May 8, 2008
Bowling and Whiskey Get More of the Campaign Spotlight Than Education Policy
None of the three remaining major presidential candidates has spent any “real time” discussing education policy on the campaign trail, even though the future of the nation may well rest on how well it educates current and future generations, argues OpenEducation.net, a Web site dedicated to tracking changes in the field of education.
In a recent post the site’s editors argued that the presidential candidates lack a vision on education. Even though the Democrats, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, have offered detailed platforms on education topics, they wrote, the candidates have failed to shine much of a spotlight on the issue as they have campaigned.
On the Republican side, the situation is bleaker for education. The blog item says that “it has become increasingly clear that John McCain may forgo any real discussion about the topic completely.”
The item also links to several other articles that have raised similar concerns about the lack of extensive discussion so far about education policy in the 2008 campaign.
They include an article in The American Prospect that said that Mr. McCain’s last major statement on any plans he has to fix the nation’s problems in education came in 2000. The OpenEducation blog item also links to an opinion piece in The New York Times by Bob Herbert, who lamented that education appeared to be “much too serious a topic to compete with such fun stuff as Hillary tossing back a shot of whiskey, or Barack rolling a gutter ball.”
Sara Hebel | Posted on Thu May 8, 02:45 PM | Permalink | Comment [5]May 7, 2008
Student Superdelegates Post YouTube Plea for Advice
As superdelegates to the Democratic National Convention, the president and vice president of the College Democrats of America are seeking students’ advice on how they should vote.
Lauren Wolfe, a 25-year-old law student at the University of Detroit Mercy, and Awais Khaleel, a 23-year-old political-science major at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, posted a video on YouTube last week urging students to weigh in.
Party leaders, celebrities, even the Democratic presidential candidates themselves have been calling, Ms. Wolfe says. “That’s not who we want to hear from.”
Mr. Khaleel chimes in: “We really want to hear from you.” He tells students to friend him on Facebook or MySpace — or contact him “the old-fashioned way — through e-mail.”
“We want to make sure,” Ms. Wolfe says, “that our vote belongs to you.”
A few students have replied with their own videos. “We college students, we love Senator Obama,” says Nick from Concordia College. “Please, please, please vote for Obama,” says Karla from San Diego State University.
One student urges the superdelegates to vote for the candidate they “genuinely, deep inside think would be the best person to sit in the Oval Office.”
“You should vote for whoever your state voted for,” another respondent says. “As a delegate, you should represent the people.”
Sara Lipka | Posted on Wed May 7, 03:08 PM | Permalink | Comment [2]Clinton, Campaigning in North Carolina and Indiana, Skipped Vote on Earmark Measure
Hillary Clinton, who has backed a one-year moratorium on earmarks, passed up a chance last week to send another earmark-reform measure to the Senate floor, CongressDaily reports.
The measure, which was offered as an amendment to the fiscal-2009 defense authorization bill, would have required earmarks to be listed in the bill’s text and not the conference report. It was defeated, 12-12, after Ms. Clinton, who was campaigning, failed to cast a proxy vote in favor of the amendment.
John McCain, her Republican rival for the White House, voted yes by proxy. Barack Obama, the leading candidate for the Democratic nomination, does not serve on the committee that held the vote. Only two Democrats, out of 13 on the committee, voted in favor of the amendment.
Philippe Reines, a spokesman for Senator Clinton, told CongressDaily she had opted not to vote because she missed the markup and debate on the bill.
“Because of the technical issues raised, she would like to have the benefit of her colleagues’ input before taking and expressing a position on the issue,” he said.
Kelly Field | Posted on Wed May 7, 11:36 AM | Permalink | Comment [4]May 6, 2008
Presidential Candidates Are Urged to Use International Education to Improve U.S. Global Image
The next president needs to act deliberately to respond to “serious concerns” about the United States’ standing on the global stage and should leverage international-education programs as a way to build a strong foundation for collaboration with other nations, officials at Nafsa: Association of International Educators said in an interview posted on a blog about public diplomacy in the 2008 presidential election.
