BC in the News 2017-2018

IN THE NEWS

2017-2018

OFFICE OF UNIVERSITY COMMUNICATIONS

BOSTON COLLEGE

June, 2018

Dear Members of the BC Community: Boston College in the News is a compilation of the University’s major news stories and faculty opinion pieces from the 2017-2018 academic year.

The News Team within the Office of University Communications works with local, national and international media to publicize the teaching and research activities of our faculty and the accomplishments of our students in a manner that helps to promote Boston College as one of the nation’s premier institutions of higher learning.

As the print and broadcast media summaries at the end of the book demonstrate, Boston College— thanks mainly to the good work of our faculty—is in the news every day. Most importantly, as the enclosed articles and op-eds indicate, we are featured in the media in a manner befitting a great university.

Given the volume of news generated at Boston College, this compilation offers only a sampling of news placements and does not include small-market papers or the hundreds of articles quoting our faculty as experts.

We hope that you will enjoy this glimpse of the University’s high visibility and the positive ways in which Boston College is perceived externally.

Sincerely, Jack Dunn Associate Vice President Office of University Communications

Atlanta Archbishop Wilton Gregory urges BC graduates to heed power of words

By Margeaux Sippell, Globe Correspondent | May 21, 2018 Archbishop of Atlanta Wilton D. Gregory urged Boston College’s Class of 2018 to heed the power of words, telling them to “strive to be sure that there’s a consistency between what we say and how we live.”

“Words can heal and they can inflame,” Gregory told the more than 4,200 graduates gathered under a cloudless sky at BC’s Alumni Stadium. “The very same words can inspire some people, while they may enrage others.”

Gregory, the nation’s highest ranking African-American Catholic bishop, told graduates to throw out “useless contemporary phrases” like “thoughts and prayers” in exchange for heartfelt expressions of empathy and compassion.

Cheers erupted as Gregory emphasized the importance of continuing the work of movements like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo. As archbishop, Gregory has advocated for policy changes within the Catholic Church in response to hot-button contemporary issues.

During his time as president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, he pressed for a zero-tolerance policy to confront the clergy sex-abuse scandal. He has also spoken out against the death penalty.

Boston College awarded honorary degrees to Gregory; retired BC administrator Joseph Duffy; outgoing Harvard University President Drew Faust; HBO documentary producer Kendall B. Reid; and El Mundo Boston chief executive Alberto Vasallo III. At the conclusion of the ceremony, graduates clapped and sang along to a rousing rendition of the school’s fight song -- “For Boston” -- by the Screaming Eagles band, as students dispersed to seek out friends and family.

For many in the graduating class, which featured students from 47 states and 56 countries, the reality had only just begun to set in.

“This is the best day to be an Eagle,” said Ritchie Sullivan, 22, a graduate of the Carroll School of Management. “Everything’s all coming at once. It’s been surreal.”

For Andy Pierre of the Woods College for Advancing Studies, earning his degree is a particular honor.

“I feel so good because I’m the first person in the family to ever graduate,” he said. “So this is gonna be big when I get home.”

Once a nearly forgotten foster child, Steve Pemberton has become a beacon of hope

By Adrian Walker | Globe Columnist | May 28, 2018 On the spring day in 1989 that he graduated from Boston College, Steve Pemberton — then known as Steve Klakowicz — had never felt so utterly alone.

Everyone else seemed to have arrived with a cheering section — parents and grandparents, siblings and cousins. But as a young man who had bounced from foster home to foster home in and around New Bedford, he had no such support, he had no family.

He didn’t even know who he really was.

“When my name was called it was really quiet — just some polite applause,” Pemberton recalled.

“I realized I had been alone for so long. On that day of considerable accomplishments. There was really no one to share it with.”

Rather than wallow in sorrow, that day sparked a quest. Pemberton found both sides of his family — his white Irish-Catholic relatives, and his black Pemberton family. He wrote a remarkable memoir about the experience, “A Chance in the World.” He reclaimed his birth name. Along the way, he became a corporate executive, motivational speaker, and philanthropist.

Next week, Pemberton’s book becomes a feature film. On Wednesday night, it will be screened in 800 theaters across the country — including three in the Boston area — with the proceeds going to organizations that support children in foster care.

Pemberton, 50, survived and thrived through a combination of brilliance, tenacity, and just enough support to make it.

He was the product of an on-again, off-again relationship between a gifted prizefighter and his sometime girlfriend. They split for good when he was a toddler.

Though his mother attempted to raise him, she was an unsteady presence at best. The title of his book comes from a diary entry from one of his childhood baby sitters, who wrote, “This little boy doesn’t have a chance in the world.” (The baby sitter’s daughter shared the diary with him years later — just when he happened to be pondering a title for the book he was working on.)

When Pemberton was in the seventh grade, a teacher told him he could go to college, and handed him a brochure for Boston College. His first response: “What’s college?” He was intrigued when he was told it was somewhere you went for four years; he’d never lived in one place for four years.

At Boston College, the biracial foster child found perhaps his first place of belonging.

“It was my real first sense of family,” Pemberton said. “It was the place that accepted me without condition or reservation. That’s something to be said for a kid who’s not Catholic. When I didn’t know what my place was in the world, they said, ‘This is your place.’ ” He’s now a member of the college’s Board of Trustees.

Finding his family has been a mixed blessing. After he began his search, a social worker gave him the last known phone number for his mother. When he called the number and introduced himself, a female voice said, ”We always wondered what happened to you.” It was his grandmother.

Their first telephone conversation lasted two hours. For the first time he learned that he had siblings. He also learned that he had been born a twin: His sister died when they were less than a week old.

Pemberton didn’t find his roots in time to meet his parents, who had both died turbulent deaths in the 1970s. “Addiction claimed both their lives,” Pemberton said. “That isn’t what is listed on their death certificates, but that is what claimed them.” Some relatives have been happy to meet him and forge relationships. Others have been frosty — one sibling rejected him on explicitly racial grounds. That’s their loss.

“It’s certainly not a perfect family,” he said. “Then again, no family is.”

Pemberton lives in suburban Chicago and works as an executive for a Massachusetts company called Globoforce. He has become an evangelist for children in foster care. He wants them to know that, no matter how turbulent their existence, they are not forgotten. They are not alone. His foundation is giving foster children tickets to Wednesday’s screening, and copies of the book. “I didn’t see a movie until I was 17,” Pemberton noted ruefully.

He knows, from experience, just how tenuous that existence can be. But he also thinks of the people who helped him: the teacher who told him he could make it, the Outward Bound director who said he was a leader, the other teacher who took him in as a high school senior when he had nowhere else to go.

“I did have these powerful interactions that let me know there was still goodness in the land,” Pemberton said. “That people were capable of kindness and love and generosity. Most of those interactions were quite temporary, but I held onto them.”

Many of them may never have known what they meant to a boy without roots or family, without a chance in the world.

“They were like lighthouses,” Pemberton says now. “Think about what a lighthouse is: It’s a beacon. It guides and directs, but it’s also resolute and also immovable. They were human lighthouses, and I set my life’s compass by them.”

Now his legacy is to serve as a guide for others searching for their path.

What is Pope Francis’ effect on health care?

May 18, 2018 James F. Keenan (excerpt) Throughout the first five years of his pontificate, Pope Francis has made it clear time and again that he will not change any doctrinal teachings of the church. He is inclined, however, to expand further our understanding of those teachings. One area where Pope Francis has begun to advance Catholic teaching rather remarkably is health care.

With 649 hospitals, 1,614 continuing-care facilities, 523,040 full-time employees and yearly totals of more than five million hospital admissions, 105 million outpatient visits, 20 million emergency room visits and 527,000 new births, Catholic health care comprises the largest group of not-for-profit health care providers in the United States.

Every day, one in six patients is treated in a Catholic health care facility.

To guide those works both here in the United States and elsewhere, the Catholic Church provides teachings and directives for employees working in its own facilities as well as for Catholics working in other health care facilities.

These teachings seek to affect not only the practices in Catholic hospitals around the world but also practices in other health care facilities.

In order to appreciate the Pope Francis effect, we need to examine the legacy of his two predecessors. John Paul II influenced health care in a number of ways during his papacy on three significant issues. First, he insisted on a sanctity-of-life argument that highlighted the inviolability of human life. From this teaching, best expressed in his encyclical “The Gospel of Life” (“Evangelium Vitae”), he underlined that unborn human life could not be directly compromised under any circumstances. Following from that same sanctity-of-life teaching, he similarly held that there could be no assistance in the direct ending of a patient’s life. Though Catholic teaching had opposed both abortion and euthanasia for centuries, these two teachings were given lucidity, urgency, priority and political force

by John Paul II in a way not found in previous papacies. Moreover, such was his form of leadership that his bishops followed with the same level of commitment and focus.

Third, during his papacy a major new teaching emerged on the unresolved matters of reproductive technology, ranging from artificial insemination to in vitro fertilization and surrogacy. This teaching was determined by thenCardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the prefect for the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, with the clear approval of John Paul II. These three teachings on abortion, euthanasia and reproductive technologies are central to appreciating the effect of Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI on health care.

The concerns and emphases that Pope Francis brings to health care extend beyond these matters. Yet before we enter into how he extends these teachings, we need to note his pastoral style with regard to matters related to health care, because this style provides an idea of the originality of his contribution.

In an interview just six months after his election in 2013, the pope made a remarkable statement about the the church’s pastoral ministry: We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods…. The church’s pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be

imposed insistently. We have to find a new balance; otherwise even the moral edifice of the church is likely to fall like a house of cards, losing the freshness and fragrance of the Gospel… …In the fifth paragraph, Francis recognizes both the difficulty in appraising relevant factors in end-of-life health care and that “the mechanical application of a general rule is not sufficient.” He then turns to the primacy of the patient’s conscience: “The patient, first and foremost, has the right, obviously in dialogue with medical professionals, to evaluate a proposed treatment and to judge its actual proportionality in his or her concrete case, and necessarily refusing it if such proportionality is judged lacking.”

In the sixth paragraph, he brings in economic inequities, in particular “the growing gap in healthcare possibilities.”

Here he introduces a fairly significant factor into our understanding of end-of life issues: “Increasingly sophisticated and costly treatments are available to ever more limited and privileged segments of the population, and this raises questions about the sustainability of healthcare delivery and about what might be called a systemic tendency toward growing inequality in health care.” In the international press, this was the most frequently cited sentence from the discourse. After it, the pope reiterates his concern about shifts in the delivery of care both nationally and worldwide, saying, “access to healthcare risks being more dependent on individuals’ economic resources than on their actual need for treatment.”

In the seventh paragraph, he turns to the good Samaritan parable and insists on solidarity, specifying that “the categorical imperative is to never abandon the sick.” He concludes with a nod toward “palliative care, which...opposes what makes death most terrifying and unwelcome—pain and loneliness.”

In the eighth paragraph, Francis summons democratic societies to find legal solutions for these matters respecting “differing world views, ethical convictions and religious affiliations, in a climate of openness and dialogue.” But then he turns to human dignity and asserts that “the state cannot renounce its duty to protect all those involved, defending the fundamental equality whereby everyone is recognized under law as a human being living with others in society. Particular attention must be paid to the most vulnerable, who need help in defending their own interests.” He argues that the “recognition of the other...is the condition for all dialogue” and concludes, “Legislation on health care also needs this broad vision and a comprehensive view of what most effectively promotes the common good in each concrete situation.”

Convinced of the clarity of the church’s opposition to the “act” of euthanasia, the pope has called us beyond that stance so as to attend to the most vulnerable, who might be dying with inadequate care or without accompaniment. He pricks our consciences, asking us whether, in our disproportionate use of technology, we delude those who can afford it that “overzealous treatment” is the best means by which to show they are cared for—while at the same time, having expended those resources on technology, we become distracted from the needs of those with fewer resources.

Pope Francis also pricks our consciences on a larger spectrum of health care issues when he asks whether the health care industry furthers the economic divide that already makes a disproportionate number of resources available to those who can afford them without any mindfulness of those who cannot. In a word, he brings to health care an extraordinarily developed and consistent application of the sanctity of life argument.

James F. Keenan, S.J., a moral theologian, is the Canisius Professor at Boston College.

The 'Black Hole' That Sucks Up Silicon Valley's Money (EXCERPT) A fast-growing type of charitable account gets big tax breaks but little oversight.

ALANA SENUELS MAY 14, 2018 The San Francisco Bay Area has rapidly become the richest region in the county—the Census Bureau said last year that median household income was $96,777. It’s a place where $100,000 Teslas are commonplace, “raw water” goes for $37 a jug, and injecting clients with the plasma of youth —a gag on the television show Silicon Valley—is being tried by real companies for just $8,000 a pop.

Yet Sacred Heart Community Service, a San Jose nonprofit that helps low-income families with food, clothing, heating bills, and other services, actually received less in individual donations from the community in 2017 than it did the previous year. “We’re still not sure what it could be attributed to,” Jill Mitsch, the funds development manager at Sacred Heart, told me. It’s not the only nonprofit trying to keep donations up—the United Way of Silicon Valley folded in 2016 amidst stagnant contributions.

That’s not to say that Silicon Valley’s wealthy aren’t donating their money to charity. Many, including Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Larry Page, have signed the Giving Pledge, committing to dedicating the majority of their wealth to philanthropic causes. But much of that money is not making its way out into the community.

There are many reasons for this, but one of them is likely the increasing popularity of a certain type of charitable account called a donor-advised fund. These funds allow donors to receive big tax breaks for giving money or stock, but have little transparency and no requirement that money put into them is actually spent… …And wealthy residents of Silicon Valley are donating large sums to such funds. Last year, the Goldman Sachs Philanthropy Fund received $114 million from Jan Koum, the co-founder of WhatsApp, and $526 million from Laurene Powell Jobs, the founder of Emerson Collective, according to Bloomberg, which obtained two pages of IRS information that the agency mistakenly posted online. (Emerson Collective owns a majority stake of The Atlantic.) “Donor-advised funds have been growing at double-digit rates from year to year,” Ray Madoff, a professor at Boston College Law School and a critic of donor-advised funds, told me. “Ask any nonprofit what their growth looks like—it’s nothing like that…” ….The ability to give to a fund, receive a tax benefit, and not donate any of that money in your lifetime arose from a loophole in tax law. In 1969, Congress passed the Tax Reform Act, which differentiated between public charities like food banks and universities, and private foundations, according to Madoff, the Boston College professor. The law was passed because Congress worried that

donors to private foundations were receiving too many tax benefits without any reassurances that their money was helping the public in a timely matter. The new law required that private foundations pay out at least 5 percent of their assets every year and report who their money came from and where it went.

It also imposed greater annual limits on contributions to private foundations than those that are applicable to public charities. Public charities—defined as organizations that receive a significant amount of their revenue from small donations—were saddled with less oversight, in part because Congress figured that their large number of donors would make sure they were spending their money well, Madoff said. But an attorney named Norman Sugarman, who represented the Jewish Community Federation of Cleveland, convinced the IRS to categorize a certain type of asset—charitable dollars placed in individually named accounts managed by a public charity—as donations to public, not private, foundations… …Groups that administer donor-advised funds defend their payout rate, saying distributions from donoradvised funds are around 14 percent of assets a year. But that number can be misleading, because one donor-advised fund could give out all its money, while many more could give out none, skewing the data. In addition, those funds with high payout rates could just be giving to another donor-advised fund, rather than to a public charity, Madoff says. One-quarter of donor-advised fund sponsors distribute less than 1 percent of their assets in a year, Madoff has found.

Donor-advised funds are especially popular in places like Silicon Valley because they provide tax advantages for donating appreciated stock, which many start-up founders have but don’t necessarily want to pay huge taxes on, Madoff said. Donors get a tax break for the value of the appreciated stock at the time they donate it, which can also spare them hefty capital-gains taxes. “Anybody with a business interest can give their business interest before it goes public and save huge amounts of taxes,” Madoff said. Often, people give to donor-advised funds right before a public event like an initial public offering, so they can avoid the capital-gains taxes they’d otherwise have to pay, and instead receive a tax deduction. Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan gave $500 million in stock to the foundation in 2012, when Facebook held its initial public offering, and also donated $1 billion in stock in 2013.

Some groups are pushing for donor-advised funds to be subject to more regulation. Madoff, the Boston College professor, has urged Congress to pass legislation that would require donated funds to be passed on to charities in a certain amount of time, in exchange for the tax benefit Americans are giving them. “Right now, too many tax-subsidized contributions are being set aside indefinitely— subject to no obligation for them ever to be put to active charitable use,” Madoff and Roger Colinvaux, a professor at Columbus School of Law, wrote in a letter to the Senate Committee on Finance in July. Jan Masaoka, the CEO of the California Association of Nonprofits, told me that policy organizations like hers are talking about ways to add regulations to donor-advised funds, potentially making them subject to the same requirements as private foundations and requiring they spend a certain amount of money every year….

Why It's So Hard to Learn Another Language After Childhood

By Jamie Ducharme | May 2, 2018 Everyone knows that picking up a second language grows more difficult with age. And in a new study, scientists have pinpointed the age at which your chances of reaching total fluency plummet: 10.

The study, published in the journal Cognition, found that it’s “nearly impossible” for language learners to reach nativelevel fluency if they start learning a second tongue after age 10 — though that doesn’t seem to be because language skills go downhill at this age. “It turns out you’re still learning fast,” says study co-author Joshua Hartshorne, an assistant professor of psychology at Boston College. “It’s just that you run out of time, because your ability to learn starts dropping at around 17 or 18 years old.” Those who start a few years after age 10 may still become quite good at a language, the paper notes, but are unlikely to reach total fluency.

Why the drop in learning ability happens at the threshold of adulthood is still unclear, Hartshorne says. Possible explanations could include changes in brain plasticity, lifestyle changes related to entering the workforce or college or an unwillingness to learn new things — potentially while looking foolish in the process — that mounts with age.

Though that may seem discouraging — age 10 is far in the past for many hopeful language learners — it was heartening for scientists to learn that the critical period for language acquisition might be considerably longer than they previously thought. Some scientists believed that the brief window closes shortly after birth, while others stretched it only to early adolescence. When compared to those estimates, 17 or 18 — when language learning ability starts to drop off — seems relatively old.

The study used a unique method to reach that new finding. To compile the large and diverse group of people required for a language acquisition study, the researchers created a user-friendly grammar quiz intended to go viral. The 10minute quiz, called “Which English?,” hooked people by guessing their native language, dialect and home country based on their responses to English grammar questions. At the end of the quiz, people were asked about their actual native language, if and when they had learned any others and where they had lived.

The gimmick worked. The quiz was shared more than 300,000 times on Facebook, hit the front page of Reddit and reached trending status on 4chan. Almost 670,000 people took it, giving the researchers huge amounts of data from native- and non-native English speakers of all ages, some of whom spoke other languages and some of whom didn’t.

Analyzing participants’ responses and mistakes allowed them to draw unusually precise conclusions about language learning. (Hartshorne is currently spearheading other online language experiments, which are open to anyone.)

In addition to insights about the critical period, Hartshorne says the quiz results clearly showed that students fared better when they learned a new language by immersion, rather than simply in the classroom. Though he acknowledges it’s easier said than done, “you’d be better off moving to a country as an adult and trying to learn a language than taking it all throughout school.”

If uprooting your life isn’t an option, Hartshorne recommends mimicking an immersive environment as much as possible — that is, finding ways to have actual conversations with native speakers, rather than trying to pick up your skills from books. If you can do so, it’s perfectly possible to become conversationally proficient, if not completely fluent, even as an adult, he says.

That should be encouraging for those well beyond their elementary school years, Hartshorne says. The adult brain seems to be better at learning than researchers previously thought—even if it’s unlikely that you’ll become fluent at a language you learn later in life.

“We’re finding that you don’t start to see lack of plasticity until late adolescence, early adulthood, mid-adulthood,” Hartshorne says. “As a scientist, it’s always fun when there’s undiscovered country, but it also reminds us to be careful about the things that we don’t know. It makes me wonder, what other things do we not know about?”

Scientists Pinpoint Best Age to Learn a Second Language May 1, 2018

By Kashmira Gander Children must start to learn a new language by the age of 10 to achieve the fluency level of a native speaker, a new study has suggested.

Evidence indicates it becomes harder to learn a language other than our mother tongue as we progress through adulthood. Now, a new study suggests that children are highly skilled at learning the grammar of a new language up until the age of 17 or 18, much longer than previously thought.

But while children will continue to learn quickly past the age of 10, it is unlikely they will become fluent in the new language. Scientists believe this is because they have a smaller time frame before their learning abilities begin to weaken around 17, compared with those trying to pick up the same skills before 10.

Joshua Hartshorne, an assistant professor of psychology at Boston College who authored the study as part of his postdoctoral qualification at MIT, said the team was surprised that a language could largely be mastered until the teen years. He told Newsweek that the findings have wider implications for understanding the mind and the brain. "[In the past] researchers suggested that changes that happen in the brain at around four to five-years-old might be the culprit in our declining ability to learn language. Others focused on changes that happen at puberty. Our finding that the ability to learn language is actually preserved up until early adulthood throws a wrench in that whole discussion," he said. "It means we may need to go back to the drawing board in trying to explain why adults have trouble learning language."

To obtain their findings, which were published in the journal Cognition, researchers at MIT and Harvard studied the results of a grammar quiz completed by almost 670,000 participants, the biggest ever data set on language and learning.

Past studies have struggled to shed light on the topic as adults and children were tested in lab settings where the former were more likely to be comfortable, thus skewing the results. Instead, researchers documented the grammatical proficiency of people of different ages who started learning English at different points in their lives.

The resulting quiz—called Which English?—was designed to challenge non-native speakers. Participants were asked to state whether sentences such as “Yesterday John wanted to won the race” were incorrect. In an attempt to make the test go viral and collect more respondents, the researchers also added questions relating to the grammatical quirks of different English dialects.

Participants were asked to include information such as their age when taking the quiz and the age at which they started to learn English. "It’s been very difficult until now to get all the data you would need to answer this question of how long the critical period lasts," said Josh Tenenbaum, an MIT professor of brain and cognitive sciences and an author of the paper. "This is one of those rare opportunities in science where we could work on a question that is very old, that many smart people have thought about and written about, and take a new perspective and see something that maybe other people haven’t." Further research is now needed to understand why our ability to learn a

new language appears to drop past a certain age. "It's possible that there’s a biological change. It's also possible that it's something social or cultural," Professor Tenenbaum said.

"There’s roughly a period of being a minor that goes up to about age 17 or 18 in many societies," he continued.

"After that, you leave your home, maybe you work full time, or you become a specialized university student. All of those might impact your learning rate for any language."

Professor Hartshorne also emphasized that the study is unique because of its scope. "We tested English-speakers in nearly every country on Earth," he told Newsweek. "And although we didn’t focus on it in this paper, we learned a lot about how English varies from place to place and dialect to dialect. It turns out that the grammars of the world Englishes vary in complex and interesting ways."

April 24, 2018 Why This Philosopher Wants Her Students to Ask Someone Out, in Person Kerry Cronin was shocked to discover a decade ago that when it came to relationships, ambitious, intelligent, and extroverted college students felt lost. With hookups they were pros. But dating or romance? They didn’t know where to start.

While teaching a one-credit, pass/fail course on the meaning of life and other broad philosophical topics to seniors at Boston College, she assigned them to ask someone out on a date. Soon enough students told her they were registering for the course because they wanted that push.

This month a new documentary film based on her findings, The Dating Project, features two of her students, among other singles, and invites viewers to "take the dating assignment" themselves. Cronin, associate director of BC’s Lonergan Institute, now offers it for extra credit in a yearlong great-books course for freshmen who ponder questions like, "What’s the best way to live?" Students must ask someone out in person, plan an activity (no alcohol), spend no more than $10, and limit the date to 90 minutes. Those who choose to participate write reflection papers and present them to the class.

Cronin, who gives talks about dating on other campuses, spoke with The Chronicle about what she’s going for, pushback to the assignment, and who besides students seeks her help.

Are freshmen socialized into hookup culture, or is it something they already expect?

They’re expecting it, but they’re also trying to take the temperature when they arrive on campus. They want to figure out what it means to have a college experience. I talk to my students about drinking and binge drinking and drugs. I talk to them about cultural signaling. And I tell them that this is part of a broader conversation about what kind of person you want to be and how you want to be treated and how you want to treat people.

By second semester, a lot of students are already positioning themselves relative to hookup culture. Many students just opt out of dating altogether. They’re very busy thinking about their careers and how to pay off this huge debt they’re going to have. They’re concerned about different facets of adulting. But what I found years ago was students saying they didn’t feel they knew enough about love and romance. When I first heard that, I thought, Oh, that’s heartbreaking. And that’s not right, you know? We’re all trumpeting a "whole person" education, and as a Jesuit university, that’s one of our main principles. I’m not interested in being a life coach. I just want to have students reflect deeply on the important questions of their lives.

Is there consensus on what a hookup is?

The phrase itself is abstract, so when you tell the story, there’s social status to it without having to actually account for what you did. The definition I use now is "a physical or sexual interaction with no perceived emotional content and no perceived intention for a follow-up." The word "perceive" here is really important. What I hear from most students is that they don’t know if there’s any emotional content, because you’re not supposed to talk about that while it’s happening. The point of hookup culture is to avoid the communication. The worst buzzkill in a hookup is somebody who stops and says, "Wait a minute, what does this mean?" It’s not supposed to mean anything. And then we act surprised later that maybe it does mean something.

Do you see your assignment as the antithesis to hookup culture?

A student of mine last year asked me if I’m trying to get rid of hookup culture. No, I’m not. I’m not naïve. If I thought I could change hookup culture on college campuses, I’d go out of my mind. But these days, with so many connections on social media, we are finding that students feel very lonely. They feel people don’t really know them or understand what’s going on. They’re exporting their feelings elsewhere and living with a lot of social anxiety. I’m very concerned. I’m concerned about research that says women’s confidence levels are deteriorating while they’re in college. There isn’t a single problem to point to here. But I’m trying to chip away at one piece.

Have you heard any concerns about this assignment doing more harm than good?

The administration has been nothing but supportive. I’ve had faculty at BC and other schools say I shouldn’t be in on this dating stuff. They are rightly concerned about boundaries. But I’m not in the school of thought that a student’s life and character are off limits. We know they’re going through a tremendous amount of growth, so why would we sit out of the game of figuring out what’s going on? That’s foolish. We need to learn what’s going on in dorms and on Friday and Saturday nights. I also have people say to me that I have an old-fashioned, anti-feminist agenda that limits a woman’s agency. But I’m not trying to go back in time. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with telling heterosexual women to get over themselves and learn to ask men out.

Have you come across students who use the assignment as a way to open up about their sexuality?

I always say it’s about self-knowledge and courage. I assume that some students in the class who don’t want to do it may be working out important social issues, and maybe they don’t want to put themselves out there. That’s fine. But I’ve had students who’ve completed it who are from all walks of life. It’s a question of trust and the community we’ve built in the yearlong course. This is about looking someone in the eye and making yourself awkward and vulnerable. Students come back to me and say, "Oh my God, I can’t even remember the words I used, I was such a wreck." People hide behind screens to guard from vulnerability. I get that. We want to swipe right and reduce anxiety, because on those apps, you only get the wins.

Have you ever caught a student cheating on the assignment by, say, asking someone out on Instagram?

I’m sure there are students who’ve cheated. But if you have to cheat to ask someone out for coffee, that is totally lame. I’ve caught one student whose reflections were total bullshit, so ridiculous and cookie cutter. I emailed him back and said, "That was an interesting read, but when you actually do the assignment, let me know." My BS radar is pretty good. I tell students, If you don’t want to do the assignment, don’t. You can even write about why you didn’t want to. You can still be in on the conversation.

Do you get random inquiries from people who are like, "Help me"?

Definitely. Let’s emphasize the word "random." I got an email the other day from a 61-year-old widow who had read an article about me. She wanted to ask out some guy at work. I told her to be brave. People just want you to hear their fear. They just want someone to say, "It’s gonna be OK." I’m constantly amazed by how common-sense it is, but that’s what people need.

April 13, 2018 Dating the old-fashioned way: Film that sprang from college class follows 5 singles Dating is hard, right? You seek, you don’t find … you keep seeking. Or you seek, find, but it doesn’t end well, and you keep seeking. The scenarios are many, but the long-standing question still remains: Will I ever find that one person who is right for me?

A new documentary, “The Dating Project,” is coming to theaters April 17, to show you’re not alone in your singledom. The film, a one-night Fathom Event follows five singles (20-somethings to 40-somethings) in their quest to find love. Kerry Cronin, associate director of the Lonergan Institute and philosophy fellow at Boston College, is our guide.

Cronin has gained fame on her campus for assigning students to ask someone out on a date. For 12 years, she has required students to follow certain dating parameters, like asking for a date in person and no physical interaction (except an A-frame hug). Dates with more than two people aren’t allowed, and the asker should have a plan for the date (asking the other person what to do isn’t allowed). Cronin coaches students on how to date successfully — she explains what a proper date looks like and how the dates should advance without skipping important steps to cement a foundation for a solid relationship.

“It’s almost like the structure of manners,” Cronin said. “At their best, manners are supposed to let us know how to act and how to work around social awkwardness, but at their worst, manners make people feel excluded and that there’s some secret way that they’re supposed to act that they don’t have access to.

“Dating is the same kind of thing — at it’s worst, it can make you feel like there are normative ways you’re supposed to act, and if you’re not doing that, you’re excluded, you’re out. So at its worst, it can be a really rigid system that only rewards people who are in certain circumstances, but at it’s best, what it can offer us are ways to navigate social vulnerability and social awkwardness. At its best, it can be something where you’re just saying I just want to go get coffee with you. I’m not asking you to marry me.”

The Chicago Tribune talked to Cronin and Megan Harrington, co-writer/producer of “The Dating Project” to find out why a film like this is necessary. The interview has been condensed and edited.

Q: What was the impetus for doing this film now?

Harrington: People aren’t as happy; people are more lonely and kind of just doing what they’re told romance is supposed to be and finding that it’s a little bit empty. What I discovered along the way of doing this film is we are all in control about how we approach this (dating), how we treat others and how we’re allowed to be treated. And if we want more, then we can do that.

If we want to go out on a date, then let’s start dating in a way that professor Cronin lays it out because it takes a lot of pressure off of people. This is the script we’re going off of for this date, and now I don’t have to worry as much about what this is supposed to entail.

Q: In the film, you mention dating apps make it seem relationships aren’t big deals, but they are. Can you expound on that?

Cronin: One thing that hookup culture has done is reduce everything to just hanging out. We never really say to each other or to ourselves what we really mean or what we want.

We’re sort of putting our own desires and longings on hold because we’re not supposed to go there, that’s “too serious, that’s too much to ask, it’s too vulnerable, it’s too awkward.”

But when we do that, we stop admitting to ourselves how things leave us feeling.

As a person who is interested in philosophy, that’s really problematic because I’m interested in self-knowledge.

Hookup culture doesn’t really let us engage fully in real self-knowledge. It asks us to hide things from other people and even from ourselves. I want dating to bring that social script back a little bit, to bring a little bit of social courage back into the dating story.

Q: Why does dating confound so many generations?

Cronin: I think what’s happened since the early ’90s is hookup culture has become such a dominant social script — first on college and university campuses, but then it really took hold in the wider culture. Hookup culture became so dominant that traditional dating really was pushed aside; I think dating really became a lost social script. I think, for older people, it became a cultural thing rather than a generational thing.

Q: You’ve been teaching this “dating assignment” for over a decade, do you think dating has gotten worse or better?

Cronin: I think it’s gotten a little bit worse in the past two to three years. I have seen a shift that more students are just opting out of the whole thing (dating) altogether — they’re not dating, they’re not hooking up as much either.

But it’s not that they don’t want to. They just can’t see their way forward at all. I feel really sad about that. I think it has to do with the extended adolescence trend that’s going on, and I think a lot of our really productive conversations about sexual assault are also scaring a lot of people off of dating. That to me is a conundrum.

Q: Your solution to dating is to date differently, but how is that accomplished?

Cronin: What I want to say to people is dating is something that is really about social courage, and it’s about building skills of being able to really see the person who is sitting across the table from you and trying to reveal parts of yourself in ways that are appropriate — to see dating as a way of relating to people that is not necessarily on the way to a serious relationship. I would like to bring back an easier, casual dating that doesn’t necessarily involve intense physical intimacy or the possibility of real heartbreak and drama because that’s what scares so many people off of dating. If we can make dating something that’s more fun and not all these high stakes, then maybe traditional dating can make its way back on the scene in a robust way.

15 Colleges Where Studying Liberal Arts Pays Big

By Kim Clark | April 18, 2017 While very few people study poetry or classics to get rich, studying the humanities has a big financial payoff at a surprising array of colleges, a new analysis of college grads’ earnings has found. Of course, students who major in engineering, economics, business or computer science at the best schools tend to have the highest financial return on their tuition investments, according to new salary data collected by PayScale.com. But liberal arts and other humanities majors at 16 schools have, on average, earned at least $500,000 more than they paid for school and the typical earnings of someone who did not attend college, PayScale said……Making these numbers even more impressive: they’re only for students who finished their education with a bachelor’s. They don’t count, for example, history majors who went on to earn law degrees or M.B.As. Here is PayScale’s list of the 15 colleges with the highest financial return to a humanities degree: Est. 20-Year ROI for Humanities BAs who received financial aid

City

State

New Haven

CT

$812,000

Princeton University Princeton

NJ

$804,000

Duke University

Durham

NC

$761,000

University of Pennsylvania

Philadelphia

PA

$697,000

Washington and Lee Lexington University

VA

$694,000

Lehigh University

Bethlehem

PA

$686,000

Dartmouth College

Hanover

NH

$675,000

Harvard University

Cambridge

MA

$668,000

Virginia Military Institute (in-state)

Lexington

VA

$649,000

Union College

Schenectady NY

$593,000

Wabash College

Crawfordsville IN

$582,000

Virginia Military Institute (out of state)

Lexington

$563,000

Boston College

Chestnut Hill MA $560,000

Colgate University

Hamilton

NY

$551,000

University of California-Berkeley

Berkeley

CA

$542,000

College Yale University

VA

April 19, 2018

The innovative ways Catholic groups are helping migrants and refugees Each Tuesday afternoon in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood, a group of refugee women from places such as Iraq, Nepal and Afghanistan gather to work on textile projects. This week, some of them crochet cozies for Mason jars containing wax candles. Others embroider colorful string onto cardstock, printing “Happy Birthday!” and other greetings on the front. The items will be brought to churches and art fairs and sold online, The proceeds provide the women some extra income.

But as important as the sales is the community they are building with one another as they adjust to life in the United States.“Every time somebody comes into the studio, they all say hello to each other, they hug each other,” Neta Levinson, who runs the program, told America.

Though language can be an obstacle, the women smile, check out each other’s progress and offer assistance and ideas. Some of the women feel isolated at home, their children in school and their husbands at work. Others, who are older or perhaps now alone, came to the United States and were unable to find stable employment, so the handicraft provides an opportunity to connect with other women. Ms. Levinson said the small community, known as Loom Chicago, provides a “sanctuary” to women in need of hope.“It’s a community they get from having a lot of women in one room making art, and it’s a beautiful feeling,” she said.

Loom Chicago is one of dozens of Catholic-run organizations that are adept at meeting various challenges posed by the ongoing global refugee and migration crisis. It was highlighted among others identified in a new report from Fadica (Foundations and Donors Interested in Catholic Activities) and the Boston College Center for Social Innovation.

According to the United Nations High Commission on Refugees, more than 65 million people are now displaced, with more than 22 million of them classified as refugees. Pope Francis has called on secular and Catholic institutions to do more to assist those whom he has described as “excluded and marginalized,” and the report identified 64 programs spanning 32 countries, more than half affiliated with Catholic sisters. It is not an exhaustive list but a sampling of how Catholic organizations are using innovative techniques to address the global refugee crisis.

The Boston College center defines social innovation as “a new response to social problems,” which could include new services, organizations or products. The report found that Catholic initiatives addressing the refugee crisis are marked by their commitment to a range of Catholic social teaching, including respect for life, a commitment to the common good, care for the earth and promoting the dignity of work.

Tiziana C. Dearing, co-director of the Boston College center, told America that other unique attributes of socially innovative Catholic organizations include being part of the church’s vast international network and their willingness to engage in “radical repurposing of existing resources to put them at work for vulnerable populations.”

She pointed to a transitional home for refugees outside Pittsburgh as an example.

A local refugee resettlement agency had put out a call to charitable groups seeking housing for refugees arriving from Syria, many of whom had arrived in the Pittsburgh area. The Sisters of Charity of Nazareth responded, offering to convert a house they own from a home for one sister into transitional housing for one or two refugee families.

The report called the decision by the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth to convert the house “a profoundly welcoming action” that “shows a preferential option for the poor and vulnerable.” In addition to providing housing for the families, another group of Catholic sisters has offered to provide additional support for the families.

Ms. Dearing said some might not think providing temporary housing for refugee families is particularly innovative. But, she said, “most people are not moving out of their homes and giving them to someone else.

Sometimes innovation is just being radical with what you've got.”

The notion of social innovation is not entirely new.

Ashoka, an organization founded in 1980 to promote social entrepreneurship, works with project leaders in 90 countries. That group defines social entrepreneurs as “individuals with innovative solutions to society’s most pressing social, cultural, and environmental challenges.” Those individuals “apply a sense of empathy for others, identify a specific problem or opportunity and give themselves permission to do something about it, and then use a combination of knowledge, resources, and determination to tackle it.”

But the Fadica study sought to highlight projects that encapsulate a Catholic approach to addressing societal challenges, offering a range of examples that live out these principles.

For example, the Sisters of the Good Shepherd, who have a charism to work with migrants and refugees, conducted job training projects for 1,200 women in Bolivia and Chile who were at risk of becoming migrants. “An amazing statistic...all 1,200 women got a job. And 60 percent of the women who were potentially going to migrate decided to stay with their families,” Fadica president and C.E.O. Alexia Kelley told Catholic News Service.

The project also built community with the women, who otherwise largely lead isolated lives, she added. “To me, this is getting at the root cause of migration” and preventing it, Ms. Kelley said. The Sisters of the Good Shepherd sponsored seven projects cited in the study.

Philanthropists and charities seeking to respond to the refugee crisis should be patient, flexible and willing to partner with other nonprofits, the report says. They should also recognize that tackling new projects is not always easy—and set aside “risk capital” for ideas that “sometimes fail,” and also agree to fund operating costs and help replicate successful projects.

For Ms. Dearing, the Boston College researcher, Catholic social teaching and social innovation are a match made in heaven.

“This whole concept of social innovation is at some level inherently Catholic in itself,” she said. “Catholic values challenge us to welcome the stranger, and I think these organizations are coming out of a tradition that make it necessary to do this work.”

Why There Is No ‘Liberal Tea Party’ April 17, 2018

By Matt Grossmann and David A. Hopkins In October 2015, John Boehner was driven from office by right-wing members of his own caucus. His successor, Paul Ryan, despite having been chosen as the Republicans’ 2012 vice-presidential nominee based on his ideological bona fides, faced similar pressure from his right as speaker — ultimately deciding to spend only three years in the role before announcing his resignation from the House last week.

Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi, the minority leader, is still leading her caucus despite losing her party’s majority nearly eight years ago.

Since the election of Donald Trump, political analysts have expected a left-wing version of the Tea Party movement to arise. But Republicans still suffer from more ideological dissension even after gaining control of Washington.

As the 2018 nomination season gets underway, analysts anticipate a network of insurgent candidates and activists to seek a liberal purification of the Democratic Party, in the same way that Tea Party members took aim at a detested Republican “establishment” via a series of formidable primary challenges and congressional leadership battles. Yet there has been no evidence of a national, ideologically motivated rebellion among Democratic primary voters, interest groups or donors.

The lack of a “liberal Tea Party” reflects a fundamental and longstanding asymmetry between Republicans and Democrats. The Republican Party is the agent of an ideological movement; most Republican politicians, activists and voters view their party as existing to advance the conservative cause.

Because their goals of reducing the scope of government and reversing cultural change are difficult to achieve in practice, Republican officeholders are vulnerable to accusations of failing to uphold principles. They risk becoming targets of interest groups, media outlets and rival politicians who see their role as enforcing symbolic commitment to conservative orthodoxy.

The Democratic Party, by contrast, is organized as a coalition of social groups. Democratic voters tend to view politics as an arena of intergroup competition rather than a battlefield for opposing philosophies, and the party is dominated by an array of discrete interests that choose candidates on the basis of demographic representation and capacity to deliver policy. Tensions within the party coalition have eased over time — to the benefit of Democratic leaders, who are now better able to satisfy the various demands of their members and avoid facing a mutiny from within.

Democratic voters detest Mr. Trump just as much as Republicans disliked Barack Obama, but they have different ways of expressing their opposition. The Tea Party movement reflected a popular dissatisfaction with cultural change, of which Mr. Obama’s election was a powerful symbol. Politicians, media personalities and interest group leaders on the right encouraged these sentiments but channeled them into opposition to Democratic economic priorities such as the Affordable Care Act by activating broader symbolic conservative predispositions.

Republican critics accused Mr. Obama of imposing socialism and favoring runaway government; Democrats attack Mr. Trump for his mistreatment of vulnerable social groups. The most visible manifestations of Democratic mobilization since Mr. Trump’s election have been a series of protests, each focused on one issue and led by a specific element of the group coalition. Large-scale national events have highlighted the concerns of feminists, racial minorities, young people, environmentalists and unionized public employees. Democrats promote a different cause nearly every week, with each rally promoted as an opportunity to mobilize social groups for elections and a practical policy agenda.

Mr. Trump’s rise has jump-started political activity among Democrats, but this resurgent energy has seldom produced fierce internal battles. Lara Putnam and Theda Skocpol, who have studied emerging grass-roots networks of Democratic activists, report that they “hail from across the broad ideological range from center to left” but are “working shoulder-to-shoulder” rather than igniting intraparty squabbles — a pragmatic mobilization, they explained, aimed at winning general elections.

This year, Democratic candidates remain focused on challenging vulnerable Republican-held seats more than purging ideologically impure incumbents. Unlike Republican debates over philosophical fidelity, Democratic primaries produce arguments about who will do a better job addressing the real-world priorities of key constituencies as well as competition to secure endorsements from party-aligned interest groups. Liberals have dutifully mobilized behind Democrats (often centrist) who fit their districts, leading to special-election victories like Conor Lamb’s recent capture of a Republican-leaning seat in Pennsylvania.

Liberal candidates and activists can succeed in pushing the Democratic Party to the left on specific issues. But they will do so by appealing to the interests and loyalties of social groups rather than engaging in broader ideological debates.

Cynthia Nixon started her campaign for governor of New York by describing herself as a “strong progressive alternative” to the “centrist” incumbent Andrew Cuomo, but such abstract ideological language is unlikely to persuade the state’s Democratic electorate to abandon the sitting governor. To prevail, Ms. Nixon will need to convince party-aligned groups not only that she is more sympathetic to their concerns but also that she is well equipped to work the levers of government to deliver concrete policy achievements.

Any future liberal challenger to Ms. Pelosi as House leader will face the same challenge. Republicans often prize expressions of symbolic ideological affinity. But most Democrats give precedence to more tangible rewards.

Matt Grossman (@MattGrossmann), an associate professor of political science at Michigan State University, and David A. Hopkins (@DaveAHopkins), an associate professor of political science at Boston College, are the authors of “Asymmetric Politics.”

April 11, 2018 Migration aid project study focuses on ‘Catholic social innovation’ Mark Pattison | Catholic News Service

A study by Boston College’s Center for Social Innovation found nearly 200 Catholicoriginated projects both in the United States and around the world that used Catholic social innovation to help stem the worldwide migration and refugee crisis.

The study, funded by FADICA - an acronym for Foundations and Donors Interested in Catholic Activities - was issued earlier this spring. The study is the first part of a three-year Catholic social innovation initiative sponsored by FADICA in partnership with Boston College.

“The research revealed that Catholic social innovation in the refugee crisis is made distinct by fostering or leveraging social capital and repurposing existing resources to solve a new problem,” the executive summary of the report said.

One example was highlighted by Alexia Kelley, FADICA’s president and CEO, during an April 10 phone interview with Catholic News Service.

The Sisters of the Good Shepherd, who have a charism to work with migrants and refugees, conducted job training projects for 1,200 women in Bolivia and Chile who were at risk of becoming migrants. “An amazing statistic … all 1,200 women got a job. And 60 percent of the women who were potentially going to migrate decided to stay with their families,” Kelley said.

The project also built community with the women, who largely live isolated lives, she added. “To me, this is getting at the root cause of migration: preventing migration by addressing the root cause of migration,” Kelley said. The order sponsored seven projects cited in the study.

Of the projects studied by Boston College, 64 of them were specifically cited for being noteworthy. A bit more than half were sponsored by Catholic sisters. About two dozen were in the United States, with the other projects scattered across the globe.

Among the projects held out for praise were Stone House, where nuns converted their own home into a shelter in Pennsylvania, and the No Strings Partnership, a puppet company and a nonprofit organization partnering to help displaced children in the Middle East deal with trauma after fleeing war and violence.

The study defined Catholic social innovation as “a new response to social problems … that have been with us for some time but have been difficult to address effectively and/or efficiently. The response might take the form of a new service, organization, product, structure, paradigm or approach to resource development. It should have the potential to transform the problem, the possibility of being sustainable and the promise of enhancing social justice.”

The principles and values of Catholic social teaching also were deemed key in the study. They included human life and dignity, the common good, rights and responsibilities, a preferential option for the poor and vulnerable, the dignity of work, solidarity, subsidiarity, care of the earth, integral human development and “welcoming the stranger,” defined as “emphasizing radical hospitality or offering a new interpretation of what it means to welcome the stranger in an immigrant church.”

“We have so many resources and assets in the Catholic Church, whether assets or buildings or people,” Kelley said. “They’re not all financial.” She added, “We don’t have to create new organizations. We have strong institutions and organizations that have been around for decades, and centuries. But due to the extent of this crisis, they have been creatively looking at how we create new ways to respond to the scale of this challenge.”

Kelley said the survey findings were shared with FADICA member Catholic philanthropic groups during the organization’s annual meeting. “There were several representatives of the organizations that were featured who spoke to our members, and it was very well received,” she noted.

The study recommended several funding principles to foundations, among them patience, flexibility, subsidiarity, partnership with grantees and “blended dollars.”

“With emerging social enterprises, be open to using for-profit dollars as well as philanthropic dollars to help confront this crisis,” it said.

It also suggested setting aside money akin to a “risk capital” fund. “New initiatives sometimes fail. Consider allocating some of your grant portfolio to ‘risk capital’ that allows you to invest in new ideas and absorb the losses if they fail,” the study said. “Then, fund learning from the failure so you and the grantee get smarter.”

Kelley told CNS the focus for the second year of the initiative, while not definitively settled, will look at areas of parish vitality.

April 5, 2018

Food delivery right to your dorm door: How some campus dining halls are competing with GrubHub There was a time when the only sure thing about college dining was packing on the freshman 15. A typical dinner meant mystery meat or soggy pasta, then hours goofing off around a communal table. If dining halls were where memories were made, the recollections aren’t of urgency or good food.

But a funny thing happened from those generations to now. Health-conscious students raised on restaurant food are being plied with quinoa bowls and gourmet coffees prepared by cafeteria chefs and baristas. Quality not being enough, schools are taking things further, offering Starbucks-style apps for students to order ahead, grab-and-go gourmet meals to reheat in rooms, and cafeteria food delivered right to dorms.

Which explains why Kelsey Bishop, a finance and entrepreneurship major at Boston College, thinks it’s entirely normal to sit in her morning Financial Policy class and tap her order into an app for a veggie omelet for pickup at the school’s Hillside Cafeteria.

The senior will use the app again to skip the line and order soup a few hours later. And sometimes picking up food can seem like too much work, so after late nights out, she and her roommates will tap their phone and, voila, breakfast is delivered from the dining hall to her dorm — like room service in a four-star hotel, minus the linen-draped tray.

BC is hardly alone on the frontiers of dining convenience. From Amherst to Cambridge, there are gourmet-to-go meal cases and online ordering for the dining hall grill stations. Last week, there was even a campuswide ruckus at Harvard when a glitch in the software system left students unable to preorder their grilled cheese sandwiches.

At Boston University, a school-sanctioned startup called Stoovy Snacks is taking on GrubHub, its distinguishing factor simply is that its couriers are BU students with campus ID cards, meaning they can cover the “last mile” and make deliveries directly to students’ doors. “Any other food delivery can come to the lobby, but they can’t get past security. We’re offering door-to-door service,” said Aaron Halford, a Boston University sophomore who started the business last fall, inspired in part by his own lethargy. “I think there are a lot of wealthy, lazy kids that don’t want to go down the elevator to pick up food,” he said.

Put plainly, the national trend for simple, on-demand meals doesn’t stop at the campus green. Universities facing budget shortfalls or pushback over tuition hikes are increasingly looking to dining halls as a way to generate revenue, according to the Hechinger Report, a nonprofit media outlet covering inequality in education. The average school charges $4,500 for a meal plan for an academic year, or about 70 percent more per day than if students bought and prepared their own meals. But those numbers can go much higher: Wellesley College’s mandatory meal plan costs $7,442, or about $10 per meal.

Students who do that math and realize that they can find cheaper alternatives threaten to upend those profit margins. So being able to compete with a rising tide of quick delivery options not only keeps those dollars on campus, but is increasingly important to universities’ bottom lines.

“You have to try to keep up with everything going on and be attractive to students, and most of what they’re doing is ordering on their phone,” said Elizabeth Emery, the head of dining services at Boston College. “We’re benchmarking not by what other universities are doing, but at restaurants and quick casuals in the Boston area.”

Emery introduced on-demand ordering on campus last year and now handles about 200 mobile orders a day (she lured students into using the app by only offering smoothies through the service). She recently teamed up with a student startup to offer deliveries from dining halls; students pay a $5 delivery fee.

Emery says the tech taps into students’ natural digital habits. “We know students are ordering Ubers to go from Upper campus to Lower campus” — a distance of less than three-quarters of a mile — and are increasingly placing meal orders from outside restaurants, she said. “There is so much competition out there from Uber Eats and Amazon. And Whole Foods is now offering grocery delivery.”

For universities who are feeding sizable populations, like the 22,000 students and faculty served daily at UMass Amherst, new ordering technology can help manage the production of its kitchen staff. “The millennial and Gen Z [student] wants convenience with everything,” said Ken Toong, executive director of UMass Amherst’s network of dining services, which is testing ondemand ordering. He anticipates that delivery will be introduced in the next few years and says getting creative with offerings can lead to new revenue streams. Take, for example, the recent introduction of UMass Fresh dinners. Toong realized that 11,000 of the school’s students live off campus and weren’t buying dinners on site. So he looked to trends like Blue Apron meal kits and began offering heat-and-eat meals — think locally raised lemon-roasted chicken with honey glazed carrots and mac and cheese on the side — through the meal plan. The dinners typically cost about $10 and can serve two people, he said. They now sell between 75 to 100 meals a day. The university also has introduced holiday meal kits, selling boxes stuffed with locally sourced fixings for Thanksgiving and other holidays that can feed a small army for $99.95.

These innovations reflect a growing emphasis on convenience, and succeed in that they “keep funds on campus and keep the community engaged,” said Patti Klos, board president of the National Association of College and University Dining Services, who also oversees the dining operations at Tufts University.

Yet even as schools push to create new offerings, they still must contend with an onslaught of startups. “So many college campuses are really food deserts. My sister at University of Michigan would have to shop at Walgreens for groceries,” said Mackenzie Barth, cofounder of Spoon University, a website targeting the college-age foodie. “There are so many options, and there’s a higher bar now. It’s really important for universities and dining halls to focus on technology to basically play that game with college students. If they’re not there, they’re not going to pay attention to it.”

The food industry sees the student demographic as a key market, said Josh Evans, chief revenue officer for the meal kit company Chef’d, which in 2017 partnered with Spoon University, owned by Food Network parent Scripps Networks, to create a line of meals targeting the dorm-room diner. They now serve more than 300 campuses nationwide.

Evans said finding a way into the college market came with its own lessons. The original idea to send a week’s worth of food to students for $150 was upended when the company realized its boxes contained far more than a typical mini-fridge could hold. So it dropped the price to $49 and now focuses on recipes that meet students’ demands for constant snacking (apple pie overnight oats are a favorite). Kits sold to the 18- to 22-year-old age group now account for 10 percent of overall sales. “It’s a huge focus for us,” Evans said.

The company hopes to partner with universities to offer meal kits through meal plans, a concept that parallels Blue Apron’s own recent announcement that it would begin selling kits in grocery stores. And it’s seeking partnerships with back-to-school registry sites to enable parents and grandparents to buy subscription plans for students as graduation gifts. “If a grandparent signs up a student for a Spoon U meal kit, that’s a whole new set of buyers,” Evans said.

Such deliveries can lead to a whole new set of ancillary issues. The recent uptick in meal kit deliveries, said Tom Clarke, the system manager at Boston College’s mailroom, has meant his team must flag perishable items and send out e-mails reminding students to pick them up before they spoil. “We throw it away if it starts leaking,” he said.

Bishop, the BC senior, is often on the receiving end of those e-mails and says finding deals on meal kits has allowed her to opt for a lower-cost meal plan.

And having the flexibility to eat on her own terms is worth every penny. “After a while, you get sick of eating salads,” she said.

March 28, 2018 Cao Jun: the dance and the chance of it The Chinese painter Cao Jun is an artist out of time. He doesn’t fit into the concept-driven world of contemporary art. He works and lives on a different philosophical trajectory, firmly rooted in traditional Chinese aesthetics.

In “Cao Jun: Hymns to Nature,” at the McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College through June 3, the painter adheres to an essentially Taoist template, ultimately using it as a springboard into exuberant action painting.

The tenets of the ancients give his works gas: Nature is generative; painting aims not to depict it, but to embody it.

This approach folds easily into a certain kind of abstract expressionism, but it takes no interest in 21st-century painterly concerns about space, three-dimensionality, storytelling, digital visions, or even the environment.

Cao is out of the discourse, but his work is vital and light on its feet. Whether he paints a burbling rush and suck of swoony blues, or a bold lion (in “National Spirit”) with such fleet precision you can count the hairs in its mane, he engages with life’s force. His stance insists he be awake to nature twice: imbibing it, and expressing it.

Born in 1966, Cao spent many years in China’s Shandong province, near Mount Tai, a historically sacred site. He went to a mining college and worked for the forestry service. He has said that he knows the mountain’s height with his feet, its character with his heart, and its spirit with his soul.

