeing the forest."

He says he is not immune from feelings of information overload, and that he has tried to work out strategies for dealing with the flood of communication he gets each day. When he is working on a book or is near a deadline, for instance, he only checks his e-mail messages once a day, in the evening. And he uses a slow dial-up connection at home, even though he could afford a faster broadband service, so that he is less tempted to surf the Web.

"I think part of it is that my mind, and perhaps human minds in general, are geared toward novelty, and so it's difficult to discipline yourself to disregard each new incoming e-mail and each new incoming thing that you can instantly track down and print out," he says.

Some scholars worry that even tools meant to help home in on specific information could have a negative impact on research.

For instance, Michael Gorman, president-elect of the American Library Association and dean of library services at California State University at Fresno, wants to make sure students and professors do not become so enthralled with Google, which plans to scan millions of books and add them to its popular search engine, that they stop reading books the old-fashioned way.

"We all know that, in Googleworld, speed is of the essence, but it is not to most scholarly research in the real world," Mr. Gorman wrote in a recent editorial in the Los Angeles Times. "Massive databases of digitized whole books, especially scholarly books, are expensive exercises in futility based on the staggering notion that, for the first time in history, one form of communication (electronic) will supplant and obliterate all previous forms."

In an interview, Mr. Gorman stressed that he is not against technology, and that he is a strong supporter of digital-library projects for special collections and rare materials. "I'm all in favor of technology being used wisely," he said. "My basic point is the best thing to do with a scholarly book is to sit and read it," rather than skim an excerpt that is revealed by a search engine. "A book is not just an accumulation of facts, it's an argument, a cumulative piece of knowledge, and is designed to be read sequentially."

Stopping to Think

Since students are generally even more wired than professors, some college officials think students should be encouraged to take some time away from computers, cellphones, and other communication devices.

"The amount of information that goes into a young person's head today is incredible," says David H. Landers, director of the student resource center at Saint Michael's College, in Colchester, Vt. His main concern is that students have replaced face-to-face contact with instant messaging and e-mail. "They're not going to have the same quality of interpersonal relations that will help them in a work environment," he argues.

He says colleges should encourage students to get involved in community projects where they see what life is like outside of their high-tech campus bubble. "We recognize technology," he says, "but we can't become slaves to it."

David Rothenberg, a professor of philosophy at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, took a novel approach to fighting overload in a class he taught called "Technology and Contemplation." He used a few minutes of each class session to have students meditate.

"If you stop talking and have people sit silently for five minutes, that's a good use of time because people are so stressed out," he says. "It really had a positive effect." He says he is no expert on meditation, and that the bulk of the class dealt with texts that looked at the differences and similarities between technical thinking and contemplative thinking. He tried the techniques with the support of a small grant from the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, a secular nonprofit group.

Mr. Levy says his weekly day off from technology is part of his observation of the Jewish Sabbath (his wife is a rabbi), but that he recommends time away from computer monitors as a practice in itself. "I'm not suggesting that anyone else be Jewish," he says, "but rather if you think about the idea of the Sabbath, which is a time apart, a time to cultivate different qualities, that seems like a very important idea for our culture."

He says information overload is one aspect of a larger problem that includes "fragmented attention, busyness, and the speed-up of daily life."

"It isn't just the amount of information," he argues. "It's the expectation that we're going to go faster and faster and faster."

Arthur G. Zajonc, a physics professor at Amherst College who is also director of the academic program for the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, says many people take pride in replying to e-mail messages instantly, leading them to dash off terse, often uncivil, responses. He says he makes it a point to pause and rethink his outgoing e-mail messages for 30 seconds before sending them, to make sure he hasn't been overly curt. "Everything is so fast and also a little bit anonymous" with e-mail, he says. "So you have to pause to reflect on who this person is" that will be reading the message and how they might perceive it.

Broader Issues

Academics are not the only ones feeling overwhelmed, of course, and a growing number of researchers are looking at technology's impacts on the quality of life outside of colleges.

Norman H. Nie, director of the Stanford Institute for the Quantitative Study of Society, at Stanford University, found in a recent survey that Internet use tends to cut into family time, and can lead to feelings of isolation. For the average respondent, an hour on the Internet reduced face-to-face time with family by 23.5 minutes per day, he says.

"It's not whether to use the Internet or not use the Internet," said Mr. Nie in an interview. "It's how much time we really spend on it. Time is a hydraulic system. If you spend two hours doing one thing, you can't spend it doing something else."

Mr. Nie admits to a fair amount of Internet use himself, and says he feels it has changed his habits, perhaps cutting into some leisure time.

Eric Brende became so fed up with technology that he quit his graduate studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology a few years ago to spend 18 months living with his wife in a rural farming community. (He wouldn't say where exactly to protect the identities of the people he wrote about.) He argues that the negative aspects of using technology have become so great that we would all be better off giving up nearly all modern devices -- including washing machines, lawn mowers, and cars. He published a book about his experiences and beliefs, called Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology (HarperCollins, 2004).

He argues that living more simply actually yields more leisure time, and forces people to forge greater bonds with neighbors because of a greater need for cooperation (such as for the occasional barn raising). And he notes that not enough people are looking critically at the impact of technology. "Whatever impact it's having," he says, "people are overlooking the negative aspects of it, one of which is, I think, a loss of a sense of leisure and contemplation."

Mr. Brende, who now lives in St. Louis, has not completely switched off technology, though. He said in an interview that he occasionally checks e-mail messages at a nearby public library, and that he even has a cellphone, which helps him coordinate his work as a part-time bicycle-rickshaw driver. "You're not being disloyal to progress," he said, "by picking and choosing the kind of technology that best fits your needs."

Where Is Liberal Passion?

The day after the presidential inauguration, a coalition of progressives carried a 70-foot replica of a human backbone to the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in Washington. Their point was well taken. The self-appointed party of the American left could learn from the opposition: Be more upright, less spineless.

Yet you might think that the backbone metaphor begs a question. You can't find the courage of your convictions if you lack real conviction in the first place. And as a group, blue-staters have been accused by friendly and not-so-friendly critics alike of being less than red-hot. They typically prize reason and deliberation; they are not gung-ho. They don't shout "bring it on"; they are suspicious of the blind emotion of tent revivals and military parades. They encourage thinking things through, getting a second opinion, and acknowledging the possibility that one can always be wrong. And that, some liberals worry, is just the problem.

The issue is consuming not just Democratic Party strategists. Political theorists, too, have begun a major rethinking of liberal theory. Take a look at this year's book catalogs, and you'll see the "L" word in numerous titles. Like as not, it's accompanied by words like "passion," "purpose," or "vision."

In different ways, liberals are asking: Could the very values they hold dear rob them of the requisite fire in the belly that conservatives, particularly social conservatives, seemingly have in abundance? Most liberals believe in equality of opportunity and resources, freedom for individuals to pursue their own vision of life, and tolerance toward those whose vision of the world is different from their own. Some of them, however, complain that in their eagerness to venerate their ideals, they too often undercut their ability to be politically effective. To put it in a nakedly partisan way, some liberals worry that Yeats was right: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity."

