In nearly two decades as a community-college leader, Martha J. Kanter has earned acclaim for a strong record helping disabled and low-income students graduate from college and for her bold efforts to overhaul curricula to help more students master basic skills. Kanter has made such a mark as chancellor of the Foothill-De Anza Community College…

Sean Wilentz is a Princeton historian of great vigor and ability. He has published a number of scholarly books on American history. He is a liberal activist, and a friend of the Clintons. For some Obama champions, his recent enthusiasm for Hillary Clinton passed from acceptable to treacherous: He did not simply back Clinton, he stabbed Barack…

Presidential campaigns are usually eager to provide mind-numbingly detailed domestic-policy proposals. When it comes to foreign policy, however, campaigns often prefer to operate on the plane of generality and gesture. In the absence of blueprints, journalists and tea-leaf readers scrutinize the foreign-policy advisers attached to each candidate:…

John McCain's announcement in late August that Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska would be his running mate got the attention of the news media, to say the least. The public heard more than enough from pundits, politicos, and pollsters. But they heard little from another group with opinions aplenty: scholars who specialize in how the news and…

Stories of transient students missing deadlines or being misled about their voting rights are nothing new. But this year, the role younger voters played in Barack Obama's win in Iowa's Democratic presidential primary seems to have motivated a wave of college students in other states. Some of those students--and the campaigns courting them--are out…

In the latest sign of the growing national prominence of community colleges, President Obama has named the chancellor of a two-year-college district to the government's top postsecondary-education position. The nominee for under secretary of education, Martha J. Kanter, is head of the Foothill-De Anza Community College District, in Silicon Valley.…

For Daniel J. Kaniewski, the magic formula needed to redirect his career path from anonymous academic researcher to presidential policy adviser was only 719 words long. A single newspaper column that he wrote in April 2005 succinctly criticized the Department of Homeland Security's disaster-preparation plans. A few months later, a White House…

Melissa P. Deputy, a 49-year-old mother of five and a community-college student, has long harbored desires to run for public office. Deputy decided to nurture her dreams of entering politics by attending a five-day program at Rutgers University earlier this month intended to encourage undergraduate women to run for elected office. Rutgers has held…

In this article, the author shares his thoughts when he saw the controversial "New Yorker" cover of July 21, 2008 showing the Democratic presidential nominee, Barack Obama, as a Muslim jihadist and his wife, Michelle, as a gun-toting, Afro-wearing black militant. The cover told the story of a rite of African-American passage that occurred at a…

In this article, the author provides the contentions of intellectual historian John Patrick Diggins on the November 2008 elections and the presidential leadership. Diggins observed that "all people spoke about was winning the elections, and no one seemed to be concerned with the problems of the future." Diggins also expressed how he was skeptical…

Forty years ago--on May 9, 1968--the local school board in Brooklyn's black ghetto of Ocean Hill-Brownsville sent telegrams to 19 unionized educators, informing them that their employment in the district was terminated. Eighteen were white. One black teacher was mistakenly included on the list, but reinstated almost immediately after the error was…

Obamamania has swept across college campuses. Students, it seems, are out campaigning, registering people to vote, singing the Democrat's praises far and wide. This article reports that a new poll of college students in four battleground states--Colorado, North Carolina, Ohio, and Pennsylvania--conducted by CBS News, UWIRE, and "The…

Even though Sarah Palin doesn't have the author's vote, she has her support. As a female assistant professor, the author appreciates the difficulty with which women wield authority in society. Political junkies dissect her every word as though she were the vanguard of conservatism, but the popular discourse about Palin is vulgar and crass. As the…

For adult students at Lehman College, in the Bronx, and LaGuardia Community College, in Queens, the separation between politics and daily life seems practically invisible. Both colleges are part of the 23-campus CUNY system, where more than two in five of the nearly 197,000 students are 23 and older. For most of these students, it is nearly…

With the dollar's continued swoon and grim news on the job front, American economic competitiveness has become a central theme in the presidential election. Stumping in Ohio and Pennsylvania, old-line industrial states hit hard by the flight of manufacturing jobs, Democrats Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama have called for renegotiating the…