Unlike art historical landscape painters such as Albert Bierstadt, or contemporary environmental painters such as Alexis Rockman, Cao is not trying to glorify nature, fix it, or lament humanity’s stewardship of it. He is simply a part of it, in his visions and in his actions. He mixes many of his own mineral pigments (oh, the incandescent tones!), and he often makes his own paper.

Those Western artists follow in a tradition that stems from a worldview fundamentally different from Cao’s. Painters in the West have grappled with nature as expansive, wild, or majestic — but always as something other. Landscapes have been a perfect tool for grappling with space, and thus with ordering and mastering the world around us.

Space does not appear to be Cao’s concern. The Chinese word for landscape painting, “shan-shui,” translates as “mountains and waters.” The tradition isn’t about “scapes” at all, but about the elements. Chinese painting springs from calligraphy; motion, action, and line are paramount. Not space, and not stolid form, as is often the case in Western art.

The show’s curator, John Sallis, a professor of philosophy at BC, visited Cao in China in 2012. Sallis knew well the landscape paintings of the Song Dynasty. A millennium ago, artists such as Guo Xi anchored their imagery with

a master mountain, and adorned it with water — a river, waterfalls — and mist, cloaking the scene in necessary mystery.

Cao, Sallis saw, was riffing on that format. Works from that scintillating series, in ink and watercolor on paper, are on view. Some, such as “Endless Rivers and Mountains,” revolve around a master mountain. In others, Cao depicts several peaks. In all of them, the artist begins with delicate ink drawing, and finishes with a pigment pour of glorious blue.

The craggy landscape overflows the sheet in “Thousands of Rivers Converge,” rendering a perilous scene that verges on abstract. Rocks open to a cracked and spotted nothingness. A blast of icy blue spills in — an anomalous gust across the land, like a visitation.

The artist has raised the stakes on a traditional freehand technique known as ink splashing. He calls it color splashing. Chinese modernist Zhang Daqian, Cao’s aesthetic godfather, took a similar approach in the 1960s, also topping off traditional imagery with splashes.

And like Zhang, Cao makes botanical paintings — eloquent renderings of red lotus blossoms on long, arching stems. “Poetry’s Evocative Power Over Wind and Fog” tops those forms with fluid blots of black, purple, and gold, which float from the flowers like shadows shooed away by their beauty.

You see why painters of the New York School attracted Cao — Pollock flicking his wrist, Frankenthaler pouring her acrylics.

They entrusted themselves to paint’s fluidity in a way that recalled the flow and blot of ancient calligraphers. Cao, too, has discovered freedom in the dance and the chance of it.

Having lived and worked in China and New Zealand, he moved to Long Island in 2013 and walked in Pollock’s footsteps. But where Pollock would, most famously, fling paint, Cao is more deliberate.

He mixes different consistencies of paint. He pours, but he may then brush. You can read his fresh, roiling paintings as pure abstractions. I prefer to see nature. “River of Stars Crossing Time and Space,” in gold, purple, and burning red, heaves and opens into a nebula chattering with dust and light.

My favorite, “Poetic Water,” was inspired by a visit to the South Pole. Cao leaned over the back of his boat, mesmerized by the sun playing on the churn of arctic water.

If his aim is to embody nature’s capriciousness, here it is: darting, smoky blues, diamond glints of aqua, foamy whites; dissolution and formation; surge and stillness. Constancy only in change: Nature. Chinese art seeks to be its channel. Learning and tradition provide the riverbed; creation and creator are the river.

That’s Cao’s path. It’s not slick work, and it’s not new. But it’s sincere, and he does it masterfully.

This Harry Potter-themed college acceptance video will make you want to go back to school Abigail Hess | 28 March 2018 High schoolers across the country are eagerly awaiting letters confirming they've gotten into college, but many may also still secretly dream of getting into Hogwarts.

One school wants to let them experience both. While students spend years stressing over grades, essays and extracurriculars to make themselves appealing to colleges, once decisions are mailed, colleges must convince accepted students to attend their school. This means sending school representatives to talk to admitted students, mailing glossy brochures and producing enticing videos.

This year, Boston College appealed to Potterheads with a spellbinding video that will charm even the most skeptical of muggles. The school's Bapst Library, lovingly referred to on campus as "the Harry Potter library," features prominently.

Check out the video below:

March 28, 2018 Brighton school an education ‘lab’

The Saint Columbkille Partnership School in Brighton will become a “laboratory school” for teachers and researchers, developing the best teaching methods to share with other urban Catholic schools across the country.

Through a new initiative with Boston College’s Lynch School of Education, the laboratory school expects to improve teacher training, research and professional development.

It is a next step for the Brighton Catholic school, where kids start learning Spanish in the third grade, where civics lessons are beginning to get integrated into prekindergarten classes and English language arts has a social justice focus.

“We’re like a teaching hospital. The ultimate goal is that we can be a solution for many other Catholic urban schools. We have a template and we can do the research,” said William Gartside, head of Saint Columbkille Partnership School, which teaches prekindergarten to eighth grade.

“Teachers are also designers of the research and are given time to work on these problems with teams.”

“The most distinctive feature of a lab school relationship is the opportunity to do research,” said Lynch School Dean Stanton Wortham. “The lab school would allow for the exploration of innovative teaching ideas.”

The first target is English language learning. This week, a steering committee was formed to develop teacher training for how best to teach students whose first language is not English. In September, teachers will get trained and start using the new practices they learn in the classroom.

The effort is already gaining interest from other schools, Gartside said. He has fielded questions from school leaders in New York City, Philadelphia and Milwaukee.

The new effort is part of a longstanding partnership between the two schools. Boston College, the Archdiocese of Boston and St. Columbkille in 2006 forged a partnership to save the Catholic school on the brink of closure. Since that time, the school has grown from 175 to 430 students, with a diverse student population of roughly 50 percent white, 23 percent Hispanic, 10 percent Asian and 10 percent black. Students speak 23 different languages.

“We are taking it to the next level. We can target research co-designed by the university and us,” Gartside said.

March 27, 2018

Researchers find evidence of 1755 earthquake at bottom of Lynn pond

Researchers say they’ve found evidence of the 1755 Cape Ann earthquake, the largest to hit New England in recorded history, in an unlikely place — the bottom of a muddy pond in Lynn.

Researchers decided to look for evidence in New England lakes that were near the earthquake’s epicenter. They settled on 44-acre Sluice Pond, said Katrin Monecke, the lead author of the study and a geosciences professor at Wellesley College.

“We concentrated on lake sediments for one reason — lakes form a very good geologic archive because every year you deposit one layer of sediment and so you get very good, undisturbed records, especially if you find deep lakes,” she said.

The team extracted two sediment cores from the depths of the pond to search for signs of the earthquake that shook New England more than 250 years ago.

“When you have ground-shaking, these slopes in the lake basin become unstable and sediment from the shore slides into the deep basin,” Monecke said. “We were able to find a layer of such sediment in Sluice Pond that we can date back to basically 1755.”

The team’s research was published in the journal Seismological Research Letters.

The earthquake, which had a magnitude of 6 to 6.25, had a huge effect on Boston, said John Ebel, one of the authors of the study and a seismologist at Boston College’s Weston Observatory. Brittle structures and unreinforced brick walls came crashing down. About a third of the chimneys in Boston were damaged and needed to be repaired or replaced, he said.

Faneuil Hall’s iconic grasshopper steeple came toppling down during the quake and had to be repaired, Ebel said.

“They say the streets in Boston were covered with so many bricks that you couldn’t drive a horse and carriage through them afterward,” he said.

The pond contains up to 20 feet of sediment deposited there since the retreat of glaciers from New England.

The sediments the researchers looked at were mostly homogeneous, with a rich, dark brown color, she said. But some parts were a lighter brown. After running several tests — including analyzing grain size, studying plant debris, and quantifying organic carbon content — the team was able to clearly identify differences in the sediments before and after the earthquake, Monecke said.

“It clearly shows the period where the steep sides from the lake were washed into the deep basin,” she said.

Looking at lake sediments could provide a crucial window into the distant past, researchers believe.

“Strong earthquakes in New England leave a record in the organic-rich sediments of small ponds. Such lakes are abundant in this formerly glaciated terrain and can be used to establish paleoseismic records for a region where the recurrence interval of large, potentially damaging earthquakes is mostly unknown,” the study said.

Ebel said, “We now have evidence of lake sediments in the 1755 earthquake and . . . if we can go backward in time, we can see how often strong earthquakes have occurred in the area. Right now we’ve only got one earthquake, so we’re learning how to look for patterns.

It’s an assessment of probability.”

This information will be used in national seismic hazard maps, which chart the probability and intensity of earthquakes in a certain area, Monecke said. If seismologists know what type of ground-shaking has occurred in the past, they can show the likelihood of a similar quake in the future.

Basically, Monecke said, with the help of pond mud, people could someday have a better idea of what kind of earthquake danger they’re in.

“These maps also inform building designs,” she said. “It’s information that can help a community prepare for a hazard.”

March 23, 2018 Goldman Sachs CEO talks retirement during Boston visit If Lloyd Blankfein has a retirement date in mind, he wasn’t going to share it with his audience in Boston.

The Goldman Sachs chief was interviewed by State Street CEO Jay Hooley — who, by the way, is making his own retirement plans — at the Boston College Chief Executives Club on Thursday. Blankfein held forth at the Boston Harbor Hotel on various topics: the financial meltdown, Goldman’s push into retail banking, and his use of Twitter to get his messages across.

Then there was the topic of his pending retirement. Blankfein has been the investment bank’s CEO for 12 years, making him one of Wall Street’s longest-serving top bosses. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month that he could retire as soon as the end of this year. David Solomon, a Blankfein lieutenant, subsequently emerged as the heir apparent.

Blankfein, 63, noted how reading about his retirement reminded him of the story of Huck Finn listening to his own eulogy, an observation he originally posted on Twitter.

Hooley asked Blankfein if he had a next act lined up. No, not yet. “I’m worried about it,” Blankfein said.

The timing of Blankfein’s departure remains unclear. But he is steeling himself for the inevitable.

“When things are going badly, you can’t leave,” Blankfein said. “When things are going well, you don’t want to leave. So almost by definition, you have to leave when you don’t want to leave. I know that I have to leave when I don’t want to leave.”

State Street, meanwhile, has made no secret about Hooley’s departure. In November, the Bostonbased financial giant said Hooley would retire from the CEO post by the end of 2018, and will remain as chairman throughout 2019. Ron O’Hanley was promoted to president and chief operating officer, and will succeed Hooley as CEO.

March 22, 2018 Blankfein Says His Goldman Departure Must Come Before He's Ready Lloyd Blankfein said a lack of clear options for a second career means he’ll need the resolve to relinquish his post atop Goldman Sachs Group Inc. before he has something else lined up.

“The government doesn’t seem that available for me and I’m not sure I want to die at my desk, so that creates a problem,” Blankfein, the Wall Street bank’s chief executive officer, said Thursday at the Boston College Chief Executives Club. “I don’t think I’m destined to leave because I’m finding something else attractive, I just think I’m going to have to have the discipline to leave when I want to stay.”

Blankfein, 63, said a report this month that he had made plans to step down as soon as this year wasn’t correct, but that it may become so once he makes a decision. Last week, Goldman Sachs took steps to name a successor, saying Harvey Schwartz would resign and leave David Solomon as the sole president and chief operating officer, and the most likely heir apparent.

Blankfein said Thursday that he’s been thinking a lot about his 12-year tenure as CEO and that his wife has told him she doesn’t think he should step down. But he isn’t ready to retire for a life of golf, he said.

“I know I want to do something,” Blankfein said. “I’d like to have a runway,” he said, adding, “I’m still looking.”

Scholars Talk Writing: Carlo Rotella

By Rachel Toor | March 21, 2018 Carlo Rotella believes it serves academics well to write in different registers and for different readerships.

And he practices that credo both when he writes and when he teaches.

For the Scholars Talk Writing series, we discussed a course he teaches at Boston College for graduate students and undergraduates called "Experimental Writing for Scholars."

As director of American studies at the college, he has written for mainstream publications like The New York Times Magazine, The Boston Globe, The New Yorker, the Chicago Tribune, Slate, and Harper’s Magazine, among others. He’s also the author of Good With Their Hands: Boxers, Bluesmen, and Other Characters From the Rust Belt; Cut Time: An Education at the Fights; and, most recently, Playing in Time: Essays, Profiles, and Other True Stories. A mutual friend says "Carlo uses book smarts to write about people with street smarts."

Tell me about the "Experimental Writing" course.

We start from the premise that academic research and field knowledge doesn’t always have to lead to writing the usual scholarly articles and books. We try out other forms, mostly drawn from journalism and the essay: a magazine profile, newspaper op-ed, interview, explainer piece, personal essay, review essay, memoir, in-memoriam essay, interview, public lecture, and more. Our objective is to expand our ways to write about what we learn in the classroom, the library, and the archive; to try out unfamiliar kinds of writing and legwork; and to be a lot more purposeful about addressing audiences.

What are some of the habits of mind or writerly tics you encourage graduate students to overcome? And what new tricks do you teach them?

You mean besides not beginning sentences with "Thus we see, under conditions of late capitalism, …"? Trying to sound formidable and intimidatingly brilliant would be one obvious trap to avoid. Another is mistaking abstraction for erudition.

When we workshop student drafts, we often end up talking about what could be turned into a scene — some kind of embodied action that allows the writer to show the reader what matters, rather than standing back at the usual thousand-yard distance and explaining things away in the abstract.

Making a priority of showing over telling can change your mechanics. In trade writing it’s more common to give a paragraph a narrative topic sentence, structure it as a story, and arrive at a kicker that draws a larger point from that story and signposts where we are in the developing argument. That’s a change for academics used to putting a paragraph’s main assertion into its topic sentence.

Changing your approach to writing can also lead to revising your research agenda. If you’re trying to write more scenes, you may have to go out and do more legwork — digging in archives, interviewing people, participantobserving, whatever it takes. It may be something as simple as figuring out what a particular street looked like on a particular day in 1918, and suddenly you find yourself checking century-old weather, getting into architectural and social history, and digging through City Planning archives.

Experimenting with new writing styles doesn’t just mean getting rid of writing tics. It can lead to a fresh conception of what you’re after and how to get it.

You have colleagues visit the class to talk about different forms. Can you tell us a bit about what students have heard from them?

Some describe how they’re making a jump from scholarly forms to trade writing, like Eric Weiskott, a medievalist (and an associate professor of English at Boston College), who told us how he came to start writing explainer pieces like "Before ‘Fake News’ Came False Prophecy." Jim Smith, whose research on the Magdalen Laundries helped start a church-state upheaval in Ireland, told us how he learned to deliver the essence of his own research across a wide range of genres — from scholarly collaborations to being interviewed on radio and TV. You have to have deep command of your work and its consequences in order to get something substantive through the tight aperture afforded by a drive-time radio interview, which turns out to be excellent training for even the most specialized academic tasks, like the Q&A after a job talk.

These guest-speaker visits have value not only for their how-to aspects but also because students can see their teachers wrestling with questions of genre and audience, and with the problem of how to convey both command and humane attention to their subjects. We want those questions on the table, and it’s good to see that they remain open and alive throughout an academic writer’s career.

Are there scholarly journals that seem to be especially open to nonstandard academic writing? Or are you focused on teaching students to write for general-interest publications?

There’s a range of possibilities, especially in the borderlands between academia and the trade press: literary quarterlies, reviews, outlets like The Conversation that are specifically intended for academics who want to try something different. I’ve recently come across a couple of formally inventive, original essays that were published in Rethinking History, a journal that is committed to encouraging experimentation.

And sometimes a scholarly journal will take a chance on something outside its usual purview, even if the only thing experimental about the piece is a more trade approach. Many years ago, when I was between academic jobs and feeling a need to spray my CV with pheromones of the sort that attract English departments, I sent to Critical Inquiry a magazine profile of a woman boxer I’d wanted to place in The Atlantic. All I did was add footnotes and take the analytical stepbacks between scenes a little deeper than usual.

And it works the other way, too. When I wrote a column for The Boston Globe, I’d regularly draw on my own research and showcase other scholars’ work. A column, like an op-ed, can serve as a handy vehicle for bringing research to readers and vice versa.

What can scholars do to improve their prose, even if they say they have no interest in reaching a wider readership?

Scholarly writing is a subgenre of nonfiction writing; it’s a lot better when it’s edited well. Given the current conditions of academic writing, you have to be prepared to supply (or to get your unpaid friends to supply) your own editing to fill the large gap between referees’ reports, which tend to stick to the big picture, and the kind of line-editfor-house-style that academic journals can usually provide. Much of what I’ve learned about structure, proportion, tone, narrative and character, scenes, and "stepbacks" I’ve reverse-engineered from what magazine and trade-house editors did to my drafts. So even if your intent is to write for regular academic journals, it might be worthwhile to do some cross-training on the trade side.

What general writing principles do you think apply across all disciplines?

Clarity is a cardinal virtue, obscurity one of our supervillains. There’s no idea so complicated that you can’t lay it out in clear, plain language. If you can’t, there’s something wrong with your command of the idea, or with the idea

itself. Or, you’re falling into the classic academic-writer trap of being obscure because you’re afraid you won’t sound smart enough if you just say it so people can understand what you mean.

Another basic principle: Treat narrative and character as tools for making an argument, not as gimmicks to hook the reader. Telling stories about people provides one of the best ways to show how characters live the consequences of your argument. This is one sure way to build into the DNA of your writing an answer to the "So what?" question.

And you have to answer that question. Whether you’re writing a personal essay about your grandmother’s hands, making a technical argument about Smollett’s diction, or discussing lead in the water supply, there’s a crucial point where your parochial interests touch some larger set of interests. A lot of academic work buries or brushes past this point on the way to making its case-in-detail, and a lot of weak trade writing hammers on this point without bothering to make a case-in-detail at all. In the experimental writing class, we try to get better at identifying the "So what?" sweet spot and writing toward it.

What would you tell people in social-science or STEM fields who might think that these ideas don’t apply to them?

Some of the best writing by scholars comes from those areas, and it’s often the work that devotes the most serious attention to explaining things clearly, answering the "So what?" question, and showing how people live the consequences of an argument. I read a lot of sociology, which has a particularly strong tradition of argument via narrative and character. Think, for example, of Matthew Desmond’s 2017 book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, a virtuoso example of telling stories about people to make a point.

What should scholars who want to write for more general readerships know?

It comes as news to most academics in my end of the business — who have a touching faith in the rigor of the refereeing process — that they’ll find it much harder to get into even midlevel magazines than it is to get into leading academic journals.

Before you start down that road, though: What’s your objective? What readership are you addressing now?

How does that shape your writing, and what about that do you want to change?

It turns out that what most academics mean by "a general readership" is fellow highly-educated people — really, people in other buildings on campus — and that’s fine. But before you make a writing stretch that entails choosing to submit to a new set of market and craft conditions that can be every bit as maddening and constraining as those that obtain in academic writing, it’s worth thinking a little bit about what you hope to get out of all this.

What do you get out of it?

I think most academics underrate the basic craft satisfactions of scholarship, teaching, and writing. There’s deep pleasure in working on your chops, and deep reward in being part of a community of inquiry with students who are working on theirs. Practice your scales, learn a new skill, try to get a little better at what you do — that’s all a lot more satisfying and useful than worrying about whether you sound brilliant enough.

March 17, 2018 BC’s Daryl Watts becomes first freshman to win Patty Kazmaier Award Boston College forward Daryl Watts on Saturday was named winner of the 2018 Patty Kazmaier Award, becoming the first freshman in the 21-year history of the award to be honored as the top player in Division 1 women’s hockey.

Watts, an 18-year-old from Toronto who led the nation in scoring, recorded a 40-42—82 line in 38 regular-season games, including 25 multipoint efforts and 11 multigoal outings. The Hockey East player of the year tied the single-season conference points (55) and goals (30) records originally set by Northeastern’s Kendall Coyne in her Patty Kazmaier-winning 2015-16 season. A unanimous choice as conference rookie of the year, she set conference season records for points, goals, and assists for a freshman. The other two finalists for the Kazmaier were Boston University senior Victoria Bach and Clarkson junior Loren Gabel.

“I’m so humbled and honored to be named the Patty Kazmaier Award winner,” Watts said. “Being mentioned in the same conversation as the women and legends who’ve won this award in the past — some of whom I’ve looked up to for years — is a lot to take in.

“I came to Boston College to have fun playing hockey at the highest level, learn from great coaches and be part of a special group of teammates. I never dreamed this year could’ve gone as it did. I am so lucky to be coached by Katie [Crowley], Courtney [Kennedy], and Court [Sheary] and be on the ice with our incredible team. They push all of us to be better every day and this award is as much my teammates’ as it is mine.”

Watts, who tallied the second-highest season point total in BC history for a team that went 30-5-3, joined Alex Carpenter ’16 as BC’s Kazmaier Award winners.

WBUR

For St. Patrick's Day, a True Tale of 8 Sailors Saved

By Guinness March 17, 2018

Peter Moloney If you're picking up a glass of Guinness this St. Patrick's Day, savor it while pondering this story from 1917, when Ireland's famous stout was cause for true celebration: It saved lives.

The strange tale takes place in the Irish Sea toward the end of World War I. Besides the traditional dangers of crossing this busy body of water in a small craft, the years 1914 to 1918 featured the additional danger of German submarines, which targeted all enemy vessels (not just military ones) and sunk many.

This was the challenge that Guinness steamships, with cargo full of stout, faced every day crossing the Irish Sea from Dublin to their destination, Liverpool, in the northwest of the United Kingdom. The trip was about 135 miles and took most of a day, depending on the weather.

The W.M. Barkley was the pride of the Guinness fleet. Guinness bought it from Belfast shipbuilder John Kelly & Sons in 1913, just a year before the war erupted. Then, because of the conflict, the ship was requisitioned by the British Admiralty for the war effort. (Ireland was still part of the U.K. at this time, so it was a legal act of government.) By 1917, the ship was deemed unsuitable for its wartime mission and returned to Guinness for commercial use.

On Oct. 12, 1917, the Barkley set off from Dublin on its fateful trip to Liverpool, with its cargo of stout and a crew of 13. Nearly three hours into its journey, disaster struck: A torpedo from the German UC-75 submarine hit the ship and split it in two.

The crew, shocked and jolted, went scurrying for a lifeboat. As the story goes, the ship's cook, Thomas McGlue, had been making a cup of tea when the impact of the torpedo tossed the hot water, scalding his arm. By the time he got to the lifeboat, the sun had set and the ship was sinking.

"The Barkley was doing her best to go down, but the [beer] barrels were fighting their way up through the hatches, and that kept us afloat a bit longer," McGlue told the Guinness HARP magazine in 1964. "In fact, it's the reason any of us got out of there."

The floating barrels of stout in the cargo hold made it possible for eight of the 13 souls aboard to escape into the night on a lifeboat.

Now — away from the sinking ship — the surviving crew was questioned by the captain of the German submarine about the sunken boat's identity. The German captain checked the Barkley off his "hit list" and bid the sunken ship's crew good night, pointing them in the general direction of the Irish coast.

After rowing awhile, they set down the life boat's anchor and shouted all night for rescue.

Around five o'clock the next morning, they were rescued by a passing ship and ferried back to Dublin.

Torpedo attacks in the Irish Sea were so frequent at the time that when the crew went to report their ordeal to government officials at the Custom House, they waited three hours to be interviewed. Eventually, they gave up waiting and went to the Guinness brewery instead.

There, the superintendent gave them a swig of brandy — even Guinness employees recognize that some situations merit stronger stuff — and sent them home.

The remains of the W.M. Barkley now rest on the seafloor about 16 miles east of Dublin Port, at a depth of about 180 feet. Broken in two, they show little evidence of the deadly drama that unfolded on that October night in 1917.

The stout barrels held in its cargo washed up on local shores for weeks after the ship sank. Those barrels were the unexpected heroes in a drama that genuinely allowed the survivors to state, with a straight face, that, yes, Guinness had actually saved their lives.

This story first appeared in Cognoscenti, member station WBUR's ideas and opinion page.

A native of Ireland, Peter Moloney teaches globalization at Boston College.

March 7, 2018 Cyber threats are ‘coming at us from all sides,’ FBI director says In a highly anticipated speech on cyber security at Boston College, FBI Director Christopher A. Wray said Wednesday that the threat of digital warfare is “coming at us from all sides.”

“We’re worried — at the FBI and with our partners — about a wider range of threat actors, from multi-national cyber syndicates and insider threats to hacktivists,” Wray said during a keynote address at the Boston Conference on Cyber Security on the BC campus. “And we’re concerned about a wider gamut of methods, from botnets to ransomware, from spearfishing and business email compromise, to illicit cryptomining and APTs.”

Wray cited an increase in state-sponsored cyber intrusions linked to North Korea and Russia as examples of the growing danger of such threats.

“We’ve also begun seeing a ‘blended threat’ — nation-states using criminal hackers to do their dirty work,” Wray said, according to a transcript of his remarks. “Nation-state actors are also turning to more creative avenues to steal information. They are no longer dependent on just intelligence services to carry out their aims. Instead, they utilize people from all walks of life — hackers, businesspeople, academics, researchers, diplomats, tourists — and anyone else who can get their hands on something of value.”

“We know that we need more cyber and digital literacy in every program throughout the Bureau — organized crime, crimes against children, white-collar crime, just to name a few,” he said.

“We’re embedding noncyber agents with cyber squads, so they too can learn how to conduct cyber investigations. We’re sending noncyber personnel to cutting-edge cyber training. We’re also bringing intelligence analysts from the field to headquarters to get more tactical cyber experience. And we’re boosting our training for our most cyber-savvy agents, offering interactive, boot camp-type classes to walk agents through simulated cyber investigations.”

The conference was presented jointly by the FBI and the Masters in Cybersecurity Policy & Governance Program at BC’s Woods College of Advancing Studies.

Wray said the bureau’s efforts to shore up its cyber crime defenses has paid dividends.

“Last summer we took down AlphaBay — the largest marketplace on the darknet,” Wray said.

“Hundreds of thousands of criminals were anonymously buying and selling drugs, weapons, malware, stolen identities, and all sorts of other illegal goods and services through AlphaBay. We worked with the DEA, the IRS, and Europol, and with a number of partners around the globe.”

Another vanquished target of the FBI was the Kelihos botnet, according to Wray.

“Last year, the Kelihos botnet distributed hundreds of millions of fraudulent e-mails, stole banking credentials, and installed ransomware and other malicious software on computers all over the world,” he said. “We worked with our foreign law enforcement partners in both Spain and the Netherlands to identify and apprehend the Russian hacker and dismantle the botnet.”

He urged companies to contact the bureau if they feel they’ve been targeted by hackers.

“Please, when there are indications of unauthorized access to — or malware present on — critical IT systems, when an attack results in a significant loss of data, systems, or control of systems, when there’s a potential for impact to national security, economic security, or public health and safety, or when an intrusion affects critical infrastructure, call us,” Wray said.

“Because we want to help you, and our focus will be on doing everything we can to help you.”

March 8, 2018 Adriana Cohen: For FBI, cybersecurity fight is always evolving

Just because ISIS isn’t making nonstop headlines these days, it doesn’t mean the security threats here in Boston and our nation have subsided. Far from it.

In fact, at a cybersecurity conference I attended at Boston College yesterday, FBI Director Christopher Wray said cyber warfare is “coming at us from all sides.”

“We’re worried at the FBI and with our partners about a wider range of threat actors, from multinational cyber syndicates and insider threats to hacktivists … and we’re concerned about a wider gamut of methods, from botnets to ransomware, from spearfishing and business email compromise, to illicit cryptomining and (network attacks),” he said.

During his keynote address he also spoke of seeing a blended threat meaning “nation-states using criminal hackers to do their dirty work.”

Wray said “nation-state actors are also turning to more creative avenues to steal information.

They are no longer dependent on just intelligence services to carry out their aims. Instead, they utilize people from all walks of life — hackers, business people, academics, researchers, diplomats, tourists — and anyone else who can get their hands on something of value.”

But that’s not all our men and women in blue are up against. Intel agencies are also struggling to keep up with rapidly advancing technology that’s hindering their ability to extract data stored on phones and devices.

Wray said that in 2017 the FBI was unable to unlock data from 7,800 devices in its possession due to technological challenges.

Without the ability to extract the data, the FBI isn’t able to gather the evidence needed to prosecute nefarious actors.

Hence, the threats continue.

Then there’s the Dark Web and disrupting criminal activity in that opaque space, as well as terrorists like ISIS, al-Qaeda and others recruiting and radicalizing online using social media and an endless stream of messaging apps.

Making one wonder if Al Gore should’ve boasted about “inventing” the internet if this is where we’d end up?

Nevertheless, the FBI is working day and night to keep the American people safe despite a kaleidoscope of threats in the digital domain and beyond.

And for that, they deserve our thanks.

March 5, 2018

New dual-atom catalyst shows promise to yield clean energy by artificial photosynthesis Researchers from the US and China develop a dispersed catalyst featuring two atoms Looking for new solutions to more efficiently harvest and store solar energy, scientists from the U.S. and China have synthesized a new, dual-atom catalyst to serve as a platform for artificial photosynthesis, the team reported today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The team developed an iridium catalyst with only two active metal centers. Most significantly, experiments revealed the catalyst to be a well-defined structure, capable of serving as a productive platform for future research on solar fuel synthesis.

"Our research concerns the technology for direct solar energy storage," said Boston College Associate Professor of Chemistry Dunwei Wang, a lead author of the report. "It addresses the critical challenge that solar energy is intermittent. It does so by directly harvesting solar energy and storing the energy in chemical bonds, similar to how photosynthesis is performed but with higher efficiencies and lower cost."

Researchers have spent considerable time on single-atom catalysts (SACs) and rarely explored an "atomically dispersed catalyst" featuring two atoms. In a paper titled "Stable iridium dinuclear heterogeneous catalysts supported on metal-oxide substrate for solar water oxidation," the team reports synthesizing an iridium dinuclear heterogeneous catalyst in a facile photochemical way.

The catalyst shows outstanding stability and high activity toward water oxidation, an essential process in natural and artificial photosynthesis.

Researchers focused on this aspect of catalysis encounter particular challenges in the development of heterogeneous catalysts, which are widely used in large-scale industrial chemical

transformations. Most active heterogeneous catalysts are often poorly defined in their atomic structures, which makes it difficult to evaluate the detailed mechanisms at the molecular level.

The team was able to take advantage of new techniques in the evaluation of single-atom catalysts and develop a material platform to study important and complex reactions that would require more than one active site.

Wang said the team of researchers set out to determine "what the smallest active and most durable heterogeneous catalyst unit for water oxidation could be. Previously, researchers have asked this question and found the answer only in homogeneous catalysts, whose durability was poor. For the first time, we have a glimpse of the potential of heterogeneous catalysts in clean energy production and storage."

The team also performed X-ray experiments at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Advanced Light Source that helped to determine the structure of the iridium catalyst. They used two techniques: X-ray absorption fine structure (EXAFS) and X-ray Absorption Near Edge Structure (XANES) in their measurements. These experiments provide critical evidence to better understand the new catalyst.

Wang said the team was surprised by the simplicity and durability of the catalyst, combined with the high activity toward the desired reaction of water oxidation.

Wang said the next steps in the research include further optimization of the catalyst for practical use and an examination of areas where the catalyst can be applied to new chemical transformations.

In addition to Wang and his research team at Boston College, the study involved scientists from the University of California, Irvine; Yale University; Tufts University; and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, as well as the Chinese institutions Tsinghua University and Nanjing University.

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy, as well as scientific agencies in China.

March 1, 2018 Risky mortgages primed for comeback under Senate reg relief bill

By Patricia A. McCoy Now that we’re at the top of the business cycle, it’s about time for amnesia to set in about the last financial crisis. Sure enough, that’s what’s happening with the Senate’s latest attempt to roll back key financial reforms.

The Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act, by Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, has made it to the Senate floor and is poised for a vote, with Republican and some Democratic support.

This bill, if enacted, would make a terrible mistake by paving the way for another financial meltdown. When Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Act in 2010, it required lenders to first determine that loan applicants are able to repay before making them home mortgages. Lenders who fail to make this assessment can be liable to borrowers.

Congress did provide lenders with some legal protection by insulating them from ability-to-repay claims by borrowers for loans meeting certain safety requirements set out in DoddFrank. These so-called “qualified mortgages” have important guardrails against a future spike in defaults, including stricter underwriting and safer loan terms. Congress carefully designed these protections to prevent a repeat of some of the biggest lending lapses culminating in the 2008 financial crisis.

The Senate bill waters down these safeguards for banks with total assets of up to $10 billion by permitting them to make unaffordable mortgages, with no liability to borrowers, so long as the banks hold the loans on their books.

If the bill becomes law, Congress will excuse over 97% of U.S. banks from having to verify applicants’ income, assets and debts for mortgages they keep on their books. This is a recipe for unmanageable monthly payments for consumers. Further, under the bill, these smaller banks can make toxic balloon loans and adjustable-rate mortgages without ever confirming that the borrowers can afford the higher monthly payments in future years. This raises a serious concern because both of these abuses contributed to the 2008 financial crisis.

The Senate bill poses another, less obvious risk. If smaller banks don’t have to play by the same rules as big banks, we face a race to the bottom in lending standards. Smaller banks will lure away business from big banks by offering borrowers loans that appear to be cheap, but are filled with nasty surprises. The result: Smaller banks will load up their balance sheets with risky mortgages to pursue lucrative fees, while ignoring the peril to their solvency.

The bill’s sponsors pooh-pooh any problem, saying that banks will not make unsafe loans if they retain those mortgages. But that is a myth. FDIC data reveal that, by year-end 2012, banks, both big and small, held a whopping $238 billion in bad home mortgages on their books. Many of those banks were so insolvent that they required taxpayer bailouts to stay afloat.

Similarly, the bill’s sponsors blame the Dodd-Frank Act for crimping economic growth and hurting smaller banks. Once again, they are wrong. Since Congress enacted Dodd-Frank, bank revenues and lending have grown, the S&P 500-stock index has more than doubled, wages are rising, home mortgages to minority borrowers are up and full employment is in sight. Since Dodd-Frank became law, smaller banks have enjoyed rising income and loan volumes. And while the number of small banks has declined, that trend began many decades ago and long before enactment of the Dodd-Frank Act. If the Senate had held hearings on the bill, it could have addressed the myths advanced by the sponsors. Instead, the Senate Banking Committee rushed the bill through markup, with no hearings or amendments, before sending it to full Senate. In the process, the Banking Committee cut off any serious examination of the risks the bill presents. While several prior Banking Committee hearings touched on small-bank lending, witnesses for consumers were noticeably excluded and the senators had not yet seen the language of the bill.

Bottom line, the bill will wreak havoc by allowing small banks to “sell” homeowners loans they cannot afford, triggering rising defaults and foreclosures. The bill, if passed, will also set off bank failures. In 2008, we saw how that movie turned out and it wasn’t pretty. To prevent a repeat of the last crisis, the Senate should reject this bill.

Patricia A. McCoy is a professor of law at Boston College and spearheaded the ability-torepay rulemaking at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in 2011.

February 28, 2018

Centers of the Pedagogical Universe When Jason Rhode began working at Northern Illinois University’s Faculty Development and Instructional Design Center more than a decade ago, his team’s primary mission was to introduce faculty members to new technology they could only get through the institution. Among other efforts, the center held a Teaching With Technology Institute at the end of each academic year to let instructors test new tools.

Attendance was strong at first but steadily declined; no such event is planned for this summer. Instead, the institution will hold a symposium for online teaching -- evidence, Rhode says, of a broader philosophical evolution.

“The days where we were really concerned about how we were equipping computer labs, setting up small classrooms, are probably over,” Rhode said. “It seems like there’s less introducing of brand-new technology in teaching and learning, as opposed to really thinking more about how do you teach well with it.”

Centers like Rhode’s -- often with names like “center for teaching and learning” or “center for faculty development” -- increasingly serve as hubs of pedagogical innovation, influenced by but not dependent on flashy digital technology. They allow instructors to ponder new teaching approaches and experiment with new formats.

Institutions also position centers to disseminate campuswide strategies and to actively pursue and encourage projects that improve classroom experiences for students.

Many centers represent amalgamations of previously separate campus units. Staff sizes are typically small and funding can be tight. Strong relationships and collaboration with other departments are essential, as is a solid connection to the institution’s overall mission.

“They offer space for cross-campus discussions. Perhaps they offer grants or other new incentives,” said Mary Wright, director of the Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning at Brown University. “They may know champions who can help tell their story about using a digital learning tool in the classroom. Centers can do work as key partners in supporting change around technology.”

Most center directors interviewed for this article said their organization’s focus has shifted since its inception -- or that the current center combines the tasks of two or even three formerly separate teams. Adaptability and flexibility keep successful centers abreast of constantly shifting priorities for instructors.

The degree to which centers try to drive innovation and new approaches depends on the temperament of the faculty.

Newly established centers need time to establish relationships with academic departments and offer services that address their concerns. Over time, instructors learn to come to the center when they have questions about technology or pedagogy. Most centers concentrate on providing a wide range of solutions and offering faculty members the tools they need to improve classes as they see fit.

"A key principle for many centers for teaching and learning is to be responsive to institutional goals and priorities, and to work in collaboration with faculty and academic units, guided by their learning goals," Wright said.

"However, responsiveness should not be read as mere reaction. Instead, centers express leadership and innovation in how best to support strategic initiatives, and a key competency of the director role is serving as an effective change agent."

Boston College’s Center for Teaching Excellence was formed in fall 2014 out of two existing organizations on campus: Instructional Design and E-Teaching Services (IDeS), which supported academic classroom technologies like the learning management system and lecture capture; and the Connors Family Learning Center, which focused on student learning and faculty development. When the center opened in 2014, it absorbed everything from those two organizations but the parts that dealt with student learning, which remained with the Connors Family Learning Center.

“What had been a center that supported technology and teaching became a center that supported pedagogical interests more generally, including technology,” said John Rakestraw, director of Boston’s Center for Teaching Excellence.

The goal of these changes, according to Rakestraw, was to centralize the institution’s commitment to helping faculty improve pedagogy and acknowledge that technology is but one piece of that puzzle.

The center’s scope is vast: programming events around course development for faculty members, organizing reading groups among various campus stakeholders, helping with efforts to improve accessibility of course materials, establishing faculty cohorts focused on technology. Its goals are unified by a common principle.

“We are the organization on campus that is constituted by the question: How do we teach better and how do we develop better reflections on pedagogical practices?” Rakestraw said.

That can mean helping instructors overcome resistance to technology -- or steering them away from overemphasizing technology interests.

“Some faculty are fascinated by the use of the technology and they want to play with this toy. They’re drawn into it by what they see as the possibilities of the technology rather than by the possibilities of the pedagogy that could be enabled by technology,” Rakestraw said. “We move pretty quickly to the question, what is it you want students to do?”

A similar fusion took place at the University of California, Davis, a couple years ago, when the center for excellence in teaching (itself a derivative of the former teaching resource center) joined forces with an organization called I Am STEM. The former center was built around faculty members taking initiative to improve their courses; the latter emphasized a more active approach to tackling classroom issues -- identifying trends of classroom struggles across departments and disciplines, and meeting them with proposed solutions. The end result is the Center for Institutional Effectiveness, which allows faculty members to seek consultations and conducts student analytics research of its own. Marco Molinaro, assistant vice provost for educational effectiveness and the center’s director, pointed to its broad view of campus academics as its calling card.

“We have great strength in being able to, in a sense, find patterns in how students are doing that you don’t really see unless you look at broad swaths across departments of what students are experiencing,” Molinaro said. “We can look at all introductory STEM courses or all courses students tend to experience in their first year, and see patterns among them.”

Change and adaptability are key to a center’s longevity. At Brown, Wright’s center a few years ago concentrated on creating massive open online courses, following a directive from institutional leadership that led Brown to become one of the earliest adopters of Coursera. As the MOOC craze has settled down, so has the center’s responsibility to create them. Wright believes centers should adapt to the priorities of present circumstances.

“The best model is one that is in alignment with institutional priorities, always working with collaboration with key partners in digital learning,” Wright said.

The goal for any center for teaching and learning is to get faculty members thinking about improving their classes -or in some cases, to meet faculty's hunger for innovations they commence of their own accord. Approaches vary depending on institutions’ strengths and personality traits.

When Dixie State University, a public institution in Utah with 9,000 students, created its Center for Teaching and Learning in 2014, its founding director, Bruce Harris, conducted a faculty survey to determine the range of teaching styles in use. The results were more dispiriting than he anticipated: 75 percent of instructors reported using a traditional lecture-based, teacher-centered approach. Harris hoped to decrease that figure by at least 10 percentage points.

February 27, 2018 Former UN Chief Scheduled to Speak at Boston College Former U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is making an appearance at Boston College.

Ban was South Korea's foreign minister before serving 10 years as U.N. chief. He's scheduled to speak Tuesday on "human welfare and global citizenship."

Ban told the U.N. Security Council last week that the "current reconciliatory atmosphere" between North and South Korea that began during the 2018 Winter Olympics must be kept alive.

He called on the U.S. to play a role by engaging with North Korea.

At Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, on Monday, Ban expressed optimism about recent dialogue between North and South Korea and added that another war in the region is "unacceptable and unthinkable."

He said President Donald Trump has been sending a "loud and clear message" to North Korea.

February 24, 2018

‘Crisis Actor’ Isn’t a New Smear. The Idea Goes Back to the Civil War Era. After any major attack, you are likely to find in some dark corner of the internet conspiracy theories that the survivors or victims made it all up or were part of a troupe of paid “crisis actors.” Such theories emerged after the massacres in Las Vegas in October; at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla., in 2016; and at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in 2012. It happened again this month, after 17 people were killed in the school shooting in Parkland, Fla. Those conspiracy theories have been amplified in the internet age, but they are a part of a long, troubled history of dismissing the voices of those seeking change. "his theme that anyone agitating for change must be either an outside agitator or must have been paid or put up to it is one that runs throughout American history,” Kevin M. Kruse, a history professor at Princeton University, said in a phone interview.

Conspiracies of this kind quickly circulated about the Florida shooting, with one top-trending YouTube video suggesting, falsely, that one of the survivors was a hired actor. The video’s caption tapped into the idea that student protesters were paid to advocate gun control, and Mr. Kruse pointed his followers on Twitter to a decades-old analog: In 1957, civil rights supporters had to dispel rumors that nine black children seeking to integrate Central High School in Little Rock, Ark., were being paid for their activism. That strategy of dismissing protest as being funded or imported by outsiders was commonly used during the civil rights movement to minimize racial tension or brush aside genuine demands for equality.

“If our white brothers dismiss as ‘rabble rousers’ and ‘outside agitators’ those of us who employ nonviolent direct action, and if they refuse to support our nonviolent efforts, millions of Negroes will, out of frustration and despair, seek solace and security in black nationalist ideologies — a development that would inevitably lead to a frightening racial nightmare,” Dr. King wrote. Politicians of that era often promoted the idea of the “outside agitator” to portray racial discord as isolated and exaggerated, but they hardly invented the strategy.

Similar tactics were used in the years after the Civil War to minimize stories of the violence and discrimination faced by African-Americans, Heather Cox Richardson, a history professor at Boston College, said in a phone interview. As the nation began the process of postwar reunification, some in Congress invited testimony from African-Americans, offering them a per diem to cover travel costs and missed wages, she said. But those seeking to dismiss their stories of pain and demands for equality argued that the payments were proof that their accounts could not be trusted.

“You get this idea immediately after the war, during these testimonies, that people talking about civil rights are literally getting paid” to tell fabricated stories, Ms. Richardson said.

That belief spread to other contexts, too. Testimony from African-Americans on the violence perpetrated by the Ku Klux Klan, for example, was explained away as funded falsehoods. “They were attracted by a fee of two dollars per diem, and in many cases were evidently drilled for the occasion,” one politician said of the testimony, according to

an 1871 news report. The accounts, he said, were “of the lowest kind and utterly unworthy of belief.”

To Ms. Richardson, those early dismissals of African-American testimony, starting with the congressional hearings during the Reconstruction era, are not unlike the false theories spread about the Parkland school shooting suggesting that the student survivors were actors paid to protest for gun control. “That actually sounds very much like what you got in those first congressional hearings,” she said.

Top Producers of Fulbright U.S. Scholars and Students, 2017-18 February 18, 2018

Why AT&T’s CEO was smiling at his Boston appearance today

By Jon Chesto | February 15, 2018

Randall Stephenson’s “elephant in the room” takes on new meaning now.

Speaking to the Boston College Chief Executives Club today, the AT&T CEO offered color and context about the fight of his professional life. AT&T’s proposed Time Warner acquisition will likely be decided by a trial due to start March 19, as Stephenson’s team faces off against the US Department of Justice in a widely watched antitrust case.

Stephenson’s Boston visit coincides with news reports that the Dallas-based company took the unusual step of putting DOJ antitrust chief Makan Delrahim on its witness list.

Delrahim declared in a 2016 TV interview that he didn’t see any major antitrust problems with the AT&T-Time Warner deal.

Of course, that was before the Trump administration tapped him for the DOJ job. Now, he leads the charge against the merger.

Stephenson referenced the latest reports about the case: He described Delrahim’s change of heart, alongside President Trump’s antipathy toward Time Warner-owned CNN, as “an elephant in the room, and it’s probably going to have to be dealt with in that context.” Stephenson has mentioned this particular elephant before — except now we know more about how he plans to address it.

Fidelity Investments CEO Abby Johnson shared the stage with Stephenson, and asked him about the case. He jokingly called the tangle with DOJ “a little speed bump.” This is what’s known as a vertical merger -- AT&T and Time Warner aren’t direct competitors. Stephenson says no one has successfully challenged this kind of deal in 50 years.

Johnson noted that she’s never heard of somebody talking about going to court with a smile on their face. But Stephenson came across as someone who is confident about the outcome.

Theologian: Church doctrine must be life-giving, not oppressive February 14, 2018 (Excerpt) [Editor’s Note: Richard Gaillardetz is the Joseph Professor of Catholic Systematic Theology at Boston College.

He is the author of By What Authority? Foundations for Understanding Authority in the Church; the revised edition was just released by Liturgical Press, and An Unfinished Council: Vatican II, Pope Francis, and the Renewal of Catholicism. Last month he was awarded the Yves Congar Award for Theological Excellence by Barry University.

He spoke to Charles Camosy.]

If you were to boil down your lecture into a 2-3 sentence thesis, what might it be?

One of the more daunting challenges facing the Church today comes from many young adults, in particular, for whom the idea of adhering to a normative religious tradition appears both unnecessary and irrelevant to their lives. The Church needs to offer an account of its tradition that makes evident the authentic human flourishing that tradition makes possible while affirming the value of questioning, doubt and disagreement. Such an account might build on the biblical metaphor of Jacob’s wrestling with an angel in the book of Genesis to propose what it might mean to “wrestle “with the Church’s normative tradition.

Camosy: This has the potential to be a very unifying thesis - one that could bring Catholics with quite different views together for fruitful discussions. But there are some in the theological and religious studies academy who resist this kind of approach; people who believe that doctrine actually is merely about power. How difficult is it to hold the positions you do when the very foundations of the Church come under such scrutiny?

Gaillardetz: Yes, the challenges that a coherent religious tradition like Catholicism faces today come from multiple directions. There is the challenge presented by our larger western culture that, as I noted in my lecture, has a default hostility toward institutions of all kinds and views religion according to the interpretive habits of consumerism.

There is the challenge presented by the Church’s own pastoral complacency that has impeded its attentiveness to the spiritual needs and concerns of young people today. And finally, as you noted, there is the challenge that comes from a certain segment of the academy, those who rely perhaps too much on critical theory and the power analysis associated with Michel Foucault, which can reduce normative doctrinal truth claims to mere power politics.

The difficulty we must face is that this analysis is not entirely wrong. Anyone who has studied Church history, or the dynamics that governed many an ecumenical council, knows the extent to which power politics played a role in the formulation of Church doctrine. It does the Church no good to deny or whitewash this feature of our tradition.

Nevertheless, for Catholic Christians, doctrine cannot be reduced to those power dynamics. Why? Because, for all of the inevitable entanglements of doctrine in the sinfulness, bias and finitude of humanity, it is still tethered to the primordial event of revelation manifested in the incarnation, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The challenge is for the Church to offer an account of doctrine that doesn’t reject its authentic witness to revelation while at the same time acknowledging its inevitable limits.

As I stated in my lecture, I think normative doctrine continues to play an important role in the life of the Church, but if that doctrine is to be seen not as oppressive but life-giving, then it needs to be subject to a stringent reform regarding both the manner in which it is proposed and the forms of engagement it encourages…

What I propose would in fact require that we elevate demanding teachings that are too easily ignored like our fundamental obligations to the migrant, the stranger, or our enemy. But it would also require that we acknowledge that there are also doctrinal claims that seem increasingly problematic because they depend on contingent knowledge. Here I have in mind, the Church’s teaching regarding the intrinsically disordered character of a same sex orientation. As a Catholic I must allow myself to be “troubled” by such a teaching but I must also acknowledge that such teachings are so entangled with contingent understandings of human sexuality that they must be offered with much greater care and modesty.

Put simply I want the Church to be attractive for the right reasons: Not because it demands nothing of believers but because it witnesses to the intrinsic beauty of the love of God come to us in Jesus of Nazareth by the power of the Spirit. But I also want it to be unattractive for the right reasons: Not because its message seems harsh or irrelevant and its community life uninviting but because authentic Christian discipleship will inevitably require conversion, something few of us embrace eagerly….

Finally, I want to add that being a fan of Pope Francis, as we both are, doesn’t mean being a booster. For all of his many accomplishments, I remain deeply saddened by his two great blind spots: 1) his failure to see that compassion for clerical sexual abuse victims is necessary but not sufficient; there must also be a clear commitment to bring episcopal enablers to justice. 2) his criticism of “gender theory” and Christian feminism which strikes me as lacking in both understanding and nuance.

The responsibilities incumbent upon the “loyal opposition” are great. One must avoid trumpeting one’s own “prophetic” stance and remain committed to the humble service of the gospel, our Church and its mission to be a living sacrament of God’s saving love.

February 13, 2018 BC senior sells his startup as he prepares to graduate It’s hard to forget the harried dash toward college graduation: Prepare for your final, final exams, start looking for a new place to live . . . sell your startup?

For Boston College senior Riley Soward, the end of the year includes a milestone that many company founders take years to achieve. He and his brother, Stephen, are cashing out of Campus Insights, the business they started in college to help clients get better feedback from students than the stuffy settings of traditional focus groups might offer.

Harvard Student Agencies, the business run by students at that well-known college across the river from BC, will take over Campus Insights, adding it to its stable of enterprises including the Let’s Go travel guide series.

Soward started the company with his brother, who went to the University of Michigan, to collect input from the coveted millennial demographic at campuses around the country.

Riley Soward, a business major, declined to disclose the terms of the sale, but he said he will step down as chief executive as he finishes up school this spring. Now, like most other people who are completing their undergraduate degrees, he has to get a job.

But he said he’ll bring a lot of what he learned at Campus Insights to whatever he does next. The company said it worked with clients including the payment provider Venmo, and it was featured by Money in 2016 as one of a handful of startups that could be “the Next Facebook.”

“We tried as quickly as possible to go from a thought in our minds to actually talking with companies, building out a product, and scaling up on the sales side,” Soward said. “We really saw the importance of just taking the initiative and hustling.”

February 12, 2018 Eagles gather in South Korea

From left: US hockey players Cayla Barnes, Kali Flanagan, Brian Gionta, Emily Pfalzer, Megan Keller, and Haley Skarupa in South Korea.

Boston College’s contingent at the Winter Olympics in PyeongChang got together for quick group shot the other day. Cayla Barnes, Kali Flanagan, Megan Keller, Emily Pfalzer and Haley Skarupa are all on the US women’s hockey team while BC alum Brian Gionta is captain of the men’s team.

February 12, 2018

47 bishops to take part in theology seminars on 'Amoris Laetitia' Forty-seven Catholic bishops from across the U.S. will take part in a series of daylong seminars in mid-February aimed at helping them better understand and implement Pope Francis' 2016 apostolic exhortation on family life, Amoris Laetitia.

The seminars will be led by a team of seven theologians and several bishops and held on separate days at Boston College, the University of Notre Dame and Santa Clara University. Among the speakers: Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington, D.C.; Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago; Cardinal Joseph Tobin of Newark, New Jersey; and Bishop Robert McElroy of San Diego.

The initiative was announced Feb. 12

by Jesuit Fr. James Keenan, a theologian at Boston College who is organizing the seminars alongside Cupich and Cardinal Kevin Farrell, head of the Vatican's Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life.

The seminars follow a two-day conference Keenan and Cupich hosted at Boston College last October, where two cardinals, 12 bishops and 24 other invited participants discussed what they called the "new momentum" that Amoris Laetitia ("The Joy of Love") gives local bishops to renew their pastoral practices toward families.

In an email announcing the events, Keenan said Cupich and other bishops from the October event hoped the new initiative would "allow American bishops the opportunity to further their understanding and their pastoral implementation of Pope Francis' apostolic exhortation."

The three seminars — to be held Feb. 19, 21 and 23 — are being kept private.

A program for the Boston event shows it will consist of three panel discussions, focused on the methodology of Amoris Laetitia, the challenges and opportunities it presents, and the processes of episcopal leadership and pastoral formation it envisions. The day in Boston starts with a Mass celebrated by Wuerl.

Included in the team of theologians leading the seminars are:

● ● ● ● ● ● ●

Conor Kelly of Marquette University; Msgr. Jack Alesandro of the Diocese of Rockville Centre, New York; Brian Robinette of Boston College; Natalia Imperatori-Lee of Manhattan College; C. Vanessa White of the Catholic Theological Union; Kate Ward of Marquette University; Paulist Fr. John Hurley of the San Diego Diocese.

The previous October conference was considered the first of its kind and was noted for a collegial atmosphere in which bishops and theologians could share ideas openly.

In an essay for NCR afterward, Keenan called the event "refreshing" and remembered a bishop stating that "no one [had] the shields up" during the discussions.

How rich are the rich? If only you knew February 5, 2018

By Gil B. Manzon Jr., Associate Professor of Accounting, Boston College “If poor people knew how rich rich people are, there would be riots in the streets.” Actor and comedian Chris Rock made this astute statement during a 2014 interview with New York magazine, referring to the yawning gap between rich and poor. In so doing, he stumbled upon a key challenge in the study of inequality.

