Boston College in the News 2013-2014

BOSTON

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BOSTON COLLEGE OFFICE OF NEWS AND PUBLIC AFFAIRS

May 31, 2014 Dear Friends: Boston College in the News is a compilation of the University’s major news stories and faculty opinion pieces from the 2013-2014 academic year.

The Office of News & Public Affairs works with local, national and international media to publicize the teaching and research activities of our faculty, the accomplishments of our students, and the unique societal contributions of the University, in a manner that helps 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 in large part to our faculty—appears in the news every day. Most importantly, as the enclosed articles and op-eds indicate, we are featured in a manner that reflects most favorably on the University.

Given the volume of news that we generate, this compilation offers only a sampling of our news placements and does not include small-market papers or the hundreds of articles quoting our faculty as experts. In addition to the traditional media outreach, we have also included a snapshot of the reach and engagement of the University's official social media channels.

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

Sincerely, Jack Dunn Director of News & Public Affairs Office of News & Public Affairs: Patti Delaney Ed Hayward Sean Hennessey Melissa Lesica Michael Maloney Rosanne Pellegrini Sean Smith Kathleen Sullivan

14 MAYFLOWER RD, CHESTNUT HILL, MA 02467 TEL: 617-552-3350 FAX: 617-552-3959

John Kerry urges BC graduates to spread dignity

By Matt Rocheleau| G L O B E C O R R E S P O N D E N T

MAY 19, 2014

Invoking his Catholic faith, his Boston College law degree, and his service in Vietnam, Secretary of State John F. Kerry urged BC’s class of 2014 Monday to tackle some of mankind’s greatest problems — including climate change, disease, and extremism — while instilling dignity around the globe.

“When families have access to clean water and clean power, they can live in dignity,” John Kerry told more than 4,000 undergraduate and graduate students.

“When families have access to clean water and clean power, they can live in dignity,” he told more than 4,000 undergraduate and graduate students gathered under sunny skies in Alumni Stadium.

“When people have the freedom to choose their government on election day and to engage their fellow citizens every day, they can live in dignity.

“When all citizens can make their full contribution, no matter their ethnicity, no matter who they love or what name they give to God, they can live in dignity,” said Kerry, the former Massachusetts senator and 2004 Democratic presidential candidate who earned a law degree from BC in 1976.

At Yale graduation, Kerry urges optimism on government institutions Wearing black robes and caps, dozens of graduates stood and waved their white commencement booklets to identify themselves to friends and family seated in the surrounding bleachers, packed by an estimated 15,000 people.

Clutching cellphones, many graduates posed with friends for photos, fired off texts, and updated Facebook, Twitter, and other online profiles.

Even Kerry, before the ceremony, tweeted a black-and-white photo of his younger self at a graduation.

“Deja vu to ’76 @BCLaw,” he wrote, one day after giving the commencement keynote address at his undergraduate alma mater Yale University, where he spoke about maintaining hope in government.

At BC, Kerry started his speech with a series of jokes.

He said his two alma maters, BC and Yale, have much in common, namely, their “mutual dislike of Harvard.”

And he spoke about how his job involves monitoring many of the world’s rivalries. “BC versus Notre Dame is at the top of my list,” he said. “And then there’s the Red Sox and Yankees.”

Kerry recalled that when he attended law school, BC became like home for him and he was warmly welcomed by one man in particular, the Rev. Robert Drinan, the longtime BC Law dean who became the first Roman Catholic priest elected to Congress.

“He made no apologies for his deep and abiding Catholic commitment to the weak, the helpless, the downtrodden,” Kerry said. “ ‘If a person is really a Christian,’ Father Drinan would say, ‘they will be in anguish over global hunger, injustice, over the denial of educational opportunity.’ ” Kerry spent several minutes urging the graduates to confront climate change.

“As we sit here on an absolutely beautiful morning in Boston, you might not see climate change as an immediate threat to your job, your community, or your families,” he said. “But let me tell you, it is. “Climate change is directly related to the potential of greater conflict and greater stability — instability,” Kerry added. “It is the poorest and the weakest who face the greatest risk. As Father Drinan would say, we should be in anguish over this.”

He recounted how Thomas Jefferson, the nation’s first secretary of state, spoke about the image of using one candle to light another.

“Both candles gain light and neither candle loses any,” Kerry said.

“So graduates of 2014, pass on your light to others,” he said, And, quoting the writings of St. Ignatius Loyola, he added: “Set the world aflame with your service.”

At its 138th commencement, the university awarded honorary degrees to Kerry; to Boston Celtics legend and former BC coach Bob Cousy; and to three alumni: Ann Riley Finck, a leader in the nursing field; Paloma Izquierdo-Hernandez, president and chief executive of Urban Health Plan Inc.; and Robert J. Morrissey, founder and senior partner of the Boston law firm Morrissey, Hawkins & Lynch and a BC trustee.

Anna Adondakis, 22, of St. Lake City earned a degree in biology and plans to study further to become a clinical pharmacologist.

After the ceremony, she posed for photos with a dozen of her classmates who became her closest companions over the past four years.

Her proud mother, Tara, looked on.

“These girls right here — lifelong friendship,” she said. “They’re all so close and just really good people.”

Anna called graduation day “bittersweet.” She said she will miss her friends, but vowed she would not lose touch.

“You’ll always have a home at the Heights,” she said.

Matt Rocheleau can be reached at matthew.rocheleau@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @mrochele.

Kerry Tells BC Grads To Embrace Spirit Of Service

By Paige Sutherland May 19, 2014 Updated May 19, 2:10 pm

BOSTON — U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Monday challenged Boston College graduates to turn the Jesuit institution’s words of “men and women for others” into actions.

Kerry, who graduated from college’s law school in 1976, told the packed stadium to embrace the “spirit of service” and help preserve the dignity of all races, ethnicities and sexual orientations.

“The diploma you will receive today isn’t just a certificate of accomplishment, it’s a charge to keep,” America’s top diplomat said.

“You have already been blessed with a Secretary of State John Kerry delivers the commencement address at Boston College world-class education and with it Monday. (Stephan Savoia/AP) comes responsibility. And part of that responsibility comes with taking to heart the values that you learned here and sharing them with the world beyond B.C.” The Vietnam veteran spoke of America’s role as a global leader and how the nation has lived up to the ideals of equality and democracy. He encouraged recent graduates to live up to the same ideals, echoing advice he delivered to Yale University graduates on Sunday.

Under President Barack Obama, Kerry has been part of efforts to remove chemical weapons from Syria, resolve the longstanding Israeli and Palestinian conflict and settle unrest throughout the Middle East and Ukraine.

He also urged B.C.’s approximately 4,000 undergraduate and graduate students to take part in the struggle against global warming.

“If we do nothing and it turns out the critics and the naysayers and the members of the Flat Earth Society, if it turns out that they’re wrong, it turns out we are risking nothing less than the future of our entire planet,” said Kerry, who spent a significant part of his 28 years as a U.S. Senator of Massachusetts fighting for clean energy.

He added that global warming could lead to food insecurity through longer droughts and more powerful storms, which hurt the poorest of the world’s population the most, something he witnessed firsthand while visiting the Philippines after last year’s typhoon.

“The solution,” he said, “is staring us in the face: the right energy policy,” he said.

Mass. public pensions are stingiest in the country

By Alicia H. Munnell | MAY 14, 2014 Talk to business people in downtown Boston about Massachusetts’ public pensions and they will go on endlessly about how expensive these plans are and how they should be reformed. Truth be told, these plans have been reformed to death and now are the cheapest in the nation. I should know; I chaired the Blue Ribbon Panel on Massachusetts Public Employees’ Pension Classification System in 2006 and the Special Commission to Study the Massachusetts Contributory Retirement Systems in 2009. The area where these plans deserve failing marks is their financing. Be mad at the politicians, not at public employees.

Massachusetts has two state-administered plans, the State Employees’ Retirement System and the Teachers’ Retirement System. Massachusetts ties with Colorado for having the cheapest retirement system in the country. Three factors explain why it is so cheap. First, public employees in Massachusetts are not covered by Social Security, which means the state does not pay the 6.2 percent of payrolls that other employers pay for Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance. Second, despite having no Social Security protection, the normal cost — the cost of accruing benefits — of the Massachusetts plans is below the national average for state-administered plans. And third, Massachusetts public employees pay a much higher percentage (SERS — 70 percent, Teachers — 82 percent) of normal costs than most other public employees.

The bottom line is that, while taxpayers in other states are paying an average of 14.2 percent of payroll (6.2 percent for Social Security and 8 percent for public pension costs), taxpayers in Massachusetts are paying less than 3 percent of payroll for public employee retirement benefits. Thus, in terms of benefits, the Massachusetts plans serve the taxpayer very well.

The flip side of that, of course, is that Massachusetts plans do not serve public employees as well as plans in other states. A recent study from the Urban Institute, a Washington think tank, gave the Massachusetts plans failing grades on four out of five benefit criteria. Massachusetts received low marks on benefits for young and short-term workers because of 10-year vesting and high employee contributions. Regarding older or long-term workers, Massachusetts received an “F” for encouraging older workers because benefits are capped at 80 percent of earnings and only partially inflation-protected.

Many of these benefit shortfalls could be eliminated by providing Social Security coverage as is done in most other states.

Such coverage would ensure that young and short-term workers would leave with some retirement credits, that older employees would face incentives to keep working, and that retirees would enjoy full inflation protection on their basic retirement income. Social Security coverage, however, would cost the state 6.2 percent of payrolls.

Turning from benefits to funding, Massachusetts has done a miserable job. In Massachusetts’ defense, the state only started funding in the early 1980s, so the state has been promising benefits for eight decades and funding for three. Not surprisingly, it entered the century with a substantial unfunded liability.

But since 2000 the unfunded liability of the Massachusetts SERS and Teachers’ plans has increased 6-fold and 12-fold, respectively. Roughly half of the increase can be attributed to two financial crises, but the other half reflects the fact that the state has simply not been contributing enough money. To prevent the unfunded liability from growing – never mind paying it down – the state must contribute enough to cover the normal cost and the interest on the unfunded liability. The state has failed to make this minimal contribution to either plan for the last 10 years. Moreover, the state shows no inclination to mend its ways. This behavior helps current taxpayers, but hurts future taxpayers who will have to pick up the bill as well as current and future employees who are unlikely to see the benefit improvements they need.

Massachusetts is unique among sponsors of public plans. It has been prudent, if not downright stingy, on the benefit side during a period when the major concern has been profligacy. Cheap benefits should be easy to fund, but the state has blown it, failing to make even the minimal contributions to stop the unfunded liability from exploding.

Alicia H. Munnell is director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.

Students at Dorchester school are all college bound Cristo Rey school builds on success

By James Sullivan | M A Y 0 8 , 2 0 1 4 At Cristo Rey school in Dorchester, “Signing Day” is a twist on the usual high school celebration. Rather than announce where top athletes will play in college in the fall, Cristo Rey announces where its “scholastic superstars” are headed.

Hundreds of well-wishers gathered at the Catholic school one recent evening for the annual event. Yasmary Rondon and four other outstanding graduating seniors sat nervously before three hats, embroidered with the logos of their respective top college choices.

When her turn came, Rondon pulled on a Boston College hat, signaling her acceptance there.

“We got one!” said a happy Thomas P. O’Neill III, a BC alumnus, former lieutenant governor, and chairman of the Cristo Rey Boston board of trustees.

It is Cristo Rey’s intense focus on achievement that has earned the little school a big reputation.

The entire senior class, more than 60 students, expects to attend a four-yearcollege this fall. It marks the fifth straight year the school will have accomplished the feat, one it attributes to scrupulous academic standards and unique work-study partnerships with some of the region’s top businesses.

A holistic approach to education is key to propelling students from the two-story brick school near the Savin Hill MBTA station to some of the region’s top campuses, said president Jeff Thielman.

ESSDRAS M SUAREZ/GLOBE STAFF) Senior Yasmary Rondon prepared to don a Boston College hat after revealing her college choice. A board at Cristo Rey shows the logos of the colleges the graduates will attend.

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The challenges are great. Students typically arrive a grade and a half behind.

About 84 percent qualify for free or reduced-price lunches.

But teachers work quickly to bring them up to speed, and the school amps up the rigor in grades 10, 11, and 12. Individual tutors, longer “double-block” classes in math and language arts, and advanced placement classes for all seniors add up to a culture of high standards.

“We have a different group of learners from 50 different feeder schools,” Thielman said. “Most of them come from very difficult family and financial backgrounds. Learning and education are not necessarily a priority in their homes.”

In addition to academic rigor, the work-study program gives students real-world experience and good work habits, along with new skills. Students work five days a month and offset the bulk of their tuition. Corporate partners include Hill Holliday, Novartis, and TJX. In part-time jobs in health care, students might assist patients. At financial and legal firms, they deliver mail and aid researchers.

“The work experience broadens their minds,’’ said Thielman. “When they rub elbows with successful people all day long, they notice what it takes. It develops their resilience and grit.”

Only a few local schools rival Cristo Rey Boston’s record.

Cathedral High School in the South End, a peer Catholic institution, also boasts a 100-percent college acceptance rate. At the city’s top public high school, the much larger Boston Latin School, 94 percent of last year’s graduates planned to attend fouryear colleges, according to state data.

Cristo Rey started as North Cambridge Catholic High School and joined the national Cristo Rey Network of 26 schools in 2004.

In 2010, it moved into the former St. William’s Elementary School to better serve Boston’s underprivileged, who were commuting as much as an hour each way to the Cambridge location.

Some neighborhood parents were said to be dismayed that the network’s policy of admitting only financially disadvantaged students meant their own children were ineligible. But Mayor Martin J. Walsh, who grew up and still lives in the

neighborhood, was a strong supporter of the school as a state representative and helped to smooth tensions. He also spoke at the school’s opening.

“We ended up signing an agreement with the local parish,” Thielman said. “If anybody from the neighborhood applied and their parents made too much, we’d help them find another school.”

Cristo Rey has since integrated with the community, he said, lending its facilities for neighborhood events and serving as a polling station.

Signing Day is a crowning achievement for the school community. Rondon’s peers announced their college choices: One will be going to UMass Amherst, and the other three to Holy Cross, a popular destination for the students.

Some students acknowledged that the high expectations can lead some to transfer.

“They’re very strict,” Monica Rivera, a graduating senior who will attend Bridgewater State University, said of faculty and administrators. “You can be sent home for not [obeying] the dress code.”

“They’re not in your business, but they know you personally,” Jazmyn Grissett, a senior bound for Dean College, said with a smile. But the two friends agreed their experience at the school was overwhelmingly positive.

“Our class is like a family,” Grissett said. “No drama.”

At the Signing Day ceremony, on hand to salute the seniors were three employees of H.P. Hood who have worked with Cristo Rey students, including Yasmary Rondon, in the company’s quality control office in Charlestown and the corporate headquarters in Lynnfield.

“We’re very excited for Yasmary,” said Traci Tenggren, a senior human resources manager at Hood. “It’s so rewarding to coach a young person and teach them work and life skills.”

Some students had prepared their speeches in advance, but Rondon spoke off the cuff.

“I cannot thank the people I met here enough,” she said, pausing to gather herself as she suppressed a few tears with an embarrassed smile.

Afterward, she scurried through the crowd, still wearing her BC hat.

Unlikely friendship forms in shelter classroom

By Maria Cramer | M A Y 0 5 , 2 0 1 4

When they met, he was an 18-year-old freshman at Boston College, the son of a network engineer and a fashion designer who had been raised in a comfortably middle-class home in Southern California.

She was a 56-year-old widow from Haiti, who had raised two daughters on her own and worked two or three jobs at a time to put them through Catholic school, then college.

DINA RUDICK/ GLOBE STAF F

Achilles Aiken began volunteering at Rosie’s Place, where he met Marie Saint Louis. He began tutoring her, and they soon became inseparable.

Achilles Aiken and Marie Saint Louis found each other at Rosie’s Place, a shelter for poor and homeless women in the South End, where Saint Louis was taking classes to help get her GED. Aiken was homesick, missing his mother, aunt and grandmother back West, and hoping that tutoring women at the shelter might fill that void.

Saint Louis desperately needed help figuring out math word problems.

An unlikely friendship was born.

“She’s an absolute beauty,” Aiken gushed, staring at her adoringly as they sat together recently in one of the classrooms where he had tutored.

“He’s so good to me,” Saint Louis said.

It is not unusual for the Boston College students who volunteer at the shelter through a community service program called 4Boston to grow close to the women they tutor. But even longtime staffers at Rosie’s Place have been surprised by the depths of this friendship. For the last four years, Aiken has come to the shelter twice a week, two hours each day, to tutor Saint Louis. He has rearranged his schedule to accommodate hers so they could remain paired up, taking a train, then a bus from Boston College to get to their appointments on time.

“Most students in the 4Boston program come to Rosie’s Place for a full year,” said Marty Wengert, director of volunteers at the shelter. “Occasionally, a student will go for two years. I’ve been at Rosie’s Place for 13 years and I’ve never seen a student stay for four years.”

Now, as graduation approaches and Aiken prepares to return to California for medical school, he is trying to find another tutor for Saint Louis, who has decided to take a break from studies so she can baby-sit her grandson while her 26-year-old daughter and her husband are working.

Aiken initially began helping Saint Louis with multiplication and long division. But it was not long before the two of them started talking about their personal lives. Aiken became fascinated with Saint Louis’s story. Twenty years ago, she was living in Florida, raising her two daughters, a 6-year-old and a 1-year-old. Her 38-year-old husband was still in Haiti, planning to reunite with his family. But she would never see him again. He was killed in a car accident in Port-au-Prince, leaving her to raise her daughters alone.

Saint Louis, who now lives in Mattapan, decided quickly she would not remarry. Another man could not love her daughters like their father did. Even worse, he might hurt them. “He touches them. I kill him,” she explained to Aiken. “I would go to jail. He would go to the cemetery.”

Aiken was awed by her fierce independence and her determination that her girls go to college.

For Saint Louis, Aiken was a patient tutor and a sympathetic listener. When the earthquake struck Haiti in 2010, Aiken comforted Saint Louis, who lost her 20-year-old nephew in the catastrophe. When her brother died a year later, he grieved with her again.

Only recently were they able to spend time together outside the classroom. The shelter asks that tutors and students not exchange personal information with each other and that all their interactions occur in the classroom.

“It’s about boundaries,” Wengert said. “So that neither side feels there are unrealistic expectations.”

Earlier this month, Aiken went to a party for Saint Louis’s grandson, who just turned 1. Saint Louis piled his plate high with fried pork chops, plantains and rice and mushrooms. She and her relatives doted on him, making sure he was comfortable and well fed.

“It felt like I was at home on spring break,” he said.

On May 19, when he graduates, Saint Louis plans to sit with Aiken’s family to watch him get his diploma.

Neither of them is worried they will lose touch when he starts medical school at UCLA. They already plan on chatting by phone and he is determined to return to Boston to visit her.

“He’s like my son,” she said matter-of-factly.

Aiken leaned toward her and grabbed her hand. Their friendship is one of the most important in his life, he told her.

“I’m so thankful for it,” he said.

BC study says Latinos are key to future of US Catholicism

By Peter Schworm | M A Y 0 5 , 2 0 1 4

The future of Catholicism in America rests heavily on the church’s ability to attract and retain young Hispanics whose connection to secular life is stronger than to the faith that sustained their parents, according to a new national study led by Boston College researchers.

The three-year study, which will be released Monday, said that failing to bring more young Hispanics into the church has broad consequences at a time when Latinos constitute 40 percent of all Catholics in the United States.

“The secularization of Hispanics is the biggest threat to the future of the Catholic Church in America,” said Hosffman Ospino, an assistant professor of theology and ministry at Boston College and lead author of the report. “We run the risk of losing a whole generation of Catholics.”

Just 3 percent of Hispanic Catholic children attend church schools and a declining number of Hispanics under age 30 attend Mass.

The report, titled “The National Study of Catholic Parishes with Hispanic Ministry,” is the first national study to focus exclusively on Catholic parishes with Hispanic ministries, Ospino said. Through broad surveys and personal interviews, the researchers sought to document the scope of the Hispanic influx, which is responsible for 70 percent of the church’s growth since the 1960s.

“If it weren’t for the Hispanic influx, the Catholic Church in the US would be in major decline,” Ospino said.

Researchers note that the arrival of 40 million Hispanic immigrants over the past half-century is 10 times the immigration rate of another ethnic group that transformed the church: Irish emigres from 1860 to 1960.

The report, conducted in collaboration with the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University, will be released in Boston at a gathering of prominent Catholic leaders, and it comes at a moment when the church for the first time is led by a pontiff from South America, Pope Francis.

The study makes a clear call to action, urging the church to develop a strategy to address the issues facing Hispanics and their parishes.

The issues take on added importance as the Catholic Church becomes more reliant on Hispanics, specialists said. By 2050, Hispanics will probably account for more than 60 percent of American Catholics.

“It will be an entirely different Catholic experience,” Ospino said.

But without a shift in focus, the parish structure in the United States will decline dramatically, as it did in Europe, Ospino said.

“Somehow, the church needs to change strategies and attitudes toward Hispanics in the parishes,” Ospino said. “It’s something the church has to come to terms with.”

Because the stakes are so high, efforts are underway to bolster the church’s presence in the Hispanic community.

Mar Munoz-Visoso, executive director of the Secretariat for Cultural Diversity in the Church for the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, said the group is working to increase the number of Hispanic seminarians and priests, and she said that Hispanic offices have been established in dioceses throughout the United States.

“The Catholic Church in the US has made strides in meeting the spiritual needs of Hispanics, yet the needs of such a growing and huge community require the church to do more,” she said.

Ken Johnson-Mondragón, director of research and publications at the Institute for Faith and Life, a nonprofit Catholic leadership institute that specializes in ministry for young Hispanics, said reaching younger generations has been a “major preoccupation” for Hispanic ministries.

“The reach with the next generation is not very strong,” he said. “It doesn’t hold the attraction.”

In a secular society in which religion seems to be “on the back burner of life” and parents are struggling to pass their faith on to their children, churches face a stern challenge, Johnson-Mondragón said.

“The culture doesn’t help, and the church doesn’t have the tools,” he said.

The Rev. Thomas Domurat, pastor of Most Holy Redeemer Catholic Church in East Boston, said the parish has reached out to the Hispanic community, going door to door to promote prayer groups and Bible study. On an average weekend, some 2,700 people attend Masses, the vast majority of whom speak Spanish.

“The Spanish Masses get the big crowds,” he said. The church also offers confessions in Spanish, drawing worshippers from outside the parish.

But like other churches, Most Holy Redeemer struggles to attract Hispanics who have grown up in the United States.

“They are captured by the culture around them,” Domurat said.

On Sunday, Most Holy Redeemer filled every pew for its noon Mass in Spanish. Parishioner Maria Luperon, 57, said it is typical to see a full house at each of the church’s four Sunday Masses. She and other congregants said the church appeals to the local Latino community by offering a wide variety of classes and activities in Spanish, with several specifically geared to young people.

“This church is very open to everybody,” said Luperon, a native of the Dominican Republic who has sung in the church choir for 18 years.

Carlos Monroy, 22, was born in the United States to parents from El Salvador. He said he attends church each week, but he knows many young people who do not, though most were not brought up in the church.

Carlos Rodriguez, 30, emigrated from El Salvador to Everett at 22 and first visited the church shortly after his arrival.

Initially, he said, he wasn’t deeply involved, but that changed after he joined a Bible study group.

Rodriguez now leads a group that visits community members at home and evangelizes to them. He said that effort makes a difference.

“I see this church very active, actually,” he said. “I see others not as big as this one.”

The authors of the BC study found that even as the ranks of Hispanic Catholics burgeoned in recent decades, the church was often slow to adapt. Only 25 percent of Catholic parishes have any Mass in Spanish, with the vast majority in the South and West. And those Masses are sometimes held at less convenient times that make them feel like “an addendum to the church schedule,” Ospino said.

“Language remains a barrier,” he said.

In the Boston archdiocese, just 40 of almost 300 parishes offer Spanish-language Masses, he said.

That has contributed to the tenuous relationship many Hispanics have with the church, researchers found. Many churches reported that Hispanics remain on the periphery of church life, and that active participation “remains at a minimal level,” the study found.

The study, which was funded by anonymous donors and the Our Sunday Visitor Institute, surveyed nearly 100 directors of Hispanic ministries in dioceses across the country.

Churches have long focused their efforts on first-generation immigrants and pastoral outreach to Hispanic youth, especially US-born, remains modest. As Hispanics move toward becoming a majority in the US Catholic Church, that needs to change, the report found.

“Much of the Catholic experience in the country during the next few decades will be significantly shaped by how the church reaches out to this important group and whether young Hispanics in this age bracket, at least those living in Catholic homes, decide to self-identify as Catholic,” the report says.

On average, parishes with Hispanic ministries have fewer resources, and many struggle financially, the BC report found. In parishes with Hispanic majorities, money is even scarcer.

And the report concluded that relatively few Latinos hold positions of leadership in the church, Ospino said, and many “champions of Hispanic ministry” are near the end of their careers.

“Who is going to replace them?” he asked.

Religion in America

Hispanic Growth Is Strength but Also Challenge for U.S. Catholic Church MAY 5, 2014

By Michael Paulson

The Roman Catholic Church has known for years that its future in the United States depends heavily on Hispanics.

The church, which is the largest religious denomination in the country, is already about 40 percent Hispanic, and the demographic change is inexorable: Within the next few decades, Hispanics are expected to make up a majority of American Catholics.

The influx of Hispanics has been a stabilizing factor for the church. Were it not for immigration, Catholicism in the United States would be dwindling as non-immigrant Catholics drift away from the church. But the changing makeup of American Catholicism also poses challenges, starting with the problem that much of the physical and political infrastructure of the church is concentrated in the Northeast and Midwest, while much of the immigrationfueled growth is in the Southwest and West.

Hispanic Catholics differ from other American Catholics in a number of striking, and significant, ways: Hispanic parents have been much less likely to send their children to Catholic schools, and their sons have been less likely to pursue the priesthood.

A researcher at Boston College, Hosffman Ospino, has undertaken a new effort to understand the behavior of Hispanic American Catholics, and the implications for the larger church. In a study released Monday, Mr. Ospino finds a relatively high level of participation in church sacraments, but a low level of participation in other aspects of parish life, and a concerning lack of personnel and financial resources in parishes with high numbers of Hispanics.

Jorge Ortiz-Garay, a priest who was born in Mexico City, during a Mass in Spanish on Sunday at the Co-Cathedral of St. Joseph in Brooklyn. The Roman Catholic Church is about 40 percent Hispanic in the United States. Credit Michael Nagle for The New York Times “There is a bleak picture in terms of resources,” Mr. Ospino said. “And it is noticeable that at higher levels of leadership, the number of Hispanics are lower.”

There are positive findings: Mass attendance in parishes with Hispanic ministries is 22 percent higher than in the average parish, a promising sign in a church that has seen attendance at Masses dropping over the last few decades.

Rates of baptism and first communions are also higher.

But attendance rates at weekday Mass are quite low, participation in non-sacramental activities like youth groups is low, and contributions to collection are also low, often reflecting economic hardship. Parishes serving Hispanics often have fewer staffers per parishioner than other parishes, according to the study; parishes with high numbers of Hispanic parishioners are also less likely to have a parish school.

Previous research has suggested that only 3 percent of Hispanic Catholic children go to Catholic schools in the United States, an issue that the leadership of the Catholic Church has been working on for some time. The challenges are cultural as well as financial. In some Latin American countries, Catholic schools cater largely to wealthy families, and as a result the idea of attending Catholic schools is alien to many immigrant families in the United States, according to Mar Muñoz-Visoso, the executive director of the Secretariat of Cultural Diversity at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Ms. Muñoz-Visoso said the church had also been trying to increase the number of priests, as well as monks, friars and nuns, who minister to Hispanics.

“The growth of the population has been so tremendous, it’s been very difficult to keep up with the needs and the demands,” she said.

The study was based on surveys of parishes with Hispanic ministries; data collection and analysis was conducted

by Boston College, in collaboration with the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University.

The study is the first of two being released this week examining the religious lives of American Hispanics. On Wednesday, the Pew Research Center plans to release results of a large poll examining religious identity among Hispanics in the United States.

Boston College's report on Hispanic parish ministry, Part I Michael Sean Winters | May 5, 2014 Boston College has been ahead of the curve compared to most Catholic universities when it comes to understanding the increasing importance of the Hispanic presence in the U.S. church. When I got the list of events sponsored by the university's School of Theology and Ministry this semester, fully a third of the events were either in Spanish or focused on the Latino apostolate. So it is no surprise that BC has created an extensive, groundbreaking study of Hispanic ministry in Catholic parishes. Nor is it a surprise that the driving force behind the study was Professor Hosffman Ospino, a rising star in the Catholic theological firmament known to readers of this blog most recently for his exquisitely beautiful reflections on the U.S. bishops' Mass at the border, "Our Lampedusa," which was published by Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good in March.

The future of the Catholic Church in the U.S. is a largely Hispanic future. This is well-known if less well understood, and this report seeks to provide the data so that Church leaders have more than intuition upon which to make their plans and decisions. In 1980, Hispanics represented 25 percent of the U.S. Catholic population and 15 percent of all parishes served Hispanic populations. Now, Hispanics are 40 percent of U.S. Catholics and growing, and fully one-quarter of all parishes serve Hispanics. The influx of Hispanic and other immigrants comes as many dioceses are closing parishes, creating a pastoral tension and challenge. As the report notes, immigrants "often rely on parishes to remain connected to their religious roots and identity while they integrate into the larger society. Parishes matter" (emphasis in original). The report continues: "Parishes are among the first places Hispanic Catholic immigrants seek when searching for a familiar experience of community in a foreign land." The celebration of their faith is part of the "Hispanic cultural ethos."

There are now 29.7 million Hispanic Catholics in the United States, according to the Center for Advanced Research in the Apostolate (CARA). If the Church does not meet the needs of these Hispanic Catholics, they will be met elsewhere. A walk through my neighborhood permits one to encounter half a dozen storefront evangelical churches serving Hispanics, and there is always activity at these small enclaves of Christian faith. Fortunately, the local Catholic parish is also packed at most Spanish-language Masses, but still, one wonders if we had been more proactive in welcoming these immigrants, we might have kept those attending the storefront churches in the Catholic fold. According to the CARA data, 35.5 percent of all Catholic parishes serve a particular racial, ethnic, cultural and/or linguistic community other than EuroAsian white Catholics, and 70 percent of these parishes serve Hispanics. The numbers are staggering.

As these themes indicate, the report is concerned to provide a "state of the question" analysis before advancing proposals for improvement, mimicking the Holy Father's intention of making the forthcoming

Synod of Bishops on the family an examination of the "state of the question" this year before moving on to next year's synod, which will consider what is to be done.

Before the authors of the report get to these four central issues, however, they first provide a useful historical analysis of Hispanic ministry in parishes. Too often, surveys forget this important step, forget to ask, "How did we get here?" and move too quickly to the question, "Where are we?" A few key aspects of this history are essential in understanding the different challenges faced by Hispanic ministry as well as illuminating some of the contortions and distortions that plague the national debate about Hispanics and immigration.

For example, the report reminds us that the very first parishes in what is now the United States were all Hispanic. Before the Hawk and the Dove arrived in Maryland bringing British Catholics to these shores, Catholic churches had been offering the sacraments for decades in what is now Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California and Florida. The diocese of San Juan, Puerto Rico, was erected in 1513. Yet despite the fact that Hispanics were here first, the development of Hispanic parish ministry in the 20th century followed a different model, that of the national parishes for the Italians and the Polish and the Hungarians.

There is a major difference, however. "The European national parish was indeed for a 'nationality' ... " the report notes. "But a mixture of Catholics from the 21 nations in Latin America, without counting Spain and Puerto Rico, call the Hispanic parish home. The Hispanic parish has often been a place of encuentro for different nationalities making the name more appropriately 'Pan-Hispanic national parish.' " The historical analysis also notes a very important post-World War II development, the emergence of a different model of ministry. "Sunday sermons and pastoral care were delivered to Spanish-speaking Catholics within existing parishes, often in the basement church. ... Hispanic communities by and large did not become clones of their Anglo counterparts but developed alongside these."

The book Puerto Rican and Cuban Catholics in the U.S., 1900-1965, edited by Jay Dolan and Jaime Vidal, related this history previously, and it is important. Cardinal Francis Spellman of New York was one of the first to break with the traditional national parish model for Latino immigrants. In the years after World War II, Spellman saw his European Catholic flocks heading to the suburbs, leaving behind large parish plants in the inner city. He did not want to leave his successors with a similar need to realign resources and structures and, so, avoided the national parish model. One can understand his reasoning, but one can also recognize that all people need a place they can call their own and that, over time, if that place is a basement, it says something about the priorities of the pastoral leaders.

The report also notes that in the 1960s, the combination of Vatican II reforms and political change intertwined in important ways. "A good number of priests, religious women, and lay leaders, Hispanic and non-Hispanic, in parishes serving Spanish-speaking Catholics across the country embraced the tools of

community organizing and political advocacy to advance important social causes," the report states.

PADRES and Las Hermanas are cited as examples. This was a time when parish leaders anticipated Pope Francis' call to acquire the smell of the sheep, and the sheep needed Mass, to be sure, but they also needed affordable housing, access to schools, transit systems that served poor, immigrant neighborhoods, health care, and a host of other material needs. It was out of this "smell of the sheep" encounter that D.C.'s own Centro Hispanico was born, begun by a newly ordained Capuchin friar, Sean O'Malley. Although in the late 19th century it did not have a name like "community organizing" and Saul Alinsky was not yet born, there were plenty of Irish and German pastors who were the de facto civic leaders of their communities as well.

O'Malley and other leaders in Hispanic ministry were also involved in the national "Encuentro" meetings in 1972, 1977, 1985 and 2000, at which Hispanic ministry strategies were discussed and debated by those who engaged in this ministry. The report notes that "parishes were at the heart of all the conversations and documents emerging from Encuentro." Again, it is interesting to see how this apostolate focused on a theme -- encuentro -- that has become a central motif in Pope Francis' discussions of the new evangelization.

With that historical background, the report moves on to consider what is going on at the parish level. I will take up that topic tomorrow.

Boston College's report on Hispanic parish ministry, Part II Michael Sean Winters | May 6, 2014 Yesterday, I began examining the Boston College study on Hispanic ministry and parish life in the United States, focusing on the historical background to the survey. Today, let’s look at the survey data itself.

Many things jump out from the data, but if there is an overall theme, it is that parishes with Hispanic ministry are vibrant. For example, the report states: On average, 1,419 parishioners attend weekend Masses at parishes with Hispanic ministry.

This is about 22 percent higher than the average for all parishes nationally (1,110 parishioners). The median for Mass attendance on weekends in parishes with Hispanic ministry is 1,000 parishioners, compared to 750 in all parishes.10 About half (48 percent) of these parishioners attending Mass are Hispanic. In more than a third (34 percent) of these communities 1,400 parishioners or more attend on a typical October weekend. Twenty percent of parishes report a total of 344 parishioners or fewer attending weekend Mass regularly.

These higher rates of Mass attendance may have something to do with the concentration of the Hispanic population in urban and suburban areas. Rural parishes tend to be smaller and post lower numbers. But, there is a cart-horse quality to this observation: People who live in more densely populated areas may see the parish as a source of real community in a cultural milieu that is otherwise not conducive to an experience of community. The suburbs are not known for their community spirit, urban neighborhoods tend to experience greater social mobility and their populations are more transient. It is in small towns that community is a given, where one knows one’s neighbors from the town meeting or the Memorial Day parade and BBQ or a visit to the General Store. So, these higher rates of participation exist where they are needed.

63% of the parishes that have Hispanic ministry also report that there is more than one priest at the parish and one of those priests is likely to be Hispanic himself. Yet, staffing these parishes is a challenge because they tend to lack financial resources. The report notes: On average, responding parishes receive $7,744 in weekly parish offertory collections (median of $5,000). This is 15.7 percent lower than the average $9,191 collected in all parishes nationally. On average, $1,502 of the weekly offertory in responding parishes comes from parishioners at Spanish language Masses (median of $840). Study findings reveal that

the higher the percentage of Hispanic parishioners attending Mass in a parish the smaller the total of revenues and expenses.

There are likely two explanations for this lower rate of financial support from the parishioners. First, Hispanic Catholics as a group are less affluent than European Catholics, especially because immigrant Latinos often face dire economic challenges. (I am sure that similar disparities would have been discerned in Maryland in the mid-nineteenth century between the contributions at parishes that hosted some of Maryland’s old, wealthy planter class and those that served the needs of Irish immigrants along the wharves of Baltimore.)

Second, in Latin America, parishes typically have alternate sources of income from longtime endowments and/or are served by a religious community that provides economic support for the parish. As well, the report notes that most ministers at parishes with Hispanic ministry acknowledge that more must be done to fully integrate the Hispanic community into the life of the parish. Most ministers reported that such integration was minimal. Here is a clear avenue for greater focus and effort.

Hispanic parishes are fertile ground for apostolic movements, especially the Charismatic Renewal movement: Fully one half of all parishes with Hispanic ministry reported hosting a Charismatic Renewal movement. Cursillo, the Knights of Columbus, and the Legion of Mary are present in a third of parishes, while groups like the Movimiento Familiar Christiano and Jovenes para Christo are represented in 13 percent of all parishes. These movements are conduits for a more intentional discipleship. The report states: Two-thirds of parishes with Hispanic ministry say that at least one apostolic movement at their parish has prayer groups rooted in the movement’s particular spirituality. In 53 percent of parishes, apostolic movements form small faith communities. Forty-eight percent indicate apostolic movements choose their own catechetical materials. Fewer, 36 percent, say apostolic movements celebrate Mass on a regular basis inspired in their spirituality. In 34 percent of parishes a priest formed in the spirituality of an apostolic movement accompanies members on a regular basis. One in five indicates that a deacon formed in the spirituality of the movement does so. Fifteen percent of Hispanic ministers report vocations to the priesthood inspired by an apostolic movement. Nine percent indicate vocations to vowed religious life.

Most pastors know that most of the work of a parish is undertaken by a minority of parishioners, and that such groups of dedicated parishioners often have diverse spiritualities and varying levels of attachment to the life of the Church outside their movement. I know these movements make some people nervous but they are a sign of new life, and they are to be encouraged and, as the report states, they need to be better integrated into the life of the parish. “Ministry in these parochial communities will benefit significantly from partnering

with the apostolic movements in them and their leaders to facilitate effective evangelizing initiatives among Hispanic Catholics. More attention is to be given to the integration of these groups into the larger ministerial strategies in the parish so they do not function as independent, perhaps isolated units,� the report states.

In a nutshell, this survey illustrates what many of us have long suspected: Parishes with Hispanic ministries are critical today to the communities they serve and will shape the future of the U.S. Catholic Church in ways large and small. It is interesting that the survey shows the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe is the second most well attended liturgical celebration after Holy Week, which was not the case in the Church in the U.S. thirty years ago! At a time when we think of the necessity of parish closings, we should instead be thinking of parish realignments to meet the needs of an increasingly diverse population.

Tomorrow, I will look at what the report tells us about Pastoral Leaders and Faith Formation in Hispanic parishes.

Boston College's report on Hispanic parish ministry, Part III Michael Sean Winters | May 7, 2014 The last two days, I have been looking at Boston College’s important new study of Hispanic parish ministry in the U.S. Monday, I looked at the historical backdrop and yesterday at the study’s examination of parish structures. Today, I will conclude this series by looking at what the study says about pastoral leadership and faith formation, with a few concluding observations.

Pastoral leadership includes pastors, directors of Hispanic ministry, Directors of Religious Education (DREs) and permanent deacons. It is interesting to note that the two groups for which ordination is a requirement – pastor and deacon – are younger than their counterparts in non-Hispanic ministry. The average age of pastors working in Hispanic ministry is 58 years old, compared to 62 years old for diocesan clergy as a whole and 66 for priests who are members of religious orders. 68% of Hispanic deacons were ordained after the year 2000 and one quarter were ordained after 2010. I am not sure why this is, but I suspect that the clergy in the Hispanic community, like the people in the pews, tend to be younger. As well, in the past few decades, many dioceses have required ordinands to learn Spanish in seminary, a requirement that did not pertain to those ordained thirty or forty years ago, so those pasturing in the Hispanic community can only be drawn from these younger ranks. In any event, we can hope that these younger clergy are going to inspire more vocations to the priesthood and the deaconate in their ministries.

Many ministers are not themselves Hispanic. 68 percent of pastors doing Hispanic ministry were born in the U.S. and only 10 percent of these pastors self-identify as Hispanic, which seems terribly low to me. As well, only 69 percent report that they are proficient in Spanish. How then do they minister to a Spanishspeaking flock? What does “proficient” mean in this context? By contrast, ninety-seven percent of permanent deacons serving in Hispanic ministry speak Spanish and 66 percent also serve the Englishspeaking communities in their parish. This leads me to think that deacons in parishes with both Spanish and English speaking communities are the linchpin for successful parish ministry. Anecdotally, back home in Connecticut, there are two adjacent towns, each with a Catholic mission church served by a different parish. One of the mission churches is thriving and the other is dying a slow death. The key difference as far as I can tell is that the thriving parish has a permanent deacon from the town and he keeps the place hopping.

Among directors of Hispanic ministry who are not pastors, the numbers yield some interesting findings.

“Thirty-nine percent are priests, 37 percent lay (22 percent female and 15 percent male), 18 percent vowed religious (12 percent sisters and 6 percent brothers), and 6 percent deacons. Sixty-four percent self-identify as Hispanic,” the report states. But, what I found very shocking where the numbers with dollar signs. “Twenty-eight percent advance this ministry in parishes as volunteers or unpaid ministers,” the report notes. “The average annual salary of a Parish Director of Hispanic Ministry is $17,449. This average includes volunteers and ministers earning $0.

Among those who are paid for their ministry, the average annual salary is $24,078.” I know that none of us who work in church-related activities do it for the money and everyone expects to be paid less in order to do the work we feel the Lord calls us to. And, I know too, that 39% of these ministers are priests who have their room and board paid for, benefits, etc. Still, for the 37 percent of lay ministers, who can raise a family on $24,078 a year?

Religious education is another under-resourced area. For DREs, “Sixty percent are lay women and 16 percent lay men,” according to the report. “Seven percent are vowed women religious and 3 percent nonordained vowed religious men. Ten percent are priests and 4 percent permanent deacons.” 21 percent of DREs are volunteers. The average salary is $21,218 and, not counting those who are volunteers, it is $26,857. 41 percent of DREs have some graduate level education. Only 25 percent lack a college degree.

For that level of education, and what is assuredly a crushing workload, the compensation is so low that surely many people who would want to work in this field find it impossible to do so because of the low pay scale. Note to bishops: Maybe you should take the money you spend on the Fortnight for Freedom and pay your DREs and Hispanic ministers more!

Interestingly, the survey found that 41 percent of bishops in dioceses responding to the survey speak Spanish. The percentage in the West – 76% - is remarkably higher than in the Northeast – 24%. Many dioceses have Offices for Hispanic ministry that undertake tasks such as training clergy from Latin America and coordinating youth activities for Spanish-speaking ministries. Religious orders are heavily involved in Hispanic ministry and have been for decades.

The report concludes its section on leadership with this observation: When considering the race and ethnicity of pastoral agents involved in Hispanic ministry at top-level positions of diocesan and parish leadership, we observe that most are non-Hispanic white. Only 10 percent of active bishops are Hispanic. Twenty-two percent of pastors, 33 percent of all priests (diocesan and vowed religious), and 42 percent of vowed religious women reported as doing Hispanic ministry in parishes are identified as Hispanic. Beyond the world of Hispanic ministry, the number of Hispanics in such positions of leadership in parishes and dioceses drops significantly. The fact that many non-Hispanics are fully committed to Hispanic ministry reveals in many ways a great sense of mutuality and care in ministry. This also models the kind of pastoral leadership that is needed in a culturally diverse Church. Many Hispanic pastoral leaders do likewise. Compared to the overall size of the Hispanic Catholic population, however, the rather small number of Hispanic pastoral agents in higher decisionmaking positions in parishes and dioceses invites serious discernment.

Pastoral leaders must be multi-cultural individuals and most already are. But, the report’s observations point to a cognitive challenge. We tend to look at anything new, and the growth of the Hispanic Catholic population is something relatively new, and we think of ways to help and support. But, Pope Francis reminds us that the culture of encounter is a two-way street. Until we have more pastoral leaders who are of Hispanic origin, overseeing ministries that are not focused on Hispanic populations, we may miss that point. It is not just us established Europeans who should help the native born and immigrant Hispanic population. They have help to give us, we have things to learn from them. Until this is understood, the danger of paternalism exists.

The final section of the report deals with faith formation, and I do not want to go into it in detail because I have gone on long enough. But, one number jumps out: “Only four in 10 parishes with Hispanic ministry have formal programs to minister specifically to Hispanic youth.” Hispanic youth are the future of the Catholic Church in this country and how will we win the hearts and minds of those youth in the other 60 percent of parishes is we have nothing to attract them? Where will we get vocations? How will they come to know the faith? Who will walk with them in a culture that is something less than attentive to the dictates of the Gospel?

This report from Boston College should be at the top of the agenda when the USCCB meets next month in New Orleans or, if that is too soon, when the bishops meet in November in Baltimore. One of the facts this report makes clear is that most Hispanic Catholics are born in the U.S. – even if immigration stopped tomorrow, Hispanics would still be the future of the Church in this country. If the Church spent as much attention on cultivating the faith of Hispanics as it does on fighting the culture wars, debating who should be denied communion and the quality of the translation of the Missal, the future of the Church in this country would assuredly be more promising. But, the Spirit moves where it wills and this report provides plenty of grounds to conclude that the Spirit is moving in the Hispanic community in this country. Our friends at Boston College have performed a great service to the Church in assembling this data and helping us to make sense of it. Let’s hope it garners the attention it deserves.

The Church's changing face Staggering numbers from a new study show how important Hispanics are to the future of Catholicism in the United States Hosffman Ospino Our Sunday Visitor Newsweekly May 5, 2014

A good indicator to measure the vibrancy of Catholic life in the United States is the parish. While not exclusively, for U.S. Catholics the parish has been and remains a privileged space to celebrate and share the Faith, to experience community and live our discipleship.

Catholic parishes in the United States have experienced many transitions during the last two decades. Closings and mergers have decimated the number of parishes in the country by 11 percent. In the meantime, the total U.S. Catholic population has increased nearly 20 percent.

The decline in the number of ordained ministers has led to conversations about whether parishes can or should remain open without the presence of a resident priest, or at least one available to celebrate the Eucharist and other sacraments on a regular basis.

The aging of large sectors of the active Catholic population and the scant participation of young and young adult Catholics in many of these faith communities are serious reasons for concern. Is the Catholic parish in the United States on its way to extinction? Will we experience the fate of thousands of parishes in Europe?

My answer to these two questions is a hopeful “no.� At least, not yet — if we take into consideration perhaps the most significant transformation of parish life in the past few decades, one many Catholics often miss: the fast-growing presence of Hispanic Catholics and Catholics of Asian background. In numbers, this is how the Hispanic presence is profoundly transforming the entire U.S. Catholic experience, with major implications for parish life:

Hispanics account for 71 percent of the growth of the Catholic population in the United States since 1960.

In the 1960s, about 10 percent of the Catholic population was Hispanic. In the 1980s, 25 percent. Today, 40 percent of all Catholics in the country share a Hispanic background.

Of the more than 50 million Hispanics living in the country, 59 percent self-identify as Catholic.

Approximately 55 percent of all U.S. Catholics under the age of 30 are Hispanic.

The Hispanic population is expected to triple by 2050.

Twenty-five percent of all Catholic parishes in the country have Hispanic ministry (only 15 percent did in the 1980s). This percentage is expected to increase.

I hope that these numbers have gotten your attention. U.S. Catholicism in what remains of the first half of the 21st century will be largely shaped by the Hispanic experience. The vibrancy or decline of thousands of Catholic parishes in our country will be closely linked to how these communities embrace Hispanics with their joys and hopes, griefs and anxieties. In turn, the future of thousands of parishes will depend on how much Hispanic Catholics commit to bringing them to the fullness of their potential. After all, the character of the parish is determined by the people who belong to it.

Tall order, isn’t it? The cultural and demographic transitions transforming our parishes call for serious discernment on the part of the entire U.S. Catholic community to envision how to best serve Hispanic Catholics in our parishes in the spirit of the New Evangelization. But to do so, we need to do pastoral planning that leads to envisioning creative ways to passionately bring people to an encounter with Jesus Christ in the everyday of their lives. And to do such effective pastoral planning, we do well studying and learning more about the faith communities where Hispanics are present.

The study In 2011, Boston College’s School of Theology and Ministry launched a three-year research project called the National Study of Catholic Parishes with Hispanic Ministry. This is the first time a comprehensive national study focuses solely on Catholic parishes with Hispanic ministry. The effort was possible thanks to several organizations — including the Our Sunday Visitor Institute — committed to supporting initiatives that lead to a stronger Catholic experience in the United States. I had the privilege of leading the project as its principal investigator working in close collaboration with the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA).

In 2011, 4,368 parishes were identified as having Hispanic ministry, mostly defined by pastoral leaders as communities with Spanish-language liturgies. All parishes received three comprehensive questionnaires designed for pastors, directors of religious education directly working with Hispanics and parish directors of Hispanic ministry. Also, all diocesan directors of Hispanic ministry or their equivalent in the territorial, Latin rite U.S. dioceses where these offices exist were invited to participate. We identified 178 directors in 172 dioceses and all received a questionnaire specifically designed for them. All materials and communications were available in English and Spanish.

The generous participation of pastoral leaders in these parishes, as well as the diocesan officers, has yielded a wealth of information that allows us to better assess life in parishes serving Hispanic Catholics. This information gives us a good sense of what Catholic life in the United States is like in many places where Catholicism is growing vibrantly — of course, not without challenges. Considering current demographic trends and the steady growth and influence of Hispanic Catholics,

these communities also provide us with glimpses of what U.S. Catholicism will look like in vast regions of the country in the near future.

The first summary report has been released and is available at the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry website.

A number of specialized reports looking more closely at parish dynamics and pastoral leadership will follow.

The following are some preliminary observations based on data collected from responding parishes. Upcoming articles will address other areas of parish life in communities doing Hispanic ministry throughout the country.

Look south and west Most Catholic parishes (61 percent) in the United States are in the Northeast and the Midwest. These are the regions that have experienced most of the parish closings and mergers. Only 39 percent of all parishes are in the South and the West.

Yet, it is in these regions where the vast majority of parishes with Hispanic ministry (approximately 61 percent) are located; only 15 percent are in the Northeast and 24 percent in the Midwest. The geographical distribution of parishes with Hispanic ministry is consistent with the distribution of the Hispanic Catholic population in the United States.

From a historical perspective, it is worth noting that the strong Catholic presence in the Northeast and Midwest led to the establishment of very important structures such as parishes, schools, universities, social service institutions and networks. For many decades these structures served not only the Catholic population in these regions, but also allowed Catholicism to exercise an influential voice in the immediate social context where those structures thrived. A good number of these Catholic institutions will remain in these regions.

However, given the current demographic changes, their future will largely depend on how Hispanic Catholics — and Catholics from other ethnicities — benefit from them and eventually are invited to lead them.

In the South and the West, however, the existence of similar structures and networks is not as strong as in the Northeast and Midwest. But this might change in light of the increasing growth of the Catholic population in these regions, mainly due to the Hispanic presence. For this to happen, Catholics need to invest in the emerging communities with a spirit of solidarity, build necessary and efficient structures to continue the work of evangelization and remain open to shifting understandings of what it means to be Catholic in the United States.

Candles are placed in sand to form a cross at St. Francis Xavier Parish in Tulsa, Okla., during a “Dia de las Muertos” celebration at the predominantly Hispanic parish. CNS photo

We must invest in parishes serving Hispanic Catholics. In some places, investment is needed to strengthen those communities already doing so. Many of them didn’t begin serving Hispanic Catholics until very recently and are still adjusting their structures and cultures to do this well. Parishes with Hispanic ministry typically began celebrating Masses and baptisms in Spanish in 1995.

In others places, Catholics must build new parishes to meet the needs of the Catholic population there. All we need to do is look at our local demographics.

Ministry in flux Hispanic Catholicism is a gift for the Church in the United States, as our bishops have repeatedly indicated. When parishes intentionally serve this population, they enter into a unique process of transformation. What is clear from the experience of parishes with Hispanic ministry is that such transformation is not reduced to uncontested assimilation into pre-existing models of pastoral life. We are witnessing the birth a new way of a being a parish and with it, a fresher way of redefining the U.S. Catholic experience.

As Hispanics approach majority in U.S. church, needs for ministry loom

By Patricia Zapor May 6, 2014 CHESTNUT HILL, Mass. (CNS) --- Training of pastoral leaders and provision of most other resources for Hispanic ministry aren't keeping up with the fast-approaching time when Hispanics will make up the majority of Catholics in the United States, according to a new report.

"Hispanic Catholics have reached critical mass in the church," said Hosffman Ospino, lead author of the National Study of Catholic Parishes with Hispanic Ministry. He said 55 percent of all U.S. Catholics under the age of 30 are Hispanic and Hispanics account for 71 percent of the growth in the U.S. Catholic population since 1960.

"Ignoring the growth of Hispanic Catholics in the United States would be self-defeating for our churches and schools," he added.

Ospino, assistant professor of theology and ministry at Boston College in Chestnut Hill, presented his findings from the first major survey of how parishes are handling the rapid demographic shift May 5 at the college.

Hispanics currently account for about 40 percent of all U.S. Catholics and their share of the population is continuing to increase. Nationwide, 4,358 parishes -- almost one-quarter of the U.S. total -- were identified as having some sort of organized ministry to Hispanics.

The study cited many signs of vitality in parish Hispanic ministry -- including youth, a strong permanent diaconate system and thriving apostolic movements. But other areas require urgent attention, it said.

Among the "urgent dynamics" of parish Hispanic ministry that are in need of attention, it listed: disproportionately limited financial and human resources, a "disquieting gap" in Hispanic enrollment in Catholic schools, and a cohort of pastoral leaders who are approaching retirement age with too few people in training to replace them.

The study pointed out that the oldest Catholic parishes under the flag of the United States were and continue to be Hispanic.

In the Southwest, a vibrant Catholic Church existed long before the United States acquired parts of Mexico, making for Hispanic-dominated parishes that predated the development of "national" parishes. National parishes were created in the 19th century to minister to European immigrants such as Germans, Italians and Poles, intended to be a temporary system for helping newcomers maintain their faith connections while they integrated.

As the study notes, "when absorbing the annexed Mexican territories, long-standing Hispanic parishes were typically treated as 'only' national parishes," although many different nationalities fall under the cluster of Hispanic.

The report is a summary of the findings of a national study, conducted by the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry in collaboration with the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate of Georgetown University. Several future reports will delve into angles such as education and leadership training, Ospino told Catholic News Service.

The study is based on responses to surveys sent to diocesan and parish leaders who work in Hispanic ministry. Parishes were counted as offering Hispanic ministry if they offer Mass or religious education in Spanish, for example, even if they don't formally have a Hispanic ministry program, Ospino said.

Other elements in the report include discussion of leadership structures and leadership development; apostolic movements such as Cursillo and Communion and Liberation; and programming and education for children, youth and adults In an event at Boston College where the study was released, Mark Gray, of the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University in Washington, said one conclusion he draws from the study that should catch the attention of church leaders is "if you don't do Hispanic ministry well, then you face an uncertain future."

Unlike past generations of immigrants, he said, people today have many more choices in where they can go to worship, whether another Catholic parish that offers something different, a non-Catholic Christian church that is welcoming or even the growing phenomena of dropping all religious affiliation.

"We call them drive-bys," Gray said, because people will drive by a church that doesn't offer what they need and go elsewhere.

Timothy Matovina, a University of Notre Dame professor of theology and executive director of that school's Institute for Latino Studies, pointed to some of the study's findings he thinks are significant: that two-thirds of the pastors doing Hispanic ministry are not Hispanic; that most of them got any training they have in Hispanic ministry on their own; and that just 13 percent said they received relevant training in Hispanic ministry in the seminary.

