A target of art

"X Marks the Spot'' (mixed media collage) by Sophiya Khwaja, in her show "Machinations,'' through June 25, at Cade Tompkins Projects, Providence. This Pakistani artist, now based in Dubai, will give a talk and participate in a panel discussion at the gallery  3-5 p.m., April 30 at the gallery, at 198 Hope St., Providence.

Saturday, April 30, 2016
3-5pm
Talk 4pm

Exhibition Dates
April 30 - June 25, 2016

'Last year is dead'

"The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh."

-  Philip Larkin, "The Trees''

Sand on the wall

"Shore'' (mixed materials with paint on panel), by Luanne E. Witkowski, in her show "New Observations,'' at Lanoue Gallery, Boston, only through April 30.

"The reflective qualities of the gleaming, color-saturated works shift with the perspective of the viewer. Glittering textures awaken tactile responses and are reminiscent of sand and other specific elements of landscape. The works continue to exemplify Witkowski's ability to echo and amplify the experience of being in nature,'' the gallery notes say.

Cambridge conference to discuss developing international cyberbehavior ethics

(April 28th, 2016) The Boston Global Forum (BGF) will host a May 9th Conference titled “Building Ethics Norms for Cyberbehavior’’. This conference (time, place and speakers below) is in part a follow-up to the recent creation of the BGF’s “Ethics Code of Conduct for Cyber Peace and Security,’’ which has been informed by BGF online dialogues with cyberexperts from several countries.

It is part of The Boston Global Forum’s BGF-G7 Summit Initiative, in which the BGF has convened leading scholars and business, technology and government leadersto seek solutions to pressing global issues involving peace, security and development. This BGF group has been working with Japanese officials to draft proposals to present to the national leaders meeting at the G7 Summit on May 26-27 in Japan.

The BGF’s biggest priority leading up to the summit is developing  what it calls “Strategies for Combating Cyberterrorism’’.

The May 9 event:

Time: 7 p.m. (EDT) May 9, 2015

Venue: Room 2, Harvard Faculty Club, 20 Quincy St., Cambridge, MA 02138

To be live-streamed at www.bostonglobalforum.org

The conference will be directly linked with participants in Tokyo and Bonn.

For further information, including on attending the conference, please send queries to: Office@BostonGlobalForum.org.

The conference will be moderated by:

• Former Mass. Gov. Michael Dukakis, Co-Founder, Chairman, Boston Global Forum.

Speakers:

• Prof.  Jose Barroso, former President of the European Union.
• President Vaira Vike-Freiberga, former President of Latvia, President of Club de Madrid.
• Prof. Thomas E. Patterson, Co-Founder, Member of Board of Directors, Member of Editorial Board, Boston Global Forum; Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press, Harvard Kennedy School.
• Prof.  Joseph Nye, Member of the BGF Board of Thinkers; University Distinguished Service Professor, Harvard Kennedy School.
• Prof.  Koichi Hamada, Special Adviser to  Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
• Prof. Thomas E. Patterson.
• Nguyen Anh Tuan, Co-Founder and CEO, Boston Global Forum; Chair, International Advisory Committee, the UNESCO-UCLA  program on Global Citizenship Education.
• Prof. John Savage, An Wang Professor of Computer Science, Brown University.
• Ryan Maness, Visiting Fellow of Security and Resilience Studies, Department of Political Science, Northeastern University.
• Tomomi Inada, Chairman of Policy Research Council of Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party and a Member of the Japanese House of Representatives.
• Prof.  Nazli Choucri, Professor of Political Science, MIT; Director of the Global System for Sustainable Development (GSSD).
• Prof. Chris Demchak, RADM Grace M. Hopper Chair of Cybersecurity and Co-Director of the Center for Cyber Conflict Studies, at the U.S. Naval War College.

The tricky challenge of managing public speech on campuses

BOSTON

Via the New England Journal of Higher Education. See nebhe.org)

Free speech is fast becoming a hot-button issue at colleges in New England across America, with campus protests often mirroring those of the public-at-large on issues such as racism or tackling institution-specific matters such as college governance. On the surface, the issue of campus free speech may seem like a purely legal concern, yet in reality, colleges should also treat it as a public relations problem.

What the public does not generally understand is that the First Amendment right to free speech is not absolute. It is much more nuanced. People cannot just say what they want whenever they want, and certainly not on college campuses. There is no right to free speech at private educational institutions, and speech can be restricted to a certain degree at public institutions. To be clear, even a public higher-education institution has the right to impose certain restrictions on protest activities.

