Arthur Erickson (1925-2009)

With apologies to my wife, one of my most vivid memories of our honeymoon in 1996 -- we travelled by rail across the Canadian Rockies -- was the discovery of a couple of intriguing buildings in Vancouver, where our rail trip began.

Knowing nothing about the structure or its design, we stumbled into a building known as the Law Courts, designed by Arthur Erickson. I did not learn until my return home that Erickson was perhaps Canada's most famous contemporary architect. I just knew this was like no court house I had ever seen. It consists of terraced banks of courtrooms, all arrayed under a great glass canopy.

Henry Cobb's federal courthouse on the fan pier in Boston owes something to Erickson's triumph in Vancouver. Coincidentally, we spent the first night of our honeymoon at a Boston hotel that overlooked what was then the construction site of Cobb's building. Erickson's is more earthbound and lush -- greenery was everywhere -- both, alas, consign the courtrooms themselves to windowlessness but at both buildings the terraces are a splendid alternative to the neoclassical bombast of so many buildings associated with the law.

Erickson died earlier this month. It is sad that most Americans, who cannot name five U.S. architects, much less any Canadian ones, know nothing of Erickson's work. One prominent example of it that many Americans have seen is the Canadian Embassy, which is on Pennsylvania Avenue just a couple of blocks from the Capitol. Here Erickson is neoclassical, but playfully so, as befits a Canadian incursion into the heart of our neoclassical federal precinct. (A picture I took in January appears at the beginning of this post.)

As it turns out, Erickson had some pointed -- and, in some circles, quite famous -- words about incursions into other people's contries, at least when conducted by tourists whether on their honeymoons or otherwise.

"Though we may be beginning to restrain the exploitation of nature, we are yet to have a conscience at all about the exploitation of human cultures," Erickson said in a speech to a group of Canadian bankers way back in 1972.

"We are expanding across the world: the race for air routes laces a network over the globe, leaving hardly an island large enough for a jet strip without the threat of one. And tied into landing rights, are hotel rights, and each jet strip is accompanied by burgeoning caravanseries to house the voracious tourist, as hungry and as indiscriminate as a plague of locusts.

"Worldwide tourism looms on the horizon as the gravest threat to human cultures - a threat because its ultimate result will be to destroy the very reason for its existence - the variety and interest of the world at large.

"The tourist, far from being a sensitive explorer, transports his own values and demands to his destinations and implants them like an infectious disease decimating whatever values existed before. It will be an enormous investment down the drain in short order unless precautions are taken now, and on a global scale, to soften this impact."

Wow! Them's fightin' words, particularly from an architect. I don't think my wife and I did any harm in Vancouver as we admired Erickson's law courts, but Canadia is not Tahiti or Tanzania, the two examples Erickson gave in his speech.

"I have come to plead for conservation, not of the environment, but of human culture, which is much more fragile than nature herself," Erickson said to the bankers by way of conclusion. "We needn't destroy other cultures with the force of our own and destroy, at the same time, the chance to renew ourselves by our experience of them. For our view of the universe is necessarily limited and we need other viewpoints to gain perspective."

And he added a few words that are well worth reading by bankers in today's greed-induced financial morass:

"I have come to plead, also, for the comprehensive approach as the most urgent issue facing us today. We can no longer afford the short term and limited view of things because of the broad impact of the consequences of our decisions. You, as bankers, cannot afford to be concerned with only the economic aspects of projects that you finance. There may be serious implications on the natural environment, on the urban environment, on human culture, which at some future time may even be considered crimes against mankind."

An architect willing to speak that kind of truth to that kind of power was probably courageous enough to design some intriguing buildings. Erickson definitely did.

Welcome to Fortress CHaD

[From the CV Spectator of May 28, 2009]

When your child is in the hospital, among the last things you want to worry about is whether some predator is going to sneak into your kid’s room and do something terrible.

