Morrisville State College officials have invested thousands of hours and dollars into initiatives aimed at improving the economy of Upstate New York.

But this holiday season, a handful of student-organized initiatives will connect the campus to its community in small ways that will make a big impact.

Eighty students from C-STEP, the Collegiate Science Technology Entry Program, came together to fill 150 holiday dinner baskets for needy families in the Morrisville community.

A mitten drive will provide gently used winter clothing to local elementary schools.

And a food drive at the college's Norwich campus produced the largest donation ever received by the Roots and Wings food pantry.

"Many of the problems we're working on are future issues that we're trying to get in line," said college President Ray Cross of the college's research efforts in the areas of sustainability and renewable resources. "That doesn't put food on the table today, or put clothing on someone's back, or help them get through a crisis that is right now. That's what the students are doing."

The college is helping its students learn more outside the classroom this year thanks to a grant from AmeriCorps VISTA, a national service program dedicated to eliminating poverty by helping individuals and low-income neighborhoods make positive changes for themselves.

The one-year grant brought coordinator Emily Casey to campus this fall, and the Indianapolis native has busied herself developing partnerships between the college and community organizations in the Morrisville and Norwich areas.

In October, Casey organized "Into the Streets," a campuswide day of service that saw more than 150 students visiting with seniors at Crouse Community Center, painting murals with elementary school students and washing windows and sweeping floors at historic Madison Hall.

"We love having the kids come into the community and show they care," said Jennifer Caloia, co-chair of the Morrisville Area Improvement Network, an organization focused on community development. "It's kind of a win-win for everybody."

The turnout was so successful that Casey plans to reprise the effort for a full week in the spring, timed to coincide with National Volunteer Week. She's also working on a Web database that will link college students with volunteer opportunities in the community year-round.

"I want them to take ownership, to know that this is our way to help ourselves and our community," she said. The college community didn't delay in answering the call for service. This fall, Norwich faculty member Jeri O'Bryan-Losee collected more than 300 pieces of clothing -- including blouses, suits, shirts, shoes and briefcases -- that will be donated to the international Dress for Success effort, which helps women who need proper attire for job interviews.

Student athletes from Morrisville's field hockey team raided their own closets and purchased toiletries.

"To be an athlete means so much more than playing on a team," said head coach Adair Milmoe.

Watching the students distribute the baskets to needy families last week, Cross said he saw the volunteerism effort taking on a life of its own.

"There was pride and sense of meaning that gave their education reality," Cross said. "It connected them to the issues around us."

Cross said he hoped the lessons would last long beyond their years in Morrisville.

Other colleges' programs

Colgate University

A book drive at the college bookstore; the college's Center for Outreach, Volunteerism and Education (COVE) made gift bags for residents of Hamilton Manor; two campus mitten drives; the men's hockey team held a toy drive during home games; Gamma Phi Beta and Theta Chi purchased gifts for a family from the Fiver Foundation.

Return to Top

Colgate University Professor Peter Balakian is the author of “Black Dog of Fate,” a memoir. This essay is adapted from a new chapter that will appear in a 10th-anniversary edition, to be published in February.

For Armenians, Der Zor has come to have a meaning approximate to Auschwitz. Each, in different ways, an epicenter of death and a systematic process of mass-killing; each a symbolic place, an epigrammatic name on a dark map. Der Zor is a term that sticks with you, or sticks on you, like a burr or thorn: “r” “z” “or” — hard, sawing, knifelike. Der Zor: A place to which hundreds of thousands of Armenians in 1915 and 1916 were forced to march, a final destination in the genocide of the Armenians carried out by the Ottoman Turkish government under the cover of World War I.

In May 2005, after I was invited to lecture in Beirut through the auspices of the U.S. State Department, the Armenian church arranged for me to travel into Syria — to Aleppo, an important city of refuge during the Armenian genocide, and farther east to Der Zor.

The highway from Aleppo followed the Euphrates River through Syria toward the Iraqi border. The river appeared and then disappeared, fresh and flowing and teal green, not brown and sluggish as I had imagined it, and certainly not red with blood and clogged with corpses as recorded by eyewitnesses during the worst period of the genocide.

By noon we were passing through the commercial district of Der Zor city. The streets buzzed with cars and mopeds as we drove up to the high stone facade of the Armenian church, called Holy Martyrs. The Der Hayr (parish priest) ushered us inside. Downstairs, under the sanctuary, there were archways and a giant marble pillar that rose up within a large opening in the ceiling. Circling the pillar were glass cases containing bones and soil. Hundreds of bones: partial skulls, femurs, tibias, clavicles, eye sockets, teeth. Case by case. Bones and more bones.

I asked the Der Hayr where they came from. “You'll see soon,” he said. And after mezze we were off farther to the east. I realized now that Der Zor was a huge region of arid land. After a couple of hours of nothing but the occasional flock of sheep, the car stopped in the middle of nowhere, and up the hill at the side of the road I saw a small chapel of white stone.

“This is Margadeh,” my guide, Father Nerseh, said. “About 15 years ago, the Syrian government was doing some exploration for oil here and put their steam shovels in the ground, and piles of bones came up.”

“Right here,” I said pointing down.

“Yes.” He explained that the Syrian government had offered the Armenian church a plot of land for a memorial.

I walked up the slope toward the chapel. I put my hand in the dirt, grazing the ground, and came up with hard white pieces. “Our ancestors are here,” I muttered. Then I began, without thinking, picking up handfuls of dirt, sifting out the bones and stuffing them in my pockets. I felt the porous, chalky, dirt-saturated, hard, infrangible stuff in my hands. A piece of hip socket, part of a skull. Nine decades later.

I filled my pockets with bones, compelled to have these fragments with me as I continued up the hill to the chapel. The floor was cool, and behind the altar was a wall of alabaster with a carved cross. With the evening sun pouring through a yellow glass window, the whole space was floating in saffron light. I tried to empty my head and let go of the graveyard I was standing in, to let go of myself. Let the breath go in, go out.

On the plane back to the United States, I kept waking and sleeping. It wasn't until we were over Labrador that I realized I was carrying organic matter from another country. The declaration card asked: Are you bringing with you fruits, plants, cell cultures, “soil, or have you visited a farm/ranch/pasture outside the United States?” The bones, now in resealable bags, were caked with soil, and although they weren't cell cultures, what were they now, 90 years later?

I reached down into my briefcase and felt them through the plastic, glancing around to see if a flight attendant might be looking. What could I say? These are bones of my countrymen? I had visited a pasture of bones in the Syrian desert? This one might be from my grandmother's first husband; this one from a farmer from Sivas. I filled out my declaration card. “Are you bringing with you … ?”

I put an X in the “No” column.

As I stood in line at customs at Kennedy Airport, I remembered my State Department hosts telling me that, because of where I'd been, they might want to check my bags. But the customs agent looked at my passport, looked at me, then stamped the passport and said, “Welcome back.”

Return to Top

Local residents who need help filing for bankruptcy due to insurmountable debt will have access to a new resource next year thanks to Colgate University and a grant from the Community Foundation of Herkimer & Oneida Counties, Colgate officials announced Monday.

Colgate will work with the Legal Aid Society of Mid-New York, Inc. to launch the Consumer Bankruptcy Law Project in the spring. The project, which expands an earlier pilot project at the university, will offer free legal services to low-income residents filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, according to a news release.

Susan Conn, the lead attorney for the project, worked with student interns during the pilot program that began in January. She said the program benefits those who need legal assistance as well as students exploring career options.

“The seven students who worked with me on the pilot project have truly appreciated the opportunity to have hands-on experiences within the legal profession and leave a meaningful impact on our community,” Conn said in the release. “The pilot project has proven to be very successful, and we are fortunate to be able to continue the work.”

A $45,000 grant from the Community Foundation will fund training for 12 to 14 pro bono attorneys and Colgate student interns, as well as the preparation of case files and bankruptcy filing fees for 35 to 40 clients over the course of 18 months, the release said.

Priority will be given to low-income residents of Madison, Herkimer and Oneida counties who are domestic violence survivors, and those whose debt is due to a job loss or illness, the release said.

Return to Top

Although the art world can grow quiet as the holidays approach, there have been a number of developments this week, like details about the next Whitney Biennial and acquisitions including a Matisse at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

First, the Biennial. Although it seems as if there just was one (there was, ending in June), officials at the Whitney Museum of American Art are already plotting the sequel, scheduled to open in March 2010. This week they are announcing the choice of curators, who in years past have consisted of all-Whitney teams, groups of outsiders, or variations in between.

This time the museum has paired Francesco Bonami, 53, a seasoned Italian-born curator with an international reputation, and Gary Carrion-Murayari (Colgate University alumnus), 28, a homegrown senior curatorial assistant. Mr. Bonami will serve as curator for the Biennial, with Mr. Carrion-Murayari acting as associate curator.

“It seemed like a good fit on a lot of levels,” said Donna De Salvo, the Whitney's chief curator. “Francesco is well known to the Whitney” — he helped organize the Rudolf Stingel retrospective in 2007 — “and he has been thinking about and looking at biennials. Gary is about investing in a younger generation of curators. Not youth for youth's sake but tapping into the way they see.”

These Biennials are “a monster to wrestle,” as Ms. De Salvo put it, but the Whitney also wanted a young eye involved; thus an experienced curator was matched with a greener one.

In 2007 Mr. Carrion-Murayari organized “Television Delivers People,” which focused on video works from the 1970s and '80s and newer examples that examined the relationship between television and the viewer. A five-year Whitney veteran, he also worked on the 2004 and 2006 Whitney Biennials and helped Mr. Bonami and the Whitney curator Chrissie Iles on the installation of Mr. Stingel's show.

This year the Biennial spilled over into the Park Avenue Armory for part of its run. At other times it has spread into Central Park. The 2010 edition, it seems, will be a more concentrated affair, occupying only the museum's landmark Marcel Breuer home.

Unless the curators find a special project that requires another sort of space. “I want to stretch the building's dimensions,” Mr. Bonami said. “Sometimes Biennials go all over the place. This one will be more specific.”

Although the curators won't start visiting artists' studios around the country until January, and at this early stage they haven't decided whether the Biennial will have a particular theme, they are already starting to focus on certain ideas.

“I grew up around the world of globalism,” said Mr. Bonami, who in 2003 became the first American citizen to direct a Venice Biennale and who recently organized “Italian Art Between Tradition and Revolution: 1968-2008,” which is on view through March 22 at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice. “It was a time, around 1992-93, when there were no boundaries. But now my challenge is to reflect on the idea of Americanness. Setting these parameters, these limitations could be an advantage.”

Mr. Carrion-Murayari said the notion of globalism, which was important in past Biennials, feels dated. “We've gotten beyond that,” he said. “It's not so much an argument anymore.”

Both curators said that their decision to concentrate on the Breuer building rather than consider other locations was not about keeping budgets low because of the current economic climate, adding that there might actually be a benefit to being focused and in one place.

The two men also said they were considering weaving works from the Whitney's holdings into the Biennial, which would be a departure.

“We have talked about using the permanent collection,” Mr. Carrion-Murayari said. “We definitely want to consider it.”

Return to Top

On Nov. 4, young voters turned out in record numbers. It's estimated over 50 percent of voters ages 18-29 cast a ballot. Those who thought "Facebook enthusiasm" wouldn't lead to votes were wrong.

But too often this year, young people weren't voting for their peers. In our pay-to-play political system, candidates are handicapped by the need to raise campaign cash. With huge student loans to pay off, young people are virtually shut out.

Some states are changing this. In Arizona, Connecticut and Maine, young leaders emerged and showed that candidates don't have to spend hours dialing for dollars. You can spend almost all your time talking with voters.

Clean Elections provides candidates with a grant to run for office, once they show broad community support by collecting a set number of small contributions. Qualified candidates agree to forgo all private fundraising and adhere to strict spending limits.

In Maine, all eight candidates in their twenties elected to the Maine House used Clean Elections. Democrat Elsie Flemings, a recent college graduate, won a seat from Bar Harbor, and said Clean Elections was the reason she was able to run.

In Connecticut, 25-year-old Democrat Matt Lesser beat an incumbent. Instead of calling donors or attending fundraisers, Lesser was able to build his grassroots base and talk to voters. "Clean Elections is a way to gain grassroots support," he said, "rather than being dependent on the kind of Special-interest support you don't have as a 25-year-old."