“While each of the candidates has noted America’s declining global image, they have not put forward detailed plans on the issue of public diplomacy,” officials from Nafsa said on the public-diplomacy Web site, which is operated by the Center on Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern California and the Foreign Policy Association. “We very much hope they will and that those plans will include an integral role for international education.”
The international group has written letters to the presidential candidates urging them to focus on using international education to help meet the nation’s needs. Nafsa is urging that the next president develop a proactive national strategy to restore U.S. competitiveness for foreign students and scholars and to ensure that American students are internationally educated.
Sara Hebel | Posted on Tue May 6, 01:48 PM | Permalink | CommentMay 5, 2008
Are Business Majors the New Swing Vote?
The vast majority of college students pay attention to the presidential campaign, favor Barack Obama over both Hillary Rodham Clinton and John McCain, and say they will definitely vote in November, according to findings of an annual survey of students’ politics and civic interests that were released last week by the Leon & Sylvia Panetta Institute for Public Policy.
The institute, on California State University’s Monterey Bay campus, sponsored a survey last month of 1,000 students at four-year colleges across the country. Mr. Panetta, a nine-term Democratic congressman and former chief of staff to President Clinton, pointed out in a written statement that the survey was done “before the most recent round of news reports about Reverend Jeremiah Wright.”
A considerable proportion of students—43 percent—had voted or planned to vote in primaries, according to the report. It breaks down Democratic voters by several categories, finding that—although Mr. Obama leads Ms. Clinton in each group—his margins of victory are narrower among women, Asians, Northeasterners, and poorer students.
Business majors prefer Mr. Obama to Mr. McCain, but Mr. McCain to Ms. Clinton, the report says, and social-science and humanities students favor either Democratic candidate over Mr. McCain more strongly than do math and science students.
Over all, students said that Mr. McCain would deal with an international crisis better than would either Democratic candidate, but that Mr. Obama or Ms. Clinton would be better on the economy, health care, and college affordability.
The report also gives a glimpse into students’ thoughts on other issues. They strongly oppose the war in Iraq but are more concerned about the state of the economy, and two-thirds of them worry at least somewhat often about finding a good-paying, quality job.
Just over half of students said they were interested in working for a “socially responsible organization,” but only 31 percent said they were interested in teaching in a public school—down from 45 percent in 2006. Twenty-nine percent of students said they were interested in running for federal elected office someday.
Sara Lipka | Posted on Mon May 5, 04:44 PM | Permalink | Comment [3]Is Facebook Becoming Passe as a Political Tool?
Facebook, the online social-networking site popular with college students and recent graduates, has not lived up to a lot of its initial hype as an effective political tool, argues Colin Delany in an article posted on the Web site techpresident.com.
“We’ve now seen more than a year of intense use of social-networking sites by the U.S. presidential campaigns (and even longer use by issue-advocacy groups), which gives us a solid base of information and experience to judge just how effective Facebook is as a political tool,” he wrote.
Mr. Delany outlines the limits of Facebook’s effectiveness for presidential campaigns. He asks whether Facebook’s moment in the sun as a hot political tool has passed and, if so, what that might mean for the future of social-networking sites for online political organizing — and for Facebook itself.
Sara Hebel | Posted on Mon May 5, 02:58 PM | Permalink | CommentHigher Education Is a Hot Topic for Some N.C. Voters
In North Carolina’s Research Triangle, many voters are carefully weighing the fine print of the presidential candidates’ higher-education policies ahead of the state’s primary contest tomorrow, according to The News & Observer, in Raleigh.
The article details the plans that Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama have offered to make college affordable for more prospective students. The Democrats have offered largely similar proposals, including those that would expand tax credits for higher education and increase the value of federal Pell Grants.
College affordability, the newspaper said, is a “particularly sensitive” topic in North Carolina because the state constitution guarantees citizens a free university education “as far as practicable.”
And the inability of the value of Pell Grants to keep up with rising costs of college is also especially relevant in the state, according to the article, which noted that North Carolina has an especially high concentration of historically black colleges, which tend to serve large proportions of financially needy students.
