On a recent Monday in Hyattsville, as bleary-eyed drivers made their morning commute, Allan Lichtman was already breaking into a sweat trying to get their attention.

In pinstriped pants, a white-and-blue striped shirt and red tie, he stood on a small sliver of concrete median at a hot and humid intersection. With every passing car, he waved his hands and peered into the windows with a smile, as if to say: C'mon, give me something -- a wave, a honk, anything.

This is what you have to do when you are going against the odds, he explained after two hours of arm-numbing waving. This is what you do when you are lesser known, out-moneyed and looking for a fighting chance.

This is how you run the race of an underdog.

For more than 30 years, Lichtman, 59, has studied politics -- as a history professor at American University, an analyst for CNN and an author. Known in some circles for his guides to predicting presidential elections, he has spent his career observing politics from the outside. Now, as one of 18 Democratic candidates for Maryland's open U.S. Senate seat, he is looking for a way in.

It's hard to ignore a man standing at Route 1 and East West Highway at 7 a.m., waving directly at you and pointing to a half-dozen volunteers -- each holding signs with his name -- at all four corners of the intersection.

About half of the drivers responded with some kind of acknowledgment -- a honk or wave back. Some ignored him. One trucker threw an empty bottle at him.

This was about par for the course.

For weeks, Lichtman has owned the intersections of Montgomery and Prince George's counties. It is part of the guerrilla, grass-roots style of his campaign. He has not come close to matching the millions in campaign funds of U.S. Rep. Benjamin L. Cardin (D). Neither does he have the name recognition of Cardin or former NAACP president Kweisi Mfume. He trails both in polls.

So he spends most days passing out fliers during rush hour in Metro stations, hand-waving at intersections and knocking on doors. The recent Hyattsville offensive was the starting point of a 16-hour day that would take him from Bethesda to Baltimore, with few breaks in between....

Louise Simone Bennett-Coverly, a Jamaican poet and folklorist who became the voice of the island’s culture at home and abroad, died on Wednesday in Toronto. She was 86.

Her death was announced by the Jamaica Information Service, which did not give a cause. She was hospitalized in Toronto after collapsing late Tuesday night.

A social commentator who liberally used Jamaican patois and made famous the Jamaican catchphrase “Walk good,” she brought an overwhelming talent to the stage, radio, television and movies. She also was a presenter on the BBC’s Caribbean Service.

Louise Bennett, known to her fans worldwide as Miss Lou, was born on North Street in Kingston on Sept. 7, 1919, the only child of Cornelius Bennett, a baker, and Kerene Robinson, a dressmaker. Her father died when she was young, and she was reared mostly by her mother.

Ms. Bennett was educated in Jamaican schools, and though she was fond of literature, she once described herself as “an average student.”

The Steering Committee of Historians Against the War deplores the role of the U.S. government in widening the circle of violence in the Middle East. We condemn the Bush Administration’s senseless quest for military solutions to the region’s problems exemplified by the invasion of Iraq, diplomatic and material aid for the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and threats of military action against Iran. We call upon Congress and the Bush Administration to support an immediate cease-fire in Lebanon/Israel/Gaza, turn away from militarism, and embrace genuine international efforts aimed at resolving underlying political conflicts.

Question: What’s the difference between the Arab League and the academic Left that despises Israel? Answer: Only the Arab League is willing to condemn Hezbollah.

The surreal politics of this war finds Saudi Arabia attributing “full responsibility” to Hezbollah and calling on the terrorists to “alone shoulder the crisis they have created;” it finds Kuwaiti journalists lauding the “operations of Israel in Gaza and Lebanon [that] are in the interest of people of Arab countries and the international community,” even as hundreds of American professors rush to denounce Israel for firing back at genocidal killers sworn to her destruction.


More than 1,000 such professors have signed a petition that is currently circulating on American college campuses. Written in the name of “academics who condemn Israel's aggression against Lebanon and Gaza,” the petition waxes indignant about Israel’s alleged crimes, including a “brutal bombing and invasion of Gaza,” and “acts of Israeli state terrorism” in Lebanon.

