Selected Media Coverage: March 16, 2006

Education: You're In—And So Are Mom and Dad
03/20/2006 - Newsweek (cir. 3,145,362)

Two-faced on terrorism
03/11/2006 - Los Angeles Times (cir. 902,164)

Green Investing
03/01/2006 - BizEd (cir. )

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con_paperclip.gif alt= />Education: You're In—And So Are Mom and Dad
03/20/2006 - Newsweek (cir. 3,145,362)
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Why should we send our child to Duke instead of our perfectly good public university? It's a legit question—Duke costs about $44,000 annually—but not one a particular parent's asking. Duke poses it in a new Q&A on the school's admissions Web site for parents. (Answer: The value of a Duke education far exceeds its price tag.)
This justification comes as parents, faced with huge tuition hikes, have begun keeping a closer eye on the investment in their child's future. This, in turn, has spurred colleges to pay more attention to the people who will be footing the bill. Much more. A soon-to-be-released report by the National Association for College Admission Counseling shows that 43 percent of about 580 schools surveyed had online resources for prospective students' parents in 2005; 13 percent even offered a separate campus tour.
The appeals can be much more direct. Starting last year at Lehigh, in Bethlehem, Pa., parents of admitted students got letters from the university president offering his personal services if parents had questions. Princeton invites parents to join alums now in Congress for receptions. Elon University, in Elon, N.C., sends parents their own acceptance letters. And Washington University in St. Louis has parents of current students send letters to parents of prospectives. Next? Michael Mills, admissions head at Northwestern in Evanston, Ill., says marketing experts are looking to target a third generation: grandparents.

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con_paperclip.gif alt= />Two-faced on terrorism
03/11/2006 - Los Angeles Times (cir. 902,164)
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Two-faced on terrorism
By Henri J. Barkey
HENRI J. BARKEY is chairman of the international relations department at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania.
March 11, 2006 WASHINGTON, Jerusalem and Brussels were shocked when the Turkish government recently invited the leader of Hamas, Khaled Meshaal, to Ankara. By hosting the leader of a terrorist organization one that has taken terror to new heights with its suicide bombings of malls and city buses Turkey undermined its own cause. After all, Turkey has for many years been campaigning to get its homegrown Kurdish insurgency classified as a terrorist group. The United States and European Union have done so. So the invitation to the Hamas leader was particularly strange coming from Turkey, even while Turkey is negotiating to join the EU.
The Turkish government justified its decision to invite Meshaal, who is based in Damascus, by arguing that Hamas had won free and fair elections in the Palestinian territories. The Turks stressed the importance of having a dialogue with Hamas in order to moderate its position.
Yet, at the same time, Turkey furiously tried to block meetings in Washington for one of its own citizens the Kurdish mayor of the city of Diyarbakir. Osman Baydemir, a member of a pro-Kurdish but legal political party in Turkey, was in the United States last month for meetings, including some with the State Department and one with the Brookings Institution.
Through its embassy in Washington, the Turkish government demanded that Brookings rescind its speaking invitation to the mayor. When, to its credit, Brookings refused, the Turks retaliated by pulling out of a major Brookings event in Doha later in February that Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was to open. The Turkish Embassy also pressured the U.S. government not to receive the Diyarbakir mayor at the State Department.
Unlike Brookings, the State Department gave in and sent a deputy assistant secretary to meet with him at his hotel, thereby providing the Turks the dubious satisfaction of claiming that no one in Washington would officially see the mayor.
Why this fuss about a democratically elected mayor carrying an official Turkish passport? The Turks mistrust Baydemir because they claim he has not sufficiently distanced himself from Kurdish rebels, and they are uncomfortable with the fact that Europeans are increasingly turning to him as an interlocutor on Turkey's Kurdish problem.
Although Baydemir has never publicly advocated or sanctioned violence, Meshaal refuses to renounce the use of terror against Israeli civilians. The ultimate irony is that while Turks claimed to be encouraging dialogue with a known terrorist organization, they attempted to censor Americans trying to engage one of their own elected mayors.
With these heavy-handed tactics bullying the State Department and failing to alert its Western allies in advance that it intended to invite the Hamas leader for an official visit and its hypocritical position on terrorism, Turkey has weakened its position in the United States and infuriated the Europeans. Ankara also has alienated key constituencies in Congress that have long supported Turkish causes.
If the costs to its prestige and standing were this high, why did Ankara engage in such reckless behavior? The current Turkish leadership has been eager to show that it can be an international player and has long thought that Turkey punched below its weight. Moreover, most Turks, including Erdogan, have a great deal of sympathy for the Palestinian cause and so are more tolerant of Hamas than are Western publics.
In their zeal to emerge as a bona fide intermediary in the Palestinian-Israeli dispute and so to host Hamas before the Russians or the Iranians the Turks jumped the gun. They made a major faux pas in allowing Hamas to determine which of its leaders would be traveling to Ankara. Turkey could have waited to invite an elected Hamas member from the Palestinian territories. Meshaal rebuffed Ankara's request to moderate Hamas' refusal to recognize Israel. And from Ankara, he promptly went to Tehran, where he was feted by the hard-line Iranian regime.
Now, to the consternation of the Bush administration, the Turks have invited Muqtada Sadr, the firebrand anti-American Shiite cleric who has played a destructive role in Iraq, to visit.
Turkey has every right to chart an independent foreign policy, but if it wants to maintain the respect of its Western allies, it must steer a morally consistent course.

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Green Investing
03/01/2006 - BizEd (cir. )
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Socially minded students at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, are participating in a socially responsible investing contest as a way to learn business ethics and corporate social responsibility outside of the classroom setting. Winners will be announced on March 20 - which is Earth Day 2006.
Students have been given a hypothetical $500,000 to invest in a portfolio via the IWF Advisor software package. The software allows students to screen the S&P 500 for possible investment opportunities based on 49 factors, including environmental performance, human rights, labor relations, and diversity. Students participating in the contest are guided by the mantra, Invest in what you believe, believe in what you invest.
We may not realize it, but Americans are involved in socially responsible decision making all the time. You buy from and invest in companies that share your core beliefs, explains David Myers, director of Lehigh's Financial Services Library. This is the future of investing. In the broadest sense, our students are applying nonfinancial factors to a strictly financial process. They will also be exposed to the important causes and effects of business ethics, in the truest sense.