Major Owens, 77, Education Advocate in Congress, Dies

Frank Polich/Associated Press

Representative Major R. Owens, Democrat of New York, at the N.A.A.C.P. convention in Chicago in 1994.

By JOSEPH P. FRIED

Published: October 22, 2013

Major R. Owens, a former librarian who went to Congress from Brooklyn and remained there for 24 years, fighting for more federal aid for education and other liberal causes, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 77.

His death, at NYU Langone Medical Center, was caused by renal and heart failure, his son Chris said. Mr. Owens lived in Brooklyn.

Mr. Owens, as a state senator and a former chief administrator of New York City’s antipoverty program, was a prominent figure in Brooklyn when he won the House seat vacated by the retiring Shirley Chisholm in 1982. Fourteen years earlier, she became the first black woman elected to Congress.

Mr. Owens represented an overwhelmingly Democratic swath of the borough that included Crown Heights and parts of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brownsville, Flatbush and Park Slope. The district encompassed stretches of severe blight and poverty, along with areas of middle-class stability and pockets of affluence.

He viewed education as “the kingpin issue,” as he put it in an article he wrote for the publication Black Issues in Higher Education. “We have to believe that all power and progress really begins with education,” he wrote.

As a member of the House committee that dealt with education, Mr. Owens spent much time sponsoring and shaping measures to put more federal money into reducing high school dropout rates, hiring more teachers and improving library services. Many of his provisions became parts of wider education bills.

In 1985, he wrote parts of a successful bill that authorized a $100 million fund to strengthen historically black colleges. In a hearing on the legislation, he said the fund was needed because “most of the historically black colleges are struggling.” He recalled his own days at one of those institutions, Morehouse College in Atlanta, from which he graduated in 1956.

“Most of the youngsters there were poor, from very poor backgrounds,” he said, and Morehouse “played a vital role of nurturing.”

Mr. Owens, who was considered one of the most liberal members of the House, opposed an agreement between President Bill Clinton and Congressional Republicans to give states more flexibility in how they spent billions in federal school aid.

“We cannot leave it up to the states,” he said. “They have not done a good job.”

On other fronts, Mr. Owens was a floor manager of the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990, aimed at curbing discrimination against handicapped people. He defended organized labor and supported proposals to prohibit the deportation of illegal immigrants who fell into various categories.

Mr. Owens, whose first wife, the former Ethel Werfel, was white and Jewish, frequently urged blacks and Jews to bridge their differences.

He condemned the Nation of Islam as a “hate-mongering fringe group” after anti-Semitic remarks by its leader, Louis Farrakhan. Even before tensions between blacks and Hasidic Jews in Crown Heights erupted into riots in summer 1991, he denounced the “Rambo types on both sides” who, he said, only poured oil on the strife.

Mr. Owens was a low-key politician, but he had a colorful streak; he wrote and even performed rap lyrics, for example. He titled one number, about male sexuality, “The Viagra Monologues,” a takeoff on the name of Eve Ensler’s play “The Vagina Monologues.”

Other lyrics, which he performed in open-mike sessions at cafes and entered into the Congressional Record, dealt with goings-on in Washington. One rap number commented on a 1990 budget accord between Congress and the White House. Here is how it began:

At the big white D.C. mansion

There’s a meeting of the mob

And the question on the table

Is which beggars will they rob.

Major Robert Odell Owens was born in Collierville, Tenn., on June 28, 1936, to Ezekiel and Edna Owens. His father worked in a furniture factory.

In 1956, the year he graduated from Morehouse, Mr. Owens married Ms. Werfel. The marriage ended in divorce. He later married the former Maria Cuprill.

After earning a master’s degree in library science in 1957 from Atlanta University (which later became Clark Atlanta), Mr. Owens moved to New York City and worked as a librarian in Brooklyn from 1958 to the mid-1960s.

He was executive director of the Brownsville Community Council, an antipoverty group, until Mayor John V. Lindsay appointed him to oversee the city’s antipoverty program in 1968 as commissioner of the Community Development Agency, a post he held until 1973.

Mr. Owens was a state senator from Brooklyn from 1975 until 1982, when he won the Democratic primary for Ms. Chisholm’s House seat. In a district so heavily Democratic, the primary victory was tantamount to election.

His opponent in the primary, Vander L. Beatty, also a state senator from Brooklyn, was later convicted of forgery and conspiracy in seeking to get the result overturned.

In his 11 campaigns for re-election Mr. Owens faced significant opposition only twice, in 2000 and 2004, when his primary opponents contended, to no avail, that he was no longer attentive to the needs of his constituents, especially the many of Caribbean origin.

He retired from Congress in 2006. His son Chris lost in a four-way primary race to succeed him.

Afterward Mr. Owens taught public administration at Medgar Evers College, a Brooklyn branch of the City University of New York. His book “The Peacock Elite: A Case Study of the Congressional Black Caucus” was published in 2011.

Besides his son Chris, from his first marriage, Mr. Owens is survived by his wife; two other sons from his first marriage, Millard and Geoffrey, an actor who appeared on television as the son-in-law Elvin on “The Cosby Show”; three brothers, Ezekiel Jr., Mack and Bobby; a sister, Edna Owens; a stepson, Carlos Cuprill; a stepdaughter, Cecilia Cuprill-Nunez; four grandchildren and four step-grandchildren.

Protests as City College Closes a Student Center

It was just a small room, one of hundreds in City College’s North Academic Center, but over the years the Guillermo Morales/Assata Shakur Student and Community Center had taken on a significance beyond its square footage. To student organizers who used it as their meeting space, it was a place for lesbian and gay activists, women’s rights groups, community organizations and others to make common cause.


To outside critics it was a symbol of campus politics gone berserk, its unofficial name a glorification of City College alumni who had joined revolutionary organizations and gone on the lam.

But officials at City College, part of the City University of New York, insisted that charged history was not a factor when they decided that the room would be better used as an annex for the school’s career services office, two floors below. Without notice, security officers entered the room this past weekend, boxed up and removed its contents — and just to be on the safe side, locked down the entire building, including the library.

With just a day to go before midterm exams, the library was reopened after a few hours. But Room 3/201 was not, resulting at least for a brief while in the incongruous sight of closed doors emblazoned with a bold, black fist, below a crisp white sign that read Careers and Professional Development. (The door had been repainted, without the fist, as of Monday afternoon.)

Given the center’s history, it could not have come entirely as a surprise when its former occupants let their dissatisfaction be known. They organized protest rallies, distributed fliers, posted videos and demanded that City College be shut down. A protester was arrested. And just in time for an outdoor demonstration on Monday, someone set off a fire alarm, sending hundreds of people out onto the plaza.

“I think that the CUNY administration is really scared of a lot of the organizing and community-building coming out of the building,” said Alyssia Osorio, director of the Morales/Shakur Center. “We provide so many services for the community — know-your-rights training, a farm share that provides healthy food, we’ve run a soup kitchen, we have provided baby-sitting services for people in the community.”

Deidra Hill, vice president of communications at City College, called the administration’s takeover of the room a matter of space. She said the career services office needed a quiet area where students can “meet with outside employers, with alumni, to seek advice on careers.”

City College said the unusually swift action was necessary. “We were concerned that we might have to move people, and that would not have been safe,” Ms. Hill said. As for the protests, “Students were exercising their free speech rights, which the college supports,” she said.

The City College students whom the center’s name honors have never visited. Guillermo Morales, a leader of the F.A.L.N., a Puerto Rican independence group that claimed responsibility for a deadly bombing in New York, fled to Cuba. So did Ms. Shakur, who as a member of the Black Liberation Army was convicted in the 1973 killing of a New Jersey State trooper. In 2006, a student objected to the name of the center. In the ensuing controversy, CUNY’s chancellor ordered that it be changed. But it stuck.

Taf Sourov, 19, a member of the Revolutionary Student Coordinating Committee, a group that regularly met there, said he believed the closing was retaliation for student protests against David H. Petraeus, the former C.I.A. director and military commander, who is teaching a course at the Macaulay Honors College.

“I practically lived out of the room,” Mr. Sourov said. “I would do my homework in there. I did my political work in there. I would socialize in there. I feel like part of me is ripped out.”

Julie Turkewitz contributed reporting.

Social Responsibility and M.B.A.'s

Arnau Bach for The New York Times

Ketevan Sidamonidze of Georgia chose to study at the Esade business school in Barcelona because of its focus on socially responsible business practices.

