In response to readers' emails, here's a PDF file of the SMU math department's curriculum when Harriet Miers was an undergraduate.
UPDATE: Reading the fine print, reader Mike Beversluis says I underestimated Advanced Calculus. "I'm sorry to be pedantic, but since Courses 37-39 include integral and differential calculus, they are equivalent to Princeton's freshman Calculus. Advanced Calculus is the proof class, and probably fell between Princeton's current MAT215 and MAT315 listings." I was an English major--you expect me to read?
Posted by Virginia Postrel on October 06, 2005 • Comments
My latest NYT column looks at rebuilding after disasters. Here's an excerpt:
Rebuilding lives and communities does not, however, mean returning the economy to exactly where it was before. Rather, a disaster tends to accelerate economic changes that are already under way. That is because some physical assets, whether outdated manufacturing plants or homes in declining areas, are worth keeping only because they were paid for long ago and cost next to nothing to use. They would cost more to replace than they are worth.
"Any modern economy is normally in constant flux," Professor Horwich wrote. "As such, the destruction of physical assets is a form of accelerated depreciation that hastens the adoption of new technologies and varieties of investment." In Kobe, the plastic shoe industry never came back after the earthquake, and air freight expanded at the expense of the port.
The more flexibility businesses and individuals have, the more adaptable they can be and the faster recovery can take place. That is one reason money helps more than in-kind gifts. Donors, Professor Horwich said, "can only guess what recipients want most" and often provide gifts of clothes or food in forms that are hard to use.
The same principle applies to the rebuilding commitments now being made in Washington. The final cost of Katrina relief is widely expected to top $100 billion, and the Louisiana Congressional delegation has submitted its own $250 billion wish list.
Those are very big numbers. With $100 billion, the government could give every man, woman and child from New Orleans a check for $200,000. Expanding these payments to the entire metropolitan area would allow a generous $75,000 per resident.
Yet nobody expects the displaced residents of New Orleans to see anything close to those potentially life-changing amounts. Federal spending is aimed not at "rebuilding lives" but at "rebuilding communities," primarily by spending a lot of money on construction projects and on government services.
But, the Harvard economist Edward L. Glaeser argues, such an approach is backward. "If there is disaster insurance, then it is, presumably, the people of New Orleans who are insured, not the place itself," he writes in an article for The Economists' Voice, an online journal (www.bepress.com/ev). The article is called "Should the Government Rebuild New Orleans, or Just Give Residents Checks?" He favors the latter.
Read the whole thing. It's free!
Posted by Virginia Postrel on October 06, 2005 • Comments
Reader James Ingram explains:
Another reason a lawyer planning to practice in Dallas might stay at SMU for law school is that the personal and professional contacts acquired there would be infinitely more valuable than those acquired at say, Harvard or Stanford. In most of the South, and much of the Midwest for that matter, the business, professional and political elites are alumni of the flagship state university (say Ole Miss or UNC Chapel Hill) or a handful of elite regional private colleges and universities (SMU, Vanderbilt, William & Mary). Ivy League backgrounds are not an asset in this part of the world.
A good example of this is Hillary Clinton. Much of the Whitewater saga revolved around her attempts, as a young partner in a Southern law firm, to develop legal business. Despite the fact that she is bright, a world champion networker and has stellar credentials she ended up falling back on her husband's political cronies like Jim McDougal. Her Wellesley/Yale axis of contacts, so valuable in New York or Washington, proved useless in Arkansas. (How many Wellesley grads have ever been to Arkansas, for Heaven's sake?)
This is quite right. Texas is certainly run by UT, SMU, and A&M grads, with the occasional Bush thrown in for diversity.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on October 06, 2005 • Comments
Over on Volokh Conspiracy Jim Lindgren wonders whether Harriet Miers really writes as badly as excerpts in Time suggest. The answer is no.
At the SMU library I got an original of her 1992 Texas Lawyer article. The worst writing quoted in Time-- "freedom of liberties," for instance--in fact reflects Nexis typos. (Miers wrote "freedom of religion," in that case.) The prose is indeed clunky, however, and the article is banal in that well-known corporate way, where you make an argument--her main point is that the courts need more money--without any sharp points.
To see for yourself, download my .pdf scan of the piece, minus the headline, which wouldn't fit on the microfiche reader's copy space.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on October 05, 2005 • Comments
Despite her lack of any record, Harriet Miers may be God's gift to constitutional law. How can we tell? Well, you could give her a test. Seriously. Instead of asking political-spin questions about abortion, somebody on the Judiciary Committee ought to ask her some tough exam questions from smart Con Law professors. She doesn't even have to say what her own position would be, simply to accurately explain different views of the law. Unfortunately, the Judiciary Committee isn't exactly made up of smart Con Law professors--so grading would be a problem.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on October 05, 2005 • Comments
Harriet Miers was a math major at SMU. What does that mean? I checked the SMU catalogue for her era.
