Dear Commons Community,

The CUNY Board of Trustees released a statement yesterday saying:  “that their action on Monday should not be interpreted as reflecting on Mr. Kushner’s accomplishments.”  This did little to quell the backlash and criticism of its decision to table an honorary degree for the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright.   (See my earlier post on this topic)

The NY Times is reporting that:

“former Mayor Ed Koch, an outspoken supporter of Israel who is receiving an honorary degree from CUNY, called on Thursday for the board to grant Mr. Kushner the degree and for Mr. Wiesenfeld to resign, saying he had abused his power.

Ellen Schrecker, a history professor at Yeshiva University who received an honorary degree from CUNY’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice in 2008, said she planned to return it in solidarity with Mr. Kushner.

Karen Kaplowitz, the head of the faculty committee at John Jay that had nominated Mr. Kushner, said she was mortified that he had been treated with disrespect.”

The CUNY Board will surely be rethinking what they did on Monday and minimally an apology to Mr. Kushner is in order.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Huffington Post has a collage of the photos of President Barack Obama’s visit to ground zero yesterday.   It is worth a quick look.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The trustees of the City University of New York have voted to table a vote for an honorary degree that one of its campuses, John Jay College, planned to award to Tony Kushner, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of “Angels in America.”  A NY Times article quotes CUNY’s Senior Vice Chancellor Jay Hershenson,  “ that since 1961, no other honorary degree nomination had been tabled after reaching the board.”

One of the 12 CUNY trustees present, Jeffrey S. Wiesenfeld, objected to John Jay College’s submission of Mr. Kushner for an honorary degree. In a letter to his fellow trustees, Mr. Wiesenfeld described Mr. Kushner as “a self-hating Jewish anti-Semite.”  He further stated:  “Every year, there are candidates that you or I don’t particularly like. We can all express dissent where we warrant it – it is our right. Every nominee that has been brought before the board, during my 12 years at least, has been approved by the Board. Mr. Kushner, however, was opposed because he is an extremist. No extremist from any quarter is a good face for any University.”

In a letter to the CUNY Board of Trustees, Mr. Kushner stated:

“Trustee Jeffrey S. Weisenfeld delivered a grotesque caricature of my political beliefs regarding the state of Israel, concocted out of three carefully cropped, context less quotes taken from interviews I’ve given, the mention of my name on the blog of someone with whom I have no connection whatsoever, and the fact that I serve on the advisory board of a political organization with which Mr. Weisenfeld strongly disagrees…. As far as I’m able to conclude from the podcast of this meeting, at the conclusion of Mr. Weisenfeld’s vicious attack on me, eight members voted to approve all the honorary degree candidates, including me, and four voted to oppose the slate if my name remained on it. Lacking the requisite nine votes to approve the entire slate, the Board, in what sounds on the podcast like a scramble to dispense with the whole business, tabled my nomination, approved the other candidates, and adjourned. Not a word was spoken in my defense.”

Mr. Kushner is quoted in the NY Times as saying that:

“This has been an incredibly ugly experience…that a great public university would make a decision based on slanderous mischaracterizations without giving the person in question a chance to be heard.”

“I’m sickened,” he added, “that this is happening in New York City. Shocked, really.”

Shocked indeed.  And I don’t think we have heard the end of it.

Tony

P.S.:  Inside Education published a piece on Tony Kushner after I had posted the above.

Dear Commons Community,

The media coverage of the death of  Osama bin Laden and accolades for President Obama, his national security staff and the Navy Seals are in full swing.   Maureen Dowd has a column today on “Cool Hand Barack”.   She makes the point that the President is cool under pressure much more so than his detractors have given him credit for.  She describes how the President on Saturday night was roasting a number of individuals while having just made what will likely be the most important and daring decision of his first term in office.  In typical Dowd style, here is the essence of her column:

“After giving the order for members of a Navy Seals team to execute a fantastically daring plan to, let’s be honest, execute Osama bin Laden, Barack Obama put on a tuxedo and gave a comedy speech Saturday night in a Washington ballroom of tippling journalists and Hollywood stars.

If we could have seen everything unfolding in real time, it would have had the same dramatic effect as the intercutting in the president’s favorite movie, “The Godfather,” when Michael Corleone calmly acts as godfather at his nephew’s baptism at church, even as his lieutenants carry out the gory hits he has ordered on rival mobsters.

Just substitute “Leave the copter, take the corpse” for ‘Leave the gun, take the cannoli.’”

Dowd also takes a swipe at Sarah Plain “ who was so tacky that she didn’t mention Obama’s name in her congratulations”.

A Great Read!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

From halfway around the world, President Barack Obama and his national security team (Hilary Clinton, Joe Biden, Bob Gates and others) monitored the strike on Osama bin Laden’s compound in real time, watching and listening to the firefight that killed the terrorist leader.

The Huffington Post reported that the President and his team gathered in the White House Situation Room.  Members of the group held their breath and barely spoke as they waited to see whether a carefully crafted yet extremely risky plan would succeed, said White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan.

Brennan said he would not reveal details “about what types of visuals we had or what type of feeds that were there but it was – it gave us the ability to actually track it on an ongoing basis.” Typically, members of the Navy SEAL team that conducted the operation wear helmet cameras that transmit sound and video to their operation centers and that data can be fed live to the White House and Pentagon.

Congratulations to all involved!

Dare I say – Mission Accomplished!

Tony

Osama bin Laden is dead, President Obama announced Sunday night, in a televised address to the nation. His death was the result of a U.S. operation launched today in Abbottabad, Pakistan, against a compound where bin Laden was believed to be hiding, according to U.S. intelligence. After a firefight, a small team of American forces killed bin Laden and took possession of his body, the president said.

Read More.

New York Celebrates and Remembers!

Dear Commons Community,

The NY Times has an op-ed piece today submitted by Dave Eggers and Nínive Clements Calegari, founders of the 826 National tutoring centers and producers of the documentary “American Teacher.”   They make the case for the need to improve teachers salaries if our country wants to make a change in its schools.   I commented on this issue last year. They cite findings from a McKinsey study in September 2010 including a comparison of  the treatment of teachers here and in the three countries that perform best on standardized tests: Finland, Singapore and South Korea.

“Turns out these countries have an entirely different approach to the profession. First, the governments in these countries recruit top graduates to the profession. (We don’t.) In Finland and Singapore they pay for training. (We don’t.) In terms of purchasing power, South Korea pays teachers on average 250 percent of what we do. “

Eggers and Calegari conclude:

“In the next 10 years, over half of the nation’s nearly 3.2 million public school teachers will become eligible for retirement. Who will replace them? How do we attract and keep the best minds in the profession?

People talk about accountability, measurements, tenure, test scores and pay for performance. These questions are worthy of debate, but are secondary to recruiting and training teachers and treating them fairly. There is no silver bullet that will fix every last school in America, but until we solve the problem of teacher turnover, we don’t have a chance.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

At the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner, President Obama poked fun at himself, the birthers, Fox News, National Public Radio, and Joe Biden among others.  He saved his best laughs for Donald Trump who if elected president would change the White House from a stately mansion into a tacky casino with a whirlpool in the garden and one of those garish Trump signs on top of it.  The video is eighteen minutes long but I am sure you will get a few chuckles out of it.

Tony

[youtube width=”425″ height=”244″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9mzJhvC-8E[/youtube]