The world is awash in deviants who are busy conspiring to steal your offspring – or worse. Overworked hospital staff are consumed with the task of delivering care; they cannot keep an eye on the comings and goings of strangers.

This flawed thinking explains the impending lockdown at CHaD – the Children’s Hospital at Dartmouth. Hospital officials are putting the finishing touches on plans to put the inpatient ward, located on the fifth floor of Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center (DHMC), under 24-hour lock and key.

Currently, family members and friends are free to wander onto the inpatient ward, which cultivates a friendly and pleasant air. There are clearly posted instructions to check in at the nurse’s station, a requirement that is generally honored in the breach.

Those days are numbered. Once the new security measures are in place, if you don’t have the proper identification prominently on display – hospital officials are deciding whether this will be a bracelet, a sticker or something else – you will be presumed a no-goodnik and treated like a trespasser.

Visitors are still welcome, but they will have to be buzzed onto the ward after stating their business.

Hospital officials breezily rattled off these plans a couple of weeks ago at the monthly meeting of the CHaD Family Advisory Board (FAB). They wanted to know if families preferred the bracelets or the stickers.

Good grief!

The FAB is a terrific thing. It operates under the aegis of CHaD’s Boyle Pediatrics Program, dedicated to the notion that caregivers have a lot to learn from the children and families they serve.

Unfortunately, the FAB is comprised almost exclusively of hospital insiders. Aside from the CHaD bureaucrats who serve ex officio, most of the family representatives are either themselves DHMC employees or close relatives of one. For example, the FAB’s chairman is the practice manager at DHMC’s radiology department.

As the result, the FAB tends to tell CHaD what it wants to hear. And what CHaD wants to hear in this instance is that making our community’s inpatient pediatric facility feel more like a prison and less like a home is the right medicine.

There is at least one FAB member – his byline appears at the top of this column – who is, perhaps, too inclined to treat CHaD initiatives with skepticism. Hence this question at the meeting:

Exactly how many incidents has CHaD experienced in which someone snuck onto the inpatient unit and did something bad?

Nobody could think of any.

Instead, they offered the perennial “all it takes is one” defense, noting that other hospitals have experienced incidents, which are inevitably followed immediately be security clampdowns that are hastily and poorly executed.

They also mentioned that nurses frequently observe people on the CHaD inpatient ward who don’t belong there. But, when pressed, they admitted that most of these folks are adult patients from other units. They wander onto the CHaD unit in search of some cheering up from what they hope will be the smiling face of a happy child.

Could DHMC find something else for these adult patients to do? Apparently not.
It has been my family’s misfortune – and also our good fortune, given the excellent care – to have a child who has a chronic illness that tends to require two-week hospitalizations every 18 months or so.

In the five such hospitalizations our daughter has experienced since 2002, we’ve never seen anyone try to get near her who had no legitimate reason to do so.

She had such a grand time there last fall – classmates and their families stopping by to say hi, tutoring visits from her teacher, jaunts to the various play areas throughout DHMC – that she actually wants to go back. I am worried she won’t recognize the place.

More worrisome is where this all leads. The security-at-all-costs mentality makes it inevitable that all of DHMC will become a locked fortress, along with our schools and every other public facility.

We’re not just locking others out – we’re locking ourselves in.

[Photo above: Rose and her classmate Brendan making mischief in the CHaD inpatient unit during Rose's stay there last fall.]

To Cystic Fibrosis families that use Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center:

What is the single greatest threat today to your child’s ability to thrive as a cystic fibrosis patient?

In my respectful though emphatic opinion, it is the plan unveiled last week in the New Hampshire Senate to zero out the state’s special funding of CHaD, the Children’s Hospital at Dartmouth, from the two pending budget bills (HB1 and HB2). That’s right – ZERO!

Many CF families that use DHMC are fortunate enough to have health insurance. If yours is one of those families, you might be tempted to think this doesn’t affect you because your kid’s healthcare is covered. Absolutely, positively wrong!

Every CF child who seeks treatment for this life-shortening disease at CHaD gets care, regardless of the family’s ability to pay. The hospital turns no CF child away, ever. Thus, rich or poor, insurance or no insurance, every CF kid who shows up at DHMC’s Lebanon or Manchester facility gets something remarkable: some of the best CF care in the nation, as documented by the national patient registry maintained by the CF Foundation.

So we rise and fall together. If CHaD cannot afford to provide the same level of excellent care we take for granted, given the income it receives from our insurance carriers and the federal/state Medicaid program, then the care every CF kid receives will suffer.

Though this irrefutable math affects every kid who uses CHaD, it looms especially large for CF patients because their care is so expensive and so dependent on inpatient stays. That’s why two familiar names were among the people DHMC asked to testify recently before the Senate Finance Committee in Concord.

Dartmouth-Hitchcock supports the sections of HB 1 and HB 2 that create special Medicaid funding for the Children's Hospital at Dartmouth-Hitchcock. This funding is critical to CHaD,” testified Dr. Pam Hofley, the pediatric gastroenterologist who helps take care of our children. “Without it, we may not be able to continue to offer the over 30 pediatric specialties we currently provide. There is no other institution in New Hampshire that will be able to step in and offer these services, because you need dedicated pediatric inpatient facilities where these specialists can care for children.


“NH Medicaid pays Dartmouth-Hitchcock just 40 percent of the cost of providing care,” Pam added. “HB 1 and HB 2, as amended by the House, reverse hospital Medicaid cuts as they apply to pediatric services. This will not come close to covering our costs, but it's a step in the right direction and will help us preserve access to pediatric specialty care.”


Sue Richardson – long a heroically outspoken New Hampshire CF parent – also testified.
“My daughter Meghan has Cystic Fibrosis and has been a ChaD kid for 11 years,” Sue told the Senate panel. “During these years they not only saved her life, but they have and continue to go above and beyond by treating not only her, but also the whole family, which has improved her health and quality of life immensely.

“I'm concerned that Medicaid payments are so low that CHaD won't be able to continue to offer the services that are so important to my family,” Sue added. “If these services — which are the only ones offered in this state — are not offered, we would have to go out of state, which may cause her to go backwards in her health and put more stress and expenses on our family and other families in New Hampshire.”

“Go out of state” is exactly the message the Senate Finance Committee is sending CF families who use CHaD. For one thing, as they have lopped off special funding for CHaD, they have agreed to increase New Hampshire’s payments to Children’s Hospital Boston by between 4 and 500 percent, depending on the type of care involved.

CHaD is vulnerable because it is so dependent on the Medicaid program. In fiscal 2008, Medicaid accounted for 39 percent of the money CHaD received for patient care. According to figures provided by the hospital, CHaD was in the black by $11.7 last year when it came to non-Medicaid patients, but CHaD lost $21.5 million during the same period caring for children covered by Medicaid. That’s a net loss of nearly ten million dollars – unsustainable!!

This is especially dispiriting if your family, like mine, lives in Vermont and thus has no direct influence on the budget deliberations of the New Hampshire Senate. We CF families are all in this together – New Hampshire and Vermont, privately insured and those who are part of the Medicaid program. If you care about the quality of CF care your family receives from CHaD, please contact your state senator immediately. To find out who that person is and how to get in touch with her/him, follow this link:

http://www.gencourt.state.nh.us/house/members/wml.aspx

This Isn't Spinal Tap, Norwich!

My dinky little blog -- its daily record is 45 visitors since it started keeping track in April -- can hardly complain about publicity in the Local Daily Newspaper (LDN). Indeed, N1303K.com hopes this is the first of many occasions when the insightful, incisive and articulate commentary that appears here attracts public attention.

But it must also be said that today's page one, above-the-fold news story about Bike to School Day in Norwich is off its derailleur.

