Departments
In the News
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Week of 10 September 1999 |
Vol. III, No. 5 |
In the News
"Soft money is a mud hole," says James Post, a BU School of Management professor who studies campaign contributions. "Soft money" is that given to political parties' "non-federal accounts" that fall outside the legal "hard money" limits on contributions to candidates for federal office. Post observes in the August 23 Dallas Business Journal, "Everyone's floundering in the mud hole. Everyone's getting very dirty. But the thinking is that it's better to stay in the mud hole you know [rather] than to venture into a mud hole you don't know."
"We cannot deprive patients of effective treatment and live up to our ethical guidelines," says Kenneth Rothman, a BU School of Medicine professor, in the Boston Globe August 16. Referring to increasing criticism of the use of placebos in testing new drugs on patients, he continues, "The placebo is just an easy out. It's an intellectually lazy approach to the evaluation of drug efficacy."
"Adults should be saying very emphatically that they are doing everything they can to keep kids safe," advises Betsy McAlister Groves, in an article on school violence in the August 23 issue of Newsweek. Groves, who directs the Child Witness to Violence program at Boston Medical Center, emphasizes communication with children. "Talk to them, reassure them," she says. "We tend to think that if they don't talk about it, it will get better; but that's not the right message."
"People don't realize how close to the edge they are," says Jeffrey Heisler in August 16's Boston Globe. The School of Management assistant professor studies behavioral finance and our sometimes dysfunctional relationship to our assets. "They talk themselves into 'I can handle this' and 'No, it won't be a problem,' " he says. "Then something happens and it is a problem, and they don't know how to handle it."
"Americans are the folk who built a better mousetrap and dreamed a grander dream," writes Leroy Rouner, CAS philosophy professor and director of BU's Institute for Philosophy and Religion, in Phi Beta Kappa's Summer 1999 Key Reporter. "Our distinctively American gift has been a youthful naïveté and an imaginative practicality. But we have been suspicious of 'culture' and have always harbored a certain anti-intellectualism." From his experience as a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar last year, Rouner concludes "that good, thoughtful, knowledgeable, and culturally gracious people are more significant for American life than the simply successful ones."
"In the News" is compiled by Alexander Crouch in the Office of Public Relations.