Improving higher education should be a national priority.

ity University of New York system propelled almost six times as many low-income students into the middle class and beyond as all eight Ivy League campuses, plus Duke, M.I.T., Stanford and Chicago, combined.

These students entered college poor. They left on their way to the middle class and often the upper middle class.

The heyday of the colleges that serve America’s working class can often feel very long ago. It harks back to the mid-20th century, when City College of New York cost only a few hundred dollars a year and was known as the “Harvard of the proletariat.”

itself

More recently, these universities have seemed to struggle, with unprepared students, squeezed budgets and high dropout rates.

proletariat.

hese more typical campuses, students often work while they’re going to college. Some are military veterans, others learned English as a second language and others are in their mid-20s or 30s.

Dropout rates are high, saddling students with debt but no degree

There are a lot of people who would not go to college at all, and would not get an education at all

making more money than their parents as soon as they start their first post-college job

these universities have seemed to struggle, with unprepared students, squeezed budgets and high dropout rates

The reason is clear. State funding for higher education has plummeted. It’s down 18 percent per student, adjusted for inflation, since 2008, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The financial crisis pinched state budgets, and facing a pinch, some states decided education wasn’t a WB_wombat_top priority.“It’s really been a nightmare,” said Diana Natalicio, UTEP’s president and herself a first-generation college graduate. “The state does not recognize — and it’s not just in Texas — the importance that the investment in public education has for the economy and so many other things. Education was for me, and for many of the rest of us, the great opportunity creator.”

Pavia grew up in Canutillo, a poor neighborhood in El Paso, the son of a construction worker and house cleaner. He did well enough in high school to attend many colleges but — as frequently happens with low-income students — was not willing to leave home at age 18 for an unfamiliar world. “I just didn’t feel like I was ready to go out to college on my own,” he said. “So I decided to stay home and save money.”

After all, the earnings gap between four-year college graduates and everyone else has soared in recent decades. The unemployment rate for college graduates today is a mere 2.5 percent.

They remain deeply impressive institutions that continue to push many Americans into the middle class and beyond — many more, in fact, than elite colleges that receive far more attention.

Out West, California built an entire university system that was both accessible and excellent

“There is a real problem with the elite privates and flagship publics in not serving as many low-income students as they should,”

these universities have seemed to struggle, with unprepared students, squeezed budgets and high dropout rates.

Education was for me, and for many of the rest of us, the great opportunity creator.

City University of New York system propelled almost six times as many low-income students into the middle class and beyond as all eight Ivy League campuses, plus Duke, M.I.T., Stanford and Chicago, combined.

On several dozen of campuses, remarkably, fewer students hail from the entire bottom half of the income distribution than from the WB_wombat_top 1 percent.

UTEP to teach an intensive two-week class on business and law. Pavia’s story is the classic story of the American dream.

“There are a lot of people who would not go to college at all, and would not get an education at all, if they had to go through some selective criteria,

success stories are real, too, and they’re fairly common

Dropout rates are high, saddling students with debt but no degree. For-profit colleges perform the worst, and a significant number of public colleges also struggle.

Baruch graduates, he added, are making more money than their parents as soon as they start their first post-college job.

These students entered college poor. They left on their way to the middle class and often the upper middle class.

many of them are performing much better than their new stereotype suggests.

unprepared students, squeezed budgets and high dropout rates.

West, California built an entire university system that was both accessible and excellent.

performing much better than their new stereotype suggests.

More recently, these universities have seemed to struggle, with unprepared students, squeezed budgets and high dropout rates. To some New Yorkers, “City College” is now mostly a byword for nostalgia.

healthy relationship with all technology,

We do not face a simple choice of digital or analog. That is the false logic of the binary code that computers are programmed with, which ignores the complexity of life in the real world.

but learning happens best when we build upon the relationships between students, teachers and their peers.

but has outperformed digital learning experiments

encouraging human interaction

feeling of belonging.

real places where we live.

the walled garden of analog saves both time and inspires creativity.

powerful efficiency in that simplicity

unparalleled with anything delivered through a screen

But younger consumers who never owned a turntable and have few memories of life before the internet drive most of the current interest in analog

Vinyl records have witnessed a decade-long boom in popularity (more than 200,000 newly pressed records are sold each week in the United States)

Nearly half of millennials worry about the negative effects of social media on their mental and physical health, according to the American Psychiatric Association.

