And two quick articles
Jul. 21st, 2008 02:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
One on a tuitionless college
With No Frills or Tuition, a College Draws Notice
By TAMAR LEWIN
BEREA, Ky. — Berea College, founded 150 years ago to educate freed slaves and “poor white mountaineers,” accepts only applicants from low-income families, and it charges no tuition.
“You can literally come to Berea with nothing but what you can carry, and graduate debt free,” said Joseph P. Bagnoli Jr., the associate provost for enrollment management. “We call it the best education money can’t buy.”
Actually, what buys that education is Berea’s $1.1 billion endowment, which puts the college among the nation’s wealthiest. But unlike most well-endowed colleges, Berea has no football team, coed dorms, hot tubs or climbing walls. Instead, it has a no-frills budget, with food from the college farm, handmade furniture from the college crafts workshops, and 10-hour-a-week campus jobs for every student.
Berea’s approach provides an unusual perspective on the growing debate over whether the wealthiest universities are doing enough for the public good to warrant their tax exemption, or simply hoarding money to serve an elite few. As many elite universities scramble to recruit more low-income students, Berea’s no-tuition model has attracted increasing attention.
“Asking whether that’s where our values lead us is a powerful way to consider what our values are,” said Anthony Marx, the president of Amherst College, who considered the possibility of using Amherst’s $1 million-per-student endowment to offer free tuition but concluded that it would make no sense, given Amherst’s more affluent student body and the fact that the college already subsidizes about half the cost of each student’s education.
“We’re not Berea, much as we respect them,” Mr. Marx said, adding there would be no social justification for giving free tuition to students from wealthy families.
Although this year’s market drop is taking its toll, the growth in university endowments in recent years has been spectacular. Harvard’s $35 billion endowment, Yale’s $23 billion, Stanford’s $17 billion and Princeton’s $16 billion put them among the world’s richest institutions.
Such endowments have helped make higher education one of the nation’s crown jewels. As Harvard’s president, Drew Gilpin Faust, said in her spring commencement speech this year, endowments at Harvard and other research universities help fuel scientific advances as government support is eroding, and help drive economic growth and expansion in a difficult economy.
Although most universities have only modest endowments, the wealth of the richest has made them increasingly vulnerable to criticism from parents upset about rising tuition costs, lawmakers pushing them to spend more of their money and policy experts arguing that they should be helping more needy students.
“How much do you need to save for future generations, and at what point are you gouging today’s generation?” said Lynne Munson, of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity in Washington.
In January, the Senate Finance Committee requested detailed endowment and spending data from 136 colleges and universities with endowments of at least $500 million, with a possible eye to forcing them to spend at least 5 percent of their assets each year, as foundations are required to do. Large, tax-free endowments “should mean affordable education for more students, not just a security blanket for colleges,” said Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, who is reviewing the data.
The commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service’s tax-exempt section said this spring that he wanted his agency to be more aggressive in ensuring that universities made “appropriate use” of their endowments. And officials in Massachusetts are studying a proposal for a 2.5 percent tax on the part of university endowments greater than $1 billion — a threshold exceeded by nine of the state’s universities.
“The endowments have grown to such an astonishing extent that people are asking, if the wealth and the value of the tax exemption are increasing, is the public benefit increasing, as well?” said Evelyn Brody, a tax professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law.
This year, Ms. Brody said, the debate has entered new territory. Traditionally, discussion about endowments has focused on the balance between using the money for the current generation versus saving it for the benefit of future generations.
“Endowment spending has usually been a ‘when’ question, about when the money would be used for a charitable purpose,” she said. “But now, it’s also being viewed as a ‘what’ question. What is the money for? And I think that’s new.”
In part, it is simply a question of itchy fingers. When one sector amasses great wealth, other sectors find it irresistible.
“That’s why Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries in the 16th century,” Ms. Brody said. “In those days, it was real estate, which was not easy to hide. Now it’s the disclosure, which makes the universities’ wealth impossible to hide.”