What’s the best way to measure it? Most inequality studies have focused on income – measures of which are widely available. However, being rich is not about a single year of earnings but rather about the accumulation of wealth over time. In the past, quantifying that has been tricky.

The wealthy would probably prefer we stay in the dark about how rich they are, presumably to avoid the aforementioned riots. People like me who study the topic, however, are always looking for more data and better and more accurate ways to measure the rich-poor gap. And while I’m not one to promote violence in the streets, I do believe it’s important for citizens to be fully aware of the levels of disparity in their society.

The most revealing way to do this, in my view, is by looking at wealth inequality. There are several ways to measure inequality. One of the most popular is by income. That’s largely because there’s more data, and it’s a lot easier to measure. But this measure is a snapshot.

Wealth, on the other hand, is an aggregation, affected not only by current income but earnings accumulated in previous years and by previous generations. Only by studying wealth inequality do scholars, policymakers and others get the deepest and broadest measure of the gap between the rich and everyone else.

How much wealth someone has is also a better measure of their quality of life and opportunities. It determines the ability to invest in education, financial assets and the comfort and security of one’s retirement. Wealth also mitigates worries about paycheck variability or unexpected expenses. If you have wealth, the sudden cost of replacing a broken water heater or paying a medical bill doesn’t cause nearly as much stress as if you’re poor.

When we do look at the data on wealth inequality in the U.S., it’s stark and dwarfs that of the rest of the developed world.

The conservative Hudson Institute in 2017 reported that the wealthiest 5 percent of American households held 62.5 percent of all assets in the U.S. in 2013, up from 54.1 percent 30 years earlier. As a consequence, the wealth of the other 95 percent declined from 45.9 percent to 37.5 percent. As a result, the median wealth of upper-income families (earning US$639,400 on average) was nearly seven times that of middle-income households ($96,500) in 2013, the widest gap in at least 30 years. More notably, inequality scholars Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman found that the top 0.01 percent controlled 22 percent of all wealth in 2012, up from just 7 percent in 1979.

If you only looked at data on income inequality, however, you’d see a different picture. In 2013, for example, the top 5 percent of households earned just 30 percent of all U.S. income (compared with possessing nearly 63 percent of all wealth).

While the U.S. is not the only developed country that has seen wealth inequality rise over the past three decades, it is an outlier. The wealthiest 5 percent of households in the U.S. have almost 91 times more wealth than the median American household, the widest gap among 18 of the world’s most developed countries. The next highest is the Netherlands, which has a ratio less than half that.

The recently passed Tax Cuts and Jobs Act will make this problem a whole lot worse. The main features of the law include doubling the standard deduction for individual taxpayers, a temporary reduction in the top marginal tax rate from 39.6 percent to 37 percent, a significant reduction of the number of families subject to the estate tax and slashing the top corporate rate from 35 percent to 21 percent.

The main impact, however, is skewed to the wealthy. For example, the bottom 20 percent of households will see a lower tax bill of about $40 on average, compared with $5,420 for those in the top quintile. The richest 0.1 percent, meanwhile, will save $61,920. By 2025, the richest will see their benefit grow to $152,200, while everyone else won’t see much of a change. All the individual cuts are set to expire in 2026.

Wealthier taxpayers will also gain from the other main features of the new law. For example, research shows most benefits of lowering business taxes go to the rich, and fewer estates subject to the inheritance tax means more wealth accumulation across generations.

The tax law’s proponents claim that it won’t increase levels of inequality because the money that the rich will save will “trickle down” to other American households and lift their boats too.

Empirical evidence, however, suggests otherwise. Specifically, channeling more money to the rich, via tax cuts, does not improve economic growth, worsens educational opportunities for poorer Americans and even reduces life expectancy, which declined for a second year in a row in 2017.

So is Chris Rock right that Americans just aren’t aware of the levels of disparity in their society?

Surveys suggest he is. Respondents to a 2011 national survey, for example, “dramatically underestimated” levels of wealth inequality in the U.S. The survey, and other research, also partially affirmed the other half of his quote by showing that by and large Americans do care about wealth inequality and would prefer it to be lower.

Whether existing wealth inequality in the U.S. is socially or morally sustainable – or might lead to the riots envisioned by Chris Rock – is an open question.

Whatever happens, first things first, we need to know and understand just how bad wealth inequality in the U.S. has become. What we then choose to do about it is up to all of us.

February 1, 2018

Why immigration advocates must take back the term ‘chain migration’

By Arissa Oh, Ellen Wu

As scholars and teachers of immigration history, we have been startled by the recent battle over the term “chain migration.”

Restrictionists — those who want to slash legal immigration in part by eliminating family-based immigration categories — have hijacked and weaponized the term “chain migration.” They describe chain migration in language designed to raise the specter of undesirables crashing through America’s gates, overwhelming welfare systems and draining resources. Some now call it a racist slur.

The White House’s own explainer on “Chain Migration” (which it capitalizes) uses dubious “evidence” and images to heighten these fears. One diagram claims that a single “low-skilled” immigrant can bring in unlimited numbers of “foreign relatives.” By depicting new arrivals trailing scores of others behind, the diagrams evoke a vermin infestation — an age-old trope in the nativist toolbox.

This was made clear in this week’s State of the Union address: “Chain migration,” the president warned, is tantamount to “open borders,” allowing terrorists, gang members and drug dealers to flood into the country and threaten good Americans.

This is just the latest attempt by the right to co-opt and rebrand certain concepts (“family values,” “security,” “freedom”) to suit its own political purposes.

Yet, we must not cede the term “chain migration” to the anti-immigrant right. It is a valuable analytical concept — one that should remain in use in academic and policy circles and by the public at large. It helps us to see the nuances in how ordinary people migrate, while keeping in mind the political and policy context in which they make their decisions.

For decades, immigration historians have used the term “chain migration” to explain the ways that social networks shape how people move and where they settle. A person would migrate to the United States, tell their family, friends and community members back home what it was like here and then help them to also migrate. Many groups came this way: Germans, Irish and, yes, Norwegians. “Chain migration” also describes movement that is not strictly immigration in the classic sense, such as the Great Migration of African Americans out of the South in the early and middle part of the 20th century.

In 1917, Congress explicitly acknowledged the right of immigrants to bring family members into the country. Since then, it has upheld this right even when those family members were from countries or racial groups that the United States considered undesirable.

The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act further solidified the nation’s commitment to chain migration by allotting a majority of visas to family members of U.S. citizens. Under the “family reunification” provisions of the 1965 law, a U.S. citizen can sponsor the immigration of a limited group of family members: spouses, parents, children or siblings.

Family-based chain migration is by no means easy or automatic. A citizen petitions for a family member, who then undergoes a long, expensive application process that involves biometric screening, health exams and an interview. The fees are high, and the backlogs are long. But when immigrants arrive in this way, with family members and a community already in place to support them, they flourish.

When Congress passed the 1965 law, it did not anticipate that large numbers of non-Europeans would use its family reunification provisions. Before the 1965 immigration act, nearly half of all immigrants came from six European countries. But in fact, most post-1965 immigration has come from nonwhite countries in Asia, Latin America and Africa. Today, none of the 10 largest immigrant groups are European.

This is the true concern of immigration restrictionists. “Chain migration” (in the pejorative sense) is a rallying cry for those who are alarmed at the country’s increasing racial diversity and who feel that it threatens the essential character of America. By closing off family-based migration, the right aims to effectively enact a racial restriction under a seemingly neutral guise — and thus reverse the browning of America to preserve its narrowly conceived, white American culture.

For us, “chain migration” has long been useful in both our research and in the classroom. It is a term that succinctly distills the complexities of individual and household-level decision-making, as well as largescale patterns of movement and settlement. And now, by actively claiming it, we resist its capture by white supremacists.

To be sure, we might use other terms instead. Many have suggested that we abandon “chain migration” to the xenophobes and use “family reunification” instead. But family-based migration is only one type of chain migration — a crucial distinction that is being lost as immigration activists look for language to counter restrictionists. It also prioritizes heterosexual nuclear families above all others and ignores the nonbiological kin networks that facilitate migration.

Ultimately, the disagreement over terminology goes far beyond the discussion on immigration. By allowing rightists to define the terms of the debate, we allow them to spread misinformation, reframe the discussion at will and bend reality to their desires. That is enough reason to resist ceding this language.

But in this case, the lives of immigrants and their families and communities are at stake. To abandon the terms of debate to the right is an enormous abdication of power, and one that we refuse to accept.

Arissa H. Oh is associate professor of history at Boston College.

Ellen Wu is associate professor of history and director of the Asian American Studies Program at Indiana University Bloomington.

January 31, 2018

City Connects program addresses all factors that affect student success The role of schools is to instruct students in subjects like math and reading, said Mary Walsh, Kearns Professor of Urban Education and Innovative Leadership at Boston College, but the quality of academic instruction is not the only factor that determines schools' success.

"We know from developmental science that children develop along different domains — academic, socialemotional, health-wise and family-wise — all at the same time, and if something's not developing properly in one area, it can impact some or all of the others," Walsh said. "As educators, as school counselors, as parents, as health care providers, we're always trying to support the whole child as best we can."

In the early 1990s, Walsh, who has a background in clinical developmental psychology, began working with partners from Boston College, Boston public schools and community agencies to find a way to address all of the factors that affect student success. In 1999, she received a grant to begin planning what would eventually become the City Connects program.

City Connects, which was piloted in 2001 at six Boston public schools, now serves nearly 100 schools in 11 cities across five states. Its model of placing a full-time coordinator in schools to identify the strengths and needs of each child and connect him or her with services provided by community partners has had well-documented success.

After the first three years of the pilot, attendance and grades improved, while fewer students were being held back.

As children who had been served by City Connects in elementary school moved on, they had higher scores on state tests during middle school — even though middle schools didn't yet have the program. "That was a huge finding because it meant that not only did City Connects impact the students while they were in the program, but it had long-term consequences," said Walsh. "We eventually were able to follow those same kids into high school, and we found that the dropout rate for students that had City Connects in the first five grades was one-half of the kids that didn't have City Connects."

These results have stayed consistent as City Connects has expanded to various sites, including Catholic schools — which fund the program with grants from foundations — and charter schools. For reasons not yet understood, English language learners experience the most dramatic improvements when assisted by City Connects.

Encompassed by these statistics are the many individual children who had their lives affected by the program. "I think the great thing about City Connects is they really look at every single child," said Laurie Acker, a program manager for City Connects who works in Minnesota, supervising several school coordinators, networking with community partners and collecting data on the program. "Even if they're not exhibiting really severe intense needs, every student who has additional help is going to be more likely to succeed."

One way this happens is through a "whole class review" where the City Connects coordinator, the teacher, and a principal or other adult who knows the child get together and talk about the strengths and needs of each child in various domains. "It's amazing the things that you find out because teachers don't always sit down and talk about strengths of a child with another professional," Acker said. "They might talk about kids who are always in trouble but they don't sit down and talk about every one."

"The coordinators are trained to really ask probing questions so instead of just 'can't sit still,' what does that look like? When does that happen? It might be that he hasn't eaten or he saw mom and dad fight last night," said Acker.

Traci Walker Griffith, principal of the Eliot K-8 Innovation School in Boston, told the story of a child who was struggling academically, "grumpy," and low-energy. Because of the City Connects system, a teacher called attention to the problem and the child visited a pediatrician, who determined that the child was iron deficient. "Within a month he was surpassing all of the goals that we put forth for him academically," Griffith said. "In some schools, a boy falling asleep maybe might not have gotten the attention it needed ‌ but because of this support system we had in place with City Connects, he's a thriving high school student."

When looking at every student, City Connects also pays attention to several areas of their lives in which they might have unmet needs. Resources community partners can provide include academic support, such as tutoring; physical and mental health care; food and housing for students' families; and enrichment activities such as summer camps.

"You can definitely see the kids that have had those interventions and those supports and resources that we've been providing since September," said Aliece Dutson, principal of Mission Grammar School, a Catholic school in Boston.

"Looking at their January growth it's pretty impressive."

Dutson and Griffith both started at their schools over a decade ago, at around the same time City Connects was implemented, and have been able to see the transformation it brought.

Griffith's school had been designated a "commonwealth priority school" because of low performance; City Connects helped them be named an "accommodation school" for "showing improvement in closing opportunity and achievement gaps" within a few years.

"It's been really a metamorphosis to see the change over time for our community," said Dutson, who was a teacher at her small, Catholic school when City Connects was implemented. "Really getting to know my kids in those different domains and dimensions made a lot of sense to me as a first-year teacher and was a really interesting way of looking at all of my students through a different lens."

For Walsh, having planned a program that has real impacts on children and families is a natural fit with working for a Catholic university which is "taking its mission seriously to develop knowledge that enhances the human condition."

"Boston College is a Jesuit university and they have been behind this 1,000 percent," she added, "because they've said this is important for our mission as a university to improve the human condition, expand the human imagination and make the world more just."

Civil War letters found in Andover attic to be gifted to Boston College

Steve Annear | Globe Staff January 31, 2018 When Ellen B. Alden’s daughter came home from elementary school five years ago and asked for an old photograph of her mother for a class project, the former teacher went straight to the attic, where she sifted through a collection of boxes stored there by her parents when they moved to Hawaii 13 years before.

She found a picture for her daughter’s assignment rather quickly. But she also stumbled upon something else: Buried in the clutter was a small leather box containing a trove of letters from her great-great-grandfather, an Irish immigrant named Florence Burke, to his wife and children. They were written, to her surprise, from the front lines of the Civil War. “You never know what you’re going to find in your attic,” Alden said. “If that project hadn’t come up, I would have never gone up there and found them.”

Last week, the Andover resident donated the letters — along with two photographs — to Boston College’s John J. Burns Library of Rare Books and Special Collections, during an event at the school. The library will preserve, archive, and digitize the letters so students and researchers can use them for years to come. The ceremony was cosponsored by The Éire Society of Boston.

Burke, Alden’s ancestor on her father’s side, moved to Western Massachusetts from Ireland in 1848 to escape the Great Famine.

“He was making a gamble,” Alden told the Globe. “He was hoping they would get a better life.”

Though he had his family’s best interests in mind, life certainly did not improve for Burke as he set out for war.

While Alden described the letters as beautifully written, the words crammed on nearly every inch of some of the pages, they told the story of a man who made the ultimate sacrifice for his loved ones.

The messages were penned from places like a camp near Brandy Station, Va., and capture Burke’s struggles and concerns as he fought as an Army private.

“Dear Wife,” an excerpt from one letter reads, “I am taking the favorable opportunity of writing these few lines to you hoping to find you in good health [as] I am not at present. My health is pretty bad these couple of weeks I do not know what is the matter with me. . . . Thinking of you and the children and all is coming down as a load on my heart.”

A snippet from a second letter, written from Cold Harbor, Va., on June 12, 1864, says, “My dear and loving wife. I once more take my pen in hand in order to let you know that I am still living thank God for it. I hope you and the children are well.” Burke continued, “We are close to the Confederate enemy only 100 yards from our entrenchment. Keep good courage and do not be fretting [as] I am doing the same hoping I will see you once more.

Good bye.” Burke died in the Battle of Petersburg.

The Burns library is “widely regarded as the most comprehensive of its kind in the world,” Boston College spokesman Jack Dunn said in a statement, making it the right place for the documents.

Christian Dupont, a Burns librarian and associate university librarian for special collections, agreed, and said the school welcomes the addition of the letters to its historical artifacts.“We have a particular mission to collect Irish and Irish-American resources,” he said. “The letters that Ellen and her family will be donating fit right in with our collecting profile.”

Alden, who earned a teaching degree from Pepperdine University, said her life’s path was rerouted after discovering these mementos, taking her to schools, libraries, museums, and organizations where she has given talks and hosted presentations about her family’s rich history.

Spending so much time with the letters has worn them down. It’s also made parting ways with them bittersweet — though she knows they’ll be in good hands at “one of the best Irish studies colleges in the world,” where they can be shared with others. “It’s going to be really sad to let these go,” Alden said.

“It’s either that, or we put them back in our attic for 160 more years.”

Letters from the American Civil War: I wish this cruel war was over Ellen Alden’s discovery of her great-great grandfather’s letters inspired her to write a novel about his role in conflict that killed over 25,000 Irish Ronan McGreevy Tue, Jan 30, 2018 It is five years since Ellen Alden found a small mahogany box in the attic of her home in West Springfield, Massachusetts. The box contained 19 original letters written by her great-great-grandfather Florence Burke to his wife, who is also called Ellen. They bear extraordinary testimony to an Irish immigrant’s involvement in the American Civil War. It has been the fate of Irish warriors for centuries to die in their multitudes in other nations’ quarrels. More Irish fought and died in the American Civil War than in any conflict aside from the first World War. At the outbreak of the civil war in 1861, there were 1.6 million Irish-born living in the United States. Of those, 180,000 joined the Union Army and 20,000 the Confederates.

The civil war was bloody beyond the imaginings of any of its combatants. Damian Shiels, the foremost Irish historian of the war, estimates that between 25,000 and 35,000 Irishmen were killed in it. For the most part these men are lying in the fields of Virginia, Pennsylvania and so many other places in the United States – out of sight and out of mind. They are a small part of the narrative of their adopted country and hardly feature at all in the narrative of their own.

They were part of the forgotten multitudes that left Ireland after the famine. Florence Burke was one of them. He was 19 when he left Ireland in 1848 from his home village of Ballinhassig, Co Cork. He was already married to There are two photographs of Burke in Ellen Alden’s possession. One taken on arrival in America shows him with his brother John. They appear purposeful and optimistic. The second is taken when he was a Union soldier, looking haunted and considerably older than his 35 years.

In January 1864, during the penultimate year of the American Civil War, Burke enlisted as a soldier in the Union army. He did so despite being married with three young children. He took the place of Samuel Day, the 19-year-old son of a wealthy local banker.

The teenager had been conscripted, but, under the conscription law, a wealthy man could buy his way out of military service if he put up $300 or found a substitute draftee. Burke agreed to be a substitute in exchange for a parcel of land which made him a landowner. He was given very little notice to report for duty, leaving his shocked wife to fend for herself in an isolated homestead with her children – the youngest a new-born baby Grace.

When war broke out, Burke was still operating as a tenant farmer with all the insecurities and diminished status that brought in 19th-century America. In becoming a landowner, he risked his life to get ahead and make a better life for himself and his family.

This is the premise of Ellen Alden’s debut novel Yours Faithfully, Florence Burke which might be best described as historical faction. The narrative of this intensely moving book is underpinned by the 19 letters which she found in the attic. The letters are not political in nature. There is no mention of Ireland in them, nor little by way of musings on the rights and wrongs of slavery.

Burke is preoccupied with the hardships of the life he has chosen and staying alive.“In earnest I have commenced the life of a soldier…. After a horrid march of 35 miles, such a hated set of men were never seen before in the army of the Sixth Corps or any other corps of the Potomac. We bivouacked on a hill in an open lot, mid a slight snowstorm.”The letters become darker in tone as Burke marches south towards the battlefields. “I awake and find myself on a pine stick like a chicken at roost and it makes me wish this cruel war was over.”

The letters are distinguished by their plaintive longing for home. Burke is tormented by guilt and homesickness.He prays fervently for deliverance and to return safely to his family. There is a lyrical tenderness in his writings which belie his lack of a

formal education. He writes to his wife: “On my arrival to camp I found a letter and a likeness from you containing your wellknown features and that of the children, and mingled tears of joy and sadness welled up in my tired and weary eyes. “Joy at again seeing through the medium of a picture the features of those I hold so near and dear to my heart, but sadness to think they were not true nature itself, that they might speak to cheer my drooping spirits.”

He assures his wife that in doing his duty he will play his part in ending the war and adds “Ellen, my beautiful wife, please keep good courage. I will return to you. For you are the bravest, most clever woman I have ever met.” His longing, though, turns to paranoia when news reaches him that his friend Daniel Sheehan has been seen around his home in West Springfield a lot since he went away. “I don’t believe it but I beg of you to write to me and tell me what it started from,” he asks his wife.

The letters reference several battles and even the Union commander Ulysses S Grant who came to inspect Burke’s regiment. It could have been a history book, but the author thought it deserved a different treatment.

“Initially I wanted to write a nonfiction book, straightforward retelling of the events of the Burke family with all 19 letters included,” Alden explained. “I collected data and research, made a time line, created detailed chapters and listed historical events, people and places. But then I travelled to Ireland for a second time. At that point everything changed. The landscape, the people and atmosphere felt more real to me. I know many Americans say this when visiting Ireland but it was true for me.

“I suddenly felt a strong connection to my past. I could imagine my great, great grandparents here in Ireland and I knew I wanted to bring their story to life with rich detail and conversation.”

In one of his last letters, Burke appears to lament the choice he made, but concludes “it is too late for spilled milk …I feel and trust in God we shall live to see each other in good health.”

He never did get to see his wife and children again. On June 18th, 1864, Florence Burke was killed during the Battle of Petersburg. This awful battle presaged all the horrors of the first World War with its protracted trench warfare and useless, bloody charges against fixed machinegun positions. Burke died occupying a trench which his commanders assumed was empty.

It was crawling with the enemy. His baby daughter Grace sadly died when he was away at war. His sons Jerry and Michael were left fatherless.And yet, by his becoming a landowner, they were entitled to a better education than they would have got otherwise.

Florence Burke’s grandchildren became judges, university professors and civil servants in Washington DC. Florence Burke is an Irish tragedy and yet a typical American immigrant story, where the first generation makes sacrifices so the next can get ahead – in Burke’s case the ultimate sacrifice.

Alden published the novel herself last year. On her visit to Ireland in September, she attended the famine exhibition in the St Stephen’s Green Centre curated by Gerard McCarthy, which featured her great-great grandfather. She also participated in Culture Night in Cork. Yours Faithfully, Florence Burke has been used in private schools in the Massachusetts area to teach schoolchildren about the connection between Irish immigration and the American Civil War. The letters recently came to the attention of Boston College, which offered to preserve them for posterity. On January 31st, Alden will hand over the letters to the college’s John J Burns library. It has been the repository of much material relating to Irish history.

“I will have a hard time parting with them, honestly,” Alden says. “I feel fortunate to have found the letters and I developed a real sense of who my ancestors were from reading their words and writing their story in the first person. So it will be hard to see them go, but I know it is the right decision.

“Education in America was a dream for the Burkes. I bet they would have never imagined their letters/history would end up being archived at Boston College, one of the best Irish-Catholic schools in the country.”

January 28, 2018 Wortham: Human tragedy abounds at border

By Stanton Wortham

I met Jesús in Nogales, Mexico, at a facility that provides humanitarian assistance to migrants.

He had lived in Salt Lake City for 20 years, but had just been deported. The morning we met he had been removed from the bus on the U.S. side of the border, unshackled and transferred to Mexican authorities who drove him to a center which feeds about 100 migrants every day and provides clothing, medicine and other necessities.

Over breakfast, Jesús told us he arrived from Mexico with his parents when he was 8 years old, attended school, learned English, and hung drywall to help support his family. Seven years ago, he married, and has two American-born children, ages 4 and 5.

Unfortunately, his wife, an alcoholic, left him, and the state of Utah placed the children in foster care. The foster parents, he told us, are good people and he’s grateful for the care they’ve given his children, but he wanted to care for them himself.

So about 18 months ago, he began the time-consuming process to obtain custody. He paid one lawyer thousands of dollars only to have her claim she could do nothing.

Eventually, however, he was able to regain custody of his children. Last November, they moved into a new apartment.

Consumed with the custody battle, he forgot to renew his work permit. When he tried to do so, he was detained. Six weeks after he gained custody, he was deported and his children were returned to foster care. Now he is living in Nogales, and desperate to see his children again.

While in Nogales I spoke with many people like Jesús. The details of their cases differed: One was deported when he was stopped for a traffic violation and referred to immigration authorities by the police; others were deported because they couldn’t navigate the paperwork or afford the fees.

Thousands of Mexican parents of American children have been deported over the past decade, and it’s become so common that many Mexican-American families develop emergency plans in the event that one or both parents is deported while their kids are at school.

JesĂşs cried when he told us that he had no choice but to try re-crossing the border. Thousands of people have died trying, and hundreds of thousands have been caught and deported in recent years. His children need him, so he will try again. Our government has left him no other choice.

Immigration reform poses political challenges. What is certain is that we gain nothing by forcing American children to grow up separated from their mothers and fathers. If we value families, and if we want these thousands of U.S. residents to contribute productively to our society, we must have the political courage and moral decency to solve this problem.This painful human tragedy will continue until we accept the reality that our system is broken, and demand that our elected officials focus on families as they attempt to resolve this crisis. As a nation of immigrants, we owe it to JesĂşs, to others like him, and to ourselves, to find a solution.

Stanton E.F. Wortham is the dean of the Lynch School of Education at Boston College. He recently volunteered at the Kino Border Initiative (KBI), a binational organization that operates the facility in Nogales.

January 17, 2018 Two Big Misperceptions David Leonhardt I’m going to take a break from All Things Trump this morning to talk about two important misperceptions in American life: “Average net tuition at community colleges is less than zero — seriously — once financial aid is taken into account. Average in-state tuition at public colleges will be just $4,140 this year. And many elite private colleges cover much of their sky-high list-price tuition through scholarships.

Yet many middle-class and low-income families believe tuition will cost them tens of thousands of dollars a year. This misperception has a serious downside. It keeps some people from attending college, even though the financial (and nonfinancial) benefits of a degree are enormous.

Fortunately, a growing number of colleges are starting to take tuition misperceptions seriously.

Sixteen top colleges are announcing this morning that they’re joining an effort called MyIntuition — an online calculator that lets people answer just a few questions, anonymously, and receive an estimate of how much attending each college would cost.

The 16 include Boston College, Brown, Davidson, Duke, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, St. Olaf and Yale. They’ve joined 15 others that already participate. The calculator was created by Phillip Levine, an economist at Wellesley College.

The Boston Globe named the calculator one of 2017’s “bold new ideas,” and administrators at Dartmouth say it has helped them attract more low-income applicants. I’ve written about it before, with more details here and here.

The calculator is remarkably easy to use, far easier than other financial-aid tools. If you have a child nearing college age, or you’re simply curious, give it a whirl — with real or hypothetical information.

A son of refuseniks chronicles the slow dissolve of Russia’s Jews

By Penny Schwartz January 16, 2018 When Maxim Shrayer traveled to Moscow for a five-day visit at the end of October 2016, his itinerary included a trip to the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center.

Shrayer, who emigrated from Russia to the U.S. with his refusenik activist parents 30 years ago, is an acclaimed scholar of Jewish-Russian literature and culture as well as an awardwinning writer on the Jewish-Russian emigre experience (“Waiting for America: A Story of Emigration” and “Leaving Russia) and of a work of short fiction (“Yom Kippur in Amsterdam”).

Shrayer was in Moscow that autumn to participate in the Moscow International Conference on Combating AntiSemitism, organized by the Russian Jewish Congress, the World Jewish Congress and the city of Moscow. He took a cab to the museum, where he delivered a literary paper on the marriage of Vladimir Nabokov and Vera Slonim. But the next day, on the advice of his longtime friend, the prominent filmmaker Oleg Dorman, who still lives in Moscow, Shrayer returned to the museum. This time he took a tram.

As the No. 19 tram approached the stop for the museum, which opened in 2012, a pre-recorded voice announced the stop as the Palace of Culture of MIIT, Museum and Tolerance Center. As Dorman had warned him, the word “Jewish” was left out of the museum’s name. The mystifying omission was unsettling. Was the word Jewish dropped deliberately? Was it a linguistic nuance, Shrayer wondered, or did it have larger and more worrisome meaning?

Shrayer discusses the mystery — along with the history of the No. 19 tram and the evolution of the Jewish neighborhood it passes through — in an early chapter of “With or Without You: The Prospect for Jews in Today’s Russia” (Academic Studies Press). Shrayer’s book adds to his reputation as a go-to scholar and commentator on Jewish-Russian life and culture.

In November, Shrayer, a professor of Russian, English and Jewish Studies at Boston College, where he co-founded the university’s Jewish studies center, was named director of the new Project on Russian and Eurasian Jewry at Harvard University’s Davis Center, in partnership with the Genesis Philanthropy Group.

Until now, Shrayer has shied away from probing one question that for him has been ever-present: Why do Jews stay in Russia?

Had the time come to write an elegy for Russian Jewry? For Shrayer, even contemplating the question has been a source of emotional conflict.

He used the trip to the Moscow conference as a jumping-off point for a kind of fact-finding mission, probing the subject in a series of interviews with Jewish friends, new acquaintances and leaders of Russia’s Jewish community. The result is a slim,

engaging and elegant read that goes beneath the surface to reveal a multi-layered portrait of Jewish life in Russia today. Those he interviewed include Berel Lazar, who the government recognizes as the chief rabbi of Russia; Anna Bokshitskaya, a journalist and executive director of the Russian Jewish Congress; and Boris Lanin, a professor and literary scholar. He writes about a couple of (non-Jewish) Russian expat clowns now living in the U.S. who entertain their Russian audiences with Jewish-inflected shtick.

On a recent afternoon, Shrayer sat down with JTA at a favorite cafe in this suburb near Boston, home to a large Jewish population, where he lives with his American-born wife, Karen Lasser, a physician, and their two school-age daughters, Mira and Tatiana. Shrayer’s parents, David Shrayer-Petrov and Emilia Shrayer, both literary lights in Russian literature, live nearby.

Parents and son have collaborated on several books, including the most recent, “Dinner With Stalin,” a collection of stories by David Shrayer-Petrov.

“With or Without You” is a departure from decades of Shrayer’s previous writing on the Jewish presence in Russia, much of it traversing the 19th and 20th centuries. They were stories of the past, he said. “The mantra for me had always been, I was writing about the past, the Jews’ Russian and Soviet past, because in a sense, I have moved on. I did not feel that the story of Jews who remained in Russia was my story,” Shrayer said, adding that he was “always puzzled why these Jews who were still there had stayed.”

Shrayer’s working method involved Mira, the older of his daughters, who was 10 when she accompanied him on the trip. She is a constant presence, both a witness and an addressee through the book, he suggested. As they walked together around the city, Shrayer described what it was like for him growing up and what it was like for Jews during the Soviet period.

The result is part historical and cultural investigation, and part memoir and travelogue, he said. Shrayer said the responses of those he interviewed formed three groups: Jews who identify religiously and are committed to the continuity of Jewish religious and communal life; others who stay for personal circumstances, such as elderly parents, being in a mixed marriage or a lucrative business; and those who may leave but not because they are Jews, but “because the situation in the country is increasingly politically suffocating.”

In the book’s chapter on anti-Semitism, Shrayer reports the recent findings of the public opinion study conducted by the Levada Center, a Russian nongovernment research organization, that found attitudes toward Jews in Russia have improved dramatically over the years and that overtly negative views about Jews about Jews are at an all-time low. Nonetheless, the study found, there are reasons to be cautious, particularly on the views within certain populations groups. This rings for true for Shrayer, he told JTA. Anti-Semitism is a kind of leitmotif that ran through his interviews and conversations. “There wasn’t a person who dismissed it,” Shrayer said. At the same time, it is not the most pressing issue for many of the people he interviewed, he observed.

The numbers are telling, he said. There are now about 170,000 Jews in Russia, according to Mark Tolts, a Hebrew University demographer. That’s a tenth of the community’s size in 1989, as counted in the last Soviet census. Combined with an aging population, low birth rate and increased immigration to Israel, Shrayer wonders what the county will look like in 50 years.

“Jewish faces and Jewish names are starting to vanish from the Russian mainstream — from literature, the arts and the entertainment industry, but also from the achievement rolls of science, medicine and the humanities,” he writes.

Has Shrayer overcome his sense of divide with Jews who stay in Russia? As a result of his research, he is both more emotionally connected, but also, paradoxically, more disconnected.“There’s a feeling of not quite mourning but certainly a feeling of deep sadness. It’s coming from a place that is somewhere deep inside,” he reflected.

It brings Shrayer back to the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center, whose galleries and exhibits shed light on the story of Jews in Russia. “It’s a great museum,” he said. But in part, it’s a museum of those who stayed, for those who stayed – and for their countrymen. Among the museum’s exhibits, pictured on the jacket of his book, are life-size plaster casts of Jews in period garb — all as white as ghosts.

Shrayer learned recently that the audio recording on the No. 19 tram, as well as the sign on its stop, have been changed and riders now hear and see the full name of the museum. He’s not claiming it’s his doing — that would be extremely chutzpahdik, Shrayer said.

Nonetheless, he added, the correction suggests to him that the story of Russia’s Jews resists closure.

January 10, 2018 BC professor’s research says prehistoric butterflies may have fluttered millions of years before the first flowers Moths and butterflies fluttered around Earth in the Jurassic Period, millions of years earlier than previously thought, even before there were flowers to provide them with nectar for food.

A new study by a group of researchers including Boston College Research Professor Paul K. Strother offers new support for that theory.

Strother and his colleagues made the scientific case, in an article published Wednesday in Science Advances, for the moths and butterflies known as Lepidoptera emerging during the Jurassic period.

Previously, it had been thought they emerged during the Cretaceous Period, when the first flowers emerged, Boston College said in a statement.

Visiting a colleague in Germany in 2012, Strother was looking at core samples drilled from the German countryside for pollen, spores, pieces of plants, and insect legs that had been trapped in sediment millions of years ago, the college said.

The sample dated to the boundary between the end of the Triassic Period and the beginning of the Jurassic Period, approximately 200 million years ago, researchers said. The Cretaceous Period began 145 million years ago.

Strother, who works at the college’s Weston Observatory, noticed features similar to those found in Lepidoptera wings.

“The consensus has been that insects followed flowers,” Strother said in the statement. “But that would be 50 million years later than what the wings were saying. It was odd to say the least, that there would be butterflies before there were flowers.”

“I thought, ‘OK, this is weird,’” Strother said in a telephone interview.

Strother was part of a team that also included researchers from Utrecht University in the Netherlands and natural history museums in Germany.

Strother said the discovery was exciting, but he couldn’t really prove it. That was up to Timo van Eldijk, a Utrecht University undergraduate at the time, working with Torsten Wappler of the German natural history museum Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt.

So how did the primitive moths and butterflies get food, if there were no flowers?

The researchers say that they developed a sucking proboscis to get nutrition by drawing off water drops from the tips of immature gymnosperm seeds. (Gymnosperms, which include conifers and other plants, have exposed seeds.)

“It turns out that there are amino acids and sugars that are dissolved in the pollen droplet ... so they can get food from them,” Strother said in the interview.

The insects later transferred their feeding preference onto angiosperms [flowering plants with their seeds protected in fruits], he said.

He said the insects and plants ended up co-evolving, with the insects getting food from the flowers and the flowers using them to transfer pollen.

The theory that ancient butterflies fed on gymnosperms is not new, he said. “But they didn’t actually have the fossils to back up those ideas. Now they do.”

January 8, 2018 Cambodia’s Python Regime

By Martha Bayles (Excerpt)

Native to Southeast Asia, the reticulated python is one of the world’s longest, strongest, heaviest snakes. Once it coils itself around its prey and begins squeezing, the prey will be dead in a matter of minutes. Of longer duration is the swallowing: the python opens its expandable jaws, grips the carcass, and begins the laborious process of ingesting a meal that occasionally rivals it in size.

This is not a bad metaphor for the regime of Hun Sen, the former Khmer Rouge commander who switched sides when the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia in 1977, and subsequently became Prime Minister in 1985. One difference is that the python kills swiftly, while Hun Sen and his ruling Cambodian People’s Party have spent 32 years choking the life out of their country. Another difference is that the python squeezes first and swallows second, while the Hun Sen regime does both at the same time.

Adopted in 1993 under the Paris Peace Accord, the constitution of Cambodia originally guaranteed free regular elections, universal equal suffrage, the secret ballot, and the right to organize political parties. In reality, these guarantees have long been subject to squeezing: elections are rigged, information manipulated, opposition figures harassed, threatened, and attacked. At the same time, those who assist in the squeezing have been rewarded with a share in the swallowing. The most conspicuous reward has been the arbitrary power to confiscate the land of less fortunate countrymen. Even more than in China, land grabs are endemic in Cambodia, in large part because, in addition to killing two million people in the 1970s, the Khmer Rouge destroyed nearly all property records and public land registers. A reform law was passed in 2001, but according to charges brought before the International Criminal Court in the Hague, that law has not prevented roughly 770,000 Cambodians from being driven from their homes, farms, and villages.

The predatory nature of the Hun Sen regime was driven home to me in the summer of 2015, when I visited Cambodia as part of a research trip looking at best practices in the U.S. government’s far-flung system of foreignlanguage media. In Cambodia my focus was the Khmer services of Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Free Asia (RFA). At the time, these two news organizations maintained separate bureaus in Phnom Penh, so a key question on my mind was whether the American taxpayer needed to be paying for what critics in Washington were calling a wasteful “duplication” of effort.

Once on the ground in Cambodia, I realized that, while there were duplications in the system, in Cambodia the coexistence of VOA and RFA was more accurately described as division of labor. Both services had been in Cambodia for decades—VOA since 1962, RFA since 1997—and over that time they had grown to fill complementary niches…

For example, VOA had three reporters based in Phnom Penh who mainly focused on the doings of government officials and leaders in the Cambodian People’s Party and its then opposition, the Cambodian National Rescue

Party. Like their counterparts in capital cities around the world, these VOA reporters could not just stroll into the corridors of power; they had to jump through certain hoops. Repellent as it sounds to most Americans, they jumped through at least some hoops, for three reasons. First, the alternative was to have no access whatsoever. Second, only one-third of VOA’s radio, TV, and Internet programming was devoted to news about Cambodia; the other twothirds were devoted to world news and news about America, supplemented by feature stories on topics of interest, such as health, technology, and the experiences of Cambodians living in the United States. And third, there was another U.S. news outlet in the country that did not jump through any hoops: RFA. Fully 95 percent of RFA’s news reporting was about Cambodia, and the majority of its journalists, 20 by one estimate, were scattered throughout the country doing hard-hitting investigative reporting about land grabs, illegal logging, labor conflicts, environmentally risky dam projects, and all the other abuses committed by the python—and by its big brother, the Chinese dragon.

Needless to say, this reporting did not endear RFA to the Hun Sen regime. But it did gain a large and loyal following among ordinary Cambodians, because they knew from bitter experience that RFA was telling it like it is. RFA’s scrappy reporters were not doing propaganda, in the sense of fabricating stories and spreading lies. But they were doing adversarial journalism, in the sense of exposing the python’s grip and greed. If VOA’s operation was less adversarial, that made sense, because the American and Cambodian governments were officially on good terms, and the presence of American NGOs and media provided a counterweight to the excesses of the regime. This view was shared by Kek Galabru, the highly respected head of the Cambodian League for the Promotion and Defense of Human Rights. When asked to compare VOA and RFA, she stated that RFA’s “local coverage” was less “impartial” than VOA’s more deferential style, and that sometimes the latter allowed Hun Sen to retain the “façade of democracy” and “not be seen as a pariah.” But at the same time she emphasized that both VOA and RFA were seen as independent and trustworthy, especially in the countryside, where “people rely on them to find out what is happening.” The importance of such “surrogate media” is often lost on outsiders. For example, at the time of my visit, Phnom Penh was also home to two stubbornly independent English-language newspapers, the Cambodian Daily and the Phnom Penh Post. Widely read by the large expat and NGO community, both newspapers served as a training ground for a cohort of courageous, highly principled Cambodian journalists. This robust English-language presence made it hard for an Anglophone like me to appreciate the degree to which the Khmer-language media— including the Khmer editions of the Cambodian Daily and the Phnom Penh Post—were …And as The Economist wrote in December, “Even reporting on resistance to the crackdown is difficult.” On the day of Kem Sokha’s arrest, the Cambodia Daily published its last issue, with the headline “Descent into Outright Dictatorship.” Here the charge was failure to pay $6 million in back taxes. Having not made a profit for 10 years, the paper was in the middle of disputing that charge when it was ordered to close. And the same strategy of bogus accusation, harassment, and outright suppression has also led to the expulsion of VOA and RFA. The Economist continues: In the past four months the government has closed two American-funded radio-news services, dozens of broadcasting frequencies and one of the country’s best independent newspapers on trumped-up tax charges. Many correspondents have fled; others nurse cheap beers in Phnom Penh’s bars and fret over finding new employment.

They are the lucky ones. Two former radio journalists, Uon Chhin and Yeang Sothearin, face 15 years in prison for supplying information which “undermines national defence”. The voices of ordinary Cambodians are kept quiet too. Social-media posts calling for political change land their authors—frequently students—in prison.

I believe it was Anton Chekhov who wrote, “The world is ugly, and people are sad.” This is true, as we all know.

But it is also abstract. The “former radio journalists” Uon Chhin and Yeang Sothearin were among the brave, scrappy reporters working for RFA, and they are not abstract. They are as concrete and real as the bitter history of their country. And it is very ugly indeed to see that country gripped in the jaws of a cold and devouring monster.

Martha Bayles works in the Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences at Boston College.

The Lives They Lived | December 28, 2017 Roy Dotrice The voice that brought the voices of Westeros to life in your head.

By CARLO ROTELLA

The experience of being read to, whether it’s toddlers nodding off to “Goodnight Moon” at bedtime or 19th-century families gathering to hear the latest serial installment of “Great Expectations,” is a deep-rooted element of a love for books. A reader’s performance can add further layers of artistry and meaning to a story, and because listeners have their hands and eyes free, they can do something useful while they listen. Being read to while washing dishes, shoveling snow or working out feels like a bonus, a book-lover’s exacta of pleasure and efficiency.

Audiobooks are the fastest-growing segment of the publishing industry, and the masterpiece of the form to date may well be Roy Dotrice’s reading of George R. R. Martin’s epic fantasy series, “A Song of Ice and Fire,” the source material for HBO’s “Game of Thrones.” The five audiobooks, totaling 201 hours, have all the strengths of Martin’s novels, which plumb the grim subjectivity of their many principal characters with patient thoroughness. And because you have approximately $11 trillion to spend on special effects in your mind’s eye, you can stage a spectacle in your head that puts to shame anything seen on a TV screen. Martin, who worked with Dotrice on the TV series “Beauty and the Beast,” recruited him to record his books because he recognized Dotrice’s voice as an instrument of sorcerous potency.

Dotrice’s bravura rendering of hundreds of characters — male and female, young and old, nobles and commoners, Westerosi and Dothraki and a score of other nationalities and tribes — has generated a good deal of acclaim. Permutatively blending a dizzying variety of intonations, timbres and cadences while borrowing regional and class inflections from across the British Isles, he gives each speaker a “distinct and distinguishable” voice, according to the citation from Guinness World Records for “most character voices for an audiobook — individual” (224 for “A Game of Thrones”). His Tyrion Lannister, the Machiavellian imp, has a Welsh lilt that manages to convey a substrate of moral rigor beneath all the scheming and whoring. His Arya Stark really does sound like a girl trying to pass as a boy in the company of violent men, and he puts just the right touch of steel in her tone to convey her dawning realization that vengeance may yet be hers.

Dotrice’s command of character voices grows especially virtuosic when unlike types converse: Tyrion and the regular-guy sellsword Bronn, the castrato spymaster Varys and the doddering savant Grand Maester Pycelle.

He was such a compelling raconteur that work would come to a halt in the Penguin Random House Audio studios in Los Angeles when everybody crowded into the break room to hear him tell tales.

But it’s Dotrice’s narration, even more than his facility with characters that puts his mark on “A Song of Ice and Fire.” There’s a creaking note in his voice redolent not only of long-ago-and-faraway but also of dinge and rot, the thick sense of lived-in everydayness that most distinguishes Martin’s grubby fantasy world from J. R. R. Tolkien’s idealized Middle-earth. And Dotrice’s own aging became part of the developing richness of the series. He was 80 when he recorded the first three audiobooks and pushing 90 when he finished the fourth and the fifth, and he had an old man’s voice — still robust, but imbued with experience and the long view. His character voices lose suppleness and range in the last two books, but his elders sound more fantastically wizened than ever, and the extra quaver and rasp in his narration only heighten its gravitas.

Dotrice was a relative newcomer to the audiobook as an art form when Martin recruited him, but over his long career he had done many other sorts of acting. He played Fairy Godmother in a production of “Cinderella” in the German stalag where he was imprisoned after being shot down over the Baltic in 1942, and he went on to perform in hundreds of plays in English repertory companies. He played Hamlet and other leading men in the troupe that eventually became the Royal Shakespeare Company and appeared many times on the London stage and on Broadway.

He played Mozart’s disapproving father in “Amadeus,” Charles Dickens in Masterpiece Theatre’s “Dickens of London,” Abraham Lincoln and the 17th-century writer John Aubrey in acclaimed one-man shows and the pallid firebug Hallyne the Pyromancer in “Game of Thrones.”

Listening to Dotrice read “A Song of Ice and Fire,” you can hear him reaching back into his deep life-catalog of voices — evoking a dotty relation, say, or a guard at the stalag — to impart distinctiveness to each character. You can hear that he has known many people and heard and told many good stories. He was such a compelling raconteur that work would come to a halt in the Penguin Random House Audio studios in Los Angeles when everybody crowded into the break room to hear him tell tales. It’s the opposite, of course, for many of his listeners: Faced with floors to scrub or weights to lift, they put in earbuds and let Dotrice’s voice carry away their minds to fantasy lands while their bodies go about the workaday business of living.

Carlo Rotella is the director of American studies at Boston College and the author, most recently, of “Playing in Time: Essays, Profiles and Other True Stories.”

December 27, 2017

Who’s Winning the Culture War? Corporate America

By David A. Hopkins

At the 1992 Republican National Convention, Pat Buchanan famously declared that American politics had become a “cultural war.” In the years since, social issues and identities have become more important in dividing Democrats from Republicans.

Traditionally, the two parties fought mostly over economics. But now cultural issues like abortion and gun control divide Americans more sharply along regional lines than economic policies. One impact of the rise of the culture war in the 1990s was to reorder the popular coalitions of the parties — for example, by attracting evangelical Protestants to the Republicans while propelling secular voters toward the Democrats. This also redefined their geographic constituencies.

But while it has been fueled by widening divisions over social issues within the American electorate, this regional realignment has left a much larger imprint on the direction of federal economic policy than on the nation’s prevailing cultural zeitgeist.

You might say that the winner of the culture wars is neither Democrats nor Republicans. In legislative terms, American corporations have claimed the biggest victories so far.

The growing sectional divide — the coasts and a handful of Midwestern and Mountain West states vote blue, while voters in the culturally conservative heartland of the South and interior West largely vote red — is magnified by winner-take-all electoral rules that concentrate representation in the hands of local partisan majorities. The Alabama Senate race was an exception, but this largely produces a stable arrangement of “red” and “blue” states and districts that seldom deviate from their normal partisan alignments regardless of the individual candidates seeking office.

On balance, the trend of rising geographic polarization has worked to the advantage of Republicans in both houses of Congress. The Republican Party has captured more seats in culturally conservative red America than it has relinquished in culturally liberal blue America, allowing it to control at least one legislative chamber in all but four years since 1994 after six decades of near-permanent minority status.

Senate Republicans especially benefit from the equal representation of thinly populated states in the nation’s midsection, which once regularly elected moderate Democrats like Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Tim Johnson of South Dakota and Max Baucus of Montana but increasingly favor Republicans in congressional races. Red states now substantially outnumber blue states; in the 2016 election, Donald Trump carried 30 states to Hillary Clinton’s 20 despite his loss in the national popular vote, while the

outcome of every Senate race matched the state presidential result — a foreboding sign for the future fortunes of Senate Democrats.

The contemporary geographic coalitions of the parties primarily reflect the nation’s roiling cultural conflicts, but the representatives chosen via today’s electoral map are equally polarized over economic policies — and it is pocketbook issues, not social matters, that dominate the business of Congress.

Increasingly unfettered by a declining bloc of dissident party moderates from the Northeast and Pacific Coast, ascendant red-state Republicans have prioritized an ambitious conservative economic agenda encompassing regulatory rollbacks, repeal of the Affordable Care Act and substantial cuts to federal taxes — like the tax bill passed last week — and entitlement programs. Departures from this small-government approach, such as the No Child Left Behind and Medicare Part D programs enacted during the George W. Bush presidency, have fallen out of fashion among post-Tea Party Republican leaders increasingly devoted to the pursuit of ideological purity.

Political analysts often argue that the rise of the culture war has had an acrimonious effect on American politics by expanding the battlefield of partisan disagreement to include a set of policies that provoke moral fervor, like abortion and gay rights, or activate fundamental personal identities such as religion and ethnicity. These divisions, they suggest, do not lend themselves to negotiation and compromise as readily as differences over economics, where horse-trading and difference-splitting are more feasible solutions.

But the growth of cultural conflict has polarized Democratic and Republican politicians on economic issues as well, by providing the two parties with increasingly distinct and insulated electoral constituencies, and bitter debates over health care and tax reform have generated just as much partisan rancor in the current Congress as any other policy domain.

The numerous Republican victories in congressional elections during the past 25 years have not managed to prevent the cultural change that has occurred over the same period, from declining religious observance and increasing support for same-sex marriage to the decriminalization of marijuana and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. Cultural conservatism remains essential to defining the Republican Party’s regional base, but its substantive fruits can be found more in the implementation of conservative economic measures than in the repeal of liberal social policies or reversal of leftward social trends.

Despite a 2016 campaign waged largely on cultural themes, the Republican tax bill represents the biggest legislative accomplishment of the current Congress — and, quite possibly, of the entire Trump administration. Though Mr. Trump once presented himself as a populist enemy of Wall Street, and though many corporations have come to adopt liberal positions on issues like immigration, gay rights and affirmative action, big business and wealthy individuals stand to benefit the most from tax cuts approved by congressional majorities elected on the basis of right-of-center cultural views.

That is why the true winner of today’s culture war is corporate America.

David A. Hopkins is an associate professor of political science at Boston College and the author of “Red Fighting Blue: How Geography and Electoral Rules Polarize American Politics.”

December 24, 2017 BC’s A.J. Dillon makes impact in community, on field The day after Boston College tied a bow on its season, the wheels in freshman running back A.J. Dillon’s head were still turning.

The Eagles had just gone into the Carrier Dome, a building that had haunted them the past seven years, and steamrolled Syracuse, 42-14.

Dillon did most of the damage, piling up 193 yards and three touchdowns.

The performance all but finalized his status as the Atlantic Coast Conference rookie of the year. But once his highlight reel was cut, his mind was on something bigger. He was thinking about growing up in New London, Conn., how much he loved home and how he would always show his appreciation by giving back.

From the time he was a child, he and his mother, Jessyca Campbell, would volunteer at soup kitchens. When he went off to Lawrence Academy, he would come back to help coach his pre-teen basketball team. He mentored elementary schoolers. “I don’t have millions of dollars to give to some charity or anything,” Dillon said. “But I’d like to be there firsthand and just kind of show people that somebody cares.”

The connection to his community is as important to Dillon as the identity he has carved out for himself on the field. He realized how much those things worked hand-in-hand whenever he looked at another New London product: Kris Dunn.

Before Dunn starred at Providence and went on to be selected by the Minnesota Timberwolves in the first round of the 2016 NBA Draft, he was one of the sons the city was most proud of. So much so, that last year, it dedicated an entire day to him.

“New London, it’s not the biggest city, so everybody knows everybody,” Dillon said. “I remember he gave a bunch of stuff back to the community. I just remember how impactful it was.”

Dillon thought about how he could make the same impact. The day after the Syracuse game, Dillon found himself sifting through Twitter. He came across BC athletic director Martin Jarmond’s profile and shot him a message.

Dillon’s question was simple: How can he be of help in the community? Getting that message at that moment took Jarmond by surprise. The two got on the phone to brainstorm. “I just got off the phone with him, and I was amazed,” Jarmond said. “Here he is, just finished the season, just ran for 190 yards the day before, you know, you’re tired. And he’s thinking about what can he do to help his community — his new community. He wants to serve.

“I just said, this guy is a freshman, a true freshman who is thinking about this stuff and wanting to serve. I’ve never had a call like that. In all my years of doing this, I’ve never had a call like that.”

Jarmond put Dillon in touch with Father Jack Butler, BC’s vice president for the Division of University Mission and Ministry.

Together they found a kitchen and during a brief lull as BC began its preparations for Wednesday’s Pinstripe Bowl in New York, Dillon jumped at the opportunity.

“Where I’m from, it’s not the worst of the worst, but inside my community, there’s a lot that I’d like to help out with,” Dillon said. “That’s always been my goal. Besides helping my mom and family, I really wanted to eventually give that to my city. So I kind of wanted to do the same thing out here. I’m very passionate about where I’m from — and I include Boston in that.”

It’s been years since a freshman has made anywhere near as splashy of a debut as Dillon did this season. He smashed BC’s single-season rookie rushing record with 1,432 yards. He became the first freshman in BC history to win ACC rookie of the year (and also took home offensive rookie of the year honors). He was just the second ACC freshman to post two 200-yard games.

And for a revitalized Eagles program making its fourth bowl appearance in five years, he may offer something that’s been missing since the Matt Ryan era: star power. “I think when you have marquee players, first of all, it brings everybody up,” said Eagles coach Steve Addazio. “You start to see a lot of guys making a lot of plays, because playmaking’s contagious. I also think when you have marquee players, it’s attractive to the fan base and it has a chance to increase your attendance, your ticket sales, and all of those things. People want to come out and see great players. I think that’s exciting.”

When the Eagles set their sights on Dillon in the recruiting process, they had an idea of the impact he could have. But Addazio admitted he wasn’t certain it would be this immediate. “We really felt like that could be the case, but you never know,” Addazio said. “I would say he has exceeded, Year 1, our expectations.”

What they were well aware of was that Dillon was chasing greatness. He had offers from Notre Dame, where his grandfather Thom Gatewood, a member of the College Football Hall of Fame, was a walking memorial. Michigan was also after him. But BC was close to home. Plus Dillon only had to look to 2013 when Andre Williams rushed for 2,177 yards and threw himself into the Heisman race to see the Eagles’ history of success with power running backs.

“He’s a smart guy,” Addazio said. “He wanted to come here. He wanted to build his platform here. He wanted the chance to be in an offense that would feature a tailback. He wanted to be able to come in and be ‘that guy,’ if you will. Honestly, I think it’s a tremendous decision.”

Dillon was never concerned with whether the weight of being the face of a program was too much to carry. It was something he embraced before it was ever on his shoulders.

“I think about it sometimes,” Dillon said. “Then I realize, this is what I wanted. I didn’t want to come to BC just to say I played college football. I wanted to be this. I wanted to win Heismans. All these things that I’ve dreamed about, written down in my room. I can’t shy away from it. It’s going to be a lot of responsibility and that’s why I push myself so hard.”

