The Women of Loi, Vietnam

Captives in Their Own Land

Dr. Alexandre Yersin

Nguyen Thi Nhan

After the war, he can begin to be bitter. Those who point at and degrade his bitterness, those who declare it's all a part of war and that this is a job which must be done--to all those patriots I will recommend a postwar vacation to this land, where they can swim in the sea, lounge under a fine sun, stroll in the quaint countryside, wife and son in hand. Certainly, there will be a mine or two still in the earth. Alpha Company did not detonate them all.
--Tim O'Brien,  If I Die in a Combat Zone

In Today's New York Times a reporter, Julie Cohn, has committed an  act of journalism, with an article about the women of a small village in Loi, Vietnam, who chose to have children without benefit of marriage.

Of course, in 21st century America, women having children as single mothers is commonplace, but Vietnam is an old culture, with old values. There, women should only have children within the confines of marriage. 

But during the American war,  women were joining platoons, fighting in the rice paddies and by the time the war was over and they returned to life in peacetime, they were in their 20's, beyond the age of marriage. Women in Vietnam married at age 15 or 16.  By 20 you were over the hill, no longer a desirable mate. They were called "qua lua," spinsters. 

The Times story tells of women who returned from the war, looked at their lives, their prospects and said, "To hell with all that," and they went out and asked a man to father a child, without asking for any support or any kind of ongoing relationship.

For these women, there was the practical consideration that in Vietnam you need a child to support you in your old age, because there is no government, no community, no other structure to support you. But, the article implies, there was also the personal calculus by each of these women, independently, that those old rules do not work for me. I served. I was a hero and now you tell me I will be shunned because I'm too old for marriage?

What all this made The Phantom realize is how myopic, how one sided his view of the war has been. When The Phantom was in his 20's, and prime draft bait, he never thought of Vietnamese men or women as having to make the same conscious decision about whether or not to serve that the Phantom and all the boys of his generation had to make. The Vietnamese, as far as he could see,  were either all fanatics, who enthusiastically marched off to war, or were simply minding their own business, when the Americans dropped war upon them.

 But now it's clear there were clearly Vietnamese, men and women, who made a decision to participate,  and paid a price.

Now these people, born on the other side of the planet, are entering their 60's just as the Phantom's generation of American kids who were 20 then are 60 now, and living with the underground ordinance of that war.

If there were any Americans who had a positive effect on that unfortunate people, the Phantom cannot think of who they might be.  Were there any members of the Wehrmacht (the German army) who brought anything but misery to the countries they invaded or to the Jews they delivered up to the Gestapo?

Westerners, as a rule raped, pillaged or exploited Indochina/ Vietnam for centuries. But, like Schindler, there were exceptions, the occasional man who, in the midst of evil  tried to do a virtuous act.  Alexandre Yersin, a German speaking Swiss, who had been educated in Paris by none other than Louis Pasteur, voyaged to Vietnam in the late 19th century and was captivated by the place. Pasteur and his French colleagues implored him to return to the laboratory in Paris, but  he slept in his room  in Vietnam and he heard tigers roaring in the night forests. He was hooked.

 When bubonic plague broke out in Hong Kong, he popped over there long enough to identify the causative organism, to make anti serum to it and he had enough on hand to treat Vietnamese villagers for plague when it arrived a few years later--the first people in the history of the world to be treated and saved by an effective medical therapy for plague.

The Vietnamese, understandably, still revere Yersin.  What they think of Americans,  we can only imagine. We did not come to save them from the black plague, or to lift their standard of living with trade and economic development. We came to murder and destroy, and we were clumsy but effective.  

And now, years later, in a very personal and profound way, we see what damage we did which cannot be measured in body counts or tonnage of bombs dropped or buildings destroyed or forests denuded.  There were victims we did not count, who also suffered, beneath our notice.

