Three over coffee.
We met friends at Piper’s Alley last night and caught the indie movie, Sugar. It was a bit slow in parts. But the story was a tender sweet one about a young pitcher from the Dominican Republic with a great curve ball. The movie is less about baseball than about an immigrant experience.
Yesterday and today were my first top down days. It is planning to rain tomorrow. But it’s a beautiful Spring day today and Ulysses and I are heading for the park.
I was in Cuba in 2002 and look forward to the day I can visit again.
In 2002 I was part of a group of educators on a state department approved trip to Cuba. We traveled from Havana to Santiago. Cuba is a lovely country and it is shameful that Americans have been deprived of the right to freely travel there. The embargo is a stupid policy that has done nothing other than bring hardship to the Cuban people. Kudos to the Obama administration for ending the Bush policy of limiting the sending of money and Cuban family travel. Now Obama should move on to full normalization of relations.
President Obama, seeking to thaw long-frozen relations with Cuba, told a gathering of Western Hemisphere leaders on Friday that “the United States seeks a new beginning with Cuba,” and that he was willing to have his administration engage the Castro government on a wide array of issues.
New School students have their suspensions suspended.
Bob Kerrey, the president of the New School in New York, has backed off his suspensions of students who occupied the building last week.
Interim Provost Tim Marshall releases statement to the New School community saying that all the students who had been suspended on April 10 have had those suspensions lifted pending disciplinary review.
To the New School Community
On Tuesday, I received a resolution from the Faculty Senate requesting that I consider lifting the suspensions on the students involved with the occupation Friday. I do not have the authority to make this decision. President Kerrey has that authority and has agreed to my leading out a process of consultation with the deans and the faculty senate. This has led to a modification of the suspensions to permit all these students to complete their academic work this semester. President Kerrey fully supports these modifications and I want to thank Linda Reimer, Senior Vice President for Student Services, for her help and cooperation.
I appreciate that recent events have provoked a variety of profound concerns for many of us within the University community. I share these concerns, and want you to know that addressing such concerns is currently my top priority.
Tim Marshall
The rampage never happened. City has to pay up.
Last year, the NY Times columnist Bob Herbert wrote a series of pieces describing the police arrest of a group of black teenagers in Brooklyn who were attending the funeral of a friend. The police claimed that the kids went on a rampage, blocking traffic and trampling on cars.
Except that none of that ever happened. The charges were quietly dropped. But the kids sued. This week the city settled.
When asked to comment on the case, Mr. Scolnick said: “My impression is that the bulk of our police officers do what they are supposed to. On the other hand, what I have been told by my clients is that their being stopped on the street merely for being on the street is about as common an occurrence in their lives as me getting up in the morning and brushing my teeth, and that’s pretty outrageous.
“I can’t imagine that 32 young white people walking down the streets of Scarsdale to pay their respects to a friend would have been arrested that way.”
