January 10, 2006
A Response To
Our Leadership Crisis
By Professor Jeffrey S. Nielsen

        A recent survey by U.S. News & World Report and the Center for Public Leadership at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University (October, 2005) revealed that seventy-three percent of Americans have no confidence in their leaders and over 60 percent believe the U.S. is experiencing a leadership crisis.

        The almost daily news stories about the corruption, incompetence, and poor judgment of some leaders and the criminal activity that seems so easily to infect leadership practices has created a growing sense that something is terribly wrong in our democracy and in our business corporations. In almost every type of organization; be it social, corporate, religious, or governmental, we have observed some with leadership rank--the organizational elites-- take advantage of their power and position to conceal the truth or to extract unfairly wealth and resources in order to benefit themselves, enrich their friends, and further their own ambitions. All of this comes at the expense of those beneath them in the hierarchy.

        Americans are, however, by nature optimistic. So the survey did show that those interviewed were hopeful, in the future, better leaders would emerge. Yet, perhaps now is the time to ask why we believe future leaders will be any better than our current ones? Is it possible that the fundamental cause of the troubles in our democratic and business organizations is our very model of leadership? Perhaps now is the time to examine our nearly universal belief that leaders and leadership are necessary and begin to explore an alternative to following leaders. The key lesson to be learned at the beginning of the twenty-first century might very well be that we can function quite well and successfully in business and government without rank-based leaders.

        David Bohm, the late physicist and social thinker, first raised this possibility for me. Though we’ve all been taught that society cannot function without leaders, he would say, “Maybe we can.” Have we ever asked ourselves why we think we need leaders, or what the implications are of this unexamined belief? Unfortunately, in our organizations most make rank-based assumptions I have named the myth of leadership. The myth of leadership is the ideology that serves to establish, maintain, and legitimize the system of authority where a select few are privileged to monopolize the information, control most decision-making, and command obedience even through coercive and manipulative means. This ideology creates the powerful belief that it is natural and correct that a few individuals should be anointed leaders and trusted to make the decisions and do the commanding and controlling of everyone else. It leads to the assumption that the only way to get things done is by managing organizations with individuals in rank-based leadership positions; so many of us willingly relinquish the control of our own choices and our own life to someone in a position of hierarchical authority. Even in our democracy, we allow our elected representatives to govern in secrecy and the leaders of our democratic institutions to manage people and affairs too often in an autocratic fashion. These false assumptions, about both leaders and followers, leave in their wake detrimental consequences for both.

        Leadership implies ranking, division, and separation. Whenever we think in terms of “leadership” we create a dualistic world. We create a dichotomy, two categories: one of leaders, a select and privileged few; and the second of followers, the vast majority. There follows the implicit judgment that leaders are somehow superior or better than their followers. An entire leadership industry helps keep this illusion alive, while government and corporate hierarchies are set up to pamper with privilege those in executive positions. So you get secrecy, distrust, overindulgence, and the inevitable sacrifice of those below for the benefit and advantage of those above. Just think of the special treatment and the huge amount of resources wasted on perks for our elected and appointed representatives, our leaders in Washington, who theoretically, at least, are supposed to be our servants and from whom we get so little in return by way of wise government, integrity, or competence. When we use the word “leadership,” we immediately create a ranked division of people in ways that do not serve healthy, long-term organizational relationships. The appointed leaders are saddled with impossible burdens, and the followers are left with few opportunities, or resources, for growth. There is a problem with our very concept of leader and practice of leadership. The heart of this problem is the corruption of communication they cause.

        I have learned, through much good and bad experience, genuine communication tends to occur only between peers, and secrecy more often than not breeds corruption and abuse of power. We only tell people we think are superior to us what we think they want to hear, and we only tell people we believe are somehow inferior to us what we think they need to know. And that’s directly tied to secrecy, keeping secrets from each other because in the absence of full communication, individuals, out of insecurity, feel the need to defend their position by protecting what they know. Of course, this leads to even less real communication where the open flow of information is restricted and secrets reign. In the rarified heights of rank-based leadership, it is easy to think that the ordinary rules don’t apply, and so the temptation of unethical actions tends to overwhelm even the most sincere individual. It should not be unexpected when organizations, or governments for that matter, which practice the rank thinking of the myth of leadership find poor communication the norm, discover a growing gap between reality and the mindset of the top executives, and perhaps even wind up in court facing civil charges and criminal indictments.

        The remedy is not to find some new leader, to whom we surrender our future, but we must decide to create genuine democracy in our country and real peer-based organizations at work. Peer-based organizations rest on the belief that everyone in the organization should have equal privilege to share in information, participate in the decision-making process, and choose to follow through persuasive means. As long ago as Aristotle, it was recognized that the wisdom of the many is frequently better than the expertise of the few in making many types of decisions, including public policy ones.

        Today, the open software movement has realized the effectiveness of leaderless decision-making. They have a saying that to many eyes all bugs are shallow; meaning that the less centralization and the more involvement and greater participation you can get in solving problems, the better the result. The viability of the Linux O.S. demonstrates the possibility of functioning well without rank-based leaders. When we learn to collaborate together as peers in our communities and in our government and work organizations, we discover that our shared wisdom, together in peer deliberation, makes it unnecessary to surrender to some rank-based leader control over our lives and the decisions that so profoundly affect us.

        The answer, then, to our current leadership crisis is to replace the concept of leader and model of leadership with the practice of peer-based managing through peer councils. Peer councils are similar to the elementary republics Thomas Jefferson endorsed at the founding of the United States. Now, unlike in his day, technology and the information processing capability in our business and political environments make peer councils, as a vehicle for governance, much more realistic. Jefferson’s dream of decentralized self-government might finally be possible through the implementation of a council-based democracy and peer-based work organizations. The mechanics of managing work through peer councils, whether it is administering government or business, requires learning the competency of peer deliberation. A competency we all can and should learn to take back our democracy and make our organizational lives more meaningful. We must demand that our government and all of our organizations become more peer-based. This means we need less leadership and more self-government and peer participation, which require greater openness with information and greater transparency in decision-making processes, including more involvement and participation by all affected parties. Peer thinking is, in fact, necessary for a successful democracy. It aptly captures and expresses the values of liberty, equality, and autonomy that are fundamental to democratic beliefs. Countries where rank thinking dominates will find democratic rhetoric is merely a cover for more oligarchic special interests.

        We need to recognize and build our democracy and our work organizations on the basic peer principle that we all share the equal privilege to speak and likewise possess the equal and reciprocal obligation to listen regardless of our place or position in society. We are at a crossroads in our history where we can make the choice to remain satisfied with surrendering information and decision-making authority, and hence control of our lives, to the next round of rank-based political and business leaders, or we can choose to create peer-based organizations and a greater peer-based democracy. Our human inclination to cooperate with others makes peer-based organizations possible. Our human propensity to take advantage of others makes peer-based organizations necessary.

[Professor Jeffrey Nielsen is an organizational consultant with international experience. He currently teaches philosophy at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, and is the author of the book, The Myth of Leadership: Creating Leaderless Organizations, (Davies-Black Publishing, 2004) which was a finalist for two different 2004 Book of the Year awards, ForeWord Magazine, and Independent Book Publishers.]

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©1958-2006 Copyright by The Bulldog Newspaper at Fresno State

December 13, 2002
John Rawls Passing,
Friend and Teacher
By Samuel Freeman

    UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA -- The philosopher John Rawls has died at 81. It's well known that he had an enormous influence on academic discussions of social, political, and economic justice: His 1971 book, A Theory of Justice, is widely recognized as the most significant work in political philosophy since J.S. Mill's 1869 On Liberty. So it's not surprising that, even in the short time since Rawls's death, we have already seen numerous tributes that focus on his formidable intellectual contributions. But I'd like to add some personal reflections.
.    Rawls's lifelong interest in justice developed out of his early concern with the basically religious questions of why there is evil in the world and whether human existence is nonetheless redeemable. That concern, originating during World War II, while Rawls was first an undergraduate at Princeton and later a soldier in the Pacific, led him to inquire whether a just society is realistically possible. His life's work was aimed at discovering what justice requires of us, and then showing that it is within our human capacities to realize it.
     Rawls was born in Baltimore into a well-to-do family. His father was a prominent lawyer and his mother active in local politics. I was one of his Ph.D. students in the early 1980s, but was inspired by him even before we met. Upon reading A Theory of Justice after I was already a lawyer, I had decided to leave the law for graduate work in philosophy. I never dreamed, then, that I would have the great good fortune to study with Rawls, as well as to edit some of his work, much less to become his friend.
     Although I cannot be sure, I think Jack warmed to me because, like his father, I was from North Carolina; he felt at ease with a relaxed Southern manner and appreciated my friendly teasing. At the turn of the millennium, for example, the Modern Library ranked the top 100 nonfiction works in English in the 20th century. A Theory of Justice placed 28th, high for a philosophy book, but still bested by Russell and Whitehead's seminal work in logic, Principia Mathematica, ranked 23rd. "Jack, you should have worked harder," I joked, and he laughed heartily.
     Jack was a quiet, modest, and gentle man. He did not seek fame, and he did not enjoy the spotlight. A private person, he devoted himself to research and teaching, or to relaxing with his family and friends. He declined almost all requests for interviews and chose not to take an active role in public life. In part, that was because he felt uncomfortable speaking before strangers and large groups, and often stuttered in those settings. But he also believed that philosophers are almost always misunderstood when they address the public, and that, while political philosophy has considerable influence on people's lives, its effects are indirect, taking many years to become part of society's moral awareness.
     In 1999, Jack agreed to accept a National Humanities Medal from President Clinton, and also the University of Oxford's Rolf Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy. Before those, he had regularly declined honors, because big prizes and awards made him uncomfortable. Knowing that, Mardy, his wife of 53 years, reports that when Jack was offered the Kyoto Prize, carrying $500,000, she declined on his behalf without even consulting him. When she told him, he said he might accept it, depending on the conditions. Upon learning, however, that those would require that he not only give three public lectures but also have lunch and dinner with the emperor of Japan, Jack reaffirmed the initial disclaimer. His daughter Liz said he was willing to do a lot of things, but not have lunch with the emperor. (Indeed, Jack regularly denounced the practice of royalty and the corrupting effects of privilege.)
     That explains his fondness for Abraham Lincoln. He admired Lincoln because he saw him as the president who most appreciated the moral equality of human beings, and because Lincoln was the rare statesman who did not compromise with evil. Jack frequently quoted Lincoln's assertion -- "If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong" -- as the best example of a fixed moral conviction that anyone with a sense of justice must believe.
     The rightward drift of American politics distressed Jack. He said of Congress under Newt Gingrich's management, "They are destroying our democracy." He was appalled by the practice of allowing business lobbyists into committee meetings to help draft legislation. He condemned it, along with our system of corporate financing of political campaigns, as "selling the public trust." He judged the current administration and Congress by the same high standards.
     Jack was also a conscientious teacher. His lectures were carefully prepared and written out, and he continually revised them after reading the most recent scholarship and rethinking his positions. He made his lecture notes available to his students, acknowledging that he sometimes stuttered and was not sure that he could be understood. A better reason, surely, is that his lectures were very intense and hard to digest upon one hearing (or even two or three). Two of three volumes of those lecture notes are now available. Jack had initially resisted publication, but former students like Barbara Herman appealed to his sense of fairness by saying that, while his own students continued to benefit professionally from his teachings, others could not. He also resisted publishing his collected papers; he said he saw them as opportunities to experiment with ideas, which would later be revised or rejected in a book. When told that students and scholars were spending hours hunting down his many short essays, he agreed to issue one volume.
     Unlike that of most Anglo-American philosophers of his time, who emphasized the analysis of language, logic, and concepts, Rawls's work was systematic and driven by a comprehensive vision. For the most part, it was a dialogue with the great figures in modern moral and political philosophy -- the social-contractarians Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau; the utilitarians Hume, Mill, and Sidgwick; and the German idealists Kant, Hegel, and Marx. Indeed, not only in its structure but also in its prose, A Theory of Justice reads like the work of a 19th-century philosopher. (As his colleague and close friend Burton Dreben once said, it reads as if translated from German.)
     In all his works, Jack was very generous in citing others, even when they said little that had to do with his points. Only very rarely did he respond to critics (most notably to H.L.A. Hart, on liberty), and only then when he felt that their criticisms were serious and constructive. Most often, he thought his critics (who are legion) misunderstood him. While self-effacing in person and in print, Jack was also sparing in his praise. I think he probably believed what Hume said in criticizing Locke's social contract (though not in that particular instance): There is little ever new in philosophy, and that which is new is almost always wrong. It was not easy handing over one's work to Jack to read.
     Jack was, nevertheless, always supportive. He taught me and his other students to look behind the intricate or clever arguments that philosophers make, to see whether those thinkers are doing anything important. At the same time, he encouraged us to try to discover the best in positions we disagree with, and to respond to that. He often told us that we should assume that the philosophers we read "are at least as smart as you are, and that if you think of an objection, they probably have thought of it, too."
     He was a tall, lanky man, with piercing blue eyes. He had participated in sports at Princeton and was an excellent sailor. He exercised until well into his 70s, biking, jogging, hiking, and he took daily walks until a few days before his death. Popular legend -- and some obituaries -- to the contrary, he never played professional baseball. That rumor was fabricated by a master at Harvard's Leverett House after Jack had hit a number of home runs in an intramural softball game. The losing students were distressed at being humiliated by an aging professor, and the house master assuaged them with the story that Jack, a "ringer," had played for the Yankees.
     He had a taste for oatmeal cookies served with tea. Recently, I spent part of an afternoon with him when Mardy went out to play tennis. She left him a large cookie, which she felt was all he should have. As I got up to leave, he asked me to look through the kitchen cabinets for a bag of oatmeal cookies. Guiltily, I complied and left him the bag. The next afternoon, after I had eaten some cookies that she had set out, he asked me if I wanted more. I said that, good as they were, I had better not. He then called definitively, "Mardy, Sam wants another cookie, and I think I'll have another one, too." Jack had a mischievous streak.
     In mid-October, I drove out to his rambling house in Lexington, Mass., carrying the newly published The Cambridge Companion to Rawls, only the second time a volume in that wide-ranging series has been devoted to a living philosopher. (The volume on Jürgen Habermas is the other.) Many of Jack's students and friends had contributed articles. His portrait, on the cover, had been painted by his wife. He had objected vigorously to any picture, saying that he did not see why people cared what he looked like. Only when I told him that every single volume in the series had portraits did he cease protesting. He appreciated the book's tribute, saying, "It looks great, Sam." It was to be the last time I would see Jack. His wife called on Sunday, November 24, to tell me that he had died at 9:30 that morning, peacefully at home, of heart failure. He had his wits until the very end. He will be greatly missed.
     Samuel Freeman is a professor of philosophy and law at the University of Pennsylvania. He edited John Rawls's Collected Papers (Harvard University Press, 1999) and the Lectures in the History of Political Philosophy. He also edited and contributed to The Cambridge Companion to Rawls (Cambridge University Press, 2002).

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©1958-2004 Copyright by The Bulldog Newspaper at Fresno State

~ Reprise ~
Saturday, May 30, 1998
Senator Goldwater
Dead at 89
By Bart Barnes

    NEW YORK -- Barry M. Goldwater, 1909-1998, a five-term U.S. senator from Arizona and a champion of conservatism whose 1964 presidential candidacy launched a revolution within the Republican Party, died yesterday at home in Paradise Valley, a suburb of Phoenix.
    He suffered a stroke in 1996 that damaged the part of the brain that controls memory and personality. Last September, family members said he was in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease. In fact, he had wrested control of the GOP from the Eastern liberal wing that had dominated it for years. By 1980, he was acknowledged as the founder of a conservative movement that had become a vital element in mainstream Republican thinking and a major ingredient in Reagan's political ascendancy. It was a 1964 speech delivered on behalf of Mr. Goldwater that brought Reagan to national prominence and helped launch his political career.
    During his 1964 presidential campaign, Mr. Goldwater was attacked by Democrats and opponents within his own party as a demagogue and a leader of right-wing extremists and racists who was likely to lead the United States into nuclear war, eliminate civil rights progress and destroy such social welfare programs as Social Security.
    But that perception mellowed with time. Mr. Goldwater returned to the Senate in 1969 and went on to serve three more terms. Long before his retirement, he had come to be regarded as the Grand Old Man of the Republican Party and one of the nation's most respected exponents of conservatism, which he sometimes defined as holding on to that which was tested and true and opposing change simply for the sake of change.
    His friends said he was often misunderstood, but his reputation for personal integrity was unblemished. At the height of the Watergate crisis, when the Republicans in Congress needed someone to tell President Richard M. Nixon he should resign, they chose Mr. Goldwater. But instead of telling the president what to do, Mr. Goldwater simply informed him in the Oval Office on Aug. 7, 1974, that the Republicans in Congress were unwilling and unable to stop his impeachment and conviction should he remain in office. Nixon announced his resignation the next day.
    A stickler for the Constitution, Mr. Goldwater refused to join the Republicans of the New Right during the 1980s when they began to press for legislation that would limit the authority of the federal courts to curb organized prayer in public schools or to order busing for school integration. He opposed busing and he backed prayer in schools, Mr. Goldwater said, but he thought it a dangerous breach of the separation of powers for Congress to be telling the courts what to do.
    Mr. Goldwater's political philosophy also included a strong military posture, a deep mistrust of the Soviet Union and a conviction that increasing the scope of government programs was not the way to solve social problems.
In all, he served 30 years in the Senate, but he was out of office for four years after losing his bid for the presidency, and he was in a political limbo for almost 10 years after that defeat. He reemerged during the Watergate crisis of the early 1970s.
    In 1934, Mr. Goldwater married the former Margaret Johnson of Muncie, Ind. She died in 1985. Their four children are Michael, Joanne, Peggy and Barry Jr., who became a Republican member of the House of Representatives from California and later an investment counselor. In 1992, he married Susan Schaffer Wechsler, a health care executive, who survives.

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©1958-2004 Copyright by The Bulldog Newspaper at Fresno State

