Ten Quotes from the MPS Superintendents Forum

Ten quotes that stick in my head from the panel discussion of former Milwaukee Public Schools superintendents at the Law School on Monday evening:

Robert Peterkin, superintendent from 1988 to 1991: “This is a town that loves politics as a blood sport.”

Peterkin on school reform when he was in Milwaukee: “We should have done it twice as much, twice as fast, and twice as deep.” 

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Violence and Social Order

The L.A. Times published an op-ed on Monday touting Randolph Roth’s recent book, American Homicide (Wash. Post review). Roth is a historian at OSU who studies violence and social change, a subject I am intensely interested in as well. In American Homicide, Roth argues that the homicide rate in the United States tends to spike not as a result of gun ownership or poverty, but when people lose faith in their government. He claims that the first such notable rise in violence occurred in the aftermath of the Civil War, “a catastrophic failure in nation-building,” when a significant proportion of the population became extremely suspicious of their fellow Americans.

If true, that thesis bodes ill for our current situation, in which oddly apocalyptic rhetoric over ostensibly ordinary government actions seems to be on the rise. Loss of a debate now seems to no longer be an invitation to try harder next year, but rather conclusive evidence that the entire system is corrupt. While some have expressed the fear that such rhetoric will lead to large outbursts of explicitly anti-government violence, such as that planned by the militia members recently arrested in Michigan, the connection between overwrought rhetoric and such extremists seems tenuous at best. What seems more likely is that heated rhetoric augurs simply more violence, not violence directed at a particular target.

But predicting the future is treacherous business; it is far safer to try to explain the past. And Roth’s thesis, as I understand it (I haven’t read the book), helps explain some aspects of a phenomenon I’ve been interested in for a while now—the outbreak of violence in Tombstone, Arizona in 1881 and 1882, usually referred to as “the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.”

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So You Think You Can Bring Peace to the Middle East?

I’ve never used a computer game in my teaching, but Andrea Schneider and Kathleen Goodrich ‘o8 make a good case that the game PeaceMaker has a lot to teach dispute resolution students.  The game puts players into the position of either the Israeli Prime Minister or the Palestinian President, with an opportunity to achieve peace and win a Nobel Prize or fail and lose office.  Andrea and Kathleen describe how the game can be used to teach principles of dispute resolution in a new paper entitled “The Classroom Can Be All Fun & Games.”  Their paper, which is available on SSRN here, was recently published at 25 Ohio St. J. on Disp. Resol. 87.  The abstract appears after the jump.  Do readers have any other suggestions for computer games that can be usefully incorporated into law-school teaching?

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