Author Archive

Pittsburgh: Is downtown at a crossroads?

Posted: December 20, 2022 by chrisharper in Uncategorized
Tags: ,

By Christopher Harper

Pittsburgh, a longtime example of how a city can change from an industrial mess to a tech haven, is running into a variety of problems in places run by Democrats.

As a journalist in the 1970s, I covered organized labor and needed a shower after trips through the blazing heat of the steel mills. On several visits in the 2000s, however, I found a city that had changed from Budweiser to craft beer and from kielbasa to kale.

Downtown Pittsburgh had changed from shuttered stores to bustling restaurants and museums.

Recently, however, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has documented the fraying of the social fabric that brought the city back from the brink.

“Frustration over shootings, fights, panhandling, and open drug dealing boiled over during a recent meeting between Downtown business owners and merchants and top officials within Mayor Ed Gainey’s administration,” the newspaper reported last weekend in a front-page story.

“Some worried about losing commercial or residential tenants if the situation doesn’t change or how they can cajole workers back to the office given anxiety about safety. Another fretted about losing businesses or restaurants.”

Although other cities have experienced far higher crime statistics since the end of the COVID crisis, Pittsburgh businesses, particularly in the downtown area, have grown accustomed to safe streets.

In a recent meeting with the new mayor, business leaders expressed concern that city leadership isn’t doing enough, particularly to address issues like aggressive panhandling, fights, unruly youths, and loitering.

Like many Democrats, the new mayor is taking a hands-off approach to street crime, which has many business leaders worried.

“We’ve got to stop kidding ourselves. We’ve got to stop fighting about it and just say, go outside, smell it, look at it, experience it. It’s bad, and it’s getting worse,” said Kevin Wade, executive vice president of the PNC Financial Services Group. “If you keep up this resistance, it’s going to be beyond repair.”

Ralph Falbo, who owns a condominium building, said tenants get upset over issues like aggressive panhandling. “I got people calling me saying as soon as my lease is up, I’m gone,” he said.

Tom Smith, the managing partner of the Pittsburgh office of K&L Gates, said the law firm had tried everything from pancake and bacon breakfasts to cornhole tournaments to entice people back to the office.

But it turned out that the event that drew the biggest crowd was when Pittsburgh police came to speak about the downtown area. “It was very eye-opening to me. The point someone made about perception is the reality. Certainly, the perception is that things are really bad and that something needs to be done,” he said.

As many visitors to Pittsburgh will attest, the city has rebuilt a vibrant downtown. It would be sad to see it go the way of other major cities!

Shining light on Penn State’s foibles

Posted: December 13, 2022 by chrisharper in education
Tags: ,

By Christopher Harper

It’s difficult to find a journalistic enterprise that is worth supporting.

I just found one: PA Spotlight’s bureau in State College, the home of Penn State University.

After nearly 20 years at a public university, I saw many examples of waste, mismanagement, and potential fraud.

It’s rare to see the emphasis of a journalistic organization on a public university like Penn State, even though colleges employ thousands of people and allegedly educate thousands more in the ways of the world. For example, Penn State has a massive $7 billion annual budget.

Here are some of PA Spotlight’s most recent headlines about Penn State:

–Penn State’s Board of Trustees spent nearly $318,000 on its past six in-person meetings, covering travel, lodging, food, and other expenses of attendees, according to newly released records.

–Unlike nearly all of its Big Ten counterparts, Penn State does not have to publicly disclose the salaries of its employees, which include $7 million to head football coach James Franklin. Penn State’s special status as a state-related university makes it largely exempt from Pennsylvania’s open records law.

–Given the university’s budget shortfall, hiring freeze, and recent tuition increase, Spotlight PA tracked the use of its jet, discovering that it flew 44 times in one month. The university declined the provide the cost of maintaining and using the plane.

The Spotlight PA team also provided one of the most extensive profiles of Neeli Bendapudi, the new president who took over last year. See https://www.spotlightpa.org/statecollege/2022/11/penn-state-president-bendapudi-profile/

The profile included a subtle analysis of a woman born in India, educated in Kansas, a one-time banker, and a Republican who faced significant issues at her former post at the University of Louisville. She currently faces similar matters from the left-leaning faculty at Penn State.

The State College bureau is the first regional outpost outside Harrisburg, the state capital, and covers issues of interest to north-central Pennsylvania, where I live. The bureau includes four reports and a budget of $500,000 a year.

The reports are available through a free weekly newsletter and regional news organizations. See https://www.spotlightpa.org/newsletters/talkofthetown

I applaud the team’s effort so far and hope the organization will be around for some time to come!

Don’t know much about history…

Posted: December 6, 2022 by chrisharper in Uncategorized
Tags:

By Christopher Harper

As I pondered retirement from teaching a few years ago, one of the most important reasons I decided to leave academia was because I didn’t think we were serving students well.

As a field of employment, journalism had grown increasingly doubtful as a longterm career, and paying more than $100,000 given the prospects of a dying industry didn’t seem right.

It appears that journalism isn’t alone in this academic fraud.

Two in five American college graduates have significant regrets about what they studied in school. Those who regret their decisions included a wide swath of liberal arts majors, according to the Federal Reserve’s annual Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking.

Nearly half of humanities and arts majors had buyer’s remorse, according to a survey in 2021. According to the Federal Reserve survey, engineering majors have the fewest regrets: Just 24 percent wish they’d chosen something different.

As a rule, those who studied STEM subjects – science, technology, engineering, and mathematics – are much more likely to believe they made the right choice. In contrast, those in social sciences or vocational courses second-guess themselves.

There doesn’t seem to be much of a relationship between loans, gender, race, or school selectivity and those who regret their choices. But Federal Reserve data show that the higher one’s income, the fewer people regret their major back in college.

These regrets have remained relatively steady since 2016, the earliest year for which consistent data exist. The most notable exception, education, went from below-average regrets before the pandemic to above-average regrets in 2021. 

Most vocational and technical students (60 percent) wish they’d gone for more schooling, while fewer than 40 percent of law, life science, and engineering students think the same.

The burgeoning regret among humanities and arts majors may help explain why humanities graduates are a dying breed.

“There’s a pretty significant change underway,” historian Ben Schmidt told The Washington Post. “The numbers have dropped by 50 percent, and there’s no sign that they’re going to rebound.”

By 2021, disciplines such as history, English, and religion graduated fewer than half as many students as they did in the early 2000s, according to Schmidt’s analysis of data from the National Center for Education Statistics.

According to Schmidt, the 2008 recession sparked the beginning of a downward spiral in humanities such as history, art, philosophy, English, and foreign languages.

In the decade since our national pivot to STEM, the number of people graduating with computer science degrees has doubled. Every STEM field notched significant gains. Nursing, exercise science, medicine, environment, engineering, math, and statistics are all up by at least 50 percent. Among the humanities, only two increased: linguistics and cultural, ethnic, and gender studies.

Over their lifetime, a typical history or journalism major can expect to earn about $3.4 million, according to an analysis of Census Bureau data from 2014 to 2018 by economist Douglas Webber, who is now with the Federal Reserve. A typical economics, biological sciences, or chemistry major can expect to make $4.6 million over that same time, adjusted for inflation.

If I were in college today, I would never choose journalism or English literature, my two fields of study. I wouldn’t encourage anyone else to do so either!

China: A realistic look at the demonstrations

Posted: November 29, 2022 by chrisharper in Uncategorized
Tags: ,

By Christopher Harper

As the news media focus on stories about Chinese demonstrations against COVID rules, few analysts are looking at the obstacles the protestors face.

President Xi Jinping has installed two of his closest allies as leaders of the Chinese police and security forces.

Wang Xiaohong’s appointment as public security minister in June marked a significant breakthrough for Xi in his consolidation of power.

Xi and Wang have known each other since the mid-1990s when the former rose through the ranks in southeast Fujian province, and Wang was a senior policeman in the provincial capital, Fuzhou.

As China’s most powerful ruler since Mao Zedong, Xi oversaw a sweeping overhaul of the People’s Liberation Army during his first term from 2012 to 2017 when I first visited the country. t the time, China had a robust economy and little dissent.

Xi, however, locked down the propaganda machine even more than his recent predecessors. The party’s most important propaganda organs routinely offer fawning coverage of his activities, such as triumphal recent tours of Hong Kong and Xinjiang, where the dislike for the party leadership is highest.

But the third traditional pillar of Chinese party power, the internal security apparatus, or the “knife,” has been a relative holdout, Peter Mattis, an expert on China’s security apparatus, told The Financial Times.

In the year before Wang’s appointment as China’s top cop, at least three current or former public security vice-ministers were purged for corruption. Two of them were accused of colluding with each other, criticizing “the party’s major policies” and having “hugely inflated political ambitions.” “This is why [Xi’s] rectification campaign against the political-legal apparatus is so important,” said Mattis. “The progression through these areas is how Mao seized power.”

Xi has also worked diligently to install allies at the party’s Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission, which oversees China’s police, state security, and courts. In a measure of its importance, the commission enjoys an official budget bigger than the military. Xi protégé Chen Yixin has been the CPLC’s general secretary and de facto head of operations since 2018.

Chen worked closely with Xi 20 years ago in Zhejiang province, where the future president served as governor and party secretary. Xi brought Chen to Beijing in 2015 and dispatched him to Hubei province, the center of the global coronavirus pandemic, to help stabilize the outbreak in 2020.

In a recent speech to internal security officials, Chen said: “Our party, country, and people are so lucky to have Xi Jinping as the core of the party, as the people’s leader and as commander-in-chief.

“He has the aura of leadership, outstanding intelligence, personal charisma, and the people are in his heart,” Chen added. “The more complicated the situation and the more arduous the task, the more we need Xi Jinping as our helmsman.”

While the media focus on et demonstrations, it’s essential to understand precisely the power of the Chinese state to put down any severe threats to the regime.

Older Entries
Newer Entries