justice

The latest experiment in peer-to-peer education kicks off next month – a new institution in which students will learn in virtual communities using free online materials and social-networking tools.

But now the venture, called University of the People, faces big questions. Among them: Can it get accreditation? And can a college that charges so little and relies so much on self-teaching retain students?

Since it was announced in January, University of the People has accumulated a pile of publicity, spurred by its populist marketing pitch as the “first nonprofit, tuition-free online university.”

“The idea is to reach the hundreds of millions of people who graduate high school, have all the ability and the right to study in an academic institution, but cannot do it either because they don’t have the money or because there aren’t enough institutions,” said Shai Reshef, an Israeli entrepreneur who founded the project. “In quite a few countries in the world, the demand is much more than the supply.”

via The Wired Campus – New Tuition-Free ‘University of the People’ Tries to Democratize Higher Ed – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

A liberal democratic society is a complex system that’s designed to be very resilient and self-correcting in the face of all kinds of extremism. But the health of that system — especially its natural immunity to would-be attackers — ultimately depends on just one factor: It cannot survive without people’s ongoing confidence in a functioning political contract.

When it’s working right, this contract guarantees the upper classes predictable, reliable wealth in return for their investments. It promises the middle class mobility, comfort and security. It ensures the working classes fair reward for fair work, chances to move ahead and protection against very real risk that they’ll be forced into poverty if they can’t work any more.

Generally, as long as everybody gets their piece of this constantly renegotiated deal, everybody stays invested in keeping the system going — and a democratic society will remain upright, healthy and moving mostly forward.

For the past four decades, conservatives have done everything in their power to dismantle that essential contract, and thus destroy our mutual confidence in the fundamental agreements that allow any democratic system to function. (None dare call it treason — but a solid case could be made.)

This isn’t news: by now, most of us can recite the litany, chapter and verse, of the all the many ways they hacked away at America’s essential ability to function as the Constitution intended.

But the biggest loser, as always, has been the working class — the people whose only real power lies in their sweat and their numbers. Their faith in the promise of democratic self-government has been shattered through years of union-busting, farm foreclosures, factory exports, college grant cuts, subprime mortgage scams and all manner of betrayal, treachery, neglect and abuse.

via 5 Ways to Build a Fascist-Proof America | Rights and Liberties | AlterNet.

Since the dawn of the Internet professors have been told not to be wasting time on online endeavors at the expense of the “real” publishing they could be doing. You have to be strong enough to resist that head-in-the-sand approach. Hopefully, the culture of academia will start coming around and this will be less of an issue. But for young scholars, I suggest that at the point of hire one makes clear the type of scholar one wishes to be. And the best way to make a case for being an open scholar in the future is to have been one in the recent past. That’s why I urge graduate students not to wait to get their ideas circulating. Imagine what future search committees will be like. They will not simply look at a pile of paper resumes or a CV of traditional publications. Anyone that is seriously of interest to the more enlightened search committees of the near future will be of interest because his or her thinking, acting, and publishing (formal and informal publishing) will be broadly evident online.

If you follow the old model just to play it safe, saving up your ideas to share once they are in a perfected form and then burying them in toll-access publications, you might be visible to those few hundred people who happen to subscribe to that scholarly journal, but you are effectively invisible to the world. I know I would look for young scholars who have not simply published, but who have engaged multiple audiences. Prove yourself by leaving a visible trail of your thinking and of your various projects, formal or informal. As long as you make this a priority–to the point that it is natural for you to be constantly publicly engaged with your thinking–then any traditional publishing you do can complement or supplement this. But if the priority is the opposite, if you buy into the hype that the only real or substantial contributions you can make are through those highly limited and dimmed outlets of conventional peer-reviewed publishing, you will hobble yourself and simply become another agent of the moribund scholarly communications system. I don’t think that things are that bleak. I think people are starting to wake up to the dignity of open scholarship. But you do have to take a stand, and you will not be very credible in making that stand if you wait until you have tenure. That will just prove that you were never really invested in being a public intellectual or an open scholar.

via Academic Evolution: Is Open Scholarship Too Risky for Young Scholars?.

All through the dark years of the Bush Administration, progressives watched in horror as Constitutional protections vanished, nativist rhetoric ratcheted up, hate speech turned into intimidation and violence, and the president of the United States seized for himself powers only demanded by history’s worst dictators. With each new outrage, the small handful of us who’d made ourselves experts on right-wing culture and politics would hear once again from worried readers: Is this it? Have we finally become a fascist state? Are we there yet?

And every time this question got asked, people like Chip Berlet and Dave Neiwert and Fred Clarkson and yours truly would look up from our maps like a parent on a long drive, and smile a wan smile of reassurance. “Wellll…we’re on a bad road, and if we don’t change course, we could end up there soon enough. But there’s also still plenty of time and opportunity to turn back. Watch, but don’t worry. As bad as this looks: no — we are not there yet.”

In tracking the mileage on this trip to perdition, many of us relied on the work of historian Robert Paxton, who is probably the world’s pre-eminent scholar on the subject of how countries turn fascist. In a 1998 paper published in The Journal of Modern History, Paxton argued that the best way to recognize emerging fascist movements isn’t by their rhetoric, their politics, or their aesthetics. Rather, he said, mature democracies turn fascist by a recognizable process, a set of five stages that may be the most important family resemblance that links all the whole motley collection of 20th Century fascisms together. According to our reading of Paxton’s stages, we weren’t there yet. There were certain signs — one in particular — we were keeping an eye out for, and we just weren’t seeing it.

And now we are. In fact, if you know what you’re looking for, it’s suddenly everywhere. It’s odd that I haven’t been asked for quite a while; but if you asked me today, I’d tell you that if we’re not there right now, we’ve certainly taken that last turn into the parking lot and are now looking for a space. Either way, our fascist American future now looms very large in the front windshield — and those of us who value American democracy need to understand how we got here, what’s changing now, and what’s at stake in the very near future if these people are allowed to win — or even hold their ground.

via Is the U.S. on the Brink of Fascism? | Rights and Liberties | AlterNet.

The recent spate of town hall dustups may look like an overnight sensation, but they’ve been years, even decades, in the making.

Since the days in the late 1970s, when the New Right began its takeover of the Republican Party, it has cultivated a militia of white people armed with a grudge against those who brought forth the social changes of the ’60s.

These malcontents have been promised their day of retribution, a day for which they are more than ready. Few seem to understand that they are merely dupes for a corporate agenda that will only worsen the conditions in which they live.

Why, you may ask, would men of power and fame shake the rough, unmanicured hands of gun enthusiasts, conspiracy theorists, gay-haters, misogynists and racists?

Because somebody’s got to do the dirty work. Magnates don’t like to soil their French cuffs, and it’s hard for a bunch of rich guys to garner sympathy for threats to their bottom lines. It’s the classic inside-outside game that the right wing of the GOP has played for the last two decades.

via Inside Story on Town Hall Riots: Right-Wing Shock Troops Do Corporate America’s Dirty Work | Rights and Liberties | AlterNet.

I know I should be mortified by the lobbyist-organized mobs of angry Brooks Brothers mannequins who are now making headlines by shutting down congressional town hall meetings. I know I should be despondent during this, the Khaki Pants Offensive in the Great American Health Care and Tax War. And yet, I’m euphorically repeating one word over and over again with a big grin on my face.

Finally.

Finally, there’s no pretense. Finally, the Me-First, Screw-Everyone-Else Crowd’s ugliest traits are there for all to behold.

via The ‘Me-First, Screw You Crowd’ Are No Longer Hiding Their Antics | Corporate Accountability and WorkPlace | AlterNet.

IT’S too bad so many people are falling into poverty at a time when it’s almost illegal to be poor. You won’t be arrested for shopping in a Dollar Store, but if you are truly, deeply, in-the-streets poor, you’re well advised not to engage in any of the biological necessities of life — like sitting, sleeping, lying down or loitering. City officials boast that there is nothing discriminatory about the ordinances that afflict the destitute, most of which go back to the dawn of gentrification in the ’80s and ’90s. “If you’re lying on a sidewalk, whether you’re homeless or a millionaire, you’re in violation of the ordinance,” a city attorney in St. Petersburg, Fla., said in June, echoing Anatole France’s immortal observation that “the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges.”

via Op-Ed Contributor – Is It Now a Crime to Be Poor? – NYTimes.com.

At Empire High School in Vail, Ariz., students use computers provided by the school to get their lessons, do their homework and hear podcasts of their teachers’ science lectures.

Down the road, at Cienega High School, students who own laptops can register for “digital sections” of several English, history and science classes. And throughout the district, a Beyond Textbooks initiative encourages teachers to create — and share — lessons that incorporate their own PowerPoint presentations, along with videos and research materials they find by sifting through reliable Internet sites.

via As Classrooms Go Digital, Textbooks May Become History – NYTimes.com.

RALEIGH, N.C., Aug. 7 UPI — The North Carolina General Assembly has voted to allow a death row inmate to challenge the state’s capital punishment law because of racial bias.

The landmark bill would allow an argument that there is systemic racial bias in the way that capital punishment has been applied, the Winston-Salem N.C. Journal said.

The measure, expected to be signed into law by Gov. Bev Perdue, gives a condemned prisoner the right to present statistical evidence showing racial disparities in how the death penalty has been used.

If a judge finds the evidence convincing, the sentence can be overturned and commuted to life in prison.

via N.C. death penalty challenge bill passes – UPI.com.

Dateline: February 1, 2009. It’s Super Bowl Sunday and throughout the nation millions of Americans have stocked their shelves and refrigerators with alcohol for the big game. In living rooms across the country, guests will enjoy the libations and gawk at the humorous beer commercials sprinkled liberally throughout the telecast. Like the Fourth of July and fireworks, the Super Bowl and booze are an American tradition. There is no societal stigma associated with this excessive drinking. It is all part of the celebration. Like the old saying goes: “We don’t have a drinking problem. We drink. We get drunk. No problem.”

But as the day’s festivities build to a climax, the nation is thrown into turmoil. Internet headlines announce that Olympic swimming hero Michael Phelps, who months earlier had electrified audiences throughout the world by winning eight gold medals in Beijing, had been captured in full digital glory taking a bong hit at a private party. The horrors! How could he do such a thing?

via Marijuana is Safer: So Why Are We Driving People to Drink? | Rights and Liberties | AlterNet.

At least 9.25 million people are in prisons and jails around the world, with incarcerated Americans making up a disproportionate number of prisoners (the U.S. takes up less than 5% of the world’s population, yet more than 2.5 million people — more than one-quarter of the world’s prison population — are incarcerated in its jails and prisons). In addition, one in 100 Americans is in prison or jail.

via About (Criminal Justice – Change.org).

Both the war and criminal justice models are seen as too crude, particularly in their theory of deterrence, for responding to the problem of global terrorism. An alternative regulatory model is advanced that overlays the public health concepts of primary, secondary and tertiary prevention with the ideas of containment (of injustice) and enlargement (of justice). An interconnected web of controls might enable an overdetermined prevention of terrorism that, in spite of its redundancy, might be more cost-effective than the war or criminal justice models because the principle of responsiveness means parsimony in resort to coercive modalities of control that are expensive. It is possible to have an evidence-based approach to regulating rare events like 9/11 terrorism by applying the principles of evidence-based regulation to micro-elements that are constitutive of macro-disasters. Viewed through this lens, support for the war on terrorism is not evidence-based but grounded in other public philosophies like retribution and arm-chair utilitarianism.

via SSRN-Thinking Critically About the War Model and the Criminal Justice Model for Combating Terrorism by John Braithwaite.

If the Obama administration pulls off a $500-million-dollar online-education plan, proposed in July as one piece of a sweeping community-college aid package, this type of course could become part of a free library available to colleges nationwide.

The administration has released only vague statements about the plan. But Chronicle interviews with a senior Education Department official and others whose ideas have informed the emerging policy suggest how colleges might use these courses—and how Carnegie Mellon, repeatedly cited by officials, might offer a model for the effort.

The government would pay to develop these “open” classes, taking up the mantle of a movement that has unlocked lecture halls at universities nationwide in recent years—a great course giveaway popularized by the OpenCourseWare project’s free publication of 1,900 courses at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Millions worldwide have used these online materials. But the publication cost—at MIT, about $10,000 a course—has impeded progress at the community-college level, says Stephen E. Carson, external-relations director for MIT OpenCourseWare.

via Obama’s Great Course Giveaway – Technology – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Google is poised to radically expand its book service, monitoring the digital books you search, the pages you read, how long you spend on various pages, and even what you write down in the margins. Google could then combine your reading habits with other information it has about you from other Google services, creating a massive “digital dossier” about you, your interests, and your concerns. With numerous reports of government efforts to compel online and offline booksellers to turn over records about readers, the time is now for Google to pledge to protect reader privacy.

You shouldn’t be forced to pay for digital books with your privacy. Tell Google it needs to develop a robust privacy policy that gives you at least as much privacy in books online as you have in your neighborhood library or bookstore. Google must:

* Protect your reading records from government and third party fishing expeditions by responding only to properly-issued warrants and court orders, and by letting you know if someone has demanded access to information Google has collected about you.

* Make sure that you can still browse and read anonymously by not forcing you to register or give personal information and by deleting any logging information for all services after a maximum of 30 days.

* Separate data related to Google Book Search from any other information the company collects about you, unless you give it express permission.

* Give you the ability to edit and delete any information collected about you, transfer books from one account to another without tracking, and hide your “bookshelves” or other reading lists from others with access to your computer.

* Keep Google Book Search information private from third parties like credit card processors, book publishers, and advertisers.

via Electronic Frontier Foundation:.

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The various attacks on the proposed North Carolina Racial Justice Act, a bill that would allow capital defendants to present claims of racial bias to the court, are, at best, based on a lack of understanding, and at worst, emotional and misleading arguments used in an effort to obscure the issues.

Some critics claim that the use of statistics to show racial bias in death penalty cases is inappropriate, but these critics offer no alternatives. Statistical analysis provides the only way to understand the role of racial bias in a system.

Rigorous statistical analyses, grounded in actual information about the crimes and the charging and sentencing decisions relating to them, facilitate a nuanced understanding of the real role of race. The only alternative is willful blindness.

via RACE: Research Experts Say Racial Bias Still Exists in Death Penalty | Death Penalty Information Center.

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