The Buckley vs. Vidal debates: The original knock-down-drag-out TV

If irreconcilable differences are the hallmark of our current political era, its founding fathers may well have been Gore Vidal and William F.

Buckley Jr. The subjects of Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville’s documentary “Best of Enemies,” they came to ABC’s jerry-built soundstage at the Republican convention in Miami with little in common but contempt for each other.

To Buckley, “Vidal was the devil,” says biographer Fred Kaplan, while Vidal thought that Buckley’s conservative politics were, at best, undemocratic. “They really do despise each other,” observes Christopher Hitchens, whom Gordon and Neville interviewed in 2010, a month or so before the diagnosis of the cancer that killed him the following year. (“We thought the film would be ideal for the 2012 election,” Gordon says. “We didn’t hold off for 2016. It just took that long.”)

As the film shows, what ensued in Miami, and then in Chicago, was a rhetorical knife fight. There’s barely a pretense of objectivity, each man looking for a chink in the other’s armor, fashioning each comment into an insult and then Buckley — having been deemed a “crypto-Nazi” by his opponent — melting down in the heat of the Democratic convention in Chicago and calling Vidal a “queer.” (Something for which, the film posits, Buckley never forgave himself.)

It all made for “great television,” little of which had been appearing at that time on ABC. It had no Cronkite, no Huntley-Brinkley, no credibility as a news source. It was ranked third among the networks. “They would have been fourth,” notes former NBC News president Richard Wald, “but there were only three.” As Nation columnist Eric Alterman (also in the movie) wrote in his 1992 study “Sound & Fury: The Making of the Punditocracy,” ABC was searching for something that would distinguish its coverage. And the idea of pairing Buckley and the unpredictable Vidal had come from Buckley himself — “albeit in a back-handed manner.”

“The network had asked him to name a liberal with whom he could profitably spar during the convention coverage,” Alterman wrote, “and Buckley replied that he would appear with any non-Communist, but he would prefer it not be that ‘philosophical degenerate,’ Gore Vidal.

” ‘Bingo,’ said the men at ABC.”

As a programming strategy, the whole affair would lead to such confrontational-by-design “debate” shows as “Agronsky & Co.” (and its more opinionated descendant, “Inside Washington,” both produced by Post-Newsweek); the “Point/Counterpoint” showdowns on “60 Minutes” between Shana Alexander and James J. Kirkpatrick (which inspired the “Saturday Night Live” parody cited above); “The McLaughlin Group”; CNN’s cacophonous “Crossfire” (famously brought down by Jon Stewart); and whatever explosions are currently heard nightly on Fox and MSNBC.

“It may be that it marked both the beginning and end of television debate,” says Lawrence O’Donnell, host of “The Last Word” on MSNBC. “Buckley showed up with a kind of Yale notion of debate, a certain set of rules — ‘This is the way we do it, we share the stage, ideas will be offered, I will critique yours, you will critique mine.’ ” Vidal was perfectly capable of engaging on a purely policy level, “but he chose very deliberately to try to hurt the other person. And out of Buckley’s rage came pain and this horrible outburst toward Vidal.

“Ultimately, that is the element of the debate that has lived longest in our TV discussion culture,” O’Donnell says. “We see it all the time, whether it’s the host going after the guest, or guest after host, and it is ugly TV. And what Buckley understood immediately was that the worst thing that you can do in this forum is have it turn ugly. There are people who call that good TV. I personally hate it. And I’ve slipped into it. Which is why I’m sympathetic to how tempers flare. It’s an inch away all the time.”

Gordon and Neville have individually made numerous music documentaries (Neville won an Oscar for 2013’s “20 Feet from Stardom”), but as Gordon puts it, music is a lens through which they examine other things, including race and class.

“I think of myself as a cultural filmmaker,” Neville says. “I’ve made lots of movies on art and literature and music, and this is a movie less about politics than about media and the culture of politics. We said from the beginning, we didn’t want to make a film about the arguments, because that’s a political film. We wanted to make a movie about how we argue, and that’s the cultural film.”

How exactly Vidal and Buckley argue — via lofty diction, engorged vocabularies and patrician inflection — would seem to make them impossible for today’s TV, despite the lasting legacy of their debating tactics.

“They represent the last gasp of the old oratorical culture,” says John McWhorter, who teaches linguistics at Columbia University and appears in the film. “Between 1960 and ’70, the shift in the way Americans used language was massive, part of a huge shift toward informality in general. There was no longer a sense that language used in public was to be dressed up, the way a man put on a hat. It was different from casual language. Now, the whole idea of ‘making a speech’ has become archaic. Today, we call it ‘giving a talk.’ “

Buckley, an author, conservative thinker and founder and editor of National Review, was familiar with the infant medium of television — he’d begun a 33-year career hosting “Firing Line” in 1966. Vidal, the autodidactic polymath, intimate of the Kennedy White House and a best-selling author of historical fiction (“Lincoln,” “Burr,” “Washington, D.C.”) simply got under Buckley’s skin — his authorship of the transsexual farce “Myra Breckinridge” went a long way toward accomplishing that. But Buckley’s effete mannerisms were also in Vidal’s cross hairs.

“They’re both gay-baiting each other,” Neville notes.

“From the first debate,” Gordon adds.

“What’s funny,” Neville says, “is Vidal telling Buckley ‘Myra Breckinridge is based entirely on you.’ Gore is trying to play with Buckley’s image and trying to get him to lose his temper, which he does.” What the two say to each other is frequently rife with innuendo — some of it, seemingly, absolutely filthy.

Buckley fans may find their hero getting the upper hand in the arena of straight debate. “He’s a known interrupter,” Gordon says, laughing. “You watch ‘Firing Line’ and one of his chief debating tactics is to interrupt and divert. If you’re about to answer something he didn’t think you were going to answer — just watch the Noam Chomsky ‘Firing Line.’ Chomsky, for 10 minutes, takes every question and tries to answer and finally says, ‘Please! Let me answer a question!’ “

Ultimately, Vidal and Buckley seem slightly antique, save for their lasting influence on how political discussion is conducted on TV. Noisily. Sometimes incoherently. Occasionally, as Buckley experienced, with bad feelings that don’t go away. (The two men apparently loathed each other until the day they died, Buckley in 2008, Vidal in 2012.)

“I completely understand Buckley’s mourning over it,” O’Donnell says. “He’s embarrassed and shamed over it, and what television doesn’t have is the outlet to which we can express that. Someone yells at someone, it gets ugly and television doesn’t have the moment where you can say, ‘You know, I think that was kind of crazy, I think that went a little crazy, I’m sorry. . . .’ “

It would be revolutionary. It might even make good television.

– – – –

Anderson is a freelance writer.

Protests over missing students planted in Guerrero spread across Mexico

The protests about his son and dozens of others abducted by police had been building for weeks.

The next morning, caravans of buses would drive out of these wooded hills to spread their defiant message to far corners of Mexico, as protesters in different states blocked highways, seized town squares, closed airports, and burned cars and buildings.

