April
5, 2002
Front-Page
News
Times-Honored
"Pricing
the Poor Out of College," an editorial in the March 27 edition
of the New York Times, praises Mount Holyoke and Smith
for their commitment "to seek out" and provide educations
to "first-generation college students as well as women who
are returning to school after motherhood or careers."
Molding Teachers
Included in the online Chronicle of Higher Education's
"Magazine and Journal" section of March 29 was mention
of a piece in the spring issue of History of Education Quarterly.
In the Quarterly article, Ronald E. Butchart, a professor at the
University of Georgia and chairman of its department of social
foundations of education, notes that about one in four teachers
of former slaves between the Civil War and World War I studied
at either Mount Holyoke or Oberlin College. Butchart attributes
that unusual fact to broad similarities in the missions of the
institutions. "Both succeeded in creating tight-knit discourse
communities that were able to wrench many of their students out
of life-as-usual for at least a time, urging them into alternative
action," Butchart writes.
Point-Counterpoint
The news media showed great interest in the "Great Debate,"
an event organized by John O. Fox to examine a proposal to scrap
the state's bilingual education program in favor of an English
immersion program. The Springfield Union-News, Daily Hampshire
Gazette, and WGGB-TV 40 reported on the March 27 debate between
Rosalie Pedalino Porter, cochair of a statewide campaign for a
ballot initiative that would strike the bilingual education law,
and Catherine Snow, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School
of Education and outspoken critic of the initiative. The debate,
moderated by Fox, a visiting lecturer in complex organizations,
"will probably be the most intelligent discussion of the
issue in western Massachusetts," Porter told Gazette
staff writer Mary Carey.
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