In the Shadow of Mt. Hollywood

Dartmouth and Grade Inflation: Grading on the Curve

The Dartmouth Alumni Magazine article I cited in my previous post points out that there does continue to be a debate on campus regarding how to grade. "In one corner of this debate," it says, "are the principled scientists who've never really abandoned their love of grading on a curve." I got graded on a curve a lot at Dartmouth in the 1960s. My memory is that it was largely in science and social science courses.

Actually, I thought it was part of the abusive official atmosphere I mentioned in my last post -- and I don't believe grading on a curve is somehow a more "principled" or purer way to grade than any other. A recent column by Walter Williams prompted some of my thinking in this area. "I never tell my economic students they ought to try to get the best grade they can in my class," says Williams. "Why? Spending the resources to earn an A in economics means that those same resources can't be spent for other classes. For example, spending the time to earn an A in my class might mean a C in biology, a D in math and an F in chemistry. That translates into a grade point average of 1.75. If by spending less time learning economics, maybe earning a C, and spending more time on other classes so as to earn a C in each of them, the student would have a higher grade point average."

One of the skills people ideally pick up in college is the ability to manage their time and priorities -- and in fact, some would say this is a desirable overall outcome of a liberal education. Walter Williams is describing a situation where a student might well weigh different levels of effort against possible outcomes in a classically economic fashion. In fact, my roommate in my last post who weighed the possible outcome of a "flag" in his class against the likely futility of trying to satisfy a professor he thought was ignorant was making a very similar decision.

However, all these decisions -- and I agree with what I think is Williams's implication, that such decisions are in fact the mark of mature, educated minds -- require some measure of predictability. If I try to earn "the best grade I can" in every class, I may run myself ragged and have a worse outcome than judiciously allocating my effort where I think it will do the most good. But how will I know where it will do the most good?

In part, I'll know this if grade outcomes are predictable. If I know that a score of 90-100 is A, 80-90 is B, and so forth, I may be able to allocate my time so that, possibly, I can shoot for a low-90s score and still get an A, where the extra effort to get a 99 or 100 wouldn't be cost-effective. (I'm not arguing for any particular range, of course, only that the range should be predictable.)

But if my profs grade on a curve, this has to reduce predictability. If enough students have overextended themselves to get scores in the 99 to 100 range, the cutoff for an "A" on the curve might be 97, and I would have wasted the time I spent reasonably (I thought) trying to get an A with a 93. But then, if the cutoff for "B" was 85, I could have gotten the "B" I got anyhow for less effort than I spent trying to get an "A". I think I had this figured out subconsciously by the middle of my sophomore year and adjusted my efforts accordingly. "Dad Thad" never liked me much, and in retrospect I think it was because he knew I had this shell game figured out -- he kept quoting Carlyle to me, hoping I'd reach the eternal yea from the eternal nay. Fat chance on that issue.

The effect of grading on a curve was, to my undergraduate eyes, to turn schoolwork into a crap shoot and a rat race. Students have no choice under such a system but to "earn the best grade they can", the thing an intelligent teacher like Walter Williams precisely doesn't recommend. If I manage my time carefully, aiming at results within reasonable tolerance, the unpredictability of the curve may make those reasonable efforts futile. Thus I either have to engage in unreasonable efforts in hopes of beating the curve (which in my observation many, many students did), or I have to game the system in some other way.

For instance, you can cry. "Once, a premed called me up in tears because she got an A-," says Professor John Thorstenson in the Alumni Mag piece. "She was in tears because she didn't do better than the median grade of A-." For all I know, this strategy may succeed often enough that it helps counteract the arbitrariness of grade distributions on the curve.

I've always been puzzled that professors in the sciences and social sciences took a bell-shaped curve as a model for grade distribution. Time after time I'd see the profs explaining how the curve came out from the midterm: they'd chalk the results, 3 got 100, 5 got 99, 8 got 98, all the way down to the other end where 4 got 55, and 2 got 52. Then, slash! B starts at 96, where 10 people got that score! slash! C starts at 89, 22 people got that score! And so forth.

Bell-shaped distributions, as I understand it, apply to extremely large numbers. If we find enough people, we'll find shoe sizes distributed in a bell shaped curve. But we likely won't find a bell shaped curve for most characteristics even in a group the size of an introductory science lecture. Actuarial tables work in a similar way -- with a sample big enough, we can predict how many people will die at a particular age. But would you want to apply that table to just 300 people? I've never been convinced that bell-shaped distributions can be expected of samples only in the hundreds, much less dozens.

So I've always thought that grading on a curve was in fact a form of grade deflation, a way of removing predictability, at least at the margin, from what ought to be a process of learning to value and manage one's time and priorities. If you take away predictability, you turn the grade part of the educational process into something more lottery-like, benefiting precisely those who can't reasonably manage their time -- who instead spend every moment with their heads in the books, or gaming the system in other ways. I came away from my time at Dartmouth convinced that "grading on a curve" was, rather than anything like a "scientific" approach to grading, instead a major form of institutionally sanctioned hazing, a way to make things unpleasant for underclassmen. This is not "good for" anyone.

As a result, I think the "argument" depicted in the Almuni Mag piece between grading on a curve versus mushier approaches is a false dichotomy. More on this in my next post.

Grade Inflation at Dartmouth

The March/April 2004 issue of the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine has a piece, "A is for Abundance" (not on line), covering the current state of grade inflation at Dartmouth, which on the face of it isn't encouraging: the current median grade there is 3.32, a B-plus, and the Registrar's office is quoted as saying Dartmouth is rapidly "approaching the point where A- will be the median student grade."

The piece is written by Rick Green, who appears to be a moonlighting Hartford Courant reporter with no special knowledge of teaching or education. Since the piece appears in an official Dartmouth publication, and a key quote is from the Dean of the Faculty, we may assume that Green wrote pretty much as he was bidden, and the position in the article is fairly close to Dartmouth's view on the problem -- which isn't pretty.

The money quote: "'If grades have migrated up, what difference does it make?' says dean of the faculty Michael Gazzaniga '61, the David T. McLaughlin Distinguished Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences. 'You still have to master the content.'" But shouldn't the grade be one of the best ways you can tell if you've mastered the content? (And I hate to say it, but a minor theme in this blog is how Psychology professors keep trying to audition for straight-lady/man roles in Marx Brothers flicks.)

One thing that interests me here is Dartmouth's tendency to gloss over hard facts in its communications with alumni. As I posted below in "An Odd Development in the Dartmouth Trustee Election", Dartmouth sent its alumni an e-mail telling them balloting would be delayed due to "a major Internet access problem on the Eastern seaboard that was beyond Dartmouth's control," when in fact according to the student newspaper, the problem was due to a router failure on Dartmouth's internal network.

By the same token, someone seems to have been telling Rick Green, the moonlighting reporter, that "since the late 1960s, the average Dartmouth GPA has climbed steadily from 2.45 to 3.32." As it happens, I was a Dartmouth student earning a GPA there in the late 1960s, and at no point does the article mention a key fact: during the 1960s, Dartmouth adopted a 5-point grading system, as opposed to the conventional 4 point system (A is 4, B is 3, etc.). In this system, A was 5, B was 4 -- and there were two C grades, a C-plus (a "plu" in student parlance, as in "I plu'ed the course"), which was 3, and a C-minus (a "min" [pronounced "mine"] in student parlance, same usage as above), which was 2. A D was 1, an E was 0. There was also an additional grade called "flagrant neglect", or "E-flag" in student parlance (as in "I flagged the course"), which I don't believe affected your GPA more than a plain E, but likely had you on double secret probation in a hurry. For that matter, beyond A you could get a "citation".

I had a roommate one year, now a music critic for one of the major papers, who had the distinction of getting both a "flag" and two "citations" in various courses. He thought the letter he received from the professor warning him of the likely "flag" was so poorly written he posted it proudly on our bulletin board. Since it was his senior year, it wasn't going to affect his graduation, and he took the poor wording in the letter as additional reason to blow off all further work in that course.

The reason for the two "C" grades in the 1960s was specifically to counteract grade inflation and expand the space at the middle of the bell-shaped curve. So, unless there's been a recalculation somewhere, if the average Dartmouth GPA in the late 1960s was 2.45, that would put it almost exactly between a "plu" and a "min", or just a tad below a straight "C" anywhere else. Which, we may assume, is roughly where we would expect it to be if the bell-shaped curve were being applied. So the climb from 2.45 to 3.32 seems less steep than it really is. In 35 years, the average has actually moved from just below middle C to a B-plus, about to become A-minus. (Naturally, I will welcome information from Dartmouth showing how the 1960s 2.45 has been normalized to a 4-point system, if this has in fact been done.)

Much, of course, has changed at Dartmouth in 35 years. There were no women undergraduates there in the late 1960s. I don't know when Dartmouth changed from the 5-point grading system it had then to the 4-point system that's explained in the current Alumni Magazine -- which is the same as most other institutions now use. But I'm sure the change occurred at roughly the same time, and for roughly the same reasons, that Dartmouth went co-ed: they'd hit the down side of the baby boom curve. They were going to have to make the place more attractive if they wanted to continue to be selective. We may assume the change from a 5-point to a 4-point system was done as a single, premeditated, official act of grade inflation -- not just an unconscious creep.

Frankly, the "official" atmosphere at Dartmouth when I was there was often abusive. To get that median grade just below C, a lot of professors had to be unnecessarily harsh with some pretty talented people, and that didn't help anyone (though I think some of the profs enjoyed it). So I don't think loosening up on grades is necessarily a bad thing. For a time, I thought taking ridiculously hard introductory science courses and getting "mins" was somehow "good for you". On more mature reflection, I don't see that school should have to be this way. But I just don't think Dartmouth is being honest with us alums, and likely not with itself, on what it's doing and why it's doing it, which perhaps is one reason the Alumni mag is silent on the change in GPA calculations. More on this tomorrow.

More to Come on Dartmouth!

My Dartmouth administration minders took yesterday off, but they were back this morning bright and early at the start of the Hanover workday, with this Google search. They always do this a little after eight Eastern time, which suggests that they get their coffee, go to their cube (I'm assuming these are fairly low-level people; my memory of the Deans' offices is that President Putin's ceremonial anteroom in the Kremlin is slightly smaller), and head straight for this blog to see if there's any new dirt on Thurman Rodgers.

Rodgers, though, is at best running a dark-horse campaign to become one presumably dissident member of a 16-member Board of Trustees, the other 15 of whom were largely recruited on the basis of "prior experience on non-profit boards". Which means, I guess, that they're scions of wealthy families who've learned how things are done at Ford or Carnegie or MacArthur, and likely to toe whatever lines are to be toed. I don't understand the nervousness I see here.

I still like the idea that someone's being paid serious money to read my blog almost every day. This is apparently the first thing they do when they get in. I'll still make an offer to read it myself for half what Dartmouth is paying those guys -- I've got to proofread it anyway, after all -- and report on anything new I've said about Thurman Rodgers.

But the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine's latest issue has an interesting piece on grade inflation, which I'll post about tomorrow. You guys in Hanover, get ready!

UPDATE: I got an e-mail this morning from a Dartmouth '71 who says, "I just voted for Thurman Rodgers, and I never would have done it without your blog. I would have just thrown out the ballot like I have so many others.

"Years ago I tried to be a good citizen and find out where the candidates stood and make an informed selection. But it seemed just about impossible. The College forbade candidates from electioneering, and I didn't care enough to invest the time and resources necessary for the Dartmouth equivalent of Kremlinology. Though I did learn something useful. Rules to make elections 'clean' are often rules to keep the rulemakers in power."

Bad Hire -- IV

Just as I was convinced something was going to have to happen with Dan Vardaman, Dan himself called a big meeting, maybe two dozen people. The whole thing had an air of great import. I should have guessed what was going on when, a few days earlier, I mentioned to Dan something that had to do with Billy, and Dan got a shifty-eyed expression and evaded whatever it was I'd said.

Billy Finch, we were told in the meeting, was being terminated as we spoke, and would be walked out the door into the hands of the Wonderful Park Police Department on charges of sexual battery. We learned, in very general terms, that the clerks who had been lining up outside Billy's cube were going to lunch with him, but the lunches hadn't turned out well. In fact, what I learned later from scuttlebutt was that Billy would take the clerks to lunch in his car, but not long after leaving the bank's parking lot, he'd open his pants and say something to the effect of "You want lunch? There it is!!"

After the meeting, though, we learned that whoever had filed charges of sexual battery against Billy had withdrawn them, so everyone missed the drama of his arrest, though he stayed fired. Later in the day, a pair of Human Resources types went through his cube. They showed me phone and card key records indicating Billy often came back to the data center late at night and made phone calls that added up to thousands of dollars. There was also a lot of cash in his cube drawers. I left work at quitting time, with the HR ladies still counting money. I never found out what resulted from that.

The upshot of the Billy Finch episode was that any tension that might have been building up over Dan Vardaman was nicely dissipated. Any action that was going to be taken over anyone had been taken for the time being, which proved to be a good while, and Vardaman just kept on going on junkets and taking long lunches for nooners with his special lady friends in the office.

Billy called me a couple of days after he'd been fired, asking if I could help him out in any way. I'd just had a phone call from a headhunter asking if I knew anyone who'd be interested in a low-level security wallah job, so I gave Billy her name. She called me later in the day delighted that I'd sent Billy to her. He made a great first impression. He stayed on that job a couple of months, but then I heard from him again that he was up in the Seattle area doing something else, and that was the last I knew of him.

Dan stayed at Mount Fuji Bank a couple of years after I left. Billy wasn't the last bad hire Dan made -- he brought on a couple of other guys who were unqualified to do the work, and he fired them both at a convenient time, distracting attention from trouble that was building up for Dan himself. I think he had a way of hiring people he could use to create a crisis when he needed one, a little like a cat I read about once that, in the fall, would capture a breeding pair of mice and bring them into the house so there'd be mice to eat all winter.

I was eating lunch one day in downtown Los Angeles, well after I'd left Mount Fuji Bank myself, when one of Mount Fuji's auditors saw me and came over to my table. "Did you hear about Dan Vardaman?" he asked. I hadn't. Dan, it turned out, had done a pretty good job of not letting any of the ladies he took to motels for nooners know about the others. But finally, one, who apparently thought she had the inside track to become the next Mrs. Vardaman, found out about another, and the result was not only calls to the existing Mrs. Vardaman, but to the bank's management as well.

Then I ran into Dan at a monthly professional meeting. Typical of Dan, the meeting didn't have anything to do with the work he was doing, but he'd been able to use it to get out of the office. We always got along well outside of work -- he was a charming, attractive guy. Now and then I'd call and touch base with him, but suddenly he wasn't there any more at the new place he was working, and his home phone had been disconnected, too. My best guess is his wife took him back to Louisiana, where she could keep a closer eye on him.

Bad Hire -- III

It was starting to cause me some concern that, because I was taking care of a lot of work that Dan Vardaman should have been doing, problems that might otherwise have come to light were being swept under the rug. Bank auditors always like to come sniffing around the security wallahs, because the things you can steal with the password authority you have can be important. I always give auditors the information they ask for, and I often take their suggestions. This was beginning to cause some friction between Dan and me, because Dan thought just turning over information to auditors was disloyal. But he wasn't around enough to make a big issue of it.

In the meantime, Billy still didn't have much to do. One day he asked me if he could leave early. "I ain't used to working more than three or four hours a day," he said, apparently with the implication that it was going to take him a while to work up to eight. I guess he could do things like run five miles with a 40-pound pack, but eight hours of desk work was a challenge. He didn't work for me, so I couldn't tell him yes or no, but I said it would probably help if he stuck around. In fact, I offered to bring him up to speed on some of the work, but he wasn't interested. He started taking off when he pleased anyhow. It didn't bother me -- at least he wasn't carrying tales about me to the higher-ups.

