My friend Pasquino likes to take pieces he reads, stand one key element on its head, slightly adjusting the piece so it makes a slightly different point. For example, here’s today’s Katherine Kersten column. (And before proceeding I should note that Kerstsen and I are former colleagues and friends. Deal with it.) And here’s Pasquino’s version of the column:
THE PARIAHS OF OUR CORPORATE CAMPUSES
By Bizarro Kersten
Over the years, Den Coyle has seen a stream of colleagues enter his office with a crestfallen look. The workers typically begin by saying they’re worried about one of their bosses. Coyle, who directs the Dilbert Institute, a little known corporate think tank, has a good idea how the story will end. The particulars differ, but the complaint is usually the same. “Some workers tell of being mocked for holding views that differ from their C.E.O.’s,” Coyle says. “Some fear they are endangering their careers. Many say, ‘I’ve figured out what the boss wants to hear and I just parrot back his ideology.’”
It’s become a common complaint that U.S. companies are home to a stifling conservative, low tax, small-government orthodoxy where contrary beliefs are persecuted. Coyle says it’s no illusion.
A new film, “Drown It In The Bathtub,” documenting that atmosphere, opens at a theater near you tomorrow.
Tiffany Shortridge, a new hire at a major local corporation, knows just what Coyle is talking about. Tiffany was one of the few young people in corporate careers who agreed to speak on the record about the problem.
In many offices, Tiffany says, managers send invitations to contribute money that reflect their ideological agenda. “If you speak up in the office and present an alternative view, you may risk being ridiculed by an upper manager who make three times what you do,” she said. “employees who agree with the C.E.O.’s politics, work to lower their C.E.O.’s taxes and contribute to his pet causes, are regularly promoted and given big raises.”
Shortridge has encountered this disregard for political diversity in all areas of middle management. “In marketing, I met a group manager who made side comments bashing Hillary Clinton and uppity women,” she said. A rigid orthodoxy prevails on issues as disparate as the death penalty and global warming, she says, and some bosses regularly pontificate on topics that have nothing to do with our jobs.
“I definitely know of colleagues whose careers have suffered because they became identified as a liberal around the office,” said Shortridge. If this happens, it’s “very difficult to defend yourself. The higher ups — your boss and their bosses and the people around the C.E.O. — think you’re complaining because you didn’t do your work.”
The Human Resources office rarely receives official complaints about ideologically motivated favoritism and discrimination and follows a regular investigative process when it does, says John Morris of the Conflict Resolution Center at Tiffany’s company.
Shortridge’s only solace is her work with the Democratic Underground, where she can trade war stories without having to look over her shoulder.
Harold Dorfman, a former executive at a local company, now retired, believes that a conservative political orthodoxy has gained a stranglehold at many if not most corporate settings.
“In recent decades, we’ve seen a relentless assault on the liberal tradition in American and Western history, blaming liberal values such as good government, secular humanism as practiced by the Founding Fathers and progressive taxation as the primary source of wickedness in this country,” he said. “Prominent business leaders no longer talk about the value of workers and the importance of employer loyalty as well as employee loyalty. Instead the corporate world has become a branch of conservative, small-government politics, with a focus on often discredited theories about workers being overpaid and the victimhood of corporate executives.”Contempt and insults are regularly leveled at four groups: union employees, environmentalists, women and government regulators,” he added.
Coyle and Dorfman see this rigid orthodoxy as self-perpetuating. “Birds of a feather hire together,” quipped Coyle. Politically correct ideology is quasi-religious in nature, he explains. “You’re not going to hire someone who seems like an infidel.”
“Especially if you find out they’re Unitarians!” laughed Dorfman. “Or worse yet, belong to MoveOn.”
Intellectual diversity
Coyle is fighting the good fight for freedom of thought in the corporate world and intellectual diversity as president of the Minnesota Association of Liberals in Business. The group’s mission is to “promote a fair valuation of all workers and free expression for everyone in the company, not just the people at the top,” according to Coyle.