More noteworthy, however, is what the petition does not say. Not only is there no mention of Hamas or Hezbollah, but reading the petition one might conclude that terrorism plays no part in the current conflagration. Instead the petition calls for the immediate release of jailed terrorists, euphemistically described as “Palestinian and Lebanese political prisoners,” and effectively erases the role of anti-Israel terrorism in precipitating the current by asserting that “Israel's destructive and expansionist policies are primarily to blame for the seemingly perpetual ‘Middle East crisis.’”...

Dr. El Guindi, an Egyptian-born professor of anthropology at the University of Southern California, has alleged that “Israel is engaged in practices muted by the media: massacres and genocides, trafficking of human organs, genetic experimentations, inhumane torture.” Hamas’s most zealous propagandists could not improve on the inflammatory rhetoric. And much like them, El Guindi has never offered any evidence for the charges, relying on innuendo and conspiracy theories to make her case. Failing that, she considers terrorism the answer to the Palestinians’ woes. In contrast to the petition, which at least condemns the killing of civilians in Israel even if it absolves the actual murderers, El Guindi has embraced anti-Israel terrorism as an acceptable form of “resistance.” Of Palestinian terrorism, she has written that “[i]t is a universal and legitimate right,” one appropriate to “colonized people.”

Similar sentiments frequently issue from Middle Eastern Studies departments. In keeping with tradition, the most notorious of these departments, Columbia’s department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures (MEALAC), boasts no fewer than four representatives in the recent petition. Most prominent among them is Hamid Dabashi, the Columbia professor of Islamic studies who despises not only Israel, which he views a “ghastly state of racism and apartheid,” but also Israeli Jews, to whom Dabashi ascribes a “vulgarity of character that is bone-deep.” His crude bigotry notwithstanding, Dabashi has his followers at Columbia, among them the Iranian-born Golbarg Bashi, a visiting scholar and a protégé of Dabashi specializing in “anti-colonial theory” and “black and Third World feminisms,” whose name likewise appears on the petition. Other MEALAC faculty who endorsed the petition are Suhail Shadoud, a Syrian professor of Arabic language, and Jeffrey Sacks a lecturer in Arabic who in recent years emerged as a leading advocate of divestment from Israel at Columbia. MEALAC’s reputation as a hotbed of political extremism is plainly well deserved.

Although the petition attracted the support of many disgruntled Arab and Muslim academics--such as New York University professor Sinan Antoon, an Iraqi exile who has written that “America tattoos its imperial insignia into the bodies of Iraqi children”--it also underscored the fact that some of Israel’s most unscrupulous antagonists are themselves of Jewish ancestry, including three of the most prominent signatories: MIT’s Noam Chomsky; Norman Finkelstein of DePaul; and Joel Beinin of Stanford University.

Why these professors would sign on to a petition assailing the “psychic terror of the Israeli military campaigns in Gaza and Lebanon” while maintaining a studied silence on the actual terror that was its cause is readily explained. Chomsky is a longtime defender of Hezbollah, a sympathy born of a common hatred for the United States and Israel and demonstrated most recently when the aging radical traveled to Lebanon to pledge his support for the Shiite terrorist militia and to defend its refusal to disarm and, implicitly, to carry on its campaign of targeting Israeli civilians. Along with Chomsky, Beinin has urged that Hezbollah be regarded as an “activist” movement rather than as a terrorist group. Finkelstein, for his part, has little interest in the activities of terrorist organizations, preferring to focus on what he calls the far more egregious “state terrorism” supposedly practiced by Israel.

