Uri McMillan calls on Yale to better foster real diversity and equal opportunity:

This lack of faculty diversity affects my scholarship and my hopes of entering the academy. But this also affects all of the students here at Yale. In the Oct. 11 News article, the problem was expressed by Daryl McAdoo ’05, who said that “there are very few black professors at Yale, so it’s harder to find black academic advisors — Everyone ends up asking [Assistant Yale College Dean Pamela] George.” This is unacceptable and places a burden not only on the students, but also on the faculty. To address this crisis of mentorship, in April of this year, more than 300 graduate students from more than 29 departments filed a grievance with the University concerning the University’s diversity procedures. In this grievance, we asked for 1) increased resources for the Office of Diversity and Equal Opportunity (ODEO) to allow it to recruit and retain more women and people of color in the graduate school, 2) permanent support for the now-defunct Center for the Study of Race, Inequality, and Politics (CSRIP) and under-resourced fields like gay and lesbian studies and area studies, and 3) the creation of an independent grievance committee to deal with issues such as hate crimes, sexual harassment and abuses to free speech. In filing this grievance, we highlighted legitimate concerns and used the University’s own process to find concrete solutions for implementation. After all, wouldn’t a university such as Yale want to pilot the academy, true to the word of former Dean William Clyde DeVane, who insisted that “it should not be the function of Yale to reflect American life but to lead it”? Right now, Yale isn’t leading in diversity; it’s being led.

Fool us twice, you won’t fool us again:

The Bush administration has promoted its education law with a video that comes across as a news story but fails to make clear the reporter involved was paid with taxpayer money. The government used a similar approach this year in promoting the new Medicare law and drew a rebuke from the investigative arm of Congress, which found the videos amounted to propaganda in violation of federal law…The story ends with the voice of a woman saying, “In Washington, I’m Karen Ryan reporting.” It does not identify the government as the source of the report. It also fails to make clear the person purporting to be a reporter was someone hired for the promotional video. Those are the same features — including the voice of Karen Ryan — that were prominent in videos the Health and Human Services Department used to promote the Medicare law and were judged covert propaganda by the Government Accountability Office in May.

One of Sam’s readers disputes another’s claim that Jesus would vote for Nader:

Jesus was not big on people who consider themselves pure, and who make a point of displaying this purity before the world…He met the human need that presented itself and never said — to my recollection — that people must suffer because ameliorative action would not result in fundamental reform of the system. (I have yet to be shown how helping elect Geo. Bush will bring about fundamental reform of the system to begin with.) My wife works at a clinic that serves low income people. They are having budget problems as many such undertakings have under Bush. A Kerry victory could make a tangible difference in the lives of the people I see in the waiting room. Which way would Jesus vote? A good question. I don’t think he would have put self-congratulatory purity above such immediate human need.

UNICEF finds reason to question just how healthy privatization of healthcare is:

The transition from planned to market economies in many Asian nations was behind much of the problem with free state health services giving way to often costly private clinics, according to the fund. “Poor people are often unable to pay for those services and stop bringing children for treatment until the very last moment,” UNICEF Regional Health and Nutrition adviser Dr Steve Atwood told AFP. “Vaccinations are also a major concern.” He said where fees have been introduced for treatment, immunisation rates had fallen. High childbirth mortality rates, representing 45 percent of all under-five deaths, and poor sanitation in many nations added to the problem.

Bush backers compare critics of attacks on Kerry to denial of the Holocaust:

“Stolen Honor” focuses on Kerry’s antiwar testimony to Congress in 1971 and its effect on American POWs in Vietnam. Kerry testified that U.S. forces routinely committed atrocities in Vietnam. The film, produced independently of Sinclair, includes interviews with former POWs who say their Vietnamese captors used Kerry’s comments to undercut prisoner morale.

