New England Journal of Public Policy

The Future of Learning

Robert B. Reich — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 06:50:35 PDT

As part of UMass Boston’s recent celebration to mark the inauguration of Chancellor Michael F. Collins, M.D., the Division of Corporate, Continuing and Distance Education (CCDE) hosted a “virtual symposium” featuring Robert B. Reich. Between April 24 and May 8, CCDE posted a streaming video and a downloadable audio file of a presentation that Professor Reich had delivered on April 11, 2006 at the national conference of the University Continuing Education Association. This talk was supplemented, on May 3, by a live teleconferencing Q&A session with Professor Reich and about fifty UMass Boston graduate students.

This article originally appeared in a 2006 issue of the New England Journal of Public Policy (Volume 21, Issue 1): http://scholarworks.umb.edu/nejpp/vol21/iss1.

Rusticus: Notes on Class and Culture in Rural New Hampshire

Donald Hall — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 06:50:34 PDT

Old New Hampshire Highway Number Four was incorporated by an act of the New Hampshire legislature in the autumn of 1800. It wound out of Portsmouth, a seaport that once rivaled Boston, drove west through Concord, north past Penacook, through Boscawen, Salisbury, Andover, and Wilmot on its way to Lebanon and the Connecticut River. These names string history like beads. The Penacook tribe assembled each year on the banks of the Merrimack at the site of the present town that bears their name. I grew up thinking Boscawen an unusual Indian name; it is Cornish, surname of an admiral victorious over the French in the eighteenth century. Andover's land was granted to veterans of the Louisburg Expedition against the French, but the first house did not go up until 1761, a year after the English conquest of Canada put an end to Indian raids. We need no reminding in 1985 that Lebanon turns up in the Old Testament.

This article originally appeared in the 1985 premiere issue of the New England Journal of Public Policy (Volume 1, Issue 1): http://scholarworks.umb.edu/nejpp/vol1/iss1.

Seeking Peace in the Niger Delta: Oil, Natural Gas, and Other Vital Resources

Darren Kew et al. — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 06:50:33 PDT

Nigeria’s oil-rich Niger Delta region has seen little benefit from the billions of dollars earned from oil over the last four decades, prompting a growing but disorganized insurgency across the region. Irresponsible oil companies and government officials have reduced the Niger Delta to one of the most polluted environments on earth. Corrupt local and national politicians, many of whom came to power through rigged elections, have colluded to manipulate ethnic divisions amid poverty to loot the region’s wealth. Consequently, the people of the Niger Delta have no formal political voice in Nigeria’s nascent democratic system, increasing the appeal of militias as alternatives for political influence and economic sustenance. A new Nigerian president takes office in May 2007, and he will likely have a brief window of opportunity to undertake measures to reverse the governance crisis in the Niger Delta.

This article originally appeared in a 2007 issue of the New England Journal of Public Policy (Volume 21, Issue 2): http://scholarworks.umb.edu/nejpp/vol21/iss2. For this reprint, the authors have prepared an update, which is included after the conclusion of the original article.

Important Places

Shaun O'Connell — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 06:50:32 PDT

The author talks about his time and associations with the University of Massachusetts Boston. He also describes Ireland and his family's roots there and how it connects with Boston as well as his life in New York.

This article originally appeared in a 2005 issue of the New England Journal of Public Policy (Volume 20, Issue 2): http://scholarworks.umb.edu/nejpp/vol20/iss2.

On Dumpster Diving

Lars Eighner — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 06:50:31 PDT

Lars Eighner became homeless in 1988 after leaving a job he had held for ten years as an attendant at a state hospital in Austin, Texas. He lives in a small apartment in Austin and continues to scavenge. This article was originally published in the Fall 1990 issue of The Threepenny Review. Reprinted with permission.

This article originally appeared in a 1992 issue of the New England Journal of Public Policy (Volume 8, Issue 1): http://scholarworks.umb.edu/nejpp/vol8/iss1.

Grinding Decline in Springfield: Is the Finance Control Board the Answer?

Robert Forrant — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 06:50:30 PDT

Springfield, Massachusetts, the Bay State’s third largest city, suffered staggering manufacturing job loss over the last thirty years of the twentieth century. In 2004, the financial impact of job loss, coupled with dubious fiscal management, plunged the city into near bankruptcy. In response, state government passed legislation appointing a Finance Control Board to manage city business. Wage freezes for City workers were continued and cuts in numerous essential services occurred to deal with the debt. But the question remains, can a Control Board approach grow a large stock of well-paying jobs — large enough to grow the city’s and the Connecticut River Valley’s economies?

This article originally appeared in a 2005 issue of the New England Journal of Public Policy (Volume 20, Issue 2): http://scholarworks.umb.edu/nejpp/vol20/iss2. For this reprint, the author has prepared an update, which is included after the conclusion of the original article.