Behind the obscene double standard set forth in the petition, wherein Israel is attacked for defending its right to exist and terrorists escape all blame, is a conviction, all too common among the academic Left, that Israel’s very existence is both regrettable and undesirable. Thus Judith Butler, another Jewish academic who signed the petition, has declared against Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, writing that “political sovereignty based on religious status is misguided, undemocratic, and discriminatory, in principle and in practice.” (That this is precisely the end sought by Hamas, Hezbollah and their terrorist brethren is a contradiction conveniently ignored by Butler.) Another signatory, Marguerite Rosenthal, a professor of Social work at Salem State College, is an activist with a radical group calling itself Jewish Women for Justice in Israel Palestine, which blames Israel for the 60-year war waged against it. Sighing over the “desperate suicide attacks by Palestinians,” the group claims that “[f]ifty years of conflict have increasingly compromised the ideals that contributed to Israel's founding.” In the eyes of Rosenthal and countless others who committed their signatures to the petition, Israel alone can do wrong.

Of the more than twenty professors contacted for comment about the petition by FrontPageMag.com only one, NYU’s Sinan Antoon, responded. But rather than explain why he supported a petition demanding that Israel cease defending itself, while urging no such restraint on terrorist groups seeking its annihilation, Antoon attacked FrontPageMag.com contributor Daniel Pipes, whom he called “fascist and racist,” saying that the magazine‘s association with Pipes made it “fruitless to engage.”...

There has been a controversy, of sorts, over whether or not the standard edition of Upton Sinclair's muckraking classic The Jungle is the product of changes imposed on the author by his publisher. That is the claim of See Sharp Press, which publishes what it dubs The Jungle: The Uncensored Original Edition, based on the serialized version of the novel as it first ran in 1905. The book offered by See Sharp is somewhat longer than the text issued by a commercial press the next year. But more, it is -- so claims the publisher --"the version of The Jungle that Sinclair very badly wanted to be the standard edition."

When I say that there"has been a controversy" over this claim, the stress should be on has -- because the debate is now over.

As one of eight American universities offering a PhD in Women's Studies, and one of two in North America offering a PhD in Islamic Studies, UCLA is a logical place to seek fresh contributors for a journal focusing on women in a very broadly defined Middle East. Previously edited by University of Michigan Middle East studies director Marcia C. Inhorn, the two-year-old Journal of Middle East Women's Studies (JMEWS), published three times a year, is moving to a new editorial shop in the UCLA Center for the Study of Women. The first issue under the leadership of co-editors Nancy E. Gallagher, a UC–Santa Barbara historian who directs Middle Eastern studies on that campus, and Sondra Hale, a professor of women’s studies and anthropology at UCLA, will appear early in 2007. Diane James of the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies will serve as senior editor.

CNES hosted a conference July 10–11, 2006, to mark the arrival of JMEWS on campus, with help from CSW and UCSB and with Hale and Gallagher as organizers of panels. Published by Indiana University Press, JMEWS is the official publication of the international Association of Middle East Women’s Studies (AMEWS). The journal has secured four years of funding from the UCLA Office of the Dean of Social Sciences.

With the debut of his Web log, Informed Comment, four years ago, Juan R.I. Cole became arguably the most visible commentator writing on the Middle East today. A professor of modern Middle East and South Asian history at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and president of the Middle East Studies Association, Cole has voiced strong opposition to the war in Iraq and to the treatment of the Palestinians, garnering him plaudits from the left and condemnation from supporters of Israel and President Bush's foreign policy. In the words of a colleague, Cole has done something no other scholar of the region has done since Bernard Lewis: "become a household word."

In the spring, Informed Comment took center stage in another arena — Cole's own career. After two departments recommended him for a tenured position at Yale University, a senior committee decided last month not to offer him the job after all. Although Yale has declined to explain its decision, numerous accounts in the news media have speculated that Cole's appointment was shot down because of views he expressed on his blog. We asked seven academic bloggers to weigh in on Cole's case and on the hazards of academic blogging.

