Get drunk with a high-protein New England holiday drink
Versions of “flip cocktails “ like this have been popular New England holiday drinks for more than 200 years. They’re made from brandy, egg and syrup and garnished with grated nutmeg. Nutmeg has been a favorite New England spice since colonial days, especially over the Christmas holidays. Consider that Connecticut is called The Nutmeg State.
Refugee from Waspdom
Spalding Gray in about 1980.
“I was raised as an upper-class WASP in New England, and there was this old tradition there that everyone would simply be guided into the right way after Ivy League college and onward and upward. And it rejected me, I rejected it, and I ended up as a kind of refugee, really.’’
Spalding Gray (1941-2004), American actor, novelist, playwright, screenwriter and performance artist. He grew up in Barrington. He died by suicide.
Boston and a haunting Christmas carol
View of Bethlehem on Christmas 1898
Read this lovely story about “O Little Town of Bethlehem’’ by our friend Don Morrison. There’s a big Boston connection.
In Boston, the former Trinity Church, constructed in 1735 and destroyed in the Great Boston Fire of 1872.
The famed current Trinity Church and parish house, on Copley Square, were designed by Henry Hobson Richardson. Its construction took place from 1872 to 1877.
Roman royalty
“Sofia Loren, Rome, 1954” (silver print) by George Daniell (1911-2002), in group show at the Maine Museum of Photographic Arts, in Portland, through Jan. 31. The photographer and painter was a resident of Trenton, Maine, near Bar Harbor, from 1960 to his death.
The features the work of 26 photographers, including Ansel Adams, George Daniel, and Linda Connor and aims, the museum says, to explore "the themes of portraits, still life, interiors, sea scapes, landscapes and collage.’’
The Trenton Lighthouse, in Trenton, Maine, is not a lighthouse but a business building, now containing a restaurant, The Beacon.
— Photo by Billy Hathorn
The four-masted schooner Margaret Todd; Bald Porcupine Island is beyond the pier and the Bar Harbor Inn is to the right.
— Photo by NewTestLeper79
Chris Powell: New Haven welcomes immigration lawbreakers
Before passports: New Haven as it appeared in a 1786 engraving
Illegal immigration might substantially change the ethnic composition of New Haven.
MANCHESTER, Coon.
For 22 years, ever since the Arab terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Americans have been urged by various government agencies: "If you see something, say something." Having done just that may cost New Haven's registrar of vital statistics her job.
The registrar, Patricia Clark, had been alerting federal immigration authorities to dozens of marriage licenses involving immigrants -- licenses that struck her as questionable -- just as guidance from the state Public Health Department recommended she do, independent of the national policy of reporting things that don't seem right. When her superiors discovered this in November, they suspended Clark with pay pending investigation.
Why? Because New Haven has declared itself a "sanctuary city" and its policy long has been to nullify federal immigration law.
Mayor Justin Elicker says, "New Haven is a welcoming and safe city for everyone, regardless of background or document status." That is, immigration lawbreakers are welcome in the city. New Haven has gone so far as to issue city identification cards to illegal immigrants to facilitate their remaining in the country illegally.
State government doesn't go quite as far but issues special driver's licenses to illegal immigrants for the same purpose.
The premise of these nullification policies is that the desire of anyone anywhere, whatever his motive, to live in the United States trumps the interest of the United States in remaining a sovereign nation by controlling its borders and judging the admissibility of foreigners and what they intend to do here.
Connecticut and New Haven persist in these policies despite the turmoil lately on display just over the state line in New York City, where, as in other "sanctuary cities," the Biden administration's open-borders policy is bankrupting city government, causing reductions in services to legal residents, driving down the local wage base, driving up housing costs, and worsening the shortage of housing.\
The New Haven registrar is in trouble for being a good citizen and public official in trying to uphold federal law against a city policy that, while dressed up in political correctness and humanitarianism, is essentially treasonous.
Most illegal immigrants mean no harm. But there must be rules to keep immigration orderly and assimilable and ensure that the country remains democratic, secular, and safe from religious and ethnic fanaticism. Letting people enter or remain in the country illegally, unvetted, in the age of international terrorism is crazy.
Some illegal immigrants do mean harm. Some have been deported many times and still sneak back in and commit crimes. The hapless immigration system has many repeat offenders, just like Connecticut's criminal-justice system.
At least six of the 9/11 terrorists violated U.S. immigration law, either by overstaying their visas or falsifying their visa applications. If New Haven and other "sanctuary cities" keep having their way -- indeed, if the Biden administration stays in power -- nothing like that may ever be caught before the damage is done.
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Another contradiction of a premise of Connecticut education policy was broadcast throughout the state the other day but wasn't noticed. The study and advocacy group Education Reform Now CT reported that while Connecticut has racially diversified its public school teaching staff in recent years, the increase in teachers from racial minorities has not matched the increase in students from minority races.
Competition for good minority teachers is intense even as state government can't control the racial composition of its student body. So any increase in minority staff is a credit to school administration. Integration and diversity are important objectives.
But learning is a higher objective than racial integration, and ever since the state Supreme Court's decision in the school-integration case of Sheff v. O'Neill in 1996, Connecticut policy has presumed that minority students learn better in a racially integrated environment. So what's the big deal if teaching staffs are, on average, whiter than their classrooms?
If, as the complaint from Education Reform Now CT suggests, minority kids will learn best in a segregated environment, education in Connecticut has a lot of rethinking to do.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
Use it up
“In Maine, there is a deeply ingrained sense that you can always get a little more use out of something.”
– Tim Sample (born 1951), Maine humorist
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“Winter in Maine is a time of alternating rest and frenzied activity.”
– Tom Allen (born 1945), writer and former Maine congressman
Llewellyn King: When will Trump and Biden talk about the looming tsunami of AI?
“Artificial intelligence” got its name and was started as a discipline at a workshop at Dartmouth College, in Hanover, N.H., in the summer of 1956. From left to right, some key participants sitting in front of Dartmouth Hall: Oliver Selfridge, Nathaniel Rochester, Ray Solomonoff, Marvin Minsky, Trenchard More, John McCarthy and Claude Shannon.
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
Memo to presidential candidates Joe Biden and Donald Trump:
Assuming that one of you will be elected president of the United States next November, many computer scientists believe that you should be addressing what you think about artificial intelligence and how you plan to deal with the surge in this technology, which will break over the nation in the next president’s term.
Gentlemen, this matter is urgent, yet not much has been heard on the subject from either of you who are seeking the highest office. President Biden did sign a first attempt at guidelines for AI, but he and Trump have been quiet on its transformative impact.
Indeed, the political class has been silent, preoccupied as it is with old and – against what is going to happen — irrelevant issues. Congress has been as silent as Biden and Trump. There are two congressional AI caucuses, but they have been concerned with minor issues, like AI in political advertising.
Two issues stand out as game changers in the next presidential term: climate change and AI.
On climate change, both of you have spoken: Biden has made climate change his own; Trump has dismissed it as a hoax.
The AI tsunami is rolling in and the political class is at play, unaware that it is about to be swamped by a huge new reality: exponential change which can neither be stopped nor legislated into benignity.
Before the next presidential term is far advanced, the experts tell us that the life of the nation will be changed, perhaps upended by the surge in AI, which will reach into every aspect of how we live and work.
I have surveyed the leading experts in universities, government and AI companies and they tell me that any form of employment that uses language will be changed. Just this will be an enormous upset, reaching from journalism (where AI already has had an impact) to the law (where AI is doing routine drafting) to customer service (where AI is going to take over call centers) to fast food (where AI will take the orders).
The more one thinks about AI, the more activities come to mind which will be severely affected by its neural networks.
Canvas the departments and agencies of the government and you will learn the transformational nature of AI. In the departments of Defense, Treasury and Homeland Security, AI is seen as a serious agent of change — even revolution.
The main thing is not to confuse AI with automation. It may resemble it and many may take refuge in the benefits brought about by automation, especially job creation. But AI is different. Rather than job creation, it appears, at least in its early iterations, set to do major job obliteration.