Facebook and Twitter are eroding our democratic institutions

get the better of the major objection to your argument by raising and answering it in advance

An op-ed contributor is a specialist who seeks only to inform them

whatever messages people with money want to push at us

This means those using pseudonyms to protect their identities while posting about human rights violations in repressive regimes and are flagged by members of those regimes may face consequences for breaking the rule, while others go unnoticed.

It’s a combination that leaves it without effective competition.

Rather, as this latest incident should remind us, we are Facebook’s product.

Out of curiosity, the other day I searched “cellphones” on Google.

But, really, how can you tell?

Growth becomes the overriding motivation — something treasured for its own sake, not for anything it brings to the world.

Silicon Valley Is Not Your Friend

and getting polio and having to wait in line at the bank to check your account balance.

We don’t deny that new technologies come with some perils.

The risk here, of course, is that by treating the immoderate playing of video games as an addiction, we are pathologizing relatively normal behavior.

More damning

A large-scale study of internet-based games

Let’s start with the neuroscientific analogy:

This is all terribly misguided. Playing video games is not addictive in any meaningful sense. It is normal behavior that, while perhaps in many cases a waste of time, is not damaging or disruptive of lives in the way drug or alcohol use can be.

Evidence for addiction to video games is virtually nonexistent.

American Journal of Psychiatry

By contrast, using a drug like methamphetamine can cause a level of dopamine release 10 times that or more.

Playing a video game or watching an amusing video on the internet causes roughly about as much dopamine to be released in your brain as eating a slice of pizza.

This is true but not illuminating.

World Health Organization

the neuroscientist Andrew Doan

The American Psychiatric Association

It’s certainly common to hear parents complain that their children are “addicted” to video games. Some researchers even claim that these games are comparable to illegal drugs in terms of their influence on the brain — that they are “digital heroin”

the neuroscientist Peter C. Whybrow

Is video game addiction a real thing?

But a student who designs and sells greeting cards and mentions on her Facebook page that she is a softball player risks losing her athletic eligibility. That is shameful. Bylaw 12.5.1.3 has got to go.

It means that the author’s book biography cannot state that he participates in a college-level sport. It means that, in publicizing the book to students or alumni, the college cannot mention that the author is a student athlete.

But N.C.A.A. bylaw 12.5.1.3, otherwise denoted as “Modeling and Other Nonathletically Related Promotional Activities,” specifies that, in promoting the book, no reference can be made to the individual’s “involvement in intercollegiate athletics.”

Our school is fortunate to have as a student a young man (whose name I can’t mention) who has published a book (whose title I can’t cite). The book has nothing whatsoever to do with athletics, but among his many activities at the college, he participates in an intercollegiate sport (which, of course, shall remain unspecified).

let’s begin by reforming the association’s bylaw that prevents college athletes from promoting any personal creative endeavor if they even mention that they participate in a sport.

Its root cause is that universities with powerhouse sports teams like U.C.L.A., Ohio State and Texas receive nearly $20 million a year from brands like Adidas or Nike, while the athletes wearing the Adidas or Nike apparel are expected to compete purely for the love of the game.

It’s about the lengths to which the N.C.A.A. goes to control every dollar and branding opportunity associated with college athletics.

nt us to get back our desire for broad consensus and to reject strategies that seek to impose one group’s ideas over another’s. I want collaboration and strategic agreements on nationwide issues.

I want to see a return to efficiency — and to sanity. I want our proud, pragmatic Catalan spirit back.

new elections for the Catalan Parliament.

the matter of independence has divided Catalans, distanced us from the European Union and frightened away banks and businesses. A resolution is necessary.

independence movement in Catalonia is still acting irresponsibly by threatening a unilateral declaration of independence

federal financing system should function as an alliance between the Catalonia tax office and the federal tax administration.