The MALB is sponsoring the documentary “Drown It In The Bathtub.” The film showcases horror stories of corporations’ anti-government and anti-liberal orthodoxy from companies around the country and how the American corporate world is working to shift all taxes and all health care and other responsibilities off of the ownership class and onto working people.
“Drown It In The Bathtub” reveals a world where liberals in white collar jobs are afraid to speak their minds, where the New York Times and other newspapers that aren’t the Wall Street Journal are regularly confiscated and burned, where managers’ primary role is seen as advocating for the C.E.O. and the major stockholders’ ideological causes, particularly lowering the C.E.O.’s tax rate.
Unfortunately, many Minnesota workers who see this film may recognize in it companies that look all too familiar.
Pasquino is the nom de plume of Minneapolis writer Eric Hanson.
Eric, you are friends with everyone. I bet you were a close personal friend of Sid Hartman.
My all time favorite commentary on Kersten was when City Pages ran a contest to see who could reduce her columns to Haiku form. Here are the winners: (Note that this was around the time of the Vikings boat cruise)
First prize:
Being poor is fun.
Look what it did for Jesus:
condo in the sky!
Posted by: Kristine Harley
Second prize:
Kinky Vikings are
all YOUR fault, fornicators!
Repent, culture fans!
Posted by: J. Hotch
Third prize:
Scold Vikings? Hardly.
Let’s use logic of Limbaugh.
Throw flag at lefties.
Posted by: Rocco
http://blogs.citypages.com/blotter/2005/10/katherine_kersten_haiku_contes.php
[…] Eric Black wrote an interesting post today on Pasquino takes Kersten for a ride through Bizarro WorldHere’s a quick excerptThe film showcases horror stories of corporations’ anti-government and anti-liberal orthodoxy from companies around the country and how the American corporate world is working to shift all taxes and all health care and other … […]
[…] Eric Black wrote an interesting post today on Pasquino takes Kersten for a ride through Bizarro WorldHere’s a quick excerptThe film showcases horror stories of corporations’ anti-government and anti-liberal orthodoxy from companies around the country and how the American corporate world is working to shift all taxes and all health care and other … […]
Much of this article appears to describe an all too common attitude in business, though most I have encountered in my pilgrimmage are much more circumspect about their views.
In order to propose some balance, I would like to see another association formed, and for the same reasons: a Minnesota Association of Conservatives in Higher Education.
Both students and faculty could belong.
First,
Are you formerly a colleague of Kersten,
Formerly a friend of Kersten, or both?
More seriously ….
I’m sure that Pasquino had as much fun writing his parody as liberals like myself had reading it. However….
His case is weakened by the fact that he conflates nonequivalents.
Corporations are by their nature and charter dedicated to the welfare of their stockholders, not their workers. Workers benefit only if the corporation is characterized by enlightened self interest.
Most students, on the other hand, attend public institutions which, if not more numerous than private ones enroll many more students.
In either case, these institutions have as a major justification for their existence the benefit of students.
Thus they can be held to different standards.
A better point would concern the usual conservative cherry picking of data (yes I know that Paul Krugman does it too ;-).
For every Marxist Political Science professor preaching a collectivist gospel in the social sciences, there is a Capitalist in the school of business preaching the gospel of extremely private enterprise (and don’t start me on the engineers).
Most of us, of course, are in the middle, and teach our subjects whatever our personal politics. The fact that more of us are Democrats than Republicans is irrelevant.
At a public institution such as the one I’ve taught at (in a nominally social science) for the past 38 years, one cannot ask about political affiliation any more than one can about marital status.
One might make a guess, but I’ve been wrong in both cases.
You know, during my time at TCF University I fondly remember taking a business course where the works of Den Coyle were prominently displayed. No, that’s not it. Maybe it was my time in the military where the entire officer corps was open to my liberal beliefs. No, that’s not it either.
May Kersten’s college age children be drafted…either into the military by necessity of war or social work by necessity of conscience. They have a lot of mom’s karma to make up for.