In his dorm room, he keeps a running list of goals and records pinned above his bed. What would read as a wish list to some comes off more as a to-do list for Dillon. He already has his 2018 checklist lined up. Win an ACC championship. Win Doak Walker as the nation’s top running back. Win a Heisman next year.

“Next year, I want to be completely night and day. I want to be so much better next year,” he said. “Not junior year, not senior year. I want to do that next year. I’m really goal-oriented in that way.

There’s also an understanding that with great debuts come greater expectations. He got words of wisdom from someone who understands overwhelming expectations as much as anyone: 2016 Heisman Trophy winner Lamar Jackson.

Jackson scorched the earth a year ago throwing for 3,543 and 30 touchdowns and rushing for 1,571 and 21 scores in a breakout sophomore season at Louisville. He ran away with the Heisman, making everyone believe they had seen the second coming of Michael Vick.

This season, the fairy dust seemed to wear off. He threw for 3,489 and 25 touchdowns and ran for 1,443 yards and 17 touchdowns — numbers still eye-popping enough to have him named ACC player of the year — but the attention around him was subdued.At the beginning of the month, Dillon went down Charlotte to pick up his awards at the ACC’s Night of Legends ceremony. If anyone remembered Dillon, it was Jackson, who was on the sidelines when Dillon delivered the stiff-arm that ostensibly ended Louisville’s season.

Dillon and Jackson ended up chatting.“He was a really nice guy, really down to earth,” Dillon said. “I mean, look at it. The year he had this year was better than the one he had last year. And people were still expecting more.”

Jackson tried to show Dillon what was ahead of him, telling him, “The way this is going to work, you’re the best running back in the ACC. The way everything is going to work out, you’re going to keep doing well and people are going to keep expecting more. They’re going to expect that there’s no ceiling — and there shouldn’t be. There’s no limit to what you can do. But never let that alter how you see yourself.”

The advice stuck with Dillon. Being a star was always bigger than numbers. “That was perfect,” Dillon said. “Because that’s really how I live my life.

December 12, 2017 The Hidden Stock Market Price of Falling for the Dividend Ruse A favorite theory of financial economists is that stock dividends are a mirage, bait conjured by companies to create the illusion of free money. Research from the University of Chicago and Boston College says almost everyone falls for it.

Consider a $100 stock that pays a $10 dividend -- it falls to $90, just as if it paid nothing and the owner sold 10 percent of his shares in the market. Same difference, and yet the study found the allure of the corporate payout incites all kinds of costly behavior among investors.

Mainly, they flock to dividend stocks simultaneously, pushing prices up and expected returns down. During times of low interest rates and poor market performance, when demand for dividends is particularly high, expected returns on dividend stocks are 2 percent to 4 percent below levels in other times, according to the paper.

Source: Samuel Hartzmark and David H. Solomon, “The Dividend Disconnect” In a yield-strapped environment, investors have a bad habit of viewing dividends as bond coupons that produce stable gains over time, according to Chicago Booth’s Samuel Hartzmark and Boston College Carroll School of Management’s David Solomon.

This leads them to focus on stocks’ total return rather than the price performance.

As a result, investors hang on to dividendpaying equities for longer than they would

have otherwise, the research paper, “The Dividend Disconnect,” finds.

“We wanted to show there is a general misconception about what a stock dividend is,” Hartzmark said by phone. “There is mental trap when investors think about dividends as a separate source of income that’s unrelated to the stock’s capital gains.”

The market’s value-weighted return soars to 16 basis points during days with the highest dividend payouts, four times higher than a mean daily return, the study shows. Most of the dividend money goes to non-dividend stocks, creating predictable price jumps on days of large dividend payouts. In other words, the dividend bounty, a substantial portion of a given stock’s return, often benefits someone other than the stockholder.

The notion that dividends represent extra money investors receive on top of their price return is a mistake made not only by retail investors, but some institutions and mutual funds as well, according to Hartzmark and Solomon.

So far this year, shares of companies with high capital expenditures relative to market value have outperformed those that spend the most on repurchases and dividends by 12 percent, data compiled by Bloomberg show.

December 11, 2017 Colleges Offer Campus Programs For Low-Income Students As a first-generation student with two immigrant parents who work as nail technicians, Karen Zheng based her college decision on which school offered the most support financially and academically.

"With Boston College, I was put into this program called Options Through Education, which is a seven-week transitional program – it's for 40 low-income, high-achieving students," says Zheng, a 20-year-old Pell-Grant student. "Being OTE has its benefits; we're guaranteed four years of housing and most of our tuition is paid for."

Initially, the New York City native wanted to attend Columbia University or Fordham University. But after looking at their financial aid packages, she made a different decision.

At Boston College, she says her financial aid covers roughly 90 percent of the full cost of attendance. Now in her junior year as a business major, Zheng works as an intern at the college's Montserrat Office – a project that supports low-income students on campus.

Education experts say that college programs such as BC's Monserrat help students from lowincome backgrounds achieve college success and increase graduation rates.

"There is research that suggests that financial aid is very important to low-income students in graduating from college. And it’s likely that institutional supports play an important role," says Robert Kelchen, an assistant professor at Seton Hall University in New Jersey.

In a recent Brookings paper, Kelchen detailed that Pell students have lower graduation rates compared with non-Pell recipients when it comes to the six-year graduation rate for students entering college in fall 2010. Students who are Pell often come from low-income households that typically earn less than $50,000 a year.

The Pell program provides need-based grants to low-income undergraduates. According to the Department of Education, more than $28 billion is disbursed annually to around 7.2 million students through the Pell Grant.

But experts say these students need – in addition to financial aid support – other institutional resources on campus to succeed. These resources can range from a community with similar students, financial safety-net resources and peer mentoring.

BC's Montserrat Coalition identifies and assists students with the high financial need, and the school's Pell recipients are automatically enrolled, says Yvonne McBarnett, manager of the program. "There's plenty of students who come to BC and they have their financial aid packages but are lacking other resources financially – which is one of our priorities," she says.

McBarnett says the program ensures that low-income students have a community as well as access to a textbook lending program, laptops and grocery money. In some cases, it can even mean providing a winter coat for a student in need.

She says providing extra financial resources and mentorship helps these students stay on track academically. "Because of the program, we've had a lot of success with graduation."

In fact, according to U.S. News data on six-year graduation rates for students who entered college in fall 2010, the comparison between Pell and non-Pell students at BC is identical at 92 percent.

The Department of Education has recognized other schools – including John Carroll University in Ohio, Georgia State University and Goucher College in Maryland – for implementing institutional approaches to increase graduation rates among low-income students.

José Antonio Bowen, president of Goucher, says the school has a long history of providing support for Pell students. Of the college's more than 1,400 undergraduate students, a quarter were Pell recipients, according to 2015-2016 data reported to U.S. News. Bowen stresses that success of Pell students at Goucher isn't solely reliant on financial resources but a mix of financial, social and academic support. "You have to do it all."

He says the school offers several special programs. The Phoenix Scholars Program provides mentoring with peers, professors and administrators, which helps low-income students develop a community and network. And extra financial assistance and resources are available to in-state Pell students through the Maryland Scholars Program. "Because we get support from the state, it's easier to give them extras like a computer or full financial aid," Bowen says. He adds that the graduation rates among Pell and non-Pell students at Goucher are virtually identical.

While BC and Goucher have been implementing special institutional programs to better support needy students for nearly 10 years, other colleges are starting similar programs.

At the Washington University in St. Louis, Anthony Tillman, the assistant dean provost for student success, created Deneb STARS – Sustaining Talented Academically Recognized Students – in fall 2016. The program, with its peer and academic mentorship, aims to support and provide a community to its low-income students. U.S. News data show that 9 percent of Washington University students received a Pell Grant in 2015-2016. But the university plans to recruit more economically diverse students, according to Diane Toroian Keaggy, a university spokesperson. Around 13 percent of the freshman class in fall 2017 are Pell eligible, she says.

When it comes to selecting a school with economic diversity and support programs for Pell students, Zheng from BC recommends prospective students to "Ask about the resources colleges have for low-income, first-generation and students of color. And call in and talk to students on campus."

December 6, 2017 Boston College 2-sport star headlines The Globies 2017

Kenzie Kent, the two-sport athlete who led Boston College to the national semifinals in both hockey and lacrosse, joined Patriots quarterback Tom Brady and Red Sox pitcher Chris Sale as the big winners at the third celebration of the Globies.

Kent took honors for Best Female Athlete and Best College Athlete.

“Thank you so much, I wouldn’t be here without my teammates, coaches, and the support of my family, and of course the Boston sports fans,” said Kent.

December 5, 2017 Northern Ireland and England schools in global top 10 for reading Northern Ireland and England are in the top 10 of the world's best primary school readers in global rankings. The Progress in International Reading Literacy Study - known as PIRLS - shows Northern Ireland in joint sixth place, with England in joint eighth. Both Northern Ireland and England have reached their highest point scores in reading tests taken in 50 countries.

Russia takes the top place in this international education league table, based on tests taken every five years. The Republic of Ireland, in fourth, is second only to Russia among European countries. Girls are ahead of boys in almost every country taking the tests.

Geoff Barton, leader of the ASCL head teachers' union, praised the work of schools in England and Northern Ireland and said the results reflected "the huge focus that schools have placed on the teaching of reading over the course of many years".

The tests taken by almost 320,000 10-year-olds around the world, show Northern Ireland's pupils as among the highest achievers, ranked joint sixth with Poland. The result puts them only marginally behind long-standing high achievers such as Finland.

With the Northern Ireland assembly still suspended, there is no current education minister, but Northern Ireland's education department pointed to the success of a "Count, Read: Succeed" strategy introduced in 2011 with targets to improve literacy and numeracy. There are no Sats tests for 11-year-olds in Northern Ireland, but pupils in the last year of primary can take transfer tests for grammar schools. It's also a system in which many places are allocated on the basis of religious faith. The National Foundation for Educational Research, which administered the tests in Northern Ireland, says families and local communities seemed to put a "high value on academic success".

Senior research manager Juliet Sizmur said the international comparison suggested that reading was particularly valued in Northern Ireland.

England was ranked joint eighth, alongside Norway and Taiwan, and England's school standards minister Nick Gibb hailed the positive impact of the phonics system of learning to read.

"Our rise through the global rankings is even more commendable because it has been driven by an increase in the number of low-performing pupils reading well," said Mr Gibb.

This is a much higher ranking than in the international Pisa tests for secondary school pupils, run by the OECD, in which England is not in the top 20 for reading or maths.

Scotland and Wales did not take part in these latest PIRLS tests.

Top 10 for primary reading: Russia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Republic of Ireland, Finland, Poland, Northern Ireland, Norway, Taiwan, England Comparisons with the last rankings from five years ago depend on which measures are used, says the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), which runs the PIRLS tests with Boston College in the US.

The Netherlands-based IEA says that this year England is 10th, but because "there is no statistical significant difference" with two countries above, they are effectively joint eighth. Five years ago, the IEA says England was ranked 11th, but as there was no statistical significant difference with US, Denmark, Croatia, Chinese Taipei, and Ireland this "could be interpreted as a joint sixth ranking".

The IEA's executive director, Dirk Hastedt, says that Russia's success reflects a series of education reforms and a "lot of emphasis on academic excellence" and much more rigour over standards. Dr Hastedt says such tests reveal international trends in education. Girls are ahead of boys in almost every country taking the tests, says Dr Hastedt.

He says there are increasing numbers of children in pre-school education - and this seems to be linked to higher performance. There are also signs that parents are more likely to get involved in helping their children's learning.

The national comparisons are based on representative samples of pupils, designed by researchers to reflect different regions and types of school. In England, there were about 5,000 pupils taking the tests last year, drawn from 170 schools. In Russia, the sample was based on about 4,600 pupils in 206 schools. Most of the pupils taking the tests were aged about 10 - but there were differences depending on the sample.

In Russia and Finland, the average of those taking the tests was 10.8 years, a year older than the average age of those taking the test in Italy and France.

Michael Martin, executive director of the TIMSS and PIRLS International Study Center at Boston College, says that this year's results showed the importance of early years education and parental interest.

"Children whose parents had engaged them in literacy activities - reading books or playing word games from an early age are better equipped with basic reading skills when they begin primary schools and go on to have higher reading achievements," said Prof Martin.

December 5, 2017 U.S. Fourth-Graders Lag Behind Other Countries in Reading Reading comprehension among fourth-grade students in the U.S. has flatlined since 2001, allowing education systems in other countries whose students used to perform worse than those in the U.S. to catch up – and even surpass – the U.S. in an international ranking.

That's the latest finding from the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study, also known as PIRLS, which measures the performance of fourth-grade students in reading. The test has been administered every five years since 2001. In 2016, 58 education systems participated in the test.

When it comes to the standing of U.S. students, fourth grade reading comprehension has slipped since 2011 – though not statistically significantly – lowering its position in the international ranking to 16th place. In 2011, four education systems scored higher than the average reading score of U.S. students, while in 2016, 12 education systems scored higher.

"We seem to be declining as other education systems make larger gains on assessments," Peggy Carr, acting commissioner for the National Center for Education Statistics, the research arm of the U.S. Department of Education, said in a press call last week. "Countries that were our peers have surpassed us while some that used to do worse than us are now our peers."

Four education systems whose students scored similar to those U.S. in 2011 scored higher than the U.S. in 2016, including Ireland, Northern Ireland, Chinese Taipei and England. Students from two education systems, Poland and Norway, scored below the U.S. in 2011 but higher in 2016. Students in Latvia and Moscow City did not participate in the test in 2011, but did participate in 2016 and scored higher than the U.S. Topping the rankings is Moscow City, the Russian Federation, Singapore, Hong Kong and Ireland.

Carr said the stagnant performance of students in the U.S. mirrors results of other internationally benchmarked exams, including the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, the blockbuster test that assesses 15-year-olds in reading and math.

"Other countries are moving around us, which is really the point," Carr said.

One silver lining exposed in the exam, Carr noted, is that a large percentage, 16 percent, of students in the U.S. performed at the advanced level. Only seven education systems had higher percentages of fourth-graders scoring at or above the advanced benchmark, the highest achievement level.

However, that statistic has also been stagnant for some time, she said, allowing other countries to play catch-up.

"The percentage of American students at that top level, advanced, has not changed very much over time," Carr said. "Meanwhile, other countries seem to be doing a better job of moving students from lower levels of achievement to higher levels of achievement."

For the first time in 2016, students in the U.S., along with students in 15 other countries, also took a new portion of the test that measures how well students are prepared to read, comprehend and interpret information online.

"This is particularly relevant as young Americans are relying on online resources for news and their main resource for other work," Carr said.

Only three education systems – those in Singapore, Norway and Ireland – had higher scores than the U.S. "It seems our students perform better comprehending material and navigating content when they're asked to do it online instead of on paper," Carr said.

November 29, 2017 Policing the Communion Line

By Cathleen Kaveny Many conservative Catholics remain opposed to relaxing the canonical prohibition against granting Communion to the divorced and civilly remarried. And many progressive Catholics perceive their more conservative counterparts as caring more about abstract legal rules than flesh-and-blood human beings.

In my view, however, this particular perception is misplaced. Most Catholics who oppose relaxing the rules on Communion are neither heartless nor unmerciful. They think that a more lenient practice is inconsistent with Jesus’ words in the gospels—a debatable point, and one on which many scholars disagree. But more than biblical interpretation shapes the approach of such conservatives. They also believe the best way for the church to help weak and sinful human beings flourish in the long run is to hold the line on the canonical prohibition. This belief also needs to be challenged, because it rests on an unrealistic notion of the power of legal norms, including canonical norms.

As I understand the conservative Catholic case, it runs like this. Lifelong marital commitment increases one’s chances of personal happiness. Perseverance during the tough times is difficult but essential; studies show that most married couples who weather their storms find themselves in a better place in a few years’ time. The canonical prohibition has a carrot; it promotes the blessings of a lifelong sacramental union. But it also seems to have a stick—the threat of denying Communion incentivizes married couples to stick it out.

In the view of conservative Catholics, while the prohibition may appear cruel, it is actually kind.

They admit that a few tragic cases may slip through the canonical cracks. But they point out that law, including canon law, is made for the general run of people. And in general, the pressure to stay together works for the well-being of the many more people who are able to work through their marital difficulties. They think of it like the U.S. Army: if unhappy recruits were simply permitted to leave basic training without any consequences, one or two people might be better off, but many others would be deprived of the benefits that sustained military discipline and commitment can confer.

So what’s the problem with this line of reasoning? The tough-love approach depends on the stick, not just the carrot. The Army analogy points to the basic flaw. If you walk away from basic training, the Army can and will put you in prison for desertion. In our society, there is no comparable threat for those who walk away from sacramental marriages, in either secular or canon law. In fact, nothing prevents a divorced and civilly remarried couple from starting afresh anonymously at a parish across town. No one is going to ask for a marriage certificate, let alone certificates of divorce and annulment, before giving them Communion.

In the abstract, the church could crack down. For example, pastors could do background checks on all married couples in the parish in order to identify and monitor those who were not in fact wed sacramentally. More broadly, they could restrict access to the Communion line to those who could prove they had recently gone to confession. But that is not a real option. The church has already decided against policing Communion lines, leaving the decision to individual communicants. Moreover, it has decided against such policing not for practical reasons, but for principled ones: such a practice fails to respect the dignity and conscience of the members of the body of Christ.

What about the function of the prohibition in communicating the value of lifelong marriage?

That doesn’t work in real life either. The remote prospect of being denied Communion will not deter men and women from entering into ill-considered first marriages. The pain of being denied Communion is too abstract to dissuade most people from leaving the miseries of a failed union.

And the existential joy and relief in finding a new love and life partner is likely to overwhelm anxiety about the effects of a distant punishment.

Moreover, as currently applied, this teaching’s intended moral lesson can easily appear to be hypocritical and even perverse. Precisely because so many Catholics in irregular sexual or marital situations do receive Communion, the prohibition falls most heavily upon those who take church teaching most scrupulously. As applied, canon law seems to be penalizing those who care most about their relationship to the church. The basic teaching—the gift and value of lifelong sacramental marriage—is sound. But it is undercut by the inconsistencies and arbitrariness in applying it.

The urgency of positive, proactive concern for marriage and family is the overarching message of Amoris laetitia, Pope Francis’s recent exhortation on those topics. What would such concern look like in the concrete? In my own view, leading with mercy is a far more effective strategy than denying the divorced and remarried the grace of the sacraments. The pope has lamented that church teaching can become “dead stones to be hurled at others.” I’d add that it shouldn’t be a stick to beat them with either.

Cathleen Kaveny teaches law and theology at Boston College.

November 28, 2017 Michael Dell says EMC merger working out better than expected The $60 billion mega-merger of Dell and EMC is now more than a year in the books. But in his first public speaking appearance in Boston since the deal, chief executive Michael Dell on Tuesday discussed how he first set his sights on EMC as far back as 2008.

Speaking before a Boston College Chief Executives Club luncheon, Dell related how he approached thenEMC chief executive Joe Tucci a decade ago about a merger, when both companies were publicly traded. But then the financial crisis wreaked havoc in the markets, and the deal became difficult to pull off.

He eventually got his prize in mid-2016, in what is considered the largest pure-tech merger in history. Now, a year later, the deal that created Dell Technologies is working out better than expected, Dell said while being interviewed before the crowd by Boston Globe managing director Linda Pizzuti Henry.

Texas-based Dell Technologies employs about 8,800 people in Massachusetts, nearly the same size as EMC’s local workforce before the merger closed. Dell said the two corporate cultures turned out to be “quite compatible.”

The company is spending more than $4 billion a year on research and development, and a significant portion of that work is happening in the Boston area, including in data storage and security.

“The teams here in Boston are a very important part of that engine,” Dell said.

And the cross-selling of products to clients — one of the big selling points of the merger — has exceeded Dell’s initial expectations. He said the “revenue synergies” are about $2 billion a year above what he had forecast. The company reported $37 billion in revenue in the first six months of its fiscal year, putting Dell Technologies on track to exceed $70 billion for the full year.

“The real idea behind this: You create the essential [computer] infrastructure company, the company that’s number one in everything, all in one place,” Dell said.

Dell is positioning the company for an age in which electronic devices are getting smarter and more connected; many will need to interact with on-site storage machines, such as those Hopkinton-based EMC became known for. Dell Technologies is poised to be a pivotal player in what Dell calls “a fourth industrial revolution.”

“We see a huge buildout in infrastructure because of the intelligence that’s embedded in all these objects,” Dell said.

EMC and Dell first combined forces with a sales alliance that began in 2001. Then in 2008, Dell said he called Tucci and suggested a full merger. Secret talks ensued, but bankers walked away from the deal the following year because of the financial crisis.

Dell subsequently took his namesake company private in 2013, to help shield it from Wall Street’s quarterly demands. Less than a year later, he approached Tucci again to restart merger talks. This time, the timing turned out to be right.

The company hasn’t disclosed how many jobs have been cut following the merger.

As was the case with EMC before combining with Dell, industry observers say there continue to be layoffs with the new company, while some workers are leaving for other opportunities.

“Perhaps a few years ago, I might have presented an opportunity where someone at EMC might have said, ‘No, I’m very happy,’ ” said Larry Kahn, vice president at the recruiting firm New Dimensions in Technology Inc. “Now with some of the uncertainty . . . they might be more interested in the opportunities I might have.”

Dell told reporters that it’s natural that some executives would want to leave following a merger of this size.

Steve Duplessie, founder of IT research firm Enterprise Strategy Group, said he believes the departures from EMC were largely concentrated in operations like marketing and finance, areas where there would be more overlap with Dell’s corporate structure.

“EMC was a bit maniacal in terms of winning. They didn’t suffer fools kindly, but 10 years ago there just wasn’t any other place you could go,” Duplessie said. “It always sucks to get fired but now’s a [better] time to get fired.”

Congress’s Assault on Charities

By Ray D. Madoff | November 26, 2017 NEWTON, Mass. — The Tuesday after Thanksgiving, called “Giving Tuesday” to mark beginning of the season of charitable giving, reminds us of the important work charities do: feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, promoting justice, nurturing the spirit, curing diseases, providing education, promoting the arts and more. These organizations play an essential role in American society.

While legislators pay lip service to the importance of charities, in recent years they have failed to adopt policies to ensure that charities get what they need to do their work. Provisions in the tax bills the House and Senate are considering would make the situation worse.

For charities to function, they need an adequate flow of donations, the ability to use these donations for their mission and the ability to remain outside the political fray. These interests have been protected in the past by a tax deduction that encourages charitable giving, a rule that requires donors to give up control over donated funds in order to take advantage of the deduction, and prohibition of political activities by charitable organizations. Each of these is under significant threat.

The first threat has to do with the availability of the charitable deduction. Under current law, it is available only to taxpayers who itemize their deductions. Tax filers can choose to either itemize their deductions (in which case they add up their deductions for charitable giving, state and local taxes, mortgage expenses and other allowable deductions), or to take a “standard deduction” of $6,350. Taxpayers who claim the standard deduction — 70 percent of all taxpayers — get no additional tax benefits for their charitable giving.

Proposals in both the House and Senate tax bills would increase the standard deduction to dollar amounts so high that a vast majority of American taxpayers would no longer itemize and therefore would receive no tax benefits for their charitable giving. Charities are particularly concerned about this expansion of non-itemizers because it would include many larger donors who tend to be mindful of the tax consequences of their gifts. A recent report by the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy estimates that charities could lose as much as $13 billion in donations if the standard deduction is increased.

The second threat to charities has to do with control of charitable donations. The requirement that donors give up control over donations to get the deduction is intended to withhold tax benefits until a charity is given full use of the funds.

But in recent years, financial institutions have promoted an investment vehicle — the donor-advised fund — that follows the letter but violates the spirit of this rule. Contributions to such funds receive an immediate tax benefit because donors give up legal control over the donated money. However, the appeal of donor-advised funds is that donors, in practice, retain control over the eventual distribution (and until then, the investment) of their contributions. Donors claim an immediate tax deduction but can defer distribution of the money into the indefinite future, all the while making money for the financial institution managing the funds.

Donor-advised funds are popular among the wealthy, with Fidelity Charitable, the largest purveyor of such funds, receiving more “donations” than any other charity, while six of the top 10 fund-raising charities were donor-advised fund sponsors. More than $85 billion is parked in donor-advised funds, but there is no obligation for these funds to

ever be made fully available for charitable use. Although proposals have been made to ensure the timely payout of money put in donor-advised funds, Congress has yet to act.

The third threat has to do with the ability of charities to remain outside the political fray. If charities were permitted to be involved in politics, they could be pressured by donors seeking to promote their political views in a taxbeneficial way. Since 1954 charities have been saved from this pressure by a rule known as the Johnson Amendment, which prohibits charities from engaging in political speech.

Charities have been unified in their support for retaining the Johnson Amendment, but still the House bill includes language limiting its application, and threatening to pollute the whole charitable sector by pulling it into the realm of politics.

Lawmakers can take three simple steps to save charities. First, they should ensure that all taxpayers be allowed to claim the charitable deduction, regardless of whether they claim the standard deduction. To minimize the impact on the federal budget, and to encourage greater giving, Congress should limit this benefit to charitable contributions in excess of 2 percent of the donor’s adjusted gross income.

Second, Congress should require that donor-advised fund accounts be distributed outright to charities within 10 years of contribution. Third, Congress should retain the law prohibiting political activities by charitable organizations.

It is the season of giving. Let’s give charities what they really want for the holidays: the ability to do their work to fulfill their missions and serve the American people.

Ray D. Madoff is a law professor at Boston College and the director of the Boston College Law School Forum on Philanthropy and the Public Good.

House G.O.P. Tax Writers Take Aim at College Tuition Benefits

By Erica L. Green | November 15, 2017 (Exceprt) WASHINGTON — The moment the last of Fred Vautour’s five children walked across the stage as a Boston College graduate was priceless.

Not only did Mr. Vautour have the rare distinction of handing each of his children their diplomas, but he was also able to pay for their nearly 18 years of schooling by collecting trash, scrubbing toilets and mopping floors while the campus slept.

“As much as I struggled, it was incredible to be able to do that for them,” said Mr. Vautour, 64, who has worked the graveyard shift as a custodian at Boston College for 17 years. “I took this job for benefits, but never imagined this would be one of them.”

It may not be one for long — or at least could be severely curtailed. The sprawling House tax bill, set for a vote on Thursday, would tax the value of college tuition benefits conferred on thousands of university employees like Mr. Vautour, one of several provisions that would hit colleges, universities and their students, hard.

Republicans drafted the bill with the premise that it would simplify the nation’s tax code and cut rates for middleincome Americans. To help pay for the $1.5 trillion tax cut, lawmakers eliminated many individual tax breaks, arguing the overall plan would compensate for any lost benefits. The result: while many families and businesses would see tax cuts, a large percentage of undergraduates and graduate students would see their tax bills increase, some dramatically. In addition to campus employees, many doctoral students would see huge tax increases, since the tuition that universities waive for them in exchange for working on campus as researchers and teaching assistants would be deemed taxable income. At expensive research universities like Stanford and Harvard, the new tax bills could swamp graduate-student stipends.

And if students take out more loans to pay their new taxes, they would face another surprise: Under the House bill, interest paid on student loans — a deduction that more than 12 million people used in 2015 — would no longer be tax deductible. “These benefits ensure the brightest and best in the country can continue to afford an education,” said Steven M. Bloom, director of governmental relations for the American Council on Education, which represents 1,800 college and university presidents across the country. “Congress is sending a clear message that they’d rather use that money for corporate tax breaks.”

LEFT: Fred Vautour put his five children through school by working the graveyard shift as a janitor at Boston College for 17 years.Credit Kayana Szymczak for The New York Times The Senate bill being drafted this week leaves out most of the higher-education provisions in the House bill. The Senate bill also retains other smaller tax credits and benefits that the House sought to repeal, such as a nontaxable annual grant of up to $5,250 that employers can offer their employees. All told, the House’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act would reduce tax benefits and savings for college students by $65 billion over the next decade, according to an estimate by the education council.

House Republicans defend the higher education provisions as contributing to the tax bill’s larger economic goals.

“The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is focused on providing tax relief and increasing take-home pay for Americans of all walks of life — including people working to pay off tuition and other education costs,” a House Ways and Means spokeswoman said in a statement. By increasing household income, the bill overall would “provide more Americans with more opportunities of their choosing, including continuing education,” said a spokesman for the House Committee on Education and the Workforce…

LEFT: “If I had to pay it, it would have been a killer,” said Mr. Vautour of his children’s tuition. Credit Kayana Szymczak for The New York Times …If approved, the tax plan could take effect Jan. 1, a fast-approaching deadline for the thousands of families who would face unanticipated tuition bills. “If I had to pay it, it would have been a killer,” said Mr. Vautour.

When he started at Boston College as a cook in 1994, he was making $10.65 an hour, and full-time tuition was about $25,000. His salary has doubled after 18 years and so has the college’s tuition, which now stands at $52,500. His children rounded out their financial aid with scholarships and small federal loans, and Mr. Vautour paid only about $3,000 per year for other expenses.

A survey by College and University Professional Association of Human Resources found that of 300 schools that had employees receiving the tuition benefit, 50 percent earned $50,000 or less and 78 percent earned $75,000 or less.

“It’s not going to hurt the people who can afford college anyway,” Mr. Vautour said. “These kinds of benefits, they’re either for the rich or the poor. It’s always the in-between people who get screwed.”

November 15, 2017

In one hand shake, lifelong gratitude for being Catholic

By Hosffman Ospino

Every now and then, I find in the offices of pastoral leaders and theologians, as well as in the homes of some families I know, a picture of them shaking hands with one of the recent popes.

When I know the person well, I ask, “What was it like to hold the pope’s hand?� For some, it is a formality. For others, a memorable moment.

There are about 1.2 billion Catholics in the world. What are the chances that I would ever meet the pope face to face, hold his hand and engage him in conversation?

Well, it happened this past Nov. 8, 2017, while in Rome for some meetings. I met Pope Francis. This was the first time meeting with a pope.

What was it like? I was filled with what I would call “Catholic awe.” Yes, a profound sense of gratitude invaded me for being Catholic. Here I was with the bishop of Rome, the pope!

Pope Francis, the successor of the apostle Peter, gazed into my eyes, listened attentively and smiled. The words from Mark’s Gospel referring to the encounter of Jesus and a young man immediately came to mind: “Jesus, looking at him, loved him” (Mk 10:21).

It was a short encounter, yet profoundly intentional. As I observed him engaging with other visitors, he did likewise. People I know who met with Pope Francis and previous popes described their encounter in similar ways. Maybe the grace of being present comes with the calling they received.

I shared with him about my research on Hispanic Catholics in the United States and my involvement in the process of the Fifth Encuentro of Hispanic/Latino ministry. As I mentioned the V Encuentro, he lit up and said, “Ah, yes!” He knows that this process is taking place and remembers its importance for the life of the church in our country.

While we spoke, we held hands. I held his strongly. It was a small, yet true sign of ecclesial communion.

The moment reminded me in a unique way of how important the pope is for Catholics and the unity to which the baptized are called by being in communion with him.

A personal and sincere encounter with the pope thrusts differences about church policy, theological debates and styles of leadership to a secondary plane. He is the pope. Being in communion with his teaching and leadership as we walk along the journey of history makes us a stronger church.

Tens of thousands of Catholics from around the world travel every week to Rome to see the pope. Most never see him up close or speak with him. Yet, being with the pope is a sign of communion that gives them life. They know that they are part of something bigger and noble. They are Catholic.

They speak many languages, come from diverse cultures and have different ways of looking at life. But in Rome, they are one.

Upon my return, family and friends asked me, “What was it like to hold the pope’s hand?” Now it is my turn to share my witness. I can also share the pictures that captured that moment of grace.

A friend told me, “Let me hold the hand that held the pope’s hand.” An immigrant grandmother from Mexico hugged me saying, “I want to partake of the blessing you received when meeting the pope.”

It is moments like this, the encounter with Pope Francis and the crowds at St. Peter’s Square, that remind me that I am part of something beautiful. What an honor to hold the pope’s hand in gratitude for being Catholic.

Hosffman Ospino is professor of theology and religious education at Boston College. He is a member of the leadership team for the Fifth National Encuentro of Hispanic/Latino Ministry

November 8, 2017

At BC, Belgian landscapes from five centuries Fernand Khnopff was a melancholy man. You can sense it in the aching stillness that envelops his landscapes.

Sturdy farm buildings trapped under gray skies feel distant, at once longed for and gently forbidding.

Pieces by the Belgian Symbolist, who worked in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, come near the end of “Nature’s Mirror: Reality and Symbol in Belgian Landscape,” up through Dec. 10 at McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College.

His “Memory of Bruges. Entrance to the Beguinage” is the exhibition’s signature image: A calm canal softly reflects a bridge and surrounding buildings. The drawing, mostly somber in black chalk, is highlighted in the center with yellow pastel — the kiss of a dwindling sun — and brief passages of green lily pads.

The quiet water predominates: depth, stillness, reflection. The artist spent a portion of his childhood in Bruges, but as an adult chose to render it from memory rather than return. He didn’t want to see how the city had changed.

“Nature’s Mirror” begins on a lustier note, with several Renaissance-era graphic works, including “Summer,” Pieter Bruegel’s dynamite print (engraved by Pieter van der Heyden) of a bountiful harvest, made nearly 300 years before Khnopff was born.

The one-point perspective sets up a giddy rush toward us through a field as workers cut and bundle grain. A fellow in the foreground guzzles from a fat pitcher. He has thrown down his scythe and kicked off one shoe, and his foot and the scythe poke beyond the frame, into our space.

Bruegel has replaced another figure’s head with a tray of fresh vegetables. Eat! The artist’s festive tone, of course, contrasts with Khnopff’s elegiac one; he lunges toward us whereas Khnopff pulls away. Bruegel’s scene buzzes, and Khnopff’s moans.

Bruegel is the grandfather of realism in Flemish art. In “Nature’s Mirror,” which draws on the Hearn Family Trust’s extraordinary collection of Belgian art, curator Jeffery Howe traces landscape art from the Renaissance, when Belgium was part of the Netherlands, to the early 20th century. His thesis — that landscape, like any art, is subjective — isn’t new. Still, it’s a refreshing saunter down a mostly realist path, with starry-eyed detours into romanticism. It leads us, in the end, to the perils of the psyche.

The Greeks and Romans painted nature tableaus on walls, but after the Roman Empire fell landscapes were relegated to mere backdrops. The Reformation’s repudiation of religious iconography, the Renaissance era’s fascination with natural sciences, and a growth in urban populations opened a new niche.

The first section features wonderful prints and drawings by Bruegel, Dürer, and Paul Bril, and includes a pair of dense, daunting landscapes painted on copper by Roelandt Savery, anchored by small figures as if to amplify the majesty and threat of the trees and rivers surrounding them.

There are gaps. Rubens is missing, and the 18th century is represented by just one suite of velvety drawings by Antoine le Loup, perhaps because landscape painting was again on the wane. Art academies, which valued other genres, dominated the discussion.

But artists began to shake off the academy, and paint what they saw in front of them, around the time of the Belgium Revolution, in 1830.

Some, such as Eugène Joseph Verboeckhoven, chased the sublime, like his American contemporaries painting in the Hudson River School. His “Mountainous Landscape With Bridge” brims with menace and salvation: The spindly bridge spans a dark chasm against a golden sky.

Others followed Gustave Courbet’s lead, and leaned into realism. But painting outdoors — a linchpin of realism — did not keep artists from artifice, coaxing glory from their oils.

Plein-air artist Frans van Kuyck’s “Marsh at Twilight” is explicitly painterly, with an Impressionist-inspired explosion of creamy, peach brush strokes evincing the sun behind clouds. Yet it’s also grounded in realism, right down to the crisp reflection of a small boat’s prow in still water. More marvelously down-and-dirty artists, such as Théodore T’Scharner and Jean-Baptiste Degreef, paid careful attention to mud’s many tones.

Belgium was an early industrial powerhouse, and a fascinating section of the show explores how artists integrated industry into their landscapes. In 1887, Georges Lemmen saw Georges Seurat’s “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte” and later painted the flickering, pointillist “Thames Scene, the Elevator.” It prickles with light-infused smog, heavy yet glittering. Lemmen didn’t critique industry; he found beauty in it.

Still, some artists set out to capture the miserable reality of worker’s lives.

Constantin Meunier’s drawing “Hiercheuse Climbing a Heap of Coal” pointedly depicts a female miner stooped under the weight of her coal-laden sack.

Realist art, while aiming at reportage, was also inevitably subjective. Artists strove to shape art from what they saw. This struggle laid ground for the internal inquiry that birthed Symbolism.

My favorite work in the show, William Degouve de Nuncques’s exquisitely creepy pastel “The Servants of Death (Nocturne),” depicts two men sawing in the moonlight. The felled tree they labor over is braced above a pit, from which one man gazes ghoulishly upward, like a corpse awakened.

Pieces such as this, and Khnopff’s misty, moody landscapes, leave behind the more realist mud and mists (and the sublime sunsets) for a more tenuous, internal world. “Memory of Bruges. Entrance to the Beguinage” was made in 1904, as the new century began. Changes nobody could have imagined — war, killing machines, a world order upended, economic disaster — would turn more artists inward, and landscape art would, once again, fall to the sidelines.

November 3, 2017 Boston College announces $150M expansion in the sciences Boston College is betting big on the sciences.

The private Jesuit school, better known for its philosophy and economics programs, unveiled plans Friday for a $150 million science facility that will bring a new engineering major to campus.

School officials are calling it an ambitious step forward that combines the college’s longstanding strength in the liberal arts with its newer expansion into the sciences.

The crowning jewel of the 150,000-square-foot (13,935-square-meter) facility will be a new integrated science institute named after Apple executive Phil Schiller and his wife, Kim GassettSchiller, who donated $25 million for the project.

Schiller, a 1982 graduate of the school, said the institute aims to give scholars from the humanities and the sciences a place to team up on major global problems.

“This is where the best work comes from, as diverse minds with different experiences try to understand a problem together and solve things as a team,” said Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing. “That is where big leaps forward happen.”

Construction is scheduled to begin in spring 2019 at the school’s campus west of Boston. It will add research laboratories, classrooms and space for students and faculty to collaborate across disciplines.

It also will bring a new engineering major to campus as the school seeks an edge in competition with other major universities The new facility is Boston College’s latest step in a recent push toward the sciences. Last year, it became one of 115 universities in the U.S. designated as a top research institution by the Carnegie Foundation, which classifies schools based on their research spending and staffing levels, among other factors.

The shift follows in the steps of other private schools that have pursued aggressive expansions into science and research fields, which can add prestige — and a source of revenue— for universities.

Nearby Harvard University is continuing work on a $1 billion science and engineering complex in Boston’s Allston neighborhood after the project was put on hold amid an economic slump in 2010.

North Carolina’s Wake Forest University also introduced a new engineering program this year, blending a science curriculum with the private school’s liberal arts tradition.

At Boston College, officials say the new Schiller institute aims to tackle projects ranging from the development of clean energy to technology that can diagnose and treat humans in poor areas around the world.

The school enrolls about 15,000 students at its campus west of Boston. Last year it had the No. 40 largest endowment among U.S. colleges, valued at nearly $2.1 billion, according to an annual study by the National Association of College and University Business Officers.

School President William Leahy thanked Schiller for the donation on Friday, saying it will “have a profound effect on the university’s ability to address pressing societal needs through advanced scientific research.”

November 3, 2017 Boston College announces $150M expansion in the sciences Boston College is betting big on the sciences.

The private Jesuit school, better known for its philosophy and economics programs, unveiled plans Friday for a $150 million science facility that will bring a new engineering major to campus.

School officials are calling it an ambitious step forward that combines the college’s longstanding strength in the liberal arts with its newer expansion into the sciences.

The crowning jewel of the 150,000-square-foot (13,935-square-meter) facility will be a new integrated science institute named after Apple executive Phil Schiller and his wife, Kim Gassett-Schiller, who donated $25 million for the project.

Schiller, a 1982 graduate of the school, said the institute aims to give scholars from the humanities and the sciences a place to team up on major global problems.

“This is where the best work comes from, as diverse minds with different experiences try to understand a problem together and solve things as a team,” said Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing. “That is where big leaps forward happen.”

Construction is scheduled to begin in spring 2019 at the school’s campus west of Boston. It will add research laboratories, classrooms and space for students and faculty to collaborate across disciplines.

It also will bring a new engineering major to campus as the school seeks an edge in competition with other major universities.

The new facility is Boston College’s latest step in a recent push toward the sciences. Last year, it became one of 115 universities in the U.S. designated as a top research institution by the Carnegie Foundation, which classifies schools based on their research spending and staffing levels, among other factors.

The shift follows in the steps of other private schools that have pursued aggressive expansions into science and research fields, which can add prestige — and a source of revenue— for universities.

Nearby Harvard University is continuing work on a $1 billion science and engineering complex in Boston’s Allston neighborhood after the project was put on hold amid an economic slump in 2010. North Carolina’s Wake Forest University also introduced a new engineering program this year, blending a science curriculum with the private school’s liberal arts tradition.

At Boston College, officials say the new Schiller institute aims to tackle projects ranging from the development of clean energy to technology that can diagnose and treat humans in poor areas around the world.

The school enrolls about 15,000 students at its campus west of Boston. Last year it had the No. 40 largest endowment among U.S. colleges, valued at nearly $2.1 billion, according to an annual study by the National Association of College and University Business Officers.

School President William Leahy thanked Schiller for the donation on Friday, saying it will “have a profound effect on the university’s ability to address pressing societal needs through advanced scientific research.”

November 3, 2017 BC expands further into sciences with gift from Apple executive Boston College’s efforts to elbow into the ranks of the nation’s top research institutions will get a big boost from a senior Apple executive and a new science institute focused on issues of energy, health and the environment.

The Jesuit college will begin construction on the $150 million lab and classroom facility in 2019 and plans to open it two years later, BC officials are scheduled to announce Friday.

The facility will be called the Schiller Institute for Integrated Science and Society, after Phil Schiller, a Newton native and a senior vice president at Apple, who has been responsible for marketing many of the technology company’s high-profile products, from the Mac computer to the iPhone. Schiller, a 1982 BC graduate and his wife, Kim Gassett-Schiller, are giving $25 million toward the construction of the new institute.

Schiller said he hopes that the institute will “lift up BC’s scientific program to a whole other level. . . . I want them to be known for great science.”

BC has been a traditional liberal arts school with more than two-thirds of its undergraduates receiving degrees in the humanities and social sciences, such as economics and political science.

But the college is trying to expand programs in the hard sciences and raise its profile in research to attract more students.

In 2016, BC joined an elite group of 115 US universities known for their intense research work.

The designation put BC in the same bracket as several other Boston-area higher education institutions, including Tufts University, Boston University, Harvard University, and MIT, when it comes to research on campus.

As part of building the Schiller Institute, BC will also create new undergraduate majors in engineering and applied science, said David Quigley, BC provost and dean of faculties.

The school also plans to hire more than 20 faculty members to be based at the institute Currently, 25 percent of undergraduates leave Boston College with a degree in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics.

Schiller was among that group. He majored in biology and planned to become a marine biologist.

However, when he went to California for graduate school, he decided that biology wasn’t for him.

It turned out other classes and electives that he took at BC, including computer science, were more helpful in helping him land a job, Schiller said.

That combination of humanities and science that BC will be able to offer students will be a key to the institute’s success, Schiller said.

The institute will try to bring biology, chemistry, English, and history majors together to address problems like climate change and disease in the developing world. Their work will be aimed to develop technologies to provide clean water and energy and reduce poverty, school officials said.

BC is not the only area college investing in space that allows students and faculty from different fields to collaborate.

Earlier this fall, Boston University announced the opening of its Rajen Kilachand Center for Integrated Life Sciences & Engineering, a nine-story, $135-million facility that houses the school’s life scientists, engineers, and physicians. The researchers, graduate students, and staff at BU’s center are also working on issues of health, environment, and energy.

November 1, 2017 There Is No Such Thing as ‘the Digital Humanities’

By Eric Weiskott Timothy Brennan’s "The Digital-Humanities Bust" is the latest in a long line of essays criticizing a new field or approach known as "the digital humanities." "What exactly have the digital humanities accomplished?" Brennan wants to know. He concludes that "the digital humanities is a wedge separating the humanities from its reason to exist — namely, to think against prevailing norms." The problem with these hit pieces is that they are swinging at air. There is no such thing as "the digital humanities."

There are digital humanities. Digital technology is remaking humanistic study. How could it not? The digitization of the humanities isn’t the sort of structural process that could be reversed or abandoned. Consider the retrospective absurdity of "The Print-Humanities Bust," a hypothetical essay published, let’s say, in 1517, soon after print technology reached Europe. "What exactly has the codex accomplished?" an ancient Timothy Brennan, used to reading scrolls, might have asked.

Brennan comes close to acknowledging the non-existence of his target when he remarks on "a basic confusion of terms: the digital in the humanities is not the digital humanities." Brennan considers "the digital humanities" to be "a program and, ultimately, an epistemology." This is news to me, an English professor who does not know how to code but who uses digital technologies in teaching and who contributed to an interdisciplinary digital research project in graduate school.

Digital technology doesn’t transform knowledge in one single way, programmatically, any more than print technology did. Introduced, in England, by William Caxton in the late 1470s, print technology brought ideas to new readerships, but it also helped center literary culture around a small group of well-connected men at the English royal court: Wyatt, Surrey, Spenser, Sidney, Raleigh, Bacon, Marlowe, Shakespeare, etc. Digital media can be put in the service of boring, wrong, or politically odious scholarship and teaching — just like print media.

Digital technology can aid humanists in answering questions they are already invested in answering. In my classroom, for example, annotation of medieval English poetry on Genius.com develops skills of close reading.

Sarah Bond describes how digital-mapping projects are deepening our understanding of racism and segregation.

Digital humanities are continuous with print humanities.

The problem with the formulation "the digital humanities" is that it equates a new institutional investment with a new form of knowledge. Institutional investments and forms of knowledge are related, but you can have one without the other, as any independent scholar or any director of a Center for Some New Combination of Disciplines will tell you.

What digital-humanities skeptics really object to is that colleges and universities are co-opting digitized research and teaching for ostensibly nefarious purposes. Brennan worries that what "the digital humanities" do is "create a framework for lucrative tech deals in classrooms with the promise of the vast automation of teaching." Laying that

criticism at the feet of researchers who use digital techniques within their disciplines isn’t just unfair, it’s a category mistake. The problem with lucrative tech deals is the lucre, not the tech.

The case against the current institutionalization of digital humanities is a case worth making. In a much-discussed essay, Daniel Allington, Sarah Brouillette, and David Golumbia indict digital scholarship for facilitating "the corporatist restructuring of the humanities." The authors characterize "the digital humanities" less as an intellectual failure than as an objectionable form of academic politics, a suspect "social movement." Still, they can’t resist asserting a contrast between "the digital humanities" and "the humanities … in their traditional form … relying on painstaking individual scholarship and producing forms of knowledge with less immediate economic application."

It’s important to remember that the humanities "in their traditional form" also had noxious institutional politics. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the humanities "in their traditional form" practiced largely by middle-class and wealthy white men, provided the intellectual rationale for colonization, slavery, and genocide. The "privileging of technical expertise above other forms of knowledge" (Allington, Brouillette, and Golumbia) is not new; it characterized the human science of philology as recently as the first half of the past century. Criticism of "the digital humanities" on political grounds has to work hard not to nostalgically rewrite disciplinary history.

The real animus behind attacks on "the digital humanities" comes from anxiety about something else: the muchhyped crisis of the humanities. Allington, Brouillette, and Golumbia are clear about this, lamenting that "the 21stcentury university has restructured itself on the model of the corporate world." They’re right. The 19th- and early 20th-century arrangement of institutional energies in the humanities now appears obsolete in the face of corporatization, adjunctification, and deanification. When university administrators and other promoters hail digital scholarship as the savior of the humanities, humanists, understandably, balk. "The digital humanities" can feel less like a new field and more like an existential threat.

Still, it would be a mistake to interpret this institutional problem as an epistemological one. The history of academic disciplines shows that knowledge and institutions stand in an incommensurate, even if symbiotic, relation. Knowing the world differently does not, in itself, change the world. Angela Davis published Are Prisons Obsolete? in 2003, yet prisons persist. At the other extreme, one can produce knowledge worth knowing even in deplorable institutional circumstances. In my own field, medieval studies, some important 20th-century scholarship was composed by English and German scholars sympathetic to — sometimes even collaborating with — the Third Reich.

In between, knowledge and institutions might roughly conform: a book in the shape prophesied by a research-grant proposal, for instance, or an interpretive move specific to a department at Berkeley. But no critique of the institution of the research grant would in itself vitiate the grant-shaped book. How could it? And yet this is the type of task that some critics of "the digital humanities" have set for themselves.

In this way, hit pieces on "the digital humanities" betray a deeper tension in the profession. Often committed to left politics and conversant in poststructuralist theories of social power, faculty members and graduate students find themselves employed by megacorporations. Will the megacorporation support the kind of intellectual work that seems most valuable for imagining and realizing a better world? Or will the megacorporation make that work very difficult? Those are genuine institutional questions, and they can only have institutional answers.

The catalog of the things "the digital humanities" is allegedly ruining turns out to be a catalog of the things humanists value about humanistic inquiry in general: qualitative interpretation; reading texts closely and slowly; rereading; thinking against prevailing norms; "critique" and particularly "scholarly endeavor that is overtly critical of existing social relations" (Allington, Brouillette, and Golumbia). Brennan is right that these are the humanities’ "reason to exist." He is wrong to suppose that digitization could cleave humanistic study from them. Print technology didn’t kill these things, and neither will digital technology.

Eric Weiskott is an assistant professor of English at Boston College.

October 31, 2017

Francis' correction of Sarah shows Vatican II is his 'sure compass'

By Richard Gaillardetz Pope Francis' letter to Cardinal Robert Sarah, correcting him on the procedures now in force for producing liturgical translations, has been both praised and denounced as an ecclesiastical "slap down." The publication of this letter, however, is an occasion for neither right-wing handwringing nor left-wing schadenfreude.

This is not about ecclesiastical one-upmanship. It is simply one more example of Francis' consistent determination to implement the vision of the Second Vatican Council. If his actions continue to surprise us, it is because, five decades out, there remains a substantial gap between the council's reformist agenda and its concrete realization in the life of the church. Let's begin with a little background.

This imbroglio has its remote origins in the momentous decision of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) to give regional episcopal conferences, sometimes singly and sometimes banding together, primary responsibility for producing vernacular translations of liturgical texts. This was the common practice for more than three decades.

However, in 2001, the Vatican's Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments issued Liturgiam Authenticam, a document that shifted much of the responsibility for these translations away from episcopal conferences and back to the Vatican. he revised translation process included a line-by-line Vatican assessment of all liturgical translations, often resulting in the imposition of thousands of amendments to the submitted translation. Liturgiam Authenticam also called for a much stricter "fidelity" to the original Latin text.

Unfortunately, the price of this stricter fidelity was often a diminishment in the texts' intelligibility and "prayability."

In the English-speaking world, this problematic new procedure yielded the much-criticized 2011 English editionof the Roman Missal.

Enter Pope Francis. In September, he issued Magnum Principium, a document that revised canon law by returning authority for liturgical translations back to the episcopal conferences. It also revised some of the norms for liturgical translation that had been established in the 2001 document. Francis expanded the earlier document's insistence on "liturgical fidelity" to include not only fidelity to the Latin text but also fidelity to the language in which the text would be translated and fidelity to the comprehension of the worshiping community.

Soon after the publication of the papal document, Sarah, prefect of the Vatican's worship congregation, wrote a commentary that appeared to minimize the changes the pope had called for. The commentary insisted on the continued authority of Liturgiam Authenticam and it held that the pope's revised process for producing liturgical translations left in place the rigorous Vatican examination and correction of proposed liturgical translations.

It was at this point that Francis took the surprising step of issuing a public letter to correct Sarah's interpretation of Magnum Principium. The pope insisted that he had, in fact, revised some of the translation norms established by the 2001 document. Moreover, he asserted that Magnum Principiumdoes in fact call for a much-reduced Vatican oversight of the translation process. For example, the worship congregation was not, as Sarah had suggested, still authorized to impose extensive translation changes on episcopal conferences. Finally, the pope instructed Sarah to send his letter to every media outlet in which Sarah's commentary had appeared.

So, what are we to make of all of this? In my view, the pope's letter to Sarah is not about evening scores with ideological enemies. Rather, it is but another concrete confirmation of the pope's single-minded intention to realize the council's reformist agenda. He may be the first post-conciliar pope not to have played a role at Vatican II, but no pope has more comprehensively summoned forth the council's comprehensive call for reform and renewal. His letter to Sarah reinforces this in several ways.

First, his response to the African cardinal indicates his robust commitment to one of the animating principles underlying the council's reform of the liturgy. In the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium, the council taught that an authentic liturgical renewal should enable "the full, conscious, and active part in liturgical celebrations which is demanded by the very nature of the liturgy" (14).

Such a renewal would ensure that "the Christian people, as far as is possible, should be able to understand them [various liturgical texts and rites] easily and take part in a celebration which is full, active and the community's own" (21).

Cardinal Giovanni Montini (the future Pope Paul VI), cleverly adapting Jesus' famous teaching on Sabbath observance, pithily captured the council's intent — the liturgy was made for men and women, not men and women for the liturgy. This principle clearly guided Francis' call for a liturgical "fidelity" attentive to both the language in which a text is being translated and the enhanced comprehension of the people.

Second, the letter attends to one of the council's most significant contributions: its re-discovery of a theology of the local church and the value of local customs and cultures. In the liturgy constitution, the bishops broke free from a stifling liturgical uniformity to rediscover the church's catholicity, a Spirit-animated unity-in-diversity. The liturgy was not celebrated on some ethereal plane but in a concrete place and time and with a specific people.

According to the council, the church should cultivate and foster "the qualities and talents of the various races and nations" (Sacrosanctum Concilium 37). Local churches, the council encouraged, should be willing to "borrow from the customs, traditions, wisdom, teaching, arts and sciences of their people" (Ad Gentes 22). This could include the incorporation into the liturgy itself, when possible, of certain elements drawn from local cultures.

