Author Archives: legallysociable

Efforts to revive local shopping malls; how about an ice skating rink?

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The recent economic downturn has severely affected many retailers, especially shopping malls. One local mall, Charlestowne Mall in St. Charles, has been hit particularly hard and is looking for ways to bring in more shoppers. One idea: build an ice skating rink.

Barring an eleventh-hour change of heart, 94 employees at the Sears store at Charlestowne Mall in St. Charles will lose their jobs in two months. But the mall management and city officials hope to coax the retail giant to stay.

And the city and mall owners see hope in new business coming to Charlestowne, including an ice arena…

There might be reasons to be optimistic about the mall. Anchor stores Kohl’s and Von Maur both own the property they operate, making them less likely to leave. Aiston said the mall also disclosed it’s in negotiations to bring two or three new businesses to the mall, including a restaurant.

In addition, the mall may soon have a new headline attraction. Aiston and Kekatos said the city is reviewing plans the mall owners submitted to build an 18,000-square-foot ice arena at the mall to revive foot traffic.

“What I really want the public to know is our new ownership is fabulous,” Kekatos said. “You have to remember it’s only been going on seven months since they’ve purchased the mall. We’re updating the interior and the exterior of the mall. The community, the people in it, they just don’t understand that it takes time to do all this.”

This seems to be a common strategy for shopping malls: attract new kinds of businesses that will bring in a steady flow of potential shoppers. The restaurant strategy has been a common one – it moves malls beyond the world of the shopping mall food court with its quick food and may bring in a crowd with more time and money. But bringing in a shopping rink hints at another area of potential uses: recreational uses. Could the shopping malls of the future include things like ice skating rinks, gyms, climbing walls, and more? If so, this could help further transform malls from shopping spaces to community centers.

It is also interesting that the quest for developers and mall owners to add uses to shopping malls mirrors the efforts of many downtowns who have also been interested in increasing foot traffic. Of course, the shopping mall is often blamed for helping to kill off many downtowns but perhaps they are both now in the same boat. Are there enough retail and recreational and restaurant businesses to fill all of the space in shopping malls and downtowns?

Academic Progress Rates, Auburn, and sociology departments

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Even though its football team is set to play for the National Championship next week, Auburn University is in the New York Times today for a more dubious feat: a large drop in their Academic Progress Rate.

Auburn’s drop in the Academic Progress Rate, a four-year assessment of the movement toward graduation for a team’s players, is the third largest in college football since 2006, behind Mississippi’s (to 113 from 18) and Florida State’s (to 105 from 17). Since 2006, both Florida State and Michigan have endured academic scandals, with Michigan’s ranking falling to 84 from 27.

Among all the bowl teams this season, Auburn has the highest disparity in the graduation rates between white players (100 percent) and black players (49 percent), according to a study at the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida.

Jim Gundlach, the Auburn sociology professor who uncovered the academic abuse, saw the decline in the team’s ranking as progress. “A genuine consequence to this has been that the people who want to do things right have gotten a bit more grasp over what the university is trying to do,” he said.

Graduation rates for Division 1 football and basketball male athletes is an ongoing issue. But this article brings up another issue: the disparity in graduation rates between white and black athletes. How much concern will this draw amidst all the National Championship hoopla that dominates ESPN every day?

Also, the Auburn sociology department doesn’t look too good in the explanation of how Auburn fell in the rankings:

In 2006, Auburn football was No. 1 among public universities in the academic ranking, alongside private institutions like Duke and Boston College. But some irregularities had caught Gundlach’s attention two years earlier.

He saw on television that an academic football player of the week was an Auburn sociology major, yet Gundlach was surprised that he had never had him in class. He asked two other sociology professors, who also did not recall having him as their student. Gundlach dug through records and soon found that Auburn football players were graduating as sociology majors without taking sociology courses in the classroom.

He found that 18 players on Auburn’s undefeated 2004 team had taken 97 directed-reading course hours — independent study-style classes — from Thomas Petee, the sociology department’s highest-ranking member. Petee taught 252 independent studies in one academic year, 2004-5, astounding Auburn faculty members, who said that overseeing 10 independent studies would be considered ambitious.

In investigating the situation, the university found that another professor, James Witte, had taught an inordinate number of directed-reading classes. The investigation did not find fault in the athletic department because the courses were available to and taken by all students.

Sociology often has a reputation of being an easy major – isn’t it all just common sense (an issue I try to tackle in day 1 or 2 of Intro)?. Stories like this don’t help this image.

Naperville’s ongoing problem with 1 homeless man

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Naperville in the last decade has been a celebrated place: named one of the best places to live in the country plus a growing population plus a vibrant suburban downtown. But one homeless man has created an ongoing set of issues:

A Naperville psychologist and others asked the Naperville City Council Tuesday to do more about what they say is continued harassment from protester and squatter Scott Huber.

Kathy Borchardt, a clinical child psychologist who is suing Huber after a 2010 confrontation that resulted in disorderly conduct and criminal trespassing charges against him, said she was frustrated more has not been done to stop Huber’s infringement on business owner’s rights.

“This sort of bullying behavior by Mr. Huber has given him more power in this community than any business owner or official,” she said, adding that an ordinance passed by the council banning camping on sidewalks in the downtown area caused Huber to move outside her business, leading to the confrontation.

Huber frequently sets up a makeshift, mobile protest site on Ogden Avenue and in other areas of the city with signs calling for the boycott of Borchardt’s practice and claims about her ethics…

City Attorney Margo Ely said the encampment ordinance that was put in place was a legal remedy the city thought would hold up if challenged in court. Expanding the ordinance to the entire city — instead of just its downtown — or establishing “free speech zones” would be a lot less likely to withstand a legal challenge. She also cautioned that the city cannot act to limit the free speech of an individual.

Councilman Bob Fieseler said the issue could be handled immediately by enforcing laws on the books giving the city the right to confiscate property left unattended on public sidewalks…

But Police Chief Dave Dial said he — nor patrol officers — have seen Huber blocking walkways or leaving his property unattended.

This story has been going on for quite a while now. This is not an issue – a homeless man creating trouble – that typically plagues suburbs but Naperville is no normal suburb due to its size plus affluence.

Throughout the coverage of this case, I don’t remember reading about efforts by the City of Naperville or Naperville citizens to help this man stay off the streets (beyond city efforts to enforce or create ordinances). And if there is one homeless man on the streets, how has the city of Naperville dealt with this issue? Is this affluent community prepared for big-city type problems?

Debunking the Transformers 3 movie trailer

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While recently in the theater to watch True Grit (perhaps to be reviewed later though I am not well versed in either Westerns or Coen Brother’s films), I saw the new trailer for Transformers 3. The trailer takes some liberties with an important moment of history and is debunked by ESPN’s TMQ:

Philip Torbett of Knoxville, Tenn., writes, “In the just-released trailer for the third Transformers movie, the premise is that the Apollo missions were a cover to explore a downed alien spacecraft. When the moon spins and the Apollo landing area is no longer facing Earth, the astronauts climb a ridge and explore the massive alien craft which is mere feet away from the Lunar Module. When the moon spins back, the astronauts quickly return to the lander and pretend to be collecting rocks. But the moon revolves such that we always see the same side. This makes the opening premise of the movie impossible, because any alien craft that landed in the Sea of Tranquility would have been continuously observable from Earth with a decent telescope.”

