Departments
In the News
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Week of 2 April 1999 |
Vol. II, No. 29 |
In the News
Lobbying and campaign contributions from the business world are fixtures of modern politics. But voters are rarely aware of the true nature and extent of the interactions between business and politics, especially those of political action committees. "You create these organizations with all kinds of apple-pie and motherhood language, but beneath it there's a hardball, white-knuckles kind of political purpose," says James Post, SMG professor and director of SMG's Public Management Program, in a story in the March 14 Portland Oregonian.
"The failure to spend money on the arts is a terrible tragedy, because the arts are one of the things we live for," says BU Chancellor John Silber in a Boston Globe story on March 15. Joining a group of other community leaders criticizing what they perceive to be the low priority arts receive in Boston's public schools, Silber linked the arts to helping with "the problems of keeping order and developing civility and discipline in classes. If you involve children in a music program, they work together. . . . They become quiet. They get excited about what they are doing. They are disciplined without being disciplined."
In a U.S. News & World Report article March 29 evaluating graduate schools and graduate education, Karen Allen, an assistant professor of physiology at BU's School of Medicine, says, "There is the promise that if you can somehow survive your time, you will come out with your name on the prestigious paper, get a prestigious postdoc, and get the prestigious position." She was attempting to lighten the gloomy perception among graduate students in the sciences that they devote undue amounts of time to lab work that some say may not be educationally worthwhile.
No matter how much we trust our physicians, hospitals are no more exempt from human fallibility than other complicated systems. "In medicine we've always had this attitude that we're going to take the brightest and best and teach them so they don't make mistakes," says Dr. John Noble, professor in BU's School of Medicine, in the Boston Globe on March 16. "That's fallacious. We've always made mistakes." Noble suggests in the Globe series on the reliability of hospital procedures that a more realistic attitude would help identify potential mistakes and prevent them.
"In the News" is compiled by Alexander Crouch in the Office of Public Relations.