December 30, 2011, 05:22 PM ET
I haven’t seen it, and I don’t plan to.
Reading about it is enough. I’m talking about the upcoming
60 Minutes interview with Sam Eshaghoff, the Long Island
teenager who took several SAT and ACT exams for other students in
exchange for $2,500 a pop—cash. The program will air this Sunday.
It seems that Mr. Eshaghoff, currently a student at Emory
University, was one mighty good test-taker. (Still, one can’t help
but wonder what went wrong that he couldn’t muster one of those
over-the-top scores for himself that would have launched him
straight into Harvard or Princeton.) From Mr. Eshaghoff’s point of
view, taking college entrance exams for other students didn’t
constitute cheating, or even present any ethical problems. His only
shame, he says, was the attention his arrest brought his family.
Mostly, he’s peeved at what a “piece of cake” it was—and still
is,...
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December 30, 2011, 02:50 PM ET
Some of my best friends are Catholics, living and
dead. And I’m not merely referring to the likes of Dorothy Day, Jim
Douglass, or the Berrigans, folks whose sociopolitical views
parallel my own. Instead, I’m thinking of the admirable inclination
of many Catholic thinkers (especially, but not exclusively, the
Jesuits) to deploy finely tuned rational arguments while
confronting some of the most difficult theological conundrums.
Admittedly, I’m convinced that their enterprise is altogether
hopeless—employing reason in support of religion strikes me as
exactly analogous to constructing a skyscraper whose measurements
are accurate to the fifth decimal point, atop a quaking bog—but I
also find their efforts courageous, stimulating, and sometimes
downright brilliant. One of my favorite examples is Augustine of
Hippo, roughly 1,700 years ago, confronting a problem that would
not...
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December 30, 2011, 11:14 AM ET
Well, I thought the Mormons were touchy, but they can’t hold a
candle to the
New Atheists, who are
all over me for my views on the limits of science and, more
particularly, the evolutionary-based nature of morality. I am a
little surprised, frankly. I would have thought that, having given
up God as a foundation of morality, they would welcome an attempt
to use evolutionary theory to provide a view of ethics that does
not sink into the rank relativism that characterizes
undergraduates' thinking after they have take a couple of sociology
courses. Oh well! Here, lest I be accused of ignoring criticism,
let me reply to three objections that have been leveled. The person
these days who seems to find my thinking most offensively incorrect
is the Chicago biologist Jerry Coyne. It is a strange world when my
biggest critic is not some evangelical Young Earther, but the head
of...
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December 30, 2011, 12:39 AM ET
Four years ago, in 2007, we faith-and-values pundits were pondering
Mitt Romney’s coupling of secularism and radical jihadism in
a memorable December speech. We were trying to figure out why
John McCain, of all people, was invoking
“Christian nation” rhetoric. We were assessing presidential
frontrunner Hillary Clinton’s many references to youthful Bible
study and Sunday School taught by her mom. As for that junior
senator, Barack Obama, we marveled at the newcomer’s God-talk
skills. He was too green, obviously; maybe 2016 would be his time.
Nor were we really focused on those who would soon become
faith-and-values Persons of Interest in 2008. Mike Huckabee only
flitted across the radar late in 2007. Outside of the initiated, no
one knew who the Rev. Jeremiah Wright was. And few, if any, on the
religion beat had ever heard of Sarah Palin. Which is my way of
saying that that...
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December 29, 2011, 03:52 PM ET
There's a new book out by a former National Public Radio
correspondent named Eric Weiner, which seems to be yet another in a
long line of works by secular Jews who suddenly discover that there
are people who take their faith seriously. Whether the result is
books like Hanna Rosin's about Patrick Henry College or Lauren
Sandler's about the evangelical youth movements, there seems to be
no end to the appetite of secular elites for finding what they see
as bizarre religious enclaves. Weiner's book, at least according to
reviews, seems to position itself more as a personal quest. But in
the end, whatever personal longings he feels seem to be an excuse
to study the odd religious practices of others. Here's a bit from
Joshua Hammer's review in Sunday's
New York Times: Still, Weiner’s odyssey feels unsatisfying.
