Ipso Facto – Musings and more

Two years ago I noted the entry into librarianship of my daughter Kimberly and her husband Will, who were receiving their degrees at UNC Chapel Hill. I therefore would be remiss if I do not now congratulate my son, Micah, upon the occasion of his high school graduation. Micah’s mother and I are very proud of you, son. (In fact, I’m so proud that I’ve made his diploma my Facebook cover page.) Micah will be attending U.C. Blue Ash in the fall, seeking a Certificate in Animation. If you’d like to see the work he’s done even before he gets some training, visit his YouTube channel.

Before voting in the U.S. election in November, members of the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) will be casting votes whether to approve proposed amendments (AALLNet login required) to the association’s bylaws. Although there are several proposed changes, the only one seriously claiming attention would change the definition of “active member’ by removing the requirement that the member work in a law library or legal information center. The association’s executive board has released an FAQ document that explains its rationale for making the proposal. Discussion of the proposal’s merits was active for a short time before the association’s annual meeting, just prior to the board’s vote to submit the proposal to the membership. There were several blog posts. My own series begins here, and you can read posts by Joe Hodnicki and Betsy McKenzie, among others. The proposal was briefly discussed at the members’ open forum held following the annual business meeting, and since then the discussion largely abated, apparently awaiting the proximity of the election, to open in October, before resuming in earnest.

Earlier today the debate did resume with a thoughtful email message signed by Caroline Walters, Michelle Pearse, Stephanie Edwards, Brian Striman, and presumably by Betsy McKenzie, who posted it to the ALL-SIS Community Discussion List. Betsy also posted the message on her blog, Out of the Jungle, which is the readiest place to find it for those who are not members of the AALL communities. I wish to continue the dialog they have started, and will do so by posing a set of questions for discussion. Text in quotations is taken from that email message.

1. The message sent to the list suggests, as one alternative, “the Bylaws could be changed to make an exception for Active Members for all vendor members who work for entities that are non-profit or funded primarily by membership dues such as NELLCO, CALI, or LLMC.” Should the goal of this process be to expand membership by only that limited group?

2. “The overwhelming concern is the inherently conflicting interests and goals that arise even in the day-to-day work of the Association.  While there is a conflicts policy in place for Executive Board member activities, vendor membership raises the possibility of more frequent conflicts of interest.  As part of the Bylaws change proposal, The Association would benefit from a discussion of how the current conflicts policy has been applied and how it would be applied in this new context.”  Would not a review of the association’s conflict of interest policies, and the adoption of any needed changes, be a more targeted way to address these concerns, rather than wholesale rejection of the proposed amendment?

3. Can the crux of the perceived issue be ameliorated by making a slight change in the definition of active member? I see the root of the issue being the statement that anyone “interested in the objectives of the association” as a weak statement. “Interest” can mean as little as curiosity or dispassionate study. Would the membership definition have a satisfactory and self-limiting effect if it read anyone “committed to or interested in advancing the objectives of the association?” I realize that at this stage of the process such a proposal cannot be made, but if the proposal does not pass, I offer this suggestion among those that undoubtedly would be considered in the future.

I look forward to our continuing discussion of this as the AALL polls open next week.

I am not a journalist, and I make no attempt at pretending to be neutral in the matter of politics. Although I majored in political science at the University of Miami many years ago, I have no special knowledge about politics or elections. I do follow these things more closely than many nonprofessionals. In tune with the blog’s subtitle, here are some musings on the current campaign.

1.  Mitt Romney is not a mathematician. Whatever you may think of the Republican presidential candidate, you have to admit that math is pretty much beyond his ability, at least if you gauge by his public statements. In the recently released video where he talks about who is now being called “the 47 percent,” he says,”There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what. And I mean, the president starts off with 48, 49, 48—he starts off with a huge number. These are people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax.”

There are a couple implied factual statements in this paragraph, and a lot of naked opinion. The more salient implied fact is that forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax. Who are being counted as “Americans” here? All 300 million plus? Children and the very old? Or the smaller number of “Americans of voting age?” For some helpful information on reaching an answer, see the charts from Planet Money at NPR. Digging more deeply, we find that the statistic originates in a 2011 report from the Tax Policy Center(TPC). Reading it we learn that the number is about 46% of households. So Romney is generalizing households into Americans. (Many other commentators do the same.) Not accurate, to be sure, since the crux of his statement is that those Americans won’t vote for him, since it is individual citizens–not households–that vote. And not all household members of voting age are registered to vote, much less likely to vote. But having set straight the real meaning of the TPC report, let’s cut him some slack on the use of that number.

The real problem with his argument is his conflating the fact that a household is not liable to pay federal income tax with the opinion, surely implied if not outright stated explicitly, that all of those households automatically support President Obama, and that his time trying to persuade them to lead worthwhile lives would be wasted. “And so my job is not to worry about those people—I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.” That’s what he says: If you don’t pay federal income taxes, you are leading a worthless life. He says that paying more taxes than he owes would make him unqualified to be president, but when other people who are not obligated to pay income tax don’t pay it they are leading worthless lives. There is a fair argument to be made that all adults should pay some amount in income tax. One could state it would be a de minimis amount for those at the bottom of the income ladder. To be sure this week many conservatives are urging Romney to advance that position. But his statement on the disclosed video is not a reasoned argument for such a provision. Instead it is an arrogant and hypocritical “us vs them” appeal to his audience.

Moving beyond Romney’s grossly arrogant assumptions about those Americans who do not pay federal income tax lies his inability to do simple math. If all of the 47% of Americans who don’t pay the tax support President Obama, then it would still be very likely that some portion of those who do pay taxes also support Obama. If that number is merely 10% of the remaining 53% of Americans, the President would claim well over 57% of the total support of all Americans. And in terms of recent elections, that would qualify as a landslide. Clearly that is not actually the case. In short, Mr. Romney has set up a canard that has no basis in fact and merely serves to show his arrogance and penchant to be dismissive of those he perceives as supporting either a progressive income tax or President Obama.

2. The time to persuade voters runs out every day from now on, not just on November 6. Many of us have particular news and opinion sources that we follow. I am partial to MSNBC, and as I prepare for my weekday I watch “Morning Joe.” When Joe Scarborough complains about how Mr. Romney is mucking up his campaign, he keeps saying that he’s got “N” days to the election to persuade voters. I’ve heard pundits of many views express the same sentiment. They’re all wrong. Early voting has already started and in the next two weeks 43 states will have early voting underway, whether by in-person voting or absentee ballot submission. Professor Michael McDonald of George Mason University tracks early voting and has a chart showing 2008 statistics here.  In many states early votes made up a substantial portion of the total votes cast; in a few they were more than half. Professor McDonald anticipates that for the 2012 election more than one-third of the votes will be cast early. Therefore the electorate’s collective state of mind on “election day” is no longer sufficient to predict outcomes; likewise turning around a campaign must be accomplished for each of the actual 40 plus election days that remain between now and November 6.

Let me begin by saying I never expect everyone to agree with me on any given post, and I certainly expect that this one would invite controversy if enough people read it. I don’t need either validation or trolls, so I’ve disabled comments. With that out of the way, there are many reasons I know in my heart of hearts that the Republican Party platform plank on abortion, which is also the Paul Ryan position of prohibiting it in all cases without exception, is unconscionable for a particular reason that irks me. It elevates the value of a potential life far above that of an existing one – the mother who would be called upon to carry the child to birth. Some proponents of a slightly more moderate position, apparently including Mitt Romney, would make exceptions for rape, incest, or the mother’s health. Both the party position and the slightly more moderate position completely ignore a medical fact: the mother’s life and health face some degree of risk in every pregnancy. Furthermore, it is impossible to confidently predict early in the first trimester whether a pregnancy will later endanger the mother’s life. So forcing any woman to undergo an unwanted, or unplanned, pregnancy, whether to  to term, miscarriage, or the mother’s death is immoral.

