The College Democrats held an event Tuesday for Steve Marchand, Mayor of Portsmouth, N.H. Marchand, who in 2006 became the youngest mayor in New Hampshire at 33, is currently seeking the Democratic nomination for a Senate run against Republican incumbent John Sununu in the 2008 elections. Marchand has gathered the support of several prominent New Hampshire Democrats, including Gary Hirshberg, President and CEO of Stonyfield Farm dairy products company. However, Marchand will face early competition from Jay Buckey, former astronaut and current Dartmouth Medical School professor, and Katrina Swett, who lost her bid to unseat former New Hampshire Congressman Charlie Bass in 2002. There is also speculation that former N.H. Governor Jeanne Shaheen, who lost to Sununu by 4 percentage points in 2002 and now heads Harvard's Institute of Politics, is contemplating another run.
A statement from Columbia's President, Lee Bollinger, opposing a recent British University and College Union boycott of Israeli academics, appeared as an advertisement in the New York Times on Aug. 8. The statement, whose headline read, "Boycott Israeli Universities? Boycott Ours Too!," was organized by Princeton's President Emeritus Harold Shapiro in conjunction with the American Jewish Committee, a group that lobbies in support of Jewish causes. The statement affirmed, "If the British UCU is intent on pursuing its deeply misguided policy, then it should add Columbia to its boycott list ... for we gladly stand with our many colleagues in British, American and Israeli Universities against such intellectually shoddy and politically biased attempts to hijack the central mission of higher education." The statement was signed by a wide array of college and university, including Dartmouth President James Wright. Of the Ivy League, only Harvard and Yale were absent from the list.
A lawsuit filed in California against Yale University Press over a recently published book has been dropped. The book, titled "Hamas: Politics, Charity, and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad," suggests that a nonprofit group, KinderUSA, is part of a trend of reconstituting banned groups with terrorist links under different names. The suit comes on the heals of a separate suit filed in England, where the burden of proof for libel laws are not as strict, against a Cambridge University Press book, "Alms of Jihad." That case was eventually settled out of court.