Matovina also observed that the immigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean who are adding to the surge of Hispanics in the church are arriving to find a different sort of church than did earlier waves of immigrants.

"A hundred years ago, immigrants arrived to an immigrant church," he said. "Now they are arriving to a middle-class church."

It will be important to the future of the church for the more established parts of the church, where there is more money and power, to think of the growing sector of less-wealthy Hispanics as deserving of their support as part of the same church, Ospino said.

Ospino told a story to illustrate how that's relevant to meeting the pastoral needs of a working-class or poor group of newcomers.

He described a parish with a high level of immigrants that was in financial crisis. The parish was administered by a religious order that also ran three wealthier, nonimmigrant parishes in the same region. The religious order leaders went to the three wealthier parishes asking for support to keep the immigrant parish open. "They said no," Ospino said.

In a subsequent interview with CNS, Ospino said perspectives such as that of the nonimmigrant parishes in that story illustrate a basic flaw in how many American Catholics think about the growth of Hispanics toward dominance in the church.

"We need to shift the language in the church," Ospino said. "We can't simply treat Hispanics as a subgroup of the church anymore. In many parts of the country, to speak about Hispanic Catholics is to speak about the majority of the church."

BC LAW SCHOOL GETS THOMAS MORE STATUE

By Ariel Rodriguez

Saturday, May 3, 2014

Photo by: Patrick Whittemore INSPIRING: Boston College alumnus Philip Privitera speaks yesterday at the dedication of a St. Thomas Moore statue, sculpted by Pablo Eduardo.

Boston College Law School yesterday hosted a dedication ceremony for a newly installed sculpture of St. Thomas More that was donated by a family that is known for its generosity throughout the city of Boston.

The statue is the latest gift from the Privitera family who has given statues to the Dante Alighieri Cultural Society in Cambridge and the Sacred Heart Church in the North End. There is also a scholarship and award in their name at the law school.

The sculpture of St. Thomas More, who was a lawyer, author and councilor to Henry VIII of England, was made by Bolivian-­‐born Pablo Eduardo, who now lives in Gloucester.

Nike CEO says could shift China production over labor strife May 1, 2014 | Richard Valdmanis

BOSTON (Reuters) - Nike Chief Executive Mark Parker said on Thursday the footwear and athletic apparel company was considering shifting its production within China following a major strike at a supplier's factory.

Thousands of shoe factory workers staged one of China's biggest strikes earlier this month over conditions at Hong Kong-listed Yue Yuen Industrial Holdings Ltd <0551.HK> - a $5.6 billion manufacturer of footwear for Nike Inc., Adidas and other international brands. Most of those workers have since returned to work after the company agreed to some of their demands.

(Jas Lehal Reuters)

"We didn't move product out in this case, but we're staying close to it. We've been in a position to do that," Parker said on the sidelines of a luncheon at the Boston College Chief Executives Club of Boston.

"We're always considering it."

He said Nike was in "close contact" with Yue Yuen and its workforce to determine if the labor conditions at the factory violate Nike's own workplace standards, but added Nike had not yet "taken a position on that."

He said Nike had a diverse factory base in China that made it possible to shift production relatively easily.

"We want to invest in the partners that are really doing the right thing with the workforce," Parker said. "We have a factory base where we can move product around as we need to make sure that we don't have issues with production."

Yue Yuen workers went on strike in the southern city of Dongguan on April 14 in what activists say was one of China's biggest labor protests since market reforms began in the late 1970s.

They were protesting what they said where chronically low company contributions to social insurance and housing provident fund accounts. By late last week, some 80 percent of the workforce had returned to work, according to Yue Yuen.

In a sign the strike had rattled Chinese authorities, police placed one labor activist in criminal detention, formally accusing him of causing a disturbance after he distributed information online about the factory strike, his manager and father said on Tuesday.

Nike's workplace code of conduct includes a clause protecting worker compensation and benefits: "Contractor's employees are timely paid at least the minimum wage required by a country's law and provided legally mandated benefits."

BC students find lost relics of China Search for pagoda miniatures takes students on odyssey from Shanghai to Somerville

By James Sullivan | A P R I L 0 8 , 2 0 1 4

JOANNE RATHE/GLOBE STAFF

Scale models of Buddhist pagodas were made a century ago by Chinese orphans. Three of the rediscovered models are on display this month in Boston College’s O’Neill Library

While in Shanghai last year, Boston College professor Jeremy Clarke heard a strange tale that could have sprung from the pages of a classic mystery novel: Nearly 100 scale models of historic Buddhist pagodas, exquisitely crafted by Chinese orphans a century ago, had seemingly vanished.

Clarke, a China scholar and Jesuit priest, returned to BC with a challenge for his China history class. Armed with their curiosity and the Twitter hashtag #findthosepagodas, the students embarked on a virtual odyssey to find the missing relics.

It took them from Shanghai to Chicago to an anonymous art collector in New York. They did extensive research online and queried art dealers and museum curators around the globe. They unearthed photos of the models.

The global pursuit ended last fall — of all places — just a few miles from campus, in a warehouse in Somerville, where the pagodas were being stored. Initially, Clarke’s students admitted they were by turns intrigued and annoyed by the project.

“A lot of us thought it was interesting,” said Sarah Malaske. “But we also thought, ‘Gosh that sounds like a lot of work.’ ” The outcome was gratifying. Three of the 86 models, including two nearly 6 feet tall, are on display this month in the atrium of BC’s O’Neill Library. For Clarke, the successful search is a happy convergence of his Jesuit commitment and his lifelong interest in Chinese culture.

“I see my role as a bridge between the Chinese Catholic communities and the outside world,” he said.

The project also carries special meaning for Damien Zhang, an exchange student who was part of the 25-member undergraduate sleuthing team. While growing up in China, he said, he and his friends would sometimes visit one of the great pagodas that inspired the models.

“I’m not Buddhist, so it was more of an architectural trip,” Zhang said recently as a few classmates and Clarke met at the library to see the newly installed models.

For Buddhists, he explained, the pagodas — some built a millennium ago — were designed as houses of worship, to get a little closer to heaven.

The students’ pursuit began in September. They pooled their talents — some were finance students, some studying international relations — and spent dozens of hours online to research the history of the pagodas.

They learned that the scale models were built for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco by children living in an orphanage that once sat on the site of the present-day Tushanwan Museum in Shanghai. Made of balsa wood, the miniature pagodas are delicately carved, with pinpoint effects. One on display at BC features a detail from the classical Chinese novel “Journey to the West.”

Clarke said the models were first purchased “for a bit of a song” by a representative for Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History after the 1915 exposition. That much was clear, but the trail went cold after a sale to a private investor.

After decades of ownership, the Field Museum quietly put the pagodas on the market in 2007. The Peabody-Essex Museum in Salem was among the institutions that expressed interest. The Field kept three; the mysterious collector, who is said to have development ties to Boston, bought the rest.

After tracing the photos of the models, the students in the class, “From Sun Yat-sen to the Beijing Olympics,” tried to contact the Sotheby’s broker identified in the book.

“It was a little odd for her, I’m sure, getting e-mail from a college student,” said student Madeline Walsh. “How many college kids could afford to buy a piece of art?”

Through the grapevine, the broker eventually learned that the students’ search was legitimate. She helped persuade the collector, who wishes to remain anonymous, to permit the students to showcase three of the pagodas during the run-up to BC’s spring Arts Festival.

“The owner was actually very keen to display them,” said Clarke, who noted that the collector wants to bring the pagodas to San Francisco International Airport next year for the centennial anniversary of the 1915 exposition.

The four-year-old museum in Shanghai, where Clarke spoke at an international conference last year, hopes that at least some of the pagodas could be displayed permanently there as a way to honor the orphanage and its place in Chinese cultural history.

Such a decision, Clarke and the students acknowledge, would be up to the collector, because this is not a case of stolen art, like the pilfered European works chronicled in the film “The Monuments Men.” Still, the class debated whether the Field Museum or the current owner owed a debt to the people of Shanghai.

“The students have had to think it through: Who does own world culture?” he said.

Clarke’s students can graduate into the world knowing they shed a little light on a cultural mystery, like the Six Harmonies Pagoda, which has doubled for centuries as a lighthouse.

“These are cool things,” Clarke said of the models. “They shouldn’t be spending all their time in a warehouse.”

Oliver Stone speaks at local colleges

By Mark Shanahan and Meredith Goldstein | G L O B E S T A F F

APRIL 07, 2014

“JFK” director Oliver Stone and historian Peter Kuznick made rounds at local colleges over the weekend. On Friday they spoke at the UMass Boston, and on Saturday, they were at Boston College for a discussion titled “Bush and Obama: The Age of Terror.”

That event was put on by BC’s Institute for the Liberal Arts and Sociology Department. Stone and Kuznick coauthored last year’s “The Untold History of the United States,” a companion to a 10-part Showtime series.

PHOTO BY CAITLIN CUNNINGHAM

From left: Boston College professors Seth Jacobs and Charles Derber with filmmaker Oliver Stone on Saturday.

Europe’s Monetary Mistake

PETER IRELAND | 04/07/2014

Unwelcome monetary conditions hold sway in the Euro Area, where the European Central Bank has allowed money supply growth to fall precipitously. This is causing unnecessary stress for European workers and businesses, generating slower than expected inflation and contributing to sluggish economic growth as well. Americans should be concerned, too, because economic weakness in Europe means less demand for our own exports.

What we are now observing is a “natural experiment,” when a major policy blunder sends the economy careening off course and, in the process, inadvertently sheds light on the validity of an economic theory. This dangerous experiment should be ended as soon as possible. But, while it continues, it provides economists with a chance to test their predictions as to which type of variable—interest rates or measures of the money supply—more accurately captures the effects that monetary policy is having on the economy.

In normal times, when a central bank wants to ease monetary policy, it does so by lowering shortterm interest rates. But few if any central banks control interest rates by fiat; interest rates do not rise and fall just because central bankers say they should. Instead, those changes in interest rates need to be brought about by open market operations—purchases or sales of government bonds that add to or withdraw from the totally supply of bank reserves.

To ease monetary policy—that is, to lower short-term interest rates—for example, a central bank will typically buy government bonds, increasing the supply of bank reserves. Over time, each individual bank will hold only a fraction of the new reserves it receives, lending the rest out, setting off the circular process of multiple deposit creation that increases the money supply as a whole.

Either way you look at it—as a decline in the interest rate or an increase in the money supply— monetary policy has become more expansionary. Likewise, in normal times, a rise in interest rates brought about by an open market operation that decreases bank reserves and, from there, the money supply, represents a monetary tightening.

In exceptional circumstances when monetary policy and inflationary expectations become unhinged, however, interest rates can be very misleading indicators of the stance of monetary policy. In the United States during the 1970s, for example, when inflationary pressures pushed interest rates to historic highs, those high interest rates signaled that monetary policy was excessively loose, not tight. And, as Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz describe in their greatest and most influential book, A Monetary History of the United States, when deflationary expectations took hold during the Great Depression of the 1930s, the very low interest rates that prevailed signaled that monetary policy was far too tight, not too loose as the usual analysis might suggest.

Instead, measures of the money supply provided more accurate readings than interest rates on the stance of monetary policy, with excessive money growth reflecting expansionary policy during the 1970s and severe monetary contraction providing evidence to support Friedman and Schwartz’s argument that tight monetary policy was a key factor contributing to the length and severity of the Great Depression.

Today, in the Euro Area, we see similar evidence of a disconnect between interest rates and money growth. The European Central Bank has seemingly brought short-term interest rates down to extraordinarily low levels, leading many observers to conclude that policymakers are doing all that they can to support the still very shaky recovery of the European economies. But, as shown in the graph below, money growth in the Euro Area fell dramatically during the financial crisis and recession of 2007-09 and has never really recovered. Most troubling of all, the rate of Euro Area money growth now seems to be declining still further.

Someone who is used to associating low interest rates with expansionary monetary policy would have a difficult time explaining why Europe is suffering through a period of very low inflation and economic growth. How could this happen, when monetary policy is apparently so accommodative?

But, once again, this natural experiment reveals how dangerous and misleading it can be to use interest rates as indicators of the stance of monetary policy. For as the statistics on the money supply clearly show, monetary policy in the Euro Area has been extraordinarily tight for quite some time, contributing toâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;not helping to solveâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the dual problems of very low inflation and slow growth.

Europeans should be asking their representatives why the ECB is not taking more vigorous action to increase the money supply so as to bring the Euro Area inflation rate back towards its long-run target. Observers in the United States and elsewhere should take this opportunity to remember, too, that our own central banks are responsible, first and foremost, for making sure that the money supply expands at a slow but steady rate, so as to avoid any replay, either of the disastrously high inflation of the 1970s or the terrible deflationary stagnation of the Great Depression.

Peter Ireland is a professor of Economics at Boston College.

BC-Catholic Extension event looks at how to respond to the call of Pope Francis

By Christopher S. Pineo April 4, 2014 CHESTNUT HILL -- A Boston College panel discussion brought together a group of Catholics who minister to the periphery of society March 31 to reflect on how their ministries respond to the call of Pope Francis for Catholics to be advocates for the poor and agents of change.

The Boston College School of Theology and Ministry (STM) and Catholic Extension, a national nonprofit that strategically invests in poor mission dioceses and Catholic dioceses throughout the U. S. that cannot financially sustain themselves, hosted "The Transformative Power of Faith: Responding to Pope Francis's Call" on March 31 to spotlight Catholics who answer the call by Pope Francis for Catholics to be advocates for the poor and agents of change.

The panelists were past recipients or finalists for Catholic Extension's Lumen Christi Award, which recognizes those in mission dioceses who have devoted their lives to serving the poor and to fostering Catholic communities that build faith, inspire hope and ignite change.

Dean of STM and Jesuit priest Father Mark Massa served as the moderator for the panel discussion.

"These folks from mission dioceses -- quote-unquote mission dioceses -- are really from very vibrant communities in the Catholic faith that are going by leaps and bounds," Father Massa told The Pilot.

Panelists, who work in some of the nation's poorest communities, included a Felician Sister whose order jumpstarted an ecumenical movement in South Carolina; a couple from California whose ministries keep the Church present for young people and migrant workers in their state; and a priest who serves the Lakota people on a Native American reservation in South Dakota.

Felician Sister Mary Susanne Dziedzic, CSSF, serves with a Felician Sisters community in Kingstree, South Carolina. The sisters began their outreach with an after-school tutoring program for neighborhood children, continued with a food pantry, and a home repair program, which ultimately brought churches together as they rallied volunteers from 11 different local denominations.

"We came to a place that, at one time, in our county court manuscripts it said Catholics are not allowed to purchase property in Williamsburg County, so that was kind of shocking to us. But to make the story short, what happened was an intervention of the Holy Spirit as we began to pay attention to what the needs were, and the outreach was developed. It was precisely our brothers and sisters from these other churches who came forth, knocked on the door and said, 'How can we help you.' And today it has become a very strong ecumenical presence, and what the Catholic Church has really done to transform the community is to offer Catholic leadership," Sister Mary Susanne said.

Jose Lopez and his wife Digna R. Lopez, both immigrants from Mexico, serve respectively as director of Migrant Ministry and director of Hispanic Ministry in the Diocese of Stockton, Calif. They train and support more than 15,000 people annually, including young people as they provide alternatives to lives of drugs and violence through

involvement with the Church.

"Some of the challenges that we face in the Stockton Diocese is that it's a poor community; however, especially among the Latino community, it tends to be a community of faith. So, that really helped us in developing and creating leaders and people that can help others and also bring the good news of the Gospel, and reach out, to the different areas in the diocese," Digna Lopez said.

Jesuit Father John Hatcher, president of St. Francis Mission in St. Francis, South Dakota, has served the 20,000 Lakota people on the Rosebud Reservation as head of the St. Francis Mission, a Jesuit ministry, for 10 years.

Father Hatcher has revitalized six parishes, launched two recovery centers that have helped more than 300 families maintain sobriety, and said he sees a need to put the people he serves into leadership life in the Church so they can bring the gift of their culture to the universal Church.

After making short presentations on their ministries, panelists answered questions submitted in writing form the audience. One posed the question of what Pope Francis could do that would be most helpful in each mission.

"I feel the pope will, and I am hoping, issue some kind of a directive on the importance of the fact that God existed in these cultures before we showed up," Father Hatcher said.

Young people involved with the ministries of the panelists joined them on the stage. Liliana Bobadilla represented the ministries of the Lopez couple, while Kevin Cooper spoke about his experience with Sister Mary Susanne, and Jennifer Black Bear spoke about her experience as a Lakota woman working alongside Father Hatcher.

Black Bear, a religious education director, told The Pilot that she and other Lakota people in the Church working to restore the practice of the Catholic faith to her community.

"We're bringing it back, with the St. Francis Mission and all of our programs. It's all Lakota leaders. Lakota are the managers of all the programs, so I think with all of us working together with Father Hatcher, we are able to bring that back to our people," Black Bear said.

Afterward, Father Hatcher told The Pilot the Church must share of itself with the people it reaches, but also let the people share of their talent and time with the Church.

"One of the most important things we can do in our relationship with native people of all cultures is to affirm the fact that the fingerprints of God are on these cultures. Part of what we need to do is invite them to share their gift, the gift that God gave them, with the Church in terms of their heritage and their symbols and language if possible, because that is part of coming to understand who the Christ is," he said.

April 4, 2013 - Rankings & Profiles

Top Undergraduate Business School Programs 2014

Overhaul of schools is the wrong diagnosis

By Andy Hargreaves, Dennis Shirley and Pasi Sahlberg | M ARCH 27, 2014 Monday’s hot-off-the-press report on “The New Opportunity to Lead: A Vision for Education in Massachusetts in the Next 20 Years,” commissioned by the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education, presents an erroneous diagnosis of the state of education in the Commonwealth and proposes remedies that are based on ideology, not evidence. While there certainly are areas for improvement in Massachusetts, Commissioner of Education Mitchell Chester is right to disagree with the report’s finding that school improvement in the state is stagnating.

What’s wrong with the report? First, its grudging acknowledgement of positive educational outcomes in Massachusetts and grim portrait of the state’s shortfalls have little to do with the facts. Massachusetts is the leading state in the United States on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. It is the only state in the United States with an “A” grade in the highly regarded Quality Counts 2014 State Report Card. It is also one of the world’s top-performing systems on a number of international assessments. Its rate of recent progress may be slower than some countries, but they’ve started from farther behind — Massachusetts literally has less room for improvement. To view the state’s school system as suffering from “complacency,” as the report claims, confounds all the findings of United States and international research on school achievement.

Moreover, the report draws many of its recommendation from the United Kingdom, where its lead author, Michael Barber, once worked as an advisor on education to former Prime Minister Tony Blair. England has made massive investments in “academies,” similar to government-supported charter schools here. It has explored various ways to prepare new teachers outside of a university setting. There have been targets and tests galore. Yet, results from the 2012 Program of International Assessment put England merely at the international average, 499, compared to Massachusetts students’ score of 524. For Bay State policymakers to follow England’s lead in education would be like the Red Sox taking coaching tips from the lowly Kansas City Royals.

Most of the solutions proposed in this report are out of line with the world’s best performers. The expansion of charter schools, less university-based teacher preparation, and putting digital technology before superb teaching as a way to personalize learning for students do not characterize the policies of international educational leaders like Canada, Finland, or Singapore.

Which is not to say the report is altogether wrong. Every school system needs to keep searching for improvement, and the MBAE is right to explore new ways of moving forward.

But it is not necessary to conjure up flaws to improve or to innovate. Although the England’s overall performance on PISA remains only adequate, some of the turnaround schools in London, which we have studied, have been spectacular. This has been due, in no small part, to Barber’s inspirational promotion of schools working with other schools to take collective responsibility for results. More professional collaboration in the Commonwealth, along with fairer and better funding to support it, would undoubtedly be a positive. And no one can quarrel with the argument that the school of the future will need better education in science, technology, engineering, and math.

Still, Massachusetts deserves a smarter reform agenda than what “The New Opportunity to Lead” is able to offer. Earlier this month, Chester met with Krista Kiuru, Finland’s Minister of Education, in Boston. Kiuru invited Massachusetts to join fellow high performers in Finland, Singapore, and the Canadian province of Alberta as leaders in a new global partnership for educational innovation. It would be a good first step.

This global network would embrace the provision of strong public schools for all children, make room in the public sector for creativity and innovation, and support teachers and schools to become the leaders of change, not implementers of more mandates. And when the state wants greater equity, it should look not to the class-ridden British system but to some of the most equitable ones found in places like Finland and another Canadian province, Saskatchewan.

Educators in the Commonwealth have worked hard for several years to improve student learning. They should be proud of all that has been accomplished. Yet no state should just hold steady. As it pursues advancement, Massachusetts should not look for inspiration from inferior international performers whose models offer an easy fit. As the nation’s educational leader, Massachusetts must instead push and pull its schools toward new heights of excellence.

Andy Hargreaves and Dennis Shirley are professors in Boston College's Lynch School of Education.

Meet the Boston College MBA Delivering an Online Engineering Education to Kenyan Students Lauren Landry March 26, 2014

Kloss and Ongogo

After Kenyan students surpass the eighth grade, education stops being free. For 60 percent of primary school graduates, moving on isn't financially feasible. Israel Kloss, a web developer at Boston College and current MBA candidate, has discovered what is attainable, however, with the right access to computers, mentors, online learning and basic training.

Kloss and his wife, Jennifer, quit their jobs and traveled to East Africa in 2012, determined to discover how they could use their backgrounds in teaching and web development to aid locals. The pair helped install and fund a computer lab in Homa Bay, Kenya. Yet, after seeing how students were reacting to the computers, the problem became all too clear. Several fumbled over keyboards, and sat perplexed, unaware of what to do with a mouse.

When Kloss met Kenyan Cavin Ongogo, he started teaching him basic web design principles and WordPress, continuing the training remotely upon leaving Africa. As a result of the education, Ongogo secured employment and was able to pay his way through college.

"It was really life-­‐changing for him to learn WordPress," Kloss said, adding, "there is the demand."

From the experience, Kloss decided to start "Learn to Earn," a one-­‐year, weekly, remote course in WordPress. Implemented from the U.S. every Saturday, at 9 a.m. EST, Kloss and fellow volunteers login to a Google Hangout to teach students overseas in Kenya. Ongogo has learned how to install the Internet using telecom company Orange, thereby putting access into the hands of others looking to learn.

What the pilot program resulted in was employment for attending students. One is now a WordPress developer, while another is a social media strategist, working 10 hours a week for a client who's currently considering taking her on full-­‐time, according to Kloss.

Those were just the first success stories Kloss hopes to see, however. As part of his coursework, the Boston College MBA candidate is setting up another computer lab in Western Kenya, and has turned to crowdfunding platform Experiment for help in building the foundation.

Kloss's goal was to raise $3,271, which would cover four Toshiba CS50 laptops, an HP LaserJet printer, a wireless router, ethernet cables and unlimited Internet access with Orange, among several other amenities. The goal was successfully met, according to Kloss, who said he's received a commitment for the final amount of necessary funding. Given that Experiment takes eight percent of the proceeds, however, Kloss would like to hit eight percent above the target so that 100 percent of the funds could go directly to the lab.

"I've been there and I've met the kids," Kloss said. "It's very motivational when you've met a student who hasn't seen a computer and you really know what they need to come up with the competitive knowledge of the rest of the world."

Thirty students have already signed up for the next class — half of which are high school-­‐age women. Kloss said they are considering using Codecademy to assist in the education, as well as local skills assessment startup Smarterer to evaluate those volunteering to teach.

"We want to make sure we have the right quality of [teachers] for students to learn from," Kloss said. And who better than the Boston-­‐based company, which just raised $1.6 million, to help?

Teacher Policy and High Quality Education Towards Achievement with Integrity

By Dennis Shirley March 25, 2014

Image by World Bank Photo Collection via Flickr

These are extraordinary times. On the one hand, astonishing progress is occurring around the world. One billion people have been lifted out of poverty in the last twenty years. Ninety-five percent of all children around the world are now in primary school. Weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve cut the number of children out of school from 102 to 57 million in the last 12 years. Weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve made real progress towards achieving the Millennial Development Goals and are set to define ambitious new goals for the upcoming years.

On the other hand, cheek by jowl with these impressive achievements, age-old problems persist and sometimes are even exacerbated. Over one billion people suffer lives of grinding poverty. Climate change continues unabated. We have not been able to combine the prosperity of some with equality for all; income inequality has risen dramatically in recent years. While technology has brought many of us together, with over one billion users now on Facebook alone, seventeen percent of all adults alive today are illiterate and thus are entirely shut out of a dazzling global revolution of instant information.

These paradoxes of poverty amidst plenty, academic excellence combined with educational exclusion, and technological transformation side by side with the most plodding and inefficient means of production frame the agenda for professional associations of educators around the world today. The overall trend lines are clear and hopeful. It is within our reach to eliminate extreme poverty altogether by 2030. Having come close to establishing universal primary schooling we can and should push on to obtain universal secondary education free of charge and open to all. Education International is at the forefront of these agendas, networking fast and furiously with civil society associations, governments, and entrepreneurs from the private sector to assure that the ambitious goal of rights-based education for all is achieved within our lifetimes.

To achieve these goals, however, we will need much greater clarity about the best way ahead both theoretically and practically. We will have to reinvent teacher policies and redefine what it means to receive a high quality education. Within our professional associations we will have to be tougher on our governments and more demanding of ourselves as well. We are

Who can help us with this second part of our dual revolution? It certainly can’t succeed if we ask governments to play the lead role, because governments are too remote from the real nucleus of education, which resides in the intensive interaction between educators and students. Nor can we ask civil society organizations, or the business community, or any other group to step up to drive this second part of the new educational revolution forward. Nor can we leave this up to individual teachers, or school principals, or system-level leaders. Rather, it is only our professional associations that can and must take on the lead for this kind of professional learning and advancement.

Do we have any evidence that professional associations can and should step up to take on new roles in pursuit of improved student learning? Absolutely! We’ve seen this in Alberta, Canada, where the Alberta Teachers’ Association (ATA) upended a conservative government plan to pay teachers for improving tests scores and instead turned that proposal into a province-wide network that accompanied Alberta’s unlikely rise to the top of international results on the Programme of International Student Assessment (PISA) tests of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). We’ve seen it in the way that the California Teachers’ Association (CTA) in the United States sued the governor of California to release $2.3 billion dollars of funding that then was allocated to a union-led effort that raised results in the state’s most impoverished schools. Educators from around the world have traveled to Finland and seen how educators’ professional associations play pervasive and inspiring leadership roles in designing new curricula, circulating them among the profession, and collaborating with an open-minded and supportive government.

So we have some excellent, solid evidence that when they are fully activated, and when the moral purposes of educators come front and center before political and administrative considerations, our professional associations can open up wide and promising new vistas for lasting, sustainable educational change.

These union-led breakthroughs of educational change point us to the right path that lies ahead. It’s time now to get past too many stalled reforms. We have to move beyond all of the political brokering and administrative wrangling that for too many years have led governments to focus on testing, accountability, and markets as reform levers. It’s time now to get past endless tinkering at the margins of our systems and to move front and center into the heart of the enterprise.

Step one: it’s time to reassert our professional knowledge by become self-activating dynamos of change rather than compliant implementers of the latest government mandate. Governments have a legitimate role to play in providing supports and broad goals, but when they get into the intricacies of teaching and learning, they overstep their boundaries. Step two: Let’s advance our collective autonomy to drive forward student academic achievement not by gaming the system and compromising our morals, but rather with real integrity based on the best interests of our students from beginning to end. Let’s work hard with our students and our parents from our communities to make sure that all students have full and unrestricted opportunities to realize their full potential.

This is a dual revolution that’s time has come. Let’s advance change both inside and outside of our profession. Let’s see what can all accomplish together to catapult the next great global educational revolution forward.

About the Author Professor Dennis Shirley teaches at Boston College and is one of the world’s leading researchers on educational change. As well as recently co-authoring the ‘Global Fourth Way-the quest for Educational Excellence’ with Andy Hargreaves he is the Editor in Chief of the ‘Journal of Educational Change. He is also a leading campaigner for the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals.

How to really measure the 'Francis effect'

By Daniel Burke, CNN March 10, 2014 Boston (CNN) -- In some ways, the "Pope Francis effect" doesn't seem very effective at all.

Despite the immense popularity the aged Argentine has won since his election last year, not a jot of doctrine has changed, nor has the Catholic Church swelled with American converts.

But there's more than one way to measure a pontiff's influence on his far-flung flock.

Start asking around -- here in Boston and beyond, Catholics and atheists alike -- and it's easy to find people eager to share how one man, in just one year, has changed their lives.

There's the gay man who finally feels welcome in his church.

The woman who weeps when headlines deliver good news at last.

The former priest who no longer Four young Boston College Jesuits: Sam Sawyer, Ryan Duns, Javier Montes clenches his fist during Mass. and Mario Powell.

The Latinos who waited forever for a WEBB CHAPPELL FOR CNN Pope who speaks their language.

"I'm telling you, brother, if you focus on the numbers, you're missing the story," says the Rev. John Unni, a Boston pastor with an accent as thick as clam chowda.

"There's an energy, a feeling, a spirit here. It's like a healing balm."

If anyplace needed healing, it's Boston -- the country's most Catholic city.

Nearly half the residents here have roots in the church. It's home to a top Catholic college, one of just two Jesuit seminaries in the United States and a cardinal who has the ear of the Pope himself.

But Boston is also a city scarred by a church sex abuse scandal that harmed hundreds of children, demoralized dozens of innocent priests and broke the bonds of trust between clergy and congregants.

To say that Pope Francis has smiled and salved those wounds is a stretch longer than the Boston Marathon, people here say. There are plenty of ex-Catholics who'll never give the church a second look. But there are many others who say they just might.

In other words, this the perfect city to take a measure of the "Francis effect" -- to visit churches, classrooms, coffee shops and bars and learn how this Pope is shaping the lives of rank-and-file Catholics.

"He's sent us an invitation," says Mark Mullaney, president of Voice of the Faithful, a Boston-based reform group born in the wake of the sex abuse scandal.

"And now many of us deciding whether to come the party."

A few surprises Jesus called Peter, the first pope, the church's foundation stone, its rock. In case you've been living under one, here's what Francis has done since his election on March 13, 2013.

He blasted bishops who spend money like they're auditioning for "MTV Cribs" and chastised priests who forget they're servants, not princes.

He called for a truce in the culture wars, refused to judge gay people and reached out to atheists.

He hugged a man covered with tumors, washed the feet of Muslim prisoners and wore a clown nose -- just for giggles.

He hired a group of cardinals -- including Cardinal Sean O'Malley of Boston -- to reform the curia, the Vatican bureaucracy that has a reputation for more shady deals than Tammany Hall.

He cold-called nuns, refused to live in the Apostolic Palace and ditched the regal trappings of papal life.

He called unfettered capitalism a false idol and trickle-down economics a sham.

He made the cover of Time, the New Yorker, Rolling Stone and The Advocate, a gay and lesbian magazine that makes no secret of its problems with previous Popes.

He said it's immoral when the media reports every move of the market but ignores the death of a homeless person.

He told his church to be big-hearted and bruised, open and merciful; to forget its finery and make a mess in the streets; to be a field hospital for this sin-sick world.

For all this and more, people love him.

A whopping 85% of American Catholics view him favorably, according to a Pew Research Center poll released Thursday.

More than 71% say he's a change for the better.

Those kinds of numbers haven't been seen since the prime of Pope John Paul II. At the same time, the Pew study found no increase in the number of Americans who call themselves Catholic, attend Mass regularly, or perform charity, leading some to doubt the "Francis effect." Others argue that those may not be the best measures of a Pope's influence.

The 77-year-old Francis may be an unlikely maverick in Rome, but he's been following the same playbook for decades in Buenos Aires, says the Rev. Gustavo Morello, an expert on Argentina's Catholic history.

Morello is a tall man who looks a bit like St. Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order, at least by the light of a Boston barroom.

He and the man he knows as Jorge Bergoglio go way back.

The future Pope gave Morello his entrance interview 30 years ago when he sought to join the Society of Jesus -- the Jesuits' official name.

"He's always been pastoral, close to the people," says Morello, now a sociologist at Boston College. "The simplicity in his daily life, that's real."

In his first days as Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Bergoglio gave his priests a vacation, a luxury many hadn't enjoyed for five years. He paid for their travel and subbed in at their parishes.

But conservatives didn't like Bergoglio much, Morello says.

The future Pope once knelt before Pentecostal pastors and asked for a blessing. He argued that the state should recognize same-sex civil unions. He had no use for high-church liturgy or fancy vestments.

Like many Latin American priests, he was a street-wise pastor with a populist touch who made up his own mind, Morello says.

In other words, he was Pope Francis on a smaller stage -- with one big difference.

"I wasn't aware of his commitment to reforming the church and the curia," says Morello.

"That's new, and surprising."

Clenched fists and tears of joy Michelle Sterk Barrett says she's not the type to shed a lot of tears -- but she confesses to crying four times during Pope Francis' first year in office.

They were tears of joy.

"He's made me proud to be Catholic," she says, "instead of always having to apologize for staying in the church."

The first drops rolled while she watched a respectful discussion about Catholicism on "Meet the Press" last March, a few days after the Pope's election.

She wept again seeing crowds flock to Francis during World Youth Day in Brazil last June. And her eyes misted over when Time named the Pope its Person of the Year and Rolling Stone gave him the full rock-star treatment in a glowing cover story.

"For years, all of the media coverage of Catholicism has been so negative. We've been ridiculed as out of touch and judgmental," says Barrett. "Just to see my church respected in public again -- it's incredible."

The 42-year-old comes from a devout family and leads the community learning program at the College of the Holy Cross, a Catholic school in nearby Worcester.

Barrett belongs to St. Ignatius Parish, a Jesuit church tucked into a corner of the Boston College campus in Chestnut Hil. On a bitterly cold day last month, pastor Rev. Robert VerEecke admitted that many in his parish have caught Francis fever.

Even long-lapsed Catholics are creeping back to the pews. VerEecke said he recently heard from a woman who left the church 40 years ago but wanted to learn more about Jesuit spirituality because of Francis.

Comb through the homilies delivered by St. Ignatius' priests and you'll find dozens of references to the new Pope. The adult initiation class is filled with converts inspired by Francis.

"For those of us who are preachers or teachers," he says, "Francis has made our lives much easier."

St. Ignatius leans liberal, but Barrett is no basher of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI or his predecessor, Pope John Paul II. She respects their erudite, if sometimes esoteric writings.

But Francis has a unique gift for reaching people on a gut level, Barrett says. He uses simple language and earthy metaphors, telling priests, for example, to be shepherds who "smell like their sheep."

Her mother, Maureen Sterk, keeps quotes like that on her family fridge in San Diego and reads the Pope's homilies online every day.

"He's putting the message in terms that people can understand," says Sterk.

What her daughter says she likes most about Francis, though, is the way he's changed the church's tone from Thou Shalt Not to Thou Shall.

"He's the best thing to happen in the Catholic Church in my lifetime. And part of that is because he's followed so closely on the worst thing to ever happen. He's given hope to a city that desperately needed it."

For Sawyer, it was watching a friend who's left the church and become an atheist grow increasingly fascinated by the Pope.

"It's not bringing him back to the church," Sawyer says, "But he does find it encouraging that the same kind of pastoral presence he's seen and respected at local levels is being given a more universal stage and more attention."

Mario Powell, a bespectacled 32-year-old from Los Angeles, had a similar story.

A few years ago, he led a spiritual retreat for the trustees of a big Boston school.

One man, an ex-Catholic, was still pained by the sexual abuse scandal and annoyed by the mandatory retreat.

When Powell saw the guy again this year, he got a big pat on the back. "I don't think he's there yet. He's not going to Mass," Powell says, "but he's coming around."

Ryan Duns, a 34-year-old from Cleveland saw the "Francis effect" while hanging out with older Irish musicians during his weekly gig at The Green Briar, a Boston bar.

They had just watched the Pope pick up a child with cerebral palsy on TV. "Even they were touched by this man's compassion and tenderness."

An accordion player, Duns can't help describing the difference between Francis and previous popes in musical terms.

"He's got his own sense of the beats of the church. He's more merengue than Mozart."

Francis' Latin flavor energizes the parish of St. Mary of the Angels in the Boston neighborhood of Roxbury, which has a large Dominican community, says the Rev. Javier Montes.

Montes, the Jesuit from Spain, says some women at St. Mary's have remarried after previous spouses abandoned them.

They'd like to receive Holy Communion, the church's highest sacrament, but they can't because of Catholic law. Pope Francis says church leaders will discuss the ban at a synod in October.

"They have heard that the Pope is insisting on welcoming and being merciful and that there is something going on in Rome," Montes says, "so they keep asking if they will be able to receive Communion."

A week ago, Montes led a parish retreat based on "The Joy of the Gospel," the apostolic exhortation Pope Francis published in November.

For the first time in their lives, the abuelas and their children and grandchildren were able to read a papal document written in their native tongue, with recognizably Latino turns of phrases.

Hispanic Catholics are picking up the Pope's books across the country, from Anchorage, Alaska, to Savannah, Georgia, says Marina Pastrana.

The Boston College graduate now directs the Hispanic Lay Leadership Initiative at Catholic Extension, which brings the faith to isolated communities.

To say that previous papal documents didn't exactly light the youth on fire is not a slam on Benedict or John Paul II, she says.

Those Popes just spoke a different language, wrote for a different crowd.

"For a lot of young people the church's public rhetoric wasn't making sense to them," says Pastrana, 27. "It wasn't relevant."

But they perked up and paid attention when Pope Francis told the million Catholics gathered in Brazil for World Youth Day to go home and "make some noise in the streets."

For the anniversary of the Pope's election, Catholic Extension collected videos from young Catholics to send to Francis.

In one of the videos, a young man from California takes the Pope's advice literally, walking with other Catholics through gang-infested streets of Salinas to give neighbors a sense of peace and safety.

"I don't know if he would have done that five years ago," says Pastrana, her eyes tearing up. "I don't know if he would have done that one year ago."

Like the woman who weeps for joy, the gay man who feels welcome, the parish priest imbued with new life, the ex-priest who unclenches his fist, it's a sign of the influence of just one man, in just one year.

Call it the "Francis effect," live and in the flesh.

Mapping behavior of charges in correlated spin-orbit coupled materials: Electronic disruption prods Mott insulator's conversion to metallic state March 10, 2014 In a relatively recently discovered class of materials, known as spin-orbit Mott insulators, theorists have predicted the emergence of new properties at points just beyond the insulating state, when electronic manipulation can transform these compounds into conducting metals.

A better understanding of electrons near this transition, theorists have predicted, could allow these new Mott insulators to pave the way to discoveries in superconductivity, new topological phases of matter, and new forms of unusual magnetism.

What scientists have lacked is experimental evidence that reveals the microscopic mechanisms that actually drive one of these spin-orbit Mott insulators to become a metal.

Now a team of physicists at Boston College report in Nature Communications that they manipulated a compound of strontium, iridium and oxygen -- Sr3Ir207 -- with a substitution of ruthenium metal ions, successfully driving the material into the metallic regime, and mapping this previously uncharted transformation as it took place, giving scientists a unique view into the workings of these insulators.

Spin-orbit Mott insulators are so named because of their complex electronic properties.

Within these novel materials, there is a repulsive interaction between electrons that tends to drive the electrons to a stand still. This tendency is bolstered by the lowering of the electron's energy via a strong interaction between the electron's magnetic field and its orbital motion around the nucleus.

This delicate interplay between repulsive action, known as Coulomb interaction, and the coupling between electrons' spin and orbital motion has allowed scientists to define this class of materials as spin-orbit Mott insulators.

Boston College Assistant Professor of Physics Stephen D. Wilson said the team succeeded in driving the insulator-to-metal transformation by replacing 40 percent of the iridium ions with ruthenium, thereby creating a metal alloy. That event introduced charge carriers, which have proven successful in destabilizing the so-called Mott phase in the transformation of compounds in this class of insulators.

Scanning tunneling microscopy revealed ruthenium effectively created features within the compound that resembled minute metallic puddles, said Wilson, one of the lead Images obtained through scanning tunneling spectroscopy show the researchers on the project. As the amount of additional ruthenium was increased, the transformation of a compound of puddles began to "percolate," coalescing to form a metal across which charges freely strontium, iridium and oxygen -- part of flow, he added. a mysterious class of materials known as spin-orbit Mott insulators. By "The addition of ruthenium introduces charge carriers, but at a low ratio of ruthenium to introducing charge carriers within the iridium they simply stay put in these little metallic puddles, which are symptoms of strong compound by replacing 40 percent of correlated electrons," Wilson said. "These electrons are stable and wouldn't move much. the iridium ions with ruthenium, But when we stepped up the disruption by increasing the amount of ruthenium, the researchers from Boston College were able to reveal the microscopic puddles moved together and achieved a metallic state." mechanisms that transform these The behavior in this particular compound parallels what researchers have seen in Mott insulators into a metallic state. The insulators that play host to such phenomenon as high temperature superconductivity, images reveal ruthenium effectively said Wilson, who will discuss his research at the upcoming annual meeting of the created features within the compound that resembled minute metallic puddles. American Physical Society.

As the amount of additional ruthenium By pinpointing exactly where this transformation takes place, the team's findings should was increased, the puddles 'percolate,' help to lay the groundwork in the scientific search for new electronic phases within spincoalescing to form a metal across which charges freely flow. orbit Mott insulators, said Wilson, who co-authored the report with his Boston College Department of Physics colleagues Professor Vidya Madhavan, Professor Ziqiang Wang, Credit: Nature Communications and Assoc. Prof. Fr. Cyril P. Opeil, SJ.

Unfair advantage would spur abuse of exempt status Do corporations have religious liberty?

By Kent Greenfield | M A R C H 0 2 , 2 0 1 4

THE SUPREME Court is poised to give corporate conscience a bad name.

The big case at the court this year asks whether for-profit corporations can exercise rights of religious conscience. At the center of the case is arts-and-crafts retailer Hobby Lobby, an Oklahoma corporation that operates over 500 stores and employs more than 13,000. Owned by devout Christians, the company says its obligation under the Affordable Care Act to provide employee health insurance that includes contraceptive care is inconsistent with its religious beliefs. Hobby Lobby is one of scores of for-profit companies now suing to get the same religious exemption from Obamacare that churches and religious charities can claim.

One might think that this is an easy question. Of course companies cannot hold religious beliefs. Over two centuries ago, the Lord Chancellor of England pointed out the difficulty of expecting “a corporation to have a conscience, when it has no soul to be damned, and no body to be kicked.”

But large institutions can in fact have religious identities. Boston College, my employer, has no soul to be damned or body to be kicked, yet has a religious identity that helps define its mission and culture.

Even for-profit companies can act with religious motivations. The most famous example of this occurred here in New England in the days before Christmas in 1995 when the Malden Mills factory in Lawrence burned down. The company’s owner, Aaron Feuerstein, kept the employees on and even paid their Christmas bonuses. He promised to rebuild in Lawrence rather than moving the jobs offshore. Feuerstein became a national hero, sitting next to First Lady Hillary Clinton during the president’s State of the Union message a few months later. Feuerstein’s main rationale for his company’s sacrifice was that he wanted his business to be a reflection of his personal religious commitments.

But Hobby Lobby should lose, and the story of Aaron Feuerstein helps show why.

The unfortunate truth is that corporate conscience is usually a loser in our ruthless marketplace. Paying employees more than competitors — or polluting less, or rebuilding a factory here rather than in Bangladesh — creates financial disadvantages that appear exactly as inefficiency on the bottom line. A few companies might “do well by doing good,” if they create a market niche that rewards such efforts or if they can create benefits they can monetize, such as customer or employee loyalty.

But making money from conscience is the exception. As with individual goodness, corporate conscience usually requires sacrifice of some kind — refusing an unfair advantage; treating with dignity someone who cannot return the favor; being honest when subterfuge would get by. When we occasionally see such sacrifice by corporations, as we saw with Malden Mills, we can trust its integrity.

But Malden Mills itself fell on hard times, filing for bankruptcy twice. The Lawrence factory was sold in 2007. Whether Feuerstein’s generosity caused the company’s demise is a subject of debate among business ethicists. But one thing is clear: Genuine corporate conscience and the sacrifice it requires is difficult to sustain when the divide between success and failure can be pennies on the dollar.

This is why no advanced nation in the world leaves corporations to their own consciences. Corporations are hardwired to produce financial gain; most will seek out shortcuts to maximize returns even if that means they must pollute, discriminate, or endanger. The best way to ensure corporations are positive influences in an economy, much less a society, is to construct a framework of financial, workplace, and environmental regulation. In other words, corporate conscience alone is no shield from bad behavior or a sufficient prompt for good. We need laws for that.

This is where the Supreme Court could do real damage. Hobby Lobby wants to be relieved of regulatory controls because of religious views. Such relief will give it an unfair advantage in the marketplace, since Hobby Lobby would not have to provide health coverage that its competitors still must.

The response to a Hobby Lobby victory will be quick. Companies will experience a Road to Damascus conversion like the Apostle Paul, discovering religious beliefs where they had none before. Companies will assert religious convictions inconsistent with whatever regulation they find obnoxious, and not just Obamacare’s contraceptive requirement. Some

companies will claim a religious right to discriminate against gay job applicants. Others will insist a woman’s place is in the home, and claim a religious exemption to Title VII’s obligation that women be paid the same as men. And are we sure there are no companies that will assert a religious right to pollute?

Our public efforts to constrain business through regulation will be circumvented by assertions of religious belief, whether genuine, inflated, or fraudulent. Ironically perhaps, claims of religious conscience could liberate companies to become bad actors in the economy and society at large. Instead of sacrifice, corporate conscience could devolve to sacrilege.

Kent Greenfield is professor of Law and Dean’s Research Scholar at Boston College Law School.

City of Light, illuminated at Boston College

By Mark Feeney | G LOBE STA F F , F EBR U ARY 27 , 2014 Ernest Hemingway called his memoir of Paris in the ’20s “A Moveable Feast.”

Think of “Paris Night & Day: Photography Between the Wars,” the current exhibition at the McMullen Museum, at Boston College, as “A Photographable Feast.” It runs through June 8. Justifying that title aren’t just place and period (the ’30s are thrown in for good measure) but also gustatory accuracy of the visual sort: The offerings on display are that rich, that abundant.

For a century, Paris had been the world BRASSAÏ ESTATE Brassaï’s “Avenue de l’Observa-toire.”

capital of painting. A strong argument can be made that during these two

decades, it held the title in photography, too. Among those working there for at least some portion of this time were Eugène Atget, André Kertész, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Brassaï, Ilse Bing, Lisette Model, Man Ray, Dora Maar, Bill Brandt, and Berenice Abbott. All but Abbott have work in “Paris Night & Day.” It’s worth noting that the only one of those photographers who didn’t come to Paris from somewhere else was Cartier-Bresson. (As it happens, most of his work in the show is of other places.)

The show comprises more than 100 photographs, which come from the collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg.

Boston College professor Ash Anderson curated the show. There’s an additional selection of 19th-century photographs of Paris, serving as a kind of prelude.

It indicates the quality of “Paris Night & Day” that among those photographs are 19 by Cartier-Bresson, a dozen by Atget, nine

by Kertész. Each man has a justifiable claim as the greatest photographer of the last century. Yet the two who define the show — because they engage with Paris so searchingly and innovatively — are Brassaï, with two dozen photographs, and Bing, with 19.

How could photographers not be attracted to Paris? As God loves all his children, so the camera loves all Earth’s cities: their scale, their energy, their endless array of possibility. It’s just that some cities are loved more than others: New York, San Francisco, Prague, Paris — Paris supremely. And Paris during these years may have been the city at its most camera-ready.

The Ancien Régime Paris so cherished by Atget, where neighborhoods that had escaped Baron Haussmann’s urban renewal could look nearly medieval, coexisted with a Deco city, sleekly up to the minute and electrically illuminated.

The illumination was no small thing, even in avant-garde circles, as the title of a 1930 Man Ray photogram here, “Electricité,” reminds us. So many of the images in “Paris Night & Day” present a beguiling visual balance, with a postwar newness and excitement enlivening the city’s elegant solidity. No image captures that balance better, or more spectacularly, than Brassaï’s “Paris From Notre Dame.” A cathedral gargoyle crouches in the foreground. In the background, a literally electric city looks all but celestial. The presence among the 19th-century photographs of a similar view of Notre Dame by Édouard-Denis Baldus serves to underscore the transformation.

Technology of a different sort was also a factor. On display is a vintage Leica camera, a reminder of the impact of lightweight cameras. Which is more of a marvel in Bing’s “Self-Portrait With Leica,” from 1931: the intentness of her gaze or the compactness of her camera? The liberating effect such equipment had on photographers — and her, in particular — is evident in Bing’s other images here: how extensively she surveyed the city and from what intriguing angles, both literal and figurative.

What also made this period in Paris special was photography’s relationship to the other arts. The city may no longer have been undisputed cultural capital of the West. At the very least, it shared the title with pre-Hitler Berlin. But Paris remained a magnet for writers and artists. It was, for example, world Surrealism headquarters — and how the Surrealists cherished the power of photography to create incongruity with the blink of a lens.

Throughout the show you can see — you can feel — an aesthetic mutual attraction: in Man Ray’s two-minute abstract film, from 1923, “Le Retour à la Raison”; in his portraits (of Kiki of Montparnasse, who posed for so many painters and sculptors; of Maar, who was Picasso’s lover; of the artist Meret Oppenheim); in Laure Albin-Guillot’s portrait of Jean Cocteau; in Kertész’s classic evocations of the painter Piet Mondrian, “Chez Mondrian” and “Mondrian’s Pipe and Glasses.”

Those two Kertész photographs are very famous. They’re also interiors, as easily taken in Mondrian’s native Netherlands or his later home, New York. Kertész, the most Mozartean of photographers, transcends any specific site, as music does. In fact, he did outstanding work in his native Hungary and, after leaving Paris, New York.

Kertész extended our idea of photography, as did Cartier-Bresson, in his very different way. What Brassaï did was extend our idea of Paris. Readers had long been familiar with a darker, desperate, hidden Paris — “this other world, this fringe world,” Brassaï called it — one familiar from the pages of such novelists as Balzac, Hugo, Zola, and Brassaï’s friend Henry Miller. The photographer set out to show it rather than just describe it. “I wanted to know what went on inside,” he wrote, “behind the walls, behind the facades, in the wings: bars, dives, night clubs, one-night hotels, bordellos, opium dens.”

A Boston College Professor Has Taken a ‘Selfie’ Everyday for the Last 27 Years Karl Baden’s feat is part of an ongoing project that explores mortality and obsession.

By Steve Annear | Arts & Entertainment | February 24, 2014 Karl Baden has been taking a photo of himself every morning, in the same exact position to the best of his ability, for the last 27 years.

And he doesn’t plan on stopping anytime soon.

“I’ll stop when I’m dead. If I’m dead, I won’t know what will happen with [my project] from there, but the plan is to have an institution acquire it in some form,” said Baden, a photography professor at Boston College.

This past weekend marked roughly 9,800 days since he first started sitting down in front of a camera lens to snap a photo of himself for the “Every Day” project, which began on February 23, 1987. The daily task is part of a decades-long examination of the role that mortality plays in people’s lives, and, more obviously, how age changes one’s appearance. Barden said it also serves as a “meta comment” on the idea of obsession, and doing something repetitiously.

“Artists need to be obsessive to get the work that they have to get done, done. They have to have some inner drive to do it; this is taking it to another step. This is a comment on the obsession and obsessively making work,” he said. “The idea of making and taking photographs has a lot to do with documenting things over time. Many people have attempted that in terms of looking at cities, and locations, or even one’s own family—kids growing up, that sort of thing. So I felt that it might be interesting to take it a step further.”

The idea first came to mind in the 1970s, but when he brought up the concept to a friend, he was told it was “stupid.” That insight put a damper on his ambitions for more than decade, but his curiousness about taking on such a long-term project lingered in his mind. So, finally, one day he took the plunge, despite his critic’s opinion. “People asked me over the years, why did you start on that date, and to the best of my recollection, I said, ‘well, that was just the day I started it.’ There was nothing special about it, it was random,” he said.

But the death of artist Andy Warhol may have played a role, in retrospect. “He made films where very little happens for a longtime, like Sleep. Thinking back now, I’m sure that Warhol’s death was the final straw. It was the thing that pushed me over the edge to start doing it. And by that time, I think that I was physically and emotionally ready.”

Since the beginning, the process for “Every Day” has been something reminiscent of Groundhog Day. Baden usually wakes up, gets ready for work or the weekend, and then simply snaps the photo using the same camera and the same lighting that he has used for nearly three decades. The type of film has changed over time, he said, because only because the older products he relied on are no longer made.

“I don’t do anything to change my face intentionally. I don’t grow beards or mustaches, and I keep my hair the same,” he said.

“I don’t use any unusual angles, and I don’t use any unusual lenses, or filters, or lighting sources. I try to keep all artistic conceits out of the picture. I try to achieve identical images, but I can’t always, because I’m human, and I make mistakes, and the camera makes mistakes. Those are all accepted as part of the project.”

Once he takes a photo, he collects the negatives and keeps them organized and well documented in a safe place, and brings them out when he needs to make prints, or in the case of one undertaking, he made to show the progression of age: a video.

Taking the same photo every day for almost 30 years sounds like a daunting task, but since the start, Baden said he could only remember one time that he forgot to take a portrait of himself, and in the end, it didn’t put a serious dent in his everexpanding project.

“It’s not a very exciting story at all,” he said. “On October 15, 1991, I was teaching at [the Rhode Island School of Design], and usually I take the picture after I get up and take a shower. There was a rush to get to the school that day, and I made a mental note to take it when I got back home, and I forgot.”

Since then, not a day has gone by that Baden didn’t sit down and let the camera capture a shot of his face.

Over the years, as various milestones approached in terms of time since he first started, Baden has put his work on display in numerous art galleries and museums. He said he also uses the photos for projects in his classes at Boston College.

When Baden set forth on his photography endeavor, he never imagined that one day the “selfie” would become a household term, and take the Internet by storm. Calling it a “distantly related topic,” he isn’t doing this project to be known as the “selfie” king, or even to land a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records—for him it’s art, and the exploration of the human condition.

“It’s photography in its most fundamental form,” he said.

Mass. Gubernatorial Candidate Makes a Case for Social Work's Health Care Role February 24, 2014 CHESTNUT HILL, Mass., Feb. 24, 2014 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Massachusetts gubernatorial candidate Charles D. Baker Jr., speaking at a Boston College Graduate School of Social Work forum on Monday, said social workers have a unique role to play in patient care in the Affordable Care Act era.

"When I think of social workers, I think of problem-solvers," Baker, former CEO of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, told an audience of nearly 300 at Boston College, where he lauded social workers' ability to "stitch clinical and social service issues together with real-life implications.

"They deal with the complexity of problems that don't fit neatly into categories."

Baker delivered the keynote speech at Health Care Reform: From Policy to Practice, a forum organized by the graduate school to examine the potential roles and challenges for social workers in the wake of the Affordable Care Act. National Association of Social Workers CEO Angelo McClain led a panel discussion on the topic with social work leaders. Graduate School of Social Work Dean Alberto Godenzi and forum organizer Associate Professor of Macro Practice Marylou Sudders gave welcoming remarks at the start of the event.

Instead of delivering "a political stump speech," Baker said he wanted to offer his views on the ACA's impact on social work and social workers, particularly in the areas of care management and therapy. He identified the expansion of coverage, the creation of health exchanges and cuts in Medicare as the "three big pieces" of ACA that would offer challenges and opportunities for social workers.

For example, expanded coverage would make more people eligible for care and treatment, he said, but also create potential dilemmas for what services can be provided, and in which form. Given this scenario, Baker strongly endorsed an emphasis on team-based approaches to health care issues, with specifically defined roles for each health care professional involved, and with measurement of outcomes built into the system.

Social workers would be a vital part of such cross-disciplinary work, he said, because their training tends to prepare them for a team-based approach better in comparison to other professions. "If everyone has a role, and if everyone plays a role, good things happen. This is a tremendous opportunity for all of you."

About the Boston College Graduate School of Social Work: A global leader in social work education, the Boston College Graduate School of Social Work provides experience-based MSW and PhD degree programs to more than 500 students, produces leading research that advances the field and actively fulfills its Jesuit, Catholic mission of social justice through service and partnerships.

