Selected Media Coverage: March 15/2007

The Best Undergrad B-Schools
03/15/2007 - BusinessWeek (cir. 985,516)

Shattered Bones Get a Boost from Glass
03/15/2007 - Medical Device & Diagnostic Industry (cir. 50,548)

New Campus Architecture: A Sampling
03/15/2007 - Chronicle of Higher Education, The (cir. 100,000)

FBI hunts last of the lynchers
03/10/2007 - Guardian Unlimited (cir. )

America's final mission in Iraq
02/11/2007 - Boston Globe (cir. 397,288)

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The Best Undergrad B-Schools
03/15/2007 - BusinessWeek (cir. 985,516)


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Lehigh's College of Business and Economics was named as the no. 20 best undergraduate business program in the country by the editors of BusinessWeek Magazine, who noted that Lehigh's Strong accounting program wins student praise, but many [students] say they could use more advanced computer training.

In addition to the rankings, Lehigh was also featured in a slideshow titled Lehigh's Tight-Knit Group: This B-school offers students a diverse but centralized campus life while preparing them for A-list job placement. The introduction reads the following:

Young adults who attend Lehigh University's College of Business & Economics applaud its accounting program almost as fervently as the football team. The majority--or about 34%--of the 1,220 undergraduates enrolled in the business program in 2005 went into accounting after graduation. Ernst & Young and KPMG are the top recruiters of Lehigh business graduates.

Recruiters and aspiring accountants aren't the only ones taking notice of the university. In 2005, more than 10,500 people applied to the undergraduate program, and the school accepted 41.40% of them. But none of the nearly 2,000 applicants placed on the waiting list was admitted.

The appeal goes beyond academics, say students. The school's proximity to two economic hubs, Philadelphia and New York City, attracts those who want an authentic campus atmosphere and eventual careers in everything from economics to supply-chain management.

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Shattered Bones Get a Boost from Glass
03/15/2007 - Medical Device & Diagnostic Industry (cir. 50,548)


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Within the glass scaffold, macropores and nanopores are interconnected.

Glass that has interconnected pores and could assist in bone vascularization. The glass has potential as a biocompatible material for implants in orthopedic procedures.

According to Himanshu Jain, director of the International Materials Institute for New Functionalities in Glass at Lehigh University (Bethlehem, PA), the glass’s porosity is the key to its use. He says it can be used to treat broken bones or osteoporosis. “The ideal treatment for diseased or damaged bone is to coax the body’s natural bone tissue,” he says.

“Doctors do this by taking a bone graft from one part of a person’s body and using it as a scaffold to stimulate bone tissue elsewhere to regrow.”

Likewise, he says, biocompatible glasses have been used as bone transplants. The glass is unique because it is porous at two scales. It contains nanopores that measure up to 20 nm in diameter, and macropores measuring 100 µm or wider. The nanopores facilitate cell adhesion and crystallization of bone’s structural components, Jain says. The macropores allow bone cells to grow inside the glass and to form new blood vessels and tissue.
Director Himanshu Jain leads the international research project that has created dually-porous glass for use in orthopedic implants. The research team includes members from Lehigh, Princeton University, the University of Alexandria in Egypt, and the Instituto Superior Tecnico in Portugal. So far, the international team has been able to create glass that features both nanopores that have diameters of 5–20 nm and macropores.

To get there, the traditional melt-quench glass-making technique had to be refined. Members at the Alexandria facility developed a recipe for the powders that make up the glass. The materials are a mixture of silicon, calcium, phosphorus, and boron oxides. A chemical treatment then etches the glass to induce the desired porosity. They also used a sol-gel technique for glass-making that encourages the development of nano-sized pores. Then the team added a polymer to the solution.

The polymer caused a phase separation to occur parallel to the sol-to-gel transition, which helped overcome a significant obstacle, explains Jain. “Thermodynamically, the coexistence of nanopores and macropores is unstable in that the larger pores should absorb the smaller pores,” Jain says. “We have developed a material that defeats that expectation.”

Jain’s Lehigh group is in the process of refining the fabrication process and investigating the mechanical properties and bioactivity of the materials.

In addition, another team at Lehigh is also measuring cells’ interactions to the glass. The researchers have found that when the glass is attached to the damaged bone, a layer forms on the surface of the glass that has the same chemical composition as the natural bone.

The new material has been successfully tested in laboratory experiments, and the researchers are currently conducting in vivo tests at the University of Alexandria.

