`Limbaugh on decaf' soldiers on -- column of April 14, 2022

By MARSHA MERCER

Former Vice President Mike Pence’s speech at the University of Virginia Tuesday night was more like a hamburger than raw meat.

His remarks were as friendly and unfussy as a fast-food burger with a smear of spicy mustard. He was respectful, approachable -- “You can call me Mike” – and traditionally conservative.

His audience was polite and attentive as Pence boldly allied himself with the Constitution, Thomas Jefferson, his Christian faith, freedom, liberty, mom and apple pie. OK, he didn’t mention pie, though he did say he’s been married to a schoolteacher for 36 years, they have three kids and “the highest title I will ever hold is spelled D-A-D.”

Serving as vice president was “the greatest honor of my life,” he said, and he bragged on the last administration’s record. Never once did he mention Jan. 6, 2021, the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, or the protesters that shouted, “Hang Mike Pence” as he and members of Congress hid.

Pence’s theme was “How to Save America from the Woke Left,” so, of course, he declared “Wokeness is running amok in our public schools and universities” and critical race theory is “nothing more than state-sanctioned racism.” 

He blamed the Biden-Harris administration for crime, high inflation, the worst border crisis in American history and a “tidal wave of left-wing policies that threaten to wipe out all the progress we made in four short years.”

His prescription was for young people to join the fight for liberty, but when a student asked if he would run for president in 2024, Pence said, “I will keep you posted.”

Republicans are waiting for Trump to actually say whether he’s running again. In any case, he ruled out Pence as his running mate.

Democrats are waiting too, although President Joe Biden said last year he will run with Vice President Kamala Harris as his running mate.

“Rush Limbaugh on decaf,” as Pence describes himself as a talk radio show host in the 1990s, may be the least scary of the GOP politicians who may compete for the White House in the election 200-plus days away.

This not a high bar in a Republican field that includes Senators Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Ted Cruz of Texas and Josh Hawley of Missouri as well as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Pence is on a speaking tour of universities sponsored by Young America’s Foundation, a conservative organization. His views on marriage, trans and gender issues have made him persona non grata to some and a hero to others.

In an editorial last month titled, “Dangerous Rhetoric is not Entitled to a Platform,” the editorial board of U.Va.’s student-run newspaper, The Cavalier Daily, warned Pence’s rhetoric “directly threatens the presence and lives of our community members,” including the LGBTQ community, and demanded the speech be called off.

In response, 17 professors, including political scientist Larry Sabato, wrote in a letter to the editor: “This speech-is-violence argument is not only wrong – no calls for violence will be issued April 12 – but also contradicts the letter and the spirit of the First Amendment, which generally creates space for a wide range of views to be expressed so long as the relevant speech does not incite violence.”

A handful of students protested outside Old Cabell Hall Tuesday, but in the auditorium, which was nearly full, everyone played nice. When a student asked Pence what he would do or say if one of his children came out to him as gay, he replied: “I’d look them in the eye and tell them, `I love you,’”

Then he told the student if they got to know each other, “You’d know the Pences love everybody.”

Love is an odd political strategy, to say the least. The recent Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearings for Ketanji Brown Jackson as an associate justice of the Supreme Court were viewed as an audition for the presidential campaign, and several likely GOP contenders bared their teeth in full, snarling mode.

Pence barks, but he wags more. He won praise for upholding the Constitution during the electoral vote count last year. He calls himself “a Christian, a conservative and a Republican,” in that order.

We’ll see if that’s enough to compete successfully against his party’s mean boys.

©2022 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

What makes America great? Free, online courses for a start -- May 26, 2016 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Enough nostalgia for America of an earlier era.  

Take the country back to the 1950s or 1960s? You’ve got to be kidding. Make America great again? Please. It’s already great.

And not just because we have sushi happy hour, Uber and Fitbit. America is great because anyone with internet access can enroll in courses from the nation’s best universities online for free. It’s great because America connects people worldwide who share the desire to learn.   

The 21^st century has delivered to our laptops and mobile devices access to thousands of free and low-cost courses that can enhance our technical and business skills or help us live more creatively and fully.   

Want to sweat through a mathematical biostatistics boot camp? Johns Hopkins has you covered. Listen and learn about Handel’s Messiah and Baroque Oratorio? Harvard has a class. Need logic? Stanford University is on it. 

  

The first massive open online courses -- MOOCs -- started at Stanford in 2011. More than 600 colleges and universities around the world have developed 4,200 online courses, and more than 35 million people worldwide have signed up for one, according to data compiled by Class Central.