Photos: Actor Liam Neeson tours BC campus with son Posted by Matt Rocheleau, February 18, 2014 Actor Liam Neeson visited Boston College Tuesday to tour the campus with his son, according to reports and photographs posted on social media by the university, students and others.

Magdalene survivors are still waiting for restorative justice Opinion: Women feel confused and anxious at the opaqueness of the scheme on offer Maeve O'Rourke and James M Smith

February 6, 2014 It is almost a year since the Taoiseach made his emotional apology to survivors of the Magdalene Laundries, and yet these women continue to suffer poverty, ill-health and trauma after decades of State-sponsored abuse.

It may surprise the Irish public to discover no legislation has been tabled to provide for the restorative justice scheme recommended by Mr Justice John Quirke last May. To those of us who campaigned against previous denial and delay, this represents more of the same.

Over the past few weeks, Magdalene survivors have begun to receive formal offer letters from the State. In them, the Department of Justice offers a lump sum payment, but states that all other aspects of the scheme remain subject to Brenda Fitzsimons legislation or discussions with other Government departments.

Deceased victims of the Magdalene Laundries were remembered at a special cermony at Glasnevin Cemetery last year.

These additional elements are therefore unspecified, apart from the statutory old age pensions, to be paid from “early 2014”. Disturbingly, many core aspects of Mr Justice Quirke’s scheme are not mentioned in the Terms of an Ex Gratia Scheme , a 13-page document accompanying the offer letters.

Waiver To access their modest lump sum – which they desperately need – the women are required to sign a waiver, accepting “all the terms of the scheme” and waiving “any right of action against the State or any public or statutory body or agency” arising out of their time in a Magdalene laundry.

In contrast with the judge’s report, there is no mention of (a) private healthcare provision, (b) healthcare for women living abroad, or (c) a dedicated unit to provide advice and support, services to meet other survivors, assistance with housing and education benefits, and the creation and maintenance of a memorial.

How can the women be asked to agree to all terms of a scheme that are not explicit and do not resemble Mr Justice Quirke’s recommendations? It would be cynical in the extreme – and an abuse of power – for the Government to use waivers signed by vulnerable women to avoid implementing the scheme it promised last year. But that is precisely what it seems to be doing.

The healthcare issue is of particular concern. Wide-ranging healthcare provision, which he described as a “fundamental element”, was Mr Justice Quirke’s first recommendation. Many of the women suffer from serious health complaints. In Mr Justice Quirke’s team’s conversations with over 350 survivors, they found one- third of the women live alone. The survivors’ average age is 68, and 14 per cent are over 80.

Acknowledging that many survivors live outside the jurisdiction, Mr Justice Quirke advised that each should be entitled to a full range of public and private health services, equivalent to those provided to victims of the Hepatitis C scandal under the Health Amendment Act 1996. He explained in his report that his recommendations were a result of “helpful consultation with relevant Government officials”. On June 26th, 2013, the Government accepted survivors “should all be granted access without charge to a wide range of services”.

Why the delay?

Why then the delay in passing the legislation? And why the subterfuge? Mr Justice Quirke recommended the establishment of a helpline to assist the women in understanding and navigating their entitlements. Not even this small measure has been implemented. It may be that from the Government’s perspective the less that is understood about entitlements before the women sign their waivers the better.

We and our colleagues at Justice for Magdalenes Research are in touch with many women who feel confused and anxious about the scheme’s opaqueness. This is no way to afford restorative justice. We also know of three survivors who have died and two others who have experienced repeated hospitalisations since the Taoiseach’s apology last year.

Time is not on these women’s side. Further delays and more broken promises are simply unacceptable.

Maeve O’Rourke is a barrister; James M Smith is an associate professor at Boston College. Both are advisory committee members of Justice for Magdalenes Research

Life Lessons

How I teach ‘Humanae Vitae’ James F. Keenan February 3, 2014 When I teach the papal encyclical “Humanae Vitae,” published in 1968, I usually do so with a class of undergraduate students at Boston College. I teach it after studying with them five other noteworthy texts: the two creation accounts in Genesis, the teachings on marriage and sexuality by Paul and then by Augustine, and finally the papal encyclical, “Casti Connubii” (1930).

In many instances I try to teach them how to read and understand “Humanae Vitae” as a real, authoritative document. I lead them, as I do here, through the document, paragraph by paragraph (indicated by the numbers in parentheses).

First, I explain to them who wrote it and to whom. I have them see that the encyclical, that is, the papal letter, was written to brother bishops, clergy, Catholic laity and to all people of good will. I help them understand the different hierarchical levels of the audience. I also explain that the universal audience reflects the conviction of the pope and, indeed, the Catholic tradition, that such natural law teachings are not simply for Catholics but for all persons, since these teachings are from right reason.

I then try to help them see that Pope Paul VI wrote it and that, as a papal encyclical, it expresses the authoritative teaching from a pope. Without trying to get into exactly how authoritative a specific encyclical is, I try to highlight that in modern times the encyclical is a major mode of authoritative teaching that imposes objective claims on the consciences of all.

I then try to explain that “Humanae Vitae” was a document that was responding to the signs of the times; it was written in response to questions that were raised most notably by the invention and marketing of the birth control pill. The pill, like many other inventions, gave humanity the opportunity to dominate and rationally organize the forces of nature such that, we could now “extend this control over every aspect” of our own lives (No. 2). In one sense the document is specifically reflecting on birth control, but in a broader sense, the pope is asking the fundamental question of whether every invention is in itself worthy.

In teaching the encyclical I often find that students today do not appreciate the specific concern of the encyclical. They tend to think that the letter was about the birth control pill. I tell them it was about married people who were wondering about the use of contraception for the purpose of responsible parenting.

I then remind them that church teaching upholds marriage as the only legitimate context for sexual activity between a man and a woman. That is, I reiterate church teaching about the rightness of chastity and the wrongness of sex outside of marriage. Here, then, I note that the church was not considering whether birth control in any context was legitimate, but whether married couples alone could use it. No one, I remind them, was asking the more general question (“Can anyone use birth control?”) simply because contraception could only have been entertained as morally legitimate in the context of marriage, where sexual intimacy is permissible. This helps open their eyes to the many, many references to “married love” made in the encyclical.

I also introduce them to an argument, the principle of totality, which was current in the 1960s. This principle follows from a metaphysical insight that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and that therefore if a married couple is committed to having children, they do not need to leave each and every act of sexual love open to procreation. In other words, the principle of totality lets married couples believe that “procreative finality applies to the totality of the married life rather than to each single act” (No. 3). According to this argument, Christian marriage could be open to contraception in specific circumstances, but not in the marriage as a total reality. I alert them to the fact that later in the encyclical the pope rejects this use of the principle.

I note the authority of the church’s competency to teach the natural law and that adherence to the law is required for our salvation (No. 4). I similarly note the commission that Pope John XXIII established for the study of the correct regulations of births and that Pope Paul VI confirmed and expanded that commission (No. 5). I add that my own life was affected by two members on that commission: John Ford, S.J., whose position at Weston Jesuit School of Theology I later held, and Josef Fuchs, S.J., with whom I did my dissertation. I describe the very different roles they ended up having as members of the commission.

Pope Paul VI at the Vatican

I note that the commission produced a majority report influenced by Father Fuchs, among others, suggesting that married couples could regulate the ordering of the birth of their children through contraception, and a minority report influenced by Father Ford that contended against this position. I add that the pope saw in the disagreement the need to personally examine this question, particularly in light of the “moral doctrine on marriage constantly taught by the magisterium of the church” (No. 6). Having covered this background, I turn to the doctrinal principles of the encyclical.

I note that a new development emerges immediately in this section. The encyclical talks about sexual intimacy not as a right or a duty, nor as permissible or tolerable, as theologians and bishops had in earlier days. Nor does the document immediately turn to procreation as the primary end of marriage, as it did in “Casti Connubii.” Rather it turns to “married love,” which derives its nature and nobility from God who is love (No. 8, reiterated in No. 11). I have my students study how the encyclical specifically describes this love: friendship, faithful, exclusive and fecund (No. 9). I turn then to the question of the ordering of births in responsible parenthood. Here I focus on the notion of an objective moral order, a concept the students reasonably acknowledge and respect (No. 10).

I then have them study paragraph 11. Here I highlight the natural law’s recognition of the “intrinsic relationship” between sexual activity and procreation. While the encyclical acknowledges that any natural infertility does not compromise the moral legitimacy of sexual intimacy in marriage, still, “each and every marital act must of necessity retain its intrinsic relationship to the procreation of human life” (No. 11). Here the encyclical instructs us on the two-fold, inherent significance of marital, sexual activity as unitive and procreative. There are no moral grounds for breaking this bond (No. 12).

The magisterium then demonstrates the rationality of its argument. Just as a sexual act with an unwilling spouse is no true act of love, so too a conjugal act that “impairs the capacity to transmit life” “frustrates” God’s designs and “contradicts the will of the Author of life” (No. 13). In highlighting the moral limits of our actions, the encyclical returns to an earlier observation: just as we do not have an unlimited domination of our lives, so too we cannot claim an unlimited dominion over our sexual faculties.

The document then specifically enunciates those activities that are by no means legitimate for the regulation of births. First, it names “the direct interruption of the generative process already begun,” above all “direct abortion”; then it re-declares its opposition to direct sterilization. Finally, it declares: “Similarly excluded is any action which either before, at the moment of, or after sexual intercourse, is specifically intended to prevent procreation—whether as an end or as a means.” It then names certain casuistic principles that cannot be invoked in order to legitimate deliberately contraceptive conjugal activity: lesser evil, totality and toleration (No. 14).

It does, however, acknowledge that it “does not consider at all illicit the use of those therapeutic means necessary to cure bodily diseases, even if a foreseeable impediment to procreation should result there from—provided such impediment is not directly intended for any motive” (No. 15). This paragraph highlights an important distinction, first articulated, as the encyclical notes, by Pope Pius XII. As a theologian who has worked in the area of H.I.V./AIDS, trying to combat stigma, while advocating for proper education and equal accessibility to treatment for all people, I have also espoused a comprehensive prevention strategy, which includes the use of the condom, not as a contraceptive, but as a preventive or prophylactic device. This certainly applies in the case of a discordant couple (where one spouse is H.I.V. positive and the other is not) who are infertile, whether by illness, accident or age. Certainly such a couple using a condom in their marital intimacy are not in any way using the device as a contraceptive.

As such, it is not an immoral activity.

Paragraph 15, I think, may be applied to those discordant married couples who may be fertile. “Humanae Vitae” does not prohibit the discordant couple from engaging in sexual intimacy while using a condom solely to prevent the transmission of the virus and not in any deliberately contraceptive way.

I think it is worth noting that I have continuously upheld the teaching of “Humanae Vitae” and through it, I have also spoken, for 25 years, about the moral legitimacy of a comprehensive H.I.V. prevention strategy, that insists on marital fidelity, abstinence of sexual relations outside of marriage and the human dignity of the person, while including the use of the condom solely as a strategy to prevent disease in the context of the loving intimacy of discordant couples.

In Paragraph 16, the encyclical highlights that no couple needs to refrain from sexual intimacy at a time of infertility. It contrasts couples who rightly engage in sexual intimacy at times of infertility with those who “obstruct the natural development of the generative process.”

The document moves to its conclusion with warnings about the social repercussions of legitimating contraceptive activity and reminding readers of the limits of human power (No. 17). It also acknowledges that its position toward the natural law is not to be its arbiter, but rather its “guardian and interpreter”(No. 18).

In its last section on pastoral directives, the encyclical urges all to appreciate the law of God (No. 20), the value of selfdiscipline (No. 21) and the relevant need to promote chastity. It appeals to public authorities to seek true solutions to overpopulation and to scientists to study “natural rhythms” so as to “succeed in determining a sufficiently secure basis for the chaste limitation of offspring” (No. 24). It positively admonishes couples struggling with the matter (No. 25) and exhorts priests (No. 28) and bishops (No. 30) to minister well and to uphold the constant teaching of the church.

I find that following this close textual approach gives my students full appreciation of the teaching and the doctrine of “Humanae Vitae.”

James F. Keenan, S.J., founders professor of Theology at Boston College, is writing a book about university ethics (Rowman and Littlefield).

‘The Wolf of Wall Street’: Martin Scorsese’s cynical global ploy US sees graphic take on Wall St., but it’s a different film overseas

By Martha Bayles | J A N U A R Y

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IN EVALUATING a film these days, it’s crucial to consider how it will be adapted and marketed overseas — where studios make more than twice the profits they make at home. Case in point: Martin Scorsese’s three-­‐hour extravaganza “The Wolf of Wall Street,” which was released on Christmas Day and is now a Best Picture nominee.

Starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Jordan Belfort, a real-­‐life stockbroker whose “pump-­‐and-­‐dump” schemes cheated investors out of $200 million in the 1990s, the film has stirred intense controversy at home.

Critics and audiences have cheered the interminable scenes of overgrown adolescents in fancy suits scarfing hard drugs, carrying on MARY CYBULSKI with prostitutes, and gleefully wasting their ill-­‐gotten gains. For David Director Martin Scorsese pauses on the set of “The Wolf of Thomson of The New Republic, these scenes are “beautiful and Wall Street.” liberating” because they show America as a country where “there is no such thing as corruption. There is just the exhilaration of everyone screwing everyone.” Others find these scenes more boring than exhilarating. To quote one of my students, “that stuff is way over the top and goes on much too long.”

In fact, there’s a lot wrong with “The Wolf of Wall Street.” For starters, the film makes Belfort’s crimes appear victimless. The scores of women hired to fulfill the porno fantasies of these drug-­‐besotted millionaires are shown as overjoyed at the prospect and not suffering the slightest abuse. Furthermore, the investors whose lives Belfort took pleasure in ruining are kept off-­‐screen and described as the “richest 1 percent,” when in fact they were middle-­‐class amateurs.

According to Joel M. Cohen, the former assistant US attorney who investigated, indicted, and debriefed Belfort, the producers never bothered to get in touch with him. Instead, they relied on Belfort’s self-­‐glorifying books — and, as Cohen explained, added flourishes not found in the books. One such flourish is Belfort’s attempt to bribe the FBI agent who worked with Cohen on the Belfort case — and the gratuitous hint, later in the film, that the agent regretted not taking the bribe. Further, Cohen told me that, contrary to the film, Belfort was never lionized by his associates and that, when Belfort and his partner were indicted, “they immediately flipped on each other and raced each other to inform on everyone else.”

One might argue that the film at least provides insight into Wall Street, but that’s not really so. The causes of the 2007-­‐08 financial crisis include well-­‐intentioned government policies encouraging home ownership, a collective delusion that the real estate bubble would never burst, and overly complex and risky trading and financing practices that, fatefully, were legal at the time. The scams and excesses of a bush-­‐league player like Belfort had almost nothing to do with it.

So why even make a film about him? Are Scorsese and DiCaprio (whose admiration for Belfort is a matter of public record) simply naïve?

I don’t think so. The key to understanding “The Wolf of Wall Street” is to step back and look at the global arena in which Hollywood now operates.

Red Granite, the company that funded this production to the tune of $100 million, is currently negotiating its release with several governments that strictly censor the media, including films. These governments, gatekeepers to some of the most profitable markets

outside Western Europe and Japan, will surely insist on cutting most of the cocaine-­‐and-­‐hookers scenes. This cannot be a surprise to Red Granite, whose backers include deep-­‐pocketed Asian and Middle Eastern investors and whose co-­‐founder is Reza Aziz, the stepson of the prime minister of Malaysia.

If you’re wondering why Scorsese added a solid hour of debauchery to a film that could have told its story in half the time, here’s your answer. Scorsese came of age in the 1970s, just after the demise of the Production Code that had dictated the content of Hollywood films since 1934. The code was not imposed by the government; rather it was adopted by the Motion Picture Association as a way of staving off government censorship during an era when film did not yet enjoy the right of free expression under the First Amendment.

By 1968 the legal status of film had changed, allowing the MPAA to replace the Production Code with the ratings system we have today.

The change proved liberating to Scorsese’s generation; they’ve long been seen as the vanguard of a freer and more creative stage in the history of cinema.

It is all the more ironic, then, to see Scorsese game the system by padding “The Wolf of Wall Street” with soft-­‐core porn — which many Americans would defend as a crucial form of artistic expression — then scrap most of it when shipping the product overseas. Not only that, but after the titillating bits are cut, what’s left will be a lurid caricature of American economic liberty, achieved through a voluntary sacrifice of artistic liberty. This may play well in authoritarian countries of Asia and the Middle East, but from where I sit, it looks like a con. Jordan Belfort, eat your heart out.

Martha Bayles, who teaches humanities at Boston College, is the author of “Through a Screen Darkly: Popular Culture, Public Diplomacy, and America’s Image Abroad.”

Dating game: US undergraduates get lessons in love 23 JANUARY 2014 | BY JON MARCUS

Students assigned an old-fashioned date by Boston College lecturer When a male friend of Boston College undergraduate Erika Peña wanted to go out with her, he, like many modern twentysomethings, had no clue how to ask. So instead Ms Peña asked him out. She had to. It was a requirement for one of her courses.

Although her Dominican roots meant that she knew a bit about old-fashioned dating, Ms Peña said the prospect was still “frightening, because I had never in my life asked a guy out on date”.

SOURCE: ALAMY

“We were all always together. There was always a party, there were always hook-ups, and I don’t think relationships grew out of those interactions.

You would go on lunch dates with people but it wasn’t a ‘date’ date. It just wasn’t our norm.”

Ice-breaker: an initiative by a Boston College academic helped to ‘erode a taboo’ against dating among the young, said one student

In an age when it might seem that students are immersed in social media to the exclusion of real human contact, and romance has been replaced by casual sexual encounters or “hook-ups”, one of Ms Peña’s instructors is making the case for an alternative.

Boston College academic Kerry Cronin, associate director of the philosophy department’s Lonergan Institute and fellow in the Center for Student Formation, requires her students, as part of a course on relationships and human development, to go on dates.

Dating is a “social script that’s being lost”, she said, adding that she first noticed the trend when lecturing on relationships at the private Jesuit university, and braced for the ensuing discussion.

“I was waiting for the really controversial questions, like on what date should you have sex,” she recalled. “But really most of the questions I was getting were, ‘Gosh, what would you do on a first date? Where would you go?’ ” Her students, Ms Cronin realised, had no idea how to date.

“They were all stressed out about it and wanted to do it. But they didn’t seem to know what they were doing, and I was sort of perplexed by this,” she said.

So she began to set dates as assignments.

“I’d say, ‘OK, I want you to go on a date, and I want you to do it in the next two weeks.’ They’d hem and haw, as we all do, because of fear of rejection or whatever else.”

But soon students were opting to take the course at least in part because of the assignment.

“One of the things she highlights in her class is that this hook-up culture we all find ourselves in doesn’t make people happy. They actually want to go on dates,” observed Evan Goldstein, a theology student. “They just don’t have the cultural vocabulary to do that. Our culture in general has become sort of anaesthetised. No one ever wants to make themselves vulnerable.”

University students in particular, said Mr Goldstein, tend to put their careers above everything else, “including things that are perceived as being more quaint and traditional, such as relationships”.

Ms Cronin sets strict rules for the assignment. Dates must be alcohol-free and last for 60 to 90 minutes during the daytime, with someone of legitimate romantic interest, whom students must have to ask out in person and for whom they must pay.

The results, which students write about and discuss, can sometimes sound like the stuff of situation comedy. Mr Goldstein, for example, inadvertently asked a woman out for a first date on Valentine’s Day. Ms Peña took her date to an ice-cream shop popular with families and children.

But the initiative has sparked broader interest. Ms Cronin has now lectured on dating at some 50 other institutions, and a handful of academics have followed her lead and added dating to class assignments.

“You’re eroding a taboo that dating is something you don’t do,” Mr Goldstein said. As a topic, he said, “this isn’t just abstract and purely academic”, as is the case with other courses. “It’s relevant.”

Especially for Ms Peña. The man she dated for her class assignment took her back to the ice-cream store and proposed.

They plan to marry this summer in New York, where she is a graduate business student.

“It’s not to say I owe my marriage to that assignment,” Ms Peña said as her fiancé listened in. “But it did finally get us dating.”

An invisible crisis We are suffering from a growing public goods deficit

By Charles Derber and June Sekera | J A N U A R Y 2 2 , 2 0 1 4 WASHINGTON’S OBSESSIVE focus on the fiscal deficit has led to a 2014 budget, signed by President Obama, that reduces discretionary government spending below levels of the George W. Bush years. Ironically, the success of the fiscal deficit hawks has increased an ominous hidden deficit more consequential than the fiscal deficit, that of public goods.

IS TO CK PHO T O

“The history of civilization,” wrote Martin Wolf of the Financial Times in 2012, “is a history of public goods.” Public goods are what governments produce on behalf of their citizens: clean air and water, safe food and drugs, libraries and parks, highways and bridges, and scores of other services that citizens rely on every day.

Public goods are funded collectively by citizens through their taxes. The government produces them because the market does not or because a society decides that all citizens should have access because the societal benefits are so important.

We are now suffering a mushrooming “public goods deficit,” foretold as early as the mid-1950s by Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith, who warned about our backwards budgetary priorities leading to a disgraceful combination of “private opulence and public squalor.” Since Galbraith’s time, we have been disinvesting in our public goods — infrastructure, social welfare, public safety, and public education — at an astonishing clip, reflecting Washington’s brand of anti-deficit passions.

The result is that we are losing public goods that are vital to national and personal well-being. The public goods deficit remains largely hidden, an invisible crisis without a name. But how can such a catastrophic hidden deficit remain hidden? There are three explanations.

One is the paradox of public goods — their essential invisibility when they do what they are supposed to do. Public goods are created to meet the unmet needs of a society or to solve complex social or economic problems. But when the need is met or the problem solved, the public forgets that: a) there was a need or problem in the first place; b) the problem has been remedied or the need met; c) it was their government that made this happen; and d) it is their government that continues to maintain those solutions. Thus, success equals invisibility.

Second, the hidden deficit remains hidden by design, a deliberate strategy developed by conservative elites with enormous power over the public discourse. Cornell political scientist Suzanne Mettler has argued that influential, monied groups do not want people to know how much they are getting from government. If people recognized how many personal and social benefits come from government spending, it would threaten the conservative anti-government position, a stance long at the center of right-wing ideology. In 2008, Mettler showed that of all who deny ever receiving benefits from US government programs, over 90 percent had participated in at least one such program. As Mettler writes, the state’s role — and thus the existence of public goods — has been intentionally submerged and shrouded, “making it largely invisible to ordinary citizens.”

A third reason is that we lack the language to discuss the hidden deficit. You cannot see what you lack the words to describe. Neo-classical economists and conservative corporate interests have taught that only private businesses can produce lasting and true wealth, and that government is inherently unproductive since it displaces private enterprise and is only useful as a temporary corrective to transitory “market failures.” Such ruling orthodoxy undermines the very possibility of a “public good” produced by government, and helps explain why people heavily reliant on public goods claim they get no government benefits.

The solution, then, is, first, to introduce the language that allows people to recognize the existence of public goods and of the public goods deficit. As Betty Friedan showed in her path-breaking 1950s discussion of women’s plight as “the problem that has no name,” women needed words to name their predicament before they could understand it and act to fix it. Intellectuals, including economists, journalists, and political leaders, must all help advance the new language and ideas to name and make visible the hidden public goods deficit.

Second, those most hurt by the hidden deficit must mobilize to fix it. This is a daunting political challenge, but since those harmed include most of those on the wrong side of the inequality divide, there is a constituency ready to listen, learn, and act. Moreover, the stakes are extremely high for everyone, as failure to address the public goods deficit guarantees the creeping deterioration of the quality of our lives and the decay of society itself.

Charles Derber, professor of sociology at Boston College, has written 17 books, most recently “Capitalism: An Invitation to Political Economy.’’ June Sekera, former vice president of the Commonwealth Corporation, is heading the Public Goods Initiative.

JANUARY 20, 2014, 3:04 PM

A Risk in Caring for Abusive Parents

By PAULA SPAN Who could condemn someone for staying far away from a parent, even an ailing or dying parent, who mistreated him or her as a child? The last time I wrote about this emotional subject, most readers understood that response.

Many who had suffered through similar experiences said they had taken the same stance.

DElight/Getty Images

“He was a terrible father and mean, so I didn’t feel bad about moving out of state a few years before he died,” wrote Murre from Alaska. “I was glad not to see him anymore and relieved when he died.”

Adam from Phoenix spent his childhood traumatized by his parents’ abuse. “They remain unapologetic, and I’d gladly let them rot if they one day could not fend for themselves,” he wrote.

Yet we also heard from people who had agreed to become caregivers even if their parents had been, or remained, abusive. “I live by a moral code,” said Minerva from New York City, who cared for her alcoholic and bipolar mother. “It was my responsibility and I stepped up to the plate.”

Helen S. from Connecticut supervised her angry, meddlesome mother’s care and had lunch with her nearly every Sunday until she died. “I felt I had done the decent thing, and it helped me to put the remaining anger and resentment to rest,” Helen wrote.

We know relatively little about how many adults become caregivers for abusive or neglectful parents, or about why they choose to — or not to. But thanks to a recent study, we can see that those who report having endured childhood maltreatment are more vulnerable than other caregivers to depression when tending to their abusive parents.

This finding emerged from a study by two Boston College researchers, using 2003 to 2005 data from a continuing survey in Wisconsin.

The researchers located 1,001 adults over age 65 who were caring for one parent (generally a mother) or both. Almost 19 percent reported physical, verbal or sexual abuse as children, and 9.4 percent reported neglect. That is a substantial percentage — perhaps because the definition of abuse included frequent swearing and insults, or perhaps because corporal punishment was more common 50 years ago, said Sara M. Moorman, a sociologist and co-author of the study. But it is in line with what other studies have found when participants are asked to recall their experiences.

The researchers divided their sample into three categories: those with no history of childhood abuse or neglect; those who had been abused and were caring for their non-abusive parent; and those who had been abused and were, to borrow the study’s memorable title, “caring for my abuser.” They also compared caregivers neglected as children with those who were not neglected.

Those who had been abused or neglected were more likely to have symptoms of depression — like lack of appetite, insomnia, trouble concentrating, sadness and lethargy — than those who had not been. No surprise there, perhaps.

But the link was strongest for the third category. “The key was caring for the abusive parent,” said the lead author, Jooyoung Kong, a doctoral candidate in social work. Years later, “they are still affected. They’re more depressed.”

Like many studies, this one raises questions as well as answers them. Its definition of caregiving — having ever provided personal care to a parent for a month or longer — could have included all kinds of arrangements. “It doesn’t measure how long ago they provided care, or whether they lived with a parent or not,” Ms. Kong said. She plans to include details from other surveys as her research continues.

But the study does indicate that caregivers with a history of maltreatment should be aware of the risk they are taking — and, if the strain of caregiving becomes overwhelming, the increased risk that they will abuse their charges, perpetuating a sorrowful cycle.

“It’s such an untenable position to be placed in,” Dr. Moorman said. “My guess is, people only do it if they’re forced to, if there’s no one else to do it.” People in that situation should “be aware of the signs and symptoms of depression,” she said, and seek therapy or find a support group.

The rest of us are hardly in a position to judge those who walk away. But our society’s overreliance on unpaid family caregiving can make that difficult to do. As Dr. Moorman pointed out, “Not only nice people get old.”

Names Kobe Bryant Surprises BC Marketing Class

By MARK SHANAHAN and MEREDITH GOLDSTEIN | G L O B E S T A F F | J A N U A R Y 1 9 , 2 0 1 4

Imagine Nick Nugent’s surprise when, during the first session of his popular international marketing course at Boston College, the professor looked up to see Los Angeles Lakers star Kobe Bryant wander in.

“I had just begun the class with an example of how the NBA is a model of successful international marketing, and how Kobe is its biggest star, when suddenly the door opened,” said Nugent (above, with Bryant). “It was surreal.”

Though not playing because of an injury, the five-time NBA champ was in town for Friday’s Lakers/Celtics game at TD Garden. Nugent said Bryant sat down with the rest of the students, took notes, and even asked a question. During a break, Bryant was asked if he knew Nugent. “I know of him,” said the Laker, who hung for the whole two-hour class and then signed autographs and posed for photos with students.

“I didn’t go to college,” Kobe told the kids,” but I love to learn and international marketing is something I’m interested in.” (Bryant was just out of high school when he was drafted in 1996.) Afterward, Bryant tweeted: “Learn, Learn, Learn. Thank you #BC #internationalmarketing, Education never stops.”

For his part, Nugent, who’s taught at BC for 27 years, said it was an experience he’ll never forget. “The only difficulty will be next week when I try to top our first class,” he said.

TECH BEAT Using rust to capture solar energy A process known as photoelectrochemical water splitting uses a semiconductor to split water into oxygen and hydrogen.

AN ELUSIVE GOAL OF RESEARCHERS is to efficiently harness energy from the sun and convert it into electricity. The objective is to develop an artificial process comparable to photosynthesis undertaken by green plants.

One approach that has been covered periodically in this column is the preparation of more efficient solar cells. Most of the solar cells are based on inorganic silicon. In a previous TLT article, the development of an organic solar cell based on naturally derived cellulose nanocrystals is described.1

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This cell exhibited the highest power conversion efficiency yet seen with a solar cell derived from renewable materials. An added benefit is that the organic solar cell can be recycled.

An alternative way to capture solar energy is to use a process known as photoelectrochemical (PEC) water splitting that involves the use of a semiconductor to use solar energy to split water into oxygen and hydrogen, which can be used as a cheap form of chemical energy. Dunwei Wang, asso-ciate professor of chemistry at Boston College in Chestnut Hill, Mass., de-scribes the process as one in which en-ergy, in the form of light, is the input and chemical energy is the output. He says, “The thermodynamic detail was worked out in the 1950s and is not dif-ferent from what occurs in a solar cell.”

The water splitting occurs at a photoanode where the ideal sunlight wavelength used is 650 nanometers.

An appealing semiconductor material to be used in this process is rust also known as hematite or alpha-iron (III) oxide. Wang says, “Hematite is an appealing material to work with because it is cheap and abundant. This material also has a relatively good efficiency because it can utilize up to 18 percent of the incident solar radiation when combined with photocathodes of suitable adsorption. One other important characteristic is that hematite is catalytically active up to a wavelength of 600 nanometers, which is close to the sweet spot required for using solar energy to split water.”

‘One of the problems in using hematite is the limited distance that photoexcited holes can diffuse to the surface to be used in the water splitting process.’

Hematite is an n-type where electrons are the majority carriers and holes are the minority carrier. Wang says, “One of the problems in using hematite is the limited distance that photoexcited holes can diffuse to the surface to be used in the water splitting process. Holes are trapped or recombined within two to four nanometers of the hematite.”

A second concern for hematite is common to all metal oxides tried as semiconductors in PEC. Wang says, “The electrochemical potential of metal oxides is too positive. Oxidation power is huge yet reduction power is not good enough.”

The photovoltage for hematite is typically less than 0.4 V, which is much too low. For successful water splitting, a photovoltage of 1.61 V or greater must be achieved. Progress towards generating the necessary photovoltage has now been achieved by surface modification of hematite

The world’s largest recorded snowflake was 15 inches wide and eight inches thick found in Fort Keogh, Montana, on Jan. 28, 1887.

‘NiFeOx acts to change the thermodynamics of the system, which leads to a dramatic 0.4 V shift in the voltage needed to generate current which is known as the turn-on voltage.’

NiFeOx OVERLAYER Wang and his fellow researchers modified hematite with a NiFeOx overlayer, which led to the generation of a photovoltage of 0.61V bringing the research team closer to reaching the required photovoltage to actually split water.

He says, “We selected NiFeOx for several reasons. It is an abundant material that is easily produced in a process that does not require the use of water.

NiFeOx acts to change the thermodynamics of the system, which leads to a dramatic 0.4 V shift in the voltage needed to generate current which is known as the turn-on voltage.”

Figure 3 shows an image of the NiFeOx layer on the hematite surface.

Preparation of the overlayer consists of applying a 1:1 mixture of iron (III) 2-ethylhexanoate and nickel (II) 2-ethylhexanoate to a fluorine-doped, tin oxide-hematite electrode surface using a transfer liquid gun. The film was left in the air for five minutes followed by irradiation with ultraviolet light for three hours.

The result of this process is the formation of a relatively uniform NiFeOx layer with a thickness of 100 nanometers. The NiFeOx layer is amorphous, but transmission electron microscopy shows good contact with the crystalline hematite surface. NiFeOx also absorbs light at the same wavelength as hematite but does not produce any photocurrent.

The effect of the NiFeOx overlayer was evaluated by comparing the modified hematite with bare hematite. It was found that the benefit of the NiFeOx was seen in experiments run in the dark as compared to when both surfaces were illuminated.

This shift in voltage can also be carried out through the use of a co-catalyst such as cobalt-phosphate. Wang says, “The co-catalyst acts in a similar W W W. ST L E .O RG

Figure 3 | Application of a nickel iron oxide coating on hematite increases the photovoltage so that it is closer to the required photovoltage needed to split water in a process known as photoelectrochemical water splitting. (Courtesy of Boston College)

fashion as any catalyst in a typical process by lowering the activation energy of the process and changing the kinetics of the system.”

The researchers did further testing by combining the hematite with the NiFeOx overlayer with a dual-absorber composed of silicon nanowires. Wang says, “We obtained an even greater cathode shift of over 0.6 V, which further narrows the gap needed to reach the photovoltage for water splitting to 0.2 V.” Future work involves finding a way to bridge the 0.2 V gap, and as Wang indicated even achieve a negative voltage. Additional information on this research can be found in a recent article2 or by contacting Wang at dunwei. wang@bc.edu.

T R I B O LO GY & LU B R I CAT I O N T EC H N O LO GY

REFERENCES 1. Canter, N. (2013), “Recyclable Organic Solar Cells,” TLT, 69 (7), pp. 12-13.

2. Du, C., Yang, X., Mayer, M., Hoyt, H., Xie, J., McMahon, G., Bischoping, G. and Wang, D. (2013), “Hematite-Based Water Splitting with Low Turn-On Voltages,” Angewandte Chemie International Edition, 52 (48), pp. 12692-12695.

Neil Canter heads his own consulting company, Chemical Solutions, in Willow Grove, Pa. Ideas for Tech Beat can be submitted to him at neilcanter@comcast.net.

JANUARY 2014

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15

5 Myths About Payout Rules for Donor-Advised Funds

By Ray Madoff January 13, 2014 Donor-advised funds are in the process of taking over the charitable landscape.

While giving to most charities has remained largely flat in recent years, contributions to donor-advised funds are growing at eye-popping doubledigit rates. At this pace, Fidelity Charitable, the biggest of the advised funds, will soon surpass United Way Worldwide and become the largest “charity” in the country.

What this explosion means for the nonprofit world is the subject of growing debate.

Supporters say that all is good: The funds have democratized philanthropy, making it easy for anyone—even those with just a small amount of money—to create an endowment that can be available with a click of the mouse whenever the urge to give strikes.

Others are far less sanguine about this shift in philanthropic giving. I and many other critics of the laws governing the funds are concerned that donors and the people who manage their money have been the primary recipients of benefits from the growth of donor-advised funds, while charities and the people they serve are being starved of resources.

Donors get an immediate up-front tax benefit—money that drains the federal treasury of much-needed revenue for government services—but face no obligations to ensure that the money makes its way out to charities in a timely manner. Under the law, these funds can be kept in place in perpetuity.

Adding to the problem is that private foundations can meet their 5-percent payout rule simply by transferring money to donoradvised funds rather than giving to real charities.

It is time to put policies in place to ensure that charities and those who depend on them get the benefit Congress intended when it created the charitable deduction.

As the debates about advised funds grow more intense, it’s worth looking closely at five of the myths that their proponents like to advance when anyone suggests that it’s time to require the funds to distribute a minimum sum, and to examine what’s wrong with their arguments.

Donor-advised funds have increased overall charitable giving. Supporters like to suggest that the availability of donor-advised funds has spurred more charitable giving. Fidelity Charitable proclaims in its promotional materials that in the two decades since it was created, overall giving well outpaced inflation, rising by 72 percent—and suggests that donor-advised funds are responsible for that purported growth. But no one seriously thinks that inflation is the appropriate yardstick to use.

Rather, numbers from “Giving USA” show that charitable giving has not grown at all when compared with more appropriate economic indicators. For the past 40 years, overall charitable giving has remained at or about 2 percent of gross domestic product, and contributions from individuals have consistently hovered at 2 percent of disposable personal income.

Moreover, given the anemic growth in donations to the vast majority of charities in the past year, particularly in relation to the record-breaking year in the stock market, it’s more likely that the rise in popularity of the advised funds has resulted in fewer—not more—resources for American charities.

Advised funds do not need payout rules because they already give a higher percentage of their assets than private foundations. The latest figures show that the organizations that offer donor-advised funds distribute on average 16 percent each year. Supporters of the status quo argue that this is much higher than for private foundations that often treat their requirement to distribute at least 5 percent of assets a year as the maximum they must give, not just the floor that Congress intended.

But these overall figures are extremely misleading. They are based on sponsoring organizations as a whole and not on each advised fund.

This aggregate approach can hide a lot of ills. The Congressional Research Service pointed out that a group that sponsors many donor-advised funds can achieve a 16-percent payout rate if only 20 percent of its accounts (measured by asset value) distribute an average of 80 percent of their funds each year, even if all of the remaining accounts distribute nothing at all.

Anecdotally, it appears that many small donors use advised funds to simplify their recordkeeping, and those donors distribute close to 100 percent each year. That’s great, but that should not provide a license for other donors to warehouse their contributions in perpetuity.

But there’s another more fundamental problem with this argument: Why compare advised funds with foundations?

Donors who put their money into advised funds receive many more tax benefits than those who give to foundations, most important among them the ability to write off the full value of appreciated real estate, artworks, closely held stock, and other nonmarketable assets. These generous tax breaks are a big reason for the astronomical growth of advised funds and all the more reason to impose some requirement on donors to give the money to benefit society in a timely manner.

Donor-advised funds do not need payout rules because they are no different from endowments. Some argue that it is unfair to complain about donor-advised funds since they are no worse then endowments at public charities, which have no payout obligations.

However, the reason current law allows endowments to let charities decide for themselves how to finance their missions. If an organization believes that creating a fund for hard times or spending frugally now better supports its charitable mission over the long haul, then we defer to its judgment.

This same justification does not extend to people who contribute to advised funds, nor should it. Donor-advised funds don’t have a charitable purpose; they are simply a holding pen where people can put money before deciding where to give. If a donor wants to create a perpetual endowment for a particular cause, she can always do so within an existing charity or by creating a foundation.

Payout concerns do not apply to community foundations. Community foundations bristle when they are considered to be in the same category as commercial organizations that offer advised funds. They argue that the community foundations don’t need payout rules because they want their donors to make distributions, unlike commercial funds that largely want fees for managing the money in an advised fund.

But community foundations actually appear to have worse payout rates than commercial funds. In the latest report from the National Philanthropic Trust, the annual payout from advised funds at community foundations was only 13.2 percent compared with the 15.1-percent overall payout rate from commercial funds.

To be sure, these aggregate numbers don’t show everything that is really happening. And it is possible that donors who create funds at community foundations make more regular distributions than their commercial counterparts.

That said, this misses the more important point: If community foundations are truly interested in payout for their causes—which I believe they are—then shouldn’t they support payout rules that will ensure that all of their accounts are distributed to the intended beneficiaries in a timely way?

Community foundations can truly distinguish themselves from commercial funds by supporting such a payout rule.

Any payout rule should be imposed on the sponsoring organization and not on the basis of each account.

Recognizing that payout requirements may soon be inevitable, some supporters of advised funds have suggested that they wouldn’t mind if an overall 5-percent minimum-distribution rule was imposed on the sponsoring organizations that offer advised funds.

However this proposal is illogical and would be worse than maintaining the status quo.

A 5-percent floor would be an absurdly low percentage to apply to advised funds. The 5-percent minimum imposed on foundations in the 1969 tax law was based on the idea that foundations should be allowed to operate in perpetuity. However advised funds are essentially charitable checking accounts. They have no specific mission, and there is no reason for them to last forever.

Moreover, private foundations receive much less favorable tax treatment than advised funds. It is appropriate to link more generous tax benefits with more rigorous payout requirements.

Most important, it would also be inherently illogical to impose a payout requirement on the basis of the sponsoring organization rather then on the individual donor’s account.

The donor is the one who benefits from the tax deduction, and, legal niceties aside, everyone understands that it is the donor who calls the shots regarding whether a distribution is made.

Given this combination of benefit and control, the only policy that makes sense is to impose payout requirements on the basis of each account.

A simple approach to bringing about real change would be this: Require donors setting up advised funds to name a charity that would receive any unspent funds at the end of seven years.

The sponsoring organization would simply need to track account spending, and at the end of seven years, it would automatically send unspent money to the donor’s chosen charity. Donors could still make additional contributions to the fund any time; each of those could be tracked separately to follow the seven-year rule.

That’s the kind of solution that balances everyone’s needs—those of donors, charities, and society.

It’s time for Congress to adopt such an idea before donor-advised funds capture even more money intended to serve the common good.

Ray Madoff is a professor at Boston College Law School, where she teaches about trusts and estates, and is the author of Immortality and the Law: The Rising Power of the American Dead.

Which Game Are You Playing?

Gerald C. Kane, January 10, 2014

Is your corporate culture geared for social business?

One of the most important, and most often overlooked, aspects of social business is organizational culture. For organizations with the right type of culture, social business represents the opportunity to unlock new collaborative potential and fundamentally transform the organization. For organizations with the wrong type of organizational culture, social business may never amount to more than a suite of unused IT tools.

So what is the “right” type of organizational culture for social business? A clue can be found in a 2012 Harvard Business Review article. This article discusses a fascinating study by Stanford psychologist Lee Ross and his colleagues.

Ross conducted a classic “prisoner’s dilemma” scenario with a group of participants. This scenario is one in which two prisoners each are given, separately, the options of Image courtesy of Flickr user cooperating with one another by staying silent, or betraying Cambodia4kids.org Beth Kanter. the other prisoner for a chance at freedom. The catch is that the benefit (or cost) of betrayal versus cooperation is determined by the choice of the other prisoner — that is, whether one prisoner’s choice is better or worse for his situation depends entirely on what action his counterpart takes.

The twist to this scenario was that the researchers told participants in one group that they were playing “the Wall Street Game” and in the other group were told that they were playing “the Community Game.”

The results were striking. When participants were told that they were playing the Wall Street Game, 70% of participants acted according to rational self-interest and chose to betray the other prisoner. When participants were told that they were playing the Community Game, however, 70% of participants chose to cooperate. The key takeaway is that a substantial portion of people decides whether or not to cooperate based on environmental conditions.

The implications for how (and with whom) to deploy social business are profound. Companies that already exhibit the cooperative culture of the Community Game will benefit more readily from social business. Social business tools unlock the inherent willingness to collaborate and desire to cooperate embedded in the organizational culture. At the risk of putting too fine of a point on it, social business is the Community Game, where benefits accrue from cooperation and sharing information.

Companies that exhibit the self-interested culture of the Wall Street game, however, may require a cultural shift before they can benefit similarly. It requires managers to begin thinking about business differently, as a cooperative enterprise with employees and customers. Social business tools facilitate those who want to cooperate and collaborate, but it does not create that desire.

The challenge is that this shift cannot be faked. Unlike a prisoner’s dilemma game that represents a single decision-point, social business is an ongoing enterprise. Even if a manager tells employees and

customers that they are now playing the Community Game by introducing social business initiatives, their actions will quickly reveal whether or not it is truly the case. Successful social business may require a shift in culture, not just a shift in tools or in rhetoric.

Although perhaps an oversimplification, I suspect most failed social media initiatives â&#x20AC;&#x201D; internal or external â&#x20AC;&#x201D; can be described as an attempt to use social business tools to play the Wall Street Game.

Instead, social business may be a different game entirely.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Gerald C. (Jerry) Kane is an associate professor of information systems at the Carroll School of Management at Boston College and the MIT Sloan Management Review Guest Editor for the Social Business Big Idea Initiative. He can be reached at gerald.kane@bc.edu and on Twitter at @profkane.

Boston Common, now cigarette-free, was once a smokers’ haven How does society feel about smoking? Just see what’s legal in the city center.

By Marilynn S. Johnson

| GLOBE CORRESPONDENT

JANUARY 05, 2014

WHATEVER THEIR RESOLUTIONS, the start of the new year has marked the end of one habit for Boston’s downtown smokers: stepping out on the Common for a cigarette. In one of his last acts before leaving office, Mayor Thomas Menino approved an ordinance banning smoking on Boston Common and the city’s other parks. That measure went into effect last Tuesday.

As restrictions on smoking have made the great outdoors the last refuge of beleaguered smokers, the notion of a smoking ban on the 50-­‐acre Common might come as a bit of a shock. But it is especially ironic given the park’s history. In the mid-­‐19th century, when public smoking was prohibited throughout the city, Boston Common was the only place that nicotine lovers could legally light up and consume their tobacco in peace.

The rise and fall of smoking in the Common says a lot about evolving social mores and attitudes toward health over the last two centuries. It also opens a window onto the changing uses of public space—and how, when it comes to what we’re allowed to do outside, stated justifications are often only part of the story.

Boston’s fraught relationship with smoking dates back to the 17th century, when the colony’s Puritan founders, who frowned on the use of tobacco, moved to curtail its use. The Colonial court first banned smoking in public in 1632, assessing a small fine of one penny for violators. In 1638 a new law upped the penalty to 10 shillings and prohibited smoking within 300 feet of all homes, barns, fields, forests, inns, and public houses—effectively outlawing smoking throughout the city. Although widely violated, these and later blue laws governing tobacco use remained on the books until 1880. Boston earned a well-­‐ deserved reputation for its persecution of smokers, who were routinely fined or even arrested on the streets.

The city’s smokers got a welcome reprieve when Mayor John Bigelow announced in 1851 that a “Smokers’ Circle” would be established in the southwest end of Boston Common, near the present day Parkman Bandstand. In this shady grove, outfitted with a circle of benches, gentlemen could gather to discuss the events of the day while enjoying cigars and pipes (cigarettes did not become popular until the 1880s). As a local magazine noted, the Smokers’ Circle quickly became a favorite haunt for businessmen who “resort each afternoon and evening to inhale the bewitching weed.” Just how long the Smokers’ Circle survived is unclear—it may have become obsolete during the Civil War when multiple regiments

were mustered on the Common. It was certainly gone by 1880, when the city’s smoking ban was overturned. In any case, the Smokers’ Circle marked the first volley in a campaign to legalize tobacco use in the city, and Boston Common served as the sanctuary where this “freedom” could be exercised.

The creation of the Smokers’ Circle also spoke to the changing physical and social landscape of the Common. Once a grazing area on the outskirts of town, the Common had by the mid-­‐19th century become the scenic centerpiece of a growing city. With the construction of the State House in 1798, prominent Bostonians built stately homes along Beacon Street, and Beacon Hill residents began to lead efforts to beautify and “improve” the park. Hills were leveled, bogs were filled in, and tree-­‐lined malls were constructed around the perimeter of the Common. Most significantly, residents’ cows, which had grazed in the Common for two centuries, were summarily evicted in 1830. In the process, the area was transformed from a productive space for grazing, carpet beating, and militia drilling to a refined leisure space for genteel residents. Fashionably dressed women strolled the malls, a social ritual that allowed them to see and be seen amid the urban bustle.

Since smoking was then almost exclusively a male activity, the creation of the Smokers’ Circle would clearly have been understood as something else as well: a male-­‐only space in a park that was technically open to all and increasingly claimed by well-­‐to-­‐do women. Such gender-­‐specific amenities were not unique to the Common; around the same time, Central Park boasted a Ladies Skating Pond as well as a Ladies Pavilion, where women park goers could wait unmolested for the streetcar.

Ultimately these preserves gave way to more mixed interactions in the 20th century, and after the smoking ban was lifted, smoking—by both men and women—became routine throughout the Common.

Now, more than 130 years later, Bostonians are reinstating the smoking ban on the Common (as well as in Franklin Park, the Public Garden, and dozens of other city holdings). Health concerns over exposure to secondhand smoke have dominated the debate, and proponents of the ban argue that it will reduce litter and pressure smokers to quit. But while health issues are the most touted motivation, changing social practices in the Commonwealth, most notably the decriminalization of marijuana and the pending legalization of medical marijuana, are a subtext that has never been far from the surface in discussions of the new rule. Residents have recently complained of increased levels of pot smoking in the Common, particularly near playgrounds or other spots frequented by children. And the widespread public pot smoking at the annual Freedom Rally sponsored by cannabis reform advocates in the Common every fall has long been a bête noir of city officials.

Last August, Boston City Councilor Bill Linehan first proposed boosting the penalties for public pot smoking in the Common to $300, which would have required violators to present identification and allowed the city to issue warrants for those who failed to pay their fines. But the measure stalled; instead, a broad-­‐based smoking ban was introduced the following month. With its promised health benefits, the blanket smoking ban sailed through the City Council in late November.

Will we see a move to re-­‐create the Smokers’ Circle? Not anytime soon, because the smoking ban on the Common is not just a health measure but a way of accommodating bigger changes in the public order. For more than four centuries, Boston Common has been a bellwether of social change. If you want to know how Bostonians feel about smoking in another hundred years, see what’s legal on the Common—and that may tell you all you need to know.

Marilynn S. Johnson is a professor of history at Boston College and is cocurating an exhibition with her students on the history of Boston Common. She can be reached at johnsohi@bc.edu.

Walsh’s choice of inaugural venue breaks with tradition

By Jeremy C. Fox | J A N U A R Y 0 5 , 2 0 1 4

Boston Mayor John Francis “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald broke a longstanding tradition of inaugurating mayors inside City Hall in 1910, when he took the oath of office inside a jam-packed Faneuil Hall.

James Michael Curley held the city’s largest mayoral inaugural in 1922 at a grand hall on Huntington Avenue, drawing 12,000 fervent supporters.

MATTHEW J. LEE/GLOBE STAFF

In selecting Boston College’s Conte Forum for his Monday morning inauguration, Mayor-elect Martin J. Walsh has placed it 6 miles from City Hall, the furthest ever.

In 1926, Malcolm E. Nichols chose Symphony Hall, where the organ music and dignified atmosphere cast such a spell that it became the site of the next 10 ceremonies, straight through John F. Collins’ second inaugural in 1964.

Since Boston’s incorporation as a city in 1822, fewer than a dozen sites have hosted mayoral inaugurations, and only one — the Strand Theatre in Dorchester, used for Kevin H. White’s 1980 swearing in — was far from the city’s center.

Until now.

In selecting Boston College’s Conte Forum for his Monday morning inauguration, Mayor-elect Martin J. Walsh has placed it 6 miles from City Hall, the furthest ever, and set the stage for the second-largest inaugural in Boston history.

Walsh said he didn’t choose BC to send a message or set a precedent; he simply wanted the inauguration to be open to the thousands who worked to elect him and to other supporters, including aunts traveling from Ireland and England and possibly all of his 67 first cousins.

“It’s the first time in 20 years there’s been a new mayor inaugurated,” Walsh said in a telephone interview. “I didn’t want to have to pick and choose who could come and who couldn’t come.”

Local historians and politicians say the venue has symbolic meaning and sets a precedent for future mayors, freeing them from the downtown tradition.

“It certainly does signal that he is not going to be a downtown mayor, and that he is not going to simply follow in the footsteps of predecessors, and that he’s not going to worry too much about what smart people like me might think,” said Robert J. Allison, chairman of the history department at Suffolk University.

If he fills the Conte Forum, which a BC spokesman said will be able to accommodate 8,000 on Monday, Walsh’s ceremony will fall between the two largest past inaugurals: those of Raymond L. Flynn in 1984 and Curley in 1922.

Like Curley, Walsh is the son of Irish immigrants and is closely associated with working-class voters, as is Flynn, the grandson of immigrants from County Galway and County Cork.

In a recent interview, Flynn recalled his 1984 inauguration as a whirlwind that began with morning Mass, continued with a swearing-in before about 4,200 at what was then called the Wang Center for the Performing Arts, (now the Citi Performing Arts Center) and included a stop at a fire at the Westin Copley Place before he attended celebrations at public housing developments in South Boston and Roxbury.

“I wanted to make the event itself a neighborhood event, so more people could participate in it,” Flynn, 74, said.

Walsh, with similar goals, could nearly double Flynn’s turnout, but he will still be considerably shy of Curley’s 1922 inaugural, which drew 12,000 people, according to a Globe report at the time, to Mechanics Hall, a massive red-brick edifice on Huntington Avenue that was razed in 1959 to make way for the Prudential Center.

Curley’s audience was “largely made up of women,” the Globe reported at the time and supporters interrupted his “fiery” inaugural address with numerous bursts of applause. Curley had considered taking the oath in Tremont Temple, as he had in 1914 to launch his first term, according to the Globe reports, but was told “that even that big structure would probably not be large enough to hold the great throng.”

White brought the inauguration back to Faneuil Hall in 1968, after a gap of 50 years, for a simple but elegant ceremony that included an 11-minute speech and a few ferns and flowers as decorations.

Flynn, White’s successor, selected other sites for the next three inaugurations, but outgoing Mayor Thomas M. Menino was sworn in at Faneuil Hall for each of his five terms. Through his spokeswoman, Menino declined to discuss his selection of Faneuil Hall.

John Winthrop Sears, 83, who ran for mayor in 1967, was a city councilor from 1980 – 1982, and served on Flynn’s transition team, noted some irony in the selection by Walsh, a Democrat, of a venue named for former Republican US Representative Silvio O. Conte.

“It’s unusual, but I like the unusual,” Sears said, “and it is at least a temporary return to the powerful Hibernian culture that has been running the city for the last 100 years.”

Walsh said the selection also had personal significance. Walsh attended BC’s Woods College of Advancing Studies, and he said honoring his alma mater had meaning for others who, like him, returned to college as adults while juggling other responsibilities.

“A lot of people who went to the Woods School are very happy,” Walsh said. “A lot of people go there, work during the day and go to school at night, and they struggle to get by.”

This inauguration also marks a first for Boston College.

Walsh will be the first mayor to have completed undergraduate studies there, BC historian James O’Toole said, though Kevin H. White earned a degree at the law school.

Historians said the inauguration returns BC to a central role in the beginning of a new era for the city, something that happened in the 1950s when its Boston Citizens’ Seminars series helped plan urban renewal projects for the “New Boston” envisioned by local leaders.

“What this inauguration does . . . is to cement and underline the connection we’ve traditionally had with the City of Boston itself,” said O’Toole, a BC history professor writing a history of the college. “It cements the establishment between the college and the community in a really positive way.”

Stay-at-home dads find acceptance slowly grows

BY AMY COYNE BREDESON â&#x20AC;&#x201C; December 22, 2013 When Nate Ulmer takes his children to the playground during the day, he is usually the only father there.

If there are mothers around, they don't talk to him, which makes him feel a little out of place -- but he doesn't let it bother him.

"I'm not going to bring up Tupperware or anything like that," he said with a laugh.

Ulmer, a Bluffton resident, is one of many men who have taken on the role of stay-at-home dad. He cares for Jorja, 5, and Hunter, 3, while his wife, Cathy, goes to work as a pharmacist. They're expecting their third child in May. Most people Nate knows say it's pretty awesome that he gets to stay at home with the children. His buddies pick on him sometimes, but he doesn't care. He knows they're just messing with him.

"I just enjoy being a parent," he said. "I've witnessed a lot of dads (who) just don't like being a parent at all."

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2012 about 189,000 fathers stayed at home with their children while their wives worked.

Professor Brad Harrington, executive director of the Boston College Center for Work & Family, said there are two main reasons fathers decide to stay at home to care for their children: First, they like the idea of having one parent at home to raise the children if possible. Second, the decision about who should stay at home depended on who made less money. In most cases, Harrington said, the mothers made significantly more money or had the potential to make more money than the fathers.

Those reasons were the most common given in the center's 2012 national study of 31 men who stay at home with their children.

The study found that many stay-at-home fathers do worry about how others perceive them, though. The survey asked the men how they respond when they meet new people who ask what they do for a living. Most said they were stay-at-home fathers. Some said they would answer the question with what they used to do and add that they are home with the children for a little while.

