Very interesting nota bene over at the Chronicle of Higher Education today. This will be the very first election to usher in a White House where the commander in chief, his VP, and both their spouses have all worked in the higher education field. Obama worked in Chicago Law until 2004, and it seems Biden has been an adjunct professor at a law school for the past 17 years.
But what does this mean for us who are now and will continue to be in the higher education establishment when Obama is inaugarated? The article doesn’t offer too much speculation–mainly because higher education has been such an underplayed issue in this election as a result of the urgencies of the tumultuous financial markets. The Chronicle does believe that research funding to universities will increase, but I suspect that within the first year of a Democrat-controlled Congress and White House, we will see some very important legislation being decided tuition costs, federal aid (e.g., Pell grants), and science funding, especially to stem-cell research (which is a very big issue over at the techie magazine Wired).
The Chronicle of Higher Education also lays out a warning. Woodrow Wilson was also a Professor in Chief, but he served only one term, seeming very distant to the American electorate. While Obama has told a very compelling narrative in this election compared to McCain, a first-term president must not forget to always keep policy discussions relevant to the lives of Americans.
Maya Robinson covered the jubilation in Raleigh as Sen. Barack Obama was declared the winner of the 2008 presidential election. Check out a slideshow of her photos below:
More than 65 percent of the nation’s voting populace between the ages of 18 and 24 voted for President-elect Barack Obama in this election—and that same demographic also comprises the generation for which Facebook is a part of daily life. Facebook, the original bastion of social networking, and Twitter, its modern reincarnation, have been absolutely abuzz with political talk over the last 24 hours—and as soon as the clock struck 11 p.m. EST and the major networks called the race for Obama, chatter became even more intense.
Of the 25 statuses on my newsfeed of updates right now, 22 are inspired by tonight’s results, and 20 are pro-Obama.
Search Twitter for “Obama”—let alone “Barack Obama” or “President Obama”—and what comes next is more astounding: In the time it took to type that sentence, there were 33 more mentions of the 44th president’s last name. Wait, stratch that. Nineteen more. Make that 17 more. And there’s another 19…
Unofficial vote totals from the N.C. State Board of Elections show President-elect Barack Obama winning N.C. over Sen. John McCain by only 0.27 percent. All 100 precincts have been counted. It’s unclear whether the small margin will result in a recount.
Former Blue Devil basketball and football player Reggie Love, President-elect Barack Obama’s body man, joined Obama on stage as part of the first wave of Obama team’s celebrating on stage. A couple hundred thousand more people than Love played in front of when Duke played North Carolina.