Whenever we talk about American troops bringing peace, freedom, prosperity, and the American way of life to other peoples, living in other cultures, whether it be Afghanistan, Iraq or Vietnam, stories like this one ought to be told.

Good works of man do not follow armies. The may follow doctors and medicine and pumps which harvest clean water for a village, but not armies. 

How They Do: The Rich Stay Rich

A good friend told me a story I've never been able to shake. It was like looking through a window into a whore house. 

He had been given a seat on the board of directors of a company which made products with which he was very familiar and he was the chairman of an academic department of one of the nations most prestigious universities. He had no illusions about why this publicly trade company wanted his name on their masthead: They were basking in his reflected respectability, in his glory.

At his first meeting the CFO outlined the bleak performance of the company, the costs of research and development, the competition the company faced, the difficulties finding and recruiting talented employees, the faltering economy.  Good friend listened with growing disquietude, thinking, I thought they wanted me for my insight; then I thought they just wanted the name of my university, but now I wonder if they really want an expert in resuscitation.

After the CFO finished speaking the next item on the agenda was voting bonuses for the CEO, the CFO and all the members of the board.

"I don't understand," Good Friend finally stammered, after the pause during which everyone in the room considered whether or not their bonuses were sufficient. "From what I've just heard, this company is in peril for its very life. How can you vote for bonuses when the company has lost over a million dollars over the past two years?"

"Oh," the CEO smiled indulgently, and he spoke very slowly, as if instructing a very dim child. "That doesn't matter."

Good Friend resigned from that board. It had been his first venture outside the academy and into the world of boards of directors, business, finance and all that. 

What really stunned him was the brazen amorality of that group. We have the power to take the money. We will take the money. Whether that is justifiable does not matter. It is legal and that is all that matters. There is money on the table, ready for the taking. This is why we are on the board.

This is one, if not the central, element of corruption in corporate, capitalistic America. 

The rich get richer not because they are deserving, but because they have worked their way into positions to exploit a very flawed system.

Members of corporate boards have found a way to turn knowing people, acquiring titles of authority, using academic positions, using connections to past government positions,  to cash in. The damage done to employees, consumers, investors is irrelevant, not even on the agenda for discussion. All that matters is greed.

House of Cards

Downton Abbey is a guilty pleasure. 
The Wire is not.

Downton Abbey is buttered popcorn, or, at best chocolate covered raisins, perhaps just a whiff of iron but mostly sugar and substantially bereft of a lack of substance, beyond the presentation of a clear picture of what makes the British less vital and less competitive--that insufferable disposition to cleave to values which are not based in reality, the things they call "standards" like placing trust in someone because he has been anointed as an honored and accomplished knight of medicine or law rather than basing judgment on what you can see and measure yourself. Thus, the obstetrician who is knighted is to be trusted where the local G.P., who knows the patient well is not, because, well, he is not ranked as high on the pecking order. 

The Wire is difficult to watch because it is written by people who know of what  they speak and they present it without sugar coating it. It is what makes Hemingway readable: You know he's been there. You know you are reading truth. It may be fiction, but it gets closer to the truth than any non fiction can because it doesn't have to worry about lawsuits or nitpicking critics, it just lays out what the author knows, and the author does not have to footnote or prove or fact check. His facts are pre checked. 

House of Cards, the American version is so vastly superior to the unwatchable British version it is not worth comparing them, other than to note the difference.

One of the things which makes HOC so enthralling is the language.  The narrator, Francis Underwood, speaks in that sly Southern way which only Southerners can, understated, full of vivid imagery and metaphors, which would sound affected if it were not spoken with that accent, full of blarney and acid, delivered with a mild smile and sense of irony which assumes you understand.

When Francis looks at you, as he peers into the camera and tells you about his people, when he says you can manipulate his people only by appealing to their demand for humility, he is not denigrating his people; he is simply stating a fact, a fact which somehow endears them to him, but which he finds useful, if not a little bit peculiar, and which he knows you will find risible. But he's not laughing. He respects his people, even if he has shown you a side of them he knows you will not respect.

What makes HOC so remarkable is you know this is not written the way The Wire was, by men who lived the story.  HOC is written by people who, at most, talked with a lot of people who lived the Washington story, or maybe by people who observed from two steps removed, but they did not live it. Despite that, the writer of the episode which sends Francis Underwood back to his district in South Carolina on a mission prompted by that absurd American sense of having been wronged when the injured person was not wronged by anyone, was injured by her own foolishness, is brilliant in a way which really good fiction can be good: This episode and it's key scenes advance so many ideas on so many levels simultaneously it leaves you breathless.

There is the idea that a girl who is driving 60 miles an hour, texting about a water tower that looks like a scrotum( or something vaguely genital) and loses control of her car and dies, can be the source of a law suit by her parents, claiming the people who erected (pun intended) the tower were responsible for fatally distracting their daughter. That this is wrong does not enter the equation. Underwood returns to his district to work out a solution, without judging right or wrong. He is only interested in what works.

He is the focus of undeserved resentment and blame, but he does not complain: He simply defuses it by addressing the deep, underlying source of the blame, the agony of loss. He does this by framing it as a part of religious experience and redemption. He delivers a sermon of extraordinary power and insight. It is a sermon of double entendre, which clearly says, "You are angry at me, but you are really angry at God. You cannot allow yourself to be angry at God, so you are looking for somebody it's okay to be angry at.  I will do, and I accept the blame, in God's behalf."
 And he follows up in a meeting with the parents in a masterpiece of understanding of the psychology of loss and healing.

And he does all this while managing, long distance, a terrifically tense meeting about the most important bill of his Congressional career, and the other ball he keeps in the air is a text message flirtation with a female reporter.

And while doing all this, he literally takes time to smell the flowers, to gather his "rosebuds" while he may--actually they are tulips--and to deliver them in an astonishingly effective way to his wife, all the while thinking about initiating a sexual adventure with the young woman he has been manipulating.

And when he makes his overture to the young woman, he begins with a warning and as honest a disclaimer as any man has ever made in the process of seduction.

He is a character of depth, enormous talent, who you have to like, admire, enjoy and yet you are repelled even as you are drawn into his web. He asks for no forgiveness. He is a sinner, and he smiles at that, knowing that all men are sinners and that is simply a part of being human, so he accepts this about himself, without rancor, agony or apology.  He has told you he adores his wife, but he need not tell you why he may stray now and again. He assumes you'll know. 

This is way better than anything, including Homeland, which has come our way for years.  So add this to Games of Thrones, Treme, Downton, Newsroom.

We have been seeing now, for some years, the best fiction not between covers of a book, or in e books, not in feature length cinema, but in long form television series. 

What an age we live in.

Electronic Medical Records: What This Means for the Patient

As the requirement for electronic medical records (EMR) extends to every doctor's office, beyond the hospital and into the community, the effect will be seen not just on doctors and nurses but on the patient in the exam room.

Until now, complaints about EMR until now have been dismissed as the grumpy old man syndrome: Older doctors simply cannot adapt to the new technology and good riddance to those old geezers.  Actually, if The Phantom's observations are correct, many of the very doctors who have quit or been fired because of their refusal or inability to use the computer for record keeping are just exactly the doctors we should not be losing, for reasons we can get to later. But the issue now affects every doctor, from medical student doctors-to-be, to interns, to more experienced doctors.

The EMR has less impact in surgical specialties, where record keeping was always far less important than what happened in the operating room. But for internal medicine and Pediatrics, the "cognitive" specialties, record keeping has always been important, if not central to the care of patients, and it has always been the cross borne by suffering medical types. 

Record keeping is essential to "medical" specialties because records of drugs given, responses to those drugs (blood pressure, heart rate and rhythm, changes in body chemistry) are the essence of those specialties, from internal medicine to endocrinology, gastroenterology, kidney, hematology, oncology and infectious disease.  If you give a drug, you need to know the response to that drug. Records become central.

Central, but not the first priority. The first priority is the patient.

We have a version of computerized medical records in my office, and the nurses, medical assistants and sometimes the doctors become so focused on getting through each screen and on to the next (because if you miss a spot, you cannot get to the next part of the record, like trying to order something on line and forgetting to put in your email or zip code) so you get stuck.  There is a computer in every place a patient may be and some they are not. The medical people look at the screens and not the patients, and spend most of their time making eye contact with the computer.

We now have to drag a nurse away from a computer screen to get her to get the shoes and socks off the patient, to remove wound dressings, because the nurses and doctors are all busy examining and interrogating and responding to the computers. The patients are often not examined adequately or even allowed to give their stories as they want to give them. They are asked the questions lined up on the screen on the computer.  But a free flowing narrative, entering the story the way the patient wants to tell it, forget that. There is no program for that.

In police work, cops on the beat "juke the stats" which is to say, rather than sitting down with a woman on her stoop and getting to know her, so the cop can come back and talk to her after a shoot out or a rape has occurred in her neighborhood, the cops have to bang heads on that street and arrest people for drinking alcoholic beverages on the street, or for jay walking. Those arrests do nothing to improve community safety or quality of life, but they make the stats for the cop look better.  Similarly, the records for the doctor are what he or she will be judged by, even if he has not examined the patient, listened to the patient, the record will show he has done his job.

We used to say, "The better the surgeon, the worse the note," which is to say, the fine surgeons who had great surgical technique often wrote de minimus notes. But their patients did well, where the patient of the guy who wrote lovely, flowing notes in the chart was the one with the wound infection, the wound dehissence , the post operative complications.

So now, at least in the shake out phase of EMR, we have the medical version of "juking the stats."  Bad doctors will look good. Good doctors will look bad, and the medical record will be page after page of pretty looking, but empty, often erroneous, well printed in good font style, and useless as a medical record. 

The Positive Side of Failure

When I was coming up through public schools, one thing I learned quickly and took to heart was you were supposed to succeed.  So, in many ways I learned how not to learn.

One of my sons, who has an enviable memory, did not learn to read in first grade until his teacher realized he had learned the books in the reading group by heart and was simply repeating the lines as he had memorized them. He did the same thing, at first, with algebra: rather than abstracting he memorized the problems and their answers. He got by all that once he was found out.  Then he had to struggle with learning the sounds the letters made, and he had to learn the abstract part of algebra which could be applied to word problems with different words but the same algebraic problem.

Now, at a ripe age, I am trying to learn to play the piano.

This requires memory, rhythm, pitch and a lot of things I know I am lacking. But mostly, it requires memory and practice and persistence.

I have reason to believe I will never be much of a piano player.  It is something you learn in pieces and add one piece on top of another, until you have enough of a package to use it. It is frustrating, and I fail a lot. 

My teacher is demanding, but patient.

He makes a living teaching piano, an occupation for which I have developed immense respect.  He is pressing  me to use parts of my brain which are not simply long dormant, but probably congenitally absent. So, I fail a lot. 

But the failure is okay. Even though I cannot do the things which require beat, rhythm and memory and all the things you need to play the piano, I now listen to someone playing the piano and I hear things I never could hear before. I've always been transported by music; it's been like heroin.  But now, I can hear things I never could hear before.  So my world has been enlarged.

I had a friend who, at age 70 something decided he ought to learn Swedish. Why Swedish I never found out. But he worked at it steadily. We moved too far apart for me to learn how far he got.  He may never had learned much Swedish. But he was trying.

Somehow, all the frustration which is involved in learning is part of the package. 

