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(04/11/13 4:00am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>The New York Times reviewed a book recently published by Jonathan Sperber that chronicles the life of Gray Lady’s favorite thinker, Karl Marx. The most exciting things the new biography reveals are details about the adored thinker’s private life.The Times wrote, “(Marx) is a man never more passionate than when attacking his own side, saddled with perennial money problems and still reliant on his parents for cash, constantly plotting new, world-changing ventures yet having trouble with both deadlines and personal hygiene, living in rooms that some might call bohemian, others plain ‘slummy,’ and who can be maddeningly inconsistent when not lapsing into elaborate flights of theory and unintelligible abstraction.” Marx the man sounds a lot like an occustriker, doesn’t he?He often pleaded to his mother for an advance on his inheritance — the occustrikers keep demanding that the state pay for more of their education. Marx constantly schemed to plot radical revolution — the occustrikers went from plotting sit-ins in the Kelley School of Business to planning a statewide campus strike. Marx inhabited slums — the occustrikers lived in People’s Park. Marx contradicted himself — the occustrikers can’t explain the discrepancy in their demands (e.g. wanting IU to provide a cheap education and one with better services for all, regardless of ability to pay).Should it shock us that the father who inspired millions of leftist radicals was just like the lot of them?Sperber would say no, unfortunately. His book argues that Marx’s influence is too large — that he does not deserve the treatment he receives among academic circles as a timeless philosopher. Rather, we should treat Marx as a man who offered solutions specific to his time and as a reactionary whose ideas should have little influence on our daily life. Sperber claims that more than anything, even more than a theorist or a committed revolutionist, Marx was a political commentator whose commentary predictably contains contradictions that a theory such as “Marxism” should not. How else does one explain the fact that he characterized “the very idea of a revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat” against the Prussians as “nonsense” to a Rhineland audience in 1848? Indeed, Marx was as unlasting a commentator of the 19th century as Maureen Dowd will prove to be in the next. Yet, on college campuses, his influence lives on — if not in his economic theory then in cultural theory — despite the fact that Marxism has never worked.The occustrikers will fail because their tactics are flawed, and their solutions are flawed. Though, when you frame the student body as a proletariat mass denied material wealth by an evil bourgeois administration, that is to be expected.Here’s the bottom line: Marx was a flawed man who did not present a timeless solution to humanity’s ills but offered reactionary tactics to political issues of his day.Why, then, do so many academics and students of the radical left determine to maintain Marx’s legacy?— arcarlis@indiana.edu
(04/03/13 4:00am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>For proof of just how much leftists dominate academia, look no further than at the three IU Student Association tickets’ platforms. Each one includes one or more sustainability proposals.Earth to IUSA candidates: Most Americans believe “global warming” does not pose a serious threat, according to a 2010 Gallup poll.Where is the ticket that won’t waste my money on sustainability? Why do student government candidates think they have to be environmentally conscious to be viable contenders?The worst sustainability proposal comes from Hoosiers 4 Solutions, the ticket this editorial board endorsed Monday, in the form of a bike share program. Yes, it’s even worse than the solar panels proposed by SPARC for IU, the ticket that forecasts spending up to 30 percent of its budget on sustainability issues.Bike share programs have a track record of failure. First, they are expensive. The mayor of San Francisco announced his plans to launch a bike share program featuring a fleet of 50 bikes. The startup cost? Between $400,000 and $500,000. Annual operating cost? $450,000. For 50 bikes. Second, because no one owns them, the bikes routinely get stolen or vandalized. In 2009, two years after Paris launched its bike share program, the company that maintained the bikes, JCDecaux, had to ask the Parisian government for assistance as it could no longer care for the bikes on its own. JCDecaux reported that 7,800 of the 15,000 original bikes had been stolen or disappeared, and 11,600 had been vandalized. NPR reported in 2009 that police had retrieved about 100 of the bikes from the Seine. Presumably this number would be higher if the French worked more than 26 hours per week. The Parisian government agreed to front $500 per damaged bike, totaling an estimated $2 million each year as of 2009. Montreal had to bail out the company that ran its bike share program to a tune of $108 million. Smaller bike share programs have other problems in addition to theft, vandalism and cost. In Washington, D.C., the system is inconvenient because there are limited parking options. Because bikers can only park the bikes in designated spots, at popular destinations during rush hour bikers may not be able to find a parking spot, forcing them to ride around until they find another appropriate bike rack. Further, more bikes on the roads translates to more dangerous roads. Anyone who’s driven a car around Bloomington knows how dangerous entitled bikers can be — their smug superiority complex makes them think they own the roads.Especially concerning is the fact that the company Hoosiers 4 Solutions proposes to run IU’s bike share program, Alta, has had a lot of embarrassing difficulty launching programs in New York and Chicago due to bugs in the software. The company had to delay launching the programs by months in these two cities. Bike share programs do not work, and the only reason people keep proposing them is because they make people feel better about themselves. Cars kill the birds. Bikes save them. Rather than encourage people to trade cars for an inferior mode of transportation, why doesn’t Hoosiers 4 Solutions try to better accommodate the superior mode?Here’s a more desirable proposal Hoosiers 4 Solutions should pursue: a giant parking garage in the middle of campus. I think the useless Arboretum offers a fabulous space to build this garage.The Hoosiers 4 Solutions ticket presents a promising opportunity for IU students. If elected, will they cling to a leftist fantasy that won’t benefit the community, or will they get real and ditch bike share?— arcarlis@indiana.edu
(03/27/13 1:31am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>In his first diplomatic address as pontiff, Pope Francis announced that he hopes to act as a bridge builder between the various peoples and religions of the world. He also declared an enemy to this goal: “the tyranny of relativism.” His predecessor, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, coined the phrase to describe the leftist rejection of a common morality, or as some call it, truth. Once only a creeping threat, the embrace of relativism has since become institutionalized in the universities and governments of many developed states. This relativism, Francis said, “endangers the coexistence of peoples”: “(For) there is no true peace without truth! There cannot be true peace if everyone is his own criterion, if everyone can always claim exclusively his own rights, without at the same time caring for the good of others, of everyone, on the basis of the nature that unites every human being on this Earth.” Relativism, practiced with the intention to encourage an understanding of the foreign and hence promote peace, actually denies peace to man when it becomes tyrannical because it does not allow him to recognize God-given truths that connect all people.What does a tyrannical relativism look like? Florida Atlantic University provides a recent example.Last week the university temporarily expelled junior Ryan Rotela from a communications class after he questioned an exercise his instructor forced the class to perform.The instructor, Deandre Poole, who also happens to serve as vice president of the Palm Beach County Democratic Party, instructed his students to write “JESUS” on a piece of paper. Then, the students were to put the paper down on the ground in front of them and stomp on it.Rotela, a devout Mormon, refused to stomp on the paper because he thought the exercise was offensive and threatened his religious freedom. “Any time you stomp on something, it shows that you believe that something has no value. So if you were to stomp on the word Jesus, it says that the word has no value,” Rotela said. He explained to the instructor his concerns before informing media and supervisors of the incident. One supervisor questioned Rotela’s account in a hostile manner and accused him of threatening the instructor. The university then told Rotela that he had violated FAU’s code of conduct, prohibiting him from attending Poole’s class or contacting other students until the matter was resolved. Though the exercise was meant to encourage a cross-cultural understanding of how different cultures apply meaning to symbols, FAU restricted the students’ takeaway from including a local Christian’s objection to the exercise.At FAU and universities across the country, if you don’t stomp on Jesus, you’ll get kicked out of class in the name of relativism. The audacity of academia is its administration of a tyranny disguised as liberalism.Pope John Paul II, with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, battled and defeated the great threat of their day, communism.Here’s to hoping Pope Francis will find the tactical means of fighting ours, the tyranny of relativism.— arcarlis@indiana.edu
(03/20/13 4:00am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Young blacks and Latinos in Indianapolis have a new role model in City Councilman Jose Evans.Indianapolis thought Evans had made history in November 2007 after he became the first Democrat elected to the city council from the 1st District on the city’s far northwest side, considered until then a reliably Republican district. As it turns out, the election wasn’t so historical. Evans was a closet Republican.He came out earlier this month, officially switching party affiliation and shrinking the council’s democratic majority of 16-13 to 15-14. He is the only black/Latino Republican serving on the council. In an open letter to his constituents explaining his switch, Evans draws on IU student turned famous poet William Ross Wallace, quoting his most famous line, “For the hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world.” The councilman says he and the poet share two characteristics: “First, an intense love and respect for our mothers, and secondly, neither of us knew our fathers.”Evans’ mother raised him and his siblings by herself in Haughville, working multiple jobs to get a nursing degree, put food on the table for her children and somehow find the means to send Evans to Cathedral High School and the University of Indianapolis. She emphasized the importance of their Catholic faith. Evans never met his father, who was described to him as a black Puerto Rican. “I can now admit I hated Father’s Day because I never knew mine,” he says. Like Evans, young minorities across the country are faced with the challenges of growing up without a father, perhaps a large part of the reason why minority communities consistently vote for the party of big government despite it not sharing their values.Evans says that these values, “pro-life, pro-family, economic freedom and putting ... faith in Him before any man,” are values of the Republican Party and are shared by the “many, many” minorities that make up “the silent majority” within black and Latino communities that struggle with the discrepancies between their values and those of the Democratic Party. He may be right about that silent majority. In the last election, nearly 20 percent of black men under age 30 voted for Mitt Romney. This surprising number invites a question: Is the young black community poised for a migration back to their first political home, the Party of Lincoln? Perhaps. For this to happen, the GOP will need more people like Jose Evans, brave leaders who reject a party who fought a war to keep blacks enslaved, fought for decades to keep them in Jim Crow and has since the Civil Rights Act of ’64 fought to ensure blacks’ dependence on the government with a slew of programs.The story of Jose Evans’ fatherless childhood and his journey to the GOP shows Indianapolis’ minority youth that when facing the void left by an absent father, their best option is to take hold of the cradle and rock it themselves. There’s only so much Daddy Government can do for a man who still sleeps in a crib.— arcarlis@indiana.edu
(03/07/13 5:00am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>The most annoying person in your literature class is the gender studies major who has to bring queer issues into everything or feels the need to enlighten everybody about the subtle misogyny of a text.Even in literature where there are no gay people, the gender studies major will find hints of homoeroticism, and in literature where there is no misogyny this student will find the unconscious perpetuation of sexist attitudes.Take the following excerpts from Richard Wright’s critique “Between Laughter and Tears” of Zora Neale Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God”:“The romantic Janie, in the highly-charged language of Miss Hurston, longed to be a pear tree in blossom ...“Miss Hurston can write, but her prose is cloaked in that facile sensuality that has dogged Negro expression since the days of Phillis Wheatley ...“Miss Hurston voluntarily continues in her novel the tradition which was forced upon the Negro in the theatre, that is, the minstrel technique that makes the ‘white folks’ laugh ...“In the main, her novel is not addressed to the Negro, but to a white audience whose chauvinistic tastes she knows how to satisfy.” In total, the review is fair and thoughtful, but a gender studies major is conditioned to categorize phrases like “facile sensuality,” “knows how to satisfy” and “was forced upon” as the language of rape, allowing him to dismiss the critique as misogynistic.In another example of seeing things that aren’t really there, Herman Melville’s unfinished novel “Billy Budd” has come to be known as gay literature, despite there not being one homosexual in the entire work. “Billy Budd” is the story of an innocent sailor who is bullied by an evil superior, a basic tale of good versus evil. Queer theorists take it a step further, though, and claim that the boss bullies the sailor because the boss houses interior self-loathing caused by a repressed homosexuality he can’t express on a military vessel.Devoid of hard evidence in the text, these queer theorists rely on psychoanalysis and subtextual clues to support their hypothesis. Their desperate need to substantiate the homoerotic reading prohibits them from exploring other claims that could explain why the boss possesses so much self-loathing. What if he were responsible for the death of his best friend on a ship years ago who looked just like the sailor he bullies? What if he thinks he has fallen out of favor with God, and Billy reminds him of what it’s like to be a man in God’s favor? What if he abandoned his only son, whose spirit is reincarnated through the sailor? The queer theorist may never know where these questions could take them.For people who claim to be progressive, gender studies majors rely on outdated notions of a nonexistent “patriarchy” that used to subjugate women and keep gays in the closet. I guess their backwardness makes sense though, when you consider that there would be no need for gender studies departments if academia accepted that women are no longer a suppressed demographic group.Until they accept this fact, gender studies majors will continue to be like “Portlandia”’s feminist bookstore owner who prohibits customers from pointing at things in the store because, as she explains to one, “Every time you point, I see a penis!” It’s beneficial to consider many theories to understand the world, but when you are trained to understand life through the narrow lens of gender studies, you are bound to see things that don’t exist and miss out on things that do.— arcarlis@indiana.edu