"Once they get past that, a lot of the guys said that what they're doing now is tremendously meaningful," Harrington said.

Dave Scheifele of Bluffton has been a stay-at-home dad since his daughter, Elizabeth, was born four years ago.

A retired firefighter, paramedic and psychiatric nurse, Scheifele is not able to work a full-time job because of injuries sustained on the job. He does work part-time from home, doing IT consulting while caring for Elizabeth.

Scheifele said he doesn't really get reactions from people when he tells them what he does.

"I think society has changed to where there's a lot more women in the working world and there's a lot more stay-at-home dads," he said.

In the Boston College study, the wives of stay-at-home fathers were also surveyed. What they found was that most of the men are married to ambitious, well-educated professional women. The wives were incredibly positive about their husbands raising the children. In all cases except one, the women couldn't say enough about how grateful they were for having one parent at home. They said their own careers could flourish because of it. They also said they couldn't help but feeling they should be the one at home.

Scheifele's wife, Alison, is a security clerk at Wexford Plantation on Hilton Head Island. She stayed home for about six weeks after the baby was born. Then Dave took over.

"Who doesn't want to be home?" she said. "But then again, after two days home on the weekend, I'm kind of ready to go back to work."

Nate knew for years he would be the primary caretaker for his children. When he and Cathy were dating more than a decade ago, they knew they wanted to have kids. Cathy was in school to be a pharmacist, and Nate worked many jobs, including surveying land for about 10 years. He said he never found a job he enjoyed. So they decided then that Cathy would be the breadwinner, and Nate would stay at home with their future children.

"We planned a lot of stuff out," Nate said. "(We) wanted to make sure everything was just right for our children."

Neither Dave nor Nate had dreams of being stay-at-home dads when they were growing up, but such a title probably didn't even exist back then.

When Nate was a child, he thought he would end up working in a factory when he grew up. He does work one day a week at Messex One Stop Service in Bluffton. But he never imagined he'd be spending six days a week caring for small children.

Meanwhile, Dave dreamed of becoming an astronaut. His plan was to join the Air Force because that was the first step to get into the astronaut program. Unfortunately, he was turned down because of a bad knee.

As far as going back to work full-time, Nate said, "I keep myself busy enough to not worry about that."

Dave said he does miss work at times, but he can't return because of his disabilities.

"I always like helping people," Dave said. "It's always been in my nature to help people. I'm still one of the guys that will see someone with a flat tire and pull over. Saving lives meant a lot to me."

Dave admits that sometimes he feels isolated not socializing with other adults much during the day.

According to the Boston College study, this is a common sentiment. There are plenty of play groups for at-home moms and their children but few for fathers. And fathers who have attended playgroups often did not feel welcome. One father was even told that the bylaws said men were not allowed.

"I think that men struggle more because there are so many fewer of them in the situation," Harrington said.

But Dave said the benefits of being a stay-at-home dad far outweigh the pitfalls, and he wouldn't trade it for the world.

He has a 17-year-old son, William, from a previous marriage and worked a lot when William was a baby. So when Elizabeth came along, he really wanted to be at home with her.

"I jumped at the chance," he said.

"I get to have the first years of molding my daughter."

Although Nate isn't yakking it up with the moms on the playground, he does make time to hang out with his buddies so he's not missing out on a social life. He doesn't get together with other stay-at-home dads, but he is surrounded by family. And the kids have instant playmates in their cousins right next door.

But honestly, he said, he is just fine not hanging out with adults. He has fun playing with the kids. More importantly, he likes knowing that his children are safe and happy.

"You have a job to do," he said.

Tablets facilitate impulse shopping for many The mere touch can make you want to purchase

By Megan Woolhouse | D E C E M B E R 1 8 , 2 0 1 3

Curbing impulse purchases can be a challenge for anyone on a budget.

But it might be even harder for shoppers to stop themselves if they happen to use their iPad to peruse the wares of online retailers. New research out of Boston College indicates that consumers feel a deeper affinity for products they touch on a screen than those selected using a laptop touchpad or a mouse.

Y O O N S . B Y U N / G L O B E STUDIO PHOTO

The simple act of touching a product on a tablet screen appeared to greatly influence the desires of Boston College undergraduates who participated in the study.

When consumers participating in the study reached out and touched an image on a touchscreen, the experience nearly rivaled their feelings of touching merchandise in a brick-­‐and-­‐mortar store, according to the measure of satisfaction used in the study.

“It’s kind of surprising how strong the effect is,” said S.Adam Brasel, a Boston College business professor and lead author of the study. “And we’re not necessarily aware it’s taking place.”

This holiday season, shoppers appear more connected to their iPads and touchscreen phones than ever, helping to drive online sales to more than one-­‐third of all holiday purchases, according to retail analysis firm NPD Group Inc. That’s because technology has made it easier for consumers to feel as if their iPads are an extension of themselves and easier for retailers to capitalize on those feelings, industry analysts said. Many e-­‐tailers retain credit card information to allow shoppers to buy with a single click — or touch — to make buying easier as well as faster.

But the convenience and good feelings of one-­‐touch shopping also carry the danger of quickly racking up debt, warned Michael Norton, a Harvard University professor and author of “Happy Money: The Science of Smarter Spending.”

“Buying feels great in the moment,” he said, “but debt can outweigh the happiness of buying things.”

Yet the simple act of touching a product on a tablet screen — rather than clicking a box with a laptop mouse — appeared to greatly influence the desires of Boston College undergraduates who participated in the study. To determine the attachment the young consumers had to the products they selected, researchers asked the students at what price they would resell their recent purchases.

The higher the asking price, the more attractive the buyers found their purchases.

Online shoppers felt drawn to products selected on a touchscreen. They were willing to sell a sweat shirt for 168 percent of the original price, compared with 131 percent when they selected a product with a mouse and 121 percent when they selected a product using a computer touchpad. (The differences were not as great for a less tangible item — a city tour.)

Brasel said generally people shopping in brick-­‐and-­‐mortar stores will want about 200 percent of the original price if reselling.

Touchscreens by themselves are powerful, Brasel said, but even more so when the students owned their devices. Students who used an iPad they owned wanted 194 percent more than what they paid for the sweat shirt. Students who borrowed an iPad to shop wanted about 165 percent more.

As people gain more familiarity with devices like an iPad, it allows them to slip into a sort of autopilot mode when they are shopping online, buying without much thought, said Brasel. It’s similar to shopping in a familiar grocery store, where consumers pick up items almost automatically.

This nonconscious shopping behavior becomes apparent when grocery stores change their layout, leaving customers frustrated.

“There’s only so much we can really pay attention to,” Brasel said. “If it’s not a mission-­‐critical decision, [our brains] offload it and e-­‐ tailers can take advantage of it.”

Marshal Cohen, a retail industry analyst at NPD Group, said shoppers have become skilled at visualizing the product they want. Online retailers have grown more skilled at finding ways to give customers a sense of confirmation about their purchases by providing easy ways for them to comparison shop or read product reviews to help them feel like they’ve made the right choice.

“They used to say nobody would ever buy a diamond online. Not true. People are even buying homes without seeing them [in person] online,” Cohen said. “We are entering a period where we’re using our imagination rather than touch, feel, or smell. We’re using our brain differently.” Some surveys of online shoppers have reported that people believe they can imagine the smell of a perfume while shopping for scents online, for example, Cohen said.

John Wells, an associate dean at the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, compared the online shopping world to a casino that uses chips instead of money. The goal is to help consumers forget that they are spending real money.

Wells, who has researched impulsiveness, said Amazon.com patented its one-­‐click online checkout for similar reasons; many consumers turn back from a purchase if they have to enter all their credit card information.

“As interfaces get more sophisticated,” he said, “you will find yourself behaving in ways you didn’t expect.”

People & Places

Rockefellers donate artwork to Boston College GLOBE STAFF

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BOSTON SUNDAY GLOBE

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DECEMBER 15, 2013

Several members of the Rockefeller clan were at Boston College the other day, and they came bearing gifts. There to celebrate Christian Rockefeller’s graduation — he’s the great-grandson of Nelson Rockefeller, the former New York governor and vice president — Steven C. Rockefeller Jr. and wife Kimberly , Christian’s parents, brought with them an etching by the German artist Albrecht Dürer. They gave the piece, which is from Nelson Rockefeller’s personal collection, to BC’s McMullen Museum of Art.

BC students trade skullcaps with Pope Francis

By Wesley Lowery and Jeremy C. Fox | December 13, 2013 Two Boston College juniors walked away from the Vatican with a treasured memento Wednesday, after Pope Francis gave them his white papal skullcap.

Philosophy majors Katherine Rich and Ethan Mack, who are studying in Rome this semester, waited along the barricades with a skullcap, called a zucchetto, and a note attached that read, “Boston College loves our Jesuit pope,” the students of the Jesuit-run university said Thursday in e-mail messages from Rome.

“We thought he wouldn’t see us, but we both yelled, ‘Papa!’ and at that second he turned around, saw us, and asked the driver to stop,” said Rich, 20, a native of Minnetonka, Minn.

KA TH ER INE R ICH

On Wednesday, Katherine Rich and Ethan Mack received a skullcap from Pope Francis after they gave him one

They extended the zucchetto, bought for 50 euros, or about $68, the night before near St. Peter’s Square, and the pope sent over a guard who carried it to him, they said.

Francis smiled at the note and donned the cap after making sure it was the right size, they said, then handed his own zucchetto to the guard.

“The pope then gave a nod and smiled right at us,” said Mack, 21, who is from Portland, Maine. “He took off with the one I bought, and the guard gave us his original one.”

The Rev. Thomas Rosica, chief executive of the Salt and Light Catholic Television Network in Toronto, said such exchanges have happened with previous popes, but are an increasingly regular practice under Francis.

“I wasn’t there to see it,” Rosica said of the exchange with Rich and Mack, “but it happens by the dozens every week.”

“It’s a wonderful gesture,” Rosica said. “It’s a way of him reaching out to people.”

Since assuming the papacy in March, Francis has garnered praise from Catholics and non-Catholics alike for his humility and compassion. He was named person of the year Wednesday by Time magazine, whose managing editor praised him “for committing the world’s largest church to confronting its deepest needs and for balancing judgment with mercy.”

KA THER INE R ICH

Rich and Mack said the idea for the trade came from friends studying at Providence College and the Catholic University of America, who attempted trades but were unsuccessful because their zucchettos were the wrong size.

The BC students arrived at the Vatican early to secure a spot near the barricades in St. Peter’s Square, where the pontiff greets the faithful from his popemobile.

At first he passed without noticing Mack waving the zucchetto, but when Mack and Rich called out to him, Francis turned back to see them.

Rich said many in the crowd asked to touch or kiss the zucchetto, or to take a photo with it, requests to which they happily acquiesced.

“The best part of the whole encounter was just seeing Pope Francis smile at us,” Rich said. “He radiates joy in a way unlike anyone else.”

December 11, 2013 | By Solomon Friedberg

Op-Ed

Can American students get smart?

Recent test results of 15-year-olds in the U.S. were appalling. Common Core standards being implemented in 45 states hope to raise student achievement.

The latest international test scores of 15-year-olds are in, and the results are appalling. The Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, found that the United States — the most affluent country in the world — failed to rank in the top 20 in any category. In math — the subject most critical for careers in high-paying science, technology and engineering fields — slightly more than a quarter of U.S. students scored below baseline proficiency.

But we shouldn't have been surprised. This year's scores were comparable to results over the last decade, leading Education Secretary Arne Duncan to describe a "picture of educational stagnation."

That could change. Forty-five states, including California, are implementing the Common Core learning standards, a highquality foundation for math and English-language arts instruction developed by the nation's governors and education commissioners. But will the new standards raise student achievement? The answer depends on implementation.

The keys to implementation are textbooks, teachers and testing. Getting any one of these wrong will leave our young people even further behind.

Textbooks: We don't have a national math curriculum, but for a generation there has been so little variation among textbook options that we have had a de facto national math curriculum. A very poor one. Most school math textbooks are badly flawed.

They present a bunch of rules and examples without clear, comprehensible explanations that enable kids to understand the material fully. Professor Hung-Hsi Wu of UC Berkeley speaks of "textbook school mathematics" — an often incomprehensible math curriculum that fails to promote true understanding of the underlying principles students need to understand to succeed in math. For Common Core to succeed, we desperately need new textbooks that are fundamentally different.

Teachers: Teachers are the heart of the enterprise. But at this point, nearly all were themselves educated in the American system, which means that they probably learned from textbooks with the same flaws as those they now teach from. Many of them need training they don't get, and they struggle to teach concepts they don't fully grasp themselves. So how will these teachers handle Common Core?

Singapore faced the same issue 20 years ago, when the vast majority of its elementary school teachers had not even had four years of university instruction. They addressed the situation by creating math textbooks that had two critical features. First, they were bombproof. Even if a teacher didn't understand the material well, he or she could follow the textbooks and students would

learn. Second, the textbooks were so clear that they taught the teachers. Even if teachers didn't understand the concepts when they began teaching, they would learn them from the book. After a few years, they became self-trained and reached higher levels. We need to help our teachers with these kind of books, borrowing from successful models abroad, and then support teachers with professional development focusing on content so that they are prepared to teach Common Core well.

Testing: If teachers teach to the test, then the test had better be so good that teachers should be teaching to it. We need tests that measure both procedural fluency and deeper understanding. Such tests can add value, both diagnostically and in terms of benchmarking achievement. But we should also recognize that not all aspects of learning are captured by tests. We should consciously seek the middle ground, valuing good tests but not letting them serve as the sole goal of our education system.

The PISA test results are an important warning that our country's education system is not getting the job done. We need urgent changes. But we need the right changes. With the right textbooks, systematic use of professional development to enhance teacher knowledge and thoughtful testing, we can put in place the improvements that we need to implement the Common Core curriculum successfully and stop our nation's stagnation.

Solomon Friedberg, a professor of mathematics and chairman of the math department at Boston College, is a graduate of the Los Angeles Unified School District.

People & Places GLOBE WEST

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BOSTON SUNDAY GLOBE

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DECEMBER 8, 2013

AWARD FOR AUTHOR: Seth Jacobs, an associate history professor at Boston College who lives in Newton’s Waban section, has won the James P. Hanlan Book Award from the New England Historical Association for “The Universe Unraveling: American Foreign Policy in Cold War Laos,’’ published by Cornell University Press last year.

The association consists of more than 700 professional historians living and working in New England.

In his book, Jacobs describes the events, circumstances, perceptions, and attitudes that shaped American decisionmaking in Laos in the 1950s and ’60s. Under presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, according to Jacobs, Laos became a “testing ground” for strategies utilized in Vietnam: support of unpopular but pro-Western dictators; clashes between American civilian and military bureaucracies; and a disregard for the native population’s needs.

A political and cultural historian of 20th-century America, Jacobs (above) teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in American military and diplomatic history, the Vietnam War, Cold War, and America in the 1950s.

“What makes this award especially meaningful is that the competition for it is so fierce,” he said.

Jacobs also won the 2006 Stuart L. Bernath Book Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, awarded to books on US foreign policy, for “America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam: Ngo Dinh Diem, Religion, Race, and US Intervention in Southeast Asia, 1950-1957.”

Nominees for the James P. Hanlan Book Award, however, cover a wide range of subjects.

“New England is easily the most historian-saturated region of the country,” he added, “so winning this award was particularly satisfying.”

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

How the Government Gives

By RAY D. MADOFF Published: December 6, 2013

NEWTON, Mass. â&#x20AC;&#x201D; THIS is the season of giving, the time when Americans from all income levels make donations to support food pantries, health centers, art and educational institutions, and other organizations that are so important for our civic society. Many donors work hard to stretch their charitable dollars to provide the maximum benefit for those in need.

If only the federal government were as thoughtful.

The government does its own charitable giving, in the form of tax deductions. When an individual makes a donation to a qualifying organization, the federal government essentially pays a portion of that donation: A $1,000 donation from a donor in the highest tax bracket costs that donor only $604. The federal government kicks in the remaining $396 in the form of a reduction in taxes.

These charitable donations are estimated to cost the federal government almost $40 billion this year alone and over half a trillion dollars in the next 10 years. What is the public getting for this investment of resources? Sadly, not enough.

The federal government too often provides the deduction for donations that offer little or no benefit. Consider three examples: Nonprofit hospitals are among the largest recipients of charitable donations. Yet their activities are often indistinguishable from those of forprofit hospitals. Both receive compensation for the services they provide.

No law requires nonprofit hospitals to provide charity care and, in fact, many nonprofit hospitals provide less charity care than their for-profit counterparts.

The charitable deduction for conservation easements is another example of wasteful giving. Conservation easements are supposed to protect the environment for future generations. However, the requirements for Michela Buttignol establishing a conservation easement are so lenient that developers of high-end housing communities have been able to claim conservation easement deductions for their private golf courses. In one 2009 case, a developer successfully claimed a $28.6 million deduction, potentially costing American taxpayers more than $10 million. Not only do these private golf courses provide little benefit to the public, but they are often detrimental to the environment because of the degradation caused by the chemicals required to maintain them.

Finally, too many charitable dollars are not available to serve the community because they are sitting in investment accounts. Private foundations and so-called donor-advised funds donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t do any charitable work themselves; they only qualify for the charitable deduction because they promise to provide dollars to other charitable organizations that do.

The problem is that Congress imposes no time frame for this commitment. Money can languish in these entities for decades or even centuries. Donor-advised funds have no payout obligation, and private foundations, which are technically required to distribute at least 5 percent of their asset value each year, can meet that requirement simply by making distributions to donor-advised funds. (In 2011 alone, private foundations “donated” well over $90 million to donor-advised funds — money that otherwise could have served real charitable needs.) In the meantime, Congress loses billions of dollars, while these warehouses of wealth pay out fees for the banks and investment houses that manage them.

There is an easy legislative fix for each of these problems. Nonprofit hospitals could be required to provide charity care (an idea floated by Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, and enacted by a few states). Golf courses could be made ineligible for the conservation easement deduction, as President Obama proposed in his latest budget. Most important, Congress could impose a seven-year payout obligation for donor-advised funds and forbid foundations to meet their payout requirements by giving to donor-advised funds.

This would be a good start toward aligning the charitable deduction with the public good. But no doubt there are other issues as well. The last time Congress took a serious look at the charitable deduction was in 1969. A lot has changed in 44 years, and these rules are too important to ignore.

Of course, any solution — large or small — will require Congress to pay attention to the problem. This will be no mean feat. Too often when Congress considers legislation limiting the charitable deduction, the conversation is overly simplistic — pretending that all charitable giving is supporting local soup kitchens. The lobbying arm for the charitable sector has not helped the situation. While it purports to represent both donors and charities, it has focused its efforts on preserving the maximum charitable deduction for donors, while paying scant attention to closing the loopholes that divert resources away from true charities.

We all know that Congress needs to get our financial house in order. Curbing wasteful charitable deductions is the perfect place to start.

Ray D. Madoff, a professor at Boston College Law School, is the author of “Immortality and the Law: The Rising Power of the American Dead.”

December 4, 2013

MOOCs as Neocolonialism: Who Controls Knowledge?

The following is by Philip G. Altbach, research professor and director of the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College.

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Massive open online courses, or MOOCs, are the latest effort to harness information technology for higher education. While they are still in a nascent stage of development, many in academe are enthusiastic about their potential to be an inexpensive way of delivering an education to vast audiences.

Yet one aspect of the MOOC movement has not been fully analyzed: who controls the knowledge. MOOCs are largely an American-led effort, and the majority of the courses available so far come from universities in the United States or other Western countries. Universities and educators in less-developed regions of the world are climbing onto the MOOC bandwagon, but it is likely that they will be using the technology, pedagogical ideas, and probably significant parts of the content developed elsewhere. In this way, the online courses threaten to exacerbate the worldwide influence of Western academe, bolstering its higher-education hegemony.

For the most part, MOOC content is based on the American academic experience and pedagogical ideas. By and large, the readings required by most MOOC courses are American or from other Western countries. Many of the courses are in English, and even when lectures and materials are translated into other languages, the content largely reflects the original course. The vast majority of instructors are American. It is likely that more diversity will develop, but the basic content will remain the same.

Approaches to curriculum, pedagogy, and the overall philosophy of education differ according to national traditions and practices, and may not reflect the approaches offered by most MOOC instructors or their providers.

No doubt, those that are developing MOOCs will claim that their methods are best and reflect the latest pedagogical thinking. Perhaps. But there are a range of approaches to learning and many traditions.

Why is this important? Neither knowledge nor pedagogy is neutral. They reflect the academic traditions, methodological orientations, and teaching philosophies of particular academic systems. Such academic nationalism is especially evident in many social-science and humanities fields, but it is not absent in the sciences. While academics who develop MOOC courses are no doubt motivated by a desire to do the best job possible and to cater to a wide audience, they are to a significant extent bound by their own academic orientation.

Since the vast majority of material used comes from Western academic systems, examples used in science courses are likely to come from the United States or Europe because these countries dominate the literature and articles in influential journals. Modes of inquiry reflect the Western mainstream. While this knowledge base and pedagogical orientation no doubt reflect current ideas of good practice, they may not be the only approach to good scientific inquiry or content.

These issues come into even sharper focus in the social sciences and humanities. In fields such as literature and philosophy, most courses reflect Western traditions of knowledge, the Western literature canon, and Western philosophical assumptions. The social sciences reflect Western methodologies and basic assumptions about the essentials of scientific inquiry. Mainstream ideas and methods in fields like anthropology and sociology reflect Western trends, especially those of the American academic community. The major academic journals and the big academic publishers are located in the global centers of knowledge, like Boston, New York, and London. It is, under these circumstances, natural that the dominant ideas from these centers will dominate academic discourse, and will be reflected in the thinking and orientations of most of those planning and teaching MOOCs. MOOC

gatekeepers, such as Coursera, Udacity, and others, will seek to maintain standards as they interpret them, and this will no doubt strengthen the hegemony of Western methodologies.

English dominates not only academic scholarship in the 21st century, but also the MOOCs. English is the language of internationally circulated academic journals; researchers in non-English-speaking environments are increasingly using English for their academic writings and communication. Major academic websites tend to be in English as well. Because English is the language of scholarly communication, the methodological and intellectual orientations of the English-speaking academic culture hold sway globally.

The implications for developing countries are serious. MOOCs produced in the current centers of research are easy to gain access to and inexpensive for the user, but may inhibit the emergence of a local academic culture, local academic content, and courses tailored specially for national audiences. MOOCs have the potential to reach nonelite audiences, thus extending the influence of the main academic centers.

Those responsible for creating, designing, and delivering MOOC courses do not seek to impose their values or methodologies on others; influence happens organically and without conspiracies. A combination of powerful academic cultures, the location of the main creators and disseminators of MOOCs, and the orientation of most of those creating and teaching MOOCs ensures the domination of the largely English-speaking academic systems.

Once people figure out how to make money from MOOCs, no doubt corporate interests, largely based in the rich world, will seek to corner the market.

The millions of students choosing to participate in MOOCs from all over the world do not seem to be concerned about the nature of the knowledge or the philosophy of pedagogy that they are studying. Universities in the middleincome and developing world do not seem concerned about the origins or orientations of the knowledge provided by the MOOCs or the educational philosophies behind MOOC pedagogy.

I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t mean to imply any untoward motives by the makers of MOOCs. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m not arguing that the content or methodologies of most current MOOCs are wrong because they are based on the dominant Western academic approaches. But I do believe it is important to point out that a powerful emerging educational movement strengthens the currently dominant academic culture, perhaps making it more difficult for alternative voices to be heard.

The Renaissance Heisman Candidate: Boston Collegeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Andre Williams Tuesday, November 26, 2014

Pete Thamel > INSIDE COLLEGE FOOTBALL CHESTNUT HILL, Mass. -- Boston College tailback Andre Williams excels at the second level.

In the Eagles' power-run game, Williams follows a pulling guard, crashes his 6-foot, 230-pound frame into the hole and plows through opposing defensive linemen. The second level is where Williams can square his pads, unleash his speed (he's been clocked at 4.39 in the 40) and burst into the open field. He leads the nation with 188.5 rushing yards per game, accounts for 51 percent of his team's total offense and could become Boston College's first Heisman Trophy finalist since Doug Flutie in 1984.

However, to truly understand Williams' place on campus amid this star-kissed season, it's important to explore the second level of Williams' off-field life. The senior toiled anonymously for three years, earning a reputation as a thinker and philosopher as much as a football player. He reads poetry before running backs meetings, serves as a teaching assistant and has already written 80 pages of a book titled "A King, a Queen and a Conscience."

"If I had to put it in a genre," Williams said in a long interview on Sunday night, "it's a philosophical memoir."

There's a striking paradox to Williams, who is as soft-spoken off the field as he is punishing on it. He carries a 3.0 GPA, will graduate in three and a half years with a degree in applied psychology and human development and hopes to one day open a foundation using sports to better kids' lives. Boston College's offensive linemen nicknamed him "Edgar," as in Edgar Allan Poe, because of his writing proclivity. Williams admits that if he wasn't set to pursue a career in the NFL, he'd consider moving to Madagascar.

"If it wasn't for football, I would probably invest in a couple cows and chickens," he said, "and go live in the bush and make my own cheese and live a simple life."

Williams acknowledges that path is no longer an option, and first-year Eagles coach Steve Addazio is happy the back stuck around. Addazio has crafted one of the country's most impressive turnarounds by forging Boston College's identity as a power-run team. The Eagles (7-4) won two games under Frank Spaziani in 2012, a total that could quadruple if they beat Syracuse on Saturday.

Behind a physical offensive line that Williams endearingly calls "nasty b-------" and jumbo run packages swiped from Stanford's playbook, Williams has lowered his shoulder and bulled his way into the Heisman conversation. Along the way, he's left a trail of steamrolled safeties and rag-dolled defensive backs.

"He's one of the main guys responsible when you think back to the change in BC football," said running backs coach Al Washington. "That'll be his legacy, the rebirth of old school."

On campus, however, his legacy will resonate deeper. ***** Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 2 p.m., Williams enters Stokes Hall and settles in for the most fascinating part of his non-football life at Boston College. He serves as a teaching assistant for campus minister Dan Leahy's "The Courage To Know" class, a freshman seminar that facilitates discussions based around broad themes like diversity, justice and faith.

Topics can range from Martin Luther King's Letter From a Birmingham Jail to the school's social scene.

Some days, Leahy has Williams lead the lectures. Others, Williams reads students' papers and provides feedback. Mostly, he challenges freshmen to think at an advanced level.

"I don't think we think enough in school," Williams said. "We try to digest books and swallow this and regurgitate it when test time comes. When Dan asked me to be a TA, I thought it would be an awesome experience to come back and meet a group of freshmen and try and have an influence on them if that's possible."

Leahy jokes that he asked Williams to be his TA "before he was famous," as Williams took the class as a freshman. Even then, Leahy was struck by the depth of Williams' mind. He recalled Williams speaking about a relationship with an exgirlfriend: "You know it's a special relationship when the person helps me to be more."

He added: "You don't hear that from a lot of freshman students."

Leahy felt so strongly about Williams working with his class that he actually moved it to 2 p.m. this semester to work around the football team's morning practice schedule. Leahy said Williams' ability to connect with students has been impressive; when Williams speaks, they "lean in and listen."

"An education at BC is supposed to be about educating the whole person," Leahy said. "He's as interested in being a good person as he is a good football player."

Williams said his introspective side comes from moving around so much as a child. He is the third of four kids, born to Jamaican immigrants in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. He moved to Jamaica for a year soon after birth, as he said his father got deported. Then he moved to New Jersey, where he lived until eighth grade. For two years Williams attended Harrison High in Kennesaw, Ga., where he backed up current Georgia Tech star Robert Godhigh. He finished his prep career at Parkland High in Schnecksville, Pa. His father, Ervin Williams Sr., runs a small heating and cooling business. His mother, Lancelene, trains nursing aids. Neither went to college. However, Lancelene said she stressed reading and spirituality with her kids; three have gone to college and the fourth is a senior in high school. Andre begins many mornings by spending quiet time reading the bible.

While Andre initially bristled at each move, he took parts of every place with him: the East Coast edge from Jersey, the southern gentlemen mentality from Georgia and the appreciation for country living from Pennsylvania. His varying perspectives from different parts of the country became the basis for his book.

"It's just using autobiographical information in my life to point out the important parts in my life that shape the way that I think about the world," he said. "There's a way of thinking about yourself and interacting with the people around you that can really shape the way that your world works out."

Williams is disappointed that he hasn't finished writing. Understandably, his semester has gotten a little hectic. But he has delved into poetry through a creative writing class, penning a dozen poems this semester. Before a position meeting earlier this year, Washington asked Williams to read one.

"It was like a love poem," Williams said. "It was metaphorical. It was talking about the love I was experiencing in a relationship being like a warm bubble bath. It was like a longstanding metaphor type of poem."

His teammates didn't clap. Instead, they snapped their fingers in approval, as tradition dictates at poetry readings. ***** When Virginia Tech defensive coordinator Bud Foster began watching film on Boston College in preparation for a Nov. 2 meeting, he saw Williams barrel his way through defenses and asked: "Where was he the last couple years?" Of all the Heisman candidates in this year's race, none had less hype than Williams. (Even Florida State quarterback Jameis Winston, who at that time had yet to play a collegiate snap, was billed as a dark-horse contender during the preseason.)

Through his first three years with the Eagles, Williams established himself as a solid but unspectacular back. He never ran for more than 584 yards or scored more than four touchdowns in a season. His totals so far this fall -- 2,073 rushing yards and 16 touchdowns -- have well surpassed his combined numbers from 2010 to '12.

Williams had fumbling issues early in his career, and he suffered nagging injuries to his shoulder, abdominal muscle and hamstring. Still, his role as the team's leading back became clear to Addazio immediately. "In the first spring practice," Addazio said, "he was running guys over and nobody could tackle him."

When strength and conditioning coach Frank Piraino first saw Williams walk into the weight room, he assumed the player was a middle linebacker or a fullback. Then Piraino saw Williams run for the first time. He asked the coach nearest him, "If he's the running back, why is he still playing college football? That guy should be long gone if he's that big and can run like that."

Piraino coached at Florida from 2005-10, during Urban Meyer's heyday. He has seen plenty of weight room freaks. What impressed him most about Williams were his legs, which are so massive that he has to buy pants with a size 38 waist -instead of size 36 -- so he can pull them up over his massive thighs.

"Look at the kid, he's a 230-pound dude and he's all lower body," Piraino said before borrowing a line from junior defensive back Sean Sylvia: "The kid looks like he has four hamstrings."

Prior to the season, Williams registered a broad jump of 10 feet, 11 inches, which would have ranked first among tailbacks at the 2013 NFL combine. His 4.39 40 -- the average of three handheld times -- would have ranked third.

Ervin Sr. was a track star in high school in Jamaica. Andre's oldest brother, Ervin Jr. (29), played a year of football at New Hampshire. (He was nicknamed "Erv The Swerve.") His older sister, Krystal (25), ran sprints for the track team at Cornell, and his younger brother, Kareem, rushed for 309 yards and four touchdowns to lead Parkland to a district championship last weekend. (Kareem is still awaiting his first Division I offer.)

"Andre is a runner from birth," said Lancelene. "He just loves to run. Our whole family are runners."

Part of what slowed Williams early in his career was shuffling through four offensive coordinators in three seasons. So when Ryan Day arrived this winter, he met with Williams in his office. "You don't know how lucky you are," Day told him. "Trust me on this."

Boston College ran mostly zone-blocking schemes last year, which requires more patience as the offensive line moves from east to west. The Eagles' new power approach with gap-blocking schemes allows him to hit holes going downhill, perfect for his bruising northsouth style.

Day recalled some skepticism, sensing Williams saw him as another coordinator telling him the things he'd want to hear. But Day's message at that meeting proved prophetic: "The perfect running back has met the perfect offense."

To start a revolution, as Addazio likes to say, the government has to be overthrown. When Addazio arrived at his first offseason winter workout at Boston College, he didn't like the look of his troops.

"He came out and looked at us and had a face of disgust," Williams recalled with a chuckle. "I was like, 'We haven't started yet. What did we even do?'"

Addazio lit into his new players for their ragged appearance. They wore cutoffs and different colored gear. Williams even admits to leaving his earrings in. "[Addazio] was just like, 'Wow, you look rag tag,'" said Williams. "'You don't look like a team.'"

Soon enough, the Eagles matched. Shirts tucked in. Sneakers tied. There was no yawning during morning workouts, and players were forbidden from leaning on equipment, as signs of weakness weren't tolerated. Sixty-foot reams of carpet were rolled out in the weight room so players could bear crawl pushing 45-pound plates.

"It's really been shaping our minds," Williams said, "and molding our minds to something tougher than it was."

Similarly, the offense embraced toughness. The program's carousel of coordinators had led the Eagles away from their roots, which included an identity as one of the country's top offensive linemen-producing schools. (Former standouts include Chris Snee, Gosder Cherilus, Dan Koppen, Anthony Castonzo and Jeremy Trueblood.) Addazio is a former offensive line coach and considered that position a strength coming out of the spring, especially with the addition of Florida fifth-year transfer Matt Patchan. Both Patchan and right tackle Ian White will likely be drafted in 2014, while junior guards Harris Williams and Bobby Vardaro and center Andy Gallick have the requisite power and athleticism to pull and clear space for Williams.

"Our offensive line is just dominant," Williams said. "They have mean streaks, each one of them."

Addazio, Day and line coach Justin Frye studied Stanford's power schemes, which use six and seven linemen, to become a cutting-edge offense through old-school smashmouth football. "You know what part of the problem is?" Addazio said. "Teams don't know how to defend it anymore. What they practice against all day long is spread teams and zone teams. Their players have a hard time on knock-you-back gap schemes. Teams aren't ready for it."

The Eagles are on a four-game winning streak, outscoring opponents 72-43 in the fourth quarter. In the last three games, Day calculated that Boston College has averaged 14 yards a play in the fourth (not including victory formation); nine of its

47 plays have been explosive plays. The joke among the offensive staff is that the Eagles are the only team in the country that sends in extra offensive linemen to run a two-minute drill.

Williams ran for a 62-yard touchdown in the fourth quarter against Virginia Tech, broke free for 80- and 47-yard scores in the final five minutes against New Mexico State on Nov. 9 and a rushed for a 34-yard touchdown in the final minute against NC State two weeks ago. "I don't know another word," said Aggies defensive coordinator David Elson, "other than demoralizing."

Added Foster: "When it's all said and done, [Williams] is their offense."

Williams has carried the ball more than 30 times in six games this season. Instead of wearing down, he compliments the staff for keeping him fresh. Williams doesn't take live contact reps during the week, a move he says has allowed him to stay healthier despite the in-game pounding.

"Last year we were getting grinded in practice," Williams said. "The staff wasn't taking care of us. I think that was a big part of me getting injured a lot."

Williams credits Addazio for resuscitating the program through hard work while taking care of his players at the same time.

As Boston College sputtered to a 2-10 (1-7 ACC) record last year, Williams said the program was in need of a change. It's often the little things that motivate college football players, and Addazio has brought in better food -- "we can eat steak every night," Williams said -- and made protein and fruit shakes available after practice. Players can now get massages to take better care of their body, and the Eagles finally have the Hudl video system to study film, which Williams said his brother uses in high school.

"We were just behind," Williams said. "It's been just a whole structural change and infrastructure from ground up has changed for this team." ***** Williams' statistics make him a compelling Heisman candidate. If he hits his 188.5-yard rushing average at Syracuse, he'll climb to fourth on the Division I single-season rushing list, trailing only Oklahoma State's Barry Sanders (2,628), UCF's Kevin Smith (2,567) and USC's Marcus Allen (2,342). Sanders and Allen, of course, went on to win the Heisman.

But perhaps more remarkable than Williams' numbers is the manner in which he's run the ball. "Defensive backs cringe," said Foster, "when he comes through at full speed."

No game better epitomizes Williams' season than his performance against NC State. He eyeballed Wolfpack backup safety Josh Stanley early, as he sensed an overmatched opponent. "I was like, 'Ah, man, this guy is not ready,' Williams said. "I came around the left side and just tested him. He just crumbled. From then on, I was just tormenting him the whole day."

Highlights from the Eagles' 38-21 victory back up that claim, as Williams leveled such a vicious shoulder on Stanley in the second quarter that Stanley went somersaulting backwards, tail over teakettle (48-second mark of that clip). By the fourth, Stanley's will appeared so broken that he feebly flailed while attempting to tackle Williams -- who finished with 339 yards on 42 carries -- on his game-sealing 34-yard touchdown.

"That guy had a long day," said Frye, who considers Williams an "adjunct child" of his offensive line group.

As games wear on, Day can see the holes get bigger from up in the booth, a byproduct of the offensive line and tight ends wearing down the opponent. Senior wide receiver Alex Amidon notices Williams becoming more powerful, as defensive backs stop running downhill toward Williams and shy away from contact.

"The cornerbacks stop talking, stop playing and wear out throughout the game," Amidon said. "They don't want to be part of him after halftime, after the third quarter."

Defenses know exactly what's coming, and so far they've been unable to stop it. Williams has averaged 265.7 yards and 7.7 yards per carry over the past four games, plowing through stacked boxes as he racks up monster numbers.

"It's a credit to his durability and toughness that he keeps doing it, and doing it and doing it," Foster says.

Addazio hopes Williams can stiff-arm his way to New York for the Heisman ceremony in December. While Williams has put forth the country's most impressive statistical season, Addazio hopes voters will consider the second level. On Sunday, he called up the Heisman Trophy's mission statement on his iPhone, noting that its goal is to recognize "the outstanding college football player whose performance best exhibits the pursuit of excellence with integrity."

"That really fits Andre," Addazio said. "If that mission statement is real to them, it fits him to a T." The same way that Williams fits in at Boston College.

Allston school students get free music lessons from BC student volunteers Posted by Matt Rocheleau, November 22, 2013 11:52 AM Through the Boston College Music Outreach Program about 60 students at Gardner Pilot Academy of Allston and Brighton High School receive free weekly lessons from Boston College undergraduates on voice and instruments such as guitar, violin, piano, trumpet, clarinet, saxophone, flute and recorder.

Directed by Boston College music department lecturer Barbara Gawlick and her husband, Assistant Professor of Music Ralf Yusuf Gawlick, the Boston College Music Outreach Program coordinates some 15 BC student volunteers who spend at least one to two hours a week working with the schoolchildren individually or in small groups.

(Caitlin Cunningham) BC student Liz Wilson and Gardner student Roxnny Roche.

Organizers say the music sessions aren’t intended to groom kids for the conservatory, or even for a spot in a school band, but to give the children and teens a sense of what it’s like to have music as part of their lives — not as a source of entertainment but as a skill or talent they can develop, or simply enjoy for its own sake.

“The benefits children get through exposure to, and involvement in, the arts are very well-known,” said Ralf Gawlick. “These kids get a taste of music education, and in the bargain, can engage with a caring young adult who is really invested in sharing the gift of music.”

Added Barbara Gawlick: “The BC students have devoted years of study to develop their musical skills, and now they have the opportunity to serve our neighboring youth through music.”

Felix Santiago, a 10th-grader at Brighton High, was so enthused by the guitar lessons he took from sophomore Amanda Adams last year that he signed up for piano as well as guitar for this year. “Amanda could really sing,” he said. “She taught us and made it easy to remember. She taught us the strings and different notes and chords. I learned it superfast.”

The parents of Sebastian Sanchez, a Gardner sixth-grader, are pleased with their son’s progress in Music Outreach. “It really helped him in a different way to have that experience of trumpet. He discovered that he liked other instruments as well and was able to start to play guitar.”

Moreover, while the weekly face-to-face time may not seem like a lot, organizers and volunteers say it has a cumulative effect, creating a bond between the children and the BC students.

Josie Bearden, a BC sophomore, cultivated a mutually rewarding relationship with Gardner student Genesis last year, when she taught the girl to play clarinet — not the easiest instrument to get the hang of, she notes. But Genesis made steady progress, especially after she was able to take the clarinet home to practice, something she did with great zeal, according to Bearden.

“I really felt that she just put all her energy into it. She’s so focused, and she would sit there for an hour absolutely fixated on the clarinet. When I spoke with Genesis’ parents, they were very excited about how well she was doing, and how much work she was putting in at home.”

Bearden wound up loaning her clarinet to Genesis for the summer, and received a big hug from the sixth-grader at this year’s orientation session for the outreach program.

“I love working with the kids,” said Bearden. “It’s wonderful to see the impact music can have.”

Ari Fleisher, director of after school and summer enrichment programs at Gardner, points out that music education can have a long-term impact on a child beyond the ability to play a I-IV-V guitar chord sequence or a Beethoven piano piece. “Think about the dedication and commitment that goes into playing music, and the bravery it takes to stand up and perform at a recital. Employers talk about looking for qualities like confidence, competence and leadership skills – music can be an enormous help in developing these.”

BC students, faculty to hold day-long commemoration 150th anniversary of Gettysburg Address Posted by Matt Rocheleau November 18, 2013

A group of Boston College students is holding a day-long commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address.

From 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. in front of BC’s century-old Gasson Hall, students and faculty will recite - some by memory - Abraham Lincoln’s historic speech and offer personal reflections on its significance, the university said in a press release.

Recent MacArthur Fellowship recipient and chair of the BC History Department professor Robin Fleming will give an introduction. The day will also include Civil War-era pieces performed by campus musical groups and the playing of taps by the university’s ROTC Color Guard.

BC seniors Anthony Bellitti, Meghan Daly and Kaitlyn McGillycuddy organized the event after being inspired by their history professor Jeremy Clarke, an Australian Jesuit priest and expert on Chinese history and culture, who encouraged them to pay tribute to their national heritage, officials said.

“The irony is that it took an Australian Jesuit who teaches Chinese history to convince us as American students to celebrate our history,” Bellitti said in a statement from the university. “This commemoration was our response to his challenge to explore the specifics of our nation’s past.”

The students organizing the event plan to film the recitations and contribute them to a project by Civil War documentarian Ken Burns called “Learn the Address,” campus officials said.

Professor Clarke said he is proud to see his students not only commemorating history, but making it themselves.

“Increasingly, I have become a believer in students being the subject and not the object of their leaning,” Clarke said, according to the press release. “They learn best by doing. So I told them, ‘This is a history class, and you have significant things in American history to reflect upon. So get going.’”

The Gettysburg Address is regarded as one of the greatest speeches in US history.

Lincoln delivered it on November 19, 1863, at the dedication of the Soldiers National Cemetery in Gettysburg. The dedication honored soldiers who died in that Pennsylvania town in a battle believed to be the deadliest of the Civil War and a key turning point in the war.

With board games, it's how children count that counts Posted By News On November 18, 2013 -­‐ 5:30am CHESTNUT HILL, MA (Nov. 18, 2013) – Teachers and parents like to use board games to teach skills that range from fair play to counting. When it comes to improving early number skills, a new report by Boston College and Carnegie Mellon University researchers finds that how children count is what really counts.

Games like Chutes & Ladders require players to count out the spaces along which they move their tokens at each turn. Earlier studies have pointed to the benefits to young children of playing games that require counting.

The new study suggests the simple act of playing a number game may not yield the benefits earlier studies have detailed. What matters is how New research by professors at Boston College children count while they play, Boston College Assistant Professor of and Carnegie Mellon University finds that Education Elida Laski and Carnegie Mellon Professor of children can improve their math skills playing Psychology Robert S. Siegler report in the journal Developmental certain board games as long as they use a Psychology. particular counting method.

(Photo Credit: Boston College) "We found that it's the way that children count – whether the counting

procedure forces them to attend to the numbers in the spaces of a board game – that yields real benefits in the use of numbers," said Laski, a developmental psychologist. "What's most important is whether you count within a larger series of numbers, or simply start from one each time you move a piece."

The researchers tested two counting methods in a study of 40 children who played a 100-­‐space board game designed by the researchers to mimic products like Chutes & Ladders. In the first method, referred to as "count-­‐from-­‐1", children started counting from the number one each time they moved a piece. In the other method, students would "count on" from the actual numerical place of their latest landing spot in the game. So a child who had moved her piece 15 spaces would "count-­‐on" from 16 during her next move.

The process of counting on allows children to develop their ability to encode the relationship between numbers and spaces, Laski and her colleagues report in the journal article "Learning From Number Board Games: You Learn What You Encode." That, in turn, improved their abilities to estimate the size of numbers on number lines, identify numbers and to count-­‐on.

Playing the same game, the standard "count-­‐from-­‐1" method led to considerably less learning, the researchers found.

In a second experiment, the researchers found that students who practiced encoding numbers 1 through 100 via methods beyond a board game showed no appreciable gain in number line estimation.

The new results suggest that simply playing board games may not yield improvements in counting skills. Instead, parents and teachers need to direct children's attention to the numbers on the game boards to realize those benefits.

"Board games help children understand the magnitude of numbers by improving their abilities to estimate, to count and to identify numbers," said Laski. "But the benefits depend on how children count during the game. By counting-­‐ on, parents and their children can see some real benefits from board games. It's a simple way to enhance any game they have at home and still have fun playing it."

Ideas 12 PLANS FOR MAYOR WALSHʼS NEW BOSTON

A whole city of innovators

By Tiziana Dearing | N O V E M B E R 1 0 , 2 0 1 3

BOSTON’S SUCCESS is increasingly tied to innovation— the ideas that come out of its universities, labs, and startups. The Innovation District has been hugely successful, creating white-collar jobs and transforming the waterfront.

But look past a few marquee neighborhoods, and those benefits come to an end. The Boston Foundation’s 2011 report “The Measure of Poverty” notes that Boston still has intractable poverty highly concentrated in Dorchester, Roxbury, and Mattapan. These communities have not benefited from Boston’s innovation renaissance.

Such neighborhoods are, nevertheless, crucial to Boston’s ILLUSTRATION BY DOUG CHAYKA FOR THE future. They are where generations have called home, even BOSTON GLOBE as newcomers arrive and settle; they are where Boston’s children grow up and go to school. Transforming the city will require the innovation economy making it out to Boston’s black, Hispanic, and Asian communities.

How? Identify and build innovation clusters right where people live. Call them “New Economy Neighborhoods,” turning Boston’s disenfranchised neighborhoods into successful, small-scale engines of tomorrow.

What could a New Economy Neighborhood look like? A small group of people in a public housing development could use 3-D printing to produce component parts for manufacturing elsewhere. A neighborhood could develop a partnership with the MIT Media Lab to do mass production of an innovation like sewable computer parts. An association of single mothers could use apartment gardening equipment to form an urban growers association, supplying local food to restaurants and markets.

A new mayor would find the pump already primed: Leaders in neighborhoods like Dorchester, Roxbury, and Mattapan have long thought about innovation and micro-economic development. They pioneer all the time. People just don’t recognize it. City Hall’s role would be to listen to those voices, identify opportunities, and then coordinate the human and geographical potential of these areas with the companies and research efforts that could use them.

Cities help smooth these connections for big industry all the time. Why not for neighborhoods of color?

That’s a change that will enhance Boston’s prosperity, reputation, and civic health for generations to come.

Tiziana Dearing is an associate professor at Boston College Graduate School of Social Work and former nonprofit CEO.

Dads, too, want to have it all

By Brigid Schulte: Nov. 6, 2014

As I listened in to Boston College’s Center for Work & Family’s virtual “Fathers in the Workplace Forum” on Tuesday afternoon, I was immediately struck by two things.

One, an outpouring of more than 350 fathers had signed up for the lunchtime forum to hear about the center’s research on what father’s really want and whether they can “have it all.”

And two, how absolutely, unequivocally critical those first few weeks and months after a child is born are for setting patterns of behavior that will shape the future for both the mother and the father, as well as the child.

Even the most egalitarian-minded men and women, surveys and time studies have found, slide unconsciously, helplessly almost, into traditional gender roles once the baby arrives. Before long, the couples who promised to be equal partners find the mothers scaling back or reducing hours at work or dropping out of the workforce and fathers working as much as or more than ever to make up the earnings. But unlike in past generations, dads are feeling more stressed because they’re also doing more at home.

But is that what fathers really want?

Not according to the center’s fascinating series of studies in recent years involving nearly 1,000 fathers, most of them white-collar professionals with big jobs at Fortune 500 companies.

Yes, they want to do good work and they are ambitious: Nearly 80 percent told BC researchers that they wanted to advance to positions with greater responsibilities.

But that’s not all they want.

When asked why they valued their jobs, the ability to advance and earn more money came in fifth and sixth on their list. Job security – perhaps an artifact of asking the question on the heels of the Great Recession — came in No. 1, following by a sense of accomplishment, the fact that work is interesting and, most notably, they valued flexible work arrangements.

When asked to rank what equates with being a good father, these men put being physically and emotionally present for their children at the top of the list, and their role as a breadwinner number four out of six choices.

In fact, 77 percent of the fathers said, as other surveys have found, that they wished they had more time to spend with their kids.

As center director Brad Harrington explained to me in a recent interview, this is all part of a slow evolution leading to fairly massive social change. A generation ago, men were forced to step in at home when women began to work in the marketplace. Now, he said, more men are reaping “significant emotional rewards” from that more intimate family involvement.

Fully 86 percent said that being a good father is their number one priority. And more than half in one survey said that if money wasn’t an issue, they’d be willing to quit work to take care of children. (Harrington said that, by the U.S. Census Bureau’s strict definition, a scant 4 percent of fathers in married couples are stay-at-home dads. But other surveys, using more generous measures, have found that fathers are the primary caregivers for as many as 20 percent of all children under age five.)

“As men put their foot in the water and get more immersed with their kids, they start to realize what they’ve been missing,” he said.

In an admittedly unscientific quick poll during Tuesday’s virtual forum, fully 70 percent of the fathers online said they’d consider being an at-home parent.

“That shows a huge attitudinal shift about the legitimacy of at-home fathers,” Harrington said. “We didn’t expect the numbers to be that big.”

So that’s what fathers want. What have they got?

Work. When men become fathers, managers expect the same amount of work from them, Harrington’s research has found. And social science has shown that men tend to get a “fatherhood bonus,” because employers think they’ll be even more committed and hard working

now they have a family to provide for. At the same time, mothers who return to work are in a “Catch-22,” Harrington said, with research showing that employers begin to think they’re less committed, less promotable and even less competent.

Fathers described their ideal: About two-thirds of the fathers surveyed said that the best arrangement would be to share equally in work, household chores and caring for children. Then confessed their reality: that same two-thirds said that their spouses did more work at home and with the children than they did.

“This is the source of the conflict and dissonance that men feel,” Harrington said during the virtual forum. “They feel they should be doing more, but they’re not living up to those aspirations.”

And that’s where workplace cultures and those first few days and weeks after the baby is born come in.

The Center found that professional women, on average, take between two and six months off after a child is born. But in their surveys, 96 percent of the men took less than two weeks off. And 16 percent took no time off at all.

So guess who is becoming used to the baby and his or her needs? Which parent has the time to learn that this kind of cry means the baby is hungry, and that kind of fussiness means its naptime? Mom. Dad comes home from work, tired but eager to help, but often doesn’t quite know what to do. That’s why so many time-use research finds that fathers tend to be the “helper parent” and that their child care is typically done in the presence of the mother – which doesn’t give mothers much of a break nor does it build a father’s sense of confidence and competence.

“From the moment the train leaves the tracks, the mother is the primary caregiver and the father is the supporting actor,” Harrington said.

“And nothing subsequent seems to change that trajectory once it gets started.”

I was struck by how different those trajectories are in countries where fathers are encouraged to take parental leave by government policy, workplace culture and even social pressure. Research done by father researchers I spoke to in Sweden and in Denmark have found that ensuring that fathers have solo parental leave, typically after a mother has finished her leave and the baby is six months or more, is the surest way to ensure a more egalitarian division of labor between parents at both work and home.

Denmark is on its way to full parity in the amount of time men and women spend at work and at home within the next few decades. If present trends continue, the United States, where mothers still put in twice the hours doing housework and child care, is 80 to 100 years at least away from that, time use researchers have found.

I spoke with Andreas Ottemo, a young father in Sweden who decided with his spouse from the start that they would equally share parental leave and work and home duties. He had just stayed home with his young daughter, Esther, who’d been sick. When Esther was born, his wife stayed home with her on paid maternal leave for nine months. Then Ottemo took over and stayed home on paid paternal leave for another nine months.

“I know it’s a cliché, but in some ways, quality time is quantity time,” he told me. “And if you don’t get good patterns set, and take responsibility from the start, it’s hard to do later on.”

It wasn’t easy – there were days when the former engineer felt flattened by another set of dishes to do or more laundry to wash rather than his neat check lists of “productive” accomplishments at work. “But I began to think of it as natural,” he said. “I really began to feel, ‘This is my kid, too.’”

For Ottemo, he had friends and colleagues who were active fathers and also taking parental leave. There was a lot of free discussion at work and among friends about the role of fathers and the importance of flexible work for family time.

And that, Brad Harrington said, is part of what motivated him to hold the virtual forum. In the United States, there are few places for fathers to talk openly about work and life issues – both about the conflicts between them, but also about how enriching full participation in both can be.

To that end, Harrington introduced the fathers of Deloitte Dads of Canada, a network of fathers who want to both, explained founder Andrew Hamer, “maintain an accelerated career trajectory, but also have an active co-parent role.”

The group offers education, advocacy, informal sessions for junior and senior dads to share stories about what’s working and what isn’t at the firm and opportunities for family fun. It also is active in charity. And the demand has grown so rapidly that they’re considering expanding beyond their Toronto offices and going nationwide in Canada. They are also talking to their counterparts in the UK, Australia and, yes, even the United States, where a vacuum in government leadership has left setting workplace culture and policy to individual firms and individual managers, whose attitudes and behaviors are all over the map.

“Women have been good having a voice in the feminist movement, saying ‘We have a place in the home, now we need a place in the workplace that is equal to men,’” Harrington said. “Men have been a lot less vocal and a lot less assertive to say, ‘We’ve got a place in the workplace, but we need to legitimize our place in the home.’”

Don't Sweat Rise in 'Full' Retirement Age It Means Less Than the 'Real' Retirement Age—70

By Jennifer Waters Nov. 2, 2013

What does all this talk about raising the so-called full retirement age really mean?

A whole lot of nothing, according to Alicia Munnell, the director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, who poses the question in a recent research brief.

No matter how you slice it, the "real" retirement age—not to be confused with the "full retirement age" we refer to so often—isn't 62 or 66 but 70.

"We have a benefit structure that pays full benefits at an age when most people have stopped working," she says. "We have set that age at 70."

Wait, what? Isn't the FRA at 66 for those of us born between 1943 and 1954 and gradually moving to age 67 if we entered the world after 1960?

Yes, that's how the Social Security Administration calculates your FRA. But Ms. Munnell reminds us that you get the full punchbowl of benefits if you wait until you turn 70. If you start receiving benefits at 66, SSA says you get 100% of what you're entitled to. Put it off for four years, you'll get 132%.

Nathalie Dion

Given such a carrot-and-stick approach, Ms. Munnell figures that SSA expects most people to retire at 70. "The delayed retirement credit has rendered the full retirement age a largely meaningless concept," she says. "It does not describe the age when benefits are first available. That is age 62. It does not describe the age when monthly benefits are at their maximum. That is age 70," she continues. "It really does not have any meaning in terms of an official retirement age."

But she's reluctant to encourage an official FRA of 70. Since the human race is a jumble of apples, oranges and lemons, doing so creates an inherent risk. Not all of us age well. What's more, a growing stock of research underscores that wealthier, well-educated people enjoy longer lives than their poorer, less-learned counterparts.

They're also more likely to work in less physically demanding jobs. You see far more attorneys and doctors working into their 70s than you do welders or heavy-equipment operators.

So, unless you have a disability or some other reason why you can't change your retirement date—just sick of working maybe?—think of your real retirement age as 70. You'll get a much bigger bang for your buck.

Q:We're both on Social Security disability from work-related injuries. I receive $1,735 per month, she receives $556. We get extra help with Medicare prescription drug plan costs. We have two teenagers at home now. When they leave home will we lose this help? (My prescriptions cost $1,979 per month.)

— Dave M., Vail, Ariz.

A:You're talking about Medicare's Extra Help program to cover costs tied to prescription-drug plans. Losing it depends on how your income compares to the limit that applies without two dependents living at home. There's a chart on Page 21 in the manual "What You Need To Know About Extra Help," which can be found at SocialSecurity.gov. It lays out income and household size.

