Huffington (Issue #20)

PUBLIC DEFENDERS | HELL HOUSES | JENNIFER GRANHOLM

THE HUFFINGTON POST MAGAZINE

Getting Schooled at the Academy of Art University

OCTOBER 28, 2012

10.28.12 #20 CONTENTS

Enter POINTERS: Lance Deletes Wins, ‘Retard’ Attack, Obama Advises Jay-Z MOVING IMAGE DATA: Checking In With American Voters Q&A: Jennifer Granholm

THE ART OF A COLLEGE EDUCATION

BY CHRIS KIRKHAM AND AARON SANKIN

Voices DEVORAH LIEBERMAN: Acting Affirmatively STEVEN CONN: CEOs vs. Presidents DAVID KATZ: Are We Out of Time?

QUOTED

FROM TOP: DAN WINTERS; COURTESY OF THE SPOT; JOHN RUDOLPH

Exit

THE HELP

BY KATHERINE BINDLEY

CULTURE: KnockKnock-Knocking on Hell’s Door ART: How a Frame Finds Its Match EWISE: Socially Engaged GREATEST PERSON OF THE WEEK: Gabrielle Ford TFU FROM THE EDITOR: Assembly Line Justice

THE DEFENSE NEVER RESTS

BY JOHN RUDOLF

ON THE COVER: Academy of Art painting graduate Mike Borja photographed with his painting by fellow Academy of Art photographer Marissa Rocke for Huffington.

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

Assembly Line Justice N THIS WEEK’S Huffington, John Rudolf takes us inside the world of public defenders, the “workhorses of the legal system” putting in long hours for low pay to represent criminal defendants who cannot afford private lawyers.

By featuring a single public defender’s office, John illustrates the lose-lose predicament many in the profession are facing: overworked, underfunded, and drowning in casework, public defenders are unable to adequately represent the clients who desperately need their services.

Meanwhile, America’s prisons and jails hold more people than any other country’s on earth.

ART STREIBER

I

John introduces us to Ed Olexa, a public defender in one of Pennsylvania’s most beleaguered offices. Olexa’s territory is Hazleton, the blue-collar city where he grew up — and which he has watched deteriorate in recent years into a battleground of gangs. His clients are mostly young and mostly broke. Unable to post bail, many of them sit in jail, waiting for their court date. And once Olexa — who is technically part-time but rises before dawn each morning and works weekends — has the chance to actually represent them in their case, it’s not in the slow and careful way he’d prefer, with more time spent with each client to explain details and consequences. Instead, it means af-

Join the conversation on Twitter and Facebook

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

ternoons representing 17 clients in a row before the same judge.

“It becomes assembly-line justice,” he says. “It’s like a McDonald’s drive-through — just moving the bodies along.”

Last year, after being singled out by a congressional legislature report for the “shocking deterioration” of its quality of work, Olexa’s office rebelled, turning down hundreds of cases and demanding more resources from the county. And as John writes, other public defender offices are doing the same, suing states and counties that underfund them and then saddle the public defenders with mountainous caseloads that threaten clients’ constitutional rights.

Elsewhere in the issue, Katherine Bindley takes us inside a very different world — that of lifestyle concierges, a growing industry encompassing everything from pregnancy planners to personal grocery shoppers for patients who have just had plastic surgery and don’t yet want to be seen in public. It’s a story of domestic outsourcing — that is, outsourcing of tasks “once spe-

cific to the hotel industry.”

The value, for many who avail themselves of these services, is that concierges not only follow orders but will also take the lead — and in some cases make key life decisions their clients don’t have time to make. As Carrie His Starner Keenan, a clients are concierge who coormostly young dinates home conand mostly tracting projects, broke. Unable puts it, “these are to post bail, busy people and they many of them don’t have time to get sit in jail, things handled.” waiting for One of those busy their court people is Amanda date.”

Jones, a San Francisco real estate agent who works seven days a week, and whose constellation of concierges includes a dog walker, closet organizer, personal stylist and work-related personal assistant. Her mantra?

“It takes a village.”

ARIANNA

Enter

POINTERS

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

1

MARK GUNTER/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

LANCE ARMSTRONG DELETES HIS WINS

The International Cycling Union (UCI) has stripped Lance Armstrong of his seven Tour de France titles and banned him for life, the organization announced Monday after ratifying the United States Anti-Doping Agency sanctions. “Lance Armstrong has no place in cycling,” said UCI President Pat McQuaid. “Make no mistake, it’s a catastrophe for him, and he has to face up to that.” Armstrong, who dropped his fight against USADA charges in August, deleted his Tour de France wins from his Twitter bio hours after the announcement.

Enter

2

FROM TOP; CHIP SOMODEVILLA/GETTY IMAGES; MARC PIASECKI/FILMMAGIC/GETTY IMAGES;

3

POINTERS

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

ANN COULTER UNLEASHES “RETARD” ATTACK

One critic of President Obama’s Monday night debate performance had some curious praise for Mitt Romney. “I highly approve of Romney’s decision to be kind and gentle to the retard,” Ann Coulter tweeted.

The conservative firebrand has courted controversy throughout election season, offending everyone from Sandra Fluke to gays to immigrants.

OBAMA OFFERS JAY-Z PARENTING ADVICE President Obama got a chance in a radio interview to answer a question that hasn’t come up in debates: What do he and his friend Jay-Z talk about? “I made sure that Jay-Z was helping Beyonce out [with the baby],” he told Cleveland’s z107.9. “And not leaving it all with mom and the mother-inlaw.” Jay-Z appears in a campaign video, and last month he and Beyonce hosted a fundraiser for the president at their 40/40 Club in Manhattan.

4

SUSPENDED FOR WHAT?

A North Carolina seventh grader was suspended earlier this month — for sporting an untucked shirttail. Danielle O’Neal, 12, had to miss classes when the dress code violation landed her in in-school suspension. “Her shirttail was a good four or five inches below her sweater all the way around,” Pamlico Middle School Principal Lisa Jackson told Compass News 360. “She’s a good kid, but my job is to make sure students follow our school’s Code of Conduct, which includes the dress code adopted by the Board of Education.” The honor student’s parents are fighting to change the school’s policy.

Enter

POINTERS

IT’S A BOY FOR ADELE

5

FROM TOP: MIKE MARSLAND/WIREIMAGE/GETTY IMAGES; HANNIBAL HANSCHKE/AFP/GETTYIMAGES

6

Adele has given birth to her first child, a son, with boyfriend Simon Konecki. “We are all over the moon,” a family source told People. While many fans offered their congratulations over Twitter, Joan Rivers took the occasion to make a fat joke about the British singer. “Congratulations to Adele on the birth of her 68 pound 8 ounces bouncing baby boy,” she tweeted.

TALIBAN COMMANDER CAPTURED

A joint Afghan-NATO operation has led to the capture of a key Taliban commander in northern Afghanistan, Mullah Abdul Rahman. “He encouraged insurgents to plant roadside bombs and stage high-profile attacks on Afghan officials,” Kunduz province police spokesman Sayed Sarwar Husseini told Reuters. Police also described Rahman as a “shadow governor” in Kunduz province, where insurgent violence has escalated in recent years.

THAT’S VIRAL NEW YORK SHOOTS DOWN DOMA

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

German Defense Minister Thomas de Maiziere (left) greets Afghan soldiers in Kunduz in July.

A selection of the week’s most talked-about stories.

HEADLINES TO VIEW FULL STORIES

YES, THIS WOMAN BREASTFEEDS HER DOG

YOU CAN’T EVEN TELL THIS GUY HAD A FACE TRANSPLANT

OW.

THE BEST FACES FROM THE “NIGHTMARES FEAR FACTORY” HAUNTED HOUSE

Enter

MOVING IMAGE

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

Going the Distance Since Matthew Webb became the first person to swim the English Channel in 1875, the chilly waterway has become the biggest test for any endurance swimmer. The Channel spans 21 miles at its shortest distance—and while hundreds of people attempt to swim it each year, only about a tenth of them make it all the way across.

REPORTAGE BY GETTY IMAGES

PHOTOGRAPHS BY GARETH PHILLIPS

Angela Lurssen poses during training off the Marine Parade Beach.

Enter

MOVING IMAGE

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

Tem qui dis arion non seruptur ab illam eum ipsum seritis ra pro endesti sequi dolorro id experciti. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet no massa curabut semper.

A man hurries along the beach front to change after training in the sea next to Dover Harbor.

PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK

Enter

A swimmer is covered in Vaseline to stop chafing and sores at the beach on Marine Parade.

MOVING IMAGE

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

A swimmer poses during training at Marine Parade Beach in Dover.

Enter

Ros Hardiman, who suffers from polio, gets ready for her morning swim. She has swum the channel a number of times.

MOVING IMAGE

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

Enter

Stefan Ivanova, 39, of Bulgaria swims across the English Channel, completing the swim in 14 hours and two minutes.

PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK

MOVING IMAGE

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

A swimmer poses during training for a channel swim, which, at its shortest distance across, is 21 miles.

Enter

Stefan Ivanova climbs a ladder to get on board the escort boat Gallivant, after completing his channel swim.

PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK

MOVING IMAGE

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

Enter

The athletes get changed in homemade towel changing suits on the beach after swimming the sea at Dover.

MOVING IMAGE

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

A swimmer poses before beginning the day’s training.

Enter

Swimmers dry off after training on a stormy Saturday morning.

MOVING IMAGE

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

Bulgarian swimmer Stefan Ivanova nears the end of his 14-hour channel swim.

DATA

Enter

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

Checking In With American Voters Foursquare compiled data on check-ins over the past year to identify the red and blue states (based on the 2008 presidential election) with the most check-ins at certain venues. Out of the red states, Texas

happened to have the most check-ins at gay bars — and Florida was the blue state with the most fast-food check-ins. Tap the icons below to see how these and other check-ins line up with election issues.

SOURCE: FOURSQUARE

Tap Icons for Text

Some Favorite Red and Blue Haunts Starbucks is the most popular coffee shop in both red and blue states.

Blue-state voters like In-N-Out, while red-state voters prefer Whataburger.

Chipotle leads in blue-state Mexican food, but redstate folks like Chuy’s.

Donuts are the top breakfast for red states, but bagels beat them in blue states.

Red states go for tacos, while burritos lead in blue states.

The top grocery store is Trader Joe’s in blue states and Kroger in red states.

Enter

Q&A

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

Jennifer Granholm Knows How to Rally the Base

PHOTOGRAPHS BY VICTORIA WILL

Enter

A

Q&A

S THE DEMOCRATIC National Convention wrapped up in September, an unlikely name was on the tip of everyone’s tongues — Jennifer Granholm, the former Michigan Governor who delivered a boisterous address, shaking up a typically sleepy afternoon speaking slot. Huffington spoke to Granholm, who is now host of Current TV’s War Room with Jennifer Granholm, about that fiery speech, as well as what it’s like to play Sarah Palin and what she thinks will happen after the election. –Mollie Reilly

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

Granholm in New York City last week.

Enter Your speech at the DNC was certainly one of the most memorable at the conventions. Did you know going into it that you’d be that fired up? No! In fact, what’s so funny about it is that I’ve spoken at conventions before. I get one of the afternoon time slots, and you go up there and everybody’s on the floor milling about and talking, and the people in the back tell you don’t worry, don’t take it personally, just remember that you’re delivering your remarks to the people back home. Just look at the cameras and keep going. So in this case, what I assumed would happen was that I’d get up, nobody’d be paying attention, and I knew there was a huge time crunch ... Well, when I got out and the crowd started to react, I was totally surprised by that. I thought “OH, this is great!”

During your speech, you came down pretty hard on Mitt Romney and his time at Bain Capital, stressing that “too often he made [his wealth] at the expense of middle-class Americans.” Since then his “47 percent” remarks have rocked the race. How important do you think these issues are to voters? It just shows that they are dividing the country [against those] who might take

Q&A

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

advantage of something that perhaps they paid into, like Medicare or Social Security, because of the moment that they’re in in life, and that’s okay. And to say they’re victims or that they’re moochers is just so utterly offensive.

You played Sarah Palin during Joe Biden’s debate prep back in 2008. What is that process like? We on the Biden side were in the hotel room in

One way or another, this will be fixed. The container will explode otherwise. I don’t think there is any way we won’t get beyond it.”

Delaware, and the stage was built to be an exact replica of the stage and the podium that were going to be at the actual debate. The room was equipped with computers and all of that for people to be able to do their research, background checks, pull up what was happening — not just during the debate prep, but for what policy positions that [Biden] could go after Sarah Palin and John McCain on, and to make sure that he was on the same page as the president...

Enter

Q&A

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

My role was to try to get under his skin, to try to see if I could knock him off balance, presenting a variety of scenarios where he might trip up during the real debate.

Looking beyond the election, the socalled “fiscal cliff” is looming right around the corner. What path do you see forward? One way or another, this will be fixed. The container will explode otherwise. I don’t think there is any way we won’t get beyond it. It may mean that it goes beyond January 1, and that way Republicans can save face in allowing some tax cuts to expire and lowering taxes on the ones that they don’t want to expire, but I think ultimately the fiscal cliff is too disastrous for the country.

Sometimes a crisis precipitates action, and that crisis of the cliff will force action. The question is, when? I think they have about six weeks before calamity hits after January 1, but once that hits, I don’t think there’s anybody who’s looking at this that thinks they will allow all the tax cuts to expire and all of the budget cuts to take take effect. It just will not happen.

You’ve frequently discussed Republican obstructionism on your show. If Obama

is reelected and congressional majorities stay as is, what’s next? The first priority is the same priority they’re talking about. It’s how to create jobs in America. What are their strategies to do that in a way that works, and then getting Congress on board with it. I think the question will be how much rant time — if the president is reelected and there’s a divided House and Senate — how much time does he have before election season kicks in again that he can work with some members to be able to get some reasonable compromise through on some key initiatives?

That’s going to be the biggest issue if there’s still a divided House and Senate. How does he move the ball when the obstructionists have signed pledges not to cooperate, essentially?

Granholm pretended to be Sarah Palin during Joe Biden’s 2008 vice presidential debate prep.

Voices

DEVORAH LIEBERMAN

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

Acting Affirmatively IN THE WAKE of oral arguments before the United States Supreme Court about the future of affirmative action in higher education, several experts foresee conservative justices overturning the law. Others believe that the court will strike down portions of the policy. Few believe that it will remain unchanged.

Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination on the basis of race by recipients of federal funds. Shortly after the act was signed, colleges and universities voluntarily began to take affirmative action to increase higher education enrollment opportunities for African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, Native Americans and other minorities.

Within four years, according to the Census Bureau, student enrollment from these diverse populations began to climb steadily.