The mounting scrutiny by lawmakers has already prompted some action. Dozens of wealthy colleges have increased their aid to low- and middle-income students, many substituting grants for loans. Many have announced plans to expand their student bodies, and some are doing broader outreach and working with nearby K-12 schools to improve academic preparation.
Nonetheless, according to 2002 data, only one in 10 of the students at the nation’s most selective institutions come from the bottom 40 percent of the income scale. And the proportion of low-income undergraduates at the nation’s wealthiest colleges has been declining, as measured by the percentage receiving federal Pell Grants, for families with income under about $40,000. At most top colleges, only 8 to 15 percent of students receive Pell grants.
At Berea, more than three-quarters of the students receive Pell grants.
Overall, Berea’s statistics speak worlds about the demand for affordable higher education; this year, the college accepted only 22 percent of its applicants. Among those accepted, 85 percent attended Berea, a yield higher than Harvard’s.
Berea can be a haven for the lower-income students at high schools where expensive clothes and fancy homes demarcate the social territory.
“When I first heard about Berea, I didn’t think I wanted to come here,” said Candice Roots, who will be a junior in the fall. “But I visited in my senior year, and as soon as I got here, I knew this was what I wanted. Everybody was like me. You don’t have to have all this money to fit in.”
With its hilly campus, Georgian president’s mansion and old brick buildings, Berea looks much like any elite New England college. But its operating budget is less than half that of Amherst, which has a $1.7 billion endowment and about 100 more students. Faculty pay is much lower, and the student-faculty ratio higher. With no rich parents and no legacy admission slots, fund-raising is far more difficult at Berea.
Lacking tuition, Berea receives 80 percent of its $43 million education and general budget, and about two-thirds of its $55 million operating budget, from the endowment income.
Families bringing a student to a campus interview may stay, free, in a four-bedroom house, complete with flat-screen television and handmade sleigh bed. Students who are single parents have their own residences.
To satisfy the work requirement, some students have jobs in the academic departments, administrative offices and labs, while others are assigned to the college farm, the workshops that make and sell traditional mountain crafts (its handmade brooms, especially, are well-known treasures) or the college-owned hotel, which anchors the town square.
Mr. Marx, in homage, keeps a Berea broom in his Amherst office.
While Mr. Marx is not trying to match Berea’s student population, he is proud of Amherst’s efforts to attract top students from all income brackets. The college has increased the proportion of Pell recipients to nearly 20 percent of its student body, from about 15 percent five years ago, for example. With more than half of Amherst’s students on financial aid, the college announced last year that it would replace loans in all aid packages with grants. A full-time staff member recruits community college graduates as transfer students. Admissions are need-blind, for both American and international applicants.
Although he, like other college presidents, opposes the idea of a required 5 percent payout, Mr. Marx said the current debate over the use of endowments was healthy.
“Congress, the media, the public all have an interest in knowing whether we’re using our resources to make sure the best students have access to the best education,” he said. “They should be asking, are we really affordable? Are we offering the highest quality education? Are we directing graduates to think about their social responsibilities?”
Berea’s president, Larry D. Shinn, also opposes a required 5 percent payout but wants colleges pushed to do more for needy students.
“You see some of these selective liberal arts colleges building new physical education facilities with these huge sheets of glass and these coffee and juice bars, and charging students $40,000 a year, and you have to ask, does this contribute to the public good, or is it just a way for the college to keep up with the Joneses?” Mr. Shinn said. “We are a tax-exempt institution, so I think the public has a right to demand that our educational mission be at the heart of all of our expenditures.”
And a heartwarming story about volunteering at a South Bronx pool, yes, that's the only way to sum it up.
At Busy South Bronx Pool, an Unlikely Team Keeps the Peace
By JAVIER C. HERNANDEZ
He is known by the name tattooed on his left arm: Scorpio. He favors diamond earrings and designer sunglasses. He takes pills to control his angry outbursts, and sometimes carries a pistol, a .22 or a .45, depending on his mood.