July 17, 2003
The White Man Unburdened
By Norman Mailer

     Lightning and thunder, shock and awe. Dust, ash, fog, fire, smoke, sand, blood, and a good deal of waste now move to the wings. The stage, however, remains occupied. The question posed at curtain-rise has not been answered. Why did we go to war? If no real weapons of mass destruction are found, the question will keen in pitch.
    Or, if some weapons are uncovered in Iraq, it is likely that even more have been moved to new hiding places beyond the Iraqi border. Should horrific events take place, we can count on a predictable response: "Good, honest, innocent Americans died today because of evil al-Qaeda terrorists." Yes, we will hear the President's voice before he even utters such words. (For those of us who are not happy with George W. Bush, we may as well recognize that living with him in the Oval Office is like being married to a mate who always says exactly what you know in advance he or she is going to say, which helps to account for why more than half of America now appears to love him.)
     The key question remains—why did we go to war? It is not yet answered. The host of responses has already produced a cognitive stew. But the most painful single ingredient at the moment is, of course, the discovery of the graves. We have relieved the world of a monster who killed untold numbers, mega-numbers, of victims. Nowhere is any emphasis put upon the fact that many of the bodies were of the Shiites of southern Iraq who have been decimated repeatedly in the last twelve years for daring to rebel against Saddam in the immediate aftermath of the Gulf War. Of course, we were the ones who encouraged them to revolt in the first place, and then failed to help them. Why? There may have been an ongoing argument in the first Bush administration which was finally won by those who believed that a Shiite victory over Saddam could result in a host of Iraqi imams who might make common cause with the Iranian ayatollahs, Shiites joining with Shiites! Today, from the point of view of the remaining Iraqi Shiites, it would be hard for us to prove to them that they were not the victims of a double cross. So they may look upon the graves that we congratulate ourselves for having liberated as sepulchral voices calling out from their tombs—asking us to take a share of the blame. Which, of course, we will not.
     Yes, our guilt for a great part of those bodies remains a large subtext and Saddam was creating mass graves all through the 1970s and 1980s. He killed Communists en masse in the 1970s, which didn't bother us a bit. Then he slaughtered tens of thousands of Iraqis during the war with Iran—a time when we supported him. A horde of those newly discovered graves go back to that period. Of course, real killers never look back.
     The administration, however, was concerned only with how best to expedite the war. They hastened to look for many a justifiable reason. The Iraqis were a nuclear threat; they were teeming with weapons of mass destruction; they were working closely with al-Qaeda; they had even been the dirty geniuses behind 9/11. The reasons offered to the American public proved skimpy, unverifiable, and void of the realpolitik of our need to get a choke-hold on the Middle East for many a reason more than Israel- Palestine. We had to sell the war on false pretenses.
     The intensity of the falsification could best be seen as a reflection of the enormous damage 9/11 has brought to America's morale, particularly the core—the corporation. All the organization people high and low, managers, division heads, secretaries, salesmen, accountants, market specialists, all that congeries of corporate office American, plus all who had relatives, friends, or classmates who worked in the Twin Towers—the shock traveled into the fundament of the American psyche. And the American working class identified with the warriors who were lost fighting that blaze, the firemen and the police, all instantly ennobled.
     It was a political bonanza for Bush provided he could deliver an appropriate sense of revenge to the millions— or is it the tens of millions?—who identified directly with those incinerated in the Twin Towers. When Osama bin Laden failed to be captured by the posses we sent to Afghanistan, Bush was thrust back to ongoing domestic problems that did not give any immediate suggestion that they could prove solution-friendly. The economy was sinking, the market was down, and some classic bastions of American faith (corporate integrity, the FBI, and the Catholic Church—to cite but three) had each suffered a separate and grievous loss of face. Increasing joblessness was undermining national morale. Since our administration was conceivably not ready to tackle any one of the serious problems looming before them that did not involve enriching the top, it was natural for the administration to feel an impulse to move into larger ventures, thrusts into the empyrean—war! We could say we went to war because we very much needed a successful war as a species of psychic rejuvenation. Any major excuse would do—nuclear threat, terrorist nests, weapons of mass destruction —we could always make the final claim that we were liberating the Iraqis. Who could argue with that? One could not. One could only ask: What will the cost be to our democracy?
     Be it said that the administration knew something a good many of us did not—it knew that we had a very good, perhaps even an extraordinarily good, if essentially untested, group of armed forces, a skilled, disciplined, well-motivated military, career-focused and run by a field-rank and general staff who were intelligent, articulate, and considerably less corrupt than any other power cohort in America.
     In such a pass, how could the White House fail to use them? They would prove quintessential morale-builders to a core element of American life— those tens of millions of Americans who had been spiritually wounded by 9/11. They could also serve an even larger group, which had once been near to 50 percent of the population, and remained key to the President's political footing. This group had taken a real beating. As a matter of collective ego, the good average white American male had had very little to nourish his morale since the job market had gone bad, nothing, in fact, unless he happened to be a member of the armed forces. There, it was certainly different. The armed forces had become the paradigmatic equal of a great young athlete looking to test his true size. Could it be that there was a bozo out in the boondocks who was made to order, and his name was Iraq? Iraq had a tough rep, but not much was left to him inside. A dream opponent. A desert war is designed for an air force whose state-of-the-art is comparable in perfection to a top-flight fashion model on a runway. Yes, we would liberate the Iraqis.
     So we went ahead against all obstacles—of which the UN was the first. Wantonly, shamelessly, proudly, exuberantly, at least one half of our prodigiously divided America could hardly wait for the new war. We understood that our television was going to be terrific. And it was. Sanitized but terrific —which is, after all, exactly what network and good cable television are supposed to be.
| And there were other factors for using our military skills, minor but significant: these reasons return us to the ongoing malaise of the white American male. He had been taking a daily drubbing over the last thirty years. For better or worse, the women's movement has had its breakthrough successes and the old, easy white male ego has withered in the glare. Even the consolation of rooting for his team on TV had been skewed. For many, there was now measurably less reward in watching sports than there used to be, a clear and declarable loss.
     The great white stars of yesteryear were for the most part gone, gone in football, in basketball, in boxing, and half gone in baseball. Black genius now prevailed in all these sports (and the Hispanics were coming up fast; even the Asians were beginning to make their mark). We white men were now left with half of tennis (at least its male half), and might also point to ice hockey, skiing, soccer, golf (with the notable exception of the Tiger), as well as lacrosse, track, swimming, and the World Wrestling Federation—remnants of a once great and glorious white athletic centrality.
     Of course, there were sports fans who loved the stars on their favorite teams without regard to race. Sometimes, they even liked black athletes the most. Such white men tended to be liberals. They were no use to Bush. He needed to take care of his more immediate constituency. If he had a covert strength, it was his knowledge of the unspoken things that bothered American white men the most—just those matters they were not always ready to admit to themselves. The first was that people hipped on sports can get overaddicted to victory. Sports, the corporate ethic (advertising), and the American flag had become a go-for-the-win triumvirate that had developed many psychic connections with the military.
     After all, war was, with all else, the most dramatic and serious extrapolation of sports. The concept of victory could be seen by some as the noblest species of profit in union with patriotism. So Bush knew that a big victory in an easy war would work for the good white American male. If blacks and Hispanics were representative of their share of the population in the enlisted ranks, still they were not a majority, and the faces of the officer corps (as seen on the tube) suggested that the percentage of white men increased as one rose in rank to field and general officers. Moreover, we had knockout tank echelons, Super-Marines, and—one magical ace in the hole—the best air force that ever existed. If we could not find our machismo anywhere else, we could certainly count on the interface between combat and technology. Let me then advance the offensive suggestion that this may have been one of the covert but real reasons we went looking for war. We knew we were likely to be good at it.
     In the course, however, of all the quick events of the last few months, our military passed through a transmogrification. Indeed, it was one hellion of a morph. We went, willy-nilly, from a potentially great athlete to serving as an emergency intern required to operate at high speed on an awfully sick patient full of frustration, outrage, and violence. Now in the last month, even as the patient is getting stitched up somewhat, a new and troubling question arises: Have any fresh medicines been developed to deal with what seem to be teeming infections? Do we really know how to treat livid suppurations? Or would it be better to just keep trusting our great American luck, our faith in our divinely protected can-do luck? We are, by custom, gung-ho. If these suppurations prove to be unmanageable, or just too time-consuming, may we not leave them behind? We could move on to the next venue. Syria, we might declare in our best John Wayne voice: You can run, but you can't hide. Saudi Arabia, you overrated tank of blubber, do you need us more than ever? And Iran, watch it, we have eyes for you. You could be a real meal. Because when we fight, we feel good, we are ready to go, and then go some more. We have had a taste. Why, there's a basketful of billions to be made in the Middle East just so long as we can stay ahead of the trillions of debts that are coming after us back home.
     Be it said: the motives that lead to a nation's major historical acts can probably rise no higher than the spiritual understanding of its leadership. While George W. may not know as much as he believes he knows about the dispositions of God's blessing, he is driving us at high speed all the same —this man at the wheel whose most legitimate boast might be that he knew how to parlay the part-ownership of a major-league baseball team into a gubernatorial win in Texas. And—shall we ever forget?—was catapulted, by legal finesse and finagling, into a now-tainted but still almighty hymn: Hail to the Chief!
     No, we will rise no higher than the spiritual understanding of our leadership. And now that the ardor of victory has begun to cool, some will see how it is flawed. For we are victim once again of all those advertising sciences that depend on mendacity and manipulation. We have been gulled about the real reasons for this war, tweaked and poked by some of the best button-pushers around to believe that we won a noble and necessary contest when, in fact, the opponent was a hollowed-out palooka whose monstrosities were ebbing into old age.
     Perhaps he was not that old. Perhaps Saddam made a decision to go underground with as much wealth as he had spirited away, and would fund al-Qaeda or some extension of it in a collaboration of sorts with Osama bin Laden—a new underground team, the Incompatible Terrorist Twins. That is a hypothesis as mad as the world we are beginning to live in.
     Democracy, more than any other political system, depends on a modicum of honesty. Ultimately, it is much at the mercy of a leader who has never been embarrassed by himself. What is to be said of a man who spent two years in the Air Force of the National Guard (as a way of not having to go to Vietnam) and proceeded—like many another spoiled and wealthy father's son—not to bother to show up for duty in his second year of service? Most of us have episodes in our youth that can cause us shame on reflection. It is a mark of maturation that we do not try to profit from our early lacks and vices but do our best to learn from them. Bush proceeded, however, to turn his declaration of the Iraqi campaign's end into a mighty fashion show. He chose—this overnight clone of Honest Abe—to arrive on the deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln on an S-3B Viking jet that came in with a dramatic tail-hook landing. The carrier was easily within helicopter range of San Diego but G.W. would not have been able to show himself in flight regalia, and so would not have been able to demonstrate how well he wore the uniform he had not honored. Jack Kennedy, a war hero, was always in civvies while he was commander in chief. So was General Eisenhower.
     George W. Bush, who might, if he had been entirely on his own, have made a world-class male model (since he never takes an awkward photograph), proceeded to tote the flight helmet and sport the flight suit. There he was for the photo-op looking like one more great guy among the great guys. Let us hope that our democracy will survive these nonstop foulings of the nest.

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©1958-2004 Copyright by The Bulldog Newspaper at Fresno State

Wednesday September 1, 2004
The Law of Averages Isn’t a Safe Bet for America’s Future
By Sarah Ruth Jacobs

    Back in 1999, I stood waiting on the curb during a balmy summer evening in Bangor, Maine. I hailed a lone taxi and hopped in, but before I could spurt out my destination, I was interrupted by the cabbie. Twisting himself around with one arm, he held out a clipboard to me where I sat in the back seat, craning his shock-worn face around to look into mine. "You 18? Mind signing this petition for me? I'm running for Congress and I can get on the ballot with enough signatures," he explained. Even then, I remember thinking, "This guy just isn't going to make it."
    Today I would argue that the mind of America is likewise poisoned with similar apprehensions. First we worry that a candidate isn't "electable" and lacks competitive funding, then we fear that a well funded and supported candidate has "sold out." We are so jaded about the political process that we can't decide what we want — an unlikely underdog whom we love, or a political commodity everyone likes.
    How can it be that America, a relatively new nation where liberties such as independence, suffrage and civil rights have been fought for and won with blood and prophetic vision, has had lessening levels of voter and civic participation? Our colleges, once a haven for resisters and draft dodgers, wild children ready to take over administrative buildings, now offer largely muted voices of opinion, small circles of activism. Have we come so far that there's nothing left to protest? Quite contrarily, most students and citizens have a long list of complaints about the direction America is headed.
    Discussing what civic engagement entails and ways to encourage it seems remiss without acknowledging reasons why people may choose not to participate in even local proceedings and organizations. When one person neglects to vote or comment, she isn't simply allowing someone else to speak for her; she's snuffing out her own voice entirely. Losing these estranged and minority perspectives in an election isn't just as simple as laxity — it means that a part of our nation is slipping through the cracks. If civic leaders don't make the effort to reach out to non-voters, and dare to take braver stances, then we will be waking up to a country half-populated by ghosts.
    Election strategies are often blinded by what officials believe to be "target groups" or the undecided voters — easy marks which may do little more than soften and overextend a campaign. Democracy is thus often misunderstood as appealing to the lowest common denominator, whereas Jefferson, Paine and the founders intended quite the opposite: a sacrifice by the majority to minority rights and property.
    Though it's easy to interpret their ideals as a mere conservation of goods for the wealthy from the poor majority, today the meaning of minority rights is understood as an inclusive and tolerant system of government which doesn't restrict the freedoms of minority groups.
    Thus the best strategy for a candidate isn't to repeatedly average the difference between herself and the competition, but (still speaking mathematically) to broaden the span of issues she supports. That way, instead of appealing to voters who teeter on the mean of two candidates, there would be a strong appeal to fringe groups, those people who aren't normally inclined to vote because the averaging strategy of candidates makes the term "election" seem a farce. A single candidate can't be all things to everyone, but once she takes a step to embrace a foggy issue, to clarify a heartfelt and compassionate viewpoint, perhaps some members will emerge from the silent half of our nation. In a time where a strong vision for the future is needed to revitalize the common faith, it is sorely regrettable that individualism is seen as a detraction to a candidacy.
    Over the years I have taken part in court hearings, ugly protests, town council meetings, assistance programs for the homeless and most recently anonymous peer counseling. Again and again individuals underestimate their role in even local decisions, or may realize the extent an issue plays in their lives when it is too late. For many people my age, passion and the gumption to speak out has become a sign of vulnerability or even foolhardiness. In an America where politics and business seem to merge, it's no wonder that citizens are afraid to get hurt, to put themselves out there. Yet there has never been a time when the need for individual voices, for "foolhardy" contributions, has been greater. The law of averages is a static instrument, and it waits for the change that even one visionary individual can bring.
    Across this nation we must come not only to know but to believe that it takes an individual, not an average to set the hearts of the people alight. Any doubt we might cast on the hopes of a smooth-talking cabbie will only serve to shadow our own ambition.

[Sarah Ruth Jacobs is a junior at Cornell University studying English and film.]

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Wednesday August 11, 2004

Elie Abel respected journalist and author dead at 83

BY LISA TREI

        PALO ALTO -- Elie Abel, former chair of Stanford's Department of Communication and a highly respected journalist and author, died July 22 at a hospice in Rockville, Md. He was 83.
        The cause of death was pneumonia, complicated by a stroke and Alzheimer's disease, said his daughter, Suzanne Abel, a director at the Haas Center for Public Service. A memorial service will be held Sept. 19 at the Cosmos Club in Washington, D.C.
         Abel came to Stanford in 1979 as the first Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication after serving as dean of Columbia Graduate School of Journalism for nine years. From 1983 to 1986, Abel headed Stanford's Department of Communication and also served as Faculty Senate chair in 1985-86.
         Abel directed Stanford's program in Washington, D.C., in 1993-94. "Elie had a profound effect on improving the quality of two major American universities," said Henry Breitrose, professor emeritus and former Communication Department chair who was responsible for hiring Abel in 1979. "He raised the bar for journalism so that it transcended mere craft and embraced the world of ideas that a journalist ought to be able to rely on."         Abel was born in Montreal, Canada, on Oct. 17, 1920. He earned a bachelor's from McGill University in 1941 and a master's from Columbia Graduate School of Journalism in 1942.

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Friday, June 11, 2004
Day of Remembrance for President Ronald Reagan
Fresno State News Staff Writers

   FRESNO STATE -- Governor Schwarzenegger has issued a Proclamation declaring Friday, June 11, 2004, as a day of remembrance for the extraordinary life of President Ronald Reagan. In support of this action, Chancellor Charles Reed has authorized presidents to cancel all or part of campus activities, and to provide informal time off to employees.
     This Friday we have a number of academic instructional activities, particularly in Continuing Education, that will compel some offices to remain open. For example, there are about 4000 students on campus for whom Friday is the last day of instruction. Final exams are being given and papers are being turned in. Managers of areas involved in these activities should ensure that services continue to be provided for those faculty and students who plan to meet on Friday.
     These services may be in the academic departments affected, continuing education, food services, housing, health center, accounting, child care center, and the library. Employees in other offices not directly involved in instructional activity may request informal time off on Friday. Managers are urged to accommodate such requests. Essential services shall remain open for regular business. These services include security, environmental health and safety, university relations, plant operations, human resources, and all managers. Managers in each area should use their own judgment in determining the level of staffing needed that day.
     Employees who are required to work on this day, or who would otherwise be scheduled to work but are on vacation, sick leave or compensating time off, will receive informal time off to be taken at a later date. The campus will observe a moment of silence to enable employees who are working to honor the memory of President Reagan

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Thur April 29, 2004
Defeat Spyware
By Carl Weinschenk, TechRepublic

         FRESNO STATE -- As if viruses, zombies, Trojans, and other assorted malicious software weren't enough, businesses of all sizes need to worry about spyware. This is a big category, ranging from legal software aimed at tracking the sites a user visits to illegal programs that can capture passwords, screen names, and keystrokes.
     This interview originally appeared in the IT Business Edge weekly report on Optimizing Infrastructure. To see a complete listing of IT Business Edge weekly reports or sign up for this free technology intelligence agent, visit www.itbusinessedge.com.
     Question: You don't hear quite as much about spyware as viruses and spam. But it is a corporate problem. What do companies need to be aware of? They need to be aware that there is a whole class of software out there that is not overtly dangerous—in other words, not a virus and not a worm—but is basically watching what you do.
     Maybe you don't care or maybe you do. In the same way that spam can clog your computer and is a bloody nuisance, this stuff can clog your computer and be a nuisance. You need to be aware that unlike viruses, where one guy probably is writing it, there's a whole team of people writing this stuff. There's a reason they are doing it—they make money. Apart from the fact that it clogs your computer, which is a pretty good start, it can also be a nuisance as it serves up ads quite aggressively to you, pop-up ads, and you have to click to close on a bunch of ads before you can get to work.
      The commercial stuff is unlikely to log your keystrokes. The whole spyware/adware thing runs the gamut from stuff that is overtly bad like key loggers…to stuff that simply tracks which Web pages you are going to. [Illegal spyware] will log your passwords, Social Security number, credit card number, and eventually send them off to the mothership, whatever the mothership is. It might be a kid in Canada; it may be the Russian mafia.Question: What should businesses do for baseline protection?
       They have to keep it off their systems somehow. They have to keep antivirus software or software like Pest Patrol that's also up to date. There is some overlap between antivirus software and spy-control software.
        Everyone wants to detect the key loggers, so antivirus software will detect some and antispyware will detect some. As long as antivirus is up to date, you are probably pretty protected from key loggers, but the antivirus software doesn't do much with the commercial spyware.

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April 28, 2004
Sex, Booze
Winning
Football?
By Murray Sperber Professor of American Studies
Indiana University at Bloomington.

        FRESNO STATE -- Last month the head football coach at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Gary Barnett, was placed on administrative leave after he made denigrating comments about a female former kicker who claimed that she had been raped by another player. It was one of seven rape charges against Colorado football players and recruits, and the governor has appointed a special prosecutor to investigate those charges and other alleged recruiting violations. The scandal has brought to light how big-time college sports programs throughout the country use women, alcohol, and sex to recruit top high-school athletes.
         When different people talk about the incidents, however, it often seems as if they aren't even conversing in the same language. Consider: "What's so wrong about taking recruits to a strip club?" (A recent graduate of Northwestern University, who is now a reporter for a Chicago-area newspaper) "She [the alleged rape victim] said Barnett told her that he would 'back his player 100 percent if she took this forward in the criminal process.'" (Greg Avery, a Boulder, Colo., Daily Camera reporter) "I have told him [Barnett] in no uncertain terms that was an unacceptable remark. You have a rape allegation here. That's a very serious criminal allegation. It is simply inappropriate to blame the victim, which is what he did." (Elizabeth Hoffman, president of the University of Colorado System, to the Associated Press)
         Each of those comments represents a different campus culture. And, at Colorado and potentially every college with big-time sports, those cultures are colliding.
         The Northwestern graduate genuinely did not understand why underage recruits should not be taken to a strip club or bar. While he was in college, not only football players but also regular student hosts did the same for visiting high-school seniors. Doing the research for my book Beer & Circus, I encountered that phenomenon at many institutions, particularly among fraternity men who wanted to impress recruits and help persuade them to join.
         The widespread nature of the practice indicates the sexually charged world in which contemporary college students live. Their favorite TV channels are MTV, E!, Comedy Central, and ESPN. MTV churns out hours of programs full of sexual content. (None of my students were surprised by the Super Bowl halftime show when Justin Timberlake exposed one of Janet Jackson's breasts.)
         E! features the shock-jock Howard Stern talking to an endless parade of nubile females, including porn stars, trying to get them to disrobe (many do). Comedy Central has The Man Show, which begins and ends with young women jumping on trampolines to expose their undergarments. ESPN constantly runs beer ads that feature women who appear always ready to party with the college-age men in the ads.
         A key component of this undergraduate culture is alcohol. Studies by the Harvard School of Public Health show that more than 60 percent of students at many institutions, particularly those with big-time sports programs, frequently binge drink. The high-water mark -- really high-alcohol mark -- occurs during spring break, when more than a million students gather at various beach resorts for nonstop binges. In this highly charged atmosphere both on campuses and off, a great deal of sexual activity takes place -- some of it unpleasant, especially for women, and some of it criminal, particularly date rape.
          Yet while intercollegiate athletes belong, in part, to the student culture, they also have their own. An athletics scholarship is essentially a one-year contract for athletic performance, renewed or canceled every July, usually at the behest of the coach. Therefore, the athletes are vocational students, working their way through college at extremely demanding jobs.
         The athletics department and the coaches control the players' lives: They arrange their room and board, steer them to majors and courses, and structure their time. The National Collegiate Athletic Association requires that athletics departments keep time charts on their players, and the coaches know where those players are most hours of the day. In addition, although a major Division I-A football team like Colorado's has as many as 125 players (85 on scholarship, the rest walk-ons), it also has about 15 coaches, a similar number of trainers and medical-staff members, and close to a dozen student managers.
         Driving all of those people and their activities is one goal: to win as many games as possible. But the best coaches in the world cannot win without recruiting blue-chip high-school athletes -- whose number, in any year, is small. Thus, a university will charter a plane to bring a prime football prospect to the campus, house him in a penthouse suite, feed him the most expensive meals, and -- surprise -- provide him with female companionship.
         Many institutions use undergraduate women for this purpose. Officially they discourage sexual contact between the hostess and the recruit. But, given the booze-and-sex undergraduate culture, unofficial contact is inevitable. That some colleges also take recruits to strip bars and hire stripper services, even escort services, is hardly a surprise -- except, apparently, to coaches like Barnett, who has denied any knowledge of the events alleged at Colorado.
         Considering how crucial successful recruiting is to a football program, and the control that coaches have over their players, such denials strain credibility. After each recruit's visit to a college, the female hostesses and the host players are debriefed by coaches and other personnel. Many questions are asked, and forms filled out. Joe Tiller, head football coach at Purdue University, summed it up well in The Indianapolis Star: "Whatever occurs on a recruiting trip, it will get back to the coaching staff. It may not get back immediately, but it will get back."
         A football program is a small world, run by the coaches out of the football complex. A player spends most of his time in that complex, including his mealtime. The idea is to build a cohesive team -- one for all, all for one. That is why Barnett said to an alleged rape victim that he "would back his player 100 percent if she took this forward in the criminal process." His comment was instinctive, and he knew that his players would want him to say it. He articulated the code of the football culture.
         Meanwhile, Elizabeth Hoffman, Colorado's president, is a typical university administrator, well aware of sexism and the law. Her condemnation of Barnett's remark and her desire to give the victim a fair hearing represent the third campus culture in play here. That culture is fundamentally opposed to the undergraduate sexually charged ethos and to the macho football code.
         Colleges have strict rules about gender rights and the treatment of women. In other professions, a supervisor is allowed to date a subordinate -- corporate and professional America do not encourage it, but it is rarely forbidden by formal regulations. At most colleges, however, no faculty or staff member is permitted to date a student. In that area, academe is in the forefront of political correctness. Yet few enterprises in America are less politically correct than students' party life and college football programs. Hence the clash of cultures at Colorado and other colleges.
         But what are we to make of Colorado administrators' assertions that they knew nothing about the booze-and-sex parties for recruits before the police and the press discovered them? Are their denials as questionable as the coaches'? No, in fact, the administrators are probably telling the truth. In my research, I've been struck by how little the average administrator, particularly the average president, knows about undergraduate life at his or her institution. Such administrators know even less about the daily lives of athletes. The same is true for most faculty members, who, at the large research universities that offer big-time sports, are preoccupied with their scholarly careers.
          Most people in power at universities were not big sports fans as students; they often had little awareness or understanding of athletics at their institutions, or even of the collegiate culture. Many were highly academic as undergraduates and did not participate much in collegiate life; others went to small institutions without big-time sports.
         But now, definitely at Colorado and probably at many other institutions as well, presidents, administrators, and faculty members can see the culture clash sparked by the scandal in Boulder. They are upset, in part, because they consider football players to be university representatives, and when those players take recruits to strip bars, the university is, in a sense, condoning that activity and its demeaning treatment of women.
         Moreover, university authorities and the NCAA cannot as easily dismiss the recent recruiting incidents as they did previous scandals. What occurred last year at places like St. Bonaventure University, the University of Georgia, and California State University at Fresno was, according to the college-sports establishment, idiosyncratic -- a few rotten apples in a large barrel. (In fact, all of the incidents were signs of systemic failure.) But the Colorado scandal is a different matter: Similar recruiting occurs all over the country; it is institutionalized sexism; and it is not easily ignored.
          Predictably, the NCAA has set up a committee to investigate the problem. No doubt it will add rules to its already huge handbook to try to control the situation. But as long as colleges want their teams to win, as long as they want to entice blue-chip athletes to sign with their programs, as long as many of their undergraduates live in a highly charged world of binge drinking and sexual activity, how can the NCAA possibly prevent this kind of recruiting?
          The NCAA will try to spin the problem away, but the stakes are higher this time. Many people at the University of Colorado and other colleges who have been indifferent to big-time athletics up to now are outraged by the recent incidents. They will not go quietly into the NCAA's rah-rah night.
         Murray Sperber has written four books on college sports and college life, including Beer & Circus: How Big-Time College Sports is Crippling Undergraduate Education. (Henry Holt, 2000).