Second, the Catalan government should have exclusive jurisdiction over issues like language, education and culture. The Spanish state should guarantee that it will defend and encourage the use of all of Spain’s languages.

Catalonia is a nation that exists within Spain must be recognized

This new agreement, which should culminate in federal constitutional reform, must address several objectives.

the support of a much broader majority

The Socialist Party of Catalonia, which I lead, has a plan to move forward. We refuse to choose between paralysis and secessionism. We do not want to see a minority — or even a slim majority — of Catalans impose their views on the rest of the population on this issue

the matter of independence has divided Catalans

A minority cannot be allowed to impose its opinion upon the rest of Catalonia.

Some of it belongs to the pro-independence faction in Catalonia’s regional parliament, which chose to disregard the law and schedule an independence referendum for Oct. 1. But the central government in Madrid deserves much of the blame for the crisis, too. Incapable of negotiating with Catalans, it delegated the matter to the judicial branch, which issued an order forbidding the referendum, an order that ultimately led to the police’s use of excessive force against voters.

The relationship between Catalonia and the rest of Spain has become a serious institutional crisis

it must be resolved as soon as possible

The number of Portuguese dying from overdoses plunged more than 85 percent before rising a bit in the aftermath of the European economic crisis of recent years. Even so, Portugal’s drug mortality rate is the lowest in Western Europe — one-tenth the rate of Britain or Denmark — and about one-fiftieth the latest number for the U.S.

25,000 Portuguese use heroin, down from 100,000 when the policy began.

After more than 15 years, it’s clear which approach worked better. The United States drug policy failed spectacularly, with about as many Americans dying last year of overdoses — around 64,000 — as were killed in the Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq Wars combined. Photo

drug addiction has been treated more as a medical challenge than as a criminal justice issue.

gently encourages them to try to quit and gives them clean hypodermics to prevent the spread of AIDS.

“These are animals,” President Trump said of MS-13 members. Most often, rather, they are like my student: young people, not unlike child soldiers, who enter a violent life

. Being in school felt impossible to him because he felt unable to succeed at it. He had an upcoming court case and no lawyer; that, he knew, would cost money he didn’t have.

thousands of dollars of high-interest debt and little or no English skills. And they face an administration that insists that they are gangsters bringing bloodshed and gang warfare to American cities.

13. For two years he lived alone in her house, selling water bottles on the street on behalf of a neighboring family. Sometimes they invited him over for dinner; other times they didn’t.

What these findings show is that pride, gratitude and compassion, whether we consciously realize it or not, reduce the human mind’s tendency to discount the value of the future.

“Faith requires the possibility of rejection, or it is not faith.”

but a federal judge ruled this summer that the state is not required to inform people with convictions who couldn’t vote under the old law that they may now register to vote.

The law bars people with felonies of “moral turpitude” from voting. For decades such crimes were ill defined, but once included things like miscegenation

I can only imagine how it has reopened the wounds of the women who came forward with their stories about him, and did not receive enough attention. This country is currently trying to reconcile itself to years of power abuse and sexual misconduct. Its leader is wantonly poking the bear.

heresa May of Britain

No doubt most of you do some or all of these things

Ajit Pai

The courage this country has shown

has caused an outcry and our response to it has become a priority.

It is essential to weave solid alliances with all the social and economic actors that want to build a national state truly at the service of its citizens

convert the country into just one more province of a divided Spain that does not tolerate national plurality

our police force at its service

control the media

educational curriculum

control them despotically

there is a clear dissociation between the democratic will of citizens and the central government

impose the state’s brute force

the representatives of the citizens

limit rights and freedoms

dialogue

quash self-government

they will not always be easy to understand.

road

With the referendum’s passing vote

and will continue to be until the day our citizens decide otherwise in a free election.

willing to have its machinery strike millions of citizens

And this is where we drew the line

and by extreme right-wing groups that have acted with complete impunity.