“The parents are enraged by so much waiting and so few results,” De la Cruz, who has emerged as a spokesman for the victims’ families, told the crowd last Wednesday. As of Monday, he said, “the flame of insurgency has been lit.”

In the seven weeks since police drove away with Cruz’s 19-year-old son, Angel, and 42 of his classmates at a teachers’ college in the rural state of Guerrero, the localized rage of their relatives at the forced disappearances has flashed across the country and the world, drawing condemnations from everyone from President Barack Obama to Pope Francis. The crime has captured Mexico’s attention unlike nearly any other atrocity in the recent years of brutal drug-war violence, and spawned a protest movement that has shown no signs of abating. President Enrique Peña Nieto, who returned this weekend from an extended trip abroad, is now facing the most acute crisis of his two years in office.

The demand to find the students and punish those responsible for their disappearance has broadened into a more diverse fury about corrupt politicians and their drug-trafficking cronies, the economic and education reforms pushed by Peña Nieto, and the enrichment of the political class as poverty persists in states such as Guerrero. The outrage reflects deep distrust of the new government, which has emphasized that security is improving, even as large swaths of the country remain under the control of drug cartels and more than 20,000 people are officially counted as missing.

“It is not violence to burn a government building that isn’t an institution, that’s a white elephant that doesn’t serve the interests of the people,” said a protest leader who said his name was Carlos, wearing a skeleton mask and aviator sunglasses as he prepared to march through the Guerrero capital of Chilpancingo. “The real violence is the assassination of our comrades. And we will not give up this fight.”

The protests have spread far beyond the rural towns and villages where they started. Tens of thousands of marchers have descended several times on Mexico City’s main Zocalo plaza. At minute 43 — the number of Ayotzinapa students missing — of the Mexican national soccer team’s game in Amsterdam against Holland last week, a stadium full of fans chanted “justice, justice.”

The trouble began on the evening of Sept. 26, when police stopped the students as they traveled on buses in the town of Iguala. Authorities accuse Iguala Mayor Jose Luis Abarca of ordering police to prevent the students from disrupting a speech given by his wife. According to the government version of events, police then handed over the students to a drug gang, Guerreros Unidos. In the ensuing weeks, 10,000 Mexican soldiers and police scoured the region and uncovered various graves. Last week, Mexico’s attorney general, Jesus Murillo Karam, announced that the charred remains of what probably were the students had been found at a dump and in a river in Guerrero. He presented videotaped confessions of drug gang members talking about how they carried out the killings. Authorities are working to identify the remains through DNA testing.

The night after Murillo Karam’s presentation, protesters threw Molotov cocktails at the door of the national palace in Mexico City.

On Friday in Chilpancingo, thousands of people marched through the streets, led by masked men from the teachers’ union carrying riot shields and metal pipes. With police or soldiers nowhere in sight, they stopped along the way to spray-paint government buildings, newspaper offices, and the storefront windows of Oxxo convenience stores, part of a national chain. The march ended at the town square, which protesters have occupied for weeks, with people living in tents surrounding a statue in the central plaza hung with a cardboard sign that reads: “We are going to disappear the narcostate.”

“If the state doesn’t return our students, this could get out of control,” said Walter Añorve, a teacher from Acapulco who is one of the protest leaders. “It’s a peaceful struggle so far, but it might not remain so.”

The state of Guerrero, rural and poor, has a history of antigovernment mobilizations. The Mexican military fought leftist guerrillas here in the 1970s and government security forces have killed villagers in uprisings in the decades since, including a massacre by police of 17 farmers on their way to a protest in 1996. As in neighboring Michoacan, a citizens’ militia movement took off in Guerrero, with peasants forming armed groups to keep out drug traffickers and corrupt cops.

Veterans of these struggles say that this time feels different. The protests tapped into a growing opposition to Peña Nieto’s reforms to open up the country’s oil sector to foreign firms, and his challenges to teachers’ unions, which have prompted months of protests in Oaxaca. A teacher and protest leader in Chilpancingo who called himself Pastor Mojica said that earlier uprisings, such as protests over the disputed 1988 presidential elections, were more narrowly focused.

“Those protests were to defend the vote,” said Mojica, a teacher from the mountains near Acapulco. “This time it’s deeper.”

(Optional add end)

The government, he said, wants “to impose these reforms at any cost,” and the “society rises in opposition to that.”

Some of the parents involved had no experience with politics. Bernardo Campos Santos, 59, a corn farmer from the town of Tixtla, first heard of his son’s disappearance when a truck with a megaphone drove down his street announcing that something “grave” had happened that night and that everyone with relatives at the school — the Escuela Normal Rural Raul Isidro Burgos — should go there immediately.

Since then, he and other parents have converted the school into a base camp for the protest movement, sleeping in student dormitories and eating communal meals on the basketball court.

Campos had never participated in any political protest before the disappearance of his son, José Angel. But like many others, he resented a government he saw as serving the interests of the cartels over the residents. He and other parents know people who have been pushed off their lands by drug traffickers and who pay them protection fees in cash or with portions of their crops. They consider the government complicit.

“Peasants don’t like to get involved in politics. We work. We go home. We sleep. We get up early,” he said. “A politician has never helped me at all.”

“For them, the lives of the poor don’t have any value,” said Nardo Flores Vazquez, whose 21-year-old son, Bernardo, is among the missing.

The parents and protest leaders say they do not believe the government’s claims that their children were burned at the dump. The hope that they might still be found has given the protest movement momentum, because it’s a concrete, although perhaps unmeetable, demand for the government: return the students alive.

“As long as they continue to be missing, the movement remains alive,” said Vidulfo Rosales, a lawyer advising the families.

The parents have presented some apparent complications to the government’s narrative. Among them, they say they cannot understand how so many young men could be burned up so completely on a night when it was raining.

“It’s just not possible,” Flores said.

Parents say they are willing to accept the findings of an independent organization, just not the government. An Argentine forensic team has been working on the case, and remains have been sent to Austria for testing. Until those results come back, Flores said, there will be more marches, more protests, more unrest and more waiting.

“This has been hell,” he said.

Has the food movement’s moment finally arrived?

“There is a war here!” thundered Mark Bittman, the New York Times columnist and self-described rabble-rouser, to scattered applause in the conference’s opening speech.

“I won’t apologize for not being genteel.” Much of what the current food system produces, he charged, “pollutes, sickens, exploits, and robs.” There were no paddy wagons or billy clubs, however, and gentility quickly returned by supper. A few ranchers muttered unhappily about Bittman’s declaration of war, but all sat down together in the center’s upscale restaurant to enjoy carrot cutlet and rotation risotto as heritage turkeys gobbled in an adjacent pasture.

At the moment, the food movement is, at best, in an awkward and confused adolescence. It doesn’t really know what it wants, how to behave, or whom to trust. There is a hodgepodge of individuals and organizations concerned about the safety of their food, the treatment of livestock, the accessibility of organic vegetables, the rise of diabetes, the low pay of food workers, the health of soil, and the role of farming in climate change. “They are not always the same people,” Michael Pollan, the famed author of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” told me. While foodies have enjoyed scattered political successes — the nation’s first soda tax was passed in Berkeley, California, on Nov. 4, and a few states have recently approved food charters — the groups behind these successes have yet to coalesce into a single political bloc.