As a former vice provost at a public university, provost at an

ILLUSTRATION BY DONGYUN LEE

urban private university, and now president of a mid-sized private university, I can assert that if one’s goal is to diversify enrollments, then affirmative action has been an effective practice. I have seen firsthand the positive impact it has made in regard to educational access and student popula-

Devorah Lieberman is president of the University of La Verne

Voices tions. That being said, my experience over the years has taught me that institutions must do more than just rely on affirmative action to do the job of diversifying college campuses. It cannot be the only thing used to provide equal educational opportunities to students because, as we know, with the banging of a justice’s gavel, the entire existence of affirmative action can change.

There are additional ways we can provide educational opportunities to all student populations while continuing a concentrated effort to reach out to underserved student populations. One example is to also focus on the socioeconomic levels from which our students come and integrate that information as part of the determining admissions process.

The Century Foundation recently released a report that supports this reasoning. Rather than evaluating applicants based only on race, the report recommends that universities also look at family income, the wealth of the neighborhood from which a student comes and parental education level, among other factors.

“If college admissions officers want to be fair—truly meritocrat-

DEVORAH LIEBERMAN

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

ic—they need to consider not only a student’s raw academic credentials, but also what obstacles she had to overcome to achieve them,” said the report.

In advocating for the passage of the Civil Rights Act, President Lyndon Johnson sought equal opportunities for all. He knew that those who are economically disadvantaged do not enjoy the same access to higher education as do students from more affluent backgrounds.

Because a larger As we portion of minority know, with students reside in the banging households with lowof a gavel, er incomes, affirmathe entire tive action, in many existence of ways, has helped affirmative this country close action can its higher education change.” entrance gap among students from different socioeconomic backgrounds.

Focusing on providing equal access to education is among one of the highest priorities for leaders in higher education. The Pew Research Center tells us that in 1970, the middle class earned 62 percent of the income in the country while the upper class earned less than 30 percent. By 2010,

Voices the upper class was earning 46 percent and the middle class was earning 45 percent. The middle class was dramatically expanded by the G.I. Bill, regarded by many as one of the most important initiatives in U.S. history. We are now seeing accelerating erosion of those gains.

Ensuring a vibrant and growing middle class and working to shrink the number of people living in poverty is crucial for ensuring the security of the national economy. Members of both these socioeconomic groups create and operate small businesses, which provide employment for millions.

They pay the bulk of all taxes.

They are not just our nurses and teachers, but our classroom aides and support staff. As the middle class shrinks and poverty increases, who will do these jobs?

If these pragmatic examples were not enough, we have a social responsibility to provide the educational tools necessary for all people to be successful. Doing this only results in us having a better-educated society, which helps make our nation more competitive overall.

Regardless of the fate of affirmative action at the hands of the Supreme Court, we must commit

DEVORAH LIEBERMAN

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

to ensuring that all high school graduates are prepared to enter and graduate from college, if they choose. And, if we accept students into our institutions, it is our responsibility to help them meet the academic standards we are expecting of all. This applies to success in the academic portion of our institutions as well as the cocurricular. To achieve a campus that models “inclusivity,” we must offer and support the needed knowledge, appreciation, underWe have standing and intera social cultural communicaresponsibility tion skills among all to provide the students, faculty and educational staff. In so doing, it tools for all to will help us to recbe successful.” ognize and celebrate, not only that which distinguishes us individually, but also that which binds us together as human beings.

Broadening our perspectives about acting affirmatively during these times will lead us toward achieving a more successful, global, inclusive and pluralistic society. In so doing, we achieve what our nation needs to flourish—we help ensure equal opportunity for all.

STEVEN CONN

Voices

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

CEOs vs.

Presidents

B

USINESS MAGNATE MARK CUBAN recently gave us a “teachable moment” when he expressed his enthusiasm for Mitt Romney ¶ In essence, Cuban believes that Mr. Romney will prove to be an effective president because he’s been a very successful businessman; Cuban feels confident that Romney will bring to the White House the same skills as a negotiator and dealmaker that he honed at Bain in Boston. ¶ The problem here isn’t merely the magical thinking that Cuban engages in when he believes that Romney will bring bipartisan comity to the Capital. Rather, Cuban has confused the job of being president with the job of being a private equity fund manager. The president does not function as the CEO of the nation, and Cuban—and many others—perpetuates a dangerous misperception when he suggests that he does. ¶ For starters, the nation is not a business, despite the rhetoric we hear from Mr. Romney, nor ILLUSTRATION BY DONGYUN LEE

Steven Conn is a professor at Ohio State University, editor of Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective, and the new book To Promote the General Welfare: The Case for Big Government

Voices should it be. Businessmen make money, and Mr. Romney made a lot of it. Presidents must make policy.

Money and policy are not the same thing because making money is a straightforward proposition while managing a nation requires attention to far more complexities.

The goal of a CEO is to maximize shareholder value, a small objective, really, because in being so narrowly focused a CEO can effectively ignore many of the larger implications of the choices he or she makes. Presidents can’t.

Nor are we shareholders—we are citizens, and the value of that is measured in far more complicated and important ways than any corporate ledger can register.

More fundamentally, corporate CEOs operate in an environment that is the antithesis of democracy.

None of us gets to vote on the performance of Jaime Dimon or even Mark Cuban, despite how the decisions they make might affect our communities and us individually.

CEOs answer only to a board—appointed rather than elected—and they exercise executive authority without any democratic set of checks and balances. The president represents merely one-third of the governing apparatus of the nation.

STEVEN CONN

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

That’s how the Founders wanted it.

Which might explain why “businessmen” have never made particularly good presidents.

Across two centuries Americans have generally preferred men with military experience (think Washington, Jackson, Grant, Eisenhower), or people with significant political experience who started out in the law (Madison, LinRather coln, Obama, among than demand others). In the 19th the country be century no president run more like came to office touting a business, that he was a “busilet’s ask what nessman,” and it isn’t might happen clear that any such if businesses person would ever were run like a have been elected. government.”

None of the Great Robber Barons ever tossed into electoral politics—not John D. Rockefeller or Cornelius Vanderbilt or J. P. Morgan.

And perhaps 19th-century Americans were displaying real wisdom by not being too impressed by businessmen.

In the last 100 years Americans have only elected two presidents who lauded their own experience in the business world, and the results weren’t pretty. In 1928, Herbert

Voices Hoover seemed an obvious choice for president. He was a genuinely self-made man who grew rich in the mining industry. He became a humanitarian hero during and after the First World War running relief programs and then served as Secretary of Commerce through much of the 1920s.

Less than a year after he took office, of course, the Great Depression set in, and Hoover flailed. It wasn’t that he didn’t try to address the crisis, but the actions he took didn’t work. His treasury secretary, Andrew Mellon, another titan of business, only made things worse through his actions, and the House began impeachment proceedings against him for his bungling.

Hoover couldn’t adapt his own thinking to the unprecedented economic situation quickly enough.

More importantly, he lost the confidence of the American people through a combination of his ineptitude and his tin ear. Hoover discovered that few of the skills that had made him a successful businessman transferred to the Oval Office, and the nation suffered as a consequence.

George W. Bush, of course, had a thoroughly undistinguished career in the private sector, but when

STEVEN CONN

he campaigned 12 years ago he still advertised himself as the first MBA candidate—a man who would bring his business training to the job of running the federal government.

And, of course, the results from our first MBA president were: two feckless, unfunded wars and the worst financial crisis since... well, since the last time we elected a businessman as president.

Let’s flip this equation between the president and a corporate CEO upside down and perform a little thought-experiment: Rather than demand that the country be run more like a business, with a CEO as president—and which business might that be, by the way, Enron, AIG, Countrywide, the airlines, Lehman Brothers?—let’s ask what might happen if businesses were run more like government. We might see decision-making that was more democratic, public and transparent; greater public accountability; and a greater concern for the public well-being, rather than the crude maximizing of profits.

After all, corporations come and go, but the nation has endured for over two centuries. There must be some wisdom there from which even the private sector could benefit.

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

Voices

DAVID KATZ

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

Are We Out of Time?

THE STONE AGE TRAITS of Homo sapiens make us a species out of our native time. I worry that certain modern perils raise the prospect of running out of time in the more familiar sense of the phrase.

Our perceptions of time and peril—our fight-or-flight impulse—were shaped by the long sweep of our shared history. The perils that mattered most were the fangs and claws of predators.

ILLUSTRATION BY DONGYUN LEE

They chased us, and we fled—or fought back. It all happened fast, and then was over.

Most decisions we have made throughout our history have been routine choices relating to food, shelter and social interaction. For much of this time, the focus was on living out the day.

David Katz is the director at the Yale Prevention Research Center

Voices There was no estate planning in the Paleolithic Era. There were no retirement homes. Long-term thinking extended to seasons, not much beyond.

And our reaction to perils in the modern world remains bounded by this biology—if we let it.

We are aroused by immediate threats, although we tend to forget them as soon as they subside.

Long-term threats that don’t rear up on hind limbs and wave their claws in our faces today may not only be easy for us to ignore, they may be hard for us to take seriously. Our perspective remains the endowment of the savannah, and the simple and immediate challenges of survival. We tend to use “short-sighted” as a pejorative term, but it is the native state of our species.

And that may count among the greatest challenges to our survival now because that perspective and our Paleolithic time horizon are obsolete.

We are choosing to do nothing about some of the most significant health perils we can see, because we forget them as soon as the acute threat concludes.

And we are managing not to see some of the health perils we

DAVID KATZ

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

might otherwise do something about. In both cases, time is conspiring against us.

Bullets are an example. Bullets fly fast, and we can readily see both cause and effect. People get shot, and often die. But the crises related to guns come and go, like those fleet predators that once We are stalked us, and we choosing to move on. We see the problem, but our mem- do nothing ory is too short and our about some concerns too parochial. of the most Until we get shot, it’s significant somebody else’s probhealth perils lem. Once we get shot, we can see, it’s too late. because Baloney—of the figuwe forget rative and literal vathem as rieties alike—poses a soon as the problem in the other acute threat direction. In a society long since mired in epi- concludes.” demic obesity, “bad” foods do more damage than bullets, but do it in slow motion. Since the causal connection between any given donut, soda, or hour spent on the couch, and bad health outcomes stretches over a span of years, we can readily overlook it. It’s just a bit too slow to see the dots connect, so we ignore

Voices the big picture year after year.

The same is true of the damage we are doing to the planet.

You may already know that climate change is real, due to our activities, far advanced and an imminent peril of the first order.

If you don’t know or believe any of this, consider asking yourself: what, exactly, would it take to convince you this were true?

If you can’t answer the question, that tells you something; maybe there is no evidence you would accept. If you can answer the question, then ask yourself another: do you really want to be there before we do something to defend ourselves? Once jaws clamp shut on our throats, we’re pretty much out of options.

Climate change and environmental degradation are too slow for us to take the menace seriously. It just doesn’t resonate with our Stone Age perceptions. And when something acute does happen—like the BP disaster—our Stone Age mindset invites us to forget about it as soon as it stops biting us in the backside.

But these choices to ignore, neglect and deny are not choices at all—unless we make them so.

We may think it puts us in the

DAVID KATZ

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

driver’s seat to “choose” to ignore the threats of fast food or climate change. But in fact, we are entirely subservient to brute biology—to our ancestors’ genes.

If we really want to be in the driver’s seat, we need to choose to care about the world we leave behind. As long as the immediate gratifications of runnin’ on Dunkin and the stock market define our time horizon, we are living on the modern savannah.

Do we really think our kids will thank us In fact, for bequeathing them we are a pile of cash along entirely with no viable planet subservient on which to spend it? to brute Or for endowing them biology— with more obesity to our and chronic disease ancestors’ at ever younger age genes.” than ever before seen in human history? I anticipate we will all be beneficiaries of the same basic eulogy: “F$@# you guys!”

This will be the case unless we act on what we see, and see what requires action—with eyes adapted to modern context.

I hope it’s soon—because we seem to be running out of time.

QUOTED

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: STAN HONDA/AFP/GETTY IMAGES; GETTY IMAGES/IMAGENAVI; AP PHOTO/PAUL SAKUMA; CLIVE BRUNSKILL/GETTY IMAGES

Voices

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

“ Al-Qaida is very active. It is like fish.

When one fish dies, another comes.”

— Logar’s provincial chief of police,

Gen. Ghulam Sakhi Roogh Lawanay, according to the AP

As some of you may have noticed, I had a lot more energy in our second debate. I felt really well rested after the nice long nap I had in the first debate.

— President Obama

at the 67th annual Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner

“ It is a bit startling to achieve global recognition before the age of 30 on account of your sister, your brother-in-law and your bottom.”

— Pippa Middleton to the U.K’s Mail

“ The upside is that Google now understands what it’s like to have your privacy violated.”

— HuffPost commenter AngelGrey

on Google’s earnings leak

CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: SCOTT EELLS/BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES; JOHN J. KIM/CHICAGO TRIBUNE/MCT VIA GETTY IMAGES PETER KRAMER/NBC/NBC NEWSWIRE VIA GETTY IMAGES

Voices

QUOTED

In Mitt’s world, the trees are just the right height, he has elevators for his cars and binders full of women.

Some people have it all.

— HuffPost commenter ClaudiaL

on Romney’s “binders full of women” debate remark

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

“ They can have my Cheetos when they pry them from my cold red-stained hands.”

— HuffPost commenter LuLou_Murder

on a Flamin’ Hot Cheetos ban in schools

“ Conversely, the lie most employers tell is that they care about your work-life balance.”

— HuffPost commenter Retromancer

on a study showing that hourly workers lie about how much they work

“ The quickest way to make money on Wall Street is to take the most sophisticated product and try to sell it to the least sophisticated client.”

— Greg Smith,

the former Goldman Sachs vice president who resigned in March, to 60 Minutes

10.28.12 #20

FEATURES THE ART OF A COLLEGE EDUATION THE HELP THE DEFENSE NEVER RESTS COURTESY OF RAYA GOLDEN

THE ART OF A COLLEGE EDUCATION GETTING SCHOOLED AT THE ACADEMY OF ART UNIVERSITY

BY CHRIS KIRKHAM AND AARON SANKIN • PHOTO-ILLUSTRATION BY DAN WINTERS

half-empty shuttle bus rolls down a crowded street in San Francisco. A tattooed 20-something art student steps off and lights a cigarette.

She walks past a bus station, under a flag affixed to a streetlight and into an unremarkable downtown building.

Everything in this picture — from the side of the bus, to the emblem stitched onto her backpack, to the advertisement on the back of the bus stop, to the flag flying above her head, to the awning above the building she just stepped into — bears the same logo.

A crisp, stylized double “A” surrounded by a bright red circle, visible from almost every downtown corner, marks the ever-expanding footprint of the Academy of Art University. The private, for-profit college has become, over the past century, the largest arts school in the country and one of the big-

gest landholders in San Francisco — only the Catholic Church owns more buildings.

In the past two decades, the Academy of Art has grown 10 times in size to nearly 20,000 students.

And administrators are pushing for more: a recent school master plan projects a student population of nearly 25,000 within five years, roughly the same number of undergraduates who attend the University of California at Berkeley. It is the only arts school in the nation with both NCAA basketball and baseball teams.

