Post-millennial entrepreneurs view higher education as vital to their startups by Eric J. Barron, President of Pennsylvania State University for The Conversation 1/3/2019

Research and education have always opened doors that benefit the nation we serve. Today, public colleges and universities are well-positioned to transform our economy and infuse it with innovation and energy. As chair of the Association of Public & Land-grant Universities (APLU) newly formed Commission on Economic and Community Engagement (CECE), I’m working with universities and our government partners to identify key areas crucial to maximizing the impact of public research universities.

By the end of this year, tens of millions of Generation Zers will enter the workforce. The challenge for higher education will be how to help the world of business to better harness the many talents, energy and inquisitiveness that Generation Zers bring to the table. The many partnerships that universities have formed with entrepreneurial students serve as an important first step toward this goal.

White right? How demographics is changing US politics by Monica Duffy Toft, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, 1/7/2019

The backlash also extends to the political leaders who support minorities’ right to be accepted and respected as Americans. These communities of color remain in the minority. But already in some states, white voters as distinct from all whites are in the minority, and nationally, whites are unlikely to remain in the majority for long. In California, for example, non-white populations now make up 62 percent of the population, with Hispanic and white populations at near parity at 38 percent each. Texas, New Mexico and Arizona are among three southern states where the gap between Hispanic minorities and white majorities is closing. Like Florida, these are also states with difficult-to-seal borders and with well-established immigrant communities.

Fighting for lost dominance

My research reveals that it is the declining majority that tends to act aggressively, often imagining it must preempt a rising minority. Simply put, declining majorities don’t want to yield their status or hegemony.This turns demographic shifts into a struggle about power and dominance, with elements of the majority refusing to cede ground to emergent new pluralities and majorities that might displace them.

El Chapo trial shows why a wall won’t stop drugs from crossing the US-Mexico border by Luis Gómez Romero, University of Wollongong, 1/17/2019.

American demand

The Sinaloa cartel didn’t become the world’s biggest supplier of illicit drugs by coincidence. It has flourished because the United States is the world’s biggest consumer of illicit drugs. Mexican cartels serve Americans’ "insatiable demand for illegal drugs,” as Hillary Clinton once said. Despite President Donald Trump’s focus on Mexican drug traffickers, his former chief of staff, John Kelly, has admitted that the U.S. is part of the problem.

"We’re not even trying,” he told Congress in 2017, calling for more drug-demand reduction programs. Kelly added that Latin American countries chide American authorities for "lecturing [them] about not doing enough to stop the drug flow” while the U.S. does nothing to “stop the demand.”

Corruption in the US

Corruption is not an exclusively Mexican trait. Over the past decade some 200 employees and contractors from the Department of Homeland Security have accepted nearly $15 million in bribes to look the other way as drugs were smuggled across the border into the United States, The New York Times has reported. Some U.S. officials have also given sensitive law enforcement information to cartels members, according to the Times. “Almost no evidence about corrupt American officials has been allowed at [El Chapo’s] trial,” New York Times reporter Alan Feuer said recently on Twitter.

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