Meanwhile, other managers began coming to me asking about projects that were apparently building up on Dan's desk. One guy wanted to buy a new product, and security had to bless it. Dan wouldn't have been the guy to know whether it was good or bad, but he wasn't passing it on to me, and he wasn't getting back to the other manager. The documentation was just sitting in a pile with everything else he wasn't getting to. All I could do was mention it to Dan, who, I could see, was beginning to have a problem with people's impression that I was doing all the work, and he was unavailable. I think he started to hold on to some of the requests as long as he could in hopes that I wouldn't have enough time to do a good job when he finally turned them over.

Dan was getting to work late, but on random days he'd call me at the office from his car phone right at starting time to be sure I was there. I'd begun to make some sense of where he was going on his long lunch breaks, and with whom (though not everyone), but I didn't have the full story until much later. I could sense that some kind of a problem was going to build up over Dan not being around and not doing anything -- the only factor, as far as I could see, that had kept things from boiling over up to then was that some of the managers and all the higher-ups still thought he looked and acted the part.

Bad Hire -- II

I'm not sure why Dan Vardaman decided we needed someone else -- at the time, there wasn't that much to do, even with Dan avoiding everything that came his way and either passing it on to me or ignoring it. He knew so little about the area that his judgment on what he could ignore wasn't good, and things were always falling through cracks. But he was doing what the higher-ups liked: he looked good, and, as one of the other managers put it, he "met" well. That meant he was able to carry a pile of papers into a meeting with the proper preoccupied look and make knowing grunts at the right intervals.

Dan's biggest skill was attaching himself to junkets. If anyone was going out to inspect the remodeling of a new branch, or visit a vendor's office, or attend some useless conference, Dan was somehow able to get himself invited along on the excursion. He didn't have much to do otherwise, and he preferred the little trips out. This also meant that nobody ever knew exactly where he was, and everyone was used to not seeing him, and that made it easier for his other hobby, which, as I gradually learned, was taking nooners at a local motel with some of the women in the office.

Somewhere, he found the time to hire Billy Finch. Billy was straight out of the Marine Corps, and he'd spent much of his time operating computers in places like Hawaii and Guam. Dan didn't bother to have me sit in on the interview and ask technical questions, so I never really knew much about his qualifications. I think Dan knew as well as I did that there wasn't much to do, and what there was of it, I was doing. So he filled the hiring authority with the most attractive candidate who came along.

And Billy was attractive, in his late twenties, still with his Marine Corps close-cropped hair, six feet tall, lean and fit, a face a little like Elvis Presley. Partly I think Dan looked at Billy and saw a younger version of himself. Dan had been in the Navy, and in fact he was a Viet Nam veteran, but from what he told me, he'd been a Seabee and mostly driven a bulldozer in rear areas, and in the process was running a sweet little racket where anyone who needed any actual bulldozer work done had to give him a case of booze. But he had a serious-looking Viet Nam Veteran plaque on his office wall.

So as Billy got settled in, I mostly just heard the usual stories you'd expect to hear from someone who ran computers for the Marine Corps on Guam, which revolved around how little there was to do and what you had to do to keep from going berserk. And our conversations would be interrupted now and then by female clerks coming from all over the rest of the building to drop by Billy's cube and chat him up. First a few, then a lot. It was getting to be a regular procession. They couldn't leave Billy alone.

Bad Hire -- I

Before I went to work at Cadovra, I worked for a little over a year at Mount Fuji Bank's data center in Wonderful Park. They'd recently had an upheaval in their computer security area. I knew the guy who was there as manager before he quit. For several years, he and I had been applying for the same jobs. Sometimes he'd get the job, sometimes I would. At one point we worked just down the street from each other until he got fired -- he got fed up and canceled a Senior Vice President's key card, or something like that, from what I heard. On top of being a manager of computer security wallahs, he was also a licensed private investigator and carried a .38. I would probably be worried if a guy who carried started acting erratically myself.

After he got fired from that place, he wound up at Mount Fuji Bank, but quit in a huff after the Japanese tried to pull a fast one on him -- when I started work there, I got his desk, still with his old files in it, and right on top of his center drawer was a copy of his resignation memo. They made him an offer with a Vice President title, but when he started they pulled the "aw, gee, we're sorry, there's been a mistake" routine on him and cut him down to a plain manager, which knocked out a lot of the benefits they'd promised him in the offer. I'd have quit, too.

So then they found Dan Vardaman, who didn't know anything about computer security, but he was willing to work for what Mount Fuji Bank would pay him. I can say good and bad about Dan, but I can never be completely down on him, because after Fred Feebles reneged on his promise to be a reference for me, Dan took his place, at least until he had to leave town. Dan was a good-looking guy. He looked good even in the cheap suits he wore. He sang with a gospel band on Sundays, and while he was married, he never let that get in the way with the ladies who admired his singing in the various churches the band would visit. I didn't know until later that he also had a Confederate flag tattooed on his bicep, but then, he was from Louisiana, and eventually he had to go back there.

So as these things go, once Mount Fuji hired Dan, they had to find someone who actually knew something about computer security to do the work, and that turned out to be me. I was a bargain like everyone else Mount Fuji picked up; I'd been fired some weeks earlier from an aerospace company, and I was willing to work for what they offered, and work for a guy who didn't know what he was supposed to be doing.

This was in the late 1980s, as the glitter was wearing off the Japanese reputation for management. Mount Fuji Bank had taken over several smaller US banks and put them under the Mount Fuji trademark, but the operations were still run by Americans who'd been held over from the old banks. The Japanese just hovered in the background and didn't get involved -- when they did, they made colossal blunders. At one point they called in an African-American manager and politely explained to him that he was being fired because, like all others of his race, he was lazy. The result was a class action suit. The Japanese quickly learned to keep a low profile. The worst bumblings of the American managers were far better than anything the Japanese could do.

The American managers seemed to have a special blind spot. One long-term Senior VP would call his secretary in to his office several times a day for dictation, in the course of which he routinely unzipped his fly and placed his penis on his desk. The secretary worked for the man for several years until she quit, mentioning the dictation business only in her exit interview. They walked the Senior VP out the door the next day. But even after that, there was still something funny about the place, which may explain why they hired Vardaman, and why Vardaman hired Billy Finch.

Dartmouth Trustee Campaign Gets National Attention

Thurman Rodgers's petition nomination, and now campaign, for the Dartmouth Board of Trustees is covered in OpinionJournal today. I've been blogging this for a while, and my site is visited almost daily by what appear to be factota at the Dartmouth administration charged with minding what appears about this in the blogosphere. Voting, by the way, is currently in progress via both electronic and paper ballots, and is due to end next month.

The Wall Street Journal's editorial page has been a steady friend to the forces of sanity at Dartmouth, publicizing one of the earliest wacky political-correctness cases, the suspension of a student for "vexatious oral exchange" (which, as someone pointed out long ago, sounds like something you could get arrested for in Georgia). (Scroll down to Jeffrey Hart's essay "Freedman and the Review".)

And Another Good Writer!

Many thanks to mallarme at the Greater Nomadic Council for pointing me at Mimi Smartypants, which looks to be an excellent read. I've already added it to my links on the right.

But Now for a Real Writer

As an antidote to the below, check out Peggy Noonan's piece in today's OpinionJournal, if you haven't already. She makes the same point about the 9/11 hearings that I've been making about many other things here: it smells to her a great deal as though all these folks, whatever their party, are in bed with each other and taking care of their own. Nothing could have been done by either party is the basic conclusion. That certainly fits what I've learned to watch for in human nature. I think she's correct in suggesting that yes, if you assume everyone's job is to be complacent and think what everyone else thinks, nothing could have been done.

This is a Writer?

Via The Greater Nomadic Council, I've found an interesting item in Salon, "The confessions of a semi-successful author", by a pseudonymous "mid-list" novelist. (Salon makes you get a "day pass" to read the whole thing, to do which you need to go through several screens trying to sell you some natural vitamins. It's your call if you think this piece is worth that trouble -- but I warn you, it was written by someone who says she can't sell her stuff).

"I've published several books, won adoring reviews, and even sold a few copies," she says. "But I've made almost no money and had my heart broken." And who is she? "I'm not saying. Because although I've published books and articles about things most people won't talk about, let alone publish -- my sex life and marriage counseling, my quirky predilections and unpopular politics, my worst mistakes and no-longer-secret yearnings -- I'm using a pseudonym to write this story, because telling the truth about my life as a writer is one risk I can't afford to take."

I assume it's not Erica Jong, because Erica Jong is likely rolling in dough. But it otherwise sounds like someone who might as well be Erica Jong, and that's one part of my difficulty with this piece. We already have Erica Jong. Here's another problem. Describing the publicity arrangements for her third book, she says,

Book assigned to Sharp Young Publicist, so I don't hire freelance publicist. Six months before pub date SYP initiates meetings with major media outlets; tells me to choose between "Good Morning America" and "Today," Redbook and O, advises me to buy "great TV clothes." One month before pub date, publisher ("Mr. Big II") calls with bad news: SYP is MIA. Mr. Big II assigns Junior Assistant Publicist to "lock down" Major Media Bookings made by SYP. After calling several "confirmed" producers, JAP concludes that SYP fabricated bookings while secretly preparing to "pursue other opportunities." JAP makes heroic effort, books local media (I wear "Good Morning America" outfit for three-minute interview on local cable news show), is unable to book promised national media. Book wins awards; sales flat, even in areas saturated by local media coverage.

I'm sorry, but ever since the first time I read it, one of the phrases from the literary canon that's stuck in my mind, never been far from the front of it, in fact, is Thoreau's "Beware of any enterprise that requires new clothes". I'm only an amateur at this writing business, of course, get paid a few hundred bucks for something now and then, blog for Site Meter traffic here. But let me tell you, I would never -- never publish a sentence I remotely thought would, by its context, suggest to any reader that I was so vapidly, blissfully unaware of that sentence from Thoreau. In the middle of all her breathless Telegrammenstil, the lady announces that, as part of her literary persona, she's buying new clothes, and clearly one of the biggest of the many disappointments in her literary career is the fact that she must wear the outfit she'd bought for "Good Morning America" on a local cable news show.

Why should I buy this person's books? She's giving me reason after reason to blow her off. I suppose it's just as well she won't tell us her real name, because there's a chance I might see one of her books at a bookstore someplace and, not knowing she's the one who did this piece, buy it when I wouldn't otherwise. You earn a buck where you can.

To tell the truth, I don't know enough about the publishing industry to make informed comments about her remarks, though from what I see here, I think she's an awful writer, with derivative subject matter and a superficial mind, and it's a problem with the industry that it's spent the money it has on her. If I knew more about the industry, I'd try to speculate on why. But I think one of the practical effects of blogging is that writers, who aren't going to make much money in any case, can find efficient ways to get their writing out without all the publishing-industry overhead that's causing this author so many problems. And the observation has certainly been made that the current literary assembly line, from MFA programs to the publishing business as it exists, is not identifying or promoting worthwhile talent. So all I can do is take this piece of evidence and try to file it among my other general impressions.

Dual Hierarchies, Witches' Sabbaths, and William James

In my post on "The Theory of the Lead Narcissist", I mentioned C.S. Lewis's essay "The Inner Ring", where he discusses the existence of "dual hierarchies": in-groups at work, clubs, faculties, or anyplace else, where largely unacknowledged, vaguely defined cabals of mediocre people exercise the real decision-making authority in many areas, with that authority exercised toward the group's aggrandizement, especially via self-exemption from ordinary standards of performance or competence. I think Lewis's thesis has more descriptive resonance than, say, the Peter Principle, which says that individuals in organizations rise to their level of incompetence.

Re-reading Lewis's essay drew me inevitably to a story I'd been hesitating to re-read for many years, Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" (both Lewis's essay and this story are fairly short, by the way, and are well worth reading or re-reading via the links). In Hawthorne's story, "Goodman" (a title equivalent to "Mister") Brown, in response to a vague but irresistible impulse, journeys away from Faith, his new wife, in Salem and into the forest, where, by prearrangement, he meets the devil. As he hesitates, the devil nevertheless guides him by stages to a witches' convocation, where it turns out that both he and his new wife are to be initiated into the community of evil -- to which, apparently, everyone else Brown knows already belongs:

"There," resumed the sable form, "are all whom ye have reverenced from youth. Ye deemed them holier than yourselves, and shrank from your own sin, contrasting it with their lives of righteousness, and prayerful aspirations heavenward. Yet, here are they all, in my worshipping assembly! This night it shall be granted you to know their secret deeds; how hoary-bearded elders of the church have whispered wanton words to the young maids of their households; how many a woman, eager for widow's weeds, has given her husband a drink at bed-time, and let him sleep his last sleep in her bosom; how beardless youth have made haste to inherit their father's wealth; and how fair damsels- blush not, sweet ones- have dug little graves in the garden, and bidden me, the sole guest, to an infant's funeral. By the sympathy of your human hearts for sin, ye shall scent out all the places-whether in church, bed-chamber, street, field, or forest- where crime has been committed, and shall exult to behold the whole earth one stain of guilt, one mighty blood-spot. . ."

"Young Goodman Brown" is one of Hawthorne's earliest stories, and it isn't a mature work. Brown's reaction to what he sees of evil is simply to become bitter and suspicious of everyone. The story concludes:

Often, awaking suddenly at midnight, he shrank from the bosom of Faith, and at morning or eventide, when the family knelt down at prayer, he scowled, and muttered to himself, and gazed sternly at his wife, and turned away. And when he had lived long, and was borne to his grave, a hoary corpse, followed by Faith, an aged woman, and children and grandchildren, a goodly procession, besides neighbors, not a few, they carved no hopeful verse upon his tombstone; for his dying hour was gloom.

Hawthorne is describing a kind of spiritual crisis that some people confront (though certainly most people don't), where they begin to recognize that not everyone is their friend, even when they say they are, not everyone has their best interests in mind, even when they say they do, not everyone who seems like a good person is one. Sometimes people they trust tell lies, for instance. By extension, not all promotions are based on merit, not all Ph.D.s who've done good work get tenure-track jobs, and so forth. Recognizing this is a difficult part of reaching maturity, it seems to me. William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience distinguishes between "healthy-mindedness", the tendency to think everything is for the best and to reject the idea of evil, and "morbid-mindedness", the consciousness that evil in various forms is everywhere -- the view of life that Young Goodman Brown suddenly falls into:

[W]e can see how great an antagonism may naturally arise between the healthy-minded way of viewing life and the way that takes all this experience of evil as something essential. To this latter way, the morbid-minded way, as we might call it, healthy-mindedness pure and simple seems unspeakably blind and shallow. . . . It seems to me that we are bound to say that morbid-mindedness ranges over the wider scale of experience, and that its survey is the one that overlaps. The method of averting one's attention from evil, and living simply in the light of good is splendid as long as it will work. It will work with many persons; it will work far more generally than most of us are ready to suppose. . .

Later, James describes those who adhere to healthy-mindedness as the "once born", and those who are morbid-minded as the "twice born". He continues:

In the religion of the once-born the world is a sort of rectilinear or one-storied affair, whose accounts are kept in one denomination, whose parts have just the values which naturally they appear to have, and of which a simple algebraic sum of pluses and minuses will give the total worth. Happiness and religious peace consist in living on the plus side of the account. In the religion of the twice-born, on the other hand, the world is a double-storied mystery. Peace cannot be reached by the simple addition of pluses and elimination of minuses from life. Natural good is not simply insufficient in amount and transient, there lurks a falsity in its very being.

Problems like the academic job market and the human situations that emanate from it, or the corruption and incompetence we find in work environments, in fact represent conditions that need to be addressed by philosophical and literary analysis (though in James's view, even philosophical and literary approaches are insufficient). I'm interested that in fact so little of the existing literary canon covers it. Some of Jonathan Swift's work addresses it in various places, such as in "Instructions to Servants" (which I can't find on the web). C.S.Lewis and Hawthorne cover it as I've discussed here. I find it with some frequency in George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London and Coming Up For Air. But not many other places. This is one of the issues I'm trying to work through in this blog.

Sorry to Remove Invisible Adjunct from the Links

Invisible Adjunct has decided to give up her blog. The details are there, for anyone who hasn't seen them. Nearly a year ago, IA gave me one of the awards she used to hand out for posting a good comment, and that was one of the factors that prompted me to decide to start my own blog. That decision took months -- a little, I guess, like IA's decision to discontinue hers.

