Tumult in Harvard Square

July 24, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

“Tumultuous” was the part of the Henry Louis Gates story that seemed most unusual. White cop arrests a black man who has committed no crime except to challenge the cop’s authority – nothing much new here. But I don’t usually think of tumultuous as a word that comes quickly to the tongues of cops on the street, even around Harvard Square. But there it was in the report: Gates had been “exhibiting loud and tumultuous behavior.”

I’d forgotten that a police department is a bureaucracy, part of the larger bureaucratic structure of the law. The cop on the street may be just an ordinary male responding to a challenge to his authority. But the cop in the precinct writing up the report is a bureaucrat. And part of bureaucratic work is making cases conform to the regulations as written.*

Here’s one relevant passage from the ruling case in Massachusetts law on disorderly conduct:

to cause public inconvenience, annoyance or alarm, or recklessly creating a risk thereof, he: (a) engages in fighting or threatening, or in violent or tumultuous behavior;

OK, that accounts for tumultuous. But why did Officer Crowley ask Gates to come out of his own house?

Explaining for the first time why he lured Gates out of his home, Crowley said he sought to protect himself and Gates from a potential intruder as he responded to a call for breaking and entering. (Boston Herald)

The explanation comes a day or two after the fact, or rather, after the facts, including the fact that Gates is a man in his late fifties who walks with a cane, and the fact that he showed the cop his ID.

This post-facto pretext went down well in the conservative press. The Wall Street Journal used it as what it called a “teaching moment”:

one lesson is that it’s usually better to cooperate during encounters with law enforcement so that matters don’t escalate needlessly. And if a cop asks you to step out on the porch, or away from your car, it’s probably because he’s concerned for his own safety.

Maybe the cop is thinking about his own safety. But maybe he’s also thinking about the law on disorderly conduct, which requires that the behavior be public.

`Public' means affecting or likely to affect persons in a place to which the public or a substantial group has access.'. . .

Inside your own house is not “public.” So if you want my name and badge number, step outside here where there are other people, and then . . . . you’re under arrest for disorderly conduct.


*According to one analysis, it was not the arresting officer who wrote up the report. Instead it was left to two officers who were perhaps more versed in the language of the law.

(Note: Much of what I’ve said here, it turns out, was already said by Mark Kleiman on his blog. Mark’s post is more detailed, somewhat more technical, and just generally better.)

No Protest on Protestants

July 24, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

The conservative reaction to the Sotomayor nomination amply illustrated invisibility cloak worn by privilege. When some characteristic is the default setting (like white male for Supreme Court justices), it goes unnoticed, and we never think to ask what its effect might be. Only when someone doesn’t conform to the default do we worry about the influence their experiences might have. (See my earlier post here.)

Andrew Gelman posting at fivethirtyeight.com finds another example. The New York Times asked “legal experts” what questions they might like to ask at the hearings. Blogger Ann Althouse summoned up her legal expertise to ask.

If a diverse array of justices is desirable, should we not be concerned that if you are confirmed, six out of the nine justices will be Roman Catholics, or is it somehow wrong to start paying attention to the extreme overrepresentation of Catholicism on the court at the moment when we have our first Hispanic nominee?

Gelman reminds us – and provides a graph, of course, to show – that for nearly all of its history, the Court had an overwhelming majority of Protestants. Yet in all that time, no legal experts seem to have been concerned or even to have noticed.

I can't imagine that, when, say, Charles Evans Hughes was being nominated for his Supreme Court seat, that somebody asked him: “Is it somehow wrong to start paying attention to the extreme overrepresentation of Protestantism on the court at the moment when we have our umpteenth white nominee?”

Faculty Without Students

July 21, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

I’m looking at low enrollments in some courses for the fall. The administration here pays attention to these numbers, and I may even have to cancel some sections.

So I took notice when I saw a recent paper called “Faculty Without Students: Resource Allocation in Higher Education” by William R. Johnson and Sarah Tuner.

The math department at Princeton, they report, has 58 faculty plus 8 visitors. It has 66 undergraduate math majors (a number that is nearly double what it was in 2007).

A student-faculty ratio of 1.0 or less is unusual.* But if you want to find low ratios like that, don’t go to sociology. Or any of the social sciences.

Here are two graphs from Johnson and Turner’s paper.

Click on the images if you want to actually see the graphs.

Student-faculty ratios are higher in the social sciences. They also show greater variation.

Political science is the interesting case here. Generally, the mean ratio increases with the popularity of a major. But in that case, psychology and English should have greater means and ranges than political science.

(Bleg: If anyone knows how to get Blogger to show a jpeg at a viewable size, please tell me.)

* In a post a couple of years ago, I told of my disillusionment at finding out that some “professors” never taught courses at all.

Everett Hughes at the Pump

July 20, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

“I don’t know how to do this. I’m from New Jersey.” The fortyish woman had gotten out of her SUV and was standing there by the gas pump looking befuddled. *

It was a small, two-pump Mobil station just off Rte. 84 in Connecticut, and my wife and I had stopped for gas on our way to Boston for my niece’s wedding.** The Jersey woman was also on her way to Boston, taking her teenage daughter to see Rent. She was a law-abiding woman, and in New Jersey, it’s illegal to pump your own gas. The Garden State does not trust its citizens to perform this delicate operation that is better left to professionals. Gas station attendants must take eight hours of training, and no doubt some of that time is devoted to nozzle technique. (On the other hand, if you want a clean windshield, do it yourself, buddy. The squeegee’s over there.)

My wife showed our fellow traveler how to unscrew the gas cap, dip her credit card, lift the nozzle, and so on. I thought about Everett Hughes.

In his course on work and professions, Hughes reflected on who was allowed to do what in an occupation. The rationale was always about the training and expertise necessary for the protection of the public. But when you looked at changes in the distribution of these tasks, you began to see an effort retain control and limit access.

To become a pharmacist required a two-year course of study. But in World War II, when the military needed druggists – and fast – the army started turning out 90-day wonders. For a long time, only MDs were allowed to give injections. Only when doctors had more complicated tasks that filled their time did the AMA change its mind and agree that on second thought maybe handling a hypodermic syringe was something a nurse might be capable of. There must be many more examples in medicine and in other professions.

Someday, even drivers in New Jersey and Oregon may be allowed to pump their own gas.

* No, the woman was not Mischa Barton. I just grabbed this pic from Google Images.

**A wonderful wedding, by the way. Pictures available on request.