It started when former selectboard member Gerard Chapdelaine made a post to the Norwich town listserve maintained by Valley Net in which he pointed out some of the contradictions inherent in the event. "I guess I'm just an old curmudgeon," he added, endearingly self-deprecating guy that he is.

Gerard was concerned about interrupting traffic during the busy morning commute, and he pointed out that shutting down Main Street and providing a police escort doesn't teach kids about how to bike to school safely.

Joyce Childs chimed in with a note of agreement. And I referred folks to a post I had made here, making points that were similar to Gerard's. Much as Gerard acknowledged his inner curmudgeon, I confessed to enjoying the event and declared that I would be joining the fun with my daughter, a first grader at Marion Cross School.

Somehow, these few blips of public discussion morphed into front-page newspaper controversy bearing the headline "Almost No Middle of the Road."

Susan Boutwell, the reporter who covered Bike to School Day and wrote the story, is an amiable, thoughtful person and I am always grateful when she seeks my perspective on issues she is covering. So I want to be respectful and constructive in my reaction. Here goes.

The LDN's story about Bike to School Day epitomizes the newspaper's morbid fascination with Norwich, its lust to spin the journalistic gold of controversy out of the straw of everyday discussion among neighbors in our town, and its inability to stay relevant -- like daily newspapers everywhere -- in the internet age.

"Bystanders Question Norwich's Bike Day," blared the sub-headline. Huh? Yours truly is a huge percentage of the quoted critics -- but as I made clear, and as Susan herself reported, I was not a bystander but an enthusiastic participant. Having been a fulltime reporter myself for nine years, I know how this happens: You write a reasonably nuanced story, the gist of which gets dumbed down and often distorted by the editors who write the headlines.

Been there, done that, gave it up for a profession with actual rules and accountability. And since I did that, the industry has been in an internet-induced death spiral. Newspapers like to claim this is a threat to democracy itself -- but it undermines this contention to be sure when what passes for newspaper news is a rehash of posts to list serves and blogs. That's especially so in light of the perennial complaint from newspapers that bloggers would have nothing without newspaper content to pilfer.

But I digress.

Unfortunately, this hyper-spiced flavor of newspaper coverage has a real effect in Norwich -- one that is decidedly negative. One has to assume that people who participate in the town list serve will be far less inclined to speak their minds now that they know for sure that even their most innocent and well-intentioned and, frankly, truly minor criticisms can and will be blown up into front-page controversy.

Much the same thing happened when our police chief, Doug Robinson, used the list serve to solicit public opinion about his plan to loan radar guns to concerned citizens (whom he had committed to train) to help them remind their neighbors of the strict speed limits in much of Norwich. It was a bad idea and I was among those who said so on the list serve. But, fundamentally, the whole episode was a stellar example of how to do things right in a democracy.

Chief Robinson had an idea, he floated it, he got a negative reaction, and he withdrew it. I note that in the process of taking those steps, Chief Robinson suggested that perhaps he had not been fully understood. I am worried that the newspaper's having turned this into front-page, above-the-fold controversy helped him decide not to explain himself further. That's a shame.

More generally, there was something ironic about the LDN's headline yesterday about there being "almost no middle of the road" in the bike-to-school discussion. That comports with the LDN's general conception of community life in Norwich, and it made for a cute visual pun (since the accompanying photo depicted kids on their bikes riding down the middle of Main Street behind a police car).

But it's wrong -- wrong in the sense of being inaccurate and wrong in the sense of being an indefensible effort to foment controversy where there can and should be consensus.

I personally sought to articulate a middle ground -- yes, let's have the event because it's fun and because the inconvenience, though real, is minor, but let's also not elide the tough policy questions about transportation and land use that we really need to confront if we want to make our community sustainable in the face of impending climate chaos. And as for Gerard Chapdelaine -- well, the guy practically personifies "middle of the road" and the LDN was terribly fond of criticizing him for that when he chaired the selectboard and supposedly vacillated between competing factions on that distinguished body.

