Correction appended

Palm trees and highs above eighty degrees in November are pipe dreams for Evanstonians. But in less than a year, a few new full-time Northwestern students will be studying nine time zones away from lake-shore winds.

Next fall Medill and the School of Communication will open a branch campus in Education City, an academic enclave outside Qatar’s capital, Doha. The roughly 40 initial students — mostly Qataris — will enroll in Northwestern’s first undergraduate program outside Evanston. They will meet the same admission requirements and will receive the same degrees as their counterparts here, but they will do so 7,000 miles away from the Arch.

Qatar juts out like a tiny wart on the southeastern side of Saudi Arabia. It’s less than one-tenth the size of Illinois and has about one-third the population of Chicago. Its natural resources happen to be oil and natural gas, so its leaders happen to be very rich. The head of state, Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani is worth about a billion dollars.

The emir employed some of this wealth to create the Qatar Foundation in 1995 to encourage students to reach their potential in the name of national improvement. The nonprofit organization, managed by the emir’s wife, funds Education City and will pay the tuition of Qataris attending the Northwestern program. It also already hosts five other American universities: Virginia Commonwealth, Cornell, Texas A&M, Carnegie Mellon and Georgetown.

Art of the State, State-of-the-Art

Medill freshman Hannah Fraser-Chanpong, who spent her last two years of high school in Qatar, says that Education City’s planners pride themselves on being the “best of the best.”

The architect of the Mito Tower and the Barcelona Olympics main sports hall designed the campus. The plans include the world’s first residence halls that will be U.S. Green Building Council Platinum Certified, according to the Qatar Foundation’s director of housing and residence life, Kevin Konecny. One environmental feature of the building is that it will recycle graywater (wastewater) from sinks and showers to water plants.

The Education City bubble

While Northwestern students rule the roost in Evanston, in Education City NU will share learning and living spaces with the other universities. Northwestern will mainly teach journalism and communications courses. However, communications majors with a passion for international relations can take a course at Georgetown’s renowned School of Foreign Service. For Medill students to fulfill their degree requirements, they’ll have to register for courses with the other schools.

Not your average frat scene

That American college staple — alcohol — is not allowed in Education City, Konecny says. (Islam forbids alcohol.) An equivalent to a community assistant supervises students in dormitories, although Medill Associate Dean Richard Roth said that most NU students will live at home.

“This is a culture that is very much about family,” he said. “I don’t expect the library to be open after five o’clock.”

Alcohol is available in restaurants and hotels in Doha, but “it’s not part of their cultural context,” Konecny said.

Islam certainly remains a visible part of that context. The Muslim call to prayer reverberates among the buildings five times a day. Most Qataris wear national dress: a long white shirt and a headdress for men, and a black headscarf and dress combination for women.

Gender roles and public intimacy also play a quieter role in Qatar than they do in the U.S. “Males and females are separated,” Roth said. “You won’t see them walking hand-in-hand. In fact it’s frowned upon.” The British Embassy warns that Qatar bans homosexual behavior and that all public displays of affection can provoke arrest.

QatarAmericana

Fraser-Chanpong says she never felt uncomfortable as a foreigner. Women aren’t looked down upon for avoiding more conservative dress, she said.

Qatar’s cosmopolitan nature might be the source of this egalitarianism. Qataris comprise only about a quarter of the population. Indians and Pakistanis make up 36 percent of the population, according to the latest CIA data.

American comforts also seem welcome. Thanks to satellite television, students can watch NU alumni such as Stephen Colbert and Zach Braff, according to Susan Dun, the assistant dean for advising and student affairs at the School of Communication. Burger King and McDonald’s deliver to students, says Konecny.

Roth said he went to a Doha mall about the size of two city blocks. In the center there’s an ice rink. A moat runs through the whole mall, and gondoliers take people around.

There were thousands of people there, he said, but the atmosphere was surprisingly calm. He didn’t hear the noise and bustle he was accustomed to in American malls.

People there “walk quietly,” he said.

Correction – November 26, 2007: The original version of this article incorrectly attributed the description of the emir’s image in public to Kevin Konecny. The sentence now correctly attributes the description to Robert Baxter, a Qatar Foundation spokesman. North by Northwestern regrets the error.