You can learn about aerodynamics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, dog emotion and cognition from Duke University and subjects in between. Beginning Mandarin? Peking University offers it. Chicken behavior? The University of Edinburgh.

After reading about MOOCs for years, I finally signed up for one. Well, three. I started Tibetan Buddhist Meditation from the University of Virginia and then Positive Psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. They weren’t for me, though, and I dropped out with a click.

Something like only about 5 percent of people who start a MOOC finish it, Online Course Report said in its State of the MOOC 2016 study. The quit rate worries academics, but to me it also shows learners exercising their freedom to explore. The course completion rate is far higher in corporate-sponsored classes.

For me, the third course was the charm. I’ve spent the last 10 weeks studying Greek and Roman mythology through the University of Pennsylvania. My classmates in America and all over the world -- including Bangladesh, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Morocco, Mexico, South Africa, Spain, Taiwan and the United Kingdom -- interacted on community discussion boards.

The mythology course “took,” even though in every session Professor Peter Struck, wearing a white shirt, looked at the camera and lectured. That sounds deadly, but his enthusiasm for his subject was contagious and his insights fascinating.

The class was offered through Coursera, a for-profit company started by two Stanford professors. Two other big providers of MOOCs are for-profit Udacity, with computer science classes developed by Google, Facebook and other companies, and edX, a nonprofit founded by Harvard and MIT.

Many people take MOOCs to enhance their resumes with tech and business skills. More than 75,000 people, for example, have taken Applied Cryptology on Udacity, taught by University of Virginia computer science professor David Evans. Information Week ranked it the #1 class to pump up IT careers.

I was looking for something to take me away from work, and a trip to ancient Greece and Rome was just the ticket. As with many other courses, you could earn a certificate for $79 or take the course free without a certificate. I didn’t need a certificate, but business learners often do.

The MOOC model is changing, though. The trend is toward more fees and fewer free courses. Humanities courses were 19 percent of offerings in 2013, but only 9 percent last year. Computer science and programming made up 17 percent of classes last year, the same percentage as business and management, according to Online Course Report.

The next new thing in MOOCs is virtual reality. Harvard’s most popular course, both on campus and on edX, with more than 1 million enrollees, is CS50, an introduction to computer science. This fall, Harvard will film the course in virtual reality. Using a cardboard viewer and the screen of a smartphone, a learner anywhere will be able to experience the class almost as if he or she were there in person.

It’s enough to make you believe in America’s greatness again.

©2016 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Tis the season for pomp, circumstance and politics -- May 19, 2016 column

By MARSHA MERCER

President Barack Obama isn’t on the ballot, but he is on the campaign trail. His harshest attack yet on Donald J. Trump previewed the president’s role in the fall campaign.   

“In politics and in life, ignorance is not a virtue,” Obama said May 15 in his commencement address at Rutgers University. “It’s not cool to not know what you’re talking about. That’s not keeping it real or telling it like it is. That’s not challenging political correctness. That’s just not knowing what you’re talking about.”

The partisan campaign pitch by a president is unusual – what isn’t this election cycle? -- but Obama isn’t the first to take center stage at graduation exercises and throw down a political or policy gauntlet.

As war raged in Europe in 1940, President Franklin D. Roosevelt used a commencement address at the University of Virginia, where his son, Franklin Jr., was graduating from the law school, to warn the United States could no longer be “a lone island in a world dominated by the philosophy of force.”

Italy had declared war on France and Great Britain just that morning, and FDR said: 

“On this tenth day of June 1940, the hand that held the dagger has struck it into the back of its neighbor.

“On this tenth day of June 1940, in this university founded by the first great American teacher of democracy, we send forth our prayers and our hopes to those beyond the seas who are maintaining with magnificent valor their battle for freedom,” he said.

The speech, received with cheers and rebel yells in Charlottesville, presaged the United States’ eventual entry into World War II. With the election only months away and Roosevelt was running for a third term, though, some Democrats worried FDR would alienate voters.

In a commencement address at the University of Michigan in May 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson set the theme for his presidential campaign and his domestic agenda when he outlined his goals for a Great Society. His ambitious plan called for no less than rebuilding cities, cleaning up the environment and transforming education.

Twenty-seven years later, President George H. W. Bush chose commencement in Ann Arbor to open his reelection bid, saying Johnson’s social agenda had not only failed but backfired.

