PRESS CLIPPINGS

Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward examine s ome of their notes from meetings with Mark Felt along with Steve Mielke, the Ransom Center's archivist who cataloged all of the Watergate papers.
Photo contributed by Harry Ransom Center

With the Valerie Plame case behind us, we have a chance to revisit the names leaked by the granddaddy of all tipsters: Mark Felt, a.k.a. “Deep Throat.” The original notes from Bob Woodward’s famous meetings with Felt have just been released by the University of Texas, which paid Woodward and Carl Bernstein $5 million for the Watergate papers in 2003 -- with a provision that confidential sources would be protected until they die or go public. Felt revealed his identity in 2005, and the online exhibition now includes eight pages of typed notes from Woodward’s conversations with him -- identified as “X” or “my friend” -- and two handwritten pages of an on-the-record interview he gave for another story. Our favorite? Dish from the Oct. 9, 1972, garage meeting, where Woodward met his old friend at 1:30 a.m. and spent more than four hours talking. Felt never allowed Woodward to take notes while they talked, so the Washington Post reporter typed highlights of the meetings from memory. And there’ll be more revelations in the future: The collection includes some interesting names and files of sources who are still living. Says Woodward: “There are going to be surprises.”

The Washington Post
Reliable Source: Watergate Papers: Who Leaked What When? (April 10)

Katherine McClenney

Four years ago, the Lumina Foundation for Education assembled several dozen of the country’s foremost experts on community colleges. They wanted to build a campus-based movement to increase community colleges’ graduation and transfer rates. The answer, they all decided, was to provide financial support to dozens of institutions across the country, creating a network of colleges that could share information with each other and, Lumina hoped, eventually influence nearby colleges. The project was named Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count. The effort began in 2004 with 27 colleges in five states and has grown to 58 colleges in nine states. Still, three years in, it is not clear whether the project will have any lasting impact on participating colleges. Achieving the Dream released a report on its preliminary findings in early 2006. The document, which focused on students in remedial mathematics, was only two pages long but packed with bad news. Researchers looked at historical data from the colleges participating in the project and found that in the fall of 2002, 61 percent of the students at those colleges were required to take at least one remedial math course. What surprised the researchers was that two years later, only 17 percent of the students, on average, had completed their remedial work and moved on to college-level math. “That is kind of a bummer,” says Kay M. McClenney, a senior lecturer in the College of Education at the University of Texas at Austin, who works with Achieving the Dream. “But there is a counterpoint.” The project’s research also showed that if colleges could get students to complete at least one developmental course in their first semester, they were more likely to stay, and to pass their courses, than any other group of students, including those who did not need remedial work. “The two of those realities together call for a really strong focus on the need to get developmental math right,” says Ms. McClenney. Improving basic math courses has become a focus of many of the colleges in Achieving the Dream. Byron N. McClenney, a project director in the Community College Leadership Program at Austin (and Ms. McClenney’s husband), says a few community colleges are having a hard time scaling up their projects. Learning communities, in which students take paired courses that focus on a central theme, like a history course and an English course on post-World War II America, have proved especially hard to expand because they require students to enroll in two specified class sections, which can cause scheduling difficulties. Community-college students, who are often balancing their studies with work or raising children, are accustomed to having more flexibility in scheduling their classes, says Mr. McClenney.

Chronicle of Higher Education
An $88-Million Experiment to Improve Community Colleges (April 20)

Maggie Rivas Rodriguez

Last month, President Bush saluted the famed Tuskegee airmen as they received the Congressional Gold Medal, affirming that the sacrifice and service of African-Americans had finally been granted its place of honor in the nation’s remembrance of World War II. But Hispanic Americans of the Greatest Generation are still battling for acknowledgment, and their fight has now embroiled celebrated documentarian Ken Burns and PBS television. Emmy-award winner Burns is noted for TV series chronicling everything from the Civil War to the histories of jazz and baseball, but it’s his new opus on World War II that has earned the ire of Latino groups. The 14-hour film War, set to air in September, focuses on the lives of 40 Americans in four U.S. cities. And the fact that not one of the 40 subjects is Latino that has Hispanic veterans’ groups and politicians crying foul. One of the leading critics of Burns’ film is Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez, a University of Texas journalism professor who has been leading a decade-long effort to collect the oral history of Hispanic contributions during World War II. “The Latino experience is really rich and very unique. We are very disappointed,” Rivas-Rodriguez said. “This is the story of not only our parents, our grandparents, but our tios and tias. This is not a Puerto Rican issue, not a Mexican issue, not a Cuban issue, but all Latinos and Latinas.” As criticism mounted in Latino media, Burns issued a statement saying he was “dismayed and saddened” by an assumption that anyone was intentionally excluded. There was no shortage of material if Burns had chosen to include Latino subjects: A quick glance at the University of Texas Web site U.S. Latinos and Latinas and World War II reveals the stories of numerous veterans, from farm-worker families in South Texas to famed members of the so-called Aztec Eagles, the 300-member Escuadron 201. Only five members of the squadron are still alive and one of them, pilot Reynaldo Perez Gallardo, nicknamed “Pancho Pistolar” after a Disney character, tells his story on the Web site.

Time Magazine
PBS Under Fire Over Excluding Latino WWII Stories (April 8)

As the first wave of baby boomers edges toward retirement, a growing body of evidence suggests that they may be the first generation to enter their golden years in worse health than their parents. While not definitive, the data sketch a startlingly different picture than the popular image of health-obsessed workout fanatics who know their antioxidants from their trans fats and look 10 years younger than their age. Boomers are healthier in some important ways -- they are much less likely to smoke, for example. They are more likely to report difficulty climbing stairs, getting up from a chair and doing other routine activities, as well as more chronic problems such as high cholesterol, blood pressure and diabetes. “We’re seeing some very powerful evidence all pointing to parallel findings,” said Mark D. Hayward, a sociologist at the University of Texas at Austin. “The trend seems to be that people are not as healthy as they approach retirement as they were in older generations. It’s very disturbing.”

