This week, as the U.S. News & World Report college rankings hit newsstands across the nation, administrators at elite colleges will react as they do every year — with a well-rehearsed display of dismissive disgust. They will call the rankings flawed indicators of a college’s academic worth. They will encourage high school seniors not to […]
Richard Just
Richard Just is the deputy editor of The New Republic. From September 2002 until December 2003, he was editor of The American Prospect Online. He graduated cum laude from Princeton University in 2001, with a degree from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. At Princeton, he was the editor-in-chief of The Daily Princetonian.
Richard is also the founder and executive director of The Daily Princetonian Class of 2001 Summer Journalism Program, a ten-day program for students from under-resourced high schools who are planning to pursue careers in journalism. The program is held annually on the campus of Princeton University; its inaugural session took place in August 2002.
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Natural Causes:
Atkins v. Virginia and Ring v. Arizona — the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decisions restricting who can receive the death penalty and who can impose it — are important for all sorts of reasons, but none quite as central as the fact that the rulings themselves aren’t so important at all. At least not in […]
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Playing the Yeshiva Card:
Last week, I argued in a TAP Online piece that the main danger of school vouchers is their potential to undermine American unity: With Christians likely to flock primarily to Christian schools, Jews to Jewish schools and Muslims to Muslim schools, America’s pluralistic melting pot could eventually start to splinter along religious lines. Yesterday, National […]
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Voucher Nation?
Forget the Pledge of Allegiance ruling. The real legal blow of the last few weeks to American patriotism was delivered not by an eccentric panel of Circuit Court judges, but by the U.S. Supreme Court — in its 5-to-4 decision declaring school vouchers constitutional. For years, libertarian conservatives and the religious right have, for different […]
Posted inFeatures
Hire the Clueless
Some say John Peter Suarez is a well-regarded career public servant, a “fair and balanced prosecutor” who has gained a reputation as a “very thorough” attorney while assembling the résumé of a government lawyer on the rise. He therefore may seem an unsurprising choice for a position in the federal regulatory apparatus — but he […]
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Democracy Hypocrisy
On June 5, Maleeha Lodhi, Pakistani ambassador to the United States, appeared on “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer” to make her nation’s case in the Kashmir dispute. Near the end of the interview, she said Pakistan’s desire was to bring about “democracy” in Kashmir. It was a noble sentiment — and a ludicrous one, too, […]
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Confederate Flap
During the 1920s, T.C. Williams’s father purchased some lots surrounding the family’s modest home in Suffolk, Virginia. The youngest of eight children, Williams, now 82, is a true Suffolkian — a term longtime residents of this city, sandwiched between the James River and the North Carolina border, use with pride. But Williams, who is black, […]
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Keep Enrolling:
In the week since I published a piece criticizing a Berkeley instructor’s exclusion of pro-Israel students from his class — but defending his right to teach from a pro-Palestinian point of view — I have heard the same criticisms again and again. The following letter is typical: Writing about the controversy at the University of […]
Posted inEducation in America
Enroll:
During the spring of my senior year in college, I signed up for a class called “Cinema, Politics and Society in the Middle East.” The professor was unabashedly pro-Palestinian, and the way she taught the region’s history reflected her political bias. As the only defender of Israel in the class, I frequently found myself challenging […]
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A New Wind:
Middle East watchers are so desperately starved for the slightest glimmer of hope these days that they’re prone to seize on even the smallest bit of good news as a genuine breakthrough. Sadly, we’ve seen would-be deus ex machinas before in the last few months, most prominent among them the dead-on-arrival Saudi Arabian peace plan. […]