(02/27/13 5:00am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Republican senators in Indiana killed a bill last week, while Democratic representatives in Colorado passed one. Both actions will leave college students more vulnerable to attacks.Senate Bill 97, authored by Sen. Jim Banks, R-Columbia City, died last week in Indianapolis after the Rules Committee denied it a hearing. The bill would have made it impossible for any state-funded university to ban a person with a concealed carry permit from carrying a gun on campus. Meanwhile, in Colorado, one of five states that permits concealed weapons on college campuses, a bill passed through the Democratic-controlled House that would allow college administrators to ban guns on campuses. The bill would negate the March 2012 decision of the Colorado Supreme Court that determined the University of Colorado’s gun ban on the Boulder campus unconstitutional. The Colorado legislators passed the bill despite the evidence of a 90 percent drop in the rate of sexual assault after Colorado Springs University legalized concealed carry on campus in 2003.In Indiana, it’s curious why a supermajority GOP Senate would fail to push for a campus concealed carry bill to reach the supermajority GOP House. Colorado Rep. Joe Salazar, D-Thornton, explained why he would vote against campus concealed-carry legislation in the face of the decrease in sexual assault concealed carry laws bring: “You’re right: there are some gender inequities on college campuses ... It’s why we have call boxes, it’s why we have safe zones, it’s why we have the whistles. Because you just don’t know who you’re gonna be shooting at. “And you don’t know if you feel like you’re gonna be raped, or if you feel like someone’s been following you around or if you feel like you’re in trouble when you may actually not be, that you pop out that gun and you pop ... pop around at somebody. “And you might have just made a mistake.” Salazar’s implication is that women with guns will not use them wisely. Women are too irrational and too paranoid to know when they are actually being attacked. They might shoot a non-attacker. And, besides, who needs a gun when we have call boxes! And whistles! And don’t forget, as Sen. Jesse Ulibarri, D-Commerce City, pointed out, ballpoint pens, or, as Minnesota Rep. Paul Rosenthal, D-Edina, aptly added, mace, tasers, the buddy system and judo.Democrats, apparently, think women are too stupid and incapable to defend themselves with guns. Anyway, the government has done enough to protect women — they don’t need to be responsible for defending themselves.The disturbing thing is that the attitude of our campus administration is the same as that of the Colorado legislators.After the Newtown, Conn. shootings — which occurred in a gun-free zone — IU President Michael McRobbie announced the campus would “continue to enforce a general ban on firearms on our campuses.”McRobbie insists that women rely on the University for protection and denies them the opportunity to yield the most effective and proven tool against attackers: a gun. Some women, like Crayle Vanest, Indiana’s state director for Students for Concealed Carry and the IU chapter president, refuse to accept the administration’s denial of her right to self-defense. She and other SCC members are planning a week-long demonstration on campus called the Empty Holster Protest on April 4-9. During the protest, students will wear empty holsters to campus to show how the administration’s policies disarm students.“The goal is to raise awareness for the cause and open student’s minds to the reality that university policies infringe on our state and federally guaranteed rights,” Vanest said. Students should support SCC until our state leadership and University administration allow us to exercise our God-given right to self-defense.Until then, ladies, never leave the house without packing your whistles and ballpoint pens. You never know when you’ll face an attacker.— arcarlis@indiana.edu
(02/20/13 5:00am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Political protests done right can be highly effective. The April protests being organized by IU’s occustrikers are not being done right.A beginning step in waging a successful political protest requires having reasonable demands, or at least feasible ones. The IU occustrike movement has neither.As obvious as it seems to most of the world, we cannot expect the University to lower the cost of attendance while providing better services, raising wages for staff and making the University more accessible to the less fortunate. Perhaps they could protest to lower tuition rates and provide fewer services or pay staff less — and certainly there are under-qualified people teaching in the humanities departments who deserve a pay cut. By the way, occustrikers, the thing you are demanding — a cheap public university with sound services that remains accessible to all — already exists. It’s called community college. Another component of successful political protest involves remaining legitimate so that activists can translate the protest into political capital. Any group that spawns from the Occupy Wall Street movement, though, threatens its legitimacy before the first inane slogan can be chanted.Many of occustrike’s supporters have ridiculed me for merely asking in a recent column if the occustrikers would engage in similar behavior as the original occupiers did after I speculated — correctly, in fact — that many of the radicals were involved with or supported Occupy Wall Street. “I was at Occupy,” they say. “And I didn’t rape anyone.” Well. That’s like a klansman claiming he’s not racist because he’s never lynched anyone. Good for you for not lynching anyone, but that doesn’t mean you don’t belong to a racist organization.Good for all the occupiers who haven’t raped anyone, assaulted anyone, threatened anyone, ingested illegal drugs, stolen property, vandalized property, committed arson, posed a public nuisance, defecated in public and gone a month without bathing. It doesn’t mean OWS isn’t a filthy, lawless movement. And it doesn’t mean that Bloomington is immune from the madness, either. Take this lead from an October 2011 Indiana Daily Student article: “An 18-year-old man reported to police that he woke up at about 1 p.m. Thursday handcuffed to a bed in a white house near 17th and North Dunn streets. He told police he feared he was sexually assaulted.” Where was he before the white house? People’s Park, where the occupiers had set up camp. The man met two women there who gave him alcohol and, he claimed, drugged him before imprisoning and possibly raping him in their house.Assuming the April demonstrations could succeed even in theory, all students who value civil obedience and respect the rule of law would hesitate to join the cause for fear of being abused.Unlike OWS, the Tea Party successfully turned its grievances — among them, a distaste for crony capitalism, a grievance shared by the occupiers — into political clout. For Occustrike to succeed, it will have to emulate the Tea Party. This starts by establishing reasonable demands and assuring the student body its tactics will remain civil. Will you propose protesting anything that could actually be changed?Will you, like the Tea Partiers, retire to your houses at night after the rallies because you have to work the next morning? Or will you camp out all night and relive the glory days of OWS?Until they mature, we will continue to regard the occustrikers as whiny, entitled children looking for any excuse to skip class.— arcarlis@indiana.edu
