Common Good
November 23, 2011
During the first week of July in 1995, I read an editorial by Judith A. Ramaley, president of Portland State University in Oregon, that seems as appropriate for today’s events and public policy environment as it was then. Perhaps even more so. Ms. Ramaley wrote:
“I used to think that character is how you behave when no one is looking. For most of us that may still be true. For public figures, however, character is how you behave when everybody is looking . . .
“. . . Nearly a century ago when President Woodrow Wilson was still a college professor, he said: ‘A great nation is not led by a man who simply repeats the talk of the street corners or the opinions of the newspaper. A nation is led by a man who, rather, hearing those things, understands them better, unites them, puts them into common meaning; speaks not the rumors of the street but a new principle for a new age; a man for whom the voices of the nation . . . unite in a single meaning and reveal to him a single vision, so that he can speak what no man else knows, the common meaning of the common voice.’”
As our “modern” nation heads into the heart of yet another election season, with earlier and earlier primaries leaving little separation from the last acrimonious campaigns, it is this quality above all others that I’m seeking to find in the candidates for public office: the uncommon heart and mind to unite us for the common good.
The First Time
April 3, 2018
I remember as clearly as if it were yesterday the first time I had to determine a student was not eligible under rules of the Michigan High School Athletic Association.
At that singular moment, it did not matter that I had been able to advise a dozen previous callers that the students they were inquiring about were eligible under the rules. All I could see in my mind’s eye was this one student who would not be able to participate as a full-fledged member of a team in a sport he enjoyed.
I assumed, as I have in almost every case since, that this was a “good kid,” and one who needed sports more than sports needed him.
But the facts made him ineligible and there were no compelling reasons to look beyond the facts. I knew it would be hard on the student to miss a season, but I also knew this was not in any sense an “undue hardship.” I could see that if the rule was not enforced in this case, I would be undermining its enforcement in other cases, and effectively changing the rule.
And I recognized that I did not have the authority to change a rule which the MHSAA Representative Council and each member school’s board of education had adopted to bring consistency and control to competitive athletics.
Many years have passed, and I’ve had to consider the eligibility of countless students to represent their schools on athletic teams. But I still see each situation as an individual student, balancing his or her individual needs and desires against the need to protect the integrity of the rules and the desire to promote competitive equity within the program.