HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF For the third consecutive week I’ll be writing here about the local school scandal whereby forty school superintendents collected up to $500,000 in annual income by serving as active superintendents -- sometimes of districts from which they had retired -- while collecting a six-figure pension in their capacity as retirees from the stresses and strains of, well. school administration. I see a contradiction here in that there’s a presumption that a person retires from a job because he/she has had enough of it and wants to “pursue other interests.” Out here, though, it looks as though they can’t wait to get back in the battle. The school boards ease the way for them by making only a pro forma “search” for new talent and settling on the recyclees as the ideal choices to educate youth in the way it ought to go. Other than a desire to enrich the retirees, what was the reason that school boards went in so heavily for investing in geezers rather than choosing new administrators out of the ranks below? I’ve explained some of this before now, so I’ll simply deal with the experience argument here. This is the argument that retirees have a matchless background of experience and the schools can’t afford to lose their talents just because they’ve decided to retire. Well, civil service law permits re-hiring retirees in special cases, but forty re-hires? That’s not a special case. All the same we hear the experience excuse reiterated on all possible and impossible occasions. One educational guru justified it on the grounds that sometimes districts experience employee or community unrest and no “rookie administrator” should be thrown into such a situation/ This, of course, is the Dawn Patrol approach. In that movie Leftenant Nigel got properly cheesed off at Captain Reggie and flew at him instead of the enemy: “You can’t send those green kids up in those flying coffins to fight the Red Baron! It’s murder and I’ll have no part of it!” To which Captain Reggie answered that orders were orders and one must bite the bullet and obey. This is different from the gurus who are overcome with anxiety to protect their proteges from the shot and shell flying about in the educational front lines. I confess I’ve never thought of school districts as battlefields where danger lurked behind every clump of grass, but apparently I was mistaken. But let’s not carry this business of looking out for the rookies too far. After all, I’ve never heard of a school administrator getting bumped off for flunking too many kids or buying lousy school lunches, so maybe the risks have been exaggerated a bit. Well, so much for the school scandal. If I devote this whole paper to it, I’ll have to call it The Stricken Land III and that joke has kind of run its course. I’ll return to the story of the Forty Thieves in the future, but for now go on to something else. One of the things is a book that I’ve been poking into from time to time called “Orley Farm.” It was first published in 1860. It’s by Anthony Trollope, an Englishman who spent a good deal of time in the United States. The book covers events beginning in the 1840’s and running up to the Sixties. That’s getting to be almost two hundred years ago, but the story reads like today’s headlines. It all begins with a rich Englishman named Sir Joseph Mason, who is inadvertently introduced in a thoroughly sexist way by Trollope. Trollope was a careful writer who didn’t normally omit essential facts, but here he introduces Mason as a rich widower with four grown children without mentioning the dead wife or anything about the births of the children. She only existed for the purpose of widowing her husband, but she deserved to get some mention. Trollope’s mother was a well-known writer. If she met her son in the great beyond, he probably heard about this. The connection with modernity comes in immediately when we find that Sir Joseph has gotten himself a very modern accessory, a trophy wife. She is a sexpot of a Victorian type, demure to the view, but with hidden fires smoldering inside. She is many years younger than her husband, but that’s no defect in his eyes. She uses a tactic popular today in such marriages, which is to conceive a child early on so as to strengthen the bond and overcome the age barrier. Tom Wolfe has identified this as a common strategy with women who marry elderly rich men. As often happens today, the four children of the first wife are in arms against the interloper and her little boy. He is obviously a threat to their inheritance of their father’s fortune. The new Lady Mason hasn’t shown any inclination to poach on the inheritance for herself, but things are different when it comes to looking out for her son. Her husband owns a valuable estate called Orley Farm and this is the property she wants bequeathed to her son. Sir Joseph dies within two years of the boy’s birth and sure enough, he has left Orley Farm to young Lucius with his mother as trustee until he’s 21. Sir Joseph’s oldest son, also Joseph but with no title, takes this very hard and drags the widow into court to face forgery charges. She is acquitted and keeps the estate. Joseph nurses his grudge and swears revenge. Twenty years later when the book takes up current events, a lawyer has found evidence that there was a forgery and he incites Joseph to reopen his case against the widow. It would be cheating to reveal the outcome of all this and besides I haven’t gotten that far in the book yet. I’ve been giving it about a half an hour a day, which means that I’ve got at least two weeks to go. Trollope had plenty to say as a writer and you find yourself engaging with it more than you thought likely when first coming across the book. One of Trollope’s preoccupations was the peculiar nature of English law. He’d seen a lot of the world in his travels everywhere and he thought the adversarial system was unsound, offering a premium for concealing truth and preventing judges and juries from knowing it. He also had a low opinion of lawyers’ honesty. I’ve sometimes thought we ought to import some English lawyers, people who defend their clients as well as any Americans but without staging circuses like the Simpson trial. In Trollope’s book, however, we find one high-priced lawyer asking another to burn some evidence for a thousand pounds, telling him ‘everybody does it.’ So much for my illusions.

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HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF

For the third consecutive week I’ll be writing here about the local school scandal whereby forty school superintendents collected up to $500,000 in annual income by serving as active superintendents -- sometimes of districts from which they had retired -- while collecting a six-figure pension in their capacity as retirees from the stresses and strains of, well. school administration.

I see a contradiction here in that there’s a presumption that a person retires from a job because he/she has had enough of it and wants to “pursue other interests.” Out here, though, it looks as though they can’t wait to get back in the battle. The school boards ease the way for them by making only a pro forma “search” for new talent and settling on the recyclees as the ideal choices to educate youth in the way it ought to go.

Other than a desire to enrich the retirees, what was the reason that school boards went in so heavily for investing in geezers rather than choosing new administrators out of the ranks below? I’ve explained some of this before now, so I’ll simply deal with the experience argument here. This is the argument that retirees have a matchless background of experience and the schools can’t afford to lose their talents just because they’ve decided to retire. Well, civil service law permits re-hiring retirees in special cases, but forty re-hires? That’s not a special case. All the same we hear the experience excuse reiterated on all possible and impossible occasions. One educational guru justified it on the grounds that sometimes districts experience employee or community unrest and no “rookie administrator” should be thrown into such a situation/

This, of course, is the Dawn Patrol approach. In that movie Leftenant Nigel got properly cheesed off at Captain Reggie and flew at him instead of the enemy: “You can’t send those green kids up in those flying coffins to fight the Red Baron! It’s murder and I’ll have no part of it!”

To which Captain Reggie answered that orders were orders and one must bite the bullet and obey. This is different from the gurus who are overcome with anxiety to protect their proteges from the shot and shell flying about in the educational front lines. I confess I’ve never thought of school districts as battlefields where danger lurked behind every clump of grass, but apparently I was mistaken. But let’s not carry this business of looking out for the rookies too far. After all, I’ve never heard of a school administrator getting bumped off for flunking too many kids or buying lousy school lunches, so maybe the risks have been exaggerated a bit.

Well, so much for the school scandal. If I devote this whole paper to it, I’ll have to call it The Stricken Land III and that joke has kind of run its course. I’ll return to the story of the Forty Thieves in the future, but for now go on to something else.

One of the things is a book that I’ve been poking into from time to time called “Orley Farm.” It was first published in 1860. It’s by Anthony Trollope, an Englishman who spent a good deal of time in the United States. The book covers events beginning in the 1840’s and running up to the Sixties. That’s getting to be almost two hundred years ago, but the story reads like today’s headlines. It all begins with a rich Englishman named Sir Joseph Mason, who is inadvertently introduced in a thoroughly sexist way by Trollope. Trollope was a careful writer who didn’t normally omit essential facts, but here he introduces Mason as a rich widower with four grown children without mentioning the dead wife or anything about the births of the children. She only existed for the purpose of widowing her husband, but she deserved to get some mention. Trollope’s mother was a well-known writer. If she met her son in the great beyond, he probably heard about this.

The connection with modernity comes in immediately when we find that Sir Joseph has gotten himself a very modern accessory, a trophy wife. She is a sexpot of a Victorian type, demure to the view, but with hidden fires smoldering inside. She is many years younger than her husband, but that’s no defect in his eyes. She uses a tactic popular today in such marriages, which is to conceive a child early on so as to strengthen the bond and overcome the age barrier. Tom Wolfe has identified this as a common strategy with women who marry elderly rich men.

As often happens today, the four children of the first wife are in arms against the interloper and her little boy. He is obviously a threat to their inheritance of their father’s fortune. The new Lady Mason hasn’t shown any inclination to poach on the inheritance for herself, but things are different when it comes to looking out for her son. Her husband owns a valuable estate called Orley Farm and this is the property she wants bequeathed to her son. Sir Joseph dies within two years of the boy’s birth and sure enough, he has left Orley Farm to young Lucius with his mother as trustee until he’s 21.

Sir Joseph’s oldest son, also Joseph but with no title, takes this very hard and drags the widow into court to face forgery charges. She is acquitted and keeps the estate. Joseph nurses his grudge and swears revenge. Twenty years later when the book takes up current events, a lawyer has found evidence that there was a forgery and he incites Joseph to reopen his case against the widow.

It would be cheating to reveal the outcome of all this and besides I haven’t gotten that far in the book yet. I’ve been giving it about a half an hour a day, which means that I’ve got at least two weeks to go. Trollope had plenty to say as a writer and you find yourself engaging with it more than you thought likely when first coming across the book.

One of Trollope’s preoccupations was the peculiar nature of English law. He’d seen a lot of the world in his travels everywhere and he thought the adversarial system was unsound, offering a premium for concealing truth and preventing judges and juries from knowing it. He also had a low opinion of lawyers’ honesty. I’ve sometimes thought we ought to import some English lawyers, people who defend their clients as well as any Americans but without staging circuses like the Simpson trial. In Trollope’s book, however, we find one high-priced lawyer asking another to burn some evidence for a thousand pounds, telling him ‘everybody does it.’ So much for my illusions.






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