Unplugged and Loving It
Batya Friedman, a computer science professor and author of a book on the implications of computer technology, nevertheless finds good reasons to occasionally drop out of the cyberspace stream. An article in The New York Times described how, each summer for several weeks, Friedman neither sends nor receives e-mail. It's a way of reclaiming one's private life, she said.
"It's an opportunity for focus, and that's harder to achieve when you are so accessible," said Friedman, who spends her summers with her husband, Peter Kahn Jr. (education), and their daughter, Zoe, at a home without electricity in northern California.
"In the summer, each communication I get I do really read, while the rest of the year I'm overwhelmed by the amount of e-mail messages I get," she said.
In the same article, professor of philosophy and former vice president for academic affairs Robert McArthur told the paper that e-mail's ubiquity may have reached a backlash stage.
Silicon Valley in Maine?
Despite impressive growth in technology jobs in Maine, the computer industry won't provide a panacea for the state's economy, Associate Professor of Economics Michael Donihue '79 cautioned in a Boston Globe article.
"To try to say that we are going to develop a Silicon Valley in Bangor or Caribou, that just isn't going to happen," Donihue said.
Even so, Donihue believes, the technology sector does hold some promise for Maine. "A few software manufacturing firms would make a huge difference" in the state's recovery from the loss of high-paying jobs at paper mills in the past decade, he told the Globe in an article written by Brian MacQuarrie '74.
Speech Analysis
Robert Weisbrot commented for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune on a landmark 1948 civil rights speech by Hubert Humphrey, then mayor of Minneapolis and later a U.S. senator and vice president.
Weisbrot, a professor of history and author of Freedom Bound, a history of the civil rights movement, said Humphrey's speech "was important in dramatizing the moral struggle and in linking black rights with the highest traditions of the country."
Liberals like Humphrey were making traditional appeasement of southern Democrats, who were resistant to black integration and equality, less palatable to the party's membership, Weisbrot said. Buoyed by Humphrey's speech at the 1948 party convention, liberals succeeded in passing a plank that solidly supported civil rights. From that point, said Weisbrot, "it was clear that a new political era was unfolding, one in which blacks, who had migrated north to take industrial jobs and who were coming into the unions, were becoming a stronger force in the Democratic party."