On this day, on the street outside the Crotona Pool in the Bronx, where hundreds of children wait to get inside, he wears the earrings and sunglasses, but does not have a gun.
“Don’t move!” he shouts when a boy in navy trunks tries to tiptoe to the front of the line of sugar-fueled children, some wrapped in SpongeBob SquarePants towels, others wearing neon flip-flops. The boy gets back in line.
Scorpio, who is known by this name, is Terrance Carpenter, 26. He is one of a dozen or so young men who volunteer unofficially each week at the pool, which sits amid an area long fractured by hostilities among gangs like the Bloods, the Crips and the Latin Kings. Some of the volunteers are gang members, but others have turned their backs on crime.
Crotona Pool was one of several huge public pools to open in 1936 in New York. Built by Robert Moses with financing from the Works Progress Administration, they were heralded as some of the most remarkable public recreational facilities ever constructed in the United States.
But the pool, like the park it abuts, went into steep decline starting in the 1960s, as middle-class residents fled the surrounding neighborhoods — Morrisania, Crotona, East Tremont, West Farms — and poverty and violence took hold. Today the area has come far from its worst days, thanks in part to a citywide decline in crime and in part to the efforts of residents. The young volunteers, some of whom have contributed to their neighborhood’s violence, now seek to help keep the peace, at least in the neutral zone of the pool.
The volunteers have no enforcement powers; their duties are not clearly defined. But at the enormous pool full of excited — sometimes overexcited — children and teenagers, they provide extra ears and eyes for the officials charged with maintaining order. When the children violate the no-diving rule, they scold them. When horseplay gets too rowdy, they tone it down. When they see loiterers looking for trouble on the streets outside the pool, they swagger over to ward them off.
“This is my block,” Mr. Carpenter said. “It’s my love. It’s my family.”
It is an unlikely alliance. Some of the pool volunteers have spent their teenage years behind bars for murder, drug possession and assault. But they command respect and attention from the children, and the neighborhood has welcomed their help.
The informal partnership began eight years ago when Mike Bunce, 50, a parks department employee who helps supervise the pool and whom several of the young men said they considered a father, called a few gang members to his office and told them: “This is your neighborhood. This is your pool.”
Mr. Bunce had watched as the pool he played in as a youngster deteriorated. He was fed up with the fistfights along the streets and drug deals out front.
“Year after year, we’d hear the same thing,” Mr. Bunce said. “ ‘Crotona Park? Uh-uh. I ain’t sending my kids there.’ ”
When the gang members, in response to his request, started dropping in for a few hours each week, the pool and the neighborhood began to change. Violence fell, pool officials said, and within a few years, the Olympic-size pool, the largest in the Bronx, became the place to be on muggy summer days.
“Now you get calls: ‘Did you open yet? When are you opening?’ ” Mr. Bunce said.
Looking over the hundreds of faces grinning in the water, Mr. Bunce added, “It’s easy for them to get engulfed in the negativity.” The gang members, he said, are able to connect with the children in a way that no supervisor can.
In the line outside the pool, Javon, 17, who would not give his surname, said poolgoers listened to the volunteers. “They did their dirt,” he said. “They fought. They’ve been in the street.”
The pool’s manager, Kevin Walker, called the volunteers role models. “If kids see they’re doing the right thing,” he said, “they’ll follow their example.”
The presence of the men at Crotona Park has prompted little concern. Pool regulars said they could point to only one instance when gang members fought, and extra police officers (there are always at least two at the pool during operating hours) were called in.
Parks department officials said on Friday that they were not aware of the arrangement and could not comment on it. But they said that Crotona Park had steadily improved as a result of significant investment by the city.
“It’s a place we definitely want to welcome people and have them go and have fun and be safe,” said Liam Kavanagh, the department’s first deputy commissioner.
With about 1,400 visitors entering the pool on its busiest days, security is tight. Swimmers undergo bag inspections and a check to make sure they have proper swimsuits. They undress in locker rooms patrolled by supervisors and emerge to a pool that is surrounded by barbed wire with park patrol officers, police officers and, of course, lifeguards, keeping watch.
