Jack Lessenberry Essays and Interviews

Essay: Remembering a Giant - 8/31/07

Here’s a story Doug Fraser told me once about his first full-time job, which was in a Dearborn machine shop. This was in 1936, and he was a nineteen-year-old high school dropout. The Great Depression was still lingering, though Franklin D. Roosevelt had given people hope of a better future. FDR was running for re-election, and Fraser’s boss  hated the President and everything he stood for.

Fraser was too young to vote, but like the other workers, he was made to watch a propaganda film about how bad Roosevelt was, and how his communistic New Deal policies were destroying America.

The men were told that if Roosevelt were re-elected, they would all lose their jobs. Most had families, and a job wasn’t something you wanted to lose when there was 17 percent unemployment.

On Election Day FDR won the biggest landslide in history.  When the boss came to work he found his office was entirely papered over with newspaper front pages announcing the triumph of the man he hated so much.

And nobody ever told who did it. I like that story, in part because it indicates that there is only so much you can do to bully or brainwash the people against their better interests.

If there is an afterlife, I would like to be a fly on the wall during the first conversation Doug Fraser has with Walter Reuther. In many ways, Reuther was sort of like Martin Luther King.  He was absolutely brilliant, a man who never lost his ideals, but knew how to be shrewdly practical in pursuit of them. On the last night of his life, King told his people that though he might not get there with them, they would get to the promised land. Walter Reuther did live to see his auto workers get there.

But he didn’t live to see the gains he had fought so hard for eroded by forces he probably never saw coming. When Reuther became head of the UAW, fifty-one percent of all the cars made in the world were made in the city of Detroit.

This year, fifty-one percent of the cars purchased in America were made by foreign manufacturers. The UAW has about a third the membership it had when Reuther’s plane crashed. The union faces another round of grim negotiations and giving up benefits.

Doug Fraser was the first UAW president to have to grapple with the changing automotive reality. Less than a decade after Reuther died, Chrysler almost died as well. Fraser skillfully led the union through the minefields and even served for a time on the Chrysler board.

Today, the union movement is in deep crisis, as is the auto industry itself. I don’t know what Reuther would do today, but I do know this. They used to say that he was the only man in America who could reminisce about the future.

Today, Walter would hope that his union’s modern leaders would somehow be able to build a future worth reminiscing about.      

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Interview: Doug Fraser - 8/31/07

Tomorrow would have been the 100th birthday of Walter Reuther.  He was a legendary president of the United Auto Workers union. Reuther led his membership to enormous financial gains.  He died in a plane crash in 1970.  Doug Fraser worked closely with Walter Reuther for more than twenty years, and went on to lead the UAW himself.   Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with him about Walter Reuther’s legacy.

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Essay: Primary Concerns - 8/30/07

The process by which we select our major party presidential candidates is fast descending into anarchy. The parties need to fix it as soon as possible, and in a minute I’ll suggest just how they can do that.

But first of all – I can’t blame the party leaders in Michigan for wanting to catapult our primary ahead of anyone else’s. Consider the case of Ohio, the key state in the last presidential election.

This time, Ohio’s primary is March 4, which will almost certainly be after the nominations are decided.

Michigan didn’t want to be irrelevant. Yet if we have a January 15 primary, there is a chance we may end up totally irrelevant anyway, at least on the Democratic side.

That’s because the party is likely to refuse to seat any Michigan delegates elected in a primary held that early, because the state would violate party rules by going before New Hampshire.

Convention delegates, you say?  Who cares?  Well, this year we just might care a lot. What we forget nowadays is that people who vote in caucuses and primaries are really voting for slates of convention delegates.  And this year, it is possible that none of the candidates could reach a majority of the delegates before the convention.

Say Hillary Clinton gets to Denver with 40 percent of the delegates, Barack Obama 30 percent, and the other candidates the rest. You have to have a majority to be nominated.

If the convention takes a first ballot and nobody does, then they vote again. And in most cases, the delegates are then on their own.

In other words, picking the next president would be up to a few thousand mostly unknown people sitting in an arena. But if that happens, Michigan won’t be part of the excitement.

Not if the national party strips the state of its 178 delegates, as they have with Florida.  So here’s my plan for how to fix this: Divide the states into four roughly equal groups. The first group has primaries and caucuses the first week in February. The next set goes in March, then April, and finally May. This would give all of us a reasonable amount of time to see and assess the people who want to lead us, and see how they respond to pressure and stress.

