So many books, so little time

At Williston Memorial Library, Mount Holyoke College {South Hadley, Mass.}

“The chapter ends. And when I look up

from  a sunken pose in an easy chair

(half, or more than half, asleep?)

the height and heft of the room come back;

darkly, the pitched ceiling falls

forward like a book.

Even those mock-Tudor stripes

have come to seem like unread lines.

Oh, what I haven’t read!’’

From “Reading Room,’’  by Mary Jo Salter

Whole Foods centralizes away the local

From Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com

GoLocal’s March 28 story headlined “Amazon Is Slashing Jobs at Whole Foods in New England Region’’ is an unsettling sign of the times. The story was instigated by a Business Insider article that said: “Whole Foods is slashing regional and in-store marketing and graphic-design jobs in its latest push to centralize operations, say people with knowledge of the matter….It’s not clear exactly how many jobs will be affected….”

GoLocal reports that “the impact locally is that the hand-drawn blackboard signage will disappear and local advertising promotions with {nonprofit} community organizations may go away.’’’ On the East Side of Providence there are two Whole Foods stores and a somewhat similar high-end supermarket called Eastside Marketplace, formerly locally owned but now owned by Ahold, a Dutch company but which heavily promotes local ties. Will Amazon/Whole Foods’ centralizing drive push customers there?

(Trump is correct to say that Amazon has too much power, although he may be mostly driven by his fear and hatred of The Washington Post, which is owned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.)

U.S. train service is 'scandalous'

The Acela pulls into Old Saybrook, Conn.

"In America, we happen to be living in a third world country from the point of view of economic and social development. I came back from New York yesterday and I took the fastest train in the country, the Acela. My wife and I took the New York-Boston train sixty years ago - it wasn't called the Acela then - and I think it's improved by about fifteen minutes since then. Any other country in the world would be about half the time. In fact when it's riding along the Connecticut turnpike it's barely keeping up with traffic, which is just scandalous.''

-- Noam Chomsky, linguist and left-wing social activist"
 

Those lost cedars

From "The Last Gift She Gave,'' by Carrie Dickeson, in the group show "Solastalgia,'' at the Dedee Shattuck Gallery, Westport, Mass., April 4-29.

She asks: "Is it possible to balance the manufactured with the organic, the man-made with the earth-grown? In decades to come, how will 'Nature' respond to the synthetic materials that humans generate?''

"The title, 'The Last Gift She Gave'  emerged from a series of text messages, as my mother stood witness to the extraction of our family’s cedar trees, felled in exchange for an updated power grid. We shared a history with those trees. They shaded our summer gatherings, and shielded our home from winter winds. As a child I used to climb the cedars’ scraggly trunks, seeking new perspectives, hanging upside down, inadvertently collecting the sap sticking to my hands and clothes. This visceral relationship included the intimacy of hugging the branches, and breathing the spicy oils. And long before my own childhood, the trees stood strong, through multiple generations.''

Boston's old private clubs press on in the 21st Century

The august Somerset Ciub, at 42-43 Beacon St., Boston.

This piece first ran in The Boston Guardian as Robert Whitcomb's March "Boston Diary'' entry.

That members of the Algonquin Club have voted to sell the  old Back Bay institution, at 217 Commonwealth Ave.,  to a developer that will turn it into a for-profit (shocking!) club, focused my attention on Boston’s old clubs. I’ve been in most of them, as a guest, over the past half century. To me, they’re still museums of class, but with  some new human exhibits.

The Algonquin, founded in 1886, was one of what had been men’s clubs (they’re gender-integrated now) founded in the mid to late 19th Century as meeting places for Boston’s elite, made rich by international trade and the Industrial Revolution. The Somerset, Union, Tavern, Algonquin and the St. Botolph clubs remain the most famous; the University and Harvard clubs  are a different species. Then there’s the Chilton Club,  founded very late, in 1910, for ladies but now admitting men.

They each had their special reputations. For example, the old story goes, the Somerset had the old-money types, the Algonquin those still trying to make a pile, the Union the money managers (lawyers, trust officers, etc.)  and the St. Botolph’s the arty and literary types.

