OPINION
6A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • THURSDAY, DECEMBER 15, 2016
Founded in 1873
DAVID F. PERO, Publisher & Editor
LAURA SELLERS, Managing Editor
BETTY SMITH, Advertising Manager
CARL EARL, Systems Manager
JOHN D. BRUIJN, Production Manager
DEBRA BLOOM, Business Manager
OUR VIEW
Others step in
where governor
abdicates role
Durant offers sensible ideas
to address PERS deficit
ddressing Oregon’s annual Leadership Summit a year
ago, Gov. Kate Brown made no mention of the biggest
financial crisis facing state government: PERS, the under-
funded, bloated retirement system for public employees.
Nada. Zilch.
A year later and a month after being elected governor in her
own right, Brown spoke again to 1,200 leaders from business,
government and academia gathered in Portland. She mentioned
PERS once. She used the rest of her seven-minute speech to lec-
ture Oregon’s business community about its responsibilities to the
state.
Gov. Brown continues to proclaim that the courts have left
her no constitutional options for reducing the pension program’s
$22 billion deficit. That’s nonsense, of course. State Sens. Betsy
Johnson and Tim Knopp have put forth several ideas, most of
which passed scrutiny from the nonpartisan Office of Legislative
Counsel.
Now, another state leader, has weighed in.
Katy Durant served for 11 years on the Oregon Investment
Council, a panel of citizens that sets investment policy for the
state’s $69 billion public trust fund portfolio, which includes
PERS, the Common School Fund and the State Accident
Insurance Fund.
Durant retired from the board last week, but not before she
offered a warning and a list of sensible solutions to the PERS cri-
sis. According to the Oregonian newspaper, Durant wrote the
governor, challenging her to show “bold leadership” on PERS.
Without that, Durant wrote: “This house of cards will quickly col-
lapse, leaving Oregon in a fiscal crisis.”
“Failure to act quickly and decisively will result in a severe
imbalance” between the pension fund’s growing liability and the
state’s ability to meet it, Durant wrote. She then offered several
proposals. Among them:
• Increase the full retirement age for public employees from 58
to 67 to match Social Security.
• Move elected officials out of PERS and into a 401(k) type
system to eliminate the conflict of interest in voting for their own
benefits.
• Reduce the assumed rate of return on fund investments to a
more realistic level.
• Require public employees to contribute to their pension plan.
• Make annual debt payments of about $1 billion.
Durant’s proposals — along with those by Johnson and
Knopp — deserve thorough consideration by the governor and
Legislature. These reforms would help ensure the long-term sus-
tainability of PERS and allow our schools and local governments
to better address current needs.
Doing nothing — Gov. Brown’s default position – is unaccept-
able and would amount to an abdication of her responsibility as
our state’s chief executive.
A
Fresh start or crazy reckless?
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
New York Times News Service
M
aybe it will all turn out
OK. If it does, put me
down as promising to
applaud.
But my fellow Americans, what-
ever mix of motives
led us to create an
Electoral College
majority for Donald
Trump to become
president — and
overlook his lack
of preparation, his
record of indecent personal behavior,
his madcap midnight tweeting, his
casual lying about issues like “mil-
lions” of people casting illegal votes
in this election, the purveying of fake
news by his national security adviser,
his readiness to appoint climate
change deniers without even getting
a single briefing from the world’s
greatest climate scientists in the gov-
ernment he’ll soon lead, and his cav-
alier dismissal of the CIA’s conclu-
sions about Russian hacking of our
election — have no doubt about
one thing: We as a country have just
done something incredibly reckless.
‘Prehistoric’
There is actually something “pre-
historic” about the Cabinet that
Trump is putting together. It is totally
dominated by people who have spent
their adult lives drilling for, or advo-
cating for, fossil fuels — oil, gas and
coal.
You would never know that what
has actually made America great
is our ability to attract the world’s
smartest and most energetic immi-
grants and our ability “to develop
technology and to nurture our human
capital” — not just drill for coal and
oil, remarked Edward Goldberg, who
teaches at NYU’s Center for Global
Affairs and is the author of “The
Joint Ventured Nation: Why America
Needs a New Foreign Policy.”
