Students of Virginity

This from the New York Times:

There was a time when not having sex consumed a very small part of Janie Fredell’s life, but that, of course, was back in Colorado Springs.

It seemed to Fredell that almost no one had sex in Colorado Springs. Her hometown was extremely conservative, and as a good Catholic girl, she was annoyed by all the fundamentalist Christians who would get in her face and demand, as she put it to me recently, “You have to think all of these things that we think.”

They seemed not to know that she thought many of those things already.

At her public high school, everyone, “literally everyone,” wore chastity rings, Fredell recalled, but she thought the practice ridiculous. Why was it necessary, she wondered, to signify you’re not doing something that nobody is doing?

Janie Fredell, an advocate of premarital abstinence, says that "virginity is extremely alluring."

And then Fredell arrived at Harvard. Sitting in a Cambridge restaurant not long ago, she told me that people back home called it “godless, liberal Harvard.” Some discouraged her from going, but Fredell went anyway, arriving in the fall of 2005. She wanted to study government, she said, maybe become a lawyer, and she knew that “people take you more seriously as a Harvard student.”

From the start, she told me, she was awed by the diversity of the place, by the intensity, by the constant buzz of ideas. There were so many different kinds of people at Harvard, most of them trying to change the world, and everyone trying to figure out what they thought of everyone else. “Harvard really puts pressure on you to define who you are,” Fredell said, and she loved everything about Harvard, except the sex.

Sex, as she put it, was not even “anything I’d ever thought about” when, as a freshman, she was educated in safe-sex practices. What she was told was the sort of thing found in a Harvard pamphlet called “Empowering You”: “put the condom on before the penis touches the vagina, mouth, or anus. . . . Use a new condom if you want to have sex again or if you want to have a different type of sex.”

Fredell began to understand she was in “a culture that says sex is totally O.K.” When a new boyfriend came to her, expressing desire, she managed to “stick to my guns,” she said, but there were “uncouth and socially inept” men, as she considered them, all around, and observing the rituals of her new classmates, Fredell couldn’t help being alarmed. “The hookup culture is so absolutely all-encompassing,” she said. “It’s shocking! It’s everywhere!” ...

Photo: Katherine Wolkoff for The New York Times.

Harvard Professor Mica Pollock: Q & A on the Supreme Court’s Diversity Decision

In a 5-4 decision, the United States Supreme Court today ruled against Seattle and Kentucky school-choice programs that considered race in the assignment of children to public schools. Associate Professor Mica Pollock, whose research — including the award-winning book Colormute: Race Talk Dilemmas in an American School — focuses on the role of race in educational settings, discusses the decision.

Q. How will the Supreme Court ruling affect schools that want to maintain racial diversity?

A. As Justice Stevens suggested, districts are now going to be waiting in fear to be sued for even voluntary attempts to create or maintain racial diversity in school enrollment. It’s a sad day in America when people fear they will be sued for attempts to create diverse and equitable schools.
This ruling could prompt more complex efforts at diversifying school populations. The danger is that districts will hear this ruling as a mandate to mute any analysis or discussion of race when planning student enrollment or school programs. But districts don’t have to be colormute – they don’t have to stop their conversations about race and opportunity, and about student body diversity. I hope districts refuse colormuteness, and keep talking about how to attract diverse populations to their schools and educational programs.

School-level educators also need to keep talking about racially equal opportunity inside their schools and classrooms. No one in the field of education should take this opinion as a mandate to stop talking about race and opportunity, or the need for diversity. We can’t afford that as a nation.

Q. Are you fearful that this ruling will result in increased school segregation or will districts find a way around the ruling?

A. I’m certain that the ruling will result in increased school segregation, as districts abandon voluntary desegregation plans out of fear. I imagine that people interpreting this opinion in more detail will keep debating whether it leaves open the potential to consider race as one of many factors in school admissions; I know people will keep debating how to use various other methods to pursue a racially diverse student body in a school.

Q. Do you see this ruling as part of a trend? Or is it an anomaly?

A. This caps off a legal trend of the past several decades, in which judges and courts have repeatedly limited efforts to diversify schools and to equalize opportunities to learn for students of color. Brown’s original intent was to outlaw race-conscious efforts to deny students of color opportunity. It outlawed race-conscious efforts to create segregated schools. Today, the majority argued that race-conscious efforts to help provide students of color opportunity, or to create diverse schools, are discriminatory. As Justice Stevens argued, the majority distorted the logic of Brown vs. Board.

Q. What are the benefits of having a diverse classroom? Why should this even matter?

A. Diverse classrooms, of course, need to be equitable classrooms. When opportunities are distributed equally and sufficiently within diverse schools and classrooms, they seem to be the nation’s ideal learning environments. Students in such classrooms get exposed to a greater diversity of human experience, and this enhances the learning experience for all.

The plaintiffs’ lawyer, who argued that all the nation’s schools are now “equal,” is grossly uninformed. Schools dominated by students of color typically are less well resourced than predominantly white schools. Given the intertwining of race and class in the United States, they also tend to be pockets of student poverty, which depresses student performance. The students of color in today’s segregated schools are equally intelligent to the nation’s white students, but typically they do not have equal opportunities to learn or succeed educationally.

This from Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Harvard dropout finally gets degree

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (Reuters) -- Bill Gates attended to a bit of unfinished business Thursday.

Gates, who dropped out of Harvard and co-founded Microsoft Corp. (Charts, Fortune 500) to become the world's richest person, stopped off at his former stomping grounds to collect an honorary law degree.

