Talk:John F. Collins

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Balance issues

@CommonKnowledgeCreator: - First off, nice work expanding the article. That said... this is an article on John Collins, not gentrification in Boston. I'm concerned at the apparent WP:UNDUE balance on the page which was solely focused on racial segregation. Additionally, your sources were somewhat contradicting your own statements - if the obituaries don't mention Collins as being closely involved with such segregation, then that means the Wikipedia article shouldn't be either. Wikipedia reflects what other sources say, and specifically on the topic - i.e. sources that directly credit / blame Collins, not that merely talk about events that were happening at the same time. The NYT article did say "Not that Boston's urban renewal was regarded as universally successful. The wholesale razing of the working-class, vibrant West End to make way for high-rise apartments became its most widely criticized feature.", so you can certainly include it, but it was one paragraph of many.

Additionally, there was a whole large section on things that happened after 1968. A "legacy" section is fine, but it should be things directly connected with Collins, not merely history-of-Boston stuff. I removed most of it; if there was a connection to Collins here, it needs to be made much more clear. This makes me worried about the rest of the article, hence the POV tag: how many of these other events was Collins directly tied to? Segregation was happening across the United States in the 60s & 70s due to a variety of reasons (school integration, rise of suburbs, etc.), and it is a truth everywhere that poor districts are the first ones targeted for new developments, simply because it's cheaper to buy the land there. If Collins was especially rapacious in the West End, then fine, but the sources need to draw that connection. In the same way, was Collins really that closely connected to the UMass Boston issue? If he was, fine, but like I said, the imbalance throughout the article and the drawing of conclusions not in sources gives me some doubts.

Finally, I removed it anyway, but as a future writing note, be exceptionally careful with the line that "blamed" the fact that an author didn't write an obituary the way you'd like because the author was a Jesuit. Take a read of Jesuit conspiracy theories, it's a long and evil trope. I'm not Catholic myself, you weren't offending me, but don't bring up the religion of the author of a source unless it's obviously relevant, and especially not as an "attack" on the source's credibility like you did. If you have a source that says another source is biased, fine, use that other source's statement, then - but I doubt that was the case here. SnowFire (talk) 04:21, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

Oh, and one other thing: File:2004 Boston Mayor John F. Collins mural marker.jpg says that the mural was dedicated in May 2002. How come the article says 2004? Was it dedicated before the mural was installed or something weird? Also, while I removed a large amount of the legacy section, it's not like your work was lost - it's possible it can go somewhere else, in some sort of history-of-Boston-housing type article. SnowFire (talk) 04:28, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

@SnowFire: Apologies for the delayed response. Upon reviewing the sources cited, WP:NPOV, and WP:COATRACK, I agree that the content in what was the Redlining and busing section should be moved to different articles (specifically the article about the Boston desegregation busing crisis and Kevin White since the reverse redlining appears to have been initiated by the White administration's $50 million home ownership initiative with B-BURG). I do not dispute that this is an article about John F. Collins who served as the Mayor of Boston from 1960 to 1968, but I must nonetheless take issue with your assertion that a public policymaker is only relevant during their term of office and that their legacy extends only to their term of office. For example, the OASDI program administered by the Social Security Administration was established during the Franklin Roosevelt administration and eligible U.S. citizens still receive old-age pensions and disability payments from that program while Roosevelt died in office in 1945. Similarly, Medicare was created during the Lyndon Johnson administration and eligible U.S. citizens still receive health insurance through Medicare while Johnson left office in 1969. The Interstate Highway System was created during the Eisenhower administration and it still carries motor vehicle traffic today while Eisenhower left office in 1961. Even though the management of those agencies and programs and public policies related to them have changed, to say that those programs and the existence of those federal agencies are not part of the legacies of those three presidents would be absurd.

