Tag Archives: Guest Column

Bales: Presidential history through a daughter’s lens

August 22, 2012 by The Chautauquan Daily 0 Comments

Living in the White House is magnificent, especially, as in my case, for a teenager. The opportunities to see and be a part of history are endless. I will always cherish that time and will always be grateful to the American people for the confidence they placed in Dad and our family during that turbulent time.

But there’s a difficult part of growing up in the White House that’s usually overlooked: the effect of criticisms — often harsh and relentless — of our dads and moms. I suspect presidential children from Sasha and Malia Obama to Lynda and Luci Johnson to Alice Roosevelt Longworth would say they were affected — many times significantly — by political attacks on their presidential dads. I certainly felt those criticisms, which were leveled not just against Dad, but also against Mom. However, Americans have recently experienced a re-examination of Dad’s presidency through the more dispassionate historical lens and that, in turn, has affected the impact of those earlier criticisms on me.

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Romano: America the Philosophical

August 13, 2012 by The Chautauquan Daily 0 Comments

Guest column by Carlin Romano.

“America the Philosophical?” It sounds like “Canada the Exhibitionist” — a mental miscue. Everyone knows Americans don’t take philosophy seriously, don’t pay any attention to it and couldn’t name a contemporary academic philosopher if their passports depended on it. As historian Richard Hofstadter dryly observed in his Pulitzer Prize-winning Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, “In the United States the play of the mind is perhaps the only form of play that is not looked upon with the most tender indulgence.”

But if the title phenomenon of Hofstadter’s classic indeed boasts “a long, historical background,” the peculiar attitude directed at philosophy in America is more quizzical than hostile, closer to good-humored wariness than contempt. Philosophy doesn’t threaten or bother the practical on-the-go American. The American middle manager confronted with a devoted philosophy type is most likely to yank out the old cliché, “What are you going to do, open a philosophy store?” and leave it at that. If, of course, the information has been accurately downloaded. Tell your seatmate on a short-haul flight that you’re “in philosophy,” and the reply is likely to be: “Oh, that’s great. My niece is in psychology, too.”

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Sullivan: Creating a culture of honor and integrity

August 10, 2012 by The Chautauquan Daily 0 Comments

Leaders of the United States’ colleges and universities continually ask ourselves, “How can we create a culture of honor and integrity?” As a sociologist, teacher and university president, I take a special interest in that topic. I will explore the topic further today as the Chautauqua Institution lecture series continues to address the theme “The Ethics of Cheating.”

The sheer numbers of college students who cheat alarms me, and it should alarm their future employers. In a 1964 study, sociologist William Bowers surveyed more than 5,000 students on 99 campuses and found that three-fourths of the students had engaged in some form of academic dishonesty. Follow-up studies in subsequent decades showed similar results. In a meta-analysis of 107 cheating studies conducted between 1970 and 1996, researchers found that 70 percent of students on average had engaged in various cheating behaviors, including 43 percent who admitted to cheating on exams and 47 percent who admitted to plagiarism.

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Allenby: Destabilizing the self

August 1, 2012 by The Chautauquan Daily 0 Comments

Galileo had a major problem. It was not just that the Dominicans were locked in a struggle with the Jesuits over difficult matters of doctrine and intellectual leadership of the Church, and he had gotten himself crosswise in that messy conflict. It was not just that his book, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, published in 1632, was — foolishly, and perhaps arrogantly — written in such a way as to make an enemy out of Pope Urban VIII, who had heretofore been his friend. And it was not just that his argument that the sun, not the earth, was the center of the solar system appeared to violate the clear language of the Bible (e.g., Psalm 104:5, New International Version: “He set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved”). No, it was that his heliocentric theory violated the clear evidence of the senses. People all around the world, every day, watched the sun move across the sky. They were not blown off the planet by the winds that movement at the rate Galileo claimed would certainly generate. The earth stood solid underneath them, and the sun moved above them; to suggest otherwise was simply nonsense.

