Major in Religious Extremism, with a minor in Land Usage

An interesting piece from the Sunday Times on reforming the American university.

Much of the arguments focus on restructuring PhD programs and better regulating departments, which, while probably necessary, would likely require the hiring of additional oversight administrative staff (unlikely in these times of budget cuts) or demand that academics, opposed to the policies themselves, act as enforcement officers (less likely, still.)

But, one innovative idea that I like quite a bit:

"Abolish permanent departments, even for undergraduate education, and create problem-focused programs. These constantly evolving programs would have sunset clauses, and every seven years each one should be evaluated and either abolished, continued or significantly changed. It is possible to imagine a broad range of topics around which such zones of inquiry could be organized... Consider, for example, a Water program. In the coming decades, water will become a more pressing problem than oil, and the quantity, quality and distribution of water will pose significant scientific, technological and ecological difficulties as well as serious political and economic challenges. These vexing practical problems cannot be adequately addressed without also considering important philosophical, religious and ethical issues... A Water program would bring together people in the humanities, arts, social and natural sciences with representatives from professional schools like medicine, law, business, engineering, social work, theology and architecture."

As a product of an interdisciplinary program, I'm obviously partial towards them, but this goes far beyond the liberal-artsy offerings of my undergrad education (religious studies and politics? and history? Hold on to your hat!). A couple years out, one of the major criticisms my peers and I have of our education was how unprepared it left us for the practical demands of our early careers ("what's a pivot table?"), yet I don't think any of would be quite willing to trade the immersion in ideas, reading, and writing, either.

I could certainly get behind the approach of pairing coursework in business administration and theology, especially as it relates to the study of a single critical issue. That sort of program would graduate students with the same "learning how to think" skills as a liberal arts program, but also conversant in a number of useful fields.

And more importantly, as the author notes, the world itself is interdisciplinary. It follows that our students ought to be, as well.

I believe Savanna

Dahlia Lithwick, in her inimitable way, had me both shaking in anger and cringing in sympathy for plaintiff Savanna Redding in her (Lithwick's) account of oral arguments in front of the Supreme Court in the case of Safford Unified School District v. Redding.

The briefest of backgrounds - Savanna Redding, then 13, was strip-searched (that term is vague, so let us be clear: forced to expose her private parts to school administrators) in pursuit of the contraband ibuprofen she was alleged, incorrectly and by a classmate of dubious motives, to be carrying. As anyone who has ever been a preteen girl can easily imagine, the experience of being stripped by school system bureaucrats without being allowed so much as a phone call to her parents*, proved scarringly violative to Redding. A former honor student, she dropped out of school shortly after the incident.

If you don't find this is hilarious, you must not be on the Supreme Court. Because Breyer, Thomas, Scalia and Roberts, at least, found the topic to be a Laff Riot - reminiscing about their own youthful locker room hijinks and giggling over the word underwear. Their disrespectful treatment of Redding's experience, in contrast to the Justice Ginsberg's apparent empathy and frustration during the hearings, prompted Liza Mundy, Lithwick's colleague at Slate, to wonder where the hell are the women:

"That Ginsburg was the only judge who seemed to understand what Redding went through is a stark reminder that judging also involves reacting as a human being, and that this is why we need women human beings as judges."

At the risk of being reductionist, I think Mundy is absolutely right, and I hope more women take notice of yesterday's hearings. The spectacle of a vicious, all-male Senate Judiciary Panel grilling Anita Hill during the 1991 Clarence Thomas confirmation process prompted a wave of outrage expressed not only in "I Believe Anita" buttons, but in the election of four new women to the US Senate a year later. There's only one voter in the selection of the next Supreme Court Justice or Justices, but I hope he's been paying attention.


*According to Lithwick, Savanna Redding was asked after the arguments "what she'd have wanted the school to do differently. " After having seen her case through so many levels of the judiciary and having her humiliation mocked in the most public of settings, by the supposedly most eminent and sober legal minds alive, her response breaks my heart: "'Call my mom first,' she says."

Stateless by choice

Robert Kaplan has a thought-provoking and sobering question up at TheAtlantic.com: "Do the Palestinians Really Want a State?"

Brief, lucid, and disturbing, the dispatch grimly assesses not just the familiar immediate barriers to peace - Israel's rightward tack and new foreign minister who, in Kaplan's deft phrase, "makes the right-wing Likud prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, appear like the centrist he isn’t," the intransigence of Hamas and the impotence of Fatah - but a possible structural explanation that might forever forestall a two-state peace:

"New communication technologies allow people to achieve virtual unity without a state, even as new military technologies give stateless groups a lethal capacity that in former decades could be attained only by states. [Johns Hopkins professor Jakub] Grygiel explains that it is now “highly desirable” not to have a state—for a state is a target that can be destroyed or damaged, and hence pressured politically. It was the very quasi-statehood achieved by Hamas in the Gaza Strip that made it easier for Israel to bomb it. A state entails responsibilities that limit a people’s freedom of action...

.... the most tempting aspect of statelessness is that it permits a people to savor the pleasures of religious zeal, extremist ideologies, and moral absolutes, without having to make the kinds of messy, mundane compromises that accompany the work of looking after a geographical space."

And, as Kaplan notes, allows Hamas to benefit from the license that the world community extends to the terrorist elements of an oppressed and displaced people, but not the violent tendencies of an established state.

You stay classy, George W Bush

I missed this nugget in present tense a couple weeks ago, but just caught the link in a sidebar on the NYT today:

"Speaking... to an audience of 2,000 people in Calgary, Canada, [George W. Bush] was, predictably, asked about Cheney’s remarks [that Obama's actions were increasing the risk of a terrorist attack] and said of his successor:

“He deserves my silence. I love my country a lot more than I love politics. I think it is essential that he be helped in office.”

No kidding. I'm not sure whether I'm more surprised by the sentiment or the elegance with which it was expressed, but... classy, W. No April fooling.