Two Philadelphia schools – the University of Pennsylvania and Drexel – are among the top universities in the country in improving the economic, cultural and social life of their urban communities, according to a new national report released today.

“Saviors of Our Cities” ranked Penn number one, along with the University of Southern California. Drexel finished 10th, Rutgers University’s Newark Campus was 23rd.

The report was released in Philadelphia this morning at the Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities conference.

“You can’t teach the liberal arts and across the street is an impoverished neighborhood. You can’t just rezone out of reality,” Dobelle said during at interview after his presentation at the Loew’s Hotel where the conference was being held. “And I think colleges and universities are beginning to understand there are enormous benefits in this, particularly in partnerships.

Schools were assessed in 11 areas, including money invested, faculty and student involvement in community service, access to students from diverse economic backgrounds, application increases and alumni giving.

They also were assessed on how well they established a “collaborative vision” with their community. Those at the top have “long-standing cooperative efforts” on a large scale, Dobelle said.

Dobelle and a colleague conducted on-site and phone interviews and reviewed data and survey responses.

“There is a degree of subjectivity in this,” acknowledged Dobelle, who noted that he has visited over 300 schools and has been researching in this area for more than 20 years.

My Dragons making a bit of news on the community service front:

Penn was the only Ivy League University in the top 25 and was recognized largely for its work through the Barbara and Edward Netter Center for Community Partnerships. The center partners with local public schools, a collaboration which has begun to be replicated on a national level.

Its service learning curriculum and neighborhood expansion also were cited.

Some Ivy League schools and others in the upper echelon try to “transcend” their communities rather than embrace them, Dobelle said.

Penn “made a decision not to transcend, but to make a difference in West Philadelphia.”

Drexel was selected for its work in rejuvenating a four-mile corridor on Lancaster Avenue and its partnership with Penn to revitalize University City. It also extended its presence in the city with the acquisition and expansion of the center city campus of Hahnemann Medical school (now Drexel Medical School.)

Its entrepreneurship and technology commercialization offices that help start-up and existing companies, faculty and inventors also helped the school garner recognition.

Dobelle described Drexel through the late President Constantine Papadakis as one of the “boldest” universities he has seen.

Also in Pennsylvania, the University of Pittsburgh was tied for second place and Carnegie Mellon placed 19th.

via Penn, Drexel, Rutgers tops for helping community | Philadelphia Inquirer | 10/12/2009.

Whoever thought it was a good idea to begin preemptively castigate Fox News for being a Republican shill news station, which it is, is not thinking straight.

Continue reading

When the county doesn’t have money for Pauper’s Burials and the citizens don’t have money to bury their dead loved ones…they stay frozen (h/t Post Bourgie)

Inside the Wayne County morgue in midtown Detroit, 67 bodies are piled up, unclaimed, in the freezing temperatures. Neither the families nor the county can afford to bury the corpses. So they stack up inside the freezer.

Albert Samuels, chief investigator for the morgue, said he has never seen anything like it during his 13 years on the job. “Some people don’t come forward even though they know the people are here,” said the former Detroit cop. “They don’t have the money.”

Lifelong Detroit residents Darrell and Cheryl Vickers understand this firsthand. On a chilly September morning they had to visit the freezer to identify the body of Darrell’s aunt, Nancy Graham — and say their goodbyes.

The couple, already financially strained, don’t have the $695 needed to cremate her. Other family members, mostly in Florida, don’t have the means to contribute, either. In fact, when Darrell’s grandmother passed recently, his father paid for the cremation on a credit card — at 21% interest.

So the Vickers had to leave their aunt behind. Body number 67.
[…]

“One way we look back at a culture is how they dispose of their dead,” said the county’s chief medical examiner, Carl Schmidt, who has been in his position for 15 years. “We see people here that society was not taking care of before they died — and society is having difficulty taking care of them after they are dead.”
via Bodies pile up in Detroit morgue; poor can’t afford burial – Oct. 1, 2009 .

What is this a f*cking Dickens’ novel? Damn.

In the New York Times, Paul Krugman brings up another reason we may fall behind as a power in the free world: increasingly deteriorating quality of public education. It is an excellent Op-Ed and points to Obama’s next big domestic challenge, whether or not anything gets done with health care.

Shorter NC Governor: Tax Breaks didn’t work to keep business in NC, but tax breaks are the only thing that works to keep business in NC.

Gov. Beverly Perdue says North Carolina has no choice but to keep offering incentives packages to attract out-of-state companies even with the closing of the Dell computer plant.

But Perdue told reporters Thursday she’s made plain to Dell the state expects back every “red cent” it’s owed in tax breaks and other benefits because it didn’t meet job and investment performance standards.

Dell announced Wednesday its Forsyth County computer desktop plant would close by the end of January, putting 900 people out of work.

The Legislature and local governments had offered Texas-based Dell a deal worth up to $318 million in tax breaks and grants.

Perdue said she would prefer that states stop bidding wars but that tax breaks are necessary to bring in new jobs.

via Perdue says Dell will pay back every “red cent” – BusinessWeek.

What’s the penalty for Dell leaving without holding up its end of the agreement? Maybe a long term tax rebate may be better next time? In any case, good luck getting that money back from Dell.

The Obama Administration, Secretary of Defense Gates, Adm. Jones and Gen. Petraeus cannot be pleased with the General who is in charge of the “war of necessity” kneecapping the executive branches policy deliberations from lecterns in London. Senator Jim Webb puts the situation into the simple context of following the chain of command.


Eugene Robinson is on the same page as Webb:

McChrystal’s view — that a strategy employing fewer resources, in pursuit of more limited goals, would be “short-sighted” — is something the White House needs to hear. He is, after all, the man Obama put in charge in Afghanistan, and it would be absurd not to take his analysis of the situation into account. But McChrystal is out of line in trying to sell his position publicly, as he did last week in a speech in London.

via Eugene Robinson – Gen. McChrystal’s War of Words – washingtonpost.com.