They touch a lot of what's happening and what's on our minds.
It's also good to hear about Berkely's real value. One of my alma
mammies.
Ed
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/03/opinion/03herbert.html?th&emc=th
Cracks in the Future
By BOB HERBERT
NY Times Op-Ed: October 3, 2009
Berkeley, Calif.
While the U.S. has struggled with enormous problems over the past several
years, there has been at least one consistent bright spot. Its system of
higher education has remained the finest in the world.
Now there are ominous cracks appearing in that cornerstone of American
civilization. Exhibit A is the University of California, Berkeley, the
finest public university in the world and undoubtedly one of the two or
three best universities in the United States, public or private.
More of Berkeley's undergraduates go on to get Ph.D.'s than those at any
other university in the country. The school is among the nation's leaders in
producing winners of the Nobel Prize. An extraordinary amount of
cutting-edge research in a wide variety of critically important fields,
including energy and the biological sciences, is taking place here.
While I was roaming the campus, talking to students, professors and
administrators, word came that scientists had put together a full analysis
and a fairly complete fossilized skeleton of Ardi, who is known to her
closest living associates as Ardipithecus ramidus. At 4.4 million years of
age, this four-foot tall, tree-climbing wonder is now the oldest known human
ancestor.
Give Berkeley credit. The school's Tim White, a paleoanthropologist, led the
international team that worked for years on this project, an invaluable
advance in human knowledge and understanding.
So it's dismaying to realize that the grandeur of Berkeley (and the
remarkable success of the University of California system, of which Berkeley
is the flagship) is being jeopardized by shortsighted politicians and
California's colossally dysfunctional budget processes.
Berkeley is caught in a full-blown budget crisis with nothing much in the
way of upside in sight. The school is trying to cope with what the
chancellor, Robert Birgeneau, described as a "severe and rapid loss in
funding" from the state, which has shortchanged Berkeley's budget nearly
$150 million this year, and cut more than $800 million from the higher
education system as a whole.
This is like waving goodbye to the futures of untold numbers of students.
Chancellor Birgeneau denounced the state's action as "a completely
irresponsible disinvestment in the future of its public universities."
(The chancellor was being kind. Anyone who has spent more than 10 minutes
watching the chaos of California politicians trying to deal with fiscal and
budgetary matters would consider "completely irresponsible" to be the
mildest of possible characterizations.)
Berkeley is laying off staffers, reducing faculty through attrition and
cutting pay. Student fees will no doubt have to be raised, and the fear is
that if the financial crisis continues unabated it will be difficult to
retain and recruit the world-class scholars who do so much to make the
school so special.
Chancellor Birgeneau said he is optimistic that Berkeley will be able to
maintain its greatness and continue to thrive, but he told me candidly in an
interview, "It's hard to see when we are going to get back to a situation
where we can start rewarding people properly."
We should all care about this because Berkeley is an enormous and enormously
unique national asset. As a public university it offers large numbers of
outstanding students from economically difficult backgrounds the same
exceptionally high-quality education that is available at the finest private
universities.
Something wonderful is going on when a school that is ranked among those at
the very top in the nation and the world is also a school in which more than
a third of the 25,000 undergraduates qualify for federal Pell grants, which
means their family incomes are less than $45,000 a year. More than 4,000
students at Berkeley are from families where the annual income is $20,000 or
less.
More than a third are the first in their families to attend a four-year
college.
Berkeley is aggressively pursuing alternative funding sources. The danger is
that as public support for the school declines, it will lose more and more
of its public character. Substantially higher fees for incoming students
would be the norm, and more and more students from out of state and out of
the country (who can afford to pay the full freight of their education)
would be recruited.
This would most likely hurt students from middle-class families more than
poorer ones. Those kids are caught between the less well-off, who are helped
by a variety of financial aid programs, and the wealthy students, whose
families have no problem paying for a first-class college education.
The problems at Berkeley are particularly acute because of the state's
drastic reduction of support. But colleges and universities across the
country - public and private - are struggling because of the prolonged
economic crisis and the pressure on state budgets. It will say a great deal
about what kind of nation we've become if we let these most valuable assets
slip into a period of decline.
***
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23601.htm
Top Things you Think You Know about Iran that are not True
Juan Cole:
Information Clearing House October 01, 2009
Thursday is a fateful day for the world, as the US, other members of the
United Nations Security Council, and Germany meet in Geneva with Iran in a
bid to resolve outstanding issues. Although Iranian president Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad had earlier attempted to put the nuclear issue off the
bargaining table, this rhetorical flourish was a mere opening gambit and
nuclear issues will certainly dominate the talks. As Henry Kissinger pointed
out, these talks are just beginning and there are highly unlikely to be any
breakthroughs for a very long time. Diplomacy is a marathon, not a sprint.
But on this occasion, I thought I'd take the opportunity to list some things
that people tend to think they know about Iran, but for which the evidence
is shaky.
Belief: Iran is aggressive and has threatened to attack Israel, its
neighbors or the US
Reality: Iran has not launched an aggressive war modern history (unlike the
US or Israel), and its leaders have a doctrine of "no first strike." This is
true of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, as well as of Revolutionary Guards
commanders.
Belief: Iran is a militarized society bristling with dangerous weapons and a
growing threat to world peace.
Reality: Iran's military budget is a little over $6 billion annually.
Sweden, Singapore and Greece all have larger military budgets. Moreover,
Iran is a country of 70 million, so that its per capita spending on defense
is tiny compared to these others, since they are much smaller countries with
regard to population. Iran spends less per capita on its military than any
other country in the Persian Gulf region with the exception of the United
Arab Emirates.
Belief: Iran has threatened to attack Israel militarily and to "wipe it off
the map."
Reality: No Iranian leader in the executive has threatened an aggressive act
of war on Israel, since this would contradict the doctrine of 'no first
strike' to which the country has adhered. The Iranian president has
explicitly said that Iran is not a threat to any country, including Israel.
Belief: But didn't President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad threaten to 'wipe Israel
off the map?'
Reality: President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad did quote Ayatollah Khomeini to the
effect that "this Occupation regime over Jerusalem must vanish from the page
of time" (in rezhim-e eshghalgar-i Qods bayad as safheh-e ruzgar mahv
shavad). This was not a pledge to roll tanks and invade or to launch
missiles, however. It is the expression of a hope that the regime will
collapse, just as the Soviet Union did. It is not a threat to kill anyone at
all.
Belief: But aren't Iranians Holocaust deniers?
Actuality: Some are, some aren't. Former president Mohammad Khatami has
castigated Ahmadinejad for questioning the full extent of the Holocaust,
which he called "the crime of Nazism." Many educated Iranians in the regime
are perfectly aware of the horrors of the Holocaust. In any case, despite
what propagandists imply, neither Holocaust denial (as wicked as that is)
nor calling Israel names is the same thing as pledging to attack it
militarily.
Belief: Iran is like North Korea in having an active nuclear weapons
program, and is the same sort of threat to the world.
Actuality: Iran has a nuclear enrichment site at Natanz near Isfahan where
it says it is trying to produce fuel for future civilian nuclear reactors to
generate electricity. All Iranian leaders deny that this site is for weapons
production, and the International Atomic Energy Agency has repeatedly
inspected it and found no weapons program. Iran is not being completely
transparent, generating some doubts, but all the evidence the IAEA and the
CIA can gather points to there not being a weapons program. The 2007
National Intelligence Estimate by 16 US intelligence agencies, including the
CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency, assessed with fair confidence that
Iran has no nuclear weapons research program. This assessment was based on
debriefings of defecting nuclear scientists, as well as on the documents
they brought out, in addition to US signals intelligence from Iran. While
Germany, Israel and recently the UK intelligence is more suspicious of
Iranian intentions, all of them were badly wrong about Iraq's alleged
Weapons of Mass Destruction and Germany in particular was taken in by
Curveball, a drunk Iraqi braggart.
Belief: The West recently discovered a secret Iranian nuclear weapons plant
in a mountain near Qom.
Actuality: Iran announced Monday a week ago to the International Atomic
Energy Agency that it had begun work on a second, civilian nuclear
enrichment facility near Qom. There are no nuclear materials at the site and
it has not gone hot, so technically Iran is not in violation of the Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty, though it did break its word to the IAEA that it
would immediately inform the UN of any work on a new facility. Iran has
pledged to allow the site to be inspected regularly by the IAEA, and if it
honors the pledge, as it largely has at the Natanz plant, then Iran cannot
produce nuclear weapons at the site, since that would be detected by the
inspectors. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton admitted on Sunday that Iran
could not produce nuclear weapons at Natanz precisely because it is being
inspected. Yet American hawks have repeatedly demanded a strike on Natanz.
Belief: The world should sanction Iran not only because of its nuclear
enrichment research program but also because the current regime stole June's
presidential election and brutally repressed the subsequent demonstrations.
Actuality: Iran's reform movement is dead set against increased sanctions on
Iran, which likely would not affect the regime, and would harm ordinary
Iranians.
Belief: Isn't the Iranian regime irrational and crazed, so that a doctrine
of mutally assured destruction just would not work with them?
Actuality: Iranian politicians are rational actors. If they were madmen, why
haven't they invaded any of their neighbors? Saddam Hussein of Iraq invaded
both Iran and Kuwait. Israel invaded its neighbors more than once. In
contrast, Iran has not started any wars. Demonizing people by calling them
unbalanced is an old propaganda trick. The US elite was once unalterably
opposed to China having nuclear science because they believed the Chinese
are intrinsically irrational. This kind of talk is a form of racism.
Belief: The international community would not have put sanctions on Iran,
and would not be so worried, if it were not a gathering nuclear threat.
Actuality: The centrifuge technology that Iran is using to enrich uranium is
open-ended. In the old days, you could tell which countries might want a
nuclear bomb by whether they were building light water reactors (unsuitable
for bomb-making) or heavy-water reactors (could be used to make a bomb). But
with centrifuges, once you can enrich to 5% to fuel a civilian reactor, you
could theoretically feed the material back through many times and enrich to
90% for a bomb. However, as long as centrifuge plants are being actively
inspected, they cannot be used to make a bomb. The two danger signals would
be if Iran threw out the inspectors or if it found a way to create a secret
facility. The latter task would be extremely difficult, however, as
demonstrated by the CIA's discovery of the Qom facility construction in 2006
from satellite photos. Nuclear installations, especially centrifuge ones,
consume a great deal of water, construction materiel, and so forth, so that
constructing one in secret is a tall order. In any case, you can't attack
and destroy a country because you have an intuition that they might be doing
something illegal. You need some kind of proof. Moreover, Israel, Pakistan
and India are all much worse citizens of the globe than Iran, since they
refused to sign the NPT and then went for broke to get a bomb; and nothing
at all has been done to any of them by the UNSC.
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