Bacon's Rebellion

The General Assembly would express “profound regret” for Virginia’s role in slavery and for “historic wrongs visited upon native peoples” in the latest version of a proposed apology that cleared the House Rules Committee yesterday, reports Pamela Stallsmith with the Times-Dispatch. The revised version of an apology originally authored by Del. A. Donald McEachin, D-Henrico, passed unanimously.

The new verbiage sounds like an improvement over the original, in which McEachin had called upon the General Assembly “to atone for the involuntary servitude of Africans and call for reconciliation among all Virginians.”

The substitude, submitted by Del. John M. O’Bannon III, R-Henrico, would express the General Assembly’s “profound regret for the commonwealth’s role in sanctioning the immoral institution of human slavery, in the historic wrongs visited upon native peoples, and in all other forms of discrimination and injustice that have been rooted in racial and cultural bias and misunderstanding.”

I can live with that. I’m still concerned about other language in McEachin’s bill that attributes the social ills of African-Americans today to past injustices like slavery and Jim Crow while skipping over the impact of the modern welfare estate. I can’t find the revised bill online. Can someone point me to the revised apology?

Update: Jim Bowden has posted the text of the revised apology, HJR 728, on his website, Deo Vindice. The language does not sugar coat the injustices of slavery or Jim Crow in the least, yet avoids the pitfalls of McEachin’s original.

I don’t know how practical his idea is, but you’ve got to admire Del. Steve Landes, R-Augusta, for his moxie. Reports Hugh Lessig with the Daily Press:

[Landes] wanted higher education institutions to report back on policies that would ensure academic freedom in support of intellectual diversity. The reports were optional, and Landes said he wanted to tread carefully because the issue was controversial.

Committee members voted to table the bill after considering it for nearly an hour, hearing from a list of supporters and critics.

It’s a litany of political conservatives that U.S. colleges and universities are dominated by liberals and leftists. Political opinion polls of college professors tend to confirm the stereotype. (As a one-time graduate student in history at the Johns Hopkins University, I lived the bias — that’s why I bailed out with a Master’s Degree instead of Ph.D.)

It wouldn’t surprise me to find that professors in public Virginia colleges lean left as well. But it’s my impression that there is more intellectual diversity in our college campuses than in other public systems. Conservatives and free-marketeers may be a minority, but they’re not an endangered species. Conservative students can find intellectual mentors if they seek them out.

As for the history profs I was closest to at the University of Virginia, two were avowed Marxists and two were mainstream liberal. But they were superb teachers who instilled a love of learning and taught me how to think logically and rigorously for myself. Not much of their politics rubbed off, but their teaching did.

Update: This issue is of more than “academic” interest. To quote from today’s Petersburg Progress-Index:

Last week, Dr. Jean R. Cobbs, a former sociology professor, received a $600,000 settlement from the university. Cobbs, who filed a complaint in U.S. District Court in 2005, claimed she was discriminated against due to her conservative political beliefs. Cobbs has open relations with the Republican Party. In a report from the American Association of University Professors, Cobbs began reporting “repeated acts of ‘professional, political and personal harassment’” in the early 1990s.

Bills that would begin to dismantle the state’s innovation-stifling process for approving and regulating health-care facilities died in the House Health, Welfare and Institutions Committee yesterday, reports Tammie Smith with the Times-Dispatch. Del. John M. O’Bannon III, R-Henrico, a physician, asked that his deregulation bill be stricken after a key stipulation was removed during a hearing. Smith provides some of the background:

Lobbyists for hospitals, nursing homes, physician specialties and other groups spoke for and against aspects of O’Bannon’s bill, which would have made several significant changes. For instance, projects would no longer need approval from regional planning agencies. Also, equipment valued at less than $500,000 would be exempt from the regulatory process.

As it stands, proposals for new medical facilities or costly pieces of equipment must go through a regulatory process, with local planning agencies considering how the service or equipment will affect the health-care market and recommending for or against approval. The state health commissioner ultimately signs off on regulated
projects.

Critics have charged that this regulatory process protects existing health care providers by restricting the entry of new players into the marketplace. Some say the future of health care is to evolve from a system of general hospitals, whcih provide a wide range of services, to medical “factories” specializing and excelling in particular disciplines and procedures. The specialists tend to have higher productivity, lower costs and better patient outcomes. But hospitals, which dominate Virginia’s health care industry, claim that such competition would “skim the cream,” and make them less profitable. As a consequence, Virginia has very few focused medical enterprises.

The health care system is so complex, of course, that no one set of changes will bring health care inflation under control. But a good starting point would be to encourage new business models in a sector where such innovation is conspicuously lacking.

Does anyone seriously think that an economic sector regulated by state government and policed by the established health care constituencies can build a better mousetrap? As O’Bannon put it: “The question is how tightly are we going to control health care in Virginia? Are we going to control it down to every blood pressure cuff?”

The American Journalism Review has published a balanced overview of the “Culture Clash” in the newsroom of the Richmond Times-Dispatch as a new publisher, Tom Silvestri, and executive editor, Glenn Proctor, endeavor to reinvent the august family newspaper in an era of declining circulation and stagnant revenue.

Here’s the summary graph:

Some have bristled at the brusqueness of those moves and a harsh management style. But the angst at the Times-Dispatch–which is not shared by everyone in the newsroom–is less about the new sheriff in town than it is about concerns that have shaken newsrooms nationwide: the evolution of family-run newspapers into corporate entities, the delicate balance between public service journalism and financial pressures in a rapidly evolving and brutally competitive media environment. Together, Silvestri and Proctor, very much on the same page, have sped up a reader-friendly revolution that had been creeping through this rather comfortable paper for a few years. The moves are familiar: a mainly–or often solely–local front page; a focus on presentation; a push for localizing national stories; a growing emphasis on multimedia. Among the staff, there is praise for a livelier paper, greater diversity in hiring and in the news pages, a higher energy level in the newsroom. But for some, that energy is more like anxiety. The Times-Dispatch is divided among those who support stabs at creating a 21st-century business model and those who question whether the changes will alter the very foundation of journalism.

If the AJR feature whets your appetite for more inside-the-newsroom, gossip, don’t miss this piece in Style Weekly on the farewell address of Mark Holmberg, one of the T-D’s more popular writers. From Holmberg’s final post on the T-D’s internal forum, the “Water Cooler”:

In the past year we’ve seen all kinds of walls come down: The wall between news and editorial, the wall between news and marketing, news and circulation, news and advertising. News and HR. Not good. Does this mean we have news for sale or rent? Perhaps not yet. But the walls coming down make it more likely. It’s all happening bit by bit. Death by a thousand cuts. We put up with each little affront, thinking that will be it, wondering if our paychecks are more important than one little slap at the Fourth Estate.

Update: John Sarvay gives the AJR story extended treatment on his Buttermilk & Molasses blog. I love his description of Glenn Proctor, based on material in the article, as “an executive editor with the empathy of a Sith Lord. A Sith Lord with a gold stud earring…”

Bacon’s Rebellion has upgraded its Blogger software.

The main change that should be visible to readers is the “label” for each story. If there is a particular editorial theme that you want to follow, click on the label link at the bottom of each post. You will be taken to a page where only posts on that topic are listed.

Please let me know if you encounter any problems.