(O.K., maybe the relevance of this to CLT is a bit of a stretch. But it is: 1. about blogging; 2. about academics who blog; 3. about the effect of controversial blogging on tenure & appointments; 4. about conservative v. liberal bloggers; and 5. about controversy generated by positions on contemporary Middle Eastern politics, so arguably relevant to Pope Benedict's Regensburg remarks.)
There's an interesting editorial in the Sep/Oct issue of the Yale Alumni Magazine about Yale's decision not to hire Juan Cole, a professor of Modern Middle Eastern history. It raises the issue of the effect of blogging on academic tenure and appointments decisions.
Do those who live by the blog die by the blog?
In April, Juan Cole, a professor of modern Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan--Ann Arbor, whas turned down for an appointment at Yale in contemporary Middle Eastern politics. This kind of event doesn't ordinarily stir up excitement in the wider world. But it became a hot topic in the blogosphere, because Cole himself is an eminent blogger. "Everyone who is anyone reads his blog," writes NYU professor Siva Vaidhyanathan in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Apparently, everyone who reads Cole's blog thought Yale rejected him because of it.
Cole has an impressive c.v. He has written, edited, or translated 14 scholarly books, many of them for prestigious academic presses. But on his blog, Informed Comment, he is an unrelenting critic of the war in Iraq and the Bush administration, and several conservative bloggers were outraged that Yale would consider him for tenure. The blog Little Green Footballs called Yale's interest "almost unbelievable." John Fund of WallStreetJournal.com called Cole "hothead" and "intolerant."
The faculty of two departments voted to hire Cole. But at Yale, senior tenure decisions must pass three levels of committees. Cole failed the second level: the Tenure Appointments Committee in the Humanities, composed of two deans and nine tenured faculty, voted him down. Now it was the liberal bloggers' turn for outrage. "Neoconservative zealots . . . screwed professor Juan Cole out of a job" (Majikthise). "This reaction reeks of fear" (Whiskey Bar).
There's no way of knowing if those who reviewed Cole were influenced by their political views. Politics are strictly dissallowed as critera for hiring at Yale. But academics are human. It would be surprising if nobody on those committees was influenced, consciously or unconsciously, by feelings about Cole's outspoken stands. It would be surprising if nobody at all wondered about the consequences of hiring a controversial public figure.
. . .
The Cole affair may help push academia to define how it feels about blogs. Cole's blog is opinionated but erudite; he translates Arabic and Persian sources and comments on theology. But academics haven't reached consensus yet on how to weight blog posts in evaluating scholarship. (It's not clear how, or whether, Yales' committees assessed Cole's blog.) As more and more academics engage in blogging, universities will have to decide whether blogging matters.
UPDATE: My colleague, Elizabeth Brown, adds: "You may be interested in a posting by J.B. Ruhl, the Matthews & Hawkins Professor of Property at the Florida State University College of Law, on his thoughts regarding the “Hierarchy of Legal Scholarship” here: http://jurisdynamics.blogspot.com/2006/09/hierarchy-of-legal-scholarship.html Basically Ruhl, like Brian Leiter (who Rick Garnett commented upon in his MoJ post here: http://www.mirrorofjustice.com/mirrorofjustice/2006/09/leiter_on_blogs.html ), thinks that blogs (while lots of fun) have zero value as scholarship.
Ruhl thinks the most valuable contributions to legal scholarship are empirical studies of law’s impact on society. Ruhl’s rankings have generated a lot of comments among other law bloggers."
Lisa
Thursday, September 21, 2006
..... but also apparently right here in the good ol' U.S.A., where babies are being screened for purposes of sex selection. CNN reports that the first comprehensive survey of fertility clinics in the U.S. reveals that
A whopping 42 percent of clinics that offer PGD [pre-implantation genetic diagnosis] said they had done so for non-medically related sex selection. Nearly half of those clinics said they would only offer sex selection for a second or subsequent child.
"That's really startling," University of Pennsylvania ethicist Arthur Caplan said of the high number of PGD for sex selection alone. "Family balancing seems like a morally persuasive reason to some people," but doing gender selection just because a couple doesn't want any girls, or any boys, is troubling, he said.
