B.U. Bridge is published by the Boston University Office of University Relations.

Contact Us

Staff

“Today’s critics mourn the loss of inspired oratory, spontaneous audiences and serious debate,” observes Bruce Schulman, director of the CAS American and New England studies program, “but, in truth, U.S. political conventions rarely featured any of these.” In a column in the August 20 Los Angeles Times, Schulman writes, “Nearly all have been tedious affairs, full of inconsequential, long-winded speeches, parochial disputes, and stage-managed demonstrations.” He points out that the conventions of the 1960s, “overwhelmed by deep political divisions and captured on network television, formed the model for most contemporary commentators.”

Speculating about the discrepancy between the points of view of many reporters and much of their audience, Robert Zelnick writes in the August 24 Wall Street Journal, “As professional descendents of those who covered the civil rights movement, Vietnam, Watergate, the feminist insurrection, Roe v. Wade and the birth of the environmental movement, liberal reporters are too often weighted with the intellectual baggage of an earlier generation.” The COM professor of journalism further states, “Their view of African- and Hispanic-Americans is frozen in a time of victimhood. Many are today nearly incapable of covering education, affirmative action, church-burning, or alleged police brutality without their preconceptions showing.”

In an August 12 Associated Press story about universities that are beginning to issue laptop computers to students, Peter Wood, associate provost and professor of anthropology in CAS, says, “It’s discouraging when students rely on the information available on the Internet instead of learning to pursue other forms of research in the libraries and in person, and that’s increasingly the case.”

Indonesian ex-president Suharto “did not so much control religious divisions as shamelessly exploit them, often with disastrous consequences,” writes Robert Hefner, a CAS professor of anthropology, of religious conflict in that country, in the August 16 Asian Wall Street Journal. Referring specifically to the strife-torn Malukan region of the archipelago nation, Hefner points to Suharto’s shifting alliances with Christian and Moslem groups as a source for what he calls “today’s cycle of atrocities and ethnoreligious cleansing. Without reform and without an end to the Suhartoist legacy of parapolitical gangsterism,” he says, “the violence in the Malukus will continue.”

“I think people in uniform are somewhat confused about what is the larger purpose that their institutions are supposed to serve in a post–Cold War world,” says Andrew Bacevich, a CAS professor of international relations, on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered August 22. “They like to imagine themselves war fighters,” he explains. “They’re, in fact, members of what is something almost of a neo-imperial constabulary force that has responsibilities for keeping order around the world. They haven’t really adjusted to that.” Bacevich, who often comments on the state of the armed forces, was joining the debate on the issue begun by Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush.

“In the News” is compiled by Alexander Crouch in the Office of Public Relations.

28 September 2000
Boston University
Office of University Relations