The university has opened recruiting offices in Taiwan, South Korea and Thailand. It’s created a massive online division, aimed at beaming courses on classical sculpture and video game animation taught by teachers located as far away as Scotland to thousands of virtual students across the world.

As the Academy of Art has expanded, so has the local prestige of its owner, Elisa Stephens. The 52-year-old lawyer has become a fixture in San Francisco high society, and is a regular attendee at fundraisers thrown by the city’s

RANDY BROOKE/WIREIMAGE

President of the Academy of Art, Elisa Stephens, addresses an audience at The Cannery in San Francisco.

THE ART OF A COLLEGE EDUCATION

political and social elite. Her mansion sits atop Nob Hill, one of the city’s most exclusive zip codes.

Under Stephens’ leadership, the school has purchased dozens of properties across the city, amassing a real estate portfolio worth at least $320 million. Annual revenues in 2009-10 were more than $247 million, up from $59 million a decade before, according to the most recent federal data.

University officials did not make Stephens available for an interview

“ NOTHING AT THE UNIVERSITY HAPPENS WITHOUT ELISA STEPHENS; NO ONE THERE HAS AUTHORITY OTHER THAN HER. SHE AND THE INSTITUTION ARE ONE AND THE SAME.” after multiple requests, citing a busy schedule, but she responded to questions by e-mail. The university referred other questions to a spokeswoman, Susan Toland.

“Academy of Art students are being hired by some of the most

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

innovative companies in the world - many of which are located right here in the Bay Area,” Stephens notes. “We are preparing students for the jobs of the innovation economy and if they come in here committed to being successful, our program is the best in the world when it comes to art and design fields.”

Stephens says the school’s emphasis on technology in arts training gives the school opportunities to tailor curriculum to the demands of the workforce.

“With the endless possibilities technology brings, in 10 or 20 years we could have a handful of new majors that don’t exist anywhere today,” she says. “That is one of the things we are most proud of — our ability to quickly adapt our offerings based on the latest industry trends — and that will be true for as long as I am running the Academy.”

Spokeswoman Susan Toland calls Stephens a “maverick” who has expanded the university to meet the desires of students looking for practical education.

“She wants to change the way we think about art education,” Toland says of Stephens. “She wants the Academy of Art to be a toptier school and realized there’s so much demand out there for art education that wasn’t being met.”

THE ART OF A COLLEGE EDUCATION

Toland says the university’s fast growth reflects a willingness to teach art to anyone who is interested, not just a privileged few.

“Most people haven’t had the chance to develop a portfolio, especially if they don’t have parents that can pay for art classes and can afford to take summers off to make art,” she says. “The school is their opportunity to prove themselves.”

Still, the Academy’s expansion has sparked bitter confrontations with city planners and slow-growth activists, who argue the school’s real estate appetite is helping to exacerbate a citywide housing crunch, making San Francisco increasingly unaffordable for all but its wealthiest inhabitants.

“When you’re growing with no end in sight, that’s like a cancer, like a virus,” former San Francisco Deputy Mayor Brad Paul says of the school’s real estate empire.

The school’s academic reputation is also at risk. California higher education officials recently blocked it from receiving state tuition grants, arguing that its recent graduation rate of less than 30 percent doesn’t justify further public investment.

In addition, a group of former

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

A RAPIDLY GROWING STUDENT BODY

Enrollment at the Academy of Art University has grown swiftly in recent years, more than doubling since 2005.

20,000

15,000

10,000

5,000 0

1998

2000

2002

2004

2006

recruiters has filed suit against the school, claiming some of its student enrollment growth was the result of bonuses, raises and other enticements offered to recruiters if they met sales targets.

Compensation schemes rewarding recruiters based on the number of students enrolled violate federal law. The Academy declined to comment on the matter.

“It seems to me that money is their number one priority,” says Natalie Wilkey, who got a BA from the school’s fashion merchandising program in 2010. “They’re not about the community, it’s more like they’re a corporation.”

For-profit colleges such as the Academy of Art have proliferated over the past decade, growing the

2008

2010

THE ART OF A COLLEGE EDUCATION

number of student enrollments more than fivefold nationwide since 1999. They advertise heavily on subway cars, highway billboards and late-night television, often promoting degrees as a path to career advancement.

Such schools have increasingly caught the eye of federal regulators and state attorneys general, who have moved to crack down on institutions that promise more than they deliver, leaving students stuck in debt and without improved job prospects. Some of the largest players in the industry, including the University of Phoenix, have experienced enrollment declines over the past year as government regulations have tightened.

Unlike the for-profit system’s many problem children, the Academy hasn’t been charged by authorities with violating any laws, and many art and design professionals and students consider its curriculum top-drawer. Also, unlike many for-profit institutions that have sprung up almost overnight in recent years, the Academy of Art has a long tradition in San Francisco, with a history stretching back to the late 1920s.

The school’s student loan default rate — often an indicator of

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

poor student performance after college — is well below the national average, and far below the average default rates of other forprofit schools. Administrators cite statistics from last year showing an 80 percent job placement rate for graduates, though school officials say the measurement is preliminary because the U.S. Department of Education has not finalized the formula.

“Because we make sure every student learns the fundamentals, employers tell us they love hiring our grads,” says Sue Rowley, the university’s executive vice president of educational services.

“They don’t have to retrain our grads on basic skills.”

In many ways, the Academy’s profile and problems are more akin to the woes facing law schools, which also have been criticized for over-enrolling students who are then burdened with heavy loan debts and graduate into an intensely competitive and unforgiving job market.

As the Academy aims for continued expansion on the ground and online, former students and faculty have questioned how a university rooted in the creative arts will be able to follow through on promises of practical career training. Research has found that students graduating with degrees

THE ART OF A COLLEGE EDUCATION

in the arts face some of the highest rates of unemployment among all recent college graduates.

This has created divided opinions about the Academy among its graduates. Some remain fans.

“There’s people that rave about the school; and there’s people who are really sharp critics of the place, the ones who think that it’s this money-hungry art school,” says Tommy Stracke, a recent 3D modeling graduate who is working for a startup gaming company in the Bay Area.

“I think you make of it what you put in, really. There are people who have a passion for art but maybe aren’t the most skilled. A lot of times they can get in, but then they just kind of find themselves in a stagnant state.”

Others have walked away from their experience at the Academy with a harsher view.

“I think their ambition and their greed has fueled the rapid pace of growth,” says Ryan Ballard, a New Orleans artist who recently graduated with a master’s degree in sculpture from the Academy’s online division. He says he regrets enrolling because he is no better off than before he entered and is saddled with more

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

than $100,000 in debt. “They have quite possibly lost their soul in a lot of ways in the drive to make money.”

FROM A LOFT TO AN EMPIRE

The massive university that now dominates downtown San Francisco got its start in a humble two-room loft in 1929. Richard S. Stephens had just returned to the West Coast with his young family after a stint in Paris trying to make it as a painter after World War I. He took a job as art director for Sunset magazine, which had chronicled the natural splendor and gradual development of the American West, and in the evenings he decided to teach illustration on the side. He named his school the Academy of Advertising Art, starting with a class of five students.

At the time, there was a huge demand for professionally trained illustrators for the burgeoning publishing industry. As photographs began to supplant illustrations on magazine covers and on advertisements, the school launched a photography major in the 1940s.

When Richard S. Stephens gave control over the university to his son, Richard A. Stephens, in 1951, a scant 250 students

COURTESY OF RYAN BALLARD

THE ART OF A COLLEGE EDUCATION

attended. Over the next four decades, the second Stephens to hold the reins of the Academy gradually increased enrollment up to 2,300, adding courses for fashion design and film and music production.

As the school grew, so did the family’s affluence. During his tenure, Richard A. built what became one of his most high-profile legacies: the Academy of Art’s Automobile Museum. Perched like a glass trophy case on one of the busiest corners of the city’s main thoroughfare, the museum houses the Stephens family’s collection of nearly 200 classic cars, including a 1954 Corvette and a 1930 Cadillac V16 Roadster. The structure is a testament to the family’s vast private wealth, and almost everyone in San Francisco has stopped for at least a moment to ogle the automobiles.

By the time Richard A. handed the reins to his daughter, Elisa, in the early 1990s, the university was regarded as a sort of blue-collar training school for the arts, a class apart from highly regarded and highly selective programs such as the San Francisco Art Institute.

In a 1998 interview in the San Francisco Chronicle, Richard A.,

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

Ryan Ballard took online graduate courses at the Academy.

He was not satisfied with the quality of the education and is now in debt. ABOVE: Some examples of Ballard’s work.

THE ART OF A COLLEGE EDUCATION

then Chairman of the Board, lamented the school’s underdog status. “It’s always confounded me that the Academy isn’t more respected,” he said at the time.

“We are the best art school, probably in the world ... [But] there’s a social prestige with the Art Institute. We don’t have the prestige.”

Much of that lack of respect in the local art world came from the school policy of accepting virtually everyone who applied.

Elisa found a way to turn that liability into an asset. Not requiring a portfolio as a prerequisite opened up enrollment to a much broader group of students than at other schools with rigorous admissions criteria.

“We’ve always had this very democratic philosophy, from when Richard Stephens was teaching ten students in a loft,” explains Toland, the spokeswoman. “The Stephenses have always believed art skills are something you learn, not something you’re born with.”

Many students have been attracted to that model. “The main reason I decided to go was because they accept everyone,” explains Wilkey, the Academy graduate. “I didn’t want to jump through any hoops to get into college.”

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

Under Elisa Stephens, the school’s growth catapulted. Enrollment kicked into high gear, expanding at a much faster rate than before, according to federal data.

The growth has helped boost Stephens’ local profile. Her guests of honor at the school’s spring fashion show this year included Saudi Princess Her Royal Highness Reema Bandar Al-Saud, noted fashion director Sarah Burton, San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee and former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown.

“Nothing at the university happens without Elisa Stephens; no one there has authority other than her,” says former Planning Commissioner Ron Miguel. “She and the institution are one and the same.”

A BRANDED CITY

As the school’s growth surged in the mid-1990s, so did its need for real estate. Administrators decided to start guaranteeing housing to all incoming students, which kicked off an ongoing buying spree.

Over the past decade, the Academy of Art has purchased 28 buildings throughout San Francisco, including landmarks such as St. Brigid’s Church, one of the oldest structures in the city. University officials even tried to pur-

NORTH BEACH MARINA

PACIFIC HEIGHTS

RUSSIAN HILL

NOB HILL

CHINATOWN FINANCIAL DISTRICT

DOWNTOWN/CIVIC CENTER WESTERN ADDITION

SOUTH OF MARKET

PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK

AN EXPANDING PORTFOLIO The Academy of Art University’s physical footprint in San Francisco has expanded alongside student enrollments. The school has amassed a real estate portfolio worth at least $320 million (red dots on map correspond to university properties). To accommodate new students, the Academy has purchased 28 buildings throughout San Francisco over the past decade. The school’s growth has caused rifts with preservationists and city officials, who argue that the Academy is displacing a dwindling supply of affordable housing in the nation’s most expensive real estate market.

POTRERO HILL

DIAMOND HEIGHTS BERNAL HEIGHTS PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK

GLEN PARK

BAYVIEW

THE ART OF A COLLEGE EDUCATION

chase the city’s historic Flower Mart in 2007, a sale that would have displaced more than 30 businesses. Strong public outcry eventually squelched the deal.

The rapid pace at which the university gobbles up buildings and converts them for its own use has drawn the ire of many city officials, who point to a litany of planning code violations by the Academy, including a history of consistent failures to file master expansion plans and illegal conversions of residential buildings into student housing.

“If you or I committed these types of violations on this scale, we’d be dragged in front of a judge,” said former Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin, who noted he received hundreds of complaints about the school from neighborhood groups concerned about evictions to displaced businesses to traffic congestion around university properties. “That’s how it works for normal people, but not how it works for Elisa Stephens.”

The Academy disagrees with these critiques. “The university has a healthy relationship with the city,” says Rebecca Delgado, the school’s vice president of

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

community and government relations. “The city has a fundamental responsibility to make sure that the students remain in San Francisco because they contribute to the city both economically and culturally.”

But others say that the Academy’s wealth and influence allow it to simply plow ahead.

“They have a culture of do whatever you want first, and then ask questions later,” adds Paul, the

A SUIT ALLEGES THAT THE ACADEMY ENTICED ITS SALES FORCE TO ENROLL LEGIONS OF STUDENTS BY DOLING OUT HAWAIIAN VACATIONS TO TOP RECRUITERS. former deputy mayor. “They don’t tell the city what they’re going to do until after they do it, figuring they can just ignore the planning code...[The school] doesn’t behave like a real estate developer, but that’s really what it is.”

Toland, the spokeswoman, disagrees with the assertion that the school has had carte blanche in the city. “We’ve been under scrutiny for a long time now,” she says.

An illustration

by Raya Golden, who studied illustration and animation at the Academy of Art.

THIS PAGE AND PREVIOUS PAGE: COURTESY OF RAYA GOLDEN

THE ART OF A COLLEGE EDUCATION

“The city pays a lot of attention to what we’re doing ...In a lot of ways we’re always the poster child.”

In early 2010, the city’s Board of Supervisors held a hearing on the university’s myriad code violations, with supervisors and outside housing advocates decrying its real estate practices.

“I’ve been here for ten years, and you’ve been a problem since I’ve been here,” then-Supervisor Sophie Maxwell told Academy of-

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

Illustrator Raya Golden, left, is now employed, but many of her friends are not.

ABOVE: One of her illustrations.

ficials at the meeting, explaining that the school’s flagrant skirting of city regulations reflected poorly on both the institution and the city itself.

In an interview with the San

THE ART OF A COLLEGE EDUCATION

Francisco Chronicle at the time of the hearing, Elisa Stephens defended the school’s real estate practices.

“We did not intentionally violate any laws,” Stephens said.

“We care about San Francisco the city and the community - but there is lot of red tape. This is the city’s reputation.”

Stephens, in an e-mail, notes that the school is working to improve its relationship with the city.

“We are addressing these issues with the city because at the end of the day we think we share the same goals for this city — to be the global innovation economy leader,” she notes. “We truly believe that the relationship between (the university) and the city should be a win-win.”

A report commissioned by the school in 2010 found that it directly and indirectly supports 4,600 jobs in the city and contributes $140 million annually to the regional economy.

The Academy also has an impact on San Francisco’s fast-dwindling supply of affordable housing — especially when it purchases rentcontrolled apartments and converts them into dormitories.

Not only does San Francisco have both the highest average rent

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

($1,905 for a two-bedroom apartment) and highest median home price ($705,000) of any major city in the country, but those prices are increasing faster than anywhere else. San Francisco only covers about 49 square miles (less than the total acreage of Walt Disney World), making the city tiny and dense and also making construction of new, affordable housing difficult.

