Dear Mr. Gold:

The LA Times attributed this statement to you:

That prompted a trustee, Stanley Gold, who managed the late Roy Disney’s investment holdings, to issue his own letter Tuesday afternoon, deriding the professors as “know-nothing vigilantes.”

from the LA Times https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-usc-trustees-meeting-20190123-story.html:

You said that in a letter? When you had time to edit and rethink? Any chance they misquoted you? Because I truly hope it was a misquote. Out of context, maybe?

We who formed the concerned faculty group know this university intimately. We are here, teaching, day in and day out. Whose writing, publishing, and teaching got us those coveted higher rankings? I don’t think it was yours, and as effective as our administrators have been at boosting our signal, we, the faculty and our students, delivered the goods.

Speaking about us as though we are mere uppity employees diminishes both us and the institution.

Do we know Board politics? No. But we shouldn’t. Your comments and the behavior reported in the Times about a small number of men on the Board of Trustees reflect self-involved, rich men’s egos rather than the leadership we need. We need people on our board who understand two things:

• the point of the university is not to annoint elites but to advance the human endeavor for enlightenment; and
• a truly great university faculty is marked not by its deference to CEO-style leaders like Nikias, but by its intellectual and moral fearlessness in pursuing what is true and what is good.

Perhaps I am a fool in the world of the 21st century to believe these things, but I do.

This university has real problems. In addition to the decades-long powderkeg of sexual misconduct, our students, staff, and faculty suffer from crushing housing costs in Los Angeles. Some are homeless. Our contract employees have few benefits and little connection to our community. Just about every year, a student on campus takes their own life.

When you look at these problems, whether Jim Ellis’ feelings got hurt on his way to collect three more years of his lavish salary falls, deservedly, into the “cry me a river” problem category. I am sorry if he feels he was badly treated. That’s unfortunate, but worthy of two months’ squabbling, let alone airing the Board’s dirty laundry to the Times, it is not.

Less important than our real problems, certainly, is the fact that I want you to know that far from being a wild-eyed mob looking to exact vengeance Nikias or any other men, the concerned faculty agonized over how to approach the BoT about our concerns. The day I signed the original letter was one of the worst days of my professional life, and it wasn’t because I was worried about my job.

Mr. Gold, signing that letter broke my heart. It broke my heart.

But it was the right thing to do. I am sorry you do not see that.

Letter from a Birmingham Jail is an extended argument about the relationship between law and justice, the difference between those two terms and the duties to resist and change unjust laws. It is a call to action: he takes to tasks his fellow pastors and white moderates who are wringing their hands instead of joining him and his peers in the fight to change unjust laws and practices.

He helps moderns understand Plato’s Crito about when, perhaps, one should choose solidarity over individual right, and when you should choose the latter, and why time and patience can be oppression’s most powerful allies.

Much gets emphasized about MLK on his birthday: he gets quoted out of context, then we have lots of fights about how people have tried to defang him when he was really a revolutionary who stood not just for justice in civil rights, but also against poverty. I’m sure those worried about his cooptation are right.

One thing that gets lost sometimes, however, in that back and forth, is his sheer brilliance. “Letter from” is a masterpiece of composition and political thought that deserves a place in any class on justice theory.

You can find it here.

I don’t know what else to say about Dr. King other than, like lots of Black people destroyed by white violence, he should have had the rest of his time.

We all know the critiques of cost-benefit and EIR analyses. They are pseudo-science; they are political, agencies and politicos manipulate them, etc. As somebody who has done these things for a long time, though, I really still believe in them for their rhetorical value. No, they aren’t science. They don’t have to be. But they are a means of both a) engaging in and b) disciplining the imaginaries we construct around new projects. I’m not saying they provide all the info we need, or that they are the only decision criteria we should use. I am saying that they are a useful means for generating discussion.

We don’t have this with The WonderfulWall. And it’s bad.

I have found lots of conservative media references to ‘an internal report from the Department of Homeland Security’, but I can’t find the report itself. Just reporting on it from Reuters.

