I teach political science courses at Houston Baptist University in addition to my work as an administrator for the school.  I also occasionally speak to young people in other venues.  Something that I see now, which was nearly non-existent when I first gained teaching responsibilities as a grad student years ago, is the backside of a bunch of laptops facing me while I lecture.

Speaking to a colleague in the education department, I expressed my concern that students are too distracted by technology to pay attention and learn.  She assured me these young people have different brains and can handle the multi-tasking.

I’m not so sure.  I imagine that while I’m lecturing the students are partly listening and are dedicating the rest of their attention to online chat, email, facebook, fantasy football, and wedding planning.  There may be some evolution of neural pathways, but I find it hard to believe there is any substitute for actually reading material, listening carefully to a lecture, asking questions, and discussing the subject matter without any other distractions.

And forget the immediate question of education in the classroom.  Are these the kind of people who can pay sustained attention to public policy debates so they can participate meaningfully in the democratic process?

When I send my son (now 6 and pretty tech savvy) off to school, I may be looking for one that bucks the trend by promising me that he WON’T have a laptop in class.

Did you hear about the visiting professor of media studies who bragged on the Huffington Post about stealing McCain-Palin yard signs? Well, it looks as though the administration of St. Olaf College did not appreciate his brand of performance art, and actually pressured him to resign — which he has. At least, that’s his story. Given the current state of academia, this story (assuming it’s true) is just short of astonishing. I would have guessed that the sign-snatching would have clinched a tenure-track appointment for the fellow. (HT: Don Surber (also for my next post, above))

It has been several years since I have given a talk at Biola University in La Mirada, California. It is an institution that has a number of my friends on the faculty including Craig Hazen, John Mark Reynolds, J. P. Moreland, and Scott B. Rae. So I am very much looking forward to this Thursday, when I return to Biola as a speaker in its Distinguished Speaker Lecture Series for Christianity and Culture.

Scheduled for October 30 at 6 pm in Biola’s Calvary Chapel, I will be delivering a lecture on the topic of abortion and American politics. After the lecture I’ll be meeting for an informal Q & A at the Philosophy House of Talbot School of Theology (Biola’s seminary) with some students in the school’s M.A. program in philosophy of religion and ethics.

If you are in southern California, feel free to attend. The lecture is open to the public.

(cross-posted)

I’m inspired by Feddie’s post about his physical location.  I’ll be in Pine Mountain, GA speaking to the students of the Impact 360 program for three days Nov. 3-5.  It’s right next to Callaway Gardens.  The next two days, I’ll be visiting Atlanta.  If any of the readers would like a guy to come talk with them or their group of friends about the importance of Christian higher education while I’m there, I can probably find a way to do it.

I have spent the last five years of my life with two goals.

One has been to write a book about secularism which would demonstrate what I believe to be the uselessness of the concept.  That goal has been achieved.  The End of Secularism comes out in August 2009 with Crossway Books. (more…)

There’s now a website where academics can sign a statement in support of Bill Ayers, who has recently come under renewed scrutiny due to his associations with Senator Obama. Here are some of the more deranged excerpts:

The current characterizations of Professor Ayers—“unrepentant terrorist,” “lunatic leftist”—are unrecognizable to those who know or work with him. It’s true that Professor Ayers participated passionately in the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s, as did hundreds of thousands of Americans.

*     *     *

[T]he attacks on and the character assassination of Ayers threaten the university as a space of open inquiry and debate, and threaten schools as places of compassion, imagination, curiosity, and free thought. They serve as warnings that anyone who voices perspectives and advances questions that challenge orthodoxy and political power may become a target, and this, then, casts a chill over free speech and inquiry and the spirit of democracy.

I’d like to say that I’m shocked that so many academics have rallied in support of a man who is a black mark on their profession, a man who bombed the pentagon and other military facilities and says he “can’t imagine entirely dismissing the possibility” of committing such bombings again.  However, given what academia so often preaches and/or tolerates, I’m not really surprised.

 Today my wife and I attended our first Notre Dame football tailgate party. What an amazing experience!

One of the many people I met and talked with this afternoon was the great Ralph McInerny, author of many books including Lack of the Irish, a murder mystery surrounding a football game between Notre Dame (where I am a faculty member this year) and Baylor (my home institution). That’s pretty cool.

What in the world ails the officials at the University of Florida?

Just saw this on the Catholic League’s website:

Paul Zachary Myers, a professor at the University of Minnesota Morris, has pledged to desecrate the Eucharist. He is responding to what happened recently at the University of Central Florida when a student walked out of Mass with the Host, holding it hostage for several days. Myers was angry at the Catholic League for criticizing the student. His post can be accessed from his faculty page on the university’s website.

Here is an excerpt of his July 8 post, “It’s a Frackin’ Cracker!”:

“Can anyone out there score me some consecrated communion wafers?” Myers continued by saying, “if any of you would be willing to do what it takes to get me some, or even one, and mail it to me, I’ll show you sacrilege, gladly, and with much fanfare. I won’t be tempted to hold it hostage (no, not even if I have a choice between returning the Eucharist and watching Bill Donohue kick the pope in the balls, which would apparently be a more humane act than desecrating a goddamned cracker), but will instead treat it with profound disrespect and heinous cracker abuse, all photographed and presented here on the web.”

Catholic League president Bill Donohue responded as follows:

“The Myers blog can be accessed from the university’s website. The university has a policy statement on this issue which says that the ‘Contents of all electronic pages must be consistent with University of Minnesota policies, local, state and federal laws.’ One of the school’s policies, ‘Code of Conduct,’ says that ‘When dealing with others,’ faculty et al. must be ‘respectful, fair and civil.’ Accordingly, we are contacting the President and the Board of Regents to see what they are going to do about this matter. Because the university is a state institution, we are also contacting the Minnesota legislature.

“It is hard to think of anything more vile than to intentionally desecrate the Body of Christ. We look to those who have oversight responsibility to act quickly and decisively.”

Here’s Professor Myers’ contact info, and his reply to the Catholic League.

(cross-posted)

David Lat has the details.

This is beyond awesome.

Dale Price rules!

I’ve been in Grand Rapids, Michigan attending Acton University, which is a large conference put on by the Acton Institute.  There are a few hundred participants, almost all of whom have been flown here by the institute.  Many of my fellow attendees are from Africa.

The crux of the program has to do with faith and economics.  So far, the programming I’ve seen has been impressive.  Jennifer Roback Morse’s presentation on learning to think in economic terms was brilliantly articulated.  Jay Richards talked about myths of the market and showed signs of being an emerging think tank rock star.

Acton is influencing “influencers” like graduate students, professors, and clergy and producing impeccable content.  Last night I saw their new film The Birth of Freedom, which explored the impact of Christianity on the West.  The production values were high.  The narrative and visuals were compelling.  It could easily be aired on The History Channel or PBS and expect to receive a strong rating.

The Acton Institute is The Christian Think Tank 2.0.  I expect to see them develop greater influence and budget very quickly in the years ahead.  Check out their blog here.

Feddie, you gotta link these guys!

I can’t recommend strongly enough that you read this remarkable essay by Alan Charles Kors, originally published in the May issue of The New Criterion.   If my recommendation is insufficient, read the last two sentences:

The academic world that I entered is gone. I teach for my students, whom I love, and I fight for intellectual pluralism, for legal equality and for fairness simply because it is my duty to bear witness to the values I cherish, with no expectation of success.

I am apparently about 15 years younger than Kors and my academic interests were different from his, so I’m probably not as melancholy about all this as he is, but I know where he’s coming from.  Maybe you will, too.

Incidentally, Kors received a “Bradley Award” Wednesday night, along with Gary Becker, Victor Davis Hanson, and Robert L. Woodson, Sr.  Pretty nice company.

Michael Gerson has the details:

At an event designed to further mutual religious sympathy, two of the panelists — including the president of Yale University, Richard Levin — casually asserted that religious Americans who support pro-life restrictions on international family planning aid are as doctrinaire and exclusionary as Saudi extremists. Pro-life Catholics and evangelicals? Wahhabi extremists? What’s the difference?

Clearly, mutual religious sympathy has a ways to go in places such as Yale.

(LvRamesh)

The Cardinal Newman Society asked me for my reaction to Pope Benedict’s remarks on Catholic higher education.

You can read it at the Catholic Higher Ed site here. (more…)

If your answer to either or both of these questions is “Yes,” then I invite you to learn more about “American Law and Liberty: Structure and History,” a one-day course designed primarily for students entering law school this fall and other “pre-law” students, by clicking here.  It will be taught — by yours truly — on Friday, June 27, from 9:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., at the offices of the Alabama Policy Institute, 400 Office Park Circle, Birmingham, Alabama.  There’s a $25 registration fee — but that covers lunch and a couple of very useful books, in addition to a fine short course.  If you have any questions at all about the program, call me at (205) 726-2434 or email me (just click on the email link, above).