"We recognize the most illustrious member of the Harvard College class of 1977 never to have graduated from Harvard," said Harvard University Provost Steven Hyman. "It seems high time that his alma mater hand over the diploma."

"I've been waiting for more than 30 years to say this: Dad, I always told you I'd come back and get my degree," Gates, 51, told the crowd, which included his father, also named Bill.

"I'll be changing my job next year, and it will be nice to finally have a college degree on my resume," said Gates in a reference to his plan to shift full time into philanthropy.

This from CNNMoney.com.

Harvard approves biggest curriculum change in 30 years

Harvard University on Tuesday approved its biggest curriculum overhaul in three decades, putting new emphasis on sensitive religious and cultural issues, the sciences and overcoming U.S. "parochialism."

The curriculum change, proposed on February 8 after three years of faculty debate, is intended to counter criticism the oldest U.S. institute of higher learning was focused too narrowly on academic topics instead of real-life issues.

This from CNN.

"Dropout" to receive Harvard Degree

The School Bill Gates left to start Microsoft will bestow honorary degree

Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft Corp., will speak at Harvard University's commencement ceremony in June and like all commencement speakers will receive an honorary degree from the institution.

It's hard to guess if Gates, the wealthiest person in the world and co-founder of a company that brought in US$44 billion in revenue last year, cares. But the programming whiz who once dropped out of Harvard will likely feel some sense of satisfaction.

Gates arrived at Harvard as a freshman in 1973 and while there got to know Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's CEO, who lived just down the hall. Gates had already discovered his interest in software, having programmed computers since the age of 13. While at Harvard, Gates helped develop a version of the programming language BASIC for the first microcomputer, the MITS Altair.

During his junior year, Gates dropped out of the university to work full-time on Microsoft, a company he and his childhood friend Paul Allen founded. In hindsight, it's hard to criticize that decision.

Source: InfoWorld

A Future Herald-Leader?

There have been several days lately when I have opened the front section of my Herald-Leader only to find that I am largely familiar with the world and national stories being reported. This is much less true for City & Region and subsequent sections – and I almost never read the ads. I wonder; are other readers having the same experience?

I don’t raise this question to be critical of the Herald-Leader. I’ll bet the same would be true if I subscribed to the Courier-Journal or any other daily from a mid-sized city. I just find that today’s technologies put me in touch with more real-time news than I can consume.

But newspapers are important. From America’s early days publicists have realized the power of our newspapers to influence public opinion. As David Sloan wrote in American Journalism, “Their main purpose was to have a forum to promote their party’s views…to win elections…and thus determine the nature that the political system would take.” As Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson is said to have used state department funds to pay Philip Freneau, to edit a pro-Jefferson, anti-federalist bi-weekly newspaper called the National Gazette.

As late as 1870, 89% of urban daily newspapers were overtly affiliated with one party or another. But the conditions changed. Paper became cheaper, telegraph and new printing technologies came into being, cities grew and demand for news increased. These combined to make newspapers much cheaper to produce. The climate was right for new entrants into the profitable newspaper business.

Papers found that their editorial positions had to change to present both sides of the issues. Increasingly, cities had one newspaper and its readership was composed of liberals and conservatives. By 1920, fewer than half of the nation’s newspapers were politically affiliated. This journalistic model sought truth and valued honesty in a non-partisan manner; a neutral government watchdog.

That journalistic model is now under attack. Changes in technology have allowed politicians to use the press in ways that are new to 21st century citizens and increased political polarization has resulted. As the Scooter Libby trial has revealed, some of our watchdogs have been lured into government service. (For example: this from the Star-Tribune)

Today many newspapers seem to be struggling with a business model that just isn’t working. Take the mighty Wall Street Journal, for example, with their 1.75 million print subscribers. WSJ’s Deputy Washington Bureau Chief, David Wessel told an audience at the Yale School of Management last April that they maintain that number only by persistently discounting subscription rates. There is no growth.

But the on-line WSJ has 750,000 subscribers, an increase of eight percent over the prior year. Their growth market consists of college kids who are getting their news on-line. The problem is that they can’t charge advertisers as much for on-line readers as they can for the print readers. How can they continue to support the number of reporters it takes to produce reliable stories?

The unit of Dow Jones (WSJ’s parent company) that includes print and on-line editions of WSJ, Barrons and Market Watch had revenues over a billion dollars in 2005 - but still lost $2.5 million. They created their web site, hoping to move advertisers to the internet with them. The advertisers went - but most of them skipped WSJ and advertise with Google instead. Now Google has annual revenues four times that of Dow Jones.

The competition that once drove journalism toward unbiased reporting seems to be having the opposite effect today.

Harvard economists Sendhil Mullainathan and Andrei Shleifer argue that today’s competition forces newspapers to cater to the prejudices of their readers. As a result, news outlets seem to be returning to the kind of political niche marketing that existed in the days of pamphleteers. Whenever competitors can create so called “differences of opinion,” they do so to further divide the market and enhance profits.

So what’s a local newspaper to do? Is the most effective future business strategy for the Herald-Leader to be “in the middle;” fair and balanced in the traditional sense? Will competition reemerge in Lexington, perhaps in the form of an outrageous, youth-directed New York Post/Fox News-style on-line tabloid; meant to strip 30 percent from the Herald-Leader’s readership at low cost?

I suspect the answer for the Herald-Leader won’t come from its journalistic philosophy. It will more likely come from the local content itself. That’s the only thing the paper can (and must) produce better than anyone else - if it is to reinvent itself for the new century.