These are “third places’’ --– not home, but with homelike aspects not found in restaurants and hotels, and certainly not work places, although  many members would be likely to run into colleagues there.

Such “mansions away from mansions,’’ as Sam Hornblower called them in  The Harvard Crimson in 2000, were/are very appealing both for their  creature comforts and how they are seen  as validating high social status.  Further, until recent decades, Boston was not famed for its restaurants and its hotels (the old Ritz Carlton a famous exception). The clubs helped fill the service gap for real and wanna-be Brahmins.\

But the Hub has become much more like Manhattan, and now abounds with great restaurants and hotels. And even rich lawyers, businesspeople, academics and physicians are much more likely in these frantic days to eat at their desks or restaurants than at  old clubs, which  tend to be run in  elegantly unhurried ways.  Meanwhile, the ethnic coherence of these places as refuges for the old WASP aristocracy has long been crumbling in  an increasingly globalized, multi-ethnic and meritocratic Boston. Mix up membership or die!

(I’m increasingly struck by how much downtown Boston has come to look like Manhattan. As you walk east across the Common, with the skyscrapers in front of you, you’d think you were walking east in  southern Central Park.)

I think that most of the old clubs will survive, although their lunch business will continue to lag.  With good marketing, the aging of the population and the increasing density of very rich people in, especially, the Back Bay and on Beacon Hill, should be good for the institutions. They can draw growing numbers of wealthy retired and semi-retired people, especially if these clubs boost the number of special events, such as famous speakers.

Even as the Algonquin is turned into a for-profit for striving Millennials, the rest of the clubs will go on in pretty much the same way, except that  more of the criteria for membership will be relaxed.  (What will happen to the old “blackball’’ tradition?”)
 

One criterion for admission, however, that won’t change is the need to have lots of money, new or old.

Loyal to New England flowers

iris, a mid-spring flower in New England.

"Not only was she traditional by nature, Katherine showed a strong streak of parochialism in her approach to gardening. New England was what she knew as a child, and the roots of her ancestors went deep in the soil of Maine and Massachusetts. The things that grew in New England, therefore, were 'correct.' They occupied a special place in her heart, an authenticity not enjoyed by flowers that made the mistake of blooming in other sections of the country.''
 

-- E.B. White, commenting in his late wife Katherine White's book Onward and Upward in the Garden. For many years, they lived much of the year in Brooklin, Maine.

Llewellyn King: We lost our confidence in basic rightness of America in the '60s

Soldiers stand guard in Washington, D.C., in the riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968, was a shot that rang out like none other in the tumultuous 1960s.

Washington and many other cities erupted in riots, mostly described as race riots, but I would aver. I was there. I walked the streets of the nation’s capital, saw the looting, and had rioters protect me from fire and mayhem.

These were riots of anguish. They were, if you will, a great bellow of pain. King meant more to the African-American community of that time than we can now imagine.

If anything, right after the Washington riots, when peace was being kept by National Guard troops backing up local police, there was a surreal politeness between the races. Reporters, who were in the thick of things, wrote about it.

Later, when Congress held hearings and conservative Southern congressmen wanted to know why the District of Columbia police had not opened fire on the rioters, why they had been so restrained, race was emphasized. To its credit, the largely white police force held its fire.

Despite the civility, it was not pretty. Washington’s stores were looted and restaurants burned. On 14th Street, maybe the worst hit, I watched as a pleasant restaurant called California, as I remember, blazed while the owner stood on the street and wept, tears running down his face. He wanted to know why the police did not act, why the fire department could not save his restaurant.

The price Washington and the nation paid was high. After cataclysmic events, things do not return to the status quo ante. They are forever changed.

As King had changed the civil rights debate, so his murder changed Washington. The obvious things were a greater segregation in a city that had been quietly edging toward modest integration. At that time, we went to black-owned clubs on U Street to hear jazz, and young people like myself had black friends in a natural, not a contrived, way.

Sure, there was racism everywhere (particularly, I had found, in the police department), but there was a cozy feel to the nation’s capital. It went. White flight was almost immediate, and the move by so many whites to the suburbs changed a lot of things. Washington became a black city surrounded by white suburbs in Maryland and Virginia.

