NAS Blog

Yesterday NAS president Peter Wood wrote “Character Lessons: What We Can Learn From the Huntsville Killings.” In it he wrote:

“Higher” education is not much of a barrier against jealousy, disappointment, fantasies of revenge, or even blood hatred.  I hear stories in confidence from time to time from frustrated and angry academics who are filled with self-pity about the treatment they have received.   Often enough their grievances are real.  It would be a good thing if universities still had at their center a sense that higher education really does demand of us something higher—something morally as well as intellectually higher.

Today the article received a comment by John Hundscheid, worth reprinting here:

I have lived in Huntsville, AL for the last 17 years and have many friends who attend the University of Alabama at Huntsville. A week before the shooting at UAH, there was a shooting at Discovery Middle School in Madison (a suburb of Huntsville). A ninth grader shot another ninth grader in the head during a class change. My first reaction was that the UAH shooting was a copycat incident. It came as a shock to learn that a faculty member, rather than a student, was responsible for the violence at UAH.

However, there is an eerie similarity between the two incidents. In both cases, the perpetrator was described as “cool” and “collected” when the incident occurred.  Dr. Bishop and the ninth grader both shot their targets, went to the restroom to dispose of their weapons, and waited for the police. The lack of passion makes these killings all the more disturbing. More passionate killings are easier to rationally comprehend. We can attribute such actions to a person being on edge, disrespected, disturbed, etc. But when a Harvard-trained neuroscientist or a fourteen-year-old intentionally targets and kills his or her colleagues with such precision and deliberation, I think our modern paradigm of rationality is challenged.

The  incident brought to mind that passage from the Summa where Aquinas argues that there can’t be intellectual virtue without moral virtue. The key to the relationship between intellectual and moral virtue is prudence. Prudence requires both moral and intellectual virtues because we have to comprehend the world and act in an appropriate way. And Prudence seems to have lost favor in modern conceptions of virtue. A quick search of the Oxford English Dictionary reveals it’s even a sort of pejorative now (“prudes” ) or has been confined to a strictly utilitarian conception (“In politics there is nothing wrong and everything prudent in changing the game plan at halftime if necessary to win”). I don’t think our society has a language to describe or explain the tragedies in Huntsville over the last two weeks and so we rightfully remain silent in our grief.

In today’s Clarion Call, my colleague Jay Schalin writes about Erskine Bowles, who has served as president of the UNC system for five years but is stepping down to work on a problem far more daunting than improving efficiency in higher education — the national debt problem.

Jay’s take is that Bowles did a pretty good job and I’m inclined to agree. He was willing to listen to ideas about higher education that did not emanate from within the system.

I hope he’ll be equally willing to listen to “non-mainstream” ideas on curing the federal addiction to spending.

Professor Mike Adams writes here about a course taught in the education school at UNC-Wilmington, where the students — future school teachers — are taught Black English.

Well, the festivities, seminars, workshops and other aspects of Yale’s recent “Sex Week” are over, but don’t fret: there’s lots of follow-up information available that may tide you over until next year and beyond. The Yale Daily News is now publishing minute statistics and details about the libidinal lives of seemingly everyone at the New Haven campus. The school’s 46K annual tuition sure buys you a lot, doesn’t it?

In today’s Pope Center article, Professor Robert Blumenthal of Georgia College and State University argues that the mathematics requirement at most colleges and universities these days is just a rehashing of high school topics. (More evidence for my argument that it’s erroneous to assume that just by getting through college a student has necessarily advanced in knowledge and skills!) What schools should do, Blumenthal says, is to create a challenging course for non-majors that will (or at least can) give students a look into the way mathematicians think — their approach to problems. Taught well, such a course could really be mind-expanding, showing students the beauty of mathematical logic.

Today is Charles Darwin’s birthday, and the Intelligent Design community has declared a national Academic Freedom Day in his honor. The Discovery Institute think tank sponsors the Day, encouraging students to “speak out against censorship and stand up for free speech by defending the right to debate the evidence for and against evolution.”

The campaign logo is a large cartoon of Darwin saying, “A fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question.”

Some curmudgeons are peeved by the appropriation of Chuck Darwin’s birthday for this cause.

NAS doesn’t take a position in the debate between intelligent design and evolution, but we are happy to see it take place.

The title may be a bit misleading, since we’ve never suggested that genuine harrassment isn’t something that needs to be dealt with swiftly and forcefully. But we’ve also had major problems with the kind of sexual harrassment codes which treat simple accusation as an indication of guilt and invite malicious, vindictive or frivolous charges of harassment from disgruntled students, antagonistic colleagues or cynical, calculating administrators. Today’ s Inside Higher Education issue carries a lengthy story indicating that the more troublesome type of harassment code may be an issue at the Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, which has certainly had its share of controversy regarding free speech, academic due process and related issues over the last decade. We’ll be watching, since we certainly don’t want a reprise of the harassment hysteria which dogged many campuses during the 1990s. Our Illinois affiliate head Jon Bean, who was quoted in the IHE article, is a professor at SIU and will be able to provide first-hand information.