Betsy McKenzie‘s post of yesterday on what she (and judging by some commentary, others) see as the lack of respect shown to its membership by AALL’s leadership is worthy of further discussion as it relates to the thread I opened here a couple weeks ago. Betsy describes the two main points of discussion at last week’s Members’ Open Forum at the conclusion of the AALL business meeting in Boston. These were the proposed bylaws amendments that, inter alia, would allow fewer restrictions on which members may serve as officers or executive board members; and the reorganization, or perhaps takeover, of the Private Law Librarians SIS Summit by the association’s headquarters staff.

I too was at that meeting, and I’ll begin by trying to put a slightly different spin on Betsy’s description of the change to the PLL Summit. I understood the description provided by the respondent to Steve Lastres (I can’t remember whether outgoing President Darcy Kirk or incoming President Jean Wenger responded) as a move to integrate the functionality of the summit with the annual meeting. Among the reasons for that is maintaining headquarters staff oversight of sponsor relationships–apparently the summit counted on significant external funding for its success. Doing this is well within the long-standing policies of AALL, which provide that the association, rather than its constituents, is charged with sponsor arrangements. Having said that, I can well understand the concern expressed by Steve Lastres and Michael Ginsborg that in its new form the summit would not meet the needs of the PLL members. I am hopeful that discussions among PLL leadership, headquarters staff, and association leadership can resolve these concerns in a manner that satisfies all parties. Discussions toward that end cannot be begun, much less concluded, in the venue of a members’ open forum. I hope all parties will undertake these discussions shortly, and I look forward to reading about them in future communications from Steve and Michael.

Turning to the proposed bylaws amendments, I agree with Betsy that the posting of the “Board Book,” i.e., the agenda and materials for consideration by the executive board at its meeting, to the association’s web site a couple weeks before the annual meeting is not as transparent as an association can and should be in the current digital environment. I made this very point in my earlier post on this topic: “But one wonders whether, in the age of instant broadcast communication enabled by the Internet, where fact and rumor are spread instantaneously by social media, blogs, and email, is it not time for organizations make better use of this technology to satisfy membership perceptions regarding organizational transparency.” I have no doubt that the association’s leadership and staff can and will better communicate such information to the membership in the future.

I must also discuss, however, what I see as Betsy’s underlying premise that the association leadership is acting without regard to membership needs or interests and therefore is being disprespectful. She says, “The lack of respect for members who are not on the executive board, or not in the “inner circle” has a lot to do with the fact that AALL may be losing members or that current members are putting their energies into other associations. I am starting to think that way myself. ” I do not see a blanket lack of respect from the board. The board is not a hand-picked group of oligarchs with life-terms. At least three and more often four of its eleven members are replaced every year, by association members who are elected to those positions by their fellow members.* The committee that nominates the board slate likewise is refreshed with a new group of members every year. So, in short, the executive board is a representative group composed of the membership, charged with overseeing the operations of the association as is the case with most other not-for-profit organizations. The association, through the board, hires a staff to conduct operations on a daily basis.

The specific bylaws now generating controversy, and for that matter all proposed bylaws, should be made available to membership as early as practicable in their consideration. But ultimately a group assigned with oveseeing the operations of the organization – here the executive board – must make its best decision about the language of the proposal. The membership then decides the fate of such proposals by its vote. That fate lives or dies by all our hands, not the actions of a few. I have no doubt that between now and the end of the bylaws election, a period of nearly three months, there will be plenty of back-and-forth discussion about the relative merits of the proposal in blogs and other media. This is as it should be. Ultimately we, the membership, will cast our votes and the majority** of us will decide whether they are adopted. This too is as it should be.

*Here I should disclose that I am a candidate for a seat on the executive board, in the interest of full disclosure.

**For my discussion of the rationale for requiring majority or super-majority votes on bylaws, please see my earlier post on the bylaws proposal.