At $27,492 in disability benefits alone, it appears that you won't meet the threshold for a family of two. You can appeal using SSA Form 1021, and there are other resources such as a state pharmacy-assistance program that can help you. They generally have higher income limits.

Remember, too, that the income limits, announced in February or March, go up slightly each year.

Q:I will be 65 in November and am retired. I will start Social Security in January. My former employer is paying my Cobra health insurance through May 2014, through Blue CrossBlue Shield. I called Florida Blue to see if the Cobra insurance can be secondaryâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;after being shuffled around for about an hour, I was told "no." I hate to lose the insurance benefit from my employer, but should I apply for Medicare now or can I wait without penalty? Can Medicare be secondary? â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Dee M., Tampa, Fla. A:You will automatically be enrolled in Medicare Part A when you turn 65, so I'm assuming you've already received your Medicare cards. Normally, you can sign up for Part B anytime you have health insurance based on current employment (it's best to do it before that coverage ends), but that doesn't count for retiree or Cobra coverage. That means you can expect to lose your Cobra coverage.

Call the Medicare Coordination of Benefits Contractor at 800-999-1118 with more questions. You might also want to talk with State Health Insurance Assistance Program (SHIP) about Part B and Medigap. You can find that number at Medicare.gov/contacts, or at 1-800-MEDICARE (1-800-633-4227).

Top Producers of U.S. Fulbright Students by Type of Institution, 2013-14 Research institutions

Number of applicants

Number of awards

Harvard U.

134

39

U. of Michigan at Ann Arbor

151

32

Arizona State U.

60

26

Princeton U.

82

26

Rutgers U.

129

26

Northwestern U.

106

23

70

22

Columbia U.

107

21

Yale U.

106

21

Cornell U.

67

20

U. of Chicago

98

20

Boston College

85

19

U. of California at Berkeley

62

18

Duke U.

54

16

Ohio State U.

72

16

Stanford U.

75

16

U. of Pennsylvania

81

16

U. of Maryland at College Park

41

15

U. of Rochester

32

15

College of William & Mary

53

14

U. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

91

14

Georgetown U.

50

13

U. of Colorado at Boulder

42

13

U. of Pittsburgh

51

13

Fordham U.

44

12

U. of California at San Diego

25

12

U. of Southern California

81

12

Washington U. in St. Louis

43

12

Johns Hopkins U.

54

11

New York U.

49

11

Pennsylvania State U. at University Park

54

11

San Diego State U.

47

11

U. of Washington

77

11

American U.

32

10

Brown U.

82

10

Florida State U.

49

10

Indiana U. at Bloomington

71

10

Tulane U.

53

13

U. of Arizona

64

10

U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

46

10

U. of Texas at Austin

BC to feature diary of law alumnus at Pentagon on 9/11, in Iraq invasion Posted by Matt Rocheleau October 25, 2013 02:01 PM An upcoming multimedia exhibit at Boston College will feature 36 pages of diary entries by Marine Lt. Timothy McLaughlin, who attended BC Law, that recount his experience at the Pentagon on 9/11, commanding a tank during the invasion of Iraq, and draping his American flag over a statue of Saddam Hussein at Firdos Square, university officials said.

The exhibit “Invasion: Diaries and Memories of War in Iraq,” also includes texts by journalist and author Peter Maass and photographs by Gary Knight, both of whom reported on the battles fought by McLaughlin’s Marine battalion as it approached Baghdad.

The exhibit will be on display in the BC Law School Library from Monday, Oct. 28 through the month of November. A panel discussion featuring the McLaughlin, Maass and Knight is scheduled for Nov. 5 in Law School’s East Wing Room 120 at 6:30 p.m.

The exhibit “displays an innovative grid of 36 pages from McLaughlin’s diaries, each page blown up to poster-size, along with Knight’s haunting images and Maass’s stories. The grid, which includes pictures, maps and poems, operates as a text about war and also an artwork about war,” the university said in a press release.

“In the pages, McLaughlin writes of stumbling through the smoke-filled Pentagon after it was attacked, of the Iraqis shot and killed by his tank’s guns in 2003, and of the chaos when his flag was placed on the statue in front of a global television audience,” the release adds.

Some of McLaughlin’s personal possessions will also be displayed, including – on select days –his American flag that was briefly draped on the statue of Hussein.

“We hope this exhibit brings people back to the invasion and shows them, directly and without the usual filters of the government or the press, what the invasion truly consisted of,” the three contributors said in a joint statement. ”After ten years, we feel it is time for a thoughtful examination of the war before it is forgotten or romanticized.”

Utilities must adapt to changing environment, CEO says

By Erin Ailworth | G L O B E S T A F F

OCTOBER 25, 2013

Utilities must adapt to a changing energy environment that will require greater reliance on renewable resources, increased investment in transmission and other infrastructure, and strategies to hold down costs for customers, National Grid chief executive Steve Holliday said Thursday.

“We have a significant challenge,” Holliday told executives gathered the Boston Harbor Hotel for the Boston College Chief Executives’ Club luncheon. “How can we deliver cleaner energy in the future, make sure it’s reliable, and at the same time afford it — things in conflict.”

Holliday, who has led London-based National Grid since 2007, said the utility is trying to become more flexible in the way it delivers power to and interacts with its customers, for instance by testing smart meters and real-time pricing as a way to encourage energy users to conserve.

Holliday said that continued investment in energy infrastructure and new technologies is needed to ensure reliable, accessible power.

But, he added, those expenses must be balanced against rising energy costs, particularly in New England, which has some of the highest electricity rates in the country.

DINA RUDICK/GLOBE STAFF “We have a significant challenge,” Steve Holliday told his audience.

“Affordability has to be a key consideration,” he said, but “there is no doubt that if we don’t invest, reliability will suffer.”

Holliday’s comments about affordability drew some challenge from one audience member, who questioned National Grid’s agreement to buy power from the controversial offshore wind project, Cape Wind, at a starting price of 18.7 cents per kilowatt hour. That is roughly 11 cents more than the company’s current basic residential electric service rate of 7.25 cents.

Holliday responded that he believes the world must act now to find and encourage the development of new energy resources, which are likely to become cheaper the more they are used.

“We will never have enough wind onshore to provide the clean energy that we need,” he said. “Fossil fuels will run out. We can leave that problem to our kids and our grandkids or we can get on to start to incentivize the new technologies to come forward.”

How Crummy, Run-­‐‑Down Housing Harms the Children Who Live in It EMILY BADGER OCT 24, 2013

The housing crisis sounded all kinds of alarms for policymakers and the public about what happens when families can'ʹt afford their homes, or when they lose the stability that a secure home provides. We'ʹve heard about the effects of foreclosures on neighborhoods, the weight of housing stress on human health, the impact of lost equity on household wealth for huge portions of the U.S. population.

But something has been absent in all this talk about how unstable housing in any form affects families. "ʺThe attention raised by the mortgage crisis and the Shutterstock foreclosure crisis really missed a lot of central aspects of housing that are likely to be important for children," says Rebekah Levine Coley, a Professor in the

Lynch School of Education at Boston College.

Notably, it'ʹs the quality of housing – the presence of peeling paint or cockroaches, broken appliances or damaged walls – that most strongly predicts a child'ʹs well-­‐‑being and development.

Coley and colleagues from Tufts University identified this in research recently published in the journal Developmental Psychology. They looked at data on 2,400 low-­‐‑income children in Boston, Chicago, and San Antonio, as part of a six-­‐‑year longitudinal study that had been designed to track child development within poor families in the years after welfare reform. Over that time, 1999-­‐‑2005, researchers (Coley was one of the original investigators) collected all kinds of data on the environments those families lived in, as well as the behavioral, emotional and cognitive development of the children.

In retrospect, that study amassed precisely the kind of data you'ʹd need to understand how housing itself – not the social environment of a "ʺfamily home"ʺ – might influence children. The study recorded whether a home was rented or owned, or rented through public housing or subsidies, how affordable it was relative to a family'ʹs income, how often families moved from house to house, and the quality of the property. Researchers looked for working refrigerators, holes in the wall, rodents, functioning heat and hot water, adequate light and fresh air – many of them signs of poor-­‐‑quality housing outside of a family'ʹs control. All of the families were low-­‐‑income, but some had considerably more run-­‐‑down housing than others.

Controlling for other factors like a parent'ʹs employment status and income, Coley and her co-­‐‑authors concluded that the poor quality of housing more strongly and consistently predicted a child'ʹs well-­‐‑being than all of those other housing characteristics (including whether the home was considered "ʺaffordable"ʺ to the parents or not). Children in more derelict housing had lower average reading and math skills.

They had more emotional and behavioral problems. And as families moved over time into worse housing, the children functioned less well, too.

It'ʹs easy to suspect correlation here instead of causation, but the study is compelling with its long time frame and broad sample. "ʺOne of the concerns is that parents who don’t have the skills or the resources or the energy to find and maintain an affordable or a high-­‐‑quality home might also be parents who have some other characteristics,"ʺ Coley says. "ʺThey might be more likely to be unemployed or have mental health problems, or poor parenting practices. But we tried to parse out what part of this is due to the housing itself versus what was due to all of these other characteristics happening in families."ʺ Coley suspects that crummy housing has an impact on children through the behavior of their parents. A hole in the wall or a broken boiler may induce stress in parents or cause them mental health problems, further hamstringing their ability to parent children and maintain regular family activities. It'ʹs also possible – although this study can'ʹt address this – that a run-­‐‑down home environment (picture cockroaches and peeling lead paint) might have direct impacts on a child'ʹs health, influencing his or her development in other ways.

We often celebrate the value for children of a safe and comfortable home, a place that'ʹs a refuge from other problems. This study suggests that we may be ignoring the costs of the opposite scenario: when it is the home itself that'ʹs the problem.

In Coley'ʹs view, this means that we should be worrying as much – if not more – about the quality of housing as its affordability. Low-­‐‑income children in high-­‐‑crime neighborhoods, she adds, are also likely to spend considerably more time in their homes than are middle-­‐‑class suburban children who have safe playgrounds, schools and after-­‐‑school activities. In other words, children vulnerable to the worst housing also tend to spend the most time in it.

In the concrete, this research also implies that this situation – and many others like it – may be an even bigger problem than we realize.

The Answer Sheet

Six principles for using data to hold people accountable

By Valerie Strauss October 22 at 4:00 am A new policy brief being released today by National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder examines the linkage between data-driven improvement and accountability in education. It was written by Andy Hargreaves and Henry Braun, professors in the Lynch School of Education at Boston College, who in this post introduce the brief.

By Andy Hargreaves and Henry Braun One of the most unlikely bestselling books and blockbuster movies of (By Alan Brandt – AP) the past decade is a story about how baseball statistics turned from being a nerdy preoccupation of obsessive fans into a powerful tool for dramatically improving team performance.

Michael Lewis’s Moneyball showed how insightful use of a range of performance statistics to select and deploy players boosted the underfunded Oakland Athletics to World Series standard, where they faced and often defeated teams with triple their payroll. For the Oakland A’s, statistics often trumped coaches’ intuitions. The use of performance stats that Oakland pioneered in the United States is now commonplace throughout professional sports.

Performance metrics are also ubiquitous in business. Most companies now monitor a plethora of indicators — from product defect ratios to speed of output, from customer satisfaction to internet “stickiness” — to pinpoint performance problems and prompt real-time interventions. The brutal metrics of victories and defeats and of profits and losses, hold sports teams and companies accountable to fans and shareholders alike. In business and sports, we can get data-driven improvement and accountability (or DDIA) at the same time. Why should public education be any different?

One of the biggest buzz-words in education today is accountability. Accountability is seen as a strategy for improvement, by rewarding the successful and eliminating or intervening forcefully with those who are not. And it is mainly enforced through indicators of student achievement derived from standardized test scores. Test scores purport to reveal the successes or failures of students, teachers, schools and even entire educational systems.

As in business and sports, student test score data also have a second purpose – to focus everyone’s efforts on justin-time improvement by providing ongoing information through many tests about students’ progress. This enables teachers to monitor individual students and to intervene immediately if they start to fall behind. It provides principals with data that indicate how their teachers are performing, and to take appropriate action. And it enables districts and state departments to know what is happening in every school, so that corrective action can be taken before it is too late.

So are the opponents of student testing just unrealistic romantics who are out of date and out of touch? Perhaps they are not just resisting the rightful insistence that they should be held accountable to the public. They may also be rejecting the data tools that would enable them to improve.

In our policy brief Data-driven Improvement and Accountability (DDIA), published today by the National Education Policy Center, we examine the linkage between improvement and accountability in education, especially in relation to their use of data. Our paper is based on the research we have done on the use of data in high

performing countries, in business and sports, as well as the advice we are now providing to state and provincial departments of education that are revamping their testing instruments and accountability policies.

What have we found? DDIA is, in itself, neither good nor bad. It all depends on how the data are defined and used.

When DDIA is done thoughtfully, with due respect to the strengths and limitations of the data, it provides educators with valuable feedback on their students’ progress and difficulties that can inform decision-making and even lead to changes in practice. It can also give parents and the public meaningful information about student learning and the quality of the education that students are receiving.

In high-performing educational systems, businesses and sports teams, DDIA systems are based on data that are valid, balanced, usable, stable and shared. But in the United States, up until now, these are not the typical characteristics of DDIA, with the result that DDIA has generally impeded improvement and undermined accountability.

The answer is not to avoid data or abandon all testing but, rather, to learn from high performing systems and organizations elsewhere. Here are some of the key principles and practices identified in our report.

1. Validity: Measure what is valued instead of valuing only what can easily be measured, so that the purpose of schooling is not distorted. Few of the individuals we have interviewed dispute the validity and utility of metrics such as customer satisfaction in business or blocked shots in hockey. But almost all educational professionals, and increasing numbers of the public, regard test scores as weak measures of what our children should be learning in the 21st Century: The ability to think deeply about a topic or to apply knowledge to unfamiliar problems, the capacity for entrepreneurialism or innovation, or even to read for pleasure as well as for proficiency. The result is that schools and educators are driven largely by what is easily measured, not what is highly valued.

2. Balance: Create a balanced scorecard of metrics and indicators that captures the full range of what the school system values. Urban communities in high performing Finland followed best business practice by having a “balanced scorecard” of different measures to judge their progress. High performing businesses and sports organizations also use many metrics, defying the notion of a single ladder of success. But in US education, we have largely relied on a very small number of metrics, such as test scores and attendance, to judge performance.

This encourages schools to boost the numbers on a few metrics rather than attending to a wider range of indicators that offer the clues and keys to improvement.

3. Insist on credible, high quality data that are stable and accurate. High performing systems do not have a “bullwhip” overreaction to short term peaks or dips in a quarter or even a year that could be just an anomaly, but give equal attention to medium-term trends to guide decision making. Unfortunately, the data in public education systems and, especially, individual teachers’ classrooms are often highly unstable because of small numbers or high student mobility. Eventually this volatility undermines the credibility of the entire accountability system.

4. Design and select data that are usable in real time. Useful video and numerical data are available to coaches within days so they can have timely conversations with their players about passes made or shots that have been blocked. Internet retailers get instant feedback on their website use so they can make continuous and incremental improvements to their digital platform. But achievement tests are usually taken and the results handed back at the end of the school year when it is too late to do anything for the students who took them. The emphasis should shift back to collecting real-time data for improvement during the course of the year.

5. Develop shared decision-making and responsibility for data analysis and improvement. The best organizations set shared targets for improvement that are owned by everyone, not simply imposed from on high. We documented this in one of London’s most turned around school districts – Tower Hamlets. In places like Ontario, Canada – one of the two highest performing English speaking educational systems in the world – we have seen how leaders enable all teachers to assume collective responsibility for all students’ achievement, across grades and between special education and regular classroom teachers. In these settings, data are collected and organized to stimulate purposeful collective discussions and to inform interventions for real children who are known personally by the teachers — not to game the system to avoid the consequences of failure.

Opinion » Op-­‐Ed

Getting the IITs back on top October 22, 2013 Philip G. Altbach

India’s premier institutes of technology are losing their academic edge because of unplanned expansion and excessive politics The Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) figure prominently among Indian higher education institutions known outside the country. They are internationally respected for the quality of their graduates and for the quality of their teaching. The IITs may be the most selective schools in the world, with more than 500,000 students taking the entrance exams each year. Yet, the IITs have been in trouble for some time, and recent comments by Ved Prakash, the chairman of the University Grants Commission certainly do not help their cause. Mr. Prakash called the IITs “glorified engineering colleges” and argued that traditional universities should be the main beneficiaries of funding.

Standing apart

Losing vision and mission: The numerous factors that made the IITs excellent are being whittled away. The picture is of IIT Delhi. Photo: Sandeep Saxena

Why have the IITs been so successful over a half century? They are elite institutions — attracting top faculty members committed to the best-­‐quality teaching and with some focus on research. The faculty knew that their students would be the cream of the crop and that meritocracy would be the hallmark of the “IIT ethos.” They were attracted not by high salaries but by an idea that top, international quality higher education in technology and engineering can succeed in India. The country needs some elite institutions if India is to compete globally. IIT governance has traditionally been less bureaucratic than in other Indian universities — academic staff have had more power to influence key decisions and politics has been generally absent from campus life. In other words, the IITs have been more like the best universities worldwide, and are unlike the mainstream Indian academic institutions. Without question, good governance is central to the success of academic institutions everywhere — and Indian universities, steeped in bureaucracy, have not been noted for effective campus governance One of the main reasons that the IITs and, later, the Indian Institutes of Management were established was precisely because the traditional universities could not be reformed. Bureaucracy, politics, a dispersion of academic authority, and other factors prevented this. Unfortunately, the situation has not changed over the past half century. While some of the traditional universities have good quality departments and some of the colleges are outstanding, the institutions themselves seem impervious to change.

Why are the IITs in trouble? They have been unable to replace the superior quality faculty who were first attracted, as several generations have retired. Inadequate funding, much greater opportunities in the private

sector, and some deterioration at the IITs themselves have made them less attractive. At present, a significant percentage of academic posts remain vacant because appropriate candidates could not be found.

In an effort to “spread the wealth,” there are now 17 IITs, many established in recent years, and some located in quite remote places. This expansion has to some extent “cheapened the brand” since the overall quality could not be maintained — in part because qualified academic staff cannot be lured to mofussil locations. Top facilities — including needed laboratories, residences, and others — could not be provided in a timely way. Overexpansion has not served either the IITs or the quality of Indian higher education well.

India, facing public demand for IIT-­‐level education, as well as shortages of top talent in most fields, frequently errs on the side of expanding too quickly, failing to ensure that the needed intellectual and infrastructural resources are available.

Course correction The IITs have also become enmeshed in the complex political issues affecting Indian higher education. Close to half the students admitted to the IITs must be from the backward classes or disadvantaged caste and tribal groups. Policies relating to these reservations have been constantly debated and litigated.

Appointments of academic staff are also affected by reservation policies — but not to as great an extent.

Other political battles concerning the locations of new IITs and other issues have also ensued. There have also been disputes relating to the appointments of IIT directors and allegations of political inference.

The factors that made the IITs excellent are being whittled away. What is needed is a return to the effective policies and practices that characterised the IITs first for several decades. Rather than forced to conform to the norms of the rest of India’s sclerotic higher education system, the IITs should be a beacon for the rest.

The UGC’s Ved Prakash has said exactly the wrong thing.

(Philip G. Altbach is research professor and director of the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College, U.S.)

October 15, 2013

The Paranoid Style: Then and Now

By Alan Wolfe

Barry Goldwater, the Republican senator from Arizona who ran for president in 1964, made his priorities clear: "My aim," he famously said, "is not to pass laws, but to repeal them." Goldwater's comment was seized upon by the historian Richard Hofstadter in his 1965 book, The Paranoid Style in American Politics. Although claiming to be conservative, the senator, Hofstadter maintained, was anything but. "How are we to explain," he wanted to know, "the character of a 'conservative' whose whole political life has been spent urging a sharp break with the past ... ?"

It seemed remarkable that a country as modern, wealthy, and stable as the United States was witnessing such deep, persistent, and intransigent rightwing discontent. By using the term "paranoid," Hofstadter sought an answer in the inner workings of the mind, as if what Goldwater represented could best be explained not by analyzing polling data, but by psychoanalyzing officeholders.

These days, repealing laws rather than passing them is the single most prominent feature of the way some conservative Republicans in Congress Art Rickerby, Time Life have approached their job. Does a term such as "paranoid" therefore apply Pictures, Getty to Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, and Rand Paul, in the Senate, and to Tea Party members in the House of Representatives, all of whom have done their best to defund Obamacare, indeed to act as if President Obama had no mandate to govern?

In many ways, the answer must be no. Although often described, especially by Senate Majority leader Harry Reid, as insane, hard-right Republicans can be viewed as hyperrational: They have forced the country to debate issues such as the deficit and taxes on their terms. In other ways, Hofstadter's term "paranoid" fails to convey the extent to which psychology, rather than politics, helps explain the actions of today's politicians who adhere to the radical right.

Ideology is generally held to be a threat to democratic governance. It certainly was for Hofstadter.

Democratic politics, he wrote, demands a flexibility that ideological rigidity scorns. The genius of American politics lies in its nonideological thinking. Too much passion, and our politics would begin to resemble Europe's disastrous experience with extremism.

Goldwater was without question an ideologue. Like all leaders committed to self-professed timeless truths, he had published a book, The Conscience of a Conservative, which became a rousing best seller.

(It also offered Hofstadter an invaluable source for dissecting Goldwaterism.) The majority of senators from both parties who voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did so out of a prejudice holding that black people simply were not equal to whites; Goldwater, whose family-owned department store refused to practice segregation, voted against the act out of a principled opposition to federal power.

After Goldwater's retirement from political life, his principled libertarianism led him to be sympathetic to gay rights and to become an advocate for gay marriage. It remains true that, during his 1964 presidential campaign, Goldwater supported policies and uttered comments that were deeply reactionary. But the worst Hofstadter could say about his behavior was that the candidate had little interest in Senate committee work and waited one whole night before congratulating Lyndon Johnson on his election. Whatever else he was, Goldwater was no Joe McCarthy.

Despite the differences between the radical right then and now, Hofstadter's insight that psychology, more than politics, motivates it can still prove helpful. Suffering one of the great defeats in the history of American presidential politics, Goldwater carried just six states (Arizona and five in the Deep South).

Republican governors now rule in all of them, plus 24 more. It is in the states, and especially in those where legislatures have dominant Republican majorities, that Koch money feeds the ambitions of politicians whose attitudes are more worrisome than their ideas.

In the national capital, gridlock is the law of land. In the states, the same could be said for haste. No sooner had the U.S. Supreme Court weakened the preclearance provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act than conservative legislators in Texas and North Carolina passed laws making it more difficult for minorities to vote. Unlike their fellow Republicans in Washington, they made no effort to spin their actions with obfuscatory language: Although they once insisted that making it more difficult to vote would protect against fraud, increasingly they have proudly bragged that their rationale is strictly partisan. They want everyone to know that they have power, are willing to use it, and are determined to show how far they plan to go in curtailing the rights of those who disagree with them. From a civil-rights perspective, one can only wish that the states were in as much gridlock as the federal government.

Authoritarianism, rather than OCD, is the dominant psychological strain of those who engage in such determined activity. The mentality of right-wing politicians in the states may be different from those in Washington, but they equally fear being contaminated by contact with individuals or ideas they find threatening. One way of avoiding such contact, favored by Republicans in Congress, is to negotiate only under the threat of blackmail. Another, more popular in Republican-controlled states, is to work assiduously to make sure that you will never have opponents in the first place. The former allows elections to produce outcomes and then deals with the consequences. The latter aims to influence the outcomes of elections in advance, so that the results are a foregone conclusion. (Both major parties gerrymander; only one pays such careful attention to stacking voting requirements.) Paranoids need enemies, real or imagined. Authoritarians simply dispense with them.

Of all the scholars who discussed the radical right of the 1950s and 1960s, Hofstadter was the most worried. "The far right," he concluded, "has become a permanent force in the political order because the things upon which it feeds are also permanent: the chronic and ineluctable frustrations of our foreign policy, the opposition to the movement for racial equality, the discontents that come with affluence, the fevers of the culturally alienated ... ." If the radical right lived on, he feared, so would the "agitational mind, with its paranoid suspicions, its impossible demands, and its millennial dreams of total victory."

It has been a truism of politics that once extremists come to power, they jettison some of the radical ideas in which they once believed, so as to hold onto power as long as possible. No one can know whether Goldwater, had he improbably won the presidency, would have done so, even if his denunciation of the Christian Right in his last years suggests that he may have been tempted. We can, however, be fairly sure that today's version of the radical right, should it ever reach that point, will lack any such moderating influence. Whatever the outcome of this fall's intense standoff, one thing is certain: There will soon be another one.

Politics is the art of finding deals that make it possible to move on to the next deal. Because psychology is now playing such a prominent role in the fervid imagination of the radical right, any deadlock is just one more step toward another.

Hofstadter died in 1970, at the age of 54. He never got to witness just how correct he was.

Alan Wolfe is director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life and a professor of political science at Boston College. His latest book is Political Evil: What It Is and How to Combat It (Knopf, 2011).

After the Jobs Disappear

By JULIET B. SCHOR Published: October 14, 2013 BOSTON — In Somerville, Massachusetts, just across the line from Cambridge, is an institution called Artisan’s Asylum. At 40,000 square feet, it says it’s one of the largest “makerspaces,” or community craft studios, on the East Coast of the United States. A nonprofit group, it hosts craftspeople, artists and entrepreneurs, analog and digital alike. In addition to classes in traditional fields like woodworking, fiber arts and metalworking, it offers coveted rental space for creative types.

At one end of the space, tech whizzes are building Stompy, a 4,000-pound hexapod — a six-legged robot. At the other is a “bike hacking” collective that repurposes old bicycle frames. In between are the folks who invented a 3Doodler, the three-dimensional pen — it extrudes heated plastic that can be formed into just about any shape. The 3Doodler raised $2.3 million on Kickstarter (far outpacing its $30,000 goal) and is on track to be the next musthave gift item.

Javier Jaén

Community fabrication spaces like Artisan’s Asylum are becoming popular across the United States and Europe.

For many, they represent an appealing vision of the future of work.

Unlike in the classic industrial setting, where the manual and mental aspects of work are separated between blueand white-collar employees, those tasks are integrated in these “makerspaces.” There’s a commitment to ecological sustainability. There are no bosses or even “jobs,” in the traditional sense. Value is generated, for sure, but as “livelihood” or, in the case of the start-ups, worker/creator ownership.

This shift from employment to livelihood, while far from prevalent, has become a necessity for many in the wake of the 2008 global financial collapse, which led to the loss of more than 8 million jobs in the United States. At the time, I and other observers predicted that these jobs — a victim of labor-saving technical change, globalization and financialization — were unlikely to return. Five years later, the employment-to-population ratio in the United States, 58.6 percent, is at its lowest since 1983. In much of Europe, unemployment has soared, especially for youth, even as aging populations place pressure on pension and other social welfare programs.

As jobs disappear, people have begun to carve out new ways to gain access to income, goods and services. This is evident not only in the “makerspaces,” but also in what has come to be called the “sharing economy,” which encompasses activities as diverse as car-pooling, ride-sharing, opening one’s home to strangers via Web-based services like Couchsurfing or Airbnb, sharing office space and working in community gardens and food co-ops.

Like “makerspaces,” the sharing economy is refashioning work, giving people new opportunities to earn money or to have access to goods and services. People are joining “time banks,” through which members trade services like baby-sitting, carpentry or tutoring. They are selling their labor for cash on platforms like Task Rabbit and Zaarly.

They are renting out their cars, homes and durable goods, from appliances to lawn mowers. They are also giving away their stuff, via Web sites like Yerdle and Freecycle, rather than throwing it away.

The potential for the sharing economy to give work more meaning, autonomy and social impact is considerable. It has begun to reallocate value along the production chain, by cutting out middlemen, like hoteliers and landlords.

What’s revolutionary is not the sharing — people have engaged in nonmonetary transactions for millenniums —

but that the transactions are occurring among strangers. Digital reputations, including ratings systems on sites like TripAdvisor and Amazon, make such interactions safer than they were in the past. Many sharers also aim to reduce the carbon footprints of production and consumption, and stimulate local economies, though these effects are, so far, more hypothetical than proved.

In the sharing economy, people are returning, in a sense, to modes of independent production and self-provisioning that preceded (and persevered through) the industrial revolution. Technology — the growing availability of relatively cheap, small-scale 3-D printers, laser cutters and other fabrication tools — has made the sharing of equipment more affordable. Internet tools have significantly reduced the transaction costs associated with peer-topeer sharing. More generally, digital technologies are likely to be one reason small and medium-size enterprises have become key sources of employment job creation.

Like most economic innovations, these trends promise their share of pain. New products like the 3Doodler take away market share from established sellers. Traditional service jobs in hospitality and transportation are threatened by services like Airbnb and Uber. Sites where people bid to perform tasks have the potential to create a race to the bottom, particularly in times like now, when the supply of labor in wealthy countries is abundant, and the demand is limited.

These trends won’t solve the most urgent economic afflictions facing the West — a shortage of jobs, soaring inequality and a fraying of the welfare state — but they represent one significant response to it. Low-income people don’t typically have the kinds of homes one can rent out on Airbnb. But they can participate in urban food growing, an increasingly popular phenomenon, and in collective initiatives like Growing Power, in the Midwest, and Co-op Power, in the Northeast, which provide participants with income, food and energy. As in the maker movement, the work in such projects is tactile, connecting creativity with the handling of materials.

If some of this seems fanciful, even naïve, consider the alternatives. Large corporations are more profitable than ever, partly because of the consolidation in industries from banking to aviation to book publishing, and a neoliberal political ideology, in the United States, Britain and parts of Western Europe, that continues to favor deregulation — even though it was deregulation that brought about the financial crisis.

So while they are no panacea, the emergent trends of community fabrication, self-provisioning and the sharing economy collectively suggest a future for work in wealthy countries that involves more making, sharing and selforganizing. There may be fewer formal jobs — but a more entrepreneurial approach to making money, one that emphasizes smaller-scale companies and collectively owned enterprises, more sharing, and less spending. As painful as the years since the crash have been, a more resilient, satisfying and sustainable way to work and live could be one beneficial consequence.

Juliet B. Schor, professor of sociology at Boston College, is the author of “True Wealth: How and Why Millions of Americans Are Creating a Time-Rich, Ecologically Light, Small-Scale, High-Satisfaction Economy” and a member of the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Connected Learning.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on October 15, 2013, in The International New York Times.

The 50 Best Law Schools In The US

Melia Robinson OCT. 7, 2013

Given the absurdly high price tag on education and dim outlook on the legal job market, choosing the right law school makes all the difference.

We asked more than 400 American legal professionals to select the 10 law schools that would best serve a legal career. Harvard Law School was the resounding top answer.

Rank

Law School

Location

Tuition

Score

1

Harvard University

Cambridge, Mass.

$53,308

4.56

2

Yale University

New Haven, Conn.

$54,650

4.55

3

Columbia University

New York, N.Y.

$57,838

3.78

4

Stanford University

Palo Alto, Calif.

$50,802

3.65

5

Georgetown University

Washington, D.C.

$50,890

3.30

6

University of California — Berkeley

Berkeley, Calif.

$48,058

3.06

7

Cornell University

Ithaca, N.Y.

$55,301

2.78

8

New York University

New York, N.Y.

$48,950

2.67

9

Duke University

Durham, N.C.

$53,596

2.65

10

University of Chicago

Chicago, Ill.

$53,406

2.64

11

University of Michigan — Ann Arbor

Ann Arbor, Mich.

$52,784

2.31

12

University of Pennsylvania

Philadelphia, Penn.

$54,992

2.18

13

Northwestern University

Evanston, Ill.

$55,064

2.05

14

University of Virginia

Charlottesville, Va.

$52,900

2.00

15

University of Notre Dame

Notre Dame, Ind.

$48,730

1.98

16

University of California — Los Angeles

Los Angeles, Calif.

$51,720

1.77

17

George Washington University

Washington, D.C.

$49,840

1.71

18

Vanderbilt University

Nashville, Tenn.

$48,156

1.68

19

Boston College

Newton, Mass.

$45,231

1.66

20

University of Texas — Austin

Austin, Tex.

$49,244

1.48

21

University of California — Hastings

San Francisco, Calif.

$48,200

1.45

22

Boston University

Boston, Mass.

$45,786

1.42

October 7, 2013

Professor Recycles Drug-Trade Tools to Teach Kids Science G. Michael Barnett, 42, is an associate professor of education at Boston College. He leads a project that gets urban youths in Boston involved in hydroponics, a soil-free method of farming. The goal is to help students learn about agriculture, science, and entrepreneurship. Here is his account of that effort, as told to Justin Doubleday.

Photo via Edward Hayward, Boston College G. Michael Barnett (right) works with students to grow produce indoors.

In 2011, I was introduced to Irving Backman, a technology entrepreneur who wanted to start an indoor hydroponics business. I thought that might be an interesting project for kids, so I agreed to try it.

He gave us some equipment, and we pilot-tested the idea with a group of eight graduating high-school seniors in Boston College's College Bound program. I thought it would be fun for them to play with the idea, figure out how to make it work, and build some stuff. And they were all over it.

Most urban students don't have the opportunity to participate in any kind of agricultural program or have any place to grow something to eat. Our project lets them do that. Because our space was limited, we built a vertical, tiered system for growing plants in the campus greenhouse. We can grow 25 to 75 plants in a 4-by-5-foot space. The kids helped us think through the design. They sell the produce at farmers' markets.

One of our challenges was looking for funding. The idea occurred to us: What happens to all that marijuanagrowing equipment that gets confiscated by the DEA and the state and local police? We called around to find out. I figured that the people I was calling thought I was either an immensely dumb criminal or an immensely clever one.

But they said, "That's really cool." We started getting lights, nutrient solutions, and things like that donated by lawenforcement agencies.

Now we've got the program in 10 high-school classrooms, reaching about 450 kids. We also bring 60 kids to the campus, as part of the College Bound program, who go much more in depth and learn to manage a greenhouse.

They're trying to minimize the project's ecological impact by building aquaponic systems that use fish and beneficial bacteria that convert the fish waste into nutrients for the plants. And they're designing new hydroponic systems that are going to rely on solar and wind power.

We're scaling up. We just a got a new National Science Foundation grant, for $1.2-million, and we're working with high-school teachers to get indoor hydroponic systems embedded in their classrooms as part of their regular curriculum. When you're a C student, as many of the kids in our program are, you're pretty OK with just being average. You can get through high school without being noticed if you want, because you're not excelling and you're not failing.

Now, rather than being average at school, they are excelling. So far, every kid who has taken part in the in-depth program has gotten into college. We've given them a "third space" environment, one that is not school or home, where they get to explore, be a leader, learn science, and be proud of the work they're doing.

Ideas MacArthur ‘genius’ Robin Fleming on using archaeology to write history Boston College’s first honoree wants historians to stop being afraid of science

By Ruth Graham | O C TO B E R 0 6 , 20 1 3 HOW DO YOU TELL the story of a silent era?

Historians usually work from documents and archives, but huge swaths of history unfolded with barely any written records surviving at all.

This is the problem that Boston College historian Robin Fleming faced in looking at the first centuries of British life after Roman rule, an era of poverty, illiteracy, and tumult.

Last month, Fleming became the first-ever Boston College scholar to receive a MacArthur fellowship—the so-called genius grant—for her innovative illumination of a nearly impenetrable time. Her solution to the problem: Rather than relying on the written evidence, which amounts JOHN TLMUACKI/GLOBE STAFF to scattered accounts of the exploits of kings and Boston College history professor Robin Fleming. bishops, she trains a historian’s eye on what archeologists are turning up. She analyzes reports from digs, pores over photographs, and travels to examine excavated objects herself, then weaves the story of a society from the things people left behind.

Fleming is part of a broader trend of writing social history based on material objects, an approach strikingly different from those of historians focused on politics, power, and documents. Her study of everyday materials gives her remarkable new insights into a wide cross-section of society, including women, the poor, and other everyday people who were not kings or bishops. She has written, for example, about one fourth-century community in which many people were buried with small, elegant drinking beakers. By the fifth century, the Roman economy was collapsing, and the buried beakers begin to look much more beat-up. From this, Fleming was able to piece together a portrait of people who could no longer access the material goods of their recent ancestors, but still carried on their traditions.

In her work, Fleming can show a notable tenderness toward her previously anonymous subjects. In a recent brief biography of a seventh-century leper, she refers to the woman as “Eighteen,” after the number assigned to her by the archeologist who dug her up. Fleming calls this a “cheap party trick,” but she also says, “That makes her a person, because she’s got a name.”

She says she’s still figuring out how to use the MacArthur money, $625,000 doled out over five years.

But she said her main goal is to increase collaboration across disciplines, particularly between historians and archeologists. Despite the natural overlap in their interests, they tend to employ different kinds of evidence, tell different kinds of stories about the past, and even publish their work in different formats.

And most historians, she says, are “afraid of science, which we need to knock off.”

Fleming’s most recent book, published in this country in 2011, is “Britain After Rome: The Fall and Rise, 400 to 1070.” She spoke with Ideas from her home in Cambridge.

IDEAS: You’re looking at a period that is sometimes called the Dark Ages. It’s an outdated term among historians, but do you think it’s in some way accurate?

FLEMING: To say it’s the Dark Ages doesn’t give people any agency or credit. These people, a whole world imploded around them and they had to build it all new. Calling it “dark” doesn’t give them the credit they deserve. It makes them all seem like victims.

IDEAS: How have historians traditionally tried to approach this era?

FLEMING: The standard practice has been that historians interested in the fifth and sixth centuries go to their shelves and they pull down the Venerable Bede, who was a very good historian, and he wrote in the eighth century. He tells us what happened in that period.

And so, we look at what he says, we critique what he says, we write history from what he says. But the fact of the matter is, the Bede didn’t know anything about that period. He did as best as he could, but he didn’t have the evidence that we have.

Romano-British beaker.

IDEAS: What kinds of evidence are you using that aren’t typically tapped into by historians?

FLEMING: Medievalists, if they use objects, tend to use the famous ones and the pretty ones. So all historians will know about some of the really famous, what we call “princely burials,” full of gold and weapons and all this wonderful stuff....What I look at isn’t pretty at all and isn’t known to historians. So, things like bits of pottery. I’m really interested in slag from metal production; I’m interested in really poor-quality knives. It’s looking at the kind of quotidian and everyday, the stuff most people had.

IDEAS: How is your work is different from an archeologist’s?

FLEMING: The field archeologists that I know all have this incredible visual imagination, and they can look at a site that’s only from the ground down, excavate it out, and see what it looked like. Which is something historians just can’t do. I have no visual imagination at all. So archeologists do those things, but they’re not interested in looking—most of them, anyway—at the kind of range of archeological material being pulled out of the ground, against the background of the kinds of questions that drive historians, and writing a compelling story about the lived experience of people of the past. I’m talking medieval here. In the Americas, things are a little bit different, because for a long time in the Americas, the only story people could tell was an archeological story.

IDEAS: You found lower-status women wearing knock-offs of expensive accessories that rich women hung from their belts, which is a lovely detail.

FLEMING: You have to read archeology reports to understand, and they can be kind of souldestroying. There’s a lot of information in there and most of isn’t very interesting. But these little details come out and you think, Oh my god, somehow I’m going to work that in, because those are the things that enliven the story and make these people real.

IDEAS: Is it a challenge to a put together a full picture of an era with only the handful of things that have randomly happened to survive?

FLEMING: Metal objects survive well, ceramic objects survive well. But if you think of the things we use to mark us as individuals, that’s all gone, like hairstyles and slang. It’s just gone. There’s organic stuff and this other stuff that we know from our own lives is really important. These are just echoes. It’s like being an astronomer and looking at some faraway galaxy.

IDEAS: In the short video produced by the MacArthur Foundation, you say, “People make things, but things make people.” What do you mean by that?

FLEMING: The fact that I don’t have a toilet in my living room or a bed in my kitchen makes me live my life in my house in specific ways. And I have this picture of what a house should be like in my brain, so when I go to build a new one, I build it so the toilets aren’t in the living room and the beds aren’t in the kitchen. So the house forces me and everybody else to continue living lives the way we’ve been living them. Objects really boss us around. I’m always struck by this because I spend a lot of time with 18- and 19-year-olds. Smartphones have completely reorganized the way our students inhabit the world. It’s not them taking charge of the world, it’s their smartphones telling them how to operate in the world.

IDEAS: It’s touching to me that some of these people have waited for more than a millennium to have their lives recognized. Is there an emotional component for you in this work?

FLEMING: Absolutely. I feel it’s my job to let people speak who have been forgotten and ignored. I think about how important my own life is to me, and how 500 years from now, I want historians who are looking at 21stcentury America to capture what life is like for me and people I love. But they’re not going to do that if all they do is write histories of the Senate or biographies of Obama. That’s just not going to get at it. So I know what I want for myself, and I want that for other people as well, people in the distant past. It’s really hard in my period to get beyond kings and bishops and really, really important people.

But there were all these other people who had lives that were just as important. I want to speak for them.

The 2013 MacArthur 'Genius Grant' Winners Read about the recipients of this year's MacArthur 'genius grants.

Robin Fleming Medieval Historian Age: 57 Affiliation: Boston College Location: Chestnut Hill, Mass.

In her 2010 book, ‘Britain after Rome: The Fall and Rise of the Middle Ages, c. 400–1070 ,’ Ms. Fleming brings to life the way people traded, worshiped, and commemorated their dead while also revealing the impact of repeated resettlement and urbanization.. Her recent work focuses on the centuries of economic collapse following the withdrawal of Roman power from the edges of its empire. She is the author of ‘Kings and Lords in Conquest England’ and ‘Domesday Book and the Law: Society and Legal Custom in Early Medieval England,' as well as numerous articles and book chapters.

D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

Mindful Teaching With Technology

By International Perspectives on Education Reform Group on October 4, 2013

by Dennis Shirley I was recently in Singapore, where I was invited to speak at a conference on mindful teaching with technology. On the morning of the conference I was having trouble getting a good wi-fi connection for the prezi presentation I prepared. The problem was with a video that was embedded in the presentation.

At one point I counted eight technical assistants fiddling with different possible wi-fi solutions before we finally found the right one, and my presentation was underway.

Now, imagine a school teacher in a classroom filled with restless youngsters. The teacher has spent her weekend creating an online prezi presentation. Come Monday morning she is trying to get the wi-fi connection up and running in her school and it just isn't working. There are no technical assistants available to help her--not one, let alone eight! At some point the teacher has to make a decision to admit defeat and to turn back to her good old trustworthy friend, the textbook, accompanied by a homespun lesson plan that may lack technological flare but at least is accessible and ensures that the students can be guided to master the given curriculum content at hand.

Sound familiar? You'd have to be a Rip Van Winkle of educational change not to have observed that new technologies are sweeping into our schools. A triple whammy of consumer demand, corporate marketing, and policy proliferation are changing the nature of learning in schools. With the right blend of strong support and unwavering encouragement, teachers can use these new technologies to initiate conversations with students in other schools half-way around the world, to engage in scientific experiments with field stations in remote rural communities, and to model molecular compounds that are much easier to understand when they can rotate on a screen than when they are displayed on a static textbook page.

At the same time, the hyperventilating hyperbole of technophiles has left many educators cold, and not just because they are opposed to change. Many school districts, states, and even whole nations have found that their investments in technology have produced disappointing results in terms of student achievement. The infusion of technology only exposes how little control educators have over teaching and learning that should lie at the center of our profession.

What might be the answer to these dilemmas? In The Global Fourth Way: The Quest for Educational Excellence (Corwin, 2012), Andy Hargreaves and I try to find a commonsensical middle way between technophiles and those that oppose them. We call this "mindful teaching with technology," aspiring to initiate conversations within and across the education profession that will enable us to explore when and how we should use new technologies and when we should avoid them altogether. Beyond endorsing technology, questioning it, or sheltering students from it, we can see before us a rich and abundant new terra incognita for educational change. But this will only hold true if we make sure that our conversations aren't driven and controlled by the corporate interests that stand to make profit from pushing new

technologies. It can't be driven by policy makers, students or parents either, although they have important roles to play in democratic deliberation. Here is a key terrain for conversation and debate within the profession, informed by our classroom observations and research, and animated by real moral purpose.

And now, back to my prezi presentation in Singapore. When I finally did get my prezi up and running, I showed a brief clip, "disconnect to reconnect", a plea to not become so immersed in our technologies that we miss out on the most rewarding moments of companionship with family and friends. The audience was engrossed in the film until an unexpected pop-up advertisement appeared marketing sexual services. The audience exploded with laughter, and I had to grapple with yet another paradox: even in using new technologies to critique new technologies the medium has its own way of taking control of the conversation!

To this day I still am wondering: Is mindful teaching with new technology even possible? If so, how would we recognize it? Your ideas are welcome!

Dennis Shirley is a professor of education at the Lynch School of Education at Boston College. Follow him on @dennisshirley and @JournalEdChange.

First Global Study Confirms Widely Held Practices On Science, Math, and Reading Education Sep. 30, 2013 â&#x20AC;&#x201D; It's a long held belief that parental and administrative support helps breed academic success; now there's data to back that up. A new study released today by the IEA and the TIMSS and PIRLS International Study Center at Boston College examines what makes up "cultural educational excellence" while quantifying the strengths of best practices at school, and at home.

"The data supports many long held beliefs about good ways of raising your children and preparing them for school," says Dr. Michael Martin of Boston College, co-executive director of TIMSS and PIRLS and the study's co-author. "The analysis focuses on, 'How does that work, what's behind that?' There's never been data to do this, to show this mechanism, this path."

The study, titled TIMSS and PIRLS 2011: Relationships Among Reading, Mathematics and  Science Achievement at the Fourth Grade -- Implications for Early Learning, is the first report looking at the issue of cultural excellence -- what parents, schools, and students are doing to improve success in reading, math, and science. Researchers used data from 180,000 students, 170,000 parents, 14,000 teachers, and 6,000 principals who participated across 34 countries.

"This is the biggest and most comprehensive set of data at this grade level -- fourth grade 10-year olds kids -- by far," says Dr. Martin. "There's never been data from so many countries on such a level of achievement -- really good measures of mathematics, science, reading achievement -- really good background from questionnaires to the parents primarily, which was a good resource, but also from the school principals, teachers, students themselves, data from all of these sources. There's never been a set of data like this.

While researchers found each country has a unique approach towards education, the data also pointed to across the board similarities in school and home that affect achievement.

"The culture of educational excellence starts in the home," says BC's Dr. Ina Mullis, co-executive director of TIMSS and PIRLS and the study's co-author. "It follows with a school that has a focus on educational success by all the parties concerned -- the teachers, the administration, the parents, the students themselves. It continues into the classroom with a teacher that is holding student engagement.

We know then we will have students in the end that have a higher achievement, a higher motivation, and actually I think have a higher probability of becoming life-long learners."

"Obviously well educated parents tend to buy lots of books, tend to engage in activities with their kids tend to read to them, do literacy tasks and numeracy tasks," adds Dr. Martin. "Those kids, when they begin school, are able to do these things. They know what a book is, they can do their ABC's, they can

read, even when they start. And of course, that's a huge, huge boost to their achievement in school.

They never lose that advantage, they start school with an advantage and they never lose it. So we were digging into how that advantage comes about. What the mechanism of this is. It all starts at home and this isn't news, but the amount of data that we have on how it works I think is new."

More than half of the 34 participating countries were able to get 90% or more of fourth grade students to a basic level of proficiency in reading, math, and science (though the U.S. wasn't included in this study, 98% of fourth graders reached basic proficiency in reading in 2011, 96% in math and science) while five countries saw 35% of their students reach a high level of achievement in those subject areas.

"For many years we've known that kids from homes of educated parents, with lots of reading materials will do better in school in the fourth grade," says Dr. Martin. "But we have really good data at TIMSS and PIRLS, reports from parents, about not only on the materials they have in the home but the literacy activities they engage their children with -- numerous activities -- and their estimate of just how competent the kids were in being able to read and write, and do basic things when they began primary school. And then from an assessment result we have what they can do in the fourth grade."

The study also underscored the across the board advantages of being a better reader.

"The effect of concentrating on these literacy activities also enhanced student achievement in mathematics and science," says Dr. Mullis. "We found that as the amount of reading increased, the students who weren't very good readers had more and more difficulty with the math and science items.

Reading is crucial to success in school. It's the glue that's holding it together. "

Names

Katherine McPhee at ‘Pops on the Heights’

By Mark Shanahan and Meredith Goldstein | G LO B E S TA F F

SEPTEMBER 2 9, 2 01 3

BILL BRETT FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE From left: “Pops on the Heights” co-chair John Fish, CEO of Suffolk Construction, Katharine McPhee, co-chair Charles Clough of Clough Capital Partners, and Boston College President Rev. William Leahy.

Katharine McPhee was the special guest at Friday’s “Pops on the Heights,” a concert by the Boston Pops Orchestra, conducted by Keith Lockhart, and the University Chorale of Boston College, under the direction of John Finney. The annual show at Conte Forum benefits financial aid at BC. An “American Idol” alum, McPhee is no stranger to Boston, having studied at Boston Conservatory for three semesters before heading to LA to find fame and fortune. When she’s not making music, McPhee’s been acting, most recently on the NBC show “Smash.”

Job Satisfaction May Suffer When Role Is Misunderstood September 26, 2013

THURSDAY, Sept. 26 (HealthDay News) -- Professionals' job satisfaction, performance and pay can suffer when clients don't understand what they do, according to a new study.

"If people don't understand what you do, they tend to devalue what you do," study co-author Michael Pratt, a professor of management and organization at Boston College, said in a college news release.

"They don't understand why you're making all this money -- 'Why should I pay you all this money?' is a common question these professionals keep hearing."

Pratt and his colleagues looked at people in four professions: 24 architects, 13 nurse practitioners, 17 litigation attorneys and 31 certified public accountants. In most cases, these professionals had to educate clients about the type of work they do and to manage "impracticable" and "skeptical" expectations, according to the study in the August issue of the Academy of Management Journal.

"Image discrepancies" occur in these four areas and in many other professions, the authors pointed out in the news release.

For example, Pratt said, "Architects are being told, 'All you do is draw lines, sketches and pictures all day. What do you actually do? You don't build anything. Why should I pay you all this money?'"

Nurse practitioners are also often devalued, he noted. "Nurse practitioners can actually examine patients and prescribe medication, but you'll get a patient in there saying, 'I don't want to talk to you, I want to talk to a doctor.' They won't tell the nurse practitioner their problems; they won't let themselves be examined," Pratt said.

This lack of understanding among clients can have a major effect on professionals' levels of job satisfaction and their pay. For example, potential clients might decide to use a contractor instead of an architect or go to a doctor instead of a nurse practitioner.

"I assumed professionals would actually get over it, that there would be frustration, it would be an interpersonal problem, and that would be the extent of it," Pratt said. "I didn't think it would have such a big impact on how they did their job, how it affected their pay and how they performed. I was surprised at the depth of how this affected job performance. It's not simply annoying -- it has real impact," he added.

Japan's 'Abenomics' may pave way for investment, Mitsubishi says September 26, 2013, 7:03 am

By Richard Valdmanis BOSTON (Reuters) -­‐ Mitsubishi Corp <8058.T> Chairman Yorihiko Kojima said on Wednesday that Japan's economic reform agenda could, if successful, pave the way for the company's expansion in the country's energy sector.

A sweeping economic policy overhaul by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe aimed at pulling the world's third largest economy out of a 15-­‐year deflationary period -­‐ a policy dubbed "Abenomics" -­‐ has succeeded in building market optimism, he said.

Yorihiko Kojima, chairman of the board of Mitsubishi Corporation, speaks at the Boston College Chief Executives' Club of Boston luncheon in Boston, Massachusetts September 25, 2013. REUTERS/Brian Snyder

"The challenge now is converting this positive sentiment into genuine improvements in the real economy," he said at a luncheon sponsored by Boston College's Chief Executives' Club of Boston.

"This is related to the government regulations, therefore we are always communicating," he said, referring to Mitsubishi's interest in expanding its energy business in Japan.

Since taking office in December, Prime Minister Abe and the Bank of Japan have gambled on massive fiscal and monetary stimulus to spark life in the economy, and signs of an upswing are accumulating.

But pessimists have argued that the benefits of "Abenomics" may be short-­‐lived and will not prompt companies to spend more on investment and wages, unless they are accompanied by a raft of structural reforms like tax cuts and changes to labor laws.

Mitsubishi Corp is a multinational Japanese company covering finance, banking, machinery, chemicals, food and energy businesses. It employs about 60,000 people in approximately 90 countries and is part of the Mitsubishi Group of Companies, best known in the United States for its automobile brand.

While Mitsubishi Corp is already a major independent power producer in overseas markets, it has seen its options limited in Japan under previous governments that have permitted large regional monopolies to dominate the sector.

Prime Minister Abe has signalled an opening up of Japan's electricity market to increased competition, and is considering whether to reduce Japan's dependence on nuclear energy in the wake of the massive earthquake and tsunami that crippled the Fukushima Daiichi plant in 2011.

"At this point the energy mix, we have to change it. About 30 percent is nuclear power, and this will be going down to 20 percent or something," Kojima told Reuters on the sidelines of the luncheon. "We are always communicating with the electric companies or with manufacturers. We have ideas about how to participate and we are studying them."

He said Abe had an opportunity to push through his reform agenda because his party had won both upper and lower house elections, ending a period of deep political division in Japan.

"It has been quite a while since Japan enjoyed this kind of political stability and the expectation is that Mr. Abe will remain at the helm for the next three years at least," he said.

Kojima credited Abe's monetary and fiscal policy measures for a recovery in the yen and a near 50 percent increase in the NIKKEI stock index since he took office in December.

He added that the recent announcement that Japan will host the 2020 Summer Olympics, as well as Japan's participation in the Trans-­‐Pacific Partnership negotiations -­‐ a free trade zone scheme led by the United States -­‐ were providing momentum for Abe's economic agenda.

He also said Abe's plan to impose a consumption tax in Japan to counter the country's fiscal deficit was risky, but probably necessary for Japan's long-­‐term prospects.

"Doing this while at the same time stimulating the economy to grow will not be easy, but I think it will be essential for Japan to succeed," he said.

He said that Mitsubishi was also interested in further investing in North American shale gas and strengthening existing ties with the U.S. defense industry.

Francis wishes to release Vatican II's bold vision from captivity Richard Gaillardetz | Sep. 25, 2013 Analysis This is the third in a series of articles examining Pope Francis' recent interviews. A new article will be published each day this week on NCRonline.org.

In the last 50 years, we have had five popes.

The first four were at the Second Vatican Council as either bishops or peritus (theological advisers). Francis may not be a pope from the council, but he is quickly establishing himself as a pope of the council. Each of his recent predecessors, to be sure, carried forward particular elements of the council's teaching.

This pope, however, has received the council's teaching through his distinctive experiences as a Pope Francis greets people in wheelchairs after celebrating Mass Jesuit, a Latin American and, pre-eminently, as June 16 in St. Peter's Square at the Vatican. (CNS/Paul Haring pastor. His pontificate represents a fresh new phase in the ongoing reception of Vatican II, one shaped by a variety of post-conciliar developments.

Pope Benedict XVI seemed to prefer a smaller, doctrinally purer church. He wanted a church willing to confront the pernicious forces of secularism. Francis has expressed his preference for Vatican II's image of the church as the people of God. His words and deeds evoke a more expansive, extroverted church that must be "the home of all, not a small chapel that can hold only a small group of selected people." He sees a church that must risk making mistakes by going out into the world and engaging people where they are. He wants a church that can foster a "culture of encounter."

The church he calls for would be messier because it makes a space for honest dialogue, listening and even disagreement. For example, in his recent interview with Jesuit publications worldwide, he reflects on what it means to "think with the church." For him, this starts with getting beyond our own self-styled and often self-serving credos. Yet "thinking with the church" also means much more than a scrupulous, servile obedience to every ecclesiastical decree. It means thinking with the whole church and not just the ones who count ecclesiastically. It means daring to enter into a "complex web of relationships," living in receptive solidarity with all God's people. It means recalling not only the infallibility of the church's teachers but also, as the council taught, the infallibility of the believing church.

