By Charles Peters at the Washington Monthly.
The District of Columbia government has an Incentive Awards Committee that determines cash bonuses to city employees. Three percent of the employees get the bonus. Guess the percentage of committee members who get it? Fifty.
…Emily Basile, a high school student in my hometown, Charleston, W.Va., got in trouble last winter for protesting the Iraq War. When her principal, an African American named Clinton Giles, objected, she told him, “Without Rosa Parks, you wouldn’t be where you are right now.”
Giles reacted by calling her “racist and bigoted” and suspended her from school. I think he should have hugged her and held an assembly in her honor. How many American high school students have any idea who Rosa Parks was, much less that her protest of segregation was an apt precedent for Basile’s protest of the war?
…Gretchen Morgenson had a line about the recently retired president of the New York Stock Exchange that reminds one of what that institution is really about, when she described the “$140 million paid to Richard Grasso for his work as a casino greeter.”
…William Robertson is my new hero. He’s suing Princeton to get back $525 million that his family foundation has given the university’s Woodrow Wilson School for Public and International Affairs. His reason for the suit-and the reason I’m all for it-is that Princeton officials knew that the money was given “to send students into federal government, and [the school has] ignored us.” Robertson’s foundation pays each student’s entire tuition. Princeton could easily require federal service in return for the tuition, but it does not. The result, reports Michael Powell of The Washington Post, is that “year after year, the [graduate] school has churned out bright young men and women who go to work in non-profit agencies and universities and private industry-just about anywhere but the federal government.”
This government desperately needs these bright people. Unfortunately, what is true at Princeton is true at practically every other prominent school of public affairs. At best, only a small percentage of graduates go into government. What’s sad about all this is that, if they got there, they’d find, as I did, that there’s a lot of interesting and challenging work, plus the enormous satisfaction of serving the public interest. So, why not encourage them to try it out by making any tuition subsidy dependent on their spending at least three years or so in Washington?