At Colgate and Syracuse universities, college students are working to build support for Clean Elections among students and faculty through Democracy Matters, a national, non-partisan student organization. Colgate senior Mitri Wohns said, "We want to give young New Yorkers a chance to run for office and have a voice in the critical decisions facing our state and our country."

They want New Yorkers to be able to join the more than 370 Clean Elections officials who will take office in January, a dramatic increase from just over 200 in 2006. In Maine, 85 percent of candidates elected to its statehouse used Clean Elections. In Connecticut, 81 percent of lawmakers were elected free from the influence of special-interest contributions. And in Arizona, over 50 percent of the legislature will consist of Clean Elections officials.

In the seven states and two cities where Clean Elections is in place, the systems are thriving. Congress is starting to pay attention. When the 111th Congress convenes in January, 120 members will be on record in support of Clean Elections.

With the skyrocketing costs of campaigning, this isn't surprising. President-elect Barack Obama may have been able to attract a large number of small donors, but for Congress, the numbers are shrinking. Congressional candidates had to raise, on average, $1.1 million to win their seats in 2008, and only 10 percent of that came from donations under $200.

After a $5-billion election, it's time to look at the way most campaigns in this country are financed. In Clean Elections states across the country, voters and future leaders of the country agree it's time to take back democracy from the big, special-interest funders.

Joan Mandle is associate professor of sociology emerita at Colgate University. She also serves as executive director of Democracy Matters and chair of Public Campaign, national organizations dedicated to campaign reform. For more information go to www.democracymatters.org and www.publicampaign.org.

Return to Top

An article in the New York Times last Sunday on relative levels of corruption in state governments reproduced the main results from a survey on state corruption in the U.S.

The survey was originally published in 2003 by Associate Professor of Economics Cheryl Long jointly with collaborator Richard Boylan in the journal State Politics and Policy Quarterly. (Click on the link above, and then scroll down to "A Survey of Journalists")

Return to Top

Spencer D. Kelly received his Ph.D. in developmental psychology from the University of Chicago and then did a two-year post-doctoral fellowship studying developmental neuroscience at the University of Louisville. He is currently an associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at Colgate University. His research focuses on the role that hand gestures play in language processing, development and learning. He has published a number of papers on this topic (in Brain and Language, Child Development, Developmental Neuropsychology, Journal of Memory and Language) and recently (2007) co-edited the first special issue on gesture, brain and language in the journal, Brain and Language.

1) I understand that you have just completed a study on foreign language learning. What first got you interested in how to learn a foreign language?

As an undergraduate, I majored in History, with an emphasis on Japanese history. I struggled learning Japanese and was fascinated by how different it was from English. At the same time, I was taking a Psychology class and that got me interested in studying the psychology of language. That lead me to pursue a graduate degree doing research on the role that the body (specifically, hand gesture) plays in how people process and learn one's native language. In a return to my original interest, my current work investigates the role that gestures play in learning and teaching second languages—again with an emphasis on Japanese.

2) I am pretty fluent in Spanish, but have never been to Spain. Should I take a refresher course and what should I tell the Berlitz instructor?

Refresher courses are a smart idea. Depending on what aspects of your Spanish you want to refresh, I would recommend different approaches. If you are working on Spanish pronunciation, I would watch videos of Spanish speakers, paying attention Spanish pronunciation while watching the speakers' lip movements. Lip and mouth movements have a big impact on how we hear speech sounds, and I have recently conducted research with a linguist and expert on second language instruction, Dr. Yukari Hirata, demonstrating that lip movement help English speakers learn to hear subtle differences in Japanese speech sounds. As an interesting neuroscience side note, the lip and mouth are so closely tied to how we hear language that auditory regions of the brain are active even when people watch lip movements with the speech muted.

If you are working on vocabulary, I would learn words in the context of hand gestures. Unlike words, many gestures are iconic and have non-arbitrary meanings. So if you are trying to remember new vocabulary items in Spanish, it would be wise to associate those words with established gestural meanings.

3) I have been to Finland many times, but they don't seem to use very many hand gestures. Any insights?

Although some cultures use gestures more or less than other cultures, people across the globe gesture. In fact, blind people gesture—not only that, blind people gesture even when talking to other blind people. That said, there are cultural rules for gesturing. For example, there are certain contexts in Japan in which gesturing is rude and inappropriate.

Regardless of culture, some things are simply easier to say while gesturing. For example, try explaining to someone—without using any gestures—how to tie a shoe. This is remarkably difficult, and it illustrates the power of gesture when talking about highly imagistic and spatial things.

4) Now, were these hand gestures grossly exaggerated in your research or just subtly integrated?

They were all typical action gestures that people naturally produce with verbs (e.g., a drink gesture while defining the meaning of the Japanese word for drink, "Nomu"). Gestures need not be conspicuous to impart meaning. In fact, I have shown in previous research that people register gesture without even knowing it: when asked about the source of a piece of information that was presented exclusively through gesture, people often mistakenly remember that the information came from someone's words.


5) Are there languages that appear to need such hand gestures more than others? (I hate to be politically incorrect, but would Italian be different than say Danish?)

As I explained earlier, there is variation amongst cultures in gesture production. Interestingly, however, the variation is often in type, and not amount. For example, Efron conducted a classic study in the 40's in which he observed the gestures of Italian and Jewish immigrants to New York City. He observed that although the two groups were very different in the form of gesture (Italians gesture bigger), they did not differ in overall amount of gesturing. Interestingly, these differences diminished with longer assimilation into the United States.

Again, although there are certain cultural rules about producing gestures, people everywhere frequently move their hand when they speak, especially when talking about things that are highly spatial and imagistic.

6) Now, in your study, who were the subjects and how long were they involved and what kinds of pre-test and post tests were used?

The participants were undergraduates at Colgate University. None had any background in Japanese (the language we instructed). Because the students had no background, we did not conduct a pre-test. After 30 minutes of instruction, we did a simple memory test for the new Japanese vocabulary items, in which we stated the Japanese word and asked students to write down the English translation. We also did this test two days later and again one week later. In all three tests, students remembered the words better when related gestures accompanied instruction (e.g., saying, "Nomu means drink," while making a drinking gesture) compared to when no gestures were present. Interestingly, training with related gestures also produced better recall than training with unrelated gestures (e.g., saying "Nomu means drink," while making a washing gesture). So it is not mere hand waving that helps people remember—content matters.

7) Where will the full report of your study be published?

The paper will appear in the 2009 special issue on speech-accompanying hand gesture in the journal Language and Cognitive Processes.

8) What do you see as the implications?

One implication is that because learning multiple languages will become more and more important in this increasingly connected world, it will be necessary to develop new and improved teaching strategies for second language learning. Although some exceptional teachers already use nonverbal behaviors (such as hand gestures) to teach students various aspects of a second language, there is a surprising lack of controlled scientific research demonstrating the effectiveness of this approach.

A second implication is that this research uncovers a possible neural mechanism for why gestures help people learn vocabulary items in a second language. It appears that the reason people do the best with gesture is that gesture creates deeper and more imagistic memory traces in the brain than just hearing the definitions alone. This makes sense because we know that gesture affects the brain's comprehension of words in one's native language, so it follows that these imagistic qualities of gesture positively impact the brain during second language learning as well.

9) In general, why is it important to study hand gestures?

Neuroscience research demonstrates that the brain is optimally designed to integrate speech and nonverbal behaviors, such as hand gesture. For example, the same parts of the brain that are involved in producing and understanding hand actions are also involved in producing and comprehending speech. Some have argued that this link reflects the fact that spoken language emerged from gestural communication systems in our evolutionary past. So it makes sense that if one is to study and understand language comprehension and second language learning, one must not only focus on speech, but gesture as well.

Return to Top

The first night, Paul Ridley allows, may be the most difficult.

That's when he'll first face the darkness of almost 3,000 miles of ocean, the isolation of not seeing another human for 60 to 80 days, the claustrophobia of having one's existence confined to the boundaries of a 19-foot boat that has neither a sail nor a motor.

That night will come Friday or Saturday, at the end of the 25-year-old's first day of a scheduled solo-rowing trip across the Atlantic Ocean. Ridley, a 2001 Binghamton High School graduate, can't wait.

"The boat is where I'm most comfortable," Ridley said by telephone last week before jetting off to his scheduled departure point in the Canary Islands, a Spanish territory off West Africa. "I know I can live on it. That gives me a good feeling."

The boat is a yellow Fiberglas craft christened Liv, after Norwegian terms for "life," "protection" and "defense." Ridley's motivation: to honor the memory of his mother, Katherine Raub Ridley, and to raise money toward a cure for the cancer that took her life the year that her son graduated from BHS and enrolled at Colgate University.

Paul Ridley calls the journey "Row for Hope." He hopes the project will raise $500,000 for the Yale Cancer Center in Connecticut, the state where he lives, works and entertains the passion for rowing that he developed while studying economics at Colgate in Hamilton.

Two other Americans have completed such a row alone and unaccompanied by a support vessel. The last was eight years ago. About 85 rowers total have attempted the crossing; 60 percent have succeeded.

Three-year journey

Technically, the row will begin shortly after Ridley downs a Michael Phelps-style breakfast, but it really began at Christmas three years ago, during a conversation between Ridley and his sister, Joy.

"We both had wanted to do something significant in our mom's memory, but it wasn't until he got turned on to the idea of ocean rowing that it all seemed to fall into place," said Joy Ridley, 28, a Minnesota financial consultant who has been her brother's right hand in planning the event. "Our parents taught us not to take life sitting down, but to stand up and work for what we wanted. That became the beginning of Row for Hope."

Their father, Mark, a Lutheran pastor who lives on Binghamton's West Side, also had been diagnosed with cancer. He was treated and reports being cancer-free.

For Paul, the next three years were a balancing act. When he wasn't working, he studied everything from celestial navigation and sea survival to how to turn a diet of freeze-dried foods into something high in fat (hint: add olive oil).

"I don't have the luxury of running to Nirchi's around the corner," he jokes.

He's also had to do a dozen or so workouts per week to pound his body into the shape needed to withstand the rigors of propelling a boat through salt water for 10 hours a day. Though the south Atlantic is generally at its calmest in the winter, the ocean can crank out waves 10 feet higher than Ridley's boat is long.

Eleventh hour

Two weeks before the launch, Ridley's to-do list had been narrowed to logistical items.

The Web site where people can learn about the trip, track his progress and, most importantly, make donations? Up and running.

Paperwork: Ongoing. One doesn't get permission from the Spanish government to row through its portion of the Atlantic, apparently, without first proving he knows how to operate a VHF radio and can navigate using the stars, despite having an on-board GPS system.

His flight overseas Thursday: Successful. His Friday update to his Facebook page reads, "Paul is in Tenerife, Canary Islands."

Making sure all the supplies got where they needed to go? Liv was shipped earlier this year -- cost: $15,000 -- but there were worries that some little things, like the 12 pounds of Gatorade powder Joy was bringing, might have difficulty clearing customs.

Joy arrived in the Canaries on Friday. Mark and Nadine Ridley -- Paul's dad and stepmother -- will join them today. So will Liz Tomic, a family friend from Binghamton.

Shortly thereafter, though, it will be just Paul and the ocean.

Return to Top

Gov. Rod Blagojevich's arrest last week on federal corruption charges has led to a rare special session set to begin Monday, when state lawmakers will begin grappling with the Herculean job of finally ending the culture of 'pay-for-play' politics in state government.

When it comes to ending 'pay-for-play' politics in Illinois, lawmakers won't lack for ideas, according to political scientists and advocates for good government interviewed. And if lawmakers are serious about cleaning up corruption, these observers contend, they will have to follow these steps:

Appoint a statewide blue-ribbon commission to look at all aspects of ending corruption.

Dramatically tighten Illinois' campaign finance laws to take the big money out of politics.

Sharply boost the powers of the Illinois Ethics Commission and ensure the independence of the state agencies' inspector generals.

Educate voters from an early age on the importance of fighting corruption.

Blue-ribbon commission

A blue-ribbon commission should be chaired by a political heavyweight, such as former U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert, said Robert Rich, director of the University of Illinois Institute of Government and Public Affairs.

'And that commission would be charged with ways to try to end pay-to-play, a broad practice in the state of Illinois,' Rich said.

Campaign finance laws

Illinois' campaign finance laws have long been derided as the most wide-open and least regulated in the nation. The state's campaign finance laws allow almost any person, group or corporation to donate unlimited amounts of money to any candidate. The only catch is these donations must be reported.

By allowing so much money to enter the system, 'We set up so much temptation and we make it so easy in this state,' said Cindi Canary, the executive director of the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform in Chicago. 'I think we should have limits as they do in most states.'

In September, the Illinois Senate overrode Blagojevich's veto to pass a law that prohibits people with state contracts of $50,000 or more from giving to the politicians who administer them, or to those officeholders' opponents in an election year.

Just a few weeks after that law was passed, Blagojevich had instructed a lobbyist to demand a $500,000 contribution to the Friends of Blagojevich from a highway contractor aiming to bid on the $1.8 billion Tollway Authority project, according to the criminal charges filed against the governor last week.

Federal campaign laws, as well as the laws in most states, would never allow such a massive donation in the first place.

'The first step would be to limit the amount a money a person could spend in a race,' said John Orman, a politics professor at Fairfield University, in Fairfield, Conn.

One of the surest ways to do this is to get big media outlets, such as television stations, to quit charging for political advertising. Expensive TV ads are one of the reasons politicians need to scoop up so much money, Orman said.

Canary, however, acknowledged that persuading lawmakers to approve a comprehensive law to restrict campaign fundraising could be difficult.

'It's very hard to get the legislature to vote in a system that affects them,' she said. 'It's much easier for them to vote about something affecting farm animals.'

Ethics Commission

In the wake of the bribery and racketeering scandal that eventually sent ex-Gov. George Ryan to federal prison, the General Assembly in 2003 passed a law to set up a state ethics panel.

But that panel remains weak. For instance, it can only act on cases brought to it by the inspectors generals assigned to the offices of governor, secretary of state, attorney general, comptroller and treasurer, said David Morrison, deputy director of the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform.

Here's the problem: These inspectors general are appointed by the executive officeholders they must oversee, Morrison said.

Morrison noted that more than 3,000 ethics complaints have been brought to these inspectors general, but less than half a dozen have gone before the ethics panel.

'You want to insulate the (inspector generals) as much as possible,' Morrison said. 'And you also want somebody watching over their shoulders who is completely insulated. And that would be the commission.'

Voter education

One reason Illinois has such a long history of political corruption is that voters are willing to tolerate it, said Michael Johnston, a political science professor at Colgate University, of Hamilton, N.Y.

The only way to turn this around is to 'persuade people by your actions that even the tiniest case will be taken seriously, will be investigated, and people can report it without fear of retribution,' Johnston said. 'That takes time to persuade people, as well.'

Ironically, though, Illinois is not the most corrupt state in the union, as some have suggested.

North Dakota, it turns out, may hold that distinction instead, followed by Louisiana and Alaska. On a per-capita basis, Illinois ranks 18th in the number of public corruption convictions the federal government has won from 1998 through 2007, according to a USA Today analysis of Department of Justice statistics.

Johnston cited a gov-ernment-sponsored anti-corruption campaign in Hong Kong that began in the early 1970s following a police scandal.

At the start of the campaign, only 20 percent of residents said they would report corruption, Johnston said.

'Now 70-plus percent said they will,' he said.

Applying such a program to Illinois cannot begin soon enough, John-ston said.

'If you think about it, the Illinois governor in 2030 is out there in some City Hall right now deciding who gets the snow plowing contract,' he said. 'How that person learns the system is going to be critical.'

For far too many politicians, however, one of the lessons they first learn is how much voters are willing to overlook, according to Morrison, of the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform.

'The people of Illinois have a much higher tol-erance for corruption,' he said. 'And that's really the problem. We don't slap people often enough. And we need a system that's going to say, 'No, you can't do that.''

Return to Top

The Dallas Stars acquired center Brian Sutherby from the Anaheim Ducks on Sunday for center David McIntyre and a conditional sixth-round draft pick in 2010.

Sutherby has three goals and three assists in 17 games with Anaheim this season.

McIntyre is in his junior season at Colgate University. He was selected by Dallas in the fifth round of the 2006 draft.

The Stars also reassigned defenseman Dan Jancevski to Hamilton of the AHL. He had been recalled on Thursday.

Return to Top