The Lessons of Juan Cole, by Siva Vaidhyanathan
The Politics of Academic Appointments, by Glenn Reynolds
The Trouble With Blogs, by Daniel W. Drezner
Exposed in the Blogosphere, by Ann Althouse
The Invisible College, by J. Bradford DeLong
The Attention Blogs Bring, by Michael Bérubé
The Controversy That Wasn't, by Erin O'Connor
Juan R.I. Cole Responds

Excerpts:

GLENN REYNOLDS
[Glenn Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee. His blog can be found at http://instapundit.com]

Bloggers Daniel W. Drezner and Jacob T. Levy were recently denied tenure at the University of Chicago, and it was widely thought to be because of their blogging. Now Juan Cole has lost out on an appointment at Yale, and it's widely thought to be because of his blogging. I'm not a regular reader of Cole's blog, and while I think his hostility to the Bush administration is excessive, that hardly seems grounds for not hiring someone, or the universities would be largely empty of faculty members.

Does Internet fame necessarily spell academic doom? Given that hiring and tenure decisions in higher education are usually made by committees, and that strong public opinions voiced on any subject will probably offend at least one member of a committee, the results are likely to be a negative. Though the academy gives lip service to academic freedom, it's quite clear that a candidate's expressed views, and politics generally, are often important factors in hiring or tenure decisions.

Is that a bad thing? It depends. Jacques Pluss was fired from Fairleigh Dickinson University after it became known that he was a member of the National Socialist Movement. (He claimed his neo-Nazi affiliation was for research.) Not many people seem to have been upset by his case. One doubts that an admitted member of the Ku Klux Klan would do well, either. On the other hand, far less controversial beliefs, including opposition to affirmative action or the belief that senior faculty members should teach heavier loads than colleagues who produce more scholarship, might well stand in the way of hiring or tenure at many institutions. Expressing such ideas on a blog merely ensures that they are Google-searchable if anyone bothers to check.

My own feeling is that blogging is like most hobbies — something that should be peripheral to hiring and tenure decisions. (Has anyone been denied tenure because of a preference for wet over dry flies? Probably somewhere, sometime, but it's not common.) When blogs focus on topics at the core of scholars' expertise, of course, they're likely to play a bigger role in evaluating academic fitness, fairly or unfairly. Obviously, fraud or plagiarism on a blog is still fraud or plagiarism. But smaller matters probably shouldn't play much of a role. When blogged comments produce prejudice or bias on the part of hirers, well, I don't like that,but so long as hiring decisions are subjective, that sort of thing is unavoidable. We can hope, however, that faculty members will be aware of their own prejudices and open-minded enough to rise above them. Sometimes those hopes will be fulfilled.

ERIN O'CONNOR
[Erin O'Connor is an associate professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. Her blog can be found at http://erinoconnor.org.]

The Juan Cole controversy struck me as essentially uncontroversial: Cole is free to write what he wants on his Web log, Informed Comment; Cole's readers are free to criticize his writing and to criticize Yale for considering hiring him; Yale is free not to hire Cole. In the absence of evidence that Yale capitulated to a political campaign to sink Cole's appointment, there seemed nothing else to say. But plenty has been said nonetheless, much of it along the lines of the comment by Zachary Lockman, president-elect of the Middle East Studies Association, that the opposition to Cole's appointment was "an assault on academic freedom and the academic enterprise."

Assuming that pro-Israel ideologues badgered Yale into rejecting Cole, Cole's defenders have proceeded according to two flawed assumptions: that blogs written by academic job candidates should be off limits to hiring committees, and that public debate about academic personnel processes threatens academic freedom. Both assumptions betray confusion about what academic freedom is — and what it is not.

Had the University of Michigan — where Cole is a full professor — sought to suppress his blog, it would have violated his academic freedom. But academic freedom is not freedom from criticism, nor is it freedom from judgment. And deciding whether to hire an academic is very different from continuing to employ one. Hiring is evaluative; it requires judicious criticism and definitive judgment.

Yale's search committee, according to one member quoted in the Yale Daily News, only considered Cole's scholarly writing. But what if Informed Comment did inform Yale's decision? There still would be no assault on academic freedom. Cole's Internet status as Middle East expert emanates from his academic position as Middle East expert; as a public intellectual, he is better known for his blog than his scholarship. In deciding whether to invest in the entire intellectual package Cole represents, Yale could legitimately have considered Informed Comment.

