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Even the house organs of the obama administration can’t stomach his selection of Susan Rice for State. Dana Milbank started it Friday in WaPo.
… Even in a town that rewards sharp elbows and brusque personalities, Rice has managed to make an impressive array of enemies — on Capitol Hill, in Foggy Bottom and abroad. Particularly in comparison with the other person often mentioned for the job, Sen. John Kerry, she can be a most undiplomatic diplomat, and there likely aren’t enough Republican or Democratic votes in the Senate to confirm her.
Back when she was an assistant secretary of state during the Clinton administration, she appalled colleagues by flipping her middle finger at Richard Holbrooke during a meeting with senior staff at the State Department, according to witnesses. Colleagues talk of shouting matches and insults.
Among those she has insulted is the woman she would replace at State. Rice was one of the first former Clinton administration officials to defect to Obama’s primary campaign against Hillary Clinton. Rice condemned Clinton’s Iraq and Iran positions, asking for an “explanation of how and why she got those critical judgments wrong.”
Clinton got a measure of revenge in 2010 after she worked out a deal with the Russian foreign minister on a package of Iran sanctions to be adopted by the U.N. Security Council. The White House wanted Rice to make the announcement (part of a campaign to increase her profile that included high-visibility foreign trips and TV appearances), but a Clinton aide got Kerry to ask Clinton about the matter during an unrelated Senate hearing. …
… Rice’s pugilism provoked the Russians to weigh in this week in opposition to her nomination as secretary of state. The Russian business daily Kommersant quoted an anonymous Russian foreign ministry official as saying that Rice, who quarreled with Russia over Syria, is “too ambitious and aggressive,” and her appointment would make it “more difficult for Moscow to work with Washington.”
Compared with this, the flap over Libya is relatively minor — but revealing. It’s true that, in her much-criticized TV performance, she was reciting talking points given to her by the intelligence agencies. But that’s the trouble. Rice stuck with her points even though they had been contradicted by the president of the Libyan National Assembly, who, on CBS’s “Face the Nation” just before Rice, said there was “no doubt” that the attack on Americans in Benghazi “was preplanned.” Rice rebutted the Libyan official, arguing — falsely, it turned out — that there was no evidence of such planning.
True, Rice was following orders from the White House, which she does well. But the nation’s top diplomat needs to show more sensitivity and independence — traits Clinton has demonstrated in abundance. Obama can do better at State than Susan Rice.
Maureen Dowd was next.
… Ambitious to be secretary of state, Susan Rice wanted to prove she had the gravitas for the job and help out the White House. So the ambassador to the United Nations agreed to a National Security Council request to go on all five Sunday shows to talk about the attack on the American consulate in Libya.
“She saw this as a great opportunity to go out and close the stature gap,” said one administration official. “She was focused on the performance, not the content. People said, ‘It’s sad because it was one of her best performances.’ But it’s not a movie, it’s the news. Everyone in politics thinks, you just get your good talking points and learn them and reiterate them on camera. But what if they’re not good talking points? What if what you’re saying isn’t true, even if you’re saying it well?”
Testifying on Capitol Hill on Friday, the beheaded Head Spook David Petraeus said the C.I.A. knew quickly that the Benghazi raid was a terrorist attack.
“It was such a no-brainer,” one intelligence official told me. …
… An Africa expert, Rice should have realized that when a gang showed up with R.P.G.’s and mortars in a place known as a hotbed of Qaeda sympathizers and Islamic extremist training camps, it was not anger over a movie. She should have been savvy enough to wonder why the wily Hillary was avoiding the talk shows. …
Two days ago we took a swipe at university administrators. The Austin American-Statesman provides an example of their aberrant behavior.
A forgivable loan program benefiting law professors and a former law dean at the University of Texas raises legal concerns and should be permanently ended, according to a report by the UT System and a review of that report by the state attorney general’s office.
The American-Statesman obtained copies of the documents under the Texas Public Information Act.
The UT System report was especially critical of the former dean, Larry Sager, who remains on the faculty of the School of Law and who, while dean, sought and received a $500,000 forgivable loan from the UT Law School Foundation.
Although the foundation approved his loan, campus administrators did not sign off on it and were unaware of it, the report said.
“Obviously, this lack of transparency and accountability is unacceptable and, at a minimum, it creates an impression of self-dealing that cannot be condoned,” said the report, which was written by Barry Burgdorf, the system’s vice chancellor and general counsel.
Glenn Smith, a spokesman for Sager, took issue with parts of the report and parts of the review by the attorney general’s office. …
Since abuses like the above are widespread in graduate education, there are going to be some changes. Above the Law Blog covers some suggested changes to legal education.
As I mentioned the other day, I recently attended an excellent conference at George Mason Law in honor of the late Larry Ribstein. At a panel entitled “The Past and Future of Legal Education,” Professor John O. McGinnis presented a paper arguing for an undergraduate option for legal education.
It’s not an entirely novel proposal — Elie attended a conference over the summer where another professor presented a similar idea — but it’s certainly worth considering. Here’s how McGinnis described his proposal in a Wall Street Journal piece (co-authored with Russell Mangas of Kirkland & Ellis):
“States should permit undergraduate colleges to offer majors in law that will entitle graduates to take the bar exam. If they want to add a practical requirement, states could also ask graduates to serve one-year apprenticeships before becoming eligible for admission to the bar.
An undergraduate legal degree could be readily designed. A student could devote half of his course work to the major, which would allow him to approximate two years of legal study. There is substantial agreement in the profession that two years are enough to understand the essentials of the law—both the basics of our ancient common law and the innovations of our modern world. A one-year apprenticeship after graduation would allow young lawyers to replace the superfluous third year of law school with practical training.
This option would reduce the law school tuition to zero. And the three years of students going without income would be replaced by a year of paid apprenticeship and two years earning a living as a lawyer.”
I support the idea of reducing classroom time and combining formal instruction with paid apprenticeship. I outlined a similar proposal in the New York Times last year.
In his conference presentation, Professor McGinnis suggested that about 60 credit hours of coursework could suffice for an undergraduate degree in law. This might require change from the American Bar Association, since the ABA currently requires 80 hours of coursework to earn a law degree from an ABA-accredited law school, and many jurisdictions require those who sit for the bar to have graduated from an ABA-accredited school. (Northwestern Law’s former dean, David Van Zandt, has persuasively argued why this requirement should be reduced.) …
Interesting look at learning in different cultures from NPR.
In 1979, when Jim Stigler was still a graduate student at the University of Michigan, he went to Japan to research teaching methods and found himself sitting in the back row of a crowded fourth-grade math class.
“The teacher was trying to teach the class how to draw three-dimensional cubes on paper,” Stigler explains, “and one kid was just totally having trouble with it. His cube looked all cockeyed, so the teacher said to him, ‘Why don’t you go put yours on the board?’ So right there I thought, ‘That’s interesting! He took the one who can’t do it and told him to go and put it on the board.’ ”
Stigler knew that in American classrooms, it was usually the best kid in the class who was invited to the board. And so he watched with interest as the Japanese student dutifully came to the board and started drawing, but still couldn’t complete the cube. Every few minutes, the teacher would ask the rest of the class whether the kid had gotten it right, and the class would look up from their work, and shake their heads no. And as the period progressed, Stigler noticed that he — Stigler — was getting more and more anxious.
“I realized that I was sitting there starting to perspire,” he says, “because I was really empathizing with this kid. I thought, ‘This kid is going to break into tears!’ ”
But the kid didn’t break into tears. Stigler says the child continued to draw his cube with equanimity. “And at the end of the class, he did make his cube look right! And the teacher said to the class, ‘How does that look, class?’ And they all looked up and said, ‘He did it!’ And they broke into applause.” The kid smiled a huge smile and sat down, clearly proud of himself.
Stigler is now a professor of psychology at UCLA who studies teaching and learning around the world, and he says it was this small experience that first got him thinking about how differently East and West approach the experience of intellectual struggle.
“I think that from very early ages we [in America] see struggle as an indicator that you’re just not very smart,” Stigler says. “It’s a sign of low ability — people who are smart don’t struggle, they just naturally get it, that’s our folk theory. Whereas in Asian cultures they tend to see struggle more as an opportunity.” …
Late Night Humor from Andrew Malcolm.
Leno: So, we’re headed for a fiscal cliff. The bad news is we just reelected a guy whose campaign slogan was “Forward.”
Leno: What’s so hard about counting votes in Florida? They just finished. Half the population there can play 10 Bingo cards at once. But they can’t count votes?
Leno: Hillary Clinton denies she’ll run for president in 2016. Says all she wants to do is sleep. So, she should probably be vice president.
Fallon: A 76-carat diamond went up for auction in Switzerland. The jeweler called it “a priceless stone.” David Petraeus’ wife called it, “a start.”
Fallon: Man this David Petraeus scandal just keeps getting bigger. It turns out that another top general and an FBI agent had inappropriate contact with Jill Kelley, the woman who sparked the investigation. They need to stop pulling the thread on this thing or we’re gonna end up with nobody left to run the government. …