Tenants’ rights advocates shake their heads at the Academy of Art’s conversion of rentcontrolled units. “Taking affordable housing off the market really bothers me because we need it for our own citizens,” said Miguel, the former city planning commissioner. “It shows a blatant disregard for the city.”

Earlier this year, San Francisco Supervisor Scott Wiener proposed legislation that would enact a city-wide prohibition on converting regular apartments to student housing and create a financial incentive for schools to build new facilities as opposed to taking over old ones. The Board of Supervisors passed his measure.

According to Delgado, the Academy executive, the city’s famously onerous and bureaucratic development process makes it difficult to construct new properties as needed. She also says there’s “no evidence that the

THE ART OF A COLLEGE EDUCATION

school is displacing tenants.”

The school does, however, appear open to the proposition of creating new facilities. “Anything is possible,” Delgado says.

“Once everything settles with this new law, we will take a look at building new housing.”

DIALING FOR DOLLARS

The Academy of Art’s real estate boom was a direct result of student demand. Thousands of budding artists were flooding into San Francisco each year, and everyone needed a place to live.

One possible factor for the Academy’s rapid enrollment growth was suggested in a 2009 lawsuit filed by three former Academy of Art enrollment advisors. The suit alleged that Academy officials enticed its sales force to enroll legions of students by doling out Hawaiian vacations to top recruiters — a practice prohibited by federal law.

Rewarding people for sales success makes sense in most industries, but it can lead to conflicts of interest in higher education. “It creates an incentive to enroll as many students as possible, without any thought to their ability to do the coursework,” says attorney

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

Stephen Jaffe, who is representing the plaintiffs in the suit.

Academy officials won’t comment on the suit since it’s still pending in court.

Earlier this year, California’s infamously cash-strapped government looked to winnow down the cost of its Cal Grants program, which provides tuition assistance for college-bound Golden State residents. To better focus resources, the state raised the benchmarks for what a school needs to qualify for the money: a 30 percent graduation rate and a 15.5 percent loan default rate. Academy of Art was one of 154 schools that slipped below this threshold.

While the vast majority of schools disqualified from the program were cut for having unacceptably high student loan default rates, Academy of Art was one of a small handful that missed out because its graduation rate was too low. The university has sued the state, asking to be readmitted to the program because it has since upped its graduation rate from 29 percent to 34 percent.

“The Academy of Art does a good job of providing financial literacy for its students and keeping the number of defaults to a minimum,” said Ed Emerson of the California Student Aid Commission. “But even a 34 percent

THE ART OF A COLLEGE EDUCATION

graduation rate isn’t something to really be proud of.”

Toland says one reason the school’s graduation rate may be low is that some students leave midway because they get job offers.

“We grade ourselves on how many of our students get jobs,” she says, “not how many get diplomas.”

Academy of Art has long been concerned about its high dropout rate. About a decade ago, the school created the Student Advocate Advisor program to help incoming students navigate their first year-and-a-half at the school. “We were the new students’ best buddies,” said Emily Esch, who worked as one of those advisors from 2004 to 2006. “Our job was really about retention—making sure the people who dropped out were doing it for the right reasons.”

Many of the problems Esch encountered stemmed from a combination of the university’s open admissions policy and a strong recruiting surge. “Sales team’s goals were really, really aggressive,” she said. “They were being pushed to get more and more students.”

A former Academy of Art academic employee said the focus on retention was a business decision by the school, one that encouraged

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

its faculty to lower academic standards so underperforming students would return for a second year.

“It wasn’t about the quality of the portfolio packages. That was what you said in front of the cameras,” says the former employee, who declined to be identified to avoid difficulties with his current employer. “Behind closed

THE PRIVATE, FORPROFIT COLLEGE HAS BECOME, OVER THE PAST CENTURY, THE LARGEST ARTS SCHOOL IN THE COUNTRY AND ONE OF THE BIGGEST LANDHOLDERS IN SAN FRANCISCO. doors, when everybody is sweating and there are stains in everyone’s armpits, it’s all about the numbers. It was about keeping attrition down: How do we keep underperformers in the program, and how do we lower our standards to include more?”

One way the school includes more students is through heavy international recruitment practices. Academy of Art has offices in Taipei, Taiwan; Bangkok, Thailand; Seoul, South Korea;

THE ART OF A COLLEGE EDUCATION

and a representative in India.

University Facebook pages and the school’s website advertise in at least four different languages, listing dates for meetups and information sessions.

According to the same former employee, international students serve as a huge source of revenue for the school. “The thing that’s great about international students is not only are they full ride, but they have to take ESL classes, which are in addition to whatever their unit loads are,” the employee said. “So not only do they nail them for the unit loads, but they take an additional three or five classes of ESL, which are full tuition price courses.”

International students tend to represent a significantly more affluent segment of the population than the overall student body.

“Money wasn’t an issue for a lot of the international kids,” recalls Esch, the former student advisor.

“They had to pay cash up front and didn’t get government loans.”

Academy of Art has also managed to rapidly expand enrollments in recent years through its introduction of online-only degree programs. Almost all the university’s majors, from painting to

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

graphic design to visual effects, are available through fully online coursework—a development that has raised concerns among both students and faculty about an erosion of quality in its programs.

“The push for that, to me, is 100 percent entirely due to the economic benefits of online education,” says a second former employee, who also declined to be identified in order to preserve relationships with faculty members. “You create a class once, and you’re done, and anybody can just teach it. The only beneficiary of that is the school itself, because of the profit potential.”

Several former academic employees described the difference in quality between the work of online and on-campus students as vast. Artwork from online students very rarely makes it into the Academy of Art’s annual spring show, which features the best student work of the year and is often a jumping-off point for job opportunities, the employees said.

Rowley, the university vice president, claims that online students participate in both the spring and fall shows. “We’ve gotten rave reviews from everyone who has seen our online programs—teachers, accreditors, everybody. They’ve all given it five stars,” she says. “With the

COURTESY OF MOLLY MALONEY

THE ART OF A COLLEGE EDUCATION

explosion of remote working career opportunities, the online classes really prepare students how to collaborate and work from a distance.”

Ryan Ballard had been a working artist in New Orleans for nearly 10 years when he decided to enroll in the Academy’s online master’s program for sculpture in 2009. He had already designed several public art installations in the city and was in the midst of creating a science fiction-themed Mardi Gras parade club.

He figured he could knock out

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

Molly Maloney was offered a job as a concept artist for a video game design company before graduating from the Academy of Art.

THE ART OF A COLLEGE EDUCATION

the online master’s degree while still working in New Orleans, given the flexibility the school was advertising. But almost from the start, he felt frustrated with the coursework.

Some of the classes were very basic, like figure drawing, while others required complicated and expensive equipment that he had to purchase, he says. For a smallscale bronze casting and jewelrymaking class, for example, he said he had to buy nearly $15,000 worth of supplies, including a crucible and a vacuum chamber for pouring and heating bronze. Often, he’d only find out about the supply lists a few weeks before the beginning of class.

“It had no application to my work, and I felt as a graduate student that I should be choosing the type of work I want to do,” Ballard says.

Toland, the spokeswoman, called Ballard’s situation “an anomaly.”

“I’ve never heard of someone spending that much money on a single class,” she says. “The choices a student makes for materials and how much to use is up to them. Teachers usually don’t dictate that to the class.”

Ballard says there were a handful of professors he admired, but most were unremarkable. And the

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

online format created problems.

Professors often did not respond to emails or other questions for days, he said, and the work was never graded on time.

He often thought about dropping out, but with tens of thousands of dollars already paid, Ballard decided to stick it out. He graduated earlier this year and said he is resigned to the fact that he’ll be working the rest of his life to pay back the more than $100,000 he borrowed for classes and supplies.

“That’s a big sword hanging over my head,” he says. “It’s like you get yourself so far into debt that you can’t afford to lose. You just have to kick ass all day long.

I’m taking on crazy production jobs left and right, and a lot of it is specifically for the purpose of just trying to kill this debt.”

‘THE MYTH OF THE STARVING ARTIST’

As for-profit higher education has grown rapidly in recent years, artsrelated majors have proven a popular way for companies to expand enrollment and enter new markets.

Education Management Corp., a publicly traded corporation that is the nation’s second-largest owner of for-profit colleges, grew its Art Institutes chain from 22 schools in 2001 to 50 by last year, operating in 24 states, according to the

THE ART OF A COLLEGE EDUCATION

company’s securities filings.

The Academy of Art’s enrollment has grown from fewer than 6,000 students in 2000 to more than 18,000 students last year.

The school generated revenues of more than $247 million in 200910, when the student population was about 17,600, according to the most recent data from the U.S. Department of Education.

By comparison, Ashford University — another for-profit school — posted $444 million in revenues with a student enrollment of 63,000 in the same year; the University of Phoenix’s online campus generated more than $3.5 billion in revenues, with more than 307,000 students.

A trade school at its core, the Academy of Art is rooted in the assumption that illustrators, painters and photographers can be trained from the ground up, regardless of past experience or talent.

“When students begin here, we start off giving everyone a basic foundation. We show them how to sharpen their pencils, how to set up their easels and then go on from there,” says Rowley, the Academy executive. “Other schools don’t all offer that same fundamental level of training and

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

that, I think, is the reason behind the myth of the starving artist.”

Up until the late 1990s, the expansion of arts schools nationwide had been relatively modest, held in check by selective admissions policies and a general assumption that the arts field did not have a well-worn career path.

“Historically, you really couldn’t peddle art as the ticket to fame and fortune,” says Barmak Nassirian, a higher education consultant and former associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. “What the for-profit business did was to turn it on its head. It’s really the story of overthe-top marketing of unthinkable paths to wealth. It’s like advertising low-income social work as a way to become a millionaire.”

Spend any time perusing The Daily Show or other late-night television, and you’re bound to see advertisements for arts programs that claim to specialize in getting students jobs in video game design and animation. The Academy of Art’s advertisements feature the slogan “Jobs for the 21st Century” and urge those watching to “bring your dreams to life.” A commercial for film production majors includes an instructor saying, “Our students are working everywhere in the indus-

THE ART OF A COLLEGE EDUCATION

try.” In a video game design advertisement, the narrator says: “Our graduates hit the ground running, and can work at the best gaming companies in the world.”

The onset of more sophisticated advertising campaigns, combined with an economic recession that has sent millions into the ranks of the unemployed, has led to a boom in the arts school field — particularly at institutions with open admissions policies and a desire for revenue growth.

Although Academy of Art has a longer history than some of the newcomers to the business, the school’s fastest period of growth has come only in the past decade, following the trends of other for-profit colleges that have rapidly expanded.

Arts schools rank among the most expensive in the nation, according to Department of Education statistics, but research has shown that fine arts degree holders have some of the highest unemployment rates of recent college graduates.

A study released earlier this year by Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce found that college graduates with arts degrees face an average unemployment rate of

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

11.1 percent. That compares to a 9.4 percent unemployment rate for humanities and liberal arts graduates, and a 5.4 percent unemployment rate for recent graduates in healthcare-related fields.

Because of the way the Department of Education collects statistics, it is difficult to know how

“I KNEW THERE WAS GOING TO BE DEBT HANGING OVER MY HEAD. TROUBLE IS, IF THAT’S YOUR PASSION IN LIFE, UNFORTUNATELY YOU CAN’T REALLY TURN THAT OFF.” many students at any institution get jobs after graduation. Not all schools are required to provide job placement rates, and some college accrediting agencies that collect such data have found inflated statistics at some for-profit schools in recent years.

The Obama administration has tried to get a handle on the issue by requiring career training schools — including for-profit colleges and some non-profit vocational schools — to provide statistics on how students are able to

THE ART OF A COLLEGE EDUCATION

manage their debts after college.

The Academy of Art performed fairly well on tests of students’ debt when compared to other for-profit arts schools. But on average, only a little more than 50 percent of its students were repaying at least a portion of their debt within a year, according to the data, and less than a third of students in the school’s undergraduate cinematography program were repaying loans.

By comparison, at the Art Institute of Philadelphia and the International Academy of Design and Technology in Tampa, Fla., only about 20 percent of students in some arts programs were able to repay at least a portion of their student loan debt after graduating or dropping out.

“The issue is: Where is the tipping point?” says Stephen Rose, a research professor and senior economist at Georgetown’s education and the workforce center.

“People are going to school somewhere that they might enjoy, and there are some successes. So what has to be the balance between success and failure that you say is a good investment? What number is the right number?”

Academy of Art is not the most expensive of the nation’s arts

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

schools, but, at $18,050 in tuition and fees per year, it is among the top ten percent of the priciest four-year, for-profit college programs, according to Department of Education data. The cost of living in San Francisco drives up the total price tag to more than $36,000 per year, according to the government figures.

Opinions of past and present students vary widely on the cost of the programs, and the motivations of those running the school.

The university’s sink-or-swim mentality stirs complex emotions among its students: an open enrollment policy offers a foot in the door for those without formal training, but it also boosts the risk of failure and a life of debt for those who don’t succeed.

Molly Maloney worked three jobs while attending the University of Wisconsin for her undergraduate degree, feverishly saving money and avoiding any scrap of student loan debt. The decision to attend Academy of Art came as a tough choice: she knew she wanted to do game design, but she knew the decision would immediately plunge her $30,000 into the hole.

“I knew there was going to be debt hanging over my head,” she recalls. “I knew that there was a good chance I’d graduate and not be able to pay it back, because

THE ART OF A COLLEGE EDUCATION

when you’re an artist you never assume anything. Trouble is, if that’s your passion in life, unfortunately you can’t really turn that off, and you’re never going to be really, truly happy doing anything else. So I just said I’m going to do this thing.”

The decision paid off for Maloney. A year before graduating the master’s program, she already has a job as a concept artist for a video game design company; an industry recruiter saw her work featured in this year’s spring show, which led to an internship and a job.

Yet for many others, the gamble wasn’t worth it.

Raya Golden came to the Academy of Art in 2002, drawn to its animation and illustration programs. Promises of a more than 90 percent job placement rate kept her going, but by year three she realized from talking to other graduates that the definition of a “job placement” was malleable. Many other illustration graduates were finding only part-time, unsteady work in a highly competitive field.

After graduating in 2008, she bounced around the Los Angeles area, looking for work drawing storyboards for the movie

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

industry. The steadiest gig she found was managing an arts supply store in Santa Monica. By early this year, her $80,000 in loan debt had ballooned to more than $130,000 after interest. Her mother, who co-signed the private student loans, faced the prospect of losing her home.

“I come from poor people, and all I wanted to do was take something that people had been telling me my entire life I was good at, and make a business out of it,” she says.

“That’s all I wanted to do, that whole American dream thing. And I felt really tricked when I got out.”

In a stroke of luck and benevolence, Golden had an uncle who recently scored a major contract in the entertainment industry. He offered to pay off her loan balance entirely if she would agree to work for him in New Mexico.

