Dear Commons Community,

On Monday, the City University of New York Board of Trustees approved the establishment of the the Center for Policing Equity at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.  The  Center was originally established at U.C.L.A. by Dr. Phillip Atiba Goff as a national research center focused on interactions between the police and the communities.  Supported by a $1.5 million gift from the Ford Foundation and another $1 million from Atlantic Philanthropies,  Dr. Goff and the center will open this summer.

The move will place John Jay at the forefront of a national conversation on race and policing.  As reported in the New York Times:

“We’re having a moment in police and criminal justice reform in the United States, and the beating heart of police reform begins in New York,” Dr. Goff said in an interview. “New York is in the vanguard, and when you have the entire of New York City agreeing on the need for some kind of a change, that’s a powerful thing.”

He will direct the center and also teach at John Jay.

[President of John Jay] Jeremy Travis said, “John Jay is the most diverse of CUNY’s senior colleges, so these issues involving interactions with the police are not far removed from the lives of our students.”

“This research fits with the DNA of John Jay,” he added.

It also coincides with the Ford Foundation’s focus on inequality. Darren Walker, the foundation’s president, said one of its priorities was “improving relations between communities of color and law enforcement.” He described New York as “a laboratory for policing practices and innovation in law enforcement.”

In 2014, John Jay, in partnership with Yale Law School and U.C.L.A., among others, received a $4.75 million grant from the Justice Department to establish the National Initiative for Building Community Trust and Justice. Directed by David Kennedy, it has a goal of improving relationships between communities and the criminal justice system. Dr. Goff was one of the principal partners in the initiative.

Dr. Goff, 38, an associate professor at U.C.L.A., is currently on leave as a visiting scholar at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.

The Center for Policing Equity’s agenda is to improve the morale of the police and the community’s perception of officers. As part of its research, it will collect data from local law enforcement agencies to try and determine where disparities in policing arise from bias.”

Congratulations all around!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The pendulum has swung back with the election of Betty Rosa yesterday as the new chancellor of the New York State Board of Regents. In a 15-0 vote and two abstentions, Rosa was the overwhelming favorite for the position.  As reported in the New York Times:

“The members of the State Board of Regents on Monday elected Betty A. Rosa, a former New York City principal and superintendent, as the new chancellor, signaling a sharp shift in the state’s education policies after dramatic protests by parents.

Dr. Rosa has criticized the new, more difficult tests that the state introduced under her predecessor, Merryl H. Tisch, as part of its transition to the Common Core standards. She has suggested that the tests were designed so that many students would fail, giving policy makers a chance to point to a crisis in the state’s schools. On Monday, she said that if she had children in the grades taking the exams, she would have them sit out the tests, as the parents of more than 200,000 students did last year.

Board members are elected by the Legislature, and set education policy for the state.

Dr. Rosa’s election is an indication of how much both politicians and the public have turned against the policies promoted by Dr. Tisch, including the evaluation of teachers on the basis of state test scores. In December, the Regents placed a four-year moratorium on including the scores as a factor in teacher evaluations. Dr. Rosa has said she would like to make that change permanent.”

Her bio reads as follows:

Born in New York City but raised for the first ten years of her life in Puerto Rico, Dr. Rosa attended public elementary and junior high schools in the Bronx (Districts 9 and 10) before graduating from St. Helena’s High School, now Monsignor Scanlon High School, in the Throggs Neck section of the Bronx.

She received a B.A. in psychology from the City College of New York and holds two Master of Science in Education degrees, one in Administration and Supervision and the other in Bilingual Education from the City College of New York and Lehman College respectively. She also received an Ed. M. and Ed. D. in Administration, Planning and Social Policy from Harvard University.

Dr. Rosa worked in the N.Y.C. Department of Education as a bilingual paraprofessional, teacher and reading coordinator, served as an assistant principal and principal in special education, introduced an integrated linguistic model in developing a multilingual and multicultural school for general and special education populations, and was principal of I.S. 218, a full-service community school in partnership with the Children’s Aid Society in District 6. While working in the central office of the then N.Y.C. Board of Education, she developed the Office of Conflict Resolution in the Division of Special Education. She has taught graduate level education courses Education of Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Exceptional Children and Due Process: Law and the Handicapped, has served on dissertation committees and is currently an executive coach for doctoral students.

