Departments
In the News
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Week of 24 September 1999 |
Vol. III, No. 7 |
In the News
Peter Wood, BU's associate provost and a CAS associate professor of anthropology, talks about an Internet site that promises to post class notes from selected universities in an interview on CBS This Morning that aired on September 10. "The students who are taking the notes obviously don't know the subject -- if they did they'd be teaching the class, not taking it," he says. "The real problem with class notes up on the Internet is that professors just don't have any control or influence over what goes into those notes. They may contain mistakes, they may contain omissions. They certainly don't contain the expertise of the professor."
"If there's something that can be done to enhance a woman's possibility for reaching her full sexual potential, I'm all for it," says Laura Berman, a sex therapist at BU's Women's Sexual Health Clinic, in the September issue of Discover magazine. "That said, there are a couple of potential backlashes. It's just like antidepressants. A person may suffer from depression for all sorts of good reasons -- family problems, death of a loved one -- and taking an antidepressant may relieve the symptoms, but not the problem. Well, with drugs for sexual dysfunction, women can use them as Band-aids and not resolve the real issues in their lives -- like abusive relationships or body-image problems."
"I hope others will start to look at dance not simply as a technical form, but as a way of looking at society," says Micki Taylor-Pinney, coordinator of dance in BU's Department of Physical Education, Recreation and Dance, in the September 3 Boston Herald. "It really is about behavior, aesthetics, humanity, and education. I'd like to broaden their idea of what dance is about," she adds, explaining the implications of the newly created dance minor in the School for the Arts.
In a September 5 Philadelphia Inquirer story, Lee Quinby, an associate at BU's Center for Millennial Studies, contrasts fears of Y2K upheaval with the upbeat movement to mark the new millennium by relieving the debt burden of poor countries. "There's this intensifying anxiety on the one hand, so we have the doom-drenched voices that everything is going amok," he says. "And we have the polar opposite in the intensity about this millennial hope. With a sweep of a pen, we write off debt. It's completely utopian."
Reflecting on the publication of the eighth volume of the Einstein papers, which contains unflattering details of Einstein's personal life, Robert Schulmann, director of BU's Center for the Einstein Edition, says in the August 31 New York Times, "In these pages we can closely observe Einstein on his solitary path to general relativity, on which personal relations are sometimes callously sacrificed in the name of scientific ambition." He continues, "The Einstein we're trying to recover in these volumes is a living, breathing personality with faults. We want to see what kind of personal style he had and what kind of scientific style he had."
"In the News" is compiled by Alexander Crouch in the Office of Public Relations.