There are some people who seem to learn music and languages with little frustration. They go from success to success. I'm not sure what to make of them. I cannot recall ever learning anything without trying hard, except maybe swimming, which just seemed to happen. I watched other kids swim, got the group lessons at camp and then jumped in and swam, as far as I can recall. When they coached us on the swimming team, I did what they told us to do, and it worked.  Nothing frustrating there. Teaching people how to swim, I realized it's not that easy for everyone. 

Maybe it's like that for some people with languages and piano. 

But somehow, for reasons I cannot fully comprehend, I think it's important, at least later in life, to keep trying to learn things which frustrate you. 

It keeps the world new and fresh.  You remember what it was like trying to learn stuff, how it felt to be a kid before everything gets transferred from the conscious part of your brain to the unconscious part, further down toward the brainstem.

When you first learn to type, it's all frustration and drudgery, but then, once you've been doing it for years, it's just in there. No thought involved. In fact, if you try to write down a picture of the keyboard, forget it. You can't. You can use the keyboard, but it's not on the conscious level of knowledge. 

As you get older, there are a lot of things just in there, and there's less daily frustration.

That's why you should try the piano, or the violin or something you find frustrating. 

It'll make you feel young again.

Gerrymandering and The Corruption of an Ideal

As we all learned in middle school history, when the 13 original colonies were trying to figure out the new Republic, the small states were worried they would become colonies of the big states, ruled over by the populous states who would use and abuse the resources of the smaller states to the advantage of the big states. Merchants in Rhode Island and Maryland, small states with big bays,  were determined to protect their own access to international markets and  Virginia, a very large state with slaves and cotton did not want New York simply voting to control its economy.

So emerged the concept of representation in the legislature not by counting bodies, one man one vote, but by apportioning power in the legislature according to other criteria. 

Initially, the only people with power were free (white) male property owners, and men who were "bound to Service for a Term," meaning indentured free men who would complete their contract to serve another man, and then be free to earn a living independently. Slaves would be counted as 3/5 of a body and Indians did not count at all, specifically excluded by the Constitution.

The states themselves were defined by various charters, history, occasional surveyors.  Some, like Vermont and New Hampshire, were divided by geography, a river, topographic differences--Vermont was populated in valleys between forested mountains and New Hampshire had granite mountains, a seacoast and a river separating it from Maine to the East and a river separating it from Vermont on the East.  

Once the Republic was up and running, the idea of representatives in Congress being selected to represent not people but regions, geography, land was never quite dismissed. Voters in upstate New York believed the huge voting block of New York City might vote for projects and values which reflected the needs and desires of the city which would conflict with the needs and values of the rural upstate population. 

Whole states, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana cover vast expanses of geography, but have fewer people than Washington, D.C. or any of a score of  large metropolitan areas.

So, withing states, territories were carved out to insure geography was proportioned votes in the legislature to protect the interests of the few who controlled big geographic territory.  Senators from each state are elected without regard to the geography of the state, but Representatives are elected from "districts" which presumably were meant to reflect the interests of distinct territories within a state. You might have an urban district with several million voters getting one representative in Congress while three rural districts, with a grand total of thirty thousand people might get three representatives. 

State legislatures were given the power to draw these districts and they drew them to keep the party in power when the lines were drawn in power until the next census ten years hence.  This practice of Gerrymandering of course, violates the principle of Congressmen representing people as opposed to rich industrial farmers, or coal mine owners or steel magnates or oil barons, who might control a small number of voters by virtue of their power to employ. 

In a fascinating article in today's New York Times, a Princeton professor of molecular biology, Sam Wang, has applied his computer programs to analyze how Gerrymandering has perverted representation among the states. In only one state--surprisingly it's Arizona--do the Democrats have more Representatives in the House of Representatives than they have votes in the last election. But in five states, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina and Florida, popular majorities for Democrats were thwarted by Gerrymandering so the majority of Representatives from each of those states are Republicans.

In California, where districts are not drawn by the politicians in the state legislature, but by a non partisan commission, the popular vote is reflected almost precisely in the numbers of Representatives allotted each party. 

