csmonitor.com

image-store.slidesharecdn.com; via ACP III on Facebook



See also: "Slide in home ownership threatens the American Dream," from USA Today.

Of course I (JB) haven't read the
 entire below text word-for-word ... But consider the irony:

Karl Marx
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

Private Property and Communism

Re. p. XXXIX. [This refers to the missing part of the second manuscript. - Ed.] The antithesis between lack of property and property, so long as it is not comprehended as the antithesis of labour and capital, still remains an indifferent antithesis, not grasped in its active connection, in its internal relation, not yet grasped as a contradiction. It can find expression in this first form even without the advanced development of private property (as in ancient Rome, Turkey, etc.). It does not yet appear as having been established by private property itself. But labour, the subjective essence of private property as exclusion of property, and capital, objective labour as exclusion of labour, constitute private property as its developed state of contradiction – hence a dynamic relationship driving towards resolution.

Re the same page. The transcendence of self-estrangement follows the same course as self-estrangement. Private property is first considered only in its objective aspect – but nevertheless with labour as its essence. Its form of existence is therefore capital, which is to be annulled “as such” (Proudhon). Or a particular form of labour – labour levelled down, fragmented, and therefore unfree – is conceived as the source of private property’s perniciousness and of its existence in estrangement from men. For instance, Fourier, who, like the Physiocrats, also conceives agricultural labour to be at least the exemplary type, whereas Saint-Simon declares in contrast that industrial labour as such is the essence, and accordingly aspires to the exclusive rule of the industrialists and the improvement of the workers’ condition. Finally, communism is the positive expression of annulled private property – at first as universal private property.

By embracing this relation as a whole, communism is:

(1) In its first form only a generalisation and consummation of it [of this relation]. As such it appears in a two-fold form: on the one hand, the dominion of material property bulks so large that it wants to destroy everything which is not capable of being possessed by all as private property. It wants to disregard talent, etc., in an arbitrary manner. For it the sole purpose of life and existence is direct, physical possession. The category of the worker is not done away with, but extended to all men. The relationship of private property persists as the relationship of the community to the world of things. Finally, this movement of opposing universal private property to private property finds expression in the brutish form of opposing to marriage (certainly a form of exclusive private property) the community of women, in which a woman becomes a piece of communal and common property. It may be said that this idea of the community of women gives away the secret of this as yet completely crude and thoughtless communism.[30] Just as woman passes from marriage to general prostitution, [Prostitution is only a specific expression of the general prostitution of the labourer, and since it is a relationship in which falls not the prostitute alone, but also the one who prostitutes – and the latter’s abomination is still greater – the capitalist, etc., also comes under this head. – Note by Marx [31]] so the entire world of wealth (that is, of man’s objective substance) passes from the relationship of exclusive marriage with the owner of private property to a state of universal prostitution with the community. This type of communism – since it negates the personality of man in every sphere – is but the logical expression of private property, which is this negation. General envy constituting itself as a power is the disguise in which greed re-establishes itself and satisfies itself, only in another way. The thought of every piece of private property as such is at least turned against wealthier private property in the form of envy and the urge to reduce things to a common level, so that this envy and urge even constitute the essence of competition. Crude communism [the manuscript has: Kommunist. – Ed.] is only the culmination of this envy and of this levelling-down proceeding from the preconceived minimum. It has a definite, limited standard. How little this annulment of private property is really an appropriation is in fact proved by the abstract negation of the entire world of culture and civilisation, the regression to the unnatural || IV ||IV| simplicity of the poor and crude man who has few needs and who has not only failed to go beyond private property, but has not yet even reached it.

The community is only a community of labour, and equality of wages paid out by communal capital – by the community as the universal capitalist. Both sides of the relationship are raised to an imagined universality – labour as the category in which every person is placed, and capital as the acknowledged universality and power of the community.

In the approach to woman as the spoil and hand-maid of communal lust is expressed the infinite degradation in which man exists for himself, for the secret of this approach has its unambiguous, decisive, plain and undisguised expression in the relation of man to woman and in the manner in which the direct and natural species-relationship is conceived. The direct, natural, and necessary relation of person to person is the relation of man to woman. In this natural species-relationship man’s relation to nature is immediately his relation to man, just as his relation to man is immediately his relation to nature – his own natural destination. In this relationship, therefore, is sensuously manifested, reduced to an observable fact, the extent to which the human essence has become nature to man, or to which nature to him has become the human essence of man. From this relationship one can therefore judge man’s whole level of development. From the character of this relationship follows how much man as a species-being, as man, has come to be himself and to comprehend himself; the relation of man to woman is the most natural relation of human being to human being. It therefore reveals the extent to which man’s natural behaviour has become human, or the extent to which the human essence in him has become a natural essence – the extent to which his human nature has come to be natural to him. This relationship also reveals the extent to which man’s need has become a human need; the extent to which, therefore, the other person as a person has become for him a need – the extent to which he in his individual existence is at the same time a social being.

The first positive annulment of private property – crude communism – is thus merely a manifestation of the vileness of private property, which wants to set itself up as the positive community system.

(2) Communism (α) still political in nature – democratic or despotic; (β) with the abolition of the state, yet still incomplete, and being still affected by private property, i.e., by the estrangement of man. In both forms communism already is aware of being reintegration or return of man to himself, the transcendence of human self-estrangement; but since it has not yet grasped the positive essence of private property, and just as little the human nature of need, it remains captive to it and infected by it. It has, indeed, grasped its concept, but not its essence.

(3) Communism as the positive transcendence of private property as human self-estrangement, and therefore as the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man; communism therefore as the complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e., human) being – a return accomplished consciously and embracing the entire wealth of previous development. This communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man – the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species. Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.

||V| The entire movement of history, just as its [communism’s] actual act of genesis – the birth act of its empirical existence – is, therefore, for its thinking consciousness the comprehended and known process of its becoming. Whereas the still immature communism seeks an historical proof for itself – a proof in the realm of what already exists – among disconnected historical phenomena opposed to private property, tearing single phases from the historical process and focusing attention on them as proofs of its historical pedigree (a hobby-horse ridden hard especially by Cabet, Villegardelle, etc.). By so doing it simply makes clear that by far the greater part of this process contradicts its own claim, and that, if it has ever existed, precisely its being in the past refutes its pretension to reality.

It is easy to see that the entire revolutionary movement necessarily finds both its empirical and its theoretical basis in the movement of private property – more precisely, in that of the economy.

This material, immediately perceptible private property is the material perceptible expression of estranged human life. Its movement – production and consumption – is the perceptible revelation of the movement of all production until now, i.e., the realisation or the reality of man. Religion, family, state, law, morality, science, art, etc., are only particular modes of production, and fall under its general law. The positive transcendence of private property as the appropriation of human life, is therefore the positive transcendence of all estrangement – that is to say, the return of man from religion, family, state, etc., to his human, i.e., social, existence. Religious estrangement as such occurs only in the realm of consciousness, of man’s inner life, but economic estrangement is that of real life; its transcendence therefore embraces both aspects. It is evident that the initial stage of the movement amongst the various peoples depends on whether the true recognised life of the people manifests itself more in consciousness or in the external world – is more ideal or real. Communism begins from the outset (Owen) with atheism; but atheism is at first far from being communism; indeed, that atheism is still mostly an abstraction.

The philanthropy of atheism is therefore at first only philosophical, abstract philanthropy, and that of communism is at once real and directly bent on action.

We have seen how on the assumption of positively annulled private property man produces man – himself and the other man; how the object, being the direct manifestation of his individuality, is simultaneously his own existence for the other man, the existence of the other man, and that existence for him. Likewise, however, both the material of labour and man as the subject, are the point of departure as well as the result of the movement (and precisely in this fact, that they must constitute the point of departure, lies the historical necessity of private property). Thus the social character is the general character of the whole movement: just as society itself produces man as man, so is society produced by him. Activity and enjoyment, both in their content and in their mode of existence, are social: social activity and social enjoyment. The human aspect of nature exists only for social man; for only then does nature exist for him as a bond with man – as his existence for the other and the other’s existence for him – and as the life-element of human reality. Only then does nature exist as the foundation of his own human existence. Only here has what is to him his natural existence become his human existence, and nature become man for him. Thus society is the complete unity of man with nature – the true resurrection of nature – the consistent naturalism of man and the consistent humanism of nature.

||VI| Social activity and social enjoyment exist by no means only in the form of some directly communal activity and directly communal enjoyment, although communal activity and communal enjoyment – i.e., activity and enjoyment which are manifested and affirmed in actual direct association with other men – will occur wherever such a direct expression of sociability stems from the true character of the activity’s content and is appropriate to the nature of the enjoyment.

But also when I am active scientifically, etc. – an activity which I can seldom perform in direct community with others – then my activity is social, because I perform it as a man. Not only is the material of my activity given to me as a social product (as is even the language in which the thinker is active): my own existence is social activity, and therefore that which I make of myself, I make of myself for society and with the consciousness of myself as a social being.

My general consciousness is only the theoretical shape of that of which the living shape is the real community, the social fabric, although at the present day general consciousness is an abstraction from real life and as such confronts it with hostility. The activity of my general consciousness, as an activity, is therefore also my theoretical existence as a social being.

Above all we must avoid postulating “society” again as an abstraction vis-à-vis the individual. The individual is the social being. His manifestations of life – even if they may not appear in the direct form of communal manifestations of life carried out in association with others – are therefore an expression and confirmation of social life. Man’s individual and species-life are not different, however much – and this is inevitable – the mode of existence of the individual is a more particular or more general mode of the life of the species, or the life of the species is a more particular or more general individual life.

In his consciousness of species man confirms his real social life and simply repeats his real existence in thought, just as conversely the being of the species confirms itself in species consciousness and exists for itself in its generality as a thinking being.

Man, much as he may therefore be a particular individual (and it is precisely his particularity which makes him an individual, and a real individual social being), is just as much the totality – the ideal totality – the subjective existence of imagined and experienced society for itself; just as he exists also in the real world both as awareness and real enjoyment of social existence, and as a totality of human manifestation of life.

Thinking and being are thus certainly distinct, but at the same time they are in unity with each other.

Death seems to be a harsh victory of the species over the particular individual and to contradict their unity. But the particular individual is only a particular species-being, and as such mortal.

