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In the News
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Week of 9 October 1998 |
Vol. II, No. 9 |
In the News
"Manufacturing is more exciting than ever," says SMG Professor Stephen R. Rosenthal in the cover story of the September 21 issue of Industry Week. "It's receiving brighter minds than ever and requires people to have more skills than ever." Rosenthal, who is director of the Center for Enterprise Leadership, maintains that manufacturing remains fundamentally important in the digital age. "If we didn't get progress in the products that support the digital age, the digital age would stop," he says. "If Intel stopped developing new advanced chips, manufacturing them, and figuring out how the heck they get more and more onto a chip and make those chips at high quality, we'd come to a halt. You can't be in a digital age if you can't move all those bits and bytes around, so what's happening is that the excitement and the investment and the growth are in different kinds of manufacturing."
In the September 27 issue of U.S. News and World Report , University Professor Alan Wolfe, a sociologist, is asked why, according to opinion polls, the majority of the public is tolerant of President Clinton's behavior in the Lewinsky affair, but the press seems to be outraged. "It is an oddity," he says. "The liberal elite has developed a taste for Puritanism."
In an editorial in the September 23 Boston Globe entitled "What Moral Decline?" Professor Caryl Rivers of the College of Communication argues that despite the insistence of the media, there is no real evidence of national moral decay. "What's declined isn't morality, but hypocrisy," she says. "The press used to accept that 'boys will be boys' and regarded the abuse of women as of no consequence." The press has fallen for the "declining morality" pitch of today's right, she maintains -- a view that idealizes the apparently simpler and more serene world of the 1950s, which was actually characterized by seething undercurrents of sexism, racism, and anti-Semitism.
Anxiety over their children's character development is a key factor driving the rising interest of voters in school reform, according to SED Professor Charles R. Glenn. "There is a diffuse, general idea that America is going to hell on issues of moral character," he says in the New York Times on September 20. "Most parents say they are worried about discipline. What kind of kids will my kids be in contact with? Are my kids going to come home as strangers with different values than mine? Conservatives talk about school choice because they see the current monopoly of content to be relativistic."
LAW Professor Tamar Frankel is profiled in the October issue of WIRED for her role as chair of an effort to create a new nonprofit organization to manage Internet domain names. An expert on corporate governance, she has worked to balance the often conflicting interests of the Internet's academic creators and business executives who are turning it into a mainstream business. "This project has given me an opportunity to test some of my ideas about trust," she says. "That's what gets us academics excited, a chance to see our theories in practice."
"In the News" is compiled by the Office of Public Relations.