Education Archives
May 1, 2007
A Tolerant Tyranny
(I've already supplied these links to WWWTW's contributors, but want them available to readers as well. Gotten via friend Jeff Culbreath.)
This one's to an NCR piece about a recently passed law in England making it "illegal for a teacher in any school, including a Catholic school, to state that homosexual activity is morally wrong..."
The other concerns an effort of the Oregon legislature to "eliminate attitudes opposing homosexuality," although the scope of the measure is not clear to me.
There is also a move underway in California to repeal Prop 22, which defines marriage as between a man and a woman.
And now we have news of a video making the rounds of public schools and television stations.
May 11, 2007
The University: Reform if you would preserve.
Cardinal Newman wrote very astutely, if a bit acidly, that it is a misfortune to be self-educated. It may be a misfortune; often it is a joy and a calling. But even where joyous it must always be an exception, unless barbarism is ascendant. In that sense we might almost say of a society which, by lassitude, heresy or avarice, forces many men to become autodidacts: “there is a society oppressed by barbarism.” Upon reading a devastating essay by Larry P. Arnn in the Fall 2006 issue of The Claremont Review of Books, one is left with that distinct impression. Ours is a society oppressed by barbarism. Misfortune will be the lot of Americans for some time to come — at least for those Americans who believe that “education” contains a notion of diligent immersion in, and exploration and veneration of one’s own civilization.
What Arnn — President of Hillsdale College — lays out in some detail is an arraignment of education in America so shattering as to induce the reader to a kind of despondency, followed by, it is to be hoped, a very solid kind of defiance. As Arnn tells it, with subtlety and incision, the agents of barbarism are in the driver’s seat; and the would-be defenders of civilization are reduced by bafflement, misconception, and disarray. Deriving from work by a committee of the President’s Advisory Council, the verdict is grim: “our kindergarten students rank with the best in the world in their knowledge of science and math. For each year that they are subjected to the capable attentions of our public education system, they fall a step behind. By the time they graduate from high school, they rank at the 10th percentile in math internationally, struggling to keep ahead of the unschooled goatherds of the Third World.” It might be added, of course, that a goatherd at age eighteen is probably the master of quite a variety of useful skills, such that his education is, in its own way, quite adequate.
Continue reading "The University: Reform if you would preserve." »
May 20, 2007
Times Change (cont.)
For this Sunday, we continue with Bertrand Bronson, circa 1952:
* * * The assumption that men are basically alike in all times and places, and that the sum total of scientific information already available or yet to be discovered is unlikely to make any radical alteration in human nature, obviously puts a premium on the way in which the old truths are restated. This is not...to reduce the importance of the old truths, which are old because they are fundamental and therefore discovered early, and which, only because they are familiar, are likely to be rejected unless continually re-presented in fresh and agreeable forms.
August 14, 2007
Chesterton on nonsense.
This website needs a new post to go up. Now whenever I have trouble thinking of what to write, I do the only reliable thing — I read some Chesterton. Fortunately much of his work is available for free on the Web — a fact which alone outweighs all the pornography out there, and let no one doubt my detestation of porn. So let’s go take a dip in the wide, clear, cool sea of Chesterton, shall we?
September 3, 2007
Technology ain’t always so bad.
I have grave doubts about the true value of technology, like any good Conservative. This position is strained by discoveries like this. Last night our esteemed Mrs. McGrew pointed out that Google Books includes William Muir’s classic The Life of Mohamet, right there in a reading format. Then I read a vigorous and wise statement by Touchstone’s James Kushiner:
I propose that no bishops be consecrated in any church unless they have studied and inwardly digested the full ecclesiastical history of the fourth century, beginning with the mass persecutions, then on to Nicaea, the Arian-inspired exiles and persecutions, and beyond. They should be rigorously quizzed on the names, the dates, the documents, the accounts of the martyrs, and then sign a form (in triplicate, of course!) saying they will faithfully walk in the steps of these orthodox bishops (and saints), and defend, to their last breath, that which was handed on from the apostles, and if not, then get a real job.
— Which, in turn, sent me off on a search which produced this. So there. Technology ain’t all bad.
October 15, 2007
Chesterton’s gift
Chesterton wrote a small book (pdf) on William Cobbett, a late-eighteenth century farmer, medievalist, and contrarian blessed with unparalleled a talent for the polemic. Cobbett grounded his fierce slashing rhetoric on a firm foundation of Christian realism. This is his greatness. He shares with Chesterton an opinion on Capitalism (not very high), and a grand reverence for private property; but he possessed none of Chesterton’s infectious generosity in his writing. He thought the Reformation in England was but an usurpation designed to beggar the rural civilization flourishing there and plunder its wealth. The book is worth reading, though I would not count it among Chesterton’s classics.
As with virtually anything Chesterton has written, there are in this book flashes of jocular genius, of that playful intuition of being which was the great man’s great gift, that almost make you laugh out loud. Here are two examples, one from early in the book, and one from near the end.
February 14, 2008
University of Notre Dame in 2008-09
I will be spending next school year on the faculty of the University of Notre Dame as the Mary Ann Remick Senior Visiting Fellow in the Notre Dame Center for Ethics & Culture. I was offered it two weeks ago, and formally accepted it on Monday of this week. I am deeply grateful to Baylor University, my department chair, my dean, and the university provost for allowing me to take this research respite in such an idyllic setting.
March 25, 2008
Baptist Press Story Misrepresents Dembski's 2000 Baylor Demotion
This just appeared in a story in the Baptist Press:
Dembski himself was at odds with some faculty members over Intelligent Design, a scientific theory that says certain patterns in nature are best explained as the product of intelligence rather than random material forces. In 2000, he was removed from his post as director of Baylor's Michael Polanyi Center for Complexity, Information, and Design after refusing to rescind a statement he made supporting Intelligent Design as a legitimate form of academic inquiry.
That's not what happened. Here's the correct narrative, as I tell it in my review of the revised edition of Ronald Numbers' The Creationists, forthcoming in the Journal of Law & Religion 23.2 (2007-08). (You can find the review online here):
Continue reading "Baptist Press Story Misrepresents Dembski's 2000 Baylor Demotion" »
April 10, 2008
Plotting to save the humanities
Suppose I had scads of money (I don't) and wanted to found a new college (I don't). What would I do about the humanities departments? I'll set aside Philosophy, where I do happen to know that there are lots of excellent candidates out there looking for jobs and that one could easily fill a department. In fact, even if one were founding a Christian school, so long as it wasn't denominationally restricted, I'm pretty sure that one could fill a good analytically-oriented philosophy department.
But what about English? Indulge me for a moment and imagine that I want to have an English department entirely staffed by people who are completely opposed to postmodernism. No "critical theorists," no "Well, Foucault had some good points" folks, nobody wishy washy on this subject. Everybody should take a traditional approach to the humanities, should believe that texts have meaning outside our heads, and should be seeking to teach them. Also, nobody should require students to read The Color Purple. Traditional canon scholars, as well. I'll take old-fashioned New Critics, though probably if I had happened to live when they really were "new," I would have been one of the Old Historicists opposing them. But as it is now, they are the Old Guard, and at least they usually hate and are hated by the postmodernists; and they are by and large real scholars and know their stuff. If there are any of them left, that is.
Now, the trouble here is that we need to staff our hypothetical English department in our hypothetical new college with people who are alive, healthy, active, and willing to teach for a good while, not people who are retired or on the point of retiring.
Is it possible?
April 17, 2008
Art Imitates Death (Update: It's "Probably" a Hoax)
UPDATE: As Serious George correctly pointed out in the combox, it turns out that it may be a hoax. Read about it here.
This from this morning's Yale Daily News:
Art major Aliza Shvarts '08 wants to make a statement.Beginning next Tuesday, Shvarts will be displaying her senior art project, a documentation of a nine-month process during which she artificially inseminated herself "as often as possible" while periodically taking abortifacient drugs to induce miscarriages. Her exhibition will feature video recordings of these forced miscarriages as well as preserved collections of the blood from the process.
You can read the rest of the article here.
April 29, 2008
Why Bother?
English departments, hotbeds of fashionable schools of literary criticism, are slowly emptying out, and William Deresiewicz, examining some of the proximate causes, suggests that the discipline lacks a survival instinct. Conservatives conversant with the bitter struggles over the literary canon and the various theoretical fads that have buffeted the discipline might indulge in a few reveries tinged with schadenfreude, consoling themselves with the thought that perhaps the relativists and radicals are finally receiving their just due; perhaps, however, the causes are more mundane. Perhaps no one really cares anymore:
...the number of students studying English literature appears to be in a steep, prolonged and apparently irreversible decline. In the past ten years, my department has gone from about 120 majors a year to about ninety a year. Fewer students mean fewer professors; during the same time, we've gone from about fifty-five full-time faculty positions to about forty-five. Student priorities are shifting to more "practical" majors like economics; university priorities are shifting to the sciences, which bring in a lot more money. In our new consumer-oriented model of higher education, schools compete for students, but so do departments within schools. The bleaker it looks for English departments, the more desperate they become to attract attention.
May 30, 2008
Beyond Belief
Or, almost beyond belief, given what we know about the degradation of the humanities under the ministrations of 'cultural studies' vandals:
And you thought that the Middle Ages was all about jousting knights and damsels in distress. That's because you have never attended the medievalists' congress, the annual first-weekend-in-May ritual at Western Michigan where Persels read his wine-bottle theorizing and where it is definitely not your grandfather's Middle Ages. Persels's paper was part of a Thursday morning panel titled "Waste Studies: Excrement in the Middle Ages" and devoting a full hour and a half to human effluvia. The other two scholars that morning read papers dealing with excrement in Icelandic sagas and the theology of latrines.Waste studies is a brand new academic discipline invented by Susan Signe Morrison, a dark-haired, extroverted 49-year-old professor of English at Texas State University's San Marcos campus and mother of two (her husband is also an English professor) who organized the session and admitted with good-humored candor in an email that her new field's disgust-provoking subject matter might be a "challenge" to scholars thinking about specializing in it. Morrison's own specialty as a medievalist used to be women on pilgrimages, but then she got the idea for her latest book, Excrement in the Late Middle Ages: Sacred Filth and Chaucer's Fecopoetics, forthcoming this September. In her email she explained that the idea for the fecal book came to her partly because she noticed that dung and privies played a role in the works of Chaucer, Dante, and other medieval authors, and partly because her "son was potty-training." And so a new scholarly industry was born.
Initially, I believed, or was greatly desirous of believing, that Charlotte Allen's essay in the Weekly Standard was an elaborate satire. This because, in spite of myself, and perhaps against my better knowledge, I do not wish to be that cynical. Alas, satire it was not, but a Boschean vision of horror translated to this plane of being. Fecopoetics. The very notion raises the serious question of whether the night of simple ignorance might be preferable to such willful endarkenment. Is it time?
July 24, 2008
Baylor University President Fired
From Christianity Today's blog:
Baylor University's board of regents has fired president John Lilley, whose presidency began and ended with disputes over tenure.
In 2006, associate professor of church-state studies Francis Beckwith was denied tenure. His appeal became a cause celebre in some evangelical academic circles, and he eventually prevailed. Lilley, however, continued to be viewed with suspicion by some Christian observers.
But it was April's decision to deny tenure to 12 candidates that really set the drumbeats going. Most years, about 10 percent of faculty up for tenure are denied. This year, the 40 percent rejection rate sparked accusations of a "purge" and capricious standards. Seven of the ten faculty who appealed ended up receiving tenure.
A press release from Baylor says board member Harold Cunningham will be acting president until an interim president is named.