Nonetheless, Golden has watched her alma mater continue its expansion as friends who have graduated struggle to find jobs and maintain debts. She takes a dim view of the Academy of Art’s future.

“The bigger it gets, and the less teachers care — because their classes are overrun and not organized well — the worse the art is going to be. Anything that has to do with the quality of the trade is going to disappear,” she said.

“It’s going to destroy itself.”

the

THE HELP

Concierge Services Get HyperPersonal

BY KATHERINE BINDLEY | PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY STEPHEN WEBSTER

AMANDA JONES, A REAL ESTATE AGENT from San Francisco, toured her house one day last month and counted the number of people she was paying to take care of her. There were seven. ¶ April, the dog walker, was in the kitchen picking up Speedy and Willis – Jones’s miniature dachshunds — for their $35 walk. Up in the master bedroom, Christina, Jones’s $50 an hour closet organizer was strategizing with Jackie, her $200 an hour personal stylist, about what to buy at the Container Store (Jackie’s assistant was there, too, built into the hourly rate). ¶ Meanwhile, two men were installing new windows in Jones’s bedroom, but she hadn’t hired them herself — she hired someone else to hire them. They came with rave reviews from Carrie Starner

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

THE HELP

Keenan, a lifestyle management concierge who coordinates home contracting projects, plans events and secures the most elusive reservations at the best vineyards in wine country for $75 an hour.

“I turned to my assistant and said, ‘It takes a village,’” recalls Jones, who has a separate personal assistant to take care of work-specific matters. “It’s kind of crazy but I feel like I need these things because I’m not going to sew a button on a shirt, and I’m not going to spend a weekend organizing my closet.”

People like Jones, with little time and plenty of money, have seen their options increase of late when it comes to personal providers, otherwise known as concierges. The line of work once specific to the hotel industry is now offering hyper-individualized services in industries ranging from home contracting and fitness to pets and pregnancy.

And with these services comes a new mentality toward the help.

They aren’t just following orders anymore. They’re taking the lead, sometimes guiding their employers’ most important life decisions — even something as personal as raising a child. In the same way a

hotel concierge can plan every day of your trip to a new city, a maternity concierge, for example, can plan out a pregnancy with suggestions for a birthing plan and which baby products to buy.

Indeed, it does take a village — but it will cost you.

Altogether, Jones estimates that she pays anywhere between $2,500 and $5,000 a month contracting out aspects of her life that she’d otherwise neglect. Paying to have other people deal with unpleasant tasks helps to mitigate the “always-on mentality” that her job requires, and that constant e-mailing only exacerbates.

“I don’t think we can underestimate how technology has changed our lives, just changed everything about how we spend our time, how we think about our time,” says Jones.

Because she often works seven days a week and can’t predict her schedule, Jones thinks of the army of people helping her out as contributors to her success. The money she pays Starner Keenan to set up a catered outdoor lunch on the terrace of a property she is trying to sell, for example, might help to win over prospective buyers. On top of that, each of the services

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

THE HELP

that Jones uses provides her with something invaluable: time.

“I think people are looking into things that are going to allow them to be more efficient, and that’s how I feel. I am so much more productive when the personal things in my life are handled,” says Jones. “I’m going to pay $50 an hour for the closet girl and $200 an hour for a stylist. But I’m not going to spend time roaming around Barneys and Saks on my own being sold things by a commission based sales person.”

In line with many business sectors pushing luxury items and non-essentials, the concierge industry was hit hard by the recession. According to a recent report by the research firm IBIS World, industry revenue dropped 6.2 percent in 2009, with demands from both corporate clients and households declining. By the end of 2012, industry revenue is expected to total $220 million. But over the next five years, IBIS expects the concierge industry to see an uptick, with annual revenue projected to grow to $264 million for 2017.

“Some factors that have really contributed to growth is decreased leisure time among indi-

“ I NEED THESE THINGS BECAUSE I’M NOT GOING TO SEW A BUTTON ON A SHIRT, AND I’M NOT GOING TO SPEND A WEEKEND ORGANIZING MY CLOSET.” viduals,” says Caitlin Moldvay, a senior analyst with IBIS. Moldvay notes that according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as of 2010, the average American was limited to 5.2 hours of leisure time per day, with two of those hours going towards household activities.

The IBIS report also predicts that people making more than $100,000 a year — the industry’s primary targets — will see their incomes improve in the coming years along with the economy, and that they’ll have more discretionary funds as a result. Demand in the concierge industry, according to IBIS, is directly tied to the number of people with disposable

Amanda Jones, center, and her concierge Carrie Starner Keenan, third from right, surrounded by Jones’ team, including the dogwalker, assistant and closet organizer.

PHOTOGRAPH BY GABRIELA HASBUN

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

THE HELP

incomes. So indicators show that this arguably superfluous industry will only strengthen over time, despite a flagging economy.

As over the top as such expenditures are, fans of hiring concierges consider them somewhat practical purchases: in the longrun, people argue that through concierges, they’re saving time, work and even bettering their overall health and well being.

While having services tailored to one’s individual needs is no doubt a luxury that’s out of reach for most people, the same reach for outside help has translated to lower income brackets. Some in the industry have identified a more affordable market for people willing to pay someone else to do things for them. With the emergence of more virtual assistant services, even those outside the 1 percent are getting some taste of what it’s like to have hired help.

In both the concierge and virtual service industries, what’s slowly emerging is a new relationship between ‘the help’ and the helped, so to speak. Instead of simply following orders, they’re taking charge of some of the most intimate parts of their employers’ lives.

“TARGETED MONEY”

Katharine Giovanni, founder of the International Concierge and Lifestyle Management Association, estimates that in 1998, there were only around 50 individuals offering concierge services outside of hotels nationwide. Around that same time, Giovanni was launching her own concierge business and collecting information as she researched what the industry already had to offer.

Giovanni says it was hotel concierges who started offering their services to non-guests that pioneered the independent concierge industry. Those concierges simply took what they were already doing — like making reservations or getting tickets — and started doing those tasks for other people.

Eventually, some of them started their own businesses. Today, there are hundreds of concierges serving every niche imaginable.

“I know a concierge who is specializing in the patients of plastic surgeons,” says Giovanni. “If you’re a patient and you just had a facelift, you certainly don’t want to go out to the grocery store.”

Giovanni admits that the concierge industry as a whole is still

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

THE HELP

climbing out of the recession, with association membership numbers dropping by 40 percent as recently as 2011. But Giovanni says that those numbers have started to rebound this year as a consequence of Americans being busier at work.

“Everybody on the planet is trying to squeeze 36 hours into a 24 hour day,” says Giovanni. “I don’t care what the economy is doing, that’s what’s happening. And when you do that, inevitably you don’t do it very well.”

Giovanni has a term for the currency flowing toward the concierge industry: “targeted money.”

“People who have the money to spend are saying, ‘I’m going to spend targeted money. So what means the most to me?

Spending more time at the office or spending more time with my kids?” she says.

Starner Keenan, the lifestyle concierge who found the good window guys for Jones, says she’s already seen signs of increased demand in terms of the number of clients she is working with. At the same time, there’s been a subtle shift in how some of her clients are spending money, which she links to the recession.

“ EVERYBODY ON THE PLANET IS TRYING TO SQUEEZE 36 HOURS INTO A 24 HOUR DAY.” “Even my very, very wealthy clients, everyone took a moment and stopped and really reassessed their spending. I think a lot of people were very nervous,” says Starner Keenan.

She says the cautionary mood hasn’t reduced her business, but rather made her clients more practical, and thoughtful, in their spending, going after value-based services. They might ask her to develop a plan to make their homes more eco-friendly, incorporating solar panel floors to save on operating costs. Other requests include having her shop around for bids from contractors to get the best deal on a remodeling project that will eventually increase a home’s value.

“It’s not 100 percent valuebased,” admits Starner Keenan, “I get some really fluffy requests,

Fitness concierge Vanessa Martin for SIN Workouts makes sure her clients don’t skip their cardio.

PHOTOGRAPH BY LAURA BARISONZI

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

COURTESY OF TUTTI BAMBINI

THE HELP

but these are busy people and they don’t have time to get things handled.”

For Julia Dalton-Brush, 33, of Manhattan, practical spending means putting money towards personalized fitness. She recently started paying $150 a month for a fitness concierge and says that the service is worth it by ensuring that she actually works out.

As a former college athlete, Dalton-Brush used to exercise on a regular basis. But since becoming a mother and a business owner, she’s gained 70 pounds,

PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK

which is why she hired Vanessa Martin, the fitness concierge behind SIN Workouts.

“It’s a luxury service, there’s no doubt about that,” says DaltonBrush.

Contrary to what one might expect, a fitness concierge is different from a personal trainer.

They function not as coaches so much as secretaries, scheduling clients’ fitness routines, and occasionally coming along for the ride. Martin, 27, launched her business in August after recognizing the need for her expertise

An elegant baby shower set up

by Tutti Bambini.

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

THE HELP

in managing the boutique gym circuit, which includes studios like FlyWheel, SoulCycle, Barry’s Bootcamp and Pure Yoga.

“It’s kind of a daunting process to get into some of these prime-time classes,” says Martin, who started out by managing the workout schedules of her friends.

“They would ask me, ‘What instructors are good? How early do I have to get there?’ It comes down to the basic things of, like, what do you wear to a spin class?”

Martin refuses to disclose her fees, or even a range, claiming it’s impossible to know what any hypothetical client would have to pay because her services are just that individualized. But all the clients Martin works with have enough money where they don’t need to budget for her services.

Many of those clients are friends of friends who pay three digits a month on top of their gym costs.

In exchange, Martin might create a personalized regimen, make wake-up calls, or have a car service outside a client’s door in the morning. She also might take classes alongside her clients.

One rainy Friday morning last month, for example, Martin and Dalton-Brush met in Chelsea and

“ WE’RE JUST OVERWHELMED BY INFORMATION. PEOPLE WILL PAY TO WHITTLE DOWN 200 CHOICES DOWN TO 20.” took a 9:30 a.m. circuit training class at Barry’s Bootcamp, followed by a 10:30 a.m. spinning class at FlyWheel.

Classes at Barry’s and FlyWheel feature marquee instructors at the front of the room, so Martin’s presence is supplemental: she might tweak a client’s form if need be, but on this day at least, she functioned mostly as moral support by running on the treadmill next to DaltonBrush and shouting out the occasional, “Woo!” “Now I’m being held accountable,” says Dalton-Brush. “It’s definitely a cheerleading thing.”

If Dalton-Brush wasn’t scheduled to meet Martin at Barry’s that morning, she says there’s

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

COURTESY OF TUTTI BAMBINI

THE HELP

a good chance she would have dropped off her 4-year-old at school, walked right back home to her apartment and wasted the money by not showing up for a class she’d already paid for.

CHOICE OVERLOAD

Before first time mother Maria Campos-Yatzkan, 42, gave birth in August, she was willing to pay for the peace of mind that came with

having a maternity concierge from a local store called Tutti Bambini plan out her registry.

“It prepares you and saves you time, and probably money as well,” says Campos-Yatzkan. “If you don’t have experience, you could buy certain bottles that are not good for the baby.”

Campos-Yatzkan, who works as a physician, is unsure how much money she spent at Tutti Bambini before giving birth, because in addition to hosting her shower and designing her registry, the com-

Maria CamposYatzkan and her husband depended on a maternity concierge from the local store Tutti Bambini.

COURTESY OF TUTTI BAMBINI

The nautically themed nursery set up by Tutti Bambini as a surprise for Maria Campos -Yatzkan from her husband.

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

THE HELP

pany designed a nautical themed nursery for Campos-Yatzkan, a surprise gift from her husband.

Monica Burgos-Valdes, the executive baby planner at Tutti Bambini, says that the year-old maternity concierge operation has brought in about 25 clients so far.

The market extends beyond the borders of well-heeled cities like New York. Melissa Moog, with the International Baby Planner Association cites members who are running their own maternity concierge and baby planning businesses in 20 different states.

For $75 to $115 an hour, Burgos-Valdes finds nannies, night nurses and lactation consultants, all the while planning baby showers, designing nurseries and telling parents which products should be avoided due to recalls. Her clients, she says, tend to be “working moms” who “don’t have time for all the little things that having a baby encompasses.”

By extension, these mothers are putting substantial trust in their service providers, and in the idea that paying a high enough price will guarantee them the best stroller, the best baby proofing services for their homes, or even something as

“ I’VE HEARD PEOPLE SAY THIS KIND OF BUSINESS IS FOR THE 1 PERCENT. WE’RE BREAKING DOWN THAT WALL.” crucial as a nanny referral.

In much the same way that people of a certain means are willing to spend top-dollar on their children, Mitch Marrow who runs a pet day care service, is working off of the concept that they’ll do the same for their pets. He recently launched a pet concierge service in 30 luxury apartment buildings in Manhattan, with the operating principle that no perk is too expensive to incorporate.

“It’s not a dollars and cents type of relationship with our customer base,” says Marrow, a former NFL player and owner of The Spot Experience.

For monthly fees starting at $400 and going all the way up to $1,500, residents can choose

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

THE HELP

COURTESY OF THE SPOT

from a range of packages that might include shuttles to and from daycare and GPS monitored walks with a trained employee who has been through a criminal background check.

NOT JUST THE 1%

According to Melissa Hobley, a representative from the marketing firm Buyology, such extravagant offerings are a new expression

of the American corporate tenet of customer service. As a result, she says, the concierge model is spreading upwards. Last spring, Lincoln, the luxury car division of Ford, paired with an international concierge association.

To counteract the allure of the internet as an easy resource for people in the market for a car, Lincoln now has some of its employees trained by hotel concierges to offer a higher level of service.

Virtual concierges are also on call 24 hours a day to offer online

The storefront of The Spot, a pet concierge service that could cost from $400 to $1500 month.

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

THE HELP

tours of vehicles and answer questions from customers.

“It’s not terribly surprising in a digital age,” says Hobley. “It’s become so hard for a company to build a relationship with you.”

In a similar vein, finding just about any goods or services online these days can be overwhelming, Hobley says, thanks to the deluge of offerings on the internet.

“We’re just overwhelmed by information,” says Hobley. “People will pay to whittle down 200 choices down to 20.”

The twist here is that the hired help now tell their bosses what to do. Clients are willing to have less power over certain aspects of their lives, because it’s easier than doing it themselves.

“This is why it kind of matters that you have some faith in the concierge, who is your proxy, to make the decision for you,” says Rachel Sherman, a professor of sociology at the New School who has studied concierge providers.

“If you want your concierge to give you 10 options, you are sacrificing seeing the other 500 options that the concierge is going to look at.”

Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, Sherman says, may depend on the individual client and

“ I KNOW A CONCIERGE WHO IS SPECIALIZING IN THE PATIENTS OF PLASTIC SURGEONS.” how much they care about sacrificing choice versus spending time.

Through their marketing, Sherman says, service providers try to circumvent the idea that handling tasks yourself has an inherent value.

