Phoebe considers a new report from the Education Trust on dismal disparities in higher-education graduation rates and the connections it draws between our struggles as students:

ultimately, only 7% of low-income students get a BA by age 26, compared with 60% of high-income students.” according to the report, “institutional-level data show that some institutional graduation rates are much, much different from others, even when compared with institutions with very little students,” suggesting that a significant portion of the responsibility for these varying graduation rates does, indeed, lie with the institutions of higher education themselves. as one solution, the report suggests “improving alignment between K-12 and higher education” as one way to increase graduation rates, emphasizing in as few words the responsibility the university has for the education at local K-12 schools: “while K-12 schools continue to lag in providing enough higher-level course opportunities for their students, higher education institutions are by no means blameless in this.” a second solution is increasing “the quality of learning” as a strategy to improve graduation rate. and increasing “the quality of learning” directly calls for better mentoring and better teaching, especially of low-income students and students of color. so we see two of the things around which we’re organizing as related methods of improving this same set of problems.

As Phoebe argues, calling for Yale to make a greater investment in education in New Haven and a greater investment in diversifying its faculty are not a zero-sum fight but rather two pieces of a greater demand for our university to value our learning, our teachers’ teaching, and our mutual stake in equal opportunity and diversity that would foster better education and better public citizenship.

Phoebe also culls the vital paragraph from this article:

Harvard, for example, could cover the full cost of tuition, room, board, and fees — nearly $40,000 per year — for all 6,600 of its undergraduates by spending less than 1.4 percent of its endowment each year. That’s less thana tenth of its average annual endowment return, 14.7 percent, over the decade that ended last June 30. Harvard officials will tell you that is impossible because a large portion of the endowment is restricted, but perhaps its six highest-paid money managers could help out: They personally pocketed more than $100-million in 2003 — a sum that would cover the cost
of attendance for 38 percent of undergraduates.

Harvard has the largest endowment of an American University. But Yale has the second largest.

Human Rights Watch calls for Chile’s Supreme Court, in considering appeals by members of Pinochet’s army convicted for disappearing one of opponents, to validate the horror of their crimes and uphold the justice of their sentences:

This promises to be a historic decision. Chile’s top judges should fully back the efforts made by their colleagues to clarify these terrible crimes and hold those responsible accountable.

Meanwhile, newly-released tapes further confirm what we already know – that the American government, in what William Robinson rightly identifies in Promoting Polyarchy as effective disproof of the “democratic peace” thesis, actively worked to subvert a democratic election in Chile and topple its democratically-elected leader:

In the 1973 conversation, Mr. Kissinger tells the president that “of course the newspapers are bleeding because a pro-Communist government has been overthrown.” Mr. Nixon responds, “Isn’t that something.” To which Mr. Kissinger says that he and the president would have been hailed as heroes during “the Eisenhower period” of the 1950’s. He complains that instead they are criticized for tolerating the apartheid government in South Africa. Mr. Nixon then says, “Well, we didn’t, as you know – our hand doesn’t show on this one, though.” Mr. Kissinger replies: “We didn’t do it. I mean we helped them.” The transcript then says, with a long dash that seems to indicate that a word or words were deleted, ” — created the conditions as great as possible.”

When it comes to wrestling with authentic truth and reconciliation and trying crimminals, unfortunately, our government is way behind Chile. The more articulate and succinct case I’ve read for why Kissinger belongs in Hague and not on the lecture circuit is Christopher Hitchens’ The Trial of Henry Kissinger, written a few years before he himself lost it and started issuing apologia for the current batch of war crimminals in the White House.

Mother Jones‘ Michael Sherer on the latest development in outsourcing:

For 25 years, the clearest window into the murky world of federal contracting has been an obscure public database available to anyone for a nominal fee. No longer. Under a new deal approved by the White House, the government’s voluminous compilation of contracting information has been turned over to a contractor.

Established by an act of Congress in 1979, the Federal Procurement Data System was a rare island of public information, the only complete record of federal contracts. Using the database, journalists, auditors and federal investigators could review the million or so agreements with corporations Uncle Sam signed each year. They could find the companies reaping the largest awards, track the rise in no-bid deals, and measure the recent drive to replace federal employees with corporate employees. But under a new contract, the General Services Administration has now turned over responsibility for collecting and distributing information on government contracts to a beltway company called Global Computer Enterprises, Inc.

Once again, the Bush administration is stymied in its campaign to subordinate states’ rights to hew left of federal policy to the conservative ideology of the White House:

A federal appeals court yesterday upheld the only law in the nation authorizing doctors to help their terminally ill patients commit suicide. The decision, by a divided three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, said the Justice Department did not have the power to punish the doctors involved. The majority used unusually pointed language to rebuke Attorney General John Ashcroft, saying he had overstepped his authority in trying to block enforcement of the state law, Oregon’s Death With Dignity Act. “The attorney general’s unilateral attempt to regulate general medical practices historically entrusted to state lawmakers,” Judge Richard C. Tallman wrote for the majority, “interferes with the democratic debate about physician-assisted suicide and far exceeds the scope of his authority under federal law.”

