"In readying Yale speech, Kerry looks back, ahead; Kerry issued a warning in ’66. Back at the school today, he is rethinking his words" by Matt Viser | Globe Staff May 18, 2014
WASHINGTON — On a June day in 1966, John Kerry strode in front of his senior class at Yale University and, having thrown away a mundane text, launched into a speech raising doubts about the foreign policy doctrines that were inexorably escalating the Vietnam War in which he was about to fight.
“An excess of isolationism has become an excess of interventionism,” Kerry said.
Now, almost exactly 48 years later, Kerry has come full circle, returning Sunday as the nation’s top diplomat to address Yale’s graduating class. And just as he did as a 22-year-old, Kerry is again exploring the United States’ role in the world. Revealingly, from his new perch, his outlook has markedly changed.
Indeed, in the past few days he has been mulling remarks that would almost exactly reverse the message he delivered as a much younger man.
Related:
“I think that in the next days, the government of Afghanistan’s response to anticorruption efforts are a key test of its ability to regain the confidence of the.... American people [who] are prepared to support with hard-earned tax dollars and with most importantly, with the treasure of our country — the lives of young American men and women.... and say, ‘Hey, that’s something worth dying for.’ ’’
Related: How Do You Ask a Man to Be the Last to Die For a Lie, Senator?
What the hell happened to you, $enator?
The $y$tem cooped him at best, sent him out there at worst.
“We’ve gone from an excess of interventionism probably to an excess of isolationism — an instinct to want to button up in this global world and, you know, not necessarily exercise our leadership,” Kerry said in an interview, between sips of dragonfruit-flavored water, at a State Department office. “I don’t think we can afford to do that. Particularly, I suppose, as secretary of state, looking at the challenges that I see out there.”
He saying we have become excessively isolationist? Is that what he said? Please tell me he didn't say that.
Kerry made clear that he wasn’t criticizing President Obama, but he did outline a case for a more robust engagement that he says has grown difficult in times of budget cuts.
Related:
"The deal buoyed Wall Street investors. Guggenheim Partners, a financial services firm, concluded that as a result overall Pentagon spending will remain relatively the same for the next several years before it begins to grow once again, at about 2.5 percent per year."
The same deal that locks in social service austerity when Americans need it the most.
What seems clear from interviews with Kerry and a number of his Yale classmates is that the secretary of state, like so many that have held the position before him, is finding that the job requires a constant adjustment as crises erupt and solutions seem elusive.
In his 1966 oration, Kerry questioned what he called the “Rusk doctrine,” referring then-Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who believed in using military force to combat communism around the world.
Now, 15 months into the job Rusk once held, Kerry is developing his own doctrine. But there has been little time to reflect in such a frenetic job; he has already traveled about 420,000 miles and visited 48 countries. So, as he prepared to deliver today’s speech, he consulted with his closest Yale friends, most of whom were part of the school’s elite, secretive Skull and Bones society.
How very interesting that organization would be hung out there for public consumption, almost as if it were a signal or something. Better stay in line or we will start hanging out the blackened laundry and sending it through the mail.
It was a sometimes painful process, inevitably recalling one of the darkest moments of Kerry’s life, when he received word that one of his closest friends had died in a forlorn rice paddy in Vietnam.
Think of how many he sent to die and be killed with his Iraq vote.
Related: The Kerry Chronicles: Return to Vietnam
Then think of the millions of Vietnamese daed and the chemical warfare campaign against them.
Also see:
Vietnam Initiates Violence Against China
Chinese ships evacuate workers after Vietnam riots
Vietnamese leaders vow to halt riots over China
Anti-Chinese protests end in Vietnam
At least that latest U.S-instigated(?) flare-up seems to be simmering down.
“I feel lucky on a career level that it’s brought me to a place where I can go back and share maybe a few thoughts with people, which I hope are relevant,” Kerry said. “And I’m lucky in the sense that I’m alive and able to go. Some of my classmates who were there are not, obviously.”
Interventionism speech
Kerry had long dreamed of following in his father’s footsteps to Yale.
Related: Kohn Men
He embraced the Ivy League campus, playing on the soccer and hockey teams, becoming treasurer of the Young Democrats and serving as a leader on the debate team. He was president of the famed Yale Political Union and given one of the 15 positions at Skull and Bones. His political ambitions were so well known that some played a kazoo version of “Hail to the Chief” whenever Kerry arrived.
Kerry bonded with a group of classmates who would become life-long friends. There was David Thorne, who Kerry first met at a greasy spoon diner off the Yale campus called “My Brother’s Place” and quickly learned were dating the same girl, Janet Auchincloss, half-sister of Jacqueline Kennedy.
Related: Khatib the Kook
There was Frederick Smith, who Kerry would go flying with and who would later become the founder of FedEx. There was Danny Barbiero, who went to prep school with Kerry and was his roommate at Yale. And, always at the center, was Richard Pershing, bon vivant and grandson of the famed General John Joseph Pershing.
It was a tumultuous four years. President Kennedy was assassinated, the civil rights movement took hold, and American involvement in Vietnam escalated.
There is a direct link there.
By his senior year, Kerry was given one of the top honors, chosen to deliver the class oration at graduation. He wrote a speech and submitted it to be printed in the yearbook. But in the weeks before graduation, Kerry began to question himself. The week before graduation, Kerry and the other seniors in Skull and Bones went to a 40-acre island in the St. Lawrence Seaway. Vietnam was increasingly on everyone’s minds, and Kerry and three of his best friends -- Pershing, Smith, and Thorne – had already enlisted in the military.
