Dear Commons Community,

There was an excellent guest editorial in yesterday’s New York Daily News that presented the issue of enrollment of males in our nation’s colleges and universities.    The editorial was written by Lorenzo Esters and Richard Whitmire.   Esters is vice president for Access and the Advancement of Public Black Universities at the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities. Whitmire, immediate past president of the National Education Writers Association, is the author of “Why Boys Fail.”  Among the points made are that male enrollments in higher education are increasing but they are doing so at a slower rate than female enrollments. “For every male college student today, there are nearly 1.39 females. Between 1993 and 2007, the percentage of males enrolled in higher education dropped from 45% to 43% – and over the next 11 years, the percentage of males is expected to drop an additional 2 percentage points.”   College enrollment figures are substantively lower for black males and poor white males.  The article goes on to discuss that the gap actually begins as early as ninth grade and only worsens in high school and college.

Tony

The full piece can be found at: http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/2010/05/17/2010-05-17_where_the_boys_arent_college.html

Dear Commons Community,

We should take a moment to remember that today, May 17^th is the 56^th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education Decision that declared segregated public schools “unconstitutional”.  In perhaps the most controversial and most important decision of the 20^th century, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously decreed  that in the field of public education, “the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”   As many of us know, this decision changed the face of education throughout the country but especially in the South.   For anyone wanting to read one of the more informative books on this decision, Richard Kluger’s Simple Justice is highly recommended.  A website dedicated to the Brown Decision with lots of resources is available at:  http://brownvboard.org/

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Ross Douthat has a rather provocative column today in the NY Times entitled, The Great Consolidation.  It comments on how many of the major failings we have experienced (economy, environment, national security) has resulted in greater concentrations of power in the government and other large organizations.  His conclusion is:  “This is the perverse logic of meritocracy. Once a system grows sufficiently complex, it doesn’t matter how badly our best and brightest foul things up. Every crisis increases their authority, because they seem to be the only ones who understand the system well enough to fix it”.

Tony

A NY Times article on the above is available at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/17/opinion/17douthat.html?th&emc=th