Pollan and Bittman want to herd these cats toward common objectives in order to change a food system that they see as a deadly threat to U.S. national security. On Nov. 7, just a few days before the conference began, Bittman, Pollan, and two co-authors published a Washington Post opinion piece called “How a national food policy could save millions of American lives.” The manifesto has something for everyone: It demands a fair wage for food industry workers, well-treated animals, limits on marketing junk food to kids, and access to healthy food free of toxins for all Americans, as well as support for food policies that jibe with public health and environmental goals. In the essay, they challenge the Obama administration to join them on the right side of history by taking a stronger stand in remaking a system that they contend is controlled by “agribusiness oligopolies” uninterested in the public welfare.

Bittman, Pollan, and one of their co-authors arrived at the Stone Barns conference eager to spread their message. For a movement often accused of elitism, the setting seemed a bold choice. Once part of a sprawling Rockefeller estate, the center comprises a bucolic farm designed to train a young generation of organic farmers and a restaurant where acclaimed chef Dan Barber serves a $198 tasting menu. Participants paid $1,400 apiece to attend the day-and-a-half meeting sponsored in part by Porsche — one of the perks, along with the carrot cutlet and a pig-butchering demo, was the chance to schedule a test drive. “So what — we all meet in a Marriott?” said a testy Bittman when I asked him about the luxury of our surroundings.

Though the backdrop was upscale, Pollan and Bittman came to Stone Barns to prepare to take their argument to the streets — and to Washington. “We’ve tended not to think of food as a public concern,” Pollan told me. “But if there were a food bill, the public would feel they have a stake, and you would have urban legislators suddenly wanting to be on a Food Committee, because they represent eaters.” Pollan and his colleagues intend to canvass Capitol Hill for support, and their manifesto already has garnered 18,000 signatures of support that the Union of Concerned Scientists has forwarded to the White House. If the Republican Congress ignores them, “it is something that Obama can do unilaterally.”

There’s one main problem with that plan, though, and it became abundantly clear at the Stone Barns conference: The White House hasn’t yet shown any support for Pollan and Bittman’s food policy proposal. “We already have a food policy,” insisted Sam Kass, the executive director of Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move program and the senior policy adviser for nutrition policy. At the conference, Kass trumpeted the food-related successes of the administration, like making school lunches healthier and keeping junk food out of school vending machines. But he also pointedly warned that it is “a political liability” to criticize incremental changes and demand only sweeping revisions of the food system, a veiled reference to the manifesto. The way to a better food policy, he argued, is through immigration reform — a key issue for farmers and many of their workers — as well as an increase in minimum wage that would benefit fast-food employees. In other words, Kass thinks that food activists can improve the food system by supporting traditional progressive labor goals.

However, Kass did concede that bringing health care concerns into the food debate has “massive untapped potential.” Limiting the junk food market and advertising aimed at hooking children into sugary products is something that could energize insurance companies, the medical profession, and other communities to exert political pressure on the existing system, in which there are few limits. That struggle is already quietly taking place as the federal government assembles its 2015 dietary guidelines; the 2020 guidelines will include a mandated section on the diet of young children likely to prove controversial. Research shows that food habits instilled in the first two years are enormously important for a person’s future health, says Marion Nestle, a New York University nutritionist, who spoke at the meeting.

Clearly, Kass shares Pollan and Bittman’s explicit goals, even if he disagrees with the best way to meet them. But there’s another obstacle standing in the way of the proposed national food policy: the people who actually grow our food. All the talk about the evils of the food industry clearly baffled and shocked the few actual food producers at the Stone Barns conference, including members of the U.S. Farmers & Ranchers Alliance, an organization based in Missouri that sponsored a panel to get its voice in the mix. The cultural gap between the New York and California foodies dominating the meeting and the Midwestern producers yawned wide. “We’re the Big Ag you were taught to hate,” Illinois pig farmer and businesswoman Julie Maschhoff, who was on the panel, told the audience. “I grew up on a corporate farm, and my grandfather had a corporate farm before it was bad.” She spoke of her excitement that biotechnology will “create a better animal on fewer resources” and noted something that would be unremarkable to most urban foodies: “One of my good friends is a vegetarian.”

On the same panel, Joan Ruskamp, a cattle feeder in Dodge, Nebraska, expressed dismay at the direction of the conversation started by Pollan and Bittman. Ruskamp told the group: “Please let us be involved in the conversation about food!” She added, “I don’t want it to be a war.” Ruskamp went on to refer to cattle as “one of the great converters of grain to protein” and organic meat as a “niche marketing tool,” and to defend antibiotics as necessary to relieve animal suffering. Both Maschhoff and Ruskamp later said they were appalled by Bittman’s acerbic language. “I felt deliberately offended,” said Ruskamp.

By meeting’s end, Bittman had backed off his revolutionary rhetoric. “We’ve learned that everyone wants to be sustainable, to produce less waste and better food, avoid worsening climate change, use fewer antibiotics, encourage more people to farm, and encourage more people to farm smarter,” he said. “We all want the same thing.” Life, he said, is compromise, and he insisted “the food movement is not about targeting individual farmers,” but about changing the entire system. He added that he thought that the food movement could build bridges between different camps. “This is not about being adversarial,” Bittman added. “We are a family. It is our food system. Let’s make it as good as we can for everyone.” Ruskamp was satisfied. “The tone changed,” she said. “It softened. Perhaps being here made the difference.”

Pollan acknowledges that the food movement has a long way to go. “We’re still young, and we don’t have a big membership organization,” he told me. Tom Colicchio, a high-end chef and sustainable food advocate who was at the conference, agrees that the food movement — whatever its goals may be — needs broader support before it’s ready for prime time. “To me, food has always been political,” he told me. “Now the mission is to raise public consciousness around food.” He added that this is a time to focus on the movement’s grass roots. “I don’t think we’re on the bridge to Selma yet.”

Lawler is a freelance writer who writes for Smithsonian, Discover, Science, Archaeology, and other magazines. Lawler won the 2009 Gene S. Stuart award as well as an MIT Knight Science Journalism Fellowship. For more, see andrewlawler杭州桑拿会所,.

Why Hampshire College stopped accepting SAT/ACT scores

For one thing, U.

S. News & World report has refused to include Hampshire in its annual rankings. For another, Hampshire officials say, this year’s freshman class, the first chosen under the new rules, is more qualified by other measures than earlier classes.

Hampshire College was founded in 1970 as an alternative private liberal arts college that experiments with curriculum and relies on portfolios of work and narrative evaluations rather than distribution requirements and grades. It is one of the top colleges in the nation in terms of the proportion of its graduates who go on to graduate school.

Here’s an explanation of what the college did regarding SAT/ACT scores and why, from President Jonathan Lash, who is also a director of the World Resources Institute, a D.C.-based environmental think tank, where he previously served as president. He chaired former President Bill Clinton’s Council on Sustainable Development and was Vermont’s environmental secretary and commissioner. He holds a law degree and master’s degree in education from Catholic University of America and a bachelor’s from Harvard College.

From Lash:

You won’t find our college in the U.S. News & Word Report “Best Colleges” rankings released this month. Last year Hampshire College decided not to accept SAT/ACT test scores from high school applicants seeking admission. That got us kicked off the rankings, disqualified us, per U.S. News rankings criteria. That’s OK with us.

We completely dropped standardized tests from our application as part of our new mission-driven admissions strategy, distinct from the “test-optional” policy that hundreds of colleges now follow. If we reduce education to the outcomes of a test, the only incentive for schools and students to innovate is in the form of improving test-taking and scores. Teaching to a test becomes stifling for teachers and students, far from the inspiring, adaptive education which most benefits students. Our greatly accelerating world needs graduates who are trained to address tough situations with innovation, ingenuity, entrepreneurship and a capacity for mobilizing collaboration and cooperation.

We weighed other factors in our decision:

– Standardized test scores do not predict a student’s success at our college.

– SATs/ACTs are strongly biased against low-income students and students of color, at a time when diversity is critical to our mission.

– We surveyed our students and learned not one of them had considered rankings when choosing to apply to colleges; instead they most cared about a college’s mission.

– Some good students are bad test takers, particularly under stress, such as when a test may grant or deny college entry. Multiple-choice tests don’t reveal much about a student.

– We’ve developed much better, fairer ways to assess students who will thrive at our college.

In our admissions, we review an applicant’s whole academic and lived experience. We consider an applicant’s ability to present themselves in essays and interviews, review their recommendations from mentors, and assess factors such as their community engagement and entrepreneurism. And yes, we look closely at high school academic records, though in an unconventional manner. We look for an overarching narrative that shows motivation, discipline, and the capacity for self-reflection. We look at grade point average (GPA) as a measure of performance over a range of courses and time, distinct from a one-test-on-one-day SAT/ACT score. A student’s consistent “A” grades may be coupled with evidence of curiosity and learning across disciplines, as well as leadership in civic or social causes. Another student may have overcome obstacles through determination, demonstrating promise of success in a demanding program. Strong high school graduates demonstrate purpose, a passion for authenticity, and commitment to positive change.

We’re seeing remarkable admissions results since disregarding standardized test scores:

– Our yield, the percentage of students who accepted our invitation to enroll, rose in a single year from 18% to 26%, an amazing turnaround.

– The quantity of applications went down, but the quality went up, likely because we made it harder to apply, asking for more essays. Our applicants collectively were more motivated, mature, disciplined and consistent in their high school years than past applicants.

– Class diversity increased to 31% students of color, the most diverse in our history, up from 21% two years ago.

– The percentage of students who are the first-generation from their family to attend college rose from 10% to 18% in this year’s class.

Our “No SAT/ACT policy” has also changed us in ways deeper than data and demographics: Not once did we sit in an Admissions committee meeting and “wish we had a test score.” Without the scores, every other detail of the student’s application became more vivid. Their academic record over four years, letters of recommendation, essays, in-person interviews, and the optional creative supplements gave us a more complete portrait than we had seen before. Applicants gave more attention to their applications, including the optional components, putting us in a much better position to predict their likelihood of success here.

This move away from test scores and disqualification from the U.S. News rankings has allowed us to innovate in ways we could not before. In other words, we are free to innovate rather than compromise our mission to satisfy rankings criteria:

– We no longer chase volumes of applications to superficially inflate our “selectivity” and game the U.S. News rankings. We no longer have to worry that any applicant will “lower our average SAT/ACT scores” and thus lower our U.S. News ranking. Instead we choose quality over quantity and focus attention and resources on each applicant and their full portfolio.

– At college fairs and information sessions, we don’t spend time answering high school families’ questions about our ranking and test score “cut-offs.” Instead we have conversations about the things that matter: What does our unique academic program look like, and what qualities does a student need to be successful at it?

– An unexpected benefit: This shift has saved us significant time and operational expense. Having a smaller but more targeted, engaged, passionate, and robust applicant pool, we are able to streamline our resources.

How can U.S. News rankings reliably measure college quality when their data-points focus primarily on the high school performance of the incoming class in such terms as GPA, SAT/ACT, class rank, and selectivity? These measures have nothing to do with the college’s results, except perhaps in the college’s aptitude for marketing and recruiting. Tests and rankings incentivize schools to conform to test performance and rankings criteria, at the expense of mission and innovation.

Our shift to a mission-driven approach to admissions is right for Hampshire College and the right thing to do. We fail students if we reduce them to a standardized test number tied more to their financial status than achievement. We fail students by perpetuating the myth that high standardized test scores signal “better” students. We are in the top one percent of colleges nationwide in the percentage of our undergraduate alumni who go on to earn advanced degrees – this on the strength of an education where we assess their capabilities narratively, and where we never, not once, subject them to a numerical or letter grade on a test or course.

At Hampshire College, we face the same financial challenges as many colleges. But these challenges provide an opportunity to think about who we are and what matters to us. We can not lose sight of our mission while seeking revenues or chasing rankings. We are committed to remaining disqualified from the U.S. News rankings. We’re done with standardized testing, the SAT, and ACT.

Strauss covers education and runs The Answer Sheet blog.

Virginia commuter line kicks off expansion plan with a new Spotsylvania County stop

The new terminal in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, will extend service south of Fredericksburg, potentially drawing several hundred new riders from a part of Northern Virginia geared up for growth and development.

The $3.4 million station is the first of several major projects VRE is pursuing as part of its goal to double ridership by 2040. Next month, it will launch a mobile app to give riders the option of purchasing and showing tickets via smartphones, and it will add a train to the Fredericksburg Line this summer. A station at the Potomac Shores mixed-use community, south of Woodbridge, is in the design phase, and a study is underway for the extension of the Manassas Line to Gainesville and Haymarket in Prince William County.

“The future growth in Northern Virginia demands that we do something about transportation, and I don’t think building or widening roads is the answer,” said Spotsylvania Board of Supervisors member Gary Skinner, I-Lee Hill, who serves as vice chairman of the VRE Operations Board. “We can reduce traffic congestion on major highways by adding more ways for people to commute north.”

Beyond expanding the service area, VRE envisions more frequent service and the use of longer trains to ease crowding. The agency plans to expand platforms at five Fredericksburg Line stations to accommodate those trains. And it is collaborating with CSX and the state’s rail agency in the construction of a third track between L’Enfant Plaza in Washington and Spotsylvania that will ensure better traffic flow in the busy rail system VRE shares with Amtrak and freight trains. That undertaking is half completed.

Demand for commuter train service has steadily grown over the past decade. As VRE has invested in new rail cars and expanding station platforms and parking facilities, its daily ridership has grown by about 30 percent. The increased demand coincides with significant population growth in the communities it serves, including Fairfax, Prince William and Stafford counties and Fredericksburg.

The emergence of job centers such as Innovation Park in Manassas, which is anchored by George Mason University’s Prince William campus; defense-associated growth at Quantico and Fort Belvoir; and the surge of mixed-use development in the region’s outer suburbs is projected to boost the use of the commuter rail, said Kanti Srikanth, director of transportation planning at the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments.

As the region continues to grow, investment in commuter rail is an integral part of the long-range plan to meet growing mobility demands, Srikanth said. The Council of Governments projects that the region — including the VRE service area — will have a nearly 26 percent increase in population and 36 percent increase in jobs over the next 25 years.

“We will need more transit — all kinds of transit,” Srikanth said.

– – – –

Andrea Holmes, an auditor, says commuting on VRE between her Woodbridge home and Union Station in the District means she doesn’t have to deal with the stress of bumper-to-bumper traffic on Interstate 95. It also saves money on gas, vehicle maintenance and the $20 a day she’d otherwise pay for downtown parking.

“This is a lot more relaxing than being stuck in traffic,” Holmes said recently during her 45-minute ride home as she listened to soothing music and looked out at breathtaking views of the Potomac River.

VRE says that most of its trains run at 90 percent capacity. Agency officials say the plan is to introduce 10-car trains to increase capacity. The problem is that longer trains require more storage facilities, which VRE lacks.

Increasing storage is on VRE’s list of priority capital projects for the next 25 years, totaling more than $2.7 billion.

Expanding the Long Bridge over the Potomac is another priority. Turning it from two tracks into four is critical for VRE to be able to run more trains. A four-track bridge with bike and pedestrian facilities is under consideration, but funding for the $1.1 billion project and for others has not been identified.

VRE is a partnership between the Northern Virginia Transportation Commission and the Potomac and Rappahannock Transportation Commission and, like other transit systems, it depends heavily on local, state and federal subsidies. About half of its operating costs are covered by fares.

The agency’s proposed fiscal 2016 budget of $136 million includes a 4 percent fare increase that officials say is necessary to keep up with rising costs. The budget includes money for nine new rail cars and some station and parking improvements.

Holmes, a VRE rider for the past decade, said that although she prefers riding the train to driving for her daily commute, on days when she takes a dance class in Washington she is forced to drive because the last train leaves at 6:40 p.m. When she has to return home early, she has to make sure to be on the 12:55 p.m. train because there are no southbound trains earlier and the next one is not until 3:35 p.m.

Like other riders, Holmes would like to see more frequent trips, trains running later at night and on weekends, and more reverse commute options.

– – –

All of those are in VRE’s 2040 plan, which projects adding reverse peak and express trains by 2030.

A more immediate plan is the expansion of the Manassas Line to Gainesville and Haymarket, which could be completed within seven years. Already underway is a 22-month study of the proposed addition of three stations in areas of western Prince William that have seen extensive growth in housing and commercial development.

“We already have the track that goes out this way, and that’s why it is a logical extension,” said Brian Henshaw, Haymarket’s town manager.

The town of nearly 2,000 residents views the proposed extension as an opportunity to draw commerce and visitors.

“We are very proud of our small town, and we like having a small-town feel. But at the same time, it is a realistic issue, it will give people a chance to actually come here, too,” Henshaw said.

At Potomac Shores, 30 miles south of Washington on I-95, the developer, SunCal, is building a $20 million VRE station in the middle of a town center for a planned community of nearly 4,000 residential units and 3.7 million square feet of commercial space. The station is slated to open in 2017.

Access to public transit at the mammoth project is touted as one of the top amenities of the 1,920-acre waterfront community, said Frank Cappello, president of the company’s eastern region.

“We know what the home buyers are looking for. We are watching demographic shifts and know where people want to live, and people generally want to spend less time in their cars — or at least have the option to,” Cappello said.

Getting Virginians out of their cars and onto public transit has been a tough sell over the years. When VRE began in 1992, transportation planners envisioned the state’s first commuter railway attracting as many as 32,000 daily riders by the end of its fifth year. Five years later, daily ridership averaged 7,150, prompting the agency to consider slashing fares and some VRE board members to ponder scrapping the train system.

Since then, VRE has seen slow but steady growth, reaching 20,000 daily rides and becoming the nation’s 10th-largest commuter railroad, based on ridership. Although the figures are far below projections in the 1990s, the agency and other regional transportation planners say the system meets a need in highly congested areas and places where growth is sure to increase demand for alternate modes of transportation.

Parking lots are full at many of the stations, including Fredericksburg and Broad Run, the last stop on the Manassas Line.

The new station at Spotsylvania, with 1,500 parking spots, will ease some of the crowding, but officials are already projecting as many as 1,200 Spotsylvania residents will be taking the train within six months of operations.

“There is a big market out there,” said Doug Allen, VRE’s chief executive. “And we know that there are more people who would take VRE if the stations were more convenient, more accessible and had more parking.”

Iran targets $75 oil amid plans for post-sanctions output boost

“Nobody is satisfied with current prices and instabilities and fluctuations,” Zanganeh said Wednesday at a news conference in Tehran.

“I think everyone is very satisfied with $70 to $75,” he told reporters later.

Iran would start to boost crude output in 10 days if international economic sanctions against it are removed, Zanganeh said. Production would climb to 3.8 million barrels a day within six months and 4 million in less than a year, he said, enough to propel Iran to second-biggest in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. Iran pumped 2.78 million barrels a day in April, data compiled by Bloomberg show.

More Iranian crude may threaten a price recovery with Brent crude rising 20 percent this year after tumbling 48 percent in 2014. Iran’s exports have dropped more than 60 percent because of the sanctions imposed over its nuclear program, Zanganeh said. Nuclear talks are to resume May 12 in Vienna with a deadline for an agreement by June 30.

“We have sent significant signals to OPEC” on the plan to raise output, Zanganeh said. “Our main market is Asia. Our priority is Asia. After Asia, it’s Europe. We aren’t by any means worried about seeing oil left on our hands. The name of the game is marketing.”

State-run National Iranian Oil Co. is “facing very difficult conditions” because of “payment problems and the drop in oil,” Zanganeh said.

Iran is determined to continue nuclear talks on a “serious basis,” First Vice President Eshagh Jahangiri said earlier Wednesday in a speech at the opening of an international oil and gas exhibition in Tehran. Under a preliminary accord outlined in April, the U.S. and European Union would lift sanctions if inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency verify Iran’s compliance with curbs on its nuclear work.

Iran needs $200 billion of investment in its oil industry, with $70 billion of that for petrochemicals, Zanganeh said.

“Under no circumstances will Iran relinquish its drive to restore its lost share of the oil market,” he said.

The best way to compliment little girls

“You cut your hair! So cute!” “Oh my gosh, I LOVE that bag.

Where did you get it?” “Have you lost weight? You look amazing!” “Ooooh, those boots. I want.”

The compliments flew fast between old friends, zinging across our crowded table and returned just as enthusiastically. It was our way of greeting one another, connecting after time apart, and re-establishing the bond of friendship now that we could see each other in the flesh, and not just in a Facebook photo or Instagram stream.