Sinclair, based in the Baltimore suburb of Hunt Valley, decided to air the film after it was rejected for airing by the major broadcast networks, vice president Mark Hyman said. “This is a powerful story,” Hyman said. “The networks are acting like Holocaust deniers and pretending [the POWs] don’t exist. It would be irresponsible to ignore them.”…Sinclair’s top executives, including members of the controlling Smith family, have been strong financial supporters of Bush’s campaign. The company made news in April when it ordered seven of its ABC-affiliated stations not to air a “Nightline” segment that featured a reading of the names of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq; a Sinclair executive called that broadcast “contrary to the public interest.”

Outrageous. Although, as the National Jewish Democratic Council observes, this is not a first.

Many thanks to our 10,000th unique visitor. And to all the other ones too.

Nigerian workers continue their general strike:

Many Nigerian shops and offices remain closed on the second day of a general strike, called over fuel price hikes. Trade unions have joined a government team to find ways of easing the impact of a 25% rise, but refused to end the protest. Oil production has not been affected in Africa’s biggest exporter. The strike, which began on Monday, is one reason why the price of oil has reached a record high of $51 a barrel for London Brent crude. The strike was called by the trade union umbrella grouping, the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), to protest against big increases in the price of petrol since fuel subsidies were removed last year…Our correspondent says many Nigerians support the idea of a strike, but cannot afford not to work. One person was shot and injured in the northern city of Kaduna when police dispersed protesters who had attempted to close roads. In a bid to take the steam out of the strike, President Olusegun Obasanjo set up a task force to look at the effects of the fuel price rises, which included NLC leader Adams Oshiomhole.

Jamie Kirchick rightly faults the YDN for ignoring the controversy over Derrida’s defense of de Man in its article on the former’s death. While quotes like these are certainly interesting –

“He was a very committed and rigorous champion of human rights and the rights of the oppressed,” Kofman said. “It’s sad the degree to which his work has been misunderstood, and I just hope that he’s more appreciated than he has been.”…Holquist said that Derrida’s work at Yale left a division among students and professors between those who felt that Derrida eroded the tradition of close reading and textual analysis, which was a hallmark of the University, and those who felt that Derrida had in fact strengthened that tradition.

– they’re made both more relevant and more dubious by arguments like this:

Some former colleagues asserted that the scandal was being used to discredit deconstruction by people who were always hostile to the movement. But Mr. Derrida gave fodder to critics by defending Mr. de Man, and even using literary deconstruction techniques in an attempt to demonstrate that the Belgian scholar’s newspaper articles were not really anti-Semitic. “Borrowing Derrida’s logic one could deconstruct Mein Kampf to reveal that [Adolf Hitler] was in conflict with anti-Semitism,” scoffed Peter Lennon, in a 1992 article for The Guardian. According to another critic, Mark Lilla, in a 1998 article in The New York Review of Books, Mr. Derrida’s contortionist defense of his old friend left “the impression that deconstruction means you never have to say you’re sorry.”

Now I’m no expert on the controvery in question. And I’m not one to suggest that noxious views Derrida had or defended detract from the importance of studying him in an academic setting, any more than Plato’s or Lincoln’s or Elliot’s make their work less relevant. But such moral failings should be part of the discussion – particularly when they illustrate limits or contradictions within an individual’s moral universe – and part of the narrative. It makes for more honest, more relevant discourse. And it makes for better news too.

It’s about time for a memo like this:

Kerry distorts, takes out of context, and mistakes all the time, but these are not central to his efforts to win. We have a responsibility to hold both sides accountable to the public interest, but that doesn’t mean we reflexively and artificially hold both sides “equally” accountable when the facts don’t warrant that. I’m sure many of you have this week felt the stepped up Bush efforts to complain about our coverage. This is all part of their efforts to get away with as much as possible with the stepped up, renewed efforts to win the election by destroying Senator Kerry at least partly through distortions.

That’s ABCNEWS’ Political Director finally turning away from one of the sacred cows of the corporate media: wrongly portraying both sides as equally responsible for misrepresenting the truth. As Kevin Drum points out, even the supposed bastions of the “liberal media” have been clinging to that principle out of fear of being tarred as, well, bastions of the liberal media. What we end up with is what conservatives like to call “false moral equivalency.” Let’s hope we see more news networks turning away from it.