The Rake Magazine

Author: Tom Bartel

  • Opportunity Lost

    The American legal system and the parents of a certain Breck School senior took a pounding in the press and on talk radio last week. For the few of you who missed it, here is the story: Andrew Stanoch, a high school senior at Breck, was caught with a small amount of marijuana during the morning of a school day. Breck expelled him. Stanoch’s parents sued Breck, and Hennepin County Judge Allen Oleisky ordered Breck to readmit him.

    Essentially, Judge Oleisky’s reasoning was that Breck’s policy on possession of drugs was sufficiently vague so as to make their expulsion of Stanoch arbitrary. Although the Breck policy clearly states that a student who is found to possess drugs “faces dismissal,” the policy also says a student who “possesses, uses, or comes under the influence of alcohol or other harmful chemicals is required to follow the appropriate recommendations as set forth by the school in order to remain in the Breck Community.”

    What I think Breck was trying to accomplish by their wording “faces dismissal,” was the total discretion to act however they please whenever they please. That is, if they like the kid they can find a way to keep him. If they don’t, he’s gone. As Breck is quick to point out, they have hundreds on the waiting list ready to fill the spot. (I am discounting any suggestion that Breck was just sloppy in the way they wrote their policy. God knows there are enough lawyers around the place they could get it right if they wanted.)

    The criticism leveled at Stanoch’s parents and Judge Oleisky was vicious. The talk radio crowd and the letter writers to the Strib were near unanimous in their condemnation. As a parent of a Breck sophomore and a recent Breck graduate, my first inclination was to agree with them. But I’ve read Oleisky’s decision, and I’ve spent some time looking into the policies at another private high school I know, and I have come to the conclusion that Breck not only blew it legally, they also blew the opportunity to do what they are supposed to do best—educate.

    The other private school I contacted has an extensive disciplinary policy regarding drug and alcohol possession that involves three levels of offenses. The Level 1 offense is possession with intent to sell, or actually selling drugs. That gets you expelled, period. The Level 2 offense is hosting a party where alcohol or drugs are used. That gets you suspended or expelled, depending on the discretion of the dean of students. The Level 3 offense of simple possession or being under the influence gets you a parent conference, chemical dependency evaluation and in-school suspension for a first time offense. The second offense gets you mandatory rehab and out-of-school suspension. Only the third Level 3 offense gets you expelled. And even then, you may be able to come back if you can convince the school your behavior has changed.

    When I asked the president of that school why their seemingly lax policy worked for them, he answered, “We want to be partners in helping that student become a better person. If we simply expel him, we lose that educational opportunity.” He also pointed out that a more lenient policy also encouraged students who aren’t using to tell the school if another student “needs help” without worrying that their friend will be expelled. “We have had several students approach us on that basis,” he said. “They want to help, and they know we want to help, too.”

    Now perhaps the Breck administration wanted to get rid of Andrew Stanoch for other reasons and took this opportunity to pull the trigger. Perhaps they wanted to get rid of his parents. That is exactly the sort of arbitrary power Breck’s policy was intended to protect.

    Stanoch’s parents certainly squandered their opportunity to teach their son a lesson about the consequences of his actions. Since they didn’t seem to know or care that the lawsuit made it a matter of public record that their son uses drugs, as well as made it much less likely that any exclusive college would admit a litigious family, we wonder if they understand the concept themselves.

    But maybe if the Breck administrators were to reexamine their own role in the education of Andrew Stanoch, they would come to the conclusion they could have done a better job, too.

  • Wellstone the Teacher

    My son Matt, who is a freshman at Carleton College, called me early last Friday afternoon to tell me that he’d just heard that Paul Wellstone had been killed in a plane crash. He’d got the news right after getting out of his freshman political science class, the same class I’d taken at Carleton 32 years ago from Paul Wellstone.

    By then I’d been at Carleton for two terms and had encountered, I thought, all the typical types of college teacher. The calculus teacher had a beard and wore a peace medallion over his turtleneck and smoked dope with students. The Latin teacher was 70 years old and chain smoked Pall Malls while quizzing you on Virgil’s grammar. The English teacher lost his collection of tweed jackets and Hemingway when his house went up in smoke.