IA has been uniformly generous to me throughout the time I've been blogging -- she was one of the first blogs to link to mine, and she's often had links to posts here in her own posts. This has spiked my traffic a number of times and been a real encouragement. In fact, for a while, referrals from Invisible Adjunct were 20 percent or more of my traffic on a normal day, which made me very concerned that I needed to diversify my referrals -- I had a sense she wasn't going to blog forever. I'm happy that I've diversified, but sad that her blog is going away. Many thanks, IA, for both your many personal kindnesses and for producing such an excellent blog.

As many have posted on the comments to her announcement, her blog was one of the best ones going, and like all her visitors, I can only wish her the very best in her future efforts, and naturally hope she returns in some other form -- but we'll all likely run into each other in the buffet line at the heavenly banquet in any case. Until we meet again.

Where are the Editors?

The News Hour had a segment (realaudio only available at this link) last night covering the widening scandal of USA Today's Jack Kelley, who ". . . likely fabricated substantial portions of at least eight stories." Terence Smith had Bill Kovach, director of the Committee of Concerned Journalists, and Geneva Overholser, professor of journalism at the University of Missouri and former ombudsman of The Washington Post, in the studio to discuss that and related issues.

There was, of course, much sanctimonious head-shaking over naughty-naughty reporters like Kelley and Jayson Blair. Terence Smith should, in fact, rent himself out as a sanctimonious head-shaker; he seems uniquely able to enunciate "tut-tut". But the question that kept bothering me was that, while I have no professional journalism experience, the stories on Jayson Blair suggest to me that the kind of fraudulent, narcissistic, or otherwise pathological behavior that results in large-scale plagiarism or fabrication simply rings, or ought to ring, alarm bells in the minds of normal people. These things do not happen without very clear, obvious warnings, long before the situation gets out of hand.

This is something I keep running into in my thinking on this blog, over and over. A Ph.D. clinical psychologist starts dating someone who is, from all available evidence, likely a criminal psychopath, with an extensive record, and time in prison. That person, to appear "normal", is going to have to lie extensively to explain major gaps in his biography. This sort of lying, even if it can't be certainly demonstrated, is going to bother ordinary people, when accompanied by glibness likely alternating with threats to make sure the story stays the story. In the end, an ordinary person is going to say, at an early stage, this guy is creepy. Why am I going out with him?

The gaps in Jayson Blair's stories have been fairly well documented -- the non-existent trips to distant cities, when he wrote the reports in his apartment, for instance. It appears that among Blair's colleagues, the discrepancies were well-known, and it was deeply resented that management systematically glossed over them. Blair's managers, clearly the parties who allowed the scandal to occur (as opposed to dealing with a personnel problem when it presented itself much earlier), were held responsible only after much outcry, from both New York Times employees and outside observers. Blair wasn't the problem, Blair was a symptom.

The News Hour's discussion glossed over this problem. Jack Kelley, it can only be logical, must have been telegraphing in very clear ways that something was fishy on his stories. If the Blair case, or others, is any guide, expense reports would be out of whack, sources couldn't be found, members of the public would be complaining, and many things would be common knowledge among the rest of the staff. And this would be happening for years. The problem is not what do we do to keep Jack Kelleys from misleading the public. The problem is where were the managers who should have seen the problem long before it got out of hand.

Geneva Overholser furrowed her brow and stroked her chin, at least metaphorically, over this issue when Smith posed it to her, and said the problem is that newspapers have cut back too much on editors. They need more editors. More editors will solve the problem. My guess is they aren't getting what they ought to be getting out of the editors they have. And this is only part of a more general social problem: we are accepting, not just on newspapers, but in many other places, that the people who should be acting like responsible adults aren't doing it. People who should be in a position to hear the alarm bells ringing aren't hearing it, or aren't acting. And those people aren't being held to account. The perps themselves should be dealt with by the system at an early stage. It's the higher-ups that keep the system from working that are the real problem with any such scandal.

No editor so far has been fired from USA Today. It seems only reasonable here that this other shoe should drop.

Statistical Milestone, Maybe

I find that, well after my cognate colleague Douglas Bass at Belief Seeking Understanding (we started blogging at roughly the same time and have shared advice now and then), I've reached Adorable Little Rodent status on The Truth Laid Bear's Ecosystem. However, this seems to be associated with some wild gyrations in the calculation of my links over the last couple of days, so I'm not sure if this is valid or if it will last.

I do note that Technorati seems to pick up different links from TTLB, and I find links on my Site Meter referrals report that are on neither -- so I would assume that if a single source added all of them up, they'd be more than either Technorati or TTLB alone reports. On the other hand, I assume that this factor applies across the board to all blogs, so I accept what I see as a relative measure of my blogging progress on that basis.

I certainly appreciate encomiastic comments like Oldman's on my "Theory of the Lead Narcissist" post, but I have to evaluate all feedback, including links and traffic, to decide if this is a worthwhile effort. I see progress in the slow growth of links and traffic, but I certainly envy those bloggers who've leapt from nowhere to Daniel Drezner-like status in a short time.

What Is It About Southern California and Psychologists?

Via Critical Mass, I read somewhat belatedly about Dr. Kerri Dunn, a visiting Psychology professor at Claremont McKenna College, who, according to police, vandalized her own car and then filed a false police report alleging a hate crime.

This follows less than a month after the case of Dr. Glenda Vittimberga, an Associate Professor of Psychology at Cal State Los Angeles, who was decapitated by a man with whom, according to police, she had a dating relationship. The man may have been either a criminal psychopath or a paranoid schizophrenic -- conditions which her specialty in Clinical Psychology apparently did not equip her to recognize.

I'm interested in the quote the LA Times attributes to Dr. Dunn: "'This is like a very big deal if they think I'm a suspect,' Dunn said in the doorway of her Redlands home. 'I didn't want any of this from the beginning. This is so overshadowing the bigger problem on campus, which is that the administration has turned its head regularly on hate speech and hate crimes.'"

I've Googled in vain for a Kerri Dunn Ph.D. (someone else may have the details), as I'd be interested to see what school turns out Ph.D.s who say "This is like a very big deal. . . . This is so overshadowing. . ." and so forth. The issue I'm seeing here is Ph.D.s in Psychology are acting like part of the problem they're supposed to be helping society solve. And Dr. Dunn apparently just doesn't speak like an educated person.

I routinely read on sites like Invisible Adjunct of highly qualified Ph.D.s in many fields who can't get good jobs. Yet there seems to be no shortage of Ph.D.s in jobs many would envy whose stewardship in those jobs is grist for slapstick comedy routines. There is a national problem here that nobody's taking a serious look at.

On Not Blaming Yourself

I got the following e-mail a couple of weeks ago from a visitor who talked in part about blaming himself for problems that turned out not to be his fault:

I read some of your Dartmouth entries and found them quite entertaining. As a musician, I had the choice to continue in academia or to stop and try to find a teaching job with the degree I had (master's). I got lucky (relative term) and ended up teaching part time at _____ in _____ (many of my fellow conservatory graduates have left the field) . The reason I mentioned this is because I presumed that while there were no music teaching jobs, there must be teaching jobs in English and the more traditional subjects. I see from your experience that these jobs were/are hard to come by as well and that makes me feel a little better.

It seems to me that one thing that's come out on the various blogs discussing the academic job market is that it's at best a lottery, but can be looked at as a rigged lottery in some cases as well. Some people lose their stake in multi-level marketing schemes and blame themselves, not recognizing the arithmetic that was going to make sure they lost. Some come out short in the academic job market and blame themselves as well. The blogs that talk about the numbers -- and either the motives or the sins of omission behind the numbers -- in the academic job market are performing a worthwhile human function. They let some good people know they shouldn't be blaming themselves for the outcomes if they don't get the job they thought they would when they entered the graduate program -- or indeed, the job they thought they deserved when they interviewed with the "right" vita and numerous articles and even books.

The other side of the coin is the reaction of the "winners" in the lottery. There are some very good people with some of the best blogs in the business who in fact have come out well in the system and have good academic jobs, but along with it some sense of detachment and compassion for the folks who haven't done as well. Others seem a little unwilling to acknowledge the role of luck in their cases and question the motives of the bloggers who think the lottery aspect of the job market is worth examining. ("He's just saying that because he's bitter he didn't get a tenure-track job.") Even worse, they seem to want to insist that there was something wrong with the folks who came out on the other side of the lottery. This is unhelpful. Some number of those who didn't win the lottery are going to have to transition into other lines of work, and they ought to be doing this with all the proper self-esteem they deserve.

Shelby Steele on Gay Marriage

OpinionJournal has a piece by Shelby Steele taking the position that gay marriage is not a "civil rights" issue as, for instance, the African-American civil rights movement is understood, and then drawing an essential distinction between the drive for gay marriage, which he basically feels is something imitative and inauthentic, and the civil rights movement, which has been a drive for natural, authentic rights.

I have several concerns here. I've watched the debate -- and the Wall Street Journal has been running pieces on both sides of it -- with interest, since, although I'm a married straight guy with generally centrist social views, I live right next to Hollywood, and I'm a communicant at a largely gay Episcopal parish. It seems fairly straightforward to me that acceptance of gays is part of the Christian message. I have a number of gay friends, and a pair of gay neighbors, who've been among the best friends and neighbors I've ever had.

It's also worth pointing out that the religious question of gay marriage is even less resolved than the secular question, since the Episcopal Church in the US, probably the most progressive in this area, has been moving only tentatively to "bless" committed gay relationships -- this is not the sacrament of marriage by any means. Episcopal priests routinely "bless" household pets, and as one priest has pointed out, blessing a committed human relationship is still much more controversial.

So I see gay marriage so far as an epistemological issue, not as either a religious issue (not a question before us at this point in any denomination), nor a civil rights issue. The question, as I see it, is whether in our civil society we're entitled to try it, and I think the answer, stemming from "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" is of course. So I do disagree with several of Steele's points.

The question of how to deal with slaves, freed slaves, African-American enfranchisement, segregation, and all the related issues, is certainly one of the main narrative threads in the American epic. As Steele says, it's obtuse for other movements -- especially among privileged people angling only for marginal aggrandizement -- to compare their cause with the African-American struggles. It's no different from those who, with equal obtuseness, compare minor injustices with the Holocaust, and Jewish writers often make a similar point.

But this doesn't mean that some injustices don't exist, even if on a lesser scale. As Alan Dershowitz has pointed out, to be Jewish in the US before World War II was to have a "disability". At various times, Irish, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, and Hispanic ethnic groups have faced prejudice. That they weren't discriminated against as much as African-Americans doesn't diminish their own struggles.

Gays have never been held as chattel property. They've never been systematically denied voting rights. On the other hand, episodes of "gay bashing" not much different from lynching have occurred, and continue to occur. A member of my parish was beaten to death on the street in West Hollywood in 2002 for being gay. Until last year, private consensual acts between gays were illegal in a number of states. Both of those problems represent issues that I think can fall under the category of "civil rights", if not at the level in the African-American experience.

And the moral issues posed by prejudice, leaving aside the legal issues in civil rights, seem to me much closer. During my life I've displayed prejudice toward both African-Americans and gays. I've had to learn many of the same lessons about my attitudes in both cases. I've had to repent just as much in both cases. In terms of my own conduct and attitudes, I see little difference; I've been wrong in the same ways and in the same degrees. I would guess most other people have approximately the same balance on the moral question.

Steele says that the difference among races is so superficial that policies discriminating on the basis of race are unreasonable and unjust. He says that what separates gays from straights, on the other hand, is more basic, since as he sees it marriage is for procreation, and gays can't procreate. I'm certainly not the first (because I've stolen this from someone else I can't remember) to say that this argument falls when we consider that we don't think it's inauthentic or imitative if a woman who's had a hysterectomy gets married to a man who's had his testicles removed. Nor is it inauthentic or imitative if a straight octogenarian couple marries. The idea that only those who can have children via conventional heterosexual interaction should marry simply falls on the evidence that many heterosexual couples marry in full knowledge that they can't have children -- and some, like gay couples, pursue adoption or surrogate parenting, which we don't feel is imitative or inauthentic in those cases. It may be possible to argue this case more precisely, but I haven't seen it done, and Steele hasn't done it here.

Nor do we know what makes people gay. The argument has been made that it's genetic, while others say it's a choice people can make. I'm inclined to lean away from choice -- as one gay acquaintance has said, "who would choose this life?" But if we don't know what makes people gay, then I can't see Steele's certainty that being gay is definitely different from being of a particular race. He can argue that the genetic component of race is so ephemeral that it doesn't really describe a person with any accuracy. But doesn't the same apply to being gay? As we leave stereotypes behind, gay people appear in all occupations, at all income levels, sometimes in heterosexual marriages, sometimes gay during some periods of their lives, sometimes straight in others -- with all types of social personas -- and at all times and social conditions in history. What makes people gay is as big a conundrum, it seems to me, as what makes people belong to a particular race.

Which is simply another reason I can't agree with Steele's certainty on this issue.

The Theory of the Lead Narcissist

In trying to make some overall sense of what happened in the Bob Willis story, I re-read C.S.Lewis's essay "The Inner Ring", which I'm very happy to see is on line. Lewis begins by quoting a page from Tolstoy's War and Peace, in which a young lieutenant, Boris, sees to his initial puzzlement an old general who is acting deferential to a captain, putting up with the captain's discourtesy in interrupting him to talk to Boris. Lewis observes:

[T]he young second lieutenant Boris Dubretskoi discovers that there exist in the army two different systems or hierarchies. The one is printed in some little red book and anyone can easily read it up. It also remains constant. A general is always superior to a colonel and a colonel to a captain. The other is not printed anywhere. Nor is it even a formally organized secret society with officers and rules which you would be told after you had been admitted. You are never formally and explicitly admitted by anyone. You discover gradually, in almost indefinable ways, that it exists and that you are outside it; and then later, perhaps, that you are inside it.

This is one feature of the Willis story that puzzled me more as I wrote it down than it did when I lived through it -- two fairly high-level managers (though, in Cadovra's highly stratified system, neither a Vice President), Fred Feebles and Vijay Patel, wound up spending considerable time and effort catering to, making allowances, and covering for Bob Willis, whom they outranked. Throughout Willis's career, the organization adjusted to his various personal quirks and irresponsibilities, if possible simply by telling complainers to suck it in, but if not, by shuffling him around without visible penalty. I witnessed and heard directly about several such episodes, but there had been a considerable history of similar happenings in the past.

I had suspected, in fact (probably with some justification), that he had never had his disastrous interpersonal skills discussed on an annual appraisal, and likely had never been held accountable for the various lacunae in his professional stewardship that resulted in his transfers around the organization. I think the dual-hierarchy insight from Tolstoy and C.S.Lewis goes some way to explaining why this happened.

"Inner rings", according to Lewis, exist for two reasons; the one I'm most interested in here is to exempt the initiates from ordinary rigors of their disciplines or professions. Willis was tolerated, it would seem, until his self-exemptions threatened to become something his higher-ups could no longer brush off on their own -- for example, abusiveness toward female subordinates that could potentially bring in Human Resources, the company lawyers, and even outside authority. The situation, I think, is roughly as Lewis describes:

Obviously bad men, obviously threatening or bribing, will almost certainly not appear. Over a drink or a cup of coffee, disguised as a triviality and sandwiched between two jokes, from the lips of a man, or woman, whom you have recently been getting to know rather better and whom you hope to know better still-just at the moment when you are most anxious not to appear crude, or naif, or a prig-the hint will come. It will be the hint of something which is not quite in accordance with the technical rules of fair play: something which the public, the ignorant, romantic public, would never understand: something which even the outsiders in your own profession are apt to make a fuss about: but something, says your new friend, which "we"-and at the word "we" you try not to blush for mere pleasure-something "we always do."

The actual factors that make someone eligible for high status in the "dual hierarchy" are inscrutable. Whatever they are, Willis had them. I think almost everyone who knew him would (at least in unguarded moments) describe him as unbalanced and corrupt -- I suspect there's a relationship.

Willis served a valuable function in Cadovra's "second hierarchy". He basically showed how far you could go if you were in it, and by implication he showed the penalties for not being in it. If you were in it, any of the silly business on the appraisal form about leadership skills and the like was so much twaddle. If you weren't in it, of course, they could make those words mean anything they wanted to be sure you got a lower rating. To try to make someone like Willis answer to the same requirements as any old programmer, as Fred Feebles half-heartedly did, was to invite disaster. To be sure, Feebles and Patel were fully aware of their corner offices and all their other perks and position on the org chart, but they tacitly accepted some implicit standing Willis had in the "real" order of things -- something likely no one in the organization would ever verbalize. (I can imagine what some lady in Human Resources would do if I started explaining to her about dual hierarchies, too.)

I think this is also an answer to David Foster's comment that in a corporation, subordinates would complain if a manager didn't fill a hiring authority, and superiors would expect it to be filled. In addition to the fact that some creative procrastination -- excuses for which are always legion -- can allow the open authority to be overtaken by some other event like a hiring freeze, the fact is that the "second hierarchy" -- the real chain of command run by the entrenched narcissists and cube weasels -- is exempt from the complaints of subordinates or the normal expectation of the "red book" system. Willis treated his subordinates like crash dummies and suffered no real penalty -- his superiors covered for him. And the whole point of the "second hierarchy", as Lewis sees it, is to exempt its members from ordinary professional expectations. Willis's superiors covered for him there, too, and insofar as Feebles didn't do it, he suffered.

So we're back to where I started: the narcissist-survivor is, I think, often more in charge than you would think looking at the org chart. David Foster is right that, if you look at the org chart, some low-level supervisor who won't fill a hiring authority ought to be in deep trouble. But in the real world, that's not necessarily how it goes. Lewis repeatedly makes the point that the "inner ring" that exempts itself from the ordinary requirements of the organization is a feature of all groups much beyond the size of a string quartet, so I don't believe it's an answer simply to call Cadovra an "outlier" or a unique case. Willis served an important function in the "unofficial" hierarchy as a "lead narcissist", setting very important expectations for self-aggrandizing behavior that other members of management had to observe. I strongly suspect this kind of situation is as common as dirt.

Lead Narcissist -- Aftermath and Reflections

Following his transfer and demotion, Willis nevertheless made it all the way through to retirement. Demoted on the organization chart, he retained the salary he'd drawn as a manager, though by Cadovra policy, it was "redlined", meaning that he couldn't receive salary increases as long as he was doing the work of a lower pay grade. Nevertheless, since he wasn't able to handle such work, he came out extremely well -- able to finish out a 30 or 35 year career in a well-paid sinecure, then getting a pension payment based on his manager's salary. (The pension, of course, would be shared with two ex-wives.) Willis, it seems to me, is an archetypical narcissist survivor, whose abilities consisted entirely of keeping his job. He had neither technical nor people skills otherwise, and in fact his effect on the organization was destructive in nearly all respects.

The data base programmer who was exchanged for Willis and put into Willis's manager job, while definitely a narcissist (and likely a subject for future discussion), didn't come out as well. He and I were laid off nearly the same day, in one of Cadovra's rounds of downsizing. A vendor I frequently worked with told me, when she'd learned of my layoff, "I'm sorry to hear that, and that's from my viewpoint. We'd all rather work with customers who know what they're doing, and I don't think they're going to replace you with someone who knows what they're doing."

In fact, I learned gradually over the years that the opinion within Cadovra was, with little dissent, that what had happened to Willis was an injustice, and I was the one responsible. The truth was, of course, that my efforts to secure redress against him were completely ineffectual, and the actual reason for his transfer and demotion was the women in his area who'd complained. When Feebles left Cadovra, I asked him if he'd be a reference should I need one in the future, and he agreed -- but once I needed one, he reneged. Apparently on reflection, he'd decided I was also the problem as far as Willis went, and I suspect he blames me for the outcome in his case as well, though since he had a good job to return to, it's hard to see much injustice there, either.

This brings me to the original reason for this series of posts, which was David Foster's comment on my earlier theory about narcissistic survivors and their impact on corporate hiring (I will certainly welcome David's reactions). First, it seems to me that from Cadovra's perspective, Feebles's original error was in filling the hiring authority he'd been given -- or at least in trying to assure himself that it would be filled with someone who was worth the hire. Amid all the subsequent politics, the original reason for the hiring authority -- to bring in someone to handle the password backlog (and other undone tasks) was simply lost, and we may assume it was not important. In terms of the organizational turmoil that resulted, it was far more important that existing lines of authority be maintained, and the status of incumbent managers be validated.

Feebles's error was simple: his job was to keep the lid on, and he couldn't do it. One of David Foster's key comments was that if a hiring authority is made, the higher-level managers expect the authority to be filled. Actually, my experience of corporate life is that such things as hiring authorities are fairly easily revoked in hiring freezes, traded around, or otherwise vitiated by budget cuts or other adjustments. I would guess that it's not a real problem for an organizational adept to procrastinate until the matter is overtaken by events. Feebles, it seems to me, had two choices. One would have been to recognize that Willis was the actual problem, and deal with Willis before filling any hiring authority, since it shouldn't have been too difficult to predict how things would play out with Willis still in the catbird seat The other course would have been to procrastinate on the hiring authority, as seems frequently to happen in the real world.

I still haven't outlined my Theory of the Lead Narcissist, so I will continue this tomorrow.

The Real St. Patrick

Over the years I've gotten very tired of the usual green-beer-and-parades routine for St. Patrick's day -- possibly because it's taken me a long time to recognize and appreciate my own Irish heritage, which, like my wife's, is non-stereotypical. Both of us have Irish forebears, hers somewhat more identifiable than mine. The best I can tell from a family history written by my uncle is that a great-grandfather on my father's side, a William John Bruce (I am John William Bruce), who was born in Scotland in 1860, apparently moved (according to another family tradition) to Ulster, where he was a mason or stonecutter of some sort building railroad bridges, but by 1889 he was in Philadelphia, where my grandfather was born.

He apparently was neither Catholic nor Protestant, but Anglican, as were my wife's forebears. There is a later, perhaps apocryphal, story of William John Bruce working on St. Patrick's cathedral in New York, where the bishop paid him in whiskey. On not getting his preferred payment one day, he hammered the nose off the image of the bishop that was to be placed on the cathedral wall. William John Bruce died on the operating table in 1910, suffering from cancer of the tongue, probably brought on by heavy smoking. I can't envision him drinking green beer or marching in a parade wearing a funny hat. He sinned, I suspect, much more boldly, and I look forward to meeting him. You may argue that William John Bruce doesn't sound very Irish at all, but I will reply that neither was St. Patrick.

The real St. Patrick, once we try to peel away the layers of saccharine-sentimental Irish-American nostalgia and equally goopy hagiography, comes through as remarkably human (as many saints do when you stop listening to what well-meaning priests try to tell you). Patrick lived in the fifth century, still the late Roman period, and was a near-contemporary of St. Augustine of Hippo, another very human saint. One of the best discussions of Patrick's life, in fact, is in Stanley Coren's book The Intelligence of Dogs: "Consider Patrick MacAlpern, later Saint Patrick, whose life was strangely entwined with dogs."

Around A.D. 400, at age sixteen, Patrick [who had grown up in Wales or Cornwall] was abducted by Irish marauders. He was enslaved and kept as a shepherd for six years, his sole companion being a dog. In response to a dream, he made his way some two hundred miles to the coast, where he found the ship that the dream foretold would return him to his own land.

The ship was from Gaul, and the master had put into Irish waters in order to get a cargo of hunting hounds, which were bringing fabulous prices on European markets. Not surprisingly, as a penniless runaway slave, Patrick was received rather unsympathetically when he tried to gain passage. However, just as he was leaving, he was suddenly called back. It seems that, to maximize his profit, the captain had opted for stealing, rather than purchasing, his cargo of dogs. Over one hundred great Irish wolfhounds now packed the holds and filled the deck of the ship. Taken from their masters and their familiar surroundings, the giant dogs were frantic and furious, ready to savage anyone who came near. Some of the sailors had noticed that during Patrick's brief visit to the ship, he had spoken with some of the dogs and seemed to have a calming effect on them. Therefore, in exchange for his services -- which would involve feeding, cleaning up after, and otherwise caring for the dogs -- Patrick received passage to the continent.

The ship was badly underprovisioned and reached a ruined and deserted section of Gaul with its stores exhausted and nothing left to feed dogs or men. Because the dogs were worth more than the ship, the crew took the animals, abandoned the ship, and set off on foot, heading inland. Finding no inhabitants or food in the area, the dogs and men were soon all in jeopardy of dying of starvation. The shipmaster, who had learned that Patrick was a Christian, turned to him and in a taunting manner said, "If your god is so great, then pray to him to send us food." Patrick did so, and, the story goes, a miracle occurred. A herd of wild pigs appeared, seemingly from nowhere. Instead of bolting and running, as one might have expected, the swine stayed within reach long enough for the starving men, with the assistance of the dogs, to kill a number of them, providing meat for all.

When he was about 30, Patrick returned to England, studied for the priesthood, and entered a monastery in Brittany. It wasn’t until then that he realized his major goal in life, to return to Ireland and covert the pagans there. And it wasn’t until he was over 40, after struggling with his superiors’ worries that he didn’t have the education, that he was appointed Second Bishop of Ireland and began his 30-year mission. Bits and pieces of Patrick's attitudes come through in his autobiographical Latin fragments -- I'll bet his struggle for promotion wasn't an easy one, and I'll bet he knew some characters in the Church that would seem much like the compulsive climbers and cube weasels we know now in the business world (and likely still in the Church as well).

Coren continues, St. Patrick's association with dogs did not end in Gaul. Many years later, after a number of adventure, he returned to Ireland. This time it was of his own free will, and his goal was to preach Christianity. It is on his return that his rapport with dogs came to the fore again. It seems the news that a strange ship had just landed, from which had emerged white-robed men with clean shaved heads who chanted in a strange tongue, prompted an Irish prince named Dichu to go to the coast to investigate the situation. He was accompanied by his favorite large hunting hound. Observing St. Patrick's missionary group, Dichu decided that the best course was to kill these odd clerics and be done with it. With a wave and a shout, he set his dog at Patrick. The dog leapt forward in full fury, but when Patrick uttered a short, one-sentence prayer, the dog halted, grew quiet, and then approached Patrick and nuzzled his hand.

I've come up empty trying to Google another aspect of Patrick's life, the so-called "St. Patrick's measure", which came about, at least according to one story, when Patrick visited a tavern and found the barmaid pouring short measures of whiskey. He remonstrated with the barmaid, who became repentant on the spot, and thereafter poured extra measures of whiskey. My regret in telling this story is that my own capacity for whiskey is steadily diminishing.

So my St. Patrick is maybe a little like my own not quite Irish ancestor, someone who's likely sinned more than a little, had both struggles and disappointments, someone who, in the end, nevertheless comes off as pretty tough, someone you'll likely not encounter singing sappy songs in the beery sentimentality of the stereotypical Irish holiday. But by all means, if you're in fact into green beer and sappy songs, enjoy the day as you please.

Lead Narcissist -- VI

One day I was checking Vijay's appointment calendar on line -- I'd found that browsing the calendars of the high-level managers was a good way to find out what was happening. His secretary had made another mistake, and she hadn't made a series of meetings confidential. A whole parade of women who worked for Bob Willis was coming in to talk to Vijay about him, one at a time. I hadn't heard anything about this.

Over the next several days, I began to learn what had happened: I wasn't the only one having conversations with Willis suddenly veer into arguments with his wife. It turned out that all the women who worked for him had experienced episodes where he'd start arguing with them about some divorce-related issue and become abusive, as if the women were temporarily his estranged wife. It was happening enough that one or two had gone to Vijay about it, and then he called the rest in.

In fact, I'd gone to Vijay myself for the same reasons I went to Fred Feebles -- including the strange outbursts -- but all that happened was I'd learned it was useless to complain to Vijay. I didn't know him very well, but I came out of that meeting realizing he was very top-down. My job was to do what my manager told me. If there were problems with Willis, it was because I wasn't doing what he told me to do. Period. The memo about the travel authorization he'd told me to fill out so he could complain about it to Vijay was probably just part of the groundwork Willis had already laid.

I suspect the difference between me going to Vijay and all the women in Willis's area going to him was that any of the women might turn it into a sexual harassment case. At that point, it would simply be out of Vijay's hands, and Vijay himself would be in hot water, so he had to do something. Vijay got with Feebles and arranged another trade. One of Feebles's data base programmers who wasn't working out would take Willis's job, while Willis would become a data base programmer, where I already knew he wouldn't work out. Everything would be even. It was all under Vijay's budget, so nobody else would gain or lose from the trade, which made it even better.

Feebles had, of course, apparently taken a mildly rigorous tack with Willis when I'd brought the problem to him -- Willis had suddenly ended his little ploy of not quite being the manager but still sorta-kinda giving orders, and he'd had to back off the data base boondoggle, at least as long as he still worked for Feebles. The outcome with Willis, it seemed to me, should have vindicated both Feebles and me. The guy shouldn't have been a manager.

In fact, Feebles was on his way out. Unlike most of the other people at Cadovra (but like me), Feebles wasn't a lifer. He'd only been there six or seven years, and he'd come from an aerospace company where he'd taken early retirement. He pulled some strings back at the aerospace company and got another job back there, under some pressure, he mentioned to me at one point, to do so. For a long time, I thought there may have been some justice in Cadovra suggesting Feebles find himself a new placement -- assuming, that is, that the high-level IS managers at Cadovra felt that Feebles hadn't dealt quickly or severely enough with Willis, and the eruption of Willis's personality problems was something Feebles could have forestalled by dealing more proactively with him.

I was naive. I'll conclude this series Thursday with some of the aftermath and my reflections, but I have a special post for St. Patrick's day coming up for tomorrow.

Lead Narcissist -- V

I had no illusions about what Willis was doing -- he was regularly going to Fred Feebles and Feebles's boss, Vijay Patel, and telling them I was preparing some major disaster. Meanwhile, he was making my life miserable with his half-baked data base project and his bizarre behavior. He'd still come around to my cube with strange details of his personal life -- one day he confided that he beat the family cats when they got up on the furniture, but since they would now bite and scratch him, he was afraid of them. Another day he came around and wanted to know the meaning of the word "etagere".

"Oh," he said. "A knick-knack shelf. Now I know what my wife's lawyer meant. They're working on how to divide the property." Cadovra, by the way, issued everyone a dictionary. He may have been too lazy to look it up at first, but he likely went back to his office to check afterward, and was probably angry when he found out I knew what the word meant. I'd also begun to notice that, in conversations, he'd suddenly, without warning, change the subject to some long-running fight with his wife that he'd keep playing through in his mind. He'd make some angry remark completely unrelated to anything we'd been talking about, and I'd have to navigate my way through the situation.

He was my friend, except when he wasn't. He was my boss, except when he wasn't. The puzzling thing was that, as far as I could tell, he wasn't what they would call in Human Resources a "good performer", but his whims were being catered to by both Feebles and Patel. And it wasn't as though nobody could be fired from Cadovra. A couple of people I knew, liked, and respected were in fact fired during this period. Once I overheard a couple of contractors talking about it. It was very sotto voce in the hall, and I suspect they knew I overheard it, but they probably trusted me.

"What I don't understand," said the one to the other, apparently in the midst of a conversation about the most recent case, "is the ones they get rid of are the most capable and knowledgeable. It happens over and over." I've worked as a contractor myself, and I understand the contractor's perspective -- a contractor normally has to rely on technical ability and people skills to get the job done (and therefore get paid), and sees acutely the absence of those skills among regular employees.

I hesitated to go to Feebles over Bob Willis, since technically I'd be going around Willis, but it was plain I finally had to have a talk about what was going on. The constant suggestions I was doing it all wrong, the incoherent data base project, and the increasingly odd behavior were reaching the point where I had to elevate the problem.

"I don't understand this reporting relationship," I told him. "I've never seen anything like it before. Basically, he isn't responsible for what happens, but he gets to back seat drive."

