Teen Charged with Hate Crime after silly joke

A photo that appeared on Craigslist of a black teen that was captioned "Slave for Sale" has set off an hysterical frenzy in the town of Naperville, Ill., as the prosecutor has charged the young man who posted the photo with a hate crime.

White supremacists run amok in the suburbs of Chicago? A racist kid planning to shoot up a school? Not exactly. You see, the young man who posted the photo and the kid in the picture are friends. And what surely began as an insensitive joke has now morphed into a criminal investigation.

For racialists, there's no such thing as a sense of humor, even though the "joke" was in extremely poor taste. But if "poor taste" was a criminal offense, think of how many liberals would be in prison right now?

The school, for once, appeared to handle the situation properly.

CBS News:

Prosecutors allege the white Naperville Central High School freshman also included "an offensive racial slur" in the ad that they called "beyond disturbing." The teen's defense attorney counters the students were friends and school authorities are handling the matter with an apology and suspension.

In my day, the dean of students would have told the two kids to hug each other, apologize, and that would have been the end of it. But what chance would that have given the race warriors to over-emote and demonstrate outrage?

Assistant State's Attorney Lee Roupas said the teen took the photo last week while the two sat at the same lunch table. Prosecutors describe the allegations as "serious and aggravating," and said the actions risked the safety of the victim.

"Hate crimes have no place in our society and will not be tolerated," the county's State's Attorney Robert B. Berlin said in a statement. "Anyone, regardless of age, accused of such disgraceful actions will be charged accordingly."

"This was a despicable and extremely offensive post that is not at all reflective of the caring, welcoming community that our department serves and protects every day," Naperville Police Chief Robert Marshall said in a statement quoted by CBS Chicago.

"Despicable"? Sure. "Extremely offensive"? Matter of opinion but, OK.

But is it criminal? When anything and everything having to do with race is morbidly exaggerated, it's worse than criminal; it's insensitive. Was the black kid's safety at risk? There are scenarios where a frothing-at-the-mouth white nationalist saw the picture and took it seriously, and now that the cops have made a huge deal out of this, someone looking to kill someone in the news might get the idea of becoming famous himself.

But in the realm of the hyper-sensitive race warriors, those far-fetched fantasies are possible.

I believe in being sensitive and empathetic to everyone. But being insensitive is not criminal behavior and acting in poor taste is not a crime. Trying to make it so only makes advocates look like idiots.

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Why Students Should Still Pick a History Major

Since the 2008 financial crisis, the history field has seen a precipitous decline in the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded in American colleges. As Benjamin Schmidt, a historian at Northeastern University, reported in the American Historical Association’s Perspectives, the number of history degrees awarded fell by 30 percent—from 34,642 to 24,266 in just nine years from 2008 to 2017.

History’s steep decline is not an anomaly, but part and parcel of a broader “crisis” in the humanities. STEM has steamrolled these disciplines on college campuses: Computer science has more than doubled its students between 2013 and 2017. Moreover, critics have made punching bags out of history, humanities, and social sciences writ large.

However, from the perspective of a freshly minted history graduate like myself, history departments are uniquely inspiring homes for an undergraduate education.

Indeed, history as a discipline is constantly engaging with the public, critiquing itself, and evolving through contemporary debate. Just as important, majoring in history prepares students for fulfilling and financially rewarding careers.

I studied history and political science at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio and am continuing my studies in history at the University of Cambridge. Had you told me five years ago that today I would be preparing for a career as a professional historian, I would have burst into laughter. It was only after the first session of my first class at Miami—“The History of the Graphic Novel”—that I decided to lean into my interest in history as a major.

I then discovered a department full of passionate professors dedicated to teaching and presenting historical topics in innovative ways. During “Food in History,” a course co-taught by nearly a dozen Miami historians, Elena Albarrán explained the significance of tortillas in Latin American history and demonstrated how to make them from scratch. I can recall the exact number of hand “pats” it took to form the tortillas: 33.

Over a feast of falafel, hummus, kebabs, dates, and baklava, Matthew Gordon delivered a lecture on the history and political dimensions of Middle Eastern dining customs and etiquette. I later served as an undergraduate teaching assistant in Stephen Norris’s course on European films about World War II, which was full within minutes after opening for registration. The reason? Norris had reframed his course as “History at the Movies”—not, say, “WWII in 20th Century European Film”—and structured it around questions about whether or not films can be “histories.” At the end of the semester, several of the students in my discussion group added history as a second major.

Beyond any single course—no matter how many movies or free food is included—the history major prepares students to meet the demands of dynamic workplaces in turbulent economy.

Though seemingly frivolous, courses like “Food in History” actually train students to adjust to sudden changes and roadblocks in life. In a “job-hopping” economy like ours, there is no greater skill. Indeed, history not only teaches concrete skills (e.g., data interpretation and primary source research) but also develops in students a much broader ability to synthesize large quantities of information and reason through intricate puzzles and problems. It is for this reason that the humanities, in general, are among the Princeton Review’s “best pre-med majors.”

And history, of course, teaches students how to bring these skills to bear in substantive historical research. In Andrew Offenburger’s senior capstone course on the history of news, for example, students spent more than half of the semester conducting crowdsourced primary source research on Goodwin’s Weekly, a small, early 19th-century newspaper in Salt Lake City. SourceNotes, a digital humanities tool created by Offenburger and others to digitize primary source research, allowed each student to develop a research paper throughout the semester.

Through teaching students to answer complex historical research questions and deliver a refined research product, courses like Offenburger’s sharply contradict the quip that history is a “useless” major. Departments that offer courses like Offenburger’s and Albarrán’s are serious about teaching their students more than how to write well. Among many other skills, they develop in students an ability to tackle a wide range of problems.

The history major is a program of learning which prepares students for fulfilling careers and engaged lives.
In fact, LinkedIn’s research on the job skills employers desired found that the three most-wanted “soft skills” were creativity, persuasion, and collaboration—all skills developed in a class like Offenburger’s. But don’t just take my word for it. Microsoft’s president and another top executive recently wrote that “Languages, art, history, economics, ethics, philosophy, psychology and human development courses can teach critical, philosophical and ethics-based skills that will be instrumental in the development and management of AI solutions.”

To boot, history majors can expect good compensation in their careers. Among history majors between 25 and 64 years old, the median income for those in community and social services is $45,000, with $47,000 for education, $80,000 for managerial positions, and $100,000 for legal occupations. Overall, the median is $60,000 per year. And when history majors with graduate degrees are factored in, the median rises for all majors at 13 years into a career.

The argument that history majors are worthless simply does not hold up when we look at the data.

According to Georgetown’s Center for Education and the Workforce, for example, the median income for those with BAs in history is $54,000; for those with graduate degrees, the median is $80,000, with the 75th percentile rising to $128,000. These incomes aren’t that different from those of general business degree holders, whose medians are $65,000 and $89,000, respectively. Of course, when we compare history majors with specialized degrees in accounting, engineering, or finance, the gaps between median income rise.

However, by virtue of their broad liberal arts education and robust training in fundamental analytical skills, history majors are able to enter innumerable industries, whereas accounting, engineering, and finance majors are trained in specific skill sets that have fewer opportunities for application. Indeed, as the popular employment site Glassdoor reports, history majors end up as journalists, politicians, and lawyers, or as professionals in museums, non-profits, or universities, and others enter related fields like finance, international relations, and management. Others have gone on to become CEOs of companies like YouTube and HP.

This is neither a sleight-of-hand swipe at business and STEM majors nor an attempt to bring everything under history’s tent. Instead, it’s a presentation of facts usually ignored when the value of a history major is discussed. This article is an attempt to better-inform students when they compare majors.

Yet to focus on compensation alone in education, and the broader debate of which this article is a part, is to miss one of the deeper goals of education in the humanities. The history major, as I’ve argued elsewhere, is not simply a pathway to gainful employment, but a program of learning which prepares students for fulfilling careers and engaged lives.

Beyond securing a steady paycheck, studying history prepares people to shape their own lives and careers in an ever-changing economy. It trains students to tackle the kinds of complex ethical and historical questions that require attention in our own lives—not just the workplace. Studying history, English literature, sociology, or any of the humanities has the distinct double benefit of preparing students for dynamic careers and equipping them with a historical self-consciousness and ability to grapple with big questions that make for a fulfilling life.

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Decline in Australian nurse education standards

Union claims graduates unable to perform basic tasks

Student nurses nearing the end of their training are unable to perform basic tasks such as calculate medication doses, set up IVs or take blood pressure, leaving them flailing in high-pressure hospital wards.

Explosive claims by the Nurses Professional Association of Queensland highlight the career is in crisis and some graduates are declaring their $20,000 nursing degrees are worthless.

The union says the "dumbing down" of bachelor of nursing degrees means necessary practical skills are missing, knowledge of anatomy is poor and patient interaction often appalling, posing serious risk not only to patients but to the students themselves who are filled with anxiety and fear.

Veteran nurses report that many registered nurse trainees lack the stamina for a busy shift in today's hospitals that have fast turnover of patients and some have no more knowledge of health conditions than the patients themselves.

The Queensland Nurses and Midwives Union says that the problem lies with the lack of time available for experienced clinicians to act as mentors and instructors to students on clinical placement and to nurses at other stages of practice development.

"That is the systemic fix we need far more than any tinkering with the educational preparation program," QNMU assistant secretary Sandra Eales told The Sunday Mail. The QNMU insists that nursing work is at the core of why hospitals exist and nurses are not "bottom rung".

The Nurses Professional Association of Queensland was set up five years ago as an alternative to the QNMU. It is not a registered industrial body but has close to 4000 members.

Phill Tsingos is 'a clinical nurse in the emergency department of a Queensland hospital. He has been nursing for 27 'years and is a supervisor to student nurses, and is very concerned about the level of nurse education. "I have worked with students who were doing a bachelor of nursing and gained access to the degree with an OP 20.[A very low high school mark]

I see some in their third year and am stunned at times over the lack of knowledge. "Don't get me wrong, we have some great young people but the general standard is not up to scratch," he said. "Many do not know how to spike an IV fluid bag or calculate medication doses when they are at the end of their degree. "Patients often know more about health conditions than the students. "I would struggle to trust some of the students."

Mr Tsingos says student nurses need more on-the-job experience rather than being stuck in a classroom learning the difference between private and public hospitals.

"The universities are turning out a glut of nurses, many of whom have little chance getting a job," he said. "One girl went for an interview for one of 30 jobs in Brisbane and there were 90 plus vying for the positions. "The whole sector needs an overhaul."

State Health Minister Steven Miles says he is disappointed to hear an association talk down the skill set studies of nurses. "We have highly trained and hardworking nurses and midwives employed in our public hospitals," he said. "There are many rutal areas in Queensland that are struggling to recruit nurses  and midwives.

"The National Graduate Outcomes Survey suggests that 90.4 per cent of graduate nurses were employed in 2019 and 91.5 per cent in 2018.” Tertiary education, including university places, are the responsibility of the Federal Government.

Flagging the need for change, an independent national review "Educating the Nurse of the Future" has just been completed and the final report, taking into consideration 83 submissions, has been presented to federal Health Minister Greg Hunt. The report will be considered by government and a plan for public release developed soon. The review was announced as part of the 2018-19 Federal Budget.

Ms Eales says there is no evidence of admissions to nursing with OP 20s. "Skills acquisition within the workplace, both practical and theoretic, is as important as classroom or simulated learning environments," she said. "Professional Practice Environment is key to ensure safe learning at all levels and stages of nursing practice development."

NPAQ founding director Graeme Haycroft says if there is a shortage of nurses their value goes up. "The first responsibility of any union is to ensure there is a 'small' shortage of your member base skills," he said. "If there is a shortage of nurses wages go up in response."

Mr Haycroft says there has been an ongoing campaign by the QNMU to constantly train and recruit more nurses to the point that there is a glut "There are thousands and thousands of three-year degree nurses who will never get a fourth and final grad year enabling them to become a trained nurse who can start on the bottom rung in a hospital" he said.

From the Brisbane "Sunday Mail" of 24 November, 2019