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As she blazes trails, Rhodes Scholar leads and inspires

Anonymous — Tue, 04 Dec 2018 16:33:16 +0000

As she blazes trails, Rhodes Scholar leads and inspires Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 12/04/2018 - 09:33

James W.C. White

Serene Singh aspires to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, and she has a resume, mind and heart that could drive her there

Follow your heart.

That’s the advice I give the many students who ask me how to choose from the diverse array of degree possibilities at the �鶹��Ƶ. When you follow your personal passion, you wake up in the morning excited to get after every day. That’s when you do your best. Do what you are passionate about doing and life seems more like a daily gift and less like a daily grind.

James W.C. White

Serene Singh is a classic example. Serene aspires to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, and she has a resume, mind and heart that could drive her there.

She is the first woman from CU Boulder to be named a Rhodes Scholar, and she’s in good company. Former Supreme Court Justices David Souter and John Marshall Harlan II were also Rhodes Scholars. So was CU Boulder student (and football star) Byron White, who was named a Rhodes Scholar 80 years ago and was later the first Coloradan to serve on the high court.

Where is my sweet spot, and am I really being true to who I am? If I didn’t have that conversation with myself, I might be in a very different major and a very different part of my life right now.”
—Serene Singh

Following their path, she will study at Oxford University, where she will pursue graduate degrees in criminology and criminal justice. Singh, who is from Colorado Springs and is majoring in political science and journalism, has previously been named a Truman Scholar and Dalai Lama Scholar. She is president of her political science honors fraternity, chief justice of the CU Student Government’s judicial branch, and president and founder of the Sikh Student Association.

She is also president and founder of The Serenity Project, a nonprofit aimed at empowering women in at-risk communities. It aims to boost women’s self-esteem by imparting skills such as public speaking and interviewing.

These are talents Singh honed through pageantry. She was Miss Colorado Teen 2016 and America’s Junior Miss in 2017. “I joined pageantry because I had a bias against it,” she told Voice of America. Doing things she thinks she will hate, she said, is one way to challenge herself.

It’s also one way to expand one’s horizons, a principle at the core of a liberal arts education. Open inquiry is a critical value the university strives to impart, as is independent thought. Both permeate her philanthropic work and disciplinary focus.

“Going into college, there was a lot of pressure from my community and from the world around me to be either in engineering or in pre-med,” she said. “Even in high school, I really felt like in order to be successful, I needed to be in the hard sciences.”

But science was not where her passions lay: “It was in government. It was in communications like journalism, and it was in understanding our Constitution, democracy, freedom studies and learning how to reduce violence through a political lens in the United States.”

Each student choosing whether to study the humanities, STEM or anything in between, Singh said, should ask themselves this question: “Where is my sweet spot, and am I really being true to who I am?” Singh added: “If I didn’t have that conversation with myself, I might be in a very different major and a very different part of my life right now.”

Serene Singh personifies hard work, intellectual curiosity and compassion. And she embodies the wisdom of some old but good advice: Follow your heart.

James W.C. White is interim dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.

Serene Singh aspires to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, and she has a resume, mind and heart that could drive her there.

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Democratic Party has lost touch with working folks, author says

Anonymous — Mon, 26 Sep 2016 23:22:49 +0000

Democratic Party has lost touch with working folks, author says Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 09/26/2016 - 17:22

Clint Talbott

Author’s CU Boulder appearance first of two events highlighting diverse perspectives from media professionals and public intellectuals

The Democratic Party, which presents itself as a vanguard of working people, has become an elite meritocracy that has lost touch with its roots, argues Thomas Frank, a journalist and author of the bestselling book What’s the Matter with Kansas?

Frank will give a talk titled “What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?” on Monday, Oct. 3, at 7 p.m. in Math 100 on the �鶹��Ƶ campus.

His appearance is the first of two events hosted by CU this fall that aim to highlight diverse perspectives from media professionals and public intellectuals. The second is an appearance by author, columnist, talk-radio host and Fox News contributor Meghan McCain, who will speak at a town hall on Monday, Nov. 14 at 7:30 p.m. in Math 100.

In Frank’s view, well-educated Democratic leaders have lost touch with working-class people and tend to be unduly sympathetic to comparably learned elites.

“You talk to a certain kind of Democrat about economic problems that we’re having in the country, which are in high relief now, and the conversation automatically for them gravitates to education,” Frank said in a recent interview.

“Everything for them is an education problem.”

One thing we know about the meritocracy is that the people on top respect one another.”

The lives of such Democrats are “defined by education, so they naturally think that education will play a similar role for everybody,” Frank continued.

But that view tends to shift the topic’s focus back onto the individual. “People are falling behind because they didn’t study the right subject, or they didn’t go to college, or their field is obsolete,” Frank argued.

Such Democrats “have real trouble talking about grand, sweeping economic changes, and this makes it easy.”

To buttress his view that the Democratic party has become fixated on well-credentialed elites, Frank compares the Obama administration’s cabinet with that of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

The Obama administration did not “get tough with Wall Street” after the 2008 crash and “dropped the ball” in several ways, Frank said. President Obama’s cabinet and inner circle of advisers has been packed with Ivy Leaguers and Rhodes Scholars and included “some of the best-credentialed people who’ve ever been in government, taken as a whole.”

“Yet they delivered these shabby results,” Frank said, noting a similar phenomenon in the LBJ administration, which was chronicled in the David Halberstam’s landmark book The Best and the Brightest.

Halberstam highlighted the fact that President’s Johnson’s defense advisers were “the most brilliant people around,” many from Harvard. “And they dreamed up the Vietnam War, this incredible catastrophe,” Frank said.

The Obama and Johnson administration examples might prompt one to wonder if “there’s something wrong with government by expert,” Frank said, before quickly adding, “But that can’t be right.”

The golden age of “government by expert,” by contrast, was FDR’s New Deal. But President Roosevelt’s advisers had broad expertise without the same “concentrated collection of credentials” seen today.

What constituted expertise “wasn’t always answered by the word ‘Harvard,’” Frank said. While Roosevelt himself was a Harvard man, he enlisted the help of people from a broad range of experience.

For instance, Roosevelt appointed Robert Jackson, former chief U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials and associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, as solicitor general and attorney general. But Jackson did not have a degree in law.

The Roosevelt administration “got tough” with the bankers after the crash, Frank said, adding that the Obama administration declined to do so. “One thing we know about the meritocracy is that the people on top respect one another.”

So when the government’s top watchdogs view the titans of the financial sector “they see peers. They see people they are automatically sympathetic with, people whose concerns they understand. They are willing not just to forgive these people but to give them the benefit of the doubt in every imaginable way.”

That mindset makes it difficult for the government elite to grasp that fraud on a massive scale was perpetrated at the top of the financial sector, Frank said, suggesting that the government elite viewed the financial meltdown this way: “If there was an epidemic of fraud, it was committed by people at the bottom, people who are signing the loan documents, people who are borrowing money to buy houses.”

Frank’s articles have appeared in the Financial Times, Harper’s Magazine, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Salon, The American Prospect, The Guardian, The Nation and Wall Street Journal.

He is the author of eight books, including the aforementioned New York Times bestseller What’s the Matter with Kansas? His most recent book—Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?—was published in March.

Frank’s appearance is sponsored by the CU Boulder College of Media, Communication and Informatioon, the Center for Western Civilization, Thought and Policy and BoulderTalks.

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