Stanford Report, February 4, 2004

In Print & On the Air

IN A JAN. 30 OPINION PIECE IN the San Jose Mercury News, MICHAEL MAY argued that the United States was intent on going to war, whether or not Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. May, a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for International Studies and an engineering professor emeritus, said analysts in both the United States and Britain who knew that Iraq had no weapons capability could not get their message past the lowest levels of the intelligence bureaucracy. "The 'intelligence failure' cost the lives and health of thousands of men and women, and left families in America and around the world grieving -- all for nothing," May wrote. "It has cost the American people $200 billion and counting. Saddam is gone, perhaps a few months ahead of when he would have been gone anyway, but the United States is saddled with an Iraq that will take a long time to find its way, assuming the United States does not desert it again." According to May, "heads should roll" at the top of the intelligence community and among those who would not hear or investigate the truth while they could.

HANS WEILER, PROFSSOR emeritus of education and political science, told Die Welt, one of the leading national papers in Germany, that a much-debated proposal to establish in that country "elite universities à la Harvard and Stanford" is absurd. In the Jan. 13 interview, Weiler argued that the proposal, which is backed by Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democratic Party, is totally unrealistic and disingenuous, particularly at a time when existing German universities are seriously underfinanced. Weiler argued it would make much more sense to establish and foster centers of scholarly excellence at existing universities that would include the kinds of research capacities now largely located outside institutions of higher learning.

LAW PROFESSOR EMERITUS WILLIAM B. GOULD, former chairman of the National Labor Relations Board, told the San Francisco Chronicle on Jan. 28 that recent grocery worker union plans to march to the Alamo home of Safeway CEO Steve Burd, whose company is involved in a bitter labor dispute, are unusual but not unique. "Unions are resorting increasingly to unorthodox tactics because of the relative ineffectiveness of the normal weapons they use, like strikes," said Gould. "I don't think that focusing on the head of the company in a labor dispute is low-ball at all. The buck stops there." About 70,000 workers are locked out of Southern California Safeway, Albertsons and Kroger stores in a three-month dispute that both sides view as pivotal. The grocery chains say they need concessions from workers to compete against nonunion competition, while the union views the supermarket industry as one of the last bastions providing middle-class jobs that cannot be exported overseas.