(4) [In the manuscript: "5". – Ed.] Just as private property is only the perceptible expression of the fact that man becomes objective for himself and at the same time becomes to himself a strange and inhuman object; just as it expresses the fact that the manifestation of his life is the alienation of his life, that his realisation is his loss of reality, is an alien reality: so, the positive transcendence of private property – i.e., the perceptible appropriation for and by man of the human essence and of human life, of objective man, of human achievements should not be conceived merely in the sense of immediate, one-sided enjoyment, merely in the sense of possessing, of having. Man appropriates his comprehensive essence in a comprehensive manner, that is to say, as a whole man. Each of his human relations to the world – seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking, observing, experiencing, wanting, acting, loving – in short, all the organs of his individual being, like those organs which are directly social in their form, ||VII| are in their objective orientation, or in their orientation to the object, the appropriation of the object, the appropriation of human reality. Their orientation to the object is the manifestation of the human reality, [For this reason it is just as highly varied as the determinations of human essence and activities. – Note by Marx] it is human activity and human suffering, for suffering, humanly considered, is a kind of self-enjoyment of man. Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it – when it exists for us as capital, or when it is directly possessed, eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited, etc., – in short, when it is used by us. Although private property itself again conceives all these direct realisations of possession only as means of life, and the life which they serve as means is the life of private property – labour and conversion into capital. In the place of all physical and mental senses there has therefore come the sheer estrangement of all these senses, the sense of having. The human being had to be reduced to this absolute poverty in order that he might yield his inner wealth to the outer world. [On the category of “having”, see Hess in the Philosophy of the Deed]. The abolition [Aufhebung] of private property is therefore the complete emancipation of all human senses and qualities, but it is this emancipation precisely because these senses and attributes have become, subjectively and objectively, human. The eye has become a human eye, just as its object has become a social, human object – an object made by man for man. The senses have therefore become directly in their practice theoreticians. They relate themselves to the thing for the sake of the thing, but the thing itself is an objective human relation to itself and to man, [In practice I can relate myself to a thing humanly only if the thing relates itself humanly to the human being. – Note by Marx] and vice versa. Need or enjoyment have consequently lost its egotistical nature, and nature has lost its mere utility by use becoming human use. In the same way, the senses and enjoyment of other men have become my own appropriation. Besides these direct organs, therefore, social organs develop in the form of society; thus, for instance, activity in direct association with others, etc., has become an organ for expressing my own life, and a mode of appropriating human life. It is obvious that the human eye enjoys things in a way different from the crude, non-human eye; the human ear different from the crude ear, etc. We have seen that man does not lose himself in his object only when the object becomes for him a human object or objective man. This is possible only when the object becomes for him a social object, he himself for himself a social being, just as society becomes a being for him in this object. On the one hand, therefore, it is only when the objective world becomes everywhere for man in society the world of man’s essential powers – human reality, and for that reason the reality of his own essential powers – that all objects become for him the objectification of himself, become objects which confirm and realise his individuality, become his objects: that is, man himself becomes the object. The manner in which they become his depends on the nature of the objects and on the nature of the essential power corresponding to it; for it is precisely the determinate nature of this relationship which shapes the particular, real mode of affirmation. To the eye an object comes to be other than it is to the ear, and the object of the eye is another object than the object of the ear. The specific character of each essential power is precisely its specific essence, and therefore also the specific mode of its objectification, of its objectively actual, living being. Thus man is affirmed in the objective world not only in the act of thinking, ||VIII| but with all his senses. On the other hand, let us look at this in its subjective aspect. Just as only music awakens in man the sense of music, and just as the most beautiful music has no sense for the unmusical ear – is [no] object for it, because my object can only be the confirmation of one of my essential powers – it can therefore only exist for me insofar as my essential power exists for itself as a subjective capacity; because the meaning of an object for me goes only so far as my sense goes (has only a meaning for a sense corresponding to that object) – for this reason the senses of the social man differ from those of the non-social man. Only through the objectively unfolded richness of man’s essential being is the richness of subjective human sensibility (a musical ear, an eye for beauty of form – in short, senses capable of human gratification, senses affirming themselves as essential powers of man) either cultivated or brought into being. For not only the five senses but also the so-called mental senses, the practical senses (will, love, etc.), in a word, human sense, the human nature of the senses, comes to be by virtue of its object, by virtue of humanised nature. The forming of the five senses is a labour of the entire history of the world down to the present. The sense caught up in crude practical need has only a restricted sense.> For the starving man, it is not the human form of food that exists, but only its abstract existence as food. It could just as well be there in its crudest form, and it would be impossible to say wherein this feeding activity differs from that of animals. The care-burdened, poverty-stricken man has no sense for the finest play; the dealer in minerals sees only the commercial value but not the beauty and the specific character of the mineral: he has no mineralogical sense. Thus, the objectification of the human essence, both in its theoretical and practical aspects, is required to make man’s sense human, as well as to create the human sense corresponding to the entire wealth of human and natural substance.

We see how subjectivity and objectivity, spirituality and materiality, activity [Tätigkeit] and suffering, lose their antithetical character, and – thus their existence as such antitheses only within the framework of society; What indeed are we to think of a science which airily abstracts from this large part of human labour and which fails to feel its own incompleteness, while such a wealth of human endeavour, unfolded before it, means nothing more to it than, perhaps, what can be expressed in one word – “need”, “vulgar need”?

The natural sciences have developed an enormous activity and have accumulated an ever-growing mass of material. Philosophy, however, has remained just as alien to them as they remain to philosophy. Their momentary unity was only a chimerical illusion. The will was there, but the power was lacking. Historiography itself pays regard to natural science only occasionally, as a factor of enlightenment, utility, and of some special great discoveries. But natural science has invaded and transformed human life all the more practically through the medium of industry; and has prepared human emancipation, although its immediate effect had to be the furthering of the dehumanisation of man. Industry is the actual, historical relationship of nature, and therefore of natural science, to man. If, therefore, industry is conceived as the exoteric revelation of man’s essential powers, we also gain an understanding of the human essence of nature or the natural essence of man. In consequence, natural science will lose its abstractly material – or rather, its idealistic – tendency, and will become the basis of human science, as it has already become – albeit in an estranged form – the basis of actual human life, and to assume one basis for life and a different basis for science is as a matter of course a lie.

Sense-perception (see Feuerbach) must be the basis of all science. Only when it proceeds from sense-perception in the two-fold form of sensuous consciousness and sensuous need – is it true science. All history is the history of preparing and developing “man” to become the object of sensuous consciousness, and turning the requirements of “man as man” into his needs. History itself is a real part of natural history – of nature developing into man. Natural science will in time incorporate into itself the science of man, just as the science of man will incorporate into itself natural science: there will be one science.

||X| Man is the immediate object of natural science; for immediate, sensuous nature for man is, immediately, human sensuousness (the expressions are identical) – presented immediately in the form of the other man sensuously present for him. Indeed, his own sense-perception first exists as human sensuousness for himself through the other man. But nature is the immediate object of the science of man: the first object of man – man – is nature, sensuousness; and the particular human sensuous essential powers can only find their self-understanding in the science of the natural world in general, just as they can find their objective realisation only in natural objects. The element of thought itself – the element of thought’s living expression – language – is of a sensuous nature. The social reality of nature, and human natural science, or the natural science of man, are identical terms.

(5) A being only considers himself independent when he stands on his own feet; and he only stands on his own feet when he owes his existence to himself. A man who lives by the grace of another regards himself as a dependent being. But I live completely by the grace of another if I owe him not only the maintenance of my life, but if he has, moreover, created my life – if he is the source of my life. When it is not of my own creation, my life has necessarily a source of this kind outside of it. The Creation is therefore an idea very difficult to dislodge from popular consciousness. The fact that nature and man exist on their own account is incomprehensible to it, because it contradicts everything tangible in practical life.

The creation of the earth has received a mighty blow from geognosy – i.e., from the science which presents the formation of the earth, the development of the earth, as a process, as a self-generation. Generatio aequivoca is the only practical refutation of the theory of creation.[33]

Now it is certainly easy to say to the single individual what Aristotle has already said: You have been begotten by your father and your mother; therefore in you the mating of two human beings – a species-act of human beings – has produced the human being. You see, therefore, that even physically man owes his existence to man. Therefore you must not only keep sight of the one aspect – the infinite progression which leads you further to inquire: Who begot my father? Who his grandfather? etc. You must also hold on to the circular movement sensuously perceptible in that progress by which man repeats himself in procreation, man thus always remaining the subject. You will reply, however: I grant you this circular movement; now grant me the progress which drives me ever further until I ask: Who begot the first man, and nature as a whole? I can only answer you: Your question is itself a product of abstraction. Ask yourself how you arrived at that question. Ask yourself whether your question is not posed from a standpoint to which I cannot reply, because it is wrongly put. Ask yourself whether that progress as such exists for a reasonable mind. When you ask about the creation of nature and man, you are abstracting, in so doing, from man and nature. You postulate them as non-existent, and yet you want me to prove them to you as existing. Now I say to you: Give up your abstraction and you will also give up your question. Or if you want to hold on to your abstraction, then be consistent, and if you think of man and nature as non-existent, ||XI| then think of yourself as non-existent, for you too are surely nature and man. Don’t think, don’t ask me, for as soon as you think and ask, your abstraction from the existence of nature and man has no meaning. Or are you such an egotist that you conceive everything as nothing, and yet want yourself to exist?

You can reply: I do not want to postulate the nothingness of nature, etc. I ask you about its genesis, just as I ask the anatomist about the formation of bones, etc.

But since for the socialist man the entire so-called history of the world is nothing but the creation of man through human labour, nothing but the emergence of nature for man, so he has the visible, irrefutable proof of his birth through himself, of his genesis. Since the real existence of man and nature has become evident in practice, through sense experience, because man has thus become evident for man as the being of nature, and nature for man as the being of man, the question about an alien being, about a being above nature and man – a question which implies the admission of the unreality of nature and of man – has become impossible in practice. Atheism, as the denial of this unreality, has no longer any meaning, for atheism is a negation of God, and postulates the existence of man through this negation; but socialism as socialism no longer stands in any need of such a mediation. It proceeds from the theoretically and practically sensuous consciousness of man and of nature as the essence. Socialism is man’s positive self-consciousness, no longer mediated through the abolition of religion, just as real life is man’s positive reality, no longer mediated through the abolition of private property, through communism. Communism is the position as the negation of the negation, and is hence the actual phase necessary for the next stage of historical development in the process of human emancipation and rehabilitation. Communism is the necessary form and the dynamic principle of the immediate future, but communism as such is not the goal of human development, the form of human society.|XI||[34]

image via LH on Facebook

washingtonpost.com

Emily Elizabeth Smith, fifth-grade teacher at Cunningham Elementary School in Austin, Tex. (Erich Schlegel)

Emily E. Smith is a fifth-grade social justice and English language arts teacher at Cunningham Elementary School in Austin, Tex. She was just awarded the 2015 Donald H. Graves Excellence in the Teaching of Writing award given at the National Teachers of English Language Arts Convention in Minneapolis.  Smith created and founded The Hive Society, a classroom that inspires children to creatively explore literature through critical thinking and socially relevant texts.

In her speech accepting the award, Smith talked about a seminal moment in her career when she realized she needed to change her approach to teaching students of color, one of whom told her that she couldn’t understand his problems because she is white. The following is an excerpt of the speech in which she discusses her transformation (and which I am publishing with permission).

From Smith’s speech:

I’m white. My classroom is not. Sure, it’s been my dream to work at an “urban” school. To work with kids whose challenges I could never even fathom at such a young age. And changing at-risk lives through literature is almost a media cliché by now. These were, however, how I identified myself at the beginning of my teaching career. I was a great teacher. I taught children how to truly write for the first time and share meaningful connections on a cozy carpet. We made podcasts about music lyrics and filled our favorite books so full with annotated sticky notes that they would barely close. We even tiptoed into the alien world of free verse poetry.