His quest for a religious identity isn’t particularly convincing;
in fact, it...
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December 29, 2011, 02:26 PM ET
The orthodox among us seem convinced that proprietary
institutions are the only ones with a profit motive and
shareholders. Yet having worked in all three sectors of higher
education—private, public, and proprietary—I can say with great
confidence that the one thing they all have in common is the need
to generate a profit and provide a return on investment to both
students and shareholders. Sure, nonprofits like to use terms like
“net revenue” or “budget surplus” rather than “profit” to describe
their black ink, but as our friend Willy Shakespeare once wrote, “A
rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Money in the bank is
money in the bank, no matter what you call it. There is no doubt
that a company like mine depends on shareholders for up-front
capital to build campuses and develop new technologies. And like
anyone else who provides this sort of capital, our investors want
to...
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December 29, 2011, 01:54 PM ET
Roxanne Coady, owner of one of the world's best independent
bookstores, R.J. Julia's, and a dynamic, brilliant woman who makes
it her personal responsibility to get people reading
(www.justtherightbook.com), e-mailed me the following question:
"Every year I send out a NY poem—one that's smart or witty and
inspiring without being sappy. After years of having no problem
discovering exactly the right piece, I'm having trouble finding
one. Any ideas?" Roxanne is not the kind of woman you want to let
down. I spent part of yesterday morning looking for my favorite New
York poems. Yes, I am that much of a genius. That's why people rely
on me. The fact that my friend told me she sent out poems once a
year on December 31st did not clue me into the fact that "NY" could
represent anything except the Empire State. I went so far as to
send her a link to
Mark Doty's poem "Broadway," with its...
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December 28, 2011, 09:17 PM ET
North Carolina officials are trying to figure out how to compensate
survivors of their eugenics program. These men and women were never
able to have children. Decades after halting the state-sponsored
eugenics program, which forcibly sterilized countless young men and
women, the state wants to compensate those victims who are still
alive. Most were poor. More than 80 percent were girls and women.
Some of the girls had been raped. Some had been raped by their
relatives, including fathers who later signed for them to be
sterilized. North Carolina was not the first state to sanction
sterilizations for those considered a burden to society—the state
of Indiana holds that distinction, enacting its law in 1907.
Eventually, 32 states passed eugenics laws, which provided for
compulsory sterilizations of poor people, epileptics, persons with
low IQ's, and people of color. Tens of thousands of...
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December 28, 2011, 11:36 AM ET
In this week's
New Yorker is a short
update
on Heather Donahue, the woman who played in the 1999 hit film,
The Blair Witch Project. Because the film was such a
success ("Shot in eight days, for twenty-five thousand dollars, the
film had a creepy, do-it-yourself plausibility that made it a
worldwide, two-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar hit"), it typecast
her so much that it prevented other acting jobs coming her
way. After a few years in Los Angeles, she packed up and
became a medical marijuana grower with boyfriend "Judah" in the
Sierra Nevada mountains. Later, she left and wrote a book
about her experiences, entitled "Growgirl." Now she lives in
New York City (apparently), where the reporter met her for lunch to
gather her thoughts about her life. Here is the concluding
paragraph:
Now, having left Judah, marijuana husbandry, and
acting--if not Blair Witch--behind, she's...
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December 27, 2011, 04:48 PM ET
I grew up in a three-story house. There was the family made up of
my great-grandmother and grandmother. There was the family made up
of my grandmother’s sons; my father was her favorite out of all of
her eight children. Then, eventually, there was the little family
made up of my father, my mother, my brother, and me. So that my
father would live under her roof, my grandmother took in his
wife—but only the way a body takes in a foreign disease: as an
inoculation against worse. The war my grandmother could do nothing
about; she HAD to let her favorite son go because the government
took him. But he returned to her, safe and sound, after bombing the
country she had left thirty years earlier. Yet—and this almost
killed her—he returned only to leave again. He wouldn't stay
in his one small room, just down the hall from his loving mother,
every day, every night, after all he had...
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Brainstorm, The Chronicle Review's blog on ideas, culture, and the arts, features some of the best minds in academic and policy circles.