Don’t misunderstand me: It is
excusable to raise questions about
climate change. But it is inexcusable
not to sit down with our own gov-
ernment experts at NASA and the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration for a briefing before
you appoint flagrant climate deniers
with no scientific background to
every senior environmental position.
It is excusable to question if Rus-
sia really hacked our election. But it
is inexcusable to dismiss the possi-
bility without first getting a briefing
from the CIA, some of whose agents
risked their lives for that intelligence.
Unbecoming
That is reckless behavior —
totally unbecoming a president, a
professional or just a serious adult.
It’s not that all of Trump’s goals
are wrongheaded or crazy. If he can
unlock barriers to innovation, infra-
structure investment and entrepre-
neurship, that will be a very good
thing. And I am not against working
more closely with Russia on global
issues or getting more tough-minded
on trade with China.
Putin is out
to erode
democracy
wherever he
can. Trump
needs to send
Putin a blunt
message
today: ‘I am
not your
chump.’
But growth that is heedless of
environmental impacts, collaboration
with Russia that is heedless of Vladi-
mir Putin’s malevolence, and greater
aggressiveness toward China that
is heedless of the carefully crafted
security balance among the U.S.,
China and Taiwan — which has pro-
duced prosperity and stability in Asia
for over four decades — is reckless.
For an administration that lost the
popular vote by such a large mar-
gin to suddenly take the country to
such extreme positions on energy,
environment and foreign policy —
unbalanced inside by any moderate
voices — is asking for trouble, and it
will produce a backlash.
Already, some Republican law-
makers who love our country more
than they fear Trump’s tweets —
like Sens. Lindsey Graham and John
McCain — are insisting that Rus-
sia’s apparent cyberhacking to help
Trump win election be investigated
by Congress.
If Congress affirms what the
intelligence community believes —
that Russia intervened in our dem-
ocratic process — that is an act of
war. And it calls for the severest eco-
nomic sanctions.
At the same time, Trump’s readi-
ness to dismiss the entire intelligence
community because its conclusions
contradict his instincts and inter-
ests could really haunt him down the
road.
Let’s imagine that in six months
the CIA concludes that North Korea
is about to perfect a nuclear missile
that can reach our West Coast and
President Trump orders a pre-emp-
tive strike, one that unleashes a lot of
instability in Asia. And then the next
day Trump and his national security
adviser, Mike Flynn, the purveyor
of fake news about Hillary Clin-
ton, defend themselves by saying,
“We acted on the ‘high confidence’
assessment of the CIA.” Who’s
going to believe them after they just
trashed the CIA?
Naiveté
Finally, Trump has demonstrated
a breathtaking naiveté toward Putin.
Putin wanted Trump to win because
he thinks that he’ll be a chaos pres-
ident, who will weaken America’s
influence in the world by weaken-
ing its commitment to liberal values
and will weaken America’s ability to
lead a Western coalition to confront
Putin’s aggression in Europe. Putin
is out to erode democracy wherever
he can. Trump needs to send Putin a
blunt message today: “I am not your
chump.”
As Stanford University democ-
racy expert Larry Diamond noted in
an essay on Atlantic.com last week:
“The most urgent foreign-policy
question now is how America will
respond to the mounting threat that
Putin’s Russia poses to freedom and
its most important anchor, the West-
ern alliance. Nothing will more pro-
foundly shape the kind of world we
live in than how the Trump adminis-
tration responds to that challenge.”
Make colleges diverse and look more like America
By DAVID LEONHARDT
New York Times News Service
M
any college campuses have
reacted to Donald Trump’s
election with shock and
angst. Professors and students are
wondering how the
rest of the country
could be so different
from them. The
more introspective
are asking: What
can we do?
Michael
Bloomberg has an answer.
It’s an answer that should appeal
to both liberals and conservatives —
an answer that isn’t about Trump per
se but instead about the alienation that
helped him win. Bloomberg wants to
make leading colleges more open to
the working class. He wants to make
them fairer places that look more like
America.
Top colleges are already diverse
in some ways, of course. They enroll
students of every ethnicity, from
around the world. Yet those otherwise
diverse student bodies remain dis-
tressingly affluent. Worst of all, they
remain affluent even though many
poor and middle-class students could
thrive at top colleges.
Local collages
A landmark recent study found
that most highly qualified low-in-
come students don’t attend one of the
country’s roughly 250 top colleges.
Many instead enroll in local colleges
with relatively few resources and high
dropout rates.
Think about what an injustice
this is. Thousands of students each
year overcome long odds — tough
neighborhoods, weak schools, cha-
otic families — and excel. Then soci-
ety lets them down once again. They
are robbed of the opportunities they
have earned, to borrow a phrase
from David Coleman of the College
Board.
On Tuesday, Bloomberg’s founda-
tion is starting an ambitious response,
the American Talent Initiative. As
some readers may know, this issue is
a passion of mine, and I consider the
project very promising.
It has a clear goal: The number
of Pell Grant recipients (who tend to
come from the bottom two-fifths of
the income distribution) attending the
270 colleges with the highest gradua-
tion rates should rise 50,000 within 10
years. That would be an increase of
more than 10 percent.
To get there, Bloomberg is creat-
ing a coalition of colleges that pub-
licly commit to become more diverse.
The initial 30 members include pub-
lic universities (Berkeley, Michigan,
North Carolina, Ohio State, Texas)
and private (Harvard, Yale, Prince-
ton, Stanford, Rice, Duke). Dan Por-
terfield, the president of Franklin and
Marshall and a Bloomberg adviser,
says that the coalition will welcome
any college with at least a 70 percent
graduation rate. I hope many more
join.
Porterfield emphasizes the bene-
fits that colleges will get from work-
ing together — like learning how to
find students or find budget savings to
pay for scholarships. No doubt, this
collaboration will help. But I think the
public commitment matters more.
The truth is that colleges have long
had the ability to enroll more mid-
dle-class and poor students. They’ve
chosen other priorities: sports teams;
new buildings; ethnic and geographic
diversity; admitting alumni children.
Now, to their credit, college lead-
ers have acknowledged that their stu-
dent bodies are too affluent. Students,
professors and the media should hold
them to their commitment.
Expense
Often, recruiting lower-income
teenagers starts by simply letting them
know their options. Jeffrey Valde-
spino Leal initially assumed that col-
leges outside of his home state, Ari-
zona, would be too expensive. But
after receiving a flier in the mail, he
attended a workshop where he learned
how much financial aid Stanford
offers.
Thanks to his PSAT score, he was
also invited to receive college coun-
seling through a Bloomberg-financed
program. Over FaceTime and Skype,
a student at Williams College advised
Valdespino on his essays — the sort
of advice affluent students take for
granted.
Today, Valdespino, whose parents
didn’t graduate high school, is a Stan-
ford freshman, finishing first-semes-
ter exams and living in the same dorm
as the children of a Cabinet secretary,
a tech company co-founder and other
millionaires. “If there could be more
lower-income students here, it would
be great,” he says, “because we’ve
shown we can do just as well as the
other students.”
Diversifying the country’s Stan-
fords and Ohio States is obviously
only one small step toward addressing
alienation. But it matters. The top 270
colleges educate 2.1 million students
and produce most of society’s leaders.
When I sat down with Bloomberg,
he made an economic argument for
the project: “America needs to have
as big a pool of talented, hard-work-
ing, well-educated people as it can
possibly get.” He also harkened back
to the work he did as New York’s
mayor to make the police force more
racially diverse: “The country needs
to have people in government and
business that understand all of the dif-
ferent constituencies.”
It may sound surprising to com-
pare a class-based diversity effort,
which will benefit many white stu-
dents, to a racial-diversity push. Yet it
makes sense, because diversity, at its
best, revolves around fairness.
Making top colleges more diverse
is not about replacing students of one
race with students of another. It’s
about enrolling more working-class
students of all races. It’s about getting
colleges to live up to their ideals.