Moreover, the LDN needs to use a less blunt instrument to view Norwich. The paper needs to draw meaningful distinctions between mild inconsequential disagreements -- some amiable griping about Bike to School, a trial balloon from the police chief being respectfully shot down -- and ones that make a difference.

In the latter category one might place the lawsuit that residents of Bragg Hill Road have pending against the town having to do with tax valuation of certain high-end real estate in Norwich. (I could go on about that but I will eschew further comment, given my own minor role in the town's valuation process as a member of the Board of Civil Authority. Suffice it to say that I agree with the empassioned encomium at town meeting from local attorney and school board member Geoff Vitt that, from the perspective of the town and its citizenry, this is a case that really, really should be settled.)

But I digress again. Sorry.

The editors of the Local Daily Newspaper are not the only observers of Norwich doings who are stuck in Spinal Tap mode. (Remember This is Spinal Tap? It's the Christopher Guest pseudo-documentary about a heavy metal band whose leader famously discussed the volume dial on his band's amps thusly: "You see, most blokes will be playing at 10. You’re on 10, all the way up, all the way up . . . Where can you go from there? Nowhere. What we do, is if we need that extra push over the cliff . . . Eleven. One louder.")

Similarly, this morning's edition of list serve posts included a rejoinder to the critics of Bike to School Day. The author proclaimed that she was "saddened, embarrassed, and flabbergast" about the criticism from folks like Gerard Chapdelaine and Joyce Childs.

"How anyone can criticize a town for gathering together to share a morning ride down Main Street, with wonderful smiles on everyone's face, is just beyond me. . . . [t]o suggest as adults, our own individual convenience is more important than allowing one road to be closed for all of 15 minutes for this wonderful event promoting healthy lifestyles, is just the silliest, saddest notion I have heard."

Heck, it wasn't even the silliest, saddest notion that appeared on page one, above the fold, in today's Local Daily Newspaper. That honor belongs to former Vice President Cheney, whose response to yesterday's articulate speech from President Obama about national security was to reprise his snarlish defense of torture and authoritarianism.

My point is that we need to cultivate some perspective and discernment when it comes to public discussion in a democracy. Because the inevitable consequence of treating every issue as if it's dialed up to 11 is that a lot of conversations will simply be shut right down to Zero.

Bike to School Day? Bah Humbug!

Thursday is the annual Bike to School Day that will shut down Main Street at the height of what passes for the morning rush hour in my pleasant Vermont village on the banks of the Connecticut River. As this post now proves, there is only one person in all of Norwich who is willing to offer public opposition to this whole idea.

Maybe it is nothing but a cranky expression of self-interest. I live downtown. When the segment of Main Street affected by this event is closed down, I can't leave my house in my automobile. And, like essentially everyone else in the bedroom community of Norwich, I can't get to work by bike or on foot. At least my car won't sit idling somewhere, waiting for the Norwich police officer to wave them through when Main Street reopens.

I love bicyling as much as the next person. My seven-year-old is thrilled to pedal around, now that she knows how to ride a two-wheeler. My three-year-old is stuck on his tricycle, desperate to learn the skill his sister so proudly displays. We'll be biking to school on Thursday for sure.

But -- really. The problem with events like Bike to School Day is that they sweep under the rug -- or maybe under the asphalt -- the fundamental land-use and transportation issues we would need to confront if we really wanted to see people biking en mass to school and to work regularly.

Most people in Norwich don't live the way my family does, on 0.23 acres, within ready walking distance of shopping, eating and public schooling. Most folks live on dirt roads that require SUVs or pickup trucks to access, in secluded farm-like settings that have no real justification for people who do not live off the land. (I realize that some people do live off the land -- I am not talking about them.)

I worry that when these people pile into their SUVs on Thursday, drive down to Huntley Meadow, unload their bikes and those of their kids, and join the parade for the final mile to the Marion Cross School, they will honestly believe they are doing something meaningful to promote transportation alternatives.

