“In 1979, CANDO [the Chicago Association of Neighborhood Development Organizations] had no real model to follow,” the group reflects in its 1998-’99 annual report. “There were no citywide neighborhood economic development coalitions from which to borrow organizational concepts. For the most part, CANDO had to invent itself from its original base of eight neighborhood-based nonprofit member organizations. In 1999, CANDO has become the model to follow. We regularly entertain visitors from other cities and other countries who wish to learn from our experience. Our original eight Voting Members have grown nearly tenfold [to 78].”
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Twilight on the left? “Liberals, enthralled by Clinton’s popularity, never criticized the president’s appalling lack of a second-term agenda,” writes Walter Shapiro in the New Republic (February 1), condemning what he calls the “self-centered values” of the American left. “As long as Clinton upholds affirmative action and defends abortion rights, then his personal excesses and timid policies are to be defended at all costs.”
What do you think you’re doing? Speaking at last year’s graduation, University of Chicago philosopher Robert Pippin asked if the ceremony could be considered “an essentially empty ritual” and answered no. “Simply understanding what we are doing when we vote, marry, command, submit to authority, trust a doctor, pay taxes, or bury a loved one is quite a difficult task, not to be as easily taken for granted as we must do in the rush of daily life. All of these activities and many more once meant something very different to the people who participated in them and could just as well come to mean something very different again. Putting on one of these gowns and rushing to graduation carry with them almost one thousand years of aspiration and meaning, but also a meaning and bearing in the present that is hidden, hard to extract, easy to overlook, and that needs to be recovered by reflection and argument” (“University of Chicago Record,” December 10).