No one wrestles with that dilemma more than Michael Walzer. In his intriguing and intelligent Politics and Passion: Toward a More Egalitarian Liberalism (Yale University Press, 2005), Walzer takes Yeats's warning as his touchstone as he presses his point from the left. Standard liberalism, he writes, is "an inadequate theory and a disabled political practice." It is inadequate, in part, because its values are not conducive to real conviction. It is disabled "because the social structures and political orders that sustain inequality cannot be actively opposed without a passionate intensity that liberals do not (for good reasons) want to acknowledge or accommodate."

As one of the most distinguished advocates of the communitarian critique of liberal theory, Walzer thinks that liberalism has a problem with passion because it ignores the politics of community. A typical picture of a liberal society is one formed on the basis of a rational contract, where social arrangements are made from the standpoint of enlightened self-interest. That, communitarians like Walzer point out, overlooks the fact that human beings' primary sources of value emerge from the communities to which we belong. Moreover, even in the shifting whirl of mobile Western economies, we don't choose most of our communities -- our family, our ethnicity, our religion; we get them handed to us.

By overlooking those facts, standard liberalism not only overplays the role of reason and autonomy in our lives, Walzer thinks, but also ends up being less egalitarian. If an individual's passions and values are formed in a community, then it is not just individuals who deserve equal respect and opportunity, but the communities themselves. Only by providing such respect -- and in some cases, actual financial support -- to traditional communities can we hope to encourage their members to fully participate in liberal civil society. In short, if it takes a village to raise a tolerant liberal citizen, then villages, not just villagers, deserve the support and the protection of the state.

Lefty communitarians are not alone in making that critique of liberalism. Social conservatives have long argued that progressive liberals, in trumpeting individual rights, ignore traditional communities as a source of value. That, after all, is the reasoning behind the president's faith-based social-services initiatives. The thought is that by supporting programs run by churches and synagogues, which are by nature embedded in communities, the community itself is better supported.

Maybe so. But as the neocons are well aware, traditional family values frequently clash with liberal values. That is not a problem for social conservatives, who often argue, for example, that we should ban same-sex marriage on the basis that it offends traditional morality. But it does present a problem for liberal communitarians like Walzer. Some traditional communities are rife with intolerant oppression -- precisely the sort of thing that enlightenment liberalism is presumably meant to combat. Surely liberals needn't tolerate intolerance.

Walzer valiantly attempts to deal with that concern. But in the end, his principle argument is resistible. Consider a hypothetical local religious community that does not value equal education for boys and girls. According to Walzer, if we are to compel our traditional community to educate its girls, we shouldn't appeal to individual rights; we should appeal to the pragmatic demands of citizenship. If a community wishes to participate in an egalitarian state, it must ensure that its members can be full citizens; among other things, that means that all of its children must read and write.

That argument makes sense as far as it goes. The question is whether it goes far enough. For one thing, it is not clear that the "pragmatic" demands of citizenship -- such as voting -- do absolutely require education, even if they are inestimably enriched by it. But even putting that aside, there are surely harms that an intolerant community can bring upon its members that are independent of the demands of citizenship. Even if we grant that citizenship requires equal literacy for the sexes, it doesn't obviously require that the sexes (or races, or ethnicities) be given equal opportunity to all levels of education -- or that communities recognize same-sex marriages, or that children be taught the theory of evolution instead of creationism. Those sorts of requirements only make sense when one sees the state -- as the liberal does -- as being in the job of ensuring that its citizens are free from explicit harms suffered when a community forces its values upon them. That doesn't deny that our values are shaped by our communities. It just rejects that such values are justified by their origin.

In my view, the reason that liberals are sometimes perceived as passionless isn't because liberal values are in need of a communitarian correction. The reason is that some liberals misunderstand, and therefore misrepresent, their own values. In particular, they misunderstand their values in a way that has made them wary of describing their own moral position as true. And that is bad. For once you cease thinking of your values -- your fundamental moral beliefs -- as objectively true, it is hard to even think of them as values at all. And without political values, there simply is no place for political passion.

Two important liberal values, for example, are equality and tolerance. Liberals believe the state should treat its citizens with equal respect and therefore that the state -- and the individual citizens within that state -- should tolerate, as much as possible, a wide range of different ways of life. It is largely that emphasis on tolerance that sets liberals apart from social conservatives. Social conservatives believe that treating people with respect means treating them as they should be treated given the one true way people ought to live. If that is the Christian way, for example, then treating people with respect means treating them as equally subject to the values inherent in Christianity.

That point was most recently echoed in conservative commentaries on the Terri Schiavo case, but it emerged even more explicitly in the Rev. Bob Jones III's now-infamous open postelection letter to President Bush. As Jones wrote, "In your re-election, God has graciously granted America -- though she doesn't deserve it -- a reprieve from the agenda of paganism. You have been given a mandate. We the people expect your voice to be like the clear and certain sound of a trumpet." The letter went on to urge the president to pass "legislation that is defined by biblical norm(s)," "to appoint many conservative judges," and "to leave an imprint for righteousness upon this nation that brings with it the blessings of Almighty God."

In recoiling from that position, some left-leaning thinkers have argued that liberals need to adopt what the philosopher Richard Rorty calls an "ironic" attitude toward our own liberal principles. If we want to be truly tolerant, the thought goes, we need to stop seeing liberal views about equality and tolerance as objective moral truths. Instead, we should see them as morally neutral. Otherwise, we risk being intolerant about tolerance.

Tempting as it may sound to some, that line of reasoning is a mistake. It undermines liberalism's ability to galvanize passionate intensity. That is most obvious when liberal tolerance is defended, as it sometimes is in the popular news media, on the basis of naïve relativism: If different ways of life deserve equal respect, then all ways of life are equally good. The just state must remain neutral with regard to questions of how to live because there are no objectively true or false answers to such questions. So we should live and let live.

But relativistic liberalism is clearly a rational and political failure. It is a rational failure because its key inference is invalid. From the fact that many different forms of life deserve equal respect, it doesn't follow that we can't criticize some as being worse than others. It is a political failure because if every way of life is as good as any other, then what motivation does the liberal have for opposing the conservative's and trumpeting his or her own? It is hard to stand up and fight for a view that sees itself as no better than the opposition's. Passion has no foothold.

Bloodlessness is also the result of more philosophically sophisticated attempts to understand liberalism as morally neutral. The preeminent architect of contemporary American liberal thought, the late John Rawls, argued over the last decade and a half that tolerance demands that liberalism should be understood as a "political, not metaphysical" doctrine. That is, we should not defend liberal principles, such as the principle of tolerance itself, by asserting that they represent fundamental moral truths. Rather, Rawls said, in defending those principles and whatever follows from them -- for instance, a right to abortion, the constitutionality of same-sex marriage, etc. -- the liberal must appeal only to the uncontroversial popular consensus -- that is, "public reasons" that every reasonable person implicitly accepts. In short, since the liberal state must remain neutral among different conceptions of morality, liberal principles must themselves be justified in a way that is morally neutral and that all reasonable points of view can accept.

