Apr 29 2009

A courageous, principled Christian does the right thing

Category: abortion,higher education,Obama — harmonicminer @ 9:00 am

Mary Ann Glendon: An Open Letter to Fr. Jenkins, President of Notre Dame, re: Obama receiving honorary degree

April 27, 2009
The Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C.
President
University of Notre Dame

Dear Father Jenkins,

When you informed me in December 2008 that I had been selected to receive Notre Dame’s Laetare Medal, I was profoundly moved. I treasure the memory of receiving an honorary degree from Notre Dame in 1996, and I have always felt honored that the commencement speech I gave that year was included in the anthology of Notre Dame’s most memorable commencement speeches. So I immediately began working on an acceptance speech that I hoped would be worthy of the occasion, of the honor of the medal, and of your students and faculty.

Last month, when you called to tell me that the commencement speech was to be given by President Obama, I mentioned to you that I would have to rewrite my speech. Over the ensuing weeks, the task that once seemed so delightful has been complicated by a number of factors.

First, as a longtime consultant to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, I could not help but be dismayed by the news that Notre Dame also planned to award the president an honorary degree. This, as you must know, was in disregard of the U.S. bishops’ express request of 2004 that Catholic institutions “should not honor those who act in defiance of our fundamental moral principles” and that such persons “should not be given awards, honors or platforms which would suggest support for their actions.” That request, which in no way seeks to control or interfere with an institution’s freedom to invite and engage in serious debate with whomever it wishes, seems to me so reasonable that I am at a loss to understand why a Catholic university should disrespect it.

Then I learned that “talking points” issued by Notre Dame in response to widespread criticism of its decision included two statements implying that my acceptance speech would somehow balance the event:

• “President Obama won’t be doing all the talking. Mary Ann Glendon, the former U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, will be speaking as the recipient of the Laetare Medal.”

• “We think having the president come to Notre Dame, see our graduates, meet our leaders, and hear a talk from Mary Ann Glendon is a good thing for the president and for the causes we care about.”

A commencement, however, is supposed to be a joyous day for the graduates and their families. It is not the right place, nor is a brief acceptance speech the right vehicle, for engagement with the very serious problems raised by Notre Dame’s decision-in disregard of the settled position of the U.S. bishops-to honor a prominent and uncompromising opponent of the Church’s position on issues involving fundamental principles of justice.

Finally, with recent news reports that other Catholic schools are similarly choosing to disregard the bishops’ guidelines, I am concerned that Notre Dame’s example could have an unfortunate ripple effect.

It is with great sadness, therefore, that I have concluded that I cannot accept the Laetare Medal or participate in the May 17 graduation ceremony.

In order to avoid the inevitable speculation about the reasons for my decision, I will release this letter to the press, but I do not plan to make any further comment on the matter at this time.

Yours Very Truly,

Mary Ann Glendon

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Apr 05 2009

The Left At Christian Universities, Part 11: You know your school has gone left when….

Category: higher education,left — harmonicminer @ 8:32 am

The previous post in this series is here.

The following are culled from discussions with faculty and staff at several Christian colleges and universities.

You know your Christian college or university has gone or is moving Left when:

1)  Faculty close their office doors to discuss with other faculty the political changes (to the Left) on campus.

2)  People are generally a bit nervous about speaking up to buck the trend, at all levels, from newbie faculty all the way through the hierarchy.  In a world where a Left-leaning fellow like Larry Summers at Harvard can speak the plain truth and be pilloried for it, it’s pretty clear that  no one is safe.  Summers eventually had to resign, too.

3)  You can walk through the faculty parking lot and count Right leaning bumper stickers on the fingers of one hand, but you see large numbers of Left leaning ones.  (This doesn’t necessarily mean that the Left is a majority…  but it means they’re a LOT more vocal about it.)

4)  Students start forming groups to promote conservatism and traditional values (because they see so little defense of them on campus).  And if no faculty member will stop and talk to such students at booths displaying literature promoting such values, that’s a bad sign, too, not because that proves there are no faculty who agree, but because faculty may fear being seen to agree….  or even being interested.  A corollary: faculty who are considering joining the facebook group of conservative students pause for a moment, and count the cost.

5)  Every chapel speaker for two weeks straight seems to come from the Left.