Yet just because a college can limit speech does not mean that it should. Colleges are loathe to take any action perceived as encroaching on free speech, thus undermining their image as centers of learning, creative thinking and open discourse. College campuses should be seen as places that encourage independent thought and social awareness even to the point of protest. But, at the same time, higher ed institutions must always keep safety and the educational mission at the forefront of their daily operations.

So how can colleges avoid damaging their educational franchise while still maintaining a safe and orderly campus? The answer is planning, communication and positive messaging.

From an institutional perspective, protests today bear little resemblance to those that stole the headlines in the 1960s and 1970s. Back then, there were no computers, cell phones, Internet or e-mail, and schools were often blindsided by student activism. Today, schools know protest plans well in advance, since most are coordinated through social media. That means the administration has the opportunity to work with protestors, actually helping to shape the protest and establish expectations.

Viewed this way, campus protest is much like an organized chess match, in which both the school and the students have the opportunity to anticipate and plan for the opposition’s next moves. Doing that effectively requires advance planning.

Delegating protest oversight and control to a small and nimble decision-making team is one approach that has proven effective. Members of the team might include the provost, the VP for student affairs, the director of public safety and the VP of communication. A few student affairs professionals can then be designated to work closely and proactively with protest leaders.

Having school officials on the ground level of a protest ensures that the school has all the inside information it needs to formulate its game plan. Such plans can then be customized to each individual demonstration, whether the protest be over racial discrimination, college governance or endowment investment.

Creating and disseminating protest restrictions well in advance (preferably in student handbooks at student orientations) establishes the rules of engagement. Schools should make clear that these guidelines comply with federal, state and local laws, and they should articulate institutional policies and procedures. Schools can then rely on these rules to work with protestors to set limits on the time, place and manner of the demonstration. For example, a school may choose to prohibit protests during final exams. Or it may allow protests on the college green, but not within the administration building. Managing expectations well in advance of a protest diminishes the potential for the type of confusion or emotion that causes unmanageable disruptions.

Communications before, during and after a protest are critical. A college should use social media to its advantage, engaging directly with students, setting expectations and boundaries, and controlling its public image. With a media plan in place, press releases and social media posts can be drafted well in advance of the day of the protest. This way, a school can tailor its message and ensure that anyone speaking on its behalf stays on message when dealing with the media. The goal is to avoid those cringe-worthy public comments made when unprepared school officials speak off the cuff. It does not help the school’s public image if it appears that the administration and the students are at odds.

By working with protesters, colleges and universities can present demonstrations and campus dissent as an opportunity for discourse. That, in turn, can turn a potential public relations problem into a positive and sanctioned part of the educational experience.

AiVi Nguyen is a partner and Anthony Dragga an associate at the Boston law firm of Bowditch & Dewey, LLP. Both focus their practices on business and employment litigation.

Vietnam vet looks back

"Wounded Memories,'' by Tom Morrissey, a Vietnam War veteran and  a professor of visual and digital art at the Community College of Rhode Island.

This is part of a new exhibit, "Support and Defend: Art Relevant to the Veteran Experience,'' at the Vets Gallery, in the Veterans Memorial Auditorium, Providence.

'These April sunsets'

"I smile, of course,
And go on drinking tea,
Yet with these April sunsets, that somehow recall
My buried life, and Paris in the Spring,
I feel immeasurably at peace, and find the world
To be wonderful and youthful, after all."

-  Henry James, in Portrait of a Lady   

There's still plenty of life in newsprint: Welcome The Boston Guardian

The Boston Guardian, a new weekly newspaper that’s the successor to the recently closed Boston Courant, has come out with its first edition. The paper serves Boston’s downtown, Back Bay, Beacon Hill and Fenway neighborhoods and will soon expand circulation into the booming Seaport District.

The profitable Courant had a hefty circulation of 40,000 and The Guardian will probably do at least as well.  While it has a somewhat different design than The Courant it will cover the same sort of topics, especially development and politics.  I hope  that they also do more profiles of the many curious characters who live and/or work in their circulation area, one of the  world’s most stimulating urban centers.

David Jacobs is the editor and publisher and his wife and longtime business partner, Gen Tracy, is the associate editor of the new paper – the functions they had as The Courant’s owners. Jennifer Maiola is the managing editor of the new paper, as she was of The Courant.

Neither Mr. Jacobs nor his wife own The Guardian. Rather, a group of investors have capitalized it to let the couple and their colleagues continue to serve their community. {Disclosure: The duo are friends of mine, and I have long admired their commitment to community journalism, not to mention their ingenuity, good humor, civic courage and resilience.}

Mr. Jacobs and Ms. Tracy have gotten a lot of attention for deciding to push back against the idea that all print publications must have a Web site. They  have come to see such sites as just sucking money, energy and attention from the profitable print product, which, in any event, their readership prefers over staring at screens for coverage of their neighborhoods. And of course Web sites, as wonderful as they can be, are also fertile ground for cut-and-paste plagiarism of copyrighted journalistic work.