But something was missing. If you’ve already forgotten, I’m white. “White” is kind of an uncomfortable word to announce, and right now people may already be unnerved about where this is going. Roughly 80 percent of teachers in the United States today are white. Yet the population of our students is a palette. That means America’s children of color will, for the majority of their school years, not have a teacher who is a reflection of their own image. Most of their school life they will be told what to do and how to do it by someone who is white, and most likely female. Except for a few themed weeks, America’s children of color will read books, watch videos, analyze documents and study historical figures who are also not in their image.

I’ve been guilty of that charge. But things changed for me the day when, during a classroom discussion, one of my kids bluntly told me I “couldn’t understand because I was a white lady.” I had to agree with him. I sat there and tried to speak openly about how I could never fully understand and went home and cried, because my children knew about white privilege before I did. The closest I could ever come was empathy.

My curriculum from then on shifted. We still did all of the wonderful things that I had already implemented in the classroom, except now the literature, the documents, the videos, the discussions, the images embodied the issues that my children wanted to explore. We studied the works of Sandra Cisneros, Pam Munoz Ryan and Gary Soto, with the intertwined Spanish language and Latino culture — so fluent and deep in the memories of my kids that I saw light in their eyes I had never seen before. We analyzed Langston Hughes’s “Let America be America Again” from the lens of both historical and current events and realized that the United States is still the land that has never been. The land that my kids, after reading an excerpt from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s letter to his son that connected so deeply to their personal experiences, decided they still wanted to believe in. The land they decided to still hope for. The land that one of my kids quietly said would be changed by her generation. A generation of empathy.

We read about the Syrian crisis, analyzing photographs of war-torn faces at the border and then wrote poetry of hope, despair and compassion from the perspectives of the migrants. Many of my kids asked to write about their own journeys across the border and their [dreams] for a better future. One child cried and told me he never had a teacher who honored the journey his family took to the United States. He told me he was not ashamed anymore, but instead proud of the sacrifice his parents made for him.

We listened to StoryCorps podcasts by people from different walks of life, and children shared their own stories of losing pets, saying goodbye to a mother or father in jail, the fear of wearing a hoodie while walking to a 7-Eleven, and thriving under the wing of a single parent who works two jobs.

So as I stand here today I can declare that I am no longer a language arts and social studies teacher, but a self-proclaimed teacher of social justice and the art of communication with words.

Looking back, I think that my prior hesitation to talk about race stemmed from a lack of social education in the classroom. A lack of diversity in my own life that is, by no means, the fault of my progressive parents, but rather a broken and still segregated school system. Now that I’m an educator in that system, I’ve decided to stand unflinching when it comes to the real issues facing our children today, I’ve decided to be unafraid to question injustice, unafraid to take risks in the classroom — I am changed. And so has my role as a teacher.

I can’t change the color of my skin or where I come from or what the teacher workforce looks like at this moment, but I can change the way I teach. So I am going to soapbox about something after all. Be the teacher your children of color deserve. In fact, even if you don’t teach children of color, be the teacher America’s children of color deserve, because we, the teachers, are responsible for instilling empathy and understanding in the hearts of all kids. We are responsible for the future of this country.

So teach the texts that paint all the beautiful faces of our children and tell the stories of struggle and victory our nation has faced. Speak openly and freely about the challenges that are taking place in our country at this very moment. Talk about the racial and class stereotypes plaguing our streets, our states, our society. You may agree that black and brown lives matter, but how often do you explore what matters to those lives in your classroom?

Put aside your anxieties and accept your natural biases. Donald Graves once said, “Children need to hang around a teacher who is asking bigger questions of herself than she is asking of them.” I know I’m going to continue to ask the bigger questions of myself and seek the answers that sometimes feel impossible, because my kids deserve it … you’re welcome to join me. Thank you.

(Update: removing extraneous word, “even” from this sentence: “The land that my kids, after reading an excerpt from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s letter to his son that connected so deeply to their personal experiences, decided they still wanted to believe in.”

nytimes.com

Review of ‘Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs, by Lisa Randall


By MARIA POPOVA NOV. 24, 2015, nytimes.com
A good theory is an act of the informed imagination — it reaches toward the
unknown while grounded in the firmest foundations of the known. In “Dark
Matter and the Dinosaurs,” the Harvard cosmologist Lisa Randall proposes
that a thin disk of dark matter in the plane of the Milky Way triggered a minor
perturbation in deep space that caused the major earthly catastrophe that
decimated the dinosaurs. It's an original theory that builds on a century of
groundbreaking discoveries to tell the story of how the universe as we know it
came to exist, how dark matter illuminates its beguiling unknowns and how
the physics of elementary particles, the physics of space, and the biology of life
intertwine in ways both bewildering and profound.

If correct, Randall’s theory would require us to radically reappraise some
of our most fundamental assumptions about the universe and our own
existence. Sixty­-six million years ago, according to her dark-­matter disk
model, a tiny twitch caused by an invisible force in the far reaches of the
cosmos hurled a comet three times the width of Manhattan toward Earth at
least 700 times the speed of a car on a freeway. The collision produced the
most powerful earthquake of all time and released energy a billion times that
of an atomic bomb, heating the atmosphere into an incandescent furnace that
killed three­quarters of Earthlings. No creature heavier than 55 pounds, or
about the size of a Dalmatian, survived. The death of the dinosaurs made
possible the subsequent rise of mammalian dominance, without which you
and I would not have evolved to ponder the perplexities of the cosmos.
A necessary primer: Dark matter is the invisible cosmic stuff that, like
ordinary matter — which makes up the stars and the stardust, you and me and
everything we know — interacts with gravity but, unlike ordinary matter,
doesn’t interact with light. Although scientists know that dark matter exists
and accounts for a staggering 85 percent of the universe — billions of dark­­
matter particles are passing through you this very second — they don’t yet
know what it’s made of. For Randall the possibilities within that mystery are
among the most thrilling frontiers of human knowledge.

Ordinary matter contains an entire ecosystem of particles — among them
various quarks and neutrinos, the electron, and the newly discovered Higgs
boson. So far, scientists have assumed that dark matter comprises only one
type of particle. Randall, however, posits that dark matter might also comprise
a variety of building blocks that interact through different forces. No prior
theory has considered the simple yet profound possibility that while most dark
matter doesn’t interact with ordinary matter, a portion of it might. Because
dark matter carries five times the energy of ordinary matter, that tiny fraction
could have enormous consequences.

Randall calls the force driving that fraction “dark light” — an
appropriately paradoxical term confuting the haughty human assumption that
the world we see is all there is. Her hypothesis that dark matter might interact
with itself through its own unique form of invisible light calls to mind the
poetic title of a 2003 paper by the physicist Brian Josephson about Einstein’s
famous conversation with the Indian philosopher Rabindranath Tagore: “We
Think That We Think Clearly, but That’s Only Because We Don’t Think
Clearly.”

As stimulating as the substance of the book is, however, Randall doesn’t
quite join the ranks of such masterly science-­storytellers as Stephen Jay
Gould, Diane Ackerman, Alan Lightman or James Gleick. Giants like the late
Oliver Sacks — working scientists who are also enchanting writers — come
about once or twice a century, if we’re lucky. Randall is first and foremost a
working scientist — but while she isn’t a natural storyteller of Sacks’s caliber,
she is an excellent explainer, and her affection for her subject matter is
infectious.

“Anyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time,” E.B.
White told The Paris Review in 1969. “You have to write up, not down.” What
is true of children’s books turns out to be true of science books. While you
need not be a physicist to metabolize the narrative, you are certainly called
upon to do your own chewing — a rare opportunity in a culture where we are
taken for so intellectually inept that our own conclusions are fed to us in
listicles of bite­size buzz.

To be sure, Randall does have her lyrical moments — it’s hard to imagine
that someone this genuinely enamored with the cosmos wouldn’t, much less a
scientist who alludes to Blake in explaining cosmological inflation and weaves
a description of a Renaissance fresco into the history of comets. Above all, she
takes care to reveal the inherent poetry of science: The dinosaurs, who walked
the earth for much longer than we have, perished, but from them evolved the
birds that animate our skies; meteorites, for all their deadly capacity, once
deposited the very amino acids that became the seeds of earthly life.

“Extinctions,” Randall writes, “destroy life, but they also reset the conditions
for life’s evolution.” The universe is strewn with dualities, which Randall
insightfully exposes.

Therein lies the book’s greatest reward — the gift of perspective. The
existence of parallel truths is what gives our world its tremendous richness,
and the grand scheme of things is far grander than our minds habitually
imagine. “The future enters into us in this way in order to transform itself in us
long before it happens,” Rilke wrote. Although it took the deadly comet an
immeasurably long time to reach its earthly victims, the dinosaurs’ destiny —
and, in consequence, our own — was sealed in the cosmic blink when dark
matter jolted that icy body out of orbit. It’s a sobering revelation of the
gestational period of consequences. As Randall peers into the universe’s 13.8­­
billion-­year history, she notes that in her lifetime alone, human population has
more than doubled, straining Earth’s resources and undermining cosmic work
billions of years in the making. Although her periodicity model projects that a
major meteoroid isn’t expected to hit us for another 32 million years or so, our
civilization’s impact on the planet is like that of a slow­moving comet headed
for doom — but unlike the one that killed the dinosaurs, Randall reminds us,
we still have a chance to avert its course.

Almost more interesting than the theory itself is Randall’s tour of the
process of scientific endeavor, in which scientists traverse the abyss between
the known and the unknown, suspended by intuition, adventurousness, a large
dose of stubbornness and a measure of luck. Her account of how scientists
proved that a meteoroid killed the dinosaurs — a hypothesis that was first
considered preposterous but that later precipitated a worldwide detective story
30 years in the making — is one of the most thrilling tales in the history of
science. Only time will tell whether Randall’s own model ends up as the kind of
work that merits a Nobel Prize or as one of those trailblazing wrongs that steer
future scientists toward the truth.

Randall’s work, which she approaches with equal parts passion and
precision, is perhaps best described as creative computational cosmology.
Although she is one of the world’s most prominent working scientists, her
theory is essentially a thought experiment in the tradition of philosophy,
bridging metaphysics with the most strenuous experiment and observation of
science. What emerges is an imaginative and ambitious model of how we
ended up where we are now. Science, after all, isn’t merely about advancing
information — it’s about advancing understanding. Its task is to disentangle
the opinions and the claims from the facts in the service of truth. But beyond
the “what” of truth, successful science writing tells a complete story of the
“how” — the methodical marvel building up to the “why” — and Randall does
just that.

DARK MATTER AND THE DINOSAURS
The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe
By Lisa Randall
412 pp. Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers. $29.99.
Maria Popova is the founder of BrainPickings.org and an M.I.T. Futures of Entertainment fellow.
A version of this review appears in print on Nov

via FHK on Facebook

Parker J. Palmer, onbeing.org

Religious affiliation in the U.S. (2014)^[247]

Affiliation	% of U.S. population
Christian	70.6
Protestant	46.5
Evangelical Protestant	25.4
Mainline Protestant	14.7
Black church	6.5
Catholic	20.8
Mormon	1.6
Jehovah's Witnesses	0.8
Eastern Orthodox	0.5
Other Christian	0.4
Non-Christian faiths	5.9
Jewish	1.9
Muslim	0.9
Buddhist	0.7
Hindu	0.7
Other Non-Christian faiths	1.8
Irreligious	22.8
Nothing in particular	15.8
Agnostic	4.0
Atheist	3.1
Don't know/refused answer	0.6
Total	100

William Sloane Coffin said, “There are three kinds of patriots, two bad, one good. The bad are the uncritical lovers and the loveless critics. Good patriots carry on a lover's quarrel with their country.” The same could be said of adherents to any religious tradition.