The real issue here is how little faith Cole's defenders have in academic procedure. They ascribe enormous power to outside critics, who, they believe, can sink appointments with columns and letters. They also ascribe enormous spinelessness to administrators, who, they imply, cannot maintain integrity when debate surrounds controversial candidates. The undocumented claim that a "neocon campaign" scuppered Cole's appointment masks an unacknowledged condemnation of academic ethics. It makes no sense to blame Cole's critics for Yale's — entirely hypothetical — failure....

REPONSE BY JUAN COLE

The question is whether Web-log commentary helps or damages an academic's career. It is a shameful question. Intellectuals should not be worrying about "careers," the tenured among us least of all. Despite the First Amendment, which only really protects one from the government, most Americans who speak out can face sanctions from other institutions in society. Journalists are fired all the time for taking the wrong political stance. That is why most bloggers employed in the private sector are anonymous or started out trying to be so.

Academics cannot easily be handed a pink slip, but they can be punished in other ways. The issues facing academics who dissent in public and in clear prose are the same today as they have always been. Maintaining a Web log now is no different in principle from writing a newsletter or publishing sharp opinion in popular magazines in the 1950s.

The difference today is that, because of Internet neutrality (which may not be long with us), an academic's voice is potentially as loud as or louder than those of corporate-backed pundits. Occasionally, my Web log has generated as many as 250,000 unique hits and over a million page views per month. Entries have also been sent in e-mail messages in numbers that cannot be traced. My Web log is, for the moment, certainly a mass medium.

The ability to speak directly and immediately to the public on matters of one's expertise, and to bring to bear all one's skills to affect the public debate, is new and breathtaking. I have had some success in explaining the threat of Al Qaeda and suggesting how it should be combated, and have addressed U.S. counter-terrorism officials on numerous occasions on those matters. And then there is Iraq, about which I was one of the few U.S. historians to have written professionally before the 2003 war. In the summer of 2003, when the general mood of the administration, the news media, and the public was unrelievedly celebratory, I warned that a guerrilla war was building and that powerful sectarian forces such as the movement of Moktada al-Sadr were a gathering threat. I gained a hearing not only with broad segments of the public but also at the highest levels of the U.S. government....

By now, Waskar Ari should be preparing his lectures for the fall semester at the University of Nebraska, a year's professorship already under his belt. The Bolivian historian and political scientist, an Aymara Indian with a doctorate in history from Georgetown University, was offered a tenure-track post in Lincoln teaching Latin American history more than a year ago.

But Ari has yet to obtain a U.S. visa. He hears rumors that he has been accused of "terrorist" connections, although no one has told him anything directly. "It's all very secretive," Ari, 44, wearing the modified bowler hat favored by traditional Indians, said during a recent interview at an upscale cafe in this Andean capital. "We really don't know what's behind this." Representatives of the U.S. Embassy here declined to comment on the matter, citing privacy concerns.

But Ari's lawyer speculated that his client had been linked, unfairly, to the U.S.-bashing indigenous movement associated with Evo Morales, Bolivia's first Indian president and a critic of Washington.

Ari's case has become somewhat of a cause celebre in U.S. academic circles, prompting a letter-writing campaign to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and condemnations of the visa delay as an assault on scholarly freedom.

Ari's lawyer, Michael Maggio, says his client's visa has been held up -- and his student visa canceled -- on hazy national security grounds, an increasingly common occurrence since the Sept. 11 attacks. Ari is among hundreds, perhaps thousands, of foreign intellectuals, businesspeople and others languishing in visa limbo, apparently blacklisted and left to wonder what has triggered the suspicion, rights activists say.

"Waskar is one of many people caught in this web," said Maggio, a Washington attorney who is taking Ari's case on a pro bono basis. "What I've told Waskar, and his many supporters here at Georgetown and in Nebraska, is that you've got to hunker down for a long and difficult struggle."

One U.S. official here, who declined to be named, acknowledged that such reviews could take a long time, but declined to be more specific when pressed about Ari's case.

