General News

This is a really interesting study of the community of Kalamazoo, Michigan, where a group of anonymous donors back in 2005 announced that they would pay full college tuition for every Kalamazoo public school student who graduated from the district’s high schools, at any of the state’s public colleges and universities. “The Promise,” as it called locally, has had a range of effects on the local community.

From the very beginning…[Superintendent Janice Brown], the only person in town who communicates directly with the Promise donors, has suggested that the program is supposed to do more than just pay college bills. It’s primarily meant to boost Kalamazoo’s economy. The few restrictions — among them, children must reside in the Kalamazoo public-school district and graduate from one of its high schools — seem designed to encourage families to stay and work in the region for a long time. The program tests how place-based development might work when education is the first investment.

“Other communities invest in things like arenas or offer tax incentives for businesses or revitalize their waterfronts,” says Michelle Miller-Adams, a political scientist at the W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, which is located in the city.

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Here’s a thoughtful essay by Texas Chicana anthropologist and journalist Cecilia Ballí, reflecting on the trajectory of San Antonio mayor’s Julian Castro’s political career.  Julian and his brother Joaquin are the twin sons of single mother and longtime Chicana community organizer Maria del Rosario “Rosie” Castro.  The Chicana por mi Raza Project writes that Rosie “served as president of the Bexar County Young Democrats and as vice-president of the women’s division of the Young Democrats at the state level. She ran for city council in 1971 and finished second out of four candidates on the Committee for Barrio Betterment slate. She earned a MA in environmental management from the University of Texas-San Antonio. Castro was also instrumental in making San Antonio shift from electing City Council members at-large to creating districts.”

But about Rosie’s boys, Cecilia Ballí writes:

In 1995, as a freshman at Stanford, I watched two Texans two years above me land the highest number of votes in the race for student senate. They were identical twins, no less, a fact that made for a catchy story in the school paper (“Twin Senators Not Two Close for Comfort”) and a portrait of the smiling, newly minted politicians clad in khakis and polo-style shirts, sitting back-to-back on the floor of the Stanford Quad. It seemed Julián and Joaquin Castro had grasped a critical lesson my sister and I had learned running for our junior high student council: Being a twin pays in politics because it doubles your publicity and votes—and people love twins.

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The Russian feminist punk band has been in the news lately; three twentysomething young women rockers were sentenced to two years in prison for “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred”– that is,  their guerrilla rock performance on the altar of a Russian Orthodox Church. For less than a minute, the women danced, singing “Our Lady, Chase Putin Out!” and crossing themselves until they were apprehended by security guards.   What you probably haven’t read is their own insightful analysis of what their acts meant in Russian’s current political context.  From their closing statements in their Moscow court trial:

Yekaterina Samutsevich charged that Putin has been “exploit[ing] the Orthodox religion and its aesthetic…” by making use of

the aesthetic of the Orthodox religion, which is historically associated with the heyday of Imperial Russia, where power came not from earthly manifestations such as democratic elections and civil society, but from God Himself….

Our sudden musical appearance in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior with the song “Mother of God, Drive Putin Out” violated the integrity of the media image that the authorities had spent such a long time generating and maintaining, and revealed its falsity. In our performance we dared, without the Patriarch’s blessing, to unite the visual imagery of Orthodox culture with that of protest culture, thus suggesting that Orthodox culture belongs not only to the Russian Orthodox Church, the Patriarch, and Putin, but that it could also ally itself with civic rebellion and the spirit of protest in Russia.

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