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thatcrazycajunThe year isn't even one day old, and already we've lost one of the truly great ones. Former US Senator Claiborne Pell (D-Rhode Island), the father of the federal Pell Grant program for higher education and of the National Endowments for the Arts and for Humanities, died this morning at his Newport home of complications from Parkinson's disease. He had just turned 90 the week before Thanksgiving; CNN has the obit here.
A Senator for nearly four decades until his 1997 retirement, he served as head of the Foreign Relations Committee, a mentor to his Delaware colleague (now Vice President-elect) Joseph Biden and a US delegate to the United Nations. He helped make many of your favorite PBS and NPR programs possible, not to mention some excellent work in the lively arts and museums, by creating the endowments. (He also indirectly put a bee up the bonnets of Newt Gingrich and other straitlaced conservatives with some of the more—ahem—controversial NEA-funded projects of the 1990s. The then-Speaker of the House famously vowed to "zero out" NEA's Congressional funding as a result, in which endeavor my least favorite fellow Georgian happily failed.). And he made a marriage last over 64 years, with the help of his wife Nuala.
But Pell's signature accomplishment (literally!) was sending millions of low-income families' kids to college who might not have been able to swing the obscene costs of four years at even a public institution otherwise...and vastly raising the nation's collective IQ and expanding its human capital thereby. My heart, thoughts and prayers are with his widow, daughter, son, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, friends, colleagues and former constituents in this most difficult hour.
Pell once said, "The strength of the United States is not the gold at Fort Knox or the weapons of mass destruction that we have, but the sum total of the education and the character of our people." Amen and farewell, sir, from a proud fellow Democrat and college graduate; and thank you for your long and impressive record of service to our country.
A Senator for nearly four decades until his 1997 retirement, he served as head of the Foreign Relations Committee, a mentor to his Delaware colleague (now Vice President-elect) Joseph Biden and a US delegate to the United Nations. He helped make many of your favorite PBS and NPR programs possible, not to mention some excellent work in the lively arts and museums, by creating the endowments. (He also indirectly put a bee up the bonnets of Newt Gingrich and other straitlaced conservatives with some of the more—ahem—controversial NEA-funded projects of the 1990s. The then-Speaker of the House famously vowed to "zero out" NEA's Congressional funding as a result, in which endeavor my least favorite fellow Georgian happily failed.). And he made a marriage last over 64 years, with the help of his wife Nuala.
But Pell's signature accomplishment (literally!) was sending millions of low-income families' kids to college who might not have been able to swing the obscene costs of four years at even a public institution otherwise...and vastly raising the nation's collective IQ and expanding its human capital thereby. My heart, thoughts and prayers are with his widow, daughter, son, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, friends, colleagues and former constituents in this most difficult hour.
Pell once said, "The strength of the United States is not the gold at Fort Knox or the weapons of mass destruction that we have, but the sum total of the education and the character of our people." Amen and farewell, sir, from a proud fellow Democrat and college graduate; and thank you for your long and impressive record of service to our country.
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Date: 2009-01-02 03:35 am (UTC)Heck, I'd never heard of them until about 10 years ago.
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Date: 2009-01-02 03:47 am (UTC)Re: FREE
Date: 2009-01-02 05:36 am (UTC)Re: FREE
Date: 2009-01-02 10:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-01-02 06:23 am (UTC)