6)  It is always completely safe, in public discourse (meetings, workshops, councils, etc.), to express your fidelity to the aims of diversity activism, but not to express your commitment to working politically towards a Supreme Court that will overturn Roe v. Wade, or for a Right to Life constitutional amendment.

7)  You feel that it’s safer to “feel people out in person” before sending them a document expressing conservative or libertarian values.  On the other hand, people from the Left constantly send email to the entire campus expressing their point of view, and appear to feel perfectly safe in doing so.

8)  Official college publications begin using the phrase “speech codes” in a non-pejorative manner.

9)  Your campus has “justice weeks” in which there is no mention of abortion; anti-Semitism’s rise in the West; out-of-wedlock birth leading to fatherless children (with the inevitably higher rates of crime, time in prison, poverty, etc.); Muslim treatment of women (in Western nations, not just “Islamic” ones); the responsibility of society to care for military veterans and their families, especially disabled veterans, and the families of killed soldiers (a scandal if there ever was one).  Huge injustices all, but somehow never in view during campus “justice week.”

10)  High level administrators try to suppress student political activism towards the Right.  Corollary: the administrators may be forced to apologize via legal action by the students.

11)  The cafeteria goes “green” and refuses to give customers “to go” containers even as an extra cost item.  There are recycling bins all over campus, but not enough trash cans…  or at least, they’re someplace distant from the recycling bins.  The cafeteria doesn’t supply trays anymore (to save water), so you have to juggle plate, beverages, utensils, soup bowls, etc., the hard way.  Corollary:  the cafeteria carpet has more stains than it used to.

The next post in this series is here.

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Apr 01 2009

The Left At Christian Universities, part 10: Rewarding the indefensible

Category: abortion,higher education,Obama,university,White House — harmonicminer @ 9:42 am

The previous post in this series is here.

A Moral Exemplar?

The University of Notre Dame has announced that Pres. Barack Obama will be the principal speaker and will receive an honorary doctor of laws degree at the university’s commencement on Sunday, May 17. The invitation comes after the president has taken several official actions that directly oppose the Catholic Church’s most sacred teachings. National Review Online asked some of our experts on education and Catholicism for their comments.

At the link, an important discussion on what it can mean for Notre Dame to have invited President Obama to receive an honorary degree and deliver a commencement address, to students who will have been taught (we hope) that abortion is deeply immoral, and who will witness the honoring of a president who supports it.

What, exactly, would a president have to do to be found ineligible for such an honor by a putatively Christian institution?  Apparently, supporting abortion in the most radical way possible is not enough.

Perhaps if he actually ate the babies after the abortions?  An interesting question:  is cannibalism a greater sin than aiding, abetting and encouraging unjust killing in the first place?  I think not.  After all, they’re already dead, right?  It’s a shame to waste them.  (And besides, for the pro-abortion crowd, they never did have human rights anyway, did they?  I mean, being just lumps of tissue and everything.  How immoral can it be to eat something that has no civil rights, anyway?  Isn’t that the same as cattle ranching, or hunting and eating what you kill?)

So, I think we have conclusively demonstrated that even if Obama ate aborted babies, he would still get an honorary degree from Notre Dame, a Christian university, since abortion is a greater sin than cannibalism (if someone else did the killing), and promoting abortion did not disqualify him.

Ah, but if Obama was well known as an industrial polluter, shooter of wolves from helicopters, corporate raider/downsizer, Pentecostal snake handler, and believer in young-Earth Creationism, and had still managed to get elected, would Notre Dame have invited him to receive an honorary degree and address impressionable undergraduates ?

Probably not.  Some sins really do matter.

The next post in this series is here.

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Mar 25 2009

Seven Contradictions of Diversity

Category: diversity,higher education — harmonicminer @ 9:55 am

In the traditions of Six Contradictions of Marxism, I present Seven Contradictions of Diversity, because Marxism was invented by dead white men, and what’s so special about the number “six”?  Herewith:

Seven Contradictions of Diversity

*  Your college has an Office of Diversity — yet it isn’t diverse enough

*  It isn’t diverse enough —  yet it celebrates diversity constantly

*  It celebrates diversity constantly —  yet faculty of color are oppressed

*  Faculty of color are oppressed  —  yet they are constantly invited to speak their mind

*  They are constantly invited to speak their mind  —  yet they are marginalized and ignored

*  They are marginalized and ignored —  yet many are hired as faculty and promoted to important administrative positions to develop “diversity weeks”, “diversity courses”, and “faculty diversity committees” in order to promote people of color.

