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The last time we tuned in the Southern Methodist University soap opera involving the George W. Bush presidential library, we were seeing lots of people claim that, for the faculty, this was an issue of academic freedom and, for a vocal chorus of Methodist clergy, it was a fight over W’s sins against “Methodist values” in foreign policy and a hot cultural issue or two.
The smart folks over at Harvard University came out with their report on how to overhaul the general education curriculum, more commonly known as the core curriculum. As expected, the requirement asking students to study religion as a particular subject was dropped.
This may sound like a strange question, but I think it is one that needs to be asked and, if asked, it could add some needed depth to a hot-button story in Virginia higher education.
So if it’s Monday, that must mean I write about something from The New York Times Sunday Magazine. And so I will. Mark Oppenheimer used the hook of a nondenominational university in Arkansas permitting dance for the first time as a way to explore some Christians’ view of dancing. The piece is ridiculously smooth and well-written and looks at the issue from a number of angles.
Back when I was in graduate school at Baylor University in the late 1970s, I had a classmate who was considering doing graduate work at the Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. This student was not a fundamentalist at all and, in fact, I believe that he soon converted to the Episcopal Church. As often happens, we lost touch after graduate school.
What happens at Harvard University matters to journalists covering higher education. Whether you like it or not, as Hahvad goes, the rest of American academia goes, as the saying goes.
The best thing reporters can hear from editors is that they can have as much space as they need to tell the story. In an era of online publishing, this should be the case every time, but I don’t see reporters or their editors using that opportunity all that often.
Judy Woodruff has us kids figured out. In her documentary Generation Next: Speak Up, Be Heard, the veteran broadcaster took a segment to explore the issue of religion with 16- to 25-year-olds. I can’t say I am a big fan of the documentary’s methodology, but it has its redeeming qualities.
I am preparing to leave beautiful Colorado, where I spent the last few days of Christmas and the beginning of Epiphany with my family.