“The research that I did indicated that the more general lifestyle management concierges are being sold as a way of outsourcing the parts of your life that are not rewarding to you. They’re always saying, ‘We do what you have to do you, so you can do what you want to do.’ That’s a very frequent tag line you see,” says Sherman.

Ariana Massarat, 30, who works in business development for AT&T, started paying for a virtual assistant three months ago to help plan her wedding after finding a deal on a flash sale website for a company called Fancy Hands. Since then, Massarat has had assistants

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

COURTESY OF FANCY HANDS

THE HELP

booking appointments at venues, and sorting through reviews online to find the most reputable people to handle hair, make-up and flowers for the big day.

“It really just frees up some of my time so that I can actually fo-

cus on my fiance,” says Massarat.

Fancy Hands, which launched in 2010, joins the ranks of what’s become a popular business model. Red Butler, for example, offers similar services and they’ve been around since 2005. But they’ve seen more industry competition in recent years from other virtual assistant services.

Fancy Hands is a company that provides concierge services for a reasonable price.

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

THE HELP

Nick Ramirez, a vice president of business development for Red Butler, says demand for reasonably priced online personal assistants to handle errands and menial tasks has been growing.

“We’ve actually increased staffing,” says Ramirez. “We’ve hired more concierges.”

Customers pay less for these types of concierges by virtue of the fact that requests are usually handled over email, and that a rotating cast of characters might be helping them on any given day. TaskRabbit, for example, which launched in 2008, pairs people looking for errand-runners with vetted local service providers online. Customers can name their own price and service providers then bid on the task.

Ted Roden, the man behind Fancy Hands, uses the tagline “Assistants for Everyone” on his website. Roden is making an effort to appeal to people who want to have a personal assistant, but can’t afford one.

A $25 a month membership gets customers five requests that can be as specialized as they want, and $65 a month buys 25 tasks.

Roden says his assistants have fired off lists of the best Twitter accounts for Broadway reviewers

and ordered flowers for wives on behalf of their husbands.

Roden says he knows from his tracking system that his company’s assistants are already logging more than 24 hours each day on the phone fulfilling tasks for wits customers.

“I’ve heard people say this kind of business is for the 1 percent,” he says. “We’re breaking down that wall.”

According to Sherman, services providers marketing to those outside the 1 percent often try to make their clients in middle income ranges feel like they’re entitled to contract out errands and personal tasks, as opposed to selling them as a luxury.

“It encourages people to think that there are certains kinds of things that they’re not doing for themselves anymore, just like when you first hired someone to clean your house,” says Sherman, the sociologist. “It creates a hierarchy of tasks, some of which are appropriate to pay people to do, and some of which are not.”

Eventually, that mentality might start to become normal for a consumer, redefining what we consider personal enough to do ourselves.

SHUTTERSTOCK

PUBLIC DEFENDERS REBEL AGAINST CRUSHING CASELOADS

BY JOHN RUDOLF

T HALF PAST 5 on a cold, cloudy April morning, Ed Olexa kneels by his front door, sorting through stacks of case files for the coming day’s hearings. Olexa works as a public defender in Luzerne County in northeastern Pennsylvania, and he’s quadruple-booked this morning, with four clients scheduled to appear at the same time before different judges.

“My choice last night was to watch ‘American Idol’ or get my files in order,” he says.

Olexa represents nearly 120 clients at a time for the Luzerne County defender’s office, the majority of them charged with felonies. It’s a typical caseload for the office, which is one of the most troubled in the state, according to a 2011 report commissioned by the Pennsylvania legislature.

The report excoriated the state system as a whole, calling it obsolete and ineffective, but singled out Luzerne as a place where inadequate training, funding and supervision of defenders contributed to a “shocking deterioration” in the quality of representation given to some poor people.

Public defenders are infamous as the workhorses of the legal system, charged by the courts with representing poor defendants in criminal matters ranging from misdemeanors PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOHN RUDOLF

THE DEFENSE NEVER RESTS

to death penalty cases. The pay is low, the hours long and the turnover high. Complaints that they suffer from crushing caseloads and inadequate support staff can probably be heard in any courthouse in the country.

But the situation finally reached a tipping point in Luzerne last December, when chief public defender Al Flora Jr. mutinied against the county government — his office’s sole funding source — and began turning down hundreds of cases assigned to his attorneys by the court. Three months later, he filed a class-action suit seeking an injunction, forcing the county to provide additional resources to his office.

The move quickly drew the attention of the state’s legal establishment. “The problems in Luzerne County are very well known. At some point somebody had to say enough,” says Ronald Greenblatt, chairman of the Philadelphia chapter of the Pennsylvania Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. “I’m hoping that other public defenders will take the courageous stand that Mr. Flora did.”

The situation in Luzerne is not an isolated one. As funding falls

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

“ IT BECOMES ASSEMBLY-LINE JUSTICE. IT’S LIKE A McDONALD’S DRIVE-THROUGH — JUST MOVING THE BODIES ALONG.” and cases continue to flood the system, many already-stressed defender programs across the country are being pushed to the very brink of collapse. And with little hope of state or federal action to remedy the problem, a small but growing number of defender offices are rebelling, suing states and counties over excessive caseloads that their attorneys cannot handle without violating their clients’ constitutional right to effective representation.

For attorneys like Olexa, the heavy caseloads follow them home. Case files are everywhere in his small home in Trucksville, a small town just outside of WilkesBarre, the county seat — piled on the living room floor, the coffee table, the dining table, the dining

room floor. They blanket the backseat of the rusty Subaru in the driveway, which he’s borrowing from his mom while his own car is in the shop. In his cramped home office, law books, legal journals and other documents cover the floor and the windowsill, while a printer on his narrow desk churns out more pages.

Olexa, 37, is clean-shaven, with close-cropped wavy brown hair, a boyish face and a slightly crooked smile. He would probably seem

younger than his age, if not for the dark circles under his eyes.

“What am I missing?” he mutters to himself, tossing some folders aside and stuffing others into an oversized briefcase. “What am I missing?”

Many public defenders in Luzerne are assigned specific geographic areas, and Olexa covers Hazleton, a blue-collar city of 25,000 about 40 miles south of Wilkes-Barre. The city is distinguished by a once-stately and now badly dilapidated downtown area, built during the region’s coal boom a century ago.

Ed Olexa has a caseload of 260, way over the 150 cases a year recommended by the American Bar Association.

THE DEFENSE NEVER RESTS

The coal industry went bust in the 1950s, and economic stagnation set in and never lifted. More recently, the National Drug Intelligence Center identified Hazleton as an emerging regional hub for the state’s heroin trade, fought over by Dominican gangs that migrated west from Philadelphia and New York. It’s one of the county’s tougher jurisdictions.

It’s also Olexa’s hometown.

He graduated from the local high school and his parents live in a quiet neighborhood on the north side. The city used to feel safe, but lately he worries about his mother just taking the dog out for a walk after dark. “One of the saddest things in my life is seeing what has happened to this town,” he says.

After three years in the public defender’s office, Olexa’s well acquainted with Hazleton’s dark side. He represents nearly every criminal defendant arrested there who can’t afford an attorney, with the exception of juvenile offenders and adults charged with murder.

Some clients are homeless drifters, or immigrants come to work in the area’s three meat packing plants. Most are young, in their 20s and early 30s, and virtu-

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

ally all are flat broke. Unable to make bail, they often sit in jail for months as their cases slowly wend through the system.

To handle the caseload, Olexa rises before dawn five days a week and works weekends and late into the night, reviewing police reports and tapping out briefs on his lap-

Criminal defendants in Luzerne are overwhelmingly poor, and those that are unable to afford bail often spend months and even years in jail.

THE DEFENSE NEVER RESTS

top while watching TV with his girlfriend, Anne Marie. He shuttles regularly between Hazleton, where a local magistrate arraigns the newly arrested, and WilkesBarre, where the public defender’s office, main county courthouses and the county jail are located.

Olexa handled nearly 260 cases last year, with more than half of them felonies — mostly assaults and robberies and the more serious drug charges. The rest of his clients face misdemeanors, which in Pennsylvania can bring a jail or prison sentence of up to three years. He also files his own appeals, a complicated, time-consuming process. The American Bar Association recommends that full-time public defenders handle no more than 150 felony cases in an entire year.

Olexa’s caseload far exceeds those standards, but there’s a twist: he technically works only part-time for the county. Like the majority of attorneys in the public defender’s office, his salary of about $30,000 is based on the pretext that he carries only half the workload of a full-time attorney, and can earn a second income by taking on private clients.

In reality, Olexa works a grueling

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

schedule simply to keep pace with the constant influx of county cases and squeezes in private clients whenever he can, often by working through the weekends.

The volume of cases causes pile-ups in the courtroom. The previous week, Olexa represented 17 clients in a row before the same judge over the course of an afternoon. Authorities brought many over in shackles and orange jumpsuits from the nearby jail, and several pleaded guilty to felonies that would follow them the rest of their lives. Most wanted to discuss their cases and have the proceedings explained to them.

But the pace of the hearings made it impossible for Olexa to consult with them for more than a few minutes before his next client was called. And while he’d put hours of work into preparing each case, as the hearings progressed, fatigue set in, and it took all his energy to stay focused on the task at hand.

“It becomes assembly-line justice,” he says. “It’s like a McDonald’s drive-through — just moving the bodies along. Bottom line, the only way that it gets done right is if I work way more hours than they pay me for and do it on my own time.”

THE DEFENSE NEVER RESTS

Al Flora Jr., the Luzerne chief public defender and Olexa’s boss, says he anguished over his decision to sue the county. For nearly two years, attorneys on his staff — starting with Olexa — had come to him asking for help in reducing their caseloads to a manageable level. Some were in over their heads, missing filing deadlines and court appearances.

Others were burning out, losing their tempers with clients and in court, and taking unacceptable shortcuts in their work. A few attorneys told him they feared making a serious mistake and putting an innocent client behind bars. The office was also under intense scrutiny in the wake of a major scandal involving its representation of juvenile defendants.

But county officials continually rebuffed Flora’s pleas for additional funding, he says.

“It came to the point where I just felt that we couldn’t do it anymore,” he says. “This had to be stopped.”

The county fiercely contested the suit, setting the stage for a long, uphill battle in the courts.

Advocates for indigent defense reform are watching the case closely. If it succeeds, it may serve

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

as a model for other overburdened offices throughout the country.

“I think that public defenders have to consider this option, and have to study what’s going on in Luzerne County and learn from it,” says Ed Burnette, vice president of defender legal services for the National Legal Aid and Defender Association in Washington, D.C., and a former chief public defender for Cook County, Ill., the second-largest defender office in the country. “It certainly is going to impact the mainstream.”

“THIS REPRESENTS A CRISIS”

America’s prisons and jails hold more people, in sheer numbers and on a per-capita basis, than any country on earth, including China, Cuba and Iran. Those prisons and jails are kept full through the ceaseless work of a massive criminal justice apparatus that processes the 14 million people arrested every year, on an average of about 26 every minute, according to the Justice Department.

The vast majority of those arrested are poor, often desperately so; many are mentally ill, homeless or addicted to drugs and alcohol.

Only a small percentage can afford a private attorney.

THE DEFENSE NEVER RESTS

The rest are represented by a public defender, free of charge.

This extraordinary right dates only to 1962, when the Supreme Court heard the case of Clarence Gideon, a penniless and uneducated Florida man forced to represent himself in a felony robbery case after being denied a courtappointed attorney. In a landmark decision, the court ruled unanimously that denying free counsel to Gideon, who was sentenced to five years in prison, violated his right under the Sixth Amendment to a fair trial. The decision created the nation’s public defense system, as legislatures in every state passed laws creating programs to provide all criminal defendants with counsel.

Fifty years later, this public defender system is widely seen as failing, overtaxed by improbably high caseloads, poorly supervised and catastrophically underfunded.

Except for the comparatively small number of defendants charged in federal court, the provision of attorneys to the poor is left exclusively to the states, creating a patchwork of 50 autonomous systems functioning without federal oversight. State legislatures fully underwrite many

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

“ OUR COUNTY PROBABLY LOOKS AT OUR OFFICE AS REPRESENTING ALL THE SCUM OF THE EARTH.” systems; others are supported through a mix of state and local funding. Regardless of where the money comes from, there is never enough to go around.

The problems plaguing the system have been recognized by Congress and at the highest levels of the Obama administration. At a national summit on indigent defense in New Orleans this February, hosted by the American Bar Association, Attorney General Eric Holder called the issue a “key area of focus” for the Justice Department, and himself personally.

Legal representation for the poor, Holder said, was hobbled by “insufficient resources, overwhelming caseloads and inadequate oversight.” He noted how poor defendants often spend weeks and even months in jail before seeing an attorney, while others are en-

ALEX WONG/GETTY IMAGES

THE DEFENSE NEVER RESTS

couraged to waive their right to counsel and plead guilty without understanding their rights, the charges against them or the potential sentences they face.

“You’ve seen the alarming statistics. And some of you have experienced this harsh reality firsthand, in the communities where you live and practice. So I don’t need to tell you that this represents a crisis,” he said.

In New Orleans, Holder announced $2.4 million in new federal grants to aid public defender programs and to study problems in the system, and described the Obama administration as providing an “unprecedented level of support” to improve poor people’s access to quality legal help.

Yet the administration’s efforts are dwarfed by the effect of the financial meltdown and recession on states and municipalities, which slashed funds from defender programs, even as the number of prosecutions continued to climb or remained the same.

Federal support for public defender programs also remains miniscule, totaling less than $10 million per year, a pittance compared to the hundreds of millions of dollars in federal aid

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

given to prosecutors and police, according to Christopher Durocher, a researcher with the Constitution Project, a non-partisan legal think tank.

Burnette, with the National Legal Aid and Defender Association, applauds the Justice Department’s recent efforts to increase funding, but acknowledges that it isn’t nearly enough. “People say it’s a drop in the bucket, but it’s a drop that we didn’t have before,” he says. “The defender community is frustrated, because too much has happened that makes the problem worse.”

NOTORIOUS FAILINGS

Luzerne County’s defenders weren’t always so overwhelmed, says Flora, who became chief public defender in 2010. He first took a job with the office in the

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder cited the importance of increased aid to public defenders.

THE DEFENSE NEVER RESTS

early 1980s and never left. When he started working there, a first offense for drunk driving was settled with a $50 fine. Today, depending on the circumstances, the same charge can carry a prison term of up to five years. “Back in those days the amount of files you would get was not that much,” he says. “You weren’t slammed with cases.”

Flora sits in the defender’s office early on a Friday evening in April. It’s quiet and dark, and most everyone is gone for the weekend. He’s in his early 60s, with thinning silver hair, and speaks in quiet, measured tones.

He’s probably the only attorney in the county to successfully argue a case before the U.S. Supreme Court, a death sentence appeal for a convicted mass murderer suffering from severe mental illness.