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April 20, 2004
Detainees' Challenge
Supreme Court Hears
Arguments in Guantanamo
by Marcia Coyle, Washington bureau chief for
The National Law Journal.

    GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba -- The Supreme Court entered the debate over which rights should apply to those held in connection with the U.S. war on terror Tuesday, hearing arguments in two cases questioning whether foreign fighters captured abroad and held in a military camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba should be able to challenge their imprisonments in the American court system. Margaret Warner reviews the day in the high court and key portions of the arguments with Marcia Coyle, Washington bureau chief for the National Law Journal.

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Friday February 27, 2004
Ethics - Caught Any Lately?
by Howard E. Hobbs, Ph.D., Editor & Publisher

     FRESNO STATE -- In my graduate school classes most USC Profs settled on this truism - virtue is caught not taught. Of course my university professors were begging the point. That is, virtue and ethics are learned the hard way.
     In fact, Universities seem to have a growing number of budding ethicists in fields like bioethics, medical ethics, legal ethics, computer ethics, and ethical realism. I've even been accused of ethical skepticism.
     I readily own-up to some well deserved skepticism about the idea of requiring graduate students to memorize meta-ethical paradigms. I admit my skepticism about the motives of Ethics missionaries who seem to know less about honesty than ethics or moral behavior or even the importance of maintaining an informed level of self-interest.
     One might want to know what to do when adhering to moral principles jeopardize one's own economic well being. In the face of these consequences moral knowledge becomes more and more obscured by demands of self-interest
     Ethics professors ought to consider how ethical conflicts motivate professors in confronting their own truisms and self-interest.

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©1958-2004 Copyright by The Bulldog Newspaper at Fresno State

~ Reprise ~
Sept 16, 1963
Downtown Fresno Urban Renewal
Challenge And Responsibility
By Howard Hobbs, Bulldog News Editor

       FRESNO STATE --   What to do with downtown Fresno? This week in The Fresno Saving and Loan News (1963) a shocking series of statements written by Fresno State College Social Science professor, Karl Leonard Falk appeared on the front page, a portion of which follow:

  "WHAT BOMBING DID to the cities of Western Europe in World War II has to be done with bulldozers and dollars in the United States. The destruction of old and crowded European cities was not a complete calamity because it gave these cities an opportunity after the war to rebuild in keeping with 20th Century needs.
    For the first time in history America can do the rebuilding in peacetime without undergoing the indiscriminate destruction suffered by our west European friends, America has the financial means -- if it has the imagination and foresight - to renew the cities it has outgrown...This is not a time for sentiment and nostalgia, nor is it a responsible attitude to say that the jumbled and jangled life of our big cities is interesting and colorful and exciting and couldn't be changed; as long as some people in our "affluent society" are still living in cramped, undesirable quarter and are working in factories and offices in an unnerving environment under conditions that are unnecessarily bad, we need renewal..."

    It need not be be pointed out, but, Karl Leonard Falk did not win the Nobel Prize or anything else for such attention grabbers. Falk argued endlessly in class that despite the war against Nazi Germany, the economic philosophy of the Nazis and communists was becoming the guiding light for American and British policy makers.
    Falk would often remark,"Consider, for example, the Nazi economic system. Who can argue that the American people do not believe in and support most of its tenens? For example, how many Americans today do not unequivocally support the following planks of the Nationalist Socialist Party of Germany, adopted in Munich on February 24, 1920: "We ask that the government undertake the obligation above all of providing citizens with adequate opportunity for employment and earning a living..."
   
        [Editor's Note: This week The Fresno Saving and Loan News, published a column by Fresno State College Social Science professor, Karl Leonard Falk. To download the printable page version click the title: "Rebuilding Our Cities: Challenge And Responsibility."  Prof. Karl L. Falk, a Professor of Economics at State, is coincidentally the current President of First Federal Savings & Loan Assoc. of Fresno. and a self-styled housing-urban renewal expert, and chairman of the Fresno City Housing Authority. He told reporters he is currently vice-chair of the Calif. Governor's Commission on Housing Problems. Falk also said he is a past president of the National Association of Housing and Redevelopment Officials of America. But before World War II, in 1938, Falk was a graduate student at the Technische University of Berlin where he narrowly escaped being charged with war crimes and treason against the United States predicated upon his Nazi radio broadcasts for the German Reich from 1937-1938 when he was employed by the Nazi Ministry for Public Enlightenment & Propaganda.In fact, The American student, Douglas Chandler, who took over for young Karl Falk was subsequently arrested by US Agents in Berlin. Back on US soil, Chandler was tried and found guilty of treason against the United States and hanged. [see Federal Reporter Second Series, Volume171 F.2d 1949.] Falk often argued in his economics class lectures at Fresno State the economic philosophy of the Nazis was becoming the guiding light for American policy makers. On October 28, 1969, Karl Falk was appointed as acting president of Fresno State. After only five days, Falk's Gestapo Tactics began to show when he announced a massive realignment of the college structure. Dale Burtner, the dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, was reassigned and replaced with Phillip Walker. Harold Walker, the executive vice president, was reassigned and replaced with James Fikes. These reassignments once again caused a rift in the campus community, resulting in even more protests. Falk also instigated layoffs and curtailing of funds in the Experimental College, the Ethnic Studies Program and the Educational Opportunities Program. These changes resulted in peaceful as well as violent student activism. Protests continued and began to be connected with larger societal issues, including the Vietnam War. With the campus in an uproar, the search began for a permanent administrator to relieve Falk of his duties. On July 14, 1970, Norman Baxter was inaugurated as the president of Fresno State College. His presidency was marked by the cancellation of the La Raza Studies program and campus unrest in response to his administrative policies. The Student Senate, in a vote of nineteen to four, administered a vote of “no confidence” in Baxter’s ability to run the school. ]

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Feb. 3, 2004
Nationally Known Journalists
On Campus This Week
Staff Writers

    FRESNO STATE -- On March 5th, two Pulitzer Prize winning journalists with combined experience of more than 50 years in covering war, conflict and U.S. military affairs will be the main speakers in March at a symposium at California State University, Fresno focusing on media coverage of the conflict in Iraq.
     New York Times war correspondent Chris Hedges and free-lance writer Seymour Hersh will speak at Fresno State’s first Roger Tatarian Symposium in Journalism, “Covering the War after the War,” that will examine how well the media has covered the Iraq conflict since the fall of Baghdad about a year ago and other related issues about the Iraq war.
     The free symposium will be on Friday, March 5, from 9 a.m. until noon at the Satellite Student Union on campus.
     It is sponsored by the Department of Mass Communication and Journalism and the Roger Tatarian Endowment for Journalism. The endowment honors the late Fresno State journalism professor, who was once editor-in-chief of United Press International.
     The conference also will include Seymour Hersh. He is one of the best investigative reporters on military affairs. Hersh, a graduate of the University of Chicago, began his career in 1959 as a police reporter for the City News Bureau in Chicago. He later worked for United Press International in South Dakota and The Associated Press in Chicago. In the early 1970s he was a reporter in The New York Times Washington bureau. He has written eight books, including The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House, which won him the National Book Critics Circle award.
     The symposium is open to the public.

        [Editor's Note: Additional information about conference registration will be forthcoming or call Miller at (559) 278-2087. See updates at www.FresnoStateNews.com.]

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(Facsimile translation from original unpublished 1938 paper in German Language)

August 12, 1938
National Socialist
Economic Measures
by Karl Leonard Falk, Student
Unter den Linden,Technishen Universitat Berlin 1933-38

    BERLIN -- The Nazi economic policy in 1930-33 has been just to reduce the high unemployment associated with the economic depression. This involved public works, expansion of credit, easy monetary policy and manipulation of exchange rates.
    Generally, a centrally administered Hitler's economy has little trouble eliminating unemployment because he can create large public works projects and people are put to work regardless of whether or not their productivity exceeds their wage cost. Germany has already been successful in solving the unemployment problem.
    The Hitler government reacted to the threat of inflation by declaring a general price freeze in 1936. From that action the Nazi Government was driven to expand the role of the government in directing the economy and reducing the role played by market forces. Although private property was not nationalized, its use was more and more determined by the government rather than the owners.
    For an example, I point to the case of the an individual leather which takes its production orders at the direction of the Leather Control Office. This arrangement makes it possible for the factory to get the hides and other supplies it needed to produce leather.
    The output of leather is according to the dictates of the Leather Control Office. The Control Offices set their directives through a process involving the collection of statistical information by a Statistical Section. Then the Statistical Section assembles all the important data on past production, equipment, storage facilities and raw material requirements.
    Next, the planning of production taking into account the requirements of leather by other industries in their plans; e.g. the needs of the Shoe Control Office for supplies of leather. The available supply of hides limited the production of leather. There had to be a balancing of supply and demand.
    The result of the planning of all the control offices was a sort of Balance Sheet. There was some effort at creating some system for solving the planning, such as production being limited by the narrowest bottleneck, but in practice the planning ended up being simply scaling up past production and planning figures. And the issuing of production orders to the individual factories. Last, is checking up on compliance with the planning orders.
    In practice the authorities of the control offices often intervene and there is continual negotiation and political battles as the users of products tried to use political influence to improve their allocations. The prices made little economic sense after Germany began war preparations.
    So economic calculations using the official prices were not particularly meaningful. For example, the profitability of a product was of no significance in whether it should be produced or not. Losses did not result in a factory ceasing production; the control offices made sure that it got the raw materials and that the workers got rations of necessities.
    The Government establishes a priorities list for allocating scarce resources. Activities associated with consumer goods production is near the bottom of the list. If two users wanted gasoline and one use of gasoline is for trucks to haul raw materials to factories, well, the Government always gives the available gasoline to the Army then the truckers cannot deliver supplies to the factories and they shut down and eventually other factories dependent upon them also shut down.
     The problem with making production decisions without reference to relevant prices is that the control offices may dictate the production of goods which are of less value to the economy than the opportunity costs of the resources that go into their production. And because of authorities typically persecute people for dealing in these markets.
     Yet, the reality is that such markets are essential for preventing a collapse of the new Germany economy.
  
Bibliography:  Bruns, Paul (1937). Vom Wesen und der Bedeutung der Deutschen Arbeitsfront: Ein Beitrag zuihrer Würdigung als Wegbereiterin einer neuen deutschen Sozialordnung, Leipzig: Joh. Moltzen;  Falk, Karl Leonard (1938). The Nazi German Economic Model.Unter den Linden, doctoral dissertation abstract, Technishen Universitat Berlin.

  [Editor’s Note: Karl Leonard Falk is a Foreign Language major attending Stanford University, Palo Alto Calif. Although he has taken no formal coursework in Economics and has no formal training in Social Science, he claims to have become an expert of sorts on the subject through his readings of articles in German newspapers on “Hitler’s National Socialist Miracle” from the early 1930’s. He told reporters he decided to obtain a student visa for travel to Germany's Technische Universitat in Berlin where he might more closely study Hitler’s Nazi economics. A central element of the Falk's course of study required him to identify and articulate the various modes of argumentation, persuasion, rhetoric, and debate used by Nazi-professors in Course Content. For example a central element of the course content required young Falk to identify and articulate the various modes of argumentation, persuasion, rhetoric, and debate used by German university scholars in their diaries, correspondence, ideological propaganda essays and scholarly ethical and political treatises. For example, Falk learned how to instantly identify the modes of argumentation and rhetoric used in Nazi political ideological and propaganda essays, such as Hitler’s Mein Kampf and Julius Streicker’s newspaper Der Strumer, as well as in documented statements of numerous members of the Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units of the SS) as recorded in the book, Good Old Days. The course content examined the mode of argumentation expressed in Hitler’s Mein Kampf in conjunction with the severe economic and political crises of the Weimar Republic in the 1920s and Germany’s compliance with the Versailles Treaty of 1919. In addition, the student Karl Leonard Falk was required to communicate effectively his positions and arguments through a variety of oral and written assignments. A major goal and critical element of that course was to encourage him to develop lucid arguments, logical argumentation skills and the ability to present positions and arguments through a variety of communicative formats. On completion of the Nazi curricula in 1937 , Karl Leonard von Falk submitted a slim essay of a mere 108 pages as a dissertation, entitled "Grundsatz und Probleme der americanischen Tagespresse." For this and other services he was awarded a Ph.D. in Nazi Journalism by Technische Universtat in Berlin. The rest is a sad chapter in Fresno State history.]

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January 29, 2004
Doom at Fresno State
Will It Ruin Hard-Drives?
By Amy Williams, Staff Writer

    FRESNO STATE -- Suppose Norton AntiVirus has detected an infected email, and you have chosen to quarantine the file. You now find that your Netscape or Outlook Express Inbox has been quarantined. After restoring the Inbox from quarantine, it no longer contains your original email. What now?
     The University support services staff manager, Chip Hancock' said late Wednesday that Fresno State University computer hard drives had been inundated by the troublesome virus known as "My Doom", "Mimail.R" or "Novarg".
     According to the Hancock, "cleverly designed" e-mails are being received in campus computer hard drives. The bogus e-mail appears to be from a known address but which is a cleverly disguised e-mail bomb attachment.
    The sneak attacks are flooding computer servers and causing shutdowns all over the internet since yesterday when users began attempting to open the infected e-mail.

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January 28, 2004
Downtown Mall, Futuristic City Hall
New Valley Times, Who Needs 'em?
By Edward Davidian, Staff Writer

   FRESNO STATE --  Fresno's innovative downtown mall, built in the 1960s, flourished, declined and now struggles. Originally, it was the centerpiece of a reborn downtown retail area, complete with fountains, streams and water-spouting sculptures. It helped Fresno become an All-American City later in the 1960s. Then it was all over.
     Its early promise was undone by the City Council that created it. The County and City Council action approving Fresno's City Limits move northward and the inevitable expansion that resulted brought a retail exodus from downtown.
    By century's end, nearly a decade of wrangling over a downtown stadium proposed for just west of the mall hadn't produced any more than a pile of dirt and a lot of ill will, although there is much talk about sprucing up the mall and redeveloping other parts of downtown.
    Some of those early optimistic City Council decisions to build the mall were made in a City Hall as early as 1941. But it took the City Council until 1958 build it. By then it was too late and downtown shopping was already a dead-letter even before construction was beguin. Later, talk of a lake instead of streets and construction of a futuristic design for City Hall failed to bring back the people and the stores. Magnificent shopping at River Park on the bluffs overlooking the San Joaquin River finished off downtown Fresno. Even those most sympathetic to the plight of West Fresno's ghetto are not persuaded that simply reviving the social programs dismantled in the last decade or so will solve Downtown or West Fresno's problems.
    Residential and class inequalities appear to be as great as inequalities in financial and human capital that present fundamental racial isolation issues, coupled with socially inherited differences in community networks and norms, means that Downtown Fresno, even in the long run, is not a competitor for Rive Park dollars.
     In tackling the ills of Downtown Fresno, investments in physical capital, financial capital, human capital, and social capital are complementary, not competing alternatives. Investments in jobs and education, for example, will be more effective if they are coupled with reinvigoration of community associations than the publishing of Mock news in the New Valley Times.
     If Fresno State administrators want to help solve Fresno's socio-economic ills, they might think of providing job banks and use their reputational capital to vouch for Downtown Fresno's street commuity members who may be ex-convicts, former drug addicts, or high school dropouts.
     More fundamentally, the importance of social capital for Downtown Fresno's domestic agenda must not limited to minority communities. Many people today are concerned about revitalizing Fresno through public discussion of such procedural issues as largely unnoticed social changes.
    Classic liberal social policy emphasizes social capital that might be recaptured by ill-advised strategies like the New Valley Times that suddenly appeared on front-porches on Tuesday. This emphasis is misplaced and results in wasted social capital and ill-will. Instead we must focus on community development, allowing space for both politics and economics. Government policies, whatever their intended effects, should be vetted for their indirect effects on social capital. If, as some suspect, social capital is fostered more by home ownership than by public or private tenancy, then we should design housing policy accordingly. The fate of the Fulton Mall is a signed and sealed dead-letter.
    Similarly, Social capital is not a substitute for effective public policy but rather a prerequisite for it and, in part, a consequence of it. Social capital works through and with individuals and markets, not in place of them. Wise policy can encourage social capital formation, and social capital itself enhances the effectiveness of government action. The planning mistakes of fifty years ago still divide the community organizations.
    We have buried that dead horse generations ago. Fresno City Hall government has often promoted investments in social capital, and it must renew that effort now. In view of the passage of time, it is unsettling to find that Fresno State students of social capital have only just begun to address some of the most important questions that this approach to public affairs suggests. Some like, "What kinds of civic engagement seem most likely to foster economic growth or community effectiveness?" and "What strategies for rebuilding social capital are most promising?"
    The community also needs to ask about the negative effects of social capital, for like human and physical capital, social capital can be put to bad purposes as we have seen this very day. We have not always reckoned with the indirect social costs of City planning and related policy strategies, but we were often right to be worried about the power of the press, even such as the mock news page delivered to our homes earlier today.
   Recognizing the importance of social capital in sustaining community life does not exempt us from the need to worry about who is inside and who benefits from the mock newspaper. And who is outside and does not. Some forms of social capital can impair individual liberties, as critics of free press should know.

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    Saturday January 24, 2004
Govenor's Budget Scales Back
CSU System by $240 Million
by Edward Davidian, Staff Writer

    FRESNO STATE -- Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California proposed more spending cuts for the state's public universities and recommended double-digit percentage increases in tuition in his first state budget plan, released this month.
    The proposed cuts are part of the governor's plan to deal with a projected state budget deficit of $14-billion in the 2004-5 fiscal year.
     Specifically, Mr. Schwarzenegger's budget would cut state funds for the University of California by 8 percent, or $372-million, and scale back spending on programs at California State University by 9 percent, or $240-million. Funds for the state's 108 public two-year institutions would increase by $211-million, or 4.4 percent.
     Under the governor's plan, increases in tuition would make up for some of the cuts at universities and would increase the money available for community colleges. Mr. Schwarzenegger, a Republican, proposed raising tuition for in-state undergraduates at the University of California and California State University systems by 10 percent in the 2004-5 academic year.
     The jump in rates would be even greater for out-of-state undergraduates and graduate students in the two public-university systems. Mr. Schwarzenegger recommended increasing tuition by 20 percent for nonresidents in undergraduate programs and by up to 40 percent for graduate students.
     At community colleges, the governor called for increasing rates by 44 percent, to $26 per credit hour. Tuition for students at two-year institutions who already hold bachelor's or higher degrees would increase even more, to $50 per credit hour, under Mr. Schwarzenegger's budget. All students now pay $18 per credit hour, which represented a 64-percent increase over the previous academic year.
     Even as he urged tuition increases, Mr. Schwarzenegger called for a more predictable tuition policy, to limit the wide variance in rate increases over the state's good and bad economic times. For example, while in-state students at public universities saw a 30-percent jump in tuition rates at the beginning of the current academic year, students at California's public institutions during the economic boom of the late 1990s enjoyed a freeze, and then a 10-percent cut, in tuition rates.
     Mr. Schwarzenegger said that tuition should not rise by more than 10 percent each year for California residents who are undergraduates at the state's public universities, and that the tuition rates should be tied to the rate of growth of per-capita personal income in California.
    "We must end the boom-and-bust cycle of widely fluctuating fees with a predictable, capped-fee policy for college students and their parents," the governor said during his State of the State address.
     In his budget plan, the governor also proposed reducing the current requirement that universities set aside one-third of revenues from tuition increases for financial aid. Citing the state's budget crunch, Mr. Schwarzenegger is recommending that institutions instead devote only 20 percent to student aid, so that they could use more of the revenues to help absorb cuts in state funds.