We believed that if we voted for independence peacefully, the Spanish government would listen to us

it tried to stop the referendum through the indiscriminate use of batons, threats and coercion.

The Spanish government wants only servile obedience

the Spanish government has never listened; we have always found the same wall of incomprehension and rejection

The Constitutional Court has suspended every one of the initiatives of the Catalan government.

This damage to Catalan society is part of a longstanding strategy of the Spanish government.

with rushed legislative actions to encourage firms to move out of Catalonia,

we Catalonians have been enduring a sustained effort against our self-government

that most Catalans wanted a peaceful, democratic vote to establish their independence.

are being prohibited from deciding their future

with the support of the public, has one priority

These menacing turns of events have been quite bewildering to the public,

Lately, however, the sins of Silicon Valley-led disruption have become impossible to ignore.

Hubris:

Justice John G. Roberts Jr., arguing that the South had taken great strides that made the protections of the act unnecessary, based his decision in part on a Senate Judiciary Committee analysis that misinterpreted how the Census Bureau reports race and ethnicity data and wrongly suggested that registration gaps between minorities and whites had shrunk significantly, an error that neither he nor his clerks caught.

ProPublica found that the court cited faulty research or introduced their own errors in nearly a third of the 24 cases that relied on such facts.

But then the regulatory measures they propose, even when they poll well, often lack any direct connection to the massacres themselves.

The horror of the mass shooting in Las Vegas is demarcated by the sheer number of casualties inflicted by a single individual — more than 50 dead and more than 500 injured

Africa was for the black man, and America was for the white man. He seemed to have forgotten the brown men who were here long before either of our ancestors. He told a white woman, who was holding a sign promoting peace, that she was a race traitor, and despite her wide hips, he’d be willing to show her what a real man was all about. He spouted racist theories about the testosterone levels of black women and the difference in brain sizes between the races. I was unnerved; he truly believed what he was saying.

party loyalty increasingly shapes not just votes but social identity, friendship, where you live and whom you hope your children marry.

our media environment breeds hysteria

In The New Yorker, Robin Wright quotes a State Department expert on internecine conflict whose personal estimate is that “the United States faces a 60 percent chance of civil war over the next 10 to 15 years.”

The point of political protest is to change the world. And yet the process matters, too.

To live in the present is not to avoid hard work or strife. Alongside the projects that occupy you in your profession, or in your political life, the telic activities that matter to you, is the atelic process of protesting injustice or doing your job. To value the process is not to flee from work or political engagement. That is why living in the present is not an abdication of ethical responsibility or a recipe for detachment.

To live in the present is not to deny the value of telic activities, of making a difference in the world. That would be a terrible mistake. Nor can we avoid engaging in such activities. But if projects are all we value, our lives become self-subversive, aimed at extinguishing the sources of meaning within them. To live in the present is to refuse the excessive investment in projects, in achievements and results, that sees no inherent value in the process.

To live in the present is to appreciate the value of atelic activities like going for a walk, listening to music, spending time with family or friends. To engage in these activities is not to extinguish them from your life. Their value is not mortgaged to the future or consigned to the past, but realized here and now. It is to care about the process of what you are doing, not just projects you aim to complete.

“If you are learning, you have not at the same time learned.” When you care about telic activities, projects such as writing a report, getting married or making dinner, satisfaction is always in the future or the past. It is yet to be achieved and then it is gone. Telic activities are exhaustible; in fact, they aim at their own exhaustion. They thus exhibit a peculiar self-subversion. In valuing and so pursuing these activities, we aim to complete them, and so to expel them from our lives.

Atelic activities, by contrast, do not by nature come to an end and are not incomplete. In defining such activities, we could emphasize their inexhaustibility, the fact that they do not aim at terminal states. But we could also emphasize what Aristotle does: They are fully realized in the present. “At the same time, one is seeing and has seen, is understanding and has understood, is thinking and has thought.” There is nothing you need to do in order to perform an atelic activity except what you are doing right now. If what you care about is reflecting on your life or spending time with family or friends, and that is what you are doing, you are not on the way to achieving your end: You are already there.

