Tag: NPR

Alumni Diplomacy

An interesting coda to the U. Mass. ban on Iranian students in engineering and the natural sciences that was later overturned… On Friday’s All Things Considered, Melissa Block interviewed US Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, a former nuclear physicist at MIT, about the nuclear arms negotiations/deal with Iran. This exchange occurred: BLOCK: There is a really interesting confluence here because when you were starting teaching at MIT, the Iranian, now Iran’s top nuclear physicist, was then a graduate student at MIT. Do you think that had a bearing on the talks, the fact that you shared that history? I know you brought him some MIT swag when you went to Switzerland. MONIZ: (Laughter) That’s right. Well, because in the – in our second […]

NPR Says Karen Lewis is Too….Something to Speak for Teachers

Because of Rosh Hashanah, I’m a little late to this story. And now that the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) has voted to suspend the strike, it might be moot. But still, it’s worth noting. On Sunday, the CTU voted to continue striking so that its members could have additional time to discuss and debate the terms of Chicago’s contract offer (which is still not final). You’d think that decision would have been held up as a triumph of deliberative democracy. Here you had union members demanding time and space to discuss the rules that govern their everyday lives, not waiting passively for their leaders to determine their fates. If this happened in other countries, we’d call it a Chicago Spring […]