In all seriousness, this was one of her worst columns ever. How does this stuff pass muster? It’s almost like she’s being edited by a former colleague at her old think tank. Maybe after TCF University’s J-school and communications department have been de-liberalized, Kersten and Tice can teach a class on the dangers of liberal bias and how liberalism ran the Strib into the ground. The Strib should just do away with the pretending and run nothing but Sid, CJ and Kersten. Let them write everything. Well, maybe Souhan could have a seat at the table too.
I wasn’t aware they ran anything else.
If the Strib ran only Sid, CJ and Kersten they’d still have to retain the entire editing staff, in addition to turning the third floor over to a research staff.
Wow. It would be something if any of them started using actual RESEARCH….
Sid is the key. If you read a Kersten column and imagine that she is talking about the Gophers or the Twins stadium, then it all becomes clear. Just use Sid’s last column as a point of reference:
“The Jeff Sagarin computers ratings make North Dakota State a one-touchdown favorite to beat the Gophers on Saturday at the Metrodome.
The Las Vegas oddsmakers don’t offer a line on any games involving teams in the Football Championship Subdivision (formerly Division I-AA).
However, the Sid Hartman pick is: Gophers 42, North Dakota State 21.
This is a game the Gophers won’t lose, even though with 25,000 visiting fans in the stands, there might not be much of a home-field advantage.
NDSU (6-0) has an impressive record but against non-Big Ten opposition. The Bison have averaged 41.2 points per game and have some players with impressive stats this season. Quarterback Steve Walker has thrown for 1,224 yards and 11 touchdowns, and running back Tyler Roehl has rushed for an average of 122 yards and scored 13 touchdowns.
Despite all of that, I’m convinced that last year’s narrow escape by the Gophers — a 10-9 victory over NDSU — was an accident. They caught the Gophers on a bad day.
The Gophers scored 31 in losing to Bowling Green, 41 in beating Miami (Ohio), 31 against Purdue and 48 against Northwestern, and they will have a big offensive day against NDSU.
Freshman running back Duane Bennett is healthy, quarterback Adam Weber is getting better with each start, and he has three great receivers in Jack Simmons, Eric Decker and Ernie Wheelwright. They will score a lot of points against the team from Fargo. It will be a game in which the Gophers offense will have its biggest day.
However, this is a big game for NDSU and it can get some serious national recognition if it can defeat the Gophers.”
…look, I fully understand that Sid’s rolodex is helpful in a pinch, but why not just go the Kersten route and hire Joel Maturi as his editor a’la Tice?
I saw that one of the local conservative blogs is up in arms over the idea that “leftyblogs” have never taken Kersten on with just the facts. This is true. Kersten has never claimed to use any in the first place.
The Strib has a fine stable of cartoonish columnists.
Oh, come on, gump. Remember when she wrote that gay marriage was already wrecking marriages in Canada? And she thoughtfully and carefully provided reasoned examples to prove her thesis, citing couples who admitted that the homosexuals had ended their marriages?
No?
Eric, is Kersten really a liberal and everything she writes just satire?
My personal favorite Kersten column was her 1st one as a full time columnist. She chastised Archbishop Harry Flynn for taking issue with Tim Pawlenty’s no taxes pledge. This column becomes even funnier when you place it in the context of her most recent opus where she attacks liberal universities for being too dogmatic. Translation: her own church can’t even match up to her faith in the topic d’jour of the U’s Econ department. Again, a good editor could really help clear up some of this nonsense.
I’ve actually heard some conservatives speculate that Kersten is part of the liberal agenda of the paper because she is so utterly ridiculous and absurd that her viewpoints would actually drive people away from conservatism.
It’s ironic that conservatives like Kersten are down on welfare and affirmative action, since she’s the beneficiary of both. She started out in a right-wing think [sic] tank, which is really a way of rewarding people who couldn’t hold honest jobs for sucking up to the rich. The strib took her on when the current version of management was stuffing the op-ed pages with the likes of Jonah Goldberg and even putting Mallard Filmore on the comic pages in the name of some crazy idea of balance. Kersten was pretty obviously hired because Doug Growe and Nick Coleman had columns; management apparently didn’t care that KK had only two moves: regurgitating the dumber right wing spin points; writing heart warming little vignettes that made the old “Most Unforgettable Character” pieces in the Readers’ Digest look like Dostoyevski.