We wish Dr. Rosa the best of luck!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

For the past couple of decades, non-tenure track faculty (adjunct and full-time contractual) have been increasing especially at our private colleges and universities.  Last week, non-tenure track faculty at Duke University voted 174 to 29 to unionize, according to a tally of ballots by the National Labor Relations Board.  As reported in The News & Observer:

“Part-time and full-time non-tenured faculty had filed a petition with the labor board in February to hold an election. A group called Duke Teaching First led the effort to join the Service Employees International Union in hopes of better pay, benefits and job security.

The Duke vote is the first union election in decades at a private university in the South, according to SEIU. But the Duke faculty join a national movement of unionization of college instructors. Some 10,000 have chosen to unionize in the past three years, SEIU said, at places such as the University of Chicago, Tufts and Georgetown universities.

“We’re all excited, ecstatic,” said Eileen Anderson, a Duke senior lecturing fellow in Spanish. “We can’t wait to start the next phase of bargaining. … We really feel like everybody came together. I think the numbers say it, really, that this was a good idea.”

Anderson and her colleagues traveled to Winston-Salem, where the votes were counted at a branch office of the labor board.

“A real big issue has been transparency,” she said of faculty issues at Duke. “We’re really hoping to figure out how promotions work, how people can advance in their careers.”

As the Duke campaign gained steam, the administration launched a website warning about tactics of union organizers. “You are your own best representative,” the site said.

On Friday, a Duke official issued a conciliatory statement about the vote.

“We respect the decision of Duke’s adjunct faculty to form a union and remain committed to their success as valuable contributors to the university’s academic mission,” said an emailed statement from Michael Schoenfeld, Duke’s vice president for public affairs and government relations.

In December, more than 80 faculty sent an open letter to Duke President Richard Brodhead saying that contingent faculty had increased dramatically in the past decade. The SEIU said 41 percent of faculty at Duke do not have access to tenure, mirroring a national trend.

Schoenfeld said Duke has 3,500 faculty members, 80 percent of whom are tenured, tenure track or on multiyear contracts.

The North Carolina State AFL-CIO congratulated adjunct faculty.”

Votes to unionize faculty at colleges and  universities will become much more commonplace as their numbers continue to grow.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Elizabeth Warren did today what nobody else has been able to do – tag Donald Trump “a loser” for his bullying ways.  For .Mic, Luke Brinker reported:

“Attacking the Republican presidential front-runner’s “petty bullying, attacks on women, cheap racism, [and] flagrant narcissism,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) embarked on a Twitter tirade against Donald Trump on Monday, labeling him with a decidedly Trumpian insult: “Loser.”

Signaling the aggressive Democratic attacks Trump would face if he secures the GOP nod, Warren’s tweet-storm depicted the billionaire businessman as a scam artist and demagogue, imploring voters to reject his message at the ballot box:

If past is prologue, Warren’s latest round of attacks is sure to draw Trump’s unsparing wrath. In an interview with New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd that appeared on Sunday, Trump jabbed at Warren with a reference to her disputed claims of Native American ancestry.

“I think it’s wonderful because the Indians can now partake in the future of the country,” Trump said of Warren’s outspoken criticism of him. “She’s got about as much Indian blood as I have. Her whole life was based on a fraud. She got into Harvard and all that because she said she was a minority.”

The only way a bully can be stopped is to punch him in the nose.

“Loser Trump” it is!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

I have just finished reading Dark Money:  The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer, a staff writer for The New Yorker.   It is a carefully researched  telling of how a group of billionaires led by Charles and David Koch, have been using their financial might to garner public opinion and to sway local, state, and federal elected officials to their right-wing and in most cases, self-serving ideology.  There are long chapters on the Koch, Scaife, Bradley, Olin, and other families who have used their fortunes for extracting large-scale political influence. Mayer tells well the stories of think tanks, media operations, and pseudo foundations such as the American Enterprise Institute, The Heritage Foundation,  and the Cato Institute that are the vehicles used by dark money purveyors.  Here is an excerpt from the New York Times Book Review published on January 19, 2016.

