The Nation

Barack Obama lays out his gun control package with Joe Biden in January. (Reuters/Larry Downing.)

It’s no easy task to come up with an interesting newspaper column twice a week. Virtually no one has genuinely original thoughts—or groundbreaking reporting—on so demanding a schedule. Columnists therefore rely on hobby horses, lenses through which they see and interpret events that lead the front pages and other news outlets.

We applauded Congress’s recent defense of Saturday delivery at the United States Postal Service and the USPS’s subsequent decision not to cancel it. However, the story didn’t end there. As John Nichols reported, the USPS still suffers from attempts to weaken the public institution and privatize its services. To preserve and modernize the USPS well into the twenty-first century, Senator Bernie Sanders and Congressman Peter DeFazio have introduced the Postal Service Protection Act, a package of reforms designed to give this critical institution a fighting chance.

TO DO

In March, a bill was introduced in the California State Senate that, if passed, could radically redefine the role of online learning in American higher education. The proposed legislation, SB 520, would require state colleges and universities to grant credit to students who, unable to register for core classes at their home universities due to “bottleneck” conditions at the entry level, opt to register for massive open online courses (MOOCs) instead.

The bill is packaged by its champions as a necessary measure designed to defend the best interests of a student body under siege. “We want to be the first state in the nation to make this promise,” said Darrell Steinberg, the State Senate president. “No college student in California will be denied the right to move through their education because they couldn’t get a seat in the course they needed.” Detractors, however, attack it as a top-down effort to allow private companies to profit from public institutions of higher learning—what some have labeled the University of Phoenixization of the U Cal system.

Whatever the outcome, this bill has direct implications for the City University of New York (CUNY) as well as other public universities nationwide. The debate in California arrives during a period in which CUNY’s public system has come under great strain from rolling budget cuts, privatization measures and major battles between administrators and faculty over curricular decision-making and control. The potential embrace of MOOCs could well contribute to further contention.

Shaquille O’Neal. (Reuters/Brian Snyder)

Why did Newark’s only movie theater, co-owned by Shaquille O’Neal, just pull a scheduled showing of a documentary about Mumia Abu-Jamal? No one is talking, but this is a story that stinks worse than the Jersey swamps. For the unfamiliar, Mumia Abu-Jamal is perhaps the most famous of the 2.4 million people behind bars in the United States. He has spent the last three decades as not only a prisoner but a political lightning rod, with the Fraternal Order of Police demanding his execution after the killing of Philadelphia Officer Daniel Faulkner. Following thirty years on death row, Mumia’s sentence was commuted to life without the possibility of parole last year.