(02/13/13 5:00am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>What a speech. In case you missed it, the president promised big things in Tuesday’s State of the Union address. Here’s a survey of his vows.President Barack Obama said he will soon solve the poverty problem: “Tonight, let’s declare that in the wealthiest nation on Earth, no one who works full-time should have to live in poverty, and raise the federal minimum wage to $9 an hour.” Beyond eliminating poverty in America, Obama also promised that “the United States will join with our allies to eradicate ... extreme poverty” worldwide.His global coalition will also realize “the promise of an AIDS-free generation.”To please all the silly females who voted for free birth control, Obama urged the House to pass the Violence Against Women Act in order to allow women to “live their lives free from discrimination in the workplace, and free from the fear of domestic violence.”The president was also able to address global warming, claiming “we can make meaningful progress on this issue while driving strong economic growth.” Of course, we saw what the president’s green energy fantasies look like after companies like solar power company Solyndra went bankrupt during his first term.Obama promised to fix the education system.He promised to fix the immigration system.He promised to get chaotic Middle Eastern countries the help they need to become more civilized nations.And, as expected, he offered many vague gestures toward fixing the economy and putting people back to work, but he’s been doing that for four years with no results. Big promises.Yet, buried deep in the speech was a small promise that received little elaboration. He said he will do “more to encourage fatherhood, because what makes you a man isn’t the ability to conceive a child. It’s having the courage to raise one.”Reversing the breakdown of the family unit in the United States could solve huge problems, including educational underachievement and poverty, especially among minority communities. The first black president is uniquely qualified to lead the charge on the seemingly unimportant problem of paternal outsourcing.Too bad he is too busy making bigger promises to follow through on this little vow that could make so much difference.— atcarlis@indiana.edu
(02/06/13 5:00am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Sociologists at the City University of New York just released a study that examined the anatomy of the Occupy Wall Street movement — and it’s not what we saw on the news.OWS was not populist. It was not spontaneous. It did not operate under a strict “horizontalism.” It was not multicultural — unless multicultural means rejecting everything about American culture.Mostly, the movement was manufactured by seasoned radicals and made up of rich white guys with advanced degrees. Among the actively involved OWS members, 67 percent were white. 80 percent held a bachelor’s degree or higher and 37 percent had a household income of $100,000 or more.Among the employed protesters — shockingly, about 90 percent of participants were employed — 71 percent held professional occupations, including the 14 percent who worked in academia. Only 8 percent of working participants could be described as “blue collar.”In short, while it’s true many protesters were in debt, the CUNY study illustrates that “the 99 percent may have been a little above-average,” as Matt Pearce wrote in the Los Angeles Times.The report also emphasized the fact that the Occupy movement was not the organic, “spontaneous eruption” the media portrayed it as, “but rather an action carefully planned by committed activists,” namely “older veterans of the anti-corporate globalization protests and other late 20th and early 21st century social movements.”Despite the protesters’ insistence that Occupy operated under a strict “horizontalism,” there in fact existed a vertical hierarchy, at the top of which sat seasoned globalist radicals long committed to crippling the American economy.The authors noted that “although veteran activists were instrumental in planning the occupations, they also attracted numerous other participants who had little or no previous experience with political protest. Many of these individuals were deeply radicalized by their participation in Occupy and will likely continue on a life path that includes some type of progressive political activism.” OWS, then, was a sort of coming of age for a new generation of leftist radicals, carefully constructed by their older counterparts. As our campus is not immune to the disruptions of radical protesters, I think more questions arise for the students planning the system-wide IU strikes in April in light of the CUNY survey findings:First: How many of those currently organizing the IU strike were involved in OWS? Second: Will the strikers employ similar tactics that OWS used? (As you may recall, some of the Occupiers were dirty and disruptive, using drugs and committing rape. Students have a right to reject such behavior on our campus.)Third: Most significantly, when the April strikes fail to accomplish anything meaningful, as did the Occupy movement, when will the next protest take place?— arcarlis@indiana.edu
(01/30/13 5:00am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Before the rest of us agree to join our more revolutionary colleagues in their proposed system-wide strike in April, I request they address a glaring contradiction in their preliminary list of demands.Their first is: “Immediately reduce tuition and eliminate fees.” This seems a fine thing to protest if you have the protesting temperament, except that the strikers immediately attack the way in which the University attempts to reduce cost. Their second is: “Stop privatization and outsourcing at IU.” In fact, the strikers call for the University to make itself more public. Given its current state funding structure, how can we expect the University to reduce our cost, yet provide more services and expand access to the disadvantaged, without forcing it to charge us more?Higher education, said professor Luigi Zingales of the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, is “the least competitive and most subsidized industry of all.” Almost nine million students received Pell grants in the 2010-2011 school year.That year the program cost taxpayers $33 billion.The federal direct loan program cost an additional $13 billion that same year. Education receives $43 billion a year in subsidies, “and that does not even include tax subsidies (for college funds); tax breaks (for university endowments, for example); and subsidies dedicated to research,” Zingales said. Further, in 2011, President Barack Obama issued an executive order that allowed borrowers to reduce their monthly payments to 10 percent of discretionary income. At the same time, he also shortened the loan forgiveness period to 20 years.At the end of those 20 years, all outstanding debt will be forgiven. All this in the name of college access.Education subsidies have, of course, caused the price of college to skyrocket. Outstanding student loans exceeded outstanding credit card debt in 2011.The current tally of both totals more than $1 trillion. This has been a direct cause of the sevenfold increase in the cost of attending college since 1965, when the Pell Grant was signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson. Economists are warning that the student debt bubble will soon end up like