    Wellstone breathed fire.

    He was the first teacher who reminded me of me—short stature, long hair, loud voice. Like me, he wore t-shirts and jeans to class and seemed to pay scant attention to the reading list he’d assigned, except that he had an amazing command of facts that he used to support his lectures, which actually were more like speeches. His brilliance was manifest. He was a first year teacher, so he couldn’t have memorized his lectures, but he spoke without notes for an hour. He wasn’t constrained by a podium, but he was predictable. Every lecture he’d start with his fingers jammed into his jeans with the thumbs hooked over the edge of the pocket, as if he were trying to restrain himself from what he must have known was coming–the inevitable rising volume, quickening cadence, and karate chopping of knowledge into our small freshman brains.


    Sometimes you’d come out of class feeling as if you’d been assaulted by an intellect and energy so far superior to yours that you’d never measure up. But more often, you felt smarter for having spent an hour with him. That was his power, and he used it to great effect on people who had yet to fully develop their own critical abilities.

    Wellstone didn’t fit the Carleton mode. Then, Carleton was the ivory tower, and the presumption was that most of what you’d ever have to know could be learned within the confines of campus. Students were not permitted to have cars. All students lived in the dorms. And the work load was so ferocious and academic standards so high that every moment spent other than in class or the library was regarded as lost. Carleton’s stature among the best liberal arts colleges seemed a justification of its insular attitudes. Whenever we had a large snowfall, I imagined the college news bureau coming up with a press release headline: “Highway 19 Closed, World Cut Off.”

    Wellstone wasn’t of such scholarly demeanor. In 1974, he was given a negative evaluation by his department and was on the verge of being fired. The then president openly wanted to be rid of him, as did most of his colleagues. (To their credit, many Carleton profs admitted this even after last Friday.) But students and recent alumni, who’d obviously picked up something about the power of politics in his classes, organized in his defense, as did some sympathetic colleagues. The college eventually agreed to an evaluation of his work by scholars not connected with Carleton. This evaluation was overwhelmingly positive, and the decision was reversed. He was actually granted tenure a year ahead of the normal cycle.

    Carleton was an early power base for him. A liberal arts college in a liberal state is a Petri dish for growing lefties, and he knew it. From Carleton, he started organizing in Rice County, moved from there to the western Minnesota power line controversy, to the nomination for state auditor and to the Senate. His cadre was young, very smart, and mesmerized by his power to harangue. Wellstone never taught, by example anyway, that it was sometimes more effective to shut up. (Rick Kahn, a former student who spoke at his memorial service, unfortunately didn’t pick up that lesson from anyone else either.)

    Wellstone’s attractiveness lay not just in his oratorical skills, though, but in his liberal message itself, repeated endlessly. His true believers never flagged.

    But to others, the diatribe became tiresome, and we lost interest. It’s hard to tell whether it was from pure repetition or because of the seeming change in Wellstone from outsider to insider, best typified by the change in his advertising strategy from the distinctive wit and message of 1990 to the same monotonous doggerel broadcast by every other Candidate X ad infinitum. As his erstwhile ad man said last month in The Rake, “He drank the Kool-Aid.” Hell, if you believe what you hear from those who spend too much time on counterpunch.com, our interest waned because Wellstone wasn’t radical enough.

    I went to a Democratic fundraiser with Al Gore last month. The main topic of the evening was why Democrats were losing ground every election. Gore, one would think, should have more insight into that question than any man alive. A brilliant man with the right ideas, who so muddled his message during the campaign that he couldn’t even carry his own state, somehow didn’t offer me any answers. Congressional candidate Janet Robert made it all clear to me though. She chimed in that she was in such a close race she had to support Bush’s Iraq policy so she could get elected.

    Since I also have never learned the lesson of shutting up, I asked “Why then should Democrats vote for you if you’re just going to act like a Republican? Any first year marketing student could tell you that you have to draw a clear distinction between your product and that of your competitor. Do you think they sell Aquafresh toothpaste by telling you it’s just like Colgate, only a little bit tastier?” There was a brief lull in the din, which in a room full of Democrats, is about all you can hope for.