Just as importantly, decisions made by policymakers have effects long after they leave office, and initiatives that are begun during one presidential, gubernatorial, or mayoral administration are often not completed until subsequent ones. This was certainly the case of the urban renewal initiatives in Boston during the 1950s and 1960s including the West End itself. In Building a New Boston by Thomas O'Connor (pages 122–141), From the Puritans to the Projects by Lawrence J. Vale (pages 273–282), and The Death of an American Jewish Community by Hillel Levine and Lawrence Harmon (pages 73–74) all note that the planning and purchase of the land for the West End redevelopment began during the John B. Hynes administration while the actual demolition of the development occurred at the beginning of the Collins administration. However, the West End was not the only urban renewal initiative or program begun by the Hynes administration that was completed during the Collins administration (for example, the conversion of Scollay Square into Government Center). (O'Connor pp. 148–181; Vale pp. 295–300)

"[This] is an article on John Collins, not gentrification in Boston. I'm concerned at the apparent WP:UNDUE balance on the page which was solely focused on racial segregation. Additionally, your sources were somewhat contradicting your own statements - if the obituaries don't mention Collins as being closely involved with such segregation, then that means the Wikipedia article shouldn't be either. Wikipedia reflects what other sources say, and specifically on the topic". The sources that I had cited, The Death of an American Jewish Community by Hillel Levine and Lawrence Harmon, Boston Against Busing by Ronald P. Formisano, UMass Boston at 50 by Michael Feldberg, and From the Puritans to the Projects by Lawrence J. Vale, are book-length treatments on the history of Boston by journalists or academics, were published by the Free Press, the University of North Carolina Press, the University of Massachusetts Press, and the Harvard University Press respectively, include chapters about the history of Boston while Collins was serving as its mayor, and about the specific public policy topics (e.g. housing, gentrification, the UMass Boston campus siting, and racial imbalance in the Boston Public Schools) related to Collins tenure. The obituaries are relatively brief in comparison, and because of this, I do not believe that their usage constitutes a violation of WP:NPOV.

The obituaries do not mention the displacement in the South End that was caused by the Collins administration's urban renewal programs including by a B-BURG member institution while Collins was in office. B-BURG was mentioned in two of those book-length treatments on urban renewal and were published before the obituaries were (O'Connor pp. 224–240; Levine & Harmon pp. 171–173). Collins may not have been the person within his administration who actively carried out the segregation of the city's public housing developments but he supported policies to sustain it. (Vale p. 305) As Edward Hassan was the Boston Housing Authority Board Chair, Hassan retained control over tenant assignment and Hassan was a Collins appointee carrying out policies Collins wanted (Vale p. 292). Similarly, Collins may not have been directly involved in the mortgage lending activities of B-BURG as they were private corporations, but he was the mayor that organized the B-BURG consortium so it is not a violation of WP:NPOV or WP:COATRACK to include one sentence that states that B-BURG would later reverse redline Blue Hill Avenue (even though I reiterate that most of that content should be moved to the Kevin White article since it occurred during his tenure as Mayor and was initiated by a home ownership initiative of his administration). The obituaries also do not mention the Grove Hall riots and the deterioration of race relations in the city during his tenure, and also do not mention that the public housing developments in the city were segregated during his tenure even though it was reported in the news at the time Collins was in office that they were segregated. (Vale pp. 301–302)

The reason there is a focus on racial segregation in housing is because such segregation was cited as being a major cause of the racial imbalance in the Boston Public Schools in the report prepared by the special committee appointed by the Massachusetts Education Commissioner that was released in April 1965. As the current revision of the article notes, that report would serve as the basis for the Racial Imbalance Act of 1965 passed by the Massachusetts General Court, signed into law by Massachusetts Governor John Volpe, and upheld as being constitutional by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. In turn, the desegregation busing of the Boston Public Schools ordered by Judge W. Arthur Garrity Jr. in the lawsuit Morgan v. Hennigan was ordered in accordance with that law. As the Collins administration made efforts to sustain the racial segregation of the city's public housing developments and implemented urban renewal policies that furthered racial segregation in the city, I do not believe that the focus on racial segregation in housing constitutes a violation of WP:UNDUE.

As for Collins and UMass Boston, the Boston Redevelopment Authority proposed locating the UMass Boston campus permanently at Columbia Point in 1967 after Collins publicly requested that the university not keep its campus in Downtown Boston, while membership of the state legislature pressured the UMass System Board of Trustees to accept the Columbia Point campus proposal over multiple counterproposals made by different UMass Boston Chancellors. The Columbia Point public housing development that was eventually leased to a private developer in the 1980s is now a luxury housing development with a large population of UMass Boston students. While Collins is not at fault for the negligence in the construction of the campus or the subsequent leasing of the Columbia Point development, Boston Redevelopment Authority executives were appointees of the mayor and his administration proposed locating a commuter school campus in proximity to the development and on a peninsula despite publicly available scientific research released by the Lyndon Johnson administration two years earlier warning about the possibility of rising sea levels from growing carbon emissions.