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Wednesday January 21, 2004
Budget Prospects at Fresno State
Amy Wiliams, Staff Writer

      FRESNO STATE -- California State University, Fresno President John D. Welty informed the faculty and staff today that a mid-year reduction in the current state budget and Gov. Schwarzenegger’s proposed budget for this year 2004 and next (2005) will require the university to face “painful decisions” as it copes with the state fiscal crisis.
     In his annual Spring Assembly address, Welty said the Fresno State’s steps over the last several years to prepare for belt-tightening have served it well. “But,” he added, “this year will require hard work, creativity and maximum accountability from all of us.”
     On a positive note, Welty pointed with pride to the new Science II building under construction and scheduled for occupancy in January 2005.
     And he highlighted the importance of passage of Proposition 55 on the March ballot. That statewide bond issue includes $91 million for expansion and renovation of the Madden Library at Fresno State.
     Looking at 2004-05, the situation is serious, Welty said. Based on Gov. Schwarzenegger’s proposal to cut $250 million or 9 percent from the California State University system, Fresno State would have to reduce its base budget in 2004-05 by $12 million. That would come after a 13 percent reduction last year, defrayed in part by increased student fees.
     The Governor’s proposal also would mean Fresno State would serve 1,500 fewer students, and students who do attend would pay 10 percent (undergraduate) or 40 percent (graduate students) more. If enacted, that fee increase would be on top of two hikes last year that pushed fees up 30 percent.
     Though the situation may change as the Governor’s proposed budget moves through the Legislature toward its final form, planning must start immediately, Welty said. He said he has instructed each school, college and division at Fresno State to prepare a plan to meet the reductions with 7.5 cutbacks. The plans will be reviewed by the University budget committee and implemented in April.
     “We will continue our efforts to avoid laying off employees,” Welty said. “However, given the severity of the reductions we face, I cannot promise you at this time that layoffs will not be necessary.”
     Welty also discussed the importance of the university’s just-started multi-year “Comprehensive Campaign” to raise millions for academic and other uses on the campus.
     Welty started his speech by paying tribute to “our colleague and dear friend” President Harold H. Haak, who died Dec. 26. He praised Haak as a compassionate and strong leader who had “enormous impact on higher education in Central California.”

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Tuesday January 20, 2004
Writers Write & The Writing They Do!
by Howard Hobbs PhD, Editor & Publisher

    FRESNO STATE -- Writers write what they do and for some, it is both exhilarating and arduous. Writers explain why they write one way. The mind that writes is also the brain that writes. And the existence of brain states that affect our creativity raises questions that make us uneasy.
    Some social scientists believe that enterprises as diverse as scientific discovery, literature, dancing, and successful business decisions should not all be lumped under the single concept of creativity.
    Howard Gardner, for instance, has argued that different intelligences are needed for different domains such as language and mathematics, and that creativity in one domain does not necessarily extend into another.
    Researchers on creativity have begun to combine information from a number of different disciplines, and argue persuasively that it is such an important phenomenon that we cannot afford not to study it.
     Most researchers agree that a useful definition of creative work is that it includes a combination of novelty and value. The definition of creative work as novel and valuable also captures the societal aspect of what gets called creative work.
     Creativity is not the property of a work in isolation: Novelty and value have to be defined in relation to a social context. Sometimes the social context is not clear, however.
     The role of social context in determining value also underlies the process whereby the geniuses of one generation are hacks the next, while people dismissed as mad are rehabilitated as geniuses. Someone who is fascinated by language attends to details and to the overall texture of a writing project more than he will if he is writing simply to satisfy the public.
    People who know how to write, seem to want desperately to write may have the urge to write as a secondary drive that grows out of a more fundamental onr, the drive to communicate. Recent researchers propose that communicating is something hardwired into us, that we have, a language instinct.
    Linguists tend to focus on semantics and sentences as vehicles that transmit a logical proposition. Llinguists ten to argue that the emotional aspect of language, transmitted as much by tone as by words, does not separate it from primitive nonlinguistic gestures.
    If language and writing grow out of a biological system for attempting to fill needs, then the idea of self-expression can teach the us more about ourelves. Many creative writers have been quite capable of powerfully emotive writing yet lack insight into the internal conflicts that drive their sense of relief by the act of writing.
    A recent Social Science study by Alice Brand provides evidence that writing, at least on personally chosen subjects, has measurable mood effects. In both students and professional writers, the act of writing both intensified positive emotions and blunted negative ones.
    Brand's findings were consistent with what has been described by many writers. For example, Ernest Hemingway once told reporters: "When I don't write, I feel like shit. And for many, writing is what they are meant to do."

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~Reprise~
Friday March 12, 1943
A WESTERN STAR
Shines Bright For America Tonight
Stephen Vincent. Benet

    FRESNO STATE -- In the spirit and beginnings of America, there is an essence of what America is and the sure knowledge of what it will be.
     In 1934 I began writing a long narrative poem about the western migration of peoples and more specifically the pioneers, first as they came to America and then as they spread out through America toward the West.
     It was to be a long poem - of three, four or possibly five books. I worked on this for some years, put it aside while I wrote other things, and took it up again later on.
     When the war came, I put it aside to do pieces on the war, speeches on the radio broadcasts and other things. A few months ago I put into shape, for possible publication, my book Western Star which begins..."Americans are always moving on.  It is an old Spanish custom gone astray, a sort of English fever, I believe, or just a mere desire to take French leave, I couldn't say. But when the whistle blows, they go away, somtimes there never was a whistle blown, but they don't care, for they can blow their own whistles of willow stick and rabbit bone, a dozen tunes but only one refrain...these are the notes they hear..."

    [Editor's Note: On Friday March 12, 1943, Stephen Vincent Benet died at his writing desk. Next to him on his desk were pencilled papers, notes for his new book Western Star on top of which was this message --"Now for my country that it still may live, all that I have, all that I am I'll give. It is not much beside the gift of the brave, and yet accept it since tis all I have." Binet was born July 22, 1898, in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, into a military family. His father had a wide appreciation for literature, and Benet's siblings, William Rose and Laura, also becmae writers. Benet attended Yale University where he published two collections of poetry. His studies were interrupted by a year of civilian military service; he worked as a cipher-clerk in the same department as James Thurber. He graduated from Yale in 1919, submitting his third volume of poems in place of a thesis. He published his first novel The Beginning of Wisdom in 1921. Benet was successful in many different literary forms, which included novels, short stories, screenplays, radio broadcasts. His most famous poem Western Star (Farrar & Rinehart Inc. New York - 1943) based on American history, won him the Pulitzer Prize. At the age of 44, Benét suffered a heart attack and died , in New York City.]

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    FRESNO STATE -- It’s too early to form a definitive opinion on the president’s plans for space. Broadly speaking, I support the president’s initiative. Nonetheless, there are concerns. Missions to the Moon and Mars are far into the future.
    That means the real outcome of this plan is in doubt. For the program to bear fruit, we’d need to sustain a commitment far beyond president Bush’s term in office, even if he’s reelected. In the current political and budgetary climate, serious spending increases are not workable.
    So most of the money will come out of the retirement of the shuttle program. That makes sense, since the shuttle is of limited use. But I worry that important scientific projects, like astronomical observation satellites, may be curtailed to pay for the Moon launch.
    Actually, I think the president has handled this issue well. I’m increasingly convinced that the real problem here is not with our national willingness to sustain a great project, or even with the choice between government or private funding of space ventures.
    The real problem here is the challenge of space itself. Space is not like the American West. It is much more physically challenging, relative to our current level of technology. Given the history of failed projects and cost overruns, it becomes increasingly clear that space may prove too expensive to conquer at our current (or even near-term future) technical level.
    Since we can’t know this with certainty, it makes sense to devise a program for the long term that may or may not be sustained, depending on how NASA produces. But again, the more I look into this, the more daunting it seems. Consider the Op Ed by Paul Davies in today’s New York Times (which Dennis Powell notes in his NRO piece).
    It proposes leaving astronauts to die on Mars as a cost effective way to explore the planet. Mars is looking a whole lot more like Mt. Everest than like California every day. But let’s not end on too pessimistic a note. Rand Simberg has put up a thoughtful response to my skeptical post of yesterday.
    I get more skeptical every day, but Simberg is still the man to go to for intelligent and creative ideas on how to conquer space. For all my doubts, I’d like him to succeed.

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    FRESNO STATE -- Communities with casino gambling have higher crime rates than communities that don't have casinos, according to researchers at the universities of Georgia and Illinois.
    There was no increase in murder rates, said UGA economics professor David Mustard, who co-authored the as-yet unpublished paper with economist Earl L. Grinols of the University of Illinois and Illinois graduate student Cynthia Hunt Dilley.
    But six other felony crimes did increase, Mustard said: aggravated assault, rape, burglary, auto theft, larceny and forcible robbery. Auto theft showed the sharpest increase -- 30 percent higher in counties with casinos -- followed by robbery, at 20 percent, according to the study.
    Overall, casinos push up the crime rate by nearly 8 percent, the study concludes. The researchers timed the release of their study to coincide with the final report of the National Gambling Impact Study Commission, which is expected today to propose steps to halt the spread of gambling.
    The higher crime rates don't show up right away, but tended to appear in the third year after a casino opened -- perhaps because it takes chronic gamblers that long to exhaust their resources, Grinols suggested. About 2 percent to 5 percent of the gamblers in casino areas can be classified as ''pathological'' or ''problem'' gamblers, according to Grinols.
    Earlier studies have shown conflicting results -- that crime stayed the same, increased or even decreased after casinos come in, Mustard said, and some experts have even argued that casinos cause crime to go down because they increase employment in an area.
    But those studies were limited by a small time frame or a small area of geographical study, he said. ''What makes our study unique is that it's the most exhaustive study on the subject,'' Mustard said.
    The researchers included census data from every county in the United States and looked at crime data over a 20-year period beginning in 1977. They also introduced statistical control factors to account for 50 variables that might affect crime rates, including things like the age of the population in the area, income levels, race and population growth.
    Nationally, crime rates have been steadily decreasing in the 1990s after steady increases in the 1970s and 1980s. The number of counties with casinos has increased from 14 in 1977, all in Nevada, to 167 in 1996.
    According to the national gambling commission, total legal wagers have grown to about $600 billion a year in the United States -- more than is spent by Americans on cars or groceries. And the poor bet more, according to the commission.
     According to the commission report, gamblers with household incomes $10,000 a year wager three times more money than those with household incomes exceeding $50,000 a year.
    Nationally, casino revenues were $26.3 billion in 1997, the commission says. But the increased crime came at a cost of some $12.1 billion annually -- about $63 for every adult American, according to the researchers.
    The point, said Mustard, is that ''What you want to do is evaluate the costs and benefits of the casinos. Crime is one of the costs, and you want to look at all the costs and all the benefits,'' he said. Mustard pointed out that the study was unfunded -- that the researchers took no money from either pro- or anti-gambling sources.

    [Editor's Note: Go to Yosemite News for latest local area casino up-dates. And for pro-con positions see Casino Economics.]

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   FRESNO STATE --  Within seconds after we meet, Gary Pruitt is apologizing profusely, digging his hands deep into the pockets of his blue jeans and confessing to a misunderstanding between him and his secretary that had him body surfing the day before instead of sitting down for an interview. Pruitt, the multimillionaire wunderkind CEO of the McClatchy Co., had come from the company's Sacramento headquarters to Orange County's $500-a-night Ritz Carlton beachfront resort to preside over a retreat for publishers and editors of his 11 dailies, coincidentally arriving a few weeks after the Wall Street Journal named his company as a candidate to buy the Orange County Register and its billion-dollar parent company, Freedom Communications Inc.
     Pruitt presented himself at the Ritz as he often does, a modern Candide, always positive, always on message, always looking as though he stepped from the pages of a Ralph Lauren catalog, running a company as trim and fit and athletic as he is. He has a smile that probably broke a hundred hearts in high school and an endearing goofy charm, stumbling over Hegel and rattling off Rolling Stone lyrics in the same conversation, likening his Wall Street strategy to a Lenny Kravitz tune for analysts, talking as guilelessly about journalism as he does about redecorating his office from the dark wood paneling of the previous regime to a streamlined modern gray and blue, with matching Expressionist paintings and a light fixture that his mentor and predecessor Erwin Potts told him looks vaguely pornographic.
     At 46, Pruitt represents the future of journalism, a new game whose rules have changed considerably from the '70s and '80s, when C.K. McClatchy led a company so aggressive it had more than a dozen libel suits pending against it. Back then, McClatchy paid some of the best salaries in the business and boasted a stable of newspapers with a "raw, heartfelt sense of belonging to a cause," as the company's octogenarian namesake--and its journalistic conscience--Jim McClatchy put it recently.
     Today, McClatchy papers are thoroughly modern and professionally designed newsgathering machines, heavier on features, sports and projects than they were, and far less willing to take down the big players that control the economic development of the markets McClatchy dominates. If C.K. McClatchy was a cowboy, then Gary Pruitt is a dairy farmer, more inclined to see his high-quality products graze and grow, with editors embracing the industry's latest trends--teams, public journalism, civic mapping, easy-to-read digests--anything to boost circulation and the company's reputation in the world of modern newspapers.
    When C.K. died in 1989, the family put Erwin Potts, then Pruitt in charge; in the last three decades, that triumvirate has presided over a company whose tumultuous transformation--from a family-owned nearly nonprofit to a publicly traded powerhouse--mirrors the turmoil of an industry far more focused on economic performance than on journalism. Over the years, McClatchy's vision has changed considerably, from its founders' decree to "always [be] fighting for the right no matter how powerfully entrenched wrong may be," to multiple visions and voices controlled by the publishers in each city where McClatchy papers operate daily monopolies.
     Pruitt aims to do what no other CEO of a publicly traded newspaper company has yet accomplished: to unravel the Gordian knot that confounds most of journalism these days, to figure out a way to make enough money to satisfy Wall Street's unrelenting demands while serving the public interest and redefining quality journalism.
     In the last five years, McClatchy has become an oft-cited standard-bearer for publicly traded newspaper companies, lauded for pledging to provide the journalistic equivalent of guns and butter--dedicated to expanding the company while continuing to invest in its newsrooms. The three Bees have won notice of late: in Sacramento, for exposing sex crimes at public universities; in Fresno, for exposing academic fraud at Fresno State; in Modesto, for exposing shady land deals.
 " For my money, they exemplify the best of chain ownership," says Jim Bettinger, director of the John S. Knight Fellowships for Professional Journalists at Stanford University. "They seem to be doing it right."
     Editors and reporters so admire Pruitt that in hundreds of interviews, only two people said anything critical about him, neither for publication. But despite their embrace of Pruitt, a significant number of veterans expressed serious doubts about the reign of professional management--now prevalent industrywide--about how those forces have hijacked McClatchy's once passionate and idealistic vision, while relegating Jim McClatchy to a tiny office, filled with family memorabilia, stacks of mail and Fed Ex boxes.
     Unlike the Chandlers, Hearsts, Sulzbergers and Grahams, no published history documents the McClatchys. Yet the family's grip on California's capital and vast Central Valley--its swing votes and rich agricultural center--historically has helped make the state largely Democratic, counterbalancing the Republicanism that drove the Chandler and Hearst empires in Los Angeles and San Francisco. But that influence has waned, as the Central Valley's largest cities have moved decidedly to the right, so much so that when the Sacramento Bee's publisher spoke out at a local university graduation about protecting civil liberties a few months after September 11, she was booed into silence.
     Pruitt's respected strategy is straightforward: Pay what it takes to acquire newspapers in growing regions, eschew all "national pretensions," as he has said, make the papers the best for their size, maintain the leading local Web site and boost advertising market share, all the while defusing unions, raising readership and tightly controlling expenses. "A company our size either has to grow or die," says David Zeeck, executive editor of the News Tribune in Tacoma, a midsize McClatchy daily. "It's gonna eat or get eaten by somebody. Gary talks about that all the time. You're either gonna be eaten or [be] an eater. We want to be an eater."
     Without resorting to highly public layoffs and their attendant morale and severance costs, Pruitt quietly has reduced the McClatchy workforce 6.9 percent through attrition since 2000, helping to contribute to record earnings in 2002 despite flat revenues.
     Among media conglomerates, McClatchy boasts the 10th-largest daily circulation, with newspapers in rapidly growing regions--Tacoma, on the southern part of Washington's Puget Sound; Raleigh, at the center of North Carolina's Research Triangle; ever-expanding Anchorage, Alaska; and, its most recent acquisition, the Star Tribune in Minneapolis.
    Pruitt promises to preserve the best of the past while protecting journalism in the future. And if Wall Street's demands seriously threaten journalism, he says, "We would consider removing ourselves from the public market," though that has yet to occur, he quickly adds. No McClatchy paper, Pruitt concedes, will "ever be the New York Times. But we'd like for each of them to be the best for their size."
     Five years ago, Pruitt stunned the newspaper world by secretly buying the Star Tribune for $1.19 billion--at the time the most money ever paid for an American newspaper--provoking a ripe and rousing refrain of ridicule from industry insiders. "I will prove them wrong over time," he petulantly told the New York Times, "and I look forward to doing that." In the years afterward, the company's stock price soared, putting Pruitt at the table next to Arthur Sulzberger Jr., Donald Graham and P. Anthony Ridder as a major player in the journalism business.
     Most everyone who knows Pruitt appears awestruck, mesmerized by the charisma he uses to charm journalists, executives and Wall Street analysts alike.
     There is no doubt Pruitt is sincere when he says, as he so often does, that "good journalism is good business." But just what good journalism is, who will define it and how, are central questions at McClatchy. Jim McClatchy, now 82, has said he wants the company to become a "nationally recognized example of integrity and quality in public life," one that produces newspapers "large and small, of great quality and great courage to lead our citizens to the better society they deserve."     
      
    [Editor's Note: This research study upon which this article is based was funded by a grant of the Ford Foundation. Senior American Journalism Review writer Susan Paterno has written about McClatchy's Bee, Knight Ridder, the Los Angeles Times and the Seattle Times. The article concludes that McClatchy--the company that owns the three Bees (Sacramento, Fresno and Modesto) as well as eight other dailies across the country [Anchorage Daily News, The Fresno Bee, The Modesto Bee, The Sacramento Bee, Minneapolis Star, North Carolina The News & Observer, South Carolina The Beaufort Gazette, South Carolina Hilton Island Packet, South Carolina Rock Hill The Herald, Washington Tri-City (Pasco,Kennewick, Richland) Tri-City Herald, and Washington Tacoma The News Tribune --has slipped, to some degree, from its early ideals but is still a better parent than the other chains. The full text of the review may be accessed at the University of Maryland's American Journalism Review. Volume: 25. Issue: 6. August-September 2003.]

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©1958-2004 Copyright by The Bulldog Newspaper at Fresno State

    WASHINGTON, D.C -- It may seem strange to say this, but perhaps the Republican Party would have been better off under President Dole. He is too old, too moderate, and too irrelevant for the job, it is true. But his presence as leader of the party, and his ability to help Republicans get legislation passed, would have preserved a coalition that is quickly breaking apart.
    The conservative movement was born as a makeshift alliance between three distinct schools of thought: anti-Communists, libertarians, and traditional moralists. The Cold war and the ever-present threat of the Soviet Union held it together for thirty-five years.
     Now that the Russians aren’t coming, the libertarians and the moralists are duking it out for possession of the party. The moralists are better organized, and tend to control the party machine. On the other hand, they are encumbered by a moral asceticism that does not go over well with the electorate at large. Libertarian and moderate candidates have a much easier time winning office.
     Practical considerations suggest that a libertarian platform would be more likely to win office; yet such a platform is inconsistent with moral conservatism, and would alienate the one sure Republican constituency. What is the party to do?
     This is a serious question. As militia groups and the religious ultra-orthodox propose armed revolt against the American government, it seems clear that we are at a critical juncture. Some means must be found of accommodating the right, without alienating the center.
     A compromise would be easier if the far right would tone down its militant rhetoric, even if they didn’t change their policies. It would also be easier if moderates wouldn’t call Ralph Reed a Nazi every time he mentions God. But an agreement must be reached. If it isn’t, it will be the end of the Republican Party. It may also be the end of the American Republic.

Comment

©1958-2004 Bulldog Newspaper Foundation. All Rights Reserved.