Feebles didn't have much to say. His position was mostly "I'll tell Bob to sit down with you, and you can work it out with him." That, of course, wound up being nothing more than a continuation of his insistence that we had to eliminate all possible risk from issuing passwords.

So I went back to Feebles again and said nothing had changed. The result was that Bob Willis magically decided that he'd finished all the important work he'd needed to do, and he could now return to his previous position as manager and be completely in charge. At the same time, he backed down from insisting we do his data base boondoggle.

But then Vijay Patel reorganized the area and took Feebles out from in between Willis and himself. This cut Feebles's area of management in half, a bad sign for him. In hindsight, Patel probably didn't like it that Feebles apparently told Willis to fish or cut bait over being manager. Willis likely had some kind of a side channel to Patel in any case.

I probably never knew more than a small fraction of what Willis was telling Patel. I found out about one instance due to an error by Patel's secretary. Patel, by the way, used his secretary the old-fashioned way: he had a PC on his desk, but he never turned it on. Instead, his secretary would print out his e-mail and bring it in to him on paper. Patel would read the messages on paper, and when he was ready, he called his secretary back in and dictated his replies, which she dutifully typed into Patel's e-mail account and sent.

One day I got a call from a guy in a Federal regulatory agency that supervised our utility. I was neither in a department nor at a level where I normally got calls like that, but the guy, either going beyond his own pay grade or due to some mistake, called me and told me to come to a meeting in San Francisco. On one hand, this was something that somebody else in the organization needed to know about and deal with, but it also involved travel, which I couldn't approve for myself anyhow. Since Willis was my boss, the correct thing to do was to tell him about it and give it to him to handle, which I did. "Well," he said, "for now, just fill out a travel authorization request and send it up to Vijay to see if he wants to approve it. I'll talk to him about it."

Well and good. I filled out the request and sent it up. A day or so later, I got by return office mail a copy of a memo Willis had written to Vijay, explaining how I was angling for an unnecessary trip to San Francisco, another example of my bad attitude. Vijay had written a comment on the bottom that he completely agreed with Willis, and my travel request was completely out of line. The travel form was attached, with DISAPPROVED written in big letters in Vijay's handwriting. Apparently Vijay's secretary had addressed the envelope to me instead of Willis by mistake.

And since Vijay had moved Feebles away from our area, Willis decided this meant any agreement he'd had with Feebles to back off on the data base project was void. He started pestering me about it again, this time as my full supervisor, not as some back seat driver. As his divorce proceedings continued, he seemed more and more often to leave work-based conversations behind and suddenly change the subject, arguing with me on divorce-related issues as though I were his wife's attorney.

Lead Narcissist -- IV

What I'd been doing in solving the password problem, of course, was making Willis look bad. He'd been shunted into his position of managing the security wallahs from a more responsible position, systems programming manager. Nobody had quite put a finger on what he was or wasn't doing right, but eventually someone decided he wasn't working out there, and they moved him aside. They worked out some kind of a deal with Fred Feebles, who was willing to trade his current password manager for Willis.

But then Feebles discovered that Willis wasn't working out on passwords, either, any more than he'd worked out on systems programming. He'd turned a situation that was middling-OK into a months-long backlog, and the supervisors who couldn't get passwords for their new hires were starting to complain. At that point, Feebles put in to hire someone else to "help" Willis with the passwords, and that turned out to be me. All I'd done was the job I'd been hired to do, but the world is a complicated place. Feebles, of course, was happy. Willis wasn't.

Willis began to complain to Feebles that he had too much work. Exactly what that work was, I could never quite figure out -- I was doing most of what Willis was supposed to have been doing before I came. But he convinced Feebles that he had projects so urgent that he had to take a temporary break from managing the passwords. Not that his title would change, of course, or even that his position would change on the org chart. But Willis worked it so I would sorta-kinda be in charge of the area, but he'd still be my supervisor. What it boiled down to was if anything went wrong, it was my fault, and that would prove Willis had been doing things right all along. Not only did Feebles approve this arrangement, but his higher-ups did, too.

At this point, Willis got The Shadow. He began to worry. "We've got the password backlog solved," he said. "But they're doing everything so fast, what if they make a mistake? How do we know they're doing things right? What if they lose a request?" For starters, of course, the problem had been solved to the point where dozens of unsatisfied customers -- the supervisors who hadn't been able to get passwords for their new hires -- were now satisfied customers. In an imperfect world, an occasional error might lead to another occasional unsatisfied customer, but not the dozens they'd had earlier.

That, of course, wasn't enough of an answer, and I knew it. I began to suggest other approaches. The password requests were all logged. We already double-checked to be sure all the requests were matched by a new password. We sent out evaluation forms to a percentage of the supervisors to see how well we'd done. I suggested we follow up and do a full QA check on a percentage of the passwords issued. All this was what an MBA would likely recommend. Willis was still in a tizzy. "We can't have any errors," he said. "What if the system breaks down, so we not only lose a request, but we forget to log it? Then we wouldn't know we'd lost it." I answered that at worst, if that happened, the supervisor would call to follow up a day or two later. If it happened once in a blue moon, it was still far better than how things had been a few months earlier, when nobody was getting their passwords.

"That's unacceptable," said Willis. He began to propose a solution where the security-wallahs would make an entry in a PC data base package for every password request they got. He'd already started designing it. He put in at least a dozen fields, all the information you could think of, name, title, supervisor name, job function, department, employee ID, date requested, date filled, so on and so forth. The problem was, of course, that it would take much longer just to enter the information in the data base than it did to issue the password -- and we already had the original password request on file with all that information, along with the existing log, in any case. This was adding a lot more work just to get information we already had and used.

We'd be back to square one, taking twice as long to issue a password and building up a backlog again. This, I suspected, was what Willis had in mind -- if he hadn't planned it out that way, it was certainly going to be the practical effect. Willis and I went back and forth on this for weeks. I could see his knuckles whitening in fear as he seized the arms of his chair when I'd make my suggestions. There was no way I was going to win this with common sense.

And the data base project then became the important task he could fill his time with, since I clearly wasn't doing my job properly. Like his doodling over whether he needed different kinds of tires on the left and right sides of his car, it was a long, complicated boondoggle that stubbornly resisted light-of-day solutions.

Data base programming, in fact, was beyond Bob. He would get very confused while working on the project. He'd call one of my co-workers in hoping to get help, but my co-worker told me that what would happen would be that Bob would start to ask a question -- get out the first few words -- and then freeze. He wouldn't say anything more, but he'd sit staring into space, and my co-worker wouldn't know whether to stay or leave. I began to think Bob actually got himself high when he became that confused, since he did it so often.

Lead Narcissist -- III

Cadovra has always been interested in its own corporate culture -- in fact, as much as a corporation can be so, I think you can characterize it as self-absorbed. For instance, it hires sociologists to study itself. And the company is self-aware enough to identify problem areas in its corporate culture -- though like many people who visit therapists, they're aware of the problems, in fact talk them to death, but aren't motivated enough to do anything about them. Every once in a while, somebody from Human Resources refers to a problem area. For instance, she might say, "We need to identify our top performers. However, our current system of appraisals doesn't tell us who our top performers are."

Well and good, one might say -- an insightful analysis. But do we do anything to change our current system of appraisals? Of course not. We might hire some consultants, form a committee, and a couple of years down the line decide to change the appraisal forms so people will get a "Needs Improvement" instead of a "Meets Some Expectations" -- but bottom line, the same bad people seem to get good appraisals, and the same good people are sent out the door. Willis, who was shunted laterally to get rid of him throughout his career, probably never got a bad appraisal.

Or the Human Resources types might say, "We know we suffer from a risk-averse corporate culture. We need to find ways to let our managers tolerate more risk in their decision making." A worthwhile, progressive-sounding statement. But let's look more closely at what they mean by a risk-averse culture. "Risk-averse" carries with it a certain positive connotation of prudence, like the person who might choose to drive a Volvo instead of a BMW or invest in bonds rather than stocks, a matter of reasonable personal preference. A risk-averse person might be a fuddy-duddy, but not a wacko.

But in practice at Cadovra, to be "risk averse" is to have a hysterical fear of making tiny mistakes. This fear is so dominant and unreasonable that I can only compare it to obsessive-compulsive disorder -- for example, the person who leaves the house and can never be completely certain that he's locked the door, so he feels the need to keep going back to double-check. Somehow most people find a way to accept and manage the risk that they've forgotten to lock the door and get on with their lives. They might develop a going-out routine that reliably incorporates a twist on the knob as they shut the door, or some other way they can assure themselves with nearly complete certainty that they've left things safe.

Then there's the percentage who can't handle that small risk, and they feel the need to return to check the door once, then check it again in case they forgot to double-check it the first time, then check it a third time in case the first two times were just something they remembered doing yesterday, and so forth. Naturally, in the worst cases, people with this problem will never get where they want to go, because they'll never be able to feel comfortable enough that they've locked the door. Let's call this feeling that you're never quite sure if you' ve done something The Shadow. This Shadow creeps into Cadovra activities at unpredictable times.

For instance, I was hired at Cadovra, among other things, to find a way to eliminate the backlog of password requests. If it was taking months for people to get their passwords, this was a major problem, and it had to be fixed. So a little bit at a time I had the security wallahs start logging the requests. Then, Mary Poppins style, I started pointing out how many requests you could actually do in a short time, and raised the level of awareness and expectation. Pretty soon the backlog went away, and people were getting their passwords in no time at all.

Somewhere toward the end of this process, Bob Willis got The Shadow.

Lead Narcissist -- II

WIllis had, in fact, been bounced around Cadovra for two decades before I showed up there. He started out in Marketing. It's worth pointing out that Cadovra is a utility, and marketing jobs in a utility are notoriously cushy, since utilities are monopolies. There's no need to seek out customers -- customers come to you, because you're the only place they can get electricity or natural gas or phone service. Somehow, Willis screwed up in Marketing, and Marketing was able to fob him off into Information Systems, which was the bottom of the barrel. If you screwed up anyplace else, you got sent to IS.

On the other hand, it's not as though anyone in Marketing had duties important enough to make errors or omissions matters of any consequence. All they typically did was take important customers to lunch, but since those customers had no choice but to deal with Cadovra, the lunches were pro forma. My conjecture is that Marketing simply found Willis creepy, as nearly everyone else did.

During one of his divorces, he went to a party at the home of a single female programmer. He was just another guest, with no reasonable expectation of making a score with her or anyone else. Nevertheless, he brought a small gym bag with him to the party that apparently contained a change of underwear and a bottle of mouthwash. At some point during the party, he left the gym bag in the woman's bathroom, and he put the bottle of mouthwash prominently on the counter by the sink. As the other guests said their good-byes, the woman conspicuously returned the gym bag and bottle of mouthwash to Willis and ushered him out the door.

One of the smaller problems for me in working for him, in fact, was his assumption that, since I worked for him, I was his friend. Bosses who want their subordinates to be drinking buddies or golfing companions do it because they aren't going to get drinking buddies or golfing companions any other way but, in effect, to hire guys to do it. This was the case with Willis. The worst part of going to conferences and similar travel was that I'd frequently have to go with him, and sometimes my wife and I would have to socialize with him and his wife. One year he had the office Christmas party at his home, naturally a compulsory event. The guy was so tactless that at one point during the party he asked, "Where's John?" and went and opened the door on me in the bathroom to be sure that's where I was.

Another time we drove together in his car to another company facility. He decided to stop on the way at a tire store, where he talked earnestly for an hour with a salesman. It seemed he'd carefully figured out the number of uphill left turns versus downhill right turns he made on his daily commute, or something like that, and they didn't balance out. So he was concerned that maybe he needed to have different tires on the two sides of his car, and he wanted the salesman's advice. Remembering this episode, it's occurred to me that if he drove home by the same route he went to work, all the uphill-downhill right and left turns would cancel themselves out. But this was actually typical of the way Willis would get bogged down in details and never see a simple solution. (I doubt if he actually bought two new tires, by the way; he was too cheap, and his second divorce wasn't far off.)

Lead Narcissist -- I

David Foster asks in the comment to my post below on "My Theory of the Low Job Growth Recovery":

But do narcissist-survivors really act this way when given the opportunity to hire?

1. Their own managers have given them additional budget & hiring authority, and expect it to be exercised. N-Ss, by their very nature, do not say "no" to things they are asked to do by higher authority.
   
2. The people who report to the N-S are probably burned out due to reduced staffing over the last few years, and are bitching and complaining like hell. This is stressful, and N-Ss don't like stress.
   

It seems to me that David is exercising what I call elsewhere the "Weberian rationalistic assumption": this is how things ought to be. The fact is that, from observation, we can determine that narcissist-survivors are not penalized for inaction -- seldom by their subordinates, and almost never by their superiors. Late in life, I've discovered that I'm a disciple of Max Weber (or at least his investigative technique), so I think we need to recognize that the corporate-style social organization does in fact deviate from the rationalistic assumption of what it should be, and then we should try to figure out why.

I'm going to relate my experience here of one narcissist-survivor, his various inadequacies, and the generally feckless response of the organization to the problems he presented over many years, and try to arrive at an explanation for why this happened. I call my explanation the "theory of the lead narcissist".

Almost 15 years ago, a headhunter kept trying to put me in touch with Bob Willis, who was Cadovra's manager in charge of passwords. The first problem was simply setting up a phone interview. The headhunter said, “he wants you to call him at 11:00 Tuesday morning.” Fine; I called at the stroke of eleven, and I got his phone mail. I left a message saying I’d called, suggesting he call back when he became available, but he never did. The headhunter called me a day or so later asking if I’d talked with Willis, and I told him he hadn’t been there to pick up the phone, so he went back and set up another phone interview time, and the same thing happened. This wound up happening three or four times, and I finally stopped returning the headhunter’s calls.

A couple of months later I was at home one evening, and the phone rang. My wife came and got me, saying “It’s a Bob Willis from Cadovra.” When I got on the line, he said, “Boy, I’m sorry I haven’t been able to return your calls. I’ve been so busy -- I’m still at the office right now, in fact.” (As I later found out, he was at the office at 8:30 PM mainly because he didn’t get along with his wife.) So we chatted for a while and set up an in-person interview, and after a while they hired me.

The problem was the usual one, they had a backlog of passwords that three people couldn’t work through. In the interview I gave the Horatio Alger-Mary Poppins answer I've discussed below in more detail, in fact, but what made the difference was that Bob Willis’s boss, Fred Feebles, was in that interview as well, and Feebles liked the answer and overruled Willis’s objections. (You'll see in this account that as long as Feebles was able to overrule Willis, things went more or less OK.)

Bob was self-conscious about his height, and he teased his hair up in a sort of cockscomb that he reinforced with hair spray. He had a can in his office, and he reapplied it several times a day. At certain angles, he looked vaguely like Clint Eastwood. When Cadovra finally replaced him, the CIO dipped into his private stock and found a successor who looked vaguely like Tom Brokaw.

Bob had toned down the worst of his idiosyncrasies at about the same time they hired me. Before I started, he liked to ask his secretary to stand on his back while he did pushups. In fact, pushups were a major part of his life. A woman who worked for him told me that she’d be working at her computer in her cubicle, and she’d see a movement in the reflection on the screen.

She’d learned not to turn around or take notice, because if she looked closely, she could see in the reflection that Bob Willis had slipped into her cubicle, had silently dropped to the floor, and was doing pushups. She decided the best approach was to avoid any reaction, ignore the pushups right behind and below her, go on working at her computer, and after a while he’d get tired and slip out again.

Something Finally Worth Reading

I don't know if it's just me, but over the past several months, I've found less and less on the web worth reading. I liked Victor Davis Hanson for some months until he began to repeat himself irretrievably; Mark Steyn has had a longer run, but I think he's going to squash his creative impulses now that he's a professional conservative at the National Review, where Jonah Goldberg, also at one point a writer of promise, has been visibly burning out.