The riots were emblematic of what was happening in the tumultuous decade. It was a decade in which old values perished and were replaced with a new lack of trust in government and institutions, big and small, public and private. It persists today.

The 1960s were host to major movements, all underlaid by the Vietnam War and the loss of young American life there. It was the key in which the symphony of discontent was written.

Along with the war were the social movements, all of which fingered the establishment, the elites. There was the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, the women’s movement and a huge sense among young people that the older people could not be trusted.

These legacies of the 1960s are still with us: distrust of government, lack of confidence in expertise, suspicion of institutions, and the use of the media and the courts to achieve political and social goals.

The greatest loss to the 1960s might be patriotism. We do not have the absolute confidence in the rightness of the national cause, which had motivated what Tom Brokaw called the “greatest generation.” Craven praise of the military should not be confused with what we had in the 1940s and 1950s: selfless patriotism.

The turbulent decade put paid to the old patriotism and unleashed a new kind of social riot that is alive and well.

On Twitter: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS.

'Seafarers' show in Newport

Atelier Newport will host a collaborative exhibition featuring works from The Donald Tofias Collection to run May 5-May 25, during the Volvo Ocean Race, with Newport being the only stopover in the United States. 

The gallery says that the show, entitled "Seafarers,' will highlight Newport as the Sailing Capital of the World. It will feature the works by John Mecray and Michael Keane, along with  contemporary nautical works by Heinke Bohnert, Antonia Ty Peeples, Jennifer Day and Sunny B. Wood, in addition to other artists. "The exhibition will celebrate the rich history of Newport through the painters' eyes, while moving to present contemporary work. Newport is steeped in marine work and 'Seafarers' presents an homage for two well-known marine painters of the 20th Century.''

Chris Powell: The 'victimhood' racket failed this time in Conn.

Announcing a few weeks ago his nomination of Connecticut state Supreme Court Justice Andrew J. McDonald for chief justice, Gov. Dannel Malloy celebrated the nominee's sexual orientation as if it was the highest qualification for the job. This suggestion was echoed by fellow Democrats in the General Assembly.

To hear them tell it now, McDonald's sexual orientation killed his nomination in the state Senate and almost killed it in the state House.

But if the governor and his allies really thought that prejudice against homosexuals was so pervasive in Connecticut, they would not have made such a big deal of McDonald's sexual orientation at the outset.

They did it in part to move discussion of the nomination away from the policy issues it raised: McDonald's record as a legislator, gubernatorial aide, and judge, and particularly his participation in the Supreme Court's ruling that capital punishment is unconstitutional.

But the governor and his allies also emphasized McDonald's sexual orientation because their party, the perpetrator of identity politics, knows that these days there is great political power in  victimhood.  They knew that the more they emphasized McDonald's sexual orientation, the more they could intimidate people out of criticism.

With Democrats today, anyone disputing a person of color or member of an ethnic minority risks being called a racist, anyone disputing a woman risks being called a misogynist, and anyone disputing someone in a same-sex relationship risks being called a "homophobe."

Of course "homophobia" was disproved by the bipartisan endorsement  that McDonald received from the legislature five years ago when, his sexual orientation fully known, he was nominated as associate justice. What happened since then is no mystery. He developed a record on the court, Malloy's prestige collapsed, and his promotion of McDonald was seen as extreme cronyism.
McDonald's supporters were reluctant to debate his record. Their most relevant rejoinder was only that court decisions should not be questioned by the Great Unwashed, as if judges themselves don't question and reverse each other and as if McDonald's own supporters don't advocate reversing recent decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court.

The victimhood racket failed with McDonald, if partly for the wrong reasons -- a Democratic senator's personal conflict with him and another Democratic senator's weariness of the governor's political correctness and arrogance. But the governor is doubling down, making the bigotry charge against even the Democratic legislators who opposed McDonald, not just the Republicans. The governor says he would not vote for any legislator who voted against McDonald.

So maybe while frothing the governor will add that those Democratic legislators should be expelled from the party and driven into the Republican caucuses. While that would flip both chambers to Republican majorities, the governor would have cleansed his party of "homophobes."

The governor and Democratic legislators are expressing sympathy for McDonald on account of his supposed mistreatment. McDonald himself issued a maudlin statement emphasizing his sexual orientation. He said he didn't know what the future holds for him.

