History
Paul Simon lived for many years in the small town of Makanda, south of Carbondale, where he was a professor and director of the SIU Public Policy Institute. While there, he worked to foster the Institute into becoming a think tank that could advance the lives of all people. Activities included going to Liberia and Croatia to monitor their elections, bringing major speakers to campus, denouncing the death penalty, trying to end the United States embargo against Cuba, fostering political courage among his students, and promoting amendments to the Constitution to end the Electoral College and to limit the president to a single six-year term of office. Concerning the Electoral College during the controversial Election 2000 fiasco, Simon said, "I think if somebody gets the majority vote, they should be president. But, I don't think the system is going to be changed."
Simon believed modern presidents practice "followship," rather than leadership, saying, "We have been more and more leaning on polls to decide what we're going to do, and you don't get leadership from polls... and not just at the presidential level. It's happening with senators, House members and even state legislators sometimes conduct polls to find out where people stand on something."
Read more about this topic: Paul Simon Public Policy Institute
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“We don’t know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don’t understand our name at all, we don’t know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)
“There is no example in history of a revolutionary movement involving such gigantic masses being so bloodless.”
—Leon Trotsky (1879–1940)
“The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)