But wouldn’t that still give extra clout to the first set of states to vote?  Probably, because the first round would give some candidates momentum and knock off some others.

So, in the interest of fairness, I’d rotate the order in which the states vote every election cycle. If you vote in February in 2008, plan on voting in May in 2012. What the political parties need to do is to agree to make those rules ironclad and stick with them.

Then, we’d have a process that makes sense. Average people could understand it.  We might get better debates, and, with more time to study them, better presidential candidates.

Given what’s happened lately, it just might be worth a try.

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Interview: Bart Stupak - 8/30/07

State House and Senate leaders have reached a deal that would move Michigan's presidential primary to January 15th. Both chambers are expected to vote on the agreement this afternoon and send it to Governor Granholm. But not everybody thinks that’s a good idea.  Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with Congressman Bart Stupak who is a Democrat from the UP.  He doesn’t think we should have a primary this year at all.

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Essay: School Consolidation - 8/29/07

Civilians, unlike people in the military, don’t have many opportunities to win medals. Oh, there’s the Presidential Medal of Freedom, but they reserve that for people like former Presidents or famous authors who are just about to die.

But that’s about it for medals, once you get too old for either the Girl or Boy Scouts. And I think that‘s a mistake. People like medals – boys do, especially, and I think we need more of them.

So I am proposing establishing the Michigan Civilian Award for common sense under pressure, and I want to nominate a man I have never met, except in the pages of the Muskegon Chronicle newspaper.

Meet Calvin Cederquist, who they call “Hap.” He is a councilman in the small Muskegon suburb of Montague. That’s just down the road from another suburb called Whitehall. These aren’t teeming metropolises. Both towns have fewer than three thousand people each.

Yet, each has its own school system. That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, frankly. These towns aren’t large enough to give their kids a full range of academic choices.

Back in 1990, those who cared about education were concerned about this. They decided to look into the possibility of consolidating the two districts. Their study was an eye-opener.

If the school operations merged, their high school students would have more than thirty new courses to choose from. Middle and elementary school kids would get more, too.

Consolidation was a no-brainer. They put it on the ballot, and the people overwhelmingly turned it down.

Why? Football. They have a historic small-town rivalry going. Justin Flynn, who was on Montague’s team then and still lives there now, tried to tell a reporter that “We thought our education system was better than theirs.

However, he added, “Football is everything in Montague.” Everything, that is, except education and jobs.

Times are worse today. The schools could save a lot of money and provide better education if they merged. But most local politicians fear the voters’ wrath.

Except, that is, for Hap Cederquist. “My feeling is the reason to have the schools is to educate the kids, not to have two schools or two football teams. I guess I’m naïve.” he told a reporter.

No, Mr. Cederquist. You are not naïve. You are a grownup, with your children’s interests in mind. We need leaders like you.

We need some creative problem solving here. Maybe they could combine the schools and still have two football teams.

Regardless, thirty years ago there were more than two million students in Michigan schools. Today, that number has declined by 350,000. Yet we have more schools than ever.

Thirty years ago, you could still get a good job even with a poor education. Not any more. Schools need to do whatever they can to rationally save money to protect the core mission.

And that would be … educating our kids. Thanks for the reality check, Mr. Cederquist. And have a nice day, wherever you are.

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Interview: Barbara Markle - 8/29/07

Michigan’s Public Schools are facing a unique set of challenges. The ongoing state budget crisis means they are increasingly strapped for money. That, plus an overall decline in students is forcing consolidation of services, schools, and sports programs. Barbara Markle is assistant dean for outreach in Michigan State’s college of education. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with her about what consolidation means for students.

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Essay: Higher Education - 8/28/07

Barry Stern’s column began this way: “Michigan’s high schools need a makeover. They bore too many students, frustrate too many teachers and are deemed irrelevant by too many employers.”

Well, there is a lot of truth in that. I see college students who seem to have had a nearly content-free high school education. My wife, who has been an advanced placement high school history teacher for many years, knows all about frustrations.

Yet much of what Barry Stern is proposing as a cure strikes me as being worse than the disease. Particularly troublesome is his idea that we ought to replace our elected school boards with industry-led boards.

He wants to then split high schools off from the rest of the school system and tie them to nearby community colleges and the local business community. What this would do, in other words, is largely hand out students’ fate over to local businessmen, who would presumably train the kind of workers they think they’ll need for the future.

Not only does that sound like some kind of totalitarian nightmare, our local business leaders haven’t exactly done a brilliant job at either predicting or preparing for the economies of the future.

Would Dearborn students, for example, be shaped by the geniuses at Ford who managed to lose $10 BILLION dollars last year?

I think it is safe to say that no business leader saw the personal computer revolution coming. Industry in this state has a track record that reminds me very much of the military-industrial complex.

We are always knocking ourselves out to prepare for the last war. Having said that, I think there’s a lot of good in Stern’s overall concept. Nor do I think he is being malevolent. He worked in the federal Department of Education under George W. Bush, a big believer in privatization, and has a career development background.

The fact is that we don’t do nearly enough to help train people for careers other than those who are plainly what we identify as conventional college material. The otherwise excellent Cherry report on higher education in Michigan was notoriously weak on this point.

Clearly it is not enough to just shunt the slow readers off to auto mechanics classes anymore. But neither should we attempt to fix a fourteen year old child’s future. At that age, without the slightest shred of athletic ability, I was still thinking shortstop.

In her state of the state speech, the governor proposed sending laid-off workers to community college to develop a new set of skills.

Having taught for years, I think that while we may tweak the way our high schools function, I would really like to see us reinvent education for those between ages 18 and 20. For some, this may be a time for intense vocational training. For others, two years of civilian or military national service might make sense. We need to worry about the future, But we need never to lose freedom of choice.

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Interview: Barry Stern - 8/28/07

In the coming weeks, America’s teenagers will be returning to high school fresh from their back to school shopping. But is it America’s high schools that need a new look and a complete makeover? Barry Stern thinks so. He’s an educational and workforce development consultant in Ann Arbor. Earlier this year he wrote in a column that our high schools “bore too many students, frustrate too many teachers and are deemed irrelevant by too many employers. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with him.

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Essay: State of the State - 8/27/07

When Ronald Reagan was President, someone once said that if he took a walk around the White House and met a needy and hungry child, he would give the boy whatever money he had.

Then, he would go back to the Oval Office and veto a bill providing money for school lunch programs. Other politicians might have done that out of cynical hypocrisy. Reagan would have done so out of what psychologists call a cognitive disconnect.

That’s something most of us do, by the way; we’re just not responsible for the fate of the world.

We are, however, citizens of that world, and of a place in it called Michigan. We now face the necessity of making a long-overdue choice that we have avoided for years.

Do we severely slash the services this state provides us, and which we aren‘t used to living without? Do we cut off the money our great research universities need to keep themselves relevant and our state competitive? Do we give our colleges enough money so that the daughter or son of an average Michigander can hope to somehow afford to get a degree from them?

Do we want to adequately fund the departments that take care of our essential infrastructure, so that our bridges don’t fall down and our roads don’t look like they came under mortar fire last night?

Do we want to build a future for Michigan?

If so, we need to support our legislature by raising taxes in the most sane and sensible way possible. There is no other choice.

Besides, we are all paying more taxes anyway. You just don’t realize it. Just before Memorial Day, to avoid raising taxes, your state legislators actually did raise them in some sneaky, irrational and underhanded ways.

They flushed half a billion dollars down the drain. They did that by selling off money the state was supposed to get in coming years from the settlement of the lawsuit against the tobacco companies.

They sold off $900 million dollars we would have gotten n a few years from now for $400 million, right away.

Then, they took more money away from higher education. That caused colleges or universities to raise tuition rates by as much as 18 percent.

In other words, our lawmakers indirectly taxed poor young people who are trying to improve themselves.

That’s partly because they fear a guy named Leon Drolet, who travels around with a pink fiberglass pig and threatens to recall any lawmaker who votes to raise taxes. Drolet, by the way is a taxpayer-funded government employee.

If you are worried about government spending, consider this. The amount the federal government spends on the war in Iraq every week is more than Michigan’s entire budget deficit.

Every six months, it spends more on the war than Michigan spends every year for everything. This is a war that the vast majority of the American people now believe was a mistake.

There may be a problem with runaway government spending.

But it’s not in Lansing.

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Interview: Chris Christoff - 8/27/07

You may not have heard much about the Michigan budget crisis lately but it is not only still with us, it is worse than ever, and the clock is ticking. Projections show the state budget running a nearly two billion dollar deficit for the fiscal year that starts October 1st. And the legislature needs to somehow agree how to balance that budget. Chris Christoff is the Lansing bureau chief of the Detroit Free Press. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with him.

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