the recent housing bubble crisis, which, as you may remember, ended badly.In short, the efforts of the government to make higher education more accessible, more affordable, more public, has caused it to become more burdensome and more restrictive. David Brooks last week in “The New York Times” described this conflict as a fight between a meritocracy “which widens inequality” and the LBJ/Obama progressives “who are trying to mitigate inequality.” For example, with liberal measures like Obama’s health care law that, according to Brooks, “taxes ... the top one percent by about $20,000 per household” and establishes benefits “for the working class by between $400 and $800 per household.” Academia is an elitist phenomenon, unknowingly, let’s hope, made even more exclusive by those liberals it tends to breed. Obama went to Columbia and Harvard, as did many beltway types.When we declare that everyone has a right to a world-class higher education, we shouldn’t be surprised when we have to pay for it.Brooks concluded by acknowledging the futility of liberal attempts to make college more affordable by arguing “the meritocracy is overwhelming the liberal project.” IU’s strikers will have to explain how they will conquer the meritocracy before we agree that their efforts to cut class will actually help us. Why would we join them in something so seemingly futile?History suggests that higher education in the U.S. can remain affordable if left to the private market. Alternatively, it can become increasingly public — and increasingly inaccessible. — arcarlis@indiana.edu
(01/16/13 5:00am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Once, after reading the Second Amendment aloud in an English class, a certain professor at this University declared the United States Constitution does not protect the right of individuals to bear arms, it simply is not in the text.Militias, the professor explained, rely on a cohesion a group of unrelated individuals lacks — plus, there’s no way men of Revolutionary America could have anticipated semi-automatic weapons.And, for that matter, wouldn’t you just feel so uncomfortable if students were allowed to carry concealed weapons to class? Would concealed carry laws not fundamentally change the intimate environment of a college classroom?Indeed, the professor’s oratory conjured up many rationales as to how exactly the text of the Second Amendment neglects an individual’s right to bear arms. All of them ignore what humanities departments across the country also too often sacrifice in the name of their humble opinion, the text. So let’s take a look at the text. The Second Amendment is a relatively straightforward sentence, yet people treat it like it’s James Joyce. I think it’s all the commas.Punctuation was excessive in the 18th century (see the First and Third Amendments), as were capital letters. In fact, two of the commas in the Second Amendment are unnecessary, the first and the third: “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” Thus, it is a sentence made of a dependent clause followed by an independent clause. The author of this sentence structured it so that the second clause is emphasized. There is a passive verb form in the first clause (“being”), and an active verb in the second (“shall not”). These verb forms dictate how the sentence must be read, with “shall not” combining the subject noun “the right” with the nonexistent object noun “by the government” (“The right ... shall not be infringed [by the government].”).The militia clause is merely a reason why the people shall be able to bear arms. “Militia” is not the subject of the sentence. For any person with a basic understanding of the English language, this is the only proper interpretation of the Second Amendment, and any other is an attempt to ignore the language.The Second Amendment does not suddenly mean something different than it did two hundred years ago just because a crazy man guns down twenty children during school — its second clause remains as independent today as it did yesterday.As Justice Scalia says, “By trying to make the Constitution do everything that needs doing from age to age, we shall have caused it to do nothing at all.” In the mean time, we will sit obediently in intimate classrooms as authoritarians with Ph.D.’s convince us the words of the Second Amendment preclude an individual from asserting his autonomy with a gun. On this campus, as long as we ignore the text, we’re unarmed.— acarlis@indiana.edu
(01/11/13 5:00am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Paid parking will increase the wellbeing of everyone, including the crows that keep us up during winter nights. It’s elementary economics. Currently, there is a shortage of parking, as every driver isn’t willing to pay for a parking space. As the price of parking increases, less people are willing to pay for a space, freeing up parking spaces for those who are willing to pay. With a paid parking system, there will be more parking for those who are willing to pay the price.At the same time, those who aren’t will receive the benefit of spending the money they may have spent on parking on something they value more.Less people will be inclined to drive downtown, which is great for you environmentalists, as less congestion means less carbon emission, which means cleaner air. On the downside, this means there will be more bikers on the roads, which means your English professor won’t be the only stinky one in class with dripping armpit stains.In short, a world with paid parking means less traffic, more parking availability and happier birds. The city will also receive the money from the meters. I can’t believe it’s taken this long for Bloomington to seriously consider implementing a paid parking system.Two groups of people are among the things preventing us from benefits of paid parking. The first includes those who believe parking in public spaces is an inalienable right and believe they should do so at no cost. To these, I say, no, free parking is not a God-given entitlement. The Bill of Rights does not protect it, nor should you.The second group includes the “people instead of profits” loons who think allowing a private company — God forbid an out-of-state company — to collect profits from parking meters somehow harms the citizens of Bloomington. These are the people who said in Liberation, a “newspaper for the party of socialism and liberation,” that Chicago mayor Richard Daley’s “sale of the parking meters [to Morgan Stanley] is part of an all-out attack on workers in Illinois.” You’d think the CEO’s of parking operations were stopping rush-hour traffic, pulling people out of their cars and busting their kneecaps. In fact, the privatization of parking actually benefits workers. Under a privatization plan, city governments will be free to focus their energies on more important things, like running social welfare programs for the poor. A city will not only receive a large sum of money up front when a company acquires its parking. It also may receive regular payments from the company. So, the government will have more money to spend on less things. Everyone will benefit from this increased efficiency.To the profit-haters, I say profit benefits people. Private companies don’t just have more incentive than government to provide better services.They can also make government more efficient at the same time.So, hurrah to Bloomington for growing up and realizing that in big person world, things aren’t free — and that’s a good thing.— arcarlis@indiana.edu