Now I see Joseph Epstein's The Perpetual Adolescent in The Weekly Standard, a serious piece of writing that discusses, in part, the days when adults wore serious adult clothes. Epstein concludes:

Maturity provides a more articulated sense of the ebb and flow, the ups and downs, of life, a more subtly reticulated graph of human possibility. Above all, it values a clear and fit conception of reality. Maturity is ever cognizant that the clock is running, life is finite, and among the greatest mistakes is to believe otherwise. Maturity doesn't exclude playfulness or high humor. Far from it. The mature understand that the bitterest joke of all is that the quickest way to grow old lies in the hopeless attempt to stay forever young.

This, for those who've asked, is one reason I occasionally blog on the subjects of hairpieces and plastic surgery. It's an outstanding piece of writing, up there with the other writer who's currently writing (and thinking) at the top of his form, David Brooks.

The Welborn Protocol

Douglas Bass at Belief Seeking Understanding and I sometimes borrow from each other's Blogger template gizmos, and this time I've cribbed his "Welborn Protocol" wording (see the right hand margin). I believe Douglas has posted saying he hasn't been able to find the actual "Welborn Protocol" anywhere, though a good many blogs appear to ascribe to it, with the wording used here being very common.

It seems to me that it's probably a worthwhile warning, though I'm not sure if it has much to do with the price of bread. One of my first posts here concerned an e-mail I'd received from a former student at Magdalen College in New Hampshire, who'd found a comment I'd left on a thread at Critical Mass nearly a year ago, where I said it sounded to me as if Magdalen wasn't just a strict school; it sounded like a cult. The student e-mailed me with some remarkable information substantiating what I'd surmised. It was so remarkable that if I'd posted the information as it was sent to me, it might have allowed the student to be identified and embarrassed. I did (before fully digesting what the e-mail said) reply to the student asking permission to post its contents, but got no reply.

The student, of course, was naive, and I had a positive duty to protect the individual from possible consequences of that naivete. In other cases, I've e-mailed bloggers and columnists and gotten interesting replies. I was tempted to blog a particularly obtuse set of remarks from a National Review columnist, but thought better of it (I'm still not sure why). But certainly, with fellow bloggers, this business of links and being nice and reciprocating courtesy is important, so I'm especially inclined to give a blogger the benefit of the doubt and not just blast an e-mail to the world here, confidentiality invoked or not.

But ordinary people who are adults and might presumably know better -- such as current or recently working journalists -- who send e-mails that are just begging to be made public are something else, published Welborn Protocol or not. I haven't had this problem here, but I'm looking at this issue on my hobby-related site (see right hand margin) and a former hobby journalist who sent me some material that I included in my essay "The Sociology of Model Railroading", via publishing two e-mails that had been sent to me (a total stranger to him) with his name. (This essay is a blog-like enterprise that I update from time to time with new information as it appears, such as the e-mails cited here. As a result, it is reaching a Miltonic length; a reader foolish enough to print it out at work complained vociferously that it was 38 pages long. Sorry, dude.)

I'd be interested to hear comments on the ethics of Welborn Protocol-related publishing of juicy, abusive, or whatever else e-mails, when the individual is showing poor judgment somewhat beyond what you would expect in a normal exchange.

The Latest from HappyCare

As I've been blogging in my series of posts titled "They Need a Guru" below, I keep getting calls from recruiters who need a guru to do some work at HappyCare, but HappyCare keeps thinking I'm overqualified -- but for nearly three years now hasn't found anyone they find suitable. So I keep getting calls and e-mails. The latest development is:

Hi John

I just wanted to let you know that the position has reopened for interviews and I am having the account manager look into getting you interviewed. Since it is not direct with HappyCare and through us hopefully it will be a different situation.

The most I can offer on an hourly basis is __/hr, please let me know if you want me to submit your resume.

Suzy H. Creamcheese
Senior Technical Recruiter
&c.

How can I resist? This blog is a monster that must be fed!

Give a Rouse. . .

. . . once again for the folks from Dartmouth, who've become among my most loyal visitors. The number of today's screen views suggests they stopped by my recent post on Dartmouth's eminently capable Director of Computing Bob Johnson, now with his temporary replacement firewall up and working following last week's term-of-art "disaster". Keep coming around, guys, you might learn something.

Cell Phone Follies -- II

I missed the first reporting on this (not the sort of thing The News Hour covers), but this is a followup from the New York Times via Railpace News Magazine (not on line):

On December 12, Metro-North Railroad announced that it would not seek restitution from commuter Edwin Gallart, who on October 29 made national news when he dropped his cell phone into the toilet bowl of the MNRR commuter rail car restroom he was using, and subsequently got his arm stuck in the toilet trying to retrieve it. Emergency personnel had to be called to free Mr. Gallart, which required the toilet bowl being torn apart. MNRR officials had earlier said that they would attempt to recover approximately $3000 reinstallation cost from him. "The expense of trying to recover, we now believe, would be economically infeasible," an MNRR spokesman said.

My Theory on the Low Job Growth Recovery

The News Hour had a segment Friday on the puzzling continued lack of job growth in the current economic recovery. Rebecca Blank said, for instance, "All of the other indicators suggest much higher economic growth and in past recessions we've always seen a substantial increase in the job market by this time, so this is a real mystery, something different we've seen in any recent recovery post-World War II."

The other guest, Lakshman Achuthan, said, "Last summer we saw a 20-year high in GDP growth and today we saw a 20-year high in the duration of unemployment. Typically, you should not have that kind of divergence." While Achuthan blamed the lack of job growth on productivity gains (a legitimate possibility) and outsourcing (baloney), and Blank suggested continuing uncertainty from the Iraq war (I doubt it), Blank summed things up by concluding, "I have to emphasize that everything is in the category of theories. We are just facing a situation that we haven't seen before historically. And it is recent enough that we don't have the data to nail it down and say it's clearly this, it's not clearly that."

My own feeling is based on my experience on the ground and in the job market over the past several years, and while it's anecdotal, it's just as good as the economists' above, since they acknowledge they don't have data, either.

I simply think that the last economic contraction resulted in a working population of survivors. I think the corporate world may be suffering from something a little like the effect of repeated crash dieting, in which the body adjusts to periodic reductions in caloric intake and, sensing this is just a temporary thing, doesn't lose weight the way it should. The US corporate culture has gotten used to crash layoffs and downsizings, and a cohort of corporate employees has learned how to survive them.

Unfortunately, these are the most risk-averse, the ones most adept at keeping their noses clean (but to mix a metaphor, likely to be brownnosers as well). In fact, I'm tentatively inclined to say that there is a correlation between these qualities and incompetence. I have some number of anecdotal accounts on this site -- not least the one in the post below, Dartmouth's Director of Computing Services, Bob Johnson, whose firewall went out in a true IS-term-of-art "disaster" during Dartmouth's Winter Term final exam and term paper crunch, apparently requiring shipment of a temporary replacement from Cisco. Johnson had clearly not planned for the possibility, nor designed his network to avoid the single point of failure. "Disaster" planning is in fact a standard part of an IS chief's job responsibility, and I've been familiar enough with this field to have a good insight into the work Johnson (via his subordinates) simply didn't do. (Dartmouth isn't a for-profit corporation, but the creature I'm looking at here, Johnson, seems very corporate.)

But there are other, similar anecdotal cases here alone, Kit the dysfunctional Vice President; Tina Hale, who presides over a months-behind backlog of passwords at HappyCare. These people, counterintuitively, are somehow able to hold on to their jobs in the face of evidence that couldn't point much more clearly to their inability or unwillingness to do them. I suspect that the biggest reason is simply that the corporate environment, in response to two decades of a downsizing placebo effect on the markets, has simply retained the people whose chief skill is keeping their jobs. The skill, I suspect, is related to the narcissistic personality type, and consequently there's a high incidence of incumbents who are, in fact, inadequate in terms of ordinary life tasks, as narcissists typically are.

These people are at the front line of new hires, because they're now the hiring managers. They aren't going to make new hires, though, because the new people will inevitably be brought in to solve the problems that have grown up under the survivor-incumbents and make them look bad. The survivor-incumbents haven't been penalized for the problems (as they should have been) up to now, so there's no motivation for them to hire anyone to fix them.

I frankly think a whole corporate generation of these people is going to have to be fired, bought out, allowed to retire, shoved into what the Japanese call "window seats", or otherwise dealt with for corporate hiring to resume. (An obstacle to this process, though, is the corporate Human Resources department, which typically acts as an enabler to narcissist-survivors.) The economy has in fact been performing suboptimally in large part due to the presence of this body of narcissist-survivors in the workforce, and I would predict that corporate performance will improve quite nicely once the snake is able to digest this particular pig.

An Odd Development in the Dartmouth Trustee Election

I received the following e-mail yesterday from Dartmouth Alumni Relations:

Dear Alumnus/a:

As you know, the Association of Alumni planned to begin the Alumni Trustee balloting today. Due to a major Internet access problem on the Eastern seaboard that was beyond Dartmouth's control, the balloting period will now begin on Monday, March 8. You will receive an email on that date instructing how to access the voting site.

Sincerely,


Dartmouth College Alumni Relations

I was puzzled at the reference to a major Internet problem on the Eastern seaboard beyond Dartmouth's control. While I've noted a dropoff in my traffic over the past couple of days, and a decrease in Eastern Time Zone access, several Google News searches haven't produced any coverage of such a problem. If a visitor here knows of one, I'd be interested to hear about it. (My traffic dropoff, of course, could simply be due to reader dissatisfaction with the murder trial posts.)

However, my Google searches did turn up this item from the Daily Dartmouth: it appears that "the campus 'border router' was brought down due to excessively high traffic, Director of Computing Services Bob Johnson said. While the router was out of commission, students and faculty on campus could not access the internet or receive non-campus e-mail."

The piece says farther down, "The router crashed because it was overloaded, Johnson said. He blamed the 'older-generation' router's 'limited CPU' for the difficulties. However, certain applications -- particularly those operating multi-cast video sharing -- prove especially problematic for the router."

This strikes me as an interesting combination of academic and technocratic doublespeak (a "border router", by the way, is not an exotic breed of dog, but appears to be the word educators use to mean what the rest of us call a "firewall"). The article appears to pass along a campus bureaucrat's explanation for the failure, blaming the router itself for the failure. But routers don't bring down networks, people bring down networks.

There may have been "excessively high" traffic due to any number of causes -- recent variations on the "mydoom" virus seem to be adding load to the Internet -- but the question is whether system managers could have, or should have, predicted such peak loads and designed the network around them. A quick Google search brings up this recommendation for border router configuration to avoid a single point of failure, which appears to be what occurred in the Dartmouth situation.

What Campus Bureaucrat Bob Johnson appears to be saying in plain language is, "I promised to take my whole yoga class to the art show. I tried to do it in my Ford Pinto, but could only carry about four of the 20 people who showed up. The problem can be blamed on the small motor and age of my Ford Pinto. Freeway speeds present a particular difficulty for my Pinto." Frankly, if I were the administrator in charge of Campus Bureaucrat Johnson, I've have had him in my office for a very, very serious discussion under these circumstances. It was Johnson's responsibility as a manager to plan adequately for failure and implement appropriate network configurations to avoid what happened on March 3. It appears that ways to avoid the problem are common knowledge, and Johnson didn't follow them.

One may, of course, argue that due to limited budget blah, blah, blah, Johnson couldn't do his job. I would possibly accept that argument if it referred to Podunk State. I will not accept that argument from Dartmouth. If an adequate network design or up-to-date hardware must compete with condom festivals, sensitivity training, or the Dean's trip to the seminar, that's Dartmouth's problem. It's also Johnson's problem, because we all have a responsibility to do a basic good job. If the Dean won't let Johnson do it, there comes a time when Johnson has to choose how he'll react.

So Dartmouth tells its loyal sons and daughters there was a "major Internet access problem on the Eastern seaboard that was beyond Dartmouth's control." Don't make me laugh.

Murder Trial -- V

After the first full week of the trial, with the prosecution’s case almost but not quite finished, I spent the weekend in an odd state, where it was hard to think of anything but the trial, and I kept trying to put the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle together. For me the problem that wouldn’t go away was the location of the cartridge casings in the crime scene diagram, which I couldn’t see any reason to dispute, versus the testimony of Officer Toti. The crime scene diagram had all ten cartridge casings between the pier and the spot where Erik Hurtado fell. The casings were found in a pattern that suggested that the shooter was moving to the north, shooting at Hurtado from the south. The closest casing to Hurtado was roughly 30 feet south of the spot where he fell. It seemed to me that whoever shot at Hurtado had to be facing north, moving to the north toward him, and shooting to the north.

One of the first things we did in the jury room was to take a straw vote to see where we stood. There were nine votes for Not Guilty for Solis on the first degree murder charge, with two Guilty and one not sure. There were five votes for Guilty for Ahumada, five votes for Not Guilty, and two not sure. We drew a diagram of the crime scene on the blackboard, based as closely as we could on exhibits in the evidence. Neither the defense nor the prosecution had provided a single, clear map of where events had taken place and where witnesses were. In fact, early in deliberations we noted that an aerial photo of the crime scene had been printed only on an 8-1/2 by 11 piece of paper and briefly waved at the jury during testimony. We didn’t get a good look at it until we were in the jury room, but it was one of the first things we wanted to see. (My own feeling is that a clear map of the crime scene in the trial would have hurt the prosecution’s case, and the defense wasn’t going to take any chances by providing one.)

Once we began to draw a map and place the events on it, we saw what we thought was sloppy police work from the time before the actual shooting to the processing of crime scene evidence. Why was Officer Toti the closest police officer to the pier, and why was he where he was, a K-9 officer who couldn't use his dog? How was a vacationing North Carolina homicide detective, out for beers, able to get involved in the investigation, to the extent that he identified a putative suspect and found ostensible evidence? Why didn’t there seem to be contingency plans for what happened, given the popularity of the pier as a place for gangs to congregate? Two of the Santa Monica officers who had been responsible for securing and mapping the crime scene had retired between February 2002 and the trial, and it didn’t seem to be a coincidence that their work was slipshod and incomplete. The jury quickly decided that there were too many holes in the picture. By later in the first day the vote on the first-degree murder counts was 12 for Not Guilty on Solis, 10 Not Guilty for Ahumada, with one Guilty and one Not Sure.

To get as clear a picture as we could of what Solis had actually done, we asked for a readback of testimony covering the stabbing motions and the apparent object in his hand. The result of the readback was astonishing. Information that had come out slowly over a period of days and in different contexts suddenly became much clearer as each witness’s testimony on that particular subject was read without digressions or interruptions, and based on what we had learned later in the trial.

Osorio testified, for example, that what he saw in Solis’s hand was maybe a knife, but probably scissors or shears. It was fresh in our minds that the defense’s expert on knife wounds had testified that the wound on Hurtado’s head came from a thin-bladed knife, not from scissors or shears. Osorio testified that he observed Solis trying to stuff the knife or scissors or shears down the front of his white sweat pants. We now knew from subsequent prosecution testimony that no blood or DNA had been found on the front of Solis’s sweat pants, and no blood was visible on his white clothes in the booking photos.

We also knew from Solis’s booking shot that he had been wearing a very long, white shirt outside his sweat pants; it would have been very awkward and noticeable if Osorio had actually seen him pulling up that shirt to stuff a knife down the front of his pants. The testimony of the other witnesses turned out to be much more vague and noncommittal on exactly what Solis was doing near Hurtado, and much of it was plainly inaccurate based on the physical evidence we had, especially the booking shots that showed Solis dressed in spotless white, not a drop of blood visible, when he'd been accused of repeatedly stabbing the victim.. We returned to the jury room and after perfunctory discussion unanimously voted to acquit Solis on all counts.

With this, the jury’s opinions had firmed up. We were ready to let Solis walk, and to acquit Ahumada on Murder 1. The prosecution’s theory was that Ahumada and Solis premeditated the murder of Hurtado to enhance Barrio Van Nuys’s reputation vis-a-vis the predominant 18th Street gang. Based as it was entirely on “gang expert” LAPD Officer Smith’s testimony, our jury instructions allowed us to disregard it, since he’d testified falsely about Ahumada’s non-existent probation officer. Premeditation for Ahumada was therefore out, as was any finding that the crime was technically gang-related, since the only evidence for this in the trial had come from Officer Smith, who'd lied on the witness stand.