“Programs designed to ensure racial harmony generated animosity. Programs intended to help people out of poverty invited dependency,” Bush said in May 1991.

“We don’t need another Great Society with huge and ambitious programs administered by the incumbent few. We need a Good Society built upon the deeds of the many, a society that promotes service, selflessness and action,” Bush said.

Obama renewed the debate about the scope of government and the level of political discourse in a commencement speech at the University of Michigan in 2011.

“What troubles me is when I hear people say that all of government is inherently bad,” he said.

“We’ve got politicians calling each other all sorts of unflattering names. Pundits and talking heads shout at each other. The media tends to play up every hint of conflict because it makes for a sexier story – which means anyone interested in getting coverage feels compelled to make their arguments as outrageous and as incendiary as possible,” Obama said.

Trash-talking about government has only gotten worse, and Trump’s candidacy five years later makes Obama seem prescient. Trumpians endorse the isolationist tendencies FDR rued so long ago.

In his Rutgers speech, Obama said, “If the past two decades have taught us anything, it’s that the biggest challenges we face cannot be solved in isolation.”

He scorned the ideas of building a wall to keep out Mexicans and banning Muslims from entering the country as “not just a betrayal of our values” but as actions that “would alienate the very communities at home and abroad who are our most important partners in the fight against violent extremism.”

In reply, Trump typically fired a quick, personal hit. 

“`In politics, and in life, ignorance is not a virtue.’ This is a primary reason that President Obama is the worst president in U.S. history,” he tweeted.

Obama will have many chances over the next six months to use the bully pulpit to assail Trump. His final commencement address as president is June 2 at the U.S. Air Force Academy, where he likely will focus on the United States’ role in the world.

   

©2016 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Next history lesson: Reconstruction --April 23, 2015 column

By MARSHA MERCER

The 150^th anniversary of the Civil War has been a gift to many of us who failed to fully appreciate our American history classes.

The lectures, workshops and battlefield tours of the last few years have offered a second chance to learn about our nation’s most tumultuous period. Many events have been well attended. 

Tickets sold out last December to an all-day Civil War 150 Signature Conference April 18 that brought 13 historians to the University of Virginia to discuss the end of the war.

But only a handful of the hundreds of attendees in Charlottesville were close to college age. The UVa event apparently was more the demographic rule than an exception. University of North Carolina history professor W. Fitzhugh Brundage has surveyed his students for four years and not one has ever attended a Civil War sesquicentennial event.

The Civil War, which emancipated 4 million slaves at a cost of at least 620,000 dead, is not the end of our nation’s struggle -- or the end of our opportunities to learn about our past.

Reconstruction, the chapter of American history that follows the war, won’t get nearly as much attention, although it is as vitally important in understanding today’s world. Interestingly, some young people recognize Reconstruction’s significance.

“Maybe it’s regional,” Civil War historian John R. Neff of the University of Mississippi told the conference in Charlottesville, which was sponsored by the Virginia Sesquicentennial of the American Civil War Commission and is available on C-SPAN.

“But I’ve never had a Civil War class not filled to capacity. They are admittedly very much involved and very much aware that it is not just the Civil War. It is Reconstruction that is most responsible for the society in which they live,” Neff said.

When he joined the Ole Miss faculty in 1999, Neff planned his first class so students would spend a week or two on the coming of the Civil War, most of the semester on the war, and Reconstruction at the end.

“The one consistent comment I got was `More Reconstruction. More Reconstruction,’” he said. You could hear the audience’s surprise in the collective intake of breath in Old Cabell Hall.

“The war is important, sure. Lee is important. Grant is important. It is the Reconstruction era that is most responsible for the world in which they live -- and they crave that,” Neff said.

It was during Reconstruction, a period of cultural and political upheaval from roughly 1863 to 1877, that attempts were made to remake the South. Blacks gained the right to vote and began electing black legislators. Fourteen blacks were elected to the U.S. House and 600 blacks were elected to Southern state legislatures between 1869 and 1877, according to the Gilder Lehrman Institute for American History.

Former Confederates worked to limit black political participation, first by intimidation through vigilante groups including the Ku Klux Klan and then through a series of discriminatory laws.

“Preoccupied with the challenges of our own time, Americans will probably devote little attention to the sesquicentennial of Reconstruction,” historian Eric Foner wrote in an op-ed in The New York Times last month.

“This is unfortunate, for if any historical period deserves the label `relevant,’ it is Reconstruction,” he wrote. Foner is the author of the 1988 book “Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution.”

Reconstruction was defined early on by D.W. Griffith’s classic, melodramatic 1915 movie, “The Birth of a Nation,” and by Claude Bowers’ 1929 history bestseller, “The Tragic Era.”   

Today, historians see the era, despite its widespread corruption, in light of the struggle for racial and social equality that culminated in the civil rights movement of the 1960s and still continues.

The Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 officially abolished slavery. The Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 declared that everyone born or naturalized in the United States, including African Americans, were citizens, and the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870 extended the right to vote to every male citizen, regardless of race.

Foner argues that many contemporary issues first arose during Reconstruction, including citizenship and voting rights, the relative powers of the state and federal governments, and the response to terrorism.

The 150^th anniversary of the Civil War is wrapping up. Now it’s time to read and learn the lessons of Reconstruction as we shape our nation for the next 150 years.  

©2015 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Doing something right on obesity -- Aug. 8, 2013 column

By MARSHA MERCER

In 1974, the federal supplemental food program known as WIC started providing poor women and their young children whole milk and cheese, cereals and other items. Conspicuous by their absence were fruits and vegetables.

 

By the 21^st century, obesity had replaced malnutrition as a public health problem, and the Institute of Medicine recommended in 2005 upping WIC’s nutritional content by adding fruits and vegetables, whole grain cereals, reduced-fat yogurt and other lower-fat dairy products. It also recommended cutting back on the amount of full-fat dairy. The healthier changes took effect in 2009.

This week we began to see the fruit of those changes. We are gaining ground in the war on childhood obesity

.

The decline in child obesity rates is small, but the trend is encouraging. After decades of explosive growth, the obesity rate among low-income preschoolers has leveled off nationally and is starting to fall in some states, government researchers reported.

Among children 2 to 4, the obesity rate between 2008 and 2011 dropped in 18 states and the Virgin Islands, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. Florida, Georgia and Mississippi were among the states with declines.  

The obesity rate for low-income preschoolers increased in only three states -- Colorado, Pennsylvania and Tennessee. And in 20 others and Puerto Rico, the rate was unchanged. These included Alabama and North Carolina. No data was available for 10 states – including Virginia.

Washington typically gets the blame, but this is a moment when the federal government deserves praise for doing something right. Changes in WIC – formally the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children – were cited as a major factor in the fight against child obesity.

WIC helps feed more than 9 million poor pregnant and postpartum women, infants and children under 5 a year. It provides nutrition education and referrals to health care and social services and promotes breastfeeding, which may help prevent child obesity, although that’s not certain.

First lady Michelle Obama has been derided for the White House vegetable garden and her Let’s Move! Campaign, but she is leading by example and deserves a shout out. In addition, child care centers around the country, following her lead, have adopted healthier food choices and exercise programs.

The government says simple things like breakfast, playground time and water fountains can help in the childhood obesity fight. Every little bit helps because children who are overweight or obese are five times more likely than normal-weight kids to be overweight or obese as adults and to suffer related health conditions – and higher health care costs.

       

We still have a long way to go to reverse the obesity trend. One in eight preschoolers is obese, and the problem is worse among black and Hispanic children.  

“Obesity remains epidemic,” says Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the  CDC, but “the tide has begun to turn for some kids in some states. While the changes are small, for the first time in a generation they are going in the right direction."

So, what’s next?

A new study led by Dr. Mark D. DeBoer of the University of Virginia found that little ones, like their older brothers and sisters, gain weight with sugary drinks. Two- to five-year-olds who drank one sugar-sweetened soda, juice or sports drink a day were more likely to be obese than other kids their age who had such drinks less frequently.

No big surprise there, but what are the policy implications? Food stamps – called SNAP – can’t be used for tobacco, alcohol or even soap products. What if SNAP benefits couldn’t buy sugary drinks?

In 2011, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg tried to find out. He asked the federal Department of Agriculture for permission to prohibit purchases of sugary drinks with food stamps. No, the government said, Bloomberg’s request was too broad.

The makers of soft drinks and junk food argue rightly that no one item causes weight gain; it’s a matter of total calories, in and out. They’ve cut back on sugar, salt and package sizes. That’s good for health – and business.

But if we’re serious about improving the nation’s health and cutting health care costs, we should use food stamps to encourage healthy food choices. The new WIC evidence indicates it’s time to give revamping SNAP a try.   

© 2013 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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