I also found a report from a stat prof Liberty Vittert writing for FoxNews where s/he puts the cost at about $25 B using a quick and dirty method. Ok. Vittert want us to know that it’s impossible to understand the consequences of the wall, but then mentions the goodies before concluding “Meh”:

Now, I’ve estimated the cost of the wall to be about $25 billion, but many of the estimates given by other sources include many other factors: how many more or fewer border agents are needed; reduction of “virtual” walls; on-going maintenance; economic costs to border towns; reductions in human trafficking and illegal immigration; reduction in drug trafficking; etc.

There are so many factors that “might increase” or “might decrease” that as a statistician, I can tell you it is empirically impossible to calculate all of the unintended consequences – good or bad – that the wall might cause. Anyone saying otherwise is flat out wrong.

Let’s give a litany of benefits, including the really, really dodgy claim about controlling smuggling, and then throw up our hands and say “who knows?”.

If it’s really the case you are lying if you think you know the future consequences, then why build anything? Why risk anything? We wind up looking towards the future through a glass darkly–the same we are doomed to look at our past–but throwing up your hands like this is frankly irresponsible.

And then they later then gives us an anecdote about going to Ellis Island with her dad and finding her grandma there! How sweet! Who cares? I have no idea what that story is meant to communicate about immigration policy other than the usual conservative assumption that things were so much better back in the day.

Cato estimates the cost more along the lines of about $60B. My quick and dirty calculation with risk factors put it lower, about $40B to $29B. I found a HuffPo report on an MIT study that puts the cost around $40B, but I can’t find the MIT study. AND IT’S DRIVING ME CRAZY. But anyway, a good rule is that when you have experts landing around the some number, it’s ok for going on with it. Cato writes:

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) recently sent a letter to Congress where it argued that $5.7 billion would pay for approximately 234 miles of a new physical steel barrier along the border.  That new estimate comes to about $24.4 million per mile.  This new OMB estimate is 41 percent more costly than the approximately $17.3 million per mile construction costs that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) estimated just a few years ago, 2.7 times as expensive as Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan estimated, and 5 times as expensive as Trump’s lowest estimate. 

So that’s the $5B number, and it’s per-mile breakdown from OMB, but why the 234 miles? Is that all they want to build?

This is all by way of saying, nobody in the United States would get away with asking for $1 million funding for a rail project without a way, way better cost-benefit analysis for the project. We have some cost analysis–some–but all we have for benefit analysis is a lot of blah blah. Am I missing that report?

And that’s kind of my point. As flawed as EIRs and C-B analyses are, they at least provide a framework for having a deliberation about what future consequences we want and how to deal with the ones we don’t want. Right now, it’s all just unabated conservative fantasyland.

Oh Lookie! The wall (fence) between Egypt and Israel works works works! (What do we mean works? Can we establish that Walls work! That’s why we put walls around prisoners, ya know! Walls make your house stand up! Of course they work! What would your cells be without walls, Huh? Huh? WATER THAT’S WHAT.

THINK OF HOW MUCH MONEY WE’LL SAVE ON BORDER PATROL! Come on. What are the actual costs of operating and maintaining the wall? Israel’s WonderWall I suspect *expanded* labor requirements. Do we know? Nope.

BUT THAT STOPPED ALL THE PEOPLE CROSSING. Um, maybe it stopped them crossing *there at that location* or smuggling *at that location*. But did it decrease human trafficking and smuggling overall? Can we show that terrorism is lower?

But WE’LL MAKE JOBS AT THE SAME TIME. (while controlling Border Patrol costs). And $5 billion is NOTHING, NOTHING compared to what we waste elsewhere. (Amazing. We have to cut Social Security because there is absolutely no money, but there’s just a lot of extra money lying all over for a wall.)

I have yet to see a real analysis of the security benefits here. For people who are claiming there are oodles of precedents, that’s inexcusable.

I TOLD THEM SO!!!!

Discovering is way more than being told what to do.

Little buggers, driving me nuts.