It was then that Kerry decided to rip up his first speech. For the next several days, often by candlelight in the woods, Kerry rewrote his graduation speech.
“I do remember him working very hard on it,” said Barbiero, a longtime Kerry friend and fellow Bonesman. “And reading it to us ad nauseam.”
“We’ve always teased him about being pontifical, verbose,” Smith said, who added that Kerry was absolutely right to switch gears on the speech. He knew, Smith said, “ This is the issue of our time and I better address it.”
And so instead of a message calling upon his classmates to do great things, Kerry delivered a 2,779-word outline of his view that there was an “excess of interventionism.”
He said “this Vietnam War has found our policy makers forcing Americans into a strange corner . . . that if victory escapes us, it would not be the fault of those who lead, but of the doubters who stabbed them in the back.”
The speech was not a full-throated opposition to the Vietnam War, but the beginnings of his questioning about the rationale for it.
Kind of an agenda-pushing trailblazer, 'eh?
Later, as Kerry headed to Vietnam on the USS Gridley, an officer came with a telegram that revealed that Pershing had died in combat. An anguished Kerry wrote his parents, “With the loss of Persh something has gone out of me.” He would serve in the war and then lead the protests against it.
Complicated issue
Fast forward 48 years from the Yale speech and some things seem not to have changed. Kerry is consulting some of the same friends for today’s oration, and seeing old questions in new ways.
“He’s told me it’s a tough one,” Barbiero said. “It’s not an easy thing to balance between these young people and the world, and who he was as a young person.”
Kerry has also shown a draft to his old friend Thorne, a former US ambassador to Italy who is now a senior adviser to Kerry at the State Department.
“It’s not plain vanilla. It’s complicated. Life and death, roads taken and not taken, and other things like that, that I’m sure everyone faces,” Thorne said.
Kerry last week seemed the picture of establishment Washington as he sat for an interview in an ornate room at the State Department. Portraits of George Washington and James Madison hung on the walls, and a painting of a swift boat like the one Kerry commanded in Vietnam stood on an easel. A window framed a view of the Lincoln Memorial.
But he bristled when asked about the irony of going back to Yale as perhaps the embodiment of the foreign policy establishment.
“I don’t buy that,” he said. “I do not view myself as the establishment when I go out and start yelling about – not yelling, but giving what I hope is a strong speech about climate change in Indonesia and what will be a strong initiative on oceans. That’s not an establishment move . . . The establishment is digging coal and selling it. And building a coal-fired power plant. So I think there’s a distinction here, frankly.”
420,000 miles and a big old jet airliner!
When his former classmates were informed that Kerry didn’t view himself as part of the establishment, they sounded bemused. “How many years had he been a senator?” Smith said, chuckling.
Yeah, it's all funny! Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!
The Kerry Doctrine
As Kerry prepared for this speech, he was far from writing by candlelight on a remote island like he was 48 years ago. He has had the help of several aides and speechwriters, and he’s been honing it while traveling across the Atlantic Ocean on a Boeing 757 government plane.
Didn't he just spew some fart mist about climate change?
Dressed in his usual traveling outfit of jeans and hooded sweatshirt, he tapped away on a laptop while traveling to and from London last week. An aide described how he sat at a desk in the forward cabin, a bottle of water and a sleeve of oreos within reach, gazing out the window while a monitor tracked the plane’s location.
During the interview, Kerry was asked what a senior in college today would make of a Kerry Doctrine. It is too early to answer, he said.
“I presume they would talk about engagement and diplomacy, and, you know, making an effort. Getting caught trying to make peace,” he said. “I think we’ve had some good initiative starts.”
See: Kerry holds out hope for Middle East peace
Maybe he can finally settle the question of Jewish extremism before moving on to Syria.
It is an unsettled time, of course. Amid the crisis in Ukraine, Russia and the United States seem to be entering a new phase that some are calling a post-post Cold War.
Well, as far as Ukraine goes it looks like Putin's efforts at peace are being dismissed.
Efforts to broker peace between Israel and Palestinians have so far failed. The civil war in Syria has shattered that country and the president whom the Obama administration hoped to oust, Bashar al-Assad, remains in power. It has been for Kerry, as it would be for any secretary of state, a severely taxing time.
“He still has a couple years left, and he’s energetic, he’s committed, and he’s determined,” said Peter Feaver, a professor at Duke University who was on President George W. Bush’s national security team. “But I gotta believe that he thought even in the darkest days he’d have more to show for it at this point than he does.”
Awww, the poor failure John Kerry.
Kerry, meanwhile, highlights what he considers some early successes. He mentions getting 92 percent of the chemical weapons out of Syria, although many say the last 8 percent are the most crucial — and there are new reports that Syria has been using chlorine.
I'm getting ready to brew up a post about that.
He talks about negotiations with Iran, although that’s a work in progress. And he insists he’s not giving up hope on peace between Israelis and the Palestinians.
He returns to the idea that the United States is not engaged enough in the world. One of the reasons, he says, is a lack of federal funds that prevents the United States from investing in development projects the way the country did after World War II. It is a topic he has taken up with Obama and which the administration is trying to address.
But what crucial for for Kerry is the diminished way too many have come to think about American power and influence — not that he is nostalgic for anything like the excesses of aggression he critiqued as an undergraduate.
“I just think we’re not as quick to pick up the baton as we were, perhaps, back then,” Kerry added. “There’s a lot of cynicism around, a lot of doubts about what can be achieved. You know, I think if there’s one dominant feature that sort of characterizes the American political process right now, and even global challenges, it’s frustration.”
