2008 Woodie Awards
Newark Mayoral elections have interested me for a while, even before I came to New Jersey. It might be because of the disintegration of the city over the years, or just because of Roth’s books, but NPR covers the 2002 election story a bit here. I find it fascinating how they called the 2002 race (maybe in an earlier broadcast) a classic case of machine politics still at work.
Something they said here really struck me, and reminded me of an earlier post on PPN about intelligent minority students (primarily black, hispanic) being told they are “acting white” when they succeed. Here, the incumbent Sharpe James in one of his speeches in the race 4 years ago implied that Cory Booker wasn’t “black” enough, although he had lived in a housing project for I think over a year in order to figure out how people in Newark actually lived.
If I remember correctly, Sharpe in that election was backed pretty strongly by the police department and other community organizations, and he won. This year, he’s not running, but Booker doesn’t have it easy. An article in the New York Times Friday talked about Booker voting for a land deal in 2001 that he’s now actively denouncing as part of his campaign. There are some quotes from Obama, which I think are very interesting, about people needing to make an issue since he’s not really facing anyone in the election. It’s an interesting case. I don’t know where I stand on this, since I think this kind of clear contradiction may point to a bigger issue, but I’ll let you draw your own conclusions on this one. I don’t think Booker would have overlooked or forgotten this issue when he was planning for the 2006 race.
Building upon others’ reflections on TNR in the Foer era, I’m compelled to rethink in that spirit, slightly, that painful subject of why John Kerry lost. Here’s my crack theory. One meme that you saw endlessly repeated during the campaign by the right-wing was that he was a “Massachusetts liberal,” which made him utterly out of touch with the realities in the rest of the country. But shouldn’t the Democratic Party have realized that Kerry would be charged as such beforehand? Part of the Kerry campaign’s strategy was to associate the candidate’s Massachusetts origins with the American Revolution, specifically the patriots at Lexington and Concord. This was an interesting strategy, but it backfired because the Kerry campaign overestimated the endurance of the mythological dimensions of the American Revolution in the modern American psyche. Had the Democratic Party read the historical psychology of the voting public accurately vis-à-vis the impact of a candidate’s geographical origin on his viability (an underlying determining factor in the race), I claim, they wouldn’t have run Kerry at all, or at least not talked up his geographical connection to the Revolution.
Why? Because while the campaign was right to assume that the ‘myth of the Revolution’ is indeed an enduring myth in American cultural psychology, they forgot that the ‘myth of the War of 1812 and its aftermath’ is a much more enduring one even if nobody ever talks about it. A much greater one is the ‘myth of the War of 1812 and its aftermath.’ This is my unlikely theory, so don’t put too much stock in it.
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Howard, you are right; however, I do not think that their editorial is a good one. They rightly reject the College Republicans’ SBOR, but they suggest that if it were amended, it would be fine and they would editorialize in favor of it:
A more clearly-articulated SBOR that is free of redundant sections would give students the opportunity to clarify what we see as essential to a fair learning environment that is free from unnecessary politicization. But the current bill proposed by the College Republicans is not this ideal bill.
This is still the wrong position to take. The editorial board’s position here is like the liberal hawk position on Iraq: a good idea, but badly executed. Similarly, the ed board says SBOR is a good idea, but the College Republicans’ version is badly executed. This is precisely akin to the “incompetence dodge” used by liberal hawks vis-a-vis the Iraq war. Just like the liberal hawks say the war was a good idea but badly executed, the newspaper’s editorial board says the SBOR is a good idea, but badly executed. But the liberal hawks were wrong, and the Princetonian editorial board is wrong as well: the SBOR is a bad idea, period. They write that “we support the general values outlined by the SBOR because we strongly believe that students should actively affirm their desire for a fair and open classroom.” In this they misunderstand what the general values outlined by SBOR actually are. Like far too many Princeton students, they think “academic freedom” means “academic freedom” when the College Republicans say it. This is naive: “academic freedom” is a Lakoffian frame employed by the CR’s disguise a partisan agenda. I would not even support a revised SBOR on principle, because students simply have no right to dictate to faculty how they should teach their classes. If you are being harrassed, that’s illegal, and you should take it up with the authorities. Even if we were to concede that English professors have no business talking about the Iraq war in class, the principle of SBOR is still wrong, because students have no business telling a professor how they should run their classes or what they should say.
The Daily Princetonian has sided with Asheesh on this one.
The Nebraska legislature recently passed a law to segregate the Omaha school district into three seperate districts based on race, one that is mostly white, one mostly black, and the third mostly Hispanic. You can see the article here. One might have thought the New York Times was pulling a line from The Onion with this article, but unfortunately, unlike The Onion, it is true and very serious.
For the mostly white population that make up the suburbia surrounding Omaha, where most students in schools are minorities, and the minorities who live within the city to oppose forced integration is understandable. No one likes busing. But to choose the opposite extreme, of creating racially divided districts to preserve in stone the differences, is morally indefensible. Nebraska’s legislature may have taken one backward step in passing the law, but should it be implemented, then it will be one giant backward leap for mankind.
The Wall Street Journal has a front page cover story about Princeton senior Dan-el Padilla, who not only is one of the top students on campus but also is here as an illegal immigrant. It’s definitely worth reading:
Dan-el Padilla Peralta, a 21-year-old classics major at Princeton University, has risen from a childhood in homeless shelters and blighted apartments to maintain a 3.9 grade-point average. He has won prize after prize, often taking twice the typical course load. One faculty member, writing a recommendation, predicted “he will be one of the best classicists to emerge in his generation.”
Mr. Padilla stands out at Princeton for another reason: He’s an illegal immigrant. And two weeks ago, he did something few people in his shoes ever do. He turned himself in.
Mr. Padilla recently won a two-year scholarship to Oxford University in the United Kingdom. But according to longstanding immigration law, if he leaves, he can’t return to the U.S. — his home since the age of 4 — for at least 10 years.
Like many people on campus, I found the fact that there are undocumented immigrants in the student body surprising. It was surprising because the thought never crossed my mind and only goes to show how fundamental a role such undocumented immigrants, of all stripes and colors, play in our accepted everyday surroundings and lives. Knowing Dan-el’s story is also important in the context of all the debates, protests, articles written on campus, whether in this publication or elsewhere, about the political hot potato of immigration. His story tells us these public statements and articles are on a topic that is as much of a reality to us as the student sitting next to us in class.
On Tuesday Harvard economist Roland Fryer came to Princeton to give a talk on the above subject. The subject is on how some African American and Hispanic students are perceived as “acting white” by their peers because they get good grades in school. It happens that popularity (or an index of popularity), when correlated with grades, rises for white students across all GPA levels–so the higher the GPA the higher the popularity among whites–but for blacks popularity rises and then dips down when GPA passes 3.5 (see graphs on page 5 of Fryer’s article). What this says is a black high school student’s popularity is negatively correlated with his or her grades after he or she has obtained a sufficiently high grade, forming a hump on the graph. A similar humped graph also shows the popularity/GPA correlation for Hispanic students. How big of an issue is this?
Fryer certainly thinks it’s a very deep issue, with deep and hard to change forces at work. Even after controlling for fixed effects, such as the income of the student’s parents, which school the student attended, school size, etc., these correlations persist. Furthermore, when schools are separated between public and private, the humped correlation disappears among minorities but is almost identical as before for public schools, so the negative stigma of “acting white” is predominantly in public schools. In fact, the cost in popularity of minorities “acting white,” or attaining better grades, exists even in interracial schools. Perhaps there are social pressures at work here and Fryer beleves these are the main culprits.
I think Fryer has a point. Personally, “acting white” is an issue at my former high school (Princeton High) where there is, at the very least, a perceived stigma among select groups of minorities that doing well in school or seeking help on an assignment goes against the flow. How do I know? People tell me what they hear in the hallways. It may be the mentality that because one is different from high achieving students (where there are very few minorities in the advanced placement classes for example), it is in your best interests to be different from them, not just in who you are or in the color of your skin, but also in your attitude towards education, an opposites attitude. This is a self reinforcing phenomena that’s nearly impossible to break out of if left by itself.
Over at the Tory’s new blog, they’re asking:
Do we have any (preliminary) preferences for the ‘08 Republican candidate? McCain, Frist, Tancredo, Rice, Giuliani, Sen. George Allen (R-VA), Sen. Brownback (R-KS), Mitt Romney, Chuck Hagel? Personally, I’d like someone with a Reaganesque determination to limit the growth of the Federal Government…a determination our current President does not have.
It’s important to highlight the use of “we” here- the conflation of the interests of the Tory and the Republican Party. In Juergen’s phrasing, there’s really no difference between them. Also, is it not true that almost all of the Tory’s leadership are members of Princeton’s College Republicans as well? One then should ask, why should I read the Tory when I can just read Ken Mehlman’s better written, more concise, and more professional press releases? Either way, we’re just getting the views of a bunch of Republicans, so why read the inferior articulation offered by the Tory? The point is that the Tory makes no genuinely new, creative, or interesting contribution to the political discussion. I can get the exact same opinions and views- only more informed and more elegantly articulated- from Mehlman’s website. Of course, you can’t ask a similar question of this magazine because the PPN makes absolutely no pretenses to be a mouthpiece of the Democratic (or any other) political party. Maybe the Tory should be saving some trees; oh wait . . . I guess the idea of ‘editorial independence’ is as much of a foreign concept among young conservative “journalists” as integrity itself.
I have an op-ed in today’s Daily Princetonian explaining why the proposed “students bill of rights,” pushed by College Republicans and (sadly) supported by some mis-guided and mis-informed progressives, is a very bad idea. Do check it out. I hope Princeton students do not buy into the propaganda being put out by the College Republicans on this one, exemplified by this op-ed by Wyatt Yankus. He misleads his readers when he writes that “. . . correcting the problems that do exist does not require the same drastic measures that have been used by Students for Academic Freedom in other cases, and our SBOR reflects this difference.” First, the only ‘problem’ here is the College Republicans’ attempt to quelch the free exchange of ideas at Princeton University. Second, this is simply not what their bill says. You wouldn’t know that, however, because the College Republicans’ bill is not publicly available. I have obtained a copy, and it is indistinguishable from Horowitz’s. Below the fold, I have reprinted a press release that Free Exchange at Princeton sent out last Friday highlighting the similarities. (Let me make clear that Free Exchange at Princeton is in no way affiliated with the Princeton Progressive Nation).
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For the summer, I know Princeton students end up all over the place. There are those who choose to spend the months of June, July, and August participating in REUs (Research Experience for Undergraduates), taking even more courses, living in and travelling to distant places, and taking on a job, possibly at a local store or by participating in an internship. Then there are those who choose to suck in the sunny days with no work on the horizon. The list goes on.
The Harvard Crimson has an article from several years back about summers that still seems relevant today, and as relevant to Princeton as it is to Harvard now.
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