For most of his career, Flora worked exclusively in homicides and remained uninvolved in the defender office’s day-to-day operations. But when he took over as chief defender, he faced immense pressure to tackle systemic failings in the office that had suddenly grown notorious across the state. In 2009, Luzerne County was caught up in one of the largest

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

judicial scandals in Pennsylvania history, involving the handling of poor juvenile defendants. Dubbed “Kids for Cash,” the case featured the extraordinary allegation that two sitting Luzerne County judges took $2.8 million in kickbacks from the owner of a private juvenile detention facility leased by the county in exchange for filling those facilities with young offenders through harsh sentencing. The ringleader of the scheme is serving 28 years in federal prison.

The public defender’s office wasn’t implicated in the corruption, but its reputation took a beating anyway, after it emerged that more than half of the juveniles prosecuted for delinquency in the county over the previous decade appeared in court without legal representation. Parents told a state panel investigating the scandal that they were pressured to sign forms waiving their children’s right to counsel without being told the potential consequences. In court, children as young as 11 were badgered into pleading guilty, then hauled away to detention for months at a time for petty misdemeanors involving marijuana possession or fighting.

Analysis showed the county sen-

THE DEFENSE NEVER RESTS

tenced young offenders to detention at 2.5 times the state average.

Basil Russin, Luzerne County’s chief public defender since 1980, resigned in disgrace, and county commissioners tapped Flora to fill his post.

He instituted major reforms in juvenile defense, but quickly saw that the office’s representation of adult defendants also desperately needed reform. Attorneys in the office, beginning with Ed

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

Olexa, told him they were carrying caseloads that far exceeded the American Bar Association’s recommended national guidelines. He began warning county leaders and the courts that a major investment in new attorneys and support staff was desperately needed. In response, the county proposed cutting his budget by 12 percent. It wasn’t a particularly surprising reaction.

“Our county probably looks at our office as representing all the scum of the earth,” Flora says. “They think that’s it’s not

Al Flora Jr., the Luzerne County chief public defender, sued the county government over their failure to provide the necessary resources for his attorneys.

THE DEFENSE NEVER RESTS

worth spending money on.”

The office’s funding dilemma is further complicated by the fact that the Pennsylvania legislature provides zero funding for indigent defense. It is the only state that fails to do so. As a result, countylevel politicians throughout the state make crucial funding decisions, even as they hold the power to appoint and remove the chief public defenders charged with making budget requests.

With his requests for additional funding rejected, Flora presented county officials and the county’s chief judge with an ultimatum.

Increase resources for the public defender’s office, he said, or he would begin declining qualified criminal defendants referred to his office by the court on the grounds that his attorneys could not represent them ethically, given their caseloads.

It was an unprecedented move. Defender offices in other states have declined clients due to overwhelming caseloads, but only after asking for a judge’s permission first.

“He did it without any formal motion. He simply refused to proceed,” says Norman Leffstein, dean emeritus of the Indiana

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

“ WE SENT OUT SECRETARIES TO TAKE STATEMENTS WITH NO TRAINING WHATSOEVER. THEY WERE ESSENTIALLY CLERICAL WORKERS DOING INVESTIGATIVE WORK.” University School of Law, and a national expert on indigent defense. “That really hasn’t been done without a prior agreement that it’s okay.”

The county didn’t blink, and in late December 2011, Flora began turning clients away. County officials blasted him in the press.

“He just throws things out there,” Stephen Urban, a county commissioner, told the Citizens’ Voice, a local daily, in reference to Flora’s concerns over caseloads. “He is out of line.”

After four months of stalemate, Flora, represented by the Pennsylvania branch of the Ameri-

THE DEFENSE NEVER RESTS

can Civil Liberties Union, filed a class action civil rights lawsuit against the county on behalf of three defendants turned down by his office under the new policy.

The county filed a motion attacking the suit as baseless and seeking to have it tossed out of court. “Flora’s own dereliction of duties” were responsible for the plaintiffs’ lack of representation, the county argued in a brief.

“A HEAVY BURDEN”

Flora is not far from retirement, and has little to gain from the suit.

But he hopes his action will make a difference for the attorneys on his staff, many of whom are just starting their legal careers. He fears that the younger attorneys, like Olexa, are quickly burning out. “Ed carries a heavy burden,” he says.

“He doesn’t have it easy up there in Hazleton, all by himself.”

In 2009, Olexa had been an attorney for three years, two of which were spent as an assistant prosecutor in the Luzerne County district attorney’s office. The work there was interesting, but the pay was dismal, less than $30,000 a year. Payments on his student loans left him clearing about $350 a week before taxes. He lived at

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

home. “It wasn’t getting me out of my parents’ basement,” he says.

That was when he jumped to the Luzerne County public defender’s office, where he thought he’d fare better. He was told he’d earn about the same salary as he did as an assistant prosecutor, work fewer hours and have the opportunity to take on private cases in his spare time. But after a few weeks on the job, he realized he had signed on for more work, not less, and that his aspirations of building a private law practice on the side were fated to be overshadowed by his public defense work.

Just as disturbing was the impact the caseloads had on his ability to function as an attorney.

There were too many clients and nowhere near enough hours in the day to do everything that needed to be done. Client communication suffered, as did investigations. For a while, the office had no investigative support staff at all, leaving lawyers to do their own investigative work. Sometimes the secretaries chipped in.

“We sent out secretaries to take statements with no training whatsoever,” he says. “They were essentially clerical workers

THE DEFENSE NEVER RESTS

doing investigative work.”

After about a year on the job, Olexa put his concerns about excessive caseloads in a letter to Russin, the chief public defender.

“This matter cries out for an urgent response,” he wrote. “I will await your advice.”

Russin ignored the letter, not even offering an informal response. But four months later, he resigned, so Olexa tried again with Flora. Two years later, Flora effectively declared war against the county. Olexa was bowled over. “I didn’t think anything was going to happen,” he says.

“I’LL NOT BACK DOWN”

Flora’s lawsuit seeks an injunction forcing the county to boost funding for his office, and in early May, lawyers for the ACLU and the county meet for a preliminary hearing to argue for and against such a ruling in front of Joseph Augello, a local circuit judge. An injunction provides temporary but immediate relief, in advance of a trial, and is a drastic step that courts rarely endorse. In this case, however, hundreds of poor criminal defendants are in limbo, without legal counsel, because of Flora’s new policy, giving his request

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

“ ONE OF THE SADDEST THINGS IN MY LIFE IS SEEING WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO THIS TOWN.” for an injunction real urgency.

The hearing is in a small auxiliary courtroom on the third floor of a drab municipal building in downtown Wilkes-Barre. The defenders office is one floor down, and all day long, public defenders dip in and out of the courtroom to catch a few minutes of the proceedings. For a while, Olexa watches intently from a seat in the corner. Robert Lawton, the county manager, sits at the defense table.

Flora testifies for nearly four hours. On direct examination, his voice chokes with emotion as he describes the sorry condition of the defender’s office and his battles with local officials over inadequate funding. On cross-examination, the county’s attorney, Jack Dean, attacks Flora with an almost theatrical viciousness. He waves a copy of Pennsylvania’s Public Defender Act and passes it to Flora to review. The act cre-

THE DEFENSE NEVER RESTS

ated the state’s public defender offices, and mandates that they accept clients who fall below the state’s poverty line.

“Show me where it allows you to decline cases for people who cannot afford lawyers,” Dean says.

“Specifically in the act, it does not say that,” Flora concedes.

Dean moves on, focusing on the county’s precarious finances. “You are aware, sir, that other departments in the county have suffered layoffs?” he says. “Is it fair to say that while other offices are being asked to do more with less, you are asking to do less with more?”

Next up is Leffstein, the indigent defense expert, serving as a witness for the plaintiffs.

“I cannot tell you how unprecedented this hearing is,” he whispers to a reporter, as he gathers his papers and makes his way to the stand.

Under questioning from the ACLU, Leffstein describes his analysis of caseloads handled by the Luzerne County defenders.

Part-time attorneys, he says, handle an average of 74 felony cases — including homicides and sex offenses — and 33 misdemeanors at a time, as well as handling their own appeals. The full-time

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

lawyers handle roughly the same amount of cases and appeals, but also hundreds of parole and probation violation cases. The support staff is “woefully inadequate,” he says.

“Given the caseloads that they have, they must necessarily fail to deliver competent representation,” he says. “When you have over 100 clients who you are simultaneously representing, what occurs is a form of triage, where you deal with only the most immediate problems of the day.”

The hearing, which started at 9:30 in the morning, ends at about 7 p.m., with Augello declaring that he is taking the arguments “under advisement.” A few days later he orders the two sides to begin negotiations.

In mid-June, the judge issues a remarkable 25-page decision.

It broadly accepts as fact Flora’s depiction of his office as teetering on the brink of collapse. “To describe the current state of affairs in the Office of the Public Defender as approaching crisis stage is not an exaggeration,” he writes.

He finds that Leffstein’s expert opinion on staffing was “well articulated and persuasive.”

Augello orders the county to

THE DEFENSE NEVER RESTS

draw up a report on how it will “meet its constitutional obligations” to poor defendants. He also rules that Flora can no longer refuse representation to poor clients.

For Mary Catherine Roper, the lead attorney for the ACLU on the suit, the decision is a substantial victory. The judge recognized the sorry state of the Luzerne defender’s office and ordered the county to figure out how to fix it, she says.

It’s a decision she thinks will resonate throughout the state.

“Everybody should take notice of this,” she says. “Adequacy of counsel is not theoretical. It is something that can be enforced.”

“We think it’s a very big deal,” she says.

Jack Dean, the county’s attorney, sees it very differently. In an interview, he says that the judge’s order to improve the quality of public defense services might be accomplished through a reorganization of the public defender’s office, not necessarily through providing more resources. “I don’t think it’s in their favor,” he says of the ruling.

“The county is very happy with this.”

But Roper scoffed at the idea that a simple office reorganiza-

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

tion could fix the flaws in the defender’s office. “If Jack thinks that they can propose a restructuring of the public defender’s office that magically enables 20 lawyers to handle 4,000 cases a year, let him come up with the plan,” she says.

The two sides remain in mediation, and if they cannot reach a deal, the lawsuit will return to the courts, with uncertain results. Flora will fight it out to the bitter end if necessary. “I’ll not back down under any circumstances,” he says.

Given the complexity of the case, a full resolution is probably years away, and Olexa isn’t sure he can last that long. The job is taking a toll on his health and straining his relationship with his girlfriend, who is tired of him spending more time at the county jail than at home with her. On the other hand, he’s inspired by Flora’s crusade to reform the defender’s office. “I feel like I’m part of a change in the system,” he says.

“This is why I got into the law in the first place.”

“I’m going to stick around as long as I can,” he says.

Anna Sanders contributed reporting.

ADVERTISEMENT

Live.HuffingtonPost.com

|

Facebook.com/HuffPostLive

|

@HuffPostLive

Exit

CULTURE

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

Knock-Knock-Knocking on Hell’s Door

BY LILA SHAPIRO

EENAN ROBERTS didn’t invent the idea of scaring Christian youth into salvation, but he has done more than anyone else to turn it into an industry. For $299— and with the Denver-based pastor’s approval—you can build your own “Hell House,” complete with theatrical scenes of teen suicides and gay marriages gone wrong.

Staged by Evangelical churches predominantly in the South and

REUTERS/JESSICA RINALDI

K

Midwest, Hell Houses share some of the tropes of classic haunted houses and are most active in the run-up to Halloween, when Americans are most primed for scaremongering. But if haunted house directors generally aim to entertain, Roberts has very a different goal.

“The number one priority is reaching people with the message that sin destroys and Jesus saves,” he explained to Huffington by phone from his church.

Trinity Church members dressed as demons take a breather while awaiting the next tour group to come through the Hell House in Cedar Hill, Texas, on Oct. 30, 2006.

REUTERS/JESSICA RINALDI (BOY, ABORTION SCENE); COURTESY OF PASTOR KEENAN ROBERTS (CAR ACCIDENT)

Exit

SECTION

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

The method is effective, according to Roberts. By the time guests reach the final, “heaven” scene (a room draped in silvery cloth) Roberts says around 1 in 4 of the more than 75,000 who have traipsed through his church’s production over the last 16 years have either decided to join the Christian faith or renewed their commitment to it.

Since 1996, Roberts, pastor of the New Destiny Christian Center in Colorado, has sold more than one thousand Hell House kits to youth pastors. It’s unclear who put on the first-ever Hell House, but Jerry Falwell is generally credited with popularizing the idea in the 70s, and a documentary made in 2000 brought them further recognition. Roberts’s own Hell House serves as the template for the hundreds of others around the country that are built to the specifications outlined in his kits, which include a DVD of his production, a 300-page instruction manual and a spooky soundtrack.

Roberts’ house typically consists of seven rooms. In each, a different “sin” is played out to its horrid conclusion. Roberts plays a demon.

Dressed in a black robe, with a bumpy grey mask and large black horns, he guides guests from room Top to bottom: A boy is depicted as being trapped in hell; Trinity Church members Christina Hunt and Jonathan Collins act out an abortion scene as images of a fetus flash on a screen; a Hell House displays the consequences of driving under the influence.

REUTERS/JESSICA RINALDI

Exit

to room—from a lesbian suicide to a rave where a church girl takes ecstasy and dies (the manual suggests the demon tour guide declare here, “just another day at the office!”)

The themes vary from year to year, but abortion and damned gay people are constants.

Not surprisingly, since its inception Roberts’ kits have attracted criticism, and not just from gay rights groups and Planned Parenthood. A number of religious groups, including the National Council of Churches, have criticized Hell Houses for their harsh approach.

Roberts hasn’t flinched.

“Jesus was so controversial that

CULTURE

they killed him,” he said. “You can’t have an impact without a collision.”

Roberts will not provide the media with samples of the kits, which also include guidance for handling media (crucial for both getting out the church’s message and responding to criticism). But over the years, excerpts have leaked online. For the abortion scene, Roberts recommends buying “a meat product that closely resembles pieces of a baby” to put in a glass bowl and suggests the actors portraying the medical staff act “cold, uncaring, abrupt and completely insensitive.”

Roberts knows of only a handful of times that secular groups have managed to purchase a Hell House kit. In 2004, a director in Hollywood posed as a pas-

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

Prayer team members talk to people who have chosen to receive salvation at the close of the Cedar Hill Hell House.

SARA KRULWICH/THE NEW YORK TIMES

tor in order to procure a kit, and ended up putting on a farce, starring Sarah Silverman and David Cross, among others.

“It was an abomination,” Roberts said. “People have been trying to do damage to Hell House for years, and I always say this: God’s going to have the last word.”

Roberts first put on a low-budget version of a “hell house” in his late 20s, but it wasn’t until 1995, after he’d moved to Colorado, that he made scaring kids for the Lord a regular part of his mission. He sent out press releases to media outlets all over Denver. (“And they came like crazy,” Roberts said.)