Although Ari and President Morales share an Aymara ancestry, Ari's political views appear more moderate than those of Bolivia's outspoken chief executive. Ari says he has not joined the president's political party and has openly questioned some of his policies, even as he acknowledges that Morales has been a vivid symbol for the Americas' indigenous masses.

Specifically, Ari has criticized Morales for allying himself with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Cuba's Fidel Castro, the most high-profile U.S. adversaries in the hemisphere. Ari, who openly admires the freedoms and academic opportunities available in the United States, has urged closer U.S.Bolivian ties.

"I would like President Morales ... [to] work more for better relationships with other democracies of the world, including the largest democracy of the world," he said in a recent e-mail.

In Bolivia, Ari often has been accused of being too close to the United States, where he studied for a decade and has many friends. His frequent trips north made him suspect in certain indigenous circles in his homeland, where there is deep mistrust of Washington.

"Don't become white," he recalls a well-known indigenous leader warning him once. Ari has sometimes heard the epithet "Gringo Aymara."

But his very independence has made him a popular choice as an analyst for Bolivian news agencies and Western media outlets eager for an English-speaking expert to comment on his nation's turbulent politics. The U.S. Embassy here even invited Ari this year to sit on a panel comparing populist movements in the United States and Bolivia.

The University of Nebraska, which filed the "expedited" petition for Ari's work visa more than a year ago, continues to stand behind him and has canceled classes and found fill-in teachers.

"We remain committed to his appointment," said Patrick Jones, an assistant professor. "We have decided to leave the post open for him indefinitely and continue to hope that he will be able to join us in the near future."

Ari says he accepted the position at Nebraska, which has a strong ethnic studies department, over four other job offers in the United States. In the meantime, he is teaching at his alma mater here, the Greater University of San Andres, Bolivia's largest public institution.

The visa delay has forced Ari to spend more time in his homeland than he has in a number of years. He says he has learned a great deal, even though the teaching workload is three times larger -- for about one-fifth of the pay -- than it would be at Nebraska, leaving little time for research.

"Life continues," Ari said. "In Bolivia I am a public intellectual. I'm always participating in discussions, giving interviews.... I am gaining an audience. People have an interest in what I'm saying. So, in a sense, I am living in a good moment."

The Aymara scholar still holds out hope that he will be able to move to Nebraska and take up his professorship, intellectually fortified by his forced exile in his homeland. He exhibits no hard feelings and continues to admire much about the United States.

"I feel bad that these things have happened, that someone like me can fall into such a sad situation," Ari said. "But I recognize these things really aren't against me, but are part of a more complex process that is happening in the United States....

"I have hope that one of these days, the situation will change, and people will realize this has all been an injustice."

The PBS documentarian Ken Burns has been working for six years on “The War,” a soldier’s-eye view of World War II, and those who have seen parts of the 14-plus hours say they are replete with salty language appropriate to discussions of the horrors of war.

What viewers will see and hear when the series is broadcast in September 2007 is an open question.

A new Public Broadcasting Service policy that went into effect immediately when it was issued on May 31 requires producers whose shows are broadcast before 10 p.m. to adhere to tough editing requirements when it comes to coarse language, to comply with tightened rulings on broadcast indecency by the Federal Communications Commission.

Most notably, PBS’s deputy counsel, Paul Greco, wrote in a memo to stations, it is no longer enough simply to bleep out offensive words audibly when the camera shows a full view of the speaker’s mouth. From now on, the on-camera speaker’s mouth must also be obscured by a digital masking process, a solution that PBS producers have called cartoonish and clumsy.

In addition, profanities expressed in compound words must be audibly bleeped in their entirety so that viewers cannot decipher the words. In the past, PBS required producers to bleep only the offensive part of the compound word.

Since May 31, bits of dialogue have been digitally obscured about 100 times in four PBS programs, most often in two episodes of the music documentary “The Blues.”

Mr. Burns, in an interview, said he was not worried that his work, which he called a “very experiential take on the Second World War,” would be affected by the policy, noting that while the series includes some “very graphic violence,” there are just two profanities, read off camera.

