Departments
In the News
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Week of 15 January 1999 |
Vol. II, No. 19 |
In the News
It's that time of era: three nines in a row. "Western culture is obsessed with time keeping," says CAS Associate History Professor Richard Landes, director of BU's Center for Millennial Studies, in the January 5 issue of Family Circle. "Commemorations in honor of a chronologically round number are more widespread here than in any other culture." The center's representative in Jerusalem, Gershom Gorenberg, knows that some commemorations may go too far, as illustrated by Israel's deportation of American cultists believed to be planning violent nudges of the millennium. "The situation here has tremendous religious energy," Gorenberg says in a January 2 Boston Globe report. "That could cause some individuals to be swept away."
As avenues of passive entertainment proliferate, fewer Americans are making the effort to learn another language. Statistics showing that foreign language study is declining concern Associate Professor Dorothy Kelly, chair of the CAS modern foreign languages department. "The students are really missing something in the areas left behind," she says in a December 26 Boston Globe story. "And I think we all lose something intangible, as a society, as a result."
"I think shame is the one emotion that is very strong with people who stutter," says Andriana DiGrande, a speech therapist at BU's Sargent College in a January 3 Boston Globe story featuring her work with adult stutterers. "And I think that shame comes a lot from early childhood -- people laughing, people looking away when you talk, the feeling that what you say isn't important."
Building on his description of genes as "nature's Legos," ENG Professor Temple Smith, director of BU's BioMolecular Engineering Research Center, says, "All of life is modular. Each protein is a small micromachine that carries out some mechanical or chemical actions. . . . Life just exploded when these collections of machines were available." His comments appear in the December 3 Longview (Texas) News-Journal.
As museums are pressed to examine more closely the provenance of their collections, the Museum of Fine Arts has been facing criticism of its acquisitions. "The MFA needs to make an unambiguous statement that it will no longer acquire undocumented antiquities," Murray McClellan, CAS assistant professor of archaeology, says in the December 27 Boston Globe. "This is one more opportunity for the MFA to say, 'Our eyes have been opened. We take responsibility for what's happened. We've done wrong in the past, but we'll now do better.' But they seem unwilling to say that publicly."
"In the News" is compiled by Alexander Crouch in the Office of Public Relations.