SCHOOLS & THE YOUNG

MASSACHUSETTS STUDENTS REBEL AGAINST MILITARY RECRUITING HARASSMENT

BOSTON GLOBE - More than 5,000 high school students in five of the
state's largest school districts have removed their names from military
recruitment lists, a trend driven by continuing casualties in Iraq and a
well-organized peace movement that has urged students to avoid contact
with recruiters. The number of students removing their names has jumped
significantly over the past year, especially in school systems with many
low-income and minority students, where parents and activists are
growing increasingly assertive in challenging military recruiters'
access to young people.

Since 2002, under the federal No Child Left Behind law, high schools
have been required to provide lists of students' names, telephone
numbers, and addresses to military recruiters who ask for them, as well
as colleges and potential employers. Students who do not wish to be
contacted -- or their parents -- notify their school districts in
writing. In Boston, about 3,700 students, or 19 percent of those
enrolled in the city's high schools, have removed their names from
recruiting lists. At Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, 952 high school
students, more than half the student body, ordered the school system not
to give their names to the military this year.

http://www.boston.com/news/education/k_12/articles/2005/11/13/
students_rebuffing_military_recruiters/


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ON CAMPUS
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THE ENRONIZATION OF COLLEGE CAMPUSES

MICHAEL JANOFSKY, NY TIMES - Donald E. Ross turned Lynn University,
once a nearly bankrupt two-year Catholic school for women in Boca Raton,
Fla., into a thriving four-year liberal arts college. Now, as Mr. Ross
nears retirement after 34 years as president, it is apparent how much
the board of trustees appreciates his work. Mr. Ross ranked first in
total compensation among the nation's private university presidents for
the 2003-4 academic year with a package worth $5,042,315, according to
the latest annual survey of executive compensation by The Chronicle of
Higher Education. Data from 2003-4 is the most recent available for
private institutions. The results are to be released publicly on Monday.

For the first time, the survey reported leaders of private universities
earning $1 million in a single year. The four others identified were
Audrey K. Doberstein, formerly of Wilmington College in Delaware
($1,370,973); E. Gordon Gee of Vanderbilt University ($1,326,786); John
R. Silber of Boston University ($1,253,352); and John N. McCardell Jr.,
formerly of Middlebury College in Vermont ($1,213,141).

Overall, the survey said, nine presidents of private universities earned
more than $900,000 each, compared with none the year before, and 50
presidents of private universities earned at least $500,000 each, a 19
percent increase over the previous year.

The upward spiral serves as the latest reminder that effective college
presidents are a hot commodity and that college boards are going to
unusual lengths to recruit and retain them even as tuitions soar and
Congress and the Internal Revenue Service examine the finances of
nonprofit institutions. The I.R.S. is looking at the rise in
compensation for executives working for nonprofit institutions and is in
the process of auditing about 2,000 of them, some of them university
officials.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/14/education/14colleges.html

LACK OF CURIOSITY AMONG STUDENTS AS WORK BECOMES MORE SPECIALIZED

J. PEDER ZANE, CHARLOTEE NEWS OBSERVER - Over dinner a few weeks ago,
the novelist Lawrence Naumoff told a troubling story. He asked students
in his introduction to creative writing course at UNC-Chapel Hill if
they had read Jack Kerouac. Nobody raised a hand. Then he asked if
anyone had ever heard of Jack Kerouac. More blank expressions. Naumoff
began describing the legend of the literary wild man. One student
offered that he had a teacher who was just as crazy. Naumoff asked the
professor's name. The student said he didn't know. Naumoff then asked
this oblivious scholar, "Do you know my name?"

After a long pause, the young man replied, "No."

"I guess I've always known that many students are just taking my course
to get a requirement out of the way," Naumoff said. "But it was
disheartening to see that some couldn't even go to the trouble of
finding out the name of the person teaching the course."

The floodgates were opened and the other UNC professors at the dinner
began sharing their own dispiriting stories about the troubling state of
curiosity on campus. Their experiences echoed the complaints voiced by
many of my book reviewers who teach at some of the nation's best
schools.

All of them have noted that such ignorance isn't new -- students have
always possessed far less knowledge than they should, or think they
have. But in the past, ignorance tended to be a source of shame and
motivation. Students were far more likely to be troubled by not-knowing,
far more eager to fill such gaps by learning. As one of my reviewers,
Stanley Trachtenberg, once said, "It's not that they don't know, it's
that they don't care about what they don't know."

This lack of curiosity is especially disturbing because it infects our
broader culture. Unfortunately, it seems both inevitable and incurable.

In our increasingly complex world, the amount of information required to
master any particular discipline -- e.g. computers, life insurance,
medicine -- has expanded geometrically. We are forced to become
specialists, people who know more and more about less and less.

Add to this two other factors: the mind-set that puts work at the center
of American life and the deep fear spawned by the rise of globalization
and other free market approaches that have turned job security into an
anachronism. In this frightening new world, students do not turn to
universities for mind expansion but vocational training. In the parlance
of journalism, they want news they can use. . .

http://www.triangle.com/books/zane/story/2833105p-9283263c.html