The Courant was closed on Feb. 5.  In what many legal and media observers saw as an outrage against justice, The Courant lost a wrongful-termination suit from an executive hired to help increase advertising sales.

Mr. Jacobs said that the judgment with interest grew to about $300,000, with $250,000 in legal fees, forcing the couple to shut The Courant and liquidate its assets.

But The Guardian will now take up where The Courant left off as a source of rigorous, useful and often entertaining reportage about the heart of Greater Boston.

-- Robert Whitcomb

Uneven swing seasons

Even after a mild winter, spring is usually hesitant in New England -- a few warm sunny days but then days of cold rain! But fall is usually generous  with mild days until Thanksgiving, as if to make us forget the direction we're going.

A tax-free profession

Panhandlers are proliferating in Providence. (There are usually several stationed outside my little office across the street from the Marriott Hotel all day. One is a very bad saxophonist.)

They seem to be raking in money from motorists waiting at the red light.

Do these street merchants declare any of their income for taxes?

--- Robert Whitcomb

Jill Richardson: Every-day racism continues to pervade America

Via OtherWords.org

I’ve had a front row seat to learn about the environment for students of color on campus. As a white woman assistant teaching a class on race, I got a crash course in the subject. But it’s possible to see it everywhere.

The everyday experience of a person of color generally doesn’t involve being spat on. But it’s often shaped by race in more ways than a white person might guess.

A black friend told me, for example, that she selects her clothes so that she doesn’t look threatening to white people.

Another black friend watched cops eyeing her 13-year-old son, an honor student who was doing nothing wrong. Perhaps he forgot to think about whether he looked threatening when he got dressed that day? Or was it because he was born black and male and grew to be six feet tall?

A white student asked an Asian classmate for math help. When the Asian girl said she’s no good in math, she was told: “Yes you are. You’re Asian.” A Korean-American friend, born in Illinois, gets asked how she learned such good English.

It keeps going.

A Chinese person is routinely mistaken for other Chinese people — you know, because they “all look alike.”

A black girl’s friend tells her, “I don’t even think of you as black,” as if that’s supposed to be a compliment. Should she not be proud of her identity?

A Mexican woman is told jokes about Mexican people and — when she points out they’re offensive — she’s accused of not being able to “take a joke.”

These are the experiences people of color have day-in and day-out that many white people remain entirely unaware of.

When whites say they aren’t racist because they’re “colorblind,” they’re blinding themselves to these experiences of their neighbors and classmates. Such attitudes prevent us from having open and honest conversations about the realities of race in our country.

If you don’t feel confident talking about race, start by reading online articles. One can learn a lot from blogs like Angry Asian Man or media outlets like The Root.

And if someone you know says they find something racist or offensive, ask why. Listen. Resist being defensive or immediately accusing that person of being too sensitive.

Instead, if you don’t agree that it’s racist, consider that perhaps there’s something you don’t understand. Don’t feel attacked — it wasn’t your fault you were born into a racist society and socialized by it.

In short, stopping the most disgusting incidents of racism should start with ending the everyday racism that pervades our society.

OtherWords columnist Jill Richardson is the author of Recipe for America: Why Our Food System Is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It. 

Chris Powell: Don't blame the NRA or Yale

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Connecticut saw four of the five remaining presidential candidates on the eve of its primary election.    

On the Republican side, Donald Trump, having admitted that he doesn’t want to seem "presidential," went to Bridgeport and Waterbury to revel in the buffoonery, mockery and contempt that have made him so appealing to so many. In Glastonbury, Ohio Gov. John Kasich easily contrasted himself as thoughtful and respectful.   

On the Democratic side, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders complained to a rally in New Haven that 36 percent of that city's children are not just living in poverty but doing so within sight of Yale University's $26 billion endowment, as if there was some connection.

Hillary Clinton visited Hartford, emphasized the problem of gun violence, and pledged to confront the National Rifle Association and strive to "change the gun culture."  

But repugnant as the NRA may be, it has little to do with gun violence, and the"gun culture" Clinton deplored -- presumably the NRA’s 5 million purported members -- is not the culture doing the most damage with guns.   

