Oh, Marcus. Washington Independent:

On July 7, 2007, Marcus Epstein had too much to drink and stumbled onto Georgetown’s scenic, shop-lined M Street, walking in no particular direction. At 7:15 p.m., he bumped into a black woman, called her a “nigger,” and struck her in the head with an open hand. An off-duty Secret Service agent was watching. Epstein “jogged away,” according to the agent’s affidavit, and when Epstein was finally chased down, he “continued to flail his arms while being taken into custody.”

And that wasn't just any strike - the U.S. Attorney's office called it a "karate chop." He's scheduled to be sentenced on July 8 (OnePeople'sProject has a slew of scanned court documents). He was originally charged with a hate crime, but pled it down to assault. SPLC's Hatewatch lays out what Epstein has coming:

He faces a maximum punishment of 180 days in jail and a $1000 fine. He’s under a restraining order to stay away from the couple involved, has agreed to seek mental health treatment, complete an alcohol treatment program, write a letter of apology to the victim and donate $1000 to the United Negro College Fund.

$1000 to UNCF? That's got to sting. How many times will you have to mow David Duke's lawn to make that back?

So who is Marcus Epstein, anyway? Oh, where to begin...

Dubbed "the man who seems to be vying for the World's Second Darkest White Supremacist" by OnePeople'sProject, Epstein is a frequent writer for far-right outlets like Human Events, The American Conservative, The Washington Examiner, the anti-semitic Taki's Mag, and racist/anti-immigrant sites like VDARE. He's also linked with the founding of the white nationalist Youth for Western Civilization (started by his good friend Kevin DeAnna).

He also does his fair share of legwork for the far right: Epstein founded the Washington DC Robert Taft Club (yes, the Taft of Taft-Hartley infamy) which often features white supremacist speakers, is the executive director of Tom Tancredo's Team America PAC, and runs Pat and Bay Buchanan's The American Cause.

Memorable Epstein quotes:

"Diversity can be good in moderation — if what is being brought in is desirable. Most Americans don't mind a little ethnic food, some Asian math whizzes, or a few Mariachi dancers — as long as these trends do not overwhelm the dominant culture." [source]

"A number of Miami's boosters, including Time Magazine, have dubbed it 'The Capital of Latin America.'

But why are Americans supposed to like this?

Even the Cuban immigrants, still preponderantly white, law-abiding, Republican-voting, affable people are not desirable if they don't assimilate. Perhaps a few Little Havanas are manageable in a huge country, just as many Americans may see a few isolated Chinatowns as an exotic novelty. The problem is when the Little Havanas become Big Havanas and the Chinatowns become Chinacities or even Chinastates." [source]

Looking at a tapestry in Ethiopia:

"It's no Sistine Chapel, but you know what Samuel Johnson said about a Dog walking on it's hind legs." [source]

Here's what Samuel Johnson said: "Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all."

Not so tough when not on the interbutts, are you Marcus? When you attack people of color in real life, your internet buddies and Stormfront trolls aren't there to back you up. I'm glad more and more people linked with Youth for Western Civilization are pulling out their fasces for all to see.

UPDATE: I don't know how I missed this; looks like UVA Law un-accepted him. Well, there's always Liberty University Law, right?

"Don't mourn; critique!"
- Joe Hill, had he been a Ph.D.

As I was doing research for my book on student power, I dug through a seemingly endless stack of books, essays, and articles by various scholars of the left, bemoaning the current state of higher education.

• Some took the "corporatization" angle - showing how powerful private interests had hijacked both the operations and fundamental principles of most universities and colleges, while killing tenure positions, raising tuition, and using undergrad and grad students as labor pools to break wages of non-student school employees.
• Others took the "militarization" angle - describing the insidious and deadly relationship between the military-industrial complex and the academy (what Henry A. Giroux creatively appends the "military-industrial-academic complex"); hard research and propaganda, funded by the Pentagon, has been integrated into the academy since World War II and facilitates our empire abroad and oppression at home.
• Still others took the "conservatization" angle - chronicling the various well-funded attempts to tilt university curricula in a more socially, culturally, and economically right wing direction (e.g. David Horowitz, YAF, think-tank-funded "centers" for "liberty" or "western values," etc.).

The more ambitious writers tried to tackle all three in the same text. And, for the most part, these are all entirely valid ways of looking at the current sad state of "higher" education. While a great deal of ink has been spilled formulating a good way of weaving all these assaults together into a larger narrative, there's one common factor between them all that's blindingly obvious: they're all incredibly depressing, disempowering narratives.

I must confess boredom as I reached the end of the fourth ominously-titled book describing how far downhill the American University has gone, how the noble institution of yore has been degraded and vulgarized, and how there's little more than doom and gloom as far as the eye can see.

I get a sense that the writers themselves know how dreadful this genre is to read in any quantity - that's why they devote an inordinate amount of their titles to hopeful add-ons, usually a form of " - and how to take it back" or " - and what we can do about it". But crack open any of them and you'll find what should be the most rigorous and energizing part of the piece turns out to be in the case of a book, half of the final chapter, and in the case of an essay, one or two obligatory paragraphs at the end.

And of that, it's mostly vague paeans to "speaking out" or "organizing" - or, most nauseating of all, "voting." The better ones bring up faculty unionization (rare), and the best ones also bring up student unionization (just about nonexistent).* I've also noticed a worrying tendency to look back to some ethereal "good ol' days" of higher education. The implicit assumption is made that there was some magical era, decades ago, when Universities actually lived up to their mission statements: when they were truly communities of learning; when outside influences were unheard of; when students and professors, hand in hand, boldly pushed the limits of human knowledge and understanding; when the education given prepared one for active participation in democratic society.

As far as I can tell, nothing close to that has ever existed in America. Obedience to the agendas of powerful, outside institutions is embedded firmly in the DNA of higher ed in this country - its pedigree is that of Rockefellers, the Church, and Congress. All had agendas, and made very sure that their schools carried them out.

To be fair, at least they're saying something can be done about the problems in higher education, even if their answers are unsatisfying. Much of what passes for liberal commentary on higher education has the dank air of inevitability, of submission to administrative excuses like "the state of the economy" or the "job market," excuses which are laughably used often word for word in both economic booms and busts.

This is symptomatic of a larger problem with the left: 95% of our output is in the form of describing and assessing what exactly is wrong - with 2% offering concrete solutions and 3% warning why that 2% is all horrible ideas that will lead to disaster. While Michael Albert and his comrades at ZNet are often the ones who say it most loudly, the sentiment has been around for a long time: mere critiques aren't enough. We need to think of, write about, and create alternatives that embody our values.

Often, the dire rhetoric coming out of the left is but a hair's breadth from the power relations described by conspiracy theorists: an enemy so huge, so powerful, and so pervasive that we are always - and will always be - complicit in its continued functioning, and the implication that anything we could muster in opposition would be minuscule and wiped out in an instant. Part of this might come from a desire for attention - the modus operandi of the left publishing industry seems to be: if there's a book out called "Capitalism is Bad But Defeatable," then come out with "Capitalism is Really Bad and Undefeatable."

Thankfully, those on the ground doing actual organizing in education don't wring their hands the way most of that sector's writers do - probably because their hands are busy locking down occupations, knocking on dorm doors, holding megaphones, and signing union cards. Yes, our foes are formidable, but as G.K. Chesterton reminds us, even dragons can be beaten.

When we defend our universities from David Horowitz, or Monsanto, or Lockheed Martin, or the Pentagon, we aren't defending the university as it is. We're defending the university's potential - its potential to live up to our dreams of a liberatory, democratic, and engaged community of learning. And when we do so through the framework of prefigurative politics, we're showing the world that such a school is both possible and worth fighting for.

*One writer who bucks the trend is Marc Bousquet, whose book How the University Works and eponymous blog do a great job not only dissecting the bad, but actively supporting and contributing to those who are fighting for a more just university.

Late last month, Obama's Secretary of Education Arne Duncan came out swinging against elected school boards:

Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Tuesday that mayors should take control of big-city school districts where academic performance is suffering.

Duncan said mayoral control provides the strong leadership and stability needed to overhaul urban schools.
[...]
He acknowledged Baltimore schools chief Andres Alonso, asking how many superintendents the city had in the past 10 years. The answer was seven.

"And you wonder why school systems are struggling," Duncan said. "What business would run that way?"

After the forum, Duncan told The Associated Press that urban schools need someone who is accountable to voters and driving all of a city's resources behind children.

"Part of the reason urban education has struggled historically is you haven't had that leadership from the top," he said.

In a sense, I can understand his motivation: as head of Chicago Public Schools, he was a direct recipient of abrogated school board power. The democratic, decentralized, and much-lauded Local School Council system in Chicago (which was created in the late 80s through tireless grassroots community organizing against the very bureaucracy Duncan would end up running) was systematically gutted and ignored under his tenure. It also isn't surprising that his main line of attack is that institutions of learning and governance aren't run enough like businesses. Duncan's Renaissance 2010 program was written and handed to him by the big business players in Chicago and elsewhere.

Now the Center for American Progress, through its panoply of blogs, is pushing the idea with some help with Mayor Bloomberg. Both CAP's Wonk Room and Matthew Yglesias blogs talked up the idea that really, having fewer elected officials means more democracy. Tom Vander Ark at the Huffington Post called what little democratic control we have over our schools to be a "strange historical remnant." Yglesias took the idea and ran with it, all the way to its monarchical end:

I think this is part of a larger issue about getting democracy right in the United States. There was an assumption, at one time, that you could make government more democratic and accountable by, in essence, multiplying the number of elected officials.

In retrospect, I think this was based on flawed logic and faulty assumptions that forgot to account for the fact that people have a limited amount of time they’re realistically going to spend monitoring public officials.
[...]
I think part of the answer is that states should probably adopt unicameral legislatures and consider cutting down on the number of independently elected statewide officials. But cutting down on the quantity and influence of hyper-local electeds and putting responsibility in the hands of visible figures like the mayor and city council is crucial.

Apparently Bloomberg did an interview for ThinkProgress, part of which featured him extoling the virtues of dictatorial control over schools, teachers, and students, with the help of bogus, cooked numbers:

My favorite part is near the end, when he says: “...you could literally end democracy as we know it here in this country… without an educated public. And when you have these school boards that are fundamentally controlled by special interests, the truth of the matter is that students come last, if at all.” Fewer elected officials = more democracy! It all makes perfect sense now!

Thankfully, regular readers largely countered and ridiculed such a position:

The flipside of Matt’s point is that when a single local elected executive is responsible for EVERYTHING, it’s pretty hard to hold him or her accountable for any specific thing. If you like what Bloomberg’s doing with, say, public safety and housing but don’t like his education policies, how do you hold him accountable? You can’t cast half a vote. On the other hand, a school board subject to being voted out of office can be held accountable.

And one of the commenters actually mentions what progressive reform of our school systems would look like:

The other kind of reform that is possible is to empower parents and teachers, but in order to do that you don’t need to gather power into the office of the mayor- you need to distribute power into the neighborhoods, families, and classrooms.

Another tip-off is the exaggerated concern about the “special interests”. Matt isn’t talking here about the textbook publishers and computer sellers- a mayor who doesn’t know anything about education isn’t going to tangle with those “experts”. And he isn’t talking about the real estate industry that wants to keep school taxes low- no mayor is going to try to trim the horns of the real estate barons.

No, when Matt is talking about “special interests” he’s referring to teachers and parents. Transfer the powers of the school board to the mayor’s office and those “special interests” will have just as much influence as the rest of us in an election- which is to say, none.

Authoritarian, bureaucratic schools are a bipartisan affair in politics - which means it's going to take a lot more than mere elections to reclaim our country's educational systems.

I just ran across a great article from Education Week looking at the striking similarities between Obama's Department of Education and George W. Bush's.

The writer also interviews the always-awesome Alfie Kohn, teacher union officials, and some right wing policy people (Bush Administration, AEI, etc.). It's one of the best mainstream analyses of Obama's education priorities that I've seen in awhile.

The money quote is pretty early on in the article:

"He is operating almost in a straight line from President Bush," said Diane Ravitch, an education historian at New York University, who co-writes a blog for edweek.org. She has criticized core elements of Mr. Obama’s K-12 agenda, such as his enthusiasm for the charter sector and what she worries is an overreliance on standardized testing to judge schools and teachers.

"Obama is, in effect, giving George W. Bush a third term in education," said Ms. Ravitch, who served as an assistant secretary of education under the first President Bush.

 The article is behind a barrier at edweek, so I've reposted it below the fold: