More black people are buying homes, but they’re all buying in the same places, reports the Woodstock Institute in a recent press release. If anything, home-owner segregation is getting worse. “By 1995-1996, 45 percent of African-American home buyers were moving into neighborhoods in which at least 75 percent of buyers were African-American, compared with only 27 percent in 1990-1991.”
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“Universities are becoming more like athletic shoe companies and less like institutions with transcendent and idealistic values,” according to Cary Nelson, an English professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and coauthor of the new book Academic Keywords: A Devil’s Dictionary for Higher Education. Corporate values and worker exploitation are leading the schools into trouble, he argues. “Without a major collective effort, higher education as we know it will be over within a decade or two.”
A conservative to Pat Buchanan: get over the 1950s already. Former Reagan staff economist Murray Weidenbaum notes that “we did not all prosper together” during the 1950s. “The unemployment rate reached 6.8 percent in 1958 (the non-white unemployment rate hit 12.6 percent that year). The average worker’s compensation in ‘real’ terms (boiling out the effects of inflation) was more than a third lower in 1959 than it is today. The national total of savings deposits–a good measure of consumer wealth–was a modest $146 billion in December 1954. It is almost eight times that amount now. Total industrial production in the 1950s was half of today’s rate. So much for the subsequent ‘destruction’ of U.S. manufacturing by foreign competition” (from a March pamphlet published by the Center for the Study of American Business, “The Great Confusion,” reprinted from Challenge, November/December).