Wal-Mart Watch: Wal-Mart wins approval for one Chicago store, and loses it for another:

After a raucous debate, the council voted 32-15 to allow Wal-Mart to construct a 150,000-square-foot store in a poor, largely black and Hispanic neighborhood on the city’s West Side. In a second vote, the council rejected a huge store Wal-Mart wanted to build in a racially diverse, largely middle-class South Side neighborhood. The vote was 25-21, just shy of the majority of the 50-member council needed to make the zoning change. It was referred back to the zoning committee for reconsideration. The Bentonville, Ark., discount retailer ran into fierce opposition from community leaders who claim Wal-Mart pays substandard salaries and who fear the store would hurt established businesses. The victory for Wal-Mart comes after an expensive defeat in April in the Los
Angeles suburb of Inglewood, where voters rejected a superstore.

A new report from FAIR examines the guest list of National Public Radio – the station disparaged by a phalanx of right-wing-commentators as government sponsored socialism, and described by its President as working to “serve the entire democracy” – and uncovers a consistent bias towards Republicans, toward government elites, and towards white men as sources:

Despite the commonness of such claims, little evidence has ever been presented for a left bias at NPR, and FAIR’s latest study gives it no support. Looking at partisan sources—including government officials, party officials, campaign workers and consultants—Republicans outnumbered Democrats by more than 3 to 2 (61 percent to 38 percent). A majority of Republican sources when the GOP controls the White House and Congress may not be surprising, but Republicans held a similar though slightly smaller edge (57 percent to 42 percent) in 1993, when Clinton was president and Democrats controlled both houses of Congress. And a lively race for the Democratic presidential nomination was beginning to heat up at the time of the 2003 study. Partisans from outside the two major parties were almost nowhere to be seen, with the exception of four Libertarian Party representatives who appeared in a single story (Morning Edition, 6/26/03).

Republicans not only had a substantial partisan edge, individual Republicans were NPR’s most popular sources overall, taking the top seven spots in frequency of appearance. George Bush led all sources for the month with 36 appearances, followed by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld (8) and Sen. Pat Roberts (6). Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, Secretary of State Colin Powell, White House press secretary Ari Fleischer and Iraq proconsul Paul Bremer all tied with five appearances each.

The White House hints that when it comes to dismantling the government services on which Americans depend to foster and protect life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the best is yet to come:

The White House put government agencies on notice this month that if President Bush is reelected, his budget for 2006 may include spending cuts for virtually all agencies in charge of domestic programs, including education, homeland security and others that the president backed in this campaign year.

Administration officials had dismissed the significance of the proposed cuts when they surfaced in February as part of an internal White House budget office computer printout. At the time, officials said the cuts were based on a formula and did not accurately reflect administration policy. But a May 19 White House budget memorandum obtained by The Washington Post said that agencies should assume the spending levels in that printout when they prepare their fiscal 2006 budgets this summer.

That’s funny – I must have missed this in the Bush campaign advertisements. Either that, or this is why so many of them show him promising that he has “a plan” but seem to run out of time before he can tell us what it is.

Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber, in an excerpt from their new book, consider Arnold Schwarzenegger, the media, and the politics of misdirection:

The announcement prompted whoops and cheers from Leno’s studio audience, and Schwarzenegger rewarded them with some of the lines he had made famous in his movies. “Say hasta la vista to Gray Davis,” he said, promising to “pump up Sacramento.” He also paraphrased a line from another movie–the 1976 film, Network. The people of California, Schwarzenegger said, were “mad as hell, and we’re not going to take it anymore.”

Months previously, Schwarzenegger’s approach had been spelled out by Republican pollster Frank Luntz, who conducted focus-group research for the party’s “Rescue California” campaign to recall Davis. In a memo to “Rescue California,” Luntz outlined 17 ways to “kill Davis softly.” It was important, he advised, to “trash the governor,” but, “Issues are less important than attributes and character traits in your recall effort.” Accordingly, Schwarzenegger carefully avoided mentioning the budget or raising any policy questions during his Leno appearance, sticking to Luntz-tested lines such as, “Do your job for the people and do it well, otherwise you are ‘hasta la vista, baby!'”

Anti-war icon David Dellinger died yesterday. Jacob recounts his meeting with Dellinger a few years ago at Yale. As Ron Jacobs writes:

this man had devoted his entire adult life to opposing imperialism and the wars that system demands without ever even throwing a brick at a cop. Like the Berrigan brothers and Martin Luther King, Jr., his commitment to nonviolence was total. At the same time, he understood that pacifism was not passivism.

From the LA Times, via The Statesman:

…an unlikely revolution has taken root here. Today, dozens of women work in relative comfort while seated on customized ergonomic chairs…A city grant will soon bring the ergonomic equiptment to other garment shops that dot Oakland’s Chinatown and other commercial strips. And the project has spawned a much larger study now underway in Los Angeles County – the heart of California’s rag trade. Most surprising in an industry synonynous with powerless and mistreated workers: The women made it happen.

More uncompassionate conservatism:

The Bush administration is changing the nation’s largest program of housing assistance so that, for the first time, the government no longer is promising to pay the full cost of rent vouchers that help nearly 2 million poor families. The Department of Housing and Urban Development is putting into place the new payment method for the program, a cornerstone of federal housing policy known as Section 8, before Congress decides whether to endorse a broader proposal by the administration that would eliminate many longtime federal rules governing which people get rent assistance and how much they must pay.

The payment change, which is infuriating congressional Democrats and advocates for affordable housing, is essentially a different route for the administration to accomplish a central goal of its larger proposal: to constrain rapid growth in the program’s spending.