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Jon Gertner: The meaning of innovation, and why we should care

July 10, 2012 by The Chautauquan Daily 0 Comments

Here’s a quick question that seems simple but that I think is a lot harder than it looks: What does the word “innovation” mean? Is it the same as invention? Or is it more similar to discovery? We probably know that innovation has something to do with human creativity and usually with new technology. But can innovation just be explained as any kind of creative new thing or idea? Or is it something altogether different?

These days, on the television news or in the business press, we can’t go long before hearing about new, innovative companies. In fact, it’s become a steady drumbeat. We hear about innovative products and innovative “apps” for our smartphones. Or we hear about fantastically innovative people, like the late Steve Jobs, who have earned themselves the honorific of being called innovators. But it can sometimes be difficult to separate truth from hype. What’s more is there seems little doubt that the term innovation now seems to function much like a buzzword: We hear it so often, and apply it so indiscriminately, that we may have only the haziest sense of its definitions. Meanwhile, as the deeper meanings of innovation have become obscured, I’ve often wondered: Does that mean we have lost a sense of what innovation requires, or why it’s so difficult, or why — when it succeeds — it can be so central to our culture and economy?

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Michelle Nunn: We are the ones we’ve been waiting for

July 9, 2012 by The Chautauquan Daily 1 Comment

Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Teresa, Jonas Salk, Clara Barton. Those are hallowed names of people who live in our historical imagination. Yet none of them held elected office. None of them ran corporations or made millions of dollars.

Although our society admires celebrity and material reward, those whom we most revere give of themselves and make a difference for others. The problem is that those iconic figures have become so lionized that it can seem impossible to aspire to be like them. They seem to be of another world, one of superheroes and saints. Yet the transformations they achieved — in the world and in themselves — are within our reach.

I have seen firsthand that ordinary people are capable of superhero-like accomplishments. My hope is that my speech today prompts you to believe that you can, in the words of Gandhi, “be the change you wish to see in the world.”

We live in a world of self-help, but the most profound and fundamental way to help ourselves lies in our ability to reach out and help others — to extend beyond our own needs to support those around us. There is a profound truth in Dr. King’s familiar pronouncement that “everybody can be great because everybody can serve.” Service is the great equalizer. We each have remarkable gifts and discover our greatest selves when we reach out beyond ourselves.

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Ayres

Whit Ayres: History puts poll numbers in context

July 3, 2012 by The Chautauquan Daily 0 Comments

Both long-term and short-term forces determine the outcome of U.S. presidential elections. Long-term forces include the state of the economy, voters’ satisfaction with the direction of the country and the level of stability in world affairs. Short-term forces include candidate speeches, political ads and presidential debates.

In 2008, the long-term forces — overwhelming dissatisfaction with the direction of the country, fatigue with eight years of a Republican president, fear over the financial meltdown — created an enormous tailwind for Barack Obama. He and his team ran a superb campaign, but the effect of that campaign was far more evident during his Democratic primary win over Hillary Clinton than during the general election. In the general, a mediocre campaign would have defeated John McCain given the forces at Obama’s back.

In 2012, the long-term forces are reversed for President Obama. Three-fourths of voters are dissatisfied with the direction of the country, unemployment remains a full percentage point higher than the highest a post-Depression president running for reelection has ever survived, and a majority of the country still thinks we are in a recession. Those forces create a strong headwind for the president’s campaign.

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Rereading Montaigne’s last essays

June 27, 2012 by The Chautauquan Daily 0 Comments

Two months after the al-Qaida attacks on the World Trade Center, Michael Dirda, editor of The Washington Post’s “Book World,” wrote to ask a number of writers, including me, to write about our favorite “comfort” books — ones we returned to in times of stress, “if only for the balm of the familiar and beloved.” I was glad to accept the invitation, not least because of that word “balm.” In the wake of the devastation, I had gone back to Michel de Montaigne’s Essays; the contrast they offered, I noted in my journal, had felt like “balm for the soul.”

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