Month: January 2008

University does something illegal to puppy

Canine solicitation has been criminalized.

The signature item at Temple University’s fourth annual Owl Club auction, held on Saturday, was a cute golden retriever puppy, in addition to Wing Bowl passes, Philadelphia Eagles tickets, and golf packages with Temple football Head Coach Al Golden.

Turns out, though, that only a licensed kennel can sell a dog, as the Philadelphia Inquirer reported.

So while proceeds from the auction benefit Temple athletics, including the reported $700 that women’s basketball coach Dawn Staley paid for the dog, Temple might run into more trouble, as they face a citation for the infraction.

Nicole Williams: a rare model

Interview and article prepared for the Philadelphia Business Journal, as filed last week, without edits, to run in last Friday’s edition. American law firms have not always had black female attorneys. Some don’t have any today.Nichole L. Williams, an associate in the Haddonfield, N.J. office of Archer & Greiner, is one of particular note and promise.

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Last month, Williams, of Blue Bell, was selected for membership in the National Coalition of 100 Black Women, a prestigious professional organization for women of color.

“The organization has an incredble reputation,” said Williams, 29. “I wanted to be a part of that.”

The Coalition formed in 1971 in New York City and has rapidly expanded beyond its now symbolic name. Today, the group numbers some 7,000 members in 24 states and Washington, D.C.

With her membership in the organization’s Pennsylvania chapter came a leadership role, as Williams took on co-chair responsibilities of the public relations committee. She is charged with promoting the group’s signature event, the Madame C.J. Walker Awards luncheon and economic development seminar to be held on March 1. Little more than two weeks later, in her capacity as board member of UrbanPromise, a nonprofit that offers activities for youth in Camden, N.J., she is hosting a fundraising bowling event with Andre Iguodala from the Philadelphia 76ers at Lucky Strike Lanes at 13th and Chestnut Streets on March 18.

Oh, and she is a lawyer, too, one with a goal in mind.

“In this role as a black female attorney, I take it as my reponsibility to speak for those who don’t have a voice themselves,” she said. “To serve as a role model.”

She concentrates her practice in corporate law and joined her firm’s sports and entertainment practice group in August. There, too, she is representing underrepresented groups, as the only female and the only associate member. She doesn’t seem worried. Williams will continue her drive to service and find strength in an organization full of successful people who had plenty of reasons not to be.

“As a young, black, female attorney, I wanted to surround myself with women who were doing incredible things” Williams said. “I’ve done it.”

Men's college basketball video

For The Temple News, the college newspaper for which I work, I filmed yesterday’s men’s basketball game between Temple University and crosstown Big 5 rival St. Joseph’s.  A friend and colleague, Sean Blanda, edited it. The quality is less than stellar because of some technicalities – this was our paper’s first foray into adding video to our Web site – but check it out. Temple lost on a buzzer beater.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5Ncgl5Bvx0]

The professor and the sexpert

hill_m.jpgTemple University’s resident public intellectual, Marc Lamont Hill, who can be seen a whole lot answering the tough and less tough questions on cable news has a (relatively) widely read blog.The reason your sex life sucks? Because you aren’t reading it.

Hill, either the most well known academic this school boasts or the prof who dabbles in pop culture so much that this school hides him, offers his Web site as a forum for Timaree, a former college sex columnist and current Widener University grad student. It is typical shock fare, but sometimes it gets too good to not mention.

Like one from last week, about a question I didn’t entirely understand on a type of intercourse I thought I knew everything about. Yeah, I know, you really ought to check it out here. But, trust me, it’s (verbally?) graphic.

Campus unknown named next dean of Japan campus

By Christopher Wink | Jan. 22, 2008 | The Temple News

Bruce Stronach was named the next dean of Temple University-Japan on Jan. 10, to replace the retiring dean, Kirk R. Patterson. Stronach will officially join TUJ on Feb. 1 but will not assume the role of dean until April 1.

An interim dean has not been named.

Currently, Stronach, a campus outsider with an academic career that spans three decades and two continents, is transitioning from his term as president of Yokohama City University, where he has been since 2004.

“I am very happy to have been selected as dean,” wrote Stronach in an email from Japan. “I am very much looking forward to working with everyone on the Temple team in Philadelphia, Tokyo, and elsewhere around the world.”

Stronach is accomplished, having been the first foreign president of a Japanese public university when he was first hired as president of YCU, a mid-sized school of 4,500 in a city of 3.5 million some 20 miles south of Tokyo.

Prior to that appointment, Stronach had been acting president at Becker College in Worcester, M.A. since 2003 and its chief operating officer before then since 1998. From 1990 to 1997, he held faculty and administrative positions at the Graduate School of International Relations at the International University of Japan in Niigata, eventually serving as the school’s dean beginning in 1994. Stronach also has held faculty appointments at Merrimack College in North Andover, M.A, and at Keio University in Tokyo.

Indeed, Stronach, 57, is the accomplished academic to his former competition, 37-year-old attorney Matthew J. Wilson, TUJ’s current chief legal counsel and the only other candidate to be named a finalist by the university’s search advisory committee.

Wilson had been a frequent de facto acting dean when Patterson was away on leave, most recently in the interim between Patterson’s TUJ departure Dec. 17 and Stronach’s appointment, according to some at the campus. However, some university sources said Wilson’s exact role was unclear.

No official announcement regarding an interim dean was named between Patterson’s official exit Dec. 31 and Stronach’s official entrance Feb. 1. TUJ’s semester began on Jan. 14, according to Stephanie Gillin, chief of staff to University Provost Lisa Staiano-Coico, who, with President Ann Weaver Hart, made the final decision on Patterson’s successor.

There had been some question to the delay in the decision to nominate Stronach, a longtime friend of Patterson’s. Official comment on the timing of the announcement has not been made.

“I am just beginning to absorb all the pressures of the transition and to bring myself up to speed on matters pertaining to both the home campus and the Tokyo campus,” wrote Stronach in the same email from Saturday.

He has not spoken to what, if anything, his friendship with Patterson, who was not active in the selection of his replacement, might mean for his plans and goals.

Patterson, who served from 2002 to 2007 and announced his retirement on Aug. 27, will likely be remembered for a tenure highlighted by unprecedented growth, though marred with late coming criticism of his leadership style, which some suggested was too controlling. Sources, including TUJ administrators and faculty, who afforded this characterization would not speak on the record but additionally praised the fiscal successes Patterson led.

“My successor will inherit an institution that is very optimistic,” wrote Patterson in an email from early December. “TUJ is becoming a first in the world model for international education.”

The man Stronach beat out, Wilson, had a leading role in the Patterson administration. He noted during interviews on Main Campus in November that his direct experience with TUJ was a prize advantage in his quest to become dean.

“I won’t have an on-the-job learning period,” he said while on Main Campus in November.

Despite watching an outside leapfrog him for the chief spot he coveted, Wilson intoned his intentions to stay on with his role at the branch campus.

“I am excited that Dr. Bruce Stronach has agreed to join the Temple family,” he wrote in an email to The Temple News from Tokyo on the day of the announcement. “[I] look forward to working with him in my capacities as Associate Dean and General Counsel.”

Wilson, who is narrow, blonde and noted for his boyish features, rapidly ascended through administrative ranks during a four and a half year TUJ career.

Wilson was taken on as a professor of law at TUJ in April 2003 and began what has been a startling ascension. Just two months later he was named the law program’s director. Then, a little over a year later, he was installed both as TUJ’s chief legal counsel and associate dean. Those positions, which he still holds, were coupled with a semester as director of TUJ’s undergraduate program last spring. If he had been appointed, he would have been the youngest dean in that campus’s history.

But he wasn’t and, where Wilson’s rise through Temple administrative ranks has been heralded, Stronach’s youth was less direct. His first attempt at college failed.

“You should be committed to your education because I wasn’t,” he told The Temple News in a November interview on Main Campus.

Young Stronach grew up on a small farm in Massachusetts and first left home for Boston College in the late 1960s. The football player who got caught up in the anti-war movement struggled to find a desire for academics, so he left in 1970. The next three years of his life were spent working as a truck driver and in various manufacturing capacities.

“The first half of my life was spent in factories, on trucks,” he said in the same interview. “So, I think I have a pretty good idea what the real world is like.”

Stronach has two daughters, one of whom currently attends Wake Forest University, another is a student at a high school outside of Boston.

In speaking with The Temple News, Stronach expressed an interest in further developing TUJ’s image as a permanent fixture of higher education in Japan and working on partnerships with other Japanese universities.

“I want TUJ to become more of a Japanese institution,” he said in November, while still just a candidate for the position. “Not just the extension campus of Temple University.”

Still, he admitted not knowing much about the daily operations of TUJ.

“I don’t know all that much about TUJ,” he said. “But I think that is more of an asset than a deficit.”

-30-

The Temple News originally misreported when Stronach will officially become dean. He will join TUJ on Feb. 1, but won’t become dean until April 1 as changed on Jan. 23 at 6:21 p.m.

This story was prepared for the 1/22/2008 edition of The Temple News. See it here. This is a follow-up in continued coverage of this story. See the original on this Web site here.

Post-racial urban politics: hardly

We have called for and expected the end of mainstream institutional racism in the United States since about the third day after it was exported to this country, maybe 400 years ago.

Back in 1999, when white Republican Sam Katz was challenging black Democrat John F. Street, Katz’s surging success in a city that had nearly as large a black population as white seemed to embolden that notion. Indeed, Katz seemed to make inroads in black communities that hadn’t voted more for a Republican than a Democratic mayoral candidate since 1972, when W. Thatcher Longstreth took on legendary Frank Rizzo, often derided as an outright bigot. Katz won the endorsement of John White Jr., a black former City Council member who lost to Street in the Democratic primary, as reported by the Philadelphia Inquirer.

When less than two months before the 1999 election, Martin O’Malley, a white Democrat, won over black voters in his party’s primary to beat out a field of mostly black candidates, the comparisons were sure to be made, as was done by the New York Times.

Continue reading Post-racial urban politics: hardly

Wanna read 100 words on layoffs?

pbj.jpgToday I worked on a handful of stories, including one on the burgeoning merchant cash advance industry, an idea I pitched, researched and am focusing on, hoping to grow it into something fairly substantial. While most of my work was lent to future work, I did write an online brief on today’s annoucement that Sprint, facing losses in contracted customers, will lay off 4,000 employees.

Philadelphia taxes created King of Prussia, lost jobs

It frustrates me that so much of the Delaware Valley’s gain is Philadelphia’s loss. That is, much of what makes this metro region great is development that could have helped make this city even greater.

In researching this thesis and making mention of the 2003 mayoral election between John F. Street and former oft-Republican mayoral candidate Sam Katz, I have referred several times to an essay written on that election by Dr. Jeffrey Kraus, a Wagner College professor of politics and government.

Entitled A Tale of Two Cities Revisited: The Philadelphia Mayoral Election of 2003, Kraus mostly makes the case that national politics trumped the normal rules of urban mayoral politics. Anyone unsure of this can see the popular Tigre Hill documentary Shame of a City for confirmation.

But, something always catches my attention when reading it.

Katz’s campaign focus was – before “the bug” – creating a business friendly Philadelphia. He wanted to slash the city’s wage tax from 4.4 to 3.5 percent by issuing a $750 million bond to be repaid over the subsequent decade.

Kraus continues:

According to Katz, Philadelphia faced three problems: a high crime rate and low quality of life, the exodus of the young and college-educated, and tax policies that create an unfavorable business climate. Katz said that one of his goals as mayor would be to attract 250,000 residents into the city over a 15 year period. By cutting business taxes, Philadelphia would retain businesses. As Katz explained it, “our tax structure created Cherry Hill and King of Prussia.” (Emphasis added)

See, this region is blessed, some might say, with the second largest mall in the country and Cherry Hill, N.J., another outpost of business and shopping. What’s more, the region features the world’s largest management services company in the Vanguard Group, located in Valley Forge, the pharmacuetical giant Merck & Co. has major offices in Horsham and Blue Bell, and the credit card services corporation MBNA, Du Pont Corp. and Christiana Health Care System all are based in Wilmington, Del.

I could, of course, go on, but the point is made. These are among the largest employers in the region, accounting for tens of thousands of jobs and millions in taxable assets and profits.

They aren’t based in Horsham or Wilmington for the view or the chance at a fine skyscraper. They are based in communities that offered enormous tax incentives because, well, increasingly, communications development means you don’t necessarily need to be based anywhere. A half century ago, businesses paid for the privilege to be based in a major city. That has become less and less the case, but Philadelphia hasn’t caught up.

Imagine the population boom, how much denser Center City would be, where the additional funds could go – like further developing a massive, world class, effective, clean and efficient mass transit system – if the King of Prussia mall, Merck and the rest were in Philadelphia.

We need someone to attract these and others back to grow this city into the international destination it once was.

A publishing meeting

banner2_top.gifToday, I briefly met with a representative from Temple University Press, set up by a professor-friend of mine.

I had forwarded two query letters to the rep, one on a collection of writing I had done while in Japan, another regarding my desire to compare the lives of a handful of North Philadelphia residents whom I had come to know through my coverage of the community for The Temple News.

He was kind and offered a great deal of insight into the publishing a world, a place I have long wanted to visit but never understood how to arrive. That said, I have no reason to believe the publisher was a place to shop my two ideas for published work.

He did suggest I write a full chapter of my suggested Japan manuscript and have him give it a read. It can only be considered a small step in the direction of a career in writing.