By CHRISTOPHER F. SCHUETZE

Like many businesspeople, Ketevan Sidamonidze has traveled far — in her case from Georgia, in the Caucasus region, to the Esade business school in Spain — to earn a master’s in business administration. Unlike most others, she said, the driving force in her decision to get an M.B.A. was not to improve her career prospects, but rather to improve her ability do social good.

“I came to Esade because of the way they were advertising their social aspect,” said Ms. Sidamonidze, who is just finishing a degree program that she started in August 2012. “It really stood out.”

At Esade, social entrepreneurship is part of the curriculum, both in the classroom and outside: As an extracurricular activity, Ms. Sidamonidze is part of a team helping to set up a business plan for an organization that brings specialized housing to the elderly.

Teaching effective management remains the core function of business schools. But since the near-collapse of the global economy, teaching business as usual has lost some of its luster.

Particularly in Europe, which suffered much of the fallout, revelations of reckless management in the financial industry — a main employer of business school graduates — and the devastating consequences for taxpayers and working people have led to something of a backlash. Students and employers have started to demand that business educators pay more attention to long-term social and ethical sustainability.

In responding to this, business schools are following, not leading, the trend.

Pamela Hartigan, director of the Skoll Center for Social Entrepreneurship at Oxford University’s Said Business School, said that much of what was being taught in the field of social entrepreneurship — market-driven business with a social end — was at the behest of students.

“We are putting down the tracks as the train is coming,” she said.

The increased emphasis on teaching sustainable or more socially responsible business practices is driven by larger cultural changes, not the schools themselves, said Daniela Papi, who worked for nongovernmental organizations in Cambodia for six years before heading to the Skoll center to join a master’s program last year. She is now a consultant for the center.

“M.B.A.s are changing; they will have to, to survive,” she said.

Experts say that students interested in social business remain a minority of M.B.A. applicants, reflecting both the typically high cost of tuition and the fact that universities often offer management programs more suited to the nonprofit sector outside their M.B.A. programs.

Still, Professor Hartigan estimated that half the M.B.A. students at the Said school were interested in the subject.

The Skoll center has made a point of focusing on teaching and researching social business models. At other schools the percentage is lower, but it is nonetheless significant.

Net Impact, a sustainable-business networking group, carried out a study of business students last year that found that 39 percent of respondents would consider working in social enterprises and that about 34 percent were considering the nonprofit sector — figures that may have reflected the depressed state of the graduate jobs market.

While training managers for social business and nonprofits is important, so too is educating traditional business managers in issues like corporate social responsibility, advocates of sustainable-business education say.

“If students go on to work at McKinsey or Shell, that is not necessarily a bad thing,” Ms. Papi said, noting that socially responsible business training was also needed at large corporate entities.

The Copenhagen Business School, the largest in Scandinavia, has a strong reputation for its social and sustainable business courses, at least in part a reflection of the character of Danish society, according to Daniel Hjorth, a professor at the school.

“We insist that the social is not an epi-phenomenon in the economy,” he said, noting that the provision of social benefits in Scandinavian countries was not seen as merely a secondary effect of market-driven activity.

Senator Raises Questions About Protecting Student Data

By NATASHA SINGER

Nicholas Kamm/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Senator Edward J. Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, said that outsourcing the management and assessment of student performance data raises important questions about the privacy rights of parents and their children.

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A lawmaker who is a staunch advocate of children’s privacy is investigating whether the data collection and analysis practices of the growing education technology industry, a market estimated at $8 billion, are outstripping federal rules governing the sharing of students’ personal information.
On Tuesday, Senator Edward J. Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, sent a letter to Arne Duncan, the Secretary of Education, about how K-12 schools are outsourcing management and assessment of student data, including intimate details like disabilities, to technology vendors. The letter cited an article in The New York Times this month about concerns over the proliferation of student data to companies.
“By collecting detailed personal information about students’ test results and learning abilities, educators may find better ways to educate their students,” Senator Markey wrote in the letter. “However, putting the sensitive information of students in private hands raises a number of important questions about the privacy rights of parents and their children.”
School districts nationwide are increasingly using digital technologies that collect and analyze academic and other details about students in an effort to tailor lessons to the individual child. But privacy law experts say that many schools are employing student assessment software and other services without sufficiently restricting the use of children’s personal data by vendors. Researchers at Fordham University School of Law in New York, for example, recently found that certain school districts have signed contracts without clauses to protect information like children’s contact details, the locations where they wait for school buses every morning, or the food items they buy in school cafeterias.
In his letter, Senator Markey asked Mr. Duncan to explain whether the Department of Education had assessed the types of student information schools share with private companies; whether the department had issued federal standards or guidelines that outline the steps schools should take to protect student data stored and used by private companies; what kinds of security measures the department requires companies to put in place to safeguard student data; and whether federal administrators believe that parents, not schools, should have the right to control information about their children even if it is housed by private companies.
“Sensitive information such as students’ behavior and participation patterns also may be included in files outsourced to third-party data firms and potentially distributed more widely to additional companies without parental consent,” Senator Markey wrote. “Such loss of parental control over their child’s educational records and performance information could have longstanding consequences for the future prospects of students.”