    Wellstone wasn’t there that night, but he gave us his answer the next week by voting against granting Bush dictatorial war powers. He was the only candidate in a close race to do so. He certainly didn’t do it for marketing reasons, because, if anything should be clear to us, it’s that Wellstone knew nothing about marketing. What he did know was what was right. Oddly, that was his market advantage, and his polls immediately trended up. I wonder if he even knew why.

    That’s the last lesson the professor got through to me–that despite the prevailing political wisdom, the people will ultimately know the genuine man not by what he says, no matter how loud and often he says it, but by what he does. The rest is silence.

    Photo courtesy of Carleton College

  • Forgiving Rick Kahn

    Fritz Mondale said Wednesday that the effect of the tragedy on those closest to Wellstone didn’t justify the tone of his memorial service, “But we’ve all made mistakes. Can’t we find it in our hearts to forgive?”

    I certainly hope so—for a couple of reasons. First, how do we blame Rick Kahn for an electorate that gives Norm Coleman only 30 percent of the vote when he’s running against Jesse Ventura but 50 percent when running against Fritz Mondale? And second, if the Democrats are in a situation where one speech by one person that nobody had ever heard of can kill their election chances, their problems undoubtedly run deeper.

    So, whom can we blame? I think Ventura gets a heaping share for making such a big deal out of Kahn’s speech that he walked out of the memorial, appointed Barkley to the senate seat, and ordered the flags which had been lowered for Wellstone back to the top of the staff. (Of course, if you believe the disingenuous Pioneer Press editorialist D. J. Tice, we should praise Governor Dimwit’s swift assessment of Kahn’s speech, for if not for Jesse, response to the memorial faux pas “would have hardened along partisan lines, producing mostly confusion and still more bitterness.” Yup, thank God for Jesse helping to mitigate the bitterness so voters could get back to considering the real issues.)

    Some blame should accrue to Jim Ramstad, the Republican singled out by Kahn that night, who immediately said, "People get carried away sometimes with emotions. We all get carried away sometimes with emotions. Just let it be." The stark contrast between the class Ramstad and the crass Ventura not only benefited the Republicans, but helped sink Ventura’s party mate Tim Penny.

    Don’t forget Norm Coleman, who was facing certain drowning under a tidal wave of Wellstone sympathy, and yet never complained, nor showed anything less than regret at the loss of an honorable opponent, even when he knew he would now have to go up against the second most popular politician in Minnesota history.

    President Bush deserves particular blame, too. The son of the man who once called Paul Wellstone a “chicken shit” praised Wellstone’s principles, even though he agrees with not a one.

    Yeah, I’m blaming the Republicans for their victory, in Minnesota and in every other state where they kicked Demo butt. They are better actors, better marketers and much better politicians. If you don’t believe that, ask yourself if you do believe, had the shoe been on the other foot, that the Republicans would have let the family send some overwrought accountant without a script to deliver Jesse Helms’ eulogy.

    It reminds me of the line in The Untouchables when Sean Connery accuses his opponent of “bringing a knife to a gun fight.” Well, the Democrats brought a pea shooter. They have the best orator that’s been in the White House in my lifetime in the audience and they let the admitted drudge Tom Harkin rattle off the same old Democrat doxology? We should be glad these guys lost, because if you can screw up a funeral that bad, imagine what they’d do to the country.

    Which, come to think of it, is what you have to do–imagine what the Dems would do, because I’ll be damned if I can remember if they told me in the past several months. One thing you can say about the Republicans is they’ll sure tell you what they are going to do. In case you have forgotten, it’s destroy Iraq, give you a prescription drug plan, fix social security, make sure your neighbor is not Al Qaeda, police up the corporate villains, fix the schools, and get tough on crime while keeping it easy for a 17-year-old undocumented alien to get a sniper rifle. Best of all, you won’t have to pay for any of this because they are not going to raise taxes. What makes it even cooler is that each one of these messages fits neatly into a 30 second voice over of pictures of a good looking young man in an open collar shirt shaking hands and kissing babies.