One doctor who offers it takes a different view.
"It performs a much desired service. We're making people happy," said Dr. Jeffrey Steinberg, medical director of Fertility Institutes, which has clinics in Los Angeles, California, Las Vegas, Nevada, and Guadalajara, Mexico.
Many countries ban PGD or restrict it to prevention of serious inherited diseases. Many people from foreign countries travel to the United States to obtain it, especially from countries like China and Canada.
I find a sad, sad, irony in the mental image of Chinese couples travelling to the United States, and then leaving this country "happy" because they have been permitted to select out, leave behind, and almost certainly destroy, their female embryos.
Lisa
Wednesday, September 20, 2006
At today's General Audience at St. Peter's Square, this is what Pope Benedict XVI said about his Regensburg remarks:
It was an especially beautiful experience for me that day to deliver a conference before a large auditorium of professors and students at the University of Regensburg, in which for many years I was professor. With joy I was able to meet once again with the university world which, during a long period of my life, was my spiritual homeland.
I had chosen as topic the question of the relationship between faith and reason. To introduce the auditorium to the dramatic and timely character of the argument, I quoted some words of a Christian-Islamic dialogue of the 14th century, in which the Christian interlocutor, the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus, in an incomprehensibly brusque way for us, presented to the Islamic interlocutor the problem of the relationship between religion and violence.
Unfortunately, this quotation has given room to a misunderstanding. For the careful reader of my text it is clear that I did not wish at any time to make my own the negative words uttered by the medieval emperor in this dialogue and that its controversial content does not express my personal conviction. My intention was very different: Based on what Manuel II affirms afterward in a very positive way, with very beautiful words, about rationality in the transmission of the faith, I wished to explain that religion is not united to violence, but to reason.
The topic of my conference -- responding to the mission of the university -- was therefore the relationship between faith and reason: I wished to invite the Christian faith to dialogue with the modern world and to dialogue with all cultures and religions. I hope that on different occasions of my visit, as for example in Munich, where I underlined the importance of respecting what others consider sacred, my deep respect for the great religions, in particular for Muslims -- who 'adore the one God' and with whom we are engaged in "preserving and promoting together for all mankind social justice, moral values, peace and freedom" ("Nostra Aetate," No. 3) -- emerged clearly.
Therefore, I trust that, after the reactions of the first moment, my words at the University of Regensburg will represent an impulse and encouragement to a positive dialogue, including self-critical, both among religions, as well as between modern reason and Christians' faith.
Lisa
Monday, September 18, 2006
A number of commentators on Benedict's remarks on Islam (see, e.g., Stephen Bainbridge ) have pointed out that his intended audience was post-Christian Europe. I find myself wondering how his message is playing among that audience.
Listening to a story about this on NPR this morning, I was struck by Sylvia Poggioli's reporting about the European reaction to this controversy. She noted that many left-leaning European newspapers (she mentions Britain's The Guardian and France's Le Monde) were supporting the Pope, and calling on moderate Muslims to heed his calls for open and open dialogue. This is consistent with the European press reactions excerpted by Amy Wellborne. I think the contrast between this reaction and the reaction of the American press is quite striking, especially given the growing Muslim population in Europe.
Later in the day, my big brother (who, like me, was born & spent most of his childhood in Germany) sent me a link to a report by the German Statistics Office, which paints a rather grim portrait of Germany's mental state right now:
According to a new report put out by the German Statistics Office, Germans have the most pessimistic view of the future among all Europeans.
The latest census shows that Germans -- especially young people and eastern Germans -- believe living conditions are much worst than they actually are.
The Date Report is released every two years and is a joint study conducted by various research and statistical agencies.
Jürgen Kocka, head of the Social Science Research Center in Berlin, said there is a discrepancy between Germans' subjective view of living conditions and the actual conditions themselves, because Germans tend to set their standards higher than other Europeans. His analysis was reported on the economics internet site Wirtschaftswoche.de.