"When the dialogue among the people and the bishops and the pope goes down this road and is genuine," the pope contends, "then it is assisted by the Holy Spirit." He calls for the reform of consultative and collegial structures (e.g., episcopal synods) because he wants a humble, listening, discerning church.

Francis emphasizes the council's teaching that the church is "missionary by her very nature" (Ad Gentes). His outspoken advocacy for the poor and marginalized has led him to set liberation theology free from its ecclesiastical dungeon and restore it as a legitimate and necessary response to the council's missionary imperative. Francis calls for a church sent in mission as an instrument of God's mercy and justice. "The thing the church needs most today is

the ability to heal wounds and to warm the hearts of the faithful; it needs nearness, proximity. I see the church as a field hospital after battle."

He is not interested in church reform that amounts to a mere rearranging of the ecclesiastical furniture. Authentic ecclesial reform will be in service of the church's mission. In an address to the coordinating committee of the Episcopal Conference of Latin America, or CELAM, during his visit to Brazil in July, he said: The "change of structures" [from obsolete ones to new ones] will not be the result of reviewing an organizational flow chart, which would lead to a static reorganization; rather it will result from the very dynamics of mission.

What makes obsolete structures pass away, what leads to a change of heart in Christians, is precisely missionary spirit.

A missionary council has inspired a missionary pope to create a missionary church.

There are some who believe that too much is being made of Francis' distinctive style. It is great that he lives more simply, pays his own bills and drives a 30-year-old Renault, but the fact remains, the argument goes, that at the level of church doctrine, this pope has changed nothing. Put bluntly, whatever one makes of Francis, women won't be ordained and gays are still viewed as intrinsically disordered.

But how helpful is this "style vs. substance" distinction? "Substance," in this case, means doctrine understood as a set of essential propositions unaffected by pastoral application. The distinction has real limits, however, because Francis doesn't think about doctrine as a set of absolute truths. In an open letter to an Italian intellectual and nonbeliever, Francis admitted his reluctance to speak of "absolute truth," not because he was a "relativist" but because for Christians truth is mediated through a person, Christ, and is encountered in history. Here the pope stands firmly within the theology of revelation articulated in Vatican II's Dei Verbum.

Vatican II offered a new way of thinking about doctrine; it presented doctrine as something that always needed to be interpreted and appropriated in a pastoral key. This is why Francis can insist, "The dogmatic and moral teachings of the church are not all equivalent." Rather, they find their true pastoral significance within "proclamation in a missionary style [that] focuses on the essentials, on the necessary things." This is why he doesn't think he is compromising on doctrine when he suggests we may need a more compassionate pastoral response to the divorced and remarried. Being pastoral, in short, is not a matter of overlooking doctrine; it is how pastoral "style" makes doctrinal "substance" meaningful and transformative.

Will this pope rewrite controversial church doctrines? No, but that isn't how doctrine changes. Doctrine changes when pastoral contexts shift and new insights emerge such that particular doctrinal formulations no longer mediate the saving message of God's transforming love. Doctrine changes when the church has leaders and teachers who are not afraid to take note of new contexts and emerging insights. It changes when the church has pastors who do what Francis has been insisting on for the last six months: Leave the security of your chanceries, rectories, parish offices and episcopal residences. Set aside the "small-minded rules" that keep you locked up and shielded from the world. Go meet the people where they are.

If Francis succeeds in creating a new generation of pastor-leaders who are willing to meet the people where they are, who are willing to create what he has called a "culture of encounter," he will have created the necessary conditions for appropriate doctrinal change. That's how it works.

Six months into his pontificate, it is too early to know whether Francis will succeed in moving from tantalizing symbolism to real structural change. But we do know where he wants to take our church. Over the past five decades, we have been tantalized by empty allusions to Vatican II that too often masked halfhearted efforts to give the council's teaching robust historical form. Francis wishes to release the council's bold ecclesial vision and deepseated Gospel values from decades of captivity. It has been a long time coming.

[Richard Gaillardetz is the Joseph Professor of Catholic Systematic Theology at Boston College.]

Opinion

Syria: The history of a name

By FRANCK SALAMEH 09/23/2013

As Eyal Zisser rightly noted in a recent e-­‐International Relations essay, all forecasts of an impending collapse of the Alawite order in Damascus seem to have been frustrated by Syrian realities that have befuddled and outwitted experts, diplomats and policymakers over the past few years.

Those who predicted a Tunisian model for Syria, with its speedy (and almost bloodless) dethroning of a loathed kleptocracy, soon switched toward a possible Egyptian outcome, where a weary geriatric despot yielded to the will of the people and ceded the presidency with nary a whimper, in a matter of days.

A BULLET-­‐riddled portrait of late Syrian leader Hafez al-­‐ Then came the Libyan debacle, with its delusional Assad. Photo: REUTERS philosopher-­‐king holding fast to his reins, vowing to “not go gently into that good night” and opting to drag a country of his own making into a vicious tribal fight – a conflagration from which Libya is still trying to recover.

But Syria did not go the way of Libya as predicted, nor did Muammar Gaddafi’s fate find Bashar Assad – an inarticulate man of few words, a wretch with a lisp, but a cool-­‐headed, cruel operator who always delivered what he promised and always promised what he meant.

By comparison, today’s Syria is a combination of Tunisia, Egypt and Libya – on steroids. It is also none of the above. Instead, Syria is a cruel dictator skillfully clinging to power; it is the minor realm of a petty, wily despot, manipulating a superpower and bilking the leader of the Free World with exquisite craft, art and skill; it is a raging civil war poised to consume the entire region, likely to entangle Iran and Israel, and ultimately lead to the dismemberment not only of Syria, but of neighboring Iraq and Lebanon, and possibly even Jordan.

Finally, the Syria conundrum is a challenge met with an awesome but reluctant superpower issuing ultimatums but then repealing them, drawing red lines but then erasing them, firing “shots across the bow” but then reassuring the Syrian corsair that America’s response will be “unbelievably small [and] limited.”

AT THE root of America’s mystifying inability to articulate a coherent and resolute policy towards Syria are perhaps failures of interpretation and analysis that have defined the past century of American academic and popular attitudes vis-­‐à-­‐vis the Middle East. Already in January 2011, during the early days of the misnamed and illdefined “Arab Spring,” foreign correspondent Robert Kaplan was warning American observers against naming things “Arab” and “Spring-­‐like” in a modern Middle East that still eluded easy, monochromatic labels.

“As the situation evolves in Tunis,” then wrote Kaplan in The New York Times, “and as we watch other Arab capitals expectantly, we would do well to focus less on what unites these places than on what divides them... The more we focus on the particularities of each place, the less surprised we will be by political developments.”

Burton noted that, “Outwardly, you do not see much, but in their hearts [the inhabitant of the State of Damascus] hate one another. The Sunnites excommunicate the Shiahs, and both hate the Druse; all detest the Ansariyyehs [Alawites]; the Maronites do not love anybody but themselves, and are duly abhorred by all; the Greek Orthodox abominate the Greek Catholics and the Latins; all despise the Jews.”

Writing along those same lines in 1907, another British traveler, Gertrude Bell, noted that Syria was “merely a geographical term corresponding to no national sentiment.” This view was echoed by many Levantine contemporaries of Bell, most of whom maintain that there has never been a distinct Syrian society historically speaking; that what Europeans referred to as Syria had always been a bevy of disparate groups and loose geographic entities brought together by conquest and ruled forcibly through terror and tyranny; in sum, “a society based on a despotism of brutal force modeled on that of the ruler.”

Only “Europeanized Syrians” – that is to say Arabic-­‐speaking urban Christians and Jews – who were familiar with the languages and concepts of Europe, began describing the lands of their birth collectively as Syria, and began viewing themselves as Syrians, to be distinguished from Turks, Arabs or Ottomans.

STILL, THIS European concept of Syria is similar to the way one may refer to something approximating “the Balkans,” or “the Alps,” or “the Mediterranean.” Eyebrows would be raised in discontent should analysts in our time venture to write about the Alps as some concrete, coherent political entity. Yet, this is the kind of discourse dominating the debate on Syria, the finality of Syria and the uniformity of Syria. But in their majority, the Syrians themselves, whether cut from Assad’s parochial cloth or ill-­‐disposed to it, do recognize the diverse nature of their besieged country and have shown themselves to be keen on maintaining, protecting and enshrining that diversity through constitutional safeguards.

Approaching a solution to the Syrian conundrum does not entail spouting expressions of moral outrage when banned weapons are deployed, nor does it mean issuing threats of retribution when chemical agents are rained upon civilian neighborhoods. A solution comes from an honest acknowledgment of Syria’s past, a genuine recognition of its diversity and a sincere pledge to observe the aspirations, respect the apprehensions, and commit to the protection of its minority populations.

A roadmap for this future of Syria does already exist. At the outset of the Syrian uprisings, long before foreign jihadis came to sully what had begun as a noble enterprise, a group of Syrian dissidents met in Antalya-­‐Turkey, and issued a memorable statement reflecting the true face of their nation and charting its brighter future.

“We, participants in the Syria Conference for Change,” began the Antalya Declaration, “affirm that the Syrian people are a composite of many ethnicities, including Arabs, Kurds, Chaldaeo-­‐Assyrians, Circassians, Armenians and others. The conference recognizes and asserts the legitimate and equal rights of all of these constitutive elements of Syrian identity, and demands their protection under a new Syrian constitution to be founded on the principles of civil state, pluralistic parliamentary democracy and national unity.”

Unfortunately the Antalya Declaration fell on the deaf ears of a heedless world in 2011. It became a dead letter.

It can still be revived, but this would take more than empty slogans and feckless posturing by a reluctant superpower. A new Syria in the image of Antalya will take resolve, moral clarity, courage and true leadership in a world awash in politicians but bereft of leaders.

The author is an assistant professor of Near Eastern Studies, Arabic and Hebrew in Boston College’s Dept. of Slavic and Eastern Languages and Literatures, and senior editor---in---chief of The Levantine Review.

Metro

Catching up with Courbet Exhibit captures zest of father of realism

By SEBASTIAN SMEE | B O S T O N S U N D A Y G L O B E | S E P T E M B E R 2 2 , 2 0 1 3 Show-off, scoundrel, and self-promoter par excellence, Gustave Courbet, the father of Realism, did his best to needle 19th-century decorum wherever he sniffed it. He was an all-round pain in the neck.

So it’s interesting to imagine what Realism, a movement that purported to care only for truth, would have looked like if it had been sired (and eventually it would have been) by someone else.

Someone less theatrical. Someone more modest, measured, and subtle. Someone more in touch — well, with reality.

You would think it would have helped. But don’t count on it. Courbet’s paternity of Realism reminds of a truth about the movement: It was as artificial as the next style. Its rhetoric was catchier and more in tune with the temper of the times than the availing alternatives (lead-footed romanticism and clapped-out classicism). But it was a style, built on prejudices and proclivities like any other.

There was also his talent.

For all his faults — his sloppiness, his histrionics, his championship arrogance — Courbet’s painting sticks to the eye. It’s optical Velcro. It can feel as cheap and trashy, too. But in the end, Courbet is consistently alluring because he loved paint, he had a nose for drama, and he had a feeling for life that, at least until his ignominious end (he went into exile after the Paris Commune of 1871), was invincible and expansive.

Peter Schjeldahl caught the mood exactly when he wrote that, upon seeing Courbet, “you want to run out and start a riot, milk a cow, have sex, eat an apple, die – do anything rather than stand around abrading your nerves with the angel grit of ‘fine’ art.”

“Courbet: Mapping Realism,” at the McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, should be catnip to fans of Courbet; but it may baffle those coming to the artist for the first time. What, they might wonder, is all the fuss about?

The show, which was organized by Jeffrey Howe, a professor of art history at Boston College, contains none of Courbet’s outrageous lesbian scenes or full-length nudes, no vaunting self-portraits, no vast, politically charged group portraits, no scenes of peasant laborers, and no outsized hunting scenes.

Although admirably ambitious for a college museum — it includes 17 paintings by Courbet and almost twice as many by painters he influenced — it is a strange hydra. Spread across the museum’s two floors, it is divided into works generously lent by the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium (upstairs) and works made available by various public and private collections in the US (downstairs).

Both halves sprinkle paintings – some of them very interesting, many dully didactic — by lesser lights around the works by Courbet. The Belgian section includes a really interesting genre painting by Louis Dubois of middleaged men and women playing roulette — each individualized face combining nail-biting anxiety with spiritual defeat in a weird, contracted space.

The American half contains, surprisingly, no works by Whistler and only one print by Winslow Homer. On the other hand, it has eight works by John LaFarge, an artist of delicate sensibility not easy to square with the abrasive Courbet.

But both Courbet and LaFarge were obsessed with geology and with forested landscapes. And LaFarge, under the sway of Courbet and the Barbizon school, did experiment with rich impasto in his painting. Look out for his terrific “A Boy and His Dog (Dickey Hunt).”

Landscape accounts for almost twothirds of Courbet’s career output, and about the same fraction of his paintings here. A lot of the time, his signature style — lots of palette-knife effects loosely approximating textures found in nature, from rough stone to shimmering leaves — becomes rote, while his insistence on dark, massy tones (Childe Hassam later described it as “molasses and bitumen”) dated very quickly.

Manet, Degas, and the Impressionists are hard to imagine without Courbet’s precedent. But their embrace of sunlight and sharp tonal contrasts endowed so much of Courbet’s painting with the musty atmosphere of the attic.

Nonetheless, it’s impossible to forget that Courbet – like Constable and Corot, but with more ferocity – loved the land he came from. Everything he did was aimed at making us feel the landscape as an intimate, breathing, close-up, material phenomenon, because that’s how he felt it. He was territorial, and instinctive about it, like a dog.

He spent his privileged childhood taking walks in the Franche-Comte region of France (his father owned huge tracts of land there) and this region – with its cliffs, caves, plateaus, and valleys sluiced by churning waterways – would always be his territory.

He spent a great deal of time in Paris, but never painted it. In his imagination he returned instead, repeatedly, to far-off Franche-Comte, which he painted most often from memory. Every Courbet landscape is a statement of pride, fierce and tender, full of gratitude.

“Landscape at Ornans,” on loan from Belgium, is one of the few pictures here with a blue sky (and hence brighter greens).

Other landscapes show shadowy caves, deer-sprinkled streams in bosky forests, glens, brooks, and a hillside of snow and ice.

Pope Warns Church Focusing Too Much on Gays, Abortion

Francis Sets Out Vision of More Welcoming Church, Less Preoccupied With Doctrine

By DEBORAH BALL AND JENNIFER LEVITZ September 19, 2014 Pope Francis warned that the Catholic Church had become so focused on abortion, gay marriage and other social issues that it risks overshadowing its pastoral mission, threatening to bring down the church "like a house of cards."

The pope's comments, part of a blunt, wide-ranging interview with the Italian Jesuit journal CiviltĂ Cattolica, didn't mark a break with church teaching. But they appeared intended to nudge the church away from politically charged issues by setting out a vision of a church that is more welcoming and less preoccupied with emphasizing doctrine.

With his remarks, Pope Francis appeared to put more distance between himself and his two predecessors, Pope Benedict XVI and Pope John Paul II, who vocally reinforced traditional church dogma. Indeed, the interview came amid grumblings from some bishopsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;particularly in the U.S.â&#x20AC;&#x201D;that the new pope has failed to issue strong pronouncements on divisive issues.

"We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods," said the 76-year-old pontiff, who came to power in March after the sudden resignation of Pope Benedict.

"This is not possible. I have not spoken much about these things, and I was reprimanded for that.

"The teaching of the church, for that matter, is clear and I am a son of the church, but it is not necessary to talk about these issues all the time," he said. "We have to find a new balance; otherwise even the moral edifice of the church is likely to fall like a house of cards."

His comments could signal dissatisfaction with the strong stance some church leaders have taken on the highly charged social issues. For instance, in an interview last week with a local Catholic newspaper, Rhode Island Bishop Thomas J. Tobin said that he was "a little bit disappointed in Pope Francis that he hasn't, at least that I'm aware of, said much about unborn children, about abortion, and many people have noticed that."

Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York, the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, has taken a leading role in denouncing gay-marriage initiatives as well as the contraceptive mandate in the Obama administration's health-care program.

On Thursday, Cardinal Dolan said that the pontiff's remarks show that "he is a man who profoundly believes in the mercy of a loving God, and who wants to bring that message of mercy to the entire world, including those who feel that they have been wounded by the church."

He added that he welcomed this "reminder that the clergy are primarily to serve as shepherds."

The 12,000-word interview, which touched on personal points such as the pope's favorite composer, artist, author and film (Mozart, Caravaggio, Dostoyevsky and Fellini's "La Strada"), was conducted in August. It was published

simultaneously by CiviltĂ Cattolica and other Jesuit magazines globally on Thursday, and was reviewed before publication by the pope, the first Jesuit to be elected pontiff.

Thomas Groome, a professor of theology and religious education at Boston College, called the comments by the pope a shift away from his predecessors.

"He doesn't want to just harp on birth control and gay marriage, he wants to bring us back to compassion, mercy, outreach to the poor and inclusion of the marginalized," he said.

But Stephen Pope, another professor of theology at Boston College, said he didn't see the pope as scolding the U.S. bishops for the focus on cultural issues. "I don't think Pope Francis would do anything that the bishops would perceive to be undermining their efforts," he said. "They'll probably interpret this as broadening their agenda rather than cutting out their agenda."

Pope Francis, who has eschewed living in the grand papal apartments at the Vatican in favor of a modest guesthouse, has become enormously popular among many Catholics for his human touch. The church is facing a sharp drop-off in membership in the face of rising secularism and increased popularity of evangelical churches.

While he has affirmed Catholic teachings, he has opened the door to members of groups who have at times struggled in their relationship with the church, such as gays and women.

In the interview, the pope expanded on comments he made in July regarding homosexuals. On a return flight from a trip to Brazil, he said, "Who am I to judge a gay person of goodwill who seeks the Lord?"

In the magazine interview, the Argentine-born pope said, "In Buenos Aires I used to receive letters from homosexual persons who are 'socially wounded' because they tell me that they feel like the church has always condemned them. But the church does not want to do this."

He also suggested a reconsideration of the role of women in the church. While he didn't address the church's teaching that women can't be priests, he said "women are asking deep questions that must be addressed."

"The woman is essential for the church," said the pontiff. "We must therefore investigate further the role of women in the church."

The interview was remarkable for its candor and length. The remarks will likely reinforce Pope Francis' image as a leader more concerned with the pastoral role of the church and impatient with the shortcomings of the institution.

The comments were in line with the pope's thinking as a top prelate in Argentina. In an interview shortly after the new pope was picked earlier this year, one of his former top aides in Argentina said the pontiff was grounded in the everyday lives of his parishioners that gave him a healthy distance from the doctrinal debate in Rome.

"Someone who is behind a desk in Rome, they aren't even having Mass with the people," the former aide said. "They are totally cut off. We have the people in front of us all the time."

The pope has signaled plans to shake up the Vatican's hidebound and fractious bureaucracy that has given rise to a series of financial and personal scandals in recent years.

"The church sometimes has locked itself up in small things, in small-minded rules," he said.

When asked how he viewed himself, he answered, "I am a sinner. It is not a figure of speech, a literary genre. I am a sinner."

Some more personal comments are likely to further endear the pope to Catholics who have already cheered his folksy manner. The pope has eschewed more regal clothing worn by his predecessors and has been photographed carrying his own luggage on trips. He has even taken to personally making calls to people who have written to him recounting their problems. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;David Luhnow contributed to this article.

September 12, 2013

No Child Left Untableted

By CARLO ROTELLA Sally Hurd Smith, a veteran teacher, held up her brand-new tablet computer and shook it as she said, “I don’t want this thing to take over my classroom.” It was late June, a month before the first day of school. In a sixthgrade classroom in Greensboro, N.C., a dozen middle-school social-studies teachers were getting their second of three days of training on tablets that had been presented to them as a transformative educational tool. Every student and teacher in 18 of Guilford County’s 24 middle schools would receive one, 15,450 in all, to be used for class work, homework, educational games — just about everything, eventually.

There was, as educators say, a diverse range of learners in the room. Some were well on the way to mastering the tablet. Ben Porter, for instance, a third-year teacher who previously worked as an operations manager for a Cold Stone Creamery franchiser, was already adept at loading and sharing lesson materials and using the tablet’s classroom-management tools: quick polls, discussions, short-answer exercises, the function for randomly calling on a student and more. Other teachers, including a gray-bearded man who described himself as “technologically retarded,” had not progressed much further than turning it on.

Smith, the most outspoken skeptic among the trainees, was not a Luddite — she uses her Web site to dispense assignments and readings to her students — but she worried about what might be lost in trying to funnel her teaching know-how through the tablet. “I just don’t like the idea of looking at a screen and not at the students,” she said.

A couple of seats over from her, I was thinking the same thing. I teach college students, not middle schoolers, but I count on being able to read their faces and look them in the eye, and I would resist — O.K., freak out — if obliged to engage them through a screen in the classroom. And as a parent of middle schoolers, I would strenuously oppose any plan by their school to add so much screen time to my children’s days. The tablets, paid for in part by a $30 million grant from the federal Department of Education’s Race to the Top program, were created and sold by a company called Amplify, a New York-based division of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, and they struck me as exemplifying several dubious American habits now ascendant: the overvaluing of technology and the undervaluing of people; the displacement of face-to-face interaction by virtual connection; the recasting of citizenship and inner life as a commodified data profile; the tendency to turn to the market to address social problems.

Still, I came to Guilford County, I hoped, motivated by curiosity and discovery rather than kneejerk repudiation.

I try to be on guard against misrecognizing complex change as simple decline, and I acknowledge that my tendency to dismiss the tech industry’s marketing might blind me to the Amplify tablet’s genuine potential as a teaching tool — and to major new developments reshaping not just the nature of schooling but also the world in which my kids are growing up.

The first time I met with Joel Klein, the chief executive of Amplify and an executive vice president of News Corporation, he checked his e-mail on his phone a lot, even as we talked about the concern that technology isolates rather than connects people. I pointed this out, and he, in turn, expressed wonder that I don’t even allow the use of laptops in my classroom.

We were discussing his frequently stated view that education is “ripe for disruption.” Entrepreneurs sound boldly unconventional when they talk about disrupting an industry, but they also sound as if they’re willing to break something in order to fix it — or just to profit from it. Klein, who was chancellor of New York City’s public schools from 2002 to 2011, begins from the premise that our schools are already broken.

“K-12 isn’t working,” he said, “and we have to change the way we do it.” Citing global assessments that rank the United States well behind the leading countries in reading and math, he said: “Between 1970 and 2010 we doubled the amount of money we spent on education and the number of adults in the schools, but the results are just not there. Any system that poured in as much money as we did and made as little progress has a real problem. We keep trying to fix it by doing the same thing, only a little different and better. This is about a lot different and better.”

He was talking about the curriculum and games being developed by Amplify, as well as its custom-built, openplatform Android tablet. Klein thinks the moment favors his enterprise. The new common-core standards, adopted so far by 45 states, define educational goals for schools — and present commercial opportunities for companies like Amplify. The initial price of a tablet has dropped to $199, including support and training, making it feasible for school systems to buy large numbers of them. And generational turnover in the teaching profession will help, too, as what Klein calls “digitally sophisticated millennials” replace retiring boomers.

At my second interview with Joel Klein, during which he barely looked at his smartphone at all, I asked if he felt technology was essential to improving American education or if we might be better off committing our resources otherwise. “We’ve spent so much on things that haven’t worked,” he said, making a list that included underused computers as well as obsolete textbooks, useless layers of bureaucracy and smaller class sizes. “We should have spent that money on preparing higher-quality teachers.” So there was at least one other way to do it a lot different and better.

“Take Finland,” Klein continued, citing everyone’s favorite example of a country that puts its money on excellent teachers, not technology, and routinely finishes at the top in international assessments. “There’s a high barrier for entry into the teaching profession,” the kind that lets in the Robin Britts and keeps out weaker aspirants. Teachers there are also well paid, held in high esteem and trusted to get results without being forced to teach to the test. But America’s educational system is a lot bigger, messier, less centralized and more focused on market-based solutions than Finland’s. Also, our greater income inequality and thinner social safety net make for much wider variation in student performance, and a toxic political climate has encouraged our traditional low regard for teachers to flower into outright contempt.

Still, if everyone agrees that good teachers make all the difference, wouldn’t it make more sense to devote our resources to strengthening the teaching profession with better recruitment, training, support and pay? It seems misguided to try to improve the process of learning by putting an expensive tool in the hands of teachers we otherwise treat like the poor relations of the high-tech whiz kids who design the tool.

Are our overwhelmed, besieged, haphazardly recruited, variably trained, underpaid, not-so-elite teachers, in fact, the potential weak link in Amplify’s bid to disrupt American schooling? Klein said that we have 3.5 million elementary- and middle-school teachers. “We have to put the work of the most brilliant people in their hands,” he said. “If we don’t empower them, it won’t work.” Behind the talking points and buzz words, what I heard him saying was Yes. 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.”

College Rankings Assume One Size Fits All in Higher Education

By Philip Altbach Sept. 11, 2013 College and university rankings are ubiquitous worldwide. The U.S. News & World Report rankings garner headlines in the United States. The three major global rankings â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the Academic Ranking of World Universities from Shanghai, the Times Higher Education global rankings from London, and the QS World University Rankings â&#x20AC;&#x201C; are carefully watched by academic leaders, governments and the public.

Big decisions are made on the basis of rankings. Students and their families use them for deciding where to study, governments sometimes allocate funds on the basis of rankings and the academic community obsesses over its current score.

In today's world of mass and competitive higher education, rankings are probably and unfortunately inevitable. But what do the rankings measure? Everything and nothing.

They claim to provide in a single score the essence of quality. But quality cannot be measured easily, and some aspects of educational performance cannot be accurately assessed at all. Research performance is most easily assessed; it is possible to count articles, grants, books and to measure the impact of work in the sciences.

Most rankings rely a lot on measures of reputation, such as asking administrators and academics what they think about various universities. These are notoriously inaccurate. No one has wide knowledge of a range of schools, particularly if asked about institutions in other countries, and subjectivity reigns supreme. Other key variables cannot be accurately gauged. Teaching quality and learning outcomes are among the most problematical â&#x20AC;&#x201C; and most important.

Further, one size does not fit all in higher education. Harvard University differs immensely from Bunker Hill Community College, just a few miles away. Rankings generally measure the research universities and neglect the rest. Some of the rankings change their criteria from year to year, thus making it difficult to trace trends over time.

Are rankings a good or a bad idea? As a way of obtaining truly objective judgments about who is ahead and who is behind, they do not do a very good job. Indeed, only the Shanghai Academic Ranking of World Universities is truly objective and consistent, as it measures only research productivity and a few other variables over time and does not change its criteria. But it captures only a small part of the complex work of universities and totally ignores learning and teaching and other key missions. As a way of permitting oversimplified choices about which universities are "on top," they may be useful. And they illustrate just how competitive global higher education has become.

Philip Altbach is the director of the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College

Boston College MBA Takes to the Road to Find Himself

By Francesca Di Meglio September 03, 2013

Ben Lee, a 2013 graduate of Boston College’s Carroll School of Management, is taking the MBA road less traveled: a motorcycle trip to all 59 national parks in the U.S. His goals are to pursue his passion for riding a motorcycle, to see the country, and to figure out what to do with the rest of his life. As he goes, Lee is maintaining a blog that highlights the details of his trip and the people he encounters along the way.

While passing through Cuyahoga Valley National Park in Brecksville, Ohio, during the first week of his trip, Lee spoke to Bloomberg Businessweek’s Francesca Di Meglio. Below are edited excerpts of their conversation:

Photograph courtesy of Benjamin Lee/59parks.com Ben Lee hiking in the White Mountains in New Hampshire

A lot of things can go wrong on this trip—from your motorcycle breaking down in the middle of nowhere to not having a job when you get back. So how scared are you?

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t scared. The first day on the road, I was driving from Boston to New York. And I had this fear that the trip would end before it started because the bike would break down around Connecticut. The fear of failure is going away because I redefined success for this trip. At the start of this project, I thought if I didn’t finish the trip, it would be a failure. Now it’s more about the journey than the destination.

Did your MBA program fail you, because you’re still trying to find yourself?

The Carroll MBA did not fail me. I see all this as a calculated risk, and I trust the 59Parks blog will generate interest. The MBA gave me the confidence to do this. I have practical skills that helped launch the blog and helped me think outside the box.

A lot of people go into an MBA program thinking the answer of what to do with their life will be handed to them on a silver platter. That’s not how it is designed. The MBA helps you achieve the goals you set. It teaches you to analyze a company and tell it what to do to improve. But it is hard to take your own medicine.

How is it possible for you to forgo a traditional job and take off on this trip?

It is a huge privilege. I have some savings, I’m single with no children, and I’m young enough that I don’t have too many responsibilities. People often regret they didn’t do things like this. But everyone has his own risk to take. I tell my guy friends, “Yours is asking your girlfriend to get married.” It’s about taking the next step in your life.

How long do you expect this trip to take?

Assuming there are no major setbacks, it should take between one and two years. With the pace of travel on a motorcycle, and breaks in the winter and for the holidays to visit family, it will probably be closer to two years. In the upcoming winter, I’ll be spending time in Hawaii, offering up my MBA skills in exchange for staying at a hostile. After Hawaii, I’m headed to American Samoa to spend a week with a family that offered to host me.

What is the take-away for others following your journey?

I’m trying to show people that this isn’t just about me. We can all learn from this. There’s something you’re hesitating to do that you really want to do right now. You can do it. I wanted to stop waiting and start living.

Arts BC museum offers rare focus on French painter Courbet

By NANCY SHOHET WEST | G L O B E S T A F F | A U G U S T 2 9 , 2 0 1 4

The 19th-century French painter Gustave Courbet never traveled as far as the United States, but evidence suggests he probably would have enjoyed the trip. He counted many American art collectors among his greatest devotees.

Members of the Allston Club, a salon in Boston devoted to fine art, and Isabella Stewart Gardner were among the early American purchasers of his work, and a hunting scene purchased by the Allston Club hangs in the Museum of Fine Arts.

So presumably the artist would be delighted to know that he will be feted this fall at Boston College, where the McMullen Museum of Art is hosting the most comprehensive exhibition of his work ever offered in the United States, organizers say.

“Courbet: Mapping Realism,’’ which opens Monday, is the result of a longstanding collaboration between its cocurator, Boston College art Portrait of Monsieur Nodler, the Younger, 1865 by GUSTAVE COURBET history professor Jeffery Howe, and his colleagues in Belgium, the country that Howe says Courbet considered his second home.

“About three years ago, Dominique Marechal, my counterpart at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels, was organizing an exhibition based on their collection of Courbet, and he suggested that we bring this show to BC,” said Howe, an authority on Belgian art who wrote the catalog for the Royal Museums show.

“Courbet is one of the key figures of 19th-century art, in that his new Realist style represented a pivotal change in the history of European art that eventually influenced the same change in American art,’’ he said. “I agreed that bringing his work to BC would be very interesting, but wanted to find a way to amplify the idea a little bit. And the way to do that seemed to be to use the exhibit to explore his effect on American artists such as John La Farge, Martin Johnson Heade, William Morris Hunt, and Winslow Homer.”

The exhibition that eventually developed from Howe’s discussions with Marechal and his Belgian colleagues will be on display at the McMullen Museum through Dec. 8. It features 49 works, some by Courbet and some by his American contemporaries, including Elizabeth Boott Duveneck, Heade, Homer, Hunt, Eastman Johnson, and La Farge.

“Throughout his career, Courbet met some resistance from the French establishment due to his rather controversial style,” Howe said. “He was even sometimes the object of satire. Members of the French art community thought he was missing the point of their high-flown tradition. In fact, he was doing something very different that opened the path for a new generation of Realists and Impressionists in Belgium, and in France too.

“And then when his work reached America, it gained even more credence,” Howe said. “His philosophy that people should paint just what they see really resonated in the American art scene, where there was a great demand for authenticity. His interest in nature and painting outdoor landscapes played very well in this country as well.”

Numerous American art collectors and museums in possession of works by Courbet were eager to cooperate with the McMullen exhibition, he said. The list of contributors includes the museums at Yale University and Smith College, Springfield Museums, Clark Art Institute, and Rhode Island School of Design, as well as the MFA in Boston. An early purchase by Isabella Stewart Gardner, “A View across a River,” is among the pieces in the show.

Howe said he hopes the show will attract both those familiar with Courbet’s work and those new to it.

“Seeing it firsthand is so different from seeing a reproduction, and Courbet covered such a variety of subjects,” Howe said. “He painted everything from landscapes to portraits to figure studies to still lifes. He was so versatile but always so strong in his technique. And alongside his work, we’ll be showing works by the American artists who were most powerfully influenced by him. So people who are already familiar with the work of those American painters might see new things in it when they view those artists in this different context.”

An opening reception will be held Sunday from 7 to 9:30 p.m. at the museum, in Devlin Hall on BC’s Chestnut Hill campus, 140 Commonwealth Ave. Additional events include free lectures on Nov. 7 and 14 at 5 p.m., and free docent-led tours will be offered at 2 p.m. on Sundays starting Sept. 15; tours can also be arranged by calling 617-552-8587.

Admission to the McMullen Museum is free, and the building is handicapped accessible.

For directions, parking, and other information, call 617-552-8100 or visit www.bc.edu/artmuseum.

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Germany v. France: Berlin Flexes Diplomatic Muscles on Syria A Commentary by Jonathan Laurence August 24, 2013 Germany has urged caution in response to French calls for the use of force in Syria.

Its stance is more than a mere aversion to military intervention, however. The country is quietly asserting itself and fleshing out its foreign policy.

Raising the ante in the confrontation with the Assad regime and its international supporters, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius this week called for the use of force in Syria. Across the Rhine Valley in Berlin, however, his German equivalent Guido Westerwelle urged caution: "Before speaking of consequences we must first have clarification." French daily newspaper Le Monde ran the outsized headline "Toxic Gas Massacre in Damascus". Most German newspapers that day led with the Bradley Manning verdict.

The 50-year-old ElysĂŠe Treaty, the European Union, and the euro join France and Germany at the hip, and their national security interests are fused at every other point above and below by virtue of a shared 451 kilometer (289 mile) border. But they exhibit diverging strategic postures vis-Ă -vis North Africa and the Middle East. Germany has gone from foot-dragging -- abstaining from the Libya intervention in 2011 and equivocating in Mali in 2012 -- to putting its foot down against French involvement in Syria.

Since a rare misstep responding to the uprising against Tunisian President Ben Ali, France has sought redemption by betting early and often on opposition movements. In successive interventions, the Sarkozy and Hollande administrations have courted the Arab public square and its revolutionary avant-garde. Germany, meanwhile, is much more comfortable with Color Revolutions or the noble resistance of protesters in Teheran or Taksim Square than with armed revolt. While France rides the bronco of Arab Awakening, Germany looks on aghast.

Franco-German Rift Germany started deviating from French leadership in March 2011, when its diplomats ruled out participation in Libya regardless of UN Security Council resolutions. The following year, Germans long refused the French assessment that the occupation of northern Mali by al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) presented a threat against Western interests. France has continued to raise international pressure on the Assad regime over German objections -- leading the lifting of the arms embargo, disclosing suspected cases of the regime's use of chemical weapons and inviting Syrian coalition leaders to Paris.

While French leaders were declaring that "all hopes for a political solution or a political transition in Syria are destroyed" and considered unilaterally arming the opposition in March, German ministers were doing their best to get the parties to the negotiating table. "As long as the logic of violence and military victory is in place, there can be no lasting peace and stability for Syria," Westerwelle said in May. The post-reunification "German Question" has time and again challenged Germany's partners to reconcile the federal republic's economic power with its reticence to contribute to collective security. The oddity of an unaligned behemoth at the heart of NATO has begun to harden into reality, even as allies refuse to allow Germany to slip into Swedishstyle neutrality.

Gaining Confidence But something different is at work here. Contrary to appearances, Germany is not simply receding ever deeper into itself. In fact, the Berlin Republic is quietly asserting itself and fleshing out its foreign policy. The unwillingness to act as France's cheerleader in the greater Mediterranean comes with the creeping recovery of self-confidence, and a desire to reposition itself vis-Ă -vis this historically French sphere of influence.

France insists its recent military interventions abroad are grounded in humanitarianism and counter-terrorism, to safeguard "the fate of the local population and French nationals." Germans perceive instead a French sense of entitlement in a region rich with extraction and infrastructure contracts, and refuse to play a supporting role.

When explaining why it did not join France in Mali earlier this year, Germany pleaded superfluity: France was intervening "because of its tradition, history, and relationship with this part of Africa" and because "France is the only nation capable." The polite demurral belies Germany's intention to undermine the Franco-centric status quo.

German obstructionism also reveals the consensus across the German political spectrum that an Islamist regime in Syria is to be avoided. Left-wing politicians say Germany already has blood on its hands since groups receiving aid have attacked Kurdish areas in Syria. The deputy leader of Merkel's Christian Democrats has said orthodox Christian populations risk ethnic cleansing or worse if the French-allied Islamists come to power. French commitment to the region's Christians is also sincere -- French kings guaranteed protection of Maronite Christians for centuries -- but now more Maronites live outside the region than in it.

Contradictory Positions This occasionally leaves France and Germany with contradictory positions in the clash between broad-based Sunni and Shi'a alliances -- with critical implications for religious minorities in the region. There are echoes of December 1991, when the tables were turned: a newly confident and unified Germany proactively granted diplomatic recognition to Croatia, which the French viewed as dangerously premature and as a brazen grab to reassert German influence in that part of the Balkans.

Twenty years later, German foreign policy has made the next step and challenges France's traditional spheres of influence to the south. France and Britain ultimately dropped their objections to German plans to recognize Croatia in 1991. But it is unlikely that Germany will accomodate French designs on Syria in 2013.

With fewer German ghosts in the Mediterranean basin, Germany can sell its successful national brand with less historical baggage and distinguish itself from France. This had begun shortly before the Arab Awakening, at a time when Berlin resented exclusionary moves like Sarkozy's Union for the Mediterranean and took pride in the "small differences" of its own policies.

Unlike in France, for example, Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi was not allowed to pitch his tent in Berlin, and no German government ever praised Tunisian President Ben Ali's democratization efforts. Germany's long-term security, a regional strategy report from the German Institute for International and Security Affairs argued in 2009, depended on the credibility of such German policies among local populations.

Germany still sold plenty of arms to the same regimes: The same report noted the "especially negative consequences of France's special position on the German economy" and openly complained that "when it's time to sign contracts, it's the French firms that always come in ahead."

The Merkel government has not shrunk from all relevant military roles. It sent personnel to help in Iraq and Mali, and AWACs to Afghanistan to free up allies' own planes for use in Libya. German Patriot batteries installed under NATO in Turkey have already detected hundreds of missiles fired in Syria this year.

But Germany's goals differ markedly and signal a counter-revolutionary stance against French activist zeal. None of the Merkel-led coalitions to come out of September's elections are likely to judge things differently. In addition to the 50 years of the ElysĂŠe Treaty, this October also marks the 200th anniversary of the war liberating Prussia from Napoleonic occupation.

Jonathan Laurence is an associate professor of Political Science at Boston College.

AUGUST 15, 2013, 5:42 PM

When the Grandchildren Grow Older, and Closer

By PAULA SPAN

Growing up, Melanie Cortese always felt close to her maternal grandmother, who lived eight blocks away in South Plainfield, N.J. What really cemented their relationship, though, was adulthood.

Once she’d graduated from college, landed a job and married her boyfriend, Ms. Cortese found herself turning to her grandmother for counsel on everything from dealing with in-laws and buying a house to throwing dinner together when she came home from work. “She gave me the feeling that whatever I did was O.K.: ‘You’ll get through it. Not everything has to be perfect,’ ” said Ms. Cortese, now 38. “She had the wisdom just from having lived so long. It was always comforting.”

Her grandmother, Ann Ciampa, occasionally needs her help, too.

Though still healthy and independent at 90, Mrs. Ciampa asks her granddaughter to buy her health food supplies online. She stayed with Ms. Cortese, who now lives in nearby Linden, when hurricanes caused extended power failures in the area, and she relied on her granddaughter Lara Collado/Lara Elizabeth for a ride home after cataract surgery. (She gives “gas money,” too, Photography Melanie Cortese, left, which Ms. Cortese accepts with a certain amount of private eye-rolling.) and her grandmother, Ann Ciampa.

The cycle continues. Ms. Cortese hosted her grandmother’s 90th birthday celebration last month. And now that she has two children, she still seeks Mrs. Ciampa’s advice. “Raising kids, when you never know what you’re doing, it’s nice to sit back and hear her say: ‘It’s fine. Don’t worry so much,’ ” she told me.

Much of the research on grandparents and grandchildren has focused on young children and on the safety-net function that grandparents can provide in troubled families. But lengthening lifespans mean that more people will have adult relationships with their grandparents, too, sometimes for many years.

“We know relatively little about what grandparents and grandchildren do for each other on a daily basis during the grandchildren’s adulthood,” said Sara Moorman, a Boston College sociologist who set out to learn more.

She presented the results of her research at the American Sociological Association’s annual meeting in New York this week.

Using the Longitudinal Study of Generations, which surveys families in Southern California about every three years, Dr. Moorman and her co-investigator, Jeffrey Stokes, looked at data from 1985 through 2004. Their sample included 376 grandparents and 340 grandchildren (selected randomly if a grandparent had more than one grandchild) who were over the age of 16. In 1994, halfway through the period in question, the grandparents’ mean age was 77; the grandchildren’s was 31.

These relationships had impact, the results showed. When the pairs described themselves as fairly close emotionally (“affectual solidarity,” the sociologists called it), both generations showed fewer symptoms of depression on a standard psychological scale than those with more detached relationships. Those with close relationships were less likely to report feeling lonely or sad, and were not as prone to symptoms like insomnia, lack of energy or sleeplessness.

More practical assistance — for example, “helping each other with chores, with transportation, with advice, with money,” Dr. Moorman said — had no significant connection to grandchildren’s depression scores, but it did affect the grandparents’ scores. They reported fewer depressive symptoms if they provided help (“functional solidarity”) or if the assistance was reciprocal.

If they were only the recipients of aid, though, the grandparents’ depression scores were higher. “Older adults want to continue to be independent and productive,” Dr. Moorman said. “When they can’t give back, that’s depressing.”

It’s worth noting that, over all, these grandparents and grandchildren — some of whom may have moved away from each other over the years of the study — did not describe particularly high levels of involvement. Based on six questions and a scale in which 1 meant “not at all” close and 6 meant “extremely” close, the grandparents rated their emotional closeness at 3.96 on average; the grandchildren rated their relationships at 3.54. “Pretty centrist responses,” Dr. Moorman said.

Over the full study period, the grandparents estimated that they gave practical support to adult grandchildren about 14 percent of the time, received it about 3.4 percent of the time, and both gave and received it about 8 percent of the time. The grandchildren saw the relationship differently. “Grandparents say they’re giving more,” Dr. Moorman said. “The grandkids perceive more of an exchange.” Most of the time, though, both generations said they neither received nor provided practical support.

Still, the connections between these relationships and depression scores were statistically significant. “A close relationship that induces exchange is good for both parties,” Dr. Moorman said. “Grandchildren and grandparents are a resource for each other, or at least they can be.”

She knows whereof she speaks. “My grandma and I were really close,” she said. They lived in State College, Pa., where as a teenager, Dr. Moorman worked in the public library. Her grandmother, Mary Moorman, whose house was right next door, often made her lunch. And with her brand-new driver’s license, Dr. Moorman drove her to hairdressers’ appointments and restaurants, thrilled to be trusted.

Her grandmother died last summer at 94. The new study, Dr. Moorman said, was a tribute to her.

No Kidding Republicans, Democrats, and illegal immigrants.

Peter Skerry August 12, 2013, Vol. 18, No. 45 These days, the precocious teenage political junkie who lives across the street from me understands that the notorious intransigence and truculence of House Republicans can be explained in great part by their ingeniously gerry-mandered, extremely homogeneous congressional districts. Yet in the past couple of weeks, it has been Democrats who have dug in their heels, as Republican stalwarts have begun to budge on one of the most contentious issues currently facing America: immigration reform. Prodded by their leadership, House Republicans are contemplating what only a few months ago they vigorously rejected: legal status for individuals who arrived here illegally when they were children.

So far, contemplating is all they are doing. On July 23 a hearing was held by the House subcommittee on immigration and border security to discuss the “Kids Act,” touted by majority leader Eric Cantor and Judiciary Committee chairman Bob Goodlatte as a way to address the concerns of young people who are here illegally through no fault of their own. Yet as several of the Democratic and Republican members who spoke at the hearing emphasized, there is as yet no legislation to discuss. So it is not at all clear whether Cantor and Goodlatte are talking merely about legal status for undocumented minors or an actual path to citizenship.

Still, for a party whose presidential candidate was arguing last year that illegal immigrants should “self-deport” and whose congressional leaders in 2010 resoundingly rejected legislation providing a path to citizenship for illegal youth (the DREAM Act), the Kids Act, even as a gleam in Eric Cantor’s eye, represents a sea change in Republican thinking about illegal immigration. Anyone who doubts that should listen to subcommittee chairman Trey Gowdy’s striking opening statement at the hearing, delineating how the rule of law applies differently to adults and to children.

Yet the Democratic response to this sea change has been swift—and negative. To be sure, some Democratic members have acknowledged their Republican colleagues’ movement. But they have also rejected it as inadequate. As House Democratic caucus chairman Xavier Becerra declared, “There is no reason why Democrats should be part of this political game that Republicans are playing.” Suddenly, it’s the Democrats who are rigid and unyielding.

Intransigent Democrats are of course no novelty. After all, they too get elected from gerrymandered, homogeneous congressional districts. And even more than Republicans, they are in thrall to well-organized interest groups that tend to enforce ideological rigidity. It’s also true that congressional Republicans have come to the party late, so they should expect to endure the predictable posturing and bargaining behavior from Democrats.

Yet there’s another aspect of Democratic intransigence that reflects widely overlooked peculiarities of immigration politics.

For example, it is difficult for the advocacy groups that have been supporting the push for “comprehensive immigration reform” to compromise and agree on a fallback position. This dynamic has been insightfully and honestly explored by Georgetown law professor Philip G. Schrag in his neglected insider’s account of advocacy on behalf of immigrants and refugees during the 1990s. As Schrag explains in A Well-Founded Fear: The Congressional Battle to Save Political Asylum in America, immigrant advocates invariably come together in coalitions whose dominant ethos is, not surprisingly, “consensus politics and transparent decision-making.” Yet these principles are extremely difficult for large, cumbersome coalitions to sustain. Particularly in a policy area as complicated as immigration, intense negotiations typically boil down to a few key players making tough decisions in private.

There’s more. Schrag also highlights that compromise is difficult for immigrant advocates because they feel a “sense of stewardship for the interests or constituents they represent, most of whom did not choose their representatives, even in the fictitious sense that stockholders choose their boards of directors.” Immigrant advocates are consequently left “wondering if they have sold out the interests they claimed to represent.” Schrag goes even further and observes that such “advocates perpetually doubt their right to take less than an absolutist position, even when it is clear that advocating an absolutist position will result in worse legislation than seeking a compromise.”

To be sure, members of Congress do get elected by their constituents. But do their constituents include illegal immigrants in their districts? Many members appear to believe so, even though those illegals do not get to vote for them. This raises thorny issues about the nature of representation in a democracy. But even before considering these, it is worth stopping to consider how those gerrymandered congressional districts rely on census population data that routinely include illegal immigrants. One result is that many of the 32 or so Hispanic-majority congressional districts include substantial numbers of illegal immigrants.

A good example is California’s 34th District, represented by congressman Xavier Becerra, quoted above. After the recent redistricting, the 34th is over 65 percent Hispanic, and includes Los Angeles suburbs like Huntington Park and Bell Gardens that are classic ports of entry for illegal immigrants. So while in November 2012 voter turnout in congressional districts across California averaged about 250,000, in the 34th it was only 140,590. And for a variety of reasons, this was an unusually high turnout. In previous years, Becerra’s vote totals were substantially lower. Thus, the American version of “rotten boroughs” is directly attributable to aggregated numbers of illegal immigrants.

It is possible that when Rep. Becerra and other similarly situated members reject Republican proposals such as the Kids Act, they are basing their response on what they hear from the illegals in their districts. But consider: These elected officials are hardly accountable to such politically passive individuals. Indeed, it is worth asking how, exactly, such officials determine what is in the best interests of such “constituents”? Perhaps, like the advocates described by Schrag, these officials are rejecting a compromise that the illegals themselves would accept.

I am reminded here of an interview I conducted in 1984 with a lawyer at the Los Angeles office of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF). This occurred at a particularly intense point in the prolonged debate over what eventually became the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986 and its amnesty provision. At that time, MALDEF was the primary lobby on behalf of Mexican Americans and other Hispanics, even though it was not a membership organization. And while MALDEF supported amnesty, it opposed other parts of the legislation and took a notoriously uncompromising position in opposing the overall package.

As I returned from lunch with the lawyer, we had to work our way through a picket line of illegal Mexican immigrants pleading that the advocacy group compromise and secure amnesty as soon as possible. The lawyer grimaced and proceeded into the building. Once inside, he commented that leadership was sometimes not easy!

Today, MALDEF plays a much less visible role in immigration politics. But the same dilemmas persist. Indeed, we now have evidence from our experience with IRCA that illegals may be willing to accept less than their advocates persist in demanding. Today, more than 25 years after IRCA granted an outright amnesty to 2.7 million illegal immigrants, including the option of full citizenship, we know from Homeland Security data that most of those beneficiaries—fully 60 percent— have become permanent legal residents and have opted not to exercise their right to become citizens.

This is hardly surprising. Most illegal immigrants, especially those from Latin America, arrive here not intending to stay.

Their plan is typically to work hard, save, and return home to their families with enough money to buy land or build a house. Obviously, that is not how it works out for most of them.

Yet “the myth of return” remains strong. Even after living here for decades and raising children who are U.S. citizens, notions of returning “home” linger on. While this may be unlikely, such dreams endure, and their impact is evident in the decision not to become citizens.

In the ongoing debate over immigration policy, it has come to be taken as a given that Democrats are eager to build on their 2012 victory and expand their voting base among Hispanics by securing citizenship for as many of the 11 million illegals among us as possible. Other things being equal, this is certainly true. Yet there are few disincentives for Democrats to pursue citizenship for illegals at all costs, even at the risk of illegals remaining in their current predicament.

And the fact is those costs will be paid substantially more by the illegals than by Democratic politicians—who almost certainly will not be penalized for pushing for more than many illegals themselves seem to want.

Peter Skerry teaches political science at Boston College and is a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

The Whistle-Blower’s Quandary

By ADAM WAYTZ, JAMES DUNGAN and LIANE YOUNG Published: August 2, 2013 IMAGINE you’re thinking about blowing the whistle on your employer. As the impassioned responses to the actions of whistle-blowers like Edward J. Snowden have reminded us, you face a moral quandary: Is reporting misdeeds an act of heroism or betrayal?

In a series of studies, we investigated how would-be whistle-blowers make this decision. Our findings, to be published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, not only shed light on the moral psychology of whistle-blowing but also reveal ways to encourage or discourage the practice.

In one study, we asked a group of 74 research participants to write a paragraph Olimpia Zagnoli about an occasion when they witnessed unethical behavior and reported it (and why), and we asked another group, of 61 participants, to write about an occasion when they witnessed unethical behavior and kept their mouths shut. We found that the whistle-blowers used 10 times as many terms related to fairness and justice, whereas non-whistle-blowers used twice as many terms related to loyalty.

It makes sense that whistle-blowing brings these two moral values, fairness and loyalty, into conflict. Doing what is fair or just (e.g., promoting an employee based on talent alone) often conflicts with showing loyalty (e.g., promoting a longstanding but unskilled employee).

Although fairness and loyalty are both basic moral values, some people prioritize one over the other. Studies show that American liberals tend to focus more on fairness, while American conservatives tend to focus more on loyalty, which may help explain differing responses to Mr. Snowden. To some he was defending the rights of all Americans; to others he was a traitor to his country.

Does such variation in moral values predict whether someone will decide to blow the whistle? In another study, we gave 83 research participants a questionnaire. Some questions probed their concern for fairness (e.g., “whether or not someone was denied his or her rights”), whereas others probed their concern for loyalty (e.g., “whether or not someone did something to betray his or her group”). We computed a “fairness score” and a “loyalty score” for each participant.

We also asked questions about how likely they would be to report a stranger, an acquaintance, a friend and a family member for crimes of varying severity (from petty theft to murder).

We found that neither fairness nor loyalty alone predicted whistle-blowing. However, the way people traded one value against another — the difference between people’s fairness and loyalty scores — did. People who valued fairness more than loyalty expressed greater willingness to blow the whistle, whereas people who valued loyalty more than fairness were more hesitant.

To test whether such whistle-blowing decisions are susceptible to manipulation, we asked 293 participants across two experiments about their willingness to blow the whistle, but first we had them write short essays on the importance of fairness or the importance of loyalty. We compared whistle-blowing scores between these two groups and found that participants who wrote about fairness were more willing to blow the whistle than those who wrote about loyalty.

In our final study, we sought to determine whether this writing exercise could be used to influence people’s behavior in a nonhypothetical situation. For our real-world test, we focused on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, an online marketplace where users (“requesters”) post tasks like proofreading and evaluating advertisements, to be completed by other users (“workers”) in exchange for money. Reputation is paramount on Mechanical Turk, and users can publicly evaluate and even blacklist one another.

In our study, involving 142 users of Mechanical Turk, we first asked the participants to write a short essay about the importance of fairness or loyalty. Then we made sure that all of the participants at some point during the study witnessed the substandard work of a fellow Mechanical Turk user. At the end of the study, we surprised the participants by creating a whistle-blowing quandary: we asked whether the user whose shoddy work they witnessed had violated any rules and whether we should block that user from future tasks. When we compared the responses from our two groups, we found that those who had written about the importance of fairness were significantly more willing to report a fellow worker than those who had written about loyalty. Even a nudge can affect people’s whistle-blowing behavior.

This does not mean that a five-minute writing task will cause government contractors to leak confidential information.

But our studies suggest that if, for instance, you want to encourage whistle-blowing, you might emphasize fairness in mission statements, codes of ethics, honor codes or even ad campaigns. And to sway those who prize loyalty at all costs, you could reframe whistle-blowing, as many have done in discussing Mr. Snowden’s case, as an act of “larger loyalty” to the greater good. In this way, our moral values need not conflict.

Adam Waytz is an assistant professor of management and organizations at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. James Dungan is a Ph.D. candidate in psychology and Liane Young is an assistant professor of psychology, both at Boston College.

Love the Poor you’re with Pope Francis has put a “church of the poor” front and center. How should First World Christians respond to his invitation and challenge?

August 1, 2013 Roberto S. Goizueta, the prominent Boston College theologian, has taken a path that in many ways is quite different from his father, Roberto C. Goizueta. As CEO of the Coca-Cola Company, the elder Goizueta, a Cuban immigrant, was famous for the innovative global marketing skills with which he transformed the soft drink giant.

But despite their differences, the theologian says he learned a lot from his father. “One of the things I learned from him was precisely the importance of not being afraid to take risks and to think differently.

That was one of the reasons for his success. My father was able to think globally at a time when people were not thinking globally.”

Another lesson, Goizueta says, comes from his father’s intellectual humility. “He surrounded himself with people who didn’t replicate him but who complemented him and at times challenged him.” To the theologian it has become crucial to understand those who are different as offering possibilities for growth and for understanding ourselves, the human condition, and God in new and unexpected ways.

Goizueta, who is one of the country’s leading Hispanic theologians, refuses to do theology in an academic ivory tower. In his writing he generously shares his own “halting and ongoing attempt to unpack the implications of the inspiring yet demanding statement, ‘God loved us first.’ . . . Through our everyday actions, [we must] respond to Christ’s claim to be the way, the truth, and the life by embodying that claim in our actions.”

In his first few months as pope, Pope Francis has been advocating for a church of and for the poor.

What does this mean for the church?

I am very hopeful about what this means for the future of the church. First, it reflects a recognition of the fact that the Catholic Church is now a church that is predominantly a Third World church, a church whose vitality and center of gravity is in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Pope Francis has articulated very forcefully that the church today is predominantly a church of the poor.

