Michael O'Hare

Today the Berkeley faculty will have a special meeting to consider several resolutions condemning the police behavior at the Nov. 9 Occupy Cal demonstration, and another resolution that says in part: Therefore be it Resolved that the Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate has lost confidence in the ability of Chancellor Birgeneau, EVC Breslauer and […]

In the northeastern cities best known to me (Boston and New York), small multi-family buildings whose owners live in one of the units are a common housing form. The classic types are, respectively the triple-decker and the brownstone row house. Interestingly, these physical forms became owner-occupied rental housing (OORH) from opposite directions: the three-deckers were […]

When the Alameda County Sheriff’s cops suited up in their riot armor and, AFAIK with our campus officers , beat a bunch of our students and faculty with batons, my chancellor was in Shanghai setting up a branch campus; I don’t know who was nominally in charge and forgot to be in charge. When the […]

It has now been two weeks, and the PSU affair is still, almost universally, treated as a localized problem in a small town in Pennsylvania involving mistreatment of kids (not players, not students). But that’s not what the Penn State crisis is: Penn State is just the place where a much more pervasive sickmess was […]

OWS is losing public support, to 33 for-45 opposed from 35F-36O a month ago. The project is suffering from a variety of problems mostly related to the lack of focus and leadership that appeared to its adherents as a virtue when it began. This doesn’t mean it shouldn’t have happened, but it might be time […]

Last week I polled my mostly-undergraduate policy design class at Berkeley as follows: A. Social Security is in very serious financial trouble and probably won’t be there for my parents B. Social Security is in financial trouble and probably won’t be there for me C. Social Security is basically OK and just needs some minor […]

As is well known, the California legislature is slashing state support for higher education, forcing us to raise tuition again and again. One response at Cal has been a consulting project from Bain and Co., called Operational Excellence (perhaps because the words quality and excellence hardly occur in any of their product, which is about […]

A listserv that I belong to has had a discussion about why the ancient meme that cities are evil, unAmerican congregations of overeducated snobs, while folks in small towns are decent, commonsense types who look out for each other and embody real virtue, persists. To the point that no candidate for office boasts about a […]

Matt Yglesias and Kevin Drum are at it again about digital content. Unasked, I propose to mediate this dispute between parties known to me to be technically, economically, and politically astute, and to have their hearts in the right place. The question on the table is, approximately ,whether taking a good embodied in a bunch […]

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