Centre Students Don't Expect to Find Their Friends in Class

This was a profound insight that a colleague told me this week.  

Professors are drawn mostly from the nerd tail of the distribution.  We are more likely to to see class as the best place to find friends and allies on the road to understanding the world.

The modal Centre student, by contrast, finds friends in their social groups - teams, clubs, first-year halls, and, especially, Greek organizations.  They often do not learn the names of their fellow students in a class.  They do not see class as the central arena for the main drama of college.

I don't know whether this is true of most colleges.  I think that it was less so at Swarthmore, where I was an undergraduate, and Brown, where my colleague studied.  Even there, though, class was not the main friend maker for everyone.

Which Woman on the $10?

The Treasury has decided to drop Alexander Hamilton from the ten dollar bill, and replace him with a woman.  They have solicited public input on which woman it should be.

A poll found that the top choices of U.S. adults were:

Eleanor Roosevelt (29%)

Harriet Tubman (20)

Susan B. Anthony (11)

Amelia Earhart (11)

Sacagawea (11)


My choice would be a triple portrait of the three women now displayed in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda in a sculpture:

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Lucretia Mott.

If I could get only one, I would go with Anthony, though she has already appeared on the dollar coin.

President Obama Tweets a Bad Thing Into a Good

MacArthur High School in Irving, TX displayed a sadly paranoid and probably racist reaction to clever student Ahmed Mohamad's home-made clock.  The school confiscated his clock, had him taken away in handcuffs, and suspended him for several days.  They compounded their foolishness by blaming the child.

President Obama, though, turned this shameful episode to good with one tweet:

Cool clock, Ahmed. Want to bring it to the White House? We should inspire more kids like you to like science. It's what makes America great.

Japanese Universities Kill the Liberal Arts, Choose Slow Death

The Japanese Ministry of Education wants their universities to close down their humanities and social science departments.  Seventeen have already said they will comply.

Japan has a low birth rate and a very poor record of absorbing immigrants.  Now they want to scale back the education that is the major source of broad understanding and innovation.

What they seem to be missing is that today’s “practical” fields are based on ideas invented yesterday in the liberal arts fields.

Japan was once in the “passing lane”, set to overtake the U.S. and European economies and creative leaders.  For the past generation, though, Japanese society has become increasingly sclerotic, literally and figuratively.

Choosing against the future of educational breadth is, I believe, a choice for slow death of their culture.

Small Town Development is a Quicker Path to Meaningful Work

One of the things that makes people happy is having meaningful work.  Developing a town is meaningful work.  Developing a small town gets you involved in meaningful work in which your personal impact is immediately apparent.

This weekend I got to travel with the Brown Fellows, Centre’s top scholarship group, to Paducah, KY.  We met with local do-gooders and busybodies (my kind of people).  They helped turn their historic, but derelict, Lower Town into a magnet for artists, especially quilters.  Little Paducah, KY, population 25,000, was designated a UNESCO Creative City.

Most interesting to me was how just a few dedicated people could make a difference.  One local woman, who had worked in big cities and foreign countries, said that one of the things that drew her back to her hometown was the chance to make a visible difference quickly.

Colbert Might Bring Serious Discussion of Faith to Network Television

I was disappointed when Stephen Colbert succeeded David Letterman on the "Late Night" show.  I thought the conceit of "The Colbert Report" - that he was an obtuse conservative blowhard - was a brilliant idea for a political satire show.  I thought it was a real loss to political snark when the Report ended, because I don't see how anyone could take up that idea again.

However, this first week of "Late Night with" with Colbert at the helm had a moment that gives promise of something really good:  a serious discussion with Vice-President Biden about his religious faith, and how it shapes his actions.  The network late-night hosts have, to my knowledge, never tried to touch this subject in a sustained or serious manner.

I hope that Colbert's new gig may bring something beneficial to the national discussion.

Child Mortality Has Been Cut in Half in the Past 25 Years

Some of the very best news in the world-is-getting-better watch is about our continuing success in reducing child mortality.

In the last quarter century, we have cut child mortality in half.

Moreover, the fastest gains come in the worst places, where sanitation practices which are common in developed countries make immediate improvements when brought to developing countries.  We can expect more good news like this in the next twenty five years.

The Most Likely Explanation for Similar Cultural Practices is Cultural Diffusion

I think the most likely explanation for similar cultural practices is cultural diffusion.

Multiple origins of cultural ideas are possible, of course.  I would yield to every well-documented case.

Still, after years of being impressed with similar practices in many places, I have been drawn to the ultimate lumper idea: cultural diffusion is the most likely explanation of similar cultural practices.

[RE: Lumper - There are two kinds of people: lumpers, and splitters.  I am a lumper.  I am interested in connections among people and cultures.]

Perhaps Political Scientists Just Don't Like Kids

The American Political Science Association has bannedchildren from the exhibit hall at their annual meeting.  They cite “liability”.

This is clearly nonsense, as the other academic associations, including the American Sociological Association, do not ban children from their exhibit halls.  These conferences are held in the same hotels as the APSA meets in.

In the late ‘80s, Mrs. Gruntled and I lived in Washington, DC.  For fun, we would put the kids in the stroller and walk up to the Washington Hilton to crash academic association meetings.  We particularly liked to go to the exhibit hall, to see the nifty new books.

We learned that different associations reacted differently to children.  Sociologists would smile.  Anthropologists were come over (often with their kids) to talk babies. 

And the political scientists?  They turned their backs, pretending they had not seen children.