Summum Bonum

The NYT article “Stalled Lives”  provoked a big reaction in Egypt, some of which the Times tries to capture here.

Many of the Egyptians are objecting to the typical, unthinking secular-liberal assumption, daily on display in the Western media,  that the comforts of religion are compensation for losers in life’s struggles - the old Nietzschean argument that religion is for the poor, weak and frustrated.  Give these “stalled” Egyptian youths a decent job and prospects, and they’ll stop being “Islamists.” Yet, as the NYT blog points out, many of the objectors to the original article are privileged, English-speaking, Western-educated Egyptians.

Ireland economic meltdown is not far behind ours.

“The problem for Ireland is that, as part of the euro zone, it has no control over either interest rates or exchange rates. That leaves the country no room to maneuver its way out of recession via monetary policy.”

An unusually good piece from the NYT on the origins of the subprime debacle.

But pieces like this,  which I’m sure we’ll see more of, only reminds us that journalists, too, were asleep at the wheel during the long run-up to the credit crisis. I don’t recall any stories like this when it really might have mattered, even in the Wall St. Journal, apart from asides and mentions about “exotic new derivatives” which illustrated only how “advanced” the market was becoming. No one wanted to hear it then.

Charlie Gibson muses in front of a crowd that a two - professor family would make $200,000. In Bobos in Paradise, David Brooks called it status-income disequilibrium.

Mark Bauerlein at TNR notes this story from The Independent. Might be less than meets the eye, though:

“Anyone ruing the degree’s demise can take heart: many gender and equality issues are now dealt with by mainstream courses, from sociology and law to history and English. And many universities, including Oxford, still offer the course to postgraduates.”

At the National Review, Steve Schippert blogs on Iraqi prisoners who want to complete their studies before they’re let out of prison.

If U.S. distance learning companies and colleges are reading this, do they hear opportunity calling? Can they get State Department grants to set up distance-learning programs and on-site learning centers?

I missed this March 18 NYT editorial, although I’ve been following Sen. Grassley’s committee investigations.

Right now, no one is doing more to reform higher education than Grassley. The key issue is this: colleges and universities get the same tax breaks for donations as to philanthropies. Current laws require charitable foundations to re-invest at least ten percent of their endowment each year in their primary purpose, but not colleges. Grassley is asking: Why not? So the colleges are tripping over each other to increase scholarships for low- and middle-income groups (to much media fanfare), before they are forced to start re-investing their endowments in tuition relief.

I hope Grassley prevails and some such law is eventually passed.  Tax relief is a public subsidy for a public purpose. Higher education is certainly a public purpose,  whether or not you are a private university. If you’re not using the endowments you’ve built up to further your primary purpose, why are you and your donors getting tax breaks?

This whole story has been underreported, like so much real news that isn’t Iraq, Hilary/Obama, or Paris Hilton. Again, more channels, fewer stories.

I agree with Bill Kristol here, even though he doesn’t make another point: any conversation about race hurts Obama, although he couldn’t avoid making that speech.

A prominent Italian Muslim (non-practicing) is to be baptized by Pope Benedict.

Update 3/23: Allam thinks there might be renewed threats on his life now that his conversion has been publicized.

NYT on professors as Myspace pals. Money quote:

“There are many reasons professors have embraced the Web and other media to reveal more of themselves. Mr. Gosling, whose studies include personality and virtual environments, noted that people are far less formal in all areas of life. ‘Twenty years ago, many fewer professors would have been wearing jeans and sneakers to work,’ he said.”

Yes, the informality overcomes (or tries to overcome) the distances between people created by technology. Oral societies, where everyone lives cheek by jowl and knows everything about everyone, create elaborate codes of formal address, courtesy and distinctions of speech based on rank and family proximity, for the opposite reason: to create social distance.