The report shows that only 29 percent of Germans feel that their income allows them to live comfortably, Wirtschaftswoche reported. In Denmark, that number is 64 percent; in Sweden, it is 54 percent and in Ireland, it is 50 percent.
. . .
Alternative living arrangements
The traditional nuclear family is continuing its decline in Germany as well, the study showed. More and more young people are growing up in homes with only one parent, or with parents who are not married. In 2005, nearly one-fourth of young people between the ages of 14 and 17 were living in "alternative"-style households.
None of this is probably all that relevant to the effect his remarks are having on those NOT in his intended audience, but I think it is important to remember the portion of his flock to whom Benedict was directing these remarks seems to be badly in need of some sort of spiritual direction.
Lisa
Saturday, September 16, 2006
Remember the widely-heralded announcement this past August of new stem cell research technology that would permit the development of stem cell lines by extraction of one cell from embryo's at an early stage of development, with no harm to the embryo? Well, Michael Fumento of the Hudson Institute reports that it was all a fraud. He writes, "In fact none of the 16 embryos involved in the study by medical director Robert Lanza of Advanced Cell Technology (ACT) survived. All were harmed; none were viable; none were spared."
Did I miss something? I know I've been busy lately, but I can't recall seeing anything about this in the same media outlets that reported how this development would remove the principal objections to stem cell research.
Lisa
The same John Allen column with the discussion of Benedict XVI & Islam that Michael Perry posted here also contains an excerpt from a lecture Allen gave at John Carroll University with an analysis of an aspect of Benedict's intellect that might have contributed to his current situation which I find much more insightful than the New York Time's. He compares Benedict to G.K. Chesterton (and George Bernard Shaw) -- read it, it's delightful -- and concludes:
My thesis is this: After 18 months of Benedict's papacy, one defining characteristic is what we might call his "Chestertonian assurance," a tranquility in the face of diverse currents of thought, as well as the respect that one deeply cultured soul naturally feels for another.
By the way, I am not comparing Benedict and Chesterton on a personal level. Chesterton was irascible and curmudgeonly; Benedict, on the other hand, is unfailingly gracious, polite, and kind. As a personality type, he's closer to Emily Post. Yet Benedict breathes the same air of Christian enlightenment as Chesterton. His approach to modernity is neither the craven assimilation that Jacques Maritain described as "kneeling before the world," nor the defensiveness of a "Taliban Catholicism" that knows only how to excoriate and condemn.
Facing disagreement and differing cultural visions, Benedict is not afraid -- and because he's not afraid, he's not defensive, and he's not in a hurry.
Such a spirit is largely alien to our fractured and hair-trigger era, and so Benedict has been something of a paradox- this avatar of Catholic traditionalism espousing a positive message, willing to engage in reasoned reflection with people who don't think like him. For 18 months, people have been speculating about when the "real pope" will emerge from beneath this serene, gracious façade. Ladies and gentleman, I suggest to you tonight that the façade is the real pope.
Lisa
Thursday, September 7, 2006
As a neophyte to the CLT project, I have more than a casual interest in responses to Rob's question about a "CLT Research Canon." (Indeed, if all goes well, I hope to spend a considerable part of my first sabbbatical next year working my way through such a canon.) I suspect, however, that I might not be the only MOJ reader who found Bob Araujo's list a bit intimidating, especially since it was presented as merely the "starter" list. I think the only way I could find the courage to persist with this endeavor in the face of a list like that, given the other responsibilities I have in life, is to view it as aspirational, rather than the starting point for the study of CLT.
While certainly not sufficient in itself, I think that for those of us just beginning the study of CLT Rob's idea of trying to come up with a list of examples of CLT would be particularly helpful. If we wanted to organize such a list around legal topics, it seems to me we'd have the perfect beginning of such a list in a trio of articles posted in the sidebar to this webpage:
Corporate Law
Stephen Bainbridge, "Catholic Social Thought and the Corporation"
Mark Sargent, "Competing Visions of the Corporation in Catholic Social Thought"
Susan Stabile, "A Catholic Vision of the Corporation"
Any other nominations for topics & articles?
Lisa