    That is how politics is done. And as long as the Democrats believe that a man like Fritz Mondale, whose thoughts on complex issues don’t fit neatly between the sports and weather on the 10 p.m. news, can win against this kind of expertise and execution, I don’t see much hope.

    As for me, tonight I’m going to start acting like a Republican. I’m going out for a very expensive dinner, and I’m going to charge it to my kids.

  • Public or Private?

    Smart people send their kids to private schools, right? Maybe not. Even as vouchers become a reality, and public school budgets get bodyslammed, your options may be growing.

    I am the product of a private high school. Not one of the toney schools that serve as the Ivy League of the Twin Cities, but what passed for one in Omaha-the Jesuit school.

    There was no pretense of Christian humility when it came to Creighton Prep. We were the best at everything from the math and Latin contests to the four state sport championships we won my senior year. Top performance was encouraged and expected in all areas. The culture of the student body, at least in the classes I was in, was to respect the guys who got great grades as much as the guys who hit home runs. Often they were the same guys.

    The teachers, from the beginning of freshman year, treated us like men. (There were no girls.) If you got good grades on the tests, you didn’t have to turn in, or even do, your rote homework. For sophomore American History we had to read an extra book of our own choosing each quarter and make an oral book report to the teacher after school. One time I was surprised that the only question I got on the book was, “Did you read it Mr. Bartel?” I answered truthfully, “Yes.” “That’s good enough for me,” said Father O’Leary.

    We had lots of homework, and though we rarely had to turn in pages of math or physics problems or Latin conjugations, we were tested frequently on whether or not we were keeping up. And for those who weren’t, the punishment was clear. You would have to start doing all those problems again.

    The English curriculum in particular was extraordinarily rigorous and holistic. Freshman English was concerned mostly with how to read literature. We read classic short stories, some poetry and a few short novels, but concentrated on learning how to think about them. We learned new words such as denouement and catharsis. We learned to distinguish climax from conclusion and to recognize irony. Transferred epithets did not trouble us. Onomatopoeia and synecdoche were our friends. Sophomore year started with creation stories from various cultures including Babylonian, East Indian, Native American, and Hebrew, and progressed through the Oedipus plays, Arthurian legend, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Dickens. Junior year we got Swift, the Book of Job, Hawthorne, Melville, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Salinger. Senior year started with James Joyce and then explained him by reading Homer, Virgil, Beowulf, the Niebelungenlied, and the Song of Roland. And for three years, we wrote an English paper every week.

    My friends who went to public school didn’t do this. Their math curriculum was more advanced than ours, but while we took history, they had social studies. While we took Latin and another language for four years, many of them didn’t take language at all. What did all that mean? Less than I thought at the time. Because the public schools, at least the ones I knew, taught many of the same books, grouped students by ability levels, and sent their best grads to the top colleges. Is that as true today? Perhaps. But the indications are that many public schools are only now getting back to a more rigorous education after a long experiment with something unrecognizable to many of us.

    Research assistance by Matt Bartel

  • School Athletics, Admissions, and Community

    Getting Into Harvard
    What does it take these days?

    Will graduating at the top of the class from a good Twin Cities private school get your child into Harvard? No, but it won’t necessarily hurt. According to the U.S. News and World Report compilation of college admissions information for 2001, 34 percent of the students admitted to Harvard College came from private high schools. “We don’t hold private schools against anybody,” says Marlyn McGrath Lewis, Director of Admissions of Harvard College, with a touch of irony. “We don’t admit high schools. We admit students.” By the U.S. News measurement, Harvard is the toughest college to get into in the country. When you look beyond the fact that Harvard admitted only 10 percent of its applicants last year to some of the details behind the numbers, the task of getting into Harvard is even more daunting.
    Lewis says that, of the more than 19,000 applicants for the 1,650 places in the freshman class, 87 percent were “qualified to do [Harvard] work with a measure of grace.” Of those, 347 applicants had perfect 1600 SAT scores. Fewer than half of those were admitted. Nearly 3,000 of the applicants had ranked first in their high school class. Only 20 percent of those were admitted.
    So, what does get you into Harvard?
    It’s not all academic.

    About 300 students were admitted on the basis of their scholarship as reviewed by Harvard faculty in their field. But, for most applicants, the high school record serves only as a guideline. The objective tests, such as the SAT exams, provide some means of comparison of applicants, and some means of gauging “what the grades at the school mean.” But again, Lewis doesn’t put much weight on high school preparation. “We try not to reward over-preparation. For example, we can teach people to write, so we’re not necessarily disinclined to take someone from a school where the literary education isn’t as good.” Lewis said they look for the “DE”—the distinguishing excellence. “We look for something that will let us choose them over someone else. Are they a musician, a hockey player, or did they work 40 hours a week to help support their family?”

    Does that have anything to do with the applicant’s high school? No and yes. “We ask what they have done with the opportunities they have had. If the school has minimal academics, we ask where the student spent his time. We don’t necessarily value a school that determines what you do 18 hours a day,” she said.

    “There is no sure route to the best colleges, but as a general rule, put [your student] in a school where he is comfortable enough to develop his talent. Try to send your kid to a place that has intellectual values that you value. If a high school has the right culture, it will encourage the student to read thoughtfully. Choose an environment like that—that knows and loves every kid, if you have a choice. If you can choose a school where talents are honored and developed, do it. Most aren’t that lucky.”

    At schools like Harvard, she added, “It is never just the point of admissions to have students who can get As here. We will take some with more visible flaws. For us it’s a game of futures. We place bets on people who will make a significant contribution to society after graduation.”

    NEXT: The Same Sex Option

  • Dear New Friends:

    I want to describe where we are trying to go with The Rake, and to beg your patience while we inevitably stumble on our way. Basically, we want to be storytellers. All the other stuff we’ll do will be to make room for more stories.

    I always envied my father’s ability to make up stories while he was driving the family from Iowa to Colorado on vacation. Our two favorites were “Art Bartel: The One-Man Division” about his exploits in World War II, and “El Diablo” about when he was a cowboy by day and righter-of-wrongs and wooer-of-senoritas at night. We didn’t know it then, but that story about how he held off an entire Panzer division with “nothing but a .45” wasn’t complete bullshit.

    He was a member of the 5th Ranger Battalion. He was at Bastogne. He was at the Huertgen Forest. He won a Silver Star, a Bronze Star with a cluster, several unit citations, and three Purple Hearts. After he was shot the third time, he spent a year in a hospital. But he wouldn’t talk about that, so he spun out comic book stories. The truth, my brothers and I realized later, was that he couldn’t tell us what he really had done, because that would mean he’d have to tell us about how a ricochet from his gun hit his friend in the throat, or how his best friend from the high school class of 1941 had drowned when his ship was torpedoed in the English Channel, or how he had killed 23 Germans with their own machine gun because he was too scared to get up and run after seeing two other guys shot in the back.

    So, we got the story of blowing up a tank with one bullet from the .45, instead of the one about how he lay wounded in a drainage ditch and shot morphine into his leg until the survivors of his squad could knock out the machine gun at the end of the street. Instead of talking about the life expectancy of replacements, he’d only tell us of the advice he lived by: “Try to look unimportant, the Germans may be low on ammo,” and “Never share a foxhole with someone braver than you.”

    Based on that scant testimony, I didn’t understand why he tried so hard to keep me out of Vietnam, or why he never joined the VFW, or why he wouldn’t go back to France. All he would say is that anyone who glorified war had never seen one, or he’d make some crack about the guys in the “mess kit repair battalion.”

    My father has still left all the details unspoken. I’ve got them from my mother, my aunts, some old letters, and a Silver Star citation I found in a box. This year, he wrote his memoirs, but mostly left out the war. We pry at family dinners, but when he starts to remember, he gets sad and makes up a story about something else-like when he was a cowboy. There’s no bullshit there. He can really ride a horse.

    Until I can get him to tell the real El Diablo story, we hope to fill The Rake with stories as good. In the meantime, please write us and tell us how we’re doing. Next month, this space is yours.