While we have a decent mass transportation service with a stop near my house -- Advance Transit -- it goes nowhere near where I work (Vermont Law School) and doesn't run on weekends, which is the only time I could plausibly make use of it. Many, many other Norwich people are in a similar situation.

So, let's all join the fun on Thursday. But let's not forget the inconvenient truths about Bike to School Day.

More about DHMC merging with a Catholic medical institution . . .

From yesterday's excellent Valley News story on the question of whether DHMC should move forward with plans to merge its Manchester facility with that city's Catholic Medical Center:

A DHMC spokesman yesterday stressed that DHMC and [Catholic Medical Center] won't change their procedures or philosophies as a result of the affiliation.

"We think that most of those worries and concerns are not well-founded," said Dave Evancich, vice president of public affairs at DHMC. "We want to preserve all the services that are being provided and enhance other services that may not be available in the community."

That's exactly the problem. DHMC should change its services, both in Manchester and Lebanon, so as to make abortion actively and publicly available to its patients.

New Hampshire's two feminist health centers -- in Concord and Portsmouth -- as well as the Planned Parenthood facilities in Manchester and West Lebanon -- are all excellent and compassionate providers of abortion and pregnancy counselling.

But for some women, it will be prefereable to get such services at DHMC. If nothing else, they can make an inconspicuous trip there, sit in the waiting room without anyone knowing the nature of their business, and then get the help they need.

"Just Say No" to DHMC-Catholic Medical Center Pact

From today's Union Leader:

MANCHESTER – A leading pro-life organization opposes a proposed affiliation between Catholic Medical Center and Dartmouth-Hitchcock Clinic, a pro-life activist said yesterday.

Manchester resident Barbara Hagan said she's concerned that a clinic staffed by the two organizations would offer abortions to poor, unwed girls as well as other services that violate Catholic teachings.

"If you're not protecting the moms and the babies, what good is it?" said Hagan, a longtime activist and member of the New Hampshire Right to Life Committee.

She said the committee's board of trustees voted this month to oppose the proposed affiliation. No affiliation has been finalized; CMC is in discussions with Dartmouth-Hitchcock Clinic about details.

CMC spokesman Gail Winslow-Pine said the hospital will continue to speak to pro-life activists about the affiliation. Three meetings are scheduled before July, she said.

"We have been consistently and openly engaged with the right-to-life community, and we continue to be open and have conversations," Winslow-Pine said.

Winslow-Pine said CMC continues to keep Roman Catholic Bishop John B. McCormack informed about progress on the proposed affiliation, and three medical ethicists have given their approvals to the affiliation.

Catholic Medical Center opened the West Side Neighborhood Health Center this year and expects to eventually serve as many as 6,000 uninsured and underinsured patients.
The clinic is on CMC property and is a department of CMC, but it is staffed by both the hospital and Dartmouth-Hitchcock Clinic Manchester.

Last night, Hagan and other pro-life activists spelled out their problems with the affiliation and clinic before an audience of about two dozen people in the Manchester Public Library auditorium.

Hagan said she was troubled that Dartmouth-Hitchcock does not plan to curtail any of its services. And there are no guarantees that clinic workers won't refer patients for an abortion, she said.

I deleted the part where Hagan says she is praying to Mother Teresa to prevent the affiliation with DHMC. Other than that, I could not be more in agreement with the anti-choice activist.

Access to abortion for women who need them is tough enough around here without DHMC having to worry about offending any partners in the world of Catholic healthcare. The critical limiting factor is a shortage of providers. Many doctors who would be willing to perform abortions cannot do so because they do not want to cause trouble at their institutions. While it is possible to have an abortion at DHMC (or, at least, at DHMC in Lebanon; I don't know the situation in Manchester) the medical center isn't exactly forthright about the opportunity. Nor does it require its Ob-Gyn residents to learn the procedure -- in fact, it allow them to opt out of this crucial aspect of training for physicians who intend to see to the healthcare needs of women.

Don't misunderstand -- I can't really object to the decision by Catholic healthcare facilities not to perform abortions or otherwise to support or facilitate the termination of pregnancies. DHMC, on the other hand, is a secular institution that belongs to the community -- a community that is overwhelmingly pro choice. If you want to be an Ob-Gyn who doesn't do abortions that's fine, but you shouldn't be allowed to train at this particular, prestigious academic medical center.

And the medical center in question should be so proud to do abortions that it actually advertises them. Abortion is perfectly legal, and in many circumstances it is the right choice for women who are considering them. It is time to stop stigmatizing the procedure -- and it is time for DHMC to stop considering any affiliations that led credibility or resources to the anti-choice movement.

Colonoscopic Thoughts About Dartmouth

[from the CV Spectator of 5/14/2009]

Pardon me for bragging. But it’s graduation season and I am pleased to report that, after rigorous examination and the payment of much money, I have passed with flying colors and am now ready for the future.

That’s right. I had a colonoscopy, upon turning 50.

An excellent nonprofit, Mount Ascutney Hospital, provided this service. I bonded with my doctor and nurses, I will reminisce about the experience for years, and I am grateful to the institution for sending me forth with confidence (since my colon was polyp-free).

But I didn’t leave with the idea that this should entitle me to govern the institution or even elect those who do. Hence my puzzlement with the alumni of Dartmouth College.

Well over a century ago, graduates of Dartmouth bailed out their financially troubled school and extracted the right to elect part of the institution’s board. Some of their descendants have lately been proving what a Faustian bargain this was.

Chief among them is Todd Zywicki.

Kvetching on his blog last month about his fellow trustees’ decision to deny him a second four-year term, Zywicki alleged that he was thrown off the Big Green island “either because of the content of my speech or for some unnamed reason for which I received no notice or opportunity to respond.”

The 2007 speech to which Zywicki alluded is notable for its characterization of the late James Freedman, Dartmouth’s president from 1987 to 1998. Zywicki called Freedman a “truly evil man.”

Now, Zywicki condemns the trustees for being “unwilling to stand up for the right of free speech in an academic forum.” For a law professor at George Mason University, Zywicki sure has a strange notion of the Bill of Rights.

The concepts that Zywicki invoked of “notice” and “opportunity to respond” apply to the Due Process clauses of the Constitution. They limit only the government’s ability to make decisions unilaterally.

Likewise, the First Amendment says the government cannot silence people. Dartmouth is not the government; it is free to discipline trustees who make public statements the College deems embarrassing. It can do so without explaining itself to Zywicki or anyone else.

However, as Zywicki implies, even private schools revere academic freedom. Thus, Zywicki should be free to opine intemperately at George Mason. But as a Dartmouth trustee, his job was to serve as a fiduciary of the institution – in effect, to preserve the academic freedom of others.

As someone who has taught business law, Zywicki is presumably familiar with a central tenet of fiduciary responsibility – the duty of loyalty. For a trustee, that means it’s okay, maybe even desirable, to deliver tirades about the institution in the board room -- but not in public.

In the outside world, Zywicki’s job was to defend Dartmouth. He didn’t do that job, so he got fired.

Zywicki is also a self-proclaimed avatar of Dartmouth’s traditions. So he should not be excused for commentary that ignores a pivotal moment in Dartmouth’s history, and legal history as well.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s Dartmouth College v. Woodward decision in 1819 was the occasion for Daniel Webster to proclaim during his courtroom peroration that Dartmouth is “a small school . . . and yet there are those who love it.”

Webster achieved victory against certain New Hampshire officials, and a faction of Dartmouth’s own leadership. They had, to that point, succeeded in turning Dartmouth College into Dartmouth University – a public institution.

Dartmouth, in effect, fought and won the right to evade the very constitutional limitations that Zywicki now invokes.