We split 10-2 in favor of acquittal, however, on Murder 2 for Ahumada. While the jury had moved to unanimity on all other counts, one juror made it plain she wasn’t going to change her mind that Ahumada was guilty on this one, and given the stress on our willingness to do exactly this in voir dire, I had to respect her point of view. A couple of other jurors vacillated on their votes, but there were always two in favor of a Guilty verdict. The evidence certainly allowed someone to conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that Ahumada had held the Glock while shooting it at Hurtado, had run from the scene and disposed of the same pistol.

A single bullet that could have been a 9mm had passed through Hurtado. There was no physical evidence that any casings had been ejected other than those that came from the Glock, although most witnesses testified that the shots they heard could have come from different guns, the crime scene had not been fully secured, and most of the jury doubted the competence of the Santa Monica crime scene investigators. A .38 revolver would not have ejected its casings, and a .38 bullet would have made a hole the same size as the one in Hurtado’s body. But there was no evidence that anything like this had happened -- only a feeling that we on the jury didn't have the whole story.

Ten jurors were still troubled enough by the pieces that didn’t fit in the prosecution’s case to feel that, even if Ahumada had very likely been involved, there was still reasonable doubt about exactly what had happened. Two jurors drew the reasonable conclusion that the evidence put the gun in Ahumada's hand, and he had shot Hurtado, though not with premeditation. I decided it was time to follow the instructions I had and call in the bailiff to tell the judge about the completed verdicts and the news on the one deadlock.

I told the jury that I didn’t think the judge was going to let us go home with this, and she didn’t. She told us we hadn’t been deliberating very long, and suggested we ask for additional readbacks of the testimony. Almost as an afterthought, before she sent us back to the jury room, she asked me if the verdicts we’d agreed on applied to a single defendant. I said they did, to Solis, and she asked me to give them to the clerk to read.

I don’t think any of us on the jury will have many experiences quite like hearing our three “Not Guilty” verdicts read out in the courtroom. Once he realized he was acquitted on all counts, Solis broke out in sobs, the sort of sobs that people make -- and it seems to me are impossible to feign -- when they’ve seen something like vindication, something like the truth being told, when perhaps they’d lost most hope that any such thing would happen. Whatever he’d been doing the night of February 15-16, 2002, it wasn’t what the prosecution said he did, and he spent 17 months in jail waiting for a jury to decide that. We all wish him the best and hope he stays out of trouble.

But we had to go back into the jury room and keep trying to get unanimous agreement on Ahumada’s count of Murder 2. The stereotype of a deadlocked jury seems to involve hysteria, threats, and angry remonstrance.. There is in fact a “jury emergency” signal that can be sent to the bailiff, and I would guess that circumstances have sometimes justified its use. This jury was very cordial in its deadlock; we had all grown to like and respect each other, and once it was plain that no amount of discussion was going to result in 12 votes in either direction, there was no reason for bad temper. It was a very close factual situation on which reasonable and intelligent people differed.

We asked for an extensive readback of all the credible testimony on Ahumada as the shooter and his subsequent movements until his arrest. Unlike the case with Solis, seeing the evidence in a more focused light did nothing to make a decision easier. We were still deadlocked, and I reported this to the bailiff again. This time we came out, the judge polled us, and agreed that we were deadlocked. I gave the Not Guilty verdict for first-degree murder to the clerk, who read it out, but there was no emotion in the courtroom. Ahumada will presumably continue to wait in jail until his case for second-degree murder is retried.

At the end of the trial, because so many pieces in the prosecution’s case didn’t fit, we were left with a number of unanswered questions. We decided there was no way Solis could have stabbed Hurtado in the back of the head. So how did Hurtado get the stab wounds in his head? In the hallway after the trial, wondering if the lawyers knew about information that had been kept from the jury, I asked Laub if he knew what had really happened. “The jury had everything,” he told me. “All we knew was that it didn’t happen the way the prosecution said it did.”

Some Googling that I did after the trial, by the way, suggests that Laub has something of a reputation for saving apparently lost cases. As it was, I had been so impressed by Laub's performance during the trial and a concluding argument I thought was brilliant that I told him afterward I'd missed out on hearing Earl Rogers, the well-known Los Angeles attorney of the early 20th century, but I thought I'd seen something just as good. To get his client acquitted on first-degree murder and a deadlocked jury on second-degree, with such strong circumstantial and eyewitness evidence against him, is quite an achievement -- though in my opinion, the verdict and deadlock were fully justified. Everyone on the jury felt both defense attorneys performed exceptionally well, and felt they were clearly not public defenders. I simply don't know if the outcome would have been different with less capable attorneys, but it causes me some concern.

A much bigger unanswered question is what -- even if you grant that Ahumada was carrying a pistol, pulled it out and shot it at Hurtado in the parking lot on February 15-16, 2002 -- was actually going on. The Los Angeles Police Department estimated the size of the Barrio Van Nuys gang at 600 members, about 200 of whom were active. Other LAPD estimates put the membership of all the cliques and subcliques of the 18th Street gang at 30,000. For Barrio Van Nuys to provoke 18th Street by killing a member that way would be to tug on Superman’s cape, it seemed to us on the jury. There were, by most estimates, about 40 people at the scene involved in some way with the shooting, nearly all of whom seem to have disappeared immediately. Solis may have been arrested because he was slower than the others leaving the pier, and a partying North Carolina cop tied him to something -- a third suspect was detained and released, quite possibly all the police could finger from 40 who had been there.

I put this question to Laub as well. “My investigator came up with information we couldn’t get into the trial,” he told me. “He talked to an 18th Street gang member who said they shot Hurtado themselves. They’d had a meeting, and they’d decided he had to go. Two guys were in a car in the parking lot, and one of them shot him from inside the car. The guy who told us about this is in Mexico now. We couldn’t put him on the stand -- it would be death for him, too.” That would back up the defense’s contention that the bullet that went through Hurtado came from somewhere other than Ahumada’s gun, but the information is, of course, worth what I paid Laub for it. It still leaves open the question of why, if this was an internal 18th Street matter, Ahumada, from a different gang, would have been shooting right then with a crowd full of witnesses, leaving ten casings at the scene, and jogging off only to be quickly caught. And it still doesn’t answer the question of how Hurtado got stabbed in the back of the head.

Hurtado is past explaining. Nobody else who saw it happen up close is talking. The police are at some guy’s retirement dinner, and I’m pretty sure the guys down at the crime lab are on break.

Murder Trial -- IV

Someone had trained all of the prosecution’s experts to do the same thing: when the prosecutor asked his first question, along the line of “would you explain to the jury the education and training you’ve received to become a specialist in . . .”, they would make a particularly unctuous turn toward the jury and, slowly and carefully, explain to those whom they apparently see as citizen-dummies in the most condescending way possible what they did to get their particular cushy job in the crime lab. Every one of them oozed a sense -- not even subtle -- that if you were sitting there in that box on jury duty, it meant that you weren’t very bright. They, on the other hand, had figured out how to game the system long ago, and they’d parlayed it into 20 years of a sweet deal running blood tests on the stuff that came in, if it wasn’t too close to break time, and if they got around to it when they got back from break, if that wasn’t too close to quitting time.

Mary Hong was the prosecution’s DNA expert. She worked for the Orange County Sheriff Department’s crime lab, where Santa Monica PD sent its forensic work The prosecution had large charts made of the results from DNA analysis of the physical evidence, but contrary to what you would expect, DNA was not very helpful in this case. There was, for example, no blood, no fingerprints, and only inconclusive trace amounts of DNA on the red-handled folding knife Osorio had discovered in the trash can -- and this left only serious questions about how a knife that had been used in a stabbing only minutes before it was found could be so clean.

DNA testing verified that the black knit gloves that Solis was observed wearing as he left the scene, and in which he was photographed when he was booked, had his own DNA on them, as well as the DNA of unknown other individuals, but not Hurtado. There was no blood of any type on the gloves, either. Worse still, there was no blood visible on any of Solis’s white clothes -- they were spotless in the booking photos; it was redundant to test them in the crime lab. Hong did find two droplets, each 1 mm diameter, of Hurtado’s blood, one outside the left pocket of his pants, and one inside. But there was no blood on the front of his pants, where Osorio had testified he saw Solis stuffing the knife. There was no blood on Solis’s white shirt, that extended from his neck to his mid-thighs and covered his pants pockets.

In fact, crime scene photos showed Hurtado’s clothing, which the paramedics had cut away while they treated him, soaked with bright red blood -- but none of it was on Solis’s clothing, except for the two droplets at his left pocket. (How this blood got there, when witnesses and booking photos all had Solis wearing knit gloves that tests showed had no blood on them, is one of the many puzzling questions in the case.)

Mario Toti’s testimony had already put a weapon in Ahumada’s hand, and Toti had seen Ahumada toss a gun over the fence as he followed him around the construction site. The gun was recovered, but DNA analysis didn’t conclusively show that it had been in Ahumada’s hands. During cross-examination, Aron Laub, Ahumada’s attorney, noted an important misrepresentation in Hong’s chart of DNA markers. Markers for parts of Ahumada’s DNA were found on the gun, as well as markers for what could have been several other people. Hong’s chart made it appear that the markers belonged specifically to Ahumada, as well as to unknown others.

Laub drew out that in fact the markers, while consistent with those belonging to Ahumada, might also have belonged to the other unknown people through whose hands the gun had passed prior to February 15, and not to Ahumada at all. While an exact DNA match will give the statistical assurance that only one in about 100 billion people has the same characteristics, the match for the DNA markers on the gun was unique only for one in 200 people.

In short, the testimony of a DNA “expert” told the jury less than eyewitnesses already had. The “expert”, trying too hard to prove the case, had damaged her credibility with the jury, who already didn’t completely trust her.

Anthony Smith is an LAPD gang specialist. A fresh-faced Anglo, he had 5 years on the force, about 2 years on the gang detail, and the look of someone who was out for 30. Charles Woodworth, Solis’s lawyer, brought out on cross-examination that Smith did not speak Spanish and had taken no courses in the sociology of gangs, or any sociology (I had a hard time imagining Smith anywhere near a classroom). His training had primarily been “seminars” within and outside LAPD, the recycled conventional wisdom of fellow police officers, and, interestingly, watching MTV. But the prosecution had qualified Smith as an expert on gangs. Smith’s job on the stand was twofold: he had to provide some kind of evidence that would show Ahumada and Solis had premeditated the murder of Hurtado, and he had to show that the crimes qualified for the special circumstance of “gang-related”.

What concerned me, and also concerned Aron Laub on cross-examination, was Smith’s willingness to generalize about gangs and gang-member behavior where it suited the prosecution’s case, but to insist that, in trying to shake Smith’s generalities in cross-examination, the defense “couldn’t generalize”.

Smith testified that gang members had both gang-specific tattoos, as well as “generic” tattoos that many gang members carried. He said Hispanic males with three dots tattooed on their wrists were gang members, as the dots stood for mi vida loca (my crazy life). The defense argued that such dots were worn by many people of Hispanic heritage, whether affiliated with gangs or not. Smith then accused the defense of generalizing.

Smith called the Barrio Van Nuys gang with which Ahumada and Solis were associated an “entrenched gang” or “generational gang”, claiming that it was very territorial. Yet when Solis’s counsel pointed out that Solis lived well outside the Barrio Van Nuys gang’s territory, Smith insisted you couldn’t generalize. When Ahumada’s counsel pointed out that Ahumada was 26 years old, married, with a job he’d held for eight years, in opposition to what one would normally expect from gang members, Smith said you couldn’t generalize.

One of the most moving moments in the trial came when the prosecution asked Smith to identify the defendants from their booking photos. Smith identified them and gave their gang names or monikers, “Peanut” in the case of Ahumada and “Brat” in the case of Solis. Under cross-examination from the defense, he was asked to identify certain individuals sitting in the courtroom. “That’s Peanut’s wife,” said Smith. This was jarring to everyone in the courtroom. The voir dire and the subsequent events of the trial had forged a common bond, not just among the jurors, but among everyone in the courtroom, including the defendants and the spectators. From voir dire onward, the defendants were “Mr. Solis” and “Mr. Ahumada,” and everyone else was “Mr.”, “Ms.”, or “The Court”. Laub paused, looked at Smith, and said slowly, “His name is Mr. Ahumada.”

Smith, however, kept working on destroying his credibility with the jury. At one point he claimed he had obtained information on Ahumada’s gang associations by talking to his probation officer. Laub then forced Smith to admit that Ahumada had never had either a probation officer or a parole officer; Smith was trying to slip false information into his testimony in an attempt to give the jury the impression that Ahumada had an extensive criminal record. Based on our jury instructions, this false testimony allowed us to disregard anything else Smith said, and we did.

I’ve gone through life with a heavy dose of what I was taught, I guess, in Sunday school and at my mother’s knee: give people the benefit of the doubt, wait until all the facts come in, don’t judge too hastily. I probably also had learned somewhere around the time that I was eight or nine years old that if you called someone a liar, it hurt your credibility, not theirs. People would think you were losing your temper because the real facts were against you. So I absorbed that lesson, too, and when I heard things that didn’t seem quite right to me, I would mostly just put them aside and try to figure out the reason I didn’t seem to be seeing things the same way the other person did.

Then, as I got a lot older, I began to realize that some people do in fact tell lies. Some people tell lies a lot. In fact, when you’re around them, they pull you into what seems like a little alternate universe, and if you’re around them enough, it feels like they’ve sold you a defective jigsaw puzzle, where some of the pieces fit, and some of the pieces will never fit, no matter how many times you turn them around and try to fit them with other pieces.

And not too many years ago, it suddenly dawned on me, I’m not sure how: those funny pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that never quite fit, the ones that will always keep the picture from coming out, are called lies. Those odd little stories that start off in familiar territory and wander off into a wilderness of half-truths, omissions, and things that didn’t quite happen that way are lies. And there’s nothing more I can do about them than I could when I was nine years old. You’ve broken some kind of unwritten etiquette when you call someone a liar. Maybe it’s that, if the situation is important, you’ve put some kind of duty on third parties to figure out the truth for themselves, and people don’t like to do that. People would rather get along, not offend anyone, survive as fools among knaves. A juror can’t do that; it’s the liberating part of the job.

Dartmouth Trustee Election Update

A little over a month ago I posted on the efforts of Thurman Rodgers to gain election to the Dartmouth Board of Trustees by having his name placed on the ballot as an alumni candidate via a petition process. Based on the hits I began to get on my site from Dartmouth servers doing Google searches on Rodgers starting several weeks ago, I suspected he was having some degree of success. I was right. I poked around the Dartmouth.edu site the other day and found his name on the alumni trustee ballot, and Rodgers himself confirmed his success in getting on the ballot in an e-mail to me this evening.

Dr. Rodgers has my vote and my best wishes in the election. He's clearly already made them nervous up in Hanover!

I'm Not Bad as a Clairvoyant

I noted a week or so ago that the battlefield for gay marriages was shifting to the municipal level, and that the Burkean conservative model hadn't predicted it, while a Tocquevillean model, as I saw it, had. I concluded, ". . . each municipality that [performs gay marriages on its own initiative] makes it easier for others and harder to stop. I do not see political viewpoints that derive from Burkean caution as adequately descriptive of what's now happening, nor predictive of the likely consequences -- though on this, we'll all be proven right or wrong by events."

I now see that Portland, Oregon, and two New York towns are doing as I had predicted. I suspect the trend will quickly pick up -- the mayors of San Francisco and New Paltz, NY are being threatened with wrist-slap legal penalties, but this will only demonstrate how ineffectual the opposition can be at the municipal level. On this, I think Tocqueville's understanding of the American character and system of government is fully borne out, and I think as Tocqueville would have predicted, recognition of gay marriage at the municipal level will render a "marriage amendment" to the federal constitution overtaken by events.

Though we should also consider that even the Christian denomination moving most quickly toward recognition of gay unions, the US Episcopal Church, hasn't even broached the idea of full gay marriage. I suspect that the churches will be caught flat-footed here along with everyone else, and will most likely have to play catch-up.