Updates to follow. The Waco Tribune-Herald will no doubt have coverage throughout the day.
July 26, 2008
Should P. Z. Myers be fired?
Update: Apparently, Myers' blog is one of over 70 "scienceblogs" that are owed by a company called seedmediagroup.com. These links will lead you to its leadership including its CEO, Adam Bly. In fact, here's a Seed Media promo video in which Myers appears with Bly.
Jimmy Akin thinks so. He writes:
August 5, 2008
Great video clip on government and education
This is a great little dialogue. I have trouble picking my favorite line, but I suspect it will come from the woman in the discussion, not because she is a woman, but because they have given her several of the best lines. For example, "Why do we need 2,000 civil servants to funnel money from A to B?" "Two thousand private schools deal with these sorts of problems every day of the week."
Mind you, I'm not advocating publically funded education--not in an ideal world. But you have to walk before you can run, and lampooning stuffy people who think parents are not qualified even to choose their child's school is a good way to start.
What's perhaps a tad frightening is the thought that there are people (British people, especially?) who actually believe that parents are not qualified to raise their children. I notice that at one point where Humphrey says that, there is no laugh track. Let's hope it was an oversight.
I know nothing about this show and had never heard of it until I received this link by e-mail. Perhaps my readers are better informed.
September 22, 2008
Two year anniversary of winning my tenure appeal
Today is the two year anniversary of the day on which I won my tenure appeal at Baylor University. In my forthcoming book, Return to Rome: Confessions of An Evangelical Catholic, I briefly touch on my tenure case and how I look at it in hindsight. Here is a brief excerpt from that portion of the book:
On September 22, 2006, Baylor University reversed its decision and awarded me tenure. And only 16 months after winning my appeal (in April 2008), I was promoted to full professor. In the academic world, such a story is as unlikely as they come. For this reason, I am in awe of, and humbled by, the gentle and unpredictable hand of providence that has taken my wife and me by its grace through one improbable scenario after another. Any success that I may have appeared to earn, hangs by a thin string dangling from an intricate tapestry over a fiery abyss, whose Creator is “the author and finisher of our faith” (Heb. 12:2 KJV).
And the fact that I now find myself on the faculty of the University of Notre Dame as a senior visiting fellow for the 2008-09 school year is beyond my wildest dreams. Soli Deo Gloria.
October 16, 2008
The closet is your private place, redux
The title of this post is boldly stolen from my esteemed colleague, Zippy Catholic, who used it for an inaugural post of his at this very blog about a year and a half ago. It seemed so perfect for this post that I could not resist but have added "redux" to it and trust that he will not mind.
Probably a number of my readers have already heard about the case in Massachusetts a couple of years ago in which parents, Mr. and Mrs. Parker, were denied an opt-out for their five-year-old from discussions and promotion of homosexual "marriage." The problem began with the child's being sent home with a "diversity bag" containing a book about a girl, her father, and her father's homosexual partner, all of whom live together and are treated in the book as a "family."
Continue reading "The closet is your private place, redux" »
November 10, 2008
The truth about me and Intelligent Design
In a forthcoming article in Santa Clara Law Review vol. 49 (2009)--"The Courts, Natural Rights, and Religious Claims as Knowledge"--I spell out in a footnote my views on intelligent design. I decided to finally address this directly in an academic article because of the continued false portrayal of my views by several writers as well as by the anonymous and unaccountable "authors" of my Wikipedia entry. Because of my article's topic and the arguments and court cases I address, this article provided me, for the first time, with an opportunity to offer in a widely disseminated academic periodical a brief and clarifying footnote about my views that are in harmony with the article's purpose.
This is what I write:
Continue reading "The truth about me and Intelligent Design" »
November 20, 2008
Notes on the crisis.
I'm standin' in the shadows with an aching heart
I'm lookin' at the world, tear itself apart
Here Dylan has given us a brilliant summation of the condition of the simple citizen in the face of the economic crisis that exploded in our faces in mid-September, and which may well prove more momentous than another calamity, another September, seven years earlier.
I can only speak as the simplest layman, and even that may be too bold. No doubt whatever I say about the crisis will include error, for the world of finance, despite by best efforts, remains to me mind-bogglingly opaque in many respects.
Nevertheless, I feel it is a perfectly defensible statement to say that we have beheld some astonishing sights in these last two months. At the height of the crisis in September, I asked a knowledgeable friend to try to explain what he was observing. He groped briefly for a way to convey it, then said, “Imagine you woke up and the sky was green instead of blue.” Another analogy he used was, “What if you looked, and found that the sun was rising in the west?”
February 11, 2009
‘Too Christian’ for academia?
Here is a piece I wrote for National Review Online about the political correctness controversy brewing over Wiley-Blackwell’s Encyclopedia of Christian Civilization.
UPDATE: The Catholic News Agency interviews George Kurian, the encyclopedia's editor. The Telegraph comments on the story. First Things sums it up: "This encyclopedia is too on topic"!
UPDATE 2: The Guardian and The Times have picked up the story.
February 16, 2009
Student Sues, Claims Professor Called Him "Fascist Bastard."
You can read about it here.
Okay, I am going to play a card from the bottom of the liberal deck: this is a consequence of the climate of incivility and hate resulting from the post Prop-8 drive to intimidate and marginalize those that provided financial support for the cause. Once someone is targeted as an object of civic disappropriation, then others are led to believe that they can legitimately insult, defame, and/or physically harm that individual without any fear of retribution.
Ironically, if the context had been different, if the professor had merely discovered that the young man had been sired out of wedlock, the professor would have been reprimanded for calling him a "bastard," since such distinctions, offered by a state employee, having to do with the legitimacy of one's paternity violate "equal protection."
February 17, 2009
More on the Encyclopedia of Christian Civilization controversy
I have a follow-up piece posted today at NRO’s The Corner. Inside Higher Ed ran an article on the story yesterday. It seems to me that there are serious questions to be raised about Wiley-Blackwell’s official statements on this matter, questions which are not being asked by others who have commented on this story so far (including the Inside Higher Ed piece). I raise them in my article.
March 3, 2009
And on the Leiter side…
Brian Leiter “learns” from Charles Hermes that the counter-petition mentioned by Lydia below is “the creation of Edward Feser,” of whose “unhinged screed” Leiter has (as my long-time readers know) been critical before. Except that, as even a cursory reading reveals, the counter-petition was sponsored by a group calling ourselves “Concerned philosophers.” And except that, in my response to the email from Hermes cited by Leiter (a response Hermes posted on Leiter’s own blog), I refer to the “authors” of the petition. Leiter, apparently fascinated by minutiae to the point of carefully inspecting his commenters’ IP addresses (see the crack detective work in identifying “Matt Hart” and “Michelle” exhibited in the first link above), has, nevertheless, apparently yet to master simple English plural noun forms.
Leiter kindly directs his readers to my book The Last Superstition, which he compares, bizarrely, to Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism. Apparently Leiter hasn’t mastered the difficult art of reading subtitles either, since a glance at mine would reveal that my book has absolutely nothing to do with the topic Goldberg addresses. (Yes, my puzzlement is feigned. The scare reference to Goldberg is, of course, just “boob bait for the bubbas,” viz. Leiter’s left-of-center readers.)
Readers unfamiliar with Leiter should be made aware of the moral seriousness he brings to this debate. As someone who knew him back in the day has attested, Leiter “was the only guy I knew who openly regretted the collapse of the Soviet Union.”
Those wondering how any philosopher could countenance turning the APA over to ideologues and commissars, take note.