Rawls's position was complex, and he was certainly no relativist. But his understanding of tolerance was motivated by a related desire: to make liberal values somehow "float free" from any particular moral outlook. And that is troubling, for at least two reasons. The most obvious problem is that the idea that liberal principles are neutral among all "reasonable" points of view only makes sense if "reasonable" is defined in a distinctively liberal way. The less obvious problem is that were I to believe that my foundational liberal principles were already held by all reasonable people -- whether they know it or not -- it is difficult to see why I should bother to vigorously defend my principles. The battle, in effect, would already be won, so there would be little point in getting worked up about it. Again, passion drains away.

If we want to rediscover an intellectual foundation for liberal passion, then we need to forget about the beige of moral neutrality and favor the red of moral conviction. We need to remember that moral convictions are just that, beliefs that some political ideals are objectively better for society than others.

It is also worth remembering that lots of Americans already view liberals as full of passionate conviction. Take last fall's fight over gay marriage. Eleven states, it turned out, passed bans against same-sex marriage. Liberals -- rightly in my view -- protest that such bans treat citizens unequally and privilege one way of life over others. But to many, it is liberals who are pushing their values into other folks' faces. In the endearing language of talk radio, conservatives across the nation rally to prevent "activist liberal judges" from "imposing liberal values" and "special rights." In short, far from seeing liberalism as value-neutral -- Rawls's "political, not metaphysical" account of fair play -- those on the right see liberalism as a rival comprehensive morality, a rival way of life.

Conservatives are right about that. And there is no need for liberals to apologize for it. As philosophers like Joseph Raz have argued, liberalism isn't value-neutral, nor should it be. Liberal values like tolerance and equality are just that -- liberal values, neither merely "true for us" nor ethically inert. Rather, they are part of a particularly liberal ideal of the good life -- an abstract ideal but an ideal nonetheless. The progressive liberal believes that other things being equal, the state should respect our individual rights and tolerate different ways of living that don't violate others' rights. That means that progressive liberalism is not neutral among all ways of life. The progressive liberal is committed to opposing ways of life that value racial and sexual discrimination or collapse the separation between church and state. The progressive liberal believes that societies that sanction torture, or are intolerant toward gays, or allow their citizens to be economically exploited are, in those respects, worse societies.

As much as possible, liberals need to argue for their case, as Rawls has emphasized, by appealing to reasons shared by all. But they cannot assume that all of their liberal values will be so shared, even if some are. And that is not surprising -- democratic politics, after all, is aimed at getting others to see things your way. So, much as social conservatives do, we liberals need to stand up for our values and persuade others to share them. And we must do so by defending our theory in the way that one defends any theory: by arguing for its worth on its own terms and for the beneficial consequences it brings.

But what of passion? Walzer rightly claims that standard liberal theory has too often ignored the role involuntary associations like family, race, and religion play in shaping our identities and stirring our blood. But we wouldn't share emotional bonds with other group members if we didn't also share values. I've argued that liberals do share a set of values, and that passionate commitment to them -- including the values of equality and tolerance -- requires seeing them as objectively worth defending. But it is also worth remembering that values are not just crystalline principles, sparkling under the light of reason. To talk about my values is to talk about what I care about, what I admire, what I aim for, and what I want others to aim for as well: tolerance for a wide array of lifestyles, compassion for those less fortunate than we, and the moral courage to stand up for our rights and the rights of others. So far from being a cold theory of rational neutrality, progressive liberalism is a theory of value -- and theories of value are theories of what we care about.

Liberals favor reason and evenhandedness; they are tolerant; they believe in autonomy, individual rights, and equality. But they can and should be fervent in defending the truth of those ideals. Liberals have no inherent problem with passion. They just need to remember to keep passion alive, and not to waiver in the face of spirited opposition. They just need to remember their backbone.

Michael P. Lynch is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut and author of True to Life: Why Truth Matters (MIT Press, 2004).

The Bulldog Pope

"It logically follows from the consequences of a sexuality which is no longer linked to motherhood and to procreation," he said, "that every form of sexuality is equivalent and therefore of equal worth." It is only logical, then, that self-gratification becomes the point of sex. And it follows that all forms of sex - including homosexual - become equal and considered "rights."

Sounds pretty good for our new Pope...

He meant it as a criticism.

In a book-length interview published in 1985 titled "The Ratzinger Report," he used a rigorously argued line of reasoning to support a doctrinal position that reverberates outside the church. He condemned abortion, contraception, homosexual relations, sex without marriage, "radical feminism" and transsexuality. The wrongness of those ideas all arise from the separation of sexuality from motherhood and marriage, he said.

Liberation theology of the 1980's, in which leftist clerics in Latin America argued for radical change in society to help the poor, was quashed. Bishops were chastised for straying, like Archbishop Raymond G. Hunthausen of Seattle over his tolerant views on homosexuals. More than a dozen theologians, priests and bishops were punished for doctrinal error, and presumably, many other cases have not come to light. In 2000, he published a condemnation of the concept that other religions might be as valid as Catholicism.

Cardinal Ratzinger never displayed the same degree of interest in reconciling East and West in what John Paul II loved to describe as the "two lungs of Christianity." Mostly he was busy stamping out wisps of religious pluralism, most famously in 2000, when he published "Dominus Iesus" ("The Lord Jesus") , which condemned "relativistic theories" of religious pluralism and described other faiths as "gravely deficient."

The document was mostly aimed at reining in straying Catholic theologians like the Rev. Jacques Dupuis, a Belgian theologian who after teaching in India argued that other religions could also lead to salvation, but it offended religious leaders of almost every stripe. Jewish religious leaders in Rome boycotted several interfaith meetings in protest. Even some cardinals publicly questioned its tone and timing.

Passing the Buck on Health Care

Passing the Buck

By PAUL KRUGMAN

The United States spends far more on health care than other advanced countries. Yet we don't appear to receive more medical services. And we have lower life-expectancy and higher infant-mortality rates than countries that spend less than half as much per person. How do we do it?

An important part of the answer is that much of our health care spending is devoted to passing the buck: trying to get someone else to pay the bills.

According to the World Health Organization, in the United States administrative expenses eat up about 15 percent of the money paid in premiums to private health insurance companies, but only 4 percent of the budgets of public insurance programs, which consist mainly of Medicare and Medicaid. The numbers for both public and private insurance are similar in other countries - but because we rely much more heavily than anyone else on private insurance, our total administrative costs are much higher.

According to the health organization, the higher costs of private insurers are "mainly due to the extensive bureaucracy required to assess risk, rate premiums, design benefit packages and review, pay or refuse claims." Public insurance plans have far less bureaucracy because they don't try to screen out high-risk clients or charge them higher fees.

And the costs directly incurred by insurers are only half the story. Doctors "must hire office personnel just to deal with the insurance companies," Dr. Atul Gawande, a practicing physician, wrote in The New Yorker. "A well-run office can get the insurer's rejection rate down from 30 percent to, say, 15 percent. That's how a doctor makes money. ... It's a war with insurance, every step of the way."

Isn't competition supposed to make the private sector more efficient than the public sector? Well, as the World Health Organization put it in a discussion of Western Europe, private insurers generally don't compete by delivering care at lower cost. Instead, they "compete on the basis of risk selection" - that is, by turning away people who are likely to have high medical bills and by refusing or delaying any payment they can.

