The #WussificationofAmerica: Higher Education Edition

From the Daily Caller, summarizing Peter Gray, a Boston College psychologist:

Gray observed that today’s crop of college students is less able to handle ordinary life challenges compared to generations past. He noted, for example, that emergency calls to the Boston College counseling center have doubled in recent years. One woman sought counseling because her roommate called her a “bitch.” Two students wanted professional therapy — and actually called the cops — because they spotted a mouse in their off-campus apartment.   

Gray also explained that Boston College professors receive a constant stream of email from students about trivial issues. The students expect prompt, quality customer service in response. Professors have also seen huge uptick in students who freak out when they earn low grades. Students equate grades of ‘C’ or lower — and sometimes even any ‘B’ — with failure. And “failure” means total failure, Gray observed. Like an apocalypse. Students don’t think to study harder. Instead, they beg for higher grades or paper do-overs. They yell at their professors for not clarifying grading criteria.

Read more here.

Today's intellectually fragile college students could take a few lessons from the Middle Ages on how to deal with controversy

Bishop Robert Barron has something more to offer today's coddled and fragile college students than safe zones and trigger warnings:

Even great works of literature and philosophy—from Huckleberry Finn and Heart of Darkness to, believe it or not, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason—are now regularly accompanied by “trigger warnings” that alert prospective readers to the racism, sexism, homophobia, or classism contained therein. And popping up more and more at our colleges and universities are “safe spaces” where exquisitely sensitive students can retreat in the wake of jarring confrontations with points of view with which they don’t sympathize. My favorite example of this was at Brown University where school administrators provided retreat centers with play-doh, crayons, and videos of frolicking puppies to calm the nerves of their students even before a controversial debate commenced! 

It's kind of ironic that there was greater tolerance about what you could talk about in the Middle Ages than on a modern college campus:

If we consult Aquinas’s masterpiece, the Summa Theologiae, we find that he poses literally thousands of questions and that not even the most sacred issues are off the table, the best evidence of which is article three of question two of the first part of the Summa: “utrum Deus sit?” (whether there is a God). If a Dominican priest is permitted to ask even that question, everything is fair game; nothing is too dangerous to talk about.

St. Thomas not only listened to other people's arguments but when he responded to them, he gave them the best characterization he could so that he wouldn't be arguing against a straw man;

After stating the issue, Thomas then entertains a series of objections to the position that he will eventually take. In many cases, these represent a distillation of real counter-claims and queries that Aquinas would have heard during quaestiones disputatae. But for our purposes, the point to emphasize is that Thomas presents these objections in their most convincing form, often stating them better and more pithily than their advocates could.

It worked a lot better than today's adult version of day care. Read the rest here.

Black-shirted gay students disrupt meeting at UCSB

In case you thought the gay rights movement was just wanting a place at the table, you might want to check out another instance of gay rights groups upsetting everyone else's tables.


Check out this video of a meeting of the Anscombe Society at the University of California, Santa Barbara (my alma mater), where black-shirted and pink balloon festooned gay students try to disrupt the meeting.

So let me get this straight: giving gays their rights requires inhibiting the rights of those with which they disagree?

Sure would have been nice to know this before they hijacked the culture.

Just imagine the national condemnation which would have greeted a band of black-shirted socially conservative students disrupting a meeting of gays students.

Should a college degree be required to run for president?

Liberals are attacking Wisconsin Governor and possible Republican presidential candidate Scott Walker because he doesn't have a college degree. Has anyone looked recently at actual educational attainment of any of the people who actually have a college degree and actually been impressed?

Would Walker be more qualified if he had a B.A. from the Ohio College of Clown Arts? (an actual college)? Is a B.A. from many other random college around the country an better than the one from the Clown Tech?

Here's George Leef at the National Review:

Of late, the progressives, who always say that they’re against discriminating against people over irrelevant things, have been having a field day with the fact that Wisconsin’s governor, Scott Walker, never finished his degree at Marquette. Howard Dean tut-tutted that this obviously made Walker unsuitable as president. (Never mind that a majority of voters in Wisconsin have now chosen him over properly credentialed liberals three times.)  

This prompted Glenn Harlan Reynolds to comment on the college degree obsession in his latest USA Today column. “An America that once prided itself on real-world achievement and practical good sense now runs largely on credentials,” he writes. 

I'm thinking of William F. Buckley's comment about preferring to be ruled by the last thirty names in the Boston phone book than the entire faculty of Harvard University.

Like a true Nature's child, we were born, born to be ..., well, apparently it was a mistake

The 60s campus radicals who now run our universities (the ones who did the sit-ins in the administration offices but who now officially occupy them), having apparently given up on improving their students minds, are now engaged in helping them change their gender.

The new idea hatched by the Cult of Diversity: subsidize sex-change operations:

A number of elite private institutions, such as Duke and Yale, have recently added sex-change operations to the list of covered health-care procedures, raising student fees in order to pay for it. The operations and treatments can run higher than $50,000 for a single student.

To Timothy Leary's "Turn on, Tune in, Drop out" we can now add: Transmutate.

College Quotas for Gays

As the price of higher education continues to skyrocket, the priorities of universities continue to move from academics to other things. Elmhurst College has become the first college to ask applicants about their "sexual orientation."

College diversity quotas favor traditionally low academically performing minorities. There has also been discussion of applying Title IX quotas to math and science programs because of the high percentage of males studying these disciplines. Now we could see quotas for gays in higher education.

In other words, it's a bad time to be a straight Asian male wanting to be a scientist or an engineer.

But this idea could potentially have disastrous consequences for gays. In Sweden, a national gender equity plan to eliminate discrimination against women turned ugly when, instead of helping women, it resulted in discrimination against them when females began applying in larger numbers than males. Just think, if colleges and universities impose sexual orientation quotes at their institutions, what would happen to dance and drama programs.

Wall Street journal: Student debt at record high

According to the Wall Street Journal, student debt continues to rise to mammoth proportions.

Unfortunately, the writer of the story has a rather strange view of why this might be good: because it will cause them to try to make more money. Hmmm. Wouldn't that be the case also if each of them simply had that amount of money stolen from them?

Sheeez.

Sex ed course cancelled, human race saved

There may now be some hope that the human race can avert annihilation: one university, anyway, has decided to can its human sexuality course. As I have said before, if modern educators do to sex what they have done to reading, writing, and arithmetic, they could very well bring about the extinction of the race. Fortunately, however,--at least at one university, cooler heads have prevailed.

"Northwestern University’s Department of Psychology will not offer a course in human sexuality during the 2011-12 academic year,” the university said in an official statement.

So says Inside Higher Education.

The course was, apparently, the most popular course at Northwestern. I am shocked. So shocked. More hormone charged college students wanting to take a course on sex as opposed to, say, calculus?

Robert VerBruggen at National Review says that, despite the sometimes "circus-like atmosphere," this was an overreaction, and that school officials should simply come up with new guidelines. I don't know. The current wisdom at our universities is that, among other things, males and females are not fundamentally different at all. If you can't even get that right, you why anyone would think such a course would be anything but preposterous.

The higher ed bubble. When will it burst?

They're continuing to increase the size of the college education bubble, says economist Mark Perry at Carpe Diem. Don't want to be around when it bursts.

Guess who took a stand against tuition increases--3 years ago

Guess who said the following in an opinion piece in 2008:

"... tuition has once again increased at levels that make obtaining a postsecondary degree increasingly unaffordable for Kentucky citizens."

a. Governor Steve Beshear
b. President Barack Obama
c. Coach Rick Pitino
d. State Auditor Crit Luallen
e. Teen hearthrob Justin Bieber

If you answered "d." you are correct. Crit Luallen, the very one we called upon yesterday to audit the Council on Postsecondary Education (CPE) after it acquiesced yesterday to tuition increases that place a college education further out of reach for Kentucky high school graduates, lambasted the universities for raising tuitions.

Go Crit!

Now can we have our audit? Pretty please?

Audit the Council on Postsecondary Education

The following is the letter I sent today to State Auditor Crit Luallen, via the e-mail on her website for reporting "suspected fraud and waste":

April 28, 2011

Crit Luallen
Kentucky State Auditor
209 St. Clair
Frankfort, KY 40601

Dear Ms. Luallen,

Your recent efforts to bring to public light the inadequacies at the Kentucky State Board for Proprietary Education (KSBPE) are commendable. It is vitally important that state officials such as yourself monitor the boards and commissions that are responsible for overseeing private educational institutions to ensure that they are adequately doing their job--even though, as in the case of the KSBPE, they receive no taxpayer money.