*  They attain unprecedented political clout focused on a single issue —  yet they’re still “speaking truth to power”

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Mar 24 2009

Faculty Pain Assessment Tool: Don’t try this at home

Category: higher education,humor — harmonicminer @ 9:34 am

While I generally try to avoid making too many “inside references,” I recently witnessed a health professional trying to get a feel for how much pain someone was in, and they brought out the Universal Pain Assessment Tool.  It didn’t take long to realize the universal applicability of such an assessment instrument, and so, herewith:

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Mar 17 2009

The Left At Christian Universities, part 9: the students’ parents are idiots

Category: diversity,higher education,left — harmonicminer @ 9:09 am

The previous post in this series is here.

As has been pointed out previously in this series, “diversity” is not in any sense politically neutral.  It always strongly favors the Left, and people who are big fans of “diversity” are almost always strongly committed to the Left in other ways.

Just to analyze one instance in a recent faculty discussion of diversity:  a professor of social ethics was disappointed that his students, having finished his course, had not come to the conclusion that the Iraq war is unjust.  Let’s unpack this.

First, he seems to believe that his comment is related to the discussion of diversity.  How would that be, exactly?  What relevance does the justice or injustice of a particular bit of foreign policy have to diversity at his university?  It’s clear that in his mind, diversity and general leftist thought are very much related, and since the discussion is about diversity, the floor is open to general leftist discussion.  He thinks he is at ideological home with his fellow travelers.   He has done this before, almost certainly, and been well-received.   This seems more and more common at too many Christian colleges and universities (especially the universities).

Second, he seems to believe that no other position on the matter of the Iraq war can possibly be held by a rational person, in possession of the facts, with a decent heart and Godly intent.  So his disappointment makes sense, in his very constricted world-view.

Third, he seems completely unaware that he has just hurled a deadly insult at the parents who pay his salary, because it is likely that his students reflect some of their parents’ perspectives on such matters, and he thinks those perspectives are morally and rationally indefensible.  To be blunt, he sees his job as taking parents’ money to teach their children to think that their parents are fools, or worse.

Yet there he is, in the middle of a discussion of diversity, knowing that heads around the table will nod sagely as he fires from the hip, without really having a target, other than those benighted souls of the world who do not subscribe wholesale to leftist thought.  Plenty of heads nodded, as if the comment were perfectly appropriate. He is a perfect example of what has been happening in Christian higher education, as we bring in more and more faculty who are so thoroughly indoctrinated by the Left in their graduate programs that they see themselves as being on a mission from God to disabuse undergraduates of their foolish traditional misconceptions.

Translation:  these kids’ parents have been doing a miserable job of preparing the kids for polite society, and we have to completely reorient them, as soon as possible.

The next post in this series is here.

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Mar 03 2009

Job Security for Philosophers: Theists must stay in the closet

Category: higher education,philosophy,theology — harmonicminer @ 10:19 am

At the link, a very interesting description of a debate between a theist philosopher and an atheist philosopher, which sounds very interesting in its own terms, and this revealing confession.

I was at the talk. It was packed with professional philosophers and graduate students in philosophy, most of whom sided with Dennett. I wrote live comments on the debate/session. I prefer to remain anonymous for various reasons, in particular because I am inclined towards Plantinga’s position over Dennett’s and were this to become well-known it could damage or destroy my career in analytic philosophy. This is something I prefer not to put my family through. I almost didn’t publish these comments at all, but as far as I could tell, this would be the only public record of the discussion.

Friends, if you can identify me, I request that you keep my identity secret. I am sharing my thoughts as a service to the philosophical community and all those who have an interest in such debates. But I prefer not to suffer at the hands of my ardently secular colleagues. This is not to say that all secular analytic philosophers are this way; they most certainly are not. But enough of them are that I cannot risk being known publicly.

But wait! I thought the Left was all about tolerance. And DIVERSITY!

SURE it is.

Here’s the link to the exchange between Plantinga and Dennett.

Disclaimer:  while I’m obviously a theist, I don’t find so called “theistic evolution” to be a particularly convincing perspective, nor the attempts to rename it but not change the underlying concept.

But the “live blog” of the Plantinga/Dennett debate is very interesting.

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Feb 21 2009

Agenda journalism meets agenda science

Category: global warming,higher education,media,science — harmonicminer @ 10:40 am

In a typical profanity laced diatribe, the Daily Kos accuses George Will of lying or ignorance, fielder’s choice:

George Will — “According to the University of Illinois’ ACRC, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.”

University of Illinois’ ACRC — “We do not know where George Will is getting his information, but our data shows … [the] decrease in sea ice area is roughly equal to the area of Texas, California, and Oklahoma combined. It is disturbing that the Washington Post would publish such information without first checking the facts.”

This is a reference to a column in the Washington Post by George Will.

And despite all the eco-pagan handwringing, wailing and nashing of teeth, it appears that Will was correct, and the ACRC was engaged in a certain amount of spin in its disingenuous statement.

It’s got to be tough when the public spokesperson for the ACRC can’t read a graph.  Check it out yourself:  you’ll see the values go up, and the values go down, but they consistently orbit around the same general center.

I share one bit of frustration with the Daily Kos, though for different reasons.  I wish WAPO would respond a bit more vigorously to false allegations when it’s one of their few conservative columnists being attacked.  But, for now, I guess this will have to do.

The University of Illinois center that Will cited has now said it doesn’t agree with his conclusion, but earlier this year it put out a statement
(http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/global.sea.ice.area.pdf)
that was among several sources for this column and that notes in part that “Observed global sea ice area, defined here as a sum of N. Hemisphere and S. Hemisphere sea ice areas, is near or slightly lower than those observed in late 1979,”

It would seem that ACRC’s spokesperson doesn’t read their own website.  And it would seem that the eco-pagan global warming panic-mongers simply believe spokespersons without checking the facts themselves…  which makes it especially funny that they accuse George Will and WAPO of not doing adequate fact checking.

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Jan 17 2009

Marsalis on today’s music students

Category: education,higher education,music,society — amuzikman @ 9:39 am

Here are comments by a legendary musician on music students today. Some of his comments may apply to students in other areas, but it’s really about the music. Mild language warning.

Branford Marsalis’ take on students today

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Jan 01 2009

I knew they were nuts

Category: education,higher education,society — harmonicminer @ 10:43 am

I have recently played a part in the revision of the general studies curriculum at a Christian university. One of the topics of discussion was whether all students should be required to take psychology. Many of us felt that psychology is a “baby discipline” without fully formed content as yet, as witnessed by the “fad of the decade” approach to theories of personality, theories of cognition, etc.  A psychology faculty member argued (incredibly, to me) that half of our incoming students had serious psychological problems, and that we had to address them.  I asked if there was any evidence that students who had taken an introductory college psychology course had better mental health at any point later in life.  (There is none, of course….)  By way of admitting this without admitting it, my faculty friend insisted that the way HE teaches it is different, and he IS effective at teaching the content of “intro to psychology” while also achieving therapeutic goals.  All of this struck me as “special pleading”, of course, but it seems that maybe he was right that half of college students are whacko:

Results Almost half of college-aged individuals had a psychiatric disorder in the past year. The overall rate of psychiatric disorders was not different between college-attending individuals and their non–college-attending peers. The unadjusted risk of alcohol use disorders was significantly greater for college students than for their non–college-attending peers (odds ratio = 1.25; 95% confidence interval, 1.04-1.50), although not after adjusting for background sociodemographic characteristics (adjusted odds ratio = 1.19; 95% confidence interval, 0.98-1.44). College students were significantly less likely (unadjusted and adjusted) to have a diagnosis of drug use disorder or nicotine dependence or to have used tobacco than their non–college-attending peers. Bipolar disorder was less common in individuals attending college. College students were significantly less likely to receive past-year treatment for alcohol or drug use disorders than their non–college-attending peers.

Conclusions Psychiatric disorders, particularly alcohol use disorders, are common in the college-aged population. Although treatment rates varied across disorders, overall fewer than 25% of individuals with a mental disorder sought treatment in the year prior to the survey. These findings underscore the importance of treatment and prevention interventions among college-aged individuals.

Can’t we just put ’em all on Prozac and teach ’em algebra, instead?

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