In Print & On the Air

A COMPANY GIVING ITS employees the royal treatment in Cary, N.C., is not only good for the workers, it's good for business. SAS, a software company, provides onsite medical and child care and a golf course, among other things. JEFFREY PFEFFER, the Thomas D. Dee II Professor of Organizational Behavior in the Graduate School of Business, told CBS's 60 Minutes program on April 20 that the company saves millions of dollars by reducing employee turnover. SAS enjoys only 3 percent turnover and 15,000 new job applications annually. Pfeffer uses the company as a teaching model at the Graduate School of Business.

RESEARCH PSYCHOLOGIST PEGGY F. DREXLER, a scholar at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, argued in a commentary in the Christian Science Monitor on April 28 that society must accept working mothers pursuing any job -- no matter how risky. "It is clear that American mothers have taken on the mortal career risks long associated with men," Drexler wrote. "But we're torn apart by this progress in women's advancement. Most of us applaud the risks such women take. And in the next breath, we ask how, in good conscience, a mother could leave her kids and deliberately put herself in harm's way: What are they thinking? They're mothers!" Drexler said mothers pay a high price for society's ambivalence: "The language we use is a clue. A nonsupporting father is a 'deadbeat dad'; a mother who leaves home 'abandons her children.'"

LARRY DIAMOND, A SENIOR fellow at the Hoover Institution, told the San Francisco Chronicle April 24 that the Bush administration should seek international help to share responsibility for the enormous task of rebuilding Iraq. "We're really risking, if we continue down this unilateral road, a political catastrophe at some point," he said. Diamond said it was a mistake to appoint Jay Garner, a retired U.S. general, to oversee postwar reconstruction and urged the administration to recruit a non-American replacement. "The people are poor, their lives are disrupted, the physical infrastructure has been destroyed or damaged, they're frustrated, and we need a buffer for that frustration," he said. Without shared responsibility, Diamond stressed, discontent could quickly find voice in anti-Americanism or radical Islam.