I’m not a big fan of George Will. He possesses too much of the condescending “inside the beltway elitism” attitude that I find disgusting. However he does, on occasion, knock one out of the park with his commentary. Such is the case with a recent piece in Newsweek. Here’s a few choice quotes:

Mike Stivic, a.k.a. Meathead, the liberal graduate student in All in the Family, reflected society’s belief in the cultural superiority of youth, but he was a leading indicator of something else: He lived in his father-in-law Archie Bunker’s home. What are today’s “basement boys” doing down there? Perhaps watching Friends and Seinfeld reruns about a culture of extended youth utterly unlike the world of young adults in previous generations.

And . . .

Although Cross, an aging academic boomer, was a student leftist, he believes that 1960s radicalism became “a retreat into childish tantrums” symptomatic “of how permissive parents infantilized the boomer generation.” And the boomers’ children? Consider the television commercials for the restaurant chain called Dave & Buster’s, which seems to be, ironically, a Chuck E. Cheese’s for adults—a place for young adults, especially men, to drink beer and play electronic games and exemplify youth not as a stage of life but as a perpetual refuge from adulthood.

As I sometimes try to drive home this point to other young men with whom I’m attempting to mentor, I’ll ask them to try this:

“Picture, in your mind, your ideal representation of the manly hero – a George Washington, a Robert E. Lee, a George Patton, a Douglas MacArthur – and then try to picture them sitting in front of the TV in baggy shorts, an earring, a wine cooler watching Friends and reacting to something by saying Dude! What’s wrong with that picture? Now, ask yourself: How do you want to be thought of?”

Not all readers will understand my point. I hope most of you over 40 will.

You can read the rest of Will’s piece here.

Speaking of mascots . . . not all Irish-Americans are short and green. I should know. (Recognize the fellow in the hat?) You can watch part 2 by clicking on the link at the end of the video. It’s worth it.

This video does a great job of illustrating the idiocy of political correctness, which is primarily being propagated today by liberals searching for meaning in their lives. Fight the power.

This just in:

Baylor University announces that Kenneth Winston Starr, J.D., current dean of the School of Law at Pepperdine University, has been named the 14th president of Baylor University. Judge Starr was the unanimous choice of both the 14-member Presidential Search Committee and the 10-member Presidential Search Advisory Committee, and was elected unanimously by the Baylor Board of Regents on February 12, 2010.

Judge Starr will be introduced to the campus community by Regents Chair R. Dary Stone, J.D. ‘77, at a university-wide meeting in the Bill Daniel Student Center on the Baylor campus at 3 p.m., Tuesday, Feb. 16.

If you are not able to attend Tuesday’s gathering, the event will be streamed live at http://www.baylor.edu/president/search/live/. In the event of excessive loads on our systems, on-campus viewers may experience delays or problems with the stream. The entire program will be recorded and archived for viewing on the Presidential Search web site after 3 p.m.
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“Education, after all, is typically described as a core, and possibly the core, state responsibility . . . Homeschooling is now such an entrenched practice, recriminalization is not a viable option in any event.” ~ Robin L. West, Georgetown University Law Center

Not a “viable option?” Well at least I can rest peacefully tonight knowing that jack-booted thugs won’t be knocking my daughter’s door down any time soon to arrest her for teaching “the state’s children.” (My daughter would want to know where the state was when she was going through those labor pains to deliver “their” children. By the way Professor, the youngest one has something stinky in her diaper – could you lend a hand here?) Professor West thinks that more government regulation of homeschooling is a good idea:

As the political philosopher and homeschool critic Robert Reich has persuasively argued, curricular review would give the state a way to ensure that the academic content is such as to protect the children’s interest in both acquiring the necessary skills for active, autonomous, and responsible citizenship in adulthood, and in being exposed to diverse and more liberal ways.

Well, gee whiz, that approach certainly has worked wonders in the public schools, hasn’t it? Diverse and more liberal – that’s what this is really all about. Professor West doesn’t like the fact that “the state” is losing the opportunity to indoctrinate OUR children.  Maybe she’s bucking for Secretary of Education in the Obama administration. More here.

He writes at NRO’s the Corner:

When we do know for a fact that Mutallab tried to blow up a plane, we get a presidential “allegedly” (“a passenger allegedly tried to ignite an explosive device on his body, setting off a fire”), and yet when we don’t know all the facts, as in the Professor Gates mess, we get instantaneous certainty (“the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home.”)

The perils of political correctness are especially pernicious when the emperor has no clues.

See here.

An old friend named “Winston Smith” stopped by our comments section the other day with this zinger:

“…is it merely coincidence that folks like Rush (Big Pharma) Limbaugh have flourished in a medium that doesn’t require its audience to know how to read?”

Hehe. Good one. Of course, it was pointed out that Limbaugh’s audience scored significantly higher than presumably more literate NPR listeners in a common political knowledge quiz.

And from over at Harvard, that ivory tower of knowledge and books and reading and progressive politics and other brilliant stuff, we get this report:

“Students at many of the country’s most prestigious colleges and universities are graduating with less knowledge of American history, government, and economics than they had as incoming freshmen, with Harvard University seniors scoring a “D+” average on a 60-question multiple-choice exam about civic literacy.

“At the most expensive colleges, they actually graduate knowing less,” the executive director of the Jack Miller Center at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Michael Ratliff, said.

Either it’s all the bonghits and watching The Daily Show, or places like Harvard, which serves as the Democrat establishment’s farm team, just make you more ignorant than when you started.

That would explain a lot…

This video was recently shown to elementary schoolchildren in Farmington, Utah. So pledge your service to the President and don’t flush after you pee-pee.

HuffPo managed to find a spectacular piece of postmodern asininity at Obama’s alma mater, Occidental College.  From the course descriptions of the Critical Theory and Social Justice program:

180. STUPIDITY.

Stupidity is neither ignorance nor organicity, but rather, a corollary of knowing and an element of normalcy, the double of intelligence rather than its opposite. It is an artifact of our nature as finite beings and one of the most powerful determinants of human destiny. Stupidity is always the name of the Other, and it is the sign of the feminine. This course in Critical Psychology follows the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze, and most recently, Avital Ronell, in a philosophical examination of those operations and technologies that we conduct in order to render ourselves uncomprehending. Stupidity, which has been evicted from the philosophical premises and dumbed down by psychometric psychology, has returned in the postmodern discourse against Nation, Self, and Truth and makes itself felt in political life ranging from the presidency to Beavis and Butthead. This course examines stupidity.

CORE REQUIREMENT MET: UNITED STATES

Congresswoman Diane Watson (D) California. Good Lord Almighty.

. . . it wasn’t until 1988 that a group of U.N. ambassadors was able to visit Cuba for 11 days and documented “137 cases of torture, 7 disappearances, political assassinations and thousands of violations” of human rights. This trip was summarized “in a 400-page report, which was the longest report ever to appear on the agenda of the U.N.”

This report provided irrefutable proof of what Valladares had recounted in “Against All Hope.” But academia and the media successfully passed over both the book and the report.

This 1988 report included “locking political prisoners in refrigerated rooms; blindfolded immersions in pools; intimidation by dogs; firing squad simulations; beatings, forced labor; confinement for years in dungeons called gavetas; the use of loudspeakers with deafening sounds during hunger strikes; degradation of prisoners by forced nudity in punishment cells; withholding water during hunger strikes; forcing prisoners to present themselves in the nude before their families (to force them to accept plans for political rehabilitation); denial of medical assistance for the sick; and forcing those condemned to die to carry their own coffins and dig their own graves prior to being shot.”

Against All Hope

Also via Rod Dreher,  the EEOC has evidently decided the best use of its time and resources to go after Catholic colleges not funding abortion and contraception. The EEOC has found Belmont Abbey College, a small Catholic school near Charlotte, NC, in violation of federal anti-discrimination laws because its health plan does not pay for oral contraception.  They are discriminating against women, saith the EEOC, since only women take birth control pills.

The real problem, of course, is not paying for contraception and elective sterilzation–this has nothing to do with discrimination against women.  The focus on birth-control pills is simply a way to justify the intervention of the EEOC, much like the ever-elastic ‘interstate commerce’ clause covering federal intervention in most anything.   Since Belmont Abbey is a Catholic insitution, they can’t simply charge religious discrimination outright, although I’m sure they would love to.

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Now we can sit back and await the outcry.  Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has managed to get himself arrested at his own home in Cambridge after neighbors reported a suspected break-in.  He spent several years at Duke complaining of his treatment on a regular basis, in spite of being lionized at Duke and in academia generally.

Call me cynical, but this feels manufactured.  Just ask yourself:  white, black, or latino, how hard is it to keep from being arrested for breaking into your own house?  Cops just love filing that extra paperwork, don’t you know.

A must for recent college graduates to give their input on their education, fruitful or otherwise.

I recently accepted an invitation to participate in the annual Penner Debate at Wheaton College in Illinois. Sponsored by Wheaton’s Center for Applied Christian Ethics, it will be held on September 3, 2009 on Wheaton’s campus. You can find more information about the event here. The topic of my public dialogue with Timothy George will be “A Question of Christian Identity: Evangelical and Catholic?”

Timothy George is the Dean of the Beeson Divinity School at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. He is a wonderful Christian man and an outstanding scholar. In January 2008 we engaged in a similar dialogue at Palm Beach Atlantic University in West Palm Beach, Florida. And we are set to do it yet again on April 22, 2010 on the Beeson campus.

Moderating the Wheaton event is Chris Castaldo, pastor of community outreach at the College of Church of Wheaton. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Holy Ground: Walking With Jesus as a Former Catholic (Zondervan, 2009), for which I wrote an endorsement.

(Originally posted on the Return to Rome blog)

Most of Obama’s op-ed today in the Washington Post defending the stimulus read precisely as expected (you can find Stephen Spruiell’s annotated version in The Corner) with more misdirection on fiscal responsibility, reducing health care costs, and so forth.  I was surprised, however, to find myself agreeing with his comments regarding college education.  He begins badly enough, with the absurd goal of “leading the world in college degrees by 2020.”  If he wants to lead the world in the devaluation of an already questionable credential, that’s the way to go.

His focus in the next paragraph, though, is on an expanded role for community colleges.  Herding more apathetic, ill-prepared students into four-year programs makes no sense.  Giving many of those students the opportunity to acquire a set of specific skills in a two-year setting is a far better alternative.

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According to a tenured faculty member who once sat on the admission board at the Naval Academy, the answer is yes: (more…)

At Houston Baptist University, we’ve started up a really nice partnership with John Mark Reynolds and Wheatstone Academy to offer Christian worldview programming for high school students during the summer. If you live in or around Houston and have a student who could use (or would enjoy!) an intellectual boot camp for the faith, this is it. The program goes from July 26 to August 1. The cost is $850 and is all inclusive of food, lodging, events, etc.

This is exactly what your student needs before going to college, especially if you will be sending them off to a state school. 

(Posted last week on What’s Wrong With the World)

Professor Brian Leiter of the University of Chicago has, again, misrepresented my point of view on Christian academic institutions that forbid their faculty and students to engage in extra-marital acts of intimacy including homosexual ones. I do not attribute this to malicious intent on Professor Leiter’s part. But rather, I think it is a consequence of a general lack of serious and respectful study and reflection on the philosophical beliefs that undergird theological traditions with which he disagrees.
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Liberty University has banned the Democratic club from campus.  I’m rather relieved, as this gives me a rare chance to defend the donkeys.  The impulse here–to oppose abortion and the redefinition of marriage–is laudable, but this is the wrong way to go about it.  Too often, in evangelical colleges (which I know well), there is a tendency to believe that “Christian World View” translates directly and simply into a set of political positions and demands allegiance to a specific party. It’s not about the parties, it’s about the principles.

It would be healthier for the Democratic club to be brought back to Liberty and the Republican club to be banned forthwith.

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More from Notre Dame …

A statement by Bishop D’Arcy, Bishop of the Fort Wayne/South Bend diocese, in the middle of which is, wait for it, Notre Dame itself.

I consider it now settled — that the USCCB document, “Catholics in Public Life,” does indeed apply in this matter.
The failure to consult the local bishop who, whatever his unworthiness, is the teacher and lawgiver in the diocese, is a serious mistake. Proper consultation could have prevented an action, which has caused such painful division between Notre Dame and many bishops — and a large number of the faithful.

Also, there are some interesting tidbits over at The Irish Rover’s website, the independent Catholic paper forever entrenched in warfare with the daily student paper, The Observer.  In particular, there’s an article about the student response coalition and Jenkins, which is always a good read.

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….
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This year’s national meeting of the Philadelphia Society was my first. William Campbell of LSU invited me (a young-ish faculty member of Houston Baptist University) after reading a piece I wrote on libertarians and conservatives for the Acton Institute. I am very thankful for the opportunity and enjoyed the event very much. The list of attendees was really quite impressive and people were generally interested in and open to others.

At each meal I sat with a different group of people and found the conversation rewarding. There was a strong sense of fellowship and collegiality. I felt that individuals who offered divergences of opinion were treated respectfully and well. It was, in the best sense of the word, scholarly.

However, I write to offer a suggestion. To me, the panels shaded too much to the hall of famer/veteran side and not enough (or even at all) to rising, young talent needing an opportunity to demonstrate what they can do or what new things they have to say. A meeting of this kind would represent a great way for the distinguished members to identify talent and then to figure out how to promote the careers of young people who can seek to build on the previous generation’s successes.

For every paper delivered by a long-standing member who is confident in what he has said and is ready to say it again, there are young people who will work their brains out for a chance to present something impressive to people they respect. The leadership needs to figure out how to move national meetings in that direction to a greater degree.

I visited Notre Dame last year at this time to meet with a few professors for the purpose of academic networking. My university was hiring and I hoped to hear about Christian doctoral students ready for their first job. As I walked across the snow-covered campus, I was a little in awe of how wonderfully the sacred space had been planned and laid out.

But when I met with one older professor who had been with the university for quite some time, he expressed a great deal of regret for how his student (the current president) was making decisions. Looking around his office, I noticed photographs of Martin Luther King, Jr. holding hands with priests protesting the injustice of segregation. I thought to myself, if this man feels something good has been lost at Notre Dame, it must truly be so. (more…)

You study what you want to undermine and critique.  That’s why we have departments of religion at universities.  That’s why Berkeley is starting a center to study “right wing movements.”

I study secularism.

Tonight at 10 on Fox News Channel, Notre Dame students will respond to Obama’s invitation to Commencement.  It should be a well-argued and articulate defense of the University’s values.

My alma mater, the College of William and Mary, is for the fourth year hosting a sex-worker arts show. The show was one of the basis for outcry over Gene Nichol’s tenure as College President (the former North Carolina ACLU operative also inexplicably removed a historic cross from the Chapel deeming it “establishment” at a Public University…no word if he actually also tried to remove the chapel…). Anyway, WM President Taylor Reveley now is hesitant to stop the sex-workers show for fear of censorship. Today’s piece by Mona Charen in NRO shows why support for this sex-worker shows like support for student-run porn magazines is but a symptom of a much larger problem: (more…)

U.S. News has a fascinating and informative discussion between Robert P. George and Douglas Kmiec discussing whether President Obama’s embryonic stem cell research policy really did prohibit human cloning (and for those wondering, it really did not). The exchange was initially via email between George and Kmiec, and U.S. News published it with permission.

HT: Justin Taylor.

Apparently, if you can recognize 25 of these famous people, you can consider  yourself well-educated.  Note: you can click on the pictures to enlarge them.

I am convinced #100 is John James Audubon.