Obviously, if one's goal is to produce liturgical translations sensitive to local cultures, including the distinctive nuances embedded in the languages of peoples, it is the local church that is best equipped to oversee those translations. By "local church" here, I do not mean only the local diocese (which Vatican II at times referred to as a "particular church") but the churches of a particular region. This is why the council originally handed over to episcopal conferences the responsibility for liturgical translations (Sacrosanctum Concilium 22, 36, 40, 63) and it is why Francis, in both Magnum Principium and his letter to Sarah, reestablished the council's intention.

Third, the pope's return of liturgical authority to episcopal conferences also reflects his commitment to the council's teaching on episcopal collegiality. Vatican II taught that the bishops shared with the pope "supreme and full authority" in pastoral service of the universal church (Lumen Gentium 22).

Unfortunately, the council was unable to give this important principle robust institutional form; its transfer of authority over liturgical translations to episcopal conferences represented an important exception.

Richard R. Gaillardetz is the Joseph Professor of Catholic Systematic Theology at Boston College. He is the author of An Unfinished Council: Vatican II, Pope Francis, and the Renewal of Catholicism (Liturgical Press, 2016).

October 31, 2017 Tuam dead babies scandal is only the tip of the iceberg

By James Smith Ireland seems no closer to the truth of what happened to these and other children born to the nation’s institutional care system.

“The Lost Children of Tuam” foregrounds the need for a truth telling mechanism to cultivate understanding and thereby help survivors come to terms with the system’s legacy of pain and suffering.

The response to Barry’s story on social media is unequivocal. The litany of tweets signal dismay as readers from around the globe struggle to comprehend: “devastating-incredible-shocking-heartbreaking-State sanctioned genocide-harrowing-powerful-haunting-sad-extraordinary-lost for words-powerful-wrenching-stunning-movingshameful-brutal.”

Irish readers, perhaps, are somewhat immune, saturated after twenty years of reports detailing “endemic sexual abuse” of children, of women enslaved behind convent walls, of infants exploited by pharmaceutical companies, trafficked for profit, discarded in death, experimented on by University medical schools.

Some in Ireland plead “enough already.” “Its time to move on!” They ignore stories of Artane, Ireland’s largest Industrial School where abuse was rampant. They pass by High Park where 155 Magdalene women were exhumed in 1993, forgetting that the nuns only expected to uncover 133 human remains. Twenty-two additional bodies dicovered but no police investigation came. The remains were cremated and interred in a “communal plot” at Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin.

They evade discussion of Sean Ross Abbey, from which Michael Hess, Philomena Lee’s son, was forcibly adopted to America, growing up to become the RNC’s Chief Legal Counsel and working in President Reagan and President Bush’s administrations.

These names, like Tuam, map a landscape of national self-delusion, whereby the Irish deliberately un-know what was always and already known.

But for the victims, survivors, and family-members of these institutions, the past remains deeply traumatic, unfinished, and not so easily forgotten. Silence is no longer an option. They demand truth. And, they recognize in Catherine Corless a woman who speaks their language. Dan Barry’s essay captures the essence of this indomitable woman—dignified, determined, and self-effacing. She speaks truth to power, quietly but effectively. She informs on Ireland and thereby subversively reclaims that most pejorative of Irish epithets.

Tuam is but one institution, the tip of a much larger iceberg yet to be navigated.

Other Mother and Baby Homes, and County Homes, where unmarried women also went to give birth to their socalled “illegitimate” children, have “angel” plots, as infant burial grounds are called. Some locations also have graves of women who died in childbirth. No one knows the exact number or their names, and no State body has yet produced the requisite death certificates, a precondition to burial in twentieth-century Ireland. Some graves are marked. Others are not. Similar end-of-life anomalies persist for women who died in the Magdalene Laundries.

The Tuam Home is distinct in one respect: The Bon Secours inexplicably interred infant remains in a series of underground chambers, part of a disused septic tank system. There was a town cemetery directly across the road from the institution. The nuns opted, apparently, to avoid paying the fee.

Tuam had high infant mortality rates, but so did Bessboro in Cork and St. Patrick’s in Dublin. Infant morbidity across all these institutions looked much the same—congenital conditions, contagious diseases, and “marasmus,” otherwise known as malnutrition or, to put it more bluntly, starvation.

The children who survived beyond childhood—some “boarded out,” others adopted at home or abroad, still others growing up in an industrial school—are looking to understand a past constructed to remain abstract and opaque.

For example, the ongoing Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigationhas yet to advertise in the US, despite the fact that 2,000 plus children were adopted here between the 1940s and 1970s.

Countless hundreds more were likely trafficked illegally to America. A government memorandum from 2012 suggests that as many as 1,000 infants were trafficked from the Tuam institution alone. How can the investigation achieve understanding or arrive at the truth when it ignores such a significant constituency?

Survivors seek to ascertain their birth identity, to know what became of their mothers, and to learn something of their family medical histories. The institutions fractured connections to place, separated siblings, and oftentimes deliberately falsified official documents. And, Ireland’s system of closed adoption, still in 2017, perpetuates a culture of secrecy, shame and stigma about the past.

Understanding is hindered by lack of access to records in the possession of the religious congregations—private actors formerly providing services on the State’s behalf, to Church and State policy archives that are invariably embargoed in accordance with the Commissions of Investigations Act, 2004—the very legislation that purports to facilitate justice, and by the destruction of files mysteriously wrought by “fire” and “flood.”

Many of the mothers and children in these institutions were poor and vulnerable. They did not count for enough in the Ireland of the time to have their constitutional rights protected nor their human rights safeguarded. And, many assert that they are treated little better today.

Earlier this year, in the days following confirmation of significant human remains at the Tuam burial site, Ireland’s Minister for Children and Youth Affairs, Katherine Zappone, T.D., heralded a role for transitional justice in responding to the nation’s history of institutional provision: “I believe there is also a need for us as a society to look beyond the important legal questions surrounding mother and baby homes by developing complementary comprehensive understanding into the truth of what happened in our country.”

James M Smith is associate professor in the English department at Boston College. He is author of "Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries and the Nation’s Architecture of Containment" and a member of Justice for Magdalenes Research.

Commentary: In Sunni North Africa, fears of Iran’s Shi’ite shadow Jonathan Laurence | October 26, 2017 These are challenging times for North Africa’s Muslim governments. Even as Islamic State is ousted from its strongholds in Iraq and Syria, the extremist group is continuing its battle against authorities in countries like Morocco, Algeria and Egypt.

On Oct. 16, the Egyptian military announced that six soldiers and at least 24 IS militants were killed in attacks on military outposts in North Sinai. That same weekend, Moroccan police arrested 11 members of an “extremely dangerous” IS-linked cell and seized chemical products used to make bombs. Algerian forces, meanwhile, have killed at least 71 Islamist fighters so far this year – the most since 2014.

The list of arrests, shootouts and seizure of passports from citizens who want to be foreign fighters goes on. But North African leaders have to navigate a particularly tortuous sectarian path. To avoid the perception that fighting extremism amounts to the persecution of the defenders of the faith, their governments have to be seen to be making visible gestures of Islamic piety – while also cracking down on Shi’ite proselytizing so as to rebut IS claims that authorities are complicit with Iran’s “plots and schemes” to carve up the region and spread Shi’ite Islam.

From new alliances to shifting Sunni-Shi’ite relationships, Reuters columnists examine how Islamic State losses could reshape the Middle East The Islamist PJD party in Morocco warned recently of a “sectarian Shi’ite invasion;” the Grand Mufti of Mauritania called on his country’s leaders to resist the “rising Shi’ite tide.” One North African government minister I interviewed denounced “the intrusion of Shi’ism through social media, university dormitories, high schools and ven qur’anic schools,” concluding gravely, “I ask myself whether the Persians want to dominate the Arab world.”

After Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Lebanon and Bahrein, is North Africa the next realm of a more assertive Iranian foreign policy? These fears come from Iran’s attempt to expand its influence in Algeria, Mauritania, Morocco, Tunisia – and its “backyard:” Senegal, Niger, Guinea and Mali.

Iran’s foreign minister toured the region in June, meeting with heads of government in Algeria, Mauritania and Tunisia in search of improved ties. Iran may simply be looking for new economic partnerships to offset current sanctions, but its outreach is enough to make some local powers nervous. Around the same time, Iran launched satellites beaming Arabic-language Shi’ite religious programming into North African homes.

There are thought to be fewer than 20,000 Shi’ites in Algeria, and the government recently mandated the registration of all of them. The Algerian minister of religious affairs has said that Shi’ites have no right to spread their faith in Algeria, “because that causes sedition and other problems.” "Algeria cannot play host to a sectarian war that does not concern it,” he explained in an interview. “Neither Shi'ism, nor Wahhabism nor any of the other sects are the product of Algerians, nor do they come from Algeria. We refuse to be the battleground for two external and foreign ideologies.” Diplomatic relations resist easy categories, however. Algeria is one of only a handful of countries, along with Iran, to maintain good relations with Yemen’s Houthi rebels, who are Shi’ite. Algiers was Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif’s first stop in North Africa in June.

Given the tiny number of Shi’ites living in North Africa and the tight control over mosques in the region, widespread Shi’ite religious influence on the ground is unrealistic. Whether or not the scale of proselytism justifies

the level of concern, Moroccan and Algerian leaders view Iran’s Africa policy as a threat to their domestic order and regional security. The prospect of sectarian strife exists for “heterodox” – i.e. non-Sunni – minorities scattered across the region, numbering in the millions who live under mainstream Sunni rule. Some of these groups are offshoots of Shi’ite Islam, but are not necessarily the source of conflict. In Algeria, their mere difference – and the government’s toleration of them – sometimes provokes attack from local hardliners.

North Africa’s Sunni governments struggle with the reality that two adversaries – Iran and IS – are the net beneficiaries of the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the crushing of Sunni opposition in Syria in 2017. The decline of Saudi influence after the Sept. 11 attacks and the downfall of Sunni Baathist rule in Iraq enhanced Iran’s stature while diminishing Sunni Arab influence in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria – and opening a path for IS. Officially, there is no Shi’ite minority in Morocco; unofficial estimates put the number at less than 2 percent.

Nonetheless, the foreign ministry in Rabat has accused Iran of trying to alter “the kingdom’s religious fundamentals.” The bad blood is the legacy of a sour relationship between Ayatollah Khomenei and King Hassan II (the father of current Moroccan King Mohammed VI) in the 1980s. The Ayatollah’s claims of Islamic supremacy over all Muslims threatened the Moroccan King’s role as “Emir al Mouamine” – leader of the faithful – of scores of millions of followers across Northwest Africa. Hassan chaired the international council of Islamic scholars that declared the Ayatollah to be an apostate – “if he is Muslim, then I’m not” – and openly supported Iraq in its war with Iran.

In turn, Hassan thought he saw an Iranian hand behind his domestic travails. Tehran provided safe haven to the Moroccan armed opposition group Chabiba Islamiya, and Hassan publicly accused Iran of fomenting riots against rising living costs and the violent uprising in the northern Rif region that is home to many Berbers. Street contestation in the Rif region has again put Rabat off balance in 2017 and revived the accusations a generation later.

The contrast with neighboring Tunisia is significant. Tunis has enjoyed unbroken relations with Iran since 1990, including high-level exchanges before and after the January, 2011 revolution that sparked what became known as the Arab Spring. Trade with Iran increased significantly as a result, but hardly registered compared to much more significant trade with the EU, North Africa, China and Turkey. Tunisia prides itself on being an island of sectarian tolerance in a rapidly polarizing region. Senior religious affairs officials proudly state that they represent all religions, including Christians and Jews, although in reality the country has very few non-Sunni Muslims. After the January 15 revolution, Tunisia signed the United Nations Convention on Human Rights and helped protect religious freedom in Article 6 of its new constitution.

Saudi Arabia has maintained its natural advantage, however. A month after the Iranian foreign minister left Tunis, a Saudi government delegation arrived, including 53 businessmen. They signed agreements with the government worth $200 million in development projects, including several hospitals and the renovations of a historic mosque in Kairouan.

But not all countries in North Africa feel they have that freedom when they perceive a two-front ideological battle against IS and Iran. In response to the State Department’s admonishments on religious freedoms in Algeria, the Algerian Minister said: “If they want to accuse us of defending Islam and our historic traditions, then let them.”

The defeat of IS in Raqqa has bought time for North African governments to consolidate their religious communities. But that same defeat also removes an obstacle to Iranian influence – not unlike the fall of Baghdad almost 15 years ago. Don’t expect the competition for leadership from the Persian Gulf to be resolved anytime soon.

About the Author Jonathan Laurence is a Nonresident Senior Fellow at Brookings Institution, a political science professor at Boston College and the author of Coping with Defeat: Sunni Islam, Roman Catholicism and the Modern State @jonathanlauren6

October 23, 2017 BC Strong Scholarship honors Marathon bombings survivors When Jack Manning was just 8, his parents received devastating news: Their son had cancer and would require rounds of chemotherapy. Ultimately he would lose half his left leg to the disease.

They learned of the illness after he broke his femur at a soccer tryout, while he wasn’t even involved in a strenuous activity, according to Manning, who grew up in Norfolk.

“The bone was just so weak from the tumor,” he recalled in an interview Saturday. “I think I was just kicking a ball, and it snapped.”

Manning missed a year of school and had to learn to walk with a prosthetic leg. But the setback ultimately slowed him down very little.

An athlete since his earliest days, he continued to play sports, competing in both baseball and football as a student at Roxbury Latin School, in West Roxbury where he was a solid student in a rigorous academic environment.

Manning, 19, also has worked to support cancer treatment, while showing others that they can overcome physical limitations. He is preparing for his third ride in the Pan-Mass Challenge to support the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and he counsels young patients and their parents at Boston Children’s Hospital.

Talking to children facing the kind of amputation that he experienced as a child, Manning tells them “you can still be active . . . and not let it limit you,” he said.

His efforts have earned public recognition. In a ceremony Monday at BC, Manning will become the first recipient of the Boston College Strong Scholarship, presented by Jessica Kensky and her husband, 2005 BC graduate Patrick Downes, who were newlyweds when both lost legs in the Marathon bombings.

Manning is a sophomore studying business at BC, where he maintains a 3.75 grade point average while working about 12 hours a week on campus, according to the college.

Manning “couldn’t have been a more perfect fit [for the scholarship] in his character and his drive and what he’s accomplished in life,” said Kensky, 36, in a phone interview.

She and Downes said the scholarship is part of an effort to show others who have overcome a disability the kind of support they received from Boston and around the world after the 2013 terror attack.

“It’s not lost on us that Jess and I, and all the survivors from the bombings, have been celebrated in this very special way, and we’ve had the opportunity to tell our stories many times over,” said Downes, 34, of Cambridge. “That’s not true for most people with disabilities.”

The scholarship is also part of an effort to make the college more inclusive and more navigable for people with physical limitations, he said, and to build a community of support and mentorship.

“We want to send a message that not only does BC welcome people of all ability levels, but we also want to support them in their academic endeavors,” Downes said.

The idea for the scholarship, which honors Downes and Kensky, came from a tight-knit group of college friends who had rallied to support the couple after their devastating injuries.

“We were trying to think about how we could pay forward all the love and generosity that Patrick and Jess got in the wake of the bombings,” said Michael Hundgen, Downes’s best friend from BC and senior-year roommate.

Initially, the friends envisioned a one-time scholarship, but as they considered their plan, they decided they could do more lasting good by building an endowment that would keep granting scholarships to students well into the future, according to Hundgen, 34, of Glendale, Calif.

They began fund-raising shortly before their 10-year class reunion, with the goal of collecting $250,000. The effort then grew after Downes announced his plan to run in the 2016 Marathon on a prosthetic leg, Hundgen said.

“So many of the people we were close with at BC were part of the core first round of people who gave, and that sort of became more and more and more,” said Hundgen.

After collecting contributions from almost 1,000 donors, they have garnered about $400,000 to date, he said.

“It’s amazing how generous people were,” Hundgen said. “I think it speaks to people really wanting to make something good out of something really bad that happened. I think it also speaks to what inspirational people Patrick and Jess are.”

The largesse of the fund’s supporters will allow many students to benefit from the program, eventually building a network of donors and recipients — a support system that will ease some of the burden of living with a disability, a challenge that Kensky and Downes know all too well.

“The city wrapped its arms around us, and it’s still been really hard. It’s still been exhausting,” Downes said. “I don’t know how you do it with anything less, but we are very conscious of the fact that most people do.”

For Manning, as the first recipient, it is an opportunity to show other young people that physical limitations don’t determine the course of a life. He expects to see the program expand to reach more students.

“They raised a lot more money than they even hoped that they could, so I think it will continue to grow bigger than their original expectations and become better than they could have hoped,” he said. “Hopefully this helps a lot of people.”

October 23, 2017 Boston Marathon bombing survivors award scholarship

Two amputee survivors of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing have awarded a scholarship to a college sophomore who lost a leg to cancer as a child.

Jack Manning, of Norfolk, Massachusetts, is the inaugural winner of the "Boston College Strong" scholarship. Bombing survivors Patrick Downes and Jessica Kensky presented the award to Manning at a ceremony Monday.

They say Manning was chosen for his "perseverance in the face of adversity."

Manning overcame his disability to play high school football and baseball, mentor young cancer patients facing limb loss and raise money for cancer research. He's currently enrolled in BC's Carroll School of Management.

Downes, a BC alumnus, and Kensky were newlyweds when both lost legs in the attacks near the marathon finish line. Kensky had to have her remaining leg amputated 1½ years later.

October 21, 2017 How Netflix’s Serial Killer Drama ‘Mindhunter’ Draws From Real Life’ Four decades ago, FBI special agents John Douglas and Robert Ressler began a bold new research project alongside a Boston crime victim expert named Dr. Ann Burgess.

Burgess, now a professor at Boston College’s Connell School of Nursing, thought the agents’ access to crime scenes and incarcerated killers presented a “phenomenal” opportunity for research, she told HuffPost. That research would go on to help define the ways law enforcement officials and civilians alike understand the concept of a serial killer ― and spark a must-binge TV drama show, too.

Douglas, Ressler and Burgess pioneered a model for criminal profiling at the FBI in the late 1970s, a process eventually documented in Douglas’ 1995 book Mindhunter ― which spawned the recent Netflix series by the same name. Much of the show relies on snippets from the book, a 375-page tome filled with fascinatingly macabre details from real-life cases: Charles Manson, the Son of Sam, Richard Speck and Ted Bundy among them.

In “Mindhunter,” the show’s Douglas figure is called Holden Ford played by actor Jonathan Groff, while the standin for the more seasoned Ressler (who died in 2013), is named Bill Tench played by Holt McCallany. Mirroring the achievements of the young “blue-flamer” portrayed in Douglas’ book, Holden kicks off a project to interview serial killers in an attempt to understand how they think. At first greeted by resistance from FBI Academy higher-ups at the Quantico base, the small team manages to secure some hefty funding for their endeavor. Holden and Bill set off collecting interviews on the “deviant behavior” of convicted killers across the country for Dr. Wendy Carr ― a version of Burgess played by Anna Torv ― to analyze.

In real life, the team worked together for well over a decade, Burgess told HuffPost, and they eventually published the Crime Classification Manual: A Standard System for Investigating and Classifying Violent Crimes in 1992 using their findings on violent crimes. Although forms of offender profiling existed before their research, Douglas, Ressler and Burgess are often credited as helping to establish the bureau’s distinct behavioral science method of profiling criminals.

“What we’d do is take the files and start looking at a pattern,” Burgess said, explaining how different details from the cases they encountered would be filed under categories like victimology, crime scenes and forensics, while some information would be condensed into numerical figures. The agents “gleaned” information from the profiles they created, and found that, for example, crime scenes could be classified as either “organized” or “disorganized.”

“And that’s exactly what these agents were able to do. They would go in, look at a scene, and come up with the basic categories,” Burgess recalled. “They would have their whole team there, and sometimes people would

disagree, which was great! Because by disagreeing, they could say, ‘Well, I see this.’ Or, ‘I don’t see that. How do you see that?’”

“There was a very good exchange back and forth,” she said, on characteristics as specific as a killer’s age.

And even though there were very, very few female agents or researchers at the FBI at the time, Burgess felt there was a “mutual sharing of information” among the team members. “Very collegial,” she said, although occasional conflict would arise over how, exactly, the team would gather their data. While Burgess ― and the “Mindhunter” character Carr ― preferred to stick to the agreed-upon questionnaire methodology, the FBI agents preferred their own, more casual style.

“They would get more chatty, rather than being step-by-step,” she said, adding that the agents would eventually have to hew closer to the methodology. “Who do you think always won? The academic.”

“Mindhunter” takes liberties as it develops characters’ personal lives ― Holden’s girlfriend may be loosely based on the woman Douglas married, Pam, but the steamy sex scenes are certainly left out of the agent’s memoir.

Many details of their work, however, appear to be aligned with real-life events portrayed in the book. The agency really trained up-and-coming agents by showing them a videotape of a hostage negotiation that ended with the hostage-taker turning the gun on himself in full view ― a disturbing sequence portrayed in the show’s first episode.

Douglas and Ressler really partnered up on “road school,” training local cops around the country, and some of those local cops really came up to them after class with strange cases of their own, asking for advice.

The first murderer the pair interviewed was indeed Ed Kemper, and yes, the horrifying description of Kemper’s crimes ― murdering and dismembering young women and eventually his own mother ― is also accurate. Yet the experience of talking to him was, apparently, less horrifying.

“I would be less than honest if I didn’t admit that I liked Ed,” Douglas writes. “He was friendly, open, sensitive and had a good sense of humor. As much as you can say such a thing in this setting, I enjoyed being around him. I don’t want him out on the streets, and in his most lucid moments, neither does he. But my personal feelings about him then, which I still hold, do point up an important consideration for anyone dealing with repeat offenders. Many of these guys are quite charming, highly articulate and glib.”

Other individual cases on the show derive from Douglas’ experience: He offered advice after reading about an elderly woman killed along with her dogs in his local paper, interviewed women’s shoe fetishist and convicted killer Jerry Brudos, and recalled an elementary school principal from his hometown who was fired for tickling children’s feet. Most of the killers they interviewed were men, and many had problems with women in their lives, which they used as an excuse to commit violence against women.

Burgess, who spoke with Douglas, now in his 70s and retired, during the show’s production but wasn’t directly involved with the series, explained that she understood why viewers might be drawn to a show like “Mindhunter,” in an age of renewed fascination with true crime.

“Part of it is a fascination, but part of it is a fear. There is so much crime. You don’t want to end up as a victim,” she said. “And that’s something that the agents would emphasize in the field; you would learn something about what had happened in the crime and think, ‘Boy, I’m going to try to not do that, if it ever happened to me.’ So it’s crime prevention as well as it is solving the crime.”

October 16, 2017 How 800+ College Students Are Coming Together To Help Rebuild Puerto Rico For Boston College student Alberto Medina, who is from Mayaguez, Puerto Rico, it has been a hellish five weeks. He is among thousands of Puerto Rico natives who were studying at campuses across the United States when Hurricane Maria ripped through the island on September 20.

It took him five days to get in touch with his family back home. “I was calling every phone number I could think of, even trying a hotline and listening in for hours to see if they would say my family’s name,” Medina says. “There was one person who had a working Internet connection and used the walkie talkie app Zello to communicate updates. People were asking, ‘Do you know Maria from this area?’ or ‘Have you spoken to this person?’”

Upon finding out his loved ones were okay, Medina’s focus shifted to supporting the relief efforts, which have been stymied by water, food, and fuel shortages, combined with the near total loss of power for Puerto Rico’s 3.5 million residents. Some experts estimate that there will be no water or electricity for four to six months and that it will take up to three years to rebuild the island.

Medina joined “Students With Puerto Rico,” a group mobilizing students across the mainland United States to raise awareness and funds for Puerto Rico. Within the first month, Students With Puerto Rico’s GoFundMe campaign has raised more than $200,000 (with $113,000 coming in the first week alone).

It all started the night after Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico; a group of University of Pennsylvania students connected by phone with 2016 graduate Sebastián E. Negrón Reichard, a San-Juan-based financial analyst. Led by Penn undergraduate Jose Diego Toro, along with Andrea Barreras and Gustavo Hachenburg, the group made a plan to mobilize fellow Puerto Ricans studying in the mainland U.S. and “use university communities as a platform to create awareness of the disaster,” says Negrón-Reichard.

Next, they looped in Puerto Rican students from other campuses – starting with Beatriz Martínez-Godás Fordham University and American University’s Raquel Lucca – and grew the ranks from there. Five universities ballooned to 115, and they have used a Facebook group with upwards of 800 members to spread key messages and calls. Each of the 115 schools has a student leader reporting to the central organizing team.

While most of the thousands of donations have been for around the cost of a restaurant meal, the campaign got a major boost when Jimmy Fallon kicked in $20,000.

October 10, 2017

Social work students to get addiction training Students at the nine social work schools in Massachusetts will learn about preventing and treating substance misuse under an agreement worked out by the Baker administration.

Schools have agreed to incorporate the learning into core requirements for graduating and participating as social workers in Massachusetts, Gov. Charlie Baker said after a meeting in his office with deans from nine schools. "I simply want to say thanks to the schools for stepping up and working with us on this," Baker said.

"Often the treatment of addictions has been a specialty rather than sort of core to your training as a social worker," Health and Human Services Secretary Marylou Sudders said. She said, "They will infuse addiction, the addiction principles, within their core courses."

Boston College School of Social Work dean Gautam Yadama and representatives of eight other Massachusetts social work schools met Tuesday with Secretary Marylou Sudders and Gov. Charlie Baker. Collaboration is needed to address the problem, according to Gautam Yadama, dean of the Boston College School of Social Work.

"This is a very complex social problem that's affecting our communities in the Commonwealth," Yadama said. He added, "We cannot be in silos of professions. We cannot be in the silos of our own respective school."

Whether they are investigating reports of child neglect or offering services at a neighborhood clinic, social workers are often on or near the front lines of society's response to the opioid epidemic. Addiction is not a new subject for social work students. "Clinical social work students are required to take at least one course in mental health disorders including substance use, which provides a framework for assessing and treating addictions," National Association of Social Workers Massachusetts Chapter Executive Director Rebekah Gewirtz told the News Service. The purpose of the new principles "is to expand a social work student’s knowledge and competence when working with individuals with substance use disorders and the environments in which they live," she said.

Opioids were implicated in 978 deaths through the first half of 2017. Boston Health Care for the Homeless on Tuesday alerted the public to a spike in fatal and non-fatal overdoses in Boston since Aug. 1. According to the organization, which cited the Boston Public Health Commission, there was a 50 percent spike in Boston overdoses in August and September compared to earlier in the summer and more overdoses in August than any month in the city's history.

The White House's Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis will likely make recommendations in about three weeks, said Baker, a member of the commission. "It will contain a lot of things that the federal government could do without legislation, and I think it will be really important to start there, but there will also be initiatives in there that will require legislative support, and I hope the fact that we have Democrats and Republicans serving on this commission will help us create some momentum for a bipartisan approach to dealing with this in Washington, which, by the way, will be pretty consistent with the way we dealt with it here," Baker told reporters. He said, "The final report and what happens to that final report will be the big opportunity for both the administration and Congress to demonstrate their resolve in dealing with this."

On Wednesday the U.S. House Subcommittee on Health will hold a hearing about the opioid crisis and U.S. Reps. Katherine Clark, William Keating and Joseph Kennedy III plan to testify, according to aides.The Energy and Commerce Committee plans to hold a hearing on the subject the week of Oct. 23.

President Donald Trump has declared opioid addiction a national emergency and advocated for cracking down on drug dealers.

"Drug overdose is now the leading cause of accidental death in the United States, and opioid overdose deaths have nearly quadrupled since 1999. It is a problem the likes of which we have not seen," Trump said in August, according to a transcript. "Meanwhile, federal drug prosecutions have gone down in recent years. We're going to be bringing them up and bringing them up rapidly. At the end of 2016, there were 23 percent fewer than in 2011. So they looked at this scourge and they let it go by, and we're not letting it go by. The average sentence length for a convicted federal drug offender decreased 20 percent from 2009 to 2016."

The Baker administration has previously won agreement from the heads of schools that train doctors, dentists, nurses, physician assistants, pharmacists to incorporate training on addiction into their education.

Asked about what professions might next be encouraged to incorporate addiction training into their curriculum, Sudders told the News Service, "I think we're going to reach out to the other master-level programs, so the next would probably be the master's in education and counseling and the master of psychology programs, but I wanted to start with the largest group of behavioral health clinicians."

The social work schools have agreed on nine principles to incorporate into education so that workers in the field can head off addiction and respond when someone is addicted to a dangerous drug. The principles include assessing someone's risk for substance use, understanding the recovery support system, and properly administering the overdose-reversing medication naloxone.

"In some cases social workers are just better at" interviewing skills, risk assessments and difficult conversations "than other players in the health care space or in the community generally," Baker said. He added, "I think social workers have a huge opportunity here to be really important to both helping people speak to either their own issue or the issue some other member of their family may have, but also in helping and supporting families and clinicians and coming up with plans and protocols with respect to treatment and recovery as well."

There are 4,300 social work students enrolled in Massachusetts, according to the Baker administration.

Deans of social work programs told reporters they are in the process of incorporating the principles into their curriculums.

October 10, 2017 Bad news: Your 401(k) won't give you a decent retirement For nearly 40 years now, we’ve been hearing that 401(k) plans are the key to a comfortable retirement. By giving a tax break to workers contributing part of their paychecks to their retirement nest eggs, the plans were designed to supplement Social Security benefits and employer pensions.

Instead, they’ve become substitutes, not supplements, for employer pensions and bulwarks against continuous attacks on Social Security benefits. A new survey from Boston College’s Center for Retirement Research demonstrates, however, that 401(k) plans are destined to fail millions of Americans. They’re not offered by enough employers, they’re not taken up by enough workers, and for most people, their balances aren’t large enough to provide for a decent retirement.

All these factors weigh most heavily on middle- and lower-income workers, the segment in which the participation rate and balance accumulation are disproportionately low.

The survey authors, Alicia Munnell and Anqi Chen, point to an important difference between 401(k)-type defined contribution plans on the one hand and traditional defined-benefit pensions and Social Security on the other. The latter provide lifetime benefits; the former provide steady retirement income only if they’re managed carefully by their owners during retirement.“They face the risk of either spending too quickly and outliving their resources or spending too conservatively and depriving themselves of necessities,” Munnell and Chen write. “Individuals are on their own.”

This is an important issue, because it goes to the heart of the retirement crisis facing millions of Americans.

Conservatives never tire of claiming that the retirement crisis is a myth, based on their assertion that retired Americans have consistently under-reported their income and in fact are doing just fine. The subtext of their argument is that Social Security benefits can be cut without causing much pain. That’s a faulty conclusion, as we’ll see.

The rise of the 401(k) would not be much of a problem if these accounts provided an effective way to husband assets for retirement periods that are growing longer, or if Social Security and employer pensions were as secure as they used to be. Munnell and Chen observe, however, that Social Security’s full retirement age is increasing to as high as 67 (for those born in 1960 or later) from the traditional 65. The change means that those subject to the maximum retirement age who nevertheless retire at 65 will receive 86.7% of their full benefits. In other words, most new retirees are facing a benefit cut, one way or another.

The 401(k) model has its virtues. The plans are portable, so they don’t tie workers to a single employer over a lifetime. They’re not quite as back-loaded as defined-benefit plans, which provide exponentially higher rewards to workers with high longevity. In an age when traditional defined-benefit plans are an endangered species in the private sector, at least they’re something.

But how good are they at providing retirement security? Not too good at all.

Let’s examine their record, with the help of a series of charts accompanying the analysis by Munnell and Chen.

First, the rise of defined-contribution retirement plans hasn’t compensated for the disappearance of defined-benefit pensions. Since 1999, Munnell and Chen observe, the percentage of private-sector workers offered any retirement plan at all by their employers has plummeted, from 64% to 43%. The level is lower today even than in 1979, just at the inception of the 401(k) era, when 59% of workers were offered one type or another, or both.

The last three or four decades has seen an almost complete disappearance of defined-benefit pensions in the private sector. In 1983, 88% of workers were covered by defined-benefit plans, including 26% who also had access to defined-contribution plans. In 2016, 17% are covered by defined-benefit plans alone and an additional 10% have both plans. The share of workers with 401(k) defined-contribution plans only has risen from 12% in 1983 to 73% today.

Can the 401(k) reliably provide income for a full retirement? In the 401(k) model, employees are responsible for deciding how much of their income to defer into their retirement nest egg. The maximum contribution is $18,000 a year, which is exempt from taxes the year it’s contributed (with those approaching retirement eligible to contribute an additional $6,000 in “catch-up” contributions). Typically, employers will match some portion of the employees’ contribution.

Figures from Vanguard, the largest manager of 401(k) accounts, indicate that the vast majority of workers don’t maximize their contributions. Vanguard says that only 10% of its account holders do so; Munnell and Chen speculate that because Vanguard’s universe encompasses relatively large accounts belonging to wealthier employees, the overall percentage may be lower.

The average employee contribution rate has been declining gradually since 2007; Munnell and Chen think that may be the unintended consequence of a 2006 change in the law that encouraged employers to make 401(k) enrollments automatic, with workers permitted to opt out if they chose. The idea was to increase the participation rate and it appears to have worked.

The downside is that “many of those who are enrolled at low contribution rates remain at those rates,” the authors say, without updating how much to invest as their needs change and their careers evolve.

A modest rise in employer contributions has made up for this decline, but hasn’t helped to advance the nest egg — employee and employer contributions combined were about 10.9% last year, not far from the average level dating back to 2007. But employer contributions are volatile — in the post-recession year of 2009 they fell so much the combined contribution rate dropped to only 9.8%, the lowest in a decade.

Put all these factors together, and you end up with a nation of meager retirement savers. Working households nearing retirement age have nowhere near enough saved up to provide for a lifestyle commensurate with that of their working years. The median among households in the 55-64 age range is $135,000. At today’s prices, that’s enough to buy a joint-and-survivor annuity (one that continues to cover a spouse after the principal beneficiary’s death) of $600 per month, without inflation protection.

Moreover, Munnell and Chen point out, that’s likely to be all they’ll get outside of Social Security, “because the typical household holds virtually no financial assets outside of its 401(k).” The plight is especially dire for lowerincome workers. This is the dirty little secret of the 401(k) revolution — it mostly benefits the affluent. Among the lowest-earning 20% of workers age 55-64, only about one in four has a 401(k), and their median balance is $26,700.

Among the highest-earning 20%, about 70% have a 401(k), with a median balance of $780,000.

These figures haven’t dissuaded conservative policymakers looking for rationales to cut Social Security. They seemed to get some grist for their argument that retirees are in clover from an analysis published this summer by Adam Bee and Joshua Mitchell of the Census Bureau, which documented that median household income for retirees was as much as 30% higher than previously calculated. The paper inspired headlines like this, from Andrew Biggs of the American Enterprise Institute: “New Research Confirms: No Crisis for Today’s Retiree

October 6, 2017

Listen to families on ‘Amoris Laetitia,’ bishops and theologians say While much of the debate over “Amoris Laetitia,” the controversial 2016 document from Pope Francis about pastoral outreach to families, has focused on the question of Communion for divorced and remarried Catholics, more than three dozen cardinals, bishops and lay theologians gathered at Boston College this week to explore the broader implications of the letter—and to strategize ways to promote it in the United States.

“I would caution us that there are other dimensions of family life that the pope treats in ‘Amoris Laetitia’ that have to do not just with the moral questions but also the social life, the economic constraints and the difficulties that people face in raising families and raising children,” Cardinal Blase Cupich, the archbishop of Chicago and a co-host of the conference, said on Oct. 5.

“We want to make sure that we keep in mind as pastors and theologians that we’re in touch with that reality as well, in terms of where God is revealing where God is working in the world,” he continued.

“What are some of the questions there that need to be looked at?”

The conference included discussion with several theologians, reflecting on how the document has been received in local Catholic communities.

C. Vanessa White, a theologian at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, said that her research suggests that “Amoris Laetitia” has yet to resonate with many black Catholics in the United States. She said the daily challenges to family life, such as working multiple jobs to make ends meet, which leaves little time for family activities, makes digesting the letter in great detail difficult. “Our families are struggling because we have not addressed their realities, their pain,” she said. “There must be that journey, there must be that walking with families.”

Another theologian, Natalia Imperatori-Lee, a professor at Manhattan College in the Bronx, N.Y., said that “Amoris Laetitia” has the potential to speak to Hispanic Catholics, noting that many Hispanic couples have struggled because of challenges posed by migration and poverty to enter into church-sanctioned marriage. She said some critics of Pope Francis fear that any deviation from church rules will lead to the laity “doing whatever they want.”“This is a child’s view of freedom,” she said.

Instead, she said, “Amoris Laetitia” calls for church leaders to accompany Catholic families, learning from them along the way.

“It’s not only about walking together but walking in a direction,” she said, adding that it is not always up to the priest or theologian to pick that direction. Sometimes, she said, the couples or the families will lead the way.

Julie Hanlon Rubio, a professor at Saint Louis University, said the interaction between bishops and lay theologians present at the conference will be essential in creating the kind of church Pope Francis envisions in “Amoris Laetitia.”

“If this new model of listening and accompaniment is going to work, a part of it has got to be listening to lay theologians who are working on these issues and living in families,” she said.

The first of its kind in the United States, the conference comes at a time when a small but vocal group of Catholics have intensified attacks on Pope Francis because of “Amoris Laetitia.” About 60 people signed a statement last month accusing the pope of heresy, and Cardinal Raymond Burke, an American stationed in Rome, continues to say he plans to challenge the pope publicly.

At issue is a footnote in the document, which some bishops say opens the door to Communion for divorced and remarried Catholics. Other bishops have said that the document contains no such teaching.But organizers insisted that the footnote, while important, is not the central message of the document. Instead, they called it a formational document that is meant not to reiterate church teaching but to reorient how ministers interact with families.

James Keenan, S.J., a Boston College theologian who co-hosted the conference, told participants that “Amoris Laetitia” “is about creating a new empathy for the family, for the Catholic family” and that it calls for “a new pastoral conversion among the clergy, among the episcopacy, among the entire members of the church.”

“We discovered that there are nine chapters in ‘Amoris Laetitia,’ that’s it’s more than a footnote, that it’s more than chapter 8,” Father Keenan said during the final session of the conference, referring to the chapter that deals with irregular family situations.

Atlanta Archbishop Wilton Gregory said that pastoral care providers have largely embraced “Amoris Laetitia.” “It has received the stamp of pastoral authenticity from those who know the territory,” he said, describing it as “a document that recognizes the real and serious problems and challenges facing families today, but at the same time it is a proclamation of hope through the mercy and grace of God.” Pope Francis, Archbishop Gregory continued, “challenges the church and its pastors to move beyond thinking that everything is black and white, so that we sometimes close off the way of grace and growth.”

But the divorce question was discussed. Bishops from Malta and Germany, places that have implemented processes that allow divorced and remarried Catholics to receive Communion, outlined how the new processes work in their dioceses.

October 3, 2017 Bishops, theologians gather to consider US implementation of 'Amoris Laetitia' Pope Francis' apostolic exhortation on family life, Amoris Laetitia, is perhaps the most hotly debated Catholic church document since Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul VI's 1968 encyclical letter that reaffirmed the church's ban on birth control.

Standout moments in the debate following Amoris Laetitia's April 2016 release include the November 2016 publication of a letter from four cardinals openly challenging the pope over the document and the September 2017 accusation by a few dozen Catholics that the pontiff had even committed heresy in writing it.

But not much public focus has been centered on what the document, known in English as "The Joy of Love," actually says in its 261 pages. Even less attention has been given to how local dioceses might implement its program for bishops and priests to see God's grace at work even in the sometimesunconventional situations families and marriages face today.

An upcoming event at Boston College hopes to address that lack of attention. In five panel discussions over two days Oct. 5-6, two cardinals, 12 bishops, and 24 other invited participants are set to discuss what organizers are calling the "new momentum" Amoris Laetitia gives local bishops to renew their pastoral practices toward families.

Jesuit Fr. James Keenan, a theologian at Boston College who is helping organize the event, told NCR the hope for the conference is to "fortify and further the ongoing reception of Amoris in the U.S."Keenan organized the event alongside Chicago Cardinal Blase Cupich, using the model of an earlier conference hosted at Paris' Institut Catholique by French Cardinal AndrĂŠ Vingt-Trois and Msgr. Philippe Bordeyne, a theologian and rector of that institute.

Cupich will attend the Boston-area event as will Cardinal Kevin Farrell, who was called to Rome from Dallas by Francis in 2016 to lead the Vatican's new Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life. Farrell will speak Oct. 5 as part of a panel on how the apostolic exhortation addresses those in Western cultures who have become disaffected by authority structures.

Keenan said the event will have a particular focus on hearing from those who have been involved with helping the European church better understand and implement Amoris Laetitia.

Speakers include German Bishop Franz-Josef Overbeck, who participated in the 2014 and 2015 Synods of Bishops that led to the exhortation; Malta Archbishop Charles Scicluna, who co-wrote a January 2017 document for Malta's priests on how to implement the exhortation in their country; and Jesuit Fr. Antonio Spadaro, a papal confidant and editor of the Italian magazine La CiviltĂ Cattolica.

Other bishops set to speak at the event include Atlanta Archbishop Wilton Gregory and San Diego Bishop Robert McElroy. Those in attendance are to include Santa Fe Archbishop John Wester; Indianapolis Archbishop Charles Thompson; San Bernardino, California, Bishop Gerald Barnes; Cheyenne, Wyoming, Bishop Steven Biegler; and Burlington, Vermont, Bishop Christopher Coyne.

In addition, Keenan said that while Boston Cardinal Sean O'Malley and Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput are unable to attend, both are sending representatives to take part.

Among the expected 24 lay participants at the event are some of the most prominent theologians in the U.S., including: Cathleen Kaveny, Richard Gaillardetz, and Hosffman Ospino of Boston College; Julie Hanlon Rubio of St. Louis University; Franciscan Sr. Katarina Schuth of the University of St. Thomas, and Meghan Clark of St. John's University. A handful of press outlets have been invited to report on the proceedings, including NCR. The Boston conference carries the title "Amoris Laetitia: A New Momentum for Moral Formation and Pastoral Practice." The program states that Francis is "inviting the Church to a renewed process of moral formation and pastoral practice with regard to marriage and family life that is rooted in Sacred Scripture and the Church's faith."

"Implicitly, [the pope] is also envisioning a wider perspective on renewal that has a broader application for the life of the whole Church," it continues. "The foundations are absolutely traditional ... but what brings the movement forward is a creative recovery of synodality, listening, accompaniment and discernment."

Farrell's panel on how the exhortation addresses those disaffected by authority is to be the third of the five panels of the conference. The first two are to focus on understanding "the scope, the challenge, and the promise" of the document, and the "newness that priests and laity face" in reading it. The fourth and fifth panels will focus on how Amoris Laetitia engages in a pastoral process marked by discernment and accompaniment, and the challenges the document presents to theologians and pastors.

Amoris Laetitia was released on April 8, 2016. It was written by Francis following the 2014 and 2015 Synods of Bishops on the family, which each made recommendations to the pontiff after weeks of meetings among hundreds of prelates at the Vatican.

While the exhortation does not explicitly change church teaching, it has been seen as a radical departure from recent decades of pastoral practice. In one of Amoris' most poignant passages, Francis asked Catholic pastors around the world to let their lives become "wonderfully complicated" in an effort to see God's grace at work, even in situations which might be seen as contrary to doctrinal norms.

The pontiff also called on bishops and priests to set aside fears of risking moral confusion in their efforts to accompany people in difficult family situations, saying pastors must avoid a tendency to a "cold bureaucratic morality" and should shift away from evaluating peoples' moral status based on rigid canonical regulations.

Pointedly, Francis said that Catholic prelates could no longer make blanket moral determinations about so-called "irregular" situations such as divorce and remarriage.

Sports were already politicized. And sports culture is deeply conservative.

Michael Serazio and Emily Thorson | October 2, 2017 Of all the unwritten “rules” in sports, broadcaster Howard Cosell believed it the cardinal decree: Sports and politics don’t mix. But as the events of the past few weekends have demonstrated, the reality is that was always a fantasy.

American sports culture is still — largely, if often invisibly — a conservative space. This will no doubt come as a surprise to fans, presidents and pundits enraged by the waves of NFL players and teams protesting during the national anthem — and to those who see some sort of nefarious liberal bias lurking among the sports media. But it is, nonetheless, borne out in our survey research that finds sports fans tend to harbor more right-leaning attitudes on economic and foreign policy issues, even as Republicans are no more likely than Democrats to follow most sports.

As big businesses, sports leagues and teams themselves are conservative in the sense of being “risk averse” and protecting a lucrative commercial product. One could, hypothetically, chart an inverse correlation between revenue flooding into the sports industry after the 1960s and the daring of activist athletes in those decades hence. As Michael Jordan emblematically (if apocryphally) said, “Republicans buy sneakers, too.”

So when Colin Kaepernick started protesting police treatment of African Americans last year, it surely ignited panic among league and media executives who thought his movement would bring down NFL ratings and, thus, advertiser revenue. “Protest” isn’t a word that scares sports stakeholders; “boycott” is — whether from Kaepernick-haters or those who think he’s been blackballed. A $13 billion business has too much to lose from those taking a stand (or, rather, taking a knee).

But sports culture is also conservative in “substantive” political ways, most not often recognized as such. First and foremost, sports tell us fairly consistently — if not consistently fairly — that winners work hard and losers are lazy.

That’s not an irrelevant message in era of economic inequality; you might even say that it helps determine your views on income taxation and government welfare.

Indeed, according to the results of a 1,000-person, nationally representative survey we fielded last fall — halfway through Kaepernick’s protest season — sports fans are more likely than non-fans to believe that wealth outcomes reflect meritocratic processes. Controlling for demographics and party identification, we found that those who followed sports closely were more likely to think that personal factors such as ambition and effort were more important than structural advantages such as hailing from a rich family or knowing the right people. (Because this was a survey and not an experiment, we can’t say sports fandom causes this conservatism, only that it correlates.)

In our survey coding, for example, a one-unit change in fan intensity (as measured on a five-point scale) is associated with a .03 change (on a four-point scale) in those meritocratic attitudes.

Sports fans were also significantly more likely than non-fans to hold hawkish attitudes and support increased defense spending; here, a one-unit increase in fan intensity was associated with a .11 change in pro-military views (on a similar four-point scale). This may have been what the Pentagon was paying for with its $10 million in

“guerrilla marketing” in the form of soldier tributes that were seemingly gratis and “authentic” but later revealed, in a congressional report, to have been financed by specific contractual line items.

That’s no surprise: Throughout world history, athletic activity has been seen as rehearsal for military action. Sports were a proxy for war in the ancient Greek and Roman era; the modern Olympics were revived to toughen up French youth for future battles. And President Dwight Eisenhower once declared, “The true mission of American sports is to prepare young people for war.”

Finally, sports remain deeply conservative when it comes to gender norms or what scholars like to call hegemonic masculinity. Conservative anxieties about the “wussification” of football aside (how dare we care about their brains!), sports culture still demands and valorizes a pretty traditional form of manhood: tough, stoic, aggressive, disinclined to carry murses. Incidentally, this was also the second-most- troubling sports-related hot take that President Trump delivered in his recent Alabama speech: leering at and lusting for those CTE-inducing “beautiful tackles” that football players used to be allowed to endure.

Women, meanwhile, are still reliably marginalized in sports culture — as athletes (they average 2 to 3 percent of all sports coverage on local TV affiliates and ESPN) and as media professionals (where more than 90 percent of anchors, commentators and editors are men) and perhaps, because of that, as fans (where, we discovered, 35 percent of women say they don’t follow sports, as compared to just 19 percent of men).

None of these contexts are as recognizably “political” as an anthem spat between the president and the NFL Players Association. Rather, they’re baked in subtly: a fighter-jet flyover here; an Under Armour ode to hustle there; a debate about whether a horse or a woman should be named “Sports-person of the Year.” That these don’t extrude as explicit partisan fodder, though, doesn’t make them any less influential or enduring.

That said, Trump got one thing right: Sports fans don’t seem to like those politics intruding (however construed).

The cascade of boos that rained down on dissenters at football games the past two weekends suggests this, and our national survey confirmed as much: Some 50 percent of respondents strongly or somewhat agreed with the statement that “Sports and politics should not mix” (compared with 20 percent who disagreed and 30 percent who neither agreed nor disagreed). Among those self-identifying as conservatives, the opposition to that politicization was even stronger — 62 percent as compared with 51 percent of moderates. Liberals did not evince the same recoil: Only 35 percent thought that sports and politics shouldn’t mix.

This is because the conservative politics already “within” sports are invisible and permissible, while those deemed “out of bounds” are left-leaning and illegitimate. If there’s going to be a culture war over sports going forward, the American right still has the home-field advantage.

Michael Serazio, an assistant professor of communication at Boston College, is the author of "Your Ad Here: The Cool Sell of Guerrilla Marketing."

Emily Thorson is an assistant professor of political science at Syracuse University.

October 1, 2017

BC’s Pops on the Heights, featuring Jennifer Hudson, raises record $14 million for scholarships

By Maddie Kilgannon

Star singer Jennifer Hudson dazzled with her rendition of “Alleluia” at Boston College’s 25th annual Pops on the Heights Barbara and Jim Cleary Scholarship Gala. The sold-out show with Keith Lockhart and the Boston Pops Orchestra raised a record $14 million for BC’s scholarship endowment.

The event Friday evening also included a special tribute to laureate Pops conductor John Williams, who was presented with the college’s President’s Medal for Excellence in a ceremony with actor and alum Chris O’Donnell and BC’s president, William P. Leahy.

The gala was chaired by David P. O’Connor, senior managing partner at High Rise Capital Partners, and his wife, Maureen, and Phil Schiller, senior vice president of worldwide marketing at Apple Computer, and his wife, Kim Gassett-Schiller.

Making Diversity Happen Boston College and UC Riverside share how they quickly hired more faculty members from underrepresented minority groups, without relying on hard numerical targets or costly initiatives.

By Colleen Flaherty | September 28, 2017

It’s easy to understand why so many colleges want to increase their share of faculty members who are underrepresented minorities: research suggests that cultural diversity means diversity of thought and experience -boons to any intellectual enterprise -- and both minority and white students benefit from learning from professors who look like them, and those who don’t. But actually diversifying faculty ranks is hard. Implicit biases persist in hiring, some academics resist explicit faculty diversity initiatives and data still demonstrate some “pipeline,” or supply, issues, especially in the natural sciences.

Yet a number of campuses have made strides toward achieving faculty diversity in a short period of time.

Among them are the University of California, Riverside, and Boston College. Both institutions avoided setting hard numerical goals and opted instead for cluster hiring -- which has been proven to promote faculty diversity elsewhere -- and additional training and support for faculty search committees.

Riverside also asked all candidates for faculty jobs to submit a statement describing how they’ve worked to promote diversity, equity and inclusion in their previous positions -- as graduate students or professors -- and how they planned to continue to do so once on campus. (Pomona College, among others, has recently introduced similar requirements.) By law, faculty candidates cannot be assessed based on their personal characteristics, but there was clearly a correlation between having a compelling diversity statement and coming from a diverse background.

Ken Baerenklau, Riverside's associate provost, said the university's Bourns College of Engineering ran its own simultaneous experiment, by limiting its initial review of candidates to just research records and diversity statements. All three new hires ended up being women, and two of those were underrepresented ethnic minorities (the other hire was an underrepresented religious minority). “It was striking,” he said. “But I do think it’s natural that those who are committed to diversity themselves or drawn to this part of our mission have had their own life experiences.”

Riverside over the past two hiring cycles recruited 35 new underrepresented-minority faculty members, comprising upwards of 22 percent of all new hires. Historically that figure has been about 13 percent of new hires. And in the most recent cycle, 30 percent of all new minority hires were in the natural sciences, technology, math and engineering. That’s significantly higher than the university's current underrepresented-minority faculty population of approximately 10 percent. And it brings Riverside’s professoriate closer to reflecting the diversity of its students, as 45 percent of undergraduates at the university are from an underrepresented minority background. The share of hires who were women also increased.

At Boston College, 46 percent of the tenure-track and tenured faculty hires last year were from minority backgrounds (39 hires total). Among all full-time hires by the college, including non-tenure-track professors, 38 percent (or 53 total) were minorities, which, in Boston College terminology, is “AHANA.” That means of African, Hispanic, Asian or Native American descent. Counting visiting professors, some 32 percent of new faculty hires (87 total) were AHANA. Currently, less than 20 percent of the Boston College faculty meets that definition, compared to 31 percent of students.

Looking only at underrepresented-minority faculty members, which means excluding professors of Asian descent -- who are in some cases overrepresented -- the figures change but still indicate progress toward diversity. Eighteen percent of new tenure-track and tenured professor hires by the college this year were underrepresented minorities. The current student body is 15 percent minority, while the faculty is less than 8 percent.

How They Did It Neither Riverside nor Boston College announced major faculty diversity initiatives, and both institutions avoided setting numerical targets, such as a goal of X percent of the faculty being underrepresented minorities by 2025.

Instead, they relied on consistent messaging from university leaders about the importance of diversity and other, somewhat more subtle changes.

Cynthia Larive, Riverside’s interim provost, said avoiding particular targets “gets people out of thinking about a quota system. We want to hire outstanding faculty members who can help the institution continue to be successful and, most importantly, who can mentor students.”

Billy Soo, vice provost for faculties at Boston College, said “just having conversations is very important -- getting the search committees and department chairs together sends a clear signal to them that we really care about this.”

Describing something like peer pressure coupled with peer support, Soo said, “Having people sit together and talk about what hiccups their departments are experiencing, and hearing what other departments are doing, puts the onus on everyone there to do something, too.”

In addition to stated commitments to diversity from administrators, both institutions offered additional training to faculty members involved in hiring. Ana M. Martínez Alemán, associate dean of faculty and academic affairs at Boston College, said search committees were up and running earlier than usual this past year, and that she met with each to review best practices focused on equity.

“We review what we know about explicit and implicit biases in academic searches,” such as privileging Ph.D.s from elite institutions and relying on “narrow” networks, she said. Recruitment strategies include working within professional organizations at meetings, especially those that have identified racial and ethnic contingencies, and asking faculty members to contact colleagues in their fields for recommendations, or to apply themselves. All departmental faculty members are provided with template emails for such outreach, so that contact is not limited to the search committee.

Committee membership is approved by the dean, who visits with each to discuss equity. And Boston College provides additional training seminars though its Office of Institutional Diversity.

“We make sure that the goal is clear and that we employ good strategies to recruit candidates of color,” Martínez Alemán said.