TMQ’s rule of sci-fi is that I will accept the premise — enormous instantly transforming living organisms made of metal that require no fuel or other energy and can fly without lift or propulsion, hey, why not? — so long as action makes sense within the premise, while laws of physics are observed. The moon is turning on its axis, but the same side always faces Earth. If the moon did not turn on its axis, as it revolved around the Earth, we’d see the dark side just as often as the familiar light side. The moon is “tidally locked” with Earth — its gravity creates tides in the oceans, while Earth’s gravity locks the light side of the moon facing us. That the moon is tidally locked — rotating on its axis, but the same side always facing Earth — is the reason we see the same surface features whenever we look up at the moon but never see the dark side.

The entire time the Apollo landers were on the moon, they were visible from Earth. Hollywood assumes that with science literacy being what it is, most moviegoers won’t know this. Did the scriptwriters know it?

A good question. When I first saw the trailer, I was torn between thinking it was absurd (quite the hulking alien spacecraft) and thinking it was clever (by being tied to an iconic moment in history).

Pointing out the issues with this backstory leads to a larger question: should we be willing to overlook historical or scientific impossibilities for the sake of having an entertaining movie trailer or film? Should a movie like The Social Network be truthful or be entertaining? I tend to dislike such changes though they can be done better in some movies than others.

We could also ask about how many viewers of the Transformers trailer or film would even think about this issue of the moon rotating.

How the goal of marriage has changed over time

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There has been a lot of recent discussion about marriage and its place in American society. Within this, researchers present new insights into how what people expect from marriage and their partners has changed over time:

The notion that the best marriages are those that bring satisfaction to the individual may seem counterintuitive. After all, isn’t marriage supposed to be about putting the relationship first?

Not anymore. For centuries, marriage was viewed as an economic and social institution, and the emotional and intellectual needs of the spouses were secondary to the survival of the marriage itself. But in modern relationships, people are looking for a partnership, and they want partners who make their lives more interesting.

Caryl Rusbult, a researcher at Vrije University in Amsterdam who died last January, called it the “Michelangelo effect,” referring to the manner in which close partners “sculpt” each other in ways that help each of them attain valued goals.

These findings would seem to have consequences for marriage as an institution and for society as a whole. While this particular article doesn’t really discuss these consequences, it is also interesting to be reminded how the institution of marriage has changed.

I would be curious to read work by people who have linked these findings about partnerships and shared goals and reconciled this with religious perspectives on marriage. This article also reminds me of Ann Swidler’s Talk of Love and her discussion about how individuals create new strategies between the cultural poles of romantic love and committed love.

The American Bar Association issues a financial warning for prospective law students

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The American Bar Association has issued a warning for perspective law students about the cost of obtaining a law degree:

According to the association, over the past 25 years law school tuition has consistently risen two times faster than inflation.

The average private law student borrows about $92,500 for law school, while law students who attend public schools take out loans for $71,400. These numbers do not include any debt law students may still have from their time as undergraduates.

Before the recession, the ABA cites statistics that show an average starting salary for an associate of a large law firm of about $160,000 a year. But by 2009, about 42 percent of graduates began with an annual salary of less than $65,000.

And those are just the newbies.

This is an interesting statement: a national organization warning students about the large amount of debt they will incur (and hinting at the lack of jobs to pay off this debt) for their own profession. What do law schools think about this? What sort of discussions took place before issuing this warning? How many complaints have come from people who did not know about the full cost of getting a law degree?

It would help to have some context regarding this statement. Is this the first time the ABA has issued something like this? How unusual is this across a variety of disciplines that require a professional or advanced degree? Are other organizations interested in issuing similar statements?

(Read the full statement here.)

h/t Instapundit

A call to return to studying the American character

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A historian argues that we need more current research and writing about the American character:

Does America have a distinctive national character? Up until the 1960s, this was a question of great interest to historians. But then, according to historian David Kennedy, it dropped off the map, to be taken up only sporadically by sociologists and political scientists. Writing in the Boston Review, Kennedy argues that historians need to take the question back.

Kennedy is a Professor of History, Emeritus at Stanford, and as he sees it historians are in a unique position to write on the subject of the American character. Over the last half century, they’ve put together an extraordinarily diverse set of very specific American histories, bringing once-marginalized groups into historical focus; in doing this, they stepped away from sweeping questions, becoming “a guild of splitters, not joiners.” Now, Kennedy argues, it’s time to start drawing on “the large but disarticulated library of social history that has emerged in the last few decades.”..

Kennedy singles out for particular praise Claude Fischer’s Made in America: A Social History of American Culture and Character. Fischer is a sociologist at Berkeley, but a sociologist who takes a historical approach, focusing, Kennedy writes, on “processes … trends and developments and differences over time – all matters lying squarely within the historian’s province.”

Fischer’s conclusion (according to Kennedy) is that it’s defined by voluntarism is at the core of the American character. Voluntarism has two aspects. On the one hand, it means thinking of yourself as an individual equipped with a (voluntary) will – as someone who’s entitled to pursue your own happiness. On the other hand, it means recognizing that, in Fischer’s words, “individuals succeed through fellowship – not in egoistic isolation but in sustaining, voluntary communities.” It’s because of these two aspects of voluntarism that we have an affinity for both the exclusive and the inclusive – for gated communities as well as religious diversity, for casual manners as well as social climbing. This can’t be the final answer, of course – Kennedy hopes that it’s only the first salvo in an epic exchange of fire among historians.

This is an interesting argument that might lead to some fruitful discussion. I feel that there is some discussion of this among academics: Americans of recent decades are often said to be marked by individualism, consumerism, materialism, and greed. And in order to understand something like voluntarism (or other traits), we would need to compare these behaviors and beliefs to those of other nations with similar or different historical trajectories.

Speaking of voluntarism, this has some basis in one of the key texts regarding the American character. Though it is now quite dated (over 160 years old), Democracy in America by Alexis de Toqueville is frequently cited in both popular and academic discourse. de Toqueville suggested one way Americans were distinct was their propensity to form voluntary associations. (I also wonder if this is one of those key academic works that many cite or reference but few have read all the way through.)

Kennedy also is suggesting that we need more overarching research on America and its social patterns. This is not necessarily easy: academics who engage in this sort of sweeping work could be open to criticism from many sides.

And it is also interesting to note that Kennedy singles out the work of a sociologist as the sort of work that he would like to see done regarding the American character.

A sociologist maps the universe of Twitter apps

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In recent years, services like Twitter have exploded. Perhaps to bring some sense to the dizzying array of applications available for users, one sociologist has mapped the “Twitterverse.”

I like this graphic. However, I would be curious to hear the greater purpose of this chart. Does it indicate the popularity of particular applications? Does it reflect the date such applications were made available? Or is this simply an informational chart meant to display the broad range of services available on Twitter?

Additionally, this chart is a reminder of the dizzying array of apps Twitter users can download. Sorting through all of the possible apps on Twitter or in other places (iPhone, Droid, etc.) could be a time-consuming process.

The current problems of mixed-income development in Chicago

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The challenges facing a new Chicago mayor are large. Within a story about how growing Chicago’s middle class will prove to be one of these challenges, the Chicago Tribune summarizes the progress of the mixed-income developments that replaced a number of public housing high-rises:

For years, miles of high-rise public housing buildings stretched across the city’s skyline, blocking off entire neighborhoods from any hopes of improvement and further defining Chicago as an urban failure.

Today, much of the city’s stability rides on the success of the $1.6 billion effort launched by Daley in 2000 to tear down those public housing towers, sending thousands of Chicago’s poorest residents to new neighborhoods.

As part of the Chicago Housing Authority’s Plan for Transformation, the mixed-income developments going up in those neighborhoods are meant to be cornerstones for further growth, luring urban pioneers whose presence there would then attract new stores, restaurants, better schools and even more residential development.

The plan has worked in some neighborhoods, most notably, the area near the Gold Coast that was home to the infamous Cabrini-Green housing complex. Synonymous for decades with urban despair, the community has been transformed to a bustling center of urban chic, even before the CHA began demolishing the last high-rise building there last month.

But in other Plan for Transformation communities, the weak economy has altered plans for new development, generating concerns about an effort that has been blamed for destabilizing some neighborhoods.

Unable to attract enough interest for the middle-income homes that are the linchpins of those developments, several developers have recently won approval to instead build more rental homes, including public housing units and other low-income apartments.

That has stirred worries that pockets of poverty are being re-created, though a federal judge overseeing the effort has emphasized the importance of including the mixed-income units.

“If you get too much rental, and too much of it is low income, the neighborhood can get fixed with an image that is hard to change, so that’s an ongoing concern,” said Alexander Polikoff, a director at Business and Professional People for the Public Interest, a law and policy group that has monitored the Plan for Transformation’s efforts as part of a federal court settlement stemming from a 1966 class-action lawsuit.

In a 2009 report, BPI criticized developers for the “slow pace” of building on middle-income homes that could have been sold when the housing market was still strong.

Some thoughts about this summary:

1. We will still need time to assess the full impact of the Plan for Transformation.

2. For sources like the Chicago Tribune, just getting rid of the public housing high-rises is an important enough feat. Because Chicago no longer has these high-rises, is it now not an urban failure?

3. The emphasis here is on neighborhoods, collectivities of institutions and individuals, and their status. What about the residents who left the public housing high-rises. What sort of neighborhoods are they in?

4. Within the Plan for Transportation, how much planning was there for harder economic times? When the Plan was conceived and put into practice (late 1990s-2000s), it seems imperative that middle-class professionals would want to purchase in the mixed-income neighborhoods. If this pool of buyers is not available or is not as big, then the neighborhoods can’t be what they were intended to be.

Limited American meritocracy and the importance of a college education

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A foundational cultural value in America is that residents should have equal opportunities and that if people work hard and grasp these opportunities, they will be able to get ahead. But academics have suggested for decades that while this might sound good, real chances to move up the social ladder are more limited. Some recent data suggests this is indeed the case: compared to other industrialized nations, being born into a poor American family is more limiting.

Among children born into low-income households, more than two-thirds grow up to earn a below-average income, and only 6% make it all the way up the ladder into the affluent top one-fifth of income earners, according to a study by economists at Washington’s Brookings Institution.

We think of America as a land of opportunity, but other countries appear to offer more upward mobility. Children born into poverty in Canada, Britain, Germany or France have a statistically better chance of reaching the top than poor kids do in the United States.

What’s gone wrong? Thanks to globalization, the economy is producing high-income jobs for the educated and low-income jobs for the uneducated — but few middle-income jobs for workers with high school diplomas…And Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam argues that thanks partly to the rise of two-income households, intermarriage between rich and poor has declined, choking off another historical upward path for the underprivileged.

“We’re becoming two societies, two Americas,” Putnam told me recently. “There’s a deepening class divide that shows up in many places. It’s not just a matter of income. Education is becoming the key discriminant in American life. Family structure is part of it too.”

Increasingly, college-educated Americans live in a different country from those who never made it out of high school.

This article only mentions a small bit of data and it would be interesting to see the mobility rates for all Americans.

But these findings present Americans with a contradiction: we talk about social mobility but reality is a lot harsher. What often happens is that certain cases of people who “made it” are trumpeted and held up as examples when really those people were exceptions rather than the rule.

Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers lays this out in a simple way: those born into more privileged positions accumulate advantages over time. One of these advantages in America today is a college education. For many in the middle and upper classes, college is a foregone conclusion: a young child is expected to accomplish this goal. But to get to this point, middle and upper class children have more financial resources, better schools, better health and nutrition, parental support (“concerted cultivation”), and more.

This gap between the college educated and those with less than a college education is an important one to watch in the coming decades.