Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff:

What I am suggesting is that we in uniform do not have the luxury anymore of assuming that our fellow citizens understand it the same way. Our work is appreciated. Of that, I am certain. There isn’t a town or a city I visit where people do not convey to me their great pride in what we do. Even those who do not support the wars support the troops.
But I fear they do not know us. I fear they do not comprehend the full weight of the burden we carry or the price we pay when we return from battle. This is important, because a people uninformed about what they are asking the military to endure is a people inevitably unable to fully grasp the scope of the responsibilities our Constitution levies upon them. Were we more representative of the population, were more American families touched by military service, like that of the Hidalgos or the Huntoon families, perhaps a more advantageous familiarity would ensue. But we are a small force, rightly volunteers, and less than 1 percent of the population, scattered about the country due to base closings, and frequent and lengthy deployments.
We’re also fairly insular, speaking our own language of sorts, living within our own unique culture, isolating ourselves either out of fear or from, perhaps, even our own pride. The American people can therefore be forgiven for not possessing an intimate knowledge of our needs or of our deeds. We haven’t exactly made it easy for them. And we have been a little busy. But that doesn’t excuse us from making the effort. That doesn’t excuse us from our own constitutional responsibilities as citizens and soldiers to promote the general welfare, in addition to providing for the common defense. We must help them understand our fellow citizens who so desperately want to help us.
As the first chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Omar Bradley once said: “Battles are won by the infantry, the armor, the artillery and air teams, by soldiers living in the rains and huddling in the snow. But wars are won by the great strength of a nation, the soldier and the civilian working together.”

Linda Darling-Hammond:

I could not be more honored than to be awarded this recognition from Teachers College, one of the places of all those I know in the world that holds the tightest grip on my heart and best represents my values and beliefs. Thank you for this recognition–and, more important, thank you, Teachers College faculty, trustees, students and graduates, for who and what you are.
My first real glimpse of what Teachers College is and does occurred not in New York City but in a school in Washington, DC, where one of my children had transferred into a first grade classroom to avoid the truly terrible teaching that was literally undermining her health in another school. In her new school, Elena’s teacher, Miss Leslie, had created a wonderland of stimulating opportunities for learning: children experimenting and investigating in the classroom and the community, designing and conducting projects, writing and publishing their own little stories (one that my daughter wrote after the birth of her little brother was entitled “Send Him Back”). This teacher–who was in her very first year of practice–not only had created a classroom that any mother would want to send her child to, but she also had the skillful eye and knowledge base to figure out within weeks that Elena was severely dyslexic, to teach her to read without her ever being labeled or stigmatized, and to instill in my daughter a lifelong love of books and learning that has led to her being a literacy teacher working with special needs students today.

Ron Howell:

In three decades as a news reporter, I’ve seen hundreds of bullet-riddled bodies in Haiti and in the Middle East, and I’ve had friends and colleagues killed in both of those places. I lost my father to cancer.
But no death transformed me like the death last August of Clyde E. Murphy, my buddy from the Class of ’70, my brother in Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, the best man at my wedding as I was at his. Clyde was the confidant with whom I shared deeply held feelings about life and death and–perhaps most of all–about being a black man in America.
Then, six months later, as I was making peace with the sudden loss of Clyde to a pulmonary embolism, word came that yet another brother who’d pledged Alpha with us, Ron Norwood ’70, had succumbed to cancer. A few weeks after that we learned that Jeff Palmer ’70, another black classmate, had passed, also from cancer.

The Economist:

“WE’RE excited to be working with them, and we hope they will help young people everywhere realise that you don’t need credentials to launch a company that disrupts the status quo,” declared the Thiel Foundation on May 25th as it announced its first batch of “20 Under 20” fellows.
The lucky winners were all under 20 when they applied. There are actually 24 fellows, rather than 20, and each will receive $100,000 over two years, along with mentorship from a network of entrepreneurs and innovators selected by the initiative’s sponsor, Peter Thiel (pictured above). The only condition set by Mr Thiel, who made his billions first by co-founding PayPal then investing early in Facebook, is that they drop out of college (or high school) to focus full-time on building a business. A few of the new fellows appear to have dropped out–or, as the press release quaintly puts it, “stopped out”–before they were chosen, to launch a start-up or even to climb mountains.

Brian Tamanaha:

The Association of American Law Schools (AALS) produced a comprehensive study of law schools in the late 1950s, sending detailed surveys to 129 law schools, with a 90% response rate. Here are a few interesting tidbits about the cost of attending law school:
Median annual tuition and fees at private law schools was $475 (range $50-$1050); adjusted for inflation, that’s $3,419 in 2011 dollars. The median for public law schools was $204 (range $50 – $692), or $1,550 in 2011 dollars. [For comparison, in 2009 the private law school median was $36,000; the public (resident) median was $16,546.]
The report expressed concern about cost: “The cost of attending law school at least doubled in the [past] 16 years…, raising the question whether able, but impecunious, students are being directed away from law study.”
14% of students received scholarship aid; just over half of this aid was for “scholastic performance” (merit scholarships to attract top students) and the remainder for “economic need.”

David Leonhardt:

The last four presidents of the United States each attended a highly selective college. All nine Supreme Court justices did, too, as did the chief executives of General Electric (Dartmouth), Goldman Sachs (Harvard), Wal-Mart (Georgia Tech), Exxon Mobil (Texas) and Google (Michigan).
Like it or not, these colleges have outsize influence on American society. So their admissions policies don’t matter just to high school seniors; they’re a matter of national interest.
More than seven years ago, a 44-year-old political scientist named Anthony Marx became the president of Amherst College, in western Massachusetts, and set out to change its admissions policies. Mr. Marx argued that elite colleges were neither as good nor as meritocratic as they could be, because they mostly overlooked lower-income students.