Thanks for your attention.  This concludes my shameless self-promotion post of the day.

This is an excellent post by my buddy, Rod, and the accompanying comments are also well worth reading.

But this kind of nonsense makes me want to send my son to TAC instead of Notre Dame (where I am confident there is little to no support for proabortion political candidates on campus).

The May issue of The New Criterion is concerned with education — mostly of the “higher” variety. Contributors include Roger Kimball, Alan Charles Kors, Robert Paquette, Victor Davis Hanson, James Piereson, and Charles Murray.

* The front page of today’s USA Today announces, “Value of college tuition is called into question”

* NEH deputy chairman Thomas Lindsay recently suggested six “core questions” about America “that all [college] students should examine.”

* This study shows that a reorientation of the collegiate core curriculum cannot come too soon.

* Harvard has acquired the “papers” of Norman Mailer’s mistress.

* Two web journals launched during SA’s hiatus that you’ll want to bookmark: Minding the Campus from the Manhattan Institute (a great blogroll and links list), and First Principles from ISI.

If you missed the Society’s recent (March) student confab in Ann Arbor (theme: “The People and the Courts”), fear not!  You can now watch (or just listen) to the whole enchilada online, here.   The full agenda is below the fold: (more…)

It’s gotta be a laff riot, right?  As well as a display of the subtle wit and wistful humanity we’ve all come to expect from the higher ed industry with regard to the Bush Presidency. 

Click here for some of the entries (don’t miss the 5-minute video).  Pick your own favorite, then go below the fold to see who won. (more…)

The always-interesting John McWhorter praises the documentary, and offers his personal experience of PC at UC Berkeley.

He will speak on the topic, “Is Corporate Law Still a Race to the Top?”, at Case Western from 4:30 to 5:30 ET.  You can watch it live here; at some point in the future it will be available on demand from this site, as well.

In a blog-entry entitled, “Protest at SMU Targets Bush Library,” Paul Burka of Texas Monthly writes:

The likelihood that the George W. Bush presidential library will be located at SMU has not been welcome news for at least one segment of the university community. A letter, dated December 16, from “Faculty, Administrators, & Staff” of the Perkins School of Theology to R. Gerald Turner, president of the Board of Trustees, is now circulating not only on the SMU campus but also among a wider academic community, urging the board to “reconsider and to rescind SMU’s pursuit of the presidential library.”

Texas Monthly acquired a copy of the letter, about which Mr. Burka writes extensively in his blog entry here.

In the interest of full disclosure, Baylor University, my employer, is a finalist, along with SMU and the University of Dallas, for the George W. Bush Presidential Library. As SA readers would suspect, unlike my peers at SMU, I would welcome the Bush Library at my own institution.

Update: It looks like two SMU professors recently published in the United Methodist Nexus an essay, “The George W. Bush Library: Asset or Albatross for SMU?,” in which they voice their opposition to the prospect of their institution acquiring the library. I’m not sure whether the letter about which Burka has written had its origin in this essay.

Update II: I found a copy of the letter, which is entitled, “In Protest of the George Bush Presidential Library: An Open Letter to the President & Trustees of Southern Methodist University.“

That is the new title of my forthcoming book that will be published in 2007 by Cambridge University Press. It just appeared on Amazon.com here. According to the Leiter Law Rankings, Cambridge is one of the six leading academic presses. It is ranked number one by political scientists and is considered one of the top two publishers in philosophy. Because this book overlaps the fields of law, political science, and philosophy, I am deeply gratified with the forthcoming publication of this book.

If any of SA’s readers are interested in participating, you can do so here.

SA blogger William J. Watkins Jr.’s book, “Reclaiming the American Revolution: The Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions and their legacy,” is reviewed by Soraya Rudofsky in the latest installment of the Federalist Society’s most excellent publication, Engage.

Readers of my work here and elsewhere know that I’m interested in the development of Christian higher education. There are heroes in that endeavor that include George Marsden, Mark Noll, and others. I had the good fortune to get to know Robert Sloan who put a vision of distinctive Christian higher ed in place at Baylor and engendered heavy controversy in the process. I continue to follow his work at a new school. Here is a worthwhile slice of his inaugural speech last week: (more…)

then I’d say the ivy hanging on its campus walls is most likely the kind that will give you a nasty rash.