Products and services
Norman Podhoretz: A Biography already getting attention in The Chronicle of Higher Ed: Author Thomas L. Jeffers “briskly moves the narrative from the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, where Podhoretz was born in 1930, to Columbia University, where he studied with the literary critic Lionel Trilling, and the University of Cambridge, where he studied with the […]
Read More
Calling Columbia’s bluff: Cambridge author Stephen Norwood responds to President Lee Bollinger’s article representing the university as a champion of free speech and press. Not so fast. Exhibits A & B – from Norwood’s recent book, The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower – Columbia ruined the academic careers of Robert Burke and Jerome Klein […]
Read More
Michael Ruse is a prominent philosopher and a bad speller. Should this puzzle the rest of us? via Brainstorm Health-care reform is set to become my King Charles's Head. I am going to find it difficult to write anything without it coming up in the middle. Fifty-seven million people in the United States of America without healthcare insurance and we -- at least those blocking reform -- call ourselves a Christian nation. Shame, shame, shame. But, spurred by a well-merited criticism of my last blog, I want to write about something else that has been on my mind and which I intended to raise at some point. So why not now? I have in my possession a school report from when I was about 10 years old. My mother was a schoolteacher and we took school reports very seriously in my family. They were not glanced at, signed, and then forgotten. They were returned, stored safely, and discussed on pertinent occasions in the future. The report, said he modestly, is pretty good. "Sports" is a bit off, but generally I was nicely on track. However, then we come to "Spelling." "B, Michael is improving." Well, there was room for improvement and I am afraid it did not go far. As my perceptive critic noted, I simply cannot spell. On this occasion, I got "miniscule" for "minuscule," but this is nothing. Some words I just blank out on. The other day, I could not for the life of me spell "cloathes," you know those things you put on. I can never spell "campaing," the thing that was the end of Napoleon in Russia. And you may ride in an automobile, but I ride in a "vehcule." And when it comes to, well you know what it is when you have had too many prunes and it begins with a d, I cannot get close enough to look it up in a dictionary.
Read MoreMichael Ruse In 1981, the State of Arkansas passed into law a bill that demanded that if evolution was taught in state-supported schools, then something called "Creation Science" -- aka the book of Genesis read literally -- had also to be taught. This happened during the interregnum between Bill Clinton's first time in the governor's mansion and when he regained it two years later. The bill was debated for all of half an hour by the legislature and signed by the then-governor, a man as unqualified for the post as he was surprised at getting it. Obviously this law violated the First Amendment separation of church and state, and so the ACLU swung into action to get it declared unconstitutional. After a two-week trial, the federal judge ruled precisely that and so that was the end of the Arkansas "Balanced Treatment for Creation-Science and Evolution-Scient Act," as it was called. I was one of the witnesses for the plaintiff, called in to testify on the history and philosophy of science, showing that whereas evolutionary theory is science, creation science is not science but religion.
Read MoreScience and Religion expert Michael Ruse is one of our favorite Cambridge authors. He's nuanced, compelling, and unwilling to settle for simple, doctrinal arguments on either side of the creationism debate. The Chronicle of Higher Education's Brainstorm blog recently added him as a writer, where "[y]ou might see him writing about science and religion (especially creationism and evolution), college football, film, and other similarly uncontroversial matters." Ruse's latest post "Why I am Weeping for Florida State University" ties in neatly to Weisbrod and Asch's piece on college football coach bonuses. As we start the New Year, Florida State University is in the headlines for two reasons. The first is that on New Year's Day, in the Gator Bowl, FSU beat West Virginia. It was the final game of our coach, Bobby Bowden. The lead headline in the New York Times Sports Section is "Bowden Goes Out on Top of Shoulders." The magazine Science also has news about FSU. "Recession Hits Some Sciences Hard at Florida State University." We have just fired 20 tenured faculty and another 15 tenure-track faculty. And don't think that these were just second-raters or indeed presume that any of them were. Included wasDean Falk, one of today's leading paleoanthropologists and, among other things, the expert on the brain of Homo floresiensis (the hobbit). She got a pink slip on her 65th birthday. (Disclosure: Dean is a good friend. In this post I am absolutely not making a judgment about whether, given the firings, she was legitimately included or not. If you read the Science article, you will see that decisions were made on the judged vulnerability of departments, and she is a member of one such department, anthropology.) I don't know which item of news depresses me the more.
Read MoreKeep up with the latest from Cambridge University Press on our social media accounts.
