Wow.  I am SO pumped!!! 

Don't believe for a second that we're down for the count.  We may be in mourning yet but we have but lost a battle.

It is definitely full ON, this war for the soul of our country.

Find a way to get involved, stay involved.  It is one of our key learnings that we needed to be engaged earlier, longer, on a sustained basis to make the impact we really need.  Get in at the grassroots, find a way to help your local candidates NOW.  If there aren't candidates yet, find one...or become one.  We can't wait a year or even eighteen months.  We have to fight on, immediately.

After a meeting today with my fellow DFA members, it's only too apparent that we learned much more than this, and that we are up to it in spirit.  It's time to gear up for the next level.

Are you ready?  Are you on?

http://www.democracyforamerica.com

http://dfa.meetup.com

See you at the next Meetup!

p.s. I think I'll have something BIG to share at the next one!

10:07:49 PM    comment []

Dennis Jerz wrote recently on Mark Bauerstein's essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education, regarding a bias towards liberals in secondary education.  I commented:

Bauerstein forgets a fundamental issue affecting a large portion of secondary education: publicly funded schools must be open and accepting to all students that enter. Perhaps it's not that academia screens out non-liberal educators. "Liberal", after all, is based on the root, "libe", free; being liberal means being open- or broad-minded, free from bigotry, willing to entertain new ideas. In a publicly-funded system, is this attitude not critical to equality in education? That all comers and a multitude of ideas are welcomed?

Can you imagine what the repercussions would be if an educator taught from a bias that questioned the legitimacy of the Holocaust, that espoused eugenic practices and complete isolationism, that was highly sympathetic to anti-immigration? Are liberal educators likely to have any of these biases? Are these biases that should be entertained at all by any educator? Can conservative educators say that no one within their ranks harbors these biases?

Perhaps the real problem isn't whether educators at large are liberal or conservative. Perhaps the real problem is that a premium has not been placed on critical thought and analysis, on active and open questioning and dissent. This is far more important for students to master than the political leanings of their educators. Can conservatives say they are able to advocate this? Are liberals doing their best to encourage this?

I've had hard-core conservative professors at a private business school. Even years later I cringe thinking of a certain Econ prof that encourage the growth of renewable resources by advocating an increase in consumption of paper products. He punctuated his remarks by taking a brand-new piece of white paper off a pad, balling it up and throwing it in the waste can; he said that corporations would work to fill our needs as our needs increased. When I asked him about corporations' likely response to the increase in dioxin production and chlorine-based waste that act as hormone disruptors when released into the environment, resulting from an increase use of chlorine in paper pulp bleaching, he had no answer and shut me down, moving to the next topic. On the other hand, I had an exceptional business ethics professor who'd been elected as a conservative judge; he entertained all questions, was more likely to answer questions with more questions, and generally increased my understanding of the topic exponentially beyond that which the text covered. It can go either way. I'd prefer a generation of the latter, rather than the former; a generation of students taught to think as the Econ prof, allowed to acquire positions in management, might be the death of our future.

[You might find this bit an interesting read: http://reason.com/0411/fe.dc.whos.shtml -- note the educators who are voting conservatively. Also note the rationales given by those folks who might be considered liberal. What really is conservative or liberal?]

That Econ prof really got under my skin.  I could have entertained his premise, believing as I do in the invisible hand of the market -- but he lost me because of his close-mindedness.  Had he been able to support his premise completely by following his own logic under questioning or had he been open-minded enough to throw it out to the class for further discussion, I could have bought his concept.

I live in a community in which a feud rages with a local corporation regarding an accumulation of dioxin along  a stretch of river in a chemical plant's waste stream.  The issue of corporate response to both demand and public accountability was germaine when I asked the question ten years ago; it's more so, now that the public has begun to press suit against the subject corporation.  How many new managers learned not to question the invisible hand in this last ten years while attending this private business school?  How much will the example of this particular corporation cost both the community in terms of falling property values and health, or the corporation in curative action?

[Ed. note: please bear with me, I am having problems with editing in Radio and my laptop again.  I think this is the final cut.]

9:23:21 AM    comment []