“Hang one, warn a thousand” is the moral of Zywicki’s ouster, according to alumni trustee T. J. Rogers in a letter to the student newspaper. Rogers also bragged that “swim team” was the rallying cry that won his own election in 2004.

What pleasure I take in all this, as an alumnus of an ascendant Middlebury College – a rival to Dartmouth whose governance is not hampered by fractious trustee elections featuring candidates driven by athletic preferences or petty politics.

And as for my colonoscopy at Mount Ascutney? Well, all I can say is that it’s a small hospital, and yet there are those who love it. Even if we can’t run for the board of trustees.

Friendly February Farming in Philadelphia

This seemingly bleak image – empty grocery shelves, forlorn shopping carts, ugly paneling, a ramshackle drop-ceiling – is actually cause for great hope.

I snapped this photograph back in February at what used to be Caruso’s Market, in the Chestnut Hill neighborhood of Philadelphia. For years, Caruso’s was a friendly, family-owned emporium that fit perfectly into the bustling, eclectic (and virtually national chain-free) Germantown Avenue shopping district. But, as with many family-owned businesses, eventually the founders needed to “cash out;” in this instance, they sold the store to a couple of unqualified investors who failed to thrive as grocers and shuttered the place last fall.

Enter the Weavers Way Co-op, long a mainstay of the nearby Mt. Airy neighborhood. Weavers Way agreed purchase the building for $2.8 million in January and plans to reopen the 6,700 square foot store this summer.

This is a big and bold leap for a co-op with around $8 million in sales (compared to our co-op’s annual sales of $68 million) and some 3,200 members (compared to our roughly 16,000). But nobody would accuse Weavers Way of being passive or cautious.

I used to think the Hanover Co-op was an unrivalled paragon of local agriculture until the affable Glenn Bergman, general manager at Weavers Way, took me to see his co-op’s thriving urban farm. There he walked me into a recently completed greenhouse and asked me to look down. What I saw were the plants from which the co-op had harvested greens that were sold just days earlier in the flagship Mt. Airy store. In February! Within the borders of a major American city!

As they say on late-night TV: But wait . . . there’s more. Another Weavers Way greenhouse stands on the grounds of Martin Luther King High School, which struggles to succeed in a neighborhood far more challenged and far less affluent than Chestnut Hill. By all accounts, the high schoolers are having a grand time learning how to grow stuff.

Not far away, in the West Oak Lane neighborhood, is Weavers Way Ogontz – opened last summer (at the instigation of a local legislator) to make produce available to an area that lacked such a store. And across the intersection at which the original Weavers Way store is the Co-op’s pet supply store. Staffing the place would be uneconomical, so if you need any pet items you first go into the main store, get the key, pick up your items across the street and return to let the cashiers know what you bought.

Clearly, Weavers Way is a cooperative that knows how to combine the entrepreneurial spirit with idealistic notions of public service.

What lessons for us in Hanover? Well, the short answer is: Ask Emily Neuman, our sustainability coordinator. She came to us from Weavers Way and knows its virtues intimately. Her energy and vision have a lot of Philadelphia in them.

Here’s a slightly longer answer: The new Weavers Way store is not guaranteed to succeed and, in truth, our Philadelphia friends are taking a big risk. But neither should we, or any other cooperator, be afraid to cross the divides we confront.

“Imagine an upscale provisioner to generations of Philadelphia's Brahmins being replaced by a commune of sorts selling organic rolled oats, pumpkin spice granola, and curly kale-baked tofu salad. Muscatel sentiments, if you will, inflicted on the martini set,” mused the Philadelphia Inquirer in February, alluding to the differences between Chestnut Hill and the Weavers Way home base in Mt. Airy. But in the very next sentence, the column dismissed such notions as “dated stereotypes” and noted the enthusiasm with which the co-op is being received in its new territory.

This is our moment, as cooperators, living in troubled economic times. There are people in our communities who need us, even though they do not know us. In the face of such challenges, doing nothing is the riskiest approach of all.