The pool is far different from the place Clifford Lee Dickson Sr., 47, used to sneak into as a teenager with his girlfriend to watch the sun rise.
At the pool’s edge, Mr. Dickson pulled back his shirt and to show a bullet scar from the day three decades ago when he was shot while chasing a gang member. Mr. Dickson said he was not bothered by the presence of current and former gang members.
“If I felt it was hazardous here I wouldn’t bring my kid out,” he said. “If anything, these guys can relate more, and they care.”
Some of the children look up to the young men, several of whom have left gang life behind. James Harrigan, 21, said he joined the Crips at age 7 to rebel against his family, which had long been affiliated with the rival Bloods.
After the birth of his daughter eight months ago, Mr. Harrigan left the gang. This year he also earned a bachelor’s degree. But a fresh gash on his neck is a reminder of the hazards outside. (He said that he was with his daughter in May when he was slashed by a Crips member who accused him of betrayal.)
“We come from the same place they come from,” he said, referring to the children at the pool. “I told them there’s no reason to be in a gang. These kids out here are our future. Without these kids, our future is nothing.”
Bam Bam Jr., 17, who refused to give his real name, said that he had served time for shooting the man he believed had killed his father. He said the pool was a neutral area, where gang rivalries were left outside.
On a recent day, he rushed over to one of the pool’s patrol officers to report that a group was about to throw a girl into a shallow part of the pool, putting her in danger of hitting her head.
With the girl safe, he slapped hands with his fellow volunteer Mr. Carpenter. The two stood together, watching for illicit diving and other recklessness.
“We’re all brothers here,” Bam Bam said. “If you violate the rules, you get punished.”
With No Frills or Tuition, a College Draws Notice
By TAMAR LEWIN
BEREA, Ky. — Berea College, founded 150 years ago to educate freed slaves and “poor white mountaineers,” accepts only applicants from low-income families, and it charges no tuition.
“You can literally come to Berea with nothing but what you can carry, and graduate debt free,” said Joseph P. Bagnoli Jr., the associate provost for enrollment management. “We call it the best education money can’t buy.”
Actually, what buys that education is Berea’s $1.1 billion endowment, which puts the college among the nation’s wealthiest. But unlike most well-endowed colleges, Berea has no football team, coed dorms, hot tubs or climbing walls. Instead, it has a no-frills budget, with food from the college farm, handmade furniture from the college crafts workshops, and 10-hour-a-week campus jobs for every student.
Berea’s approach provides an unusual perspective on the growing debate over whether the wealthiest universities are doing enough for the public good to warrant their tax exemption, or simply hoarding money to serve an elite few. As many elite universities scramble to recruit more low-income students, Berea’s no-tuition model has attracted increasing attention.
“Asking whether that’s where our values lead us is a powerful way to consider what our values are,” said Anthony Marx, the president of Amherst College, who considered the possibility of using Amherst’s $1 million-per-student endowment to offer free tuition but concluded that it would make no sense, given Amherst’s more affluent student body and the fact that the college already subsidizes about half the cost of each student’s education.
“We’re not Berea, much as we respect them,” Mr. Marx said, adding there would be no social justification for giving free tuition to students from wealthy families.
Although this year’s market drop is taking its toll, the growth in university endowments in recent years has been spectacular. Harvard’s $35 billion endowment, Yale’s $23 billion, Stanford’s $17 billion and Princeton’s $16 billion put them among the world’s richest institutions.
Such endowments have helped make higher education one of the nation’s crown jewels. As Harvard’s president, Drew Gilpin Faust, said in her spring commencement speech this year, endowments at Harvard and other research universities help fuel scientific advances as government support is eroding, and help drive economic growth and expansion in a difficult economy.
