February 3, 2012, 03:37 PM ET

A Pink Rethink

Early this morning, I posted my thoughts on why the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation’s decision to cut most of its funding to Planned Parenthood was a sad thing for women. The cancer fund-raising charity has now apologized and retracted its decision. Planned Parenthood is again eligible for (although I must note, not in any way guaranteed) grant money from Komen. Nancy Brinker, Komen’s chief executive, posted the following statement on the cancer foundation’s Web site: “We want to apologize to the American public for recent decisions that cast doubt upon our commitment to our mission of saving women’s lives.” The statement went on to say, “We will continue to fund existing grants, including those of Planned Parenthood, and preserve their eligibility to apply for future grants.” It included these critically important words: “We will amend the criteria [for grants]... Read More

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February 3, 2012, 09:01 AM ET

Pink Stink

So let’s say you so loathe Planned Parenthood for the fact that 3 percent of its services go to abortions that you don’t give a fig about the reasons why the Susan G.Komen for the Cure Foundation, the leading breast cancer advocacy organization in America, ended its long partnership with Planned Parenthood. You're just plain happy. Or let’s say you buy into the fantasy that poor women can easily find someplace other than Planned Parenthood to go and get mammograms--which save lives by detecting breast cancer in its earliest stages. Or let’s say you even buy the argument of Komen’s founder and chief executive, Nancy G. Brinker, who held a news conference yesterday (desperately trying to contain the damage caused by the decision) insisting that Komen’s decision had “nothing to do with abortion or politics.” Throwing around the smack of “mission” statements and... Read More

February 3, 2012, 02:18 AM ET

The Male Chromosome

For quite a while, I’ve been concerned about how norms change in countries where human rights abuses persist despite international interventions, treaties, and the promulgation of laws. Sometimes cultural traditions are so deeply entrenched that “law” does not seem to matter. For example, last week, an Afghan woman was found dead shortly after giving birth to her third daughter. Police believe that her mother-in-law assisted in the murder, by aiding her son as he strangled his wife to death. For months, the victim lived in fear that she would die if another girl were born into her family. It’s illegal to murder, but the instincts surrounding family honor, tradition, and birthing boys mattered more to the family that murdered the young mother. According to local authorities and friends of the 22-year-old woman (only known as Estorai), she knew that her husband would... Read More

February 3, 2012, 01:10 AM ET

Obama at the National Prayer Breakfast

Remember that young phenom who rocked the 2004 Democratic National Convention with the refrain “we worship an awesome God in the blue states!”? Well, in style, at least, he was nowhere to be found at yesterday’s National Prayer Breakfast. Indeed, listening to President Obama deliver his remarks I was struck by the dirge-like joylessness of his oration. In substance, however, his speech quietly drove home many of the core-beliefs of the ever-mobilizing, ever-regrouping, ever-coming-in-second-place American Religious Left. Listening carefully to Obama’s sedate address, one could detect a rather tenacious, albeit sometimes disheveled, defense of the principles that Progressives of Faith live by: We are not separationist secularists: The president has been distancing himself from separationist secularism since as far back as The Audacity of Hope. And he did so again yesterday... Read More

February 2, 2012, 06:45 PM ET

Would You Hire a Sad Person?

Kelly Egger's WSJ piece titled "Best Networking Tips" is precisely the kind of article I can imagine being dismissed by most readers of The Chronicle. "It's not like this in the academy," they might say, if they were the types who say "academy." Or they might say, "This is exactly the kind of shallow, hyper-competitive neo-conservative capitalistic garbage that made me leave my well-paid position at UBS for film school at NYU," although they might not say it quite that way to producers with whom they one day hope to collaborate--not unless they were really, really cute. And while it's true that graduate students looking for jobs might not have to take workshops on handshaking ("Weak handshakes turn people off, so practice yours with a friend to make sure it's neither bone-crushing nor wimpy"), there were several points in Egger's article our own job seekers might find useful. The... Read More

February 1, 2012, 11:31 PM ET

Saving Our Profession, Part 1: Mentoring

We humanists these days are afflicted by so many calamities (downsizing, disrespect, directionlessness) that it is easy to lapse into a state of complete demoralysis (= demoralization + moral paralysis). Understandable as such a lapse might be, it is ~~less depressing~~more productive to envision how we might assure the future of our guild. One possible solution to the crisis--and this is a long-term solution, I confess--centers around getting faculty to commit to mentoring students. It's an unusually difficult concept to grasp for my academic generation. As such, I provide you with some helpful FAQ's. As per my syllabus, I hold office hours 90 minutes a week (!), and I'm pretty much always in there. Is that mentoring? No. Conducting OH is decidedly not mentoring. Far from it (and would it kill you to put in an extra half hour a week?). It's necessary, don't get me wrong. But that's not... Read More

February 1, 2012, 02:50 PM ET

Spare the Rod, Spoil the Student

A while back, I had a student with a serious attitude problem. Let’s call her “Sue.” On the first day of an art course in which I first encountered Sue, my antennae shot up. At the end of my opening presentation, when I asked for questions, Sue responded by launching a missile. Due to her internship obligations, she would be late for several classes. I reiterated my policy on lateness (it’s strict) and suggested it might be best for her to drop my course. To this Sue responded that she needed to take my course to graduate (translation: “Your course is the course that suits my schedule”). Once the course got underway, Sue proved to be an exceptional student—in terms of mastery of the content—in fact, one of the best in the class. Still, she made it a daily practice to launch little missiles directly at me. She arrived late for each class, always causing a ruckus. I... Read More

February 1, 2012, 09:46 AM ET

Working the Assembly Line at the Human Experimentation Factory

If the past decade had an emblematic moment for clinical research, it was probably November 12, 2005, the day when Bloomberg Markets published its cover story, “Big Pharma's Shameful Secret.” In that issue, Bloomberg reporters laid out the story of SFBC International, a contract research organization in Miami that was paying undocumented immigrants to test the safety of new drugs in a seedy motel. The SFBC owners had converted the lobby into a large waiting area with plastic chairs, and they were housing their research subjects six to a room. The medical director of the research site was unlicensed to practice medicine; the Institutional Review Board that approved many of the studies was owned by the wife of the company vice-president; and the converted motel, which had been cited for fire and safety violations, was eventually demolished. Nonetheless, SFBC had become an... Read More

February 1, 2012, 05:12 AM ET

Confessions of a Backsliding Peacenik

Or "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Murder." I am now and have always been of the “peace camp,” employing an activist’s zeal combined with an academic’s scholarship in support of peace and in opposition to violence and war, especially the nuclear variety. I’ve also rarely had much doubt about policies I espouse personally and recommend publicly, which makes me all the more uncomfortable as I monitor my own responses to a lengthy and disturbing article in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, titled “Will Israel Attack Iran?” The piece was thoughtful, well-balanced, and highly informed. It laid out the major issues, reviewed much of the relevant history, discussed political as well as policy considerations, and concluded that some sort of attack was not unlikely, this year. (Gulp!) Perhaps the article was itself part of a propaganda effort designed to increase pressure on the ...

Face Time, Learning Styles, STEM Avoidance, Faculty Productivity

Some miscellaneous news reports with implications for higher ed-- The Wall Street Journal reports today on a study by Stanford researchers showing a strong correlation between media multitasking and social and emotional development for pre-teen girls. The study by Clifford Nass and Roy Pea found that the more the subjects (sample size 3,461) watched videos, emailed, texted, etc., the more they experienced "low social confidence, not feeling normal, having more friends whom parents perceive as poor influences, and even sleeping less." It's only a correlation, the authors warn, but they proceed to identify a common and simple antidote: face time. The direct encounter with faces, they say, teaches young girls to develop social awareness, to learn body language, to read other people's facial expressions. Face-to-face communication is "just enormously important," Nass asserts. One... Read More