(01/07/13 5:00am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Will someone please do something about Bloomington’s crow problem?I think I speak for many, if not most, when I say I hate the crows that descend upon us each winter.They are ugly, loud and dirty. I imagine they carry diseases.If you’re unlucky enough to have a large tree outside your bedroom window that has to hundreds of the black birds, you understand that during winter you will not enjoy the same kind of sleep you might enjoy during warmer months.Their crowing is incessant. You also understand the damage your property endures due to their always-falling feces. Life near the birds is near hell, and we can only imagine what Bloomington must be like in winter for the city’s ornithophobics — assuming they haven’t skipped town yet.There are multiple solutions to our crow problem but only one real cure. Watertown, N.Y., is another city with a bird problem. According to the Watertown Daily Times, the city shot pyrotechnics into the air to scare birds from their perches and used lasers and recordings of crow distress calls to harass the birds. While the methods seemed to work for about a week, the birds came back. Watertown learned something Indianapolis figured out decades ago — the way to eliminate a bird problem is to eliminate the birds.In the 1960s, Indianapolis was a leader in pigeon control and was “probably the most pigeon-free city in the country,” according to the Daily Times.The Eugene Register-Guard of Eugene, Ore., states the city had a Pigeon Task Force that would deploy 11 men with shotguns to shoot down the city’s pigeons every other Sunday. The task force was comprised of sanitation workers and a police officer who would escort the group to collect the dead birds and make sure no one was harmed. As of April 1965, the city killed 80,000 pigeons in five years.Besides becoming the Amateur Sports Capitol of the World, I’d say the Pigeon Task Force was Indianapolis’s greatest success.Today, there are shockingly few pigeons in Indianapolis, a remarkable feat for a city its size.The city’s bird control probably helped it pull off such a smashing success as a Super Bowl host city. Bloomington should follow Indianapolis’ lead and get rid of the pesky crows. How will we protect the tired and the ornithophobic if we don’t get a handle on the birds? How can we ever expect to become a great city if we can’t even get them out of our trees? We need to kill the birds.--arcarlis@indiana.edu
(12/03/12 5:00am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>If there’s one thing I’ve learned in college, it’s that having a Ph.D. doesn’t make you smart.Having a doctorate can, however, mean you’re a cultural Marxist, or, in one Butler University political science professor’s case, an intolerant cultural Marxist.This professor instructs students of Political Science 201: Research and Analysis to disregard their “American-ness, maleness, whiteness, heterosexuality (and) middle-class status” when communicating in her class.She explains in her syllabus that students are permitted to use only “inclusive language” to communicate, as proper language usage is “a fundamental issue of social justice.”She references a United Church of Christ conceptualization of inclusive language: “Language that is truly inclusive affirms sexuality, racial and ethnic background, stages of maturity and degrees of limiting conditions.”You might remember the UCC as home to Reverend Jeremiah “God Damn America” Wright.So, for instance, rather than use the word “chairman,” students must use the word “chairperson.” Rather than use the words “foreigner” or “alien,” students must use the terms “visitor from another country” or “immigrant.” Rather than “disabled person,” use “person with a disability” or “differently abled.”Leave it to an academic to ban the word “mankind” because it’s sexist. It might seem ridiculous, because it is.This authoritarian stranglehold on the terms of discourse is common in the supposed tolerant fairy tale that is academia. Anything considered offensive is banned.IU-Purdue University Indianapolis scolded student employee Keith John Sampson for reading a book about the Ku Klux Klan with an “offensive” cover. University of North Carolina banned the “offensive” term “freshman” because it’s not “gender inclusive.” I could go on. The sad thing is, these politically correct fascists have great influence in the society, especially on the youth who think they actually learn things in gender studies classes. Even the Indiana Daily Student has its own set of standards for what’s appropriate to publish and what’s not.Why is academia so petrified of offending everyone?Forget a disinterested pursuit of truth. Contemporary academia strives to reshape America in its own Marxist image: a weak social democracy with no authority in the world, devoid of white middle class citizens with traditional families. Their enemies are white Christians, heterosexuals and capitalists simply because these people have become the most powerful people on Earth.Ironically, the very thing these word police seek to transform, the United States in its full capitalistic glory, has brought more disadvantaged people out of poverty and despair than any other country in history.It doesn’t take a Ph.D. to figure out that not every thing a white middle-class American does is evil. Let’s stop talking like it’s true. — arcarlis@indiana.edu
(11/26/12 5:00am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Organized labor has been causing trouble all across the country this year in the struggle toward “building a fair economy, providing workers a voice on the job, fighting for equality and ensuring that all working people can live with dignity,” according to the Service Employees International Union. Most recently, the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union attempted to ruin Walmart’s Black Friday festivities. They failed and the evil empire reported record Black Friday sales and that only 50 employees participated in strikes nationwide. The main goal of the Walmart protests was to force the company to “share profits with all associates.” Curiously, none of the Walmart protesters demanded that UFCW do the same even though it paid president Joseph Hansen $361,124 in 2011.The Bakery, Confectionary, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union, better known as the Bakers’ Union, recently made headlines when 18,500 workers were put of work after the Hostess company union would not accept cuts in pay and benefits.I’m not sure how forcing an American icon to cancel all operations helps the Bakers’ Union achieve the goal of bringing “economic justice in the workplace to all workers in our jurisdiction and social justice to workers throughout North America.” Have the 5,000 members of the Bakers’ Union who worked for Hostess felt the great satisfaction of “economic justice” that comes with knowing that not only do they not have jobs but also the 13,000 nonunion employees of Hostess do not have jobs? Also, do they realize that the Bakers’ Union pays more than $4 million to 29 executives, including president Frank Hurt, who registered $262,654 in salary and benefits last year? The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the largest public sector union in the country, paid general counsel Larry Weinberg $536,035 in 2011 and president Gerald McEntee $512,369. Forcing a recall against Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker earlier this year, AFSCME failed in its fight to maintain unsustainable, taxpayer funded pensions and benefits for its government workers. No word yet that any of the more than 300 AFSCME employees who make at least $100,000 plan on sharing their money with poorer union members.The National Education Association, which played a part in Superintendent of Public Instruction-elect Glenda Ritz’s win in Indiana, paid Executive Director John Wilson $492,484 in 2011 and president Dennis Van Roekel $460,060. The NEA paid 40 of its executives more than $200,000.The teamsters last year paid $372,489 to president Jimmy Hoffa, who may be remembered for threatening Republicans at a President Barack Obama rally: “Let’s take these sons of bitches out.” In 2011, AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka received $293,750, American Federation of Teachers president Rhonda Weingarten received $493,859, and SEIU Secretary-Treasurer Eliseo Medina received $330,503, not to mention the lavish benefits of hundreds of other top executives.With all their rhetoric of fairness, dignity and the plight of the workingman, you’d think these fat cat union bosses would create organizations that share profits with all associates — right?— arcarlis@indiana.edu