Sara Hebel | Posted on Mon May 5, 02:32 PM | Permalink | Comment [6]May 2, 2008
State Higher-Education Officials Issue an Appeal to the Leading Presidential Candidates
More than 90 current and former top state higher-education officials have joined in urging Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain to pledge to support basic scientific research and work to bring about roughly a 50-percent increase in the number of Americans earning college degrees.
In a letter and report mailed to the three leading presidential candidates this week, the past and present state officials say the United States no longer leads the world in the education of young adults and runs the risk of being overtaken by other nations in terms of scientific discovery and technical innovation.
The next president will need “to give urgent attention to higher education” if the U.S. is to continue to have the rising family incomes and a strong job market that are “a top priority for the American people and a prerequisite for continued national security,” the letter says.
Both the letter and report are the work of the State Higher Education Executive Officers, a national association based in Boulder, Colo. Most—but not all—of the group’s current members signed on to the documents.
The report says the proportion of young U.S. adults with an associate or bachelor’s degree must rise from 40 percent to at least 55 percent if the nation is to keep up with Canada and Japan. To reach that level, the number of U.S. residents earning such degrees each year must rise from 2 million to 3 million, which will require simplifying and expanding federal financial aid programs and otherwise overhauling federal higher-education programs and policies.
The report asks the three candidates to “clearly and explicitly commit your campaign and your administration to reestablishing and sustaining a higher education system that is second to no other nation in its quality and productivity.”
Peter Schmidt | Posted on Fri May 2, 07:12 AM | Permalink | CommentMay 1, 2008
Northwestern Withdraws Offer of Honorary Degree to Obama's Former Pastor
Northwestern University is withdrawing its offer of an honorary degree to Barack Obama’s controversial former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, according to news reports.
Mr. Obama denounced Mr. Wright earlier this week after the retired pastor made controversial remarks about such things as his beliefs that the federal government may have intentionally inflicted the AIDS epidemic on black people and that the United States brought the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, on itself.
Earlier this year, before Mr. Wright became a divisive figure in the presidential campaign, faculty committees at Northwestern had recommended that the former paster of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago be invited to receive an honorary degree at the university this June, according to a university statement cited in today’s Chicago Sun-Times.
The university withdrew that invitation because it did not want the controversy overshadowing graduation ceremonies, a Northwestern spokesman was quoted as saying in the newspaper.
“Commencement at Northwestern is a time of celebration of the accomplishments of Northwestern’s graduating students and their families,” the spokesman’s statement read, according to the article. “In light of the controversy around Dr. Wright and to ensure that the celebratory character of commencement not be affected, the university has withdrawn its invitation to Dr. Wright.”
Sara Hebel | Posted on Thu May 1, 02:23 PM | Permalink | Comment [25]Obama, UNC Dribble Around NCAA Rules
The NCAA has a long list of rules designed to protect its student athletes. They include a ban on basketball coaches watching members of their own team playing off-season pickup games.
But when it comes to presidential politics, even the NCAA can make exceptions.
With North Carolina scheduled to hold its presidential primary next week, Democratic party front-runner Barack Obama visited Chapel Hill for a campaign rally on Monday evening. And the following morning, Mr. Obama made arrangements to play a pickup basketball game with members of the team that made this year’s “Final Four” NCAA tournament.
The North Carolina basketball coach, Roy Williams, and his wife, Wanda, gave Mr. Obama a tour of the UNC locker room and then — even though NCAA rules prohibit his attendance at any such postseason pickup game — Mr. Williams sat along the sidelines as Mr. Obama played on the court with some of the Tarheels.
Mr. Williams realized his presence wasn’t within the letter of NCAA rules, but felt these were “extraordinary circumstances,” team spokesman Steve Kirschner told The News & Observer newspaper of Raleigh.
And an NCAA spokesman agreed. “This was a unique situation and not an NCAA issue,” NCAA media-relations director Erik Christianson told the newspaper. “It certainly was a great opportunity for the student-athletes to interact with a presidential candidate.”
Paul Basken | Posted on Thu May 1, 11:52 AM | Permalink | Comment [7]