The Nation

One of this year's Ridenhour recipients was Jose Antonio Vargas, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who sparked immigration reform debate at risk of deportation. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh.)

Editor’s Note: Each week we cross-post an excerpt from Katrina vanden Heuvel’s column at the WashingtonPost.com. Read the full text of Katrina’s column here.

At last week's Deans Cup Basketball game between NYU Law School and Columbia Law School members of the Student Labor Action Movement or S.L.A.M. unfurled two banners in protest of Law School Trustee Daniel Strauss. He has sat on the Law School's Board of Trustees since 1998 and endows the University with an ongoing gift of $1.25 million a year to run the Straus Institute for the Advanced Study of Law & Justice, which is located in a townhouse at 22 Washington Square North.

The students also handed out popcorn with flyers attached asking NYU to cut ties with Strauss. Strauss owns both the CareOne and Healthbridge management companies which own dozens of nursing homes in New Jersey, Connecticut and Pennsylvania. S.L.A.M. claimed in an April 11 press release that Strauss' companies had "illegally intimidated, fired, and locked out nursing home workers in their facilities in New Jersey and Connecticut".

For more punditry, check out Tom Tomorrow's recent posts. 

Teachers, students and parents protest the plan to close 54 Chicago public schools. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast.)

I've been watching a lot of adolescents cry these days. First it was twelve-year-old Jasmine Murphy, on a media bus tour led by the Chicago Teachers Union to demonstrate the devastation likely to follow from Mayor Rahm Emanuel's plan to close fifty-four schools. She was relating how she felt when the elementary school she loved and in which she had thrived was shuttered in 2011. Then, this week, all over town, Chicago Public School bureaucrats have sat before hearings to hear public comment on each individual school set to close this coming September. In my neighborhood, Hyde Park, I joined seventy-five or so community members who sat—and, angrily, stood—in an auditorium at Kenwood Academy High School, six blocks directly east of Barack Obama's family home, to address the closing of a middle school next door known as Canter Leadership Academy. The whole thing pretty much went down like this. Picture a tough-looking black teenage boy. His name is Shane Ellis. Shane takes the microphone for his allotted two minutes. He begins listing all the schools he's attended in Chicago. He says, "Of all these schools, Canter is the only one that showed it actually cared." He relates a story about the principal telling him that given all the things he's been through in his life and with his family it's a testament to his depth of character that he can carry on at school all.