When we talk about a church of the poor, we are not talking about some small minority but about the vast majority of Christians in the world today. It is First World Christians, those of us who are privileged and comfortable, who are a small minority in the Catholic Church.

Pope Francis has renewed an emphasis on the gospel being good news for the poor. In that regard the pope represents both a source of hope and a challenge to the church, to all of us, to embody in our own lives and actions what we claim to believe as a community, as a church, and as individuals.

How do you see it as a source of hope and a challenge for us?

It is a source of hope because it is a reminder of the fundamental good news that in the person of Jesus Christ we have been reconciled to God, through God’s own extraordinary self-gift of love.

We are reconciled, we are loved—that is the fundamental message of the gospel. And in a special way, God’s presence among those persons who are not loved in the world, who have been marginalized, ostracized, excluded, and discarded, that presence is an assurance that God loves us all equally and freely, regardless of any merit we may have.

That fundamental good news that we are not abandoned is a message that this pope brings. It is a message that was brought by his namesake, St. Francis of Assisi, and one that is brought by the poor among us and by those whom we, through our own sins, have abandoned.

At the same time that represents a challenge for us to live out of gratitude for God’s mercy, for God’s acceptance and reconciliation, to live that out in the way in which we treat those who are abandoned in the world today.

So what is called the preferential option for the poor is then something we undertake not out of a sense of duty, but out of a sense of gratitude for the extraordinary gift of God’s love. The way we receive that gift is precisely through the way we share it and live it out in those places where Jesus Christ has said he is present in a special way.

In some of his statements, Pope Francis has rather bluntly criticized capitalism’s “cult of money.” Is he issuing a particular challenge to First World Christians here?

Pope Francis has simply been underscoring—and has brought to the center of his message—the great tradition of Catholic social teaching, which begins with the assertion that we are all God’s children and that all of us have a dignity that derives from that filial relationship.

According to Catholic social teaching, any society or any system that instrumentalizes human persons or that attaches value to them solely by what they produce or by what they consume is a fundamentally materialistic and atheist system. It is un-Christian, regardless of what it may claim to be nominally. And the causes of poverty therefore are not simply bad persons but bad systems or structures that promote, encourage, and reward certain forms of behaviors over others.

The pope’s focus on the poor, along with his roots in Latin America, has brought new attention to liberation theology. What are Pope Francis’ connections to and differences with liberation theology?

First, we need to clarify which liberation theology we are talking about. There are many different liberation theologies. Even the two documents from the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith that in the 1980s criticized some forms of liberation theology insisted that a theology of liberation is at the heart of the gospel. So the debate is not about liberation theology but about how to understand liberation theology.

It is perfectly understandable and appropriate that, when he was in Argentina, the current pope distanced himself from and opposed certain forms of liberation theology, particularly those that would endorse violent revolution. But at the same time, his words and his actions consistently identified him with the poor in a way that is consonant and in sync with liberation theology.

The fundamental insight of liberation theology is the preferential option for the poor, and that’s an insight that has now become part and parcel of Catholic social teaching and is cited over and over again in official Catholic

Published July 30th, 2013

Degree or start-up? Start-up accelerators give students both

By Devin Karambelas Like many college students who watch television online, Tom Coburn, 22, never paid much attention to the preloaded advertisements that often come before shows.

“My first instinct was to open a new tab and check my email,” he says. “Then I realized — that brand is spending its own money to reach someone like me, and I’m completely ignoring it.”

Originally a biology major, Coburn thought there was a way to revolutionize the online advertising industry and cofounded a start-up called Jebbit in October 2011 with fellow Boston College students Jeb Thomas and Chase McAleese.

By Thomas Northcut, Photodisc

After expanding the website in 2012, the founders decided last year to take the risk and leave school in order to dedicate their attention full time to Jebbit. But there might be a new option for students torn between building a business or getting a degree: entrepreneurship accelerators.

Entrepreneurship accelerators are essentially hubs on campuses that allow students to work on their venture projects using university resources to deal with the demands and warp-speed timing that have come to characterize the start-up industry. They often connect students with mentors and provide legal advice, funding and office space, according to one Silicon Valley Business Journal article.

“Any new business venture is all about timing,” says Ted Zoller, director of entrepreneurship at the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School. “Having grown up on the Web, many students today have the skills to put out a new product. With all the market pressures they face, they have to ask themselves: ‘Will this opportunity still be here if I wait?’”

In Jebbit’s case, the answer was no, Coburn said. The site gave companies a novel way to interact with college-age consumers, traditionally an ideal but tricky demographic to court, by offering students rewards and discounts for learning about their brands. Investors liked the idea, and after winning a handful of venture competitions and being named one of the top 25 start-ups in the world by CNBC in May, the time was right to leave.

“Boston College was very supportive and said it would hold our spots for us if and when we decided to come back,” Coburn says. “We love what we do every day. We had initial traction, clients and users, and we wanted to make the most of that opportunity.”

The New Franco-German Rituals Jonathan Laurence, July 16, 2013 The state of the Franco-German alliance demonstrates just how gaps in economic-performance numbers can drive countries apart—in this instance, countries of the Eurozone. The more Germany outperforms its neighbors in growth and unemployment, the sooner its dominance will reach a point where it feels less beholden to the spirit of compromise that has characterized Franco-German relations and fostered the “motor” of European construction. Germans feel vindicated by their difficult structural reforms undertaken in the early 2000s and are increasingly disdainful of those who shirk similar responsibilities, all the more so when they are asked to finance that very irresponsibility.

A few figures tell the story: While Germany reported a budget surplus, France posted a deficit of almost 5 percent of its GDP. German unemployment (5.4 percent) and youth unemployment (8 percent) are a fraction of French levels (10.5 percent and 24.6 percent, respectively). These are Germanyʼs best numbers in more than a decade, and Franceʼs worst unemployment in fourteen years. In this yearʼs first quarter, Germanyʼs economy grew slightly while the French and broader Eurozone economies contracted by 0.3 percent. Recent estimates that the Eurozone shrank again in the second quarter would make for seven quarters of negative growth in a row.

As the situation drags on, it will soon be fair to say that France can be considered the Eurozoneʼs second-largest economy only in the sense that the European Union has the worldʼs second-largest military budget. Disparity on this scale between the leader and everyone else fundamentally alters the balance of power. France is rapidly joining “the rest”: its economy and public opinion are trending toward Southern Europe.

German public and elite opinion, meanwhile, now resembles British-style Euroskepticism: why should we link our fate to these jokers? Germans ask themselves, not unjustly, whether this variant of European unification is the albatross they must bear ad infinitum to atone for the belligerence of their forebears. German taxpayers have paid reparations towards Israel and the mostly Jewish victims of the Third Reich amounting to roughly $89 billion. But that was a one-off. Germany can reasonably argue that without structural changes, there is no end in sight to their European solidarity. As of this spring, Germany had contributed over $280 billion to Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain.

Gallupʼs most recent study of French and German opinion depicts two countries losing sight of what initially brought them together. When given the choice, 49 percent of Germans would vote to stay in the European Union and 31 percent would vote to leave. French numbers were the reverse. France is, moreover, the country that disapproves most of German leadership, alongside the UK, with more than a third of respondents embracing that sentiment.

The tacit agreement to abide disagreement within the alliance without undue resentment seems to be fraying. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung wrote, “Because Germanyʼs economy is so strong and because the distance between it and its partners is growing, so is the jealousy.” This display of condescension recalls French insults towards the thirteen Eastern European countries that vocally supported U.S. intentions in Iraq ten years ago.

The pressures on the French government have also made critical outbursts towards Germany more likely. In April, the French minister of industrial renewal accused German policymakers of “driving us into a wall.”

How could this widening economic and opinion gap not portend an imminent rupture in Franco-German relations and the decline of European integration?

From the French perspective, Germany stands in the way of a centralized fiscal capacity that would help economies adjust in times of difficulty—which it sees as the natural exit from the crisis. Germany, in turn, sees France impeding the institutional reforms necessary to avoid repetition of just such another economic crisis.

Another point of Franco-German divergence briefly arose in view of the forthcoming Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations. The French have been more reluctant than Germany to embrace the TTIP, demanding “an agreement that respects our values.” As the prime minister said, “This is about our identity, and this is our struggle.” France soon announced its “red line” and “non-negotiables”: the respect of common agricultural policy—excluding genetically modified products and hormone-enhanced meat—and the exclusion of audiovisual products from any free-trade agreement.

The latter issue was resolved to Franceʼs satisfaction at a meeting of EU trade ministers last month.

The Franco-German drama over TTIP and the suspense regarding Outright Monetary Transactions (OMT), the ECBʼs bondbuying program currently being challenged in the German constitutional court, foreshadow a muddled future for European action en bloc.

On the one hand, we are witnessing the hardening of national positions and the revival of national identity. The German psyche appears to be calcifying into a Euroskeptic mold, while the French resent the German notion that there could only be one way out of this crisis.

The TTIP and OMT episodes illuminate the double bind perfectly: a collective mindset would benefit France or Germany in one case but not the other, and each country wields potential veto power over something important to the other one. Because they still need each other, cooler heads will likely have the last word. The coming years will demonstrate that the FrancoGerman motor is not yet spent, however, and that these two countriesʼ basic European calculus have not changed beyond recognition.

Franceʼs Francois Hollande and Germanyʼs Angela Merkel are both faithfully expressing their national zeitgeist within unusually constraining political circumstances. The process of undermining national identity from above (Europeanization) has been happening at the same time as the erosion of national identity from below (mass migration). After decades of major public policies were conducted over the heads of voters, however, the venting of dissatisfaction is probably healthier than the alternative. This public confrontation is a more democratic iteration of what used to be European integration “by stealth.”

François Hollande was ridiculed after he recently said the euro crisis was over. The French Central Bank estimates that the economy resumed expansion (+0.1 percent) in the second quarter, interest rates are low and consumer spending is high. But Hollande was overstating the case. There are good reasons for continued pessimism: the 3.2 million and counting unemployed, the highest public spending in the Eurozone (56 percent of GDP) and public debt that will soon rise to 88.6 percent of GDP. However, there is also growing German optimism about the crisis gradually ending. German companies are considered to be in good economic health, and foreign direct investment in Germany increased last year by 5 percent (second only to the UK).

Moreover, Germany had a budget surplus of €2.2 billion.

Germany enjoys more breathing room in its economy and appears increasingly realistic about lending a hand and bridging differences, within reason.

Even if the German Constitutional Court finds that Outright Monetary Transactions are indeed a fiscal matter that requires new legislation, the Bundestag has shown itself willing to go along with bailouts under another name in the past.

And because French leaders have ever fewer degrees of freedom to act within their own domestic political context, they are likely to push for (and claim) symbolic and rhetorical victories while actually making concessions to German demands.

The new Franco-German rituals—initial opposition followed by protracted negotiations and some concessions—help avoid creating moral hazard for debtor countries and has had a calming effect on international markets. One could describe Hollandeʼs approach as “altruistic misdirection.” Its effects are ultimately pro-European. Germany will continue to drag its feet—but it will do so while inching ever further away from its own nonstarters. These theatrical performances are not purely for domestic consumption. Germanyʼs “egotistical intransigence,” as French Socialists put it this spring, is good for Europe.

Jonathan Laurence is an associate professor of political science at Boston College and a nonresident senior fellow at the Center on the U.S. and Europe at the Brookings Institution.

People & Places GLOBE WEST

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BOSTON SUNDAY GLOBE

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JULY 7, 2013

HEAD OF THE CLASS: Boston College professor Solomon Friedberg (inset) of Newton was recently appointed as the James P. McIntyre Professor of Mathematics.

He is the third to hold the title, which was established in the College of Arts and Sciences by a Boston College benefactor to honor longtime senior vice president James P. McIntyre.

Friedberg joined the BC faculty in 1996 and became chairman of the mathematics department in 2007. During his tenure, the department has established a doctoral program, a new bachelor of science degree, and a distinguished lecturer series.

Friedberg noted that mathematics has long been a cornerstone of a Jesuit education.

“I’m very excited by the achievements in scholarship, teaching, and service related to mathematics that are taking place here at Boston College, and that this chair will support,” said Friedberg, whose areas of interest are number theory and representation theory. “I look forward to helping us accomplish even more in the years ahead.”

Fallen soldier’s lost medals returned to his family

By Joseph P. Kahn | G L O B E S T A F F

JULY 04, 2013 The year was 1996, the car a rusty old Ford station wagon loaned to a Wakefield couple, John and Debbie Benedetto, by a friend of theirs named Chester. He’s deceased now. So is the Ford.

When John and Debbie began cleaning out the car, in the back, among the empty oil cans and busted jumper cables, they found two small boxes containing four military medals: Purple Heart, Bronze Star, Air Medal, Vietnam Service Medal. Three medals bore the inscription “John F. Fitzgibbons.”

No service affiliation. No rank. No clue as to how or why they had wound up in an old junker Ford, a generation after the Vietnam War ended and America struggled to move on.

MARK LORENZ FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE (LEFT) AND YOON S. BYUN/GLOBE STAFF John and Debbie Benedetto of Wakefield searched for 17 years to return medals.

“I felt bad, you knew they belonged to somebody,” says John Benedetto, 64, sitting in his kitchen next to Debbie, 59, his wife of 27 years. “You don’t just throw those away.”

They put the medals in the office desk, figuring they would find the rightful owner — or his survivors — someday. That day would come 17 years later, in a selfless act of honoring a fallen soldier’s service that should make this July Fourth holiday one that the Benedetto and Fitzgibbons families will long remember.

“Bringing John home” — Debbie’s phrase for returning the medals — required persistence and luck. Some might even view it as going above and beyond the call of duty.

From the moment they found the medals, the Benedettos were intrigued by the mystery surrounding them. But they felt stymied by the search process, and wary about what the outcome might be.

They tried the local phone book at first, but there were no Fitzgibbons listed. Where else to look? It was a big country, and tools like Internet search engines were years away.

Busy lives took over. From time to time, the Benedettos would take the medals out and wonder, who was John F. Fitzgibbons? What had he done to earn them? You didn’t serve in ’Nam and earn a Bronze Star and Purple Heart for no good reason, John Benedetto knew. His own father had been a Marine. Fought at Guadalcanal.

Still, he says, they didn’t know the back story, and whether anyone wanted the medals back. “Did the family disown him because he went to Vietnam?” he says, recalling how polarizing that war was, how it divided the country and even families.

“You just don’t know.”

A decade passed. Then, seven more years. The medals were, if not forgotten, at least out of mind.

Then, one morning this May, John and Debbie were having coffee in the offices of S. Benedetto & Sons, the family’s leasing business.

For whatever reason — they are still not sure why — John pulled out the medals that morning and looked them over.

“Oh my God,” said Debbie, “you still have those.” She realized the significance of the moment: In the years since the medals had been tucked away, new search tools had come along, and with them the real possibility of finding a veteran named John F. Fitzgibbons.

She rushed home to her computer and embarked on a cyber-recon mission, plugging “John F. Fitzgibbons + Vietnam” into every Web search box she could think of. Up popped a Boston College memorial site. Then she found one for Fitzgibbons’s former high school, Central Catholic High in Lawrence, and a memorial to its war dead. And then another, for the Vietnam Memorial Virtual Wall.

Details of the fallen soldier’s service history began to emerge. He had been a First Lieutenant, B Company, First Battalion, Seventh US Cavalry Regiment, First Air Cavalry Division. Sent to ’Nam on Sept. 11, 1968. Killed in action Nov. 25, less than three months later. Tay Ninh, South Vietnam.

The First Air Cav was heavy stuff, Debbie learned. No division took more casualties in Vietnam, with more than 5,400 dead and 26,000 wounded.

“You get this overwhelming feeling of elation that you’ve found somebody,” she recalls, her voice husky with emotion. “But it’s so sad, too. He was only a kid, yet he had so much going for him. BC. ROTC. Grooming himself to be an officer. Put all this together, I still get goosebumps.”

She stayed at the computer for hours at a time, day after day, searching for surviving family members.

MARK LORENZ FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE The Benedettos of Wakefield wrapped the medals in a miniature American flag and mailed them to a cousin of Fitzgibbons.

A newspaper obit supplied some names. Back on the BC memorial website, she noticed a brief remembrance by Jack DeVeer, BC class of 1963, who described Fitzgibbons as “a wonderful person/cousin.”

Bingo. With that clue in hand, she found another cousin, the Rev. Richard DeVeer of St. Francis Xavier Parish in South Weymouth. Debbie called his office and left a message. Two days later, a return call.

“Was John Fitzgibbons your cousin?” she asked.

“Yes, he was,” DeVeer replied.

“Did he die in Vietnam?”

“Yes, he did.”

Debbie started to cry. “This is the happiest day of my life,” she choked out.

John and Debbie wrapped the medals in a miniature American flag and mailed them to DeVeer. With Memorial Day approaching, he knew exactly what to do with them.

The oldest of 11 children, John Fitzgibbons grew up in Wakefield and was by all accounts handsome and smart. Fun-loving.

Athletic.

“A quiet guy with a great sense of humor,” recalls Paul Delaney, a retired IBM executive who ran track with Fitzgibbons at BC and now lives in South Weymouth. “The best of the best.”

Delaney, who also served in Vietnam, would later cochair a committee that raised funds for BC’s war veterans memorial, dedicated in 2009. Back in 1968, though, he lost track of Fitzgibbons before the latter went off to war. When Delaney later learned of Fitzgibbons’s death, he placed his old friend’s name among 29 Eagle alums who paid the ultimate price in Vietnam.

Fitzgibbons knew could be wounded or killed in action, family members say. He belonged to an air assault team, choppering into white-hot battle zones under enemy fire. In letters home, primarily to his father, he wrote lines like, “Dad, it’s just a matter of time.” And, “Don’t tell Mom how bad it is.” And, “I am sad but I’m not afraid.”

His last letter arrived the weekend after he died, at age 23, his family gathered not for a Thanksgiving meal but for his funeral.

“That was especially tough,” says Joyce Fitzgibbons of Tewksbury, who was closest in age to her older brother of all the siblings.

After that, the family did its best to move on, much as America would, and especially other families who had lost loved ones in ’Nam. By the mid-1970s, just a few years after John’s death, his parents, Daniel and Jean Fitzgibbons, were semi-retired from the family business — a linen-rental company — and had moved to Florida.

Seven of the children stayed behind in the family house in Wakefield. In 1980, the house was put on the market and sold.

No one is exactly sure what happened to the medals.

“Emptying a 16-room house was no small job,” wrote Joyce in a June 21 letter to the Benedettos, guessing at the sequence of events. “The timing was such that the family was going to take advantage of an annual sidewalk collection, by the town, of unwanted items. We believe that at least one large box of family collectibles was inadvertently directed for collection.”

Other household items were distributed among family members. Everyone assumed the medals were with one sibling or another. Nobody took inventory.

On May 26, the Sunday before Memorial Day, the Rev. DeVeer rose to give his sermon. John Fitzgibbons’s Purple Heart medal was placed amid the offertory procession, next to the bread and wine, symbolizing Fitzgibbons’s valorous service to his country.

DeVeer spoke about the importance of God in people’s lives and how its absence leads to hatred, prejudice, war. He spoke of Fitzgibbons’s sacrifice, 45 years ago, and how his medals had recently found their way back to the family, a testament to the power of love and selflessness. A church deacon played taps on a bugle at the end of the service.

Paul Delaney, Fitzgibbons’s old BC buddy, is not a regular St. Francis Xavier churchgoer, yet he was there that morning. As he walked into church, DeVeer approached him for a private word.

“Paul,” said DeVeer, “they found John’s medals.”

At her home in Tewksbury, Joyce Fitzgibbons shows a visitor her late brother’s medals and expresses her profound gratitude towards the Benedettos, whom she still has not met in person.

“We will be forever grateful for your kindness and the way you cherished the memory of a young man you did not know — but you knew he mattered to someone,” she wrote in her letter to the Benedettos. “What a wonderful example of loving your neighbor as yourself.”

Arrayed on a table with a photo of John, these keepsakes are wonderful to have, she acknowledges.

“My brother has always been in my heart, though,” Joyce says softly. “I don’t need medals to remember him. In our humanness, we need something tangible for our connection, I suppose. But I’ve always felt close to my brother. A knowing.”

The return of the medals has sparked a familywide conversation about John, she continues, and that’s a very good thing. She would like to take the medals on a road trip from sibling to sibling, currently scattered from Vermont to Georgia.

One stop will most certainly be Forest Glade, a veterans’ cemetery in Wakefield, possibly in the company of the Benedettos.

After finding whom the medals belonged to, Debbie Benedetto, after another exhaustive search, also located where Fitzgibbons is buried.

His gravestone, it turned out, is roughly 50 yards from those of John Benedetto’s father and several other family members.

Debbie and John had been driving past John Fitzgibbons’s grave for years. When she solved that final piece of the mystery, she again wept tears of joy.

“We’ll visit with him now,” she promises. “He’ll be a stop on our travels.”

BC hosts summit to look at way to promote vocations

By Christopher S. Pineo, June 28, 2013 BRIGHTON -- Catholic churchmen from 15 dioceses and 10 priestly orders converged on Boston College, June 20-21, to discuss, explore and address a major concern in the Church -vocations.

Boston College president Father William Leahy delivers his "Summit on Vocations" dinner keynote address June 20. Pilot photo/Christopher S. Pineo

At the "Summit on Vocations: Exploring Ways to Promote Vocations to the Priesthood," archbishops, bishops, priests, vocation directors, Catholic educators, Catholic college and university presidents discussed the results of a recent research study commissioned by Boston College and the Jesuit Conference to assess the impact of higher education on the vocational discernment of men entering the seminary and religious life in the United States.

Father William P. Leahy, S.J., president of Boston College, gave a keynote address at the college's Cadigan Alumni Center on the first day of the summit.

"I remain convinced; there are vocations to be had in our Church -- especially in the United States," he said.

The research study, "The Influence of College Experiences on Vocational Discernment to Priesthood and Religious Life," was conducted by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) in Washington, and confirmed much of what Father Leahy said in his remarks.

He said the key to tapping into the potential vocations is an example of living "in hope and with faith" demonstrated by priests and religious engaged interpersonally with students.

"There is nothing as powerful as happy, fulfilled priests and religious. That is contagious. That attracts. So, one of the things I think is incumbent upon us is that we guard against pessimism, and that we take on those who may say, 'I wouldn't enter today' or 'I wouldn't be a priest or a religious.' We need to challenge that," Father Leahy said.

He pointed priests and religious toward the frontline defending the faith, by keeping a good attitude.

"If we are not happy, fulfilled, ready to recruit others, they are not going to come," he said.

The survey findings support the idea that Catholic colleges and universities offer a more encouraging environment for vocational discernment and more opportunities to dialogue about vocations.

Compared to those who attended non-Catholic colleges, those who attended Catholic colleges are: over three times more likely to report being encouraged in their vocational discernment by college staff; almost three times more likely to be encouraged by a college professor; and substantially more likely to be encouraged by parents, siblings, friends, and campus ministers.

Father Leahy said the infrastructure of Catholic education still exists as a network to spur vocations.

"We have in the United States -- at least in the higher-ed world -- huge opportunities on our college campuses, and so do we also have possibilities in our high schools. We have a great network. It is not as large as it was, but it is still a

great network," Father Leahy said.

He said recruitment for vocations should take a page out of America's favorite pastime, and how major league baseball teams rebuild. He compared owners in that model to bishops, planning a way forward to bring in the right people to nurture progress.

"We have owners. So, you need an owner that will give time and commitment. ...We need a general manager, could be the provincial, could be some superior. We need a field manager, who could be the vocation director -- promoters. And then, we need scouts. We need people who will identify individuals who have talent, inclination, desire -- who can be pointed in the direction of priesthood and religious life," Father Leahy said.

Researchers polled respondents on college coursework, Mass attendance, involvement with campus ministry, experiences with religious retreats, peer friendships, and other topics, to identify the distinct factors at Catholic colleges and universities that influence vocational discernment to diocesan priesthood or religious life, and presented information which suggested that vocations could be stimulated by work similar to that described in Father Leahy's baseball analogy.

"If we would do that as sincerely and as ardently as we do many other things, I believe we would have more and more vocations. The vocations are there. God has not left us orphans. We are not alone," he said.

Father Leahy noted the value of the guests at the summit, from a broad spectrum of the Church, having the opportunity to share information -- such as when James C. Cavendish, an associate professor of sociology at the University of South Florida presented the findings of the research at one of the panel discussions featured during the summit.

"There is just a grand sweep of people here tonight, and I think it bodes so well for the Church that we have all of us present here today, and many of us here tomorrow," Father Leahy said.

Other discussions, talks and panels presented the state of vocations today in relation to emerging strategies and new directions for fostering vocations. One panel featured Archbishop Timothy P. Broglio of the Archdiocese for the Military Services, in the United States.

"In general the exchange of information has been very useful. The results of the CARA study are fascinating. I think also what Father Leahy just had to say about having a good strategy, about investing time and talent in the pursuit of vocations is very, very important -- something that all of us can take home with us," Archbishop Broglio told The Pilot.

Guests who attended and participated in the summit included Cardinal Seรกn P. O'Malley; Archbishop of St. Louis Robert J. Carlson; Father W. Shawn McKnight, executive director, Secretariat of Clergy, Consecrated Life and Vocations at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops; Assumption College president Francesco C. Cesareo; and Father Thomas J. O'Hara, CSC, provincial of the U.S. Province of Priests and Brothers, Congregation of Holy Cross.

Archbishop Carlson celebrated a Mass for vocations on June 20, and Cardinal O'Malley celebrated the closing Mass at Gasson Chapel on June 21.

While talks and panels from Catholic leaders and educators featured bishops, archbishops and provincials who gave a high-level perspective on the issue, other events featured vocations directors, spiritual directors who attended from various dioceses, and researchers who gave a ground-level perspective on the study and its findings.

"A lot of the data that they gave in the CARA study, it really helped to frame the issue -- the whole question of who is and who are the encouragers of priestly and religious vocations," Father Dan Hennessey, archdiocesan vocations director for Boston, told The Pilot.

Boston College, the Archdiocese of Boston and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops collaborated to present, organize and promote the summit. Financial support came from the Knights of Columbus.

Problems of the Second Generation To be young, Muslim, and American.

JUN 24, 2013, VOL. 18, NO. 39

BY PETER SKERRY The Boston Marathon bombings highlighted, once again, the challenges of assimilating Muslim youth. And while the onus of accountability ought not rest exclusively on Muslim Americans, it understandably weighs most heavily on them. Indeed, any fair-­‐minded assessment of recent events must underscore the inadequacies of Muslim-­‐American leaders. Yet the usual criticisms are wide of the mark and fail to identify the institutional as well as intellectual weaknesses of these leaders.

In general we too easily overlook—even in the midst of a raging debate over our immigration policy—what Norman Podhoretz once referred to as “the brutal bargain” that immigrant children must accept in order to assimilate into the society their parents chose for them. For Muslims today, the drama involves not so much overcoming poverty and Newscom educational deficits but adapting to a society whose values are sharply at odds with their religious heritage. Among Muslim-­‐American youth, especially since 9/11, this has led to heightened criticism and suspicion of U.S. government policies at home and abroad. More generally, it has resulted in a hard-­‐edged identity politics that has encouraged some young Muslims to define themselves not only in opposition to the government but to American society and culture.

Marcia Hermansen, a Muslim who is also a professor of Islamic studies at Loyola University in Chicago, recounts her shock when she “encountered some Muslim students on my campus who seemed to feel vindicated by the destruction and loss of life on September 11.” As she elaborates, “Quite a number of Muslim youth in America are becoming rigidly conservative and condemnatory of their peers (Muslim and non-­‐Muslim), their parents, and all who are not within a narrow ideological band of what I will define as internationalist, ‘identity’ Islam.”

This trend was picked up by Pew pollsters who reported in 2007 that Muslims older than 30 were much less likely (28 percent) than those aged 18-­‐29 (42 percent) to agree that “there is a natural conflict between being a devout Muslim and living in a modern society.” When it surveyed Muslims again in 2011, Pew asked if “there is only one true way to interpret the teachings of Islam”: 31 percent of foreign-­‐born Muslims agreed, but 46 percent of native-­‐born Muslims did. Also that year, Pew found that 58 percent of foreign-­‐born Muslims agreed “the American people are generally friendly toward Muslim Americans,” compared with only 37 percent of their native-­‐born offspring.

Among many Muslim-­‐American youth, there is self-­‐conscious rejection of their parents’ easygoing, traditionalist understanding of Islam, inevitably suffused with the customs of their homeland. The youthful response is frequent invocations of the ummah, the worldwide community of Muslims that ideally transcends all barriers of ethnicity, race, and nationality. Sustained by such Islamist constructs, young Muslims on college campuses often trump their parents’ insistence that they marry within their ethnic group with a religiously grounded ethic that prioritizes marrying another Muslim regardless of ethnic or racial background.

As Hermansen notes, such youthful perspectives entail a “religious and cultural superiority . . . a mindless and rigid rejection of ‘the Other’ . . . a smug pride in one’s superior manifestation of visible symbols of identity.” One result is a preoccupation with “the evils of Western cultural elements such as the celebration of birthdays, Halloween, and prom night.” And while this mindset does not typically lead to violence, it was clearly on display when Tamerlan Tsarnaev

decentralized, non-­‐hierarchical structure. Yet in America, with Muslims from around the globe struggling to coexist in self-­‐governing mosques, leadership is all the more problematic.

In most mosques here, leadership is up for grabs. Contrary to what non-­‐Muslims think, imams are not necessarily in charge. They are typically foreigners who understand Islam but lack specific knowledge about American culture, society, and politics. Their command of English may also be limited.

The imam gets hired by the mosque governing board. In most countries mosques are subsidized by the state, but here they are self-­‐supporting voluntary institutions. So the board’s other major responsibility is the institution’s financial viability, and it tends to be dominated by key donors, invariably affluent professionals—stereotypically, Pakistani doctors and engineers. The most assertive or most generous member is likely to be board president, who may easily overshadow the imam and become the de facto leader of the mosque.

This dynamic can be a source of tension and conflict, which are invariably exacerbated by the diversity of the congregation. Because Shia and Sunni tend to worship separately, this sectarian divide does not typically trouble mosques here. But social class antagonisms do arise—for example, between successful doctors and struggling cab drivers. And disagreements emerge between more established Muslims who have invested time and resources in the mosque and recently arrived immigrants who take it all for granted and, in addition, have divergent understandings of Islam.

The sharpest divides may arise from linguistic, ethnic, and racial differences. These could involve disagreements over the different madhabs, or schools of Islamic jurisprudence. And so, Arabs and South Asians tend to establish their own mosques. Nevertheless, most mosques have mixed congregations with a variety of languages and cultures from around the globe. Then there are racial divides, especially with regard to African-­‐American Muslims. And quite apart from religion, Muslim immigrants bring with them from their home countries different political orientations and agendas.

In such contexts, leadership is not easy to exercise. Whoever is “in charge” is likely to be cautious and risk-­‐averse. Of course, what looks cautious from inside may look outrageous from outside. Thus, one imam relates that it would be “career suicide” to denounce the violent Islamist Sayyid Qutb to his members—even as this same imam preaches tolerance to his congregation and beyond. Conversely, it is easy and useful for imams and other Muslim leaders to attack the war on terror, the Patriot Act, and other such policies on which there is nearly unanimous opposition.

One final factor that weakens and even compromises Muslim-­‐American leaders is the longstanding and pervasive presence of the Muslim Brotherhood here in the United States. Most of the major national organizations and their leaders either have direct ties to the Brotherhood or come out of that milieu. Yet habituated to what Alison Pargeter calls “a culture of concealment,” those involved routinely deny any such affiliation. This understandably engenders distrust among non-­‐Muslims and enrages some, who then exaggerate the significance of such ties. Muslim-­‐American leaders end up expending a good deal of time and energy denying the obvious.

But such dissembling also has a negative impact internally. For the Brothers also conceal their activities from their fellow Muslims, sometimes even their own families. Countless mosques have been riven by conflicts over clandestine Brotherhood efforts to take over boards, and the memories of such battles die hard.

The Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center, where Suhaib Webb is the imam, is a case in point. The ISBCC is explicitly and officially managed by the Muslim American Society (MAS). But what Webb and his many non-­‐Muslim supporters refuse to acknowledge is that MAS is the American branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. To knowledgeable observers inside and outside the community, this is simply incontrovertible. This lack of candor on the part of Muslim leaders understandably arouses anxieties among many Americans about their loyalty to this nation. Yet perhaps an even more pressing question is how such deception further undermines the leadership needed to guide their own people forthrightly and authoritatively—especially troubled and turbulent Muslim-­‐American youth.

Peter Skerry teaches political science at Boston College and is a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Humanities: The practical degree

By Carlo Rotella |

GLOBE COLUMN IST, JUN E 21, 2013

THE RELEASE this week of “The Heart of the Matter,” the report of a national commission convened by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, is intended to set off a discussion of the value of the humanities and social sciences — not only to our educational system but to American culture and society more generally. That conversation is likely to run along the usual lines. We’ll hear about how a well-rounded education fosters creativity and innovation, why it’s important to think about what things mean and not just how they work, how an understanding of history and the ability to think critically are important elements of citizenship. And we’ll hear the pushback from a currently popular line of argument that reduces education to job training, job training to the imparting of technical skills, and technical skills to math and science and engineering.

I hope — but don’t expect — that this report will help us think in purposeful and useful ways about why we should invest heavily in the branches of knowledge that fall within the wide embrace of the humanities and social sciences. It’s an uphill battle, though.

Part of the problem lies in how the case is made. Too often it’s muddied by way too much talk about the meaning of life and the enriching experience of beauty. I’m all for meaning and beauty, but I prefer to make the case on more practical grounds: Full and effective participation in a postindustrial society and economy requires advanced analytical and expressive ability, and studying the humanities and social sciences is essential to developing those abilities.

Those making the case for the humanities and social sciences also find themselves up against the widely held assumption that the primary function of school, including higher education, is to provide job training by teaching specific workplace skills that employers need but don’t want to devote the resources to teaching themselves. If we’re going to have a real conversation about whether we should create more robust vocational tracks in our schools, then let’s do that, but the current tendency to reduce the root premise of all education to employer-outsourced job training is dangerously literal-minded. That’s especially true when the typical worker entering the labor market can expect to undergo so many shifts not only in jobs but career trajectory. Your education should equip you to learn fast and well over a lifetime, to handle complexity in the many forms you will encounter it, not to fasten this widget to that one like so.

The other thing we hear way too much about is how shortchanging the humanities and social sciences would improve our competitiveness by making our education system more like those of our rivals, with China chief among them. There are many things to admire about education in China — the stripped-down emphasis on academics, the value placed on hard work, the heroic commitment of students to achievement, the general esteem accorded to teachers and scholars — but it’s not a comprehensive model to emulate, which is perhaps why we’re seeing a growing impulse there to move toward more of an emphasis on Western-style humanities.

“Your education should equip you to learn fast and well over a lifetime, not to fasten this widget to that one like so.”

When I visited 14 universities across China in 2009, I was struck by how hungry the students seemed to be for anything at all that felt like analytical engagement with culture. As impassioned, inspired, and game as those students were, their minds were being slowly starved by rote instruction dominated by fact-acquisition and teaching to the test. When they studied American literature, for instance, most of them weren’t even reading Melville or Whitman; they were reading textbooks that explained why Melville and Whitman were important, then repeating that material on tests. You couldn’t ask for better students, and in their humanities and social science courses they weren’t being offered anything worthwhile to learn.

And I don’t just mean worthwhile in some truth-and-beauty sense. I also mean it in the most concretely practical way.

They weren’t being offered enough opportunities to hone exactly the suite of talents that the case for the humanities and social sciences should rest squarely on: assimilating and organizing large, complex bodies of information; analyzing that information to create outcomes that have value to others; expressing ideas in clear, purposeful language.

Carlo Rotella is director of American studies at Boston College. His latest book is “Playing in Time: Essays, Profiles, and Other True Stories.’’

In this section : Opinion

Why Justice Ginsburg should step down

By Kent Greenfield |

JUNE 17 , 2 0 13

JUSTICE RUTH Bader Ginsburg has been one of the most important jurists on the Supreme Court over the last 50 years. The second woman ever to serve on the court, Ginsburg has become during her 20-year tenure the strongest judicial advocate for women’s rights in the nation’s history. She embodies exemplary personal strength — twice a cancer survivor, she belies her 80 years and frail appearance with an energetic schedule of appearances and speeches away from the court. At hearings, her soft-spoken, courteously phrased questions cloak a dogged insistence on clear answers.

PAUL BEATY/ASSOCIATED PRESS Ruth Bader Ginsburg discussed Roe vs. Wade on its 40th anniversary at The University of Chicago Law School in May.

Ginsburg is also the senior member of the court’s fourjustice liberal bloc. As in last year’s Obamacare decision, she often takes the lead in articulating the counterpoint to the views of the right wing of the court, personified by Antonin Scalia. She is also beloved; those who know her speak of her understated grace and gentleness.

But Ruth Bader Ginsburg should step down.

Justices are appointed for life, but only three in the last 60 years stayed until death took them. Most leave either when health issues make their retirements necessary (Thurgood Marshall, for example), or when they voluntarily decide the time has come to step aside. The last three justices to leave — Sandra Day O’Connor in 2006, David Souter in 2009, and John Paul Stevens in 2010 — all left while they were healthy and vibrant.

So the question facing Ginsburg is not whether to retire, but when. And the most important aspect of that decision must be when the president can choose a replacement most likely to protect her legacy. O’Connor, appointed by Ronald Reagan, announced her retirement in the first months after George W. Bush won reelection and was eventually replaced by conservative Samuel Alito. Souter, though appointed by a Republican, was in the liberal wing of the court and retired in Barack Obama’s first year, allowing the president to nominate Sonia Sotomayor.

Many court watchers expected Ginsburg to give her notice before last year’s election, to avoid the risk of a Republican winning the opportunity to replace her. Perhaps she was confident in an Obama reelection, but for whatever reason she took that risk. The payoff may be revealed in the coming days, when the Court announces its final opinions from a particularly pivotal year when it considered affirmative action, voting rights, and gay marriage.

But she should not risk further delay.

If she announces her retirement now, the president will be able to choose a replacement from an impressive short list that almost certainly includes California Attorney General Kamala Harris and California Supreme Court Justice Goodwin Liu. Harris would be the Court’s first African-American woman; Liu its first Asian-American.

Either would be worth Obama spending political capital to champion. Because this is not an election year, the Senate’s confirmation hearings could occur with relative dispassion, and the chances of Republican filibuster would be minimized. There will be huffing and puffing, of course, but chances are that Obama will get his choice.

And even if this account overstates the functionality of a dysfunctional Senate, things only get worse from here.

Next year Obama will likely be politically weaker. Nearly two-thirds of the 33 Senate seats up for election in 2014 are held by Democrats, and most of those seats are in swing states where a vote for a progressive Supreme Court

nominee during the election season could be an albatross. The Senate Republicans will be more willing to filibuster as well, since if they hold out past November the Democrats could very well lose their majority. And if the Democrats indeed lose their majority in 2014, Obamaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s options thereafter are reduced to nominating a milquetoast moderate.

Ginsburg need only look down the bench to see the embodiment of the risk she is running. Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American on the court and a liberal lion, had to leave for health reasons under the presidency of George H.W. Bush. Bush appointed Clarence Thomas, who is even more conservative than Scalia.

Ginsburg has soldiered on through bouts with cancer, the death of her spouse, and two decades of battles with Scalia and Thomas. But if we reach the end of this term without her retirement, it will be a victory for those who oppose everything she stands for.

Kent Greenfield is a professor of law at Boston College Law School and a former clerk to Justice David H. Souter. Â

People & Places GLOBE WEST

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BOSTON SUNDAY GLOBE

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JUNE 16, 2013

REMEMBERING: Brookline resident Maxim Shrayer (inset) was born in Moscow to a Jewish-Russian literary and academic family, and spent almost nine years as a refusenik before immigrating to the United States in 1987.

Now a professor of Russian, English, and Jewish studies at Boston College, he is honoring his heritage in a new book, “I Saw It: Ilya Selvinsky and the Legacy of Bearing Witness to the Shoah,” which explores how Jewish-Russian poets became the earliest literary witnesses to the Holocaust.

The book introduces the work of Selvinsky, who witnessed a Jewish massacre outside the Crimean city of Kerch, where he was serving as a military journalist in January 1942. Titled after one of Selvinsky’s poems, “I Saw It” features translations of his Shoah poetry and more than 60 photographs and illustrations.

The book is based on archival and field research, including visits to the trenches, ravines, and other sites of mass shootings in 1941-42 within the former Soviet Union. The project was partially funded by a Boston College Research Incentive Grant and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation award.

Shrayer dedicated the book to the memory of his paternal grandfather, Pyotr (Peysach) Shrayer, a decorated war veteran who fought against the Nazis as a major in the Soviet Navy. A prolific author, scholar, and translator, the BC professor considers it to be his most important work.

“The industrialized murder of Jews in death camps is well known, but there is not as much awareness of the hundreds of thousands of Jews rounded up and crudely executed following the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union,” said Shrayer, who cofounded the Jewish Studies program at Boston College in 2005.

“Those who dared write truthfully about what they saw committed acts of tremendous civil courage.”

For more information, visit www.shrayer.com.

June 6, 2013, 2:17 p.m. ET

Fed's Plosser Says Time to Ramp Back on Stimulus

By Jon Kamp CHESTNUT HILL, Mass.--The U.S. economy is improving enough for the Federal Reserve to start ramping down its stimulus efforts, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia President Charles Plosser said Thursday.

"I think it's time that we begin to gradually unwind ourselves from this activity," said Mr. Plosser, who is a vocal internal critic of the Fed's stimulus efforts. He spoke with reporters following an address during a Boston College financial conference.

The Fed is currently engaged in an open-ended stimulus program that is purchasing around $85 billion a month in Treasury and mortgage bonds. It is supposed to end when there has been an undefined but substantial recovery in the job market.

Mr. Plosser suggested there could be some movement to begin dialing back as soon as next meeting, later this month, of the monetary policy-setting Federal Open Markets Committee. He is not currently a voting member of that committee.

Based on Fed speeches and minutes from prior gatherings, "it's clearly on the table either at the next meeting or at subsequent meetings," Mr. Plosser said. "Different people feel differently about that so we'll have to see how that plays out."

"My preference would be sooner rather than later," he said.

Regarding the level of bond buying, the Fed official suggested the central bank could "dial that back a little bit," perhaps with monthly buying somewhere in a $65 billion to $75 billion range, to begin to "wean our way out of some of this."

Mr. Plosser cited progress in labor markets, which has brought the unemployment rate down to 7.5%.

He said economic growth in the U.S. hasn't been great, but is "chugging along," which he expects will continue.

He cited potential headwinds, such as turmoil in Europe and uncertainty tied to the domestic spending cuts known as the sequestration, but said "that's not a show stopper" for how the Fed should conduct monetary policy.

-Michael S. Derby contributed to this report.

Behind the Data June 3, 2013, 8:25 PM

Brad Harrington is the executive director of the Boston College Center for Work & Family and a research professor in the Carroll School of Management.

It seems like there’s always a new headline about reconciling work and life: challenging women to “lean in,” heralding the decline of workplace flexibility (not the case) or pronouncing the “end of men” (which, to paraphrase Mark Twain, has also been greatly exaggerated). These stories are so electrifying because the work-family conversation is central to the lives of most working Americans. But the headlines can be misleading.

The latest grabber came from a Pew study that found women are now the primary breadwinners in 40 percent of U.S. households with children. Clearly, there is good news embedded in this story. For example, women now earn 60 percent of university degrees in the U.S. And these young, college-educated women in urban areas are now beginning their careers with higher starting salaries than their male counterparts. This is a cause for celebration for those of us interested in greater gender equality.

And indeed, as the Pew study rolled out in newspapers, on television and in social media, the main reaction was to celebrate it as a sign of women’s greater economic empowerment. But the dirty little secret is that in 5 out of 8 of these households, the woman was not just the primary breadwinner; she was the only breadwinner, without a partner.

That’s not the “end of men,” and it’s certainly not an economic victory for American women. When unmarried women are the breadwinners, which is now the case in 25 percent of U.S. households, the family’s average income is only $23,000 a year.

More than half of the children in these homes are living in poverty. Glossing over this fact ignores the importance of having fathers in the picture. The female breadwinners who are making more than their working husbands are in a whole different income bracket; their median household income is $80,000.

The role of men is evolving even in the three-quarters of dual-parent families in which fathers are the primary breadwinners.

They are far less likely these days to be just an economic contributor. Our research (with mainly college-educated, whitecollar fathers) shows that today’s fathers spend an average of 2.5 hours per workday with their children and more than 3 out of 4 would like to have even more time with their offspring. Those fathers reported that being a breadwinner was less important to them than providing their children with love and emotional support, being present and involved in their child’s life, or being a good mentor and role model. In spite of their longer paid working hours, fathers have doubled their time doing domestic tasks and tripled their time on child care over the last generation, although they do still do significantly less than their spouses in both categories. The number of at-home dads has also doubled in the last decade.

Families are better off in virtually every way when there are two parents present. When it comes to income to support family well-being, it matters less whether the woman earns more than her husband or vice versa. This shouldn’t be a competition pitting women against men. The progress that really matters is whether all American families are doing better. When we once again see the trend toward greater prosperity for all American families, then we will have a cause for celebration – and a truly meaningful headline.

NEWS MEDIA APPEARANCES JUNE 1, 2013 - MAY 30, 2014 DATE

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Essay: Lynch School’s Hargreaves: view teachers as an opportunity STM’s Fr. Bretzke re pope’s diplomatic skills tested in Middle East BC a top producer of asset management industry professionals STM’s Fr. Bretzke re pope’s Middle East invitation a foreign policy coup Column: English’s Rotella on the significance of neighborhoods Lynch School’s Arnold’s study: success of high school valedictorians CRR’s Belbase re planning for retirement BC grad Dannel Malloy, CT governor, addresses Law graduates Op-ed: Lynch School’s Altbach on Saudi post-secondary academic institutions BC grad John McDonough: rave reviews as interim schools superintendent CRR’s Munnell re saving for retirement SCAW’s Pitt-Catsouphes: work-life balance will never be flexible Connell School’s Vessey re bullying Law’s Lyons re new FCC Internet rules STM's Ospino: landmark study on Hispanics, future of U.S. Catholicism U.S. Secretary of State John F. Kerry JD’76 addresses graduates U.S. Secretary of State John F. Kerry JD’76 addresses graduates U.S. Secretary of State John F. Kerry JD’76 addresses graduates U.S. Secretary of State John F. Kerry JD’76 addresses graduates U.S. Secretary of State John F. Kerry JD’76 addresses graduates Law’s Lyons re the end of the landline Carroll School’s Zola re Sterling’s refusal to pay NBA fine BC official Twitter channel named 13th most influential among U.S. colleges Lonergan Center’s Cronin on moral, ethical choices and dating Column: Carroll School’s Dean Boynton offers advice to Class of 2014 Op-ed: Lynch School’s Shirley on ways to improve schools Law/Theology’s Kaveny re health care reform Op-ed: CRR’s Munnell re MA public pensions, stingiest in U.S. SCAW’s Pitt-Catsouphes re retaining older workers CRR study cited re cost-of-living cuts from state-to-state Op-ed: Law’s Lyons on Comcast, future of video competition Law's Lyons re FCC adjusting open Internet rules PoliSci’s Ross re China’s u-turn on Vietnam charm offensive CWF study cited in piece on working fathers Carroll School’s Fr. McGowan re casino land deal concerns Celtics legend Bob Cousy P'73 to receive honorary degree at Commencement Carroll School’s Nenkov re cuteness factor in design and marketing Carroll School’s Fr. McGowan re lawsuit and MA casinos STM’s Fr. Bretzke re Catholic reaction to “Black Mass” at Harvard Op-ed: Law’s Lyons on Comcast, future of video competition Column: English’s Rotella on Boston’s growing burlesque scene Cristo Rey HS sending all seniors to 4-year colleges, BC included STM's Ospino: landmark study on Hispanics, future of U.S. Catholicism STM's Ospino: landmark study on Hispanics, future of U.S. Catholicism STM’s Ospino: report on Hispanic parish ministry, Part III Op-ed: Lynch School’s Scanlan, Lowenhaupt on closing achievement gaps STM's Ospino: landmark study on Hispanics, future of U.S. Catholicism STM’s Ospino: report on Hispanic parish ministry, Part II STM's Ospino: landmark study on Hispanics, future of U.S. Catholicism STM's Ospino: landmark study on Hispanics, future of U.S. Catholicism STM’s Ospino: report on Hispanic parish ministry, Part I Achilles Aiken '14, and the friendship he made volunteering with 4Boston STM's Ospino: landmark study on Hispanics, future of U.S. Catholicism STM's Ospino: landmark study on Hispanics, future of U.S. Catholicism STM's Ospino: landmark study on Hispanics, future of U.S. Catholicism STM's Ospino: landmark study on Hispanics, future of U.S. Catholicism Connell School’s Sr. Roy re nursing as a thriving profession History’s emeritus Lawson re books in the age of distraction Law School installs St. Thomas More statue Philosophy’s Kearney re how atheists can still believe in God Op-ed: Economics’ Ireland re U.S. economy Theology's Fr. K. Himes, grad student Kate Ward: economic inequality analysis

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Gubernatorial candidate Charlie Baker speaks at GSSW heath care forum

International Business Times Gubernatorial candidate Charlie Baker speaks at GSSW heath care forum

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Gubernatorial candidate Charlie Baker speaks at GSSW heath care forum Gubernatorial candidate Charlie Baker speaks at GSSW heath care forum Gubernatorial candidate Charlie Baker speaks at GSSW heath care forum Gubernatorial candidate Charlie Baker speaks at GSSW heath care forum Gubernatorial candidate Charlie Baker speaks at GSSW heath care forum Gubernatorial candidate Charlie Baker speaks at GSSW heath care forum CRR study cited in article re MA Secretary of State Galvin, retirement accounts Law’s Cassidy on dynamics changing on federal bench in MA McMullen Museum: Paris: Night & Day review Op-ed: Theology’s Fr. Imbelli on pope’s appointment of cardinals Law’s Bloom on death penalty in Tsarnaev case Lynch School’s Altbach on integrating international students Actor Liam Neeson, son, tour BC Op-ed: English’s Smith on justice for Magdalenes Carroll School’s Fr. McGowan on MA casinos CRR’s Webb: most not saving enough for golden years Actor Liam Neeson, son, tour BC Actor Liam Neeson, son, tour BC Actor Liam Neeson, son, tour BC Op-ed: Theology/Law’s Kaveny on Daniel Callahan’s writings in bioethics Lynch School's Alemán: college leaders can learn from student social media use Kaveny joins Law, Theology faculty as Libby professor CRR’s Munnell re Rhode Island pension issues Law’s Quinn re cable mergers Op-ed: SCAW’s Fideler on seniors holding on to jobs Law’s Bloom on Tsarnaev trial STM’s Fr. Bretzke on church teaching in Asia, Africa Kaveny joins Law, Theology faculty as Libby professor Law’s Madoff re climate-change skepticism’s funding sources Law’s Bloom re Tsarnaev’s trial Essay: CWF’s Harrington on work-family balance Psychology’s Heyman on addiction CRR on complications re boomers’ inheritances Law’s Barrozo on advocacy for adoption BC grad Michael Rossi produces documentary on Penn Station Op-ed: English’s Smith on justice for Magdalenes Law, Theology’s Kaveny on firing pregnant, unwed teacher STM’s Groome re UN panel assails Vatican on priest abuse Carroll School’s Fr. McGowan on Wynn casino proposal Column: Carroll School’s Dean Boynton on Microsoft leader, ideas SCAW’s Cahill re older workers face tough hunt for new jobs Law, Theology’s Kaveny on issues facing k-12 Catholic schools Theology’s Fr. Keenan re teaching “Humanae Vitae” Essay: BC grad Frank Stamos launches “Student Nation” app Law’s Galle on purchase of $3.6m home for Trinity Church rector BC grad, mayor Marty Walsh: man of the people CRR’s Munnell re Obama announces new retirement accounts Carroll School’s Fr. McGowan on Fall River casinos Carroll School’s Zola on athletes’ move to unionize Weston Observatory re small earthquake reported near NH Op-ed: Honors Program’s Bayles on movie, “Wolf of Wall Street” Carroll School’s Fr. McGowan: casino firms to fight repeal effort in MA CRR’s Sass re when retirees should downsize homes PoliSci’s Landy on Richard Tisei’s second-try chances Carroll School’s Fr. McGowan re minimum on tax too low Philosophy’s Cronin on dating in society Law’s Quinn on cable mergers CWP’s Schervish on Boston philanthropy Sociology’s Derber re invisible crisis in growing public goods deficit CRR’s Munnell on inherited pension debts Sociology’s Moorman, GSSW Ph.D. student Jooyoung Kong on abusive parents Stephanie Costa ’15 quoted re college students and crowdsourcing Column: English’s Rotella on advertising strategies Kobe Bryant drops in on BC international marketing class

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CRR on longevity and retirement plans Carroll School’s Fr. McGowan re MA casino bids BC grads Bill Clerico, Rich Aberman receive $1.5M for WePay Philosophy’s Kearney to address Abbey Theater symposium CRR on longevity and retirement plans Essay: GSSW’s Dearing on pope: social innovator STM’s Fr. Bretzke: John Kerry visits Vatican CRR’s Munnell: too easy to take money from IRAs Law’s Lyons on patent lawsuits SCAW study on partial retirement cited Theology’s Gaillardetz re Cardinal O’Malley, Methodists building ecumenical bridges Law’s Madoff re charities and donor-advised funds Carroll School’s G. Kane on corporate culture, social business Column: Carroll School’s Dean Boynton on the “Greatest Memo Ever” CRR study cited in article re Obamacare BC grad Carolyn Dever named Dartmouth Provost EES’s Ebel re minor earthquake in southeastern Mass Lynch School’s Hargreaves, Cochran-Smith: influential education scholars EES’s Ebel re Canadian “frost quake” BC grad Mayor Marty Walsh, mayoral inauguration Transcript of BC grad Marty Walsh’s mayoral inauguration speech Mayor, BC grad Marty Walsh takes charge at BC ceremony BC grad Marty Walsh, mayoral inauguration photos BC grad Mayor Marty Walsh, inauguration BC grad Mayor Marty Walsh, inauguration BC grad Marty Walsh’s choice of Conte Forum as inaugural venue breaks tradition History’s O’Toole on BC grad Marty Walsh’s choice of inaugural venue Carroll School’s Fr. McGowan on path to casinos in MA Column: English’s Rotella on lessons learned in a pool hall Law student Caitlin Cahow on Sochi games PoliSci’s Hale re Gov. Patrick in 2014 Carroll School’s Fr. McGowan re casino hopefuls Law’s Cassidy re questioning legitimacy of use of deadly force Irish Education 100 honors President Fr. Leahy, five BC professors Theology’s Fr. Paris re medical definition of “death” Carroll School’s Fr. McGowan re casino license applications CRR study cited in article re inheritance Carroll School’s Fr. McGowan re casino bids Lynch School’s Arnold re worry of diminished value of higher education Theology’s Fr. Paris re medical definition of “death” Theology’s Fr. K. Himes’ book review of Offering Hospitality Theology’s Fr. Paris re medical definition of “death” CWF’s Harrington: slow acceptance for stay-at-home dads Lynch School’s Hargreaves, Shirley on refining teaching methods Carroll School’s E. Kane re JPMorgan Chase Chemistry’s Morken: dual catalysts synthesize alpha-olefins Column: English’s Rotella on Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Psychology’s Young on moral judgments of suicide Psychology’s Young on moral judgments of suicide Psychology’s Young on moral judgments of suicide Psychology’s Young on moral judgments of suicide Psychology’s Young on moral judgments of suicide Psychology’s Young on moral judgments of suicide Chemistry’s Morken: dual catalysts synthesize alpha-olefins Chemistry’s Morken: dual catalysts synthesize alpha-olefins Essay: CWF’s Harrington re Christmas gifts for America CRR’s Munnell on Detroit, Illinois pension issues Op-ed: History’s Richardson re lessons from the first government shutdown BCPD’s Postell to receive first Sean Collier Award Carroll School’s Brasel: study re tablets’ facilitation of impulse shopping Advocating BC grad Amy Poehler as commencement speaker Rockefeller family donates artwork to BC at son’s graduation Rockefeller family donates artwork to BC at son’s graduation Mayor-elect Walsh picks BC as swearing-in venue Carroll School’s Fr. McGowan re “gaming czar” Crosby, lawsuit BC students in Rome trade zucchettos with Pope Francis

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BC students in Rome trade zucchettos with Pope Francis BC students in Rome trade zucchettos with Pope Francis BC students in Rome trade zucchettos with Pope Francis BC students in Rome trade zucchettos with Pope Francis PoliSci’s Landy on Obama’s selfie at Mandela memorial Psychology’s Winner re effects of music on intelligence Carroll School’s Harrison on Grammy “Best New Artist” curse History’s Jacobs awarded book prize CRR’s Munnell on Detroit’s pension problems Op-ed: Law’s Madoff on how the government gives CRR provides insights on U.S. retirement outlook CEO Club: MGM Resorts International CEO speaks Sociology’s Magubane on Mandela legacy BC grad Celestino Depina inspired to teach by Mandela CEO Club: MGM Resorts International CEO speaks CEO Club: MGM Resorts International CEO speaks CEO Club: MGM Resorts International CEO speaks CRR research cited re 401(k) fees PoliSci’s Landy on possible presidential run by Sen. Warren Fine Arts’ Gallagher’s NYC solo exhibit Lynch School’s Altbach on MOOCs Lynch School’s 2011 TIMSS study results Kathryn Kravner ’14 on new life for mason jars via social media Communications’ Sienkiewicz on MBTA suit over ads BC Law experiential learning center to be launched in fall BC Law experiential learning center to be launched in fall STM’s Groome on sex and the priesthood Carroll School’s Fr. McGowan on Revere casino Theology’s Fr. Imbelli on pope’s multi-faceted reflection Business 100 includes BC grads Robert Murray, Denise Morrison Carroll School’s Fr. McGowan: gaming panel to consider Revere casino Op-ed: Sociology’s Schor on going beyond “Buy Nothing Day” Carroll School’s Fr. McGowan on MA gambling landscape Essay: Theology’s Gaillardetz on possibility of married priests BC students give music lessons to Allston/Brighton youths Column: English’s Rotella on controversial comments by Ed. Sec. Arne Duncan Carroll School’s Fr. McGowan on odds of MA casino History’s Maney on JFK legacy PoliSci’s Hopkins on senate’s “nuclear option” Lynch School’s Laski’s study: links board games and children’s numeracy CWP on prep schools’ asking grandparents for donations Lynch School’s Laski’s study: links board games, children’s numeracy SCAW’s Cahill on widening jobs gap Lynch School’s Laski’s study: links board games, children’s numeracy BC students, faculty commemorate Gettysburg Address 150th anniversary History’s Richardson on Obama’s no-show at Gettysburg event CRR’s study on CT pension cost to taxpayers Mathematics’ Friedberg named AMA fellow Lynch School’s Laski’s study: links board games, children’s numeracy Lynch School’s Laski’s study: links board games, children’s numeracy Lynch School’s Laski’s study: links board games, children’s numeracy Lynch School’s Laski’s study: links board games, children’s numeracy Lynch School’s Laski’s study: links board games, children’s numeracy Lynch School’s Laski’s study: links board games, children’s numeracy CRR study cited: downside of 401(k) automatic enrollment Slavic and Eastern Languages’ Connolly on Mayor-elect Walsh’s Boston accent CWF’s 2011 study on paternity leave BC grad, vet Timothy McLaughlin’s exhibit at Law School: Iraq war diaries CRR study: mortgage insights McMullen Museum: Courbet: Mapping Realism review BC cook Mazier wins MA restaurant association’s top chef prize CRR’s Sass, Munnell on waiting to collect SS Megan Johnson ’14 re downside of “Click This” news Carroll School’s Fr. McGowan re proposal for Milford casino Law’s Bloom on Bulger sentencing Law’s Chirba: Obamacure worse than Obamacare

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BC cook Mazier wins MA restaurant association’s top chef prize CIHE on research to sharpen global focus on higher education Op-ed: Lynch School’s Hargreaves: UK should invest in teachers’ talent Law’s Quinn on airline merger STM’s Fr. Clifford on achievements, challenges of Vatican II on scripture Sociology’s Schor on a new way to study economics Op-ed: GSSW’s Dearing on plan for BC grad, Mayor-elect Walsh’s new Boston Philanthropy of BC grad, trustee Peter Lynch, wife Carolyn Carroll School’s Fr. McGowan on Suffolk Downs’ casino plans PoliSci’s Skerry on U.S. immigration reform BC grad Phil Dumontet’s startup: rental car fleet for drivers Law’s Cassidy on West Valley City following law, releasing cop records CWF’s Harrington on the rights of new fathers Carroll School’s Fr. McGowan: casino rejection taints Gov. Patrick’s legacy Carroll School’s P-T MBA program ranked 32nd in 2013 list CRR: St. Louis pension costs BC grad Marty Walsh elected Boston mayor CRR on pensions across the U.S. BC grad Marty Walsh elected Boston mayor CWF’s Harrington: dads want to have it all BC grad Setti Warren reelected Newton mayor Lynch School’s Altbach: India fuels surge in foreign students BC ranked #77 among world’s top 100 universities in producing millionaires Theology’s Fr. Keenan nominates contender for cardinal in Catholic Church PoliSci’s Hale on Boston 2013 mayoral race Op-Ed: NYT’s Bill Keller writes on keynoting Clough Center conference CRR’s Munnell on “full” vs. “real” retirement age CRR’s 2012 study shows baby boomers are not stealing jobs Op-ed: Law’s Greenfield on corporations as good citizens Carroll School’s Fr. McGowan on Suffolk Downs casino license Governmental Affairs’ Keady helps Marty Walsh’s mayoral campaign Column: Carroll School’s Dean Boynton on lessons from the healthcare rollout BC a top producer of U.S. Fulbright winners PoliSci’s Laurence on NSA spying scandal CRR’s Munnell on Affordable Care Act for 65 and older Law School exhibit: Iraq war diaries of vet Timothy McLaughlin, JD ’09 CRR on retirement quiz CEO Club: National Grid CEO speaks CEO Club: National Grid CEO speaks TIMSS & PIRLS International Study Center: math, science study TIMSS & PIRLS International Study Center: math, science study Lynch School’s Levine Coley: substandard housing takes toll on children Admissions’ Mahoney on college essay writing TIMSS & PIRLS International Study Center: math, science study BC reports investment surge, enrollment dip Essay: CWF’s Hartmann on responsibility for work-life CRR’s Munnell on SS’s “real” retirement age Essay: Lynch School’s Hargreaves, Braun on data-driven accountability TIMSS & PIRLS International Study Center: math, science study Carroll School MBA students promote vegan cheese company Carroll School’s Fr. McGowan on Suffolk Downs casino license battle Essay: GSSW’s Dearing on Charity Navigator’s focus on results reporting Lynch School’s Levine Coley: substandard housing takes toll on children Op-ed: Lynch School’s Altbach on advice for India’s tech institutes Lynch School’s Hargreaves, Braun on data-driven accountability GSSW’s Sudders on forced mental health treatment BC grad Ken Hackett named U.S. ambassador to Vatican Carroll School’s Fr. McGowan: Caesars’ casino ouster PoliSci’s Laurence on Islam and the European left Op-ed: CRR’s Munnell re need for a simple retirement system Economics’ Murphy on congress, Treasury Department’s borrowing authority Op-ed: PoliSci’s Wolfe on paranoid style: then and now BC chemists discover rust can power artificial photosynthesis BC chemists discover rust can power artificial photosynthesis BC grad Amy Poehler reflects on her summer before BC Op-ed: Sociology’s Schor on effects of recession to work approaches

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Theology’s Fr. Daly on Rene Girard and secular modernity CWF’s Fraone on tech companies that offer best child care services CWF’s Harrington on a pitch for a compressed work week Economics’ Murphy on debt ceiling Chemists discover rust can power artificial photosynthesis Chemists discover rust can power artificial photosynthesis Column: English’s Rotella re pursuing the essence of drawing Economics’ Ireland on Obama’s nomination for Fed chair BC grads named to BBJ’s 40 under 40 honorees Carroll School’s Stoller on Obamacare Q&A: vet Timothy McLaughlin JD’09, “War Diaries” exhibit STM’s Fr. Bretzke on pope’s appeal to students Carroll School’s Fr. Parker on Hull library’s 100th anniversary Carroll School’s Zola on lawsuit against NCAA for franchise infringements Economics’ Ireland on Obama’s nomination for Fed chair BC grad creates app allowing users to track life goals BC Law named 19 among 50 best US law schools Lynch School’s Barnett recycles drug-trade tools to teach kids science History’s Fleming, 2013 MacArthur Fellow, on using archaeology to write history Lynch School’s Shirley on teaching with technology Law’s Quinn on Delaware’s corporate court change Carroll School’s Fr. Parker on effects of noise on property value BC grad Phil Schiller named world’s most influential CMO Essay: Lynch School’s Lykes re U.S. tearing apart migrant families BC cited in college scholarship article Essay: CWF’s Harrington on working dads’ roles at home Lynch School’s Hargreaves on PISA learning PoliSci’s Laurence re integrating Europe’s Muslim minorities CWF’s Fraone on students teaching executives about social media Law’s Hillinger included in book of outstanding profs in the field BC 31st in U.S. News & World Report’s annual rankings Carroll School’s Fr. McGowan: MA casino interest lagging TIMSS/PIRLS study on relationships between academic disciplines at fourth grade Slavic and Eastern Languages’ Salameh re ethnic cleansing, Syria’s future Singer Katharine McPhee performs at “Pops on the Heights” Lynch School’s Hargreaves: Scots’ education system beats English system History’s Fleming named a MacArthur Fellow Carroll School’s Zola on college pay-for-play movement Singer Katharine McPhee performs at “Pops on the Heights” Carroll School’s Zola on college pay-for-play movement Column: English’s Rotella on repealing MA casino Carroll School’s Zola on college pay-for-play movement Carroll School’s Pratt’s study: worker roles impacted when misunderstood CEO Club: Mitsubishi CEO speaks History’s Fleming named a MacArthur Fellow History’s Fleming named a MacArthur Fellow History’s Fleming named a MacArthur Fellow Theology’s Gaillardetz on pope’s wish to release Vatican II’s vision History’s Fleming named a MacArthur Fellow Carroll School’s Fr. McGowan on East Boston casino referendum History’s Fleming named MacArthur Fellow History’s Fleming named MacArthur Fellow History’s Fleming named MacArthur Fellow Carroll School’s Zola on A. Rod’s appeal of his 211 game suspension Slavic and Eastern Languages’ Salameh on Syrian crisis Review: McMullen Museum’s Courbet: Mapping Realism exhibit Sociology’s Hesse-Biber on Miss Kansas’ tattoo Theology’s Fr. Weiss: MA Catholics see hope in pope STM’s Groome on pope’s criticism of church focus on gays, abortion STM’s Fr. Bretzke on pope’s call on church to change focus sTM’s Fr. Bretzke on pope’s vision of more welcoming church CWP’s study on value of inheritances Carroll School’s Pratt: study shows worker roles impacted when misunderstood BC grad Tracey Wigfield wins Emmy for writing in a comedy series STM’s Groome, Theology’s Pope on pope’s vision of more welcoming church Lynch School’s Altbach on western values in international universities

09-18-13 09-18-13 09-17-13 09-16-13 09-16-13 09-16-13 09-13-13 09-13-13 09-13-13 09-13-13 09-13-13 09-12-13 09-12-13 09-12-13 09-12-13 09-12-13 09-10-13 09-10-13 09-10-13 09-10-13 09-09-13 09-09-13 09-09-13 09-09-13 09-07-13 09-06-13 09-05-13 09-05-13 09-03-13 09-03-13 09-01-13 09-01-13 08-31-13 08-30-13 08-30-13 08-30-13 08-29-13 08-29-13 08-29-13 08-28-13 08-28-13 08-27-13 08-26-13 08-26-13 08-25-13 08-24-13 08-23-13 08-23-13 08-23-13 08-22-13 08-22-13 08-21-13 08-21-13 08-19-13 08-17-13 08-17-13 08-16-13 08-16-13 08-16-13 08-15-13 08-15-13 08-13-13 08-13-13 08-13-13 08-12-13 08-12-13

Huffington Post Irish Voice Boston Globe Chronicle of Higher Ed Irish Emigrant Time.com U.S. News & World Rep. Wall Street Journal Boston Magazine Boston Globe Boston Globe New York Times Boston Globe Christian Science Monitor National Catholic Rep. U.S. News & World Rep. Huffington Post USA Today Wall Street Journal New York Times Boston Globe Boston.com New York Times Boston.com Time.com New York Times Newsday Time.com Chronicle of Higher Ed Bloomberg BusinessWeek

America Boston Globe Boston Globe Boston Herald Boston Globe Boston Irish Reporter PhysOrg.com Science Daily Boston Globe Boston Globe Boston Globe Boston Globe America Associated Press United Press Int’l.com Washington Post Antiques & the Arts Weekly

Der Spiegal The Pilot Times Higher Ed (UK) Boston Globe Wall Street Journal Time.com Boston.com CNN.com USA Today Boston.com Fortune Magazine The Atlantic Parade Magazine Boston Globe U.S. News & World Rep. Boston Globe Sydney Morning Herald Boston.com Medial Xpress

Essay: Law’s Murray-Tjan on deportation of U.S. citizens CIP’s Connolly to receive National Heritage Fellowship BC grad Ann Marie Gardner on media company for modern farmers Lynch School’s Altbach on Rwandan degree program Former President of Ireland Mary McAleese is Burns visiting scholar Carroll School’s Zola on paying college athletes PoliSci’s Schlozman on Syria, Obama’s political agenda Carroll School’s Pontiff on arbitraging academia PoliSci’s Laurence on crisis in Syria Column: English’s Rotella: students shortchange themselves, others BC symposium celebrates Bread and Puppet theater co. anniversary Op-ed: English’s Rotella: no child left untableted Carroll School’s Fr. McGowan on suburbs’ call on casinos PoliSci’s Christensen on Putin’s opinion on U.S., Syria Theology’s Gaillardetz re U.S. bishops set to meet with young theologians Lynch School’s Altbach: college rankings assume one size fits all in higher ed Essay: GSSW’s Dearing on social justice in the social contract Carroll School’s Strahan on possibility of another “Lehman-moment” Law’s Quinn re Dell buyout CRR’s Munnell on older Americans at work BC grad Kyle Shachmut on digital education for the disabled BC startup is MassChallenge finalist CRR’s Munnell on active retirement Samantha Prince ‘17 receives Genzyme biotechnology scholarship Economics’ Unver on companies applying matching algorithms to job recruitment Carroll School’s Zola on Johnny Football’s Payday Sociology’s Moorman on dynamic between grandparents, adult grandchildren English’s Boesky rated “campus celebrity” PoliSci’s Scholzman’s survey: political scientists emphasize importance of field BC grad Ben Lee takes journey of self-discovery Theology’s Fr. Imbelli on questions for pope CWF’s Harrington on stay-at-home dads McMullen Museum: Courbet: Mapping Realism exhibit preview PoliSci’s Landy on potential U.S. strike on Syria Column: English’s Rotella on the first day of 41st grade Music’s Falls begins teaching at BC Physics’ Madhavan’s research: new details on crystal structure Physics’ Madhavan’s research: new details on crystal structure Fine Arts’ Howe curates McMullen Museum Courbet exhibit Lynch School’s Franklin re anniversary of march on Washington CWF’s Harrington on changing role of fathers Carroll School’s Fr. McGowan on fiscal benefits of Suffolk Downs casino BC grad, STM student Sam Sawyer on lessons from Apple devotion Carroll School’s Gallaugher on Microsoft’s stock slump CRR study: people in their 60s carry more debt Economics’ Sonmez on the “housemates problem” McMullen Museum: Courbet: Mapping Realism exhibit PoliSci’s Laurence on Germany’s response to conflict in Syria BC gets grant to foster entrepreneurship in urban schools Op-ed: Lynch School’s Altbach on silencing secular vote in Turkey PoliSci’s Krause on Boston police’s Davis helping mideast police counterparts Law’s Papandrea on Manning sentencing CWF’s study: stay-at-home dads will not be norm LinkedIn to offer university pages Law’s Greenfield on U.S. helping Egypt Carroll School’s McLean on Bulger trial English’s Lewis on Poe statue in Boston Carroll School’s Brasel on why car companies can’t win young adults BC grad Ceslo Perez on U.N. responsibility for Haiti cholera outbreak A&S Honors Program founder Duhamel one of first interviewers of Julia Child Law’s Brodin on Judge Tauro’s retirement BC Law among law degrees with biggest return New Yankee Candle line salutes BC Law’s Cassidy on Bulger trial Community Affairs funds mural in Brighton Sociology’s Moorman, Stokes’ study: familial relationship reduces depression

08-12-13 08-12-13 08-12-13 08-09-13 08-08-13 08-07-13 08-07-13 08-07-13 08-06-13 08-06-13 08-05-13 08-05-13 08-04-13 08-03-13 08-02-13 08-02-13 08-02-13 08-02-13 08-02-13 08-01-13 08-01-13 08-01-13 08-01-13 08-01-13 08-01-13 07-31-13 07-30-13 07-30-13 07-30-13 07-30-13 07-30-13 07-30-13 07-29-13 07-29-13 07-29-13 07-29-13 07-29-13 07-28-13 07-27-13 07-27-13 07-26-13 07-25-13 07-24-13 07-24-13 07-24-13 07-24-13 07-24-13 07-24-13 07-23-13 07-21-13 07-19-13 07-19-13 07-19-13 07-18-13 07-18-13 07-18-13 07-17-13 07-17-13 07-16-13 07-16-13 07-15-13 07-15-13 07-15-13 07-14-13 07-12-13 07-12-13

Science World Report U.S. News & World Rep. Weekly Standard Bloomberg News Boston Herald Bloomberg News Boston Globe Time.com Patheos Huffington Post America National Catholic Rep. New York Times Wall Street Journal Boston Globe USA Today Huffington Post New York Times Religion News Service U.S. Catholic Boston Herald Bloomberg News Boston Business Journal Christian Science Monitor National Catholic Rep. Wall Street Journal Wall Street Journal Boston Globe Wall Street Journal National Jesuit News USA Today Boston Magazine U.S. News & World Rep. Science Daily PhysOrg.com Science Codex Christian Science Monitor Wall Street Journal Boston Globe Boston Globe New York Times USA Today New York Post The Street Market Watch Reuters IrishTimes Boston Globe Forbes.com Boston Globe Bloomberg.com Boston Globe The Atlantic Boston Herald The Mail (UK) Washington Times USA Today Boston Globe Wall Street Journal National Interest Boston Herald Chemistry World Boston Herald Boston Globe Chronicle of Higher Ed Nitrogram

Sociology’s Moorman, Stokes’ study: familial relationship reduces depression Sociology’s Moorman, Stokes’ study: familial relationship reduces depression Op-ed: PoliSci’s Skerry on politics and illegal immigrants Carroll School’s E. Kane on Bernanke successor Carroll School’s Fr. McGowan re potential Suffolk Downs casino CRR study cited concerning pension plans Carroll School’s Brasel on challenge of targeting Gen Y in marketing Carroll School’s McLean on Bulger trial Mission and Ministry’s Muldoon on Ignatian spirituality BC named 16th best, most collaborative U.S. college Artist-in-residence Fr. VerEcke on dancing at World Youth Day BC grad Ken Hackett named U.S. ambassador to Vatican Psychology’s Young on quandary for whistle-blowers CRR’s Munnell on keeping an eye on your IRA Column: English’s Rotella on the fairness of boxing Law’s Quinn on Dell buyout Essay: CWF’s Harrington on male athlete role models Psychology’s Dungan, Young study: whistle-blower’s quandary BC grad Ken Hackett named U.S. ambassador to Vatican Theology’s Goizueta on how to be a church of the poor PoliSci’s Landy on possible US strike on Syria Law’s Quinn on Dell buyout BC students’ Jebbit raises $1.25M led by Data Point Capital CWF’s Rikleen on increase in young adults living with parents STM’s Fr. Vicini on bridging social, political divides Economics’ Grubb on phone-plan prizing puzzle STM’s Fr. Bretzke on pope’s acceptance of gay priests STM’s Fr. Bretzke on pope’s acceptance of gay priests Law’s Papandrea on Manning’s acquittal of aiding enemy BC President Fr. Leahy on power of happy priests for vocations BC student founders of Jebbit on start-up accelerators Theology’s Pope reacts to pope’s statements on gay priests STM’s Fr. Bretzke on gay clergy members BC chemists re-conceptualize catalytic process BC chemists re-conceptualize catalytic process BC chemists re-conceptualize catalytic process PoliSci’s Krause on optimism re Israeli-Palestinian peace talks CRR report cited on Detroit bankruptcy STM Dean Fr. Massa on pope, a pontiff of surprises Lynch School’s Levine Coley on dads at Taylor Swift concerts Lynch School’s Blustein on being older and unemployed Law’s Quinn on Dell buyout offer Law’s Quinn on Dell buyout offer Law’s Quinn on Dell buyout offer Law’s Quinn on Dell buyout offer Law’s Quinn on Dell buyout offer English’s Smith on justice for Magdalenes Law’s Cassidy on Hernandez trial Carroll School’s Zola on Ryan Braun’s suspension ResLife’s Darcy receives 2013 Community service award Lynch School’s Liang on innovation’s need for a Lingua Franca Column: English’s Rotella on importance of free play Essay: Communications’ Sienkiewicz on trouble facing Afghan radio station Law’s Beckman on Benjamin Shealey case Law’s Papandrea on Manning case Carroll School’s Zola on NCAA-Electronic Arts fallout Carroll School’s Zola on NCAA-Electronic Arts fallout Communications’ Sienkiewicz on Rolling Stone’s Tsarnaev cover PhD student Hilan Kaplan named 2013 SciFinder Future Leader in chemistry PoliSci’s Laurence re new France-German alliance Law’s Bloom on Bulger Trial BC chemists discover new family of nanocarbons Law’s Bloom on witness Flemmi in Bulger case CRR’s Vitagliano on congress’s need to promote savings Lynch School’s Altbach: influence of international rankings on India’s universities BC among most popular U.S. universities on Instagram

07-12-13 07-11-13 07-11-13 07-10-13 07-09-13 07-09-13 07-08-13 07-08-13 07-08-13 07-08-13 07-07-13 07-06-13 07-06-13 07-05-13 07-04-13 07-03-13 07-03-13 07-01-13 07-01-13 06-30-13 06-30-13 06-30-13 06-28-13 06-28-13 06-26-13 06-26-13 06-26-13 06-26-13 06-25-13 06-25-13 06-25-13 06-25-13 06-24-13 06-24-13 06-21-13 06-21-13 06-21-13 06-21-13 06-20-13 06-19-13 06-19-13 06-17-13 06-17-13 06-17-13 06-17-13 06-17-13 06-16-13 06-16-13 06-15-13 06-15-13 06-14-13 06-14-13 06-13-13 06-13-13 06-13-13 06-13-13 06-12-13 06-11-13 06-11-13 06-10-13 06-06-13 06-06-13 06-06-13 06-06-13 06-05-13 06-04-13

Boston Herald Boston Herald Catholic World Report Wall Street Journal USA Today FrenchTribune.com Huffington Post PhysOrg.com Nature World News Science Daily Boston.com Boston Herald Boston Herald Boston Business Journal Boston Globe Boston Herald Mass. Lawyers Weekly Boston.com America Boston Globe Boston Globe Boston Globe The Pilot Catholic News Service Boston Herald Boston.com Photonics.com R&D Boston.com ScienceDaily PhysOrg.com Science Codex Weekly Standard Forbes.com Boston Globe New York Times Inside Higher Ed MetroWest Daily News Boston Globe Miami Herald Irish Voice NJ.com Catholic Herald Chronicle of Philanthropy

Law’s Cassidy on DeSalvo family protesting invasion of privacy BC grad Elisabeth Hasselbeck leaves “The View” Philosophy’s Kreeft on finding God in nature Law’s Olsen on Apple’s plan to raise e-book prices Law’s Cassidy on witness testimony in Bulger trial BC physicists create substance comparable to diamond on thermal conductivity Essay: Law’s Murray-Tjan on immigration reform BC physicists create substance comparable to diamond on thermal conductivity BC physicists create substance comparable to diamond on thermal conductivity BC physicists create substance comparable to diamond on thermal conductivity Math’s Friedberg appointed McIntyre Professor STM’s Groome re canonization of Pope John Paul II STM’s Fr. Bretzke on pope’s politics Carroll School’s Stoller on business globalization BC grad John F. Fitzgibbons’ family receives his long-lost Vietnam medals STM’s Fr. Bretzke on canonization of Pope John Paul II Law’s Brodin re Supreme Court dodging affirmative action Burns Library features collection of vintage Boston tourism posters Theology’s Fr. Imbelli on Pope Francis BC Environmental Affairs Law Review featured SCAW’s Pitt-Catsouphes on baby boomers postponing retirement Romance Languages’ Bruckner receives academic honors BC hosts summit to promote vocations BC hosts summit to promote vocations Law’s Greenfield on same-sex marriage ruling BC grad Ed Markey wins MA special election as senator Physics’ Padilla on laser-guided codes advance single pixel THz imaging Physics’ Padilla on laser-guided codes advance single pixel THz imaging ResLife’s Darcy receives 2013 BC Community Service Award Physics’ Padilla on laser-guided codes advance single pixel THz imaging Physics’ Padilla on laser-guided codes advance single pixel THz imaging Physics’ Padilla on laser-guided codes advance single pixel THz imaging PoliSci’s Skerry on problems of young Muslim generation Column: Carroll School’s Dean Boynton on Supreme Court’s affirmative action decision Column: English’s Rotella: degree in humanities is practical Lynch School’s Altbach on possibility of grading university systems Op-ed: Lynch School’s Altbach on India, China and the press ResLife’s Darcy receives 2013 BC Community Service Award BC grad John Kerry JD ’76, brother Cameron, together on cabinet Lynch School’s Cho on Miami-Dade ensuring digital device to students by 2015 CIP’s Connolly: National Endowment Award CWP on N.J. job expansion and economic growth BC grad Ken Hackett named U.S. ambassador to Vatican CWP’s Schervish on the stubborn 2 percent giving rate Chronicle of Higher Education Op-ed: Carroll School’s Zola on giving the rich their own NCAA division Boston Globe Op-ed: Law’s Greenfield: Justice Ginsburg should step down Boston Globe Slavic & Eastern Languages’ Shrayer on his new book New York Times Carroll School’s Fr. McGowan on NY’s plan for more casinos New York Times CRR’s Munnell on 401(k) as basic system Boston Globe Op-ed: English’s Boesky on BRAC mutation, gene ruling Boston Herald CEO Club: GM CEO speaks Wall Street Journal CRR on target-date funds Wall Street Journal CWF: why dads don’t take paternity leave Boston Globe CEO Club: GM CEO speaks Wall Street Journal CEO Club: GM CEO speaks Detroit Free Press CEO Club: GM CEO speaks CIO Magazine CWF on how to better engage millennials Washington Post CWF: stay-at-home parents New York Times CRR on SS New York Times International Programs’ Gozik on students’ study-abroad decisions Wall Street Journal Phil. Fed president Charles Plosser speaks at BC on U.S. bank debt BloombergBusinessweek Phil. Fed president Charles Plosser speaks at BC on U.S. bank debt Boston Globe Phil. Fed president Charles Plosser speaks at BC on U.S. bank debt Reuters Phil. Fed president Charles Plosser speaks at BC on U.S. bank debt Boston Herald Law’s Cassidy on jury selection for Bulger trial Forbes.com BC grad student Adam Gismondi on predictions for the social web

06-03-13 Boston Globe 06-03-13 New York Times 06-03-13 National Catholic Rep.

CRR’s Munnell: patience pays off for older investors Op-ed: CWF’s Harrington on “the end of men” STM’s Fr. Bretzke on possible détente with bishops at theology society meeting

SAMPLING OF BROADCAST OUTLET APPEARANCES (June 1, 2013– May 31, 2014)

5-28-14: CNBC.com Center on Wealth & Philanthropy study on greatest wealth transfer in US history.

5-26-14: KSL.com (Utah) Sociology/David Karp re mental illness and marriage.

5-19-14: CBSNews.com Center for Retirement Research study cited on Americans saving for retirement.

5-19-14: CBSNews.com Center for Retirement Research study cited on Americans saving for retirement.

5-19-14: NBCNews.com History/Radu Florescu obituary.

5-16-14: MSNBC Carroll School of Management/Warren Zola re Donald Sterling vs. the NBA. 5-15-14: NBC.com Center on Aging & Work/Jacquelyn James re helping millennials adjust to the work world.

5-15-14: APM’s “Marketplace” Carroll School of Management/Kathleen Seiders re behavior of grocery shoppers.

5-12-14: WBUR Communication/Michael Keith re moving from pirate radio to legal station.

5-12-14: Fox 25 Boston School of Theology and Ministry/James Bretzke, SJ re satanic Mass to be staged at Harvard.

5-10-14: NPR.com Center for Work & Family/Jennifer Fraone re center’s new dad study.

5-8-14: WCVB-TV School of Theology and Ministry/James Bretzke, SJ re satanic Mass to be staged at Harvard.

5-5-14: WBUR Carroll School of Management/Richard McGowan, SJ re waning support for casinos.

5-5-14: NECN’s “BroadSide” Carroll School of Management/Richard McGowan, SJ re waning support for casinos.

4-30-14: KPCC (Southern California Radio) Carroll School of Management/Warren Zola re NBA sanctions against LA Clippers owner.

4-30-14: HuffPost Live Carroll School of Management/Warren Zola re NBA sanctions against LA Clippers owner.

4-30-14: CBCNews.com (Canada), NBC News.com Carroll School of Management/Warren Zola re NBA sanctions against LA Clippers owner.

4-29-14: APM’s “Marketplace” Law School/Ray Madoff re donor-advised funds.

4-27-14: NECN School of Theology and Ministry/James Bretzke, SJ re canonization of Popes John Paul II & John XXIII. 4-27-14: WCVB-TV Theology/Richard Gaillardetz re canonization of Popes John Paul II & John XXIII. 4-25-14: WWL.com (Louisiana) Theology/Rev. James Weiss & STM/James Bretzke, SJ re canonization of Popes John Paul II & John XXIII. 4-25-14: WCVB-TV School of Theology and Ministry/James Bretzke, SJ & CSOM/Richard Spinello re canonization of Pope John Paul II 4-25-14: Voice of Russia STM/James Bretzke, SJ re canonization of Popes JPII & John XXIII. 4-23-14: WRKO-AM “Financial Exchange” Law School/Daniel Lyons re Aereo case at the Supreme Court.

4-21-14: NECN Psychology/Joe Tecce re anniversary of Boston marathon bombings.

4-17-14: NECN Lynch School of Education/Karen Arnold re revamped SAT. 4-16-14: WBUR’s “Radio Boston” English/Paul Lewis re Edgar Allan Poe statue to be unveiled in October.

4-15-14: CNBC.com Center for Retirement Research/Alicia Munnell re outlook for public pensions.

4-15-14: WCVB-TV Alumnus Patrick Downes speaks at Boston Marathon anniversary event.

4-14-14: NECN Fine Arts/Karl Baden, 27th anniversary of his self-portrait project.

4-10-14: NBCNews.com Center for Retirement Research data cited in story about saving for college vs. retirement.

4-10-14: CNN.com Law School/Kent Greenfield re 50th anniversary of Civil Rights Act. 4-9-14: CBC Radio (Canada) English/Paul Lewis re Edgar Allan Poe statue to be unveiled in October.

4-9-14: Fox 25 Boston Center for Work & Family/Brad Harrington re paternity leave debate in pro sports.

4-8-14: WBZ Radio’s “NightSide” Center for Work & Family/Lauren Stiller Rikleen re her book on millennials at the workplace.

4-8-14: WBZ Radio News, WBZ-TV History/Jeremy Clarke, SJ & students’ lost pagoda project/exhibition.

4-8-14: WBUR.org’s “The Artery” Advance interview with Humanities Series speaker Emma Donoghue.

4-8-14: NBCNews.com Sloan Center on Aging & Work/Kevin Cahill re retirees in the workforce.

4-4-14: KPCC (Southern California Public Radio) Center for Work & Family/Brad Harrington re paternity leave debate in pro sports.

4-3-14: ABC News Ctr Work & Family report on paternity leave cited.

4-3-14: CNBC.com Center for Work & Family/Brad Harrington re paternity leave debate in pro sports.

4-3-14: WBUR.org “The ARTery” English/Paul Lewis re Edgar Allan Poe statue to be unveiled in October.

4-3-14: WBUR’s “Here & Now” Weston Observatory/John Ebel interviewed for feature on seismic noises in Connecticut.

4-1-14: WCBS Radio “NY Opening Bell Report” Center for Work & Family/Lauren Stiller Rikleen re her book on millennials at the workplace.

3-29-14: CNBC.com Center for Retirement Research data cited.

3-28-14: WWL-AM (New Orleans) Theology/Rev. James Weiss re Pope Francis’ popularity.

3-26-14: WBUR’s “CommonHealth” Connell School of Nursing/Judith Shindul-Rothschild re legislation on nurse-patient ratios.

3-26-14: NBC News.com Center for Retirement Research/Alicia Munnell re Americans managing 401(k)s.

3-24-14: WGBH News Law School/Kent Greenfield re Supreme Court case on corporation seeking religious exemption from ACA. 3-23-14: WCVB-TV School of Theology and Ministry/James Bretzke, SJ re Cardinal O’Malley being named to papal panel on sex abuse.

3-20-14: WBUR’s “Radio Open Source” Slavic & Eastern Languages/Maxim Shrayer, part of panel on Russian literature.

3-18-14: NECN Political Science/Paul Christensen re situation in Ukraine.

3-18-14: CNBC.com, Today.com Center on Wealth & Philanthropy research cited on women managing retirement wealth.

3-17-14: “Financial Exchange” Sloan Center on Aging & Work/Kevin Cahill re career opportunities for aging population.

3-17-14: NECN Center for Work & Family/Lauren Stiller Rikleen re her book on millennials in the workplace.

3-13-14: CNN.com Sociology/Gustavo Morello, SJ; Robert verEecke, SJ; STM students Sam Sawyer, SJ, Ryan Duns, SJ, Javier Montes, SJ, and Mario Powell, SJ reflect on first year of Pope Francis’ papacy.

3-12-14: Fox 25 Boston Theology/Richard Gaillardetz reflects on first year of Pope Francis’ papacy.

3-7-14: WCHS-TV (Charleston, WV) BC student Appalachia Volunteers doing community service over Spring Break in Huntington, WV. 3-6-14: “The Pat Kenny Show” (Ireland talk radio) Center for Work & Family/Brad Harrington re work-life issues for fathers.

3-6-14: WCVB-TV School of Theology & Ministry/Thomas Groome re Pope Francis’ comments on civil unions and other issues.

3-6-14: WBTW-TV (South Carolina) BC student Appalachia Volunteers doing community service over Spring Break in Florence, SC. 3-4-14: WBOY.com-TV (West Virginia) BC student Appalachia Volunteers doing community service over Spring Break in Monongalia county, WV. 3-4-14: NBC News.com Psychology/Joe Tecce re Vladimir Putin’s body language.

3-3-14: PBS Newshour Fine Arts/Karl Baden re his self-portrait project.

3-3-14: Fox 25 Boston History/Patrick Maney re release of papers from Clinton presidency.

2-28-14: Fox 25 Boston Graduate School of Social Work/Marylou Sudders re problems facing Mass. DCF. 2-28-14: NECN Health Promotion Office/Sheila Tucker re proposed new food labels.

2-26-14: “Financial Exchange” Law School/Daniel Lyons re Netflix and Comcast deal.

2-23-14: NECN’s “This Week in Business” Carroll School of Management/Richard McGowan, SJ re pending decisions on casino licenses in several towns.

2-21-14: WBZ-TV, WCVB-TV Fine Arts/Karl Baden, 27th anniversary of his self-portrait project.

2-20-14: America’s Work Force Radio Sloan Center on Aging and Work/Elizabeth Fideler on seniors working longer.

2-19-14: CCTV Biz Asia America Law School/Brian Quinn re proposed Comcast-Time Warner merger.

2-17-14: Fox 25 Boston Center for Work & Family/Lauren Stiller Rikleen re millennials living at home.

2-13-14: WBUR’s “Radio Boston” Graduate School of Social Work/Tiziana Dearing re wealth gap in Boston.

2-13-14: FOX Business News.com Law School/Brian Quinn re proposed Comcast-Time Warner merger.

2-12-14: WBUR’s “Radio Boston” Law School/Mary-Rose Papandrea re NY Post libel case.

2-12-14: Fox 25 Boston Center for Work & Family/Jennifer Fraone re work-life balance in relationships.

2-10-14: WBZ-AM’s “NightSide with Dan Rea” Carroll School of Management/Gregory Stoller re changing Chinese economy.

2-6-14: WBUR’s “All Things Considered” Law School/Caitlin Cahow re being part of US delegation to Olympics.

2-6-14: WHYY-FM (NPR affiliate, Philadelphia) “Radio Times” Carroll School of Management/Richard McGowan, SJ re growth of gambling 2-4-14: WILS (Michigan) “Capital City Recap” Center Work & Family/Lauren Stiller Rikleen re millennials in the workplace.

2-3-14: America magazine podcast Theology/James Keenan, SJ re Catholic Theological Ethics in the World project.

1-30-14: WGRZ-TV (NY) Alumna & Russian native Olga Khmylev to cover Sochi Olympics 1-30-14: Wisconsin Public Radio “The Kathleen Dunn Show” Ctr Work & Family/Brad Harrington re new dads face struggle in the workplace.

1-23-14: BBC Radio Lynch School of Education/M. Brinton Lykes re disciplinary action decision in Guantanamo Bay case.

1-21-14: NECN Political Science/Peter Krause re security at Olympics in Sochi.

1-19-14: RTE (Ireland) BC-Ireland/Mike Cronin re deaf women in Ireland.

1-17-14: MIT Press Journals podcast Political Science/Peter Krause re his paper on distribution of power in national movements.

1-17-14: RTE (Ireland) “The Pat Kenny Show” Philosophy/Richard Kearney re Ireland’s traumas.

1-16-14: WGBH “Greater Boston” Graduate School of Social Work/Marylou Sudders re problems with the Dept. of Children & Families.

1-15-14: Fox 25 Boston Center for Work & Family/Brad Harrington re making ends meet in current economy.

1-14-14: NPR “On Point” College of Arts & Sciences/Martha Bayles re US image abroad based on pop culture.

1-7-14: The Weather Channel Weston Observatory/John Ebel re cryoseism (frost quakes) in Canada.

1-6-14: NECN, WCVB-TV, WBZ-TV, Fox 25 Boston, WHDH-TV, WGBH Radio, WBUR-FM, WBZ-AM Coverage of the inauguration at Conte Forum of BC grad Marty Walsh as mayor of Boston.

1-3-14: CBC Radio (Canada) “As it Happens” Weston Observatory/John Ebel re cryoseism (frost quakes) in Canada.

12-20-13: NECN Graduate School of Social Work /Marylou Sudders re DCF case involving missing boy.

12-19-13: WBUR “Radio Boston” Graduate School of Social Work /Marylou Sudders re DCF case involving missing boy.

12-17-13: ABCNews.com Economics/Can Erbil re marketing strategy for Beyonce’s album release.

12-13-13: Fox 25 Boston Graduate School of Social Work/Marylou Sudders re work of gun violence task force.

12-12-13: WHDH-TV, WBZ.com Students Ethan Mack & Katie Rich swap zucchettos with Pope Francis in Rome.

12-12-13: NECN School of Theology and Ministry/James Bretzke, SJ re selection of Pope Francis as Time’s Person of the Year.

12-11-13: Fox Business Network’s “Money with Melissa Francis” BC Investment Club members Pablo Beltran & Keely Henesey interviewed regarding their stock picks.

12-11-13: NECN’s “BroadSide” History/Jeremy Clarke, SJ re selection of Pope Francis as Time’s Person of the Year.

12-11-13: NECN’s “BroadSide” Law School/Ray Madoff re donor-advised funds.

12-10-13: WBUR Graduate School of Social Work/Marylou Sudders re case of mental health client who killed his social worker.

12-9-13: NPR “On Point” Center for Retirement Research/Alicia Munnell re public pensions.

12-6-13: Fox 25 Boston Sociology/Zine Magubane re legacy of Nelson Mandela.

12-5-13: NECN, WCVB-TV Sociology/Zine Magubane re legacy of Nelson Mandela.

12-4-13: WBUR.org Center for Work & Family/Jennifer Fraone re how some firms are limiting the 24/7 work life.

12-3-13: WBUR.org Lynch School of Education/Philip Altbach re how Mass. kids perform on global testing scale.

12-3-13: Fox 25 Boston Communication/Matt Sienkiewicz re MBTA ad lawsuit.

11-28-13: BBC Radio Fine Arts/Jonathan Bloom re Islamic Golden Age. 11-27-13: PRI/WNYC’s “The Takeaway” School of Theology and Ministry/James Bretzke, SJ re Pope Francis’ declaration on capitalism.

11-24-13: NECN “This Week in Business” Carroll School of Management/Richard McGowan, SJ re Mass. casino proposals.

11-22-13: WCVB-TV Ch. 5 History/Patrick Maney provides live commentary of JFK 50th anniversary commemoration.

11-21-13: NECN History/Patrick Maney re JFK’s legacy.

11-19-13: WBUR “Morning Edition” Carroll School of Management/Richard McGowan, S.J., re Mass. casino proposals.

11-18-13: Fox 25 Boston Lynch School of Education/Julia DeVoy re Generation Wait.

11-18-13: CNN.com History/Heather Richardson re Obama attending Gettysburg anniversary event.

11-15-13: NECN Carroll School of Management/Margaret McLean re sentencing of Whitey Bulger.

11-14-13: NECN Carroll School of Management/Margaret McLean re Bulger trial, coverage of victim impact statements.

11-13-13: WGBH “Greater Boston” Law School/Robert Bloom re victim impact statements in Bulger trial.

11-13-13: Fox 25 Boston Center for Work & Family/Danielle Hartmann re declining birth rate in US. 11-13-13: NECN Carroll School of Management/Margaret McLean re Bulger trial, preview of victim impact statements.

11-12-13: NPR.com Law School/Brian Quinn re merger of US Air and American Airlines.

11-12-13: WBZ’s “NightSide” Admission/John Mahoney part of panel on college admissions.

11-11-13: NECN Athletics/Men’s Basketball team adopts Robo Arcand, teen with cancer.

11-8-13: ABCNews.com Economics/Robert Murphy re October Jobs Report.

11-8-13: NECN Carroll School of Management/John Gallaugher re Facebook opening offices in Cambridge.

11-7-13: NECN Economics/Can Erbil re holiday spending.

11-5-13: NBCNews.com, KOAA.com (Colorado Springs) School of Theology and Ministry/Thomas Groome re papal survey of laity.

11-5-13: WWL-AM (New Orleans) School of Theology and Ministry/James Bretzke, SJ re papal survey of laity.

11-1-13: WBZ-AM Psychology/Donnah Canavan re social energy re Red Sox World Series win.

10-30-13: BBC Radio Sociology/Kimberly Hoang re her study of Vietnamese sex workers.

10-30-13: NECN Law School/Alice Noble re Affordable Care Act. 10-25-13: New Mexico PBS affiliate Political Science/Jonathan Lawrence re his book the Emancipation of Europe’s Muslims.

10-21-13: CBS Moneywatch.com Center for Retirement Research/Alicia Munnell older workers don’t squeeze employment opportunities for younger workers.

10-18-13: NECN Economics/Robert Murphy re federal shutdown’s effect on consumer confidence.

10-17-13: WBUR.org Economics/Robert Murphy re federal shutdown’s effect on economic forecasting.

10-15-13: Talk Radio News.com Economics/Robert Murphy re debt ceiling.

10-14-13: CBS Boston.com “39 Steps” at Robsham a recommended fall show.

10-10-13: ABCNews.com Economics/Robert Murphy re debt ceiling.

10-10-13: WBZ-TV Graduate School of Social Work/Marylou Sudders re sex abuse by teachers.

10-9-13: iHeartRadio “Janine Turner Show” Psychology/Peter Gray re kids not playing outside anymore.

10-9-13: Fox 25 Boston Center for Work & Family/Jennifer Fraone re Pew report on work-life issues.

10-7-13: NBC’s “Today”/CNBC.com Carroll School of Management/Alicia Munnell re saving for retirement.

10-6-13: WBZ-TV’s “Keller@Large” Political Science/Marc Landy re shutdown of federal government.

10-4-13: APM’s “Marketplace” Carroll School of Management/Richard McGowan, SJ re online gambling industry.

10-3-13: NPR Psychology/Ellen Winner re the science behind prodigies.

10-3-13: NPR’s “Morning Edition”

Political Science/David Hopkins re shutdown of federal government.

10-2-13: NECN’s “BroadSide” Economics/Robert Murphy re shutdown of federal government.

9-26-13: WGBH-TV’s “Greater Boston” Political Science/Ali Banuazizi re president of Iran.

9-26-13: WBUR’s “RadioBoston” History/Robin Fleming, winner of MacArthur Genius Grant, interviewed about her research.

9-25-13: Voice of America Carroll School of Management/Michael Pratt re his study on confusion over professionals’ jobs.

9-25-13: WBGH’s “Boston Public Radio”, WBZ-TV History/Robin Fleming interviewed re winning a MacArthur Genius Grant.

9-25-13: CBSNews.com History/Robin Fleming, winner of MacArthur Genius Grant.

9-20-13: NECN’s “BroadSide” History/Jeremy Clarke, SJ interviewed re Pope Francis’ call for the church to be more merciful.

9-20-13: PRI/WNYC’s “The Takeaway” School of Theology and Ministry/James Bretzke, SJ interviewed re Pope Francis’ call for the church to be more merciful.

9-19-13: WBZ-TV School of Theology and Ministry/James Bretzke, SJ re Pope Francis’ call for the church to be more merciful.

9-18-13: Fox 25 Boston Center for Work & Family/Jennifer Fraone re technology’s role in connecting workers 24/7.

9-13-13: Fox 25 Boston Theology/Richard Gaillardetz re Vatican comments on married priests.

9-12-13: Fox 25 Boston Theology/Richard Gaillardetz re Vatican comments on married priests.

9-9-13: Fox 25 Boston Political Science/Peter Krause re crisis in Syria.

9-6-13: ABCNews.com Economics/Robert Murphy re August Jobs Report.

9-6-13: WCVB-TV’s “Chronicle” Bapst Library/Adeane Bregman re Bapst Library a hidden treasure of Boston.

9-3-13: NECN’s “BroadSide” Law School/Kent Greenfield re presidential authority to order military action in Syria.

8-28-13: WBZ-AM Lynch School/AJ Franklin re 50th anniversary of MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

8-28-13: WRKO-AM Political Science/Peter Krause re possible US military involvement in Syria.

8-28-13: NECN’s “The Morning Show” Political Science/Peter Krause re possible US military involvement in Syria.

8-28-13: Fox 25 Boston, WCVB-TV Political Science/David Deese re possible US military involvement in Syria.

8-27-13: Fox 25 Boston Political Science/Peter Krause re possible US military involvement in Syria.

8-17-13: CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS” Law School/Kent Greenfield re the contradictory nature of choice.

8-14-13: Fox 25 Boston Center for Work & Family/Jennifer Fraone re update on women who opted out of the work force.

8-14-13: WCVB-TV’s “Chronicle” Lynch School of Education/Mike Barnett re his hydroponic farm project with Boston Public School students.

8-13-13: NECN Carroll School of Management/Margaret McLean re verdict in trial of Whitey Bulger.

8-12-13: WCVB-TV, WBZ-AM Law School/Robert Bloom re verdict in the Whitey Bulger trial.

8-12-13: Wisconsin Public Radio Sloan Center on Aging & Work/Jacqueline James re workplace age discrimination.

8-12-13: NECN Carroll School of Management/Margaret McLean re jury deliberations in Bulger trial.

8-9-13: NECN Carroll School of Management/Margaret McLean re jury deliberations in Bulger trial.

8-8-13: WGBH-AM Carroll School of Management/Margaret McLean re the Whitey Bulger trial.

8-6-13: NECN Carroll School of Management/Margaret McLean re closing arguments in Bulger trial.

8-5-13: NECN Carroll School of Management/Margaret McLean re Bulger not testifying in his trial.

8-2-13: NECN

Carroll School of Management/Margaret McLean re possibility of Bulger testifying in his trial.

8-2-13: NECN Carroll School of Management/Margaret McLean re the Whitey Bulger trial.

8-2-13: WBUR “Radio Boston” School of Theology and Ministry/Thomas Groome re Pope Francis and gays in the Church.

8-2-13: ABCNews.com Economics/Robert Murphy re July Jobs Report.

8-2-13: WBZ-AM Law School/Michael Cassidy re the Whitey Bulger trial.

8-2-13: WBZ-AM Law School/Robert Bloom re the Whitey Bulger trial.

8-1-13: NECN Carroll School of Management/Margaret McLean re the Whitey Bulger trial.

7-31-13: WBUR “Radio Boston” Law School/Zygmunt Plater re his book The Snail Darter and the Dam. 7-31-13: WBUR.org Law School/Mary-Rose Papandrea re verdict in Bradley Manning case.

7-31-13: NECN Carroll School of Management/Margaret McLean re Bulger trial.

7-30-13: NECN Carroll School of Management/Margaret McLean re Bulger trial.

7-30-13: NPR “The Two-Way” Law School/Mary-Rose Papandrea re verdict in Bradley Manning case.

7-30-13: WWL-AM (New Orleans) Theology/Rev. James Weiss re gay priests and women priests.

7-30-13: Radio Jamaica Theology/Rev. James Weiss re gay priests.

7-29-13: NECN Carroll School of Management/Margaret McLean re summary of prosecution’s case in Bulger trial.

7-29-13: KCBS-AM San Francisco, Fox 25 Boston School of Theology and Ministry/James Bretzke, SJ re Pope Francis’ comments on gay priests.

7-29-13: WBZ-TV, WCVB-TV School of Theology and Ministry/Thomas Groome re Pope Francis’ comments on gay priests.

7-23-13: WCVB-TV

Psychology/Donnah Canavan re social energy shared in celebration of birth of Prince George.

7-23-13: WBZ-TV Center for Work & Family/Brad Harrington re CFW study on paternity leave.

7-23-13: NECN Carroll School of Management/Margaret McLean re drama in the Bulger trial.

7-22-13: NECN Carroll School of Management/Margaret McLean re testimony in the Bulger trial.

7-22-13: NBC “Nightly News” Center for Retirement Research/Jean-Pierre Aubry re Detroit bankruptcy’s impact on pensions.

7-19-13: NECN Carroll School of Management/Margaret McLean re death of potential witness in Bulger trial.

7-18-13: NECN Carroll School of Management/Margaret McLean re the Whitey Bulger trial.

7-18-13: CBS Sports Radio Carroll School of Management/Warren Zola EA Sports using NCAA logos.

7-18-13: NPR.org Law School/Mary-Rose Papandrea re WikiLeaks case ruling.

7-18-13: WBZ-AM Communication/Matt Sienkiewicz re controversy over Rolling Stone cover photo of marathon bomber.

7-18-13: Fox News Channel Earth and Environmental Sciences/John Ebel re clues volcanoes might emit before eruption.

7-17-13: NECN Carroll School of Management/Margaret McLean re the Whitey Bulger trial.

7-17-13: NESN Carroll School of Management/Warren Zola re NCAA ending its deal with EA Sports.

7-15-13: NECN, Carroll School of Management/Margaret McLean re the Whitey Bulger trial.

7-12-13: NECN, WBZ-AM History/Alan Rogers re new DNA technologies used in the Boston Strangler case.

7-10-13: NECN Carroll School of Management/Margaret McLean re Whitey Bulger trial.

7-10-13: Fox 25 Boston Center for Work & Family/Danielle Hartmann re summer child care issues for working parents.

7-10-13: Bloomberg-TV â&#x20AC;&#x153;Street Smartâ&#x20AC;?

Law School/Brian Quinn re Carl Icahn's deal for Dell.

7-10-13: WBZ-AM Law School/Michael Cassidy re possibility of the death penalty in the case of marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

7-9-13: NECN Carroll School of Management/Margaret McLean re Whitey Bulger trial.

7-8-13: NECN Carroll School of Management/Margaret McLean re Whitey Bulger trial.

7-5-13: ABCNews.com Economics/Robert Murphy re latest jobs report.

7-3-13: NECN Carroll School of Management/Margaret McLean re Whitey Bulger trial.

7-2-13: NECN Carroll School of Management/Margaret McLean re Whitey Bulger trial.

July: Danish Broadcasting Corp.

Michael Padulsky '15, co-organizer of the student-led "Last Five" walk, re Boston's response to the Marathon bombings.

6-28-13: NECN Carroll School of Management/Margaret McLean re Whitey Bulger trial.

6-27-13: NECN Psychology/Joseph Tecce re body language of ex-Patriots player Aaron Hernandez, charged with murder.

6-26-13: NECN Carroll School of Management/Margaret McLean re the Whitey Bulger trial.

6-24-13: NECN Carroll School of Management/Margaret McLean re the Whitey Bulger trial.

6-21-13: NECN Carroll School of Management/Margaret McLean re the Whitey Bulger trial.

6-20-13: NECN Carroll School of Management/Margaret McLean re the Whitey Bulger trial.

6-19-13: NECN Carroll School of Management/Margaret McLean re the Whitey Bulger trial.

6-18-13: NECN Carroll School of Management/Margaret McLean re the Whitey Bulger trial.

6-17-13: NECN

Carroll School of Management/Margaret McLean re the Whitey Bulger trial.

6-14-13: NECN Carroll School of Management/Margaret McLean re the Whitey Bulger trial.

6-14-13: CNN BC students studying abroad in Kuwait are interviewed re Islamic superhero comic book.

6-14-13: NPR Burns Library’s collection of Bobbie Hanvey photographs highlighted in interview with Hanvey’s son.

6-14-13: CBSNews.com Center for Work & Family report on stay-at-home dads cited.

6-13-13: ABC.net.au (Australian Broadcasting Co.) Philosophy/Jeffrey Bloechl re Charles Taylor and the Church.

6-13-13: NECN Carroll School of Management/Chief Executives Club luncheon with GM CEO Dan Akerson.

6-13-13: NECN Carroll School of Management/Margaret McLean re Whitey Bulger trial.

6-12-13: NECN Carroll School of Management/Margaret McLean re Whitey Bulger trial.

6-12-13: Fox 25 Boston Center for Work & Family/Brad Harrington re changing role of fathers.

6-11-13: NECN Carroll School of Management/Margaret McLean re Whitey Bulger trial.

6-10-13: NECN Carroll School of Management/Margaret McLean re Whitey Bulger trial.

6-6-13: NPR Law School/Kent Greenfield re National Security Agency’s surveillance of citizen’s phone calls.

6-5-13: WCVB-TV Law School/Robert Bloom re finding jurors for the Whitey Bulger trial.

6-5-13: NPR’s “Morning Edition” Law School/Michael Cassidy re the Whitey Bulger trial.

6-5-13: NECN Carroll School of Management/Margaret McLean re the Whitey Bulger trial.

6-3-13: NECN Carroll School of Management/Margaret McLean re the Whitey Bulger trial.

2013-­‐2014 Social Media Report The Office of News & Public Affairs maintains all the University’s official social media channels. The following is a snapshot of the audience and reach of those channels this year.

Audience: SOCIAL MEDIA CHANNEL Facebook Twitter YouTube LinkedIn Google+ Flickr Instagram

AUDIENCE 85,700 40,200 680,000+ views 87,680 2,676 872,000+ views 38,353 (Rank fluctuates between #1-­‐3 among U.S. university channels)

Boston College Facebook and Twitter:

Twitter Demographics:

Accolades:

Facebook Demographics:

YouTube Demographics: