Category Archives: Commentary

The Chronicle: Abandoning a Misguided Boycott Is Only a First Step

By DAVID NEWMAN

I am sitting in a conference room, observing a group of 36 participants in a discussion. It is intense, and one can see the care with which the speakers choose their words. For this is no normal gathering. It involves two groups of teachersone Israeli and the other Palestinianwho, meeting each other for the first time, are not normally prepared to recognize even the basic legitimacy of each other’s claims.

We are in the neutral city of Istanbul during the first days of the Lebanon war. It took months of preparation to get the logistics right — to enable the Palestinian participants from the West Bank who did not have the permits to travel through Israel to leave via Jordan, for instance, and to arrange for kosher food for the religious Israeli participants. Then, right before they were all due to depart, hostilities broke out in southern Lebanon, Hezbollah fired the first Katyusha rockets into Haifa, and it looked as though all those preparations would count for nothing. But, with one exception, every participant has arrived.

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St. Petersburg Times: University comes away shocked, burned

The Web site of University of Florida student Andrew Meyer already displays links to the national coverage of his story (“made the front page of FoxNews.com”), suggesting he got at least some of what he wanted from his outburst at a campus forum with U.S. Sen. John Kerry. The university, by contrast, came out of the incident shocked and burned.

Meyer was doing a fine job of making a singular spectacle of himself Monday as he drilled Kerry with high-decibel non sequiturs. But that changed in less than 15 seconds, which was all the time it took before a young campus police officer drew a bead on him with her Taser gun. Before the dust had settled, five officers were holding Meyer down as one delivered a 50,000-volt shock. The episode was recorded by an array of student-owned digital video cameras, including one that Meyer had handed to a student before stepping to the microphone.

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Inside Higher Ed: The Professor’s Ten Commandments, Thanks to Notorious B.I.G.

By Phil Ford

We’re staring down the barrel of another academic year. Time for a refresher course in professional deportment — by which I mean “The Ten Crack Commandments,” by The Notorious B.I.G. All you professors starting out at new institutions (like me) will be getting orientation sessions to show you the academic ropes — procedures on academic misconduct, FERPA guidelines, sexual harassment policies, etc., but you can save some time and just listen to hiphop. “The Ten Crack Commandments” only looks like it’s about drug dealing. All hustles obey the same logic, so heed Biggie’s words.

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Globe and Mail: The (new) idea of a university

Educated citizens and democratic governance go together like the proverbial horse and carriage: They depend on and sustain one another. Without educated citizens, democracy is little more than a sham and likely a cover for elite rule. And without democratic opportunities and outlets, an educated populace will have little incentive or impetus to contribute to society.

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St Petersburg Times: USF takes easy way on diversity

I’ve known St. Petersburg Deputy Mayor Goliath Davis since 1994, when I first came to work for the St. Petersburg Times. As assistant chief of police at the time, Davis invited me to lunch for a welcome-to-town, get-acquainted chat. After he became chief, his telephone lines remained open to me. Now, when I want to know what’s going on in Midtown or elsewhere in the city, I’m always able to speak with him.

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Redeeming Columbia

New York Sun Editorial
May 18, 2007

Of all the graduates receiving their diplomas this season, the one we salute this morning is Bret Woellner. He is the Columbia University graduate student who was commissioned a second lieutenant in the United States Army yesterday in the first joint commissioning ceremony ever held at the White House for graduates of the Reserve Officer Training Corps. All of the ROTC graduates are men and women who made extraordinary sacrifices as students. But Mr. Woellner was among a select group who made a double sacrifice, because Columbia, like several other universities who had graduates at the White House yesterday, bans ROTC from campus. So Mr. Woellner had to travel to Fordham to do his military studies.

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Dallas Morning News: It’s time to stop racial preferences

Schools are helping no one, least of all the minorities in need, says LINDA CHAVEZ
We’re at the beginning of the end of the racial spoils system that has come to symbolize affirmative action in higher education, state contracting and employment.

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The New York Times: Educating the Education Secretary

“It’s not our fault.” That’s what Education Secretary Margaret Spellings seemed to say while testifying before Congress last week about her department’s failure to halt the payoffs, kickbacks and general looting of the public treasury by a lending company that collected nearly $300 million in undeserved subsidies. But that doesn’t track with the federal Higher Education Act, which clearly authorizes the secretary to disqualify from federal programs lenders who employ payoffs, kickbacks and unethical practices like those that have been found to be commonplace in the college lending business.

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The National Review: Spellings Bee
The problem with standardized testing in higher education.

By Peter Wood

Last Thursday, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings held a “summit” in Washington of 250 leaders from business and academe. Dubbed “A Test of Leadership,” the summit was Spellings’s latest effort to overcome skepticism over her aggressive plan to change the ground rules of American higher education. That plan has five parts, and while all five deserve gimlet-eyed scrutiny, one of them — “outcomes assessment” — is exceptionally mischievous.

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