Despite Rising Sticker Prices, Actual College Costs Stable Over Decade, Study Says

J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times

Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, Calif. Net college costs have been stable for 10 years, a new study shows, even as the overall figure at some institutions  approaches $60,000 a year.

By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA

Published: October 24, 2013

Every year, price increases at private colleges prompt a round of appalled responses and calls for corrective action. But even as some sticker prices approach $60,000 a year, the amount that students actually pay — because of increased discounts, grants and tax benefits — has barely changed over the last decade, according to a major analysis of college costs published this week.

The report, by the College Board, shows that the net cost of tuition, fees, room and board for the average student at a private, nonprofit college is about 57 percent of the sticker price, down from 68 percent in 2003-4. That works out to about $23,000 this year, a figure that, adjusted for inflation, has not varied much for 10 years. (Looking only at tuition and fees, the inflation-adjusted net price is actually lower than it was a decade ago.)

The cost of college, in real terms, did rise significantly in the 1980s and ’90s, and the report is not meant to play down the fact that college is often expensive and a burden, said Sandy Baum, one of the authors.

“It’s not hard to find instances of people genuinely struggling to pay the prices they’re being asked to pay,” said Ms. Baum, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute and a research professor at the George Washington University Graduate School of Human Development. “But I think the hand-wringing about the trend is greatly exaggerated.”

That hand-wringing tends to focus on the full, published prices that — without inflation adjustment — have jumped more than 50 percent in the past decade. In particular, news reports cite the higher-than-average sticker prices at the most prestigious colleges, though those universities tend to give the most financial aid and the deepest discounts, too.

Colleges have tried to get the word out for years about discounting and net prices, but “it hasn’t been terribly successful,” said Richard Ekman, president of the Council of Independent Colleges, an alliance of more than 600 private institutions. Though consumers have access to vastly more information about costs, through federal reports and databases, and the net price calculators that colleges are now required to post on their Web sites, he said, “Much of the public has trouble trying to make sense of these numbers.”

Colleges could simply lower their prices and offset them by reducing discounts, and a few have gone that route, but it goes against the prevailing consumer psychology.

“Some segment of the public is delighted to know that it costs a large number to go there, but their own son or daughter has received a scholarship,” Mr. Ekman said.

But college administrators worry that they may be approaching a breaking point in their ability to keep raising prices, whether or not those prices reflect what most people really pay. And many of the less-wealthy private colleges feel threatened by the rise of inexpensive online courses and degree programs, and a decline in the college-age population.

Public colleges have seen net prices rise sharply, particularly since the last recession began, as they have raised prices to offset plummeting state aid, though this year’s sticker price increases are the smallest in decades. The newest, smallest segment of the market, for-profit colleges, have also had significant increases in recent years.

For private, nonprofit colleges, the combination of higher posted prices and deeper discounts has resulted in bigger disparities in what different students pay: those with low incomes pay lower net prices than they did a decade ago, while those who earn more pay more.

Experts on college pricing say they worry about how that has affected people whose incomes are somewhat above average — those who neither qualify for generous need-based aid, nor are affluent enough to shrug off increases.

A federal government study, cited in the College Board report, showed that for a family in the second-highest quartile of family incomes, the net cost of sending a student to a private college rose almost 8 percent from 2003-4 to 2011-12, more than the increase for people in the top quartile.

“What’s happening with that upper-middle group is a real concern,” said Catharine Bond Hill, president of Vassar College and an economist who has researched college costs extensively. “The net price for them is pretty challenging.”