The researchers are also collaborating through the U.S.–Africa Materials Institute, which is headquartered at Princeton. The project is funded by the National Science Foundation.

Copyright ©2007 Medical Device & Diagnostic Industry

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New Campus Architecture: A Sampling
03/15/2007 - Chronicle of Higher Education, The (cir. 100,000)
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Lehigh's recent renovation of Lamberton Hall was showcased in The Chronicle of Higher Education's Campus Architecture supplement. Lamberton was selected as one of fifty shown as a sampling of new or renovated campus buildings amongst the more than 500 projects in the publications database. It reads, Constructed as a dining hall in 1907, Lamberton Hall was subsequently used from 1926 to 1941 as the home of the university's military-science department, then as a dining hall again until 1958, after which it housed simply the tip of an iceberg that had been going on for generation after generation to maintain white dominance,' said Moglen.
The initiative, coming as Senator Barack Obama is bidding to make history as America's first black President, could become a reminder that modern America has come a long way. Civil rights activists now believe there is no better way to do that than to make sure the past is fully explored, that wrongs committed 50 years ago are still righted. 'Those responsible for these forgotten deaths have gone unpunished too long,' Cohen said.
A legacy of hate
There are many unsolved racial murders from the civil rights era. Among the most notorious are
Oneal Moore
Moore was a black sheriff's deputy in Louisiana in 1965. He was shot in his patrol car by white men in a passing truck. His partner, another black deputy, was blinded in one eye.
Jimmie Lee Jackson
Jackson was shot dead in Alabama in 1965 by police after state troopers began attacking a crowd of black protesters. The killing was not investigated. But now a former policeman, James Fowler, has confessed he was the shooter. He says it was self-defence.
James Brazier
In 1958 Brazier was beaten to death in front of his family by two police officers in Georgia. The local sheriff later told a newspaper 'There's nothing like fear to keep niggers in line.'
Isadore Banks
Banks was a farmer in Arkansas and his property was supposedly envied by local white people. His body was found chained to a tree in 1954. He had been burnt to death. His property was then rented to white farmers.
Andrew Anderson
In 1963 Anderson was accused by a white woman in Arkansas of molesting her daughter. He was killed by a group of white people in a bean field. His death was ruled a justifiable homicide by local authorities.