After nearly 40 churches had reached out to him for guidance, he

began to develop his how-to kits.

By now, Roberts has sold kits to 26 foreign countries including Australia, and all 50 states.

While Roberts presents himself as a fighter on the front lines of the culture war, he’s only once written an overtly political scene: It featured Bill Clinton, Monica Lewinsky, glow-inthe-dark writing (“Lies” “Lust” “Adultery”) and, of course, demons. This year, citing logistical reasons, Roberts isn’t putting on a production. If things were different, he said he’d likely add a scene about President Obama’s support for same-sex marriage.

The next step, he says, is Hollywood. “We were real close to a movie once,” he said, “but too many people were scared of it.”

Secular theater company Les Freres Corbusier staged Keenan’s Hell House in 2006 in New York. In this scene, an angel visits a patient on life support.

Exit

ART

How a Frame Finds Its Match

BY JOE SATRAN

N A RECENT AFTERNOON at Julius Lowy Frame and Restoration Co., a three-by-four frame sat on a work table, shining with freshly-applied gold leaf. The craftsmen at Lowy, as it’s known, still apply gold leaf by hand, a painstaking process that starts with coating a wood frame with successive layers of gesso, yellow clay, red clay and water. A gilder will rub a gilding brush on his or her forehead to coat it with oil and make it slightly adhesive, and pick up a sheet of gold with the tip of the brush. The gold leaf is so thin it wags erratically in the air, like a catfish yanked out of a river by an expert noodler. The gilder gently lowers the gold onto the wet surface of the clay. The molecular attraction of the wet clay bonds gold to the frame instantly, so the tiniest stray gesture could ruin it.

“Two and a half hours,” the glider said, sigh-

O

PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY OF JULIUS LOWY FRAME & RESTORING COMPANY, INC., NEW YORK, NY

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

Exit

ing, when asked how long it had taken her to finish the frame.

Lowy CEO Larry Shar, a sharplydressed man with the bald head and Brooklyn accent of Lloyd Blankfein, wasn’t impressed. He can afford to be patient with his 4,500 antique frame inventory. They get older and more valuable by the day. But he has to make sure that with the workers he pays by the hour—to re-

ART

store old frames, craft new designs and reproduce antiques—are doing their jobs efficiently.

“The only correct answer to that question,” he told Huffington, “is not fast enough.”

For the last 105 years, Lowy has been one of the premier framers in New York, if not the world. When the Metropolitan Museum of Art acquires a new Velazquez, or the estate of Max Weber is putting on a big retrospective, or a Slovakian collector buys a $10 million Cail-

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

A Lowy’s artisan applies 23-karat gold leaf to a frame using a traditional water gilding technique.

Exit

ART

WHEN TWO BECOME ONE The underlying

principle in uniting a work of art with a frame is to strike a balance between “contrast and harmony,” Shar says.

>> TAP ON THE ARTWORK

lebotte, they go to the grand sixfloor Lowy townhouse on East 80th Street to pick out a frame. They’ve most notably made the frames that showcase Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” and Cezanne’s “The Bather” at the Museum of Modern Art. Most of Lowy’s frames were made in Europe, especially Spain, France and Italy, and sell for between $15,000-$50,000. One of the most valuable frames on hand right now, though, is American.

Larry’s son Brad, who represents the third generation of Shars to work at Lowy, estimates it will sell

for $150,000, probably to a “frame collector” who will display it as art object in itself—without a painting inside. Designed by 19th century architect Stanford White, the ornate, gilded number hangs hidden behind a thick grey velvet curtain in the Lowy’s showroom. Gold never tarnishes, and it remains a mark of prestige for many. (“Especially Russians,” Shar laughed.)

Lowy specializes in antique frames, which are found everywhere from antique stores in Europe to auction houses. Some date back as far as the 14th century.

Shar particularly admires the Spanish and Italian frames from the 16th and 17th century in his collection,

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

Exit which are often painted black and red rather than gilded, and feature figurative rather than decorative accents. “They’re not so pompous, not so regal, so they appeal to a Brooklyn boy like me,” he explained.

When Larry first started working at Lowy, learning the ropes from his father Hilly, many of the company’s clients came from elite, old-money families like the Whitneys and the Rockefellers, whose collections dominate the walls of New York museums to this day. They were confident, idiosyncratic art collectors who chose frames from the gut, often with an eye to fitting in well with the rest of their decor.

But many of Lowy’s clients now think of paintings as investments more than beautiful objects. So they tend to choose frames that they think will make an artwork marketable. A frame’s historical accuracy is a selling point that translates easily from buyer to buyer, unlike its subjective aesthetic appeal.

“In today’s world, it’s more a thinking man’s game,” Shar said.

“50 years ago, we’d put French frames on American 19th-century paintings. They were expensive paintings, so we’d put a fancy frame on it.”

But just because a frame fits a

ART

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

painting’s historical period doesn’t mean it’s the right one. For that reason, Shar sees historical accuracy as just one of many factors that should be considered when choosing a frame. The underlying principle, he says, is to strike a balance between “contrast and harmony.”

Shar notes that some bids for

In today’s world, it’s more a thinking man’s game.

50 years ago, we’d put French frames on American 19thcentury paintings. They were expensive paintings, so we’d put a fancy frame on it.” historical accuracy result in awful pairings. French impressionists, for example, would often fit gilded 18th century French frames from a century previous to their paintings—so it makes no sense to insist on a 19th century frame for a Monet today. Meanwhile, many mid-20th century American painters used low-quality frames for their artwork merely because they couldn’t afford better ones.

“If you want to put that kind of trash in your living room, around your multi-million-dollar painting, by all means, do it. But it seems like a pretty narrow-minded approach,” he said.

Exit

eWISE

BY KATY HALL

I recently found out my niece got engaged— over Facebook. I talked to her after the fact and she says she changed her status the night it happened. I understand her excitement, but wouldn’t it have been better to wait and make a few calls, or even emails, before telling the world? — Left-out aunt

Q

Of course. I hope your niece called her parents before making the status change, or she may have trouble finding someone to pay for her wedding. Facebook is great for learning about the engagement of a high school ex, but it’s the last place we want to discover meaningful news from a loved one. Your niece owed her close friends and relatives some personal contact—text, IM, phone call and email are all better

A

ILLUSTRATION BY JASON SCHNEIDER

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

choices than a Facebook announcement. The status change could have waited a day until you all were in the know.

At least she did one thing right. No one wants to see ring closeups or read a lengthy missive on the proposal—a quiet status change or sweet, simple line about the happy news will keep friends from wishing for a “dislike” button.

Exit

eWISE

My name is pretty common, and my gmail address is my first and last name followed by several numbers. (All combinations of my names, initials, etc were already taken.) A friend thinks that numbers in an email address looks unprofessional and could hurt me when I am looking for work. Is that true or is it better to at least have an email address that includes your name, even if it has numbers? — M.B. Q

Depends on how many numbers your email address requires, but please keep your full name in there rather than calling yourself something less descriptive, at best. FirstnameLastname followed by the lowest number possible—exclusing zeros as they can be mistaken for O’s—is pretty standard, and understandable considering you have a common name. If you want to highlight the industry you’re in or what you do, you could also try something like JohnDoePhotographer@gmail.com. Or stick the name of your city or “mail” in the address. You can also set up your own domain or claim your name on a smaller webmail service and run it through gmail. Just avoid putting your birth year in there as that doesn’t age well.

ENOUGH ALREADY

totally over.

Things we’re

$4 bottled water Racist Halloween costumes Extreme weightloss shows Binders full of women memes

FROM TOP TO BOTTOM: GETTY IMAGES/BRAND X; TRAE PATTON/NBC/NBCU PHOTO BANK VIA GETTY IMAGES; GETTY IMAGES; GILBERT CARRASQUILLO/GETTY IMAGES; GETTY IMAGES/FLICKR RM

A

Have a question about electronic etiquette?

Email ewise@huffingtonpost.com.

Infused vodka Election polls Octomom Lumberjack beards

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

Bullying is a choice. How somebody acts and what they say to somebody is a choice. My disease was not a choice.”

Exit

GREATEST PERSON OF THE WEEK

Gabrielle Ford

Raising Hope for the Bullied

BY EMMA DIAB

SOME WOULD RATHER NOT remember their middle school days, much less walk through those doors again. Anti-bullying advocate Gabrielle ‘Gabe’ Ford not only visits middle schools regularly, but willingly relives her painful experiences each time.

Since 2003, Ford, 32, has been speaking to children and adolescents in small classrooms, huge PHOTOGRAPHS BY ROBERT SNOW

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

Exit

GREATEST PERSON OF THE WEEK

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

assembly halls and even juvenile detention centers about the damage and trauma (both mental and physical) that bullying inflicts on fellow students. Gabe draws on her own experiences being bullied throughout middle school and high school, where barbs were usually aimed at her rare neuromuscular disease called Friedrich’s Ataxia.

“Kids that were physically different were more of a target— weaker physically, more passive.

I mean, I couldn’t really stand up for myself,” said Ford. “They’d make fun of me for everything— every little thing about me was wrong to them.”

COURTESY OF GABE FORD

EARLY YEARS Ford was born with the genetic disease, which is progressive in nature and forced her into a wheel chair at 25. However, Ford’s symptoms didn’t show until she was about 12-years-old, a time when she was focused on ballet, and generally very active. As the disease escalated, Ford’s dancing dreams were put aside and replaced with the selfconsciousness that stemmed from her inability to walk with ease and frequent struggles to keep her balance. These insecu-

rities were quickly exploited.

“They knew my balance wasn’t good—it was easy for me to fall,” she says. “They would trip me, push me into the wall or other people. They’d take things from me and wouldn’t give them back.”

In addition to the physical harassment, Ford also had to deal with a barrage of insults and rumors regularly circulating about her. With no niche for herself and no real friends at school, she retreated further into herself. Ford’s routine consisted of chores, dinner and homework in her room—with a self-enforced closed-door policy.

“I didn’t open up much about

Students line up to greet Ford and her dog, Dinah, a cousin of Izzy’s.

Exit what was going on,” recalls Ford.

“What I did, ignoring it, thinking it was going to go away was wrong—it doesn’t. You can’t ignore it.

Things began to look up for Gabe when, just four days before her 20th birthday, she met her best friend—a long eared coonhound named Izzy.

“I started coming out of my room. My time was being occupied by this puppy and I was taking care of her and was also taking care of myself. Now I had somebody to be with me by my side,” she says.

Coincidentally enough, Izzy (short for Izabel) also suffered from a rare muscle disease, and the two remained inseparable.

Izzy passed away three years ago, but not after spending almost eight years traveling with Ford on her speaking tour and meeting children at assemblies.

‘VOICE FOR THE BULLIED’ Ford travels to about 25 to 30 schools per year, and when Huffington caught up with her, she had just given a presentation to the students of the New York school made infamous after a video surfaced of children berat-

GREATEST PERSON OF THE WEEK

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

ing the school bus monitor.

“Bullying is a choice,” she says, citing the most important wisdom she would like children to take away from her presentation. “That’s my main focus. How somebody acts and what they say to somebody is a choice. My disease was not a choice.”

Her first presentation on bullying came when her uncle, a school teacher, convinced her to come

They knew my balance wasn’t good–it was easy for me to fall. They would trip me, push me into the wall or other people. They’d take things from me and wouldn’t give them back.” talk to his students about her experience, both for their benefit and for Ford to have more experience with public speaking.

“It was very difficult for me.

Never prior to that had I talked to people about my disease or the bullying that went on. Those were things I just didn’t talk about. I was scared. I wasn’t sure how people were going to treat me, react,” she recalls. “But

it was well-received. They loved talking to me and asked questions. It opened their eyes.”

Not only does Ford’s speaking engagements enlighten children about the harm in being a bully, but her experience has inspired those who are frequently the victims of bullies. One of the most rewarding experiences for

Ford was when a 13-year-old girl stricken with Alopecia, a disease that results in hair loss, sought her out after the presentation.

“When she wears a wig, kids make fun of her. When she doesn’t wear the wig, kids make fun of her. She told me that my words empowered her and my speaking with her helped her realize she is not her disease. And that she was not going to wear a wig after that.”

Ford at home with her dog, Dominik.

Exit

01

TFU

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

NATALIA KOLESNIKOVA/AFP/GETTYIMAGES (PUSSY RIOT); GETTY IMAGES (PUPPY, LOCKER ROOM); AP PHOTO/PABLO MARTINEZ MONSIVAIS (AIG CEO); AREF KARIMI/AFP/GETTYIMAGES (AFGHAN WOMEN)

Pussy Riot Members Sent to Remote Russian Prison Camps

2

Burglars Rob Home, Take the Owners’ Puppy

3

’FANTASY SLUT LEAGUE’ UNCOVERED AT CALIFORNIA HIGH SCHOOL

4

AIG CEO: Nobody Ever Thanked Us!

Afghan Mother Beheads Daughter-inLaw for Refusing to Become a Prostitute

Exit

HUFFINGTON 10.28.12

TFU

06 Walmart Workers

GETTY IMAGES/BRAND X (TENT); SHUTTERSTOCK / ANNA JURKOVSKA (WOMEN’S RESTROOM); GETTY IMAGES/ FUSE (SKUNK); AP PHOTO/ALEX BRANDON (KING); AP PHOTO/MARY ANN CHASTAIN (NUCLEAR PLANTS)

Forced to Live in Tents

8

9-YEAR-OLD GIRL SHOT AFTER BEING MISTAKEN FOR SKUNK

7

Cafe Allows Men to Peek Into Women’s Restroom... for Art

9

Steve King: Comparing Immigrants to Dogs Was a ‘Compliment’

Leaked Report Suggests Nuclear Plants Have Higher Flood Threat Than Fukushima Did

Editor-in-Chief:

Arianna Huffington Executive Editor: Timothy L. O’Brien Executive Features Editor: John Montorio Managing Editor: Katy Hall Senior Culture Editor: Gazelle Emami Senior Politics Editor: Sasha Belenky Senior Voices Editor: Stuart Whatley Quoted Editor: MacGregor Thomson Viral Editor: Dean Praetorius Social Editor: Mia Aquino Editorial Assistant: Jenny Macksamie Editorial Intern: Emma Diab Creative Director: Josh Klenert Art Director: Andrea Nasca Photography Director: Anna Dickson Associate Photo Editor: Wendy George Designers: Martin Gee, Gloria Pantell, Troy Dunham Production Director: Peter Niceberg AOL Mobile SVP Mail & Mobile: David Temkin Mobile UX and Design Director: Jeremy LaCroix Product Managers: Mimmie Huang, Luan Tran Developers: Scott Tury, Mike Levine, Carl Haines, Terence Worley, Sudheer Agrawal, Jacob Knobel, Eisuke Arai Tech Leadership: Umesh Rao QA: Scott Basham, Eileen Miller Sales: Mandar Shinde, Jami Lawrence AOL, Inc. Chairman & CEO:

Tim Armstrong

PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK