Day: August 13, 2010

Smart set

Ezra Klein of Wash Post started the infamous listserv JournoList in Feb . of ’07 to provide:

An insulated space where the lure of a smart, ongoing conversation would encourage journalists, policy experts and assorted other observers to share their insights with one another.

That “smart” gets to me, smacking as it does of — may I say it? — elitism. A place for smart people, for people who produce smart conversation. The kind a fellow or gal can take seriously, without feeling impulse to raise brow ever so slightly, casting quick glance toward one’s intimate. Nothing crude, you know: “You’re full of shit” and all that. Just the brow and the glance and, with luck, managing to ignore the gauche thing you just heard.

It was to be an exchange that honored certain premises. “The membership would range from nonpartisan to liberal, center to left,” among people unlikely to “embarrass each other.” It was to be nobody-here-but-us-chickens time. Take off your shoes and kick back, folks. You are now entering the comfort zone.

All well and good for a night on the town or in a bar or around a dinner table. But for working journalists, college professors, and the like for whom the truth presumably will out, whatever it may be, as part of their work day? Nope.

Chicago-connected JournoLister Goozner

Here’s one of three Journo-listers with Chicago identities, the only one with a media position. (Will be posting about the other two, both academics.) This fellow was with Chi Trib, but not since June 2000 (long before JournoList was started in 2007), when he “left daily journalism to teach journalism at New York University,” per his GoozNews on Health site.

He’s currently at TheFiscalTimes.com, which has partnership arrangement with Wash Post and has been a landing spot for (probably) buyout-takers and others mostly from NY Times and Wash Post, whence this is taken.

He has impeccable liberal credentials, as one may judge from what’s below. He was perhaps an amused bystander to the conspiratorial goings-on at Journo-List. In any case, he kept them under his hat.

TFT VOICES

Merrill_Goozner.ashx Merrill Goozner

Columnist, Contributor

MERRILL GOOZNER is an award-winning writer based in the Washington, DC. He spent 25 years as a foreign correspondent, economics writer and investigative business reporter for the Chicago Tribune and other publications, filing stories from more than a dozen countries while posted in Chicago, Tokyo, New York and Washington. Winner of numerous journalism awards, his freelance writing in recent years has appeared in various publications including the New York Times, Washington Post, Columbia Journalism Review, The Nation, The American Prospect and the Washington Monthly. He taught journalism for three years at New York University while writing “The $800 Million Pill: The Truth behind the Cost of New Drugs,” a 2004 explanatory exposé of pharmaceutical industry research and development practices.

Wheeling Jesuit hard-pressed

Hard times at Wheeling Jesuit — one of 321 privately operated colleges (for and not for profit) that failed the U.S. Department of Education’s 2009 financial responsibility test. That means more hoops to jump through to keep aid going to the 97% of WJU students who receive it.

[Interim Pres. Sister Francis] Thrailkill said this is the first time WJU failed the test. . . . [C]olleges who score a 1 to 1.4 on the test are considered to have failed, but can still participate in federal financial aid programs, but there are a few restrictions. If a school scores in the negative, they are subject to extra requirements. WJU scored a 1.1.

Thrailkill wants to point out that WJU was notified about this issue several months ago, and said they have taken steps to improve their financial situation.

It may be standard to keep this quiet, but The Chronicle of Higher Education apparently operates under no such compulsion.

More details:

All private colleges that award federal student aid must participate in the Department of Education’s financial-responsibility test, which is based on information from their audited financial statements. The department develops a composite score on a scale of 3.0 to minus 1.0, based on financial ratios that measure factors such as net worth, operating losses, and the relationship of assets to liabilities.

Yet more, from a separate Chronicle story:

A total of 150 private nonprofit colleges failed the . . . test, [which is] based on their condition in the 2009 fiscal year . . . That’s 23 more than the 127 that failed the test in the 2008 fiscal year, and an increase of about 70 percent over the number of degree-granting institutions that failed two years ago.

WJU has company.

Psst! It’s Alinsky you’re talking about, fella!

Does this fellow know what he’s talking about?

The Industrial Areas Foundation (637 S. Dearborn St. #100, Chicago, IL 60605; http://www.10percentisenough.org), a 70-year-old national network of community organizations, has launched a “Ten Percent Is Enough” anti-usury campaign. IAF’s material, which refers to religious tradition, suggests that they understand legal victories and legislative changes are insufficient. A solution must include moral change.

Moral change, yessss! But that’s Saul Alinsky’s IAF he is recommending. Does he know that? It’s the name that dare not be named, apparently.

Sister sez — what the hell does she say?

What a display of uncertainty and mealy-mouth assertion by Chi Archdiocese’s Master (Mistress?) Educator! Italics added:

Sister Mary Paul McCaughey, superintendent of schools in the archdiocese, told Chicago Public Radio: “The schools have very traditionally been tied with the life of the parish and in the parish accounts, and this kind of pulls them out a little bit from under that former umbrella to let us take a look and put them under a microscope a bit.”

Why does Sister McC. talk that way, even on public radio?