April 13, 2009
Virginia Tech may require faculty to agree to statement of faith
Read about it here. Authored by George Leef, the essay includes this:
In March, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (nearly always just called Virginia Tech) announced that it was considering new guidelines for faculty assessment. A crucial sentence in the proposal reads, “University and college committees require special attention be given to documented involvement in diversity initiatives.”There no more is universal agreement on the desirability of laissez-faire capitalism than there is on “diversity,” but the latter enjoys sacred cow status within the realm of American higher education. Therefore, university administrators see nothing wrong in setting up a litmus test of fidelity to their “diversity initiatives.”
To see how blatantly inconsistent this proposal is with the core academic value of free inquiry, imagine a tenure track assistant professor of chemistry who comes to the conclusion that the push for ever-increasing “diversity” on campus detracts from the educational mission of the school. Let us say he finds that many of the students admitted under “affirmative action” policies aren’t capable of handling the workload in his course. Should he say anything about it?
Apparently, according to those proposing this policy, it is not good enough to merely believe in diversity or to have a diversity orientation. You must actually document your "involvement in diversity initiatives." So, even secular institutions have sacraments that go along with their statements of faith. Gloria in Excelsis Nihilum
Read the whole thing here.
April 15, 2009
My sister Elizabeth's forthcoming book, Raising the Perfect Child Through Guilt and Manipulation
My sister, Elizabeth Beckwith, is publishing a book this Fall with Harper Collins, Raising the Perfect Child Through Guilt and Manipulation. Above is a picture of her and the book's cover, which has just appeared online at Amazon.com, which includes this blurb about her:
April 23, 2009
William McGurn's Talk: "A Notre Dame Witness for Life"
As I noted elsewhere, Wall Street Journal columnist Bill McGurn was scheduled to speak this evening at the University of Notre Dame. I just returned from the talk. It was outstanding and powerful. Mr. McGurn, who I had the privilege to speak with after his lecture, offered a principled defense of his point of view while being charitable to those with whom he disagrees.
The Notre Dame Center for Ethics & Culture has published the text of the talk online, which you can find here. The following are some excerpts:
The precipitate cause of our gathering tonight is the honor and platform our university has extended to a President whose policies reflect clear convictions about unborn life, and about the value the law ought to place on protecting that life. These convictions are not in doubt. In July 2007, the candidate spelled them out in a forceful address to a Planned Parenthood convention in our nation’s capital.Before that audience, he declared that a woman’s “fundamental right” to an abortion was at stake in the coming election. He spoke about how he had “put Roe at the center” of his “lesson plan on reproductive freedom” when he was a professor – and how he would put it at the center of his agenda as president.
He invoked his record in the Illinois state senate, where he fought restrictions on abortion, famously including one on partial-birth abortion. He said that the “first thing” he wanted to do as President was to “sign a Freedom of Choice Act.” And he ended by assuring his audience that “on this fundamental issue,” he, like they, would never yield....
Continue reading "William McGurn's Talk: "A Notre Dame Witness for Life"" »
April 28, 2009
The Classroom Without Reason
That's the title of an article I just came across on the National Association of Scholars website. It is authored by Douglas G. Campbell, lecturer in the Department of Recreation and Parks Management at California State University at Chico. Here's how it begins:
A few years ago I was asked by the instructor of a philosophy class, then titled “Roots of War,” to discuss with his students the culture of the U.S. military community. After identifying myself as a former career military officer, I discussed my impression of our military’s culture. When I was done, a young woman who had been glowering at me and holding her arms tightly across her chest raised her hand. When called upon she vehemently said, “I don’t agree with you. I don’t think it is anything like that. You have just been brainwashed by the military.”“OK,” I said, “what do you think our military’s culture is like?”
“Well, certainly nothing like that,” she sputtered. I could see some heads in the class nodding in agreement.
I asked, “Could you share with us your experience in or around the military?”
“I haven’t had anything to do with the military,” she indignantly replied.