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America's final mission in Iraq
02/11/2007 - Boston Globe (cir. 397,288)
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America's final mission in Iraq
WHATEVER PRESIDENT BUSH and his advisers might like to believe, it is too late now to stop the Sunni -Shi'ite civil war in central and southern Iraq. The proposed surge of 20,000-odd additional US troops will not change this.
Ethnic cleansing is not only an expression of hatred or a means of revenge; often it is a rational strategic response to real security fears. The more atrocities are committed in any ethnic civil war, the more everyone in both communities becomes afraid of the other. People on each side feel dependent on communal militias to protect them, even though those same militia may be murdering members of the other community and contributing to the escalation of the war.
At a certain tipping point, it is no longer possible for any authority in either community to muster a constituency determined and strong enough to suppress the ethnic cleansers emanating from their own community. Beyond that point, the war cannot be stopped until the warring communities are substantially separated. It no longer matters how the war started, or even whether most members of both communities actually want to wage an ethnic war. The ethnic cleansing will continue until nearly all mixed urban neighborhoods, towns, and rural districts have become unmixed, as forces representing whichever community is stronger in that locality kills or frightens away most members of the other. The eventual result is a de facto partition.
In the aftermath of the Samarra mosque bombing last February, it was clear the war in Iraq had passed its tipping point. Prominent leaders of both Sunni and Shi'ite communities, including clerics, made energetic efforts to dampen the upsurge in sectarian killing but had no measurable impact at all.
More than 2 million Iraqis have fled their homes since 2003, and roughly 5,000 more do so daily. Hundreds of towns, villages, and urban districts in Iraq that were ethnically mixed four years ago no longer are.
If partition is inevitable
Despite heavy US pressure for power-sharing, there is not enough support for it in the Shi'ite community to matter (nor is there among Kurds). Even if a peace agreement could somehow be reached, neither side could enforce compliance on its own community. If there was ever an opportunity for the United States to determine the future course of Iraqi politics, that opportunity died some time ago.
A poll in September by the Program on International Policy Attitudes found that 82 percent of Iraqi Shi'ites said that we are damaging, not improving security; 71 percent of Shi'ites wanted us out within a year, and 62 percent thought attacks on US forces were justified. Shi'ite attitudes toward the US military presence have hardened further since then, both because of policy disagreements and because of some actual combat. In their heads, many Shi'ites have already put us in the dustbin of their history. Sunni attitudes toward the United States are even more negative, but matter less because they are the weaker side.
Some politicians and academic analysts now propose a managed partition of Iraq as a way to end the sectarian killing. Opponents of partition argue that it would generate yet more refugees and might not end the war.
Both sides in this debate are asking the wrong question. The question is no longer: Should we partition Iraq? It is; Can anyone prevent Iraq from partitioning itself? Probably not. The fact that virtually all Sunnis and most Shi'ites still oppose partition is not relevant; the structure of the situation is causing them to act in ways that are partitioning the country anyway.
Eventually there will be a de facto partition line even if parts of it run right through Baghdad. Self- preservation will cause both sides to make sure that that line will be very difficult to cross; the barriers and check points that US forces are now trying to pull down in parts of Baghdad will go back up and will be multiplied many-fold.
A US military surge will not change any of this. The presence of coalition forces in Iraq over the last four years probably slowed the escalation of the Sunni-Shi'ite civil war — Bosnia, in contrast, went from almost no violence to full-scale war in the single month of March 1992 — but they could not stop it.
In early November the top US commanders in Iraq admitted that a three-month effort to focus our resources on population security in Baghdad had not even managed to keep the situation from continuing to deteriorate. An increase in troop strength of roughly 13 percent or 14 percent will not make possible now what was impossible then.
It is not even clear that efforts to disarm militias implicated in ethnic cleansing, such as current US efforts aimed at rogue elements of the Shi'ite Mahdi Army, will actually reduce loss of life. The same militias also provide security for their own communities.
Helping Iraqis relocate
Recently, after a especially horrific truck bomb attack in Baghdad, both Shi'ite leaders and Iraqi government officials all the way up to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki complained that US efforts against the Mahdi Army had removed checkpoints that could have stopped that attack. This is not the first time that Shi'ite leaders have made this complaint. Most Iraqi Shi'ites genuinely believe that US forces are hindering them from defending themselves.
America still has one remaining military mission in Iraq whose completion is essential: refugee protection. Our 160,000 heavily-armed troops are more than enough to protect, transport, and resettle those Iraqis who have not yet become refugees but likely will as the civil war grinds toward completion. We should identify the 150 to 200 towns, villages, and urban districts that are most at risk for ethnic cleansing — and sit on them until we can organize well-defended transport for those who wish to move.
The United States should do this because it is the right thing to do. Some people who might otherwise die at the hands of death squads will survive if US forces protect them long enough to relocate safely and without becoming desperately impoverished.
We also must recognize that by now most people nearly everywhere in the world blame us for all of the evils that have befallen Iraq since 2003 — and will for all that happens for many years to come. Anything that shortens that bill of indictment, even a little, is in the national interest.
Beyond this, we must rethink how to stabilize the region's future. Even with Sunni and Shi'ite populations largely separated, Iraq will remain unstable: its flat terrain, relatively good roads, and the world's second largest oil reserves will provide both and motivation for losers in one round of fighting to try again later. Neighboring powers, including Turkey, Iran, and Saudi Arabia will also have powerful motives to intervene.
The wider Persian Gulf region has also been destabilized. Iran and the Shi'ite rump of Iraq will be the region's natural dominant powers, while our current allies on the southern side of the Gulf are weak not only externally but internally. If they survive it will be by reform or by accommodation. American extended deterrence based on military power alone will no longer suffice.
The situation in and around Iraq today is reminiscent in many ways of the Balkans in the late 9th century. Faced with a deeply unstable configuration of competing local nationalisms and major power interests, the European powers sought to manage the region through a series of conferences, such as the famous 1878 Congress of Berlin. In the end, of course, they failed to avert World War I, but it is not obvious that the effort was doomed from the start.
Something like a Congress of Amman is called for now. Iraqi factions, regional powers, and global powers must forge ways to manage conflicting interests in the changed situation to minimize risk of an even larger war that no one wants. Each party must explain to others what policies they can expect, and must learn from rivals what they cannot tolerate.
Admittedly, few of the parties who need to talk to their rivals show signs of being ready to do so. In particular, neither the United States nor Iran appears ready to talk to the other constructively. Perhaps a sufficient achievement for the First Congress of Amman would be agreement that there will be a second.
Chaim Kaufmann is associate professor of international relations at Lehigh University.