But several other senior public broadcasting executives said “The War” was likely to become a test case for PBS and the F.C.C....

As a fourth generation Nebraskan, Scott Kleeb has deep roots in three great traditions of this state: agriculture, patriotism and public service.

Scott's great-grandfather, Albert Kleeb, was born in a dug-out outside of Broken Bow, Nebraska, before the turn of the century. He once hiked three days to earn 20 ewes and a dollar in exchange for his farm goods. This windfall was to be the origins of the Kleeb family farm and ranch, which stood outside of Broken Bow for nearly 100 years. It was here, listening to his grandfather's homesteading stories - tales of neighbors coming together to build a new home, or to dig a well - that Scott came to cherish the values and traditions of Nebraska. And it was here, as he saw the impact of government investments in rural electrification, highways and agricultural infrastructure, that he learned how government can help change lives for the better....

At college, Scott wasted no time getting back to his Plain State roots. He worked as a ranch hand in Eastern Colorado and Nebraska during summers and vacations, and even became a bull-rider on the rodeo team. During this period, Scott watched with growing alarm as the consolidation of farms and ranches left large sections of countryside depopulated. He saw the vibrant rural communities he remembered from his youth lose businesses, families and - in some cases - their very identity. By now, his family's ranch had itself been sold and consolidated into a larger operation. But some members of the Kleeb family continued their involvement in ranching as part of the McGinn Ranch Company, and Scott became an active part of that ranch's operations. (Scott on Agriculture)

Determined to help reverse rural decline, Scott set his sights on a career in public service. He became president of the local chapter of College Democrats and served as a lead campus coordinator for Gene Nichol's campaign for the United States Senate. After graduating summa cum laude, he applied and was accepted to graduate school at Yale University—a school long recognized for its pioneering research in the issues of the American West. Recognizing that the health of Plain State agriculture today is tightly linked to political and economic developments around the world, Scott pursued a Masters Degree in International Relations. For his doctoral dissertation, he focused on the history of American cattle ranching. Most of his research was done from the back of a pick-up, as he traveled through every state west of the Mississippi, listening to the stories of farmers, ranchers and small-town workers. (Scott on Working Families)...

NEWS RELEASE 7-1-06

On the strength of your contributions, a Democratic candidate has jumped to a strong early lead in campaign funds for the first time in the history of 3rd district congressional races.
 
The Omaha World Herald reported Friday that Scott Kleeb has an estimated $277,069.22 cash-on-hand, compared to an estimated $105,000 cash-on-hand for his Republican opponent Adrian Smith. They reported that more than $80,000 of Smith's total cash-on-hand was raised through his Grand Island Fundraiser with Vice President Dick Cheney.
 
“We’re very happy with this result, which represents the grassroots contributions of Democrats, Independents and Republicans alike,” Kleeb for Congress Campaign Manager Ryan Hughes said Monday. “I think people recognize that Scott Kleeb offers an independent and articulate voice in support of rural economies, alternative energies, local control of schools, and improved access to health care, among other important issues.”
 
“In talking to 3rd district voters, one thing you hear again and again is the need for an independent voice in Congress,” Hughes added. “A lot of people have been turned off by Adrian Smith’s inexplicable decision to take $400,000 from the Club for Growth special interest group -- a group that wants to abolish the department of agriculture.”
 
But make no mistake, the Club for Growth knows they have nothing to gain from an independent 3rd district congressman. They can triple Adrian Smith's campaign war chest overnight and think nothing of it. And that is surely what they will do when they learn that Adrian is trailing Scott nearly 3-to-1.
To make a donation and stand up to D.C. special interests, go to: http://www.scottkleeb.com
"Can You Repeat That Please?"
 
Our phones have been ringing incessantly as news media around the state -- most of whom expected to find Adrian Smith well ahead at this juncture -- race to cover this unexpected development. On Monday, Scott gave interviews to a dozen radio stations and two TV stations. Tomorrow morning, Scott will give a live interview on the program Midwest Opinions starting at 7:35 Mountain Time (the interview will be simulcast in the Ogallala area on AM930 and Hot Country 106.5FM).
 