The Washington Post
Baby Boomers Appear to Be Less Healthy Than Parents (April 20)

The Blanton Museum of Art
Photo: Christina Murrey

These days it’s hard to find a public museum that does not have a major expansion or building project under way. This trend has even infiltrated colleges and universities. In the last five years, higher education has undertaken or completed many major museum construction projects. In spring 2008, when the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin opens the second part of its complex, designed by Kallman McKinnel & Wood, it will become the largest university museum in the country. Several other universities, including Princeton, Harvard, Brown and Yale, have recently started ambitious capital campaigns, and new arts campuses with up-to-date museums are generally on the wish list.

The New York Times
Building Boom: On College Campuses, A Crop of Galleries (March 28)

Patricia Somers

Most of what we know about the habits of “helicopter parents” comes from anecdotes about extreme parenting that have made their way into the popular lexicon.Now, though, what’s believed to be the first scholarly research on parents who hover too closely over offspring of any age finds that helicopter parenting appears to cross racial and ethnic lines, as well as socioeconomic status. The research suggests that most helicoptering is by mothers who are hyper-involved with their sons’ lives; fathers are more likely to use strong-arm tactics to get results. “We estimate that 60 percent to 70 percent of parents are involved in some kind of helicoptering behavior,” says Patricia Somers, an associate professor of education at the University of Texas-Austin, whose analysis is based on more than 50 interviews with officials from 10 four-year public universities across the USA. She says the helicopter parent is often thought of as from the middle and upper classes, but that’s a misconception, her interviews suggest. She plans to add another 25 interviews in this first phase of research and will interview students and parents for the second phase. Her efforts may help parents, kids and educators deal with the psychological and societal effects of this increasingly pervasive form of over-the-top parenting.

USA Today
Helicopter parents across all age, social lines (April 3)

Joshua Gunn

It’s an old-fashioned concept from Lewis Carroll that has proved to have staying power when it comes to most celebrity couples. For instance: Brad Pitt + Angelina Jolie = Brangelina. Or, Tom Cruise + Katie Holmes = TomKat. The mania started in 2002 or 2003, when Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez were dating amid huge media scrutiny, and at some point “Bennifer” was coined. The moniker became so ingrained in popular culture that Affleck poked fun at it on NBC’s Saturday Night Live. And there’s good reason for the staying power of nicknames, says linguist Joshua Gunn, a professor at the University of Texas-Austin. “It sells and is, more or less, cute,” Gunn says. “That is, the blended name reflects the commodity nature of public Hollywood romances, and the blending itself is phonetically pleasing, of course.”

USA Today
Coined in the realm of celeb couples (April 5)

A growing number of employers agree that it is communication, leadership, teamwork, and other so-called soft skills that truly distinguish M.B.A. candidates today. Business schools are responding with offerings on topics like ethics, negotiation and persuasion, business writing, and, yes, occasionally even the arts. Some are launching entire programs dedicated to soft skills. At the University of Texas-Austin McCombs School of Business, all first-year students now pay $800 for the first two semesters of the extracurricular Plus program, which includes services like Coach-on-Call for help preparing a presentation, say, or advice about presentations and job-skills seminars.

U.S. News and World Report (March 30)
Acting Like You Mean It (March 30)

Joe Frost

Overprogrammed children are under stress to perform, perform, perform, with few or no outlets for that stress. “From a child development perspective, children need access to an environment that allows them to play out what is natural to them -- physical, dramatic, constructive and spontaneous games,’’ Joe L. Frost, an emeritus professor of education at the University of Texas who is an expert on play and playgrounds around the world, said in an interview. ‘’But in our high-tech society, children go indoors right after school and eat junk food and play videogames.’’ No wonder this nation is suffering from an epidemic of childhood depression and obesity.

The New York Times
A Classroom of Monkey Bars and Slides (April 3)

According to Ruby K. Payne, a consultant to school systems locally and nationwide, teachers should know a few things about poor people. The author says in her book, “A Framework for Understanding Poverty,” that parents in poverty typically discipline children by beating or verbally chastising them; poor mothers may turn to sex for money and favors and poor students laugh when they get in trouble at school. In the past several years, at least five school systems in the Washington area have turned to Payne’s lessons, books and workshops. But many academics say her works are riddled with unverifiable assertions. At the American Educational Research Association’s annual conference in Chicago last week, professors from the University of Texas at Austin delivered a report on Payne that argued that more than 600 of her descriptions of poverty in “Framework” cannot be proved true. “She claims there is a single culture of poverty that people live in. It’s an idea that’s been discredited since at least the 1960s,” said report co-author Randy Bomer. Payne said that she speaks to about 40,000 educators a year and that she has sold more than 1 million copies of her self-published “Framework.” She estimated that she and others with her company have worked with staff from 70 to 80 percent of the nation’s school districts.Critics say her approach demeans low-income families and that there are better ways to raise scores -- among them, intensifying coursework, lowering teacher-student ratios and ensuring that experienced teachers do not leave low-income schools for those with wealthier students.

The Washington Post
Author's Poverty Views Disputed Yet Utilized (April 15)

The rate of college students ever diagnosed with depression reached 15 percent in 2006, up from 10 percent in 2000, according to an annual survey by the American College Health Association. “They’re on medication, but then the stresses of college life overwhelm them, and their issues flare up again, so they need help,” says Chris Brownson, director of the college counseling center at the University of Texas in Austin.

USA Today
Protecting student rights and students a balancing act (April 18)