(11/13/12 5:00am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Wisely, Indiana law prohibits teachers from striking. Had it not, the state might have seen large protests in the face of the most revolutionary school reformer in the country, Tony Bennett.Unlike the barbarians in Chicago’s public school system, Indiana’s schoolteachers peacefully used the political system to get their way, for which they should be applauded. Their grassroots campaign, which effectively used social media and word of mouth, saw Glenda Ritz unseat Bennett. Because she must work with Governor-elect Mike Pence, a vocal supporter of Bennett’s, and the new GOP super majority in both houses, Ritz will likely have trouble enacting many of her policy initiatives.The trouble that Ritz could face is good for Indiana’s students. Ritz campaigned as a hardline education traditionalist.She rejects the expanding voucher system, Bennett’s harsh school grading scale, takeover of failing schools by a for-profit company, national Common Core standards Indiana adopted and lower standards for teacher licensing, among other things. Essentially, Ritz won on the promise of helping entrenched public school teachers and administrators maintain power.She capitalized on the feeling among public school teachers of being suffocated by Bennett. They feel that Bennett and other market-driven reformers unfairly blame them for educational failures within the education system, and that they are being unfairly held accountable for factors outside of their control.A strong educational system, they understand, depends on strong communities and, especially, strong families. The best students have the best upbringings. It is widely noted that children who grow up in the poorest neighborhoods receive the worst education. Teachers are only one component of the educational system.Why, then, does it seem reformers like Bennett blame teachers for the failure of parents and communities?I would suggest that it is because the public school system is the only thing they can immediately control. A legislature cannot simply transform a culture that outsources parental responsibility to the government or one that has accepted the destruction of the family unit. Bennett cannot change a culture that melts down when a presidential candidate vows to cut funding to PBS, as if “Sesame Street” is the only way their children will learn manners and the alphabet. He cannot change a culture that does not encourage young mothers to marry their child’s father despite the fact that fatherless students are twice as likely to drop out of high school, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. He cannot change a culture that views excessive welfare as charitable despite the fact that it discourages responsibility. The realities that have led to the malaise within the educational system have been decades in the making and will take decades to undo. We should applaud Bennett for tackling educational reform rather than resigning himself to the futility of it. Bennett’s heart was in the right place, and that is something Ritz should keep in mind. Perhaps some details of his plan were flawed, but that surely doesn’t call for a rejection of his vision, one in which every parent has the opportunity to send his child to the school of his choice, where effective teachers are rewarded and failing schools are flipped by educational experts who provide excellent services in response to the profit motive.It surely doesn’t call for an educational plan that makes disadvantaged students secondary to the desires of teachers.Hopefully, Ritz will advocate to eliminate faulty details like the excessive testing and Common Core standards rather than annihilate a revolutionary market-based education that seeks to control only what it can — the teachers.— arcarlis@indiana.edu
(11/07/12 5:00am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>President Barack Obama is nearly unrecognizable from the man he was four years ago. It’s not the gray hair or the tired face.It’s the tone of his voice and the rotten re-election campaign he just dragged the American people through. Obama summed up his campaign in an off-teleprompter remark at a rally several days ago after the crowd started to boo when he mentioned Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. Don’t boo, he said, “Vote. Voting’s the best revenge.” The past year, the president has been angry, spiteful, divisive, childish and uninspiring. He spent almost all of his time demonizing his opponent and almost none of it articulating what another four years under his leadership will mean for America. Whereas the president spent 2008 appealing to best of the American people —their optimism and desire for unity — he spent 2012 appealing to the worst of them — their fears, their envies, their pessimism.Yet, he won. Obama will be a two-term president.So, what will the next four years bring? Like 2008, he provided us with few clues to help us predict the future. As I see it, he has two options.One path leads to more of the same: partisan gridlock, cronyism and massive financial imbalance. This is the path that nearly cost Obama a second term and sent millions of his ’08 supporters fleeing to the Romney camp in 2012.Along the other path is compromise, reform and an attempt at balanced budgets. This is the path Americans want to hike.Through 2016, the president must remember something he tragically forgot during his first term: he is the president of every American, not just the liberal fanatics he let control Congress during his first two years in the White House. He must realize his presidency gave birth not only to Obamacare but to the Tea Party, a massive populist movement that dictated the dialogue in senate races throughout the country and whose concerns about fiscal responsibility and limited government are shared by independents and moderate Democrats. These people refuse to be ignored. Remember the heated protests and town hall meetings staged during the legislative battle concerning Obamacare? Remember the huge lines at Chick-fil-A restaurants throughout the country after big city liberals tried to take away our fried chicken? Remember the overwhelming crowds at the Romney rallies in the final weeks of the campaign?The only way for Obama to become a great president is to address the concerns of these people and work with the Republicans in Congress. Former President Bill Clinton, unlike Obama, pivoted to the right after his mid-term defeat and cruised to reelection. Now Clinton is one of the most admired and successful men to have held the office. The American people are predominantly a conservative people. Since former President Ronald Reagan, conservatism has been rising as the old school. New Deal, Great Society liberalism has descended. Clinton famously declared in 1996, “The era of big government is over.”Obama came into office and spat in the face of this notion. He resolved to become a progressive giant, and it nearly cost him re-election. If he continues governing in the same way he governed the last four years, he will go down in history as one of this country’s most ineffective presidents.I guess the lesson here is about realizing the dangers of ignoring the will of the people to impose your own. Obama has been warned.Let’s see what the next four years bring.— arcarlis@indiana.edu