Although most universities have only modest endowments, the wealth of the richest has made them increasingly vulnerable to criticism from parents upset about rising tuition costs, lawmakers pushing them to spend more of their money and policy experts arguing that they should be helping more needy students.
“How much do you need to save for future generations, and at what point are you gouging today’s generation?” said Lynne Munson, of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity in Washington.
In January, the Senate Finance Committee requested detailed endowment and spending data from 136 colleges and universities with endowments of at least $500 million, with a possible eye to forcing them to spend at least 5 percent of their assets each year, as foundations are required to do. Large, tax-free endowments “should mean affordable education for more students, not just a security blanket for colleges,” said Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, who is reviewing the data.
The commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service’s tax-exempt section said this spring that he wanted his agency to be more aggressive in ensuring that universities made “appropriate use” of their endowments. And officials in Massachusetts are studying a proposal for a 2.5 percent tax on the part of university endowments greater than $1 billion — a threshold exceeded by nine of the state’s universities.
“The endowments have grown to such an astonishing extent that people are asking, if the wealth and the value of the tax exemption are increasing, is the public benefit increasing, as well?” said Evelyn Brody, a tax professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law.
This year, Ms. Brody said, the debate has entered new territory. Traditionally, discussion about endowments has focused on the balance between using the money for the current generation versus saving it for the benefit of future generations.
“Endowment spending has usually been a ‘when’ question, about when the money would be used for a charitable purpose,” she said. “But now, it’s also being viewed as a ‘what’ question. What is the money for? And I think that’s new.”
In part, it is simply a question of itchy fingers. When one sector amasses great wealth, other sectors find it irresistible.
“That’s why Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries in the 16th century,” Ms. Brody said. “In those days, it was real estate, which was not easy to hide. Now it’s the disclosure, which makes the universities’ wealth impossible to hide.”
The mounting scrutiny by lawmakers has already prompted some action. Dozens of wealthy colleges have increased their aid to low- and middle-income students, many substituting grants for loans. Many have announced plans to expand their student bodies, and some are doing broader outreach and working with nearby K-12 schools to improve academic preparation.
Nonetheless, according to 2002 data, only one in 10 of the students at the nation’s most selective institutions come from the bottom 40 percent of the income scale. And the proportion of low-income undergraduates at the nation’s wealthiest colleges has been declining, as measured by the percentage receiving federal Pell Grants, for families with income under about $40,000. At most top colleges, only 8 to 15 percent of students receive Pell grants.
At Berea, more than three-quarters of the students receive Pell grants.
Overall, Berea’s statistics speak worlds about the demand for affordable higher education; this year, the college accepted only 22 percent of its applicants. Among those accepted, 85 percent attended Berea, a yield higher than Harvard’s.
Berea can be a haven for the lower-income students at high schools where expensive clothes and fancy homes demarcate the social territory.
“When I first heard about Berea, I didn’t think I wanted to come here,” said Candice Roots, who will be a junior in the fall. “But I visited in my senior year, and as soon as I got here, I knew this was what I wanted. Everybody was like me. You don’t have to have all this money to fit in.”
With its hilly campus, Georgian president’s mansion and old brick buildings, Berea looks much like any elite New England college. But its operating budget is less than half that of Amherst, which has a $1.7 billion endowment and about 100 more students. Faculty pay is much lower, and the student-faculty ratio higher. With no rich parents and no legacy admission slots, fund-raising is far more difficult at Berea.
Lacking tuition, Berea receives 80 percent of its $43 million education and general budget, and about two-thirds of its $55 million operating budget, from the endowment income.
Families bringing a student to a campus interview may stay, free, in a four-bedroom house, complete with flat-screen television and handmade sleigh bed. Students who are single parents have their own residences.
To satisfy the work requirement, some students have jobs in the academic departments, administrative offices and labs, while others are assigned to the college farm, the workshops that make and sell traditional mountain crafts (its handmade brooms, especially, are well-known treasures) or the college-owned hotel, which anchors the town square.
Mr. Marx, in homage, keeps a Berea broom in his Amherst office.