For women, exchanging compliments is a sort of culturally hardwired ritual, not unlike the way dogs sniff each other’s butts and apes groom one another lovingly. For many of us, it’s become so automatic that while the compliments themselves may be genuine, the instinct to produce them is more habit than anything else. And for most grown women who have reached a certain level of self-acceptance through time or age or by watching enough Oprah!, the exchange game is pretty harmless. Most of us don’t live or die by every stamp of approval; we haven’t attached our self-worth to what somebody says about our handbag.

But what about our daughters?

Knowing what we do now about young girls and self-esteem – that body image issues start as early as preschool, that girls who feel good about themselves are more likely to wait longer to experiment with sex and alcohol – compliments become more problematic. I want my daughters to feel beautiful, but I don’t want them to tie their worth to the way they look. I believe that paying a genuine compliment is a gracious way to connect with another person, but I don’t want them to place more importance on flattery than it deserves. I want them to learn to say “thank you” when they receive a compliment, but I don’t want them to feel slighted if they don’t. It’s a tricky balance.

Is the solution to stop complimenting our girls on the way they look or their sparkly shoes or their divinely creative hairdos? To stick to empowering them by focusing on their inner beauty and growing minds? Maybe, strictly speaking. But in the real world – the one where my girlfriends and I also fall into flattery as an easy means of female connection – I’m not sure that eliminating comments about appearance solves the problem. Yes, it’s important to ask great questions and treat our girls as the bright young people they are. But I also think there are ways to compliment a young girl on the way she looks that helps to teach her what to value about herself and other women.

When it comes to my own two daughters, I’m not trying to stop complimenting, I’m just trying to do it better. Here’s how.

Oh, the outfits

It’s easy to see how a preschooler who hears again and again how pretty she looks in her princess dress will begin to draw the conclusion that without it she is less so.

I steer my compliments in the direction of creativity and activity, two traits I want my daughters to own with pride. “I love all the colors you have going on today! What’s your favorite?” sends the message that her creative choices matter. “You look so pretty in pink!” reduces the outfit to a single color and her to that loaded adjective. I also say things like, “Those shoes look like they’d help you run really FAST!” or “I love dresses in the summertime because they’re so comfortable and cool, don’t you?”

Natural beauties

My 7-year-old has amazing eyelashes: long, dark, and impossibly thick. She’s so used to being told that her eyes are beautiful that she shrugs it off with a quick “thanks” and moves on. When it comes to complimenting little girls on their natural beauty – darling dimples, gorgeous curls or flawless skin – I think we have to tread carefully for two reasons. One, often the features we covet as women are just the ones young girls wish they could do without, so remarking on her sweet freckles may not be what a tween girl wants to hear. And two, Mother Nature is a fickle lady (as those of us approaching middle age know too well): straight hair turns curly, porcelain skin meets puberty, and someday my daughter may choose to fixate on her well-endowed brows over her luscious lashes.

I try to stay away from complimenting little girls on their pretty hair or long legs, but I do find ways to admire their natural beauty as it relates to their whole self. “I love the way your whole face lights up when you smile,” or “You looked so confident up there on the stage” takes the focus off the features and onto the person they belong to.

Size doesn’t matter

It’s the first thing we often say to a child we haven’t seen in a while: “Wow! You’re getting so big!” It isn’t even a compliment, really, but it often comes out sounding like a general appreciation of a kid having successfully outgrown her last year’s pajamas (as if she had anything to do with it). But compliments that involve a girl’s size lead down a slippery slope, even when we think we’re being careful about “fat talk” and hot-button body image issues.

Instead of commenting on growing girls or size in general, I love to point out what they can DO with those growing bodies. “You’re tall enough to ride the roller coaster now – how fun!” puts the emphasis where it belongs – on all the things she can do with her body, not how big or small it is.

Model great compliments

I can’t change the fact that it’s ingrained in our culture to gush over big blue eyes or fawn over a pretty dress. Like it or not, my daughters are going to receive those kinds of compliments in their growing years. But I can be intentional about the way I compliment other girls and women. Recently I’ve made a point of saying out loud some of the things that run through my head when I see a particularly poised or stylish woman – especially when it goes against the grain of conventional beauty.

“I loved chatting with that woman in the bookstore,” I might say. “She was so passionate about her job, and so helpful to us. And didn’t she have a cool collection of bracelets on her arm?”

At my recent girls’ catch-up lunch, the compliments were just the warm up act. After a flurry of hugs and flattery, we got into the real meat of life, the sticky stuff reserved for in-person conversations. We talked about kids, mothering, marriages and our parents’ health. We asked hard questions and laughed loudly. We left feeling full, and also lighter.

There was intelligence, honesty, bravery and hilarity around the table that afternoon. There were also some amazing shoes, gorgeous eyes and at least one enviable handbag. All of it was worthy of praise.

That’s what I want my daughters to know. Your outfit doesn’t define you, nor does your size, or the coincidental proximity of your God-given beauty to a man-made aesthetic. On the other hand, your outfit is fabulous because it reflects your creativity, and your lashes are gorgeous because they are a part of you, and your long legs can take you to the top of a mountain or the front of a stage, if that’s where you want to go. You look great, and you are great. You are beautiful because of who you are, not who you are because you are beautiful.

(And sparkly shoes are just plain fun.)

— — —

Sarah Powers lives, writes, and wrangles three young children in Southern California. She also cohosts The Mom Hour podcast and tweets @powersofmine.

US says manatee no longer endangered

The manatee, a species long considered at risk of extinction, has recovered in sufficient numbers to move from endangered to threatened status.

The US Fish and Wildlife Service is proposing to reclassify the protection status of the West Indian manatee, including a Florida subspecies listed as endangered since 1967.

The decision, announced at the Miami Seaquarium, reflects a finding that about 6,300 manatees live off the Florida coast today, compared with roughly 1,200 counted when aerial surveys began in the early 1990s.

Federal and state officials described the likely reclassification as good news for the whiskered “sea cow” popular among Floridians.

“Based on the best available scientific information, we believe the manatee is no longer in danger of extinction,” Michael Oetker, deputy regional director for the US wildlife agency’s southeast office, told a news conference on Thursday.

Federal regulators were petitioned to downgrade the status of the manatee by the Pacific Legal Foundation acting on behalf of Save Crystal River Inc, a non-profit advocating for the rights of recreational water users in west central Florida.

Motorboat propellers and speedboats are a leading cause of death and injury to Florida’s manatees.

The West Indian manatee, related to the African and Amazon species and to the dugong of Australia, grows to three metres and more than 450kg.

It has no natural predators, but is vulnerable to prolonged exposure to water temperatures below 20 C degrees.

The 2012 petition noted that US regulators in 2007 had recommended downgrading the manatee to threatened status, but never took action to reclassify the species.

“It’s taken eight years and two lawsuits to get the government to follow up on its own experts’ recommendation to reclassify the manatee,” Pacific Legal Foundation lawyer Christina Martin said in a statement.

To be defined as endangered, a species must face imminent risk of extinction, wildlife regulators said, while being threatened indicates they could become endangered in the future.

If finalised, the classification change would not diminish protections for the manatee under the Endangered Species Act, wildlife officials said.