To learn more about the crisis, we spoke to Ian Savage, a Northwestern faculty member who researches public transit and has written about the CTA for the Chicago Tribune.

What should students know about the crisis that they probably don’t?

This crisis has been building for 15 years. If we looked back at previous crises –- I think there was one in the 1970s, one again in the early 1980s –- it took about three years each time for the problems to get resolved.

We’re seeing public policy being made in front of our eyes, in a crisis mode here. This isn’t some sort of crisis where we do something and it goes away. This is part of a bigger problem, and a solution to it isn’t just going to happen this week. It’s probable we’re going to have some stop-gap arrangement and then the legislature’s going to meet. We may still be two years away before we get to the final resolution.

It seems like they’re trying to say that they’re not going to put up with another stop-gap.

Of course, they actually accepted the stop-gap funding [in September]. It wasn’t like it was foisted on them. As [Evanston's State] Representative [Julia] Hamos says, you could think someone has maxed out their credit card and the credit card company says, “Hey, let’s give you a cash advance.” I don’t criticize the government, because that’s one of the few things it could actually do. But, ultimately, you’re digging yourself deeper into debt, and this isn’t a long-term solution.

What would be a long-term solution?

I do think some of the present crisis is the CTA’s own making. Particularly in the last 10 years, they have let costs increase far quicker than would be explained by oil prices, the labor market, and things like this. I think they were very rash in holding fares constant from ’93 through 2004. Also, by adding back service around about the year 2000 –- in retrospect, the little boom in ridership didn’t pan out. I’ve made the statement before that the CTA finds itself at the bottom of a six-foot hole at the moment. Two feet is caused by circumstances outside of their control, but four feet of it is things they did themselves.

It would be nice to have a solution in which the CTA themselves partly contributed. In the 1970s, when the subsidy funds came from a variety of taxes, there wasn’t a predictable source of funds. One of the advantages of the sales tax proposal is that it’s a reasonably predictable source of money, and it’s a dedicated source of money. When you’re budgeting for the future, you can see what’s going on.

How has the CTA let costs balloon out of control?

CTA has been publicly owned for 60 years, but for the first 20-25 years it was run as a commercial operation. They kept a tight rein on costs. Then public subsidies were introduced in the 1960s, and in the 10-15 years after that you saw the costs increase considerably. I’ve publicly said in an editorial in the Tribune that we should consider privatizing some of these routes. Clearly, one of the major objectives of privatizing is to rein in costs.

When students talk about the CTA, the first thing that comes into their minds is the El. The bus network is actually where most of the ridership is, and most of the cost. If you do some privatization on the bus network, the reduction of coverage costs could be in the region of $150 million a year, which is about the size of the projected deficit at the moment. Even if we put more tax revenues into the system, if you could reduce the cost of the service, you could put more service out there for the same amount of subsidy dollars. So this doesn’t necessarily mean job losses.

Are bus cuts and fare increases short-term solutions? If overall costs aren’t reined in, does that mean ten years down the line there’ll be another crisis?

I think that’s probably fair to say. People have said to me that even after the 1983 subsidy agreements, within two or three years it was apparent that trouble was brewing. The question is, if we do end up giving more tax money to the CTA, are we going to get something that as a public we actually want from it, or is it going to get squandered in ways that may not actually benefit the riders? If you just throw additional money at them, how can we know that in not-too-many years time, they’ll be back, having spent all that money?

Won’t cutting bus routes be more costly to the CTA?

You’ve got to remember that you’re running these services at a loss. Every good you make, it costs you a dollar but you only get 40 cents of revenue at best. So not producing is always better than producing. My observation is that the proposed list of cuts for next week, you could understand where that list came from. They’re ones which are a service which it might be questionable why you’re providing it; there are alternative routings, and things like that. I think the things for next Monday might even sound like something you might want to do. It’s possible you might have to see some sort of shutdown of the system. Doomsday may have to come in order to actually prod the legislature to do something.

What is out of the CTA’s control?

There has been a global trend for people not to take transit in favor of driving, and for people to move out of cities and into suburbs. Obviously the buses run on diesel fuel, and you’ve got the cost of oil here.

Could you give an idea of the economic effects of the bus cuts and fare increases?

At the heart of all of this: What type of city are we? Urban economists refer to Chicago as a weak-centered city. Some cities are always going to have a strong center: Manhattan, Tokyo. Compared to many places, Chicago has a lot going on downtown, but in some ways there’s no real reason for people to be downtown. They could be in Schaumburg; the Art Institute could be in Highland Park.

So why do you actually need a downtown? For many of us, because Chicago has a downtown with all of what we think are good things: cultural activities, government activities, business activities. The big problem with a weak-centered city is that not everyone who works in the Loop can get there by driving, because it would be physically impossible. However, off-peak you can get to the Loop quite easily. So unlike Manhattan, you’re not going to have people crowding the trains and the buses 24/7.

Transit in Chicago is necessary to get everyone to the center of town, but it needs to have a big economic base to justify itself across the day. If you’re a mayor of a weak-centered city, you’ll always have to remember what happened to Detroit. Seventy years ago Detroit had a strong central downtown; now Detroit doesn’t exist as a downtown. If the transit system went away, part of what you might be giving away is what it means to be a central city.

Is there anything else that a student wouldn’t realize about this whole thing?

The question is, why has the problem arisen now? One thing that is very difficult to comprehend is that there’s a huge hole in the pension fund. It’s a bit like General Motors. General Motors used to make automobiles. Nowadays General Motors is a pension fund for a bunch of retirees and they make automobiles on the side. In some ways, this is what’s happening at the CTA.

I don’t think their problem is unique. The state has this problem, Evanston’s firemen and policemen fund has this problem. It’s very easy when you have a pension fund to not pay into it when you’re having bad times. It appears that this was done to hold off the problem, and now basically they’ve run out of options.

Most of us remember D.A.R.E. and whatever goofy cartoons our elementary school teachers threw at us to persuade us that smoking was a bad idea. Many local governments across the nation are now taking the helm of the anti-smoking movement. Apparently, politicians think that talking cartoon monsters and diagrams of blackened lungs weren’t enough persuasion.

Belmont, Calif., is the latest city to impose a smoking ban, one of the most stringent in the nation. When the law goes into effect in 14 months, it will ban smoking in multi-story complexes (apartment buildings), residences, workplaces, parks, stadiums and outdoor malls. Moreover, the law smacktalks smokers and calls the habit “a public nuisance” (oh, no they didn’t!). Even though the ban is typical of others in the nation, it’s the first to extend restrictions to individual apartment units.

California continued their anti-smoking campaign on Wednesday with a ban on smoking in cars with children. Twenty other states are considering the same law, while two more (Arkansas and Louisiana) have already passed it.

Chicago is in the midst of adjusting to a ban on smoking in all indoor places, including bars, malls, restaurants and taxis. The ban goes into full effect next July, so Chi-town smokers are trying to sneak in their last puffs before they’re forced outside into the cold. Even though the ban is widespread (hey, public indoor places are pretty much everywhere), it still doesn’t hold a candle to the apartment and car bans that are being passed now. With each year the smoking bans get more stringent; it’s only a matter of time before a city tries to ban it outright.

Bans are a controversial issue and pro-smokers are fighting with fire. Some detractors of the Belmont ban sent e-mails to pro-ban legislators comparing them to Hitler and one even nonsensically threatened, “Your friends will get a 747 loaded with fuel.” The detractors’ main contention is that the bans curtail smokers’ rights (hence the Hitler thing), and that smokers should be allowed to smoke wherever, whenever the nicotine calls. Others argue that the ban places a financial burden on bars that can no longer cater to their smoking patrons. Smokersclub.com, an obviously pro-smoking site, has compiled this list of businesses that have been hit hard by bans.

Smokers are already feeling pressure from increased taxes on cigarettes, since it seems like every new proposal is trying to be funded by a “sin tax” (the most recent biggie is SCHIP). Because smoking apparently relieves stress, they just end up smoking more in response to the taxes. It’s just a whole vicious cycle.

On the other side are the health devotees, who are usually pretty tough to argue against (I mean, who’s going to vilify the old woman with lung cancer?). They maintain that reducing secondhand smoke in cities makes everyone healthier and that the bans can even motivate people to quit. ABC News reported that the bans do, in fact, help reduce cigarette sales by making it more difficult to smoke. Also, the bans raise the stigma of smoking, further pushing people to kick the habit. Another study showed that in San Francisco the number of heart attacks dropped six months after a smoking ban was put in effect.

No matter what side you’re on, you could agree that smoking bans are becoming the norm and are passing with breakneck speed. They often pass with ease (Chicago has only had one dissenter) as cities race to be the next to clear its lungs. For smokers, that could mean either hitting the real estate market or looking for the patch (hint: the patch is a much cheaper option). But for non-smokers, these bans are almost universally good news. That is, unless your business is going under. Hey, at least you’re breathing easier.

Bluntly, newspapers — which used to be Medill’s stock-in-trade when Teaching Media was called simply Teaching Newspaper – are dying. The latest successes in media are those publications breaking the old guard framework: Slate’s talked-about online video magazine doesn’t try to imitate cable news; Politico, founded early this year, delivers hardcore reporting to beltway junkies in any format; even The New Yorker is posting video animations to its web site. Though adjuncts still struggle to explain Photoshop, at least Medill is inspiring students to imagine where media might go (to the dismay, no doubt, of some wide-eyed freshmen who grew up dreaming about the gray, inky paper nestled between their fingers each morning).

Since revolutionaries usually rise from the bottom up, and Lavine’s direction comes unilaterally from the top down, a better title for him might be “dictator” — but the sentiment remains the same. He’s here to “shake things up,” and so it’s easy to peg Lavine as Northwestern’s innovator. But even if the logic sounds right, the methods just don’t. In the Chicago story, a graduate student gripes that he came to Medill for writing, not this “video stuff,” to which Lavine condescends, “Young people don’t understand that if a paper doesn’t sell, it dies.” The implicit argument, then, is that journalists of the future need to sell themselves by any means necessary, and it’s this ideology that makes Medill’s new enforcement of understanding the audience synonymous with pandering.

On the first week of classes, Medill’s welcome-back note to students in Enterprise Reporting was a seven-page memo abruptly titled “What Journalists Should Know about Understanding Audiences.” The subsequent five commandments – because that’s what they are – amount to a thinly veiled rationalization for PR journalism:

I. Audience understanding is intrinsic to good journalism.
II. Audience understanding has been a part of American journalism throughout its history.
III. Audiences are becoming increasingly fragmented in this digital age, which makes understanding them even more important.
IV. Understanding the experiences of our audiences will help us connect with them.
V. Based on what we’ve learned, there are practical things we can do to appeal to our audiences.

Translation: Since “no journalist I know goes after stories that no one will read,” as Lavine puts it, you should aggressively study your audience’s wants and tweak your reporting accordingly—more “Q & A’s,” “How-to guides” and “Pros and cons,” please!

But that assumes audiences know what they want. Medill’s “report” is based almost entirely on focus group analysis within its own school: Students of Steven Duke’s Introduction to 21st Century Media will be intimately familiar with the Readership Institute, a marketing think tank in Medill’s Media Management Center that purports to gauge the future of media “experience.” Readers tell researchers they want to engage more with their media—that they want to read less and deal with less complex ideas. Instead, they want more bites—“something to talk about,” in the Institute’s terminology—and more human-interest, neighborhood-oriented stories.

All of this affirms that Americans don’t really want news at all; they want something that looks like news, makes them feel like they’ve read news without the heavy lifting. The memo repeatedly counter-attacks that “we should still go after the important stories that are essential to informing the public and keeping our democracy alive,” but it’s a hard pill to swallow. Even in new media, journalists are expected to use their intuition—the reason we call them professionals in the first place—to decide how they should deliver compelling, meaningful reporting. The Internet expands the tools at journalists’ disposal—blogs, YouTube, cell phone messages—but who’s to say it defines how they use these tools? Yet that’s exactly what Medill decides: that in the endless white noise of web content, journalists have to ditch good judgment and kowtow to advertising research. “Vary the writing mix to appeal to audiences more.” Don’t worry too much about “committees, budgets, task forces and other bureaucratic activities.” And remember that audiences want news that “looks out for my interests.”

The Readership Institute talks about the future of media as if it’s inventing it, but its research may work out better in theory than in practice. In 2005, the group published joint findings with the Twin Cities’ Star Tribune, whose up-and-coming CEO Gary Pruitt talked at the time about forming a “new paradigm” for daily newspapers. Instead, the Tribune’s resulting redesign drove down circulation at a rate faster than the industry average, and Pruitt surreptitiously sold off the company to a private buyout firm late last year. Medill’s findings failed them. One staffer interviewed by the City Pages said after the fact that you can’t discount the impact the changes had on the Tribune’s journalism itself—“[the fact] that we are fluffier, that we are dumbing down.”

To read the vitriol directed at Pruitt by former Star Tribune employees, you’d think they’re talking about the resentment inside Medill. Chicago Magazine downplays the seriousness of journalists’ rancor, drinking from Lavine’s Kool-Aid. Maybe media does need to change, but maybe the hardest part is deciding who changes it—and how. One longtime metro reporter at the Star Tribune says “[Pruitt] and Anders [a former editor of the Star Tribune] led people to believe they cared about journalism. And when push came to shove, all they cared about was the bottom line.” For that newspaper’s staff, the lesson was that journalists—not marketers—need to take control of their media’s future. In the next few years, Medill may find out the same thing the hard way.

The El is inseparable from Chicago: In a 2005 poll, Chicago Tribune readers ranked the city’s unique transportation system as its third wonder, placing it ahead of the Sears and Water towers (it still couldn’t beat Wrigley Field, which should give you some idea of how Chicagoans think). A 2006 survey showed that more than 650,000 people ride it every day. Heck, it even made appearances in The Blues Brothers and The Fugitive.

It’s also a safe bet that every Northwestern student has ridden it or will do so by the time they leave for Thanksgiving. Let’s face it, you just can’t beat the El for getting around Chicago. It’s fast, somewhat cheap, goes most places you’d want to visit, and you get to meet all kinds of interesting people (read: crazies). And if the El doesn’t take you where you need to be, odds are you could catch a bus to take you there.

However, a huge budget snafu is throwing all of that into question. The Chicago Transit Authority has been dealing with an antiquated funding system that doesn’t account for growth in the suburbs, which left the CTA with a $110 million deficit for 2007. All kinds of political wrangling with Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich – who you may recognize by his sexy RedEye nickname, G-Rod – couldn’t do anything to clear up the problems, so the CTA turned to rate increases and service cuts.

That spells major trouble for riders, to the tune of a 50-cent increase for bus fares and a one-dollar increase for train fares during rush hours. Pace buses are also increasing fares. There are also service cuts across the board, including some bus routes being eliminated from our fair Evanston. The Evanston buses that would be cut include the route to Old Orchard (CTA #205) and one that ran from Ryan Field to the Chicago campus (Pace #426).

This has been played up as the end of the world for most Chicagoans: The Sun Times ran a typically tabloid headline of “Countdown To Agony.” (Read the initials. Funny, right?) Some riders are talking about having to cut out family movie nights, magazine subscriptions or meals at nice restaurants, which sounds a lot like Al Gore in 2000 telling us about little old ladies choosing between eating and paying for medicine. But seriously, for low-income workers who ride the El to work, an extra two bucks every day means a lot.

For us college students, though, these CTA cuts are also bad news. It’s already difficult to make it to Chicago on a budget, and the extra fares certainly won’t help. There’s also the issue of service cuts, which mean we’ll be waiting longer for trains. Some classes require you to go into the city, and nobody’s got the time to just sit around and wait for the El (especially when your professor is waiting impatiently at the Art Institute). All these cuts in Evanston are going to make it harder to get around, but we dodged a huge bullet when they decided to keep the Purple Express (for those not familiar, the Purple Express, named for our lovely school color, goes from any stop in Evanston to a few important stops in Chicago in a lot less time than a normal train would). Plus, there’s that whole environmental impact thing, if you’re into that.

These cuts, which were due to start last week, were put off until November thanks to a $24 million advance by G-Rod. Really, though, that’s just a Band-aid on a pretty serious wound and unless the politicians in Springfield can work out a sensible solution (not likely), these cuts are coming soon.

So what’s a Northwestern student to do? You could bring a car, but I can speak from three weeks of experience and say that it’s more hassle than it’s worth (although the City of Evanston must love the dollars I’m donating to them through parking fees and tickets). A better option is to start getting real friendly with anyone who does have a car. There’s also the Intercampus Shuttle, which takes you and tons of grad students to the Ward building, within walking distance of the Mag Mile.

But the worst part of this whole CTA headache for Northwestern? We’re probably going to have to resurrect that tired old U-Pass debate.