While Mr. Marx is not trying to match Berea’s student population, he is proud of Amherst’s efforts to attract top students from all income brackets. The college has increased the proportion of Pell recipients to nearly 20 percent of its student body, from about 15 percent five years ago, for example. With more than half of Amherst’s students on financial aid, the college announced last year that it would replace loans in all aid packages with grants. A full-time staff member recruits community college graduates as transfer students. Admissions are need-blind, for both American and international applicants.
Although he, like other college presidents, opposes the idea of a required 5 percent payout, Mr. Marx said the current debate over the use of endowments was healthy.
“Congress, the media, the public all have an interest in knowing whether we’re using our resources to make sure the best students have access to the best education,” he said. “They should be asking, are we really affordable? Are we offering the highest quality education? Are we directing graduates to think about their social responsibilities?”
Berea’s president, Larry D. Shinn, also opposes a required 5 percent payout but wants colleges pushed to do more for needy students.
“You see some of these selective liberal arts colleges building new physical education facilities with these huge sheets of glass and these coffee and juice bars, and charging students $40,000 a year, and you have to ask, does this contribute to the public good, or is it just a way for the college to keep up with the Joneses?” Mr. Shinn said. “We are a tax-exempt institution, so I think the public has a right to demand that our educational mission be at the heart of all of our expenditures.”
And a heartwarming story about volunteering at a South Bronx pool, yes, that's the only way to sum it up.
At Busy South Bronx Pool, an Unlikely Team Keeps the Peace
By JAVIER C. HERNANDEZ
He is known by the name tattooed on his left arm: Scorpio. He favors diamond earrings and designer sunglasses. He takes pills to control his angry outbursts, and sometimes carries a pistol, a .22 or a .45, depending on his mood.
On this day, on the street outside the Crotona Pool in the Bronx, where hundreds of children wait to get inside, he wears the earrings and sunglasses, but does not have a gun.
“Don’t move!” he shouts when a boy in navy trunks tries to tiptoe to the front of the line of sugar-fueled children, some wrapped in SpongeBob SquarePants towels, others wearing neon flip-flops. The boy gets back in line.
Scorpio, who is known by this name, is Terrance Carpenter, 26. He is one of a dozen or so young men who volunteer unofficially each week at the pool, which sits amid an area long fractured by hostilities among gangs like the Bloods, the Crips and the Latin Kings. Some of the volunteers are gang members, but others have turned their backs on crime.
Crotona Pool was one of several huge public pools to open in 1936 in New York. Built by Robert Moses with financing from the Works Progress Administration, they were heralded as some of the most remarkable public recreational facilities ever constructed in the United States.
But the pool, like the park it abuts, went into steep decline starting in the 1960s, as middle-class residents fled the surrounding neighborhoods — Morrisania, Crotona, East Tremont, West Farms — and poverty and violence took hold. Today the area has come far from its worst days, thanks in part to a citywide decline in crime and in part to the efforts of residents. The young volunteers, some of whom have contributed to their neighborhood’s violence, now seek to help keep the peace, at least in the neutral zone of the pool.
The volunteers have no enforcement powers; their duties are not clearly defined. But at the enormous pool full of excited — sometimes overexcited — children and teenagers, they provide extra ears and eyes for the officials charged with maintaining order. When the children violate the no-diving rule, they scold them. When horseplay gets too rowdy, they tone it down. When they see loiterers looking for trouble on the streets outside the pool, they swagger over to ward them off.
“This is my block,” Mr. Carpenter said. “It’s my love. It’s my family.”
It is an unlikely alliance. Some of the pool volunteers have spent their teenage years behind bars for murder, drug possession and assault. But they command respect and attention from the children, and the neighborhood has welcomed their help.
The informal partnership began eight years ago when Mike Bunce, 50, a parks department employee who helps supervise the pool and whom several of the young men said they considered a father, called a few gang members to his office and told them: “This is your neighborhood. This is your pool.”