Manatees also are protected under another federal law for the conservation of marine mammals.

The range of the West Indian manatee extends into the US southeast, the Caribbean, Mexico, and Central and South America.

Regulators are seeking public comment on the proposed reclassification.

The agency has 12 months to adopt the change, or explain why it will not do so, said Martin of the Pacific Legal Foundation.

Q&A with a manager who wants to get rid of managers

“Zappos said about 14 percent, or 210, of its roughly 1,500 employees had decided Holacracy wasn’t for them, and they will leave the retailer.

“They were offered at least three months of severance pay by Zappos Chief Executive Tony Hsieh, who wrote in a 4,700-word memo in March that the company hadn’t ‘made fast enough progress towards self-management.’ Buyouts are part of an accelerating effort to ‘rip the bandaid,’ he wrote.”

Holacracy is the brainchild of former software entrepreneur Brian Robertson, who is now “Constitution Steward,” “Holacracy Spokesperson,” “People & Partnership Lead Link,” “Compensation Architect” and about 20 other things at HolacracyOne, the consulting firm he co-founded.

The name Holacracy is derived from author Arthur Koestler’s term “holon,” which means a whole that is part of a larger whole, but Robertson says the approach is less a grand philosophical scheme than the product of trial and error. The experimentation continues at Zappos, publishing platform Medium, the office of the Chief Information Officer of the state of Washington and more than 300 other organizations.

Following, a condensed, edited transcript of our conversation last week in New York.

Question: Why do we need a new way to manage organizations?

Answer: If you think about the way they’re managed today, it looks a little bit like a feudal empire. There’s kings, there’s lords, there’s barons, there’s peasants and serfs. In our societies we’ve seen the shift from top-down management, from feudal systems and dictatorships, to where people have the freedom to pursue their individual purposes within a framework of rules and interconnection and order. I want to see the same benefits that we’ve seen societally, in an organization.

Q: But corporate organizations are often get lauded for being quick-moving, at least in comparison with governments. They can change direction quickly.

A: I’m not saying that management hierarchies are necessarily bad at that. I just want to know what’s better. In our society, innovation comes when government provides a framework within which people can actually self-organize. Innovation doesn’t come from top-down bureaucracy. It comes from individual actors within a system free to pursue whatever makes sense to them locally.

Q: So what do you think is the best way to go about organizing that framework in a business?

A: That’s the question we explored when we came up with Holacracy. Holacracy is sometimes misunderstood as any system that has no managers. It’s not. It’s a specific system that replaces the management hierarchy with a different framework of rules for how we can work together. Our best answer is captured in the Holacracy Constitution. That itself is evolving. It’s an open-source system.

Holacracy is sometimes mistaken for a consensus-based system. It’s not. The meetings are only used to define authority and boundaries. Kind of like in a society, where you don’t have to come to consensus with your neighbors every time you want to take your car and drive it somewhere. Now if you want to take your neighbor’s car, you need permission. There are boundaries. Holacracy brings that into a company. The meetings are used to clarify those boundaries so you know exactly what’s yours to lead. Then we don’t need to meet about it; you don’t need to build buy-in or consensus; you can get whatever input you want and lead.

Q: In a Holacratic organization, then, the person formerly known as the CEO could conceivably have a huge amount of authority to change the direction of the organization.

A: Absolutely, yes they could. They also have limits on that authority. Here’s the interesting thing: others have lots of authority too. In my company I know I have a lot of freedom to do whatever makes sense to me, but I know where I need to get someone else’s permission. I am the founder, but when I want to make a change on our website, I know that our website manager role has the authority. I can’t tell him what to do. I have to pitch him like I’m pitching my boss.

Q: If you want a change on your company’s website and you can’t persuade your website manager, how is conflict like that dealt with?

A: The first line of defense is I just go to him and talk to him, and pitch him. … [Then] I go to what’s called a governance meeting, and I think about what I need to expect from him. Not the specific decision but the pattern, the expectations. Maybe I fill a spokesperson role, and I really want to expect our website manager to provide space on the website for me to share my presentations. He still has the autonomy to figure out how to do that, but in that governance process any of his colleagues can propose new expectations for his role. He has a voice in that process, and there’s kind of a cool conflict resolution process to sort that out.

Q: What if there’s somebody who’s just not doing their job very well?

A: Somebody needs to get someone out of the role if they’re not a good fit. That need doesn’t magically go away because you have Holacracy in place. So there’s another role that is specifically watching for performance. Now, the difference is that role doesn’t have the authority to micromanage them and tell them what to do, but they do have the authority to choose the best person for the role, and to make a change if it’s needed.

What’s a little different is that they’re also not firing the person, because in Holacracy people fill many roles. I fill 20-some roles in my company, and somebody might be removing me from one of them, and I might be grateful, right? I might be a terrible fit, and yet a great fit for 19 others.

Q: Holacracy evolved from your previous company, right?

A: Yeah, it was a software company I started specifically from a hunger to find a better way.

Q: What did you discover there that you thought, “Oh, it’s going to work like this,” and it totally didn’t?

A: A lot of the ideas I had didn’t work out so well. For example, we wanted to make sure that if anyone anywhere in the company had wisdom that it got integrated. We thought, you know, then let’s just make sure everybody gets a voice in lots of key decisions. It was disaster. It was more meetings, painful meetings, egos at play.

We tried less structure, which a lot of startups nowadays do. At very small companies I think that can work to a point, but what quickly emerges is some political structure for how power really works, and that’s hard to change. It makes it easier for that CEO/founder/whatever to show up and really control everything without looking like it, and it makes it harder to actually grow and scale a business.

We realized that absence of structure is not the answer any more than the bureaucratic structure that we were trying to move past. Holacracy is actually more structured than a typical management hierarchy. It’s just a different kind of structure and one that gives you a lot more clarity on who makes decisions and who does what.

Q: Is Zappos the biggest organization that’s doing this?

A: They’re the biggest one that’s doing it end-to-end across the whole company.

Q: They’ve been getting lots of attention, and it’s clearly a painful process.

A: It’s a huge change. This isn’t something you do in a few months. This is a multiyear journey. But the press reports this Zappos thing as if people walked out up in arms, and that’s not what happened at all. Zappos consciously said that if you’re not on board with this 100 percent, we’ll give you a huge buyout if you leave now. The amount of people that left probably is not that different than any major reorg, except typically it would be over a year or two after they were initially resisting the process.

[Begin optional add end]

Q: What happened to you in your career that made you think, “Dang, we need this?”

A: An aerospace company I worked at won an award for being the best mid-sized company in America to work for. … It had phenomenal benefits, great culture, all the stuff you’d expect from a company winning that award. Yet even with all that, I felt like I couldn’t use all my talents. I wanted to be creative and contribute, yet I had bosses to satisfy and politics to play to get change enacted, and everything was a little calcified.

That was one of the things. Then I had another experience that just became a metaphor for me. I’m a pilot, and I was flying a plane as a student pilot when my low-voltage light came on. Every other instrument said nothing’s wrong, so I ignored it, I kept flying and I nearly crashed the plane. I realized that the low-voltage light is tuned into information no one else has.