Yet the cost of providing medical care to those denied private insurance doesn't go away. If individuals are poor, or if medical expenses impoverish them, they are covered by Medicaid. Otherwise, they pay out of pocket or rely on the charity of public hospitals.

So we've created a vast and hugely expensive insurance bureaucracy that accomplishes nothing. The resources spent by private insurers don't reduce overall costs; they simply shift those costs to other people and institutions. It's perverse but true that this system, which insures only 85 percent of the population, costs much more than we would pay for a system that covered everyone.

And the costs go beyond wasted money.

First, in the U.S. system, medical costs act as a tax on employment. For example, General Motors is losing money on every car it makes because of the burden of health care costs. As a result, it may be forced to lay off thousands of workers, or may even go out of business. Yet the insurance premiums saved by firing workers are no saving at all to society as a whole: somebody still ends up paying the bills.

Second, Americans without insurance eventually receive medical care - but the operative word is "eventually." According to Kaiser Family Foundation data, the uninsured are about three times as likely as the insured to postpone seeking care, fail to get needed care, leave prescriptions unfilled or skip recommended treatment. And many end up disabled - or die - because of these delays.

Think about how crazy all of this is. At a rough guess, between two million and three million Americans are employed by insurers and health care providers not to deliver health care, but to pass the buck for that care to someone else. And the result of all their exertions is to make the nation poorer and sicker.

Why do we put up with such an expensive, counterproductive health care system? Vested interests play an important role. But we also suffer from ideological blinders: decades of indoctrination in the virtues of market competition and the evils of big government have left many Americans unable to comprehend the idea that sometimes competition is the problem, not the solution.

"The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity" -Yeats

Where Is Liberal Passion?

By MICHAEL P. LYNCH

The day after the presidential inauguration, a coalition of progressives carried a 70-foot replica of a human backbone to the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in Washington. Their point was well taken. The self-appointed party of the American left could learn from the opposition: Be more upright, less spineless.

Yet you might think that the backbone metaphor begs a question. You can't find the courage of your convictions if you lack real conviction in the first place. And as a group, blue-staters have been accused by friendly and not-so-friendly critics alike of being less than red-hot. They typically prize reason and deliberation; they are not gung-ho. They don't shout "bring it on"; they are suspicious of the blind emotion of tent revivals and military parades. They encourage thinking things through, getting a second opinion, and acknowledging the possibility that one can always be wrong. And that, some liberals worry, is just the problem.

The issue is consuming not just Democratic Party strategists. Political theorists, too, have begun a major rethinking of liberal theory. Take a look at this year's book catalogs, and you'll see the "L" word in numerous titles. Like as not, it's accompanied by words like "passion," "purpose," or "vision."

In different ways, liberals are asking: Could the very values they hold dear rob them of the requisite fire in the belly that conservatives, particularly social conservatives, seemingly have in abundance? Most liberals believe in equality of opportunity and resources, freedom for individuals to pursue their own vision of life, and tolerance toward those whose vision of the world is different from their own. Some of them, however, complain that in their eagerness to venerate their ideals, they too often undercut their ability to be politically effective. To put it in a nakedly partisan way, some liberals worry that Yeats was right: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity."

No one wrestles with that dilemma more than Michael Walzer. In his intriguing and intelligent Politics and Passion: Toward a More Egalitarian Liberalism (Yale University Press, 2005), Walzer takes Yeats's warning as his touchstone as he presses his point from the left. Standard liberalism, he writes, is "an inadequate theory and a disabled political practice." It is inadequate, in part, because its values are not conducive to real conviction. It is disabled "because the social structures and political orders that sustain inequality cannot be actively opposed without a passionate intensity that liberals do not (for good reasons) want to acknowledge or accommodate."

As one of the most distinguished advocates of the communitarian critique of liberal theory, Walzer thinks that liberalism has a problem with passion because it ignores the politics of community. A typical picture of a liberal society is one formed on the basis of a rational contract, where social arrangements are made from the standpoint of enlightened self-interest. That, communitarians like Walzer point out, overlooks the fact that human beings' primary sources of value emerge from the communities to which we belong. Moreover, even in the shifting whirl of mobile Western economies, we don't choose most of our communities -- our family, our ethnicity, our religion; we get them handed to us.

By overlooking those facts, standard liberalism not only overplays the role of reason and autonomy in our lives, Walzer thinks, but also ends up being less egalitarian. If an individual's passions and values are formed in a community, then it is not just individuals who deserve equal respect and opportunity, but the communities themselves. Only by providing such respect -- and in some cases, actual financial support -- to traditional communities can we hope to encourage their members to fully participate in liberal civil society. In short, if it takes a village to raise a tolerant liberal citizen, then villages, not just villagers, deserve the support and the protection of the state.

Lefty communitarians are not alone in making that critique of liberalism. Social conservatives have long argued that progressive liberals, in trumpeting individual rights, ignore traditional communities as a source of value. That, after all, is the reasoning behind the president's faith-based social-services initiatives. The thought is that by supporting programs run by churches and synagogues, which are by nature embedded in communities, the community itself is better supported.

Maybe so. But as the neocons are well aware, traditional family values frequently clash with liberal values. That is not a problem for social conservatives, who often argue, for example, that we should ban same-sex marriage on the basis that it offends traditional morality. But it does present a problem for liberal communitarians like Walzer. Some traditional communities are rife with intolerant oppression -- precisely the sort of thing that enlightenment liberalism is presumably meant to combat. Surely liberals needn't tolerate intolerance.

Walzer valiantly attempts to deal with that concern. But in the end, his principle argument is resistible. Consider a hypothetical local religious community that does not value equal education for boys and girls. According to Walzer, if we are to compel our traditional community to educate its girls, we shouldn't appeal to individual rights; we should appeal to the pragmatic demands of citizenship. If a community wishes to participate in an egalitarian state, it must ensure that its members can be full citizens; among other things, that means that all of its children must read and write.

That argument makes sense as far as it goes. The question is whether it goes far enough. For one thing, it is not clear that the "pragmatic" demands of citizenship -- such as voting -- do absolutely require education, even if they are inestimably enriched by it. But even putting that aside, there are surely harms that an intolerant community can bring upon its members that are independent of the demands of citizenship. Even if we grant that citizenship requires equal literacy for the sexes, it doesn't obviously require that the sexes (or races, or ethnicities) be given equal opportunity to all levels of education -- or that communities recognize same-sex marriages, or that children be taught the theory of evolution instead of creationism. Those sorts of requirements only make sense when one sees the state -- as the liberal does -- as being in the job of ensuring that its citizens are free from explicit harms suffered when a community forces its values upon them. That doesn't deny that our values are shaped by our communities. It just rejects that such values are justified by their origin.

In my view, the reason that liberals are sometimes perceived as passionless isn't because liberal values are in need of a communitarian correction. The reason is that some liberals misunderstand, and therefore misrepresent, their own values. In particular, they misunderstand their values in a way that has made them wary of describing their own moral position as true. And that is bad. For once you cease thinking of your values -- your fundamental moral beliefs -- as objectively true, it is hard to even think of them as values at all. And without political values, there simply is no place for political passion.

Two important liberal values, for example, are equality and tolerance. Liberals believe the state should treat its citizens with equal respect and therefore that the state -- and the individual citizens within that state -- should tolerate, as much as possible, a wide range of different ways of life. It is largely that emphasis on tolerance that sets liberals apart from social conservatives. Social conservatives believe that treating people with respect means treating them as they should be treated given the one true way people ought to live. If that is the Christian way, for example, then treating people with respect means treating them as equally subject to the values inherent in Christianity.

That point was most recently echoed in conservative commentaries on the Terri Schiavo case, but it emerged even more explicitly in the Rev. Bob Jones III's now-infamous open postelection letter to President Bush. As Jones wrote, "In your re-election, God has graciously granted America -- though she doesn't deserve it -- a reprieve from the agenda of paganism. You have been given a mandate. We the people expect your voice to be like the clear and certain sound of a trumpet." The letter went on to urge the president to pass "legislation that is defined by biblical norm(s)," "to appoint many conservative judges," and "to leave an imprint for righteousness upon this nation that brings with it the blessings of Almighty God."

In recoiling from that position, some left-leaning thinkers have argued that liberals need to adopt what the philosopher Richard Rorty calls an "ironic" attitude toward our own liberal principles. If we want to be truly tolerant, the thought goes, we need to stop seeing liberal views about equality and tolerance as objective moral truths. Instead, we should see them as morally neutral. Otherwise, we risk being intolerant about tolerance.

Tempting as it may sound to some, that line of reasoning is a mistake. It undermines liberalism's ability to galvanize passionate intensity. That is most obvious when liberal tolerance is defended, as it sometimes is in the popular news media, on the basis of naïve relativism: If different ways of life deserve equal respect, then all ways of life are equally good. The just state must remain neutral with regard to questions of how to live because there are no objectively true or false answers to such questions. So we should live and let live.

But relativistic liberalism is clearly a rational and political failure. It is a rational failure because its key inference is invalid. From the fact that many different forms of life deserve equal respect, it doesn't follow that we can't criticize some as being worse than others. It is a political failure because if every way of life is as good as any other, then what motivation does the liberal have for opposing the conservative's and trumpeting his or her own? It is hard to stand up and fight for a view that sees itself as no better than the opposition's. Passion has no foothold.

Bloodlessness is also the result of more philosophically sophisticated attempts to understand liberalism as morally neutral. The preeminent architect of contemporary American liberal thought, the late John Rawls, argued over the last decade and a half that tolerance demands that liberalism should be understood as a "political, not metaphysical" doctrine. That is, we should not defend liberal principles, such as the principle of tolerance itself, by asserting that they represent fundamental moral truths. Rather, Rawls said, in defending those principles and whatever follows from them -- for instance, a right to abortion, the constitutionality of same-sex marriage, etc. -- the liberal must appeal only to the uncontroversial popular consensus -- that is, "public reasons" that every reasonable person implicitly accepts. In short, since the liberal state must remain neutral among different conceptions of morality, liberal principles must themselves be justified in a way that is morally neutral and that all reasonable points of view can accept.

Rawls's position was complex, and he was certainly no relativist. But his understanding of tolerance was motivated by a related desire: to make liberal values somehow "float free" from any particular moral outlook. And that is troubling, for at least two reasons. The most obvious problem is that the idea that liberal principles are neutral among all "reasonable" points of view only makes sense if "reasonable" is defined in a distinctively liberal way. The less obvious problem is that were I to believe that my foundational liberal principles were already held by all reasonable people -- whether they know it or not -- it is difficult to see why I should bother to vigorously defend my principles. The battle, in effect, would already be won, so there would be little point in getting worked up about it. Again, passion drains away.

If we want to rediscover an intellectual foundation for liberal passion, then we need to forget about the beige of moral neutrality and favor the red of moral conviction. We need to remember that moral convictions are just that, beliefs that some political ideals are objectively better for society than others.

It is also worth remembering that lots of Americans already view liberals as full of passionate conviction. Take last fall's fight over gay marriage. Eleven states, it turned out, passed bans against same-sex marriage. Liberals -- rightly in my view -- protest that such bans treat citizens unequally and privilege one way of life over others. But to many, it is liberals who are pushing their values into other folks' faces. In the endearing language of talk radio, conservatives across the nation rally to prevent "activist liberal judges" from "imposing liberal values" and "special rights." In short, far from seeing liberalism as value-neutral -- Rawls's "political, not metaphysical" account of fair play -- those on the right see liberalism as a rival comprehensive morality, a rival way of life.

Conservatives are right about that. And there is no need for liberals to apologize for it. As philosophers like Joseph Raz have argued, liberalism isn't value-neutral, nor should it be. Liberal values like tolerance and equality are just that -- liberal values, neither merely "true for us" nor ethically inert. Rather, they are part of a particularly liberal ideal of the good life -- an abstract ideal but an ideal nonetheless. The progressive liberal believes that other things being equal, the state should respect our individual rights and tolerate different ways of living that don't violate others' rights. That means that progressive liberalism is not neutral among all ways of life. The progressive liberal is committed to opposing ways of life that value racial and sexual discrimination or collapse the separation between church and state. The progressive liberal believes that societies that sanction torture, or are intolerant toward gays, or allow their citizens to be economically exploited are, in those respects, worse societies.

As much as possible, liberals need to argue for their case, as Rawls has emphasized, by appealing to reasons shared by all. But they cannot assume that all of their liberal values will be so shared, even if some are. And that is not surprising -- democratic politics, after all, is aimed at getting others to see things your way. So, much as social conservatives do, we liberals need to stand up for our values and persuade others to share them. And we must do so by defending our theory in the way that one defends any theory: by arguing for its worth on its own terms and for the beneficial consequences it brings.

But what of passion? Walzer rightly claims that standard liberal theory has too often ignored the role involuntary associations like family, race, and religion play in shaping our identities and stirring our blood. But we wouldn't share emotional bonds with other group members if we didn't also share values. I've argued that liberals do share a set of values, and that passionate commitment to them -- including the values of equality and tolerance -- requires seeing them as objectively worth defending. But it is also worth remembering that values are not just crystalline principles, sparkling under the light of reason. To talk about my values is to talk about what I care about, what I admire, what I aim for, and what I want others to aim for as well: tolerance for a wide array of lifestyles, compassion for those less fortunate than we, and the moral courage to stand up for our rights and the rights of others. So far from being a cold theory of rational neutrality, progressive liberalism is a theory of value -- and theories of value are theories of what we care about.

Liberals favor reason and evenhandedness; they are tolerant; they believe in autonomy, individual rights, and equality. But they can and should be fervent in defending the truth of those ideals. Liberals have no inherent problem with passion. They just need to remember to keep passion alive, and not to waiver in the face of spirited opposition. They just need to remember their backbone.

Michael P. Lynch is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut and author of True to Life: Why Truth Matters (MIT Press, 2004).

Siva Vaidhyanathan on Why Copyright Matters Now

Copyright as Cudgel

By SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN

Let's pretend that a journal has just published your harshly negative review of a book in your field. In this review, you quote short passages from the book, confident that the long-accepted concept of "fair use" enables you to make even unwelcome use of copyrighted material for purposes of criticism.

But a week or so after the electronic version of the review appears on the publication's Web site, the editors inform you that it violates the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and that they are removing it. You are welcome to respond. You are free to argue that the use of the copyrighted quotes falls under fair use. But the publication is under no obligation to accept your defense. So you publish the review on your own Web page. But you soon discover that all of the major Web search engines have removed your site from their indexes.

That couldn't happen, you say? Welcome to the new millennium.

When Congress brought copyright law into the digital era, in 1998, some in academe were initially heartened by what they saw as compromises that, they hoped, would protect fair use for digital materials. Unfortunately, they were wrong. Recent actions by Congress and the federal courts -- and many more all-too-common acts of cowardice by publishers, colleges, developers of search engines, and other concerned parties -- have demonstrated that fair use, while not quite dead, is dying. And everyone who reads, writes, sings, does research, or teaches should be up in arms. The real question is why so few people are complaining.

Consider the recent case of the Church of Scientology International and the search engine Google. The wealthy church used the threat of a well-financed lawsuit -- and the 1998 act's provision that a service provider will not be liable for infringement if it moves with "dispatch" to delete offending material -- to persuade Google to block links to several sites that included criticism of Scientology. "Had we not removed these URL's, we would be subject to a claim for copyright infringement, regardless of its merits," Google said.

Back in the 20th century, if someone had accused you of copyright infringement, you enjoyed that quaint and now seemingly archaic guarantee of due process. Today, due process is a lot harder to pursue, and the burden of proof increasingly is on those accused of copyright infringement. For the copyright act, in essence, makes the owner of every Internet service provider, content host, and search engine an untrained copyright cop. The default action is censorship.

The conflict between the Church of Scientology and Google is one of many such cases. In July 1999, shortly before Talk magazine made its debut, the writers John Aboud and Michael Colton posted online a parody of the magazine, which -- until it folded -- was produced by a partnership between Hearst Magazines and Miramax Films. Miramax lawyers sent a cease-and-desist letter to Earthlink, the Internet company that owned the server on which the parody sat. Earthlink immediately shut the parody down, although it restored the site after Talk's editor, Tina Brown, appealed to let it stand. Lawyers for both Miramax and the Church of Scientology cited the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (often known by its abbreviation, DMCA) as the basis of their claim.

Besides prompting such censorship, the act has another major provision, which upends more than 200 years of copyright law that has, until now, served democracy well: the principle that what copyright law does not specifically protect remains available to all to use, for whatever purpose the user sees fit. The DMCA bars the circumvention of electronic access controls that protect online works, a provision that seems to block the use of even those portions of works that might be in the public domain.

How direct the assault on academic freedom could become was demonstrated in spring 2001, when the music industry tried to prevent a computer scientist, Princeton University's Edward W. Felten, from presenting a scholarly paper at a conference. The Recording Industry Association of America argued that the paper dealt with encryption algorithms that it hoped to use to protect digital content, and so violated the copyright law. The association backed down, but the Felten case is merely the best known of several efforts that online-content industries have made to prevent researchers from discussing certain technologies and algorithms.

All of that is the reason I view the Digital Millennium Copyright Act as reckless, poorly thought out, and with gravely censorious consequences. Yet, back in 1998, when Congress passed the law, there was little public outcry -- or interest, for that matter. The news coverage tended to treat the act as a harmless extension of copyright to the new digital world. Most often, those who raised concerns were dismissed by advocates of copyright protection as radicals who were against copyright in general.

Since 1998, the DMCA has revealed itself to be a failure. It has not been effective at preventing piracy in cyberspace, yet it has managed to stifle harmless and even beneficial uses of material for research and teaching.

Various groups -- software producers, artists, writers, librarians, media activists -- have protested. But, with a few notable exceptions -- most significantly the Digital Future Coalition, an alliance that includes law professors, library groups, and scholarly associations -- we academics have been painfully slow to argue against abuses in and of copyright law.

When the DMCA was being considered, the Digital Future Coalition put up an admirable defense of the principles of access and fair use for teaching, research, and criticism. But the commercial forces allied against it were too formidable. In the absence of widespread public outcry, Congress could only rely on what the most powerful interested parties told it: that if some copyright protection is good, then more must be better. Had there been some grassroots activism by teachers, writers, and researchers, Congress might have realized that it was considering reckless legislation.

At the 2001 meeting of the American Studies Association, fewer than a dozen people attended a session that I organized on how the regulation of intellectual property threatens intellectual freedom. And those sessions have been few and far between at most academic meetings. If most of you and your colleagues have even heard of problems with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, chances are you assume that other people will take care of them. Won't they?

Academics have more to lose in the copyright wars than most people do. We are not only the source of much of the "content" in the world. We are -- through our teaching and research -- among the major conduits and consumers of the content that others provide. We have a vested interest in keeping information flowing as cheaply, widely, and quickly as possible. We need a rich, diverse, affordable, and accessible information ecosystem to do our jobs.

So why have academics been caught napping? I have several hypotheses. They have to do with recent academic practice and culture, and its relation to our broader society.

Perhaps we have too blithely assumed that Congress and the American people actually value teaching and research and would not pass laws that impede either. We take our privileged positions in society for granted, and don't work to explain the importance of what we do. That is at the root of our discomfort when the public and legislators tell us that our scholarship is too arcane, our costs too high, and our workload too light.

Perhaps we have been too busy tilting at the windmills of the culture wars and the science wars to realize that the common interests of all academics are threatened. Internecine strife is so much more immediate. Perhaps, when and if some of us have realized that copyright matters, we have asked only, What's in it for me? Say "copyright" to many academics, and do they think primarily about protecting their own rights (even to a lot of what is really little more than worthless online content) -- instead of the wider world of scholarship?

More broadly, a mood has come to prevail not only in the academy -- particularly among administrators and trustees -- but also among legislators that has strengthened the thrust of copyright revision. Together, trends in scholarship, copyright law, and mood have combined to generate a set of assumptions about academic work that are weighted toward the exploitation of professors and the protection of a university's "property," and against sharing or distributing knowledge. The rising importance of privately sponsored research on campus and efforts by universities to capitalize on faculty research, distance education, and other opportunities are changing the nature of universities. While they are still the largest content-consuming institutions around, they have been thinking and acting like content providers -- and have missed the radical implications of changed copyright law.

As a result, course packets that used to be easy to assemble and affordable to students are now a hassle and a big expense. Professors are abandoning them in favor of prefabricated published readers or less-convenient library reserves. Getting permission to quote from a song or to include an old photograph in a scholarly publication is getting to be prohibitively expensive. Some professional journals are demanding that academic authors assign all rights in all media in perpetuity to them, then gouging subscribers and libraries for the right to read materials that academics weren't compensated for in the first place. Online journals are replacing paper volumes, allowing publishers to extort all sorts of user restrictions from libraries. And those are just the micro-horror stories, the short-term costs of current trends.

In a larger sense, while academics have slept, the content industries have systematically stifled flows of essential information, created artificial scarcity, and made certain areas of basic research potentially illegal.

Had we made a unified public stand against the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act in 1998, which extended the term of copyright protection by 20 years, we might have been better able to alter the terms of discussion, if not smooth out some of the more odious portions of the laws. Had we been able to persuade humanities scholars to step back from all the "problematizing" and "theorizing" that fills so many seminar rooms and journals and, instead, organize around clear themes and concerns, we could have joined scientists in their decade-long effort to keep information flowing by protesting ever-more-costly journals. And had administrators and lobbyists been less concerned about ways to capitalize on the false promise of online, for-profit education and more concerned with the actual future of education, we might have been able to unite in voicing opposition to copyright policies that threaten us all. Despite fashionable cynicism about our political system, Congressional representatives still read and care about constituent mail. And they still care about their local education institutions.

Fortunately, scholars and teachers, even when silent, will benefit from the hard work of public-interest groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, digitalconsumer.org, and publicknowledge.org. These activist organizations are struggling to accurately define the "public interest" in copyright and debating how best to articulate the issues to a diverse public. But without widespread, grass-roots support, these groups will face the same frustration that the Digital Future Coalition experienced in 1998 -- a remarkably powerful and well-financed campaign from the entertainment industry. They need us as an ally.

Public-interest copyright activists are an ideologically diverse group. Many of us are classically liberal, civically republican, and philosophically pragmatic. We focus on restoring the balanced, humane principles that used to guide American copyright. We frame our rhetoric in terms of individual freedom, a modest level of state intervention, and a flexible, adaptable regulatory system. Others come from the perspective of religious freedom and conservative values. They want parents and teachers to have the right and ability to edit digital material they deem offensive, even if the DMCA prevents the use of the technologies required to alter the work.

Other equally active critics of recent trends in copyright take a Marxist perspective. They warn of the coming postindustrial infotainment-industrial complex and the ways it has enlisted the state in efforts to make commodities of all information and culture. Still others espouse a form of information anarchy. According to them, if we empower every user, limit the power of large corporations to regulate the flow of information, and democratize information generally, we can achieve a state of absolute liberty in which we all can both create and consume material.

All the critics lament the erosion of the democratic safeguards that made American copyright such a brilliant and effective system and that helped fill our libraries with books. Copyright can censor. It is a prohibition on what we may reproduce, quote, perform, and distribute. Over the past 200 years, however, through both statutes and the common law, the copyright system developed four safeguards that mitigated the potentially censorious power of its prohibitions:

* The principle of fair use -- in essence, a legal defense against an accusation of copyright infringement. If you are accused of infringing, you can make an argument that your use of the protected works is "fair" because of some combination of these factors: The nature of the original work makes it important that it be publicly discussed; the nature of your use of it is important because of teaching, research, or commentary; you do not use very much of the original work; your use does not significantly affect the market for the original work. In the public discourse about fair use, it has served as a term representing a collection of uses that consumers could consider "fair," like recording television shows for later viewing, making audiocassette tapes or MP3 mixes from compact disks, and limited copying for private, noncommercial sharing.

* The principle that after the "first sale" of a copyrighted item, the buyer can do whatever he or she wants with the item, except publicly perform the work or distribute unauthorized copies for sale. The first-sale doctrine is what makes lending libraries possible.

* The concept that copyright protects the specific expression of ideas, but not the ideas themselves. This is the least understood but perhaps most important tenet of copyright: You can't copyright a fact or an idea. Because you can't, anyone may repeat your idea, whether to criticize it or build on it. Journalism, along with many other forms of common expression, depends on the principle.

* The promise that copyright will last -- as the Constitution demands -- for only "limited times," thus constantly replenishing the public domain. The public domain allows for low-cost scholarship, research, and revision of formerly copyrighted works. The reason that bookstores are filled with high-quality yet affordable scholarly editions of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and John Stuart Mill's On Liberty is that they are in the public domain. The reason there is no annotated scholarly edition of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man is that it is not.

In other words, copyright, when well balanced, encourages the production and distribution of the raw material of democracy. It is supposed to be an economic incentive for the next producer, not a guarantee for the established one. But after more than 200 years of legal evolution and technological revolution, copyright no longer offers strong democratic safeguards. It is out of balance. Each of the four safeguards is under attack by the copyright cartel.

We need to restore them. Some of us, therefore, are generating friend-of-the-court briefs for the pending Supreme Court hearing on the constitutionality of the Copyright Term Extension Act, in the case Eldred v. Ashcroft. We are fighting for the First Amendment right of a hacker magazine, 2600 (and for the right of everyone), to describe certain illegal algorithms and create hyperlinks to other pages that describe or offer those algorithms. And we are playing defense in the halls of the Capitol against pending legislation that would create a new and dangerous property right in databases of facts, and even more odious legislation that would require all producers of electronic hardware and software to include anticopying devices in their products. On the positive side, we are supporting Rep. Rick Boucher, a Virginia Democrat, who is considering introducing legislation that would temper the more censorious aspects of the DMCA.

One way to move toward a definition of the "public interest" in copyright is to examine its historical roots and the various concerns that interested parties have had with the evolving system over the past 400 years.

At its birth in England, copyright was an instrument of censorship. In 1557, Mary Tudor, the Roman Catholic queen, capped off a 120-year monarchal struggle to censor printing presses by issuing a charter to the Stationers' Company, a guild of printers. Only members of the company could legally produce books, which had been licensed by the crown.

In contrast, the American copyright system, in place since 1790, has reflected republican values. It grants a limited, temporary monopoly to a specific publisher. But just as important, the framers and later jurists concluded that creativity depends on the use, criticism, supplementation, and consideration of previous works. Therefore, they argued, authors should enjoy a monopoly just long enough to provide an incentive to create more, but the work should live afterward in the "public domain," as common property of the reading public.

James Madison, who introduced the copyright-and-patent clause to the Constitution, did not engage in absolutist "property talk" about copyright. He argued in terms of "progress," "learning," and other such classic republican virtues as literacy and an informed citizenry. When President George Washington declared his support for the Copyright Act of 1790, he proclaimed that it would be a step toward "teaching the people themselves to know, and to value their own rights; to discern and provide against invasions of them; to distinguish between oppression and the necessary exercise of lawful authority." Thomas Jefferson -- author, architect, slave owner, landowner -- had no misgivings about protecting private property. Yet he expressed some serious doubts about the wisdom of copyright, based on his suspicion of concentrations of power and artificial monopolies.

I believe that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act represents a failure of that trust in the copyright system to cope with the democratic potential of changing communication technologies.

The danger is clear. It's time to find a way to discuss copyright issues in the public sphere that doesn't leave substantive deliberation to a select group of trained experts. The public has as deep a stake in the outcomes of the copyright debate as any lobbyist or plaintiff. At one point, Napster had 77 million registered users, more than twice the number of America Online users. And there are few Americans who have not wondered about the intrusive power of that video "mattress tag," the FBI warning at the start of every rental videotape. But the common rhetoric about copyright obscures much of what is at stake.

We make a grave mistake when we choose to engage in discussions of copyright in terms of "property." Copyright is not about "property" as commonly understood. It is a specific state-granted monopoly issued for particular policy reasons. While, technically, it describes real property as well, it also describes a more fundamental public good that precedes specific policy choices the state may make about the regulation and dispensation of property. But we can't win an argument as long as those who hold inordinate interest in copyright maximization can cry "theft" at any mention of fair use or users' rights. You can't argue for theft.

Two rhetorical strategies have emerged. Most prominent is "commons talk." A growing number of activists and law professors are pushing for an appreciation of the "information commons." Sparked by a brilliant 1997 article by the Duke University law professor James Boyle, "A Politics of Intellectual Property: Environmentalism for the Net?," this movement toward preservation and expansion of an information commons resembles the environmental movement 40 years ago. With good luck and hard work, activists hope to build a similar level of public concern and awareness about how information operates in society, and the need for it to be commonly owned and shared. For an important statement on the information commons, see David Bollier's Silent Theft: The Private Plunder of Our Common Wealth (Routledge, 2002).

The second rhetorical strategy involves focusing on users of copyrighted material -- everyone who reads, writes, watches, photographs, listens, or sings. This is a more pragmatic approach, intended to warn people that the harmless acts they have taken for granted for years, like making a mixed tape or CD for a party, or "time shifting" television programs and skipping commercials, are threatened by recent changes in law and technology. The organization digitalconsumer.org is promoting "The Consumer Technology Bill of Rights," which makes private, noncommercial uses positive rights instead of weak defenses to accusations of infringement.

Within academe, we can use those strategies to make clear to our students, our peers, our Congressional representatives, and the public that copyright is a bargain, a good deal for everyone. As both content producers and users, we are in a good position to outline the complexity and benefits of such a deal. And we are in a good position to highlight the abuses that copyright holders have engaged in since 1998.

We must be blunt about the current system's threats to free speech, intellectual freedom, and the free flow of information. We must be careful not to be trapped in nihilistic rhetoric about the "end of copyright." Copyright need not end if we can rehabilitate and rehumanize it. Our jobs depend on it.

Siva Vaidhyanathan, an assistant professor of information studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, will become an assistant professor of culture and communication at New York University this fall. He is the author of Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity (New York University Press, 2001).

so much for the catholic church moving forward...

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Smoke Gets in Our News:

"The white smoke yesterday signaled that the Vatican thinks what it needs to bring it into modernity is the oldest pope since the 18th century: Joseph Ratzinger, a 78-year-old hidebound archconservative who ran the office that used to be called the Inquisition and who once belonged to Hitler Youth. For American Catholics - especially women and Democratic pro-choice Catholic pols - the cafeteria is officially closed. After all, Cardinal Ratzinger, nicknamed 'God's Rottweiler' and 'the Enforcer,' helped deny Communion rights to John Kerry and other Catholic politicians in the 2004 election."

Justice Scalia - the "Activist Judge"

Not since the 1960's, when federal judges in the South were threatened by cross burnings and firebombs, have judges been so besieged. Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, set off a furor when he said judges could be inviting physical attacks with controversial decisions. And last week the House majority leader, Tom DeLay, called for an investigation of the federal judges in the Terri Schiavo case, saying ominously: "We set up the courts. We can unset the courts."

Conservatives claim that they are rising up against "activist judges," who decide cases based on their personal beliefs rather than the law. They frequently point to Justice Antonin Scalia as a model of honest, "strict constructionist" judging. And Justice Scalia has eagerly embraced the hero's role. Last month, after the Supreme Court struck down the death penalty for those under 18, he lashed out at his colleagues for using the idea of a "living Constitution" that evolves over time to hand down political decisions - something he says he would never do.

The idea that liberal judges are advocates and partisans while judges like Justice Scalia are not is being touted everywhere these days, and it is pure myth. Justice Scalia has been more than willing to ignore the Constitution's plain language, and he has a knack for coming out on the conservative side in cases with an ideological bent. The conservative partisans leading the war on activist judges are just as inconsistent: they like judicial activism just fine when it advances their own agendas.

Justice Scalia's views on federalism - which now generally command a majority on the Supreme Court - are perhaps the clearest example of the problem with the conservative attack on judicial activism. When conservatives complain about activist judges, they talk about gay marriage and defendants' rights. But they do not mention the 11th Amendment, which has been twisted beyond its own plain words into a states' rights weapon to throw minorities, women and the disabled out of federal court.

The 11th Amendment says federal courts cannot hear lawsuits against a state brought by "Citizens of another State, or by Citizens or Subjects of any Foreign State." But it's been interpreted to block suits by a state's own citizens - something it clearly does not say. How to get around the Constitution's express words? In a 1991 decision, Justice Scalia wrote that "despite the narrowness of its terms," the 11th Amendment has been understood by the court "to stand not so much for what it says, but for the presupposition of our constitutional structure which it confirms." If another judge used that rationale to find rights in the Constitution, Justice Scalia's reaction would be withering. He went on, in that 1991 decision, to throw out a suit by Indian tribes who said they had been cheated by the State of Alaska.

Conservative politicians insist that courts should defer to the democratically elected branches, but conservative judges do not seem to be listening. The Supreme Court's conservative majority regularly overturns laws passed by Congress, like the Violence Against Women Act and the Gun-Free School Zones Act. The court has even established a bizarre series of hoops Congress must jump through to pass a law protecting Americans' 14th Amendment equal-protection rights. Congress must prove in many cases that the law it passed is "congruent" and "proportional" to the harm being addressed. Even John Noonan Jr., an appeals court judge appointed by President Reagan, has said these new rules - which Justice Scalia eagerly embraces - reduce Congress to the level of an "administrative agency."

Justice Scalia likes to boast that he follows his strict-constructionist philosophy wherever it leads, even if it leads to results he disagrees with. But it is uncanny how often it leads him just where he already wanted to go. In his view, the 14th Amendment prohibits Michigan from using affirmative action in college admissions, but lets Texas make gay sex a crime. (The Supreme Court has held just the opposite.) He is dismissive when inmates invoke the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment to challenge prison conditions. But he is supportive when wealthy people try to expand the "takings clause" to block the government from regulating their property.

The inconsistency of the conservative war on judges was apparent in the Terri Schiavo ordeal. Mr. DeLay, an outspoken critic of activist courts, does not want to investigate the federal trial judge and the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit for judicial activism, but for the opposite: for refusing to overturn the Florida state courts' legal decisions, and Michael Schiavo's decisions about his wife's medical care.

The classic example of conservative inconsistency remains Bush v. Gore. Not only did the court's conservative bloc trample on the Florida state courts and stop the vote counting - it declared its ruling would not be a precedent for future cases. How does Justice Scalia explain that decision? In a recent New Yorker profile, he is quoted as saying, with startling candor, that "the only issue was whether we should put an end to it, after three weeks of looking like a fool in the eyes of the world." That, of course, isn't a constitutional argument - it is an unapologetic defense of judicial activism.

When it comes to judicial activism, conservative judges are no better than liberal ones - and, it must be said, no worse. If conservatives are going to continue their war on the judiciary, though, they should be honest. They do not want to get rid of judicial activists, a standard that would bring down even Justice Scalia. They want to rid the courts of judges who disagree with them.