The Economic Context: Growing Disparities of Income and Wealth

Chuck Collins — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 06:50:29 PDT

In the last few years, poverty rates have remained constant in the New England states. The effort to reduce poverty in New England and the United States has been thwarted by trends of growing income and wealth inequality. Since the late 1970s, the real incomes for the majority of U.S. households have remained stagnant or fallen. During the same time, asset ownership has become dramatically more unequal, and the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few has increased. The causes of this accelerated inequality are complex, but underlying the picture are a series of rule changes, both public policies and private corporate practices. These include public policies governing taxation, global trade, labor rules, and government spending priorities.These rules have favored asset owners at the expense of wage earners.

This article originally appeared in a 2004 issue of the New England Journal of Public Policy (Volume 20, Issue 1): http://scholarworks.umb.edu/nejpp/vol20/iss1. For this reprint, the author has prepared an update, which is included after the conclusion of the original article.

Devolution: The Retreat of Government

Judith Kurland — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 06:50:29 PDT

Devolution as practiced in much of the world is decentralization of program authority and responsibility to achieve greater administrative efficiency or program standards. Devolution as practiced by the Bush administration and the Republican Congress is not that, nor is it a diminution of federal power and the strengthening of states’ rights. Rather, it is a radical restructuring of government to prevent the expenditure of funds for traditional Democratic programs of the New Deal and the Great Society, and to prohibit states from being either more generous in social programs or more stringent in regulating industry than this administration desires.

Common Sense and Civic Virtue: Institutional Investors, Responsible Ownership, and the Democratic Ideal

Marcy Murninghan — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 06:50:28 PDT

On matters of governance, the people’s good is the highest law, as Cicero said two millennia ago. Unfortunately, these days personal greed has trumped the people’s good, enflaming the current governance crisis affecting our public, nonprofit, and private spheres. The spate of corporate governance scandals over the past several years jeopardizes equity investments, harms beneficiaries, and weakens global capital markets. The remedy is not just more laws and regulation but revitalization of the system of corporate checks and balances that already exists. To get better corporate governance, corporate shareowners, especially institutional investors, need to assert their rights and responsibilities more forcefully and wisely. Doing this involves better fiduciary leadership and governance, with the establishment of a fiduciary creed. This creed sets forth ethical stewardship beliefs, principles, and standards, thus enabling sound procedures and competence for discharging the fiduciary role. It does so in a manner that serves beneficiaries by balancing long-term financial prosperity with institutional mission and the public interest, rightly understood. Improving the governance and operation of institutional investors through better integration of their ideals and principles into their investment policies, along with greater levels of participation, representation, and accountability — exemplified by The Boston Foundation and recently proposed legislation affecting the $28 billion Massachusetts state pension funds — will put wasted assets to work, deter future abuse, and restore integrity and trust in equity culture. The author calls this “civic stewardship.”

This article originally appeared in a 2003 issue of the New England Journal of Public Policy (Volume 18, Issue 2): http://scholarworks.umb.edu/nejpp/vol18/iss2. For this reprint, the author has prepared an update, which is included after the conclusion of the original article.

AIDS: An Overview

Loretta McLaughlin — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 06:50:27 PDT

"We stand nakedly in front of a very serious pandemic, as mortal as any pandemic there ever has been," said Halfdan Mahler, director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO). "I don't know of any greater killer than AIDS, not to speak of its psychological, social and economic maiming. Everything is getting worse and worse with AIDS and all of us have been underestimating it, and I in particular. We're running scared. I cannot imagine a worse health problem in this century." When asked to compare AIDS to other epidemics, such as smallpox, that have infected and killed over the course of history, Mahler said he "could not think of anything else that matched the estimates that one hundred million people will be infected with AIDS within ten years of its discovery."

In the years immediately before the world learned of the baffling and deadly new disease that would come to be called AIDS, there were forewarnings that something truly ominous was stirring.

This article originally appeared in a 1988 issue of the New England Journal of Public Policy (Volume 4, Issue 1): http://scholarworks.umb.edu/nejpp/vol4/iss1.

Editor's Note

Padraig O'Malley — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 06:50:26 PDT

We launched the New England Journal of Public Policy (NEJPP) in 1985 when Edmund Beard was director of the then-John W. McCormack Institute of Public Affairs. An Institute Senior Fellow at the time, I was founding editor and continued in that capacity until the last issue was published in 2007.

We remained closed over the last 6 years for all the usual reasons, which are encapsulated in one word: money, or rather lack thereof.

We now resume publication of the Journal in an online form, and invite you to scroll through different issues to get some idea of the breadth of our interests. Most of all, we invite you to read the forthcoming issues, give us feedback, and help us in the search for authors whose work you believe should receive consideration for publication.

We welcome you and hope you will enjoy the ten articles in this first issue, which are a compilation of some of the best we previously published. Due to time-sensitive developments, a few authors reviewed their earlier work and added a brief post-script. The republished contributions represent a diverse array of economic, public health, peace and justice, and public policy concerns, with our traditional fillip of literary reflection.

Introduction

Ira A. Jackson — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 06:50:25 PDT

When Padraig O'Malley informed me that the New England Journal of Public Policy that he edited so wisely and well for nearly 25 years was about to resume publication—albeit, electronically—I was thrilled and really overjoyed. As a new (interim) dean of a school of policy and global studies at a public research university, who wouldn't be excited about re-launching a journal that has been a crossroads between the academy and policymakers, a meeting ground between theory and politics, a safe place to explore relevant ideas that matter from a variety of valued perspectives?

The prior forty-one issues of the New England Journal of Public Policy have tackled topics ranging from AIDS and homelessness to regional economic recovery; to just wars and women in politics. The four hundred contributing authors have ranged from serious scholars to path-breaking practitioners. What rings through across topics is openness to both new ideas and reality as lived on the ground, and a desire to courageously tackle some of the biggest and most intractable and even uncomfortable issues of our time. In reading past issues, I sense a normative approach that explicitly seeks to make our world, both locally and nationally, not only better understood, but also more equitable and just. Nothing could better exemplify our mission as a school.

Foreword

Winston E. Langley — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 06:50:24 PDT

Change is a fundamental feature of life and living; without it, few things would survive, and fewer, if any, would thrive. The New England Journal of Public Policy has undergone a change, having elected to assume an electronic form. Since coming into being in this form three months ago, the success it has realized with its earlier issues has been remarkable. It is as if it were being waited on.

In the month of December 2012, for example, the journal was the second most popular publication series on ScholarWorks at the University of Massachusetts Boston, with a total of 2,783 downloads. To date, (just over three months), the 600 publications that make up the run of the NEJPP have been downloaded 17,116 times. And so it should be.

The journal's name, which represents the site from which it is published, is belied by the variety of issue areas it comprehends; the local, national, and international emphasis of its coverage, and the global character of its interests and concerns, as well as the global nature of the leadership the person who edited it for some 25 years, Padraig O'Malley, the John Joseph Moakley Chair of Peace and Reconciliation, has exhibited. It would be accurate to state that the journal is pan-human in its orientation and commitments.

The Homeless of Massachusetts: An Analysis of the 1990 U.S. Census S-Night Data

Christopher G. Hudson — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 07:17:52 PDT

This article, which examines epidemiological and policy correlates of homeless populations in 351 Massachusetts towns and cities, is based on an analysis of data from the 1990 U.S. census. It reviews the reliability of the most recent census data, reports findings on the distribution and characteristics of homeless persons in Massachusetts, and presents preliminary correlational findings on the impact of key demographic conditions and policies.

The report includes a meta-analysis of several studies that monitored the Census Bureaus street counts. It is estimated that 42.6 percent of the homeless on the streets in selected urban areas were counted by the census. This finding, as well as the results of a regression model that accounted for 68 percent of the variation in street rates in twenty Massachusetts cities with populations of more than 50,000, was used to compute adjusted rates for the remaining towns and cities. Overall adjusted rates for Massachusetts, Boston, and selected areas compared well with independent estimates and counts. The study suggests that at least 10,155 Massachusetts residents were homeless in 1990.

Good-bye to All That: The Rise and Demise of Irish America

Shaun O'Connell — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 07:17:52 PDT

The works discussed in this article include: The Rascal King: The Life and Times of James Michael Curley 1874-1958, by Jack Beatty; JFK: Reckless Youth, by Nigel Hamilton; Textures of Irish America, by Lawrence J. McCaffrey; and Militant and Triumphant: William Henry O'Connell and the Catholic Church in Boston, by James M. O'Toole.

Education and Community Development Among Nineteenth-Century Irish and Contemporary Cambodians in Lowell, Massachusetts

Peter N. Kiang — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 07:17:51 PDT

As cities undergo dramatic demographic changes, schools become important sites of conflict between the interests of established and emerging communities. This article presents a case study of Lowell, Massachusetts, where the second largest Irish community in the country resided during the 1850s, and which is now home to the second largest Cambodian community in the United States. Analysis of nineteenth-century Irish community dynamics, particularly in relation to issues of public education in Lowell, reveals the significance of religious institutions and middle-class entrepreneurs in the process of immigrant community development and highlights important relationships to ethnicity, electoral politics, and economic development. In light of the Irish example, a conceptual framework is presented to understand current dynamics of leadership, institution building, and community empowerment among Cambodians and their contemporary struggles for educational equity.

The Press and Politics: A Comprehensive Examination

Heather Long — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 07:17:51 PDT

This article is based on interviews and research on the press and politicians, whose relationship is shown to be extremely controversial. Views held by members of the press, who see themselves as dutiful to their readers, are radically different from those held by politicians, who see reporters as money-hungry thieves who do not stop short of invasion of privacy for a story. The views of scholars — who attempt to make sense of the relationship — are different from both. The author attempts to amalgamate these views, assess the picture of the institutional relationship as it truly exists, and discover means to resolve the apparent differences.

State Strategy for Developing Base Industries: A Massachusetts Case Study

Chris Tilly — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 07:17:50 PDT

In developing strategies for economic development, state governments must target base industries that bring income into the state and drive the rest of the economy. This article presents a case study of industry analysis and development strategy for Massachusetts, focusing on the state's base industries. Particular attention is paid to the role of industry clusters — groups of industries linked through customer, supplier, or other relationships, and typically concentrated geographically as well. After assessing strengths and weaknesses of the state's economy, the author concludes that despite the current severe recession, the state possesses the basis for renewed growth. Policy implications for the state government are summarized.