But for starters he retains his judgeship, his salary of $186,000, and great benefits, and after many years of employment in the legislature, governor's office, and judiciary, having risen to the top of Connecticut politics despite the supposed burden of his sexual orientation, he will be due a fat pension and gold-plated medical insurance for life. Oh, the oppression.


Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, based in Manchester, Conn.
 

'Only you are gone'

Brook in the early spring in Southbury. Conn.

"April this year, not otherwise
   Than April of a year ago,
Is full of whispers, full of sighs,
   Of dazzling mud and dingy snow;
   Hepaticas that pleased you so
Are here again, and butterflies.

There rings a hammering all day,
   And shingles lie about the doors;
In orchards near and far away
   The grey wood-pecker taps and bores;
   The men are merry at their chores,
And children earnest at their play.

The larger streams run still and deep,
   Noisy and swift the small brooks run
Among the mullein stalks the sheep
   Go up the hillside in the sun,
   Pensively —only you are gone,
You that alone I cared to keep.''

-- Song of a Second April, by Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950). She grew up in several towns on the Maine Coast before heading to New York, where she became famous.

Trying to green out

"Above" *(oil on linen), by Lully Schwartz, at Alpers Fine Art, Andover, Mass.

Great idea, but don't put it near us

The near-island called Nahant -- very exposed to rising seas.

-- Photo by Svabo

Adapted from  Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com

There’s an entertainingly ironic not-in-my-backyard battle under way in Nahant, Mass., on the northern side of Boston Harbor.  The town, once perhaps best known for summer places of Boston Brahmins, has hosted, apparently without controversy, Northeastern University’s Marine Science Center since 1967.

Nahant, of course, is one of those coastal towns that faces the threat posed by rising sea levels and stronger storms caused by global warming.

But now Northeastern wants to build a 60,000-square-foot addition to the center in order to turn it into an internationally respected coastal sustainability institute. The structure would be built in a way to minimize its visual impact. The Boston Globe reports that two stories and a basement would go into the side and top of  a concrete bunker that housed two anti-submarine guns in World War II.  To read The Globe’s story, please hit this link:

http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2018/03/19/nahant-quiet-seaside-research-center-has-turned-into-bitter-battleground/mKkUCPnoKdriw4T1meezoO/story.html?p1=Article_Recommended_ReadMore_Pos4

Postcard from around 1910, when Nahant was best known as a summer resort.

Maine as literary material

The Harriet Beecher Stowe House, in Brunswick, Maine. That's where she wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin, in 1850-52.

"In a way, I'm very interested in writing about Maine, because I think Maine represents its own kind of history. It's the oldest state {in average of residents}, and it's the whitest state.''

-- Elizabeth Strout, a novelist and native of Maine,  whose culture is the basis of much of her writing. She now divides her time between New York City and Brunswick, Maine, best known as the site of Bowdoin College. Her best known book is Olive Kittredge, set in a small town in The Pine Tree State.

Check out  nearby  gorgeous Harpswell, on Casco Bay. The town includes a wonderful seafood restaurant called Cook's.

On Lookout Point, Harpswell.

A flower for Holy Week

Bleeding Heart.

“Abruptly it unblossoms

And disappears, though among

The first of the spring –

Tulips worn out with blooming

After only the second year, daffodils

Inexplicably nothing

But a vigor of leaves, a frailty

Of azaleas – among the first of the spring

The short-lived Bleeding Heart

Is certain, I can count on it.’’

-- From “Bleeding Heart,’’ by Mark Doty, a distinguished poet and former resident of Provincetown who now lives on Long Island.

Tackling despair in the Mass. addiction community

Mady Ohlman, who has now been sober for more than four years, says many drug users hit a point when the disease and the pursuit of illegal drugs crushes the will to live. 

-- Photo by Jesse Costa/WBUR)

By MARTHA BEBINGER

For WBUR and Kaiser Health News

Mady Ohlma, of Massachusetts, was 22 on the evening some years ago when she stood in a friend’s bathroom looking down at the sink.

“I had set up a bunch of needles filled with heroin because I wanted to just do them back-to-back-to-back,” Ohlman recalled. She doesn’t remember how many she injected before collapsing, or how long she lay drugged-out on the floor.

“But I remember being pissed because I could still get up, you know?”

She wanted to be dead, she said, glancing down, a wisp of straight brown hair slipping from behind an ear across her thin face.

At that point, said Ohlman, she’d been addicted to opioids — controlled by the drugs — for more than three years.

“And doing all these things you don’t want to do that are horrible — you know, selling my body, stealing from my mom, sleeping in my car,” Ohlman said. “How could I not be suicidal?”

For this young woman, whose weight had dropped to about 90 pounds, who was shooting heroin just to avoid feeling violently ill, suicide seemed a painless way out.

“You realize getting clean would be a lot of work,” Ohlman said, her voice rising. “And you realize dying would be a lot less painful. You also feel like you’ll be doing everyone else a favor if you die.”

Ohlman, who has now been sober for more than four years, said many drug users hit the same point, when the disease and the pursuit of illegal drugs crushes their will to live. Ohlman is among at least 40 percent of active drug users who wrestle with depression, anxiety or another mental health issue that increases the risk of suicide.

 Measuring Suicide Among Patients Addicted To Opioids

Massachusetts, where Ohlman lives, began formally recognizing in May 2017 that some opioid overdose deaths are suicides. The state confirmed only about 2 percent of all overdose deaths as suicides, but Dr. Monica Bharel, head of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, said it’s difficult to determine a person’s true intent.

“For one thing, medical examiners use different criteria for whether suicide was involved or not,” Bharel said, and the “tremendous amount of stigma surrounding both overdose deaths and suicide sometimes makes it extremely challenging to piece everything together and figure out unintentional and intentional.”

Research on drug addiction and suicide suggests much higher numbers.

“[Based on the literature that’s available], it looks like it’s anywhere between 25 and 45 percent of deaths by overdose that may be actual suicides,” said Dr. Maria Oquendo, immediate past president of the American Psychiatric Association.

Oquendo pointed to one study of overdoses from prescription opioids that found nearly 54 percent were unintentional. The rest were either suicide attempts or undetermined.

Several large studies show an increased risk of suicide among drug users addicted to opioids, especially women. In a study of about 5 million veterans, women were eight times as likely as others to be at risk for suicide, while men faced a twofold risk.

The opioid epidemic is occurring at the same time suicides have hit a 30-year high, but Oquendo said few doctors look for a connection.

“They are not monitoring it,” said Oquendo, who chairs the department of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania. “They are probably not assessing it in the kinds of depths they would need to prevent some of the deaths.”

That’s starting to change. A few hospitals in Boston, for example, aim to ask every patient admitted about substance use, as well as about whether they’ve considered hurting themselves.

“No one has answered the chicken and egg [problem],” said Dr. Kiame Mahaniah, a family physician who runs the Lynn Community Health Center, in Lynn, Mass. Is it that patients “have mental health issues that lead to addiction, or did a life of addiction then trigger mental health problems?”

With so little data to go on, “it’s so important to provide treatment that covers all those bases,” Mahaniah said.

‘Deaths Of Despair’

When doctors do look deeper into the reasons patients addicted to opioids become suicidal, some economists predict they’ll find deep reservoirs of depression and pain.

In a seminal paper published in 2015, Princeton economists Angus Deaton and Anne Case tracked falling marriage rates, the loss of stable middle-class jobs and rising rates of self-reported pain. The authors say opioid overdoses, suicides and diseases related to alcoholism are all often “deaths of despair.”

“We think of opioids as something that’s thrown petrol on the flames and made things infinitely worse,” Deaton said, “but the underlying deep malaise would be there even without the opioids.”

Many economists agree on remedies for that deep malaise. Harvard economics Prof. David Cutler said solutions include a good education, a steady job that pays a decent wage, secure housing, food and health care.

“And also thinking about a sense of purpose in life,” Cutler said. “That is, even if one is doing well financially, is there a sense that one is contributing in a meaningful way?”

Tackling Despair In The Addiction Community

“I know firsthand the sense of hopelessness that people can feel in the throes of addiction,” said Michael Botticelli, executive director of the Grayken Center for Addiction at Boston Medical Center; he is in recovery for an addiction to alcohol.

Botticelli said recovery programs must help patients come out of isolation and create or recreate bonds with family and friends.

“The vast majority of people I know who are in recovery often talk about this profound sense of re-establishing — and sometimes establishing for the first time — a connection to a much larger community,” Botticelli said.

Ohlman said she isn’t sure why her attempted suicide, with multiple injections of heroin, didn’t work.

“I just got really lucky,” Ohlman said. “I don’t know how.”

A big part of her recovery strategy involves building a supportive community, she said.

“Meetings; 12-step; sponsorship and networking; being involved with people doing what I’m doing,” said Ohlman, ticking through a list of her priorities.

There’s a fatal overdose at least once a week within her Cape Cod community, she said. Some are accidental, others not. Ohlman said she’s convinced that telling her story, of losing and then finding hope, will help bring those numbers down.

The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 800-273-8255.

This story is part of a partnership that includes WBUR, NPR and Kaiser Health News.

Out of season, but....

Work by Christopher Frost, in his show "Winter,'' at Boston Sculptors Gallery April 4-May 6.

The gallery says: Chris Frost's new body of sculptural works consist of artworks observing perceptions of our natural environment. "The artist is interested in exploring a discrepancy between the groomed environment we encounter through media and commerce contrasted with the reality of our delicate and easily fractured physical spaces. These large floor and wall sculptures incorporate a variety of materials; painted fabric, resin, foam, wood and steel. Each of the artworks is anchored by natural forms (tree, boulder, stump) and is fabricated from white glazed ceramic.The white ceramic appears as a ghostly and fragile construct: an authentic environment. Winter reflects a passage of time, hibernation and dormancy, and even peril.''

Is the Granite State dangerously boring for potential drug abusers?

Boring? Lake Lake Winnipesauke and the Ossipee Mountains, in central New Hampshire.

From Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com

President Trump said in a New Hampshire speech that he wants drug dealers to get the death penalty. But in fact, laws already allow the death penalty for these people in certain circumstances. Far more effective in our “War on Drugs’’ redux would be, for example, going after physicians who over-prescribe opiates and punishing such despicable  drug companies as Purdue Pharma, controlled by the social-climbing Sackler family,  that obscured the perils of  such prescription opiates  as OxyContin. And Trump could take strong action to persuade Chinese dictator Xi Jinping to stop Chinese labs from mailing  the hyper-dangerous synthetic opiate fentanyl to America. 

Obviously much more treatment is needed, too. Trump was in New Hampshire in part because the Granite State has long had among the highest rates of drug use in the country. It also, according to a study done at Dartmouth, “has the lowest -per-capita spending for drug treatment in New England and the second-lowest in the nation.’’

Drug-abuse experts also cite the flip side of the Granite State's  attractive rural and exurban qualities in the state's drug problems: Too many people are bored and feel that there are too few interesting things to do in the state, much of which is woodlands.

Would Trump’s wall on our Mexican border help? Maybe a little, but not much. Drugs, like money, are very fungible, and dispirited, anxious  Americans have an insatiable thirst for them.

John O. Harney: The changing public perceptions of higher education

View of Middlebury College, in the quintessential college town of Middlebury, Vt.,  with the Green Mountains in the background.

Via the New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

American confidence in higher education began waning at just the time that more people began to see colleges as more concerned about their bottom lines than about education and making sure students have a good education experience, Public Agenda President Will Friedman told educators gathered in Boston on Monday at a NEBHE panel discussion on “The Changing Public Perceptions of the Value of Higher Education: Is It a Public Good?”

The discussion was moderated by Kirk Carapezza, managing editor at WGBH, a NEBHE partner. N.H state Rep. Terry Wolf, a NEBHE delegate, offered one state’s response.

The benefits of going to college and the importance of higher education institutions were once held to be a creed as American as apple pie. But recurring state budget challenges have constrained investment. Consistently rising tuitions—fueled by increasing college costs—have alarmed many. Politics and free-speech controversies have raised questions about college and universities’ openness and balance of perspectives. In short, times have changed.

Questions swirl:

How are public opinions toward higher education changing?

Why are higher education’s value propositions suspect in the eyes of some policymakers and citizens?