Mr. Bunce had watched as the pool he played in as a youngster deteriorated. He was fed up with the fistfights along the streets and drug deals out front.
“Year after year, we’d hear the same thing,” Mr. Bunce said. “ ‘Crotona Park? Uh-uh. I ain’t sending my kids there.’ ”
When the gang members, in response to his request, started dropping in for a few hours each week, the pool and the neighborhood began to change. Violence fell, pool officials said, and within a few years, the Olympic-size pool, the largest in the Bronx, became the place to be on muggy summer days.
“Now you get calls: ‘Did you open yet? When are you opening?’ ” Mr. Bunce said.
Looking over the hundreds of faces grinning in the water, Mr. Bunce added, “It’s easy for them to get engulfed in the negativity.” The gang members, he said, are able to connect with the children in a way that no supervisor can.
In the line outside the pool, Javon, 17, who would not give his surname, said poolgoers listened to the volunteers. “They did their dirt,” he said. “They fought. They’ve been in the street.”
The pool’s manager, Kevin Walker, called the volunteers role models. “If kids see they’re doing the right thing,” he said, “they’ll follow their example.”
The presence of the men at Crotona Park has prompted little concern. Pool regulars said they could point to only one instance when gang members fought, and extra police officers (there are always at least two at the pool during operating hours) were called in.
Parks department officials said on Friday that they were not aware of the arrangement and could not comment on it. But they said that Crotona Park had steadily improved as a result of significant investment by the city.
“It’s a place we definitely want to welcome people and have them go and have fun and be safe,” said Liam Kavanagh, the department’s first deputy commissioner.
With about 1,400 visitors entering the pool on its busiest days, security is tight. Swimmers undergo bag inspections and a check to make sure they have proper swimsuits. They undress in locker rooms patrolled by supervisors and emerge to a pool that is surrounded by barbed wire with park patrol officers, police officers and, of course, lifeguards, keeping watch.
The pool is far different from the place Clifford Lee Dickson Sr., 47, used to sneak into as a teenager with his girlfriend to watch the sun rise.
At the pool’s edge, Mr. Dickson pulled back his shirt and to show a bullet scar from the day three decades ago when he was shot while chasing a gang member. Mr. Dickson said he was not bothered by the presence of current and former gang members.
“If I felt it was hazardous here I wouldn’t bring my kid out,” he said. “If anything, these guys can relate more, and they care.”
Some of the children look up to the young men, several of whom have left gang life behind. James Harrigan, 21, said he joined the Crips at age 7 to rebel against his family, which had long been affiliated with the rival Bloods.
After the birth of his daughter eight months ago, Mr. Harrigan left the gang. This year he also earned a bachelor’s degree. But a fresh gash on his neck is a reminder of the hazards outside. (He said that he was with his daughter in May when he was slashed by a Crips member who accused him of betrayal.)
“We come from the same place they come from,” he said, referring to the children at the pool. “I told them there’s no reason to be in a gang. These kids out here are our future. Without these kids, our future is nothing.”
Bam Bam Jr., 17, who refused to give his real name, said that he had served time for shooting the man he believed had killed his father. He said the pool was a neutral area, where gang rivalries were left outside.
On a recent day, he rushed over to one of the pool’s patrol officers to report that a group was about to throw a girl into a shallow part of the pool, putting her in danger of hitting her head.
With the girl safe, he slapped hands with his fellow volunteer Mr. Carpenter. The two stood together, watching for illicit diving and other recklessness.
“We’re all brothers here,” Bam Bam said. “If you violate the rules, you get punished.”
no subject
Date: 2008-07-21 10:22 pm (UTC)That said, I like the quote comparing the interest in college and university endowments with Henry VIII's interest in the monasteries. The simile is very apt and, for those of us who remember our history, very worrisome for society. When Henry seized the monasteries' wealth, he spent quite a lot of it very quickly (much on a war with the Scots) and distributed the rest freely to his cronies at court. Is that what we want to happen with the accrued endowments of our established institutions? I hope not!