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From CNN:

When I applied to University of Michigan in Ann Arbor for admission in 1995, I thought it was my path to medical school. When I received a rejection letter, I ultimately reconsidered my career choice, and pursued a degree in math at another University of Michigan campus. My confidence was shaken.

…

I thought I was prepared to hear anything during those arguments, but I don’t think anything can prepare you to hear your own name referenced by a Supreme Court justice, as if you are just a policy on paper. If I remember correctly, “Gratz” was referenced in the very first question asked that day.

Each time they mentioned my name, I wanted to jump out of my seat and say, “I’m sitting right here. I’m a real person.”

Just after the oral arguments, I stood on the steps of the court fielding questions from reporters and pointing up at that inscription, “Equal Justice Under Law.” In the days between oral arguments and the decisions in the Gratz and Grutter cases, I hoped the words inscribed in the building – the words enshrined in our Constitution’s 14th amendment – mattered. I hoped that the Court would find that diversity and other equally good intentions did not trump my right, or anyone’s right, to be treated equally and without regard to skin color by public institutions.

Update: Gratz had similar comments in 2013:

During U.S. Supreme Court oral arguments in December 2006, Jennifer Gratz recalls sitting in the courtroom and hearing justices refer to her name. It wasn’t a personal reference — they were alluding to the 2003 case with her name on it.

“Stop talking about me like that,” Gratz remembers thinking. “I’m not a policy. I’m a real person.”

The Southgate native was in the court that day because the case involved race and the 14th Amendment rights of students.

 

“Try to find a practice that enables you to maintain a human existence … time for your family, your church or synagogue, community … boy scouts, little league,” Scalia said, noting he started with Jones, Day in Cleveland. “You should look for a place like that. I’m sure they’re still out there. Maybe you have to go to Cleveland.”

Cleveland! At least it’s not Detroit. That’s what he tells UChicago Law Students.

Plus, Nino told students not to take any Law-and-X classes:

After Scalia left the University of Chicago in 1982 when President Ronald Reagan named him to the federal bench, the school hired Barack Obama as a senior lecturer. One of Obama’s most popular classes was “Current Issues in Racism and the Law.”

Scalia told the Federalist audience three years ago to stick to conventional classes such as the one he taught on contracts.

“I took nothing but bread-and-butter classes, not “Law and Poverty,” or other made-up stuff, Scalia said to laughter. He said his advice to law students at the time was: “Take serious classes. There’s so much law to learn. Don’t waste your time.”

The Times writes about it!

The program is the creation of Seth Weinberger, a 56-year-old former technology lawyer from Evanston, Ill., and the founder of Innovations for Learning, a 19-year-old nonprofit organization that has set its sights on raising persistently low reading scores among the nation’s poorest children. The tutoring software is being tried by over 550 volunteers in 60 low-performing classrooms in Chicago, Detroit, Miami and Washington, as well as at P.S. 55, where in 2010, only 15 percent of the third graders passed the state English exam.

Countless studies, many outlined in an exhaustive 1998 literacy report by the National Research Council, indicate that there is a strong connection between how fast young readers progress and how often they encounter written language. But according to the 2007 National Survey of Children’s Health, less than half of the nation’s young are read to at home on a daily basis.

As a result, the literacy organization Everybody Wins! New York plants more than 1,000 volunteers in city schools. New York Cares sponsors volunteers in an early morning reading program. And in September, the national advocacy group Reading Partnersbegan a volunteer tutoring initiative in seven of the city’s poorest-performing elementary schools.

What sets Mr. Weinberg’s program apart is that the tutors arrive via technology. “If it takes a village to raise a child,” he said, “it now takes technology to connect that village.”

His methods are not without critics.

At schools like P.S. 3, in the West Village, parents gush about the “magical” connection in-school mentors develop with the students they help. There, where 78 percent of third graders passed the statewide English exam, dozens of reading volunteers show up “live” every week.

At schools like P.S. 55, the Innovations for Learning program presents a welcome solution to a persistent problem.

We’ve been doing this at the Harlan Institute, through our distance-learning mentorship program, HARLANconnect for some time now.

I am half-way through reading Moneyball, and am fascinated with how tradition-driven baseball is. Beyond the obvious debates about instant replays and the human element (see here and here), it is amazing how–until Billy Bean’s radical rethinking of recruiting–baseball teams put together teams with a total ignorance of how games were won, based largely on how things had been done forever.

I suppose one vestige of this ludditism is the bullpen telephone. On October 22, I saw this story in the Times about how the dugout phone is the last bastion of the landline. It focuses on St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony La Russa who pines for the simple landline telephone.

While landlines in homes collect dust and serve increasingly decorative functions, the attitude among baseball clubs is a familiar one in a sport tied tightly to old-fashioned ways: why change what works?

“The same old phones, the same old process,” said Derek Lilliquist, the bullpen coach of the St. Louis Cardinals. “I guess they’ve been that way forever.”

“You have technical foul-ups,” La Russa said. “That’s why I limit my technical exploits to paper and pencil.” . . .

La Russa was asked whether he had any complaints about the phones and if he thought the technology could be improved in any way. “Do you work for AT&T?” La Russa said to the reporter, drawing laughter in the room. “No, I never thought about how to make it better.”

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it right?

I was going to blog it, but I didn’t have time. Now, I have a good reason to return to it.

Now, La Russa’s reliance on that old-fashioned technology didn’t pan out so well for him in Game 5 of the World Series. Apparently the crowd was so loud in Texas that the bullpen coach was unable to hear La Russa.

Tony La Russa thought he was making a simple request of the bullpen: get closer Jason Motte ready. . .

Turns out it was anything but simple.

What happened after the call was a comedy of errors that played out like something from the “Can you hear me now?” cell phone commercials.

Cardinals bullpen coach Derek Lilliquist thought La Russa only asked for Marc Rzepczynski to start throwing, when the manager really wanted both left-hander Rzepczynski and right-hander Motte to get loose.

La Russa realized the problem once he put in Rzepczynski and saw no one else warming up, so he called back and asked for Motte again. This time, Lilliquist told Lance Lynn to start throwing, even though he was only supposed to be used in an emergency.

The series of miscommunications left Rzepczynski on the mound against Mike Napoli with the bases loaded, a lefty-righty matchup that clearly favored Texas. The Rangers’ catcher delivered with a two-run double that sent Texas to a 4-2 victory Monday night.

Is La Russa still so nostalgic over the old technology?

“That phone in a loud ballpark, it’s not an unusual problem,” La Russa said. “I mean, it doesn’t make it right, but … ”

As the pitchers came and went, La Russa’s deployment seemed curious. But he’s the winningest active manager and he’s known for his unconventional use of the bullpen, which is probably why nobody questioned whether there might be something wrong.

Rzepczynski and Motte didn’t even know there was a mixup until after the game.

La Russa said the noise problem is not unusual with bullpens “that are right amidst the fans and excitement.” The visitors’ bullpen at Rangers Ballpark is in left-center field, with fans on either side.

“Maybe we need to come up with some ear mikes or something,” La Russa said.

Considering all the technology available these days, there’s got to be a better way to do this — right?

“Yeah, smoke signals from the dugout,” La Russa said. “There are times, like what happened in Philadelphia (during the first round of the playoffs). The phone went out, and so we used cell phones. And then the Phillies brought down walkie talkies, and they fixed the phone.”

La Russa took the blame.

“Hey, it’s my fault,” he said. “Maybe I slurred it, whatever it is. It comes down to who has the responsibility when there’s those kinds of miscommunications.”

A simple text message would’ve solved this.

“They need to put TV monitors in all the ballparks you can’t see,” said La Russa’s good buddy,Detroit Tigers manager Jim Leyland. “I guarantee you they’ll be a proposal made at the general managers’ meetings. That’s all that’s going to come from this. You live and learn.”

The TImes ran a follow-up story about baseball’s game of telephone on October 25, but fascinatingly didn’t even mention the earlier article praising the nostalgia. Amazingly laptops and cell phones are banned in the dugout! What sense does that even make?

So far, baseball has resisted anything more technologically advanced than a telephone. In addition to cellphones, laptop computers are also banned for dugout-bullpen communication, according to the baseball spokesman Pat Courtney. A pre-approved form of walkie-talkie can be used if a landline fails, Courtney said, provided the affected team alerts the umpiring crew. . . .

And while managers might not like the idea of text-messaging, Golvin said that such conversations would be easy enough to type out.

“It’s not like the dialogue between Tony La Russa and his bullpen coach is the equivalent of letters exchanged in the 17th century,” he said. “It’s more like, ‘Get Motte up.’ It’s three words.”

In what passed for a New York City Public High School AP Political Science Class in 2001, I watched a Michael Moore propaganda piece, Roger and Me, to learn about economics. I was taught that Michigan in the 1960s and 1970s was the pinnacle of industrial labor development, and that we should strive for that period. The departure from that golden era, largely driven by the greedy auto companies outsourcing jobs and shutting down plants, was a travesty, and the reason for Michigan’s failure (this movie was made in the 1980s; it’s gotten much worse since). Maybe Michael Moore wasn’t right? Maybe the model that Moore lauded in that film was a powder keg waiting to explode. Maybe my political science class was a failure?

Michael Barone is on point in the WSJ:

The Michigan model was based on the Progressive/New Deal assumption that, after the transition from farm to factory, the best way to secure growth was through big companies and big labor unions.

The Big Three auto companies, economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote, could create endless demand for their products through manipulative advertising and planned obsolescence. The United Auto Workers would ensure that productivity gains would be shared by workers and the assembly line would never be speeded up. In those days, 40% of Michigan voters lived in union (mostly UAW) households, the base vote of a liberal Democratic Party that pushed for ever larger governments at the local, state and federal levels. You found similar alignments in most Midwestern states.

Liberals assumed the Michigan model was the wave of the future, and that in time—once someone built big factories and unions organized them—backward states like Texas would catch up. Texas liberal writers Ronnie Dugger and Molly Ivins kept looking for the liberal coalition of blacks, poor whites and Latinos that political scientist V.O. Key predicted in his 1940s classic “Southern Politics.” . . .

History hasn’t worked out that way. In 1970, Michigan had nine million people. In 2010, it had 10 million. In 1970, Texas had 11 million people. In 2010, it had 25 million. In 1970, Detroit was the nation’s fifth-largest metro area. Today, metro Houston and the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex are both pressing the San Francisco Bay area for the No. 4 spot, and Detroit is far behind.

Adversarial unionism is one reason the Midwest slumped. It turns out that the 1970 assembly line, with union shop stewards always poised to shut it down, was not the highest stage of human economic development. When you make labor more expensive, you create incentives to invent new machines and create new jobs elsewhere. Foreign auto manufacturers built plants in a South recently freed from state-imposed racial segregation. With no adversarial unions, management and labor could collaborate and achieve quality levels the Big Three took decades to match.