:-)
For good reason!
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Did you get your seat for the ceremony?
"At Yale graduation, Kerry urges optimism on government institutions" by Matt Viser | Globe Staff May 19, 2014
I can't sit through this.
WASHINGTON — Secretary of State John F. Kerry on Sunday tapped into what he characterized as a growing sense of global unease while urging Yale University graduates to remain optimistic that government gridlock can be broken.
He's reflecting the way his ruling ma$ters feel about the rest of us rabble.
“People around the world seem to have grown used to systems or institutions failing to respond,” Kerry said. “And the result is an obvious deepening frustration if not exasperation with institutional governance.
Yup. The whole global, corporate, centralization for profit $cheme has failed all but those like him.
“The sum total of all of this inaction is stealing the future from all of us,” he added, before calling the graduating class to action.
Wall Street already has, and the government he works for is making money of student loan debt.
“It is indifference that says our problems are so great, let’s not even try,” he said. “We have to reject that. It’s hopelessness that says that our best days are behind us. I couldn’t disagree more.”
I'm not hopeless. I recognize this decaying and hulking carca$$ of AmeriKan empire is near complete collapse.
Kerry was addressing the Yale graduating class in New Haven almost exactly 48 years after he was chosen to deliver a speech when he was a senior. In that case, he threw away mundane text and decided instead to deliver a speech raising doubts about the foreign policy doctrines that were escalating the Vietnam War in which he was about to fight.
He should have done that this time, but JFK also went off-script at American University. One of the things that got him killed.
Returning to campus nearly a half-century later has caused the nation’s top diplomat to review his words and reconsider his views of the US role in the world. In 1966, he warned that “an excess of isolation has led to an excess of interventionism,” but on Sunday he warned the exact opposite.
“We cannot allow a hangover from the excessive interventionism of the last decade to lead now to an excess of isolationism in this decade,” Kerry said. “I can tell you for certain, most of the rest of the world doesn’t lie awake at night worrying about America’s presence — they worry about what would happen in our absence.”
I suppose he needs to believe that. I think most people would be happy if our covert actions and the resulting coups would go away, as well as the criminal mafia known as the dollar-based transactions.
The former Massachusetts senator and 2004 Democratic presidential candidate also delivered a bit of a stand-up routine, which included some self-depreciating humor and a knock on Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling, who has been criticized for making racist remarks.
“Today you are graduating as the most diverse class in Yale’s long history,” he said. “Or as they call it in the NBA, Donald Sterling’s worst nightmare.”
Related: Sterling It Up
The divisive race requirement.
Kerry also joked about his long-windedness (“I promise I won’t go a minute over four hours”) and his generation’s drug use.
“It’s not true that everyone in my generation experimented with drugs,” he said. “Although between Flomax, Lipitor, and Viagra, now we do.”
Yeah, he's a real funny guy, ha-ha.
After delivering the commencement address at Yale, Kerry planned to return to Boston, where on Monday he will deliver the commencement address for undergraduates at Boston College.
More fart mist?
It is another homecoming of sorts for Kerry, who graduated from Boston College Law School in 1976. “I became far more disciplined as a student, and far more — really trained — in how to think,” Kerry said in an interview with the Globe.
Kerry, the first Catholic to serve as secretary of state since Edmund Muskie, said he was excited to return.
“I’m only a single Eagle — that doesn’t score well at some places,’’ he said, referring to the fact that he earned his undergraduate degree at Yale. “But it’ll be fun.”
Kerry attended law school after returning from the Vietnam War, and after having lost his first bid in politics, a race for a congressional seat in Lowell. He started days after his first child, Alexandra, was born, and while attending classes he moonlighted part time as a radio talk show host on WBZ-AM.
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
After graduating from law school, Kerry became a prosecutor in the Middlesex district attorney’s office, where he worked until becoming lieutenant governor in 1983 and US senator in 1985.
In the speech at Boston College, Kerry plans to reflect on teachings of his own Catholic faith. He plans to highlight the words of Boston College theologian David Hollenbach, who spoke of human dignity coming to the forefront of Catholic social teaching.
“When men and women have access to clean water and clear power, they can live in dignity,” Kerry plans to say, according to excerpts provided to the Globe. “When citizens can make their full contribution, no matter their ethnicity, no matter who they love or what name they give to God, they can live in dignity.
“The demand for dignity of men and women across the world matters deeply to our own prosperity — it matters to our security — and diplomats and development professionals cannot respond to these demands on their own,” he adds.
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Huh, what, is it over?
"Kerry offers a wise warning on isolationism | May 20, 2014
It may be tempting to view John Kerry’s two speeches on graduation weekends at Yale University 48 years apart as evidence of a five-decade flip-flop. As a graduating senior in 1966, Kerry delivered a Class Day speech calling on the United States to play a more circumspect role in global affairs. Last weekend, Kerry was back at Yale as secretary of state, this time warning of the dangers of being too circumspect.
A change of heart? Not really. Kerry was right on both occasions. The US domestic appetite for foreign engagement tends to wax and wane. This is in many ways a necessary corrective, a way of processing real-time experiences, but it can also swing too far in both directions. When Kerry addressed his classmates in 1966, dismay over the steady escalation of the Vietnam War was beginning to be felt. “What was an excess of isolationism has become an excess of interventionism,” the 22-year-old Kerry declared. Soon to be on active naval duty himself, the graduating senior warned against the “serious danger of assuming the roles of policeman, prosecutor, judge, and jury.”
This year, the nation is still absorbing the high cost of the Iraq war and an unexpectedly protracted engagement in Afghanistan. Public opinion polls show Americans’ tolerance for global engagement is at its lowest point in decades. So Kerry was wise to warn this year’s graduating seniors that America today is at risk not of being too involved in world affairs, but of being too detached. “We cannot allow a hangover from the excessive interventionism of the last decade to lead now to an excess of isolationism in this decade,” he declared.
The Obama years have been a period of palpable retrenchment, whether because of war-weariness or out of a desire to focus on “nation-building at home.” Support for that retrenchment crosses party lines; the Rand Paul wing of the Republican Party exemplifies the “excess of isolationism” that Kerry is worried about.
We never got the nation building as the infrastructure continues to decay, and I see I am in the "extremist" wing of the Republican Party -- according to the Washington Post!
Needless to say, the secretary of state is not advocating a reckless new policy of foreign intervention, and nothing in his speech at Yale on Sunday suggests that he has changed his mind about America’s decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan. But a year and a half at the State Department seems to have intensified in his mind the consequences of US retreat from global leadership: Allies lose confidence in America’s reliability. Human rights and democracy are set back. Dictators and hostile rivals are emboldened. And ordinary men and women everywhere pay the price.
Yeah, we are the good guys; ignore all the covert coups, monetary manipulation, and military maneuvers.
“I can tell you for certain, most of the rest of the world doesn’t lie awake at night worrying about America’s presence,” Kerry said in New Haven. “They worry about what would happen in our absence.”
It was a thoughtful and urgent message, made all the more significant by its messenger.
Now reach around....
--more--"
I wouldn't expect anything different from the war-promoting, agenda-pushing paper.
Over to BC:
"John Kerry urges BC graduates to spread dignity" by Matt Rocheleau | Globe correspondent May 19, 2014
Invoking his Catholic faith, his Boston College law degree, and his service in Vietnam, Secretary of State John F. Kerry urged BC’s class of 2014 Monday to tackle some of mankind’s greatest problems — including climate change, disease, and extremism — while instilling dignity around the globe.
“When families have access to clean water and clean power, they can live in dignity,” he told more than 4,000 undergraduate and graduate students gathered under sunny skies in Alumni Stadium. “When people have the freedom to choose their government on election day and to engage their fellow citizens every day, they can live in dignity.
“When all citizens can make their full contribution, no matter their ethnicity, no matter who they love or what name they give to God, they can live in dignity,” said Kerry, the former Massachusetts senator and 2004 Democratic presidential candidate who earned a law degree from BC in 1976.
Wearing black robes and caps, dozens of graduates stood and waved their white commencement booklets to identify themselves to friends and family seated in the surrounding bleachers, packed by an estimated 15,000 people.
Clutching cellphones, many graduates posed with friends for photos, fired off texts, and updated Facebook, Twitter, and other online profiles.
Even Kerry, before the ceremony, tweeted a black-and-white photo of his younger self at a graduation.
********************
At BC, Kerry started his speech with a series of jokes.
I've already seen his routine.
He said his two alma maters, BC and Yale, have much in common, namely, their “mutual dislike of Harvard.”
We agree there.
And he spoke about how his job involves monitoring many of the world’s rivalries. “BC versus Notre Dame is at the top of my list,” he said. “And then there’s the Red Sox and Yankees.”
And keeping them stoked through covert measures. US embassies are nothing more than CIA stations now. It's called diplomatic cover.
Kerry recalled that when he attended law school, BC became like home for him and he was warmly welcomed by one man in particular, the Rev. Robert Drinan, the longtime BC Law dean who became the first Roman Catholic priest elected to Congress.
“He made no apologies for his deep and abiding Catholic commitment to the weak, the helpless, the downtrodden,” Kerry said.
“ ‘If a person is really a Christian,’ Father Drinan would say, ‘they will be in anguish over global hunger, injustice, over the denial of educational opportunity.’ ”
Kind of gross to see these evil and Satanic creatures cite religion and an antiwar person.
Kerry spent several minutes urging the graduates to confront climate change.
Did he drone on -- pun intended -- like Patrick?
“As we sit here on an absolutely beautiful morning in Boston, you might not see climate change as an immediate threat to your job, your community, or your families,” he said. “But let me tell you, it is. “Climate change is directly related to the potential of greater conflict and greater stability — instability,” Kerry added. “It is the poorest and the weakest who face the greatest risk. As Father Drinan would say, we should be in anguish over this.”
He recounted how Thomas Jefferson, the nation’s first secretary of state, spoke about the image of using one candle to light another.
“Both candles gain light and neither candle loses any,” Kerry said.
“So graduates of 2014, pass on your light to others,” he said, And, quoting the writings of St. Ignatius Loyola, he added: “Set the world aflame with your service.”
At its 138th commencement, the university awarded honorary degrees to Kerry; to Boston Celtics legend and former BC coach Bob Cousy; and to three alumni: Ann Riley Finck, a leader in the nursing field; Paloma Izquierdo-Hernandez, president and chief executive of Urban Health Plan Inc.; and Robert J. Morrissey, founder and senior partner of the Boston law firm Morrissey, Hawkins & Lynch and a BC trustee.
Anna Adondakis, 22, of St. Lake City earned a degree in biology and plans to study further to become a clinical pharmacologist.
After the ceremony, she posed for photos with a dozen of her classmates who became her closest companions over the past four years.
Her proud mother, Tara, looked on....
Well, I don't want to take away from the day.
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Let's head on over to Harvard:
"Harvard president’s 2012 earnings surpassed $1 million" by Todd Wallack | Globe Staff May 17, 2014
Harvard University investment managers had another good year in 2012, while Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust topped the $1 million mark in total compensation for the first time, the university disclosed Friday.
Harvard Management chief Jane Mendillo received $4.8 million that year, down from $5.3 million in 2011, while five of her managers received $4 million or more as the stock market continued its upward march, helping to boost the value of the endowment they manage.
See: Mendillo Made Money For Harvard
Andy Wiltshire, who handles alternative investments such as hedge funds and private equity, was the highest paid endowment manager for at least the third year in a row. He made $7.9 million in total compensation, while Alvaro Aguirre-Simunovic, who manages a portfolio of natural resources, earned $6.6 million.
The large payouts are more common on Wall Street than academia, but that is because Harvard Management Co. operates as an investment firm overseeing the Cambridge school’s massive $32.7 billion endowment, the largest of any college. Harvard officials estimate the university saved $1 billion by largely managing the investments in house and say the payments are largely based on the performance of the school’s investments.
The growth in payouts to some of the endowment managers parallels gains in the stock market. The S&P 500, for instance, notched a 13 percent gain in 2012, its best performance in three years.
********************
Faust, earned just over $1 million in total compensation in 2012, including nearly $138,000 in nontaxable benefits for the value of her housing in Cambridge and other perks. Separately, the Civil War historian also received another $250,000 in cash and stock for her service on the board of Staples Inc., the Framingham office supply chain.
So much money out there they don't know what to do with it all; here is another quarter-million.
Faust, 66, joins a growing group of private college presidents to surpass the $1 million mark as university leaders are increasingly paid like executives running large companies.
I think you know it all now, kids.
Overall, at least 42 college leaders earned $1 million a year in 2011, according to a survey by the Chronicle of Higher Education, a development that colleges defend but has troubled watchdog groups worried about the rising cost of education.
And debt accrued to graduate.
Alan Garber, the school’s provost, earned nearly $751,000 in 2012, including $100,000 in housing and other nontaxable benefits. Two professors approached or surpassed the $1 million mark because of one-time payments. Economist Amartya K. Sen received $1.2 million (including a payment as part of Sen’s recruitment package), while emeritus business school professor Roy D. Shapiro received $979,000, including a $721,000 retirement payment.
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Must be why Kerry hates Harvard; he had to marry into money.
Might as well come full circle:
"Harvard goes all in for online courses; The stress is on production values, props, and, yes, scholarship" by Marcella Bombardieri | Globe Staff May 18, 2014
Quietly, Harvard has built what amounts to an in-house production company to create massive open online courses, or MOOCs, high-end classes that some prestigious universities are offering for free to anyone in the world, generally without formal academic credit. Contrary to the popular image of online classes consisting largely of video from a camera planted at the back of the lecture hall, Harvard is increasingly using mini-documentaries, animation, and interactive software tools to offer a far richer product.
The endeavor, which is called HarvardX and celebrates its second birthday this month, has two video studios, more than 30 employees, and many freelancers — an astonishing constellation of producers, editors, videographers, composers, animators, typographers, and even a performance coach to help professors get comfortable in front of a camera.
*************
In just two years, the MOOC has gone through a high-speed cycle of hype and letdown, heralded as the future of higher education — maybe even the death of the traditional campus — before being dismissed as a fad. Hundreds of thousands of people signed up for some classes, but few completed them, and critics questioned how an online offering could reproduce the alchemy of a professor and students gathered around the seminar table.
Yet, as Harvard demonstrates, universities continue to pour enormous amounts of money and talent into creating MOOCs and building an online infrastructure. Their aim reflects pragmatic self-interest and soaring idealism — staying competitive with peer institutions, and improving education for everyone, not just online learners in distant lands.
While plenty of Harvard professors remain skeptical about the costs, value, and even ethics of the endeavor, faculty who teach MOOCs see great potential to enrich what they offer undergraduates on campus by bringing elements from the online classes into regular courses....
A little bit Ivory Tower, a little bit Hollywood....
Is that what the black mass flap was?
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And what is the class being advertised?
The influence of the sewing machine on Japan’s modernization!
NEXT DAY UPDATES:
"Harvard’s Rothko murals to be seen in new light" by Geoff Edgers | Globe Staff May 20, 2014
The five multimillion-dollar murals by famed abstract expressionist Mark Rothko were so faded and damaged by sunlight that Harvard packed them away 35 years ago. Now, a revolutionary invention is being used to bring the original colors back to life, and in the process, sparking debate about artistic integrity.
The technique, developed by a team of conservators, curators, and scientists stretching from Cambridge to Switzerland, uses overhead projectors and special software to shine a precision-tinted light on the murals, correcting — pixel-by-pixel — the massive color loss in the murals.
The system is being hailed as a technical tour-de-force even by those who oppose using it in this way. And Harvard is expecting a debate. To wit: Is this a welcome way to breathe new life into aging art, or a creepy, Dorian Gray-inspired parlor trick?
“Some people will accept it, some people will condemn it,” said Harvard Art Museums director Tom Lentz. “My hope is that everybody approaches it with a kind of open-mindedness. My fundamental position remains, we developed it, what does it mean for the future?”
The public will have ample opportunity to make its own judgment....
I've already made mine.
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I don't believe anything I see in my ma$$ media anymore. That's my judgement. Sorry.
Related: Harvard physics professor wins $500,000 Minerva prize
That is $omething I do believe when I $ee it. Paper written of and for that cla$$, and I'm not complaining.
Did you get your seat for the ceremony?
"At Yale graduation, Kerry urges optimism on government institutions" by Matt Viser | Globe Staff May 19, 2014
I can't sit through this.
WASHINGTON — Secretary of State John F. Kerry on Sunday tapped into what he characterized as a growing sense of global unease while urging Yale University graduates to remain optimistic that government gridlock can be broken.
He's reflecting the way his ruling ma$ters feel about the rest of us rabble.
“People around the world seem to have grown used to systems or institutions failing to respond,” Kerry said. “And the result is an obvious deepening frustration if not exasperation with institutional governance.
Yup. The whole global, corporate, centralization for profit $cheme has failed all but those like him.
“The sum total of all of this inaction is stealing the future from all of us,” he added, before calling the graduating class to action.
Wall Street already has, and the government he works for is making money of student loan debt.
“It is indifference that says our problems are so great, let’s not even try,” he said. “We have to reject that. It’s hopelessness that says that our best days are behind us. I couldn’t disagree more.”
I'm not hopeless. I recognize this decaying and hulking carca$$ of AmeriKan empire is near complete collapse.
Kerry was addressing the Yale graduating class in New Haven almost exactly 48 years after he was chosen to deliver a speech when he was a senior. In that case, he threw away mundane text and decided instead to deliver a speech raising doubts about the foreign policy doctrines that were escalating the Vietnam War in which he was about to fight.
He should have done that this time, but JFK also went off-script at American University. One of the things that got him killed.
Returning to campus nearly a half-century later has caused the nation’s top diplomat to review his words and reconsider his views of the US role in the world. In 1966, he warned that “an excess of isolation has led to an excess of interventionism,” but on Sunday he warned the exact opposite.
“We cannot allow a hangover from the excessive interventionism of the last decade to lead now to an excess of isolationism in this decade,” Kerry said. “I can tell you for certain, most of the rest of the world doesn’t lie awake at night worrying about America’s presence — they worry about what would happen in our absence.”
I suppose he needs to believe that. I think most people would be happy if our covert actions and the resulting coups would go away, as well as the criminal mafia known as the dollar-based transactions.
The former Massachusetts senator and 2004 Democratic presidential candidate also delivered a bit of a stand-up routine, which included some self-depreciating humor and a knock on Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling, who has been criticized for making racist remarks.
“Today you are graduating as the most diverse class in Yale’s long history,” he said. “Or as they call it in the NBA, Donald Sterling’s worst nightmare.”
Related: Sterling It Up
The divisive race requirement.
Kerry also joked about his long-windedness (“I promise I won’t go a minute over four hours”) and his generation’s drug use.
“It’s not true that everyone in my generation experimented with drugs,” he said. “Although between Flomax, Lipitor, and Viagra, now we do.”
Yeah, he's a real funny guy, ha-ha.
After delivering the commencement address at Yale, Kerry planned to return to Boston, where on Monday he will deliver the commencement address for undergraduates at Boston College.
More fart mist?
It is another homecoming of sorts for Kerry, who graduated from Boston College Law School in 1976. “I became far more disciplined as a student, and far more — really trained — in how to think,” Kerry said in an interview with the Globe.
Kerry, the first Catholic to serve as secretary of state since Edmund Muskie, said he was excited to return.
“I’m only a single Eagle — that doesn’t score well at some places,’’ he said, referring to the fact that he earned his undergraduate degree at Yale. “But it’ll be fun.”
Kerry attended law school after returning from the Vietnam War, and after having lost his first bid in politics, a race for a congressional seat in Lowell. He started days after his first child, Alexandra, was born, and while attending classes he moonlighted part time as a radio talk show host on WBZ-AM.
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
After graduating from law school, Kerry became a prosecutor in the Middlesex district attorney’s office, where he worked until becoming lieutenant governor in 1983 and US senator in 1985.
In the speech at Boston College, Kerry plans to reflect on teachings of his own Catholic faith. He plans to highlight the words of Boston College theologian David Hollenbach, who spoke of human dignity coming to the forefront of Catholic social teaching.
“When men and women have access to clean water and clear power, they can live in dignity,” Kerry plans to say, according to excerpts provided to the Globe. “When citizens can make their full contribution, no matter their ethnicity, no matter who they love or what name they give to God, they can live in dignity.
“The demand for dignity of men and women across the world matters deeply to our own prosperity — it matters to our security — and diplomats and development professionals cannot respond to these demands on their own,” he adds.
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Huh, what, is it over?
"Kerry offers a wise warning on isolationism | May 20, 2014
It may be tempting to view John Kerry’s two speeches on graduation weekends at Yale University 48 years apart as evidence of a five-decade flip-flop. As a graduating senior in 1966, Kerry delivered a Class Day speech calling on the United States to play a more circumspect role in global affairs. Last weekend, Kerry was back at Yale as secretary of state, this time warning of the dangers of being too circumspect.
A change of heart? Not really. Kerry was right on both occasions. The US domestic appetite for foreign engagement tends to wax and wane. This is in many ways a necessary corrective, a way of processing real-time experiences, but it can also swing too far in both directions. When Kerry addressed his classmates in 1966, dismay over the steady escalation of the Vietnam War was beginning to be felt. “What was an excess of isolationism has become an excess of interventionism,” the 22-year-old Kerry declared. Soon to be on active naval duty himself, the graduating senior warned against the “serious danger of assuming the roles of policeman, prosecutor, judge, and jury.”
This year, the nation is still absorbing the high cost of the Iraq war and an unexpectedly protracted engagement in Afghanistan. Public opinion polls show Americans’ tolerance for global engagement is at its lowest point in decades. So Kerry was wise to warn this year’s graduating seniors that America today is at risk not of being too involved in world affairs, but of being too detached. “We cannot allow a hangover from the excessive interventionism of the last decade to lead now to an excess of isolationism in this decade,” he declared.
The Obama years have been a period of palpable retrenchment, whether because of war-weariness or out of a desire to focus on “nation-building at home.” Support for that retrenchment crosses party lines; the Rand Paul wing of the Republican Party exemplifies the “excess of isolationism” that Kerry is worried about.
We never got the nation building as the infrastructure continues to decay, and I see I am in the "extremist" wing of the Republican Party -- according to the Washington Post!
Needless to say, the secretary of state is not advocating a reckless new policy of foreign intervention, and nothing in his speech at Yale on Sunday suggests that he has changed his mind about America’s decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan. But a year and a half at the State Department seems to have intensified in his mind the consequences of US retreat from global leadership: Allies lose confidence in America’s reliability. Human rights and democracy are set back. Dictators and hostile rivals are emboldened. And ordinary men and women everywhere pay the price.
Yeah, we are the good guys; ignore all the covert coups, monetary manipulation, and military maneuvers.
“I can tell you for certain, most of the rest of the world doesn’t lie awake at night worrying about America’s presence,” Kerry said in New Haven. “They worry about what would happen in our absence.”
It was a thoughtful and urgent message, made all the more significant by its messenger.
Now reach around....
--more--"
I wouldn't expect anything different from the war-promoting, agenda-pushing paper.
Over to BC:
"John Kerry urges BC graduates to spread dignity" by Matt Rocheleau | Globe correspondent May 19, 2014
Invoking his Catholic faith, his Boston College law degree, and his service in Vietnam, Secretary of State John F. Kerry urged BC’s class of 2014 Monday to tackle some of mankind’s greatest problems — including climate change, disease, and extremism — while instilling dignity around the globe.
“When families have access to clean water and clean power, they can live in dignity,” he told more than 4,000 undergraduate and graduate students gathered under sunny skies in Alumni Stadium. “When people have the freedom to choose their government on election day and to engage their fellow citizens every day, they can live in dignity.
“When all citizens can make their full contribution, no matter their ethnicity, no matter who they love or what name they give to God, they can live in dignity,” said Kerry, the former Massachusetts senator and 2004 Democratic presidential candidate who earned a law degree from BC in 1976.
Wearing black robes and caps, dozens of graduates stood and waved their white commencement booklets to identify themselves to friends and family seated in the surrounding bleachers, packed by an estimated 15,000 people.
Clutching cellphones, many graduates posed with friends for photos, fired off texts, and updated Facebook, Twitter, and other online profiles.
Even Kerry, before the ceremony, tweeted a black-and-white photo of his younger self at a graduation.
********************
At BC, Kerry started his speech with a series of jokes.
I've already seen his routine.
He said his two alma maters, BC and Yale, have much in common, namely, their “mutual dislike of Harvard.”
We agree there.
And he spoke about how his job involves monitoring many of the world’s rivalries. “BC versus Notre Dame is at the top of my list,” he said. “And then there’s the Red Sox and Yankees.”
And keeping them stoked through covert measures. US embassies are nothing more than CIA stations now. It's called diplomatic cover.
Kerry recalled that when he attended law school, BC became like home for him and he was warmly welcomed by one man in particular, the Rev. Robert Drinan, the longtime BC Law dean who became the first Roman Catholic priest elected to Congress.
“He made no apologies for his deep and abiding Catholic commitment to the weak, the helpless, the downtrodden,” Kerry said.
“ ‘If a person is really a Christian,’ Father Drinan would say, ‘they will be in anguish over global hunger, injustice, over the denial of educational opportunity.’ ”
Kind of gross to see these evil and Satanic creatures cite religion and an antiwar person.
Kerry spent several minutes urging the graduates to confront climate change.
Did he drone on -- pun intended -- like Patrick?
“As we sit here on an absolutely beautiful morning in Boston, you might not see climate change as an immediate threat to your job, your community, or your families,” he said. “But let me tell you, it is. “Climate change is directly related to the potential of greater conflict and greater stability — instability,” Kerry added. “It is the poorest and the weakest who face the greatest risk. As Father Drinan would say, we should be in anguish over this.”
He recounted how Thomas Jefferson, the nation’s first secretary of state, spoke about the image of using one candle to light another.
“Both candles gain light and neither candle loses any,” Kerry said.
“So graduates of 2014, pass on your light to others,” he said, And, quoting the writings of St. Ignatius Loyola, he added: “Set the world aflame with your service.”
At its 138th commencement, the university awarded honorary degrees to Kerry; to Boston Celtics legend and former BC coach Bob Cousy; and to three alumni: Ann Riley Finck, a leader in the nursing field; Paloma Izquierdo-Hernandez, president and chief executive of Urban Health Plan Inc.; and Robert J. Morrissey, founder and senior partner of the Boston law firm Morrissey, Hawkins & Lynch and a BC trustee.
Anna Adondakis, 22, of St. Lake City earned a degree in biology and plans to study further to become a clinical pharmacologist.
After the ceremony, she posed for photos with a dozen of her classmates who became her closest companions over the past four years.
Her proud mother, Tara, looked on....
Well, I don't want to take away from the day.
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Let's head on over to Harvard:
"Harvard president’s 2012 earnings surpassed $1 million" by Todd Wallack | Globe Staff May 17, 2014
Harvard University investment managers had another good year in 2012, while Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust topped the $1 million mark in total compensation for the first time, the university disclosed Friday.
Harvard Management chief Jane Mendillo received $4.8 million that year, down from $5.3 million in 2011, while five of her managers received $4 million or more as the stock market continued its upward march, helping to boost the value of the endowment they manage.
See: Mendillo Made Money For Harvard
Andy Wiltshire, who handles alternative investments such as hedge funds and private equity, was the highest paid endowment manager for at least the third year in a row. He made $7.9 million in total compensation, while Alvaro Aguirre-Simunovic, who manages a portfolio of natural resources, earned $6.6 million.
The large payouts are more common on Wall Street than academia, but that is because Harvard Management Co. operates as an investment firm overseeing the Cambridge school’s massive $32.7 billion endowment, the largest of any college. Harvard officials estimate the university saved $1 billion by largely managing the investments in house and say the payments are largely based on the performance of the school’s investments.
The growth in payouts to some of the endowment managers parallels gains in the stock market. The S&P 500, for instance, notched a 13 percent gain in 2012, its best performance in three years.
********************
Faust, earned just over $1 million in total compensation in 2012, including nearly $138,000 in nontaxable benefits for the value of her housing in Cambridge and other perks. Separately, the Civil War historian also received another $250,000 in cash and stock for her service on the board of Staples Inc., the Framingham office supply chain.
So much money out there they don't know what to do with it all; here is another quarter-million.
Faust, 66, joins a growing group of private college presidents to surpass the $1 million mark as university leaders are increasingly paid like executives running large companies.
I think you know it all now, kids.
Overall, at least 42 college leaders earned $1 million a year in 2011, according to a survey by the Chronicle of Higher Education, a development that colleges defend but has troubled watchdog groups worried about the rising cost of education.
And debt accrued to graduate.
Alan Garber, the school’s provost, earned nearly $751,000 in 2012, including $100,000 in housing and other nontaxable benefits. Two professors approached or surpassed the $1 million mark because of one-time payments. Economist Amartya K. Sen received $1.2 million (including a payment as part of Sen’s recruitment package), while emeritus business school professor Roy D. Shapiro received $979,000, including a $721,000 retirement payment.
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Must be why Kerry hates Harvard; he had to marry into money.
Might as well come full circle:
"Harvard goes all in for online courses; The stress is on production values, props, and, yes, scholarship" by Marcella Bombardieri | Globe Staff May 18, 2014
Quietly, Harvard has built what amounts to an in-house production company to create massive open online courses, or MOOCs, high-end classes that some prestigious universities are offering for free to anyone in the world, generally without formal academic credit. Contrary to the popular image of online classes consisting largely of video from a camera planted at the back of the lecture hall, Harvard is increasingly using mini-documentaries, animation, and interactive software tools to offer a far richer product.
The endeavor, which is called HarvardX and celebrates its second birthday this month, has two video studios, more than 30 employees, and many freelancers — an astonishing constellation of producers, editors, videographers, composers, animators, typographers, and even a performance coach to help professors get comfortable in front of a camera.
*************
In just two years, the MOOC has gone through a high-speed cycle of hype and letdown, heralded as the future of higher education — maybe even the death of the traditional campus — before being dismissed as a fad. Hundreds of thousands of people signed up for some classes, but few completed them, and critics questioned how an online offering could reproduce the alchemy of a professor and students gathered around the seminar table.
Yet, as Harvard demonstrates, universities continue to pour enormous amounts of money and talent into creating MOOCs and building an online infrastructure. Their aim reflects pragmatic self-interest and soaring idealism — staying competitive with peer institutions, and improving education for everyone, not just online learners in distant lands.
While plenty of Harvard professors remain skeptical about the costs, value, and even ethics of the endeavor, faculty who teach MOOCs see great potential to enrich what they offer undergraduates on campus by bringing elements from the online classes into regular courses....
A little bit Ivory Tower, a little bit Hollywood....
Is that what the black mass flap was?
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And what is the class being advertised?
The influence of the sewing machine on Japan’s modernization!
NEXT DAY UPDATES:
"Harvard’s Rothko murals to be seen in new light" by Geoff Edgers | Globe Staff May 20, 2014
The five multimillion-dollar murals by famed abstract expressionist Mark Rothko were so faded and damaged by sunlight that Harvard packed them away 35 years ago. Now, a revolutionary invention is being used to bring the original colors back to life, and in the process, sparking debate about artistic integrity.
The technique, developed by a team of conservators, curators, and scientists stretching from Cambridge to Switzerland, uses overhead projectors and special software to shine a precision-tinted light on the murals, correcting — pixel-by-pixel — the massive color loss in the murals.
The system is being hailed as a technical tour-de-force even by those who oppose using it in this way. And Harvard is expecting a debate. To wit: Is this a welcome way to breathe new life into aging art, or a creepy, Dorian Gray-inspired parlor trick?
“Some people will accept it, some people will condemn it,” said Harvard Art Museums director Tom Lentz. “My hope is that everybody approaches it with a kind of open-mindedness. My fundamental position remains, we developed it, what does it mean for the future?”
The public will have ample opportunity to make its own judgment....
I've already made mine.
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I don't believe anything I see in my ma$$ media anymore. That's my judgement. Sorry.
Related: Harvard physics professor wins $500,000 Minerva prize
That is $omething I do believe when I $ee it. Paper written of and for that cla$$, and I'm not complaining.
