Column: Against the Grain

We live too much in a “food positive,” as well as a “sex positive” age — one in which we tend to defend self-seeking satiation of appetites as the individual right to do with our bodies what we want.

As an institution devoted to critical thinking, there’s a striking lack of reflection about the purpose or goal of competitiveness and the means by which we achieve that end.

By participating in the promotion of a single worldwide norm of advanced education, we reduce the actual diversity of views on education and attainment in the world.

If our newest building evinces no external acknowledgement of the university’s Catholic identity, this is hardly a radically new development.

Much of the explanatory strength of economics, however, rests on a narrow and even unrealistic understanding of human behavior.

In the very act of scouring the world for the best and brightest and putting them on the path to upward mobility, we may be accelerating downward mobility for a great many of our countrymen.

Is there room for viewpoints and perspectives that do not, strictly speaking, seek to tolerate difference, but whose commitments may consist in judging other beliefs or ways of life to be wrong?

Is our unquestioned commitment to a preparation for a future of globalization another instance of wishful thinking that obscures our ability to see opposing evidence to this supposedly inevitable process?

Could our students be a leaven in a materialist culture that has shown little sign of changing a year later? Can we have the courage to lead by a different and better example?