Gcina Mhlophe did not visit a library until she was 20 years old. There simply weren’t any in the small South African village where she grew up, and the closest one was reserved for White people only. Now an award winning writer and performer, she has spent years touring elementary schools in her homeland, working with children and watching the country and its culture change.

Today, Mhlophe concentrates on oral history, telling stories, anything to teach children to love words and books the way she does. As a child, she saw that rich oral tradition mocked and humiliated by those in power. Today, she celebrates that tradition, while continuing her mission to bring literacy and learning to South Africa.

For information about Gcina Mhlophe’s performance, Thursday, see the link below for the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. For Rhode Island performance information, call 401-789-0651.

Guests:

Gcina Mhlophe, storyteller and writer

A college education is something they tell us we can’t afford to live without, but it’s getting to be something some people can’t afford at all. Some students and their parents have the luxury of choosing from among the elite private campuses which charge 30 thousand dollars a year or more.

It’s the public colleges and universities that are supposed to make higher education available, and affordable, for everyone else, but this year, tuition at state schools has gone up in 49 of the 50 states. There’s no simple explanation. College administrators blame cash-strapped state legislatures. Others blame the schools for not controlling costs. Some say students should pay a greater share for their education at a state university.

Guests:

Patrick Callan, president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education

Rachel Wilson, University of Arizona law student bringing class action law suit over tuition increases

Chris Herstam, President, Arizona Board of Regents.

Big-time college sports are big money, and lately, that’s meant a lot of big time college scandals. The sports pages are full of stories of cheating, and secret slush funds, and lately even the murder of one basketball player at Baylor. At colleges across the country coaches and university executives are in trouble. The head of Vanderbilt University, has his own plan to make sure that his school avoids these kinds of headlines. Gordon Gee has announced that he’s eliminating his athletic department. The chancellor says he’s keeping all the teams, and the athletes, but he’s putting them back where he says they belong, as part of a university, a school, a place to learn. Is it a clever end run around the big money boys…or a hail Mary bit of desperation.

Guests:

Dr. Gordon Gee, Chancellor of Vanderbilt University

Stefan Fatsis, staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal

Dr. Murray Sperber, professor of English and American Studies at Indiana University

U.S. politics, a presidential election and foreign policy.
It’s been a grim few months in the Middle East. The once promising road map for peace is now in shreds. A Palestinian Prime Minister has resigned and members of the Israeli cabinet is now talking about “removing” Yasser Arafat. Things aren’t looking much better in Baghdad where mounting casualties and costs are taking a toll, and not just on the soldiers and the citizens there, but back here, on President Bush’s approval ratings.

Now some Democrats are asking more pointed questions about American policy in Israel and in Iraq, but others are saying whoa, worried that questions which are too pointed might hurt more than help. The Democrats fight it out over foreign policy.

Guests:

Joe Klein, columnist with TIME magazine, and occasional contributor to The New Yorker

Ambassador Marc Ginsberg, former U.S. ambassador to Morocco.

Guests:

Daniel Goleman, board member of the Mind & Life Institute, co-sponsors of this weekend’s “Investigating the Mind” conference in Boston featuring the Dalai Lama, and author, “Destructive Emotions: How Can We Overcome Them?”

When failing health felled Johnny Cash in the late 1990’s, many feared he was down for the count. But he was back on the charts in 2002 with a new album and an award winning video. The final comeback was fitting for a legendary artist whose dozens of hit records, including songs like “I Walk the Line” and “Folsom Prison Blues,” often celebrated second chances, especially for the down-and-out.

Cash, who died today at age 71, was perhaps the most widely recognized voice in country music, recording more than 1500 songs. He was the youngest member ever inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, but he also made his mark in rock and has been cited as an influence by everyone from Bob Dylan to the Beastie Boys.

Guests:

Michael Streissguth, editor of The Johnny Cash Reader

Merle Kilgore, co-author with June Carter Cash of hit “Ring of Fire” and long time friend of Johnny Cash.

Israel’s security cabinet has declared its intention to “remove” Yasser Arafat, an act that has put the chairman of the Palestinian Authority back in the spotlight, center stage. And he is in the role that he has played for many years: a besieged leader standing in defiance.

The language of the Israeli pronouncement is vague, but its message is clear. Yasser Arafat is “an absolute obstacle” that “Israel will act to remove.” The implication is that this could be by expulsion, jail, or possibly death. The immediate reaction of the United States was muted. Ousting Arafat would “not be helpful;” it would “only give him another stage to play on.” Arafat’s fate, America’s response, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at a new crisis point.

Guests:

Ambassador Dennis Ross, Director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy

Ben Lynfield, Jerusalem based reporter for the Christian Science Monitor and the Scotsman

Uzi Landau, Israeli cabinet minister

Sari Nusseibeh, president of Al-Quds University in Jerusalem

On April 18, 1983, a man drove a truck loaded with explosives into the U.S. embassy in Beirut. 63 people, including the driver, were killed. That event is considered the first modern suicide attack. Two decades later, suicide bombing dominates headlines with datelines the world over, from Moscow to Tel Aviv, Baghdad to Bali, to New York.

The message has gone global: suicide attacks can be cheap, they can be devastating in terms of death count and post-traumatic stress, and they are an effective means of recruiting new bombers. Leaders of terrorist organizations have been known to reflect admiringly on the success of other suicidal missions, by other organizations in other countries. Terror experts say that human artillery is here to stay and likely to get more deadly.

Guests:

Robert Pape, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, specializing in international security affairs

Joyce Davis, author of “Martyrs: Innocence, Vengeance and Despair in the Middle East.”

Two years later, the images remain indelible. The blue sky. The silhouettes of the planes. The smoke. The flames. The paper.

And as if those images could possibly fade, there are reminders. Homeland Security and the Patriot Acts. Orange alerts and long lines at the airport.

Yet beneath all that, there’s something else that’s harder to describe yet shared by almost everyone, that is the change to the American identity; each person’s self-image in a country made a target, in a world put on edge.

For some, September 11th was a defining moment, altering forever a sense of safety or confidence. For others, the jolt of that day has dulled with time. What it means to be an American at home and abroad, two years after 911.

Guests:

Kevin Coyne, author of “Marching Home: To War And Back With the Men of One American Town” and Professor at Columbia Graduate School of Journalism

Jack Laurence, Author of “The Cat from Hue: a Vietnam War
Story”

Vivian Gornick, author of numerous essays and books including the memoir, “Fierce Attachments”

Chuck Mathers, friend of a 9.11 victim.

In March of 2002, F.B.I. SWAT teams and U.S. Special Forces, acting on an electronic intercept of telephone calls from Afghanistan, descended on a two-story safe house in Western Pakistan and captured one of the most wanted men on earth: a top al Qaeda operative named Abu Zubaydah. That man’s arrest, and his ensuing confession, became the center point of Gerald Posner’s new book, “Why America Slept.”

It reads like a spy thriller, but if Gerald Posner’s thesis is correct, that Osama bin Laden and top Saudi Arabian officials were more than passing acquaintances, the truth is more chilling than fiction. Approaching the second anniversary of September 11th, a conversation about what the Saudis might have known, and what American intelligence still won’t reveal.

Guests:

Gerald Posner, author of “Why America Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9/11″

Khaled Al-Maeena, editor of Arab News, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.