“…at the end of that year [1980] two things happened. One, as we all know, was the election of Ronald Reagan as president. The other was an utterly private event whose significance would not be noticed for years. Charles and David Koch, the enormously rich proprietors of an oil company based in Kansas, decided that they would spend huge amounts of money to elect conservatives at all levels of American government. David Koch ran for vice president on the Libertarian ticket in 1980, but when the campaign was over, he resolved never to seek public office again. That wouldn’t be necessary, he and his brother concluded; they could invest in the campaigns of others, and essentially buy their way to political power.

Thirty years later, the midterm elections of 2010 ushered in the political system that the Kochs had spent so many years plotting to bring about. After the voting that year, Republicans dominated state legislatures; they controlled a clear majority of the governorships; they had taken one chamber of Congress and were on their way to winning the other. Perhaps most important, a good many of the Republicans who had won these offices were not middle-of-the-road pragmatists. They were antigovernment libertarians of the Kochs’ own political stripe. The brothers had spent or raised hundreds of millions of dollars to create majorities in their image. They had succeeded. And not merely at the polls: They had helped to finance and organize an interlocking network of think tanks, academic programs and news media outlets that far exceeded anything the liberal opposition could put together.

It is this conservative ascendancy that Jane Mayer chronicles in “Dark Money.” The book is written in straightforward and largely unemotional prose, but it reads as if conceived in quiet anger. Mayer believes that the Koch brothers and a small number of allied plutocrats have essentially hijacked American democracy, using their money not just to compete with their political adversaries, but to drown them out.”

Here is a frightening quote from the last chapter.

“It’s extraordinary.  No one else has done anything like it.”  said Rob Stein, the Democratic activist…It takes an enormous amount of money, and many years, to do what the Kochs have done.  They are deeply passionate.  They’re disciplined, and they are ruthless.”

This is important reading in 2016 as we try to follow what is happening during this presidential election year especially in the Republican Party.  It provides insight into the forces that are supporting and attacking candidates.

Tony

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_WScwLKfR0[/youtube]

Dear Commons Commuunity,

Coming on the heels of protests in Utah on Friday, “Stop Trump” protests erupted in Arizona. Here in New York there was a protest march from Central Park to the Trump International Tower.

A Donald Trump rally in Tucson that began with near-constant interruptions reached a violent crescendo when a protester was punched and kicked while being escorted out.   A man dressed in an American flag shirt (see video above) and holding a sign showing Trump’s face with the slogan “Bad for America,” was pulled to the ground by someone in the stands. He was punched at least once and kicked several times before police separated the two men.

In New York (see video below), thousands of protesters, angry over Trump’s hateful rhetoric, chanted “f— Trump!” and “Donald Trump! Go away!” as they rallied around the Trump International Tower building near 60th St. and Columbus Circle.

The protest in New York signifies that “Stop- Trump” is evolving into a national movement and will no longer be limited to where he makes appearances.

Happy Palm Sunday!

Tony

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYLwk0vDUGg[/youtube]

Dear Commons Community,

The press and media such as The National Review, The Wall Street Journal, and the New York Daily News have begun to ratchet up their anti-Donald Trump rhetoric.  Fox News issued a statement yesterday blasting Trump for his ““vitriolic attacks against Megyn Kelly and that his extreme, sick obsession with her is beneath the dignity of a presidential candidate who wants to occupy the highest office in the land.”  New York Times columnist, David Brooks delivered perhaps the most stinging take-down of Trump:

“Donald Trump is epically unprepared to be president. He has no realistic policies, no advisers, no capacity to learn. His vast narcissism makes him a closed fortress. He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know and he’s uninterested in finding out. He insults the office Abraham Lincoln once occupied by running for it with less preparation than most of us would undertake to buy a sofa.

Trump is perhaps the most dishonest person to run for high office in our lifetimes. All politicians stretch the truth, but Trump has a steady obliviousness to accuracy.

He is a childish man running for a job that requires maturity. He is an insecure boasting little boy whose desires were somehow arrested at age 12. He surrounds himself with sycophants.”

As the founders would have understood, he is a threat to the long and glorious experiment of American self-government. He is precisely the kind of scapegoating, promise-making, fear-driving and deceiving demagogue they feared.

Trump’s supporters deserve respect. They are left out of this economy. But Trump himself? No, not Trump, not ever.”