Does this division mirror party lines?

Has higher education been fairly—or falsely—tarred as inefficient?

Has the higher ed enterprise overcompensated for these perceptions by obsessing with business models and efficiency?

What has this apparent shift meant to egalitarian higher education concepts such as need-blind admissions, sabbaticals (ideally to pursue deep thinking), basic vs. applied research, and tenure (especially to protect academic freedom)?

What has it meant for the role of expert faculty informing civic policy outside academe and enriching discourse as “public scholars”?

What about the role of so-called “college towns” sustaining bookstores, theaters, cafes and other businesses favored by college students, budding entrepreneurs, faculty and visitors?

NEBHE was an “early adopter” of the higher education-economic development connection. What role can NEBHE play in balancing New England’s interest in advancing knowledge … and growing its knowledge economy?

Friedman said it wouldn’t be a tremendous shock if prospective students were beginning to question the value of higher ed. Every major institution except the military and libraries have lost major credibility, he said.

Most people still believe higher education is the key to the American dream. And indeed, a surfeit of data continues to show that the more higher education one has, the higher their salary. (Notably, Tom Mortenson, the longtime publisher of Postsecondary Education Opportunity, has also compiled trend data showing states with better-educated populations show better measures of economic, civic, physical and social health, ranging from higher citizen voting rates to lower infant mortality rates.)

But after years of going up, the percentage of people saying higher ed is necessary to success has begun to go down. One reason is student debt. Another is the decline in stable middle-class jobs.

Plus, there’s a partisan dynamic. Pew research shows that among Republicans specifically, the question of whether higher ed has a positive effect in the country fell off the cliff in 2015. In a 2017 survey from Civis Analytics, 46% of Republicans said they were concerned that colleges were pushing people toward a specific political view, compared with 5% of Democrats.

Carapezza recalled that when his WGBH crew visited schools in Germany, they learned that student debt was viewed there as shame (one audience member whispered that it's also seen that way in U.S. minority neighborhoods). Higher ed in Germany, Carapezza said, is seen as a public good, whereas here it is seen as a private gain.

Wolf conceded that some legislators would be happy to totally defund higher education. And negative perceptions spread quickly via social media. She urged leaders to change the way they talk about higher education. If you have a bachelor’s degree it means you can make a million dollars more over your career than someone with a high school diploma only. So why doesn’t an ad campaign promote the chance to make a million dollars?

Plus, a legislator, Wolf said she has to take care of senior citizens and tackle the opioid epidemic before helping college students who, she noted, could be aided less expensively though dual enrollment with high schools.

Some audience members lamented that we were educating too many social workers vs. carpenters (because you can see what they do)—somewhat reminiscent of a campaigning Marco Rubio’s concerns that we need more welders and fewer philosophers.

Of course, we need both.

John O. Harney is executive editor of The New England Journal of Higher Education, part of NEBHE.

Saudi crown prince visits Cambridge in search of investors

The Cambridge skyline from across the Charles River.

From the New England Council (newenglandcouncil.com)

"Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman visited  Harvard University, MIT, and IBM during a recent visit to Cambridge. The goal of the prince’s visit was to nurture ties between the private sector and academia between the two nations as well as to seek investors to support his economic and social reforms, changes aimed at reducing Saudi Arabia’s reliance on oil.

At Harvard, the prince participated in two private roundtable conversations. The first roundtable was with Harvard professors who focus on Saudi Arabia and the other with professors whose areas of study are pertinent to the reforms the prince outlined in his Saudi Vision 2030 document. The second meeting included presidents of local universities and colleges who discussed higher education and technology-related education. The prince also attended a MIT forum focused on science and technology, and visited IBM’s Cambridge facility to learn more about artificial intelligence.

“He’s very interested in the connection between research, entrepreneurship and innovation and how they fit together to fuel the economy,” said Harvard Vice Provost of International Affairs Mark C.  Elliott. The prince is impressed by what he saw at Harvard and shares the concerns of some speakers about the need to prepare young people for jobs that do not yet exist. After the prince’s visits, Saudi officials announced new partnerships with MIT and Harvard with a focus on sustainable energy, fellowships for women, and research.''

What a choice