What’s overlooked is that there is a conservative right-wing p.c. on some campuses that’s much more virulent than the liberal version. A friend of mine was teaching in a Catholic college in Pennsylvania, and the academic v.p. told her that in his view academic freedom did not extend to holding a pro-choice point of view. The last case I can remember reading about a faculty member being fired for ideology occurred when a tenured professor of sociology at Bethel was canned for telling a student in response to a question in a conversation that if people were gay they should be monogamous. The only person I remember getting angry at that was Doug Growe. My guess is that a pro-life faculty member in a “liberal” i.e. state institution has a better chance of thriving than a pro-choice faculty member in a lot of church institutions.
I’m going to stick my neck out and suggest the there is a grain of truth in Kersten’s comment based on my own experience of attending college in the late 1960’s and 1970’s. This grain of truth I believe is based on the experience of some tender students who are shaken bby the experience of being challenged on their strongly held conservative prejudices by iprofessors and others on campus. For some people, I expect, this experience can bring about something like cognitive dissonance and also something like rationalization for poor grades. It’s easy to complain that the “umpire was biased against me” just like the right does with the SCLM and other areas where they work the refs. They learn this from the adults you see.
I say this from my own experience as a conservative teen in the 1960’s and going to a large midwestern University (not Minnesota) in the late 1960’s. I remember one particular professor whom I believe most people would probably say was a radical or a Marxist (I don’t know) but who really got in the faces of her freshman students in a class called “American Thought and Language.” If any of us had ever heard of things like the Haymarket Square Massacre, the Colorado Mine strikes and the bonus marchers, we had never heard it told like this young (and good looking) female Professor presented it to us. She literally called us a bunch of shitheads for not knowing any of our history which included a lot of violence against working class people and women and children. This really shook and challenged this conservative student’s understanding of the world. I would not be surprised if a lot of sheltered youngsters come to college and experience cognitive dissonance with being confronted with the true facts about their country and its history. Except instead of making the experience a learning and growing one, they choose to complain about the “liberal professors”.
What people like Kersten don’t seem to understand is that this type of shakeup is part of why we want people to be educated. Somehow, people like Kersten seem to get through the educational system, being exposed to the same things (I assume) I was and yet still seem to come out thinking like a robot like she does. Kersten herself is evidence that critical thinking is not a skill easily taught or imparted. Unless Kersten is being completely cynical and taking the undisclosed Straussian position that the truth is too precious for the unwashed to hear, she has a remarkably narrow mind for an adult.
Interesting post jonerik, it reminded me of a WORD that Stephen Colbert did regarding a university student who refused to view “An Inconvenient Truth” in a class because he disagreed with the premise of the film. The whole transcript can be found here:
http://collegefreedom.blogspot.com/2007/05/forced-to-see-gore-stephen-colbert-last.html
He sums up his “conclusion” (satire for those who do not follow his work) as follows:
“Folks, at a “college” Barry was forced to think about something he didn’t already think. When you confront young people with information that doesn’t jibe with what they already believe they can get confused, or even worse, bitter.”
“But these days college is all about silencing the dissenters, it’s no longer a place to raise your hand, offer your minority viewpoint and have healthy and informed debate. The Barry Luciers of the world are entering a minefield of knowledge. Who knows what destructive information they’ll be confronted with next. That’s why all colleges should be forced to advertise every element of their curriculum so students are guaranteed that when the leave college they’ll be exactly the same as when they went in. That folks, is what I believe college is for. You take these unformed lumps of clay, leave them unformed lumps, then fire them in the kiln of unchallenged thought so they become rigid and never move again.”
Satire, again, exposes the absurdity of this claim.
But, relating to Karsten, I find it intersting that she has resorted to a tactic that is usually decried by Conservatives- victimization- as a method of avocating change. Could it be that she is not intellectually consistant?