To major in math, students had to take one semester of Advanced Calculus (the catalogue lists no non-Advanced Calculus, so I take this to be what was known at Princeton as "freshman calculus"), Differential Equations, Introduction to Linear Algebra, and "nine additional semester-hours of advanced work in the department or in physics." The math department's advanced courses included a second semester of calculus, several actuarial and finance-oriented courses, College Geometry ("modern synthetica plane geometry...a continuation of classical high school geometry"), probability and statistics, the Teaching of Mathematics, Introduction to Modern Algebra ("an introduction to the principal modern algebraic systems; integral domains; groups, rings, and fields"), and a directed readings option. The department also offered a number of high-school-level algebra, geometry, and trig courses, though presumably majors took a more demanding curriculum. Grad courses were also open to seniors.
UPDATE: Here's a PDF file of SMU's math curriculum when Miers was an undergrad.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on October 05, 2005 • Comments
After reading this Hit and Run post and the comments that followed, it's clear that a lot of people have absolutely no idea what Harriet Miers's graduation from Southern Methodist University and SMU Law School suggests about her brainpower or academic record.
It does not, first of all, imply that she "could not get into" a school with a national reputation. Until very, very recently, southerners--even incredibly smart southerners--almost never considered leaving the region to go to college. (The exceptions were a few legacies from prep-school-oriented families.) For a bright woman in the early 1960s, a good private school like SMU would have been plenty ambitious. In Dallas, people today are still impressed by an SMU degree and even more by an SMU Law School degree. And, aside from her White House stint, Miers has spent her life in Dallas.
In Miers's day, SMU was a predominantly female undergraduate institution with an almost entirely male law school. Then, as now, it was a rich kids' school, a lot like the University of Southern California until recently. You can get a fine education there, but too few students bother. (To upgrade its program, the university has in recent years aggressively recruited scholarship students.) Miers appears to have been an unusually serious SMU student and, as far as I can tell from the one yearbook from her undergrad days left in the SMU library, she did not join a sorority--which would make her quite unusual. Kids at SMU take partying much more seriously than they take academics. (I often joke that while the UCLA library has many more books, the great thing about SMU's library is that none of the books are ever checked out.) From her academic record alone, it's clear that Miers is a self-directed person who does not simply follow the crowd.
But I'm still not impressed. SMU, which provides most of the Postrel family income, is a decent school. But it is not a place that demands that a student stretch her mind. Miers has never been in a scholarly environment where she was surrounded by people who were smarter than she and just as hard working. She has had a demanding, successful career in a fairly parochial environment where she could easily impress people. And she appears to be a legal technician, not part of the cosmopolitan debate over legal ideas, a debate that emphatically includes conservative voices.
Maybe the Supreme Court needs parochial judges--though David Souter already fills that role--just as it arguably needs people who've practiced law. But I'm skeptical
Posted by Virginia Postrel on October 05, 2005 • Comments
Manolo makes me laugh out loud.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on October 03, 2005 • Comments
In 1991, the Dallas Morning News did a Q&A with Harriet Miers, as part of a regular feature on local celebs. Asked what people say about her behind her back, she replied, "They can't figure me out." A stealth nominee with no particular judicial philosophy? Or just not the typical Park Cities matron?
Posted by Virginia Postrel on October 03, 2005 • Comments
The long Dallas Morning News profile of Harriet Miers offers assorted interesting tidbits: Her brothers--Robert Lee Miers and Jeb Stuart Miers--are named after Confederate generals and one of them, Jeb, is married to a state appellate judge. Her fantasy dinner party guests would be "the Apostle Paul, Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Margaret Thatcher." She "has dated Texas Supreme Court Justice Nathan Hecht for years." As a young woman, she never wanted to be a judge but, says a fellow law clerk, "was intent on being a person who helped solve problems in society." She's a great bowler. And then there's this:
Longtime friend Merrie Spaeth, a Dallas communications consultant, said one of the most remarkable things is how discreet Ms. Miers is, how she holds her tongue even in private, when friends and political allies let down their hair.
"Not only did Harriet never tell a joke, she never laughed. She might smile so she didn't look stern. But she would never say anything snide," Ms. Spaeth said.
"In the 22 years I've known here I've never heard her use a curse word. Not even 'hell' or 'damn.' I've never heard her gossip. I've never heard her say a nasty word."
I'm sure she's ladylike yet tough as nails. But that doesn't make her qualified for the U.S. Supreme Court.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on October 03, 2005 • Comments