I'm not a loveless critic of Christianity. I'm an insider who has a lover's quarrel with fellow Christians who distort both Christianity and American democracy when they conflate the two. This country is founded on religious freedom and the strict separation of church and state, and it's perilous to play fast and loose with that fact.

But there's a peril on the other side of this coin. With religious freedom comes a responsibility to find non-doctrinal ways to address deep questions of meaning and purpose in places like our public schools. Many young people flounder because they get so little companionship from their elders as they try to understand what their lives are all about.

If we could do a better job on that front in the year ahead, we'd have even more for which to give thanks this week in 2015...

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
—The Declaration of Independence

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...
—First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

These foundation stones of American democracy were laid a century too late to save Mary Dyer's life. Dyer, a middle-aged mother of six, was hanged in 1660 for defying a Puritan law that banned Quakers from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The Christians who cruelly deprived this woman of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness were dead certain (so to speak) that they were on a mission from God, protecting their "divinely ordained" civic order against Mary Dyer's seditious belief in the Inner Light.

As a spiritual descendant of Mary Dyer, I'm profoundly grateful that America is not a Christian nation. If it were, my Quaker convictions might get me into very deep oatmeal. As a Christian who does his best to take reason as seriously as I take faith, I find it impossible to understand America as a "Christian nation." And I believe that there are vibrant possibilities in the fact that it is not.

Whatever America's founders believed about Christianity — and they believed a wide range of things — they clearly rejected the idea of an established church.That's strike one against the curious conceit that we're a Christian nation. If being a Christian nation means asking ourselves every day, "What would Jesus do?" about a political issue, then doing it, that's strike two. To take but one example from Stephen Colbert (without forgetting things like slavery, justice for those who can afford it, and peace through war):

"If [America] is going to be a Christian nation that doesn't help the poor, either we have to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we've got to acknowledge that He commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition and then admit that we just don't want to do it."

If a Christian nation is one whose popular culture is dominated by Christian convictions about what's good and true and beautiful, I'm afraid that's strike three. Just look at the fact that our nation-wide Christmas festivities begin on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, a day that celebrates consumerism, our true civil religion. If anyone wants a fourth swing of the bat in hopes of getting on base, let me pitch this brief theological reflection. If, as Christians believe, God is the Creator and Redeemer of All, then there's no way God favors Americans above people of other nationalities. Strike four.

As a Christian, I'm passionately opposed to American pretensions that we have special standing with God, to political office-seekers who play on our religious differences, and to the religious arrogance that says, "Our truth is the only truth." But I'm equally passionate about the urgency of creating a culture of meaning that responds to the deepest needs of the human soul. This is a task we have been neglecting at great peril, a task that demands the best of all our wisdom traditions, a task on which people of diverse beliefs can and must make common cause.

Viewed from this angle, the fact that America is not and cannot be a Christian nation is very good news. America's freedom of religion, and freedom from religion, offers every wisdom tradition an opportunity to address our soul-deep needs: Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, secular humanism, agnosticism and atheism among others. These traditions are like facets of a prism, each of which refracts a different wavelength of the light that overcomes darkness, including the darkness created from time to time by every nation and every tradition.

The philosopher Jacob Needleman has said that "one of the great purposes of the American nation is to shelter and guard the rights of all men and women to seek the conditions and the companions necessary for the inner search." In this society, where religious and philosophical diversity is one of our most precious assets, we can take a big step toward opening our culture to the "inner search" by shaking off the mistaken notion that this is code language for the search for God.

Inner-life questions are the kind everyone asks, with or without benefit of God-talk: Does my life have meaning and purpose? Do I have gifts that the world wants and needs? Whom and what shall I serve? Whom and what can I trust? How can I rise above my fears? How do I deal with suffering: my own, that of my family and friends, and that of the larger world? How can I maintain hope? What does any of this mean in the face of the fact that I'm going to die?

These are not questions that yield to conventional answers. They are the big questions that must be "lived," Rainer Maria Rilke writes, so that we might "gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answers." Do our schools give young people a chance to wrap their lives around questions of that sort? Do our religious communities listen for the questions that are alive among us instead of answering questions that few are asking? Do we offer spaces of public life that are safe for vulnerable explorations of meaning, spaces that are not Roman arenas where demagoguery slays reflective, rational, and factually grounded discourse?

American democracy gives us a chance to do all of that and more, free of ideological restraints. That's why I'm grateful that America is not and cannot be a Christian nation.

Of course, we can continue to have pseudo-theological food fights over questions like, "How can we save our nation by making all Americans into God-fearing souls?" or "How can anyone be so ignorant as to believe in God or the soul?" Or we can take advantage of the fact that American democracy offers us an open space in which to pursue questions of personal, communal, and political meaning, illumined by multiple sources of light.

Which will it be? That's a question worth wrapping our lives around, with gratitude for our political inheritance.

By MITCHELL OWENS JAN. 8, 2004, nytimes.com; see a contrary view at, which states that "Dwight D. Eisenhower's mother was said to be of mixed blood from Africa and mulatto.^[3][5][7] However, historians and biographers of Eisenhower had documented his parents' German, Swiss and English ancestry and long history in America. Some of his immigrant ancestors settled in Pennsylvania in 1741 and after, and migrated west to Kansas."

JOHN ARCHER first appears in Northampton County, Va., in the mid­-17th
century. He started a family that prospered, fought in the Revolutionary War
and built a mansion. Generations later, Archer's blood trickled down to me. It
mingled in my veins with DNA from a gravedigger in 17th-­century
Württemberg, Germany; from an Appalachian clan with a recessive gene that
turns their skins indigo blue; and from a rich young widow in Jamestown, Va.,
whose fickle heart led to America's first breach­-of-­promise suit, in 1623.

I have been researching my past for two decades, since I was in high
school, so finding a new ancestor is hardly startling. Learning about John
Archer three years ago, however, was startling. He was black, a slave or
indentured servant freed around 1677. I am white. That's what it says on my
birth certificate. Now I know better, thanks to Paul Heinegg.

A retired oil-­refinery engineer in Collegeville, Pa., Mr. Heinegg, who is
white, has compiled genealogies of 900 mixed­-race families who lived freely in
slave-holding states in ''Free African Americans of North Carolina, South
Carolina and Virginia'' and ''Free African Americans of Maryland and
Delaware.'' (The information is posted on a Web site,
www.freeafricanamericans.com.)

Mr. Heinegg's research offers evidence that most free African-­American
and biracial families resulted not from a master and his slave, like Thomas
Jefferson and Sally Hemings, but from a white woman and an African man:
slave, freed slave or indentured servant.

''Most of the workers in colonial America in the 17th and early 18th
centuries were indentured servants, white and black,'' said Dr. John B. Boles, a
professor of history at Rice University in Houston and the editor of ''The
Blackwell Companion to the American South'' (2001). Since there was not a
clear distinction between slavery and servitude at the time, he said, ''biracial
camaraderie'' often resulted in children. The idea that blacks were property did
not harden until around 1715 with the rise of the tobacco economy, by which
time there was a small but growing population of free families of color. Dr.
Boles estimated that by 1860 there were 250,000 free black or mixed-­race
individuals.

''Some academics have studied this parallel story of blacks in America, but
it hasn't trickled down to the general population,'' Dr. Boles said. ''The action
is in slavery studies.'' Mr. Heinegg is one of the few people to trace the free
black families that lived in slave-­owning America: some of them rich slave
owners, most of them poor farmers and laborers, nearly all of them little
known.

''When I saw what Paul had done, my eyes opened wide,'' said Dr. Ira B.
Berlin, a professor of American history at the University of Maryland and the
founding director of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project there. Dr.
Berlin met Mr. Heinegg in November 2000 at a conference in Durham, N.C.,
about the mixed­-race cabinetmaker Thomas Day, a major antebellum figure.
The documentation Mr. Heinegg had amassed in five years convinced Dr.
Berlin to write a foreword to his book praising his meticulous work.

It is incontrovertible that America is a multiracial society, from the
founding father Alexander Hamilton (the son of a mixed­race woman from the
British West Indies) to Essie Mae Washington­-Williams, 78, a retired
schoolteacher, who, the late Senator Strom Thurmond's family acknowledged
last month, is his daughter. And for decades there have been questions about
the possible mixed­-race ancestry of Ida Stover, Dwight D. Eisenhower's
mother.

Since 1997, after it broadcast ''Secret Daughter,'' a documentary about a
mixed-­race child given up for adoption in the 1950's, ''Frontline'' has been
exploring the mixed ancestry of well-­known Americans on its Public
Broadcasting System Web site. One is Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, whose
blood lines, according to the historian Mario de Valdes y Cocom, go back to the
van Salees, a Muslim family of Afro­-Dutch origin prominent in Manhattan in
the early 1600's. If any branch of your family has been in America since the
17th or 18th centuries, Dr. Berlin said, ''it's highly likely you will find an
African and an American Indian.''

That's where Mr. Heinegg, 60, comes in. In 1985, his mother-­in­-law,
Katherine Kee Phillips, who was black, asked him to research her family tree.
''I had hoped to trace as many branches of her family back to slavery as
possible,'' he said. Instead, he found that Mrs. Phillips and his wife, Rita, had
white ancestors who were not slave masters, including a woman who started a
family with John Kecatan, an African slave freed in 1666. The ladies were
intrigued by his discoveries but not surprised, Mr. Heinegg said.

Curious about his findings, he began tracing free black families related to
his wife by combing colonial court records, wills, deeds, free Negro registers,
marriage bonds and military pension files. Many were dauntingly unindexed.

''Nobody has done anything like this,'' said Dr. Virginia Easley DeMarce, a
historian and former president of the National Genealogical Society who works
for the Office of Federal Acknowledgment, Department of the Interior, which
decides who is an American Indian. ''Paul is the first person to identify
families of color on such a broad scope,'' gathering material from entire states
rather than just a county or two.

Dr. Berlin said, ''There were communities in 17th-­ and 18th­-century
America where blacks and whites, both free, of equal rank and shared
experiences, were working together, living together, drinking and partying
together, and inevitably sleeping together.''

Tracing those communities has not been easy. ''People of color are often
not identified as such in early records,'' Mr. Heinegg said. ''For example, an
individual might appear in deeds and court records and leave a will without
ever mentioning his race.'' Sometimes a person's race can be discerned only by
studying the tax assessed on nonwhites. If a man paid the tax on his wife but
not himself, Mr. Heinegg said, it meant he was white but she was not.

An added challenge is that racial identity can mutate from free black to
white in just a few generations. In my Archer ancestors' case, it was mixed
marriages and a cross­-country move: my great­-great­-grandfather Esquire
Collins and his wife, Roxalana Archer, are listed as mulatto in an 1800's
Tennessee census but show up as white on a later Arkansas census. ''You
crossed over as early as you were able to,'' said Antonia Cottrell Martin, a
genealogist in New York. Mixed-­race families who had difficulty passing
sometimes explained dark complexions as coming from an American Indian or
Mediterranean ancestry. ''It's what people in the South used to call Carolina
Portuguese,'' said Dr. DeMarce, who comes from a mixed­-race background.

''Free African Americans of North Carolina,'' self-published by Mr.
Heinegg in 1991, won an award from the North Carolina Genealogical Society.
(The American Society of Genealogists gave a later edition the Donald Lines
Jacobus Award for best work of genealogical scholarship.) But the book also
stirred controversy. Some white members of the North Carolina group were
upset with his findings and asked that the award be withdrawn, Mr. Heinegg
said.

Dr. DeMarce said: ''He's just publishing the documents. He's not
interpreting them. That's up to anthropologists.''

Mr. Heinegg is familiar with racial prejudice. He and his wife, who met as
members of the Brooklyn outpost of the Congress on Racial Equality, left the
country in 1969, disgusted by what they saw as a lack of progress. They raised
their three daughters in Tanzania, Liberia and Saudi Arabia.

But even when he was abroad, Mr. Heinegg ordered microfilm records by
mail and spent one­-month vacations in the United States to peer at faded
records in county courthouses. He still works on his research, and updates his
book and Web site regularly. A new edition of ''Free African Americans'' is
published every two years by Clearfield, a division of the Genealogical
Publishing Company, Inc., www.genealogical.com. The latest two-­volume
paperback costs $100 and is 1,042 pages long.

The index to Mr. Heinegg's book lists more than 12,000 individuals,
including ancestors of mine it would be nice to know more about, like Richard
Nickens and his wife, Chriss, freed in 1690 by the will of John Carter II, a
prominent Virginia planter. Nickens and his wife were given two cows, six
barrels of corn and the right to farm some Carter land for life.

Matters like these fascinate me. My brother, Derrick, finds our black
ancestry only mildly interesting, being riveted instead by our Native American
blood. My eldest nephew, Justin, an elementary school pupil obsessed with
islands, cherishes the knowledge that one ancestor was shipwrecked on
Bermuda in 1609.

Genealogy is not regarded as an academic discipline, Dr. DeMarce said,
which is why Mr. Heinegg's work is not more widely known. And his lists are
published by a specialty house, not a university press, she said, ''so it's unlikely
to be reviewed by a major publication like The American Historical Review.''

Mr. Heinegg prefers to let the academics find his work on their own. Right
now, he is busy adding more free black Virginia families to his list. ''My goal,''
he said, ''is to find the origins of every family that was free in the Southeast
during the colonial period.''

Via great artist FW on Facebook

mashable.com

Remarkable (but arguably posed? see below) photographs for anyone interested in the question of American identity/"unity."

From the introduction to the photographs:

Born on a Wisconsin farm in 1868, Edward Sheriff Curtis grew up to become a commercial photographer in Seattle. In 1895 he photographed Princess Angeline, the daughter of the Duwamish chief Seattle, for whom the city was named.

That encounter sparked Curtis' lifelong fascination with the cultures and lives of Native American tribes. He soon joined expeditions to visit tribes in Alaska and Montana.

In 1906, Curtis was approached by wealthy financier J.P. Morgan, who was interested in funding a documentary project on the indigenous people of the continent. They conceived a 20-volume series, called The North American Indian.

With Morgan’s backing, Curtis spent more than 20 years crisscrossing North America, creating over 40,000 images of more than 80 different tribes. He made thousands of wax cylinder recordings of native songs and language, and wrote down oral histories, legends and biographies.

In his efforts to capture and record what he saw as a vanishing way of life, Curtis sometimes meddled with the documentary authenticity of his images. He posed his subjects in romanticized settings stripped of signs of Western civilization, more representative of an imagined pre-Columbian existence than the subjects’ actual lives in the present.

“Noble savage” stereotypes aside, Curtis’ vast body of work is one of the most impressive historical records of Native American life at the beginning of the 20th century.

Some of the many photos:

Forget physical exercise to maintain eternal youth.

No longer age 12-22, but still going through puberty in my late 60s, I find one way to keep my memory active is to try to remember names of friends/colleagues from the past (high school, college, early employment).

When I (something of an insomniac) try to fall asleep by not by counting sheep, I seek to remember the name of persons I knew decades ago.

In the morning I (or my genes) succeed in identifying the right person(s), unfortunately not most of the time.

The "Eureka" moment of remembering the name of someone you knew decades ago can be quite exhilirating/rejuvenating (names forgotten but "miraculously" remembered, even if some of the persons in question disliked you no end). 

I would judge this mental exercise healthful. But of course I leave it up to the "mental health" experts (or, to use the more au courant word, the mental health "community.")

wsj.com

In Edward Gibbon’s ‘History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,’ the real subject is good sense and decency in a losing battle with pride, greed and vice.

washingtonpost.com

Universities in the United States are the best in the world, but the cost of attending them is rising faster than the cost of almost anything else. Professors blame administrative bloat, administrators blame a decline in state funding, politicians blame unproductive faculties who’ve become too set in their ways.

Yet while students are paying more, they are getting less, at least as measured by learning outcomes, intellectual engagement, time with professors and graduation rates. And although students are working more hours at outside jobs and receiving more tuition assistance, student debt now exceeds credit card debt and has become something of a national obsession.

So you would expect universities to have embarked on the fundamental restructuring that nearly every other sector has done to reduce costs and improve quality. They haven’t. Oh, yes, pay and hiring have been frozen, travel budgets cut, secretaries eliminated and class sizes increased, even as cheaper graduate students and adjunct professors have been hired to teach more. Everything has been done that can be done — except changing the traditions, rhythms and prerogatives of academic life.  

“There is a cultural aversion to thinking about cost,” explains Carol Twigg, president of the National Center for Academic Transformation, who for more than 15 years has run successful pilot projects in course redesign that have significantly cut instructional costs while improving student outcomes at scores of universities.

Among faculty members, there remains a deeply held view that equates spending with quality, considers “accountability” an assault on academic freedom and sees “productivity” as merely code for charlatan anti-intellectualism. For their part, administrators cling to hopes of boosting enrollment and fundraising while waiting for the current budget cycle to pass.

“The American university is a grand political accommodation,” says Richard Vedder, an Ohio University economist and founder of the Center for College Productivity and Affordability. College presidents, he argues, appease faculty members by giving them control over what and how they teach. They appease students and parents with high grades and good facilities. They appease alumni with expensive sports teams. They appease politicians with shiny new research centers. “The idea is to buy off any group that might upset the political equilibrium,” Vedder said.

Nothing I have observed during four years as a professor at George Mason University, seen in the data or heard from higher-education experts is fundamentally at odds with Vedder’s assessment. Even when states have set out to bend the higher-education cost curve, universities have found ways to avoid fundamental change.

What would that change look like? Here are four ideas that seem obvious and reasonable. If a college or university is not moving to embrace them, that’s a pretty good indication that cost-cutting is not a priority.

Cap administrative costs

The best data on college costs comes from the Delta Cost Project, a nonprofit that analyzes data reported to the government. It shows that in the decade prior to 2011, the biggest increase in cost per student at large research universities — the ones that set the competitive norms and that are the focus of this essay — was not in instruction but in administration: student services, institutional support, research and academic support.

While faculty critics have made sport of pointing out the proliferation of assistant provosts or the soaring salaries of college presidents, these don’t represent most new spending. What does is the growth in the number and pay of non-teaching professionals in areas such as academic and psychological counseling, security, information technology, fundraising, accreditation and government compliance.

Administrators cite government regulations, along with increasingly demanding students and parents, as the causes; no doubt those pressures are real. But judging from the amount of time these professionals spend meeting with each other, I’d wager there is plenty of savings to be had by setting priorities and streamlining structure and decision-making. As management consultants from Bain and Co. wrote in a recent report, “In no other industry would overhead costs be allowed to grow at this rate — executives would lose their jobs.”

Here’s a simple rule of thumb: A university should spend more on instruction than it spends on anything else, besides research. 

Operate year-round, five days a week

What are the three best things about being a college professor? June, July and August. It’s a tired old joke, but it’s true.

In 2002, George Washington University President Stephen Trachtenberg noticed that the school owned roughly $1 billion worth of facilities that sat idle for at least a third of the year. If he could reconfigure the academic calendar for year-round operation, he reasoned, he could enroll thousands more students without having to build new classrooms, labs, dorms or athletic facilities.

Doing so, however, would have required some professors to periodically teach during the summer, which didn’t sit well with the Faculty Senate. Its report on the matter reads like a parody of self-interested whining by coddled academics dressed up as concern for the pedagogical and psychological well-being of their students. The report never acknowledged any potential financial benefit; indeed, it declared such calculations illegitimate when the “academic environment” was at stake. The report also noted the severe hardship that a summer term would impose on professors with school-age children, oblivious to the fact that working parents in every other sector face that challenge.

It’s not just in summers, however, that facilities sit idle. Friday has become the new Saturday on college campuses as many students shun classes, and professors have been all too willing to accommodate them. At Mason, utilization of classroom space during prime daytime hours on Thursdays is 68 percent; on Fridays, it is 38 percent. That’s a bit above the national average, according to estimates from Sightlines, a facilities consulting firm.

A few universities have taken a shot at running on a 12-month calendar or returning Friday to the workweek, but nationally such ideas have gained little traction. Trachtenberg isn’t surprised: “Presidents who spend time fighting with faculty over things like this don’t last long.” 

More teaching, less (mediocre) research

Few students or parents realize that tuition doesn’t just pay for faculty members to teach. It also pays for their research. 

I’m not talking about research supported by grants. I’m referring to the research by tenure-track faculty members that is made possible because they teach only two courses per semester, rather than the three or more that was once the norm.

Teaching loads at research universities have declined almost 50 percent in the past 30 years, according to data compiled for the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. This doesn’t necessarily mean professors aren’t working as hard — surveys show they’re working harder and under more pressure than ever. Rather, says former Mason provost Peter Stearns, it reflects a deliberate shift in focus as universities compete for big-name professors by promising lighter teaching loads and more time for research. In the egalitarian culture of higher education, once some professors won the right to teach less, their colleagues demanded the same. Before long, “two-and-two” teaching loads — two classes in each of two semesters — became the norm.

Today, research is the dominant criterion by which faculty members are evaluated. In deciding which professors get tenure, assessment of teaching tends to be perfunctory (few members of tenure committees ever bother to visit a classroom), and all that is required is competence. It is nearly impossible, however, for a professor to win tenure without publishing at least one book and three or four articles in top academic journals.

Unfortunately, much of that work has little intellectual or social impact.

“The vast majority of the so-called research turned out in the modern university is essentially worthless,” wrote Page Smith, a longtime professor of history at the University of California and an award-winning historian. “It does not result in any measurable benefit to anything or anybody. . . . It is busywork on a vast, almost incomprehensible scale.”

The number of journal articles published has climbed from 13,000 50 years ago to 72,000 today, even as overall readership has declined. In his new book “Higher Education in America,” former Harvard president Derek Bok notes that 98 percent of articles published in the arts and humanities are never cited by another researcher. In social sciences, it is 75 percent. Even in the hard sciences, where 25 percent of articles are never cited, the average number of citations is between one and two. 

“For someone just to write a paper that nobody is going to read — we can’t afford that anymore,” says Brit Kirwan, a former chancellor of the University of Maryland.

To accommodate all this research, universities have shifted much more of the teaching load to graduate students with little training or experience in teaching, or to part-time adjuncts who — at $3,000 per course — have become the academic equivalent of day laborers. These strategies have degraded the undergraduate experience and given cost-cutting a bad name.

A better approach would be to offer comparable pay and status to professors who spend most of their time teaching, reserving reduced teaching loads for professors whose research continues to have significance and impact. Some departments at some schools have embraced “differentiated teaching loads,” but most tenured faculty members resist and resent the idea that they need to continually defend the value of their research. And administrators are wary of doing anything that might diminish their universities’ research reputation. 

Cheaper, better general education

Roughly a third of the courses undergraduates take fulfill general-education requirements meant to ensure that all students receive a well-rounded education. Universities have gotten more serious about requiring a minimum proficiency in writing and quantitative reasoning, but the rest of general education tends to be an intellectual cop-out. Students are presented with dozens of courses in four or five broad categories and are told to choose two or three from each. Many are large introductory lecture courses (Everything 101) that were designed primarily to provide foundational knowledge for students majoring in that subject, rather than an intellectually stimulating exploration of a discipline. Most of the rest reflect the specific research interests of professors.

This approach to general education, Bok writes, “is more noteworthy for the interests it serves than for the academic purposes it achieves.” According to Hunter Rawlings, the president of the Association of American Universities, it also reflects reluctance on the part of professors to risk offending colleagues by standing up at a faculty meeting and declaring what they think is, and is not, vital for an educated person to know.

A university concerned about cost and quality would restructure general education around a limited number of courses designed specifically for that purpose — classes that tackle big, interesting questions from a variety of disciplines. Harvard, with its Humanities 10 seminars, and the University of Maryland, with its I-Series, have recently taken steps in that direction. But this approach will achieve significant savings only if the courses are designed to use new technology that allows large numbers of students to take them at the same time.

I’m not talking about simply videotaping lectures. I’m talking about combining great talks by one or more professors and outside experts with video clips, animation, quizzes, games and interactive exercises — then supplementing that online material with weekly in-person sessions for discussions, problem solving or other forms of “active learning.” And having “labs” open day and night that use tutors and interactive software to provide individualized instruction in math and writing until the desired competency is achieved.

There is plenty of evidence that using technology in this way boosts course completion rates, improves learning retention and increases student engagement, while reducing per-student costs by an average of 30 to 40 percent, according to Carol Twigg, who has helped design many such pilot courses. Yet despite these successes, Twigg said that almost none of these models have been rolled out campus-wide. At this point, more than three-quarters of students at four-year colleges and universities have never taken an online or hybrid course, the government reports.

Not all college courses are suitable for technologically driven redesign. But to pay for labor-intensive seminars and tutorials, other courses must be made cheaper. The obvious place to start is with general education and foundational classes that offer the best possibility of realizing significant economies of scale.

So why aren’t such cost-cutting ideas on the agenda?

“Institutional isomorphism,” explained Mason President Ángel Cabrera, a former business school dean. That refers to the tendency of any enterprise to affirm its legitimacy by adopting the same structure and culture and output as its peers, even when there may be a competitive advantage to doing things differently.

Jane Wellman, who for many years headed the Delta Cost Project, thinks it’s a governance problem. University presidents and trustees, she said, think about cost in terms of one- or two-year operating budgets, and through that lens, there really isn’t any way to do more with less. Big structural change makes sense only when it’s considered in terms of investment and long-term payoff.

Maryland’s Brit Kirwan thinks the answer may be simpler than that: “Until the public demands it, it won’t happen.” And right now, the public seems to be of two minds about college costs. Parents and students say tuition and student debt are unaffordable. But when push comes to shove, so many are still willing to pay that university trustees and administrators have no incentive to upset the political equilibrium to do something about it.

***

Four tough things columnists should do before writing about universities - Daniel W. Drezner, Washington Post

Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and a regular contributor to PostEverything.

The Marist College campus. Because why not? (John Greim/LightRocket via Getty Images)

As an ongoing observer of the bipartisan War on College, I read a recent column on cost containment in higher education by The Washington Post’s Steven Pearlstein with great interest. Pearlstein is a smart guy, and he stresses four “tough things” that universities must do to contain costs. Some of the recommendations he makes based on what he “observed during four years as a professor at George Mason University” are worth considering.

On the other hand — and you knew there was an other hand — his op-ed was also mildly infuriating, because it’s conceptually muddy and relies on outdated notions. In fact, as I was reading it, I realized that there are four tough tasks a columnist should acknowledge before writing this kind of essay. Which are:

1) Define what you mean by “universities.” Pearlstein opens up by talking about “universities in the United States” and citing all kinds of stuff involving poor graduation rates and rising student debt. But almost the entire rest of the essay implicitly talks about research universities, such as George Mason or Tufts.

This distinction matters great deal, because many of higher education’s negative financial externalities have nothing to do with research universities. Exploding levels of student debt and default, for example, have a lot to do with for-profit colleges. As Adam Looney and Constantine Yannelis argued in a September 2015 Brookings paper:

Most of the increase in default is associated with the rise in the number of borrowers at for-profit schools and, to a lesser extent, 2-year institutions and certain other non-selective institutions, whose students historically composed only a small share of borrowers. These non-traditional borrowers were drawn from lower income families, attended institutions with relatively weak educational outcomes, and experienced poor labor market outcomes after leaving school. In contrast, default rates among borrowers attending most 4-year public and non-profit private institutions and graduate borrowers—borrowers who represent the vast majority of the federal loan portfolio—have remained low, despite the severe recession and their relatively high loan balances.

And as the Atlantic’s Gillian White noted:

The amount of debt owed by those attending for-profit colleges has grown from $39 billion in 2000 to $229 billion in 2014 — which is more attributable to increases in the rate of borrowing at those schools than to increases in enrollment.

Similarly, low levels of graduation have a lot to do with for-profit schools and two-year colleges and not much at all to do with four-year research universities, as Pearlstein’s link demonstrates. Indeed, the National Center for Education Statistics’ data on graduation rates at four-year colleges shows that those rates have increased across the board between 1996 and 2007.

If Pearlstein wants to talk about what ails for-profit schools and community colleges, that’s fine. But the entire rest of his op-ed suggests that he’s not talking about those schools. And if you look at four-year universities, the situation is not nearly as grave as Pearlstein suggests.

2) Don’t exaggerate the problems that actually exist. Railing against administrative bloat and the explosion of student services in higher ed, Pearlstein clucks that “a university should spend more on instruction than it spends on anything else, besides research.”

Fair enough. Helpfully, he links to a Bain study on higher education that puts the problem in perspective:

So, based on that chart, are administrative costs and student services increasing as a percentage of total expenditures? Yes, absolutely. But after 15 years, they haven’t increased by that much, particularly at state schools. Instruction is still responsible for more than half of all spending at research universities.

Is administrative bloat a problem? Yeah, probably, but I’d make two cautionary notes. First, I’ve heard enough rants about how to eliminate the federal budget deficit through cutting administrative fat to be leery of the validity of these claims no matter what. Second, Pearlstein lists “academic and psychological counseling, security, information technology, fundraising, accreditation and government compliance” as problem areas. I’d suggest that given recent events, maybe counseling and security might not be areas worth trimming right now.

3) Don’t rely on outdated data. Pearlstein recommends year-round teaching to exploit underutilized facilities, which makes me wonder if he has been to a college campus during the summer. A significant money-maker for colleges is the leasing out of facilities in the summer to executive education programs, summer camps and other enterprises. Pearlstein also urges a greater use of online or hybrid courses, apparently unaware that this bubble popped, like, three years ago.

More significantly, Pearlstein recommends scaling back on research because no one reads it:

“The vast majority of the so-called research turned out in the modern university is essentially worthless,” wrote Page Smith, a longtime professor of history at the University of California and an award-winning historian. “It does not result in any measurable benefit to anything or anybody. . . . It is busywork on a vast, almost incomprehensible scale.”

The number of journal articles published has climbed from 13,000 50 years ago to 72,000 today, even as overall readership has declined. In his new book, “Higher Education in America,”former Harvard president Derek Bok notes that 98 percent of articles published in the arts and humanities are never cited by another researcher. In social sciences, it is 75 percent. Even in the hard sciences, where 25 percent of articles are never cited, the average number of citations is between one and two.

These paragraphs got quite a bit of attention on social media. They’re also badly outdated, relying on a study that first appeared in 1990 and compares apples and oranges. The Atlantic’s Yoni Appelbaum dissected the numbers — you can read his tweetstorm for more.

4) Be honest that you’re using higher ed reform as an implicit industrial policy. An implicit theme of Pearlstein’s essay is that too much money is being thrown at the humanities and not enough at the STEM fields. This theme is hardly unique to him. President Obama has scorned art history majors in the past and GOP presidential candidates have been bashing philosophers in the present. 

The obvious implication of all these insults is that the United States needs to produce more college graduates with real-world skills that add value to the economy. Which is indeed a fine idea. But can we just note that it’s a little hypocritical for politicians to praise the virtues of the free market as a source of U.S. economic dynamism and then act all-knowing in arguing for STEM majors over the liberal arts?

Virginia Postrel has been poking at this intellectually barren pinata for years now, and as she notes, the majors that politicians love to bash are hardly lacking in generating useful skills:

[A]rt history isn’t a major naive kids fall into because they’ve heard a college degree — any college degree — will get you a good job. It’s an intellectually demanding major, requiring the memorization and mastery of a large body of visual material, a facility for foreign languages, and the ability to write clearly and persuasively.

When politicians and pundits argue in favor of reallocating resources from one college major to another, they’re trying to say that they can pick disciplinary winners and losers better than universities, foundations, or the students themselves. There are big risks in making that assumption, especially if you base these selections on “facts” such as welders outearning philosophers that turn out not to be true. And usually such suggestions ignore the simple fact that U.S. research universities outperform every other country in the world. Or as that Bain report acknowledged at the outset:

Few industries in the United States have achieved unquestioned global leadership as consistently and effectively as our higher education system. U.S. colleges and universities are the cornerstone of our economic prosperity and the key to realizing the American dream. Thirty years of growth have confirmed the sector’s leadership and vibrancy — the result of demographic and economic factors combining to lift higher education even higher.

I get that higher education is a ripe target in an election year. And I get that blasting the “higher ed bubble” is popular even if it is not necessarily true. But for once, I’d like critics to concede that this is a far more complex topic than just “costs are out of control.”

It shouldn’t be that tough a thing to admit.

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by AUSTIN RUSE26 Nov 2015163

Will Hobson and Steven Rich, washingtonpost.com

Texas A&M Yell Leader Steven Lanz prays at midfield before an Oct. 31 game. Despite football’s importance at the school, students objected to a mandatory fee to help pay for stadium upgrades. (Sam Craft/The Bryan-College Station Eagle/AP)

At Texas A and M University, the president’s proposal to charge all 50,000 students $72 a year to help pay for a $450 million football stadium renovation brought protests.

At Clemson University, the athletic director’s idea to charge all 17,000 students $350 a year to help him keep up with competition brought pushback from student government.

At the University of Kansas, a walk-on golfer’s push to eliminate a $50 fee all 17,000 students paid the increasingly wealthy athletic department brought a strong — and to some students, vindictive — response from administrators.

And at many of America’s largest public universities, athletic departments making millions more every year from surging television contracts, luxury suite sales and endorsements continue to take money from tens of thousands of students who will never set foot in stadiums or arenas.

Mandatory student fees for college athletic departments are common across the country. Often small line items of a couple hundred dollars on long, complex tuition bills, these fees make millions for athletic departments at larger colleges.

In 2014, students at 32 schools paid a combined $125.5 million in athletic fees, according to a Washington Post examination of financial records at 52 public universities in the “Power Five,” the five wealthiest conferences in college sports.

[Big-time college sports departments are making more money than ever — and spending it just as fast]

To rich athletic departments, these fees represent guaranteed revenue streams that, unlike ticket sales or booster donations, are unaffected by on-field success. To less flush departments, increasing student fees is one way to keep up.

Athletic directors defend fees as well worth what their programs give back to schools.

“Athletics is a common good, bringing people together, developing relationships, unifying the institution, bringing fantastic exposure,” said Virginia Athletic Director Craig Littlepage, whose department charges undergraduates $657 annually. 

To advocates fighting to keep college affordable, however, athletic departments that continue to charge mandatory student fees as their income rises are making America’s student debt problem worse.

“These students are being forced to pay for something that they may or may not take advantage of, and then they have to bundle this into student loans they’ll be re-paying for 10 or 20 years,” said Natalia Abrams, executive director of the nonprofit Student Debt Crisis.

“It’s a huge problem in higher education,” said David Catt, the former Kansas golfer. “You think you’re paying for a degree and you wind up as a piggy bank for a semi-professional sports team.”

Virginia fans cheer at a basketball game this month; many athletic directors defend charging students fees by citing what sports offer campus life. (Ryan M. Kelly/AP)

‘They do it because they can’

For the roughly 20 million college students in America, the money they — or their lenders — pay schools every semester covers much more than professor salaries and dorm upkeep. Many colleges tack on fees to tuition bills to fund complementary aspects of college life such as libraries, computer labs and campus buses.

For hundreds of thousands of students who attend Power Five schools, one of those departments that can charge a fee is making a lot more money from other sources than it used to: athletics.

From 2004 to 2014, the combined income of 48 athletic departments in the Power Five rose from $2.67 billion to $4.49 billion. The median department saw earnings rise from $52.9 million to $93.1 million.

As more money has come in, a few schools have gotten rid of student athletic fees, including both powerhouse Alabama ($147.2 million in 2014 athletics earnings) and middle-of-the-pack Missouri ($82.2 million).

“We take pride in the fact that we carry our own weight and pay our own way,” said Tim Hickman, Missouri athletics chief financial officer.

This fall, Kansas State athletics announced it would phase out its student fee by 2020. In 2014, Kansas State athletics made $72.4 million and charged $500,695 in student fees.

“If you look at the financial pressure on students, the increased cost of tuition . . . it was time to have those dollars be available for other things,” Kansas State Athletic Director John Currie said.  

[Sally Jenkins: College athletic departments are paying themselves to lose money]

While all Power Five schools are making more from television rights contracts — which are paid primarily to conferences, who then split up the money among member schools — only some athletic departments, usually ones with strong football teams, also have been able to get ticket sales, endorsements and royalties to surge.

At Florida State athletics — which made $96.8 million in 2014 — officials justify a $237 fee that generates $8 million by pointing out students get free admittance to Seminoles football games. This is a benefit for the 16,000 students who snag student seats at Doak Campbell Stadium. There are more than 32,000 undergraduates at Florida State, though.

At some departments, athletic directors are increasingly dependent on student fees to help them keep up with big-spending rivals. At the University of Virginia, student fees for athletics generate $13.2 million per year that Littlepage said he needs to cover his budget.

From 2004 to 2014, under Littlepage’s watch, Virginia athletics spending rose from $50.3 million to $87.4 million, including significant increases in coaches pay (from $8.6 million to $18.1 million), and debt and maintenance costs on facilities (from $2.5 million to $15.2 million).

(All 2004 figures are adjusted for inflation.)

Littlepage has been unable to get earnings to rise enough to keep up. In 2014, Virginia athletics made $70.5 million, $17 million less than it spent. In a decade, Virginia has increased its student fee from $388 to $657.

“We’re all facing a lot of the same economic pressures, but it’s not an entirely level playing field,” Littlepage said.

For Paige Taul, a 19-year-old Virginia student who earns $8.25 per hour as a cashier at the campus bookstore, this means she works about 80 hours just to pay off her debt to athletics.

“Wow. That doesn’t seem fair,” said Taul, who expects to graduate with at least $30,000 of debt. Taul doesn’t go to football games, she said. She’s usually working. 

At Rutgers, students pay about $326 each, generating $10.3 million.

“It’s crazy. It’s a struggle for me, every semester, to get the money together,” said Rutgers sophomore Eric Dillenberger, 20, who works summers as a short-order cook at a pizza shop. He expects to graduate with at least $25,000 in debt.

“It should be an option, whether you want to buy tickets or not,” Dillenberger said.

At many schools, fees aren’t controversial. At Auburn, administrators raised the student fee more than 400 percent in 2006, from $36 to $192 per year, and Athletic Director Jay Jacobs said students never complained.

Auburn students also have to pay for football tickets, but an athletics spokeswoman said the fee, which generates $4.4 million, allows Auburn to discount student tickets.

Outside the Power Five, athletic departments lacking annual windfalls from television networks are even more reliant on student fees.

Jeff Smith, a business professor at the University of South Carolina-Upstate who has studied financial records from hundreds of schools, estimates students across the country borrow nearly $4 billion per year to pay off athletic fees.

Some smaller schools charge more than $2,000 per year in athletic fees, Smith found.

“They do it because they can. Most schools, it goes through the student government . . . and you’re always going to have kids who like sports and don’t understand the big financial picture,” Smith said. “When you have a president or a dean saying ‘This is good,’ most students will just go along with it.”

Sometimes, students don’t. In the last few years, students in Texas, South Carolina and Kansas have looked at their tuition bills and the surging amount of money flowing into athletics departments and asked administrators variations of the same question: Why do you need my money?

Shortly after students at Kansas objected to a mandatory fee to support athletics, officials took 120 basketball seats reserved for students and gave them to donors who contributed at least $25,000 per year. (Ed Zurga/Getty Images)

Normal doesn’t apply

With a devoted fan base and deep-pocketed donors, Texas A and M athletics had gotten by for years without a student fee.

But as A and M planned an ambitious $450 million stadium renovation — which included a new 7,700-square-foot high-definition video board and a luxury suite section featuring a baby grand piano and crystal chandeliers — former university president R. Bowen Loftin decided it was time to change that.  

In late 2012, Loftin’s administration put together a financing plan that called for $75 million from students over 30 years, through increased ticket prices and a new $72 fee.

Spread across all students at Texas’s largest public college, the fee would generate about $3.6 million per year.

It’s difficult to overstate the popularity of football at Texas A&M, where many traditions center around Aggies football, including midnight “yell practice” before games. But when the administration approached students about a fee to support their beloved Aggies, the students balked. A poll found 65 percent of students opposed.

Kyle Field’s expanded student section would hold 30,000. A and M had 50,000 students. Some conservative students began condemning the fee as a tax.

“It’s unfair to make people who will never use that stadium pay to make my football game experience better,” said Scott Bowen, 25, a former member of A and M’s student senate.

Cary Cheshire, 23, another former student senator and conservative activist, agreed.

“College administrations need to view students as students, rather than walking checkbooks,” Cheshire said.

When Loftin took the proposal to A and M’s board of regents in May 2013, a few students protested, some holdings signs that read “$TOP WASTING MY MONEY” and “REPEAL LOFTIN’S $LU$H FUND.”

The board approved the fee. But in two years since, A and M has not added it to tuition bills.

“As we predicted, the university had no trouble at all funding [the stadium] out of the money they already collect,” said Bowen, now a chemical engineer in Houston.

Loftin, who left and took over as chancellor at the University of Missouri before resigning that post earlier this month, did not respond to multiple requests to comment.

In an interview, A and M spokesman Shane Hinckley said while the university has not needed the new fee yet, that doesn’t mean it never will.

“We have not needed to impose it at this time, but that doesn’t mean we won’t need to impose it down the road,” Hinckley said.

About 1,000 miles away in South Carolina, Clemson Athletic Director Dan Radakovich ran into trouble when he started pushing for a new $350 student fee last year.

In a series of meetings with the Clemson student government, Radakovich failed to win over then-student president Maddy Thompson. In a telephone interview, Thompson said Clemson athletics officials were vague about why their department — which generated $70.4 million in 2014 revenues, up from $49 million a decade before — needed another $6 million from students, who get into football games for free.

“All they would say was their costs had gone up,” said Thompson, now a law school student at the University of North Carolina. “We just didn’t think it made sense. . . . Do we really want all students paying so they can recruit better athletes?”

In an interview, athletics department spokesman Joe Galbraith noted that Clemson is the only public school in the Atlantic Coast Conference or Southeastern Conference that does not charge a student fee and also doesn’t charge for student tickets.

A few months after the last meeting between student government and athletics, Radakovich appeared before the South Carolina legislature. He needed approval to buy a new private jet for Clemson athletics. Radakovich promised legislators he wouldn’t need student fees to pay for the $4.5 million Cessna Citation CJ2, and lawmakers approved the purchase.

About 1,000 miles to the west in Lawrence, a battle to eliminate a student fee at the University of Kansas ended differently.

In two years as a walk-on golfer, Catt got an inside view of Kansas athletics and began to wonder why the department needed $50 from each student every year in addition to ticket payments.

In two years, Kansas athletics spent $9 million in severance on fired football coaches Mark Mangino and Turner Gill. When Catt did not notice any corresponding layoffs or cutbacks, he decided to do some research.

Catt reviewed financial statements that showed Kansas athletics income rose from $50.8 million in 2005 to $93.6 million in 2013. In early 2014, Catt sent a 35-page report to the student senate, arguing that the fee, which produced about $1.1 million for athletics, should be eliminated.

“Students were seeing a rise in tuition, more student debt . . . and the athletics department was making more and more money every year. It just didn’t seem like they needed it,” Catt said in an interview.

Catt’s report was persuasive. Students voted to kill the fee. Athletics administrators fought back, though, and eventually won a compromise from the chancellor that kept a reduced $12 fee. Ultimately, the change cost Kansas athletics about $350,000.

Kansas athletics administrators weren’t satisfied. A few months later, they eliminated one of the best student sections at men’s basketball games — 120 seats right behind the Jayhawks’ bench — and gave the seats to donors who contributed at least $25,000 per year.

“When the student government proposed [eliminating the fee] . . . it made it very clear that it wanted the athletic department to find other ways to raise revenue,” Kansas athletics spokesman Jim Marchiony told a local newspaper. “That’s what we did.”

When Catt talks about the experience today, one comment from a deputy athletics director sticks out in his mind.

“He told me, ‘We’re in the business of being great, and it costs money to be great,’ ” Catt recalled.

A few months later, Kansas fired football coach Charlie Weis, who won just six of 28 games at the school, taking on another $5 million in severance.

“It became clear in our meetings,” Catt said, “that normal economics don’t apply to anyone in Kansas athletics.”

It all adds up

These public Power Five athletic departments took in the most money in 2014 from mandatory student fees. For poorer programs, increasing fees is one way to keep up with big-spending competition.

	Student fee income (millions)	Overall athletic revenue (millions)	Annual fee for fulltime undergrad
Virginia	$13.2	$70.5	$657
Maryland	$11.3	$55.3	$406
Rutgers	$10.3	$40.3	$326
Florida State	$8.0	$96.8	$237
Virginia Tech	$7.8	$65.0	$288
North Carolina	$7.3	$76.5	$279
N.C. State	$6.7	$63.8	$328
Utah	$6.1	$46.6	$171
Georgia Tech	$5.1	$61.4	$254
Auburn	$4.4	$109.3	$192

Sources: NCAA financial records, schools

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A general view of the Radcliffe Camera building, part of the Bodleian Library, in Oxford city center in England. Oxford University has a student population in excess of 20,000, taken from over 140 countries around the world. (Oli Scarff/Getty Images)

Since Kant, liberal scholars of international relations have hypothesized that greater cross-border contact can be a powerful force for good. The idea is that such contact encourages a sense of shared international community, breaking down artificial barriers separating people into different nations and inhibiting their natural human affinities for one another. This intuitively appealing hypothesis has inspired several famous student exchange programs, which among other potential positive effects are expected to quell nationalist fervors and ward off international conflict.

Despite its ubiquity, this hypothesis has rarely been tested in a rigorous way. Does cross-border contact really foster a feeling of community? In a recent study, I used a natural experiment across a sample of American “study abroad” students at 11 colleges in New England, the Midwest and the South to carry out a unique test. The institutional structure of study abroad makes it well-suited for a natural experiment. Students are typically placed in foreign settings for either the fall or spring semester, with the winter break providing a valuable window during which a treatment group of students just returning from a semester abroad can be compared with a control group of students who are about to embark. Since all subjects are predisposed to participate, the design controls for self-selection, and the choice of which semester is a logistical one with no obvious implications. These are significant design improvements over earlier studies that did not control for self-selection or lacked a strong control group.

More than 500 students were surveyed on their feelings of international community, perceptions of foreign threat, and levels of nationalism and patriotism, as well as demographics and study abroad program characteristics. As expected, those returning from a semester abroad (the treatment group) were not significantly different either demographically or in terms of program choices from those about to take their semester abroad (the control group). For instance, they selected the same host countries in which to study abroad, especially Spain, France, Italy and the United Kingdom, and females outnumbered males in both groups. All this mirrors the general population of American study abroad students, who are majority female and tend to study abroad most in Western Europe.

First, I tested the core liberal hypothesis that cross-border contact promotes a sense of shared international community, or what political scientist Karl Deutsch called a “we-feeling” across cultural divides. Theorists define this in terms of warmth, shared understandings and values, and trust. Surprisingly, the hypothesis was not supported: None of the indicators for international community was higher on average for students returning from study abroad than for those yet to travel. In fact, those who had just returned from a semester abroad felt they had significantly fewer values in common and were more likely to say their understandings of key concepts were different from the people of their host country. None of this was sensitive to potential moderators like whether or not students opted to live with a host family. Given the intuitive plausibility of the liberal hypothesis, these results are striking.

How about threat perceptions? I asked students to rate how threatening they would consider their study abroad host country if it were to surpass the United States in terms of material power, such as economic growth or military expansion. In theory, cross-border contact should mitigate perceptions of foreign threat and foster expectations of peaceful change and cooperation, despite uncertainty and shifts in the distribution of power. And indeed, given identical scenarios, those just returned from a semester abroad rated their host countries as less threatening than did students about to leave. So the liberal hypothesis that cross-border contact mitigates threat perceptions was supported, even though the hypothesis that it fosters “community” was not. 

Finally, I tested a variant on the “clash of civilizations” hypothesis—that cross-border contact, rather than encouraging a sense of shared international community, promotes nationalism. Perhaps troubling for some, the results strongly supported that hypothesis.

Students returning from their study abroad experience were considerably prouder of America along a range of dimensions, including its literature, achievements in the arts, armed forces, athletic accomplishments and political influence. They were also prouder to be American, warmer toward American culture and more patriotic. Importantly, however, they did not display a heightened belief in America’s superiority; there was no difference in that attitude across the two groups. So while cross-border contact heightened nationalism, it did not appear to promote a virulent or chauvinistic form of it.

There are several key take-aways. The first is that efforts to influence group identity in positive ways — such as programs that engineer cross-border contact — may not work the way we think they do. The second is that “community” at the international level may not be so important after all. Although treated students did not come back with a stronger “we-feeling,” they did show a lessened tendency to view “the other” as threatening. Cross-border contact may still be a strong force for peace, even if community is not the underlying mechanism.

We are used to thinking about nationalism and internationalism as mutually exclusive; people who are highly nationalistic are often assumed to lack the cosmopolitan mindset of a “global citizen.” Yet study abroad returnees were both more nationalistic and less prone to seeing other nations as threatening. Rather than fostering a sense of shared international community and warm realizations of “we are the same,” cross-border contact may instead encourage a form of “enlightened nationalism”—a sharper sense of national difference, and pride in that difference, tempered by tolerance and the realization that such differences need not be threatening. In a globalizing world where cross-border contact continues to grow, it is perhaps enlightened nationalism rather than utopian notions of international community that should be encouraged. Indeed, if nationalism were capable of evolving from the bogeyman of the 20th century into a peace-promoting norm of the 21st, we would do well to help it get there.

Calvert Jones is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Maryland.

thecrimson.com

House Masters ‘Unanimously’ Agree To Change Title

Administrators will soon meet to select a new name to replace the title, Dean of the College Rakesh Khurana says

By MEG P. BERNHARD, CRIMSON STAFF WRITER 17 hours ago

Nicholas Kristof,  New York Times, DEC. 2, 2015

Another day, another ghastly shooting in America.

So far this year, the United States has averaged more than one mass
shooting a day, according to the ShootingTracker website, counting cases of
four or more people shot. And now we have the attack on Wednesday in San
Bernardino, Calif., that killed at least 14 people.

It’s too soon to know exactly what happened in San Bernardino, but just
in the last four years, more people have died in the United States from guns
(including suicides and accidents) than Americans have died in the wars in
Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq combined. When one person dies in
America every 16 minutes from a gun, we urgently need to talk about
remedies.

Democrats, including President Obama, emphasize the need to address
America’s problems with guns. Republicans talk about the need to address
mental health. Both are right.

First, guns, the central issue: We need a new public health approach based
not on eliminating guns (that simply won’t happen in a land awash with 300
million guns) but on reducing the carnage they cause.

We routinely construct policies that reduce the toll of deadly products
around us. That’s what we do with cars (driver’s licenses, seatbelts,
guardrails). It’s what we do with swimming pools (fences, childproof gates,
pool covers). It’s what we do with toy guns (orange tips).

It’s what we should do with real guns.

We can improve public safety without eliminating guns. Switzerland has
guns everywhere because nearly all men spend many years as part­time
members of the armed forces (it’s said that Switzerland doesn’t have an army;
it is an army). Yet while military weapons are ubiquitous, crime is low.

What we should focus on is curbing access to guns among people who
present the greatest risk. An imperative first step is universal background
checks to acquire a gun. New Harvard research suggests that about 40 percent
of guns in America are acquired without a background check — which is just
unconscionable.

Astonishingly, it’s perfectly legal even for people on the terrorism watch
list to buy guns in the United States. More than 2,000 terrorism suspects did
indeed purchase guns in the United States between 2004 and 2014, according
to the Government Accountability Office and The Washington Post’s
Wonkblog. Democrats have repeatedly proposed closing that loophole, but the
National Rifle Association and its Republican allies have blocked those efforts,
so it’s still legal.

While Republicans in Congress resist the most basic steps to curb gun
access by violent offenders, the public is much more reasonable. Even among
gun owners, 85 percent approve of universal background checks, according to
a poll this year.

Likewise, an overwhelming share of gun owners support cracking down
on firearms dealers who are careless or lose track of guns. Majorities of gun
owners also favor banning people under 21 from having a handgun and
requiring that guns be locked up at home.

These are reasonable steps that are, tragically, blocked by the N.R.A. and
its allies. The N.R.A. used to be a reasonable organization. It supported the
first major federal gun law in 1934 and ultimately backed the 1968 Gun
Control Act. As a farm kid growing up in rural Oregon, I received a .22 rifle for
my 12th birthday and took an N.R.A. safety course that, as I recall, came with a
one­year membership. But the N.R.A. has turned into an extremist lobby that
vehemently opposes even steps overwhelmingly backed by gun owners.

As for mental health, Republicans are right that it is sometimes related to
gun violence. But it’s also true that in some cases their budget cuts have
reduced mental health services. To his credit, Representative Tim Murphy, a
Pennsylvania Republican, has introduced a bill that would improve our
disastrous mental health system, perhaps reducing the number of people who
snap and turn to violence. Yet some Democrats are wary of the bill because
Republicans like it. That’s absurd: We need better mental health services just
as we need universal background checks.

It’s not clear what policy, if any, could have prevented the killings in San
Bernardino. Not every shooting is preventable. But we’re not even trying.
When we tackled drunken driving, we took steps like raising the drinking
age to 21 and cracking down on offenders. That didn’t eliminate drunken
driving, but it saved thousands of lives.

For similar reasons, Ronald Reagan, hailed by Republicans in every other
context, favored gun regulations, including mandatory waiting periods for
purchases.

“Every year, an average of 9,200 Americans are murdered by handguns,”
Reagan wrote in a New York Times op­ed in 1991 backing gun restrictions.
“This level of violence must be stopped.”

He added that if tighter gun regulations “were to result in a reduction of
only 10 or 15 percent of those numbers (and it could be a good deal greater), it
would be well worth making it the law of the land.”

Republicans, listen to your sainted leader,

SETH FREED WESSLER,  nbcnews.com

• 1 in 5 families of part-time faculty receive Earned Income Tax Credit payments.
• 7 percent of families of part-time faculty members receive food stamp benefits.
• 7 percent of adjuncts and 6 percent of their children receive Medicaid.
• Families of close to 100,000 part-time faculty members are enrolled in public assistance programs.

• The taxpayer cost of public assistance for families of part-time faculty is nearly half a billion dollars per year ($468 million).

• More than half of these costs, or an average of $274 million per year, is spent on Medicaid.

Professors in Poverty

A different life