In light of the even more urgent responsibility on the part of public officials such as yourself to monitor those boards and commission which do receive public funds and which are responsible for overseeing our public institutions, we hereby request that your office conduct an audit of the Council on Postsecondary Education (CPE).

The Council's recent action in approving tuition increases at our public colleges and universities that, in some cases, are almost three times the rate of inflation raises the serious question of whether the CPE is adequately doing its job in keeping higher education affordable for Kentuckians. This is part of the mission of the CPE.

We thank you for your public service, and request a response to this letter.

Martin Cothran
Senior Policy Analyst
The Family Foundation of Kentucky

Family Foundation cries foul on approval of college tuition increase

LEXINGTON, KY--An advocacy group that has called for moratorium on college tuition increases criticized today's approval by the Council for Postsecondary Education (CPE) of tuition increases for state universities and called for State Auditor to audit the group.

"This is a clear sign that the body that is supposed to be monitoring our public institutions of higher education is not serious about college affordability," said Martin Cothran, spokesperson for The Family Foundation of Kentucky. "This is a regressive tax on Kentucky families that is eroding the educational and economic vitality of our state."

Cothran also called on State Auditor Crit Luallen to audit the Council on Postsecondary Education. "The State Auditor just released an audit of the commission that oversees for-profit colleges in the state. That commission doesn't even get any state money. Where is the audit of the CPE, which does get state money and which oversees public colleges and universities?" Cothran asked.

Luallen recently released an audit of the Kentucky State Board for Proprietary Education, callings its oversight of for-profit colleges "inadequate" and bemoaning the fact that the board had not been audited in 10 years. "Part of the mission of the CPE is to keep college affordable and they are not doing it. Where are the investigations?"

Cothran said his group will continue to call attention to the problem of eroding college affordability and will be talking with state lawmakers leading up the next session of the General Assembly.

###

Xavier University hosts "Queer Week"

Another Catholic university doing all it can do to undermine the ideas upon which it was founded:

Xavier University, a Catholic and Jesuit institution of higher learning located in Cincinnati, Ohio, hosted what it calls “Queer Week” from March 30 to April 3 in 2009, according to the university’s website.

The university said that the purpose of the event was to “embrace and celebrate the use of queer as an inclusive, unifying socio-political term for people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, straight, transsexual, intersexual, gender queer, or anyone else who supports the equality of all identities and expressions.”

Catholic universities were founded to inform the culture with Catholic values, not to thumb their noses at those same values.

Read more here.

My op ed on UK's Gaskell Affair in today's Herald-Leader

My article on the Gaskell Affair at University of Kentucky was published in today's Lexington Herald-Leader.

It highlights the university's doublespeak on diversity, as evidenced by its actions toward Gaskell, who was up for the position of observatory director at UK until it was discovered he was "potentially evangelical."

Why is the Kentucky Human Rights Commission sitting on Martin Gaskell's religious discrimination complaint?

Martin Gaskell, who has sued University of Kentucky for religious discrimination, filed a complaint with the Kentucky Commission on Human Rights in May of 2008 and still has heard nothing. Exactly how many years does it take for the Human Rights Commission to process a religious discrimination complaint?

While the Human Rights Commission, which is sponsored by the state and paid for by taxpayer dollars, can't find the time to answer religious discrimination complaints, it seems to have plenty of time on its hands to engage in liberal political advocacy. While Gaskell's complaint gathers dust in the Commission's inbox, they were hard at work fashioning a resolution calling on the Kentucky General Assembly to include sexual orientation in the state’s civil rights statute.

The Kentucky Commission on Human Rights isn’t chartered to lobby state government; it’s chartered to enforce the Kentucky Civil Rights Act. It needs to lose the taxpayer funded political activism and get on the stick.

While the Human Rights Commission was working feverishly to advance a liberal political agenda, cobwebs were forming on this man’s religious discrimination complaint. If the Civil Rights Commission can’t find the time to deal with religious discrimination, which is part of the current civil rights laws, why is it asking for an expansion if its mission?

A court recently gave a green light for Gaskell’s suit to move ahead, and it the suit is expected to come to trial on February 8. The Kentucky Commission on Human Rights is a tax-payer funded organization chartered to combat discrimination.

Gaskell ran the student observatory at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and is widely published in the field of astronomy. Internal UK e-mails suggest he was the most qualified candidate for the position of Observatory Director at UK until it became known that he was a Christian. When this fact was discovered, a number of staff and faculty conspired to prevent him from getting the position, according to Gaskell.

When Gaskell failed to receive any response from the Kentucky Human Rights Commission, he filed suit.

He shouldn't have had to.

University of Kentucky: Higher ed's poster child for religious discrimination

When the Ben Stein's movie "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed" came out several years ago, Darwinists, critical of the movie's portrayal of several cases in which believers in Intelligent Design were discriminated against by the Darwinist establishment, denied that scientists who differed from the prevailing consensus were discriminated against in academia.

All of a sudden comes the case of Martin Gaskell, who was the top candidate for the position of observatory director at the University of Kentucky until a few professors, mostly in the biology department (New motto: "No Christians need apply"), got it in their heads that he was a creationist--or Intelligent Design advocate, they don't appear to know the difference-- at which point his candidacy was effectively over.

The main argument used by the Darwinists against "Expelled," was that the cases didn't actually constitute discrimination based on Darwinistic dogmatism. In the Gaskell case, their main argument is that they should be discriminated against because of his religion because his religion forces him into something less than Darwinist purism.

The irony of the case is that Gaskell is not a creationist. He has said he thinks creationism is bad science and that he has no problems with the standard theory of evolution. The worst thing he said about the theory of the theory of evolution is that it had some flaws.

But dogmatists brook no dissent, nor do they tolerate anything but complete acquiescence.

Had Gaskell been some sort of secularist, he might have gotten by with the remark and gotten the job. But Sally Shafer, who apparently acts as UK science's heresy hunter, determined, according to an e-mail now made public, that Gaskell was a "potential evangelical."

The University is claiming, in the face of the facts, that it didn't do anything wrong. And, of course, they're getting support from those we could have predicted would stick their heads in the sand, primary among which is P. Z. Meyers:

Of course, Gaskell has a predisposition: he's a devout Christian, so that persecution complex is rooted deeply. He claims he was denied the job because he's an evangelical Christian. I say he's just inventing rationalizations…something else his religion has made him very good at. And the newspapers are helping him out.

Never mind those damning e-mails and the entire discussion attested to by witnesses that it was his religion that did him in. And never mind the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that some of these same people would club you over the head with if the institution had discriminated against a minority.

In fact, one of the arguments used to defend UK's actions in the Gaskell affair is to say that he would have public outreach responsibilities and that his religious views would embarrass the University. Okay, let's just simply apply this to a similar discrimination case against, say, an African American, another group protected under the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Let's say that the University of Kentucky was looking for an agriculture extension officer for a certain part of the state. The job obviously involves public outreach. And let's say that this part of the state had few if any black population and a history of racist sentiment. And let's say an African American man applied for the job and was clearly the most qualified applicant on paper.

And let's also say that at the University there were faculty and staff in the agriculture department who indicated in their e-mails that they didn't think highly of blacks and that there was a concerted effort to torpedo his candidacy for the job, and that one of the reasons they gave for saying he was not qualified--in spite of his expertise and experience--was that they felt that his race would impair his ability to do outreach in this part of the state.

What then? Well, I think we know what would happen then: there would be an outcry the likes of which we have seldom heard.

The case has now gone viral. The New York Times covered it on Saturday, and the Washington Post on Friday.

Now the University that talks a good game about Tolerance and Diversity in its press releases is about to become higher education's poster child for religious discrimination.

Where was the KY Human Rights Commission on the Gaskell Affair?

The Associated Press is on the story of the Scientific Inquisition at the University of Kentucky:

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — University of Kentucky scientists wondered to each other in internal e-mails if an astronomer's Christian faith would interfere with a prestigious job as the director of a new student observatory, according to court records in the man's discrimination case set for trial in February.

Even though Martin Gaskell says he is not a creationist, he claims he was passed over for the job at UK's MacAdam Student Observatory three years ago because of his religion and statements that were perceived to be critical of the theory of evolution.

While we're all marveling at the intolerance of a university that preaches Tolerance and Diversity but practices Intolerance and enforces Uniformity, let us take a moment ask where Kentucky Human Rights Commission was during all this.

According to the deposition of Gaskell, it was revealed that, on the advice of his attorneys, he had filed a complaint with the Human Rights Commission, but never heard anything back. Why does the Human Rights Commission have plenty of time to use its statutory status to lobby for left wing social causes but has no time to bother with religious discrimination complaints from people like Gaskell?

More on UK's Gaskell Affair: What a tangled web they're weaving

Well, the defenders of Scientific Correctness have themselves into another fine logical mess.

They are claiming once again that Intelligent Design is a religious, rather than a scientific position. So far the claim has served them well. It allows them to simply dismiss it without actually doing any intellectual heavy lifting. They can simply raise their noses high, sniff audibly, and utter, in a dismissing tone, vague things about the integrity of science.

But the Gaskell affair at the University of Kentucky has got them all tied up in logical knots. Gaskell was the best qualified of seven candidates for the post of observatory director at UK until one member of the search committee got wind that he was a Christian, at which point some members of the committee--and apparently some faculty in the biology department--began a campaign to smear his reputation in order to deny him employment. They ended up hiring the third best candidate for the position rather than have a Christian on staff in one of their science departments.

It started when Sally Shafer, a UK staffer apparently in charge of keeping the university religion-free, Googled information on Gaskell and discovered he had given a lecture at UK in 1997 on science and religion, in which he went over the long list of Christian scientists in history and said that he adhered to the majority position in science that the universe--and the earth--were very old. He went on to say that, although he accepted natural selection, there were some unanswered questions about it.

Shafer, apparently appalled that Gaskell would discuss religion and science in the same lecture, and clearly disturbed that he had used the two words anywhere in the same vicinity, swung into action and reported Gaskell to the search committee as (brace yourself, this is strong language) a "potential evangelical."

Several other appalled committee members began calling him a "creationist" and "Intelligent Design" advocate, although the first is certainly untrue, and the second is not entirely clear from the record. In any case, the consequence was that he was passed over, even though, according to court documents, he was clearly the most qualified candidate. Gaskell then sued the university for religious discrimination under the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

But what is interesting is the reasons now being given to justify his treatment at the hands of UK's Scientific Inquisition.

According to the critics of Intelligent Design, ID is a religious position, not a scientific one. But if it is a religious position, then those who hold it cannot be discriminated against on the basis that they hold it under the Civil Rights Act. If ID is a religious position, then its advocates should not be allowed in university science departments. But if it is a religious position, then it is discrimination not to hire them on that basis.

Oooh. Not a good dilemma to be in. But the critics--on this blog anyway--just go on blindly ignoring the inconsistency.

Again, it is not clear that Gaskell holds to an Intelligent Design position. We're just granting it for the sake of argument here.

If Intelligent Design is a religious position, then Gaskell cannot be denied employment on the basis of holding believing it. And if it is scientific, then he should not be denied employment for holding it.

Go ahead Maniacs, tell me how you get out of this one.

The University of Kentucky's "Gaskell Affair": Further adventures in intellectual "Diversity" at UK

Expect anytime now to see the following lines chiseled in stone on the wall outside the University of Kentucky's Ministry of Truth building:

Uniformity is Diversity
Favoritism is Equality
Bigotry is Tolerance

If you are a left-wing ideologue applying for a faculty position at the University of Kentucky, you have a comfortable and welcoming place awaiting you in the "Gender and Women's Studies" department. But if you have what the University of Kentucky thinks look suspiciously like, ... ahem, a religion, you might just be refused a job.

At the university that preaches "Diversity" at every available opportunity, a leading candidate was turned down for the position of Observatory Director at UK when, after seeing a discussion on a personal website, UK officials determined he was "potentially evangelical." The University was sued for religious discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

UK denies it discriminated based on religion, but the judge points out that the "record contains substantial evidence," said the judge, "that Gaskell was a leading candidate for the position until the issue of his religion (as Gaskell calls it) or his scientific position (as UK calls it) became an issue." And it is pretty clear, from the evidence, which of the two--religion or his scientific position--it is.

A paper he wrote religion and scientific issues and a similar talk he gave at UK started a discussion among search committee members about how his religious beliefs might affect his scientific views. Even though Gaskell nowhere indicates he is a creationist (and in fact gives indications that he at least believes the commonly accepted scientific evidence about the age of the earth), several committee members and other staff decided, on the mere basis of talking about science in the context of religion, decided he was.

Sally Shafer, one of the committee members sent colleagues a set of websites and links having to do with Gaskell, concluding, "clearly this man is complex and likely fascinating to talk with--but potentially evangelical." Several others admitted that it was factor or a "theme" in the decision, which is prohibited in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In fact, even the search committee chair was exercised over this. Here is the text of an e-mail sent by Professor Thomas Troland, to Professor Michael Cavagnero, the chair of UK's department of physics and astronomy, before the decision was made:

It has become clear to me that there is virtually no way Gaskell will be offered the job despite his qualifications which stand far above those of any other applicant. Other reasons will be given for this choice when we meet Tuesday. In the end, however, the real reason why we will not offer him the job is because of his religious beliefs in matters that are unrelated to astronomy or to any of the duties specified for this position ... If Martin were not so superbly qualified, so breathtakingly above the other applicants in background and experience, then our decision would be much simper. We could easily choose another applicant, and we could content ourselves with the idea that Martin's religious beliefs played little role in our decision. However, this is not the case. As it is, no objective observer could possibly believe that we excluded Martin on any other basis than religious.

The judge mentions that Troland "subsequently retracted these comments to some extent," although he doesn't explain in detail. But he does say that these comments "remain direct evidence if religious discrimination." And, anyway, the remaining evidence would probabloy be sufficient to prove it in court.

That's how "Diversity" works at the University of Kentucky. If has Gaskell had only had posts on his website about "Queer Theory" or "Black male-bodied drag queens" (a particular favorite down the road at the University of Louisville), he could have passed the Diversity test at UK.

Another higher education institution lowers itself: SUNY's Faustian bargain

The State University of New York (SUNY) recently joined the growing list of universities that are eliminating humanities and fine arts departments for budgetary reasons. It decided to dispense with French, Italian, Russian, classics, and theater arts programs. These departments are vulnerable when the Hollow Men who largely make up university administrations are unwisely given a budget-cutting knife because they want to excise programs with low enrollments, and many of these departments are having this problem.

Why do these disciplines often suffer from low enrollment in our colleges and universities? Part of it is just cyclical: they go in and out of fashion. In the 1960s for example, philosophy departments had relatively high enrollments. But when I arrived on campus in the late seventies, my philosophy department was not as popular as it once was. I am told that it has enjoyed a resurgence or two since I graduated.

Another reason for low enrollment in humanities and fine arts has to do with the fact that many universities have eliminated their academic core programs. Universities once at least gave lip service to the importance of giving students a broad education, and many of them placed specific emphasis--or, we should probably say, a general emphasis--on a basic grounding in Western civilization. But the concern with giving students a generally education is being abandoned in favor of other priorities.

The dominant priority of the soulless bureaucrats who run these institutions is "Diversity," by which they mean exactly the opposite. What they really mean is ideological uniformity. Every time I receive a piece of correspondence--any correspondence--from the University of Kentucky having to do with my son, who graduated and is now in law school there, the letterhead indicates it is from the "Multicultural Department." The University apparently is the Multicultural Department, and the Multicultural Department is the University. That's part of Diversity, you see: making everything the same.

Notice that "women's studies," or "gender studies," or what used to be called "black studies never seem to have to go under the budgetary knife. These places are hives of special interest politics that enjoy favorable treatment in all things. I'm willing to bet cash money that these programs don't have any higher enrollment at SUNY than Italian, French, classics, and theater arts.

Can you imagine the outrage from the political left if a women's studies department were cut for budgetary reasons? Never happen. Why? Because these programs run university administrations, not vice-versa.

Anyway if you want to read the ultimate takedown of SUNY and its ilk, check out Brandeis University's Gregory Petsko's open letter to George M. Phillip, President of SUNY. Here's the very end, but don't miss the rest. There are stingers throughout:

No, I think you were simply trying to balance your budget at the expense of what you believe to be weak, outdated and powerless departments. I think you will find, in time, that you made a Faustian bargain. Faust is the title character in a play by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. It was written around 1800 but still attracts the largest audiences of any play in Germany whenever it's performed. Faust is the story of a scholar who makes a deal with the devil. The devil promises him anything he wants as long as he lives. In return, the devil will get - well, I'm sure you can guess how these sorts of deals usually go. If only you had a Theater department, which now, of course, you don't, you could ask them to perform the play so you could see what happens. It's awfully relevant to your situation. You see, Goethe believed that it profits a man nothing to give up his soul for the whole world. That's the whole world, President Philip, not just a balanced budget. Although, I guess, to be fair, you haven't given up your soul. Just the soul of your institution.

Disrespectfully yours,

Gregory A Petsko

HT: Why Evolution is True