Stanford Report, Apriil 21, 2004

THE REV. WILLIAM 'SCOTTY' MCLENNAN JR., dean for religious life, told the San Francisco Chronicle April 24 that Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry had a "huge impact on the antiwar movement" when he testified to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971 against the Vietnam War. At the time, McLennan was a divinity and law student and antiwar activist at Harvard, and Kerry was a Yale graduate who had volunteered for the U.S. Navy and served from 1968 to 1969 in Vietnam. Kerry was wounded three times and decorated twice for heroism. "The vice president [Spiro Agnew] was using terms like effete, impudent snobs," McLennan recalled. "We were undermining the war effort. We were not supporting our troops. Here you had this figure come forward from within the military and say the best way to support American values was to bring the troops home."

MORE PARENTS ARE HOLDING their children back when they are old enough to enter kindergarten to give them an academic advantage, The New York Times reported April 25. Almost 22 percent of first-graders were 7 or older in October 2002, up from about 13 percent in 1970, according to the Census Bureau. But experts say that whatever slight academic advantages older students might have in the early years typically evaporate by third grade. In a 2002 report, DEBORAH STIPEK, dean of the School of Education, found that existing research showed that, on average, older children do not academically outperform their younger peers. Nor are there social or emotional benefits to being older. "It’s one of the conventional wisdoms that take hold in our society that parents are giving their children a great advantage if they’re older," she said. "But there’s real data out there showing that for most children that’s not true, and parents should know there’s a downside if their children are intellectually capable of handling kindergarten."

THE NEW YORK TIMES REPORTED April 25 that a tentative sense of Iraqi nationhood has been forged from the roiling cauldron of anti- American sentiment in the country. STEPHEN KRASNER, the Graham H. Stuart Professor of International Relations, explained that national identities are not fixed. "Individuals always have choices because they have multiple identities: Shia, Iraqi, Muslim, Arab," he said. "Which among this repertoire of identities they choose has to depend on the circumstances, on the pluses and minuses of invoking a particular identity." Krasner added that even if the Shias and Sunnis made an alliance now, its ability to hold would not depend so much on a sense of shared Iraqi nationalism but rather on whether they would be able to work out a power-sharing arrangement that would be mutually beneficial.