Murder Trial -- III

The prosecution’s first witness was David Osorio, a Charlotte, North Carolina homicide detective who was at the pier the night of the shooting, on vacation and visiting family. Osorio’s testimony was vivid, garrulous, and, once we in the jury had the chance to compare it to the physical evidence, highly embroidered. Like every other witness who saw the events from a restaurant, Osorio testified that, while he’d ordered beers, he didn’t have the chance to drink any before he saw the muzzle flashes and got distracted (this was a remarkable coincidence, especially at 11:30 PM on a Friday, and is a testament to the moderation and sobriety of the average visitor to the pier -- and surprisingly, despite the late hour, no witness was asked about any drinking he might have done before arriving at the pier). Because the band was playing, Osorio heard no shots, but saw muzzle flashes outside the window at his table.

When he looked out the window, Osorio saw people diving for cover, and at first he thought it was for a film. Then he saw a figure run to the north, followed by a second figure in dark clothes, who shot several times. When the running figure fell, Osorio saw the figure in dark clothes advance until he was directly above the fallen figure, extend his arm, and shoot several times at close range. That figure then ran off, and Osorio lost sight of it.

Then Osorio saw another figure, this one dressed entirely in white, run out from the crowd, kneel beside the figure on the ground, and stab it several times in the chest with what appeared to be a knife or a pair of scissors or shears. The white-clad figure then got up and ran back toward the pier, where Osorio lost sight of it beneath the restaurant. At this point Osorio remembered what he told people back in Charlotte, that if they see a crime, their responsibility is to be a good witness, and he got up from his table and ran outside looking for a police officer.

As soon as he ran outside onto the pier, Osorio saw the figure in white climbing the steps up from the parking lot. As the white-clad man reached the top, he and Osorio made eye contact, and the man appeared to be stuffing the murder weapon down the front of his pants. He then turned up the pier, walking toward Palisades Park. Osorio, who still hadn’t seen any local police, decided to follow the man in white as nonchalantly as he could so that he could make an identification once he found a police officer -- a remarkably foolhardy move, considering the crime he had just observed and the fact that he himself was unarmed.

There were finally plenty of police officers at the top of the pier ramp where it met the park, because the Santa Monica police had pursued and caught the other figure, the one in dark clothes who had done the shooting, and had him prone on the grass. Osorio went from officer to officer trying to tell them about the man in white, but, in his words, they “blew me off.” The man in white meanwhile headed back down the pier. Osorio followed him again, but also thought that he should check the trash cans along the side of the pier to see if there were any discarded murder weapons in them. Looking into one, which was nearly empty, he saw the red handle of a folding knife next to a crumpled McDonald’s bag. “I found it! I found it!” he called out to the police, and they finally paid attention to him. They also arrested the man in white on Osorio’s ID, who turned out to be Eduardo Solis.

The second prosecution witness was Mario Toti, a Santa Monica Police Department K-9 officer who was able to fill in the story of how the shooter dressed in dark clothing was arrested and identified. Toti was in his police car with his dog in the parking lot when he first heard shots, and it appears that he was the closest police officer to the scene, notwithstanding the satellite police station on the pier itself. A nagging question for many on the jury was, once Toti heard shots and saw the figure running from the scene, why he didn’t simply release his dog.

That question wasn’t answered in testimony, but in a chat after the trial Edwin Wakabayashi, the prosecutor, said it was because Toti was close to Pacific Coast Highway (uniformly called PCH by locals) in the parking lot at the time and didn’t want to risk having the dog run into traffic. This, to me, simply adds to the unanswered questions in my mind regarding why Toti was where he was when the trouble started, too far away to prevent the shooting or call for assistance sooner, yet with no apparent need for him to be deployed near PCH, where he couldn’t use his dog.

The first part of Toti’s account conflicts, like Osorio’s, with the physical evidence. Toti said he was helping a motorist with a question regarding a traffic ticket when he was distracted by the sound of gunfire to his west. He looked up and saw a figure facing south or southwest, moving backward to the north and extending his arm back toward the pier -- Toti never saw Hurtado, either running or on the ground, and while he said he heard shots while this was happening, he was too far away to see a gun in the shooter’s hand. He testified that the dark-clad figure crossed his field of vision moving north while facing and shooting to the south. But if this were true, then cartridge casings should have been found to the north of the spot where Hurtado fell. This simply wasn’t the case. All ten casings were well to the south

Toti’s testimony became more credible as he described the shooter’s continued flight to the north. Toti started driving his black-and-white toward the figure, at the same time notifying other SMPD officers by radio of the fugitive, who ran around the corner of a chain link fence surrounding a construction site in the parking lot. As he did so, he tossed something over the fence, which landed in a piece of construction equipment with a metallic clank. The figure headed around the fence and back toward the south, then cut across PCH and climbed the bluff up toward Palisades Park. By this time SMPD officers were waiting at the top and arrested him. He was identified as Rafael Ahumada. Toti recovered the object that had been tossed over the fence, which turned out to be a 9mm Glock pistol with an empty magazine.

The medical examiner’s testimony was short, but it contradicted much of what the earlier witnesses had said. Hurtado had died of a single, through-and-through gunshot wound that entered his lower back and exited from his chest. There was no evidence that the wound was from a shot fired at close range or while the body was lying on the ground. Other than a graze wound on his arm, there were no other gunshot wounds. Since Hurtado had fallen on his back, face up, the shot had to have hit him before he fell. This went against Osorio’s testimony that the shooter had come up to Hurtado while he lay on the ground and fired several shots at him point blank.

Hurtado had stab wounds, but all were on the back of his head or at the base of his skull. While head wounds bleed profusely, none of the stab wounds was fatal. But two witnesses had testified to the figure in white stabbing Hurtado in the chest, not the head, and nearly all witnesses had said Hurtado was on his back, not an easy position for stabbing the base of his skull.

But other than the medical examiner, a major problem was that the prosecution’s “expert” witnesses weren’t really experts -- instead, they were low-level law enforcement officers or crime lab technicians. They reflect the cusp of a recent cultural divide. The police officers and other “experts” who testified for the prosecution were people who had, or were planning to have, decades-long careers at a single agency. The police officers had had ten, twenty, or thirty years with a single department; the crime lab employees, while generally younger, were clearly following a carefully circumscribed career path themselves and seemed likely to stay with a single agency. And indeed, spend much of a 30 or 35 year career coasting.

This is in opposition to more recent career paths in private industry, where individuals may have several careers and more than a few employers in a lifetime. Companies will merge, move operations, go out of business, lay thousands off. Industries will thrive and retrench. The organizationally dependent, compulsive climbers, and cube weasels who, we’ve already seen, have a philosophical conflict with the attitudes that are required of a citizen-juror, are also the ones most threatened by this new work environment. Their task, lacking initiative, independent-mindedness, and similar qualities, is to be among those who are not laid off, to be among the privileged number who can continue to coast, and in this they often succeed. The others will need to scramble, find another job, find another line of work, commute to a different time zone, move to a different state. Of this group, those who find themselves called to become citizen-jurors evaluate with increasing curiosity people who come to the witness stand and testify to 30 years at a single job, or retirement after 40 years at a single job, or aspirations among the young of remaining at a single job for decades more.

Murder Trial -- II

I had been avoiding jury duty for many years. For part of that time I was able to get off because nobody would pay me while I was on jury duty, but then the law changed, and I finally had to show up. The reason the law changed was the employers who paid for jury duty were mostly governments or old-line companies like utilities, and somebody decided this was beginning to look like a professional juror class, rather than randomly selected citizens. Financial hardship is no longer an excuse for not serving, and people like me find ourselves in jury pools. (I assume, however, that the likes of Barbra Streisand and Jack Nicholson have found ways to get around jury duty as well as they ever have.)

The judge in our case observed that the jurors she’d seen since the law changed were much less happy about serving, which shouldn’t have been a surprise to her, though it seemed to be. The duty of citizenship sometimes conflicts with convenience. The jury coordinators warned the juror pool that got sent to our courtroom that it would be a long trial, so we were apparently selected based on two criteria: either the employer paid for unlimited jury days, or we didn’t get paid at all. I was in the second category.

We sat listening to prospective jurors giving the judge the reasons they couldn’t serve on a two-week trial. “My employer is sending me to training,” said one prospect, who was likely being paid for the jury time.

“You don’t understand,” said the judge. “You may be excused for your own extreme hardship. Not your employer’s hardship.”

“But it’s my career,” said the prospect.

“Sit down,” said the judge.

A surprising number of prospective jurors appeared to want to get out of the case because they claimed to be crazy. One prospect stood up out of turn, interrupting the judge as she questioned someone else. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m having trouble breathing in here. I’m being treated for depression. I’m having trouble breathing.” The judge started to say something about needing a note from a doctor, but the guy wouldn’t be deterred. “I’m having trouble breathing.” He looked OK to me, but I guess this had worked for him before. The bailiff radioed for a paramedic and took him out of the room.

Several others perked up. A woman said she didn’t have a note from her doctor, but she wanted to show her medication to the judge and the lawyers. They went up to the sidebar, she showed them the bottle, and they excused her. Another woman said she had a note from her doctor; she showed it to the judge. “The doctor said you needed to rest on Monday and Tuesday,” said the judge. “This is Friday. Sit down.”

A guy with a stud in his lip was truly inventive: the judge specifically warned all prospective jurors not to speak to the attorneys in the case if they saw them outside the courtroom. This fellow saw one of the defense lawyers and tried to strike up a conversation in the elevator, which of course the lawyer had to report to the judge. After lunch, the judge landed into the guy right in the courtroom. “You’ve specifically been told not to speak with the attorneys, and you deliberately struck up a conversation with one. Are you trying to be excused from this case?” He was, of course, and it worked like a champ.

Voir dire is the legal term for the first part of the formal trial, when the jury is selected. I think true crime books, when they reach the part of the story that covers the trial, often minimize voir dire, since it takes place before the opening statements, the evidence, and the arguments. But voir dire occurs, like the rest of the trial, with the judge, the defendants, their counsel, and the prosecutor all present, and the court reporter records each session. I’ve never read about the psychological effect of voir dire on the jurors and other participants in the trial. In this trial, the judge, defense, and prosecution worked their way through 60 potential jurors over more than two days to arrive at a final panel of 12 jurors and two alternates.

The process began with the often bizarre self-elimination of candidates who clearly weren’t going to work out as members of any group. But an in-group forms when an out-group is created, and as the judge excused the first very strange individuals, the people who remained in the room began to develop an inevitable sense of belonging to an exclusive, carefully selected in-group, in contrast to the out-group of malingerers, people who needed powerful psychotropic medication, and the irretrievably self-absorbed.

With the obvious misfits gone, the atmosphere changed, and voir dire began to look more like a civics seminar. The judge, defense lawyers, and prosecutor asked prospective jurors the same questions, over and over: “Juror two, do you understand what the presumption of innocence means? Juror eight? Juror five, how about the prosecution’s responsibility to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt? Do you have a problem with that? How about you, juror three?”

We spent much of the first day of voir dire in this kind of discussion, with only a few others being excused. The judge was fond of repeating ,“Do you feel you are a person with common sense? Can you apply common sense in evaluating the testimony of witnesses in this case?” Were the jurors independent-minded? Would they evaluate each witness based on their impressions of the individual person’s credibility and not rely on a uniform or a title? Were the jurors fair-minded? Were they tolerant of other lifestyles?

Clearly nobody is likely to say, “No, my family says I don’t have any common sense. And I’m actually sort of a conformist, when you think about it.” Instead, there was a mildly hypnotic effect when these questions were repeated. On one hand, the defense and prosecution were beginning to get a sense of how the panelists in the jury pool were reacting to these ideas.

We were asked, over and over, if we were willing to stick to our opinion on the evidence even if the vote were 11-1 against us. Those who seemed unlikely to stick things out this way were slowly being excused The process was creating a temporary in-group made up of a kind of citizen who approached the ideal of the founding fathers and observers like Tocqueville. I began to see that the people who were willing to serve this way weren’t simply putting up with a scheduling inconvenience; they were in fact willing, at least temporarily, to oppose themselves to conventional wisdom of any sort. The kind of citizen-juror who rises from the English legal tradition and the Enlightenment ideas embodied in the Bill of Rights is, in many ways, not an ideal contemporary corporate underling.

The organizationally dependent, the compulsive climbers, the cube weasels, do not, by and large, rely on traits like independent-mindedness, common sense, or a willingness to stick to their ideas on justice. In fact, people like the prospective juror who, on the first day, had complained in vain that jury service would be a hardship for her career, began to be magically excused anyway as the prosecution and defense used their last peremptory challenges to clean up the final panel.

The jury that was finally sworn in after more than two days was a remarkable cross-section of Los Angeles: of the 12 regular jurors, I counted six men and six women; three were foreign-born. I simply can’t speak for how each member would describe his or her ethnicity, but I would estimate that three were African-American, three were Hispanic, three were Anglo, and three were Asian. Nobody had reverse-engineered any numbers to get this result; it was the simple product of voir dire against a random pool of 60 people. Occupations ranged from computer programmer to letter carrier to building maintenance engineer to secretary to clerk.

Murder Trial -- I

At 11:30 PM Friday, February 15 2002, on the Santa Monica pier, a knot of 40 Hispanic gang members gathered only yards from a Santa Monica Police Department satellite police station. A witness heard menacing voices asking “where you from?”, and soon afterward the crowd moved down a flight of stairs into a parking lot on the north side of the pier. A family that was in the parking lot at the time saw a single figure break out of the group and begin to run toward the middle of the lot. Others on the pier saw a second figure run out after him almost immediately, raise his arm, and begin firing a gun at the first figure.

To those nearby who had experience with guns but hadn’t seen the earlier signs of trouble, the muffled pops and their peculiar rhythm were unmistakable, and they turned in the direction the shots had come from -- though some people, sitting in a restaurant on the pier with a band playing, saw only muzzle flashes and heard nothing. Crime scene investigators would later find 10 brass 9mm Luger cartridge casings in the general area, a full clip.

Both the gang members and other onlookers in the parking lot begin to dive for cover. Clouds of smoke from the gunfire quickly obscured the view, and some witnesses saw the first runner stagger and collapse to the asphalt in the parking lot, where by most accounts he landed face-up. Others didn’t see the victim or his fall, but saw another individual dressed in dark clothes running from the scene to the north across the lot.

Some of the witnesses saw a male figure dressed in white run from the crowd, kneel next to the victim on the asphalt, raise one or both hands, and make repeated stabbing motions at the victim, after which the stabber got back to his feet and ran back toward the stairs. Several people saw a female figure approach the victim, kneel down to check him, and take his hand -- one witness heard her scream; another was too far away to hear, and still others said she didn’t scream but said, “My gosh, he’s been shot,” over and over. The woman then disappeared, apparently picked up by a passing car. The victim still lay on his back.

A mother with two children and a family friend was returning to her car in the parking lot after celebrating her teenage daughter’s birthday on the pier. When the shots started, the family ducked, but as the smoke cleared, they saw the victim lying alone on the asphalt. They got in their car and drove over to see if they could help. He was on his back, alive, and conscious. First he asked if he was going to die; then he asked the group to pray for him. The mother did; her daughter, who had strong feelings against gangs, didn’t.

A police paramedic arrived on the scene some time later and found the victim still on his back, alive, and conscious. “What’s your name?” he asked his patient.

“Erik.”

“How old are you?”

“Nineteen.” The paramedic checked the victim’s chest and found heavy bleeding; an ambulance took Erik Hurtado to the hospital, where he died two hours later.

Seventeen months afterward, the case of People v. Rafael Ahumada and Eduardo Solis came to trial in downtown Los Angeles. Ahumada, who was accused of being the shooter, was charged with first-degree murder, with the lesser included charge of second-degree murder. Solis, accused of being the figure in white who stabbed Hurtado when he was down, was also accused of first and second-degree murder, with the additional lesser included charge of attempted murder. Special circumstances regarding the use of firearms and gang-related crime were also added for both defendants. I was the foreperson of the jury that acquitted Solis on all charges. We also acquitted Ahumada on first-degree murder charges, but we deadlocked on second-degree murder.