Scott has emphasized that you don't get where we are today by appealing to narrow interests.
 
"Nebraskans are looking for an independent voice in Congress," he said Monday. "They want someone who can speak for Democrats, Republicans and Independents alike. They want someone who will take a good idea and run with it -- no matter where it comes from. And they want someone who will stand up to special interests, no matter how powerful they may be.
 
"That's what it means to represent the 3rd district of Nebraska."
 
Now is not the time to rest! We are in control of this race. Let's stay in control. Please consider a contribution of $20, $50 or $100 today.
 
To make a donation, go to: http://www.scottkleeb.com
 
Fueling the Future
 
Scott completed his "Energy Independence Tour" with a stop at the Sutherland Ethanol Plant and a tour, yesterday, of the construction site for a new ethanol plant in Ord. The Sutherland plant is one of the oldest in the district, but plant manager Troy Gavin spoke with pride about how he and his team have transformed it to one of the most efficient plants around. Standing next to Gavin was plant engineer Trampas Osborne. "Everybody who works here has got a little heart, blood and soul in this place," Osborne said.
 
The Kleeb Campaign wants to do its part to support the ethanol industry. We would like to lease an E85 campaign vehicle to transport out campaign team and volunteers around the district from now until November. But we need your help. To lease the vehicle and set aside money for fuel, we have set a target of raising $8,500 by July 25th.  Help us fuel the future of this campaign and the future of the 3rd district. Contribute what you can today.

[The writer is a former executive editor in the textbook divisions of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich and Holt, Rinehart & Winston.]

To the Editor:

Re “Schoolbooks Are Given F’s in Originality” (front page, July 13):

Similarities between two history texts are not, as Wendy Spiegel, a spokeswoman for the textbook publisher Pearson Prentice Hall, maintains, “absolutely an aberration” — as a more extensive examination of texts in any field would verify.

Prof. Allan Winkler, a co-author of “America: Pathways to the Present,” says the words in question are not his, and surely they aren’t; they are the words — and probably many of the ideas — of the generic “contributors” who wrote the book and who would have slanted it to meet the market demands and so made it a success.

But it is the professor’s name that appears on the cover; it is the professor who is widely regarded as the author. The same author who accepted responsibility for the words that brought him royalty checks cannot now absolve himself of responsibility for the words that now bring him embarrassment.

Alice M. Sohn
Pensacola, Fla., July 14, 2006

It was only a year ago that I told my story in these pages, describing how I had returned to graduate school at age 55 to finish my Ph.D. in history and how, as a result, I had earned the sobriquet from my students at Brown University as the Oldest Living TA.

After spending 30 years as a public historian for various historical agencies and ultimately for the U.S. Department of State, I decided to go back to Brown to finish what I had started so long ago. But when my essay was published last year, I was having trouble finding a teaching job. I had gone on a few interviews, but after applying for positions at more than 50 departments, I had received no word at all from most of them.

Disappointed and depressed, I wondered if age discrimination might be a factor. But I had no real evidence of that. I was just thinking out loud -- in this case, in print. In my column, I cited a 1996 study from the American Historical Association that found age discrimination all too rife in history-department searches.

My essay seemed to hit a nerve. I heard from many other older graduate students and Ph.D.'s, most of them in the humanities, who thanked me for my comments and revealed that they were in the same boat, unable to find work in academe.

But then I started to feel a little guilty. For no sooner had my essay appeared in The Chronicle than I received a job offer. It was for a temporary post at the University of Maine at Farmington. Several people at the university -- including the president, the provost, and the head of the search committee looking to fill a one-year appointment in history there -- saw my essay at precisely the same time that I applied for the position.

The president, Theodora Kalikow, later told me that she had thought after reading my column, "He's the kind of person we should get up here." She was amazed when the search committee selected me to fill the temporary position, and I must confess that she welcomed me with an enthusiasm that made it seem as if we were old friends....