    NEW YORK -- The controversy over the pairings for last week's Bowl Championship Series once again raised the question of the most appropriate manner to stage postseason football for National Collegiate Athletic     Association's Division I-A teams. Now in its sixth year, the BCS system, which in effect limits participation in the four most lucrative bowl games to members of the six strongest athletics conferences, has been plagued with debate since its inception.
     At issue are not just the shortcomings of the computerized rankings, but also revenue, control of college sports, and rising costs and abuses in college programs.
     A bit of history might be useful for those engaged in the current discussion. It is ironic that the new year marks the 10th anniversary of the appointment by the NCAA Board of Directors of an ad hoc special committee of presidents and chancellors, athletics directors, faculty representatives, students, sports writers, and coaches who worked from January to June 1994 to study the bowl championship. As chancellor of the University of California at Los Angeles, I served as chairman.
     After reviewing volumes of data and conducting a number of wide-ranging discussions, the committee held a straw poll and voted, by an overwhelming majority, to support an eight-team, seven-game playoff system that would rely on six bowl games.
    Four would be played on January 1 at four bowl arenas to determine the pairings for two semifinal games to be played the following week in the two remaining bowls. The national championship would be played on the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday in mid-January in one of the major metropolitan stadiums. The eight participants each year would include the champions of five or six major conferences and two or three at-large selections.
     The recommendation would also have eliminated the preseason games, which then were, and still are, allowed. Therefore, our playoff format would only have called for two institutions to play one more game than permitted at the time.
     The intent of the proposal was to: (a) provide a playoff involving participants who would be required to win their conference championship to get there; (b) ensure the continuation of a strong, financially viable bowl structure (each of the designated bowls would be a "premier" game because each would play a major part in championship determination); (c) provide coordination of the postseason format by member NCAA Division I-A institutions, rather than by television companies and commercial sponsors; (d) provide increased revenue for a broad range of Division I-A programs within a controlled postseason environment; and (e) preserve the quality of the bowls and community interests they served.
     Financially, the 1994 proposal would have partially used projected increases in revenue to indemnify the dollar returns earned by the participating bowl associations and to provide safety-net income to subsidize the limited number of pre-January 1 bowl games, in order to eliminate the need for teams having to "buy" their invitations to those games with commitments to purchase a certain number of tickets. It would also have provided for sharing some of the revenues with the nonparticipating Division I-A institutions and the other NCAA divisions.
     The proposal was widely circulated and well received by the sports media, as well as by many in and out of intercollegiate athletics. But it did not survive. The 1994 committee was disbanded by the NCAA before making its formal recommendation because of a combination of factors: (a) a number of university presidents believed the playoff would result in the commercialization of postseason college football; (b) many college presidents argued that the playoff would substantially expand the number of games being played and, with postseason games spilling over into a new term, would negatively affect academic performance; and (c) the commissioners of the leading Division I-A conferences wanted a playoff they could control, which (with more than $13-million at stake for each team in the main bowl games) would benefit their conferences financially. In short, it became clear that no playoff proposal would be accepted at that time.
     Instead, a few years later, we got the BCS, which substitutes computer rankings for a playoff. It is, at the very least, no better than the playoff proposal in responding to the concerns that were raised against that idea and, in many cases, much worse. Additionally, it does not produce a widely accepted national champion.
     With regard to the concern about overcommercialization, I would merely point to what has happened to the commercialization of the bowls, the games, and the national championship under the BCS structure. Will the so-called national championship be played in the Sugar Bowl, or is it the Nokia Sugar Bowl? (Some of the bowls carry only the name of the sponsor, for instance, the GMAC Bowl.)
     Who controls the stadium ads, which are usually more visible than the teams on the fields? How many more commercial timeouts and minutes of advertising are there now than 10 years ago? The final straw, in my mind, is the fact that the National Championship Trophy is now named for a commercial sponsor selected each year by the network televising the bowl games.
     Thus the Sears National Championship Trophy of 2002 became the Circuit City National Championship Trophy of 2003 and now the ADT National Championship Trophy, which the security-services company will sponsor for three years.
     By contrast, "March Madness," the basketball-championship tournament, is run by the NCAA, which controls arena advertisements, exercises substantial influence over on-the-air advertising, and has generally played down the commercial character of an enormously popular event.
     As to the added-games issue, at last count there are now 28 postseason bowls, compared with 19 in the pre-BSC era. There are now 18 more institutions playing an additional game than there were when our committee was disbanded. Don't those constitute extra games? What about the extension of the season from 11 to 12 games, which occurred this year? Presumably that was because of a quirk in the calendar but, with the added income that the change has produced, isn't it likely that the extension will become permanent?
     There is no response, however, to the last basis of opposition to the playoff proposal -- control of postseason football and the revenue that comes with it. The Big Six commissioners got what they wanted and we, the colleges and the public, are stuck with it.
     Much has changed since 1994. One television company (ABC/ESPN) now holds the television rights to all but three of the 28 bowl games, yet there is no organized negotiation on behalf of the bowl-game associations, except for the four BCS games. The major commercial-sponsorship entitlements of the four BCS games are now primarily controlled by ABC and not by the bowl associations or the institutions involved.
     Further, the lack of a requirement for the networks to telecast the bowl associations' accompanying parades has led to the cancellation of the Orange Bowl Parade altogether and the diminution of the Fiesta Bowl Parade to a lower-tier cable station. Even the venerable Tournament of Roses Parade, an American tradition and a favorite for decades on New Year's morning, has found itself much diminished.
     Recently, open arguments between "BCS" and "non-BCS" institutions, conducted by Division I-A presidents and chancellors over issues of control, financing, and bowl appearances, have resulted in Congressional hearings and threats of antitrust litigation or Congressional controls on college sports. The rising costs of big-time intercollegiate athletics, the mounting number of academic scandals making headlines, and the overcommercialization associated, in particular, with college football have all stirred up a new round of critiques of college athletics, led by the Knight Foundation Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics.
     With so many ills needing to be treated, some people will say the question of postseason football is not high on the list of priorities. One of my dear friends, a former president of two different universities, recently asked me, "Why do we want a champion, anyway?" The fact is, there will be a champion selected. That being the case, let's make the process the best it can be, especially if it can result in resolving some other problems in college sports. A playoff system could be used to reduce the number of games, rein in commercialization, and help distribute the income of postseason football more fairly.
     Those of us involved in the 1994 NCAA committee were aware that our proposal might fall into the category of a "good idea whose time has not yet come." Others may still question whether it was a good idea at all. But, as the debate about the structure of the Division I-A postseason continues, it might be useful to re-examine how such a proposal might benefit educational institutions, college athletes, and fans alike. Has its time come?  I think so.
    

       [Editor's Note: Charles E. Young served as chancellor of the University of California at Los Angeles from 1968 to 1997 and just retired as president of the University of Florida. He is a member of the current Knight Foundation Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics and was a member of the two previous Knight commissions.]

Comment

©1958-2004 Copyright by The Bulldog Newspaper at Fresno State

January 2, 2004
So, Pete Rose Admits
Baseball Bets, Many!
By Fay Vincent

    NEW YORK -- So word is that Pete Rose finally admits in his new book that he bet on baseball. I guess I am supposed to feel vindicated since he spent the last 14 years calling John Dowd and me names. Mr. Dowd was the baseball lawyer who did the investigation of Mr. Rose and prepared a report we're now told was accurate. Next we're likely to have the spectacle of Mr. Rose being embraced by Bud Selig, the baseball commissioner, and, like the Prodigal Son, ushered to the front row of baseball's most honored citizens.
     Pardon me while I rise to urge some caution. Ever since St. Augustine set the bar pretty high, there has been a certain style to confessional tomes. Now we have a mea culpa by Mr. Rose and no saint is he. Augustine, having lived it up, saw the light and wrote with a sense of guilt and regret. He even anguished over having stolen a pear. Early reports are that Mr. Rose confronts his past with very little remorse. Between him and Augustine, there is little doubt whose book will live longer.
     Why are we hearing from Mr. Rose now? Credit Mr. Selig for insisting on the admission of betting before letting Mr. Rose in baseball again. It's possible that Mr. Rose wants some of the big money being paid top managers like Joe Torre. But I think there is more at work here. A player has 20 years after he last played to be elected by the baseball writers to the Hall of Fame. After that time has run out, the election can be done only by the living members of the Hall. Thus, Mr. Rose, who last played in 1986, is running out of time. He knows his best shot is with the writers, many of whom share the view that the only conduct that counts is what took place on the field. The Hall of Famers are a cranky lot who last year failed to elect Marvin Miller, who led the players union and whose credentials are solid gold. So Mr. Rose, a careful historian of the game, is playing the odds wisely. Nothing wrong so far.
     Now the issue for Mr. Selig is what to do. I suggest that if Mr. Rose is to be reinstated to full rights in baseball, there should be a two-year period of transition. During this time, I would require Mr. Rose to travel the baseball highway to spell out to youngsters and fans why gambling is a threat to the game and why his decisions as manager were corrupted by betting on one game and not another. The sincerity of his redemption can be tested and he will have done some public service to earn his way back. After all, the issue now is not what is best for Mr. Rose, but what is best for baseball.
     The two-year delay in reinstatement will give him one shot at being elected by the writers. And then, if he fails that, he may receive the honor via the Hall of Famers themselves. And I can live with that, as I suspect most fans would, though I am not at all certain his election is a sure bet, if I may be excused that term.
    I also suggest that Mr. Selig pardon all those whose names are still on the ineligible list, including Max Lanier, banned for jumping to the Mexican League to make more money, a Phillies owner who bet on his team and was tossed out and, of course, Shoeless Joe Jackson, whose participation in the Black Sox betting scandal might in today's jurisprudence be excused by his diminished capacity to have known fully what he was doing.
     Perhaps this will be the end of the whole sorry Pete Rose case. As the baseball commmissioner at the time, Bart Giamatti, said when he announced that Mr. Rose had agreed to banishment, baseball has been hurt, badly, by Mr. Rose's actions. Now as we confront his plea for mercy and a second chance, we ought to remind ourselves of Mr. Giamatti's wisdom in identifying the pain inflicted by such a great player. I only wish Mr. Rose had a better sense of why Augustine's "Confessions" strike such a chord with the rest of us sinners.

    [Editor's Note: Fay Vincent was commissioner of Major League Baseball from 1989 to 1992].

Comment

©1958-2004 Copyright by The Bulldog Newspaper at Fresno State

     FRESNO STATE -- In a recent university sports economy research paper by Mark Hales on the Bowl Championship Series [BCS] and other bowl associations he characterized the past decade as one of organized bamboozle, corruption, and sham especially so, within NCAA College Football.
    "Rise and Shout, the Cougars are out” of the BCS, thus they have no chance to win a national championship. As the Brigham Young University Fight Song says, BYU and every other non-BCS school are barred from competing for a national title because they are not within one of the six elite BCS conference.
    Under the current BCS regime, six football conferences, four bowls, and one network have essentially prevented all other football conferences and teams from participating in the product of the national championship game. Under the current established formulas, BCS schools are automatically qualified for a BCS game while non-BCS schools are practically barred from entry. With both horizontal and vertical arrangements occurring between specific bowls and conferences, the antitrust laws of the Sherman Act are significantly violated.
    Under this independent bowl system, only nine times in 45 years did one bowl comprise the top two teams. Since the top two teams seldom meet in a bowl game, the national title was often split between two teams; split championships occur when different recognized polls declared separate teams the national champion.
     By using only the Associated Press (AP) and Coaches Poll, since 1950 there has been 10 times in which the national title was split between two teams. When using all recognized polls, the number of split champions increased to 44 times during the same period. That is only seven times in over 50 years, where division I-A football had a consensus “national champion.”
    There continues to be opposition within the NCAA to administer the post season of division I-A football. The NCAA claims to be concerned with the potential negative effects: disruption of student-athletes, academic calendars, lengthening of the season, increasing the pressure to win, and the negative effect on the bowl games.
     Despite most of these concerns, the NCAA’s Division I-AA, Division II, Division III, and other college athletic associations have successfully established championship games through a playoff format amidst similar concerns.
    Until the early 1990’s, the entire bowl process of selecting football teams was disorganized and often chaotic. To remain competitive in attracting marketable teams bowls often selected schools prior to the conclusion of the season, frequently as early as mid-October.
     In some situations, bowls made informal arrangements prior to the season with a particular team based on historical success or the notoriety of a particular coach.
     These early selections frequently led to mediocre teams playing in historically attractive bowl games and rarely matched up the top two teams in the nation. Within the past decade alone, four different systems have attempted to ...More!

[Editor's Note: Statement regarding the Final BCS Standings Dec. 7, 2003 -- FROM PACIFIC-10 COMMISSIONER TOM HANSEN -- "... it is most unfortunate that elements of the BCS Standings have overruled the two polls and taken USC out of the National Championship Game because it will generate criticism of the BCS system, which the Pac-10 has consistently supported."As always, the BCS will review this year's results and determine whether changes in the Standings structure seem warranted prior to the 2004 college football season." ]

Comment

©1958-2004 Copyright by The Bulldog Newspaper at Fresno State

    FRESNO STATE -- Over a century ago, our leaders in the United States decided if they wanted a tomorrow that was better than today, they were going to have to invest in it.    
     Reeling from the expense and devastation of the Civil War, the nation was poor. The only investment capital available was land. Our leaders used land to foster the development of a network of universities that produced the Cornells, the Purdues and the all the other great land grant universities. Their graduates are testimony to the wisdom of the investment—they designed roads and missiles; created vaccines and life-saving medical procedures; and developed the safest, most abundant food supply the world has ever known. These men and women, who contributed greatly to making the 1900’s the American Century, likely would not have attended college without these fine institutions.
     After World War II, the United States again faced great challenges. To make the future better and to reward those who fought in the war, the GI Bill was enacted. That investment allowed millions of veterans to earn college degrees and their subsequent successes raised the standard of living of the entire nation for generations.
The GI Bill and the Higher Education Act made much of the prosperity and progress in the last half of the twentieth century possible.
     As we look ahead today, the future again gives our nation pause. Rising unemployment, increasing loss of industry to off shore sites, poverty, health care needs, and a host of other indicators give us concern. We look to our national leadership to make the kinds of wise investments that will brighten and secure our future.
     In recent years, our leaders have not stepped up and made the investment in the future that we need. They have taken the “easy way” and transferred the cost of higher education to students and universities.
     Universities have tried to help students with the costs. Even with diminishing state appropriations, aging campus infrastructure, and skyrocketing technology costs, 38 percent of all undergraduates in the United States are still paying less than $4,000 per year for tuition. Unfortunately, it is not these university efforts that make the national press.
     Students have stepped up too. According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, in 1999-2000, 76 percent of full time dependent students attending public non-doctoral institutions held a job while attending school. They worked an average of 22 hours per week during school and more hours each summer as well. About one-fifth of them are working 35 hours per week or more. The students are doing their part.
     Still, the national average of undergraduate student loan debt has nearly doubled in the last decade. As public policy has shifted from grants to loans, particularly hard hit have been the sons and daughters of the poor; single parents; those in some of our most essential, but low paid public service jobs; minorities; and those who need to retrain for the new economy.
     Today the debt load for a student finishing college is about $17,000. That is a staggering amount for those who want to go into crucial, but low paid professions. In many cases, it means graduates simply cannot afford to take jobs in nursing, social work, public health, public safety or teaching. Since women have traditionally held many of these jobs, and generally have fewer resources, they have been especially thwarted by the shift from grants to loans.
     Our leaders have justified the change in financial aid from grants to loans by saying that education is a private benefit. Indeed it is, but it is also a public good. When one person advances, all of us are benefited. Economists love to prove this, and they can.
If we are going to have the future that each of us wants for ourselves and our nation, we have to give more of our citizens, young and the old, the opportunity to access higher education. We cannot just hope for a decent future. We must make a major investment in the people and the institutions that can build and drive the new economy.
     The United States can afford to make the investment. If Congress appropriated an amount equal to the GI Bill, in today’s dollars, it would cost approximately $30 billion per year. That same Congress has told us repeatedly that the nation can well afford a tax cut of $1.3 trillion and an $87 billion dollar to Iraq. The math is not complicated. We know we can afford to invest in our future.
     Many of the young people who went to Iraq were college students. Many had joined their local National Guard Unit to help pay some of the costs of their education. But when the nation needed them, all of them offered us their lives. Over 140 students have already left my campus. Few of them have returned, and more are being activated. I, for one, don’t want to have to tell any of them that the best the nation can do to help with their higher education is to raise their loan limits. The math is not complicated. They know we can afford to invest in their future.
     As the United States makes its way into the twenty-first century, it is imperative that we look beyond the current budget cycle, the next election, the lobbying of the loan industry, and anything else that takes our eyes off the future.     
     A good future requires investment. A Higher Education Reauthorization Act that puts the dollars on the table to eliminate the crushing burden of excessive loans, that re-opens doors to progress with grants for students, that provides decent facilities in which learning can occur, and that funds research to enrich us all is still the best blue chip investment for this nation.
     Nobody else is going to invest in the future of the United States. We have to do that ourselves, and as citizens, we have to demand that it be done. We know the return on that investment. The math is not complicated.

        [Editor's Note: See this link for an update on the role of military in higher education. Peggy Gordon Elliott Miller, Ph.D. has been the president of South Dakota State University since January 1, 1998.]

Comment

©1958-2004 Copyright by The Bulldog Newspaper at Fresno State

Wednesday, December. 31, 2003
UCLA's Ball,
USC's Rogers
Win Morris Trophy
Dave Hirsch PAC-10 Public Relations

     WALNUT CREEK, Calif.-- PACIFIC-10 CONFERENCE--Named defensive end Dave Ball of UCLA and offensive tackle Jacob Rogers of USC as winners of the Morris Trophy as outstanding defensive and offensive linemen in the Conference. Defensive end Dave Ball of UCLA and offensive tackle Jacob Rogers of USC have been named winners of the 24th annual Morris Trophy.
     The Morris Trophy is a unique award given to the outstanding offensive and defensive linemen in the Pacific-10 Conference. What makes the award unique is the selection procedure, which has the starting offensive linemen in the Conference voting for the defensive winner and vice versa. It is truly a players' award.
     Ball, a 6-foot-6, 275-pound senior from Dixon, Calif., is the national leader in quarterback sacks with 16.5. He leads the Pac-10 in tackles for loss (20.5) as well as sacks and ranks second in the Conference in fumbles forced with five. His 16.5 quarterback sacks established a UCLA season record and he also holds the Bruin career record at 30.5.
     Ball has already been named a first-team All-America selection by both the American Football Coaches Association and the Football Writers Association of America. He was a unanimous All-Pac-10 selection and was voted the Pac-10 Defensive Player of the Year by the league's head coaches. He is a finalist for three major awards--the Bronko Nagurski Award (top defensive player), the Rotary Lombardi Awards (top lineman) and the Ted Hendricks Defensive End of the Year Award.
     Rogers, a 6-foot-6, 305-pound senior from Oxnard, Calif., becomes the eighth USC offensive lineman to win the Morris Trophy in the 24-year history of the award. Rogers is recognized as one of the top offensive linemen in the country after three years of starting at the left tackle spot for the Trojans. He is a two-time first-team All-Pac-10 selection and was a unanimous pick to the team this season in voting conducted by the league's head coaches. Rogers also has been named a first-team All-America selection by both the American Football Coaches Association and the Football Writers Association of America.

Comment

Wednesday, December. 31, 2003
SILICON VALLEY
FOOTBALL CLASSIC
BEATS ODDS TO SURVIVE
By Mark Purdy
Mercury News

     SAN JOSE -- On the first play from scrimmage, Fresno State completed a pass -- to a UCLA defensive tackle. And thus was the fourth annual Silicon Valley Football Classic inaugurated Tuesday night.
     No, these were not the best two teams in America. They weren't even the 40th- and 41st-best teams in America. But as the evening progressed, San Jose's most prestigious college bowl game -- also, its only one -- proved once more to be an entertaining, if sloppy, production.
     In fact, Fresno State's 17-9 victory pretty much lived up to the pregame prediction of Bulldogs Coach Pat Hill.``It's going to be a quagmire out there again,'' Hill had said.
    He meant the muddy field conditions at Spartan Stadium, not the UCLA offensive game plan or Fresno State's troubled kicking game. But what is a lower-tier bowl game for, if not to showcase two teams trying to overcome their dreadful weaknesses while creating surprises for young and old alike?
     For instance: The UCLA defense was ranked second best in the Pacific-10 Conference this season -- but Fresno State racked up 260 offensive yards in the first half and dominated the line of scrimmage most of the evening.
     For another instance: Fresno State hadn't endured a blocked punt all season but gave up one in the third quarter that turned into a safety when the ball landed out of the end zone.
     After all the twists and turns, however, the Bulldogs finished on top. And by doing so, Fresno State proved . . . well, something.
    One national Web site, noting that UCLA came into the game with a 6-6 won-lost record while Fresno State was 8-5, labeled this the worst of this season's 28 bowl matchups. So presumably, Fresno State can proclaim itself the 55th-best team in the nation. Given how ugly some of the other bowl games have been, that hardly seems fair. So let's put the Bulldogs in the top 50, at least.
     Also, this was the first time a Fresno State football team has defeated UCLA in six attempts, dating to 1927. That has to be a good feeling.
     And finally, because Fresno State has played in all four of the Silicon Valley Football Classic games, it's probably time to award the Bulldogs' seniors honorary San Jose citizenship.
     Yet the biggest victory Tuesday was that the Silicon Valley Football Classic survived another year, against all odds and to the bafflement of many.
     We all know the deal. There has never been any demonstrated local public demand for the game, which is barely a blip on the Bay Area sports radar screen. But the San Jose Convention and Visitors' Bureau has propped up the event, for the benefit of the local hospitality industry. The city's hotel rooms don't exactly fill up over the holidays, so any revenue from bowl visitors is welcome.
     The SVFC was created and originally driven by San Jose State, which hoped the game would give it more clout with the Western Athletic Conference. That didn't exactly happen, and when the 30,000 Spartan Stadium seats were barely one-third occupied for last year's game between Fresno and Georgia Tech, the assumption was that if the 2003 Silicon Valley Football Classic were even played, it would surely be the last one.
     That doesn't appear to be the case. In fact, this might be the year the game actually gained some traction. When UCLA was invited after losing its final four regular-season games, the assumption was that only a few dozen Bruins fans might show up. Instead, some 6,000 folks in powder blue filled the east stands of the stadium.
     In the end, there were 20,126 tickets distributed -- which was the official announced attendance -- and from the looks of it, about 17,000 of the tickets were actually used.
     For this, you can credit the bowl game's new board, headed by Sharks CEO Greg Jamison. San Jose State is more or less out of the bowl's picture entirely, replaced by a staff hired at the behest of Convention and Visitors' Bureau officials. The event's new executive director, C. Jay Key, also managed to sign up some corporate partners that hadn't participated in previous years.
     He also helped organize some social events around the game, including organized tailgate parties for both schools.
    In a brief halftime interview, Jamison promised that the game would be played again next year. But even he knows that until the stadium is close to full on a regular basis, the Silicon Valley Football Classic can't be called anything close to a fixture on the South Bay scene.
     ``If the bowl becomes part of the fabric of the community, that's when we will know,'' Jamison said. ``The game is good for the city. But it takes time to grow.''
     Of course, there were no complaints from Fresno State's players or Hill, who is SVFC's biggest cheerleader -- literally. From the first quarter onward, Hill frequently took off his hat and gestured with his arms to fire up the Bulldogs fans seated behind the Fresno State bench.
     It wasn't needed. Fresno State's fans were into it all the way. This was an amplified version of the annual South Bay class warfare between Stanford and San Jose State, where the underdog state university in an underdog conference is matched up against the rich Pac-10 school with the more prestigious name.
     Hill is fighting the good fight at Fresno State, trying to gain recognition for his school by playing against any team, any time. But the Bruins hadn't played the Bulldogs since the 2000 season and have no intention of doing so in the near future. As Fresno State tackle Dartangon Shack told the Fresno Bee the other day, he never expected to get another chance at playing UCLA in his lifetime.
     ``They get all the fame and we get the leftovers,'' Shack said. ``That's what we're fighting for, a little respect within our state.''
    Respect, the Bulldogs got Tuesday night. As for the Silicon Valley Football Classic, it's still trying. But it may have gotten off life support. That's progress.


                © 2003 Mercury News and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.

Comment

    FRESNO STATE -- Alice Knox Eaton writes in her column this week "Faith, Persistence and Luck" (Chron of Higher Ed) that in her first year on a university tenure track job in English, her department asked her to head up a search committee for a new hire. Eaton had been one of 166 applicants for her position, and they ended up with nearly 100 for this new opening.
     It was not what many Ph.D.'s would consider a plum job. It's a small college with a heavy teaching load of four courses each semester, half of them in freshman composition. The pile of applications that accumulated in the department's office exuded an air of desperation. And the legion of English Ph.D.'s who will converge on the Modern Language Association's annual meeting later this month know it well, too.
     Eaton told reporters this week, "For me, ending up where I am somehow required years of crisis, and I am happy, even at peace, to be here at last. I must trust that job candidates will find for themselves a way to survive the cruelties of the job market, and emerge, battle-scarred perhaps, but intact."
     I will add my insight to Eaton's. In a slow economy like this one, it can be difficult to land even an entry-level job. To those who feel stymied in their job searches or frustrated by the lack of openings, I recommend temporary office work as a strategy for breaking into a new field.
     Many graduate students are familiar with temping as a way to earn quick money during university vacations, but temping can also be a way to audition for a full-time job at the company of your choice.     
     In fact, while some employers might resist hiring a seemingly overqualified Ph.D. for a full-time, entry-level position, they have no such qualms about hiring a Ph.D. in a temporary position.

     [Editor's Note: Alice Knox Eaton is an assistant professor of English at Springfield College in Springfield, Mass.]

Comment

December 27, 2003
Fresno State's Bad News Dogs
By The Bulldog News Staff

Clips from the Chronicle of Higher Education:

2/14/2003 Fresno State Criticized for Invitations to Radical Environmentalists
...Fresno State Criticized for Invitations to Radical Environmentalists California State University at Fresno has come under fire for planning a conference on "revolutionary environmentalism" that includes participants associated ...

3/7/2003 Fresno State Faces Academic Scandal
...Fresno State Faces Academic Scandal A team statistician wrote 17 papers for basketball players at California State University at Fresno and was paid off by a sports agent, according to a report last month in The Fresno ...

5/11/1994 Athletes Investigated for Food-Stamp Fraud
...Athletes Investigated for Food-Stamp Fraud By Debra E. Blum Seven football players on full athletic scholarship at Fresno State University fraudulently received food-stamp benefits intended for homeless people last academic year, according ...

5/2/1997 Fresno State Athlete Sues Paper Over Story on Point-Shaving
...ATHLETICS NOTES Fresno State Athlete Sues Paper Over Story on Point-Shaving By Jim Naughton A basketball player at California State University at Fresno has sued The Fresno Bee, charging that the newspaper libeled him in stories about ...

1/28/1995 Fresno Flips for 'Tark the Shark' Despite Coach's Reputation
...mall on the sort of sunny, 75-degree day that comes all too rarely during Fresno's stifling summers. Jeanne Alburn, a Fresno State alumna, drove for an hour from Visalia, Cal., to get a signed T-shirt for her husband.

1/22/1999 Martin Luther King, Jr., to Be Honored at Fresno State
... Martin Luther King, Jr., to Be Honored at Fresno State Fresno, Cal. The campus of California State University here planned to unveil a bronze statue of Martin Luther King, Jr., this week, in honor of the slain civil-rights leader's ...

5/2/2003 3 Universities Announce Cutbacks in Sports
...55-percent men and 45-percent women, compared with a 54-46 ratio in the undergraduate student body. Earlier in the same week, Fresno State announced that it would give

9/22/1995 Athletics Director to Move From Fresno to Santa Barbara
...at Fresno, has taken the same job at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Mr. Cunningham, who had been at Fresno State for nine years, was in the running to head sports programs at several colleges in recent months. He had ...

6/4/1999 California State's Division I Colleges Struggle to Meet Gender-Equity Goals
...from dropping men's wrestling, or even capping the number of men on the team, after wrestlers sued the university. Fresno State is furthest from meeting the requirements for program expenses and scholarship budgets, largely because ...

3/28/2003 Foul Shots: Sportswriters on the Basketball Scandals
...of Rhode Island. He was suspended from the Georgia team in January 2002, after a woman filed rape charges against him. At Fresno State, where Jerry Tarkanian was the basketball coach and his son was assistant coach, the team statistician ..

3/28/2003 When the President Is Part of the Problem
...were punished for violations that had occurred on his watch. Three years later, Mr. Welty hired Mr. Tarkanian, a Fresno State alumnus and the overwhelming popular choice in the community. "Our search committee recommended him, and the ...

3/21/1997 2 Probes of Alleged Point Shaving Roil College Basketball
...Arizona State, said the university would cooperate with the F.B.I., but that it had not yet been asked to do so. Officials at Fresno State are conducting their investigation in conjunction with the Western Athletic Conference and the ...

3/27/1998 Problems Dog California State U. at Fresno's Basketball Team
...who said he did not watch the report, labeled it "unfair" because it failed to mention that in response to the team's problems, Fresno State had "developed one of the most stringent codes of conduct in America, and has successfully ...

3/14/2003 2 Colleges End Basketball Early
...and I believe it is in the best long-term interest of the basketball program and the university," Mr. Welty said in a statement. Fresno State clinched the regular-season Western Athletic Conference title over the weekend with a win ...

10/7/1992 A Poet of the Industrial Heartland
...poetic achievements" from the American Council for the Arts and the American Poetry Association. Mr. Levine arrived at Fresno State in 1958. Over the years he has spent periods at several institutions, including Columbia, Princeton, ...

12/19/2003 A Hard Year in College Sports
...standards so that incoming players with very poor SAT scores and very good high-school grades can be eligible. April 15: Fresno State announces plans to drop men's cross-country, soccer, and indoor track and field, as well as women's ...

7/16/1999 Gang Warfare in Academe
...I have known for 30 years, was very happy to hear that fear, envy, and Schadenfreude exist at many other institutions besides Fresno State. George W. Raney Chair Department of Linguistics Professor of Linguistics California State University ...

3/26/1999 Far-Flung Members Debate Future of Western Athletic Conference
... (Athletics) and Texas Christian might try to persuade some members of Conference USA to jump ship and join a new midwestern league. Fresno State, meanwhile, is rumored to be pursuing a spot in the Mountain West. Athletics directors and presidents ...

4/27/1994 ...From The Universe, a newspaper at Brigham Young University: "What do the players and coaches of the WAC think of BYU? . "Fresno State head coach Jim Sweeny on BYU's defense and playing BYU at home: "`If our defense was as good as BYU's ...

1/14/2000 Novel Corporate Deal Will Finance New Basketball Arena for U. of Maryland
...Texas Tech University and SBC Communications. Save Mart Supermarkets, a grocery-store chain based in Modesto, Calif., is paying Fresno State $20-million over 20 years for the right to the name of the Bulldogs' new basketball arena, ...

9/3/1999 What You Should Know About This Year's Freshmen
...fall? Telephone calls to several of the students listed on the Platteville Web site were not returned. Era of Ferment at Fresno State Some students are versed in the art of guzzling wine. Students at California State University at Fresno ...

6/17/1992 California Colleges Brace for Big Cuts in State Financing
...cut or eliminate any programs or departments. Thomas J. Ebert, president of the California Faculty Association's chapter at Fresno State University, which is also experiencing widespread cuts and layoffs, said a huge budget cut would ...

4/18/2003 IRS Ruling on Naming Rights for Facilities May Jeopardize Status of Some Tax-Exempt Bonds
...the Value City Arena at the Jerome Schottenstein Center. Deborah Adishian-Astone, executive director of auxiliary services at Fresno State, says that the university used tax-exempt bonds to finance the Save Mart Center, but that the ...

6/6/2003 Cutting the Field: As Colleges Eliminate Teams, the Lessons Athletes Learn Are Losing Out to Commercial Interests
...culture we live in, people favor the entertainment sports over the participation sports," says Bob Fraley, track coach at Fresno State since 1980. "People are willing to spend money on entertainment, but participation sports cost money.

Comment

    FRESNO STATE -- Dr. Harold H. Haak, 68, former president of Fresno Pacific University, and CSU Fresno suffered a stroke and lapsed into a coma earlier on Christmas Day.
     A spokesperson for Dr. Welty, John Kaiser, told reporters that Dr. Haak had suffered what was thought to have been an allergy spell and was admitted to St. Agnes Hospital.
     A hospital spokesperson reported that Haak has been placed on a respirator to assist him in normal breathing.
     Dr. Haak officially retired in 1991 after 10 years at the top administrator post of the university.
    During his tenure in office, the Fresno State's academic programs achieved praise, the Madden Library was expanded, and athletics programs were accepted into the WAC.
    In over 40 years in  higher education Haak served also as a professor and later as chancellor at University Colorado at Denver. He holds the bachelor's and master's from University of Wisconsin and a Ph.D. from Princeton.

Comment

December 19, 2003
Recording Industry's Rocky Road
By Thomas Hobbs, Staff Writer

    WASH., DC -- In a surprise decision Friday, a U.S. appeals court overturned a decision in favor of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). The three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that Internet service providers can’t be held responsible for material that passes through their Internet network.
    Earlier this year, U.S. District Judge John D. Bates approved use of subpoenas by the RIAA, forcing one service provider, Verizon, to turn over names and addresses of at least four Internet subscribers. Since then, Verizon, Comcast, and many other ISPs have identified dozens of subscribers to music industry lawyers. These tactics have served as the basis for hundreds of lawsuits filed against individual Internet users all over the U.S.
    In Friday’s ruling, Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg indicated the RIAA's campaign oversteps the bounds of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which Congress approved in 1998. The DMCA does not give copyright holders the ability to subpoena customer names from Internet providers without filing a formal lawsuit.
    Judge Ginsburg wrote in his decision the “…DMCA betrays no awareness whatsoever that Internet users might be able to directly exchange files containing copyrighted works. It is not the province of the courts to rewrite the DMCA in order to make it fit a new and unforeseen Internet architecture, no matter how damaging that development has been to the music industry.”
     The RIAA, nevertheless, vows to continue its campaign and added that the decision "unfortunately means we can no longer notify illegal file sharers before we file lawsuits against them to offer the opportunity to settle outside of litigation," according to a statement from RIAA president Cary Sherman. "We can and will continue to file copyright infringement lawsuits against file sharers who engage in illegal activity."
    Since the development of Internet file sharing programs like Napster, Kazaa, LimeWire, and others, the recording industry has been hard pressed to regain control of its copyrighted digital materials, including recorded music and video. The RIAA blames the widespread copying of music over the Internet for falling CD sales and lost profits.

[Editor’s Note: While legitimate file sharing services such as the newly revamped Napster and Apple’s iTunes appear to be gaining in popularity, the future of these services is still in question. At an Apple financial analyst conference, CEO Steve Jobs admitted that Apple makes no revenue from its iTunes online download service that launched in April 2003. "Most of the money goes to the music companies," admitted Jobs. "We would like to break even and make a little bit of money but it's not a money maker," he said. When the conversation turned to rivals such as Napster, Jobs said: "They don't make iPods, so they don't have a related business where they can make money."]

Comment

December 11, 2003
CSU New Budget
Calls for Deep Cuts, Reductions
of $345,000,000 and More
By Thomas Hobbs, Associate Editor

    FRESNO STATE -- In the face of the dramatic announcement from Sacramento earlier this week on cost cutting in the hundreds of millions of dollars, CSU Chancellor Charles B. Reed announced that all staff salaries had been frozen and that system wide graduate and undergraduate fees have now been increased by 30%.
    Even worse, the new budget requires dramatic restructuring and cutting-off all new enrollment growth by the Academic Year 2004-2005.
    In a letter received this week by all University employees, Reed wrote "...Many of our campuses will be limiting or cutting off enrollment for the spring session. For the long term, it means that our state must reform its higher education financing structure in a way that allows us to provide access to a quality education in good economic times and bad..."
    Research shows that higher education can add significantly to the subsequent earnings of some students. Returns do vary, however, with such factors as family background, innate ability, and the program of study pursued.
     Present occupational projections indicate that the majority of jobs in the immediate future ten years or so, will still not require higher education or a university diploma. Statistics for the past decade reveal the number of college educated individuals working in jobs that do not require education beyond high school has actually increased,
    The evidence indicates that many of these college-educated workers lack literacy skills traditionally associated with holding a university degree. Keep this is mind -- people who attend the university tend to be more talented and motivated those who do not enroll.
     Yet, economists who study such effects report that difference in ability account for only a small differential in the ability of workers who make higher earnings in demanding jobs.
     Dr. David Card, UC Berkeley concludes from his studies of the subject, "...the ability-bias factor is not large." In this, he concludes with Gary Becker and others, that the difference in earning between those with and those without a university degree is a minimal 10%, at best.
    Don't forget that returns on the student's investment in obtaining a university education vary greatly across programs of study and the reputation of the particular university and its administrative leadership.

    [Editor's Note: Here's a little about the competition for jobs. From 1970 to 1991, the percentage of the population in the United States who completed four years or more of college doubled, increasing from 10.7% to 21.4%. In 1990, in the United States, the average earnings of a male who had completed 5 or more years of college was $55,831.00 (female, $35,827.00); the average earnings of a male who had completed only 1 to 3 years of high school was $22,564.00 (female, $15,381.00). Since 1970, the percentage of the population in the United States (aged 25 years and older, who completed 4 or more years of college) has doubled, and the percentage of the population completing only 8 years of elementary school has been reduced by 2/3. To access a link to the Chancellor's Letter go to http://www.calstate.edu/executive/031209.shtml ].   

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    BOSTON -- College officials are seeking to add provisions to a routine office-lease agreement with a student newspaper that would give the Roman Catholic institution a more powerful voice in the publication's business and editorial operations. Among other directives, the college has proposed banning cigarette and alcohol advertising and forcing the paper to create an advisory board that includes at least one administrator.     
     Editors of the independent weekly newspaper, The Heights, rejected many of the proposals in a letter they sent last week to Cheryl Presley, the college's vice president for student affairs. They argued that the new terms would compromise the newspaper's independence and would violate their right to free expression. The annual lease is up for renewal in early December, and administrators proposed the new provisions about six weeks ago.
     Details of the college's proposal were first published this week by Boston Magazine Online.
     Negotiations are still under way, and both sides say they still hope to reach a compromise. But Nancy E. Reardon, a senior who is the newspaper's editor in chief, said that members of the Editorial Board had decided that they would refuse to sign the lease unless at least some of the new language was removed. And Jack Dunn, director of public affairs at Boston College, said that some of the terms, such as the advertising restrictions, are "nonnegotiable."
     Outside observers are surprised at the college's tactics. Mark Goodman, executive director of the Student Press Law Center, a nonprofit group, said that the college's proposals are "unprecedented."
     "No self-respecting institution would even present these arguments," he said. The most troubling part of the plan, he said, is asking the newspaper to establish an advisory board that would give college administrators direct involvement with the paper.
     In the letter to Ms. Presley, the editors argued that the proposal "would dismantle the wall of separation between The Heights and the administration." Mr. Dunn said, however, that the students were mischaracterizing the college's terms. "There is no desire on behalf of the university to control the content of one of three student newspapers on campus," he said.
     Referring to meetings between administrators and editors, he said that "we clearly stated that the intention was to create a liaison between the dean of student development and The Heights newspaper so that there could be some formal mechanism to have some informal discussions."
     Ms. Reardon said that such communication already takes place regularly. As for the proposed ban on cigarette and alcohol ads, Mr. Dunn said it grew in part out of frustration with the newspaper's decision this fall to run an advertisement for a local bar featuring "gratuitous, sexually explicit" content that drew complaints from parents, alumni, and administrators.
     Ms. Reardon said she had heard "no uproar" about the ad, which she said depicted a woman "who had some cleavage showing" and was "nothing more bawdy than what you would see in an underwear ad."
     One content restriction has long been in place in the newspaper's lease. Since 1978, the lease has banned the paper from running ads advocating abortion.
     Ms. Reardon said that editors accept the abortion-ad ban but are uncomfortable with the newly proposed restrictions, which they fear could lead to a "slippery slope" of control by the college.
     The proposed lease also calls for the paper to provide discounted advertising rates to recognized student organizations, to develop an ethics policy, to establish a board of directors, to hire an ombudsman, and to make sure its editors "fully comply" with the university's student-conduct codes.
     The editors say that they are working to do some of those things already, but that they are uncomfortable having them dictated by a lease. They also note that the ad-related provisions would deprive them of needed revenue.

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©1958-2003 Bulldog Newspaper Foundation. All Rights Reserved.

    FRESNO STATE -- The Collegian can do things that wouldn't otherwise get done. They perform services that are of inestimable value to the scholarly establishment -- researchers, teachers, librarians, and the rest of the university community -- but also to the broader world of readers, and ultimately to society itself. People working at university presses know this, of course, but too infrequently say it.
     But what if you did say it, clearly, in a couple of dozen bullet points that specified exactly what university presses -- and university presses alone -- are good at?
     Look at the recent response to a charge from AAUP President Willis Regier, a team composed of Douglas Armato, Steve Cohn, and Susan Schott has done just that. The three, all members of the AAUP Board of Directors, have assembled a document called The Value of University Presses.
     It consists of twenty-four simple, single-sentence statements under three headings, "University Presses and Society," "University Presses and Scholarship," and "University Presses in the University Community."
     The talking points range in scope from grand to modest. At the former end of the spectrum is the first declaration: "University Presses make available to the broader public the full range and value of research generated by university faculty"; at the latter, the twenty-first: "University Presses help connect the university to the surrounding community by publishing books of local interest and hosting events for local authors."
     "When you look at university publishing as a totality, and consider that we publish 10,000 books a year, you realize that this is an impressive cultural entity," said Armato, who is Director at the University of Minnesota Press. The list of bullet points, he went on, is an attempt to make clear just how impressive -- "to encompass everything we know about what university presses contribute."
     According to Regier, the idea for the list was rooted in the frequent misunderstandings that arise between university presses and the wider university community. For example, recent episodes at the University of Arkansas and, particularly, Iowa State University, make it clear that university publishers need to spend more time delineating and conveying the value of their mission.
     Armato emphasized that the document's applications are not, however, limited to the university. Intellectual and cultural leaders, too, need to know about the increasingly dynamic role of university presses. In his words, scholarly publishers must dispel the notion that they are simply "fossilized recyclers of dissertations." His point is driven home forcefully in the new talking points. While hardly discounting the importance of work published by younger scholars.
     The value of University presses emphasizes the new roles that scholarly publishers have increasingly assumed in recent years. See, for example, the third point: "University presses contribute to the variety and diversity of cultural expression at a time of global mergers and consolidation in the media industry."    
     University presses are, of course, highly complex institutions. Any attempt to express every last one of their contributions will necessarily prove reductive. But Regier, Armato, Cohn, and Schott are justifiably enthusiastic about what their document makes possible. After all, in a world that sometimes seems to consist exclusively of meetings and presentations, a good set of talking points can be an enormously effective too.

Here are just a few value-added benefits and potential future publication uses to this university that will be lost if the Collegian student press is shuttered at CSU Fresno:

1)The Collegian can make available to the broader public the full range and value of research generated by university faculty.

2)The Collegian can publish the basic research and analysis that is drawn upon by policymakers, opinion leaders, and authors of works for the general public.

3)The Collegian can make a valuable intellectual contributtioin to the variety and diversity of cultural expression at a time of global mergers ansd consolidation in the media industry.

4)The Collegian can make itself amenable to the common cause with libraries and other cultural institutions to promote engagement with ideas and sustain a literate culture.

5) The Collegian can assist in the preservation of the distinctiveness of local cultures through publication of works on the states and regions where they are based.

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    WASHINGTON D.C. -- The Social Security Administration (SSA) initiated Project NetWork in 1991 to test case management as a means of promoting employment among persons with disabilities.
     The demonstration, which targeted Social Security Disability Insurance (DI) beneficiaries and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) applicants and recipients, offered intensive outreach, work-incentive waivers, and case management referral services. Participation in Project NetWork was voluntary. Volunteers were randomly assigned to the "treatment" group or the "control" group.
     Those assigned to the treatment group met individually with a case or referral manager who arranged for rehabilitation and employment services, helped clients develop an individual employment plan, and provided direct employment counseling services.
     Volunteers assigned to the control group could not receive services from Project NetWork but remained eligible for any employment assistance already available in their communities. More!