One of the main thoroughfares in and out, Morrissey Boulevard, has apparently always flooded frequently due to its proximity to the shoreline and it is becoming more frequent due to sea level rise. The school also had to spend $2.8 million stabilizing the shoreline by the JFK Presidential Library from coastal erosion. The salt water atmosphere also contributed to the erosion of the campus substructure and the closure of the university's substructure parking garage. The gentrification and environmental discrimination were consequences of the decision to locate the campus on Columbia Point which was originally proposed by the Collins administration. It was the road taken by the university as it is where the campus was located permanently and thus is part of Collins legacy, which is another reason why the decisions of public policymakers can still be relevant decades after they have left office. This is why I would disagree that the UMass Boston and Columbia Point section violates WP:COATRACK and that content (minus the content about the 2017 deficit and the Motley resignation) should be restored in its entirety.

"… as a future writing note, be exceptionally careful with the line that 'blamed' the fact that an author didn't write an obituary the way you'd like because the author was a Jesuit. … I'm not Catholic myself, you weren't offending me, but don't bring up the religion of the author of a source unless it's obviously relevant, and especially not as an 'attack' on the source's credibility like you did. If you have a source that says another source is biased, fine, use that other source's statement, then - but I doubt that was the case here." First of all, the obituaries were not written by a Jesuit. It was Collins' entry in the Encyclopedia of the Irish in America published by the University of Notre Dame Press in 1999 that was. Leaving aside the fact that omitting details from non-fiction publications can constitute a violation of professional liability insurance policies for publishers, a well-known and common tactic for maintaining housing segregation are gentleman's agreements. The obituaries of Collins and Collins entry in the Encyclopedia of the Irish in America are probably the most widely read non-fiction publications about Collins rather than the book-length treatments since the latter are longer and not explicitly biographies of Collins.

In 2015, Boston remained among the most residentially segregated cities by race in the United States, and it was not until 2015, 25 years after the final ruling in Morgan v. Hennigan was issued, that the Boston Public Schools made an official district-wide curriculum revision requiring at least one lesson per year about desegregation in Boston. In 2018, The Boston Globe published an analysis finding that the Boston Public Schools were becoming re-segregated, and in 2020, Boston Magazine published an article noting that the Greater Boston area has remained among the most residentially segregated metropolitan areas in the United States when talking about the historical housing segregation in the city including by B-BURG. The Greater Boston area's housing market has been described as a "closed-access" market due to its zoning laws, and in the 2016–2017 academic year inter-district enrollment across Massachusetts public school districts remained mostly prohibited in Eastern Massachusetts. While I am willing to concede that the inclusion of the piped link to the Sin of omission article and mentioning that the author of the encyclopedia entry was a Jesuit may be gratuitous, I think your assessment doubting that the history of racial segregation in the city was not intentionally omitted is actually probably wrong, has had the effect of being discriminatory, and as such should be noted in the article that the obituaries and the encyclopedia entry do not mention it. I am not Catholic either, but I've lived in the Greater Boston area my whole life and can readily attest that the Catholic community (though not everyone in it of course) does still have a racism problem. -- CommonKnowledgeCreator (talk) 01:10, 9 March 2022 (UTC)

Thank you for the detailed reply. There's some very core Wikipedia policies at issue here, even more core than DUEWEIGHT which I cited initially. WP:Verifiability says that every claim needs to go back to a source somewhere. WP:No original research says that Wikipedia publishes existing, mainstream views on a topic, not something that Wikipedia editors have figured out personally. Neither my opinion nor your opinion matters on Wikipedia. So - when your earlier version of the article to have something like "Obituaries of him published in ''[[MIT Tech Talk]]'' and by the [[Associated Press]], as well as his entry in ''The Encyclopedia of the Irish in America'' (1999) published by the [[University of Notre Dame Press]] and written by a member of the [[Society of Jesus]], [[Sin of omission|do not mention]] that (insert long list of complaints)" - you need to have a source that directly says that about Collins in particular. And calls this a sin of omission, or claims that they'd lose their liability insurance, or whatever. And that directly complains that the encyclopedia entry is biased because it was written by a Jesuit. And, let's face it, if you did find such a source, it'd need to be a hell of a good one to not be tossed as fringe or one person's opinion, at least specifically on the claims that Jesuits are untrustworthy sources in 1999 (!!). Again, per "no original research", the fact that you might think that is irrelevant. For why policies like this exist, just imagine what it'd mean if the "other side" was allowed to write whatever inferences they wanted.