May 14, 2009
Hadley Arkes' 2009 Hillsdale College Commencement Address
My dear friend, Hadley Arkes, was awarded an honorary doctorate of humane letters at Hillsdale College this past Saturday, May 9. Excerpts of his commencement address have been published on The Catholic Thing. I republish some of them here:
Aristotle said that the polis, the political order, was prior in the order of nature to the family. This urbane man certainly knew that people were perfectly capable of having sex even when their governments broke down. But that was different from a family. For what constitutes a family? Would it be two people – or several joined together in a polygamous or polyamorous ensemble? Would it be two people of the same sex, the same species? What constitutes a family is something that has always depended on the moral understanding that pervades the community and finds expression in “the laws.”Our late friend, Allan Bloom, wrote that “the children who are the products of nature and real love lack something that can be provided only by law and its constraints”:
It is only within the context of the law that a man can really imagine that the offspring from his loins can people the world. . . . The law that gives names to families and tries to insure their integrity is a kind of unnatural force and endures only as long as does the regime of which it is a part.Those laws on marriage invited us, as parents, to say the most telling words that parents may say, as they claim their children as their own, and do it through that simple device of imparting a name. As they do that, they replicate those words spoken by God in relation to Israel. And is there finally anything simpler or more decisive than those words that come back to us from Isaiah: “Fear not: for I have redeemed thee, I have called thee by thy name, thou art mine.”This is a day when we celebrate again the parents who have given their names to children, borne the responsibilities for them, and the students who have borne their own responsibility, in a handsome way, by working faithfully to justify the sacrifices made for them…
You can read more here.
June 16, 2009
The value of silence
One of my pet peeves is that there are very few public places--except maybe a library--where there is not an electronic device putting out a cacophony of images and sounds (the latter of which is often confused with what I once knew as "music"). Whether it's the grocery store, the doctor's office, or even the gym, there's an endless stream of stuff impinging upon your eyes and ears.
So, I was delighted to come across this piece, "Silence, Please," authored by Susan Hill. Here are some excerpts:
June 30, 2009
Christina Hoff Sommers on Myths in Feminist Scholarship
Just saw this interesting piece published in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Here's an excerpt:
Lemon's Domestic Violence Law is organized as a conventional law-school casebook — a collection of judicial opinions, statutes, and articles selected, edited, and commented upon by the author. The first selection, written by Cheryl Ward Smith (no institutional affiliation is given), offers students a historical perspective on domestic-violence law. According to Ward:"The history of women's abuse began over 2,700 years ago in the year 753 BC. It was during the reign of Romulus of Rome that wife abuse was accepted and condoned under the Laws of Chastisement. ... The laws permitted a man to beat his wife with a rod or switch so long as its circumference was no greater than the girth of the base of the man's right thumb. The law became commonly know as 'The Rule of Thumb.' These laws established a tradition which was perpetuated in English Common Law in most of Europe."
Where to begin? How about with the fact that Romulus of Rome never existed. He is a figure in Roman mythology — the son of Mars, nursed by a wolf. Problem 2: The phrase "rule of thumb" did not originate with any law about wife beating, nor has anyone ever been able to locate any such law. It is now widely regarded as a myth, even among feminist professors.
A few pages later, in a selection by Joan Zorza, a domestic-violence expert, students read, "The March of Dimes found that women battered during pregnancy have more than twice the rate of miscarriages and give birth to more babies with more defects than women who may suffer from any immunizable illness or disease." Not true. When I recently read Zorza's assertion to Richard P. Leavitt, director of science information at the March of Dimes, he replied, "That is a total error on the part of the author. There was no such study." The myth started in the early 1990s, he explained, and resurfaces every few years.
Read the whole thing here.
July 10, 2009
Faith, Reason, and the Christian University: What John Paul II Can Teach Christian Academics
That's the title of an article I just published in Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 12.3 (Summer 2009): 53-67. You can find it online on my website here. Here are some excerpts (endnotes omitted):
August 24, 2009
The School Year Begins: Debauchery to Follow - Parents, you've been warned
Watch this. Warning: it's graphic. But it's pretty close to the truth of what happens on a vast majority of university and college campuses around the country.