If Gerrymandering had been in effect for the Presidential election, Mitt Romney would be President today, as all five of those key states (Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Florida and Virginia) would have cast their electoral votes for Mr. Romney.

Is Gerrymandering corruption or is it simply an effort at compromising between the interests of the rural, the minority of citizens who control the majority of the land and resources and the interests of the big populations in the cities?

Had Gerrymandering not handed the Republicans extra seats, had the popular vote been reflected in the House of Representatives, even though Mr. Obama won the popular vote nationwide by over 5 million people,  the seat count in the House of Representatives would still be Republicans 220, Democrats 215.  Presumably, this reflects the fact we still send Representatives to Congress based on states.

But "gridlock" in Congress, the dysfunctionality of the broken legislative branch would be significantly ameliorated. 

That is the story of the numbers. It is not the story of our Republic.

The Value of A College Education

Arthur C. Brooks
President American Enterprise Institute

In today's New York Times, Arthur C. Brooks tells the tale of how he got his correspondence B.A. and M.A. degrees for about $15,000, and how that's all he needed to launch his academic career, which propelled him to a professorship at Syracuse University and, ultimately, to the presidency of The American Enterprise Institute, a conservative Washington, D.C. think tank where Newt Gringrich and former George W. Bush war hawk Paul Wolfowitz have hung their hats. 

His argument is the well worn you-don't-need-a-Harvard-education trope to succeed in this country, just drive, discipline, intelligence and desire.

But the real question is whether his correspondence course degree was valuable to him, or could he have succeeded without it?

Thomas Friedman has recently argued in a futurist article that bricks and mortar universities are a thing of the past. The prospect of online professors from Princeton and Stanford and MIT teaching thousands of eager students, hungry for knowledge, from all over the globe will send campus based residential colleges on to the ash heap of educational history.

What could the value of a college degree be? For that matter, when it comes to education, do you really need all those other students and all those teachers at all? Is there any value to a high school education, or is passing the GED exam the "equivalent" of a high school education? 

So how do you place value on any academic degree and how do you place value on an education? Of course, the merit badge is quite different from the experience.

Well, there is the value in an institutional/certification sense: Many jobs simply require a college degree, any, college degree and make no distinction between a Harvard degree and a University of Phoenix on line degree. If your school is accredited, you can check off that box: Do you have an B.A.? For the man who worked on the line doing high tech welding at the General Electric plant, the guy who impressed his bosses and was put forward for a management position but was told, no he could not be in management because he did not have a B.A. degree, well, that correspondence course would have done the trick. It would have been worth money and career advancement to him.

Of course, most people would recognize the ridiculous nature of even having that requirement for a management position at a GE plant which makes airplane engines. Would someone who majored in drinking at State U be a better manager than the man who had demonstrated his worth over 15 years at that plant? But that's the stupidity of our thoughtless "human resource" establishment. During war,  sergeants receive "battlefield commissions" for demonstrated leadership and worthiness, without having graduated from West Point or officers' candidate school. During war, the Army is concerned with demonstrated leadership, the certification process be damned. Lives are at stake.

Then there is the "cachet" value of a degree from a certain college. Where does a Harvard degree get you that a degree from the University of Wisconsin does not?

There are certain law firms which hire only from Harvard or Yale law schools. But one might ask: Would you really want to work at one of these firms?

Goldman Sacks and other highly competitive financial institutions may recruit only from Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford, but one might ask, given the attrition of new recruits to these companies, is getting a job at one of these pressure cookers really such a plum? Is a job at Goldman a glittering prize,  or a poison pill?

 Medicine is much more egalitarian. Medicine looks for real  talent more than bragging rights.  Medical schools realize the process of selecting the freshman class at Harvard is flawed and pretty close to random. But the process of judging college students is better honed.  Medical schools can look at college performance to judge who has talent.  The most elite medical schools admit students from "no name" colleges, although a preponderance of the class at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons have been drawn from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Stanford. Out of 150 places in the first year class about 80 are drawn from those schools, but a mix come from of the  Swarthmore, Vanderbilt, Berkeley, Smith tier schools, and then there are all those from the NYU, Georgetown, University of Michigan tier and then a few from the University of Maryland,  Gettysburg College tier. 