Rather, the "gun culture" that does the most damage is the culture of poverty,  unconditional welfare, drug dealing and drug prohibition. Most shootings --  from Hartford to Chicago to Los Angeles -- are not committed by NRA members but by fatherless and uneducated young men, products of the family-destroying welfare system who see drug dealing and crime as their best career options.    Sanders’s silly linking of child poverty in New Haven with Yale’s endowment only emphasizes the difficulty of pushing the political left out of its ideological dead end.   

Since Yale is such an awful influence, the expropriation of its endowment and the resulting smashing of its political influence under the assault of Sanders’s socialism would be positive. But all Yale’s money could be spent in the name of alleviating poverty and, if it was spent as the hundreds of billions of dollars before it have been spent, there would be only more poverty and dependence afterward.   

Amid this half century of policy failure it is hard not to suspect that poverty and dependence are actually the objectives of the political left generally and the Democratic Party particularly. For poverty and dependence fuel the need for government patronage and become not afflictions to be eliminated but profitable businesses and ends in themselves.   

A few decades ago it was possible for a few on the left and a few Democrats to acknowledge this failure of policy, as the sociologist Daniel Patrick Moynihan did before becoming one of Clinton’s predecessors as a Democratic senator from New York.   

Moynihan wrote in 1965: "From the wild Irish slums of the 19th-century Eastern seaboard to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles, there is one unmistakable  lesson in American history: A community that allows a large number of men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future -- that community asks for and gets chaos. Crime, violence,  unrest, disorder -- particularly the furious, unrestrained lashing out at the whole social structure -- that is not only to be expected; it is very near to inevitable. And it is richly deserved."  

In the Senate 20 years later, Moynihan elaborated: "The institution of the family is decisive in determining not only if a person has the capacity to love another individual but in the larger social sense whether he is capable of loving his fellow men collectively. The whole of society rests on this foundation for stability, understanding, and social peace."   

To end poverty and gun violence, government needs first of all to stop manufacturing them. 

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn. 

The hour approaches

"The Last Judgment Tapestry'' at the the Worcester Art Museum through Sept. 18.

This 16th Century tapestry has 100 nearly life-size figures. There  are parts of Worcester in which it appears that the wrath of God has already been exercised.

David Warsh: Hillary Clinton the Hawk

SOMERVILLE, MASS.

Victory in the New York State primary seems to have all but clinched the Democratic nomination for Hillary Clinton. I won’t be surprised if this week’s quintet of Northeast primaries puts Donald Trump so close to the top as to diminish the suspense surrounding the Republican convention.

So it is an auspicious time for Alter Egos: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and the Twilight Struggle over American Power (Random House, 2016), by Mark Landler, to appear.  The magazine of The New York Times published a  scoop on April 24, under the headline, “How Hillary became a hawk.” The story says:

"Throughout her career she has displayed instincts on foreign policy that are more aggressive than those of President Obama — and most Democrats.''

The article, at least, reads like a campaign document, consisting mainly of vignettes that have been fed to the journalist:  Clinton pivoting towards the center in preparation for the general election. “We’ve got to run it up the gut,” she exclaims to her aides after China warns against sending an aircraft carrier into the Yellow Sea to protest North Korean actions.

When visiting Fort Drum, in upstate New York, for the first time as a newly elected senator, she sits down, takes off her shoes, puts her feet on the coffee table, and asks, “General, do you know where a gal can get a cold beer around here?”

She reads “cover to cover” the counterinsurgency field manual General David Petraeus has given her

She befriends and receives the (qualified) endorsement of retired four-star Gen. John M. “Jack” Keane, Fox news military analyst and promoter of the Iraq “surge.”

And when reporter Landler surfaces a striking disagreement with former U.S.  Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry (and for two years previously U.S. commander there), a Clinton aide volunteers,  “She likes the nail-eaters, [Stanley] McChrystal, Petraeus, Keane – real military guys, not these retired three-stars who go into civilian jobs.” 

Landler writes:

"As Hillary Clinton makes another run for president, it can be tempting to view her hard-edged rhetoric about the world less as deeply felt core principle than as calculated political maneuver. But Clinton’s foreign-policy instincts are bred in the bone — grounded in cold realism about human nature and what one aide calls “a textbook view of American exceptionalism.” It set her apart from her rival-turned-boss, Barack Obama, who avoided military entanglements and tried to reconcile Americans to a world in which the United States was no longer the undisputed hegemon. And it will likely set her apart from the Republican candidate she meets in the general election. For all their bluster about bombing the Islamic State into oblivion, neither Donald J. Trump nor Senator Ted Cruz of Texas have demonstrated anywhere near the appetite for military engagement abroad that Clinton has.''

The book itself will be useful in the event Clinton becomes president, as seems increasingly likely. Whether she is a neo-con or liberal hawk or a conservative internationalist is an open question.  In the interval, however, better to read America’s War for the Greater Middle East: a Military History (Random House, 2016), by Andrew Bacevich, a scathing assessment of US military policy since 1980.

David Warsh is a long-time financial journalist and economic historian. He the proprietor of economicprincipals.com, where this piece originated.

Lessons in growing

"Late April and you are three; today
We dug your garden in the yard. 
To curb the damage of your play, 
Strange dogs at night and the moles tunneling, 
Four slender sticks of lath stand guard
Uplifting their thin string. 

"So you were the first to tramp it down. 
And after the earth was sifted close
You brought your watering can to drown
All earth and us.  But these mixed seeds are pressed
With light loam in their steadfast rows. 
Child, we've done our best."

--  W. D. Snodgrass, "Heart's Needle''

Unreliable coast

"Restless Sand 2,'' by Phyllis Ewen, in her "Land and Water'' show at Spotlight Gallery at the  Lunder Arts Center, Lesley University College of Art and Design, Cambridge, through May 7. 

Ms. Ewen  illuminates New England's changing landscape, including how it is affected by climate change, in her most recent exhibit.  using archival paper, including maps, charts and digitally printed photographs,  to create three-dimensional sculptures resembling landscapes.

Ms. Ewen gives viewers a glimpse of the  Cape Cod coast. She notes: "The Cape's coast has been changing over many years; the ocean pushes its bed onto the land, creating new heights, narrows, and breaks in existing dunes."

Sweetness without and terror within

"It is the sweetest spring within the memory of man.  So green, so mild, so beautiful!  Ah, what a contrast between nature without and my own soul so torn with doubt and terror!"

--  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Chris Powell: Public-sector unions must be busted for the public interest

Are unions intrinsically good? Of course that is their premise, a premise often on display now that  Connecticut Gov. Dan Malloy, facing the collapse of state government's tax revenue, is trying to economize with state government's workforce and Hartford's new mayor, Luke Bronin, facing worse insolvency in a city of abject dependence, is trying to do the same with the city's workforce. The governor and the mayor are being accused of "union busting."

Unions have been crucial to the restraining of rapacious capital. But labor and capital pursue their own interests, and these interests are often opposed to the public interest, as when both labor and capital seek to block competition in the economy. (The best artistic depiction of their equally selfish instincts may be the 1951 Alec Guinness movie The Man in the White Suit, wherein textile manufacturers and the textile workers union unite to suppress the discovery of a fabric that never gets dirty and never wears out, threatening the clothing and laundry industries.)

So the public interest has to make distinctions. That means distinguishing between private-sector unions and government-employee unions. Private-sector unions often have defeated the exploitation of the many by the few. But government-employee unions are often the few exploiting the many, exploiting society as a whole.

A few generations ago even liberal politicians understood this distinction. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat, and New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, a Republican, opposed collective bargaining for government employees, partly because of the prospect later celebrated by the leader of the largest government-employee union in New York City, Victor Gotbaum: "We have the power to elect our own boss."

That is, with collective bargaining for government employees, government came to bestow great patronage on them and, through their unions, those employees kicked back to the campaigns of the elected officials bestowing that patronage, thereby making the unions a government-funded special interest that overwhelmed the public interest.Chr

So in this respect "union busting" is as essential to restoring government in the public interest in Connecticut as busting the big financial houses is essential to restoring the federal government to the public interest.

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

'Living well is the best revenge'*

"Lil Dagover With Her Shih Tzu, Berlin.'' by Lotte Jacobi, in the show "Urban Camera,'' at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln. Mass., through Sept. 11 *Translated from an old Spanish proverb.

May 9 conference to discuss G7 agenda

The Boston Global Forum will hold a conference  on May 9 on the agenda of the G7 Summit, which is coming up on  May 26-27, in Japan. The BGF conference, to start at   6 p.m. on May 9, will be held at the Harvard Faculty Club in Cambridge. The meeting is part of The Boston Global Forum's BGF-G7 Summit Initiative, in which BGF experts have been working with Japanese officials to craft proposals to present to the national leaders  for consideration at the summit.

The initiative has been discussing a wide range of issues, from security in Asia in the face of North Korea and Chinese militarism, the global economy, public health, global warming and sustainable infrastructure improvements. But the BGF's biggest priority this year is addressing cybersecurity threats, a topic to which the BGF has drawn internationally known cybersecurity experts to make recommendations.

For further information about the May 9 conference, including about attending it, please consult BostonGlobalForum.org or address inquiries to:

office@BostonGlobalForum.org