But there is good AI news, too. And those in the political line of work can use good news, whetting the appetite of the nation with the advances that are around the corner with AI.
Many aspects of medicine will, without doubt, rush forward. Omar Hatamleh, chief advisor on artificial intelligence and innovation at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, says the thing to remember is that AI is exponential, but most thinking is linear.
Hatamleh is excited by the tremendous impact AI will have on medical research. He says that a child born today can expect to live to 120 years of age. How is that for a campaign message?
The good news story in AI should be enough to have campaign managers and speech writers ecstatic. What a story to tell; what fabulous news to attach to a candidate. Think of an inaugural address which can claim that AI research is going to begin to end the scourges of cancer, Alzheimer’s, Sickle cell and Parkinson’s.
Think of your campaign. Think of how you can be the president who broke through the disease barrier and extended life. AI researchers believe this is at hand, so what is holding you back?
Many would like to write the inaugural address for a president who can say, “With the technology that I will foster and support in my administration, America will reach heights of greatness never before dreamed of and which are now at hand. A journey into a future of unparalleled greatness begins today.”
So why, oh why, have you said nothing about the convulsion — good or bad — that is about to change the nation? Here is a gift as palpable as the gift of the moonshot was for John F. Kennedy.
Where are you? Either of you?
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com, and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
The long-gone downtown department stores at Christmas
Book cover from the 1916 children's novel Christmas Holidays at Merryvale, illustrated by Charles F. Lester
From the The New England Historical Society:
“Generations of New Englanders remember fondly the glorious downtown department stores at Christmas. Those great retail palaces brought magic to the holidays with stunning window displays, conversations on Santa’s lap and walks through enchanted villages.
“The holiday season brought out the best in the great downtown department stores. They were at once arbiters of quality and fashion, makers of dreams, vibrant elements of city life and landmark consumer paradises….
“During the heyday of Downtown Crossing in Boston, carolers serenaded shoppers atop the Filene’s marquee. A giant manger scene loomed above Summer Street at Jordan Marsh and three large gold bells swayed with the Christmas music….”
To read the whole article, hit this link.
Poisoned Ivy?
The Harvard Lampoon Building, also known as the Lampoon Castle, in Cambridge. Prepare to see The Lampoon, Harvard College’s humor magazine, take on Harvard’s problems with Congress.
— Photo by Beyond My Ken
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
In Schenck v. United States (1919), U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. famously wrote of free speech that “no one has the right to {falsely} shout ‘fire’ in a crowded theater.’’
What about shouting “kill all the ----"?
There was something creepy about the congressional grandstanding (mostly by Republicans, of course) in grilling the presidents of Harvard, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania about anti-Semitism, alleged and real, on their elite campuses. Of course those leaders’ robotic and evasive, or at least equivocal, responses, crafted by a law firm, didn’t do them any good in facing those on Capitol Hill set on appealing to their always-angry-and-envious base and funders by sticking it to the trio, portrayed as Ivy-covered swells.
The authoritarian-minded inquisitors were basically telling the private universities’ leaders how to run their institutions. But even small colleges, let alone the big elite ones above, are complex enough to be compared to little countries, with sometimes warring constituencies – students, trustees, faculty, funders (including very rich and sometimes arrogant and bossy donors, more and more of whom are oft-amoral hedge fund and private-equity moguls), and residents of the schools’ host communities. These institutions can’t be run as dictatorships.
Further complicating things is that colleges and universities are, more than most other parts of American society, supposed to be dedicated to freedom of speech and inquiry. That’s bound to lead to angry encounters. Finally, universities are increasingly ethnically and otherwise diverse, thus leading to tensions between, say, people of Jewish and Palestinian backgrounds on campuses.
As for speech codes for students: They may make things more toxic by bottling up anger. But I’d leave decisions on codes to each university and its officials’ sense of the danger of violence on their own campuses. And if students don’t like the codes, they can transfer to a school more suitable for their feelings and opinions.
