It’s spring and the great migrations are underway. From throughout the north, college students are heading south for a week or ten days of sunstroke, public inebriation and reverse peristalsis. In college towns, administrators have a week to sort out all the nagging paperwork that never seems to get finished while the kids are around. It’s a particularly onerous task in California, where everyone is still picking through the remnants of Proposition 209, which did away with affirmative action in the University of California system of schools, as well as the rest of the state government.
Rather than get involved in a potentially tenure-damaging political debate, professors at one of those schools – UC Santa Barbara – went out and did what they are supposed to do: scholarly research. By interviewing students and asking them to keep diaries of their activities, the researchers were able to track the college experience for students of various ethnicities and socio-economic backgrounds. The results, published in the Chronicle of Higher Education last November, indicate that if anyone is gumming up our university system, it’s the rich white kids.
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Post-Modern Terror Warfare
Spring arrived suddenly in the Champlain Valley last weekend. Crocuses and hyacinths resolutely pushed green shoots through soil still damp from melting snow. Church Street was thronged with people, who having sat indoors for months, needed to do nothing more than stroll in the sun. Buskers and food carts were out; the more enterprising restaurant managers hurried tables out to the street.
On the block between Bank and Cherry streets, the peace and justice demonstrators lined up with their placards facing the sun. Some placards were new, some were recently revised, “Yugoslavia” having been squeezed in next to “Iraq” above the plea for an end to sanctions and bombing. The Saturday demonstration is a regular event, but passers-by seem less indifferent now that spring is here. Instead of hurrying past, many stop to take a fact sheet and chat for a moment.
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