Riverside used similar strategies. The university also hoped that its new cluster hiring program, which focused on hiring teams of faculty members to work on particular sets of problems across departments, would offer the ancillary benefit of increasing diversity. The approach worked elsewhere: a 2015 report from the Urban Universities for HEALTH, for example, found that most surveyed institutions that engaged in cluster hiring had appointed faculty members who were more diverse in terms of race, ethnicity and gender than those who were hired through traditional department searches. Other kinds of diversity, such as the intellectual variety, also were reported by the institutions that could measure them.

Riverside’s cluster hiring initiative had a rocky rollout, with faculty members complaining in a survey that it was opaque in terms of how cluster pitches would be assessed. Critics also charged that cluster hiring seemed to supplant, rather than enhance, traditional departmental hiring -- a no-no, according to the emerging literature on effective cluster hiring.

Larive said faculty members still have their concerns about cluster hiring, but that the university is dedicated to making the process more transparent and collaborative. (Many faculty concerns about the initiative were also linked to the former provost, whom Larive replaced, and who resigned from that post facing a planned faculty vote of no confidence in his leadership.) Those comments are supported somewhat by a second faculty survey on cluster hiring in the 2016-17 academic year, the results of which were released last month. "A strong plurality of the responding faculty would support (i) a far more narrowly targeted cluster hiring program that (ii) acknowledges and builds on existing campus/departmental research strengths and/or carefully defined research areas likely to yield high-value research over a long-term research trajectory, in which (iii) departments take the lead role in conducting the cluster searches themselves," reads that report.

The dominant theme in the survey comments was a "need for a far more rigorous articulation between cluster hiring and the departments in which cluster faculty are placed," it says. Further, "there is an overwhelming consensus that the selection of cluster hire themes and recruitment of prospective faculty members often do not account for the programmatic and pedagogical needs of departments, which are the primary locus for [Riverside's] fulfillment of the academic mission."

Baerenklau said cluster hiring led to increased new hires from Native American backgrounds, in part due to the inclusion of an indigenous studies cluster. Chicano and Latino hires increased as a result of both cluster hiring and regular departmental hiring, he said, while regular departmental hiring -- with enhanced training and recruitment efforts -- resulted in increased African-American hires.

The Boston College cluster initiative was smaller (just one funded proposal) but also resulted in increased diversity. Four African-American faculty members were hired: two in English, one in theology and one in arts and art history. All four have joint appointments in the African and African diaspora studies program.

Richard Gaillardetz, Joseph Professor of Catholic Systematic Theology and department chair at the college, said he and his fellow theology professors believed that having a colleauge with a joint appointment in African and African disapora studies "was a very important initial step toward creating a more diverse theology faculty."

He added, "We still have a long way to go in redress a pronounced gender inequity and a grievously inadequate representation of scholars of color. It has been our experience that AHANA faculty members bring a challenging, fresh perspective to our theological conversation."

Soo said this year’s progress is promising and necessary, but just a start. Only with similar gains, year after year, will the college's faculty diversity reflect that of students. For Riverside, Larive said it was hard to know for certain whether the recent gains were a “blip or trend,” but she was confident they would continue. Retaining faculty members of color through a positive climate is another crucial piece of the puzzle, she added.

“My sense is that faculty are more comfortable with looking at diverse candidates as part of the hiring pool, without thinking of it as an affirmative action kind of hire,” Larive said. “That’s an important breakthrough for us, and we see it as a strategic advantage.”

September 28, 2017 Leading Child Trauma and Human Rights Scholar Theresa Betancourt Joins Boston College School of Social Work Theresa S. Betancourt, whose groundbreaking research has laid bare the ravages of war on children, their families and communities, has joined Boston College’s School of Social Work as the inaugural Salem Professor in Global Practice, School of Social Work Dean Gautam Yadama announced today.

Betancourt joins Boston College from Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where she spent 11 years as an assistant and associate professor of child health and human rights and directed the Research Program on Children and Global Adversity, studying the emotional trauma experienced by former child soldiers and examining how war-affected young men and woman can go on to live meaningful and productive lives.

"Professor Betancourt's research is truly global in scale, but focused on what matters most: the well-being of children, families and communities, particularly those devastated by the effects of war and conflict," said Yadama. "This combination of robust research and practice innovation will distinguish our social work program, and strengthen our ability to improve vulnerable lives through evidence-based interventions here at home and across the globe."

Betancourt’s research has taken place in Rwanda, Uganda, India, Ethiopia, the Russian Federation and Sierra Leone, where she has spent the past 15 years directing the intergenerational study of war-affected youth.

“Understanding the longer-term consequences of the direct and indirect effects of war is critical to designing strengths-based interventions to help young people and their families to thrive,” said Betancourt. “We aim to position our research at the crossroad of policy and evidence-based practices to both understand potential leverage points for change and then to use this knowledge to develop intervention models that can be feasible, effective and ultimately scalable and sustainable to assist children, youth and families facing adversity.”

Working from available evidence, Betancourt devised her own child protection framework, known as SAFE, which reflects the basic security needs and rights to promote child protection, specifically Safety from harm; Access to basic needs; Family; and Education and economic security. The framework has been employed by Betancourt in India, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, and northern Uganda, as well as by other researchers in Haiti and Lesotho.

As part of her more than $8.5 million in research funding, Betancourt serves as the principal investigator of a National Institutes of Mental Health-funded project to integrate evidence-based behavioral interventions for war-affected youth into employment initiatives in Sierra Leone; and as principal investigator for a NIMH-funded project to work to strengthen families for Somali Bantu and Bhutanese refugees in New England.

The Salem Professorship in Global Practice was established through a major gift from Boston College Trustee Navyn Datoo Salem and her husband Paul J. Salem.

"Finding innovative ways to address global challenges is both a personal and a professional passion for me,� said Navyn Salem. “That is why Paul and I are so honored to establish the Salem Professorship in Global Practice at the School of Social Work, and to welcome Theresa Betancourt to the faculty. Our hope is that with her critical research and expertise, the School of Social Work will lead the way in offering substantive practical applications to ameliorate global challenges, particularly those that affect the most vulnerable members of our society. I can think of no better place to accomplish this goal than Boston College, which remains committed to helping all members of the human family to flourish.�

September 28, 2017 Trump’s tax plan would weaken faith in fairness of US tax system

By Gil B. Manzon, Jr. and Tim Gray

President Donald Trump and GOP leaders just released a plan to significantly change the taxation of individuals and businesses in what would be the biggest overhaul of the tax code in decades.

Among its many elements is a proposal to change the way the government taxes so-called pass-through entities, something first suggested in April.

In a nutshell, the Trump proposal would dramatically lower the rates this category of filers pays. While the cut would not be as large as first proposed, it would still lead to very creative tax planning at best and outright evasion at worst, while prompting more companies to adopt this type of business structure to gain the huge benefits.

More fundamentally, we argue, this would cause faith in the fairness of the tax system – a cornerstone of our voluntary method of taxation – to falter. The consequences of that could be dire.

The universe of pass-throughs is very large, including anything from freelancers and corner grocery stores to medical partnerships and hedge funds that file under legal categories like sole proprietorships, partnerships and S corporations.

The name “pass-through” refers to how income “passes through” to owners. Pass-throughs avoid the double taxation that hits regular C corporations. More of U.S. business income is actually generated by pass-through entities than conventional corporations like Apple and General Electric.

Currently, owners of pass-throughs report both compensation and business income on their personal tax returns and pay the same tax rates on both.

To illustrate how this works, imagine a doctor’s sole proprietorship generates US$1 million of taxable earnings.

Let’s say half of that would be considered reasonable compensation for the owner’s work, while the other half would be deemed ordinary business income. On her tax return, the doctor would report an income of $1 million, all of which would be taxed at personal income tax rates, for a federal levy of $396,000 (assuming a flat rate of 39.6 percent).

Under Trump’s proposal, the tax rates on compensation and business income would no longer be the same. A new top rate of 35 percent would apply to compensation, and a proposed rate of 25 percent would apply to business income (the original proposal targeted 15 percent). Going back to our example, the doctor’s federal tax bill would be reduced to about $300,000, assuming she followed the rules. Not bad.

But she now has a very strong incentive to characterize her compensation as business income. If she reported her compensation as $0 and business income as $1 million, her tax bill would be reduced still further, to $250,000. Put differently, for every dollar of compensation she reports as business income instead of compensation, she saves 10 cents in tax.

Clearly, the potential tax savings are huge. Many owners of pass-throughs are going to be tempted to report reasonable compensation as business income.

And who wouldn’t be? The reward for cheating is just too large. And the likelihood of getting away with cheating is as high as it’s ever been because of the reductions in enforcement in recent years, a trend Trump has shown no intention of reversing.

Defining reasonable compensation The history of taxation bears this out: If taxpayers are given flexibility in how to report their income, many will do what they can to lower their tax as much as possible.

For example, S corporation owners have long tried to reduce their Social Security and Medicare taxes by calling their compensation business income. Unlike partnership earnings, the earnings of S corporations that are not paid to shareholders as “compensation” are not subject to Social Security and Medicare taxes.

This clearly creates a strong incentive to characterize as much “compensation” as possible as regular business income. The challenge for the Internal Revenue Service has been defining what constitutes “reasonable compensation” for S corporation shareholders.

The issue has been well-litigated over the years, resulting in a 2012 circuit court ruling that was deemed a win for tax evaders. The court’s guidance boiled down to saying each case is unique and offered no ready recipe for the income allocation problem.

What happened in Kansas The state of Kansas offers a ready example of what happens when you change how pass-throughs are taxed.

In 2012, Kansas eliminated its income tax on pass-through companies, whose owners previously had to report any earnings on their personal state returns. The response to this change, which took effect in 2013, was quick and large.

The center-right Tax Foundation estimated that it caused the number of pass-through companies in the state to double and resulted in $589 million in lost revenue in 2015 alone, based on an analysis of Kansas tax expenditure reports. A recent paper examining the impact of the change concluded it resulted in “overwhelmingly” more tax avoidance. Kansas abandoned this experiment earlier this year.

The reasonable inference from the S corporation history and Kansas’ experiment is what everyone is taught in their first economics class: People are rational and self-interested. They recognize and exploit opportunities to enrich themselves.

And the Trump administration’s proposed changes to pass-through rules would create a huge opportunity and greater incentives to recharacterize income.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on May 1, 2017. Tim Gray, a freelance business writer and editor, and part-time faculty at Boston College, co-authored the original piece. Gil B. Manzon is an accounting professor at Boston College.

The Colleges Whose Graduates Do Best Financially

By Douglas Belkin | Sept. 26, 2017 Whether students go to school primarily to find a calling, read the Great Books or learn the skills to earn a lot of money, the degrees they earn have a substantial impact on their financial future.

The amount of debt accrued over the course of an education—and the student’s ability to pay it off— affects everything from how healthy and happy graduates will be to what professional choices they make, says Brandon Busteed, executive director of education and workforce development at Gallup.

“There are two types of [college] consumers, those who care very much about the economic value add and those who say they are there to make a contribution to society,” Mr. Busteed says. “Either way, your financial outcomes matter.”

That’s why the Wall Street Journal/Times Higher Education College Rankings weight outcomes as the most important factor in the overall ranking. Outcome scores are derived from graduation rates, income after graduation, debt repayment and academic reputation. The outcome evaluation is 40% of a school’s total score.

Our value-added measure of salaries was calculated by comparing predicted salaries—based on factors including students’ SAT scores, family income and an institution’s population of first-generation college students—and the actual outcomes for recent graduates. We used a Brookings Institution analysis of value-added college outcomes as a guide on this measure, recognizing that high graduate salaries alone don’t indicate school success.

Harvard University and Duke University, first and fifth, respectively, in the overall ranking, tied for the top spot in outcomes. And all of the schools ranked in the top 10 for outcomes were ranked in the top 11 overall except for one: Williams College, tied for ninth in outcomes and ranked 22nd overall. But several schools had outcome scores that were well above their overall rank.

One example is Brigham Young University, Provo. It was 113th in the overall ranking, but 40th in outcomes thanks to a high graduation rate and average annual earnings for recent graduates that are $12,000 more than predicted. Jodi Chowen, BYU’s director of career services, says her students land jobs because of a range of skills. “The feedback we hear from employees is that they have developed these critical-thinking and problem-solving skills by the time they graduate,” she says. “And they rank really high compared to graduates of other schools in a lot of soft skills like leadership.”

Boston College is another school that shines on outcomes. The school was ranked 60th overall but 33rd on outcomes. Recent grads earned $4,550 more a year than predicted.

“I think Jesuit values are great career values,” says Joe DuPont, associate vice president for student affairs at BC. “Jesuits champion reflection, exploration and action. That fits well into any paradigm, including the world of work.”

In contrast, rankings of some elite liberal-arts colleges were dragged down by their outcome scores.

Defenders of those institutions say the disproportionate number of students who attend graduate school, go into the arts or education or get government jobs work against them.

Swarthmore College graduates fell $16,750 short of their predicted annual salary. The school ranked 30th overall, but the earnings shortfall was among the most severe in the country. Swarthmore ranked 52nd in outcomes.

Gregory Brown, Swarthmore’s vice president for finance, says because his school’s admissions are needblind, the pool of students who take federal financial aid is very small. The predicted salaries used in the rankings take into account only the salaries of students who borrowed from the federal government.

“Because our sample size is very small, one deviation can really impact our numbers,” he says. “I would caution parents that while these rankings offer some helpful information, not one of them is perfect.”

September 26, 2017

Donald Trump underestimated the power of a team NFL protests show that not even the president of the US can disrupt the bond between players Mike Cronin Last week US president Donald Trump told an audience in Alabama that those athletes of the NFL who disrespected the pre-match playing of the national anthem should be sacked.

He said team owners should “get that son-of-a-bitch off the field right now”.

The protest whereby a growing number of athletes across different US sports refused to stand for the anthem began with San Francisco 49ers player Colin Kaepernick in August 2016. Kaepernick’s justification was simple: “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of colour”.

Kaepernick’s stance was motivated by his support for the Black Lives Matter movement that has, since 2013, highlighted issues relating to violent treatment of blacks in the United States by law enforcement agencies.

At the end of the 2016 NFL season, Kaepernick opted out of his contract with the 49ers to become a free agent. For the 2017 season he has failed to find a team that will employ him, and most observers argue it was his anthem protest, rather than a dip in performance, that has left him without a team.

In March this year, Trump took credit for Kaepernick’s effective unemployment by saying,“NFL owners don’t want to pick him because they don’t want to get a nasty tweet from Donald Trump.” So with Kaepernick sidelined, and the athlete protests against standing for the anthem seemingly losing support and profile, why did Trump reignite the issue last week and what does it all mean?

Protests such as Kaepernick’s aren’t new. In 1968, the American sprinters John Carlos and Tommie Smith made headlines when they gave the black power salute from the Olympic podium in Mexico City.

The pair were treated harshly for their protest. They were removed from the Olympic Village that night and returned to a United States that shunned them. They were dismissed as revolutionaries by the then vice-president Spiro Agnew and refused a post-Games invite to the White House by the president, Lyndon Johnson, (something Trump did last weekend in rescinding an invite to the NBA champions, the Golden State Warriors, after one player, Stephen Curry, expressed discomfort at the initial invite to attend the White House).

Both protests, in 1968 and 2016-17, centred on the question of racial equality in the US. Both were undertaken by athletes in a world of sport which, we are constantly told, is supposed to be a nonpolitical space. However, because sport is meant to be non-political, protests in and around sport have great power.

The teams of the NFL responded as the best teams do, standing as one against the perceived threat to their unity.

Olympic boycotts grab the attention, the anti-apartheid movement’s greatest success was in galvanising people behind the sporting boycott of South Africa, and the actions of Carlos, Smith and Kaepernick start debates beyond the field of play.

Last week in Alabama, Trump thrust politics into American sport. He no doubt thought the millionaire players of the NFL were an easy target, and that his support base would approve him calling out those who he saw as dishonouring the US. Of course, he could have simply ignored the anthem protests and let them wither away.

But in denouncing protesting players as unAmerican, Trump misunderstood something about sport.

True, he may have appealed to his core support in a state such as Alabama, but once he had called the athletes out, demanded that their owners sack them, Trump failed to recognise a key power dynamic in sport: the team.

On Sunday at NFL matches in London and across the US teams stood together in protest.

The teams were supported by their management teams, their owners as well as by the NFL itself.

The teams of the NFL, whatever any individual player may think about the validity of the race debate, stood together, raised fists or kneeled as one. They were not protesting against racial inequality in the United States, but were honouring the rights of individual players, their team mates, to do so.

Trump had threatened discord and disagreement, had tried to divide players from each other, and players from owners. The most basic sport psychology tells us that a divided dressing room is a losing dressing room. The teams of the NFL responded as the best teams do, standing as one against the perceived threat to their unity from the president.

Sunday’s protests had little to do with race politics. They had everything to do with the team mentality and its unity when being attacked from the outside.

It will be fascinating to see where the protests go across the remainder of the NFL season. It won’t start a nationwide conversation about the value of black lives, and it probably won’t arrest the steady decline in NFL audiences.

What it will do is send a message to Trump and his supporters that the professional athletes of the NFL work together and support each other. They take a stance and fight as one. And no one, not even the president of the United States, can disrupt that bond. Teamwork is key in sport if the game is to be won.

Perhaps the president, rather than dismissing the athletes of the NFL as overpaid, self-interested irrelevances, might take a lesson from this. Together, in sport, as in life, people are stronger when the team supports and believes in each other.

Professor Mike Cronin is the Academic Director of Boston College in Ireland

September 25, 2017 BC fund-raiser: $11m?

What Boston College bills as Boston’s biggest fund-raiser may be about to get bigger.

More than 7,000 people will pack BC’s Conte Forum on Friday night for the 25th annual Pops on the Heights scholarship gala.

Suffolk Construction’s owner, John Fish, a board trustee, says he hopes this year’s event will raise more than $11 million for BC scholarships — topping the $9 million raised last year.

This year, the event will again feature the Boston Pops Orchestra, conducted by Keith Lockhart.

This time, they’ll be joined by singer and actress Jennifer Hudson. Actor Chris O’Donnell, a BC grad, will preside over a ceremony honoring composer John Williams.

The event grew during Fish’s tenure as board chairman, which ended earlier this year. Fish is still closely involved as a trustee. BC trustees David O’Connor and Phil Schiller, and their wives, Maureen O’Connor and Kim Gassett-Schiller, are running the event this year.

The high cost of college, Fish says, is one of the biggest challenges in higher education. At BC, tuition, fees, and room and board exceed $67,000 a year.

“Deep inside, people want the people who don’t have the financial means not to be sidelined,” Fish says. “People who want to attend Boston College should not be handicapped by their financial position.”

September 25, 2017

BC prof: Pope critics counterproductive Several dozen Catholic theologians are denouncing Pope Francis for spreading heresy, but a Boston College priest said their accusation is a minor attack that likely will backfire.

A group of 40 clerics and theologians sent the pope a letter in August, a “filial correction” that claims Francis’ writings put forth seven heretical positions regarding marriage and Communion. The letter, which was made public this weekend, has gained an additional 22 signatures and is the first filial correction directed at a pope since 1333.

Francis repeatedly has called for changes to the church — including raising the possibility of remarried Catholics receiving Communion in his 2016 publication “The Joy Of Love” — leading to backlash from more traditional-minded members. Four cardinals responded to “The Joy Of Love” by writing “dubia” or letters questioning Francis’ writing before last month’s filial correction.

The Rev. James Bretzke, a theology professor at Boston College, was dismissive of the criticism.

“At the end of the day, there isn’t much there,” he said. “What they’re doing, I think it will be counterproductive. As you try to increase division and polarization, what happens? More people will stand in solidarity with the pope because they say this is a bridge too far.”

Joseph Shaw, a spokesman for the initiative, a signatory of the correction and senior research fellow in moral philosophy at Oxford University, said “There is a role for theologians and philosophers to explain to people the church’s teaching, to correct misunderstandings.”

But Bretzke said while the theologians’ letter was a substantial step up in criticism of the pope, it will likely not have any significant effect. He noted that only one bishop has signed on to the letter — and that bishop, Bernard Fellay, was excommunicated from the church in the 1980s and leads the breakaway Society of St. Pius X. Bretzke said by going much further than previous questioning, the letter places conservative critics of Francis in a tough spot, and that they’re more likely to backpedal than join the letter writers.

“They went a little too far,” Bretzke said. “Even conservative bishops might find this problematic — I’d be astounded if they sign on to this.”

September 25, 2017 Seventh-Circuit Shakedown

By Cathleen Kaveny

When law professor Amy Coney Barrett was nominated to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit by Donald Trump, her friends and colleagues at the University of Notre Dame rallied to her cause.

One piece of support was particularly crucial. Jennifer Mason McAward, a Notre Dame law professor and the director of the University’s Center for Civil and Human Rights, penned an impassioned open letter urging Indiana Senator Joseph Donnelly to allow Barrett’s case to go forward. Barrett already had the necessary support from Senator Todd Young, a Republican. But the full Senate does not hold hearings on a candidate for the federal judiciary without the permission of both senators from the candidate’s state. Soon after McAward’s op-ed appeared, Donnelly sent in his “blue slip” authorizing the hearings to go forward.

Donnelly and McAward (a self-described political moderate who clerked for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor) did not allow political partisanship to trump the proper workings of government.

Ultimately, they both judged that Barrett deserved a hearing.

But here’s the thing: Barrett was not the first candidate from Indiana for the vacant spot on the Seventh Circuit. In January 2016, President Barack Obama nominated Myra Selby for a seat.

While very different from Barrett’s, Selby’s qualifications are at least as impressive. Whereas Barrett received her legal education at Notre Dame, Selby graduated from the University of Michigan Law School—regularly ranked in the top ten in the nation. Barrett served as a law clerk to Justice Scalia on the U.S. Supreme Court. But Selby herself was a justice on the Indiana

Supreme Court—in fact, she was the first woman and the first African American to hold that position. During her five years on the court, she wrote more than a hundred majority opinions.

Before and after her time on the bench, she belonged to (and chaired) the court’s Commission on Race and Gender Fairness.

While Barrett has spent most of her career in legal academia, Selby has been thoroughly immersed in the world of practice and policy. She was the first African-American partner of the highly respected Indianapolis law firm of Ice Miller, where she practiced both before and after her stints in government service. For two years, she served as the director of health policy for the state of Indiana. Significantly involved in her community and her church, she emphasizes service to children and to the economically disadvantaged. She serves on the volunteer panel for the Neighborhood Christian Legal Clinic. She is also a member of the board of trustees of Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis.

Despite her qualifications, Selby, unlike Barrett, never made it to Washington for a Senate hearing. While Senator Donnelly sent in his blue slip, Dan Coats, the Republican senator at the time, flatly refused to do so. “The citizens of Indiana will be best served by a nomination process that is taken completely out of politics,” Coats said in February 2016. “We still have time to establish an equitable process for the remainder of this Congress. Myra Selby’s nomination should be considered by an Indiana Federal Nominating Commission.”

With good reason, no such commission was ever constituted. It violates the U.S. Constitution by usurping the role of the president and the Senate in the judicial nomination process. Furthermore, Coats’s implication that Selby was not qualified for the federal bench was insulting. By purporting to be above politics, Coats engaged in political machinations of the most egregious sort.

Selby’s nomination languished for the remainder of the year. It expired on January 3, 2017—the conclusion of the 114th Congress. What happened to Merrick Garland, Obama’s appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court, happened to Selby—as well as many other judicial nominees whose appointments were deliberately stalled by Republicans in Obama’s last year of office.

Did Myra Selby not deserve to have her day in the Senate as much as Amy Coney Barrett? Yet not one of the many Notre Dame Law School faculty members who are members of the Federalist Society or active in Republican politics put the same type of pressure on Coats that McAward exerted on Donnelly.

In one sense, the disparate treatment is understandable. Barrett is one of their own-- a member of the Notre Dame family. Selby, for all her merits is not. Still, in reflecting on the situation, I cannot help but think of the Jewish proverb: If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? And if now now, when?

Cathleen Kaveny teaches law and theology at Boston College.

September 21, 2017 This University Has Produced the Most Powerful Women Think you have to go to a fancy college to succeed in business? Think again.

Of the 50 women on Fortune‘s 2017 list of Most Powerful Women, just eight went to Ivy League universities as undergrads. The other 41 attended a range of institutions, from large state schools to small private colleges. At least one woman on our list, Home Depot’s Northern Division president Crystal Hanlon (No. 41 on the list), doesn’t hold a college or university degree; she started working at the company as a cashier in 1985 and rose through the ranks.

That being said, the most popular college attended by the MPWs was—as it was in 2016— Harvard University. The four women on our list who received their undergraduate degrees there are: Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg (No. 5), CVS/pharmacy president and CVS Health EVP Helena Foulkes (No. 12), YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki (No. 14), and Mattel CEO Margo Georgiadis (No. 49).

University of Miami, Boston College, and Princeton University all tied for the honor of second-most-popular college for Fortune’s Most Powerful Women, with two alumnae each.

While getting an elite undergraduate degree is far from a requirement, more than half of the women on our list received graduate degrees: 21 have MBAs (or the international equivalent), four have JDs, and seven have other types of master’s degrees.

September 21, 2017 Jake LaMotta Was More Than Just a ‘Raging Bull’

By Carlo Rotella

When a champion dies, a wave of nostalgia for his era rolls over the culture. It’s like “rocket summer,” the wash of snow-melting heat that passes over a wintry Ohio town when spaceships lift off in Ray Bradbury’s “Martian Chronicles.” The more famous the champion, the more potent the wave.

The passing at the age of 95 of Jake LaMotta, who held the world middleweight title from 1949 to 1951, has set off a wave of nostalgia for ... 1980. That’s the year of Martin Scorsese’s “Raging Bull,” starring Robert De Niro as LaMotta, a celebrated performance that set a new standard for a male actor’s immersion in a character. The character has so eclipsed the man that by now it’s hard to see around De Niro’s LaMotta to the guy who died on September 19.

The glutton for punishment depicted in the movie and almost every obituary is a highly stylized take on Jake LaMotta the boxer, who was not only strong and resilient but also a skilled craftsman. Rather than a rage-blind punch eater, he was a cagey pressure fighter who expertly rolled with most of the blows that the movie depicts him as masochistically taking flush on the chin. A swarming attacker who wore down and outpointed opponents with volume of punches, he also gulled them with tactical retreats that tempted them into overextending themselves.

There’s no point in complaining that “Raging Bull” alters its subject in the name of spectacle and storytelling. That’s what movies do. But the movie character’s supplanting of the historical LaMotta — a process in which he cooperated — doesn’t just make it harder to give him his due as a boxer.

It also makes it harder for us to get at the historical dirt attached to the roots of that character: the world that shaped LaMotta, and the knowledge that flowed through it. He fought when boxing was still a central feature not just of the sporting scene but of industrial-era American culture, intertwined with the routines of manufacturing work and deeply embedded in the textures of neighborhood life via the gym, saloon and union hall.

The gradual decline of boxing to the status of niche sport has pushed that era almost beyond our ability to recover it. As a result, we have lost contact with much of the knowledge about bodies, force and work that went along with being good with your hands in the golden age of boxing.

Floyd Mayweather Jr., our own era’s biggest name in boxing, has counted on such a forgetting to save him from being laughed off the face of the earth when he claims that he’s the greatest fighter of all time because he’s undefeated. He’s a defensive virtuoso, blessed with mentors who passed along to him precious remnants of golden-age know-how, but his claim is empty puffery. Two magic words that refute it are “Jake LaMotta.”

LaMotta fought an epochal six-bout series with Sugar Ray Robinson, who is generally regarded by those even slightly informed about boxing as the greatest of all time. The classic matchup between the bigger, stronger LaMotta and the impossibly elegant Robinson produced closely contested bouts packed with skill, heart and suspense. Robinson won five of them, but LaMotta handed him his first career loss in the other.

Robinson’s record was 175-19, with 6 draws; Mayweather’s, amassed against well-chosen opponents in an era when stars fight much less often and for a lot more money, is 50-0. For the purposes of comparison, you can set aside Robinson’s other 194 fights and simply recognize that going 5-1 against LaMotta was a herculean labor far more impressive than all of Mayweather’s victories put together.

I mentioned this to Mayweather once — backstage at a WrestleMania show, where he was dabbling in play fighting while he waited for Manny Pacquiao to get ring-worn enough that it would make business sense to fight him. Mayweather’s counter was, as always, “But was Robinson undefeated?” Fight a prime LaMotta six times and let’s see if you’re still undefeated.

Not long after I talked to Mayweather, I called LaMotta, who gave him credit for being smart enough to make more money while absorbing less damage. LaMotta said: “I fought 13 years, 106 fights, and I made $750,000, total. Fighting all the time keeps you strong, makes you able to take a shot better, but I would have fought less if I made more money.” He said he would have fake-wrestled or done anything else anybody had asked him to, as long as the work involved getting paid and not getting punched.

Mayweather is the greatest money fighter of all time, without peer in exploiting the conditions of the boxing business in his moment to maximize the ratio of reward to risk. But he can’t enjoy that distinction and also come even remotely close to being the greatest fighter of all time. To reach that simple truth, find your way past the movie back to what the midcentury fight world knew, back to what Robinson knew in his sinews and bones, ingrained there by 200 professional fights, including six monumentally tough shifts on the shop floor of the ring with the flesh-and-blood Jake LaMotta.

Carlo Rotella is director of American studies at Boston College and a co-editor, with Michael Ezra, of “The Bittersweet Science: Fifteen Writers in the Gym, in the Corner, and at Ringside.”

UK | Wed 13 September 2017

Republicans want Hillary Clinton to vanish. We can't let that happen Heather Cox Richardson The fight over Hillary Clinton’s continued presence in public life is about more than her “likeability” or the fissures in the Democratic party. Clinton attracts such vitriol because she stands at the place where two conflicting political ideologies clash.

Republicans today control all branches of the federal government and are poised to put their ideology of radical individualism into reality. But at this very moment of their apparent triumph, Americans are rejecting the Republican vision and demanding instead an active government that promotes the general welfare. It is a major political realignment, and women are key to it.

The extremism of the Trump administration has galvanized women to push back against the political system that has disadvantaged them for a generation. Clinton is the symbol of this political nexus. Hated, dismissed, and denigrated for a quarter of a century, she nevertheless remains smart, able, popular … and, crucially, will not be silenced.

Clinton’s politics are a threat to the ideology of the modern Republican party, but so is her presence on the public stage. Clinton maintains that the government must expand its protections for children and families, and make it possible for men and women of all backgrounds to prosper.

She sees the nation as an interdependent community – a village, one might say – overseen by a government that advances the interests of all. In essence, Clinton is calling for the expansion of the New Deal state. It is an inclusive vision; it assumes that government policies should treat all Americans equally. Since the 1930s, a majority of Americans has agreed.

But the modern Republican party does not. It wants to destroy the New Deal state. Republican leaders loathe government regulation and the taxes required to fund the social welfare programs and infrastructure that people like Clinton support.

Since the 1950s, extremist Republicans have warned that such government activism amounts to socialism. In its stead, they promise to slash government and restore rugged American individualism.

But their vision of individualism is not Clinton’s inclusive one, and this is why her public presence makes her particularly irritating. Their vision privileges white heterosexual men as the only significant actors in American life.

White men are the cowboys, the heroes, the silent majority, the middle Americans, the forgotten men, the Trump voters, who work hard and want nothing from government.

In contrast to them, Republicans argue, are minorities, organized workers, and women, who demand government policies that can only be paid for with tax dollars sucked from white men. In this vision, the government must protect the true American individualist, the hardworking white heterosexual man who orders his affairs as he sees fit without interference from the government.

In the individualist ideology, a man is responsible for his wife and children. This relegates women to domestic roles as wives and mothers protected by their menfolk, or silences them as special interest harpies demanding government benefits that will destroy individualist men.

“Family values” advocates like Phyllis Schlafly insisted that women who wanted to work outside the home and who wanted federal social policy – women like Hillary Clinton – were undermining the individualist vision. In 1970, Time Magazine noted that “a surprisingly large number” of conservatives blamed the era’s crises on “the fact that so many mothers have gone to work.”

Ronald Reagan rose to power with his image of the Welfare Queen who gamed the welfare system to live in luxury, and by 1984, when Walter Mondale tapped New York congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro to be his vice-president, 60% of voters thought he did so not because she was well qualified (she was) but because he was under pressure from women’s groups who wanted government benefits.

As Schlafly put it when she vehemently opposed an exemption for poor families in the 1986 tax reform act, such an exemption was “anti-growth” and thus “anti-family” by definition.

By 1987, Rush Limbaugh was electrifying radio audiences with his diatribes against “femi-nazis” who wanted to harness the government to their own deranged interests. In 1996, when Clinton advanced the argument that it takes a village to raise a child, Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole retorted that it does not take a village, “it takes a family.”

The government’s job, according to modern Republicans, is not the protection of equal opportunity for all Americans, but rather the protection of male breadwinners. This ideology has stripped away the identities of American women as independent actors in favor of their idealized roles as wives and mothers. Since 1980, women’s economic security has been erased, their control over their own reproductive health weakened and their public voices silenced as government policy has increasingly shored up the power of white men.

Now, President Trump has laid bare exactly what it means to have the ultimate individualist in charge of government. He is openly destroying the government’s protections for most Americans and using it for his own benefit. And he boasts of dominating women.

But women are fighting back. Hillary Clinton’s refusal to go quietly away is a potent reminder that her vision of American government, a vision that defends opportunity for all and accords woman an independent role in American society, is mounting a powerful challenge to the Republican vision.

American women are rejecting both Trump and the Republican system he epitomizes. January’s Women’s March was the biggest protest in American history. Women so swamped town halls that Republicans refused to continue holding them: “Women are in my grill no matter where I go,” Virginia congressman Dave Brat complained in January. Women are calling their representatives. They are organizing, and they are running for office.

And in their refusal to be silenced, Clinton herself has become a symbol. Women note that Clinton was the most qualified presidential candidate in American history, that she endured Trump’s debate stalking and taunts that she is a “nasty woman,” and that she is now being told to sit down and shut up while former losing presidential candidates were welcome to pontificate.

Both politically and personally, Hillary Clinton represents a clash over political ideologies, and women are leading the charge against the Republican regime. America is in the midst of a major political realignment, and women are reclaiming their time.

Heather Cox Richardson is professor of history at Boston College

A Surprising Finding About Student Loans, Retirement Savings Sept. 10, 2017 | By Demetria Gallegos Do student loans hurt retirement savings?

Conventional wisdom says yes. After all, having to divert money toward student-loan payments can make it difficult to start building a nest egg. And the earlier people start saving for retirement, the more they can benefit from the power of compounding.

But having steep educational debt may not affect young people to the extent you might think, according to researchers at the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.

With data from 1,400 subjects, they studied the relationship between debt and retirement-savings behavior and found that while there is a connection, it isn’t proportional. That is, those with steep debt have about as much saved for retirement by age 30 as those with very little student debt.

While those with zero student debt were further along than everyone else, the more substantive differences in retirement saving were found between those who had completed college and those who failed to obtain a degree.

Lead author Matthew S. Rutledge, a research economist, explained his findings and their implications for young people juggling debt service and retirement savings. Here are edited excerpts from the interview.

WSJ: Why did you want to study this?

MR. RUTLEDGE: We’ve heard a lot of talk about how young people are really going to be behind the eight ball when it comes to starting their retirement savings. We know the generation ahead of them isn’t saving as much as they could be even though they don’t have student debt nearly to the same degree. So we were concerned that young people would be even further behind.

We looked at people who are at the very front edge of the student-debt boom. Our [study participants] were born between 1980 and 1984, graduating in the early 2000s, and since then we’ve seen a quintupling of student debt.

The numbers can’t add up. If they’re spending more on their student-loan payments every month, that money has to come from somewhere. Is it from running up credit cards or not buying a house? Or is it from lower retirement savings?

WSJ: What did you find, and how do you explain it?

MR. RUTLEDGE: The results indicate that college graduates with debt have about half as much retirement wealth by age 30 as those who graduate without debt. Degree-holders with no debt have more than twice as much saved as nondegree-holders with no debt.

A Surprising Finding About Student Loans, Retirement Savings But what’s interesting is that the people with large loans (75th percentile) and the people with small loans (25th percentile) have about the same retirement wealth accumulation.

It doesn’t seem to fit any sort of a rational model where people look at how much money they have and decide what they can afford to save for retirement and what [they need] to pay back loans. It seems that student loans just play an outsize role in people’s head. The presence of a loan looms large over their financial decisions. [Those with minimal debt] act as if they’re just as constrained [as those with major debt.] But if you were to look at the dollar level, they probably aren’t. It just seems that people are focusing on the fact that they have a student loan, and only after that is finally paid off do they get around to saving for retirement in any substantial way.

WSJ: How might people change their savings behavior based on your study?

MR. RUTLEDGE: It may be more advantageous to think about what you can actually afford. If your loan payment is small and your interest payment isn’t too high, pay the minimum monthly payment and contribute more to your retirement savings. Unless your [student loan] rates are high, you’ll likely get a higher rate from saving in an equity index fund. In both cases, you’re increasing your net worth.

The longer it takes to get started contributing at rates that allow you to save enough for retirement, the harder it’s going to be for you, says Matthew Rutledge.

The longer it takes to get started contributing at rates that allow you to save enough for retirement, the harder it’s going to be for you, says Matthew Rutledge. Photo: iStockphoto/Getty Images The longer it takes for you to actually get started contributing at rates that would allow you to save enough for retirement, the harder it’s going to be for you. It isn’t just the power of compounding, it’s habit forming.

WSJ: What other takeaways emerged?

MR. RUTLEDGE: Finish the degree. People without degrees aren’t doing as good a job as people with degrees at saving for retirement.

It’s worth taking out student debt if it’s going to result in a more lucrative and fulfilling career.

The important thing is to start saving, period. If student loans are distracting you from that, it’s worthwhile to consider if you can afford to contribute more.

WBUR

There Is No Good Reason To End DACA. Period.

Kari Hong | September 7, 2017 On Tuesday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that the Trump administration was ending the Obama-era program that gives temporary status to undocumented immigrants who arrived in the United States as children.

Under the program, which is known as Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals (DACA), those who were under 32 years old, arrived before age 16, graduated from high school or served in the military, and committed no crimes, would be given a work permit and permission to live in the country for a two-year period. (The law says only felonies or serious misdemeanors will disqualify someone from DACA, but in practice, I had a client denied because he had one misdemeanor that had been expunged.)

There is no defense to end DACA based on the benefits it provided. In the five years since the program was enacted, 800,000 young adults seized the opportunity it provided them: 95 percent are currently employed or in school, 70 percent had gone to college, 12 percent bought a home, and 6 percent started a business.

And these DACA recipients paid $2 billion in federal and state taxes since 2012 alone.

House and Senate Democrats gather on Capitol Hill, on Wednesday, Sept. 6, 2017, to call for Congressional Republicans to stand up to President Trump's decision to terminate the DACA initiative by bringing the DREAM Act for a vote on the House and Senate Floor. (Jose Luis Magana/AP) House and Senate Democrats gather on Capitol Hill, on Wednesday, Sept. 6, 2017, to call for Congressional Republicans to stand up to President Trump's decision to terminate the DACA initiative by bringing the DREAM Act for a vote on the House and Senate Floor. (Jose Luis Magana/AP) With the end of DACA, these young people have no means to stay here. They will either wait to be arrested and deported by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or they will leave on their own accord — which is what the Republican position on immigration policy has been for the past 20 years. In the 2012 debates, for instance, Mitt Romney explained that although he does not support legalization, he will not give legal status to those without it. Instead of rounding people up, he said he was in favor of what he called "self-deportation."

President Trump has shown us what exactly it means to pursue deportation over legalization. ICE officers are now in state courts arresting victims of human-trafficking, in hospitals picking up cancer patients, and in immigration offices arresting those who are actually in the proverbial line applying for status.

Under the new priority-free deportation policies, ICE is now targeting for deportation combat veterans who served in Afghanistan and Iraq and a 9/11 volunteer who sifted through the World Trade Center rubble and is now permanently disabled from inhaling the debris. (These heroes most often committed nonviolent drug crimes. It is quite puzzling that we continue to deport long-term residents for drug crimes given that, opioid addiction is often met with treatment and marijuana is trending towards legalization.)

We will now add the Dreamers to that list of those we will force out of our country because we can.

My father’s favorite saying is that no matter how flat the pancake, there are two sides. But Trump’s enforcement-only immigration policy is getting to be a pretty flat pancake that might defy that rule.The only reason for ending DACA comes from those who support closed borders — voices once in the margins who are now heard in the mainstream. And their position is grounded in opposition to any type of immigration — legal or otherwise.

The platitudes of "America first" have superficial appeal until we realize our retirement depends on immigration policy. Immigrants — both skilled and unskilled — are needed for our economy to thrive.

The American Action Forum estimates that immigrants contribute $1 trillion to our gross domestic product.

Immigrants are twice as likely as citizens to start businesses, our rural hospitals are operating because of the visa program that recruits foreign-born doctors to serve there, and our fruits and vegetables are overwhelmingly planted and harvested by undocumented workers.

More crudely, we do not have enough young workers to pay for our retirement. In 1950, there were 150 workers for every 20 seniors; in 2000, there were 100 workers for every 20 seniors; without immigration, in 2050, there will be only 56 workers for every 20 retirees.

If the closed-border activists have their way, the number of young workers will drop even further. In 2013, undocumented immigrants paid $11.8 billion in federal and state taxes, which helped pay for all of our retirement benefits. (You'll recall that our president has bragged about not paying federal income tax for years.)

Returning to DACA, there is no rational defense to end this opportunity for a population that made the most of it and were making the rest of us better off in the process. Attorney General Sessions says we are a nation of laws. But we are also a nation of compassion, and of legislators who write the damn laws, which the DACA recipients were following until DACA was taken away from them.

For that reason, I hope there are enough moderate Republicans in Congress who will support the bipartisan 2017 Dream Act and make DACA law. In this case, we can legislate ourselves out of what would be a heartbreaking mess if we do nothing.

Kari Hong is an assistant professor at Boston College Law School

September 7, 2017 Sounds Tribe-ish, but okay

By Matt Sienkiewicz

There was a moment, back in the dial-up days, when the Internet was thought to be a force for healthy, open-minded community building. Things, you may have noticed, have changed.

However, the Web still represents a crucial tool for working out communal concerns in times of crisis and insecurity.

Diaspora Jews, particularly in America, face just such a moment today From Donald Trump to Benjamin Netanyahu to the Chicago Dyke March, voices from across the ideological spectrum have shown little remorse in making American Jews feel less welcome than they once thought they were. And while these are real problems requiring complex, real-life solutions, the Web offers a number of places in which to productively contextualize, vent and even joke about the situation.

My favorite is the wildly popular Facebook group “sounds goyish, but ok.”

The group started in September 2016 as an autofill joke – don’t worry, I’ll explain. When you type on Facebook, the site will sometimes guess your next move, offering you pre-set phrases to select and thereby saving a few keystrokes. By registering the group, the creators added an option to the site’s pre-set menu. If a user came across a post she or he found very “un-Jewish” in some sense, she or he could simply start typing “sounds g...,” and the complete sardonic phrase would pop up like magic. In the snark-driven world of Internet culture, this qualifies as an amusing, innocuous little gag.

Jokes, however, are by their nature very effective, very serious markers of community. Part of what makes something funny is the knowledge that you and people like you will get it, while those on the outside of the group will remain confused or unmoved. The “sounds goyish” autofill worked in just such a fashion.

If you laughed, you felt a part of something.

So, people, lots of people, started joining this group that wasn’t supposed to be a group. After a month, there were 50. After two, a thousand or so. Most of the content was of the off-beat, light-

hearted variety, with “goyishness” being defined in the sort of terms that Lenny Bruce made famous in his “Jewish and Goyish” routine. While sometimes overt discussion of religion popped up – group members are particularly amused by the unusual places Christians tend to see the visage of Jesus – the discussion tended toward things like the misuse of bagels or the affinity of non-Jews for getting Hebrew tattoos they must not fully understand.

The group was meant to be silly and self-effacing, explicitly avoiding the sorts of serious arguments about religious practice and Zionism that dominate many of its peer groups on Facebook. At one point, an Azerbaijani Christian asked group administrator Joe McReynolds if the “sounds goyish” crew could use its “Jew-magic” to improve her love life. There’s a delightful image of the young woman, following Joe’s counsel, balancing what seems to be an etrog on her head in order to channel the mystical powers of Sukkot. Though it could be serious at times, the group exuded Jewish- flavored fun and, one can only assume, was responsible for a beautiful new Azerbaijani family.

And then came Trump, Steve Bannon, Charlottesville and all the rest.

Suddenly, countless American Jews woke from their assimilated slumbers, grappling for the first time ever with Jewish identity as it related to race, politics and communal security.

No doubt, this moment prompted countless serious discussions online and off, with synagogues and community centers rushing to foster spaces in which to think through these tough issues. It also prompted thousands of people to sign up for “sounds goyish, but ok.”

Though not intended primarily as a space for people to work through their deepest fears, the pliable, open-ended nature of the group’s approach to Jewish identity cultivated an ideal spot for many to do just that. Having successfully kept the space free of divisive arguments about ritual practice or the Middle East, it developed into a supportive spot for people to react to Tiki-torch Nazis and ask for advice about dealing with those who refused to take Jewish vulnerability seriously. Certainly, many people still come for the jokes. But the group, now over 10,000members strong, has once again proven that Jewish culture has a productive, liberating way of merging comedy and tragedy.

It is important to be cautious when describing the threats that face American Jews today. We are not subject to disproportionate police brutality, systematic employment discrimination, or mass deportation. It is, however, a complex time. Our president gives comfort to those who hate us.

The prime minister of Israel will happily ignore or insult the Diaspora for a few votes back home. “sounds goyish, but ok,” with its potentially offensive name and penchant for silliness, is not a solution to this, or any other, crisis. It is, however, a reminder that creative uses of new technologies can yield surprising, productive opportunities to bring together disparate parts of a broad, diverse community. Or, alternatively, it might just prove the strength of Joe’s Jew-magic.

Matt Sienkiewicz is associate professor of communication and international studies at Boston College. Follow him on Twitter @mediastudied.

September 1, 2017 Why Women Need to Stop Believing in Ivanka Trump

By Lauren Stiller Rikleen It is not surprising that President Donald Trump has sought to eviscerate the Obama administration’s record of supporting gender equity in the workplace. It is astonishing, however, that Ivanka Trump has failed to have any influence on her father’s damaging policies, notwithstanding her stated commitment to be a force for women’s equality.

When Ivanka introduced her father at the Republican Convention, she vowed that they would both fight for equal pay for equal work, and stated that policies allowing women and children to thrive should be the norm, not novelties. When her father became president, she assumed an official role with a West Wing office, and a sweeping portfolio with a focus on gender inequality. Yet in failing to moderate her father’s harsh actions against women, Ivanka’s words demonstrate either dishonesty about her commitment or a complete lack of influence in her role.

Either way, the result is an unfettered Trump administration agenda that hurts working women and, by extension, their families as well.

In his first few months in office, President Trump revoked Obama’s Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces Executive Order that required companies with federal contracts to comply with identified labor and civil rights laws, stop the use of forced arbitration for victims of workplace sexual harassment or assault, and infuse transparency into salary reporting. In an uncharacteristically private ceremony, President Trump signed into law a bill that will restrict access to family planning and contraceptive support for low-income women, despite

considerable evidence that access to family planning and contraception provides social and family benefits and reduces women’s poverty levels.

President Trump’s most recent action takes direct aim at the Obama administration efforts to eliminate the gender wage gap. The president halted implementation of a rule that would have enabled the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to collect salary data by race and gender to better understand patterns of pay discrimination.

Ivanka Trump has remained publicly silent with each rollback until now, when she issued a statement supporting her father’s latest effort to cement inequality in the workplace. It was a crushing blow to those who hoped that the First Daughter would have some ameliorating influence on President Trump’s obsessive efforts to eliminate any evidence of the Obama administration, particularly its policies supporting working families and gender pay equity.

It is hard to retain hope that Ivanka will ever influence the president’s demonstrated indifference to women’s equality. Maya Angelou famously urged that when someone shows you who they are, believe them. In her recently released book, Ivanka advised working women to build a culture of success, without any seeming understanding of what those words might mean to someone born in poverty. Her recommendation that women be the architect of their own life resonates best for women who can effortlessly afford the related design and development costs, but demonstrates little understanding of a life separate from the gracious existence she has known.

Ivanka and Donald Trump have consistently demonstrated who they are. Both have shown a comfort with saying what is expedient in the moment, while making choices that promote their own idealized images of their brand.

Ivanka’s well-developed brand as a poised woman of wealth and successful young professional is her top priority. Based on months of anti-women actions by the president, and the First Daughter’s silent acquiescence, Ivanka has made clear her priorities. Ivanka has shown us who she is, and we have sadly learned we cannot believe in her—we can only believe her.

Lauren Stiller Rikleen is president of the Rikleen Institute for Strategic Leadership, a visiting scholar at the Boston College Center for Work & Family, and author of the book, You Raised Us, Now Work With Us: Millennials, Career Success, and Building Strong Workplace Teams.

August 28, 2017

Opinion: Should we plan on living to 100?

By Alicia H. Munnell A recent press request centered on the premise that people now have a good chance to live to 100 and what that might mean for achieving a secure retirement. I had been thinking about mortality rates and life expectancy recently, and I was skeptical whether the likelihood of living to 100 was a serious issue.

Fortunately, I am surrounded by wonderful colleagues and turned to Wenliang Hou, our actuary, for an answer.

Wenliang turned to the mortality tables provided by the Social Security actuaries. For the record, the Social Security actuaries are somewhat more conservative than others in projecting mortality rates and life expectancy, so they might predict fewer people will live to 100 than some other sources. But their tables are widely used.

He based his numbers on cohort, as opposed to period, life expectancy. As an example, consider an individual who is age 65 in 2017. Under the period approach, life expectancy for this individual at later ages – 66, 67, 68, etc. – is determined simply by the years applicable to individuals currently at those ages in 2017. In contrast, a cohort approach takes into account that life expectancy for individuals will likely increase in the future. Thus, for a 65-year-old in 2017, life expectancy at 66 would be that for a 66year-old in 2018; at 67, that for a 67-year-old in 2019, etc. Since life expectancy is projected to increase, the cohort approach produces higher life expectancy.

Using the Social Security data, Wenliang calculated the probability of living to 100, given that the person has survived to age 65. The results are shown in Table 1. For those who are 65 today, a man has a 3% chance of living to 100, a woman a 5.9% chance, and at least one member of a couple an 8.7% chance. These percentages rise over time, so the comparable numbers for someone age 25 today are 6.1%, 10.2%, and 15.7%. My conclusion is that living to 100 should not be a widespread worry at this time.

The question remains: what age should people be thinking about? To answer that question, some life expectancy information is helpful. Table 2 shows that the life expectancy for today’s 65year-old man is 84.0, today’s woman 86.3, and for the last surviving spouse of a couple 90.4.

Again, these numbers go up over time, so the comparable ages for today’s 25-year-olds are 86.4, 88.4, and 92.7.

Three considerations are relevant when thinking about what to make of these life expectancy numbers. First, they are averages. That means a large share of the population will live longer than the stated age. Second, life expectancy is strongly related to education and income, which means that those with higher incomes will almost certainly be on the high side of these ages.

Third, couples should recognize that at least one of them has a good chance of surviving into the 90s.

My bottom line is that it’s too soon to be worrying about living to 100. But pointing out that many people, particularly couples and those with higher incomes, will almost certainly live into their 90s is a useful exercise.

Alicia H. Munnell is director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College

August 28, 2017 Five reasons Pope Francis embraces the Vatican II liturgy John F. Baldovin In the meantime, various attempts at moving the reform forward, like proposed translations of the Psalter and the Roman Missal in the mid-90s by the International Committee on English in the Liturgy, were stalled or outright rejected by the Vatican. In addition, the Vatican also published a new document on translation (“Liturgiam Authenticam,”2001) that reversed the 1969 instruction on translation in a very traditional direction.

This restorationist movement in liturgy is being reversed by Pope Francis. A year ago the Vatican issued a rebuttal of opinions in favor of the “Reform of the Reform” put forward by Cardinal Sarah. Just this past year Francis established a commission to review “Liturgiam Authenticam.”(The outcome of their work has not yet been published.) The pope also replaced a good number of more traditional consultors to the Congregation for Divine Worship with individuals much more sympathetic to the Vatican II-inspired reforms.

And now, in a remarkably frank address to participants in National Italian Liturgical Week, Pope Francis has definitively and unequivocally put his weight behind a liturgical movement by declaring: “We can affirm with certainty and with magisterial authority that the liturgical reform is irreversible.” His use of the very strong phrase “magisterial authority” cannot be construed as casual. The paragraph with which his strong affirmation ends begins with the following:

And there is still work to do today in this direction [the reform begun by Pope Paul VI], in particular, rediscovering the reasons for the decisions taken with the liturgical reform, surmounting unfounded and superficial readings, partial reception and practices that disfigure it.

It’s not about rethinking the reform by looking again at the choices, but of knowing better the

underlying reasons, also through historical documentation, as well as to internalize the inspirational principles and observing the discipline that regulate it” [emphasis mine].

Certainly Pope Francis is no fan of irresponsible experimentation or sloppy adaptation of the liturgy (as he witnesses strongly in his sober and simple celebrational style and choice of vestments), and there is nothing that is really new in this talk.

But its importance can be found in the various aspects of the liturgical reform that Francis emphasizes. Let me name five.

First, he clearly affirms the importance of active participation in the liturgy, a participation that rejects participants assisting as “strangers and silent spectators” (“Sacrosanctum Concilium,” No. 48) Second, he espouses the council’s own careful balance between respect of healthy tradition and legitimate progress (No. 23).

Third, he reiterates the necessity of long-term and patient liturgical education for both pastors and people.

Fourth, and this is a particularly significant theological emphasis, he speaks of the liturgy as the living presence of Christ, a presence that is manifested in multiple ways: the Eucharistic elements, the priest himself, the word proclaimed and the assembly gathered (No. 7). Francis’ emphasis on the multiple modes of the presence of Christ in the liturgy is particularly important because it leads him to say that the altar is “the center toward which our attention converges…the gaze of the praying people, priest and faithful, is oriented to the altar, convoked for the assembly around it [my emphasis].” I doubt very much that the pope was speaking loosely when he said “around” the altar. In other words I think it was a comment, albeit oblique, on those who want the priest to face “east.”