Apropos of the comments made on his second Pope Center piece, Tom has asked me to post this response:

My respondent writes: “‘Blaming the culture’ has become a coded phrase for blaming the culture of students – and thus, the students themselves – for most speakers of that phrase generally excludes themselves from the swath of that ‘culture’ even though culture, by implication if not definition, is generally ‘all-encompassing.’” Absolutely, I exclude myself from immersion in and contamination by the toxicity of existing commercial culture; it is the moral obligation of the critic to eschew crassness and crudity, an obligation that I discharge with sustained alacrity.  I notice that the respondent excludes himself (or herself) from an imagined proletariat of poorly educated, unenlightened “English professors,” who putatively have never heard of rhetoric and who cannot speak French.  “Hypocrite lecteur,” wrote Charles Baudelaire, “mon semblable, mon frère.”

My respondent writes: “Phrases like ‘rhetoric of the visual’ are perhaps less familiar to professors of English than to professors of French where critics like Christian Metz set the stage, so to speak, for film analysis now decades ago.”  The phrase, “rhetoric of the visual,” is at best an analogy; rigorously, the term rhetoric applies to the public oratory that emerged in the Greek Archaic Age simultaneously with alphabetic literacy, which alphabetic literacy decisively informed.  As for mybona fides as an analyst of film – I invite my respondent to sample an item of my work, which he or she may do by following the link here: http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/4230.

My respondent writes: “As for the concept of literacy subversion effectuated by mass-circulation newspapers, well, where would Dickens and Balzac have been without newspapers for which their novels were written, chapter by chapter, and did they undermine literacy?”  Again, the writer refuses to see obvious distinctions.  A novel is, by definition, a serial story; chapter two must follow logically from chapter one and so forth until all the chapters together make a unified whole.  Novelistic structure both informs and requires sustained attention.  One hundred unconnected stories appearing “serially” in the same newspaper with a Dickens or a Balzac novel constitute, to paraphrase Neil Postman, merely one damned thing after another, and therefore do not inform or require sustained attention.  In all likelihood they destroy sustained attention, as do even more catastrophically the flickering images of the video game.

My respondent writes of “literacy not as a concept linked to the printed word but rather to argument, to rhetoric, to persuasion.” Sorry, but starting from its denotative character as an item of vocabulary, literacy is linked to letters. Whether they are manuscript or typescript, letters they are irreducibly a graphic phenomenon.  The concept of a letter– – of the visible representation of a particular sound – can only exist in a literate (more properly, in an alphabetic) context.  As Ong points out, oral people never analyze language; the idea of a phoneme would be inexplicable to them.

My respondent writes: “My point is that the attack is interesting but not
‘airtight’ and thus subject to deconstruction.”  For the record, none of my articles for the Pope Center is an “attack.”  Each one is a considered discussion of a real and troubling aspect of the existing social and cultural situation.

I plan not to address further remarks by this respondent in this forum.  I am accessible through my campus email address, however, and would not be averse to a courteous private rapprochement, with the emphasis on courtesy.

In the third of a series of articles for the Pope Center, Tom Bertonneau examines the connection between culture and memory. He finds that among today’s college students, that connection is perilously weak.

The rabid, hateful tenor of the recent, well-orchestrated verbal attack by Muslim students on Israel’s gracious ambassador, Michael Oren, is painful to behold for those of us love higher education and this democracy. But judge for yourself here, at You Tube.

Roger L. Simon justly comments that the incident — nothing new at UC Irvine – is a strong illustration of totalitarian behavior and today’s rampant anti-Semitism.

Campus administrators in fact handled the unrelenting onslaught against Oren well and appropriately, openly expressing their embarrassment and chastising the offending students. And eleven students were arrested.

But I must agree with Simon that higher education as a whole will suffer if campus leaders, in this case those in California, do not do more to confront the widespread intolerance and vile incivility on our campuses:

School officials say they were embarrassed. They should be a lot more than that. They should rectify this situation immediately and in a serious way, because this is a serious case of racism. The reputation of the whole University of California system is at risk here in an era when taxpayers are in a justifiably rebellious mood. Given what’s happened, outside the sciences, it’s hard to regard Irvine as a legitimate educational institution. Why would any of us pay for what is happening there? The California Board of Regents and the administration of UCI should think about that.