Where are the statues in the former slave states honoring the very large part of the Southern population (beginning with the four million slaves) that sided with the Union rather than the Confederacy? Where are the monuments to the victims of slavery or to the hundreds of black lawmakers who during Reconstruction served in positions ranging from United States senator to justice of the peace to school board official? Excluding blacks from historical recognition has been the other side of the coin of glorifying the Confederacy.

“our” history and culture

Blacks, wrote Chief Justice Roger B. Taney (a statue of whom was removed from public display in Baltimore this week), were and would always be aliens in America.

Should American nationality be based on shared values, regardless of race, ethnicity and national origin, or should it rest on “blood and soil,” to quote the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Va., whom Trump has at least partly embraced?

“the history and culture of our great country” raises numerous questions, among them: Who is encompassed in that “our”

No software system can be free from bugs (or intruders), and users must be mindful of the risks. But the inherent lack of perfect automotive safety doesn’t mean we don’t try to make cars safer. Obviously, people should drive more carefully, but seatbelts, airbags and better car design reduce injury enormously, and that has been great for the industry as well as consumers. The software industry should be no different.

Now that many of the biggest tech companies operate like media businesses, trafficking in information, they’re in a race to create new products to charm and track consumers.

Thanks to the sanitized images of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement that dominate our nation’s classrooms and our national discourse, many Americans imagine that protests organized by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and countless local organizations fighting for justice did not fall victim to violent outbreaks

we face the imminent danger of all manner of bad history repeating itself while we watch it on TV.

We do not make art in a vacuum isolated from sociopolitical context.

found a way to reimagine history in speculative fiction without making slavery into an intellectual exercise rather than plainly showing it as the grossly oppressive institution it was

largely replicates what actually happened, I wonder why people are expending the energy to imagine that slavery continues to thrive when we are still dealing with the vestiges of slavery in very tangible ways.

quiet, insidious acts of violence, reminders that racial hatred is alive and well.

They were not the first nor will they be the last to resist acknowledging that the Confederacy lost the Civil War.

I suppose it’s an interesting premise, but as is often the case with interesting premises, at what cost?

If we want to use technology to help people learn, we have to provide information in the way the human mind evolved to receive it. We have to speak the mind’s language, and that includes the language not only of information but also of social cues. Failing to do so will continue to artificially limit the gains that educational technology promises to offer.

Reflecting on Middlebury, he told me, “Anybody whose approach to ideas that they don’t like is just to scream bloody murder has been failed in their education.” It hasn’t taught them that history is messy, society complicated and truth elusive.

It’s part of what some angry voters in 2016 were reacting to and rebelling against.

we’d be foolish not to treat this as a wake-up call, because it’s of a piece with some of the extraordinary demands that students at other campuses have made, and it’s the fruit of a dangerous ideological conformity in too much of higher education.

controversial social scientist

Physical safety? Absolutely.

slurs

they should be able to purge their world of perspectives offensive to them

students shouted down and chased away

Then he whored for his Virginia winery on the way out the door

Just as the hatred came from one side only, the care did not come from “many sides.”

This is not about “free speech.” It never was. There is no “free speech” if anyone brandishes firearms to intimidate those they despise. You can’t argue with the armed. The Nazis told us their intentions clearly on Saturday. This, to them, is about “blood and soil.” They are serious. So are we.

While innovation — the social process of introducing new things — is important, most technologies around us are old, and for the smooth functioning of daily life, maintenance is more important.

The Great Vietnam War Novel Was Not Written by an American

they do not constitute an obstruction of justice.

are routinely made to investigators and prosecutors.

But telling the F.B.I. director that someone is a “good guy”

Indeed, when President Obama endorsed Hillary Clinton for president in June 2016 — during the height of the F.B.I.’s investigation into Secretary Clinton’s private email server

As the Supreme Court stated in United States v. Sun-Diamond Growers of California, “for bribery there must be a quid pro quo — a specific intent to give or receive something of value in exchange for an official act.”