Unfortunately, the POV tag remains on the article. As I stated before, there needs to be a much more direct line drawn between Collins and these various events that are gone into at great detail. Otherwise, you have material more fit for a "History of Boston, 1960s" spin-off type article. Maybe an analogy would help: imagine if there were four paragraphs at the article on Abraham Lincoln on how bad the Sand Creek massacre was and going into great detail on it. Now, there really are solid sources on this, but it's not really appropriate for Lincoln's article despite technically being under his administration, because Lincoln obviously wasn't paying the slightest bit of mind to frontier scuffles involving small numbers of people while a civil war was raging. If you want to make an article on the Grove Hall riots, great, but if you're going to stick that material here, it needs to be the parts directly related to Collins, not merely the natural functioning of cops 7 administrative levels removed from Collins, in the same way those US Army soldiers in Colorado were deeply removed from Lincoln.

Again, it's great that you're willing to work on this, but the material needs to be in the correct article and scrupulously referenced to the topic at hand. If it helps, take a look at David Dinkins - it mentions that the Crown Heights riot happened on his watch, and that it was politically damaging to him and he lost re-election. That's it. It'd be disproportionate to have an extensive history of the riot there as if Dinkins was masterminding it. There should be a similar break-out for the issues in this article on Collins. SnowFire (talk) 06:52, 9 March 2022 (UTC)

@SnowFire: Thomas O'Connor notes on page xiv of the introduction to Building a New Boston and Lawrence J. Vale notes on page 292 of From the Puritans to the Projects that all of the records of the John F. Collins administration were deposited at the Boston Public Library. All of the books cited in the current revision of the article are publicly available at the Boston Public Library and make reference to these records. There is no possible conflict with WP:Verifiability. As for WP:No original research, I did not figure out any of this myself, nothing in the current revision of the article draws any conclusion, and as for whether the sources are within the mainstream, I think their publishers and authors' credentials speak for themselves. Every single sentence is a statement of fact with a citation, and the references statements of fact overlap. I don't see why it is so difficult to understand how a mayoral administration works with respect to the Boston Housing Authority and the Boston Redevelopment Authority where a bureaucracy operates at the mayor's direction. As for the Grove Hall riots, their inclusion is because what the decades old research that indicates is that they were caused in part by Boston Police Department hiring practices, so the Grove Hall riots are related to Collins because of labor policies at the city police department while he was the mayor. There is no need for a separate article about Collins' administration or about housing in Boston from his biographical article. The content need only be included here. -- CommonKnowledgeCreator (talk) 07:57, 9 March 2022 (UTC)

@Snowfire: Or rather, there is a section of this article, as with all of the biography articles of Mayors of Boston and other U.S. cities, that covers Collins' tenure as Mayor of Boston. The sections of these articles, along with articles about U.S. state governors are the most appropriate place to include public policy content during a particular period of history in lieu of creating a separate article about the governorship or mayoralty. If you still take issue with the inclusion of the gentlemen's agreement content, we can leave it out. As long as the Wikipedia article summarizes the segregationist housing policies his administration implemented at his direction, then that is sufficient. What is your concern about the authors or publishers that I've cited? Lawrence J. Vale is the associate dean of the MIT School of Architecture and Planning within its Department of Urban Studies and Planning. Hillel Levine and Thomas H. O'Connor were both on the faculty at Boston University. Ronald P. Formisano is a history professor at the University of Kentucky. Jack Tager was a history professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Michael Feldberg was a history professor at UMass Boston. Lawrence Harmon was a managing editor of The Jewish Advocate and is a Boston Globe columnist. Richard Rothstein is a senior fellow at the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society at the University of California, Berkeley. -- CommonKnowledgeCreator (talk) 23:42, 9 March 2022 (UTC)