The old saw at Cornell was you better look out for the Brooklyn College students--they were admitted for a reason.  Which is to say, some of the kids from Princeton got in because they came from Princeton, but the kids from Brooklyn College had to do something to really impress the admissions people.

If you are looking at college as an investment, risk/ benefit proposition, in terms of dollars and cents, it may be worth spending big bucks to go to Harvard, Yale or Princeton, if you are looking for a chance to get your foot in the door at Goldman, but for most jobs, it doesn't matter.  But you may get a job interview more readily at Liberty Mutual insurance company if you majored in computer science at Carnegie Mellon than if you majored in economics at Harvard.

In fact, the engineering student from Drexel likely has better job prospects coming out of college than the English major from Harvard. It is not at all clear the engineer from Harvard has a better outlook than the engineer from Drexel.

If you want to go to medical school, any decent college will do, and in fact, you might are better off at the top of your class at Maryland than at the bottom of your class at Princeton. That's why you see so many Princeton grads at Albany or Downstate Medical School rather than at Harvard. 

But beyond the cachet of a brand name college, what of the actual experience at a four year residential college? Is there value beyond dollars and cents to that?

"No power point presentation or elegant online lecture can make up for the surprise, the frisson, the spontaneous give-and-take of a spirited open-ended dialogue with another person," says Darryl Thompson, the provost of Pepperdine University.

The Phantom certainly recalls classes at college where that was true in spades, but likely there were only a dozen times over four years where that sort of frisson thing happened in a classroom.

For content heavy courses, especially in the sciences, the classes were large and little to and fro occurred and could just as well been televised or skyped and even as we speak many students at Columbia P&S do not attend lectures but simply look at the lecture on line. 

At the Phantom's college, you could sit in the office of your professor and discuss topics, one on one, much as tutors at Oxford and Cambridge do. It was a small college and undergraduates were encouraged to visit professors during office hours. The Phantom well remembers a few electric sessions where the professor asked a question, the Phantom answered, only to be thwarted by another question following from that answer. That was real teaching and learning, but it happened only occasionally. 

It was the courses where they taught you how to think, often an English class or a philosophy class, where you had to be there. And when you were there, and watched a professor who had total command of his subject ask the right questions, anticipate the answers and ask the next question, you came out of that class a changed human being and you kept talking about it with classmates for days afterwards.

There were as many bad, dreary, useless, destructive experiences in my college education as there were elevating, exhilarating soul changing experiences, at least if we are talking about only classroom experience.

The thing is, the positive experiences were worth suffering through the bad stuff. That was true for the Phantom, because his parents could afford to send him through an Ivy League college without breaking the bank. His mother worked to pay for his education, and it was affordable to a very middle class family, back in the sixties.

Now, the cost of college education is beyond the means of the middle class family.

The value of a college education in dollars in cents probably only makes sense for those who are not counting pennies.

The reasons for this are not entirely clear. At Berkeley, it likely has to do with professors who teach too few classes and drive the overhead up so high tuition has gone out of sight. Professors who teach only one class a semester and sometimes only one a year are simply too expensive a luxury.

But the data is not yet available to the public. It is not clear why inflation in college costs have increased 18% over the 5 years between 2006 and 2011 while overall inflation and incomes fell.

The Phantom's father told him, "That college punched your ticket and you got into medical school. That's enough to ask."  That is the career argument, but it's not clear that really still holds true across our economy.

The real value of a college education is what changes occur inside the skull of the student, changes the Phantom's father might have dismissed with a harrumph. 

But for those lucky few who had that awakening in college, there is no cynical dismissal. The transformation was too real to deny.