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November 5, 2003
Bulldog News Goes
On Ebay to highest bidder!
Amy Williams, Staff Writer

   FRESNO STATE -- The world famous university news service at Fresno State (founded in 1958) has been put up for sale following the announcement of the retirement of its founder and publisher, Howard Hobbs, Ph.D., a Fresno State alumnus and long-time supporter of the university. The Bulldog News and five sister publications with world-wide readership are going up for sale on Ebay. The bidding for The Bulldog News with the domain CSUFresno.com starts at $45,000.
     Dr. Hobbs and a cadre of student journalists at Fresno State have written stories supporting and criticizing certain university officials and athletic eligibility policies. The online news service serves the community and students alike and has a readership of over 1.5 million. When asked why he's divesting himself of ownership, Hobbs was quick to say, "My phone line has never been cut and and my tires have never been slashed. I haven't received any threatening letters. I have many other irons in the fire and my health isn't what it used to be."
     Hobbs owns these two properties and other widely read newspapers with national and international circulation. You may have heard of some of the Web assets Hobbs is keeping, most notably the Valley Press Media Network which publishes 5 daily newspapers online including the Daily Republican, Fresno Republican, Clovis Free Press, and The American Law review. He announced today that he wants to sell them to the highest bidder and says he'd like to see the Bulldog News at Fresno State continue in its fine traditions over the past half-century.
    Hobbs won't say what he paid for the Bulldog Newspaper except to note that it was in excess of $35,000.

Comment

©1958-2003 Bulldog Newspaper Foundation. All Rights Reserved.

October 22, 2002
In Mickey Mouse
We Trust?
By Thomas Hobbs, Staff Writer

    FRESNO STATE -- California State University, Fresno, Foundation officials are accusing an "unnamed" former staff accountant for the alleged embezzlement of over $190,000 in funds. For some unexplained reason, noone has been charged with a crime, according to the Fresno Police Dept.
    According to a University Spokesman the loss, which dates back two years, was only discovered in the last few days. The OMB regulations under revised Circular A-122 require the CSU Fresno Foundation to maintain established cost principles and undergo mandatory annual audits.
    Upon visiting the CSU Fresno Foundation's page, their link to the accounting standards "OMB circular A-122" misdirects readers to a Walt Disney Corp. site, curiously.
    In view of the reluctance of the University administration to publicly identify and prosecute this individual, doubts have been raised about the administration's report of the facts of the case. This, especially in vew of the fact that no audit report has been made available to the press in support of University claims.

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©1958-2003 Bulldog Newspaper Foundation. All Rights Reserved.

October 21, 2002
What They Didn't Tell
Us About the Cuts
By Thomas Hobbs, Staff Writer

    FRESNO STATE -- Bulldog Athletics Director, Scott Johnson was in a press conference. He was announcing cuts in Fresno State Sports when he said, "In consultation with President Welty, I am recommending to Athletics Corporation Board the elimination of the women's swimming and diving team, the men's soccer team and the men's cross country and indoor track and field teams. This is strictly a budget decision."
    A major unreported issue is the changing of the accounting standards in midstream that appears to be a principal cause of the crisis. The CSU system introduced new reporting standards in 2002 restricting deductions for depreciation and amortization expense. The impact is huge, totaling close to $2.8 billion in lost surplus to the CSU system in FY 2002.
    More than likely, the timing of Governor Davis' announcement of his $38.2 billion budget gap had a political impact on the incoming administration. Would it be strange to learn six months from now that budget cuts in Sacramento were merely a political stunt by an outgoing governor as a payback for being recalled by Swarzenegger & Company?

    [Editor's Note: The following discussion and analysis provides an overview of the financial position and activities of the California State University for the year ended June 30, 2002 in its entirety, including recognized auxiliary organizations. Click here to download the official and most recent official  California State University Audited Financial  Statment and a note on the resulting fiscal crisis.]

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October 10, 2003
Save Mart Center
Bond Status Questions
By Howard E. Hobbs Ph.D., Editor & Publisher

     FRESNO STATE -- Universities like Fresno State that sell tax-exempt bonds to pay for construction of athletic venues like The Save Mart Center and then make lucrative deals to sell the naming rights to the facility might soon have to face the loss of purported tax-free status of those bonds.
     Then, the Internal Revenue Service quietly issued a ruling just made public in recent days, that the privileges gained by individual donors and corporations that purchase naming rights to such facilities as the Save Mart Center, count as a "personal-business use" of that property.
     Tax law states that if the value of personal-business use exceeds a certain proportion of the value of the property and the costs of debt service on it, the bonds' tax-exempt status is revoked.
     Public institutions like California State University, Fresno can only make deals worth up to 10 percent of the value of property and 10 percent of the amount of debt, while most private nonprofit organizations have a maximum of 5 percent. Of course, the rule does not apply to for-profit entities, which cannot issue tax-exempt bonds.
     Fresno State would appear to fall under the categories of public and private institutions covered by the decision. However, because the finding was made in a private-letter ruling, it only settled how existing law applied to one particular case and cannot cited at this time as precedent in other cases, according to IRS spokesperson, Anthony Burke.
     Some experts are worried about how the IRS interpretation will affect those who bought tax-exempt bonds to help finance the Save Mart Arena. The ruling could have a big effect on many colleges and university athletic facilities like Save Mart Center.
    Linda B. Schakel, an expert on tax-exempt bonds, who is president-elect of the National Association of Bond Lawyers told reporters, when she worked for the Treasury Department in 1997, she helped write the law on which the IRS based the private-letter ruling, she says. "It's a little bit different than controlling how your name appears on concessionaires' cups and janitors'
uniforms."
     Joseph R. Irvine, a tax lawyer for Ohio State University, told reporters, this week, "...any institution that sold tax-exempt bonds to pay for any new construction should be concerned." Most issuers, including colleges, he says, "will see that this is the position the IRS would take on an audit."
     Universities, colleges and schools often seek o pay for new construction with tax-exempt bonds through their local or state governments. The tax-free status of the bonds makes them attractive to potential buyers, who would be upset if they found out after purchasing what they were told was a tax exempt security, to find out later that they owed back-taxes and penalties on them after all.
  Selling naming rights to the Save Mart Center also brought in big bucks to the University. In the biggest tax bond deal of its kind we know of, Fresno State is getting $40-million over 20 years from Save Mart Corp., a regional supermarket chain, for naming the arena its "Save Mart Center."
     But naming rights carry with them particular effects on any tax-exempt bonds used to finance the construction, according to tax attorney, Gregory V.
Johnson, a specialist in public finance in the Denver office of Patton Boggs, a law firm. "It's not just putting your name on a building, it's putting your name on a building for a business purpose."
  For example, if John Doe personally donated $20-million to his alma mater, and, in gratitude, it named a stadium for him, the bonds would be tax-exempt. But if his company paid the institution $20-million to put its name on a stadium for advertising purposes, the bonds might be taxable. Their status would depend on whether the institution was public or private, and whether the payments met either the 10- or 5-percent maximum, respectively.
     The ruling will affect colleges more than cities and municipalities because colleges tend to build smaller facilities, Mr. Johnson says, explaining that the proportional value of naming rights increases as the size and cost of facilities decrease.
     Mr. Irvine believes that a naming-rights gift for Ohio State's new arena, as an example, falls safely below the 10-percent ceiling. The university used tax-exempt bonds to build the facility, where its basketball and hockey teams play and other events are held. OSU received $12.5-million in 1998 from the Schottenstein family, which owns Value City, a national discount-store chain, to name the facility the Value City Arena at the Jerome Schottenstein Center.
    Deborah Adishian-Astone, executive director of auxiliary services at Fresno State, told reporters Fresno State sold it's tax-exempt bonds to finance the Save Mart Center.
    According to Treasury Final regulations, sale of naming rights and tax exempt bonds may not give rise to investment-type property if it is made for a substantial business purpose.

    [Editor's Note: Go to related tax-exemption story. Also note that according to Fresno State, in the bond sale to fund the Save Mart Center – an unorthodox style of collegiate financing was devised in order to obtain public funds for the purchase of investment bonds that contractually obligate income streams, including naming rights, corporate sponsorships, private gifts, luxury suites seat licenses for the operation of an athletic facility on campus. Note that these bonds were put up as the sole source of security for the construction project. The Bulldog News has been informed that a sponsorship arrangement between Save Mart Supermarkets and Pepsi Bottling Group started the fund-raising melee back in 1998. The move soon led to Pepsi’s financial backing of the Fresno State Savemart Center following the university's strategic switch from its former Coca-Cola vending machines on campus. Local businessman Larry Shehadey then donated the eight-story clock tower at the main entrance.]

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October 7, 2003
CALIFORNIA HIGHER ED
BUDGET CUTS
By Howard Hobbs PhD, Editor & Publisher

    FRESNO STATE - In the news, California State lawmakers have announced today another cut in the University of California's budget by 8 percent, or $248 million from last year.
     Worse yet, state funds for the California State University System fell by more than $345 million. The state's community colleges have been cut by 9.4 percent, a hefty $240 million.
    In passing the 2003-2004 state budget, Sacramento will delay by about a year the 10th UC campus at Merced, Calif. This in spite of enormous graduating high school seniors.
     Meanwhile, the California Community College chancellor, Dr. Thomas J. Nussbaum has recently announced his plans to retire in January 2004. A replacement has not yet been announced.

Comment

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        “A college which is interested in producing professional athletes is not an educational institution.” Robert Hutchins, president, University of Chicago. [1980]

    FRESNO STATE -- America is different. Its universities are unique in their efforts to please many constituencies, prospective students, donors, legislators, the general public. The growth of intercollegiate sports aptly illustrates the strengths and weaknesses of a constituency-oriented system of higher education.
     With enthusiastic support from students, alumni, and even government officials, our colleges have developed athletic programs that have brought great satisfaction to thousands of athletes and millions of spectators.
     Few aspects of college life have done so much to win the favor of the public, build the loyalties of alumni, and engender lasting memories in the minds of student athletes.
     College sport is what it is because the American public wants it so bad.... Now why the public wants it so much is a question for the public. Right?     These statements identify an elemental conflict between academics and athletics that exists in American higher education; that is, the belief that the simultaneous institutional pursuits of rigorous academics and "big time" intercollegiate athletic programs are difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile.
     Many critics of American higher education note that our institutions are beset with contradictory and unrelated activities both academic and nonacademic in nature. The transformation of American higher education over the last century has led to criticism of academic activities--such as research funded by for-profit corporations--that often contribute little to students who fund the institution, and an unchecked academic balkanization on campuses has created a separation between undergraduate and graduate studies, arts and sciences, and liberal and professional learning that has meant confusion about the specific missions of specific institutions.
     Combine this with a current push for distance learning fueled by technological advances and the need to reach more diverse populations of students to maintain institutional and programmatic viability, and critics cite that it has become nearly impossible to define precisely what is meant by higher education.
     This debate is made more complex when nonacademic components are also assessed in terms of their congruence with the mission of higher education. The adoption of the Cambridge/Oxford residential college model led to the incorporation of many nonacademic components within the traditional American higher education system, including intercollegiate athletics.
     This in part has led to the development of what Derek Bok, president, Harvard University, called the "constituency-oriented system of higher education," where schools use athletics and other nonacademic activities to foster a sense of community with students, alumni, and the general public.
     While the constituency-based system contains numerous potentially contradictory elements worthy of exploration, it is intercollegiate athletics that is often cited as a particularly aberrant aspect of American higher education, particularly at Division I National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) institutions. The inevitable response of critics of the constituent system to this charge is, what do such activities have to do with the mission of higher education?
     The simultaneous pursuits of athletic success, related profits, and institutional academic integrity, say these critics, cannot be reconciled. To them, this is the glaring weakness in the constituent system. Supporters argue the strengths of the system, which the popular appeal of nonacademic activities are a vital complement to academic components and in keeping with the founding ethos of American higher education.
     Efforts to wed the athletic and the academic attempt to deflect this criticism of the wedding of the athletic and the commercial that is inherent in the constituent system. According to Helman (1989), this ideal notion of intercollegiate athletics and the student-athlete is legitimized through eligibility rules, which provide "standards that tether commercial athletics to the educational purposes of higher education". If Division I programs are to meet the standards set by the NCAA that demand this tethering (see below), then the programs must be maintained and legitimized through such eligibility rules.
     The question that arises from this charge is to whom within the academy this responsibility of tethering will ultimately fall. It is in the realm of academic tethering that school presidents, the individuals who are seen to have ultimate control over all components of the campus, have moved to the fore. When first student-athletes and then faculty oversight groups proved unable to deal effectively with the problems associated with intercollegiate athletics and the demands of constituents, many school presidents saw it as their role as institutional CEOs, those managers who serve as the public face of the institution and the ultimate internal decision maker, to address these issues.     Over time, certain groups of presidents have come to lead the associated public debate and NCAA organizational push for association-wide initial eligibility standards.
     Many other major concerns regarding Division I athletics--pay for play, controlling agent tampering, recruiting abuses by coaches, boosters and others, the recurring specter of gambling and point-shaving--have not elicited the same sort of demands for and responses of presidential leadership, because many presume that these are strictly "athletic" issues to be dealt with by professional athletic administrators.
     In an attempt to understand the roles of presidents in maintaining congruence within the constituency-based American higher education system, this article provides a detailed chronology of presidential efforts to deal with the conflicts related to the tethering of academic mission to athletic pursuits through the development of NCAA initial eligibility academic legislation.
     Such legislation impacts recruiting and admissions, the ultimate sport product on the field and the court, and the charge to tether commercial athletics to the educational purposes of higher education and to preserve the viability of the intercollegiate athletic enterprise.
     In response to criticisms that "big time" athletics has no place on campus and has no relation to institutional academic missions, the bylaws of the NCAA have been crafted to require that intercollegiate athletics be administered under an institution's academic rubric.
     The NCAA publishes annually the purposes of the association under Article 1 of its Constitution. The first stated purpose is, "To initiate, stimulate and improve intercollegiate athletics programs for student-athletes and to promote and develop educational leadership, physical fitness, athletics excellence and athletics participation as a recreational pursuit."
     Also included as stated purposes are, "To encourage its members to adopt eligibility rules to comply with satisfactory standards of scholarship, sportsmanship and amateurism," and "To legislate, through bylaws or by resolutions of a Convention, upon the subject of general concern to the members related to the administration." NCAA bylaws do not dictate whom schools may admit, as illustrated in Bylaw 2.5, "The Principle of Sound Academic Standards," which reads: Intercollegiate athletic programs shall be maintained as a vital component of the educational program, and student-athletes shall be an integral part of the student body.
     The admission, academic standing and academic progress of the student-athletes shall be consistent with the policies and standards adopted by the institution for the student body in general. An institution may admit any student, but the student may or may not be eligible to compete in intercollegiate athletics, depending on whether that student meets the initial academic eligibility criteria set by the NCAA membership.
     Division I schools must also recognize "the dual objective in its athletics program of serving both the university or college community participants, student body, faculty-staff, alumni and the general public community, area, state, nation, a verification of Bok's constituency-based assessment.

[Editor's Note: The California State University is the largest system of senior higher education in the nation, with 23 campuses, nearly 407,000 students and 44,000 faculty and staff. Since the system was created in 1961, it has awarded about 2 million degrees. The CSU mission is to provide high-quality, affordable education to meet the ever-changing needs of the people of California. For more information on The CSU, visit www.calstate.edu.]

     FRESNO -- Sacramento lawmakers cut the 2003-2004 University of California budget by $248,000,000 last week. Then went on to cut funds for the California State University system by $345,200,000. Community colleges were cut by $250,000,000.
     In the face of these drastic cuts present salary levels are on the block, as well. At present, average full-time pay for a professor is $108,180; assoc. professors $ 69, 534.
     The graduation rate form Fresno State is only 42%. Catch this, the total costs of operation of the statewide CSU System is a whopping $15,106,121,000 annually.
     The number of bachelor’s degrees awarded annually has increased over the past 3 decades, climbing from nearly 800,000 in 1969-1970 to over 1.2 million in 1999–20001 (U.S. Department of Education 2002)...More!

     FRESNO - Men's Basketball is still trying to deal with the implications of the NCAA investigation findings announced this week. FSU was placed on four years probation on Wednesday. This, on top of self-imposed sanctions by the university in December of 2002, is a morale-buster for the Fresno State's Men's Basketball program.
    The NCAA cited numerous violations of bylaws governing academic fraud, recruiting, eligibility, financial aid (including awards and benefits), extra benefits, amateurism, coaching limitations and playing and practice seasons legislation, including a "lack of appropriate institutional controls" by the program's administrators.
   Because of FSU's self-imposed sanctions, which included a ban on last season's men's basketball postseason play and the elimination of three men's basketball scholarships, the NCAA imposed probation will be retroactive to December, 2002.
     Also, the NCAA mandated that Fresno State return 90 percent of the money earned during its appearance in the 2000 NCAA tournament and that the team's participation in the tournament be expunged from the record ...More!

September 9, 2003
Hitler's Filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl Dead at 101
Associated Press News Release

    BERLIN (AP) Leni Riefenstahl, the legendary filmmaker reviled and revered for movies she made about Adolf Hitler and his Third Reich, has died one of the last confidantes of the Nazi dictator. She was 101...More!

August 27, 2003
California Schools
Academic Scores Hit Bottom
By Amy Williams Staff Writer

    FRESNO STATE -- It appears that California teachers have little effect on students' academic performance of elementary, middle, and school students.
A California state study released today by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) reports that students’ peers have a stronger effect on their achievement than the qualifications of their teachers or the size of their classes...More!

©1958-2003 Bulldog Newspaper Foundation. All Rights Reserved.

August 1, 2003
Krueger Killed Three
Dumped by UC Berkeley
Hired by National University
By Amy Williams Staff Writer

    FRESNO STATE -- Dr. Paul Krueger, the Penn State University prof who was to be hired by National University in San Diego learned yesterday that his job offer rescinded. Why? National just learned that when Krueger was a teenager in 1965, he and a friend killed three fishermen with a rifle. Krueger, at the time, was a runaway, according to local news accounts.

