Web Browsing- Professors' Liberalism Contagious? Maybe Not - NYTimes.com 3 November 2008Do liberal faculty affect the political leanings of students? These people say no. But let's look a little deeper. One author says "it is really hard to change the mind of anyone over 15." Does this mean that the average American thinks about politics now the same way he did when he was 15? Yikes. It appears to imply that political opinions are not firmly rooted in ideas, but in feelings and prejudices. The article also suggests that the real problem is that students aren't actually being educated. They aren't getting the "good stuff." In fact, this may be the root of the problem. Even if students don't buy the liberalism of their teachers, they don't get much else either. Notable deficiencies appear in political and military history, especially of the West, but also include traditional literary criticism (and probably content), civics, and economics.
- Obama, Shaman by Michael Knox Beran, City Journal Summer 2008 3 November 2008Beran brilliant combines culture, religion, and literature into a powerful commentary on the religious aspects of Barack Obama's candidacy. The article is rich (and lengthy), but certainly worth digesting.
- Obama and the Politics of Crowds - WSJ.com 30 October 2008Fouad Ajami offers a rich and culturally insightful glimpse into Senator Obama's magic. He draws upon broad themes and key historical features of American cultural history to make his case for caution. Perhaps most telling is his observation about an American distinctive. Whereas the rest of the world champions equality, American has championed liberty. Obama offers the former, and the current financial panic has suspended Americans' faith in the latter. Consequently, we are on the verge of electing someone who inspires in the way a relgious leader, a messiah, does. But the religious hype quickly fades and people realize too late that they have been fleeced.
- America's Most Overrated Product: the Bachelor's Degree - Chronicle.com 24 October 2008Chronicle of Higher Ed points out the pointlessness of most bachelor's degrees.
- Professors' Liberalism Contagious? Maybe Not - NYTimes.com 3 November 2008
Dec
22
Roger Scruton
Filed Under Education, Philosophy | Leave a Comment
I’m a big fan of Roger Scruton. His books on philosophy and culture have done much to create my love of philosophy and to deepen my understanding of culture. He has a recent article called “Two Virtues of Western Culture” which addresses culture, philosophy, and education. It is an excellent article.
Dec
19
Interview
Filed Under News | Leave a Comment
It’s Wednesday evening and I’m at the library. I got a call today asking me to come for an interview in Roanoke tomorrow. This is for a job that I applied for in August. I’m not sure what’s going on with it anymore, but this is (I think) the second interview of 3. If you would, please pray that it goes well. I’ll try to post an update as soon as I can.
Details–
Company: Virtual IT www.virtualitinc.com
Position: IT Help-desk at the Radford Army Ammunition Plant
Interview time: 2 pm
Interview with: Juliet Silver, CEO
Update: Thursday @ 4:30 pm
The interview went quite well, I think. At least the process will continue. I will have at least one more interview sometime in the new year. I also have to have several background checks and some other similar things. But the important thing is that it appears I will get the job, assuming I still want it and everything checks out on me (if it doesn’t, I hope they let me know 
).
The projected start date for the job is Jan 7. Of course, it’s dealing with the government, so who knows how long things might actually take.
Thanks for praying…please keep it up.
Dec
6
Financial Aid
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We have spent the last few months trying to get all my paperwork in for financial aid. It wasn’t until halfway through the semester that we realized I could still apply. So, we began filling out the information right away. Within a few weeks the school had all the paperwork necessary with one exception: our W-2 forms.
When Andrew did our taxes last year he accidentally sent in our copies of the W-2, so we needed to contact the IRS for a transcript. We filled out a paper request and sent it in. Weeks went by. When we were in Greenville over Thanksgiving my mom suggested I look into things because we still hadn’t received the transcript after 6 weeks. I navigated the IRS webpage for awhile and eventually discovered that it should have taken a transcript 10 days to come. I also discovered a phone number that we could call.
Andrew made the first phone call. He talked to a live person and put in the request. It came in the mail by the end of the week. Last Friday I eagerly took it to the financial aid office only to be told that we were actually sent the 1040 form. So, I called the IRS. The lady said I could request only my W-2s, and Andrew would have to request his. He called Monday for them. Yesterday we received mail from the IRS. Again, instead of sending W-2s we got a different-looking version of the 1040. And this was from his request. I was wondering where my request went.
I received a voicemail from my mom today. “I think they sent your W-2s to us here in Greenville.†Sure enough, she had gotten them today. I don’t know how they ended up there since I had a long conversation with the IRS lady about my current address.
My dad faxed my W-2s to the financial aid office, and BJU faxed Andrew’s (I had 4 employers last year as opposed to Andrew’s one). I called the financial aid office, and lo and behold, they received them and all my paper work is FINALLY in. It should take about 2 weeks before I find out if I’m eligible.
Lessons Learned:
Always keep your W-2 forms.
Remember you can apply for financial aid at any time.
Talk to a live person at the IRS. Even if they send you the wrong forms at least you got something from them.
Repeatedly make sure the IRS person you talk to understands exactly what a W-2 form is.
(By the way, the IRS customer service people are very nice to talk to. They’re articulate, efficient–mostly–and friendly. By far the best CSR people I’ve ever talked to.–comment added by Andrew)
Dec
4
Recovering fundamentalists?
Filed Under Theology | 5 Comments
Do these people really mean to imply that fundamentalism is a kind of sickness?
Lincoln has recently posted his observations about a Facebook thread called “Recovering Fundamentalists.” Since he has closed comments, I will make a couple of observations here.
1. Victimization in Fundamentalism
Sure, so-called fundamentalists have abused people. The people whining on the Facebook thread are almost certainly not among the more serious cases. Besides, we shouldn’t critique an ideology because of the way people have abused it. If we did, we should critique Christianity itself (think Inquisition, Crusades, etc.). We critique ideologies for what they say. Fundamentalism (as an idea) does not condone spiritual abuse–quite the opposite.
2. Ingratitude
Lincoln fails to make a subtle point in his initial post. He corrects it in his last comment. The problem is not necessarily that these people aren’t grateful. It’s that you can’t tell. One commenter observes that gratitude does not preclude criticism. Of course it doesn’t. But one should still be grateful, even if criticism is justified. The problem with these Facebook conversations (and I’m sure there are other forums for them as well) is that few seem genuinely grateful. