Departments
In the News
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Week of 23 April 1999 |
Vol. II, No. 32 |
In the News
CAS English Professor Robert Pinsky, who has been named to an unprecedented third term as U.S. poet laureate, has found that encouraging people from all walks of life to read their favorite poems in public is good for communities. "You have very different kinds of people from the same town or city listening to one another respectfully, presenting things that they value, and hearing what others value," he says in an April 5 Washington Post story. "I have to say I've been impressed by the kind of invisible attachment to poetry that breaks stereotypes. We're going to do an anthology, and in it poets like Elizabeth Bishop, Paul Célan, and Wallace Stevens were picked by people with professions like U.S. Marine or salesman or chemist or barber."
"The appeal of air power derives from the political advantages it offers to an administration operating with one eye fixed on the opinion polls," says CAS Professor of International Relations Andrew Bacevich in the Washington Post March 28. "As bomber in chief, the president never surrenders his control of the abort mechanism," he concludes. "Should an air campaign fail to live up to its advance billing, he can always declare victory, break station, and head for home."
Predicting on C-SPAN2 April 12 that the 20th century "will be judged and judged severely in both moral and metaphysical terms," University Professor and Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel asserts that a pervasive indifference has been one of the century's great failings. Not to respond to the plight of those suffering, "not to relieve their solitude by offering them a spark of hope, is to exile them from human memory, and in denying their humanity we betray our own. Indifference, then, is not only a sin, it is a punishment. This is one of the most important lessons of this outgoing century's wide-ranging experiments in good and evil." Wiesel was participating in a Millennial Evening at the White House with President and Mrs. Clinton, an event that was broadcast live.
"Good character demands more from us than an intellectual commitment, heartfelt desire, or mechanical fulfillment of responsibilities. It requires virtues, those habits of the head, heart, and hand that enable us to know the good, love the good, and do the good," according to SED Professor Kevin Ryan and Karen Bohlin, director and assistant director, respectively, of BU's Center for the Advancement of Ethics and Character, in an essay in the March 3 Education Week. They write further: "It is our virtues, not our views or our values, that enable us to become better students, better parents, better spouses, better teachers, better friends, better citizens."
"Nowadays when the U.S. considers intervening in such causes as that of the Kosovars, supporters and opponents alike refer to intervention as being inspired by America's Wilsonian doctrine of self-determination," says David Fromkin, CAS professor of international relations, in an essay in the Wall Street Journal on March 31. Fromkin disagrees that self-determination has been a consistent U.S. policy: "In the American theory, peoples within a country must learn to live with one another, under a rule of law that protects them all."
"In the News" is compiled by Alexander Crouch in the Office of Public Relations.