Comment

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    WASHINGTON, D.C -- Nearly 600,000 students are immediately confronting 10-15 percent fee increases at all University of California (UC) and California State University (Cal State) campuses as they return from winter break. The unprecedented midyear action came as the result of emergency meetings held last month by higher education officials responding to Governor Gray Davis’s initial announcements about the state’s projected $34.8 billion deficit over the next 18 months.
     Just how big is the state’s deficit? As Herb Wesson, speaker of the State Assembly, remarked, “That’s a hole so deep and so vast that even if we fired every single person on the state payroll—every park ranger, every college professor and every Highway Patrol officer—we would still be more than $6 billion short.”
     The increases took effect January 3, 2003 at all Cal State University campuses and UC Berkeley, which is on semester system. Fees will go up at all other UC campuses, which operate on a quarterly system, in March 2003. The last time fees were raised was in 1994.
     On December 6, Governor Davis issued proposals for midyear revisions to the 2002-03 state budget to coincide with the opening of a Special Session that he called to address the fiscal crisis. Twelve days later Davis adjusted his shortfall estimate to almost $35 billion, almost 45 percent of the total level of $77 billion in the General Fund spending on all programs approved in the 2002-03 Budget Act. He then proposed an emergency $1.734 billion midyear spending reduction in Proposition 98 programs, affecting education.
     If California were a country, it would be the fifth-largest economy in the world, surpassing France and Italy. Included among its 35 million residents, making it the most populous state, are some of the nation’s richest and poorest. During the dot.com boom, the number of overnight millionaires and multimillionaires exploded. As a result, the state also grew suddenly wealthier from corporate taxes and revenues from employee stock options from all the high-tech companies based in Silicon Valley and the greater San Francisco area.
     Over the recent period, several new campuses were built by Cal State and UC; new public schools went up; class sizes were reduced; teacher pay increased; public health facilities expanded; new roads were approved; and about 40,000 public service employees were added to the state payroll.
     However, with the convergence now of a collapsing stock market, the energy crisis and the high-tech bubble bursting, state revenues from capital gains and stock option taxes fell over the past two years from $17 billion to $5 billion, accounting for roughly half of the current deficit. But deficit spending is prohibited under the state’s constitution.
     During her address to the State Assembly, legislative analyst Elizabeth Hill said the problem goes beyond the immediate deficit of the next year and a half. A recent report says the state faces deficits of between $12 billion and $15 billion annually for at least the next five years. Hill called the governor’s cuts “credible” but also noted that they contain “virtually no meaningful reductions” in law enforcement, including prisons.
     California used to be the national model for accessibility and affordability to higher education for working class and middle class students. But today—with soaring enrollment, impacted classes and now substantially higher fees—a college diploma is becoming out of reach for hundreds of thousands of young people.
     On December 16, the board of California State University—the nation’s largest public university system, dubbed “the people’s university”—voted to raise fees. Protesting students outside the meeting where the decision was made held up signs reading, “Adding fees is not the answer” and “CSU students are the working class of California.”
     The state universities are mandated to admit the top third of all high school graduates. Its more prestigious counterpart, the UC, is required by the state to accept the top 12 percent. The Policy Analysis for California Education, a Stanford-based education policy research group, projects an additional 100,000 students will enter the CSU by 2010, while the UC faces a 40 percent jump in students by the end of the decade.
     CSU Chancellor Charles Reed said the system faces losing $60 million from its annual $3 billion budget and may be forced to consider salary reductions, hiring freezes, layoffs and even more fee increases. This year enrollment hit a record 406,896 students at its 23 campuses. For state residents, the increase raises fees $72 per semester for undergraduates, from $1,428 to $1,572 per year, and for graduate students, from $1,506 to $1,734 per year.
     University of California will increase its fees by $135 for its 180,000 students. That amounts to an 11.2 percent annual increase for undergraduates and 11.8 percent for graduates. Graduate students will be charged even more—from $150 to $400 a quarter—in addition to the system-wide increase. These fees affect students in a range of professional programs, including business, law, veterinary medicine, optometry, pharmacy and nursing.
     “This year is a problem, but next year could be a catastrophe,” CSU Chancellor Charles Reed told the San Jose Mercury News. To help the neediest students stay in school, both systems will put one-third of the money raised by fee increases directly into university financial aid. The state-funded scholarship program, Cal Grants, is expected to cover fee increases for needy students receiving those grants.
     California’s community college system of two-year public institutions is composed of 108 colleges statewide and serves more than 2.9 million students, representing the largest system of higher education in the world. Because tuition and fees are inexpensive, hundreds of thousands of working class students go to community colleges and later transfer to the CSU and UC systems.
     Governor Davis’s December 6 proposal for midyear cuts included $215 million from the state’s community colleges. He proposed a 3.66 percent across-the-board reduction to all line items in the Budget Act, including general apportionments affecting K-12 and community colleges. These total $97,457,000. Additional loss of resources for general purposes would occur due to an estimated shortfall in property tax revenues of $37 million, for which there will be no “backfill” from state funds.
     Finally, Davis proposed cutting general apportionments by $80 million for what the Department of Finance calls “estimated non-compliant credit instruction claimed in 2001-02 by community college districts for concurrently enrolled K-12 students.” In other words, city college classes enrolling public school students, usually high school level, will not receive funding.
     Although City College Chancellor Nussbaum has decided not to immediately follow the CSU and UC plan to hike fees, emergency committees have been set up to prepare for future cuts by Governor Davis in his full spending plan for the 2003-04 fiscal year. All campus administrators have been instructed to identify areas that will have to be cut.
     When all other cuts are included, a total of $1.9 billion could be slashed from public schools and colleges just this school year—or about $300 per student.
     All of this money is taken from the minimum-funding base guaranteed by Proposition 98, which sets formulas to calculate this amount. Education accounts for about half of the budgetary general fund, where the most painful cuts will be. Other cuts would affect programs including principal training, high-risk youth projects, college preparation tests, dropout prevention and education technology.
     Compounding the impact of the dot.com collapse, the state’s financial structure was significantly altered by an event 25 years ago: the anti-tax movement that saw the passage of Proposition 13, a ballot measure that permanently capped property taxes.
     The long-term effect of the measure has been the continuous erosion of what was once one of the country’s model educational systems as well as the destruction of social programs. The disparity between rich and poor schools has widened. The state has been relying on income tax for most of its revenue: in 1970, it was 18.5 percent; today, it is 50 percent.
     California’s schools, which now rank 38th in the nation in per capita spending, will be utterly devastated. There are six million public school pupils and 268,000 teachers, represented by the California Teachers Association, throughout the state.
     Under-resourced inner-city areas like South Central LA will feel the biggest impact. According to independent.co.uk, even schools in wealthier middle class areas have been asked to lay off 25 percent of their teaching staff, as well as janitors, gardeners, nursing staff and counselors. There is also talk of firing up to 35,000 teachers.
     Becky Zoglman, a spokeswoman for the California Teachers Association, told the Sacramento Bee, “These cuts are going to directly impact students in every classroom in California. It will be devastating, and coming midyear, it’s going to be impossible for schools to do.”
     Asked if schools, community colleges and universities might reopen negotiations with employee unions to reduce salaries, Education Secretary Kerry Mazzoni said she “wouldn’t rule it out.” She said, “The Governor has indicated everything is on the table.”
     Officials say that class size reduction (CSR), which limits K-3rd grade classrooms to 20 students, could be the next victim of the budget crisis. The Desert Sun spoke to the superintendent of Palm Springs Unified School District William Diedrich, who said, “It’s unpopular, but class-size reduction is something that has to be on the table.” His district could face cutting as much as $5 million. The last time there was a budget crunch, cuts were made in supplies, maintenance, secretarial time and after-school programs. “Since 85 percent of our budget is people, we know it’s going to be in that area.”
     Delaine Eastin, the state Superintendent of Education, said, “You’ll see class sizes move up. You’ll see a shortage of materials. You’ll see an absence of after-school programs.... They won’t be buying any more library books. They won’t be buying textbooks, and they’ll either discontinue busing or charge parents for busing.”
     Already, the Long Beach and Pasadena school districts have imposed a freeze on hiring new teachers. Projected current-year cuts in Long Beach of $28 million will coincide with contract negotiations for the district’s 4,000 teachers. The district is calling for $4 million in cuts in medical benefits and a mandatory weekly one-hour tutoring session without compensation.
     Irvine World News reported that at a recent meeting of the Irvine school board Superintendent Dean Waldfogel characterized the proposed state cuts as “stunning in scope and magnitude” and a “fiscal calamity” for the district. About $4.3 million will have to be cut between now and July from the district’s $173.4 million budget. That $4.3 million is equivalent to 100 annual salaries of $43,000 each, about one-fifth of all classified salaries for the year and equals the cost of about half of all books and supplies for the year.
     Vacant nonessential staff positions will not be filled; stipends and consultant expenditures will cease; travel at district expense and equipment purchases will be postponed or cancelled; staff overtime will cease; and every purchase and expenditure will be scrutinized.
    

Comment

©1958-2003 Bulldog Newspaper Foundation. All Rights Reserved.

January 15, 2003
About Madden Library's
Massive Budget Cut
Andrtew Albanse, Library Journal

    FRESNO STATE -- Effect of midyear reductions unclear, but hiring, serials, and projects likely to be targeted, even as campuses grow. California Gov. Gray Davis has proposed a whopping $74M in midyear cuts to the University of California (UC) and another $59.6M in cuts to the California State University (CSU) system.
    Meanwhile, California's budget deficit is predicted to soar to as much as $30B—a staggering amount that would equal roughly 25 percent of the state's entire budget.
    The proposed reductions will be discussed by the state legislature in January, though the amount of the cuts could change. "There are immense challenges ahead for the California State University," said CSU Chancellor Charles B. Reed. He added that CSU officials had prepared for midyear cuts, although "next year could be a catastrophe."
     Although it was unclear initially how library services would be affected, both UC and CSU libraries will certainly face an additional squeeze. CSU started this academic year with a $43M budget cut, plus $22.8M in unfunded costs for things such as health benefit premiums and salaries.
     For libraries, the previous round of cuts resulted in hiring freezes, some serials cancellations, and delays in much-needed projects and contracts. The additional $59.6M decrease brings this year's total to $125M spread across the CSU system's 23 campuses.
     At the University of California, $20M of the proposed $74M will be taken from "administration and libraries," with each of UC's nine campuses to decide locally how they will meet the decreases. Ironically, the steep cuts come just weeks after California voters approved $19B in bonds over the next 30 years for education (see News , LJ 12/02, p. 16).
     Despite this voter support, the new reductions will have a grave effect on library services at some CSU libraries, as the system is facing a huge increase in enrollments. At CSU Fresno, a seesaw. Things will get worse before they get better in California, said Michael Gorman, dean of library services at CSU Fresno. But they will eventually get better.
    The midyear cuts, Gorman said, were largely planned for and the effect on the library at Fresno State should be minimal. The cut will result in an additional five percent from his budget this year, meaning that some temp workers may not be retained and a position may be lost to attrition.
    Materials have already been purchased, so acquisitions will not be affected. "It's a short-term catastrophe," Gorman said. "But the next cut, for next year, is rumored to be just dreadful," and Gorman is preparing for "a big cut, possibly ten percent."
     Like other library administrators across California universities, Gorman is bracing for massive cuts to book-buying and serials acquisitions, among other measures, including possible reduced hours and staff. The cuts put Gorman in a rather strange position, since he is both planning for huge cuts and a new library.
     "The deficit situation is worse than it's been since World War II," said Gorman, "but as an institution, CSU is so much stronger."

Comment

©1958-2003 Bulldog Newspaper Foundation. All Rights Reserved.

       FRESNO STATE -- According to FSC Social Science Prof. Karl Falk (at FSC since 1938), " Fresno city government and the urban renewal project have nothing to do with moral standards or values." This writer's interpretation of local urban renewal initiatives is that never were means and ends in sharper conflict.
       One of the latest social scientists to pursue the line of moral inquiry in city planning is social theorist Jane Jacobs. Best known for her devastating critique of urban planning, Jacobs has long analyzed cities as problems in organized complexity and drawn on metaphors to explain, among other things, the role of money as a feedback-carrying mechanism and the rationale for political secession..
        Her latest offering, however, goes beyond the use of metaphors as heuristic devices and is better understood as a search for universal principles that characterize complex systems, both natural and human made.
        Prof. Jacob's premise is that human beings exist wholly within nature as part of the natural order in every respect – a statement that is likely to generate much controversy in some FSC Campus faculty offices.
    In taking that stance, Jacobs seems to distance herself from urban renewal economists, industrialists, politicians, and others who believe that it is possible for human beings to circumvent and outdo the moral order of the community.
        The main question Jacobs tries to answer is the same one recently raised in FSC campus Economics classes: Does economic life of cities obey the same rules as those governing natural systems?
     This writer's answer is straightforward: I'm convinced that economic life is determined by those processes and principles we didn't invent and can't transcend, whether we like that or not, and that the more we learn of these processes including moral and ethical conduct by all concerned citizens, and the better we respect them, the better our City will get along.
     Jacobs' discusses such processes as urban development, expansion, self-refueling, evading collapse, fitness for survival and unpredictability.
        Development, whether in nature or in urban economies, is best viewed as a open-ended process which most often differentiates its processes from further differentiations which inevitably emerge. Such development depends, however, on numerous, various, and intricate co-development relationships.
        For example, tool making began with four existing generalities: sticks, stones, bones and fire. Our ancestors then differentiated through innovation a moral system that required the fusion of other, originally unrelated, innovations leading to what we now think of as forms of urban renewal.
       Expansion upon human experience is a system of means and ends. It is a system for recapturing, using, and passing around the cumulative consequences of the diverse use and reuse of the dynamic energy of a diversified city that will generate much more local expansion from a new business venture than a small town, much like a well developed forest's ecosystem will convert more sunlight into biomass than a desert. The refuelment of growing cities, unlike their initial start, depends more on replacing imports than generating new exports.
     Jacobs' book contains ingenious insight, in my opinion. Her case for a diversified urban economy rather than specialization has been the subject of a heated debate in the urban economics and economic geography courses here in Fresno State College Social Science Division lecture halls in the past weeks.
       If this writer were permitted to, he would recast the discussion in light of Jacobs' theory of the benefits of accumulating human capital and its beneficial effect for environmental preservation. It is an attack on urban sprawl with a moral aim to have reduced suburban growth to such an extent that will result in virtually no negative impact on the conservation of remaining Fresno County wildlife environs.
     Perhaps things would have been different. But, as it happened, the official Fresno State public archives are witness to the following entries as they actually happened to Karl Leonard Falk and a frightful history of public opinion and personnel issues gone to the dogs under Professor Falk.. There is also significant information about the public opinion surrounding Falk’s actions even as president of the university as well as the protests that ensued in response to his administrative policies and public unrest that followed wherever Karl Falk turned up.
     For example, at three o’clock on Friday, December 4, 1970, it is recorded that the tension and distrust of the College administration increased exponentially. The dean of the School of Humanities, Ralph Rea, accompanied by campus policemen, marched into the English Department and hand delivered letters of dismissal to Eugene Zumwalt, the department’s chairman, and Roger Chittick, the assistant chairman.
     The men and the department’s secretaries were then forcibly removed from the office. Another police officer and a maintenance man entered and began sealing the office and its contents, padlocking filing cabinets and barricading the entrance with metal plates.
     Policemen also guarded the door. Rea continued exerting control of the English Department as he was made the acting chairman, replacing Zumwalt. In an effort to calm what the administration thought was an ideologically radical faculty, Rea altered faculty roles, fired instructors, and changed programs within the department.
     The Karl Falk Campus Unrest collection measures 1.75 linear feet and dates from 1965 to 1979 and undated. The collection is arranged in five series: Administrations, Ethnic minorities, Faculty and student activism, Other universities, and Policies and reports.
     It primarily covers unrest that took place on the campus of Fresno State College but also contains information about unrest around the state, country, and world. This information was collected over time by the University Archives from various sources.
     The Administrations series (1967-1979) provides detailed information about the administrations that were in power during the period of campus unrest on the Fresno State campus. This specifically includes records relating to presidents Frederic Ness, Karl Falk, and Norman Baxter.
     The series is arranged in the order of their presidencies. The Frederic Ness subseries primarily covers personnel issues that his administration dealt with during his presidency, with specific details about the dismissals of Marvin Jackman (Marvin X) and Robert Mezey.
     There are also records related to Ness’s resignation. The Karl Falk material deals primarily with public opinion and personnel issues, including the demotion of Dale Burtner. There is also significant information about the public opinion surrounding Falk’s actions as president of the university as well as the protests that ensued in response to his administrative policies.
     The Norman Baxter section includes information about how Baxter dealt with personnel issues, protests that took place on campus and in the community, and public opinion concerning In the 1960s, a time characterized by anti-war protests and the Civil Rights Movement, college campuses around the world began to take part in widespread political and social activism.
     In 1968, Fresno State College (now California State University, Fresno), became another player in this political struggle as its campus was transformed from a traditional, primarily agricultural and teacher’s college, into one in which conservative and liberal factions openly and publicly fought, both through the administrative structure of the university and through campus-wide protests, which often turned violent.
     Campus unrest at Fresno State began in 1968 when Frederic Ness, the president of the university, chose not to retain English faculty member Robert Mezey in spite of a fervent recommendation from both the English Department and Dale Burtner, the dean of the School of Arts and Sciences.
     Mezey had become a source of controversy on the campus and in the larger community when, in November of 1967, he was invited to speak at the “Panel on Pot,”a debate and discussion about marijuana. During the presentation, Mezey commented that marijuana had not been proven harmful and that the laws against its consumption were unjust.
     After these statements were made public, and often misinterpreted as an endorsement for drug use, complaints about Mezey’s liberal and unlawful politics began to pour into Ness’s office and The Bulldog Newspaper at Fresno State, and The Fresno Bee.
     After Ness terminated Mezey’s employment, student and faculty protests began. They continued as Ness released a prominent Black Muslim instructor, Marvin Jackman (Marvin X). His termination brought on more protests.
     The publicity and scandal associated with these cases led to Ness’s resignation in the fall of 1969. Addinhg fuel to the fire, on October 28, 1969, Karl Falk was appointed as acting president.
     After only five days, Falk announced a massive realignment of the college structure. Dale Burtner, the dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, was reassigned and replaced with Phillip Walker. Harold Walker, the executive vice president, was reassigned and replaced with James Fikes.
     These reassignments once again caused a rift in the campus community, resulting in even more protests. Falk also instigated layoffs and curtailing of funds in the Experimental College, the Ethnic Studies Program and the Educational Opportunities Program.
     These changes resulted in peaceful as well as violent student activism. Protests continued and began to be connected with larger societal issues, including the Vietnam War. With the campus in an uproar, the search began for a permanent administrator to relieve Falk of his duties.
     On July 14, 1970, Norman Baxter was inaugurated as the president of Fresno State College. His presidency was marked by the cancellation of the La Raza Studies program and campus unrest in response to his administrative policies. The Student Senate, in a vote of nineteen to four, administered a vote of “no confidence”in Baxter’s ability to run the school.
     At three o’clock on Friday, December 4, 1970, the tension and distrust of the Baxter administration increased exponentially. The dean of the School of Humanities, Ralph Rea, accompanied by campus policemen, marched into the English Department and hand delivered letters of dismissal to Eugene Zumwalt, the department’s chairman, and Roger Chittick, the assistant chairman.
     The men and the department’s secretaries were then forcibly removed from the office. Another police officer and a maintenance man entered and began sealing the office and its contents, padlocking filing cabinets and barricading the entrance with metal plates.   Policemen also guarded the door. Rea continued exerting control of the English Department as he was made the acting chairman, replacing Zumwalt. In an effort to calm what the administration thought was an ideologically radical faculty, Rea altered faculty roles, fired instructors, and changed programs within the department.

Comment

©1958-2003 Bulldog Newspaper Foundation. All Rights Reserved.

Stebbins Dean's Tarnished Brass [07/25/2003]
FRESNO STATE -- The CEO of the Fresno Chamber of Commerce has taken his place in history among the high-profile Fresno liars of all time.

Ethical Journalism Practices [06/26/2003]
BERKELEY -- Let’s talk about changes in the ethics of journalism. The century began with the Yellow Press, which is portrayed in most history books as being ethically challenged.

Moral Education Abstracts on Character [06/16/2003]
FRESNO STATE -- Throughout the history of American education there have appeared discerning movements which have redefined and redirected and in numerous ways made good our fundamental commitment to democracy.

College Newspaper Fight Lands in Courthouse [06/16/2003]
FRESNO STATE -- Finding a sponsor to underwrite development of a new 18,000 seat Event Center on the CSU-Fresno campus is still in a tail spin as the SaveMart Supermarket and Pepsi deal is taking a lot of heat.

Fresno State Officials Named in Cheating Slam! [06/09/2003]
FRESNO STATE -- Documents made public today in NCAA letters, link former Fresno State adviser to academic fraud.

Save Mart Center Tax Exemption Under Fire [06/07/2003]
FRESNO STATE -- Finding a sponsor to underwrite development of a new 18,000 seat Event Center on the CSU-Fresno campus is still in a tail spin as the SaveMart Supermarket and Pepsi deal is taking a lot of heat.

Annual Father's Day Fly-In Chandler Field [06/06/2003]
FRESNO -- Computer problems can leave you feeling helpless. When yours breaks, can you rely on a professional to correctly find the problem?

Stanford Professor Named Social Science Dean [06/01/2003]
MERCED, CA. -- Kenji Hakuta, Ph.D., is an experimental psychologist by training, a teacher and researcher by profession, and a builder of bridges by nature.

International SARS Health Alert [05/22/2003]
Sars is still spreading! The full text of all articles in the New England Journal of Medicine collection on the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) is provided free.

Computer Repair Investigation [05/21/2003]
FRESNO -- Computer problems can leave you feeling helpless. When yours breaks, can you rely on a professional to correctly find the problem?

Burning Questions Remain [05/20/2003]
FRESNO STATE -- Emergency Traffic Advisory: University Police asked anyone coming to the campus this morning to avoid Barstow and Cedar Ave. approaches from the north side. A fire at an off-campus student apartment community has caused a traffic hazard.

Parable of the Cave [400 B.C.]
ATHENS, Greece --  I said, let me show in a figure how far our nature is enlightened or unenlightened.

More Fraud Allegations Fresno State Sanctions [05/06/2003]
FRESNO, Calif. (AP) -- Fresno State will formally respond to the NCAA's investigation into academic fraud violations by the men's basketball team.

Charitable Choices in the Post-Welfare Era [04/26/2003]
FRESNO STATE -- Congregations and faith-based organizations have become key participants in America's welfare revolution. Recent legislation has expanded the social welfare role of religious communities, thus revealing a pervasive lack of faith in purely economic responses to poverty.

Honor Award Goes To Madden Library Dean [04/07/2003]
FRESNO STATE -- Micharel Gorman, Dean of Library Services at California State University in Fresno, was elected to the Library Board at the ALA midwinter meeting in Philadelphia earlier this year.

Stanford Anti-War Activities Clash [04/02/2003]
WASHINGTON -- As student antiwar activists work to make their case against war persuasive to ambivalent classmates, the leaders of a Stanford University peace group have launched a different kind of campaign--to reform a conservative think tank on campus with dubious ties to the Bush Administration.

  ~ Facsimile ~
February 24, 1938
The Common Good
Before the Individual Good
By Karl Leonard Falk, Foreign Student, University of Berlin

     BERLIN -- We ask that the government undertake the obligation of providing Germany's citizens with adequate opportunity for employment and earning a living. The activities of the individual must not be allowed to clash with the interests of the community, but must take place within its confines and be for the good of all.
    Therefore, University of Berlin students demand an end to the power of the financial interests. We demand the greatest possible consideration of every capable and industrious citizen in the attainment of higher education and the achievement of a post of leadership. The government must provide an all-around enlargement of our system of public education at government expense of gifted students of poor parents.
    The government must undertake the improvement of the physical education of youth and to combat the materialistic spirit within and without us. We are convinced that a permanent recovery of our people can only proceed from within on the foundation of the common good before the individual good by the triumph of the will.

©1958-2004 Copyright by The Bulldog Newspaper at Fresno State

Hounds of War Unleashed on Baghdad! [02/21/2003]
WASHINGTON -   The George W. Bush administration has apparently begun moving along a broad front to pound Iraq with a deadly first strike that may cast the world into major economic disruption by early next week.

(cont.)

Conrotto Joins Student Leaders

What Can We Preserve?

Guilty of the Zen of Writing

CSUF Financial

Ethics of Public Diaries

Fresno State Arena Financing

World Appeal: NATO devastation

Reinvent School of Education

Trouble With E-Mail: Plagiarism

College Book Stores Sue Competitor

Welcome To Remedial.Edu

University Ethics Resource Links

Claremont Mckenna & McCain

Going to Law School?

Kentucky State Censorship Reprise

Financial aid denied for drug record

Freedom of Religion?

Bell Helicopter Caught Cheating

The Holocaust - Affront on America

Political Persecution Incites Public Ire!

Edutainment for the masses!

Two shoot students, faculty!

The Whopper Grant Guide

Nazis Executed

Cal Writer Rousted by Secret Service

American Nazi at Fresno State?

Is There Justice?

Bank financed Nazi's death camp

I, Rigoberta Menchu 

Stanford E-Mail Hacked

CSU Fresno Schedule of Courses

Shrinking PhD's

The Day The Music Died

Atlas Shrugged [reprise]

Remembering Stanford

Theft of Public Funds?

Purdue Reads Bulldog News

Foolish Excuses

Wings clipped on students

Our United States