"Paper Belt on Fire is the unlikely account of how two outsiders with no experience in finance--a charter school principal and defrocked philosopher--start a venture capital fund to short the higher education bubble. Against the contempt of the education establishment, they discover, mentor, and back the leading lights in the next generation of dropout innovators and in the end make their investors millions. Can such a madcap strategy help renew American creativity? Who would do such a thing? This story is the behind-the-scenes romp of one team that threw educational authorities into a panic. It fuses real-life personal drama with history, science, and philosophy to show how higher education and other institutions must evolve to meet the dire challenges of tomorrow."
In March 2014, in People v. Clark and People v. Melongo the Illinois Supreme Court held unconstitutional a large portion of the Illinois Eavesdropping Act ("IEA"), one of the nation's strictest criminal eavesdropping statutes. However, on December 30, 2014, outgoing Governor Pat Quinn signed into law a new eavesdropping statute remedying what Clark and Melongo deemed unconstitutional. Prior to 2014, under the IEA, if employers caught employees recording conversations at work, the employer hardly needed a justification for employee discipline or discharge: the employee was violating the law. Thus, Clark, Melongo, and the December changes to the IEA raise questions for not only criminal jurisprudence, but also employment law; specifically workplace recording policies. Currently, although eavesdropping in Illinois is only illegal if an individual surreptitiously records a private conversation, employers may still discipline their employees for violating a company recording policy. The following Comment addresses the legality of workplace recording policies and what effect, if any, Clark, Melongo, and the December changes to the IEA will have on such policies. The Comment draws from existing case law as well as examines other state eavesdropping statutes and concludes that, notwithstanding the recent Illinois Supreme Court decisions and the December changes to the IEA, an Illinois employer may still implement a workplace recording policy and discipline employees for violations of that policy. Furthermore, when Seventh Circuit federal courts and Illinois state courts review such recording policies and discipline for violations, the courts should view such actions as legitimate and favorably uphold employer actions.
Over the last 25 years, central government has attempted to join up local public services in England on at least 55 occasions, illustrating the 'initiativitis' inflicted upon local governments by the large volume and variety of coordination programmes. By analysing and mapping some of the characteristics of these initiatives, we have uncovered insights into the ways central government has sought to achieve local coordination. We observe a clear preference for the use of funding and fiscal powers as a lever, a competitive allocation process, and a constrained discretion model of governance, with some distinct patterns over time. These choices made in the design of initiatives are likely to be shaped by the perceived and real accountability structures within government, and so offer an opportunity to consider how accountability affects, and is affected by, particular programmatic efforts at a local level. This article makes a significant contribution to our understanding of coordination programmes at a central–local government level. By identifying patterns in the approach of government over the last 25 years, it offers an empirical lens to map the 'glacial and incremental' reframing of central–local relations and associated shifts in public accountability. In this way, the article provides more solid foundations to a range of issues – central government's reliance on controlling the reins of funding, the competitive nature of allocation processes, and the enduring centralisation of accountability – that have been much discussed among policymakers, practitioners and researchers, but have lacked clear empirical grounding.