It remains to be seen whether any of this will effect Trump’s march to the Republican nomination.  Nothing else has yet.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Merrick Garland, President Obama’s nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court, is drawing a lot of attention these days as elected officials and the media try to determine where he would side on critical issues, assuming of course that the Republican-controlled Senate will even consider his nomination.  The New York Times characterized him as moderate but “well to the left of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, the member of the court at its ideological center and the one who often holds the controlling vote. A Supreme Court including Judge Garland would contain a five-member liberal bloc and put either him or perhaps Justice Stephen G. Breyer, the most conservative liberal, in what had been Justice Kennedy’s pivotal spot.”  The article mentions:

“He has achieved a rare distinction in a polarized era. He has sat on a prominent appeals court for almost two decades, participated in thousands of cases, and yet earned praise from across the political spectrum.

A look at a substantial sample of his opinions starts to supply some answers about how he managed this unlikely feat. His writings reflect an able and modest judge with a limited conception of his role working on a docket largely lacking in cases on controversial social issues.

His most charged cases, involving national security and campaign finance, were as likely to disappoint liberals as to please them. He has repeatedly voted against detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and he joined the Citizens United decision that gave rise to “super PACs.”

In more run-of-the-mill cases, he was apt to side with workers claiming employment discrimination and against criminal defendants who said their rights had been violated.

Throughout, Judge Garland’s opinions were models of judicial craftsmanship — unflashy, methodically reasoned, attentive to precedent and tightly rooted in the language of the governing statutes and regulations. He appears to apply Supreme Court precedents with punctilious fidelity even if there is reason to think he would have preferred a different outcome and even where other judges might have found room to maneuver.”

Judge Garland appears to be a compromise nominee.  It remains to be seen whether the Senate is willing to compromise and allow his nomination to go through.  Not likely, but Republican leaders will have to consider whether he would be a better choice than someone Hillary Clinton might appoint should she win the presidency.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

I was at Queens College yesterday at the invitation of Eva Fernandez and Michelle Fraboni.   I gave a presentation entitled,  The Online Learning Landscape:  Implications for Teaching and Learning, that drew heavily from my book, Online Education Policy and Practice:  The Past, Present, and Future of the Digital University, that will be published later this year (Taylor & Francis/Routledge) .  The audience of mostly faculty were engaged and asked good questions.  I enjoyed spending the afternoon meeting with them.

Best of luck to Eva, Michelle, and their colleagues as they pursue online learning initiatives.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Coming on the heels of the drinking water crisis in Flint, Michigan, school officials in Newark, New Jersey prepared to begin testing young children for lead poisoning this week.  School officials in Newark yesterday acknowledged that water in the city’s schools had contained elevated levels of lead for years.  As reported in the New York Times:

“Reports from the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection to be released on Thursday showed that levels of lead above 15 parts per billion, the threshold at which the federal Environmental Protection Agency suggests taking action, had been found in about 250 samples of water in the schools in the past four years. Similar levels of lead had been found in the tests taken over the past few months, which led officials to shut off the faucets and drinking fountains at 30 of the city’s 67 schools and immediately bring in bottled water.

“As a parent, I too find the fact that the district has identified elevated levels of lead in water in each of these past years extremely concerning,” Christopher Cerf, the superintendent of Newark Public Schools, said in an interview.

Mr. Cerf said the school district was working with the state environmental department to develop a plan for testing and retesting the water in the schools, starting on Saturday. He said that samples would be taken from school buildings that had not previously been tested, and that the 30 schools where high levels of lead had been found most recently would be tested again…

But Mr. Cerf said the discovery of dangerously high levels of lead in the public water system in Flint, Mich., had changed the way people responded to the issue.

“Our national consciousness has been raised by other national events,” he said. “I think the way the world would receive these data is different after Flint.”

Schools are not required to test their water, but the Newark schools have been having it tested for more than a decade, Mr. Cerf said. The Newark schools have had a protocol of flushing pipes and replacing filters since 2004, he said.

From 2004 through 2011, different companies collected the samples, and those reports will be released when they are available, the district said.

About 12 percent of 2,067 samples taken in the schools since 2012 had lead above the “federal action level” of 15 parts per billion, the school district said.

Health officials say that there is no safe amount of lead in drinking water and that it poses the most danger to young children, potentially causing behavior problems and learning disabilities. Testing of children for lead poisoning is being offered first, starting on Thursday, at two of the affected schools that have early-childhood programs.”

Tony