When we show up in companies, we become the sensors, the instruments. If we can’t use what we sense, or if one person who senses that something’s off doesn’t have anything they can do with it, we risk crashing the organization. … How can we create a company where anyone anywhere in the organization who senses something that could be improved, can act on it and get meaningful change enacted, without obstacles in the way?

Fertility medicine bring babies — and tough decisions

Loblein was 35 when she walked down the aisle for the second time, and she was already a mother to three children from her first marriage.

But the meteorological satellite operator knew that she wanted a child with her new husband, and in vitro fertilization was necessary.

Today they have a little boy and a little girl — and, despite Loblein’s best efforts not to create more than they needed, that extra embryo she’d wanted to avoid. Waiting in limbo for her decide its fate.

The Lobleins are among thousands of couples and individuals grappling with difficult choices regarding their stored genetic material. The Department of Health and Human Services estimates that more than 600,000 frozen embryos are stored in the United States, in addition to countless more cryo-preserved eggs and sperm.

The issue made for dramatic headlines recently as “Modern Family” star Sofia Vergara was hit with a lawsuit by her ex-fiance, who wants custody of their two fertilized embryos to use for a potential pregnancy. But for most people who have used assisted reproductive technologies, the question of what to do with frozen eggs, sperm and embryos plays out in a much more private, if no less wrenching, manner.

“Having embryos in limbo is a huge problem for our field,” says Eric Widra, medical director at Shady Grove Fertility Center, which has locations throughout the Washington area. “Parents are apprehensive or conflicted and don’t know what to do.”

Most couples never consider the fate of excess embryos when they start down the path of fertility medicine. Especially for childless pairs, longing to conceive, “addressing that is not on the list of priorities,” Widra says. “Many of them take a ‘We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it’ approach.”

A 2005 study funded by the National Institutes of Health found that of 58 couples with leftover embryos, 72 percent hadn’t decided what to do with them.

— — —

The possibility of extra embryos never occurred to Elizabeth, a 42-year-old lawyer in Northern Virginia who asked that only her middle name be used because not all of her family members and colleagues are aware of her decisions. She married at 36 and soon became pregnant. But she always thought that if she had one child, she’d want to have another and was surprised when she had trouble conceiving a second time.

After nearly a year of trying, she and her husband consulted a fertility specialist, who first attempted the less invasive and less costly process of intrauterine insemination. When that didn’t work, they moved on to a round of in vitro fertilization that resulted in nine fertilized embryos.

The first two implanted didn’t take. The doctors then implanted three, one of which resulted in a viable pregnancy. Forty weeks later, Elizabeth’s second son was born. Family life felt full and busy, she says, “but then it started weighing on me that we have four frozen embryos that potentially could be another sibling for the two that we have.”

It’s not that Elizabeth or her husband are desperate for a third child — it would stretch them financially and add to their already hectic schedules — but Elizabeth was raised a Catholic, and it gnawed at her that a potential new life sat frozen in a storage facility.

“I did not think we’d be in a position where we had to think about, ‘Oh, now we have leftover, what do we do?’ ” she says. “I was more concerned with, ‘We only have three attempts covered by insurance — are we going to spend money after that if we don’t have a kid?’ “

If it were solely up to her husband, they might try to donate the remaining embryos to scientific research, but that option doesn’t sit well with Elizabeth. “I felt this need to know whether there was potentially another viable life among the embryos,” she says. The couple decided to have the four embryos thawed and tested to see whether any were chromosomally normal and would thus have a significantly higher likelihood of surviving. One of the four was.

So last week, Elizabeth had one healthy embryo implanted. The couple will find out at the end of the month whether she is pregnant.

“I don’t want to say that I felt like I had no option,” she says. “But it felt like the best option for me, personally.”

— — —

A fter becoming pregnant with twins, Teresa Crawford and her husband, Michael Hess, didn’t want more children. Hess already had two from a previous marriage, and the twins were born 10 weeks early. “We felt very lucky to have two healthy kids, especially because they were born premature,” says Crawford, who works in international development.

In 2006, a year after their IVF cycle, the Washington couple received a bill in the mail for nearly $1,000, with a letter asking what they wanted the clinic to do with their six remaining embryos. The options, they were informed, were to implant them, offer them for donation to another couple, pay the hefty annual storage fee or have them destroyed.

“And we did not like those options at all,” Crawford says. They would have preferred to donate the embryos to science, but at the time, embryonic stem cell research was banned, so that choice was off the table.

Ultimately, the couple decided to have the embryos destroyed, as neither felt a strong emotional attachment to them.

But for some people, the decision to destroy is much more fraught.

On DC Urban Moms and Dads, an online parenting message board, one woman posted that after debating the options for her leftover embryos, she brought the vials home, “burned some incense, held them and cried. I could’ve had the lab dispose of them, but this felt better to me, for whatever it’s worth.”

Meryl Rosenberg, a lawyer in Potomac, Md., who specializes in assisted reproductive technology law, says that as the use of fertility medicine becomes more common, these issues are increasingly making their way through the judicial system. They become particularly complicated when a couple divorces or someone dies, and the interested parties are at odds over the fate of the stored material.

“The relationship sours,” she says, “and one person wants to use the embryos and the other partner does not want to use them.”

“Generally,” she says, “courts have found that the right not to procreate outweighs the right to procreate. But there have been exceptions to that.”

Widra, of Shady Grove, says that his clinic tries to get patients to address the topic proactively, “without drama and with good legal advice.” They sign consent forms acknowledging that embryos are jointly held property, and that “once you make these they are made forever. They are yours and it’s your problem to solve should it come to separation or death.”

Widra says the clinic is trying to offer clients more options. Since President Barack Obama repealed the ban on stem cell research in 2009, there has been some resurgence of interest in donated embryos from the scientific community, he says. And although donating embryos to other people has for many years been arduous and time-consuming, leaders in the field are trying to streamline the process to make it easier “to offer more embryos for adoption and for [adoptive parents] to find them.”

But even that option comes with its own calculations. Loblein was so conscious of the possibility of having extra embryos that when she and her husband had trouble conceiving, they first attempted natural-cycle IVF, fertilizing only one egg at a time. But after two attempts, each costing $5,000, they moved on to traditional IVF.

The couple wound up with three embryos, implanted two and had a boy. A little more than a year later, Loblein became pregnant naturally, this time with a girl. That left her and her husband with one frozen embryo. They talked about donating it, but Loblein fears that she would always wonder whether a child was born and how he or she was being cared for.

Now, with two kids younger than 4, the thought of adding a third sometimes seems overwhelming, especially to Loblein’s husband. “It’s the stressed-out times when both the kids are screaming and he’s like, ‘I don’t know if I can handle another,’ ” she says.

“But at the end of the day I always come back to, ‘Well we just need to try it because I don’t know if I can live with all the other decisions and options.’ “

So sometime early next year, they’ve agreed, the final embryo will be implanted. And then, regardless of the outcome, their family will be complete.