(11/05/12 5:00am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Ten years from now, Democratic voters will look back at this election cycle and be awfully embarrassed. The 2012 campaign will be that photo album that shows just how long you can’t believe your hair was.The Democrats’ campaign has been one freak sideshow after another — any spectacle they can think of to keep people from paying attention to the devastation that is the economy playing out on the main stage.In one ring you have the racist whistleblowers, mostly occupied by the paranoid schizophrenics that are the MSNBC anchors.Here are some words deemed racist by Chris Matthews, Lawrence O’Donnell and company: “Chicago,” “golf,” “kitchen cabinet.”You see, when you can’t find evidence of actual racism coming from the Tea Party and Republican candidates, you have to claim, as O’Donnell did, “These people reach for every single possible racial double entendre they can possibly find.”Hence, the new racist words.In another ring are the people trying to convince women they will be set back 60 years if Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is elected, as if before President Barack Obama women were an oppressed minority. The Obama camp urges women to “vote like your lady parts depend on it” because they define women by nothing but their lady parts.When you belittle women like Democrats do, naturally you assume their biggest fear is not being able to have an abortion. This is why abortion was mentioned so many times at this year’s Democratic National Convention. Its motto very well could have been “DNC 2012: We love abortion.”The Democrats have no problems convincing women they will be raped if we elect people like U.S. Senate candidate and State Treasurer Richard Mourdock, who made a perfectly reasonable pro-life statement but was portrayed as a rape enthusiast.Besides, you know you are a failed president when the highlight of your reelection campaign is a former president. Horndog-in-Chief Bill Clinton was making a disgrace of the presidency two decades ago, but that doesn’t stop the Obama campaign from acting like Clinton is the future of the party. Newsflash to Democrats: It’s usually a good idea to let the guy on the ticket have the best ideas, especially ones that are his own.Then there’s Vice President Joe Biden, who is a sideshow in and of himself. His life is a continuous cycle of gaffes, the latest being, “There’s never been a day in the last four years that I’ve been proud to be vice president. Not one single day.”Adding to the spectacle, the Democrats spent considerable time and money trying to demonize Romney. Remember when they tried to paint him as a tax-evading Scrooge? How about when they said he was a robot? Or when they claimed he was responsible for the death of a cancer patient? I’d be remiss if I failed to mention the absurd Internet memes the Democrats tried to make a thing. For example, there was Big Bird, “binders full of women” and “Romneysia.”I haven’t witnessed many presidential campaigns, but I can’t imagine the amount of absurdity the Democrats have rolled out this election season is normal. Perhaps someone should remind the Democrats the unemployment rate is higher than when the president took office, people cannot afford to send their kids to college or fill up their gas tanks and small businesses across the country fear they won’t be in business this time next year.Perhaps someone should tell the Democrats that while we are proud they have moved on from the complete nonsense of the 2008 “hope and change” campaign, their efforts in 2012 have been just as ridiculous.— arcarlis@indiana.edu
(11/02/12 4:00am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>President Barack Obama and Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney have practically identical opinions about the “civil rights” issue of gay marriage. Romney, of course, is openly against it. Obama, who has only been in favor of gay marriage for a few months, last Friday told a reporter at MTV that it’s the responsibility of future Americans and not his responsibility to make progress on gay rights. Obama said, “For us to try to legislate federally into this area is probably the wrong way to go,” a statement of conservatism from a man who pushed through Congress a bill that gave a federal bureaucracy control of one sixth of the entire U.S. economy. Perhaps, you might suggest, Obama believes the solution to the gay marriage issue lies with the executive branch. This, of course, is wishful thinking. Why hasn’t a president who has issued more than 100 executive orders issued one forcing all states to recognize the legitimacy of same sex marriages, like the executive order he issued granting immunity to young illegal immigrants in June? Why hasn’t he sued states that don’t allow gay marriage as he sued Ohio for permitting military people extra voting time? Perhaps Obama thinks the courts should decide, but surely he doesn’t think Chief Justice John Roberts court will rule for gay marriage. With federal avenues closed, Obama relegates gay marriage to the states, as a way of saying, “I do not care about this issue. It’s not my problem.”This state-by-state remedy has been in action since 1998, when Alaska amended its constitution to define marriage between a man and a woman. There are 29 other states who have since amended their constitutions to prohibit in some way the legal recognition of same-sex couples. Only six states and Washington, D.C., allow gay couples to marry. If Obama thinks the way to legalize gay marriage is through the states, he is supremely dumb. So please, gays, stop claiming your “very personhood” and your “dignity as a citizen of this country” will be diminished if Obama is not reelected, as Doug Wright does in his viral Facebook message. It simply is not true that people who will vote for Romney and GOP candidates believe their “taxes and take-home pay mean more than your fundamental civil rights” or they support “anti-gay legislation and cultural homophobia.”As much as you’d like to think of this election as a pivotal one in terms of gay rights, recognize that Obama, like Romney, has no plans to make gay marriage a reality.Stop making the rest of us feel guilty for voting for the only candidate with a plan to make our country strong again.— arcarlis@indiana.edu
(10/22/12 4:00am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>IU will provide a platform for one of the dirtiest old misogynists in the public eye this Sunday.Comedian Bill Maher will perform his routine, which highlights the monumental stupidity of Republicans, conservative women and religious people. I’m sure he’ll be preaching to the IU choir.While the Bloomington community might applaud Maher’s political views, I dare people to support his shameful rhetoric against women. Consider what he’s said about one of his favorite subjects, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and her family.In one routine, he said, “Sarah Palin agreed to do commentary at Fox News, which is actually very similar to her day job: talking to a baby with Down syndrome,” and also claims she has a “strange family of inbred weirdos.” In the same routine, he said of Palin’s daughter, Bristol, “She fucked Levi over and over until a baby fell out.” Concerning former Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Sarah Palin, he said, “The maverick and the MILF.” About Rep. Michelle Bachmann, R-6th District of Minnesota, and Palin, he continued, “(They’re) two bimbos.” I call on all who think it’s wrong to use degrading discourse like Maher’s to boycott his Sunday appearance at the IU Auditorium. Demand a refund. Let IU know the Bloomington community does not approve of hate against women.If you decide to go, don’t laugh when he engages in this sick behavior. Demand he make a public apology for his comments.The IU Auditorium website lists Bloomington Bagel Company as a sponsor. Boycott this company and their misogyny bagels, too. Shame on Maher for waging war on women.Shame on IU for sponsoring women-hating comedians like Maher.— arcarlis@indiana.edu