Of course, the threat to yank federal money always hangs over congressional hearings. But we should bear in mind that colleges and universities get federal money for good reasons -- to educate future leaders and other citizens, to underwrite scientific and other research and otherwise enrich society. In short, for the national self-interest.
Thus while I think the three presidents above generally did a bad job in explaining their universities’ evasive “official” positions on confronting anti-Semitism in the current fraught climate, I have some sympathy for them, even if they are trained, as are many leaders dealing with crises, to prevaricate.
Meanwhile, now that Harvard President Claudine Gay has been raked over the coals in Congress, her career in the distant past is being exhumed, raising allegations she’s a plagiarist, and certainly some of her scholarly work has that aroma. So I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s soon no longer leader of America’s richest university. Once you’re in hot water for one problem, you’re apt to find yourself in it for something else as your enemies continue digging.
An inventor’s etching
“Hairy Hare” (zinc etching, mixed media), by Dan Welden, in his show “Dan Welden: Solo 100,” at Mitchell • Giddings Fine Arts, Brattleboro, Vt., through Jan. 14.
The gallery says the show celebrates “paintings and prints by artist Dan Welden, inventor of the solarplate etching process, with his milestone 100th solo exhibit. Also featured, ‘masterworks,’ hand pulled impressions of current and past masters collaborating with Welden, including Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Kiki Smith, Eric Fischl, Roy Nicholson and others.
The Brattleboro Retreat treats mental-health disorders and drug addiction. It was established as the Vermont Asylum for the Insane in 1834. New England has many private facilities dealing with mental illness and drug addition.
Photo by Beyond My Ken
The glory of 'gravy'
“Gravy is what Italian-Americans call tomato sauce, the three-hour kind with enough meat to feed a small country. My mother makes a huge pot of it every Sunday. It isn't so much about cooking as it is about connecting with her heritage. She likes knowing that generations of her maternal ancestors spent their Sunday mornings stirring what they called 'ragu' in their own kitchens. Even when we ate Sunday dinners at Nonna's, my mother made her own gravy before we went. She'd give half the pot to me to bring to the city, and before the end of the week we had each used up our share for lasagne, sausage-and-pepper sandwiches, baked stuffed peppers, and veal parmigiana.”
― Nancy Verde Barr (born 1944) in Last Bite. The food expert is a native of Providence, famous for its large Italian-American community and eateries.
‘Winteractive’ whale in Boston
Boston behemoth
From The Boston Guardian:
“A massive whale sculpture has received final approval for installation in {Boston’s} Downtown Crossing, promising to interact with visitors through responsive light and sounds….
“Hailing from Quebec, the 60-foot sculpture is the first component of the ‘Winteractive’ public art series sponsored by the Downtown Business Improvement District (BID)….
“The completed art series will form a linear path through the Downtown with a focus on lights, interactive exhibitions and play features that can occupy younger audiences. In addition to Downtown Crossing, the BID also hopes to bring visitors to Chinatown, the financial district, Government Center and the theater district.’’
To read the whole article, please hit this link.
‘Layers of time’
“Facade” (hand-woven and Jacquard-woven fabric, knitting, paint), by Maris Van Vlack, in the show “The Blu of Distance,’’ at Bromfield Gallery, Boston, Jan. 3-Jan. 28
The gallery explains:
"‘The Blue of Distance’ features a series of textile objects that combine weaving, knitting, and paint to create layered and dimensional images referencing architecture, family history, and abandoned landscapes.
“The imagery is drawn from an archive of family photographs, using layering of material as a process through which to explore the way that landscapes evolve overtime through geological and historical events. Each of these pieces function as a window through which to see layers of time and memory, and depict spaces that exist between the past and the present.’’
Seal of the New England Historic Genealogical Society
Bella DeVaan: Billionaires on your Christmas list
“The Worship of Mammon” (1909), by Evelyn De Morgan
Via OtherWords.org
It’s high giving season in America. From Angel Trees and red buckets to year-end appeals, nonprofits and charities receive more donations during the five week holiday stretch than any other on the calendar.
Millions of people whose incomes are too low to take advantage of charitable tax deductions are still moved by the holiday spirit to give generously.
For Americans with enough income to itemize — less than 10 percent of the country’s population — the tax benefits of giving to charity can encourage generosity. For over a century, our country has used tax deductions to publicly subsidize charitable donations because of the promise that they can help fund a better world.
Yet there’s a pernicious trend in year-end giving: It’s more and more dominated by the extremely wealthy.
The share of regular people giving to charity has decreased, slipping below 50 percent of households for the first time in 2018. The share of how much regular people give to charity consistently hovers around 2 percent of annual disposable income.
Meanwhile, mega-philanthropy has been increasing — even as these mega-philanthropists keep getting richer. This gargantuan giving might sound like good news. But the rise of “top-heavy philanthropy” correlates with a decline in household buying power and a staggering increase in inequality.
The extremely wealthy don’t give the way regular people do. You might donate directly to a local food bank, the Red Cross, or another charity that directly serves people in need. But the very richest are more likely to give first to intermediaries whose charitable impact is a lot murkier.
At this point, 41 cents of every dollar donated to charity — over $130 billion in 2022 — flows into private foundations and donor-advised funds, known as charitable intermediaries. The donors can take a big tax break immediately, while those intermediaries promise to distribute the donations to working charities in the future.
Private foundations are required to disburse just 5 percent of their assets each year — and donor-advised funds face no payout or transparency requirements. This creates a massive lag in money reaching organizations with urgent needs.
That means we’re losing out on tax dollars that might support schools, jobs, public programs, or the environment for “charitable” contributions that could sit warehoused in private foundations or donor advised funds for years. My colleagues and I at the Institute for Policy Studies estimate that the costs in tax revenue likely add up to several hundreds of billions of dollars each year.
In other words: The average taxpayer’s holiday generosity extends, unwittingly, to subsidizing the ultra-wealthy.
Many American workers — including firefighters, teachers, and nurses — already pay a higher tax rate than American billionaires. They take home less income in a year, too, than average CEOs of large companies make in a few hours. The idea of these workers subsidizing billionaire philanthropy — which may or not support real charities, and certainly not at an acceptable pace — feels wrong.
This holiday season, we should demand a world in which we all get to define our common good — where the wealthiest cede power to the charities, causes, and people who they claim to support and who enabled their success in the first place.
That means restructuring philanthropy so those foundations and DAFs have to quickly distribute funds to urgent causes. It also means making our tax code fairer and funding public investments so fewer Americans need to rely on charity in the first place.
Let’s kick billionaires off the nice list.
Bella DeVaan is a researcher at the Institute for Policy Studies and co-author of the IPS report “The True Cost of Billionaire Philanthropy’’.
Colleen Cronin: Monitoring the health of a bay by seagrasses
Zostera marina – the most abundant seagrass species in the Northern Hemisphere.
Evolution of seagrass, showing the progression onto land from marine origins, the diversification of land plants and the subsequent return to the sea by the seagrasses.
Text by Colleen Cronin for ecoRI News
There are many ways to understand the health of Narragansett Bay. Scientists monitor its bacteria and nutrient levels, its temperature, and the populations of its sea creatures.
But there is another indicator, lying below the surface, recognized by the Environmental Protection Agency and tracked by the Narragansett Bay Estuary Program (NBEP), that can also help explain the complicated condition of Rhode Island’s marine waters.
Seagrasses that make up the “forest beneath the sea” shelter the sea’s young, provide food for its inhabitants, stabilize sediment, and even absorb carbon, according to NBEP staff scientist Courtney Schmidt. But their growth can also sound the alarm on the overall health of the water.
In Rhode Island, the two prominent types of seagrasses are called widgeon grass and eelgrass. The latter is the most common.
“We don’t have a big historical record of seagrass,” Schmidt said. “That isn’t to say it wasn’t there, it’s just that we weren’t writing it down.”
To read the whole article, please hit this link.
Llewellyn King: Christmas sweeps up the world
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
I am an oddball. I like to work on Christmas.
I don’t know how it is now, but when I was younger and worked for newspapers, variously in Africa, Britain and the United States, I always volunteered to work over the holiday and loved it. There was a special Christmas camaraderie, often more than a little nipping at the eggnog, and the joy to know that senior staff weren’t around — and, especially, to know that they weren’t needed. We, the juniors, could do it.
When you were unimportant otherwise, being in charge of a daily newspaper was the kind of Christmas gift one savored. It was a case of being news editor, city editor or chief correspondent for a day.
The senior editors were gone, and the junior staff had the run of the proceedings. Lovely fun, it was.
But not every worker is happy to labor on the great day. Consider the parish priest.
Once, I stayed with my wife, Linda Gasparello, at The Homestead, the grand hotel in Hot Springs, Va., where affluent Washingtonians have been spending Christmas since the 1800s.
Having feasted happily but unwisely on Christmas dinner in the hotel’s baronial dining room, we felt the need for a little drive and perhaps a walk. We fetched up at The Inn at Gristmill Square, in Warm Springs. The town abuts the hotel’s 2,300 acres and is a delightful contrast, small and cozy.
At the bar was the local Episcopal priest. He was enjoying a little bottled Christmas cheer. Together, we had some more of what had brought him to his relaxed state and, looking dolefully at me, he said, “I love my job. I love my parishioners. But Christmas is so hard on a parish priest, that is why I am here with my friend,” he indicated the bartender.
He explained that apart from the additional services, he was expected to call on many families, attend many parties, eat lunches and dinners, and visit the sick and attend the everyday pastoral work of his office. The poor father was exhausted and enjoying Christmas in his private way, far from the madding crowd.
Clearly, this was nothing like the lark of working on newspapers at Christmas. But we shared more cheer, and he told me of how the real Christmas for him was in his daily pastoral work. He also liked working on Christmas, just that his lasted all year and got a bit hectic toward the 25th of December.
I marvel at Christmas. How it grips the whole world. How transcendental it is. How it sweeps up denominations. How Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and animists get into the spirit of it.
Also, I marvel at how Christmas has been modified globally to fit the Northern European tradition, with snow and mistletoe and songs that often have no religious relationship — like “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” or “White Christmas.”
My mother — who, like me, grew up in Africa — was against what she saw as the cultural appropriation of Christmas by the snowy European influence. She insisted on covering the house in ferns and other greenery, which she cut and hung on the 24th of December. Not an hour earlier. The 12 days of Christmas began for her on Christmas Eve and extended to Twelfth Night. Decorating earlier was heresy.
In vain, I pleaded for cotton wool snow, even though there was no snow in Bethlehem, and told her there was no greenery in the desert.
“Good King Wenceslas” was, it is believed, the Duke of Bohemia, now the Czech Republic. But to us in Africa, in the summer in the Southern Hemisphere, the snow lay deep and crisp and even in our imaginations.
That is the miracle of Christmas. It is for everyone, celebrated in its own way across the continents, inside and outside of Christendom.
Christmas is the world’s happy place. Enjoy!
On Twitter: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS, and an international energy consultant. He’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
In the protest age
“Smash Communism: Boston Common 1969),’’ by Southborough, Mass.-based multi-disciplinary artist Joe Landry, in the show “Capital Vice: Politics of the Seven Deadly Sins,’’ at the Fitchburg (Mass.) Art Museum, through Jan. 14.
Fitchburg in 1882, when it was a thriving diversified manufacturing center.
In the center of Southborough.
This illustration depicts the execution of Ann Hibbins on Boston Common for witchcraft in 1656.
Chris Powell: Adios school integration, and college is way overpriced
Capitol Community College, in Hartford.
“The Problem We All Live With” (1964 oil) painting), by Norman Rockwell, dramatizes efforts to integrate Southern schools in the face of intense racism. U.S. marshals are escorting the little girl to a newly integrated school.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
For decades, even before the Connecticut Supreme Court decision in the school-integration case of Sheff v. O'Neill,. 27 years ago, educators have been telling the state that racial integration in education is crucial to better student performance, especially for children from minority groups. In response, Connecticut built and operated dozens of regional schools at a cost of billions of dollars to induce minority students from the cities and white students from the suburbs to mix voluntarily.
While the regional schools have moved thousands of students around, they have produced little integration, particularly in Hartford, which was the center of the Sheff case. Student performance throughout the state has continued to decline. But the political correctness of it all has produced high-paying jobs for many educators and has made them feel better about themselves.
Whereupon last week the state community college system repudiated racial integration in education without anyone noticing it.
The system announced a partnership with Morehouse College, in Atlanta, through which students of color who graduate from Capital Community College, in Hartford, in two years with an academic average of at least 2.7 will be guaranteed admission to Morehouse as juniors on their way to a four-year degree.
Morehouse is a prestigious "historically Black" institution, and according to Connecticut's Hearst newspapers, state community college officials said "studies have shown that Black students who enroll in historically Black colleges and universities are more likely to earn their degrees and have more income than those who attend non-HBCU institutions."
Surprise! Racial integration is not such a boon in education after all.
"HBCUs like Morehouse College inherently believe in the success of their students," community college system President John Maduko said, implying that other schools couldn't care less about how their students do.
So having long strived to integrate its students in primary education, Connecticut now will strive to resegregate them when they get to higher education.
The irony passed without comment from the state's education bureaucracy and the rest of state government. Have those billions spent on regional schools been wasted? Who cares? Now let's cost people billions more by making them all buy electric cars.
Meanwhile, the even more expensive failure of higher education is getting less notice than the failure of lower education.
Bloomberg News reported last month that changes to the federal college student loan program made since President Biden took office have facilitated forgiveness of more than $127 billion in debt, which has been transferred to taxpayers.
The problem of student loan debt is presented as a matter of the heavy burden that prevents borrowers from advancing to homeownership and family formation.
But this is only a subsidiary scandal. The bigger scandal is the grotesque overpricing of higher education. If higher education was worth what is charged for it, millions of young people wouldn't be stuck with heavy debt for so long. They would get jobs paying them enough so that they easily could discharge their debt soon after graduating.
The loan system itself is largely responsible for inflating the cost of higher education. The more money is available, the more colleges and universities will absorb it, as by establishing courses and degrees that bestow few job skills.
A 2014 study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that many college graduates end up in jobs that don't require college education. A study a year earlier by the Center for College Affordability and Productivity reported that there were 46% more college graduates in the U.S. workforce than jobs requiring a college degree.
College grads often earn more than other people. But is this because of greater knowledge and skills or because of the credentialism that higher education has infected society with?
Nothing has been done about this problem, since college loans are less of a benefit to students than to educators and college administrators, the ultimate recipients of the money and a pernicious influence on politics.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).
'Beauty of decay'
Video still from the show “Impermanence III,” by Connecticut-based artist Miller Opie, at Fountain Street Fine Art, Boston, through Jan. 14.
She explains:
“I started making art to explore a very personal physical experience that started over ten years ago. After several years of surgeries to rebuild my jawbone that was being destroyed by benign tumors, I create art to intimately explore beauty, mortality, and rejuvenation. As my practice has progressed, I have found that there is great beauty in aging, evolving and even in decay. These themes have led me to explore the idea of ‘Impermanence”’ while at an artist residency in France last year. This film shows the continuation of the ‘Impermanence’ concept in which I created a sculpture of seagrasses and jute at another recent artist residency. I wove the seagrasses with jute into small basket forms that float in the ocean water, seeming to rejuvenate and come back to life. The result is a meditation on nature, life, and its impermanence.”
Party poopers
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
“No one who sets out to make the world better should expect people to enjoy it. All history shows what happens to would-be improvers.’’
— Charlotte Perkins Graham (1860-1935), a Hartford, Conn., native, was an author and social activist.]\
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“You've got that kiss, that kiss that warms
That makes reformers reform reforms
'Cause you've got that thing, that certain thing.’'
— From the song “You’ve Got That Thing,’’ by Cole Porter (1891-1964) , who was educated in New England.