Finally, and certainly consistent with the fourth emphasis is Francis’ insistence that the liturgy is an action (“for the people, but also of the people” [emphasis in original]). He refers to his own homilies to drive home the insight that liturgy is not so much about doctrine in some abstract sense but about putting Christian life into action. The Eucharist in particular is not so much an act of private piety as it is the formation of the people of God. It has been said that Francis is the first real Vatican II pope, having been ordained after the council concluded. He is showing that today by his strong affirmation of the way forward according to the liturgical reform that comprised such a significant element in that council’s outcome.

John F. Baldovin, S.J., teaches liturgy and sacraments at the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry. He is the author of Reforming the Liturgy: A Response to the Critics (Liturgical Press, 2008).

August 15, 2017

Using experimental and computational methods, researchers reveal workings of bacterial defense system Central to understanding why bacteria become antibiotic resistant is knowing how bacteria respond to the drugs trying to kill them. In a new study, Boston College researchers report that antibiotics disrupt the genetic defensive responses in lethal bacteria.

When facing a common - or historic threat such as deprivation of nutrients, the deadly bacterium Streptococcus pneumoniae exerts a highly organized response - one influenced by the bacteria's genetic evolution and powered by genes that respond cooperatively to stress, the researchers found. But when confronted with antibiotics - a relatively new form of stress - the bacterium mounts a confused defense, according to the study "Antibiotics Disrupt Coordination Between Transcriptional and Phenotypic Stress Responses in Pathogenic Bacteria," published today in the journal Cell Reports.

"We show that nutrient stress results in a highly organized response from the bacterium," said Associate Professor of Biology Tim van Opijnen, the study's principal investigator. "It basically seems to recognize the stress and knows how to deal with it.

"But the response to antibiotics was highly disorganized, showing that the organism has difficulties with this stress, trying out all kinds of unrelated things to come to a solution and overcome the stress," he said. "This shows that the bacterium is far less familiar with antibiotics, not 'knowing' how to respond appropriately."

Van Opijnen, whose data-driven research has helped to establish an understanding of how bacteria rely on underlying genetic networks to function, said the findings may advance the development of new drugs and also help predict how bacteria evolve, adapt and become resistant to antibiotics.

Van Opijnen and co-authors Karen Zhu, a BC doctoral student, and former post-doctoral researcher Paul Jensen, now at the University of Illinois, combined large quantities of experimental data with a new, large-scale

computational model they developed to produce new insights and challenge some long-held assumptions about the interplay between bacteria and the drugs designed to treat them.

S. pneumoniae kills approximately 1.5 million people annually. In prior research, van Opijnen and colleagues have revealed that different strains of the bacterium respond uniquely to antibiotics. This time, the research team looked at how strains respond to different stressors. The team employed two analytical approaches - one in use for many years and one developed in the van Opijnen lab.

The team used a process known as RNA sequencing, or RNA-Seq, to assess bacterial genes that are provoked to change, a process known as transcription. This activity has long been viewed as central to understanding how bacteria combat antibiotics and other stressors.

The team paired that analysis with its own technique: transposon insertion sequencing, or Tn-Seq. Developed by van Opijnen, Tn-Seq combs through millions of genetic sequences and singles-out gene functions in bacteria. The advantage of Tn-Seq is that it is able to begin to pinpoint which genes play the most important defensive roles.

During the course of more than two years, the team's RNA-Seq experiments analyzed 800 million genetic sequences and produced 150,000 data points. Tn-Seq analyzed 1.2 billion sequences and produced 300 million data points, Zhu said.

"RNA-Seq looks at the activity of every gene in the genome of the organism," said van Opijnen.

"The activity of every gene has always been associated with importance. The assumption for nearly three decades has been if you take an organism and stress it out, and a gene's activity changes, it must be important."

That assumption has been difficult to test, said van Opijnen. But with Tn-Seq, van Opijnen has the ability to assess the importance of a gene in a specific condition. "We found that you cannot assume that change in the activity of a gene means the gene is important," said van Opijnen. It was a surprising finding, he said. After all, why would a change in gene activity take place if it was not important to the organism's survival?

Part of the answer may be in the collaborative nature of the way genes work across the entire genome of a bacterial strain, van Opijnen said. "They collaborate and corroborate to perform functions, to resolve into a specific phenotype," he said. "So there is a relationship as genes all work with each other in pathways, or networks; they cooperate with each other."

The researchers constructed a metabolic model of the coordinated response to deprivation, which placed the responding genes in close proximity to each other. When challenged with antibiotics, the model shows that the response of the physical network breaks down in disorganization and those genes are no longer in close proximity.

"Bacteria use these types of regulation to fight against stress," Zhu said. "In terms of nutritional depletion, because they have responded to this type of stress over the course of their evolution, the bacteria 'know' how to coordinate this activity. But with a relatively new invasive stressor, like an antibiotic, bacteria may not be able to figure out a way to produce a coordinated response."

In a search for reasons why certain types of bacteria become resistant to antibiotics, the researchers have established a new approach to understanding why antibiotics succeed in combating bacterial infections.

"By combining computational and large-scale experimental work, we've built a model to get the first, basic understanding of how known and unknown stress is processed by bacteria," said van Opijnen. "That's critical because it makes it a stepping stone to a new intervention at some point in the future. If we can understand how stress is processed, we can come up with a better way to develop a new stressor to break an organism, or eradicate it."

August 9, 2017

China in precarious position as tensions flare up, sparking instability

Bob McGovern

As heated rhetoric between the United States and North Korea hits a nuclear pitch, the Chinese can do little but play reluctant mediator and send signals to its isolated neighbor that it is on its own if war with America is on the table, according to experts.

“The best China can do is minimize North Korea’s incentive to use force of any kind,” said Robert Ross, a political science professor at Boston College who focuses on Chinese security and defense policy. “They can politically isolate them and signal that they would not support North Korea in a war they initiate.”

much, fearing instability on its border.

China is North Korea’s biggest trading partner and delivers the outcast nation its economic lifeblood. The relationship is complicated, and experts say China does not want to push — or harm — its neighbor too

“If there is social or military instability, they could be looking at a war on their border,” Ross said.

“They don’t want a war on their border. They don’t want the potential of American troops that close to their border. That is a far more difficult situation than the status quo.”

In its position as a regional power and unenthusiastic friend to North Korea, Chinese leadership may try to deescalate the war of words between Kim Jong Un and the Trump administration, University of California, Berkeley political science professor Steven Weber said.

“The Chinese would love to get them at a negotiating table, even if it’s indirectly,” Weber said. “They would conduct a type of shuttle diplomacy. It wouldn’t solve the problem, but it could turn down the heat a little bit.” Weber also said he wouldn’t be surprised if these conversations, with China as the go-between, are already happening behind the scenes.

But experts say China is in no hurry to try to destabilize Kim’s government or outwardly flex its political muscles in North Korea’s direction. It is also uncertain how rigorously China will enfore new sanctions handed down by the U.N. over the weekend.

And, if future sanctions could potentially lead to a regime collapse, Ross said China would likely back away “If they were sufficiently effective to create a regime change, it would create the possibility of instability on the border. That would be too costly to China,” he said. “They aren’t going to do that.

Choking them off to the point that it would be effective is just too costly.”

That leaves the status quo — a global game of “chicken” where tensions between the U.S. and North Korea flare up close to a boiling point through statements or forbidden nuclear tests. And China, Weber said, is acting as if either North Korea or the U.S. will invariably turn the wheel.

“It’s basically that both sides are trying to prove to the other that they are willing to tolerate a higher level of risk. They send signals that the other had better back down because they aren’t willing to do so,” Weber said. “The risk, of course, is that signals get misinterpreted.”

August 8, 2017 - Singapore

Get into a novel via virtual reality Professor Joseph Nugent of Boston College (left) and Ryan Reede, a computer science major at the university, demonstrating Joycestick, a 3D virtual reality game that takes one inside Irish writer James Joyce's novel Ulysses. Photo: The Straits Times/ Asia News Network

The revolutionary field of digital humanities - all the rage in the US and Britain - is gaining ground among local universities.

You are frying kidneys in the kitchen as a black cat the "pussens", you call it - winds its way around the table. You follow it into the hallway, where there is a letter on the floor. As you pick it up and read it, smoke begins to fill the hallway. The kidneys are burning.

Welcome to the world of Joycestick, a 3D virtual reality game that takes you inside Irish writer James Joyce's Modernist novel Ulysses.

The game, created by students from American private university Boston College, allows players to explore scenes from the novel via a virtual reality headset and joysticks.

Joycestick made a stopover in Singapore two weeks ago as part of the International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures conference at Nanyang Technological University (NTU).

The conference's emphasis on the digital humanities signals a growing recognition among local universities of this revolutionary field, which has been all the rage for some years now in universities in the United States and United Kingdom.

The idea of using cutting-edge technology to better study the arts and humanities may seem incongruous at first, even blasphemous. Can you really code Coetzee or distil Dickens into data?

Traditionalists who prefer poring over the page tend to be horrified that digital scholars want to feed centuries of classic texts into machines.

But for scholars such as University College Dublin literature professor Margaret Kelleher, the digital humanities represent the new horizon of academia.

The 53-year-old, who runs a digital platform for contemporary Irish writing and was in town two weeks ago to give the keynote address at the NTU conference, says: "The humanities have always been about innovation."

The first wave of the digital humanities is usually digitisation, she explains. This step is especially valuable to those who study ancient material. "In the past, we would have to put on white gloves and spend hours in the archives with the only surviving copy of a manuscript. Now, more and more resources are digitised and put online."

The next - and more controversial - stage is using technology to analyse and interpret the material.

University College Dublin's Jane Austen Social Network project, for instance, uses network imaging to visualise relationships within the Regency-era author's works.

In the case of Joycestick, its creators hope that giving users a flavour of Ulysses through game play will help draw them into Joyce's famously difficult tome.

Project leader and literature professor Joseph Nugent, 62, says: "The kind of people who play video games aren't usually the kind who read Joyce, but we hope to change that."

The game, which took 25 students more than half a year to create, allows users to wander through settings from the novel, such as protagonist Leopold Bloom's home at 7 Eccles Street.

It features 100 3D objects - from a bowler hat to a death mask of Joyce, who died in 1941 - that players can pick up, examine from all angles and even throw across the room, while listening to audio about the object's significance.

NTU literature student Saiful Azri, 24, who tried Joycestick during the conference, found it "disorienting at first, but really quite immersive".

"Virtual reality is what our generation was brought up with and this definitely helps to contextualise the book for my understanding," he adds.

"In a way," observes Prof Kelleher, "reading a novel was the original virtual reality experience."

While digital projects have popped up here and there in Singapore over the years, it is only in the last few years that they have begun to consolidate forces under the flag of the digital humanities.

Two years ago, National University of Singapore Libraries set up a digital humanities team, which is behind projects such as a spatio- temporal map of Chinese clan associations and an online gallery of mixed-media artworks about places of worship.

Although technological obsolescence and the need to keep updating location data present constant challenges, NUS Libraries continues to maintain them as well as create new projects.

University librarian Lee Cheng Ean says: "With technological disruptions and scholarly content increasingly being born digital or being digitised for preservation and to increase accessibility, the opportunities for digital scholarship and digital humanities are endless."

It is a "fascinating moment" for digital humanities in Singapore, says NUS assistant professor Miguel Escobar, who runs the Contemporary Wayang Archive, an online repository of Javanese wayang kulit performance footage.

The theatre researcher, who is Mexican, is working on a computational model that could measure differences between character styles to learn how dances change across time and regions. He is the convener of Digital Humanities Singapore, an unofficial association with 30 to 40 core members. They aim to bring together researchers across different disciplines and, earlier this year, held an international conference about metadata.

He is careful to note that digital methods are meant to supplement, not replace, traditional ones. "In other places, there are researchers who claim that you can do something completely different and there's no need for conventional tools. I think that's a mistake."

The digital humanities scene in Singapore may be at a nascent stage, but NTU assistant professor Graham John Matthews expects it to grow exponentially.

The Briton, who came to Singapore a year ago, is among the first to explore digital humanities at NTU and is building up a data set of epigraphs from English-language novels the world over. He is halfway to his target of 20,000 epigraphs, which give an idea of whom the author of the book liked to quote. "We were trying to find a way of measuring literary influence that was more empirical," he says. The idea is to build a map of the world on which lines of influence can be traced geographically across time.

"We're just looking at a very small part of individual texts and using economies of scale to build up a larger picture.

There has been a lot of support from colleagues here for the digital humanities. Soon, it's going to be one of those things that everyone does."

August 8, 2017 Are the findings of the leaked climate change report surprising?

President Donald Trump has rejected evidence concerning climate change and human activity’s influence on it, but a report was leaked to the New York Times on Tuesday that concluded overwhelmingly that Americans are already experiencing climate change and that yes, “many lines of evidence demonstrate that human activities... are primarily responsible.”

Andrew Jorgenson is a professor at Boston College and an environmental sociologist, focusing on studying the human dimensions of environmental changes. He spoke with Metro about his thoughts on the leaked report.

The two main takeaways from this report seem to be that it “directly contradicts” Trump administration claims that “the human contribution to climate change is uncertain,” and that Americans are feeling the effects of climate change now. Were these conclusions surprising to you?

Oh no, absolutely not. It’s been well established within the broader scientific community for some time, with a great deal of consensus and scientific certainty, that the climate change the world is experiencing now is largely human caused. Primarily, that the burning of fossil fuels — which leads to greenhouse gas emissions — result from human activity.

Have your colleagues discussed this leaked report today?

For sure, it’s just the most recent in an ongoing, never-ending wave of reports like this that come out. It might be a [U.S. Global Change Research Program] report, or U.S. National Academy of Sciences, which was a part of this report. The evidence is so abundant, it’s ridiculous that we're still having to have this incredibly important conversation. We should have a long time ago moved beyond this to focus on saying, “Well, the science is quite clear, what are we going to do about it?”

In an administration that has negated these findings, is it now the responsibility of scientists to speak out about climate change?

This is tricky because most scientists are trained to be objective researchers, to let the research speak for itself. The idea being we are not policy makers, but those trained in policy would use our objective, peer-reviewed research to make decisions.

Now, with where things are going in the U.S. with the current presidential administration and what they’ve done with climate change, you’re starting to see more of a growing movement of scientists that work in the public or private sector starting to think that they need to speak out.

For me, I don’t have that kind of worry because I’m not employed by a federal agency.

Those employed by federal agencies, what they’re doing is incredibly brave. They're risking their jobs to do this, but they’re doing it because they’re so deeply concerned by how undemocratic things are currently.

If the scientific certainty of human-caused climate change is only increasing, yet the administration still refuses to accept it, what is the next step?

One of the important things we need to keep in mind is that there are different levels of governance in the U.S. So even if the Trump administration might be making, frankly, decision that are entirely inconsistent with science, with the fundamental principles of sustainability, and are undemocratic, if you look around the country, you see at the state, city or county level, elected officials saying that they take this issue seriously. I’m encouraged by this, my colleagues across scientific disciplines and throughout the world are encouraged by this.

July 25, 2017

Size and Color Saturation, a Perceptual Connection?

By Nathaniel Scharping (Credit: Shutterstock)

Paint a room in light colors to make it look bigger. Wear black to look slimmer. These are well known facts about how color influences our perception—but it’s not all black and white.

New research from Boston College is showing that color saturation — how pure a color is — affects how we perceive an objects’ size. The more saturated a color is, the bigger something looks, the researchers say, with attendant implications for marketing and design. More than that, however, their findings also hint at how much more we need to learn about the ways colors influence cognition.

From Art to Science The impetus for the study came not from the literature but from a previous life. Henrik Hagtvedt, now an associate professor of marketing at Boston College, was for nearly a decade an artist whose work garnered international exhibitions. In the mid2000s he switched careers and became an academic, focusing on the intersection of marketing and art “Because my background is as a painter I have a number of … perceptual phenomena that are more within the realm of intuition than systematic knowledge,” Hagtvedt says.

The impact of color saturation is one of the intuitive effects Hagtvedt is now exploring rigorously, and some of his latest findings were recently published in the Journal of Consumer Research. Along with co-author Adam Brasel, Hagtvedt performed a few different experiments looking at the ways color saturation distorts perception.

In one, they asked participants to fill a cup with as much jellybeans as they wanted — when the cup’s color was more saturated, they took more candy. Another asked them to estimate the size of a laptop that was either saturated or not. The more saturated laptop was perceived as bigger. A third had them rate suitcases: Those who wanted large suitcases rated the more saturated version as larger.

In all they conducted six experiments, and each reinforced the theory that more pure colors make objects appear bigger. Hagtvedt thinks it could have something to do with how saturated colors grab our eyes.

“What we find in our studies is that more saturated color is arousing, it arouses a certain level of excitement. And because it has that quality it also attracts our attention,” he says. “The effects of attracting attention causes an object to seem larger.”

This aligns with previous research that finds that bigger things tend to better grab attention. It then stands to reason that we would expect attention-grabbing things to be bigger as well.

Coloring in the Blanks While the findings are fairly intuitive, Hagtvedt says research on this narrow topic is sparse. While there’s been some research linking saturation and anxiety (anxious people don’t like it as much), attention (things that catch our attention look more saturated) and preference (one study says people prefer more saturated colors, another says they don’t), most of this research is isolated and piecemeal.

Indeed, the only literature he came across on saturation and size actually found the opposite effect.

“I looked at it like ‘there is no way,'” Hagtvedt says. “Something strange must have happened there. We ran a number of studies and we did not manage to flip our effects.”

Their study is small for the moment, but the plurality of tests adds weight to conclusion.

The findings have obvious applications in marketing and packaging, as well as in website design and other commercial fields. But, Hagtvedt and Brasel are also helping to illuminate an understudied area of color research, one that takes both the intuition of an artist and the rationality of a scientist to fully explore.

Luckily, Hagtvedt is up for the task.

Monkey Cage | Analysis | May 23, 2018

The Trump administration wants regime change in Iran. But regime change usually doesn’t work.

Editors’ note: Given Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s speech on Iran policy this week, we asked Alexander Downes and Lindsey O’Rourke to revisit their post on regime change from July 31, 2017.

Here is an updated version.

The Trump administration is again pushing regime change in Iran.

Earlier this month, President Trump withdrew the United States from the Iran nuclear deal and reimposed onerous sanctions. Now Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has outlined a 12-point plan demanding Tehran forsake its nuclear program, halt ballistic missile development, end support for Shiite militias, withdraw from conflicts in neighboring countries and more.

Lurking beneath these demands is the threat of regime change. As Pompeo put it: “At the end of the day, the Iranian people will get to make a choice about their leadership. If they make the decision quickly, that would be wonderful. If they choose not to do so, we will stay hard at this until we achieve the outcomes I set forward today.” According to The Washington Post’s Jason Rezaian and others, “That translates roughly as, ‘Topple your regime, or we’re going to do it for you.’ ” None of this rhetoric from the administration and its supporters is new. Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis has said more than once that the three most dangerous threats facing the United States are “Iran, Iran, Iran.” Other administration voices on record as favoring regime change include national security adviser John Bolton, Trump’s new lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani and former secretary of state Rex Tillerson.

All this has mostly been rhetorical, and has done little to address whom Washington would promote to replace the mullahs. But would a more serious overt or covert effort in Iran bring benefits — such as a friendly Iranian regime — to the United States?

That’s unlikely. As recent U.S. experiences in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya show, helping to overthrow a regime doesn’t usually put a compliant, friendly government in the target state. Rather, it can bring a host of problems, including continued conflict, state collapse, and newly empowered hostile groups — whether the effort is open or covert, as U.S. efforts to oust Syria’s Bashar al-Assad have shown.

Indeed, Chicago Tribune columnist Steve Chapman recently wrote that U.S. policymakers’ failure to learn from this history is like “watching Wile E. Coyote open a package of dynamite he ordered.”

Why is regime change so hard?

Trying to change a regime is appealing for a powerful country like the U.S. Rather than persuade, cajole, bribe, or threaten recalcitrant foreign powers, Washington imagines being able to deal with leaders who promise to pursue its preferred policies.

But there’s a catch. Toppling a foreign government is usually the easiest part of a regime change. Getting the desired results afterward is hard.

The fundamental problem, as we argued in a 2016 article, is that foreign-imposed leaders answer to two masters — the intervener that placed them in power, and their own citizens. Interveners typically replace a government to avert or eliminate perceived security threats, hoping to install elites who will implement their preferred policies.

But once in power, newly installed foreign leaders are confronted with the political realities of ruling their countries. Often, they find that keeping their domestic audiences happy brings them into conflict with their foreign backers.

Foreign-imposed leaders thus face a Catch-22. If they placate their foreign patrons, they risk alienating those at home, who may take up arms against them. If they turn against their foreign backers, those patrons may seek to remove them, reigniting conflict between the two states.

Externally imposed dictators are most vulnerable to this dilemma because they frequently have little support at home and are most dependent on foreign patrons. Promoting democratic regimes, however, is no panacea; democratic transitions engineered by outsiders usually fail.

The result? Regime changes typically do not improve relations between interveners and targets.

Here’s our look at the evidence To evaluate how changing a regime affects the relationships between the nations involved, we analyzed all successful overt regime changes around the world during the past 200 years, as well as all attempted covert regime changes (successful and failed) by the U.S. during the Cold War. We found that most types of regime change do not improve the relationship between the two nations. Pairs of countries in which one overthrew the other’s government were just as likely to fight each other in the ensuing 10 years as pairs in which regime change did not happen. That was true even when the intervener tried to promote democracy. If the intervener installed a dictator, the two countries were actually more likely to experience hostilities.

Trying to change a regime covertly, as Trump officials are apparently contemplating, is doubly doomed. Such attempts succeed only one-third of the time, and when they fail, they increase the likelihood of conflict between the intervener and the targeted state.

Our research supports the conclusions of other studies. Researchers have found when a country overthrows another’s government, it increases the likelihood of civil wars and usually doesn’t establish a democracy.

In short, U.S. troubles in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria are typical. Regime change often backfires. It does not improve relations. And it triggers civil wars that can draw the intervening nations into costly quagmires.

What does this mean for Iran?

Today, those who think the U.S. should encourage the overthrow of the Iranian government hope that the ayatollahs would be replaced by democracy — and that the Iranian people would choose a more peaceful path. Regime change in Tehran would thus get Iran to abandon its nuclear weapons program as well as stop supporting the Syrian regime and militant groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas that threaten Israel.

But any Iranian leader is likely to want to pursue these policies, popular among Iranian citizens. A poll last year found that 81 percent of Iranians believed it was “very important for Iran to develop its nuclear program” and 68 percent thought that Iran should “seek to increase the role it plays in the region.”

A regime change that democratizes Iran thus may not significantly change Iranian policies — or end its conflict with Washington.

The United States should know this. As declassified U.S. government documents on Iran make clear, Washington backed a coup in 1953 that replaced Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh with right-wing monarch Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

Washington’s role in the coup, as historian Malcolm Byrne explains, “virtually guaranteed that burgeoning hostility toward the shah would also be directed against the United States when the revolutionary Islamic regime came to power in 1979.” That hostility remains to this day, as you can see in Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif’s tweet last year: Trying to change Iran’s regime, in other words, may not change its policies — or its attitude toward Washington — any more successfully than it has in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and beyond.

Alexander B. Downes is an associate professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University, and is working on a book about the consequences of regime change.

Lindsey A. O’Rourke is an assistant professor of political science at Boston College, and is the author of the forthcoming book “Covert Regime Change: America’s Secret Cold War” (Cornell University Press, 2018).

July 20, 2017

How to Fix Social Security Retirement expert Alicia Munnell lays out options for rejuvenating the 82-year-old mother of all safety nets.

Alicia Munnell wants to make one thing clear. Social Security is not going bankrupt. The program that the economist calls “the most valuable component of our retirement system” is a sustainable system and can be fixed.

America has just been avoiding the hard choices it has to make if it wants to keep Social Security around for future generations.

Munnell, who worked at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston for 20 years, the Treasury Department for two years during the Clinton administration 1 , and served on a U.S. Social Security Advisory Board in 2015, is director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. She has parsed just about every argument for how to reset Social Security’s finances. In a recent conversation and paper, Munnell, 74, laid out the stark choices Americans face, and the solutions suggested by two diametrically opposed pieces of legislation.

We all know Social Security has long-term cash-flow issues. How would you describe the challenge?

Munnell: It’s a very simple system. It’s not like the health-care system, where you have insurance companies and doctors and patients. This is money in, money out.

The recent Social Security trustee’s report said the same exact thing it’s said almost every year since 1992 or 1993. We have a deficit—it’s a little bigger now than in the past—that’s equivalent to 2 percent to 3 percent of taxable payrolls, and we need to fix it. Every year the actuaries tell us there’s a deficit; every year as a nation we do nothing. It’s very easy to put off making changes for something that won’t happen. You really won’t see anything until the trust fund actually is exhausted in 2034. At that point, benefits have to be cut or revenue increased, because the system is not allowed to pay out money that it does not have.

By the way, when people talk about how the Social Security deficit will lead to big increases in the budget deficit, well, Social Security can’t run a deficit. When people say that, either they don’t understand how the law works or are trying to create alarm about the system.

One misperception about Social Security is that it should be enough to live on, which was never really the intent. How much income does it actually replace for workers? The current level of tax revenues coming in mean that the replacement rate—benefits relative to preretirement earnings—would drop from 36 percent for the typical 65-year-old worker right before the trust fund is exhausted to about 27 percent by 2070. That’s a level we last saw in the 1950s.

Right now, the replacement rate is already set to decrease from 39 percent to 36 percent for those claiming Social Security benefits at age 65. That’s because of the gradual increase in full retirement age, from 65 to 67, that was part of the legislation in 1983.

You describe two proposals out there as good “bookends” to consider when looking at ways to get rid of the deficit facing Social Security.

I like the proposals as bookends because they are so different, they don’t compromise at all. One is all on the benefit side, just big benefit cuts. The other says it would enhance benefits a little and make big tax increases. And those are the two ways to go. They highlight the notion that we should really decide politically—and I don’t know quite how we do this—what share of the solution Americans want in benefit cuts, and what share they want in tax increases.

It’s not really arguing about the specific provisions—should we change the inflation indexing to the Consumer Price Index for the Elderly, the CPI –E [an inflation measure geared to rising costs faced by the elderly, such as medical expenses]. The big question: Is this program important enough to people that we as a nation want to pay up and maintain current benefit levels, or are people willing to split the reform between benefit cuts and tax increases somehow.

Where do you stand on that?

Surveys say that Americans want—and this is my instinct—to pretty much maintain current benefit levels. When I look at how much money, or how little money, people have in 401(k) plans, I just don’t see any other sources of retirement income out there. So I’d argue for fixing it on the revenue side. But I do believe in democracy, and if the American people writ large want to do it on the other side, in benefit cuts, we should do it.

The first proposal you analyzed in a recent paper was legislation proposed last year by Representative Sam Johnson, a Republican from Texas who is chairman of the House Ways and Means Social Security Subcommittee. What does he propose?

The Johnson proposal wants to cut benefits sharply so that the reduced benefits match the current income for the program. He would raise the age when you can collect full benefits to 69, cut benefits for above-average income earners, and reduce cost of living adjustments (COLAs) for people making more than $85,000 ($170,000 for couples). For those who would get COLAs, he would use a chain-weighted Consumer Price Index. [That index “employs a formula that reflects the effect of substitution that consumers make across item categories in response to changes in relative prices,” according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics website.]

What would the impact of that be on average Americans?

I looked at the ratio of proposed to current benefits at different points on the earnings scale. Since doing away with COLAs has a bigger impact as retirees age, I looked at individuals who were 85 years-old. It has no impact on the benefits of lower earners. But medium earners—which I calculate as having an income of $49,121—would see benefits cut to 77 percent of what they would get under current law. [That would be for someone born in 1995, turning 85 in 2080.] Those making $118,500 would get 34 percent of what they would get under today’s benefit schedule.

What does the other proposal, from Representative John Larson, the Connecticut Democrat who is the ranking member of the House Ways and Means Social Security Subcommittee, suggest?

His proposal, a few years old, has some small enhancements to benefits and two big revenue changes. He would raise the total payroll tax paid by employers and employees by 0.1 percent a year until it reaches 14.8 percent in 2042. And he would have the payroll tax apply to earnings over $400,000. The current cap on wages that the payroll tax is applied to is $127,200. [The current gap between $127,000 and $400,000 would not be subject to payroll tax.]

It would also use a different measure of inflation when adjusting benefits—the CPI-E. This rises faster than the inflation measure used now, the CPI-W, the CPI for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers. The income threshold for the taxation of Social Security benefits would be raised. [The threshold at which a portion of one’s Social Security benefit gets taxed hasn’t been adjusted since 1984. It is $25,000 for singles and $32,000 for married couples.] Larson would raise it to $50,000 for singles and $100,000 for marrieds. His proposal would also increase the “special minimum benefit” that goes to long-term low earners or people with sporadic work histories.

Are there proposals out there now that advocate for a middle ground between the two proposals?

No. But you could do it. You just raise payroll taxes by half as much and cuts by half as much. There are infinite ways of doing it, and no new ideas particularly. This is a solvable problem. We can’t solve other things, but this should be easy.

July 20, 2017 - UK

Optimism about US international student numbers is misplaced US universities’ efforts to remain positive won’t wash. Trump is a disaster for recruitment, say Philip Altbach and Hans de Wit At the recent annual conference of Nafsa: Association of International Educators in Los Angeles, many leaders in the field of internationalisation emphasised that global solidarity would remain despite US president Donald Trump’s “America first” stance and his curbs on travel and immigration from certain countries. They insisted that talk of deep declines in foreign student enrolments in the US were likely overblown, and that the US would remain the destination of choice for international students.

At a national seminar of international higher education professionals that we recently hosted at Boston College, a more realistic stance was generally adopted. But speakers were still hopeful that they could rise above the bigger political picture and provide a welcome on their own campuses that was so warm that it would sustain their international student numbers through word of mouth.

We believe that such hopes are misplaced. Optimism is unsustainable in the current reality, and we predict the acceleration of a trend towards more plurality in global student flows that will anyway take place in the coming decades.

Since the Nafsa conference, the US Supreme Court has ruled that key elements of the Trump administration’s ban on travel and immigration from certain Muslim-majority countries are legal.

And although additional court challenges are looming, those judicially sanctioned elements are now being implemented. Moreover, the government has significant leeway to interpret the rules, and essential decisions are in the hands of US consular officials at embassies around the world – and in those of junior bureaucrats in the Department of State and the Department of Homeland Security.

A few examples illustrate what is going on now and what will without question occur more frequently in the future. We recently hosted a group of doctoral students from Switzerland’s University of Basel. But one member of the proposed delegation was missing: an advanced doctoral student who holds a Sudanese passport. It was not that the US authorities had turned down his visa application: rather, they had simply sat on it until it was too late for him to travel.

There does also seem to have been an increase in the number of visa refusals. Media reports in Boston noted that many previous European participants in the world-renowned Boston Early Music Festival were absent this year because US embassies denied them permission to return.

One well-known woodwind group from Germany was turned down because they were, in the eyes of a consular official, not famous enough. No doubt that official had expertise in the music of 14th-century Germany!

The point of these examples is that little decisions shape internationalisation realities as much as the specific policies of presidents and decisions of judges. There is no doubt whatsoever that these little decisions will create havoc among colleges and universities seeking to admit international students – and not only from Muslim-majority countries.

When it comes to international perceptions, French president Emmanuel Macron’s invitation to scholars feeling unwelcome in the US to come to his country is already very telling. And while there will probably be only a modest decline in international student enrolments in the coming academic year, the real challenge will be in the following years, as these stories of bureaucratic hassles and political hostilities establish a narrative that studying, teaching or doing research in the US is simply no longer worth the trouble.

We have already seen in the year prior to Trump’s election that the excitement about a record 1 million international students in the US hides the reality of an increasing dependence on Chinese and Indian applicants. New economic and political realities in Saudi Arabia and Brazil have resulted in declining numbers from those countries, with few prospects of a reversal. Other nations, such as Canada, Germany and the Netherlands, with their solid economies and welcoming policies, will see their international student numbers rise, and there are clear examples of increasing mobility within and between countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

After France, China is now the largest recipient of African students, for instance. All this makes US higher education very vulnerable to the economic and political tensions with China and India that might well result from Trump’s aggressive foreign and economic policies.

Perhaps in a few years, the Boston Early Music Festival will have become the Berlin Early Music Festival, and the students from Basel will enjoy visiting Montreal or Toronto instead of Boston to discuss international higher education. It is time for everyone involved in US educational and cultural exchange – a multibillion-dollar industry and a key part of what really makes America great – to face up to reality and understand exactly what is happening.

The efforts of student information online teams to design welcoming admissions policies are certainly needed. But even more important is for US higher education leadership to make greater efforts to convince politicians of the enormous dangers of the current Trump policy.

Optimism is not enough in a time of crisis.

Philip G. Altbach is research professor and founding director of the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College. Hans de Wit is professor and the centre’s current director.

July 17, 2017 Millennials ruining everything? It’s an age-old accusation

By Dugan Arnett If you’ve cracked a magazine or launched an Internet browser at any point in the past few years, you’re no doubt familiar with the rash of anti-millennial think-pieces, those pointed articles attempting to pin blame on the country’s most despised generation for various perceived societal shortcomings.

What you might not know, however, is that such rants have been around for quite some time — as in, dating back to at least the 1300s.

In a recent piece for The Conversation, a website for the academic and research communities to share news and views, Boston College professor Eric Weiskott points out that millennial bashing has actually been occurring in literature for hundreds of years.

“There’s [always been] rampant worry that society, as we knew it, was crumbling,” says Weiskott, an assistant professor of English who focuses on Medieval literature. “And that the people to blame for that were the youngest generation.”

Defined by Pew Research Center as those born after 1980, millennials have indeed been the target of some not-so-nice accusations, shouldering the blame for the alleged demise of — among a slew of other things — golf, running, napkins, soap, and marriage.

But take a peek back through the work of some medieval writers, Weiskott says, and you’ll see them expressing the very kinds of sentiments about younger generations.

In the 15th century, for instance, the writer Thomas Malory opined about youngsters ruining sex by being too eager to jump into bed. A century earlier, famed medieval author Geoffrey Chaucer had fretted over the younger generation’s perceived negative influence on both communication and language.

“Millennials might be bankrupting the napkin industry,” Weiskott writes, “but Chaucer was concerned that younger readers would ruin language itself.”

Another modern-day practice millennials have been accused of rendering obsolete?

Poetry.

Except, as Weiskott points out, Chaucer accused younger generations of the very same offense in the 1300s — and poetry, of course, is still very much a thing.

An older millennial himself, Weiskott, 30, says he was inspired to write about the topic in part because of the rash of “hit pieces” targeting his generation, as well as the curious position he occupies between the older academics who often opine on millennials — and the millennial students who fill his classroom.

And while he does concede that millennials will undoubtedly inspire societal change, he considers it a fruitless exercise to attempt to predict how, exactly, they’ll do so.

“The history of culture, the history of society, is filled with left turns that no one saw coming,” he says. “I’m very certain that millennials will change the world somehow. But I don’t know how, and I don’t think anyone else does, either.”

July 14, 2017

The 5 Traits Of Digitally Advanced Companies Joe McKendrick Digital transformation not only means adopting a constellation of technologies -- including cloud, data analytics and online channels -- but also making fundamental changes to corporate culture. Employees up and down the ranks should have a stake in the process, and be given latitude to experiment with new approaches. However, few companies appear to be making the fundamental changes their leaders believe are necessary to achieve these goals.

That's the takeaway from a survey of more than 3,500 organizations, released by MIT Sloan Management Review and Deloitte Digital. The study finds that 71% of digitally maturing organizations have conquered this barrier by encouraging their organizations to experiment and accept the risk of failure, compared to 29% of early stage companies.

The study compares the digital transformation habits of “digitally maturing” companies versus “digitally early-stage” companies.

What are the leading components of a digital effort? Here's what executives say is underway this year:

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

Analytics 34% Social media (internal or external) 19% Mobile 14% Internet of things (IoT) 11% Cognitive technology/artificial intelligence Robotic process automation 2% Additive manufacturing 1% Virtual reality 1% Manufacturing/warehouse robots 1% Other 5% Don’t know/not sure 4% None 2%

5%

The study's authors, led by Gerald Kane and Doug Palmer, state that digitally mature companies have the following common traits:

They implement systemic changes in culture. Digitally mature companies are more than four times as likely as non-digitally maturing companies to have a clear and coherent digital strategy in place than other companies (80% of digitally maturing organizations versus 19% of early-stage companies), Kane and his co-authors relate. Overall, less than half of executives (48%) agree, to any extent, that their leaders "have the vision necessary to lead our digital business efforts."

Somewhat fewer, 45%, agree that their organizations provide employees "with the resources or opportunities to develop skills and opportunities to thrive in a digital business environment." Only 40% agree their organizations "effectively utilize the digital knowledge, skills, interest, and experience held by our employees."

They play the long game. The strategic planning horizons of digitally mature organizations "are consistently longer than those of less digitally mature organizations, with nearly 30% looking out five years or more versus only 13% for the least digitally mature organizations," Kane and his coauthors relate. "Their digital strategies focus on both technology and core business capabilities.

We discuss how linking digital strategies to the company’s core business and focusing on organizational change and flexibility enables companies to adjust to rapidly changing digital environments."

They scale small digital experiments into larger enterprise initiatives. As the researchers put it, at digitally mature companies, "small 'i' innovations or experiments typically lead to more big 'I' innovations than at other organizations. Digitally maturing organizations are more than twice as likely as companies at the early stages of digital development to drive both small, iterative experiments and enterprise-wide initiatives rather than mainly experiments. Digitally maturing organizations also can be shrewd and disciplined in figuring out how to fund these endeavors and keep them from languishing in the face of more immediate investment needs."

They are talent magnets. Moving to digital makes people want to work for an organization. The MIT-Deloitte survey finds vice president-level executives without sufficient digital opportunities are 15 times more likely to want to leave within a year than are those with satisfying digital challenges.

"Employees and executives are highly inclined to jump ship if they feel they don’t have opportunities to develop digital skills," the researchers state. Seventy-seven percent of digitally maturing organizations recognize and reward collaboration and cross-functional teams as a cornerstone of how they operate, versus slightly more than 34 percent of early stage entities, the study finds. However, Kane and his co-authors add, "even the most digitally mature organizations don’t have all the needed talent." They recommend that executives seek out those "pockets of people who want the organization to become more digital, and leadership needs to identify them and give them opportunities to develop and grow. Put these advocates to work on the experiments and initiatives called out above and let them build and advance their skills as they make contributions to the shift in becoming a digital business."

They nurture leaders with a digital vision. Digitally mature organizations "are more likely to have articulated a compelling ambition for what their digital businesses can be and define digital initiatives as core components to achieving their business strategy. A larger percentage of digitally maturing companies are also planning to increase their digital investment compared to their less digitally mature counterparts, which threatens to widen an already large gap in the level of digital success" -- about 75% of digitally mature companies versus 49% of their less-mature counterparts.

July 11, 2017 Leadership Interviews – 3 Questions – Living Legend Ann Wolbert Burgess Welcome to the Nursing Outlook Blog – “3 Questions” – Timely Interviews with Thought Leaders in Nursing and Health Care Policy 2016 American Academy of Nursing Living Legend – Ann Wolbert Burgess Nursing leaders of our times are recognized by healthcare professionals and the public for their outstanding contributions not only to our discipline, but to the health of the population. The American Academy of Nursing recognizes its distinguished leaders who have given service over their career to a group of selected individuals known as the American Academy’s “LIVING LEGENDS.” In 2016, these recognized scholars, policy makers, educators, researchers and truly dedicated nurses received this highest honor and addressed the audience with humble thanks and inspired all of us in the room with their living stories. For future nurse leaders who may not have been in the room, we believe that their personal viewpoints about leadership ought to be shared online in their own words. This second interview is with Dr. Ann Wolbert Burgess, Professor of Nursing at Boston College.

Dr. Ann Wolbert Burgess is internationally recognized for her contributions in the assessment and treatment of victims of trauma and abuse. Her research has provided significant insight into the links between child abuse, juvenile delinquency, and the perpetrators of serial offenses. Her public service on numerous national committees and councils for victims of serious trauma, including sexual abuse in a variety of settings, has culminated in work that has been applauded at many levels of government and her courtroom testimony has been described as “groundbreaking.”

Her focus that includes elder abuse, cyberstalking, and internet sex crimes has been recognized in forensic science classrooms nationally. At the heart of the work is her compassion for victims and victimization on which she has built a distinguished career, receiving numerous honors and numerous highest awards including the Sigma Theta Tau International Audrey Hepburn Award, the American Nurses’ Association Hildegard Peplau Award, the Sigma Theta Tau International Episteme Laureate Award, and named a 2016 American Academy of Nursing “Living Legend.”

Dr. Burgess’ leadership continues in her active work with other researchers and scholars at the Boston College.

One of her two most recent projects is the College Warrior Athlete Initiative Project funded by the Wounded Warrior Project . The purpose is to assist our nation’s wounded service men and women transition back into civilian life by partnering with an athlete in active physical exercise and socially supported learning activities. We asked her about the project and advice she might offer aspiring nurse leaders who seek ways to channel personal compassion into meaningful research and scholarship.

Ann Wolbert Burgess, D.N.Sc., APRN, FAAN, Professor of Nursing at the Connell School of Nursing, Boston College, is an internationally recognized leader in Forensic Nursing. Her research with victims began when she co-founded, with Boston College sociologist Lynda Lytle Holmstrom, one of the first hospital-based crisis counseling programs at Boston City Hospital.We asked her to elaborate on the College Warrior Athlete Initiative Project and her leadership lessons in forensics by answering 3 Questions!

Question 1. Can you tell us about the Wounded Warrior Athlete Initiative Project and how you found the connection with your own body of work and the victims of military trauma?

The College Warrior Athlete Initiative or what we call in shorthand the Wounded Warriors Program is a nurse led health promotion program for wounded vets. It’s our way of having academic nursing to be a part of the wounded warrior trajectory back to health. There had been some discussion about how we, who are in academic situations, could be helpful. What happened is Ada Sue Henshaw, who was Dean down at the Graduate Nursing Program of the

Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USUHS) in Bethesda had taken on a high profile military issue for nursing to take the lead – and it was what is called “military sexual trauma.” And at the time that she contacted me it was getting a lot of press as well as Congressional attention. She knew of my clinical and research work in the area of sexual trauma. So she applied for a budget to fund a visiting professor to come to USUHS, advertised it competitively, I applied! And that’s why I got down to USUHS. Now once I was down there working with Dean Henshaw, I spent some time with Dr. Sue Sheehy who was on faculty.

And interestingly enough Sue had been a military nurse and had spent time working with returning wounded warriors coming into Walter Reed Hospital, which is right down there on the campus. And she had made a very compelling point that once these wounded warriors were discharged back home, there were very few resources, often, for them to continue in any kind of rehab program. Now that’s in more of the rural areas, certainly not in the major cities. But she was kind of pondering that and had been thinking about it, and realized that every small community would have access to a nursing program. That’s one thing that we certainly have done very well is that we have our nursing programs scattered nationwide.

So she thought why not test the nurse led program using the “battle buddy” system. Now, the occupational culture of the Army’s “battle buddy” concept refers to an attitude of support during tough times and had at that time never been applied to veteran health promotion. The big health problem outside of any of the medical or psychiatric diagnoses were nutrition for weight control, and strength decline. These seem to be two of the big problems that wounded warriors were having. So, with Sue, there was a decision to design a program with an athletic department and a nursing department to pair a veteran with a college student athlete for an exercise workout program that would also include wellness classes, and lunch – a nutritious lunch.

Now the next step is that Dean Susan Gennaro here at Boston College was able to offer Dr. Sheehy a visiting scholar position. Sue came up, we wrote a grant, submitted it to the Wounded Warrior Project and was one of three projects to be funded. That’s how it all got started.

We just finished our two-year program. We had a total of 50 veterans between Boston College and we had one satellite site at Norwich University. So we had 38 males and 12 females between the ages of 25 and 54, of seven cohorts. And they lost a total of 232.8 pounds and showed very positive changes in their BMI. The way I got involved is through the military program and these were veterans who were also victims, if you will, of a war, and it seemed to be kind of a natural fit for me to become involved. And our goal is to extend the program to other nursing programs across the country. It’s very low-cost, highly rewarding, certainly for the wounded warriors, certainly for the students, certainly for the faculty who participate, the University and the community. In all it’s a winwin.

Question 2. What lessons did this project and other work you have done teach about nursing and what nursing can do?

Well I think there are several lessons that we can talk about. One is certainly to identify a high profile issue where nursing can take a leadership role. That, I think is critical. For example, one is the current opiate crisis. I’ve just finished analyzing data from over 300 cases where teens died by suicide. And so what we did was to look at the toxicology findings from the medical examiner’s office that identified the drugs in the teen’s system at death. And that’s important – for all that I’ve looked at the problem, nobody says what are the drugs that kids have in their body when they suicide? That will be from the data – that will be a recommendation for nurses on how to prevent teen suicide where prescription drugs and mental health is involved. So I saw that as an example of a high profile issue where nursing really can take a major role…I send that out for all of nursing!

Now a second high profile issue from my perspective is nursing staff violence, especially in the ER. How are we training or responding to violent patients and visitors? Now I know that many are…as we read some of these incredible cases of shootings…I know they are doing that…but is there anything else we can do? And one experience I’ve had that I would pass on is: I was involved in analyzing, doing a psychological autopsy of a mass shooting in the community of Seattle Washington. And the police chief there convened a panel to analyze the shooting and then publish our report on his website for the community to understand. So that is again another place, when they have one of these horrendous cases, nursing should get in there and suggest this – that the police chief can do such a thing.

Out of Seattle, they found that very, very helpful.

July 5, 2017

Where Mass. ranks on education tests At K-12 and college levels, state does well PHILIP ALTBACH

IN THE SEASON OF GRADUATIONS, it is worth looking at how Massachusetts and Boston stack up against international competitors in education. According to global university rankings and international school achievement tests, Massachusetts ranks near the top in global education excellence. According to the respected Academic Rankings of World Universities (the Shanghai rankings), when population is taken into account, Massachusetts ranks No. 6 in the world in terms of local universities in the global top 100, ahead of Germany, Sweden, Singapore, and other well-regarded higher education systems.

The Commonwealth also does well in K-12 education. In math and reading tests administered by the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA and PIRLS), conducted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), administered by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement, Massachusetts does quite well. These tests, conducted every few years, are considered the international gold standard for assessing the performance of national education systems. From time to time, Massachusetts has benchmarked itself against countries as well as the few US states that take part.

In higher education, Massachusetts has three universities in the top 100, another three in the top 200, and two more in the top 500. In the US, only California scored better. In the K-12 tests, Massachusetts (separated from the US as a whole) scored sixth in the world in 8th grade math and science in TIMSS, and 4th at the fourth grade. It was also ranked No. 1 among 12 US states along with Canadian provinces (leaving out the country rankings) that participated in the 8th grade test. In the OECD’s PISA exams, only Singapore outranked Massachusetts in science, and no country outranked Massachusetts in reading, although a small number of countries had similar scores.

An interesting study prepared for the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in 2016 compared the academic structures of Boston, London, and Paris in an effort to help Paris improve its position in science and scholarship. Although much smaller in population than London or Paris, Boston scored very well. The researchers pointed to Boston’s ecology of higher education excellence. Not only does the Boston area host three universities in the top 100 (Harvard (#1), MIT (#5), and Boston University (#75)), but four additional institutions in the top 500 (Boston College, Brandeis, Northeastern, and Tufts), more than most countries with much larger populations. They noted the importance not only of the universities at the pinnacle, but the excellent research universities just below them, as well as large numbers of other strong postsecondary institutions serving diverse purposes and populations. The CNRS report cited Boston’s knowledge-based economy—not only education and

research, but also biotech, info-tech, and finance—and argued that this powerful combination is instrumental to Boston’s strength.

While Massachusetts ranks eighth in the United States in per student spending for K-12 education, it does much worse in support for higher education. State support for public higher education has declined by 14 percent since 2001 with per student cutbacks at 31 percent. Massachusetts ranks 43rd in the US in support for public higher education as a proportion of personal income. Of course, these cuts were accompanied by increases in tuition and fees, making the Commonwealth one of the most expensive states for public higher education. Thus, the “Massachusetts Miracle” in education is not due to state support for education in general or especially for higher education, but is continuing despite reduced public funding. Despite these problems, public higher education constitutes an important part of the effective ecosystem that contributes to the state’s strength.

For higher education, much of the success is the strength and diversity of the private higher education sector. Private colleges and universities in general rank higher than their public counterparts in the Commonwealth. Nationally, around 80 percent of postsecondary students study at public institutions, but the corresponding number is 53 percent in Massachusetts. Thus, the non-profit private sector carries much of the burden of both quality and quantity in higher education.

Further, Boston-area universities, led by MIT, contribute significantly to economic development in the region. The start-ups that have emerged from basic and applied research in the universities and the contributions to the economy from international students are just two examples of the synergy between the universities and the economy.

As the French CNRS report points out, the Boston area has a rather unique ecosystem that supports education and the knowledge economy generally. The range of knowledge industry firms supports the system. It is not surprising that Boston has the highest proportion of millennials of any American city.

Boston is particularly welcoming to what futurist Richard Florida has called the “creative class.” At the core of the ecosystem are the educational institutions, including many high-quality public and private schools, but also the not insignificant array of cultural institutions, restaurants, and sports.

July 3, 2017

Changing landscape requires mutual accompaniment, convocation hears The U.S. Catholic Church's increasing diversity presents Catholics with the opportunity to accompany each other on the journey of faith Pope Francis envisions, a Boston College professor told delegates to the "Convocation of Catholic Leaders: The Joy of the Gospel in America" in Orlando.

Hosffman Ospino, associate professor of theology and religious education at Boston College, said the changes in the landscape are a sign of strength and present new opportunities to welcome newcomers into the church family.

"It's OK if we wrestle with diversity and pluralism," he told the 3,500 delegates assembled for the convocation's first plenary session July 2. "This where we need to exercise the pastoral practice of mutual accompaniment."

Ospino suggested that Catholics of the first decades of the 21st century might begin to understand that they can set the course of a "new Catholic moment in the U.S." by embracing diversity.

Citing the explosive growth of Catholic communities in the American South and West, Ospino said the church is being called to respond to the needs of new immigrants so that they are welcomed and not made to feel forgotten.

He said half of U.S. church members today are non-European, with about 40 percent Latino, 5 percent Asian and Pacific Islanders, 4 percent African-American and 1 percent Native American. The numbers contrast with the church population of 50 years ago, when 80 to 85 percent of Catholics were of European descent, he said.

"The question is do we see those faces in our faith communities? Do we see them in our diocesan offices?

Do we see them in our Catholic schools, universities, seminaries? Do we know their concerns?" he asked.

"The future of U.S. Catholicism is being forged in areas once not central to U.S. Catholic life. ... Are we paying attention?" he asked.

"This is an excellent opportunity for us as a country to be a poor church for the poor. As Pope Francis reminds us, an opportunity for solidarity of Catholics at all places," he said.

Ospino also cautioned that the church faces challenges from increased isolation, rising secularization and increasing numbers of people unaffiliated with any faith community, and the continuing differences

entrenched in the "so-called culture wars." He called for respectful dialogue among people with differences of opinion across the spectrum of issues that concern the church, from abortion to care for the poor.

"Our society continues to witness an erosion of communal life. If communal life is not important, advocating for others is not a priority. Caring about the most vulnerable is somebody else's problem," Ospino said, explaining that the church can bridge such gaps.

He said the convocation-goers and those they engage when they return to their home parishes and dioceses can set the tone for future historians to see that they have laid the foundation for a stronger church that embraced diversity and inclusion.

In response, four panelists offered their insights into the changing landscape the church is facing, saying that the church will be better positioned to respond following the convocation.

They addressed issues of women's role in the church, the need to embrace young Latinos as active church members and the vital role of family in the church at a time when society's understanding of family is changing.

Franciscan Father Agustino Torres, who has worked with youth and specializes in bilingual outreach to Hispanic millennials said he had found young Latinos want to engage in ministries that affirmed their identity. "Latinos don't want just a program," he said.

"If the church can say, 'You belong here this is your home,' you're going to get an army of people," he said.

Women can be welcomed into church leadership roles that do not depend upon ordination, said Helen Alvare, professor of law at the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University. She said women must be accepted seriously as contributors rather than being chosen for their roles to check off a box on a list.

She suggested, to applause, that Catholics adopt an expanded view of complementarity that applies equally to family and the church.

Kerry Weber, executive editor of America magazine, recalled her conversations with parishioners across the country who are seeking ways to live out the joy of the Gospel, as Pope Francis envisioned in his encyclical, "Evangelii Gaudium" ("The Joy of the Gospel").

"People are trying to see how to turn this sentiment into action," she said.

Francis calls people to show mercy, not as a passive action, but in response to the realities of the world today, Weber said, adding, "We have to figure out how to live mercy in the world today."

Jesuit Father Thomas P. Gaunt, executive director of the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University, said the center's researchers have identified as many as one-third of the country's 75 million self-identified Catholics are not connected with the church.

He said the resulting question focuses on why people who may not be connected with the church still consider themselves Catholic and he suggested that they represent an untapped resource for the church.

"How do we re-invite and re-engage them once more?" he asked.

The key, Ospino concluded, is that it is time for the church to start building a "language of communion" rather than dividing the church community into different groups and individually responding to those needs. "It's the church serving the church," he said. "We all are the church."

June 28, 2017

CONFESSIONS OF A CONFLICTED FATHER Have you ever wanted to spend more time with your children but also wanted a job with greater responsibility? Do you think your family is your top priority but feel susceptible to messages at work that suggest that committed employees are focused and available 24x7? Do you aspire to share caregiving equally with your partner but always feel you come up short in meeting these expectations?

you are experiencing at work and at home.

If so, you are likely what might be termed a Conflicted father. And in the spirit of full disclosure, I’m one too.

Let me explain what this means and how being conflicted is likely undermining the joy and meaning

For the past eight years in my work as executive director of the Boston College Center for Work & Family, I have spent much of my time researching fathers. New dads, at home dads, working dads, Millennial dads, dads who take paternity leave and dads who don’t. I have written a lot about these fathers and have appeared in many major media outlets and given talks at conferences to discuss how fathers’ roles are changing. I’m occasionally asked for fathering advice in one of these forums, but there I always hesitate, reminded of my wonderful wife who once lovingly exclaimed, “An expert on fatherhood everywhere but at home.” Touché.

Since we began publishing The New Dad studies, we have uncovered many interesting findings. One that has frequently recurred is the gap between fathers’ aspirations to be equal partners in caregiving and their inability to actualize this. Following the publication of our first report in 2010, one journalist titled her article on our work “Why do men lie on surveys about fatherhood?” Her intention wasn’t to be cynical. She described the concept of aspirational lying which she defined as “the unconscious shading of the truth to make us appear smarter, more generous, and closer to the person we want to be.” The point she was making is that fathers today at least aspire to be hands-on caregivers, even if they often fall short of that goal.

Through more extensive research over the years that followed, we concluded that men likely weren’t lying about their aspirations – they sincerely wanted to be equal caregivers. But when we asked whether their actions fell in line with their aspirations, more than one out of three fathers admitted they did not. We labeled these fathers Conflicted dads to distinguish them from Traditional dads (those who say their partner should do more caregiving, and their partners do) and Egalitarian dads (those who strive for equality in caregiving and feel they achieve it). By every measure in our studies, Conflicted fathers reported having the lowest levels of work and life satisfaction among these three fatherhood types. They were the most likely to feel they weren’t spending enough time with their kids, the most likely to be susceptible to organizational cues about being an ideal worker, the least satisfied with state of their lives, the most likely to be considering quitting their jobs.

So, given I know, perhaps better than anyone, that being a conflicted father doesn’t yield good outcomes, how did I get to that place and why don’t I address the error of my ways? It’s a long story.

After graduate school I secured a good, high paying job, I married after a decade of being workcentric, I travelled a lot on business and actually commuted 3000 miles to work when we had two young children, etc. At some point my wife decided to stay home with the kids to accommodate this and we fell into typically gendered roles. Eventually, I changed careers and my wife returned to work. But even as our work schedules and income levels became more equivalent, I was slower than I should have been to change. We had established roles and patterns that were hard to unravel.

Much like the fathers in our study, I felt the cost of being conflicted. But we struggled to establish a “new normal,” at home and to redefine our roles in light of the ongoing career and family shifts we had made.

Redefining oneself is never an easy endeavor. Adult identities are extremely sticky. They’ve been built up over many years and reinforced in hundreds of ways. But if you are a conflicted dad and are committed to getting the balance right, there are a few things I might suggest: § Start by fessing up. Look at your goals when it comes to fatherhood and ask yourself (and your partner), how you are doing. Are you egalitarian or traditional in your approach? If so, and your partner is fine with this, it’s all good. If not, and you frequently (always?) feel conflicted, it’s time to alter things. Rather than think of work and family as competing priorities, consider the right balance for your family. There will always be more demands for your time than you have available. § Go through an in-depth self-assessment process. Explore your values, your career and life goals, how your relationship is going with your partner. You may be able to do this through using a careerlife self-help book or with the aid of a career counselor or life coach. Work with your partner. Know what each of you needs and work together to minimize the conflicts around work and family. § Start a father’s group. Start a group with work colleagues or with fathers in your neighborhood or social circle. Meet with your fellow dads to discuss your common struggles and successes in balancing work and family. You will find you are not alone and also support in achieving the balance you are looking for. I’ve been part of a father’s group in my neighborhood for 15 years and have learned a lot from my fellow dads. § Take your leave. If you are one of the fortunate few fathers that are offered paid paternity leave by your employer, take advantage of it. Nothing will help you understand the value of parenting better than taking time to “fly solo” caring for your new child.

Psychologists would agree that being conflicted in general does not enhance one’s quality of life (”I did A but probably should have done B”). But when it comes to domains as central to our lives as career and family, being conflicted is a major obstacle to life satisfaction. And trust me (and 1000 other fathers), that’s not where you want to be.

June 23, 2017

In Long Run, There’s No Such Thing as an Einstein Investor

By Robert J. Shiller There are no easy answers in investing. It is tempting to replicate a successful strategy — one created by an outstanding investor, like Warren Buffett, or through in-depth statistical analysis of the wisdom of crowds — and such approaches can actually work for long periods.

But paint-by-number portfolios won’t succeed forever. And without deep expertise, it makes little sense to veer much from a simple market portfolio — one that seeks to match the overall performance of the market, and not beat it.

These reflections are prompted by the television series “Genius” (based on the Walter Isaacson biography “Einstein: His Life and Universe”), which I’ve been watching on National Geographic TV. The series also inspired me to reread Einstein’s own popularization of his theories, in the book “Relativity: The Special and General Theory.”

Albert Einstein, who may have been the most famous person ever to be publicly identified as a genius, had a disrespectful attitude toward the dignitaries of the physics profession of his time, and a lonely and unique approach to science.

Yet great as Einstein’s theories were, others in the scientific community had been on the verge of discovering them when he came along. In fact, it is possible to argue that large numbers of collegial scholars who do not keep secrets, do not pretend to know everything and share freely will eventually surpass the achievements of a lone genius.

Similar debates dominate professional investing. For help in making important financial decisions, some of us are looking for Einsteins, others for communities of scholars or professional money managers with solid ideas.

In terms of popular reputation, Mr. Buffett may be investing’s closest approximation of an Einstein. Some investors have done well simply by copying Mr. Buffett’s financial moves.

On the other hand, many investors embrace the catchy methods that bubble up from time to time, like “smart beta,” a phrase for a form of systematic investing that claims to outperform the market. There is no universal agreement on what smart beta means, but it typically refers to published theories and replicable statistical analysis, and mechanical procedures aimed at beating them. Smart beta clearly is the epitome of community property, not quirky genius.

A lone investor, whether a genius or not, can typically keep a secret better than a community can, and does not have to publish his methods. This difference is important but not absolute, because the Securities and Exchange Commission generally requires large institutional investment managers to file quarterly reports listing their holdings.

Through the years, despite Mr. Buffett’s admonitions not to do so, many people have tried to mirror his strategy as it is revealed on the Berkshire Hathaway Form 13F filed with the S.E.C. Because Mr. Buffett presents himself as a long-term value investor, investors may think it doesn’t matter that this filing may be months out of date. But not understanding exactly how he makes decisions, they don’t have his edge, must come to the party late and have frequently bid up prices as they compete against one another to buy the assets in his portfolio.

There is plenty of evidence of this: A 2008 study by Gerald S. Martin of American University and John Puthenpurackal of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, found that when S.E.C. filings reveal changes in the Berkshire Hathaway portfolio, the stock prices of newly acquired companies had an abnormal one-day increase averaging 4 percent. Even so, they found long-lasting effects. A simulated replication strategy from 1976 through 2006 based on the S.E.C. filings outperformed the market by over 10 percent a year.

That was an amazing result, though merely copying Mr. Buffett has been less satisfying in recent years because his investment performance has dimmed somewhat. No one can excel all the time, and even a Buffett may produce in a lifetime no more than a few great ideas that may not be viable forever.

There are even bigger problems in replicating strategies extracted from the community of scholars who publish not only what they do, but why they do it.

For example, a much-talked-about paper by R. David McLean of Georgetown University and Jeffrey Pontiff of Boston College published last year pointed out that the effectiveness of stock market investing strategies seems to diminish, but not disappear, after publication.

The paper, which won the American Finance Association’s 2016 Amundi Smith Breeden Award, examined 97 financial patterns that appeared to predict investing returns, and had been published in reputable scholarly journals and supported by tests that found statistical significance. Such strategies relied on factors like price-earnings ratios, changes in analyst recommendations, credit rating downgrades, stock price momentum, industry momentum and failure to pay dividends.

The researchers looked at the performance of each of these strategies, assuming you had started right after publication of research papers on them and then continued for years. They found that while the strategies outperformed the market, their success decreased by more than 50 percent after publication.

In a follow-up paper, the two authors, along with Joseph Engelberg of the University of California, San Diego, showed that one-day positive surprises on firms’ earnings announcements accounted for nearly all of the investment’s total outperformance. Why? It appears to be because the market consistently makes mistaken valuations of corporate earnings, which tend to be corrected in stock prices only when the final earnings evidence is staring traders in the face.

So what’s an investor to do? Both published statistical analyses and published actions and opinions of knowledgeable people, whether geniuses or just smart and well-informed investors, are worth mulling over, if you have a taste for such things. But don’t follow these strategies blindly. We need to exercise our intuitive judgment as well as rely on the wisdom of smart, well-informed people to decide whether to continue to rely on statistical indicators and investment strategies that seemed to work in the past.

The problem is that the world is too complex for any method to work all of the time. The economist Alfred Marshall, then of Cambridge University, wrote in his 1890 textbook “Principles of Economics”: “Although scientific machinery should be as definite as possible, at the same time it should be flexible.” He added, “There is so much variety in economic problems, economic causes are intermingled with others in so many different ways, that exact scientific reasoning will seldom bring us all the way to the conclusion for which we are seeking.”

His reasoning is still valid. We need to use statistical analysis but also respect human intuition and even genius, if we are able to identify it. But do so with caution. No single strategy is likely to beat the market forever.

Robert J. Shiller is Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale.

WBUR

Trump's Fawning Cabinet Reveals A Mixed-Up Idea Of Leadership

By Tiziana Dearing | June 14, 2017

There’s something nearly pornographic about the footage of Donald Trump’s recent Cabinet meeting, in which his appointees heap praise on the president and try to top each other in professing what an honor it is to work for him. On seeing it, I felt burning shame for the sycophantism on display. It was a complete farce.

It’s exhausting trying to keep up with, analyze and then decide what to do about the latest debasement of the office of the presidency coming from its current occupant. President Trump's treatment of his role highlights disparities in our collective view of what it means to be a good leader. Trump and his supporters seem to think the right metric is, “The president can do pretty much whatever the hell he wants.”

I’d like to suggest an alternative, where we put principles of servant leadership -- in which the leader focuses on service to the cause and the team -- back in the mix.

Trump himself clearly has a strongman philosophy. From the beginning, he seems to have equated machismo and entitlement with competence and influence. For example, he congratulated the president of the Philippines on fighting illegal drug activity, a president who has openly bragged about murdering his own citizens as part of that approach. Or, his wiliness — nay, happiness — to sit there and absorb all that marshmallow fluff in the cabinet meeting. Strongmen like power, and with that comes servitude.

This machismo model continues to penetrate our American understanding of competent authority.

This machismo model continues to penetrate our American understanding of competent authority. We want the tough guy who will do the tough thing, and some part of us is grateful that he’s on watch. (Think Jack Nicholson playing Colonel Jessup in "A Few Good Men.") Elected officials, however, are also public servants, including and especially the president. It is reasonable, therefore, to argue that for public servants, strength should be matched with service. Servant leadership has been a widely accepted leadership practice for those who have appropriate awe for their responsibilities and seek to bring out the best in others.

The Greenleaf Center on Servant Leadership offers 12 servant leadership principles, including listening, empathy, healing, awareness, persuasion, conceptualization, foresight, stewardship, growth, building community, calling and nurturing the spirit.

Given that even Pope Francis probably struggles to embody all 12 traits, let’s set a lower, but still reasonable, bar for President Trump. In our divided democratic society, where the elected public servant represents a diverse polity, and where accountability is necessary for continued faith in government, I propose strength should at least be matched with listening, empathy, awareness, building community and stewardship.

We have not seen any of these qualities from President Trump.

Listening? He has 32 million followers on Twitter, but he follows only 45 people, and blocks anyone he doesn’t like. You can’t listen to people who can’t talk to you.

Empathy? Look at his early morning tweets after this most recent London terror attack -- in poor taste, mocking London’s leadership, and capitalizing on the grief and violence for his own agenda.

Awareness? The president was stunned that there was pushback on his move to fire then-FBI director James Comey.

What about building community? Walling off Mexicans, “America First” and pitting the rich against the poor in health care reform hardly gets the job done.

Stewardship? President Trump pulled the United States out of the Paris climate agreement. He is being sued for violation of the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause, and arguably made a $2 trillion counting error in his budget proposal.

It’s time to demand service, not to offer servitude.

Fortunately, more than one person leads this country. President Trump just nominated a new FBI director. As of late April, the White House had 468 presidential appointments left to complete. We have seven special House and Senate elections in 2017, and a whole passel of public leaders to hold accountable every day — including those fawning cabinet members.

Any American who has ever known a great leader surely will recognize in that person both safety and inspiration, someone who had their backs and who built up their spirits. It is not too much to ask for both, especially from those who seek to lead our nation. It’s time to demand service, not to offer servitude.

Tiziana Dearing is an associate professor of macro practice at Boston College School of Social Work.

June 14, 2017

BC professor debuts James Joyce virtual reality game in Ireland Boston College students test “Joycestick” before heading to Dublin to debut the game based on “Ulysses.”

By Mark Shanahan

Some people believe James Joyce’s “Ulysses” is the greatest novel in the English language. Unfortunately, it’s also one of the most difficult to read.

Boston College professor Joseph Nugent and a few dozen very bright students from BC, Northeastern, and Berklee have done something that could make Joyce’s masterpiece more accessible to the masses.

They’ve created a virtual reality game based on the book — cleverly titled “Joycestick” — that will debut Thursday at the National Library of Ireland for a crowd that’ll include Irish Senator David Norris and, we imagine, more than a few Joyceans. The next day, which just happens to be Bloomsday, the annual celebration of Joyce’s life, the public can put on headsets and test the game at the James Joyce Centre in Dublin.

“Joycestick” allows users to explore scenes and visit sites from “Ulysses,” a dense, door-stop-thick book chronicling a day in the life of ordinary Dubliner Leopold Bloom.

Reached Tuesday in Dublin, Nugent told us he came up with the idea for the game — it’s really more of an experience — as a way to “to give the very people who might never dream of opening ‘Ulysses’ a way to digest a book that has a quarter of a million words and a lot of very peculiar stuff in it.”

That was a year ago. He then assembled a team of students to create 3-D models of various objects found in the book; to build sets based on scenes in the book, including a restaurant in Paris, the kitchen in Bloom’s house, and an Irish pub; to find and record sound; and to write scripts and commands to run the program.

Liam Weir, one of the BC students who worked on the game and is in Dublin for the unveiling, said “Ulysses” is challenging to read, but adapting it for virtual reality wasn’t all that easy either.

“The text was really challenging so I started listening to the audio book, which helped me in terms of figuring out what’s dialogue, what’s not, and getting some level of understanding of what’s happening in the book,” said Weir, who’ll be a senior in the fall. “Adapting ‘Ulysses’ to another medium, we really had to drill down on the essence of each chapter.”

After Dublin, Nugent and some of the students are taking “Joycestick” to Toronto for the North American James Joyce Conference and then to Singapore for the International Association for the Study of Irish Literature.

June 11, 2017

'Ulysses' VR Game Developed in Boston Showcased in Ireland

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS BOSTON — A virtual reality game developed by college students in Boston and based on James Joyce's "Ulysses" is being showcased in Dublin as the Irish capital holds its annual celebration of the author and novel.

"Joycestick" was developed by a Boston College class that also included Northeastern University and Berklee College of Music students.

The public can test the game from June 14 to 16 at the James Joyce Centre. There's also an event Thursday at the National Library of Ireland with Irish Senator David Norris and the students and professors who developed the game.

"Joycestick" lets users explore key scenes from "Ulysses," a seminal work of 1920s-era modernist literature that traces a day in the life of an ordinary Dubliner.

The novel draws parallels with the ancient Greek epic "The Odyssey."

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June 9, 2017 Michelle Carter’s lawyers aiming for acquittal Friday, before they call any witnesses

By Travis Andersen Before they put on their case Friday, Michelle Carter’s lawyers will ask the judge presiding over her manslaughter trial to issue a finding of not guilty due to insufficient evidence.

It’s a routine motion during criminal trials and not often granted, especially in highprofile cases.

But this time could be different, legal experts said.

“I think there’s a decent chance in this case,” said Rosanna Cavallaro, a Suffolk Law professor. “The question is, even if everything the prosecution says is true, can you say as a matter of law that [Carter’s actions] caused [the victim’s] death? And I think that’s a real question” here.

In a disturbing case that has grabbed national headlines, Carter, 20, is charged with involuntary manslaughter in Bristol Juvenile Court for allegedly cajoling her friend Conrad Roy III, 18, into killing himself in July 2014 in a series of text messages. Prosecutors rested their case Thursday.

They also allege Carter was criminally reckless because she was on a cellphone listening as Roy, of Mattapoisett, was slowly overcome by carbon monoxide fumes in his truck in Fairhaven but failed to alert first responders or his relatives. Carter could serve up to 20 years in prison if convicted.

Judge Lawrence Moniz is serving as fact-finder in the jury-waived trial.

He has viewed chilling texts that Carter sent to Roy -- who like her battled mental health issues -- urging him to commit suicide shortly before his death.

But prosecutors, while laying out a “horrific” case, may not have the law on their side, so Moniz could verywell issue a not guilty finding before hearing any defense witnesses, Cavallaro said.

She said individuals who commit suicide are generally assumed to possess free will under the law, except in extreme cases, such as one instance in the 1920s when a woman drank poison after being abducted and brutalized by her male captor.

“But that’s pretty unusual,” Cavallaro said. “You want to see [Carter] punished, because morally we find it so appalling -- what kind of person does that? But that’s not exactly the same question” as the legal matter.

Robert Bloom, a Boston College Law professor, said defense motions for a directed not guilty finding are rarely granted in high-profile trials, in part because juries usually decide those cases.

“The judge has the safety of the jury,” Bloom said. “By that I mean, the judge doesn’t really have to decide if he doesn’t think there’s much of a case, if he has confidence that the jury will decide the same way.”

But Moniz is the sole arbiter in the closely watched Carter trial.

“The piece that I think may be missing is whether her actions caused [Roy] to commit suicide, the so-called proximate cause of this whole thing,” Bloom said. “Was it her [texts], or was he going to do it anyway? And in that way, the judge could indeed do a directed [not guilty] finding.”

Prosecutors, however, were given a vote of confidence last year by the state Supreme Judicial Court.

The SJC ruled last summer that a grand jury had probable cause to indict Carter, determining in a unanimous decision that she was “personally aware that her conduct was both reprehensible and punishable.”

The decision marked the first time the court ruled that an involuntary manslaughter indictment could stand on “the basis of words alone.” The court found that through a stream of text messages and cellphone calls, Carter had established a “virtual presence at the time of the suicide.”

“But for the defendant’s admonishments, pressure, and instructions, the victim would not have gotten back into the truck and poisoned himself to death,” Justice Robert Cordy wrote in the opinion.

June 9, 2017

Visa seeks digital payments Where cash is not king Jordan Graham Credit: (Courtesy Photo) DOING IT DIGITAL: Alfred Kelly Jr., CEO of Visa Inc., says the company’s biggest rival isn’t other credit card companies, but cash. (Photo by Christopher Soldt/Boston College)

the company’s CEO said in Boston yesterday.

Credit card giant Visa is pouring resources into the future of payments — including contact-free mobile technology and internet-connected appliances that can order snacks or laundry detergent — in its decades-old war with cash,

“The enemy is cash for us, our job is to convert every cash or check transaction to electronic and digitized payment,” said Alfred Kelly Jr., chief executive of Visa.

“We must be looking two, four, five years ahead to try to find the next thing that’s going to happen,” Kelly said. “There’s no area we’re investing in more than innovation.”

Speaking at the Boston College Finance Conference, Kelly said Visa is pushing to play a role in the impending wave of internet-connected devices in public, in the home and just about everywhere else. Kelly said appliance maker Whirlpool is already working on a washing machine that can order more laundry detergent with the tap of a button and the long-envisioned refrigerator that can order food without making a trip to the grocery store. Connected home appliances that can restock on demand have long been seen as inevitable and Visa is making a play to be the company that makes the money move.

“No longer will it be about businesses where you’ll use your payment capability, it’ll be about places and things,” Kelly said. “There will be places in your house you’ll go to pay for things.”

About half of Visa’s employees are now programmers, coders and other tech positions, he said.

Visa recently opened an office in Palo Alto, Calif., the heart of Silicon Valley, just to recruit talent there.

Kelly said even with traditional competition from MasterCard and American Express and upstarts, Visa’s true competition is still cold hard cash. That’s why, he said, Visa is trying to help popularize non-contact payments including Apple Pay, which uses near-field communication to transmit payment details. Kelly said NFC payments are still less than 1 percent of all transactions, compared to countries like Australia, where those payments account for 88 percent of transactions.

Still, there are some emerging technologies that Kelly said Visa is not concerned about.

“Bitcoin has not really taken off,” he said. “I’m not ignoring it in any way, shape or form, but it hasn’t really taken off in any real way.”

The price of bitcoins have spiked recently, roughly doubling over the past three months. Last month, Abby Johnson, chief executive of Fidelity Investments, touted the benefits of the blockchain, bitcoin’s underlying technology.

June 9, 2017

Jeb Bush backs president, but says ‘who cares what I think?’

Chris Villani

Former Florida governor and GOP presidential candidate Jeb Bush said he doesn’t think President Trump obstructed justice when he fired former FBI director James B. Comey.

When Bush, who spoke yesterday to a standing-room-only crowd at Boston College’s 12th annual Carroll School of Management Finance Conference, was asked whether Trump obstructed justice, he replied, “No, I don’t, but who cares what I think?”

Bush went on to lament the lack of compromise and the constant quarreling that has engulfed Washington.

“It would be great to get back to the business of governing and less about the swirling controversies,” Bush said. “I just think the president needs to focus on doing his job.

“There are great opportunities for him to hire people,” Bush continued. “He’s done pretty well there. The judicial appointments have been good, he’s got a great foreign policy team, he should be president and stop creating all the controversies — let that process takes its place.”

And though he admitted he’s not a “big fan” of Trump, he said he hoped the president would make good on a major campaign promise to rid D.C. of Beltway insiders. “ ‘Drain the swamp’ was a classic line, it resonated with me,” Bush said. “I didn’t vote for the guy, I’m not a big fan and everybody knows that, but I was hopeful that he would drain the swamp and the swamp-draining would include lobbying reform ... which could be done by executive order if the president really wanted it.”

June 5, 2017

Jeb Bush to address finance industry executives, researchers

Associated Press

NEWTON . — Former Florida governor and Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush is planning to address finance industry executives and researchers at Boston College.

School officials say Bush will join other industry experts in a daylong conversation Thursday focused on investment opportunities in the emerging, equity, energy and real estate markets.

Bush is appearing as part of the 12th Annual Carroll School of Management Finance Conference.

Other speakers at the event include former diplomat and Kennedy School of Government Professor Nicholas Burns, VISA Inc. Chief Executive Officer Alfred F. Kelly, Jr. and Goldman Sachs Advisory Director Lindsay LoBue. Participants also include Goldman Sachs Asset Management Director Steven Barry, Kensho COO Adam Broun, Honest Dollar founder William Hurley, Geode Capital Management President Vince Gubitosi and Lazard Asset Management Managing Director Jay Paul Leupp.

NEWS MEDIA APPEARANCES JUNE 1, 2017 - MAY 31, 2018 DATE _

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11-04-17 11-03-17 11-03-17 11-03-17 11-03-17 11-03-17 11-03-17 11-03-17 11-03-17 11-03-17 11-03-17 11-03-17 11-03-17 11-03-17 11-03-17 11-03-17 11-03-17 11-02-17 11-01-17 10-31-17 10-27-17 10-26-17 10-25-17 10-25-17 10-24-17 10-23-17 10-23-17 10-23-17 10-23-17 10-23-17 10-23-17 10-23-17 10-23-17 10-23-17 10-21-17 10-21-17 10-20-17 10-19-17 10-18-17 10-16-17 10-16-17 10-16-17 10-16-17 10-14-17 10-10-17 10-10-17 10-10-17 10-10-17 10-10-17 10-09-17 10-06-17 10-06-17 10-05-17 10-03-17 10-02-17 10-01-17 09-29-17 09-28-17

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CWF’s Harrington on parenting millennials CWF’s Fraone on millennials and employment Communication’s Serazio on fake news BC grad, Trustee, donor Schiller on Center for Integrated Science and Society BC grad, Trustee, donor Schiller on Center for Integrated Science and Society BC grad, Trustee, donor Schiller on Center for Integrated Science and Society BC grad, Trustee, donor Schiller on Center for Integrated Science and Society BC grad, Trustee, donor Schiller on Center for Integrated Science and Society BC grad, Trustee, donor Schiller on Center for Integrated Science and Society BC grad, Trustee, donor Schiller on Center for Integrated Science and Society BC grad, Trustee, donor Schiller on Center for Integrated Science and Society BC grad, Trustee, donor Schiller on Center for Integrated Science and Society BC grad, Trustee, donor Schiller on Center for Integrated Science and Society BC grad, Trustee, donor Schiller on Center for Integrated Science and Society BC grad, Trustee, donor Schiller on Center for Integrated Science and Society BC grad, Trustee, donor Schiller on Center for Integrated Science and Society BC grad, Trustee, donor Schiller on Center for Integrated Science and Society Carroll School’s Martin on gender roles in voicing ideas Op-ed: English’s Weiskott writes on digital humanities Op-ed: Theology’s Gaillardetz writes on Pope Francis and the Church Op-ed: PoliSci’s Laurence writes on Iran History’s Maney on new JFK tapes History’s Maney on new JFK tapes Psychology’s Winner on logic in children’s art Physics’ Tafti on new spin liquid BC’s Amoris Laetitia conference BC awards Boston College Strong scholarship BC awards Boston College Strong scholarship BC awards Boston College Strong scholarship BC awards Boston College Strong scholarship BC awards Boston College Strong scholarship BC awards Boston College Strong scholarship BC awards Boston College Strong scholarship BC grad Downes on first Boston College Strong scholarship winner Connell School’s Burgess is inspiration for Netflix drama “Mindhunters” SSW’s Egmont on illegal immigration crackdown BC Ireland Business Council established CRR on common retirement fears Advance on BC Ireland Business Council establishment BC student on Puerto Rico relief efforts Biology’s Seyfried on ketogenic diets and cancer Law’s Yen on NFL athlete Kaepernick BC’s Amoris Laetitia conference Essay: PoliSci’s Wolfe writes on evil as a conservative buzzword Theology’s Fr. Keenan on Amoris Laetitia revisited Gov. Baker on SSW, other Mass. schools implementing addiction curriculum Gov. Baker on SSW, other Mass. schools implementing addiction curriculum CRR on 401(k) and retirement funds BC’s Amoris Laetitia conference Theology’s Fr. Keenan on BC’s Amoris Laetitia conference Theology’s Fr. Keenan on BC’s Amoris Laetitia conference Theology’s Fr. Keenan on BC’s Amoris Laetitia conference Theology’s Fr. Keenan on BC’s Amoris Laetitia conference Theology’s Fr. Keenan on US implementation of Amoris Laetitia Communication’s Serazio on political, conservative nature of sports Pops on the Heights scholarship gala raises record $14 million Theology’s Copeland on censoring and civil discussions Law and Theology’s Kaveny on nominations to the federal judiciary

09-28-17 09-26-17 09-26-17 09-25-17 09-25-17 09-25-17 09-25-17 09-25-17 09-25-17 09-21-17 09-21-17 09-21-17 09-20-17 09-18-17 09-15-17 09-15-17 09-13-17 09-10-17 09-08-17 09-08-17 09-07-17 09-06-17 09-06-17 09-06-17 09-05-17 09-03-17 09-01-17 09-01-17 08-29-17 08-28-17 08-26-17 08-23-17 08-23-17 08-21-17 08-18-17 08-18-17 08-17-17 08-17-17 08-16-17 08-16-17 08-16-17 08-15-17 08-10-17 08-09-17 08-08-17 08-08-17 08-08-17 08-08-17 08-07-17 08-07-17 08-06-17 08-05-17 08-05-17 08-02-17 08-02-17 08-02-17 08-01-17 08-01-17

The Conversation Carroll School’s Manzon, Gray on Trump’s tax plan Wall Street Journal Student Affairs’ Dupont on graduate salaries Irish Times BC Ireland’s Cronin on Trump underestimating the power of teams Commonweal Law and Theology’s Kaveny on nominations to the federal judiciary Boston Globe Trustee Fish on Pops on the Heights scholarship gala National Catholic Reporter Theology’s Copeland on cancelled Madonna University lecture National Catholic Reporter Theology’s Gaillardetz on correction of heresy marked by hypocrisy Boston Herald STM’s Fr. Bretzke on counter-productiveness of Pope Francis’ critics Miami Herald CRR on cost of raising children Fortune BC among universities producing the most powerful women Washington Post Law and Theology’s Kaveny on Dianne Feinstein, anti-Catholic bigotry New York Times Essay: English’s Rotella writes on Jake LaMotta Los Angeles Times Law’s Hong on California’s opposition to Trump’s wall US News & World Report CWF on whether dads are as torn between jobs and family as moms University World News Essay: Lynch School’s Altbach writes on nationalism and internationalization America Theology’s Gaillardetz on changes in the teaching ministry The Guardian (UK) History’s Richardson on why we cannot allow Hillary Clinton to disappear Wall Street Journal CRR on student loans and retirement savings Dow Jones MarketWatch CRR’s Munnell on SS reform New York times STM’s Ospino on slain clerics in Colombia Jerusalem Post Op-ed: Communication’s Sienkiewicz writes on anti-Semitic actions in US Boston Globe EES’ Ebel on minor Mass. earthquake Boston Globe Law’s Hong on Mass. joining other states in suing Trump administration New York Times STM’s Ospino on Pope Francis’ visit to Colombia Boston Globe Boston mayor, BC grad Walsh on BC grad Frates as global inspiration US News & World Report STM’s Ospino on Pope Francis’s visit to Colombia Boston Globe BC grad McConaughy sets record time in Appalachian Trail completion Fortune CWF’s Rikleen on why women need to stop believing in Ivanka Trump Boston Herald PoliSci’s Ross on North Korea proving its desire to provoke America STM’s Fr. Baldovin on reasons Pope Francis embraces Vatican II liturgy National Catholic Reporter STM’s Ospino on Papal trip to Colombia Chicago Tribune CRR on importance of inheritance plans Pittsburgh Post-Gazette CWP on US wealth transfer Boston Herald PoliSci’s Ross on North Korean threat US News & World Report Law’s Greenfield, Bloom on cities facing pressure to stop hate group marches New York Times Sociology’s Schor: excerpt from her book The Overspent American The Atlantic Law’s Greenfield on cities facing pressure to stop hate group marches San Francisco Gate Carroll School’s G. Kane on sites refusing anti-Neo Nazis after violence Chronicle of Higher Ed Op-ed: Theology’s Fr. Keenan on University of Virginia violence Boston Globe History’s Richardson on Boston Confederate Monument Charlotte Observer Law’s Lyons on net neutrality Science Daily Biology’s van Opijnen on antibiotics disrupting genetic responses in bacteria Wall Street Journal Psychology’s Gray advocates more free play time for children Boston Herald PoliSci’s Ross on rising tension in China Huffington Post Op-ed: CWF’s Harrington writes on adult “children” leaving home Wall Street Journal CRR pension study Daily Star English’s Nugent’s VR game based on “Ulysses” Strait Times English’s Nugent’s VR game based on “Ulysses” MIT Sloan Mgt Review Essay: Carroll School’s G. Kane writes on digital transformation Fortune CWF’s Harrington on successful “Fatherly” website Los Angeles Times Law and Theology’s Kaveny on USC dean drug scandal Boston Globe History’s Johnson’s new book The New Bostonians Irish Times History’s Kenny cited for book contribution Washington Post Op-ed: PoliSci’s Hopkins co-authors piece on GOP’s effect on Trump New York Times CAW’s James on benefits of tutoring after age 50 Law’s Bloom on Carter sentencing, appeal New York Times Forbes.com CAW’s James on companies trying to ensure jobs for older workers Financial Times Psychology’s Gray on curing childhood boredom

07-31-17 07-31-17 07-29-17 07-28-17 07-26-17 07-26-17 07-25-17 07-24-17 07-21-17 07-20-17 07-18-17 07-18-17 07-18-17 07-18-17 07-17-17 07-15-17 07-15-17 07-14-17 07-14-17 07-14-17 07-14-17 07-11-17 07-10-17 07-08-17 07-06-17 07-06-17 07-05-17 07-03-17 07-03-17 07-02-17 06-30-17 06-30-17 06-29-17 06-28-17 06-26-17 06-27-17 06-26-17 06-24-17 06-23-17 06-23-17 06-21-17 06-20-17 06-20-17 06-16-17 06-16-17 06-16-17 06-15-17 06-15-17 06-15-17 06-15-17 06-14-17 06-14-17 06-14-17 06-13-17 06-13-17 06-11-17 06-11-17 06-11-17

National Catholic Reporter Washington Post Boston Globe Fortune Huffington Post New York Times Discover.com Forbes.com Philly.com Bloomberg News The Week Washington Post New York Times PolitiFact Boston Globe Boston Globe Times Higher Education Forbes.com New York Times Time Entrepreneur America Chronicle of Higher Ed Star Tribune Harvard Business Review Pittsburgh Post-Gazette CommonWealth National Catholic Reporter America Catholic News Agency Time Boston Herald Boston Globe Huffington Post New York Times University World News Los Angeles Times The Economist New York Times New York Times Boston Globe MIT Sloan Mgt Review Inside Higher Ed Boston Globe Harvard Business Review Brides Magazine New York Times US News & World Report Los Angeles Times Business Insider Boston Globe Inside Higher Ed Bloomberg News Business Insider Commonweal Boston.com Boston Herald US News & World Report

BC’s Catholic identity PoliSci’s O'Rourke on Trump’s idea for regime change in Iran CRR on elderly residents struggling to pay bills CRR on pension plan problem CWF cited on stats for recruiting, hiring millennials Law’s Madoff on Chinese donation to NY charity Study: Carroll School’s Hagtvedt, Brasel on color, size and consumers CRR on retirement hacks CRR on retirement strategies for widows, divorcees CRR’s Munnell on fixing SS PoliSci’s Laurence on why some European countries are safer from terrorism CAW on Minn. factories urging workers to work past 65 Clough Center’s Ladegaard on Hansa Market’s plan to ban sale of fentanyl Law’s Greenfield on Trump’s claim of getting rid of Johnson Amendment Op-ed: English’s Weiskott writes on millennials CRR on people losing health care coverage as they get older Essay: Lynch School’s Altbach writes on free speech Essay: Carroll School’s G. Kane writes on adapting cos to changing world CWP on bridging a generation gap in philanthropy BC to offer Medieval studies class based on “Game of Thrones” in spring 2018 Carroll School’s Pratt on strategies for success STM’s Fr. Baldovin, student on gluten-free host PoliSci’s Hopkins on why Republicans think college is bad for the country CAW on Minn. factories urging workers to work past 65 Op-ed: Carroll School’s Subramaniam co-authors piece on trust in digital age CRR cited re retirement strategies Essay: Lynch School’s Altbach writes on Mass. ranking on educational tests STM’s Ospino on change in, response to, Church demographics STM’s Fr. Baldovin on patriotic songs sung at Mass STM’s Ospino on change in, response to, Church demographics Law’s Bilder cited in “25 Moments That Changed America” STM’s Groome on Church advancing past “era of cover-ups” BC student Bailey possible contestant on new entrepreneur show Essay: CWF’s Harrington writes on fathers’ conflicts in family, work balance Law’s Hong on SCOTUS’ action on travel ban Law’s Hong on universities looking for upside of Trump, Brexit effect CAW’s James on subconscious bias in older employees Economics’ Basu’s article cited as evidence for Fed risking inflation recovery Carroll School’s E. Kane on collapse of Banco Popular Carroll School’s Pontiff cited on investment strategies Law’s Bloom on Hernandez case Essay: Carroll School’s Ransbotham writes on AI advancements LSOE’s Aleman on strategies for navigating academic careers Law’s Albert on importance of education, health Essay: Carroll School’s Dean Boynton writes on ways to sell ideas CAW on positive effects of paid paternity leave CRR’s study on negative effects of Medicaid cuts CRR’s Crawford on New Mexico’s pension plan Law’s Beckman on the Michelle Carter trial Study: CWF: men and paternity leave English’s Nugent: VR game based on “Ulysses” English’s Weiskott on teaching digital textbooks CRR on retirement saving strategies Study: CWF: men and paternity leave Essay: BC grad writes about experience as Syrian refugee English’s Nugent: VR game based on “Ulysses” English’s Nugent: VR game based on “Ulysses” English’s Nugent: VR game based on “Ulysses”

06-11-17 06-11-17 06-11-17 06-11-17 06-09-17 06-09-17 06-09-17 06-09-17 06-09-17 06-09-17 06-06-17 06-06-17 06-05-17 06-05-17 06-04-17

Washington Times New York Times Wall Street Journal Boston Globe Boston Herald Boston Herald The Hill Barron’s Forbes.com Boston Globe MIT Sloan Mgt Review Internat’l Business Times Boston Herald PolitiFact New York Times

English’s Nugent: VR game based on “Ulysses” English’s Nugent: VR game based on “Ulysses” CRR’s Rutledge on women working longer than men CAW’s James on why more people work past age 65 BC CEO Club: Visa head Alfred Kelly, Jr. Carroll School Finance Conference: Jeb Bush among speakers Carroll School Finance Conference: Jeb Bush among speakers CRR’s Sass on theory that baby boomers could reduce investment returns CRR on Trump’s paid leave decisions Law’s Bloom on Michelle Carter trial Essay: Carroll School’s G. Kane, Gallaugher write on tech upstart CRR’s Blanton: jobs that millennials are working Carroll School Finance Conference: Jeb Bush among speakers Law’s Wirth on Trump’s climate change stance Law’s Wirth on Trump’s climate change stance

SAMPLING OF BROADCAST OUTLET APPEARANCES (June 1, 2017– May 31, 2018) 5-21-18: Fox Boston 25 News Alumnus and Trustee Steve Pemberton interviewed about his biopic “A Chance in the World.”

5-16-18: Marketplace Radio, CBSNews.com “Moneywatch” Carroll School of Management/Richard McGowan, S.J., re Supreme Court decision on sports betting.

5-14-18: WBUR News Carroll School of Management/Richard McGowan, S.J., re Supreme Court decision on sports betting.

5-10-18: WGBH’s “Greater Boston” History/Heather Cox Richardson re Trump’s role in freedom on North Korean prisoners.

5-9-18: CNBC.com Center for Retirement Research/Geoffrey T. Sanzenbacher re legal action causing 401(k) fees to fall.

5-4-18: WBUR’s “Radio Boston” School of Social Work/Tiziana Dearing re a review of the news of the week.

5-1-18: NPR’s “Morning Edition” Carroll School of Management/Rawley Heimer re gerrymandered districts affecting constituents’ economic security.

5-1-18: Forbes podcast Psychology/Peter Gray re gaming addiction.

April 2018: CNN Theology/Rev. James Weiss featured in network’s six-week series on the papacy.

4-27-18: NECN’s “This Week in Business” Trustee Jay Hooley and CSOM’s Warren Zola discuss 25th anniversary of CEO Club.

4-27-18: WBUR News Carroll School of Management/Richard McGowan, S.J., re Mass. State Lottery policy on repeat winners.

4-25-18: NECN/NBC Boston Interview with Truman Scholar Lynch School of Education student Natalee Deaette.

4-20-18: NPR’s “Weekend Edition” Center for Retirement Research/Alicia Munnell re why teachers can’t use Social Security.

4-19-18: WGBH’s “Greater Boston” Law School/Kari Hong re capital punishment for cop killers.

4-17-18: CNNMoney.com Center for Retirement Research report cited on pensions running out of money.

4-12-18: NBC Boston; WBZ Radio’s “Nightside with Dan Rea” Philosophy/Kerry Cronin re “The Dating Project,” a documentary based on her popular course.

4-12-18: WBUR’s “All Things Considered” Carroll School of Management/Richard McGowan, S.J., re possibility of MGM taking over Wynn Resort’s spot.

4-10-18: NECN’s “The Take” School of Social Work/Tiziana Dearing re Catholic social innovation projects aiding migration crisis.

4-10-18: Marketplace Radio Economics/Robert Murphy re workers in tight supply for small businesses.

4-9-18: WBUR News Lynch School of Education/Catherine Wong re increasing number of people of color in teaching.

4-7-18: Voice of America Lynch School of Education/Philip Altbach re number of college students attending private schools worldwide.

4-6-18: WBUR’s “Radio Boston” History/Heather Cox Richardson re Trump sending troops to US-Mexico border.

4-2-18: NBC Boston Carroll School of Management student group’s MBA 5K raises money for Boston Strong scholarship.

4-2-18: NBC Boston Law School/Kari Hong re future of DACA. 3-27-18: CNBC.com Center on Aging & Work/Jacquelyn James re impact on your life when you retire early.

3-22-18: CNN.com Law School/Dan Lyons re antitrust trial between the US and AT&T. 3-22-18: CNBC, Bloomberg Radio Carroll School of Management CEO Club event with Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein.

3-27-18: CNBC Center for Retirement Research/Matt Rutledge re employer interest in workers over age 50.

3-19-18: WCVB’s “Chronicle” Feature on Will Supple ’20, a contestant on “American Idol.”

3-17-18: NPR’s “The Salt” Woods College/Peter Moloney re how Guinness stout saved eight sailors in 1917.

3-16-18: BackStory Show History/Kevin Kenny re Molly Maguires secret society.

3-16-18: Voice of America BC Ireland/Mike Cronin re celebration of St. Patrick’s Day.

3-16-18: WBUR’s “Radio Boston” School of Social Work/Tiziana Dearing re a review of the news of the week.

3-13-18: CBSNews.com “Moneywatch” Center for Retirement Research report on financial frailty of retirees.

3-13-18: CTV (Canada) School of Theology and Ministry/James Bretzke, S.J., re 5th anniversary of Pope Francis’ papacy.

3-13-18: NECN’s “The Take” School of Social Work/Tiziana Dearing re personality matchup between Trump and Kim Jong Un of North Korea.

3-7-18: NECN/NBC Boston, CBSNews.com Coverage of Woods College/Boston FBI’s Boston Conference on Cyber Security.

3-2-18: CBSNews.com “Moneywatch” Center for Retirement Research data cited in story on fortifying retirement.

2-22-18: WGBH/Facebook Live African and African Diaspora Studies/Regine Jean-Charles re what’s next for #MeToo. 2-19-18: NECN’s “The Take” Law School/Kari Hong re DACA and immigration debate in America.

2-15-18: Bloomberg Radio Coverage of BC CEO Club speaker AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson.

2-15-18: Boston 25 News Weston Observatory/John Ebel re small earthquake in New Hampshire.

2-14-18: CNN.com Law School/Daniel Lyons re DOJ antitrust lawsuit against AT&T. 2-6-18: NECN’s “The Take” Carroll School of Management/Richard McGowan, S.J. re future casino license for Wynn Resort.

2-2-18: NECN Carroll School of Management/Warren Zola re assessment of the future of football.

2-2-18: CNBC.com Economics/Peter Ireland re assessment of Janet Yellen’s tenure at the Fed. 2-2-18: WBUR’s “Radio Boston” School of Social Work/Tiziana Dearing re a review of the news of the week.

1-31-18: CBSNews.com “Moneywatch” Center for Retirement Research study cited re Americans’ retirement savings.

1-29-18: WBUR News Carroll School of Management/Richard McGowan, S.J., re Gaming Commission investigation of Steve Wynn.

1-27-18: NBC Boston Carroll School of Management/Richard McGowan, S.J., re Gaming Commission investigation of Steve Wynn.

1-25-18: NBC Boston Carling Hay, Jeremy Shakun, David Deese, Donnah Canavan interviewed for special series “The Climate Project.”

1-23-18: BBC News.com Psychology/Peter Gray re decline in play for children has negative effects.

1-23-18: WBUR’s “Radio Boston” School of Social Work/Tiziana Dearing re assessment of Gov. Charlie Baker’s first term.

1-12-18: NBC Boston Sociology/Zine Magubane re Trump’s negative comments about Africa.

1-12-18: NPR’s “All Things Considered” African and African Diaspora Studies/Regine Jean-Charles re Trump’s negative comments about Haiti.

1-11-18: BBC News.com Earth and Environmental Sciences/Paul Strother re discovery of primitive moths and butterflies from Jurassic period.

1-8-18: WGBH’s “Greater Boston” African and African Diaspora Studies/Regine Jean-Charles re speculating on Oprah running for president.

1-5-18: NBC Boston Earth and Environmental Sciences/Carling Hay re record high tide in Boston during blizzard.

1-2-18: NECN’s “The Take” School of Social Work/Tiziana Dearing re future of #MeToo movement.

12-26-17: CNBC Law School/Ray Madoff re tax reform effects on charitable giving.

12-22-17: PRI’s “The World” School of Theology and Ministry/James Bretzke, S.J., re symbolism of Christmas trees.

12-21-17: WHDH-TV (Boston) School of Theology and Ministry/James Bretzke, S.J., re legacy of Cardinal Bernard Law. 12-21-17: NECN’s “The Take” C21/STM/Thomas Groome re legacy of Cardinal Bernard Law. 12-20-17: WCVB Theology/Richard Gaillardetz re death and legacy of Cardinal Bernard Law.

12-20-17: WGBH Radio School of Social Work/Tiziana Dearing re death and legacy of Cardinal Bernard Law. 12-20-17: NPR School of Theology and Ministry/James Bretzke, S.J., re death and legacy of Cardinal Bernard Law. 12-19-17: BBC World Service’s “The Forum” History/Prasannan Parthasarathi re history of cotton.

12-19-17: NBC Boston School of Social Work/Tiziana Dearing re death and legacy of Cardinal Bernard Law. 12-15-17: CBSNews.com Center for Retirement Research report on life expectancy of women stagnating.

12-15-17: WBUR’s “Radio Boston” School of Social Work/Tiziana Dearing re a review of the news of the week, sexual misconduct allegations.

12-14-17: Bloomberg Radio, NBCNews.com Law School/Daniel Lyons re FCC’s repeal of net neutrality.

12-11-17: NECN "The Take" Law School/Kent Greenfield on the SCOTUS case Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission.

12-8-17: WGBH Radio Law School/Daniel Lyons re potential repeal of net neutrality.

12-4-17: NBCNews.com Economics/Sam Richardson re implications of CVS-Aetna merger.

11-30-17: CBS Boston Law School/Robert Bloom re SCOTUS case involving phone privacy in the digital age.

11-29-17: PRI/WGBH/WNYC’s “The Takeaway” Law School/Ray Madoff re how new tax bill could hinder charitable donations.

11-28-17: NECN’s “The Take” Law School/Kari Hong re need to review definitions and prosecution of rape.

11-28-17: NECN’s “The Take” School of Social Work/Westy Egmont re how the global refugee crisis is the story of the year.

11-28-17: NECN Coverage of BC CEO Club event featuring Michael Dell, CEO of Dell Technologies.

11-27-17: CNN Money.com Law School/Patricia McCoy re Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

11-22-17: NECN’s “The Take” School of Social Work/Tiziana Dearing re disclosure of sexual misconduct incidents in politics, Hollywood.

11-22-17: WGBH Radio Lynch School of Education/Patrick Proctor re preparing bilingual teachers.

11-21-17: WBUR “On Point” School of Social Work/Kathleen McInnis-Dittrich re need to have family conversations about elder care.

11-21-17: WBZ Radio’s “Nightside with Dan Rea” Annual college admissions panel show featuring Undergraduate Admission Director John Mahoney.

11-17-17: Marketplace Radio Economics/Robert Murphy re plans to reduce trade deficit.

11-14-17: Voice of America Lynch School of Education/Philip Altbach re decline in international students at US colleges.

11-9-17: CBS Boston Feature on BC’s Supported Employment Program.

11-9-17: Marketplace Radio Law School/James Repetti re impact of GOP tax plan.

11-3-17: WCVB.com, ABCNews.com Announcement of Schiller Institute for Integrated Science and Society.

11-2-17: CNBC.com Center for Retirement Research data cited on 401(k) balances for those nearing retirement.

11-1-17: WGBH’s “Greater Boston” Political Science /Peter Krause re terror attack in New York City.

10-26-17: NBC Boston.com, WCVB History/Patrick Maney re release of JFK assassination files.

10-24-17: NECN’s “The Take” School of Social Work/Tiziana Dearing re political squalor in Washington, DC. 10-24-17: NBC “Early Today” Presentation of the BC Strong Scholarship to Jack Manning ’20.

10-23-17: Boston 25 News, CBS Boston, NBC Boston, WCVB, NECN Presentation of the BC Strong Scholarship to Jack Manning ’20.

10-16-17: NECN’s “The Take” School of Social Work/Westy Egmont re the slaughter of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar.

10-15-17: WBZ Radio’s “Up Front with Chris Citorik” Communication/Matt Sienkiewicz re political headlines of the week.

10-10-17: WBUR.com School of Social Work/Gautam Yadama re SSW joining other social work schools in new curriculum guidelines to train social workers to deal with opioid crisis.

9-21-17: Bloomberg Radio’s “The Bloomberg Baystate Business Hour” Law School/Carmen Ortiz discusses her stint as Rappaport Distinguished Visiting Professor.

9-21-17: WBUR’s “Morning Edition” History/Heather Cox Richardson re Trump’s UN speech.

9-20-17: WBUR’s “The Remembrance Project” Appreciation of the life of Campus Ministry’s Jojo David nearly a year after his death.

9-19-17: NECN’s “The Take” History/Heather Cox Richardson re Trump’s UN speech and validity of 2016 election.

9-18-17: ABC Radio (Australia) Political Science/Peter Krause re possible Fatah-Hamas unity agreement for the Palestinians.

9-10-17: CBS’s “Sunday Morning” Law School/Patricia McCoy re future of Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

8-31-17: WBUR’s “Radio Boston” School of Social Work/Tiziana Dearing re relief efforts in Houston and long-term issues.

8-30-17: WCVB Boston Athletics/Women’s Basketball Coach Erik Johnson joins effort to donate clothing for Hurricane Harvey victims.

8-29-17: NBC Boston Earth and Environmental Sciences/Noah Snyder re how Boston could prepare for hurricanes and extreme rainfall events.

8-23-17: CNBC.com Center for Retirement Research data on late-career job changes cited in story on dog store owner.

8-22-17: WBUR Law School/Jeffrey Cohen re verdict in case involving unions and “Top Chef” executives.

8-16-17: WBUR News History/Heather Cox Richardson re Confederate monuments in Mass and across US. 8-15-17: CNBC.com Center for Retirement Research data cited in story on best and worst cities for retirement.

8-4-17: PressTV Law School/Michael Cassidy re criminal case of girl who texted boyfriend to kill himself.

8-4-17: CNBC.com Center for Retirement Research data cited in story on phased retirements.

7-30-17: PBS “NewsHour” Law School/Kent Greenfield re B Corps, a way for businesses to verify their social good for the environment and/or employees.

7-19-17: CNBC.com Center for Retirement Research data cited in story on shortfalls in retirement savings.

7-19-17: Bloomberg Radio Law School/Patricia McCoy re increase in auto loan defaults.

7-13-17: WGBH Earth and Environmental Sciences/Jeremy Shakun re using Ice Age information to predict rising sea levels.

7-13-17: Southern California Public Radio Political Science/Jonathan Laurence re meeting between Trump and France’s President Macron.

7-13-17: CBSNews.com Center for Retirement Research data cited in story on fees and IRAs. 7-10-17: Marketplace Radio Political Science/Peter Skerry re Census survey and LGBTQ issues.

7-6-17: NECN’s “The Take” Political Science/Peter Krause re meeting between Trump and Russian President Putin.

7-5-17: CNBC.com Center for Retirement Research data cited in story on problems that can affect retirement savings.

7-5-17: CNBC.com Center for Retirement Research/Alicia Munnell re shortfalls in retirement income.

7-3-17: CBSNews.com Center for Retirement Research/Kim Blanton re incomes for Americans on the decline.

6-26-17: NECN’s “The Take” Law School/Kent Greenfield re SCOTUS ruling on travel ban and insights on newest justice, Neil Gorsuch.

6-25-17: CNBC.com Woods College/Kenneth Sanford re Amazon-Whole Foods deal.

6-23-17: WBUR’s “Radio Boston” School of Social Work/Tiziana Dearing re analysis of the local news events of the week.

6-22-17: CBSNews.com Law School/Robert Bloom re future of privacy and surveillance in Trump administration.

6-20-17: WGBH Radio Center on Aging & Work/Jacquelyn James re working past retirement age.

6-19-17: NBCBoston.com Carroll School of Management/Richard McGowan, S.J., re planned merger of FanDuel and DraftKings.

6-18-17: CBS’s “Sunday Morning” Center for Work & Family study on new dads cited in story on millennial dads.

6-17-17: CNBC.com Center for Retirement Research data cited in story on switching careers and maintaining retirement goals.

6-16-17: CNN.com Law School/Kari Hong re possible punishments in texting suicide case.

6-16-17: WBUR’s “On Point” Center for Work & Family/Brad Harrington re dads being conflicted about career and caregiving.

6-15-17: WBUR’s “Freak Out and Carry On” podcast History/Heather Cox Richardson re role of US attorney general.

6-15-17: WBUR’s “On Point” History/Heather Cox Richardson re American civil society under fire.

6-15-17: Minnesota Public Radio Political Science/Peter Skerry re US-Mexico relations in the Trump era.

6-12-17: CNBC.com Coverage of Jeb Bush’s address at Carroll School’s Finance Conference.

6-6-17: PRI’s “The World” Political Science/Peter Skerry re US-Mexico relations in the Trump era.

6-6-17: Fox News.com Mark Kindschuh ’19 aids victim of London terror attack.

6-5-17: WABC-TV (New York); ABC’s “Good Morning America”; BBC News Mark Kindschuh ’19 aids victim of London terror attack.

6-5-17: CBSNews.com “Moneywatch” Center for Retirement Research/Kim Blanton re what millennials want in the workplace.

6-5-17: WJLA.com (Washington, DC) History/Heather Cox Richardson re removal of Confederate statues.

Boston College Social Media Report 2017-18 The Office of University Communications maintains all of the University’s official social media channels. The following is a snapshot of the audience and reach of those channels this year.

SOCIAL MEDIA CHANNEL Facebook Twitter Instagram YouTube LinkedIn

AUDIENCE 127K followers 65.2K followers 72.7K followers 2.488MM views, 4.8K subscribers 142.5K followers

Boston College Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn:

Instagram Overview:

GROWTH (YOY) +4.4% followers +9.9% followers +11.5% followers +34.8% subscribers +7.3% followers

Twitter Engagement:

Twitter Demographics:

Facebook Growth:

Facebook Demographics:

LinkedIn Engagement:

LinkedIn Demographics: Top-Five Positions

Top-Five Industries

YouTube Demographics: