Brainstorm » Naomi Schaefer Riley

How We Give to Universities

Naomi Schaefer Riley — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 14:52:18 +0000

Americans like higher education and American philanthropists like to give to higher education. According to The Chronicle, 19 of the top 50 donors last year gave to colleges, more than to any other cause. “Of those, 10 provided support to institutions that were not their alma maters. Altogether, the 19 donors gave colleges more than $1.5-billion.”

Perhaps the fact that half of these philanthropists did not simply write big checks to their alma maters (though they’re probably doing that as well) is a good sign. Maybe donors are looking more at the quality of the school and the worthiness of its programs than simply giving out of nostalgia because they had a good time at the football games or because that’s where they met their future wives.

Last week, there was more heartening news on this front. Judge Richard Bray, the CEO of the Beazley Foundation, decided to suspend its giving…

If This Is Art, Your Middle-School Daughter Is Picasso

Naomi Schaefer Riley — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 03:34:48 +0000

According to a piece in the Harvard Crimson: “Eric R. Brewster ’14 and Avery A. Leonard ’14 fought off drooping eyelids and the urge to sleep last week as they held a phone conversation that lasted for 46 hours, 12 minutes, 52 seconds, and 228 milliseconds—potentially setting a new world record.”

Those wacky Harvard kids! Trying to break world records in their spare time. But wait! This stunt is so much more than that. It’s an “art installation,” according to the organizers. It was actually “the premiere creation of the Harvard Generalist, a new student arts cooperative.”

How was this art, you might ask? “Stage Manager Ginny C. Fahs ’14 said that the performance was much like an athletic competition because it required extreme endurance from Leonard and Brewster. ‘This explored deterioration—physical, mental, and emotional,’ Fahs said. ‘Because of that deterioration, the …

No Progress in Our National Conversation on Race

Naomi Schaefer Riley — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 15:03:19 +0000

cross posted from Philanthropy Daily:

We’re still in the thick of primary season now, but maybe it’s time to start worrying about the general election — not who is going to win, but how the contest will be run and how it will be covered and how much the subject of race is going to be a factor. It would be easy to dismiss Lee Siegel’s op-ed in yesterday’s New York Times as a bunch of pundit claptrap, which I will do in a moment, but I am concerned it is a bad sign of things to come.

Siegel’s amazingly ignorant and ill-timed thesis is that the “one quality that has subtly fueled [Mitt Romney's] candidacy thus far and could well put him over the top in the fall [is] his race. The simple, impolitely stated fact is that Mitt Romney is the whitest white man to run for president in recent memory.” Maybe you were thinking this is the beginning of some Chris Rock sketch…

Stupid S*&t Liberals Write About Conservatives

Naomi Schaefer Riley — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 15:46:33 +0000

This week’s award goes to Corey Robin. I really hope that I’m not the only one who finds Robin’s Review cover essay completely offensive. Maybe there are even a few wives, secretaries, and factory workers (of every political stripe) who will find this a little condescending:

Despite the very real differences among them, workers in a factory are like secretaries in an office, peasants on a manor, slaves on a plantation—even wives in a marriage—in that they live and labor in conditions of unequal power. They submit and obey, heeding the demands of their managers and masters, husbands and lords. Sometimes their lot is freely chosen—workers contract with their employers, wives with their husbands—but its entailments seldom are. What contract, after all, could ever itemize the ins and outs, the daily pains and continuing sufferance, of a job or a marriage? Throughout American…

Social Conservatives and the Media Elite

Naomi Schaefer Riley — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 14:56:05 +0000

If you want to get an idea of how social conservatives are going to be treated by the media in this election cycle, look no further than Saturday night’s ABC debate. George Stephanopoulos’s endless exchange with Mitt Romney about whether he favored a ban on contraception and whether he would consider it constitutional if a state voted to ban it may have seemed like a puzzling digression. In fact, Mitt Romney probably reflected in his flustered answer the puzzlement of the whole audience at this line of questioning. What state was trying to ban contraception again? But presumably Stephanopoulos thought he was showing some great fissure in the Republican party. It’s true that Rick Santorum doesn’t favor contraception but the vast majority of his constituency–even the pro-life ones–are not against contraception. Does Stephanopoulos really think this is going to be the deciding issue–or…

Oral-Historian Privilege, Part 2

Naomi Schaefer Riley — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 15:01:11 +0000

Well, it looks like the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit has decided to issue a stay of the lower court’s order for Boston College to turn over its interviews with former Irish Republican Army members to U.S. prosecutors and the British government. (See my post on this subject yesterday here.) BC was willing to turn over the records, claiming that this was a better outcome than taking the risk that the government would force them to turn over everything from the project, rather than just certain interviews.

But individual historians on the so-called Belfast Project appealed the lower court’s decision last week and were rewarded with this stay. The battle cry of “academic freedom” has been raised again. And this time it’s supposed to trump investigations into criminal or terrorist activities. Another win for the ivory tower!

Oral-Historian Privilege?

Naomi Schaefer Riley — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 02:55:33 +0000

So it looks like Boston College will have to give to federal prosecutors the tapes of interviews that researchers and journalists there conducted with at least one member of the Irish Republican Army. As part of this “oral history project,” BC promised interviewees that their stories would be kept under wraps until after their deaths.

But on behalf of British authorities, federal prosecutors here “demanded anything in the college archive related to the 1972 abduction and murder of Belfast mother-of-10 Jean McConville, who the IRA admitted to killing and secretly burying, claiming she was an informer,” according to the BBC.

According to The New York Times, “The subpoenas summoned interviews from two members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army, Dolours Price and Brendan Hughes, a commander who died in 2008. They accused Gerry Adams, the president of Sinn Fein, of running a …

(Secular Jewish) Man Seeks God

Naomi Schaefer Riley — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 20:52:59 +0000

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…

A Great Leap Backward

Naomi Schaefer Riley — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 20:46:13 +0000

Crossposted from Philanthropy Daily:

It looks like this nation is taking a giant step backwards in the field of racial preferences. On Friday, the Obama administration issued a letter to college and university presidents, urging them, in the words of The New York Times, to “get creative” in their promotion of racial diversity. The new guidelines offer college administrators ways to essentially skirt the Supreme Court rulings on racial preferences. The Times offers a useful side-by-side comparison of the Bush administration guidelines for this issue and Obama’s:

Where the Bush administration’s letter in 2008 states, “Quotas are impermissible,” the 2011 version says “an institution may permissibly aim to achieve a critical mass of underrepresented students.” Even in addressing the same principles, the framework is practically reversed. Obama guidelines:…

CUNY’s Fall

Naomi Schaefer Riley — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 20:45:41 +0000

It looks like CUNY may be falling back down the academic ladder. After a miraculous turnaround that accompanied the end of open admissions in 1999, CUNY had set a bar for a public university with high academic standards that could serve a broad urban population. Then on Thursday, a committee tasked with creating a new core curriculum for the school released its final recommendations. From all accounts, it seems to be a grand plan for dumbing things down.

The Board of Trustees had apparently complained that the schools’ system for transferring credits was too complex (many students go from one of the junior colleges to one of the system’s senior colleges and the range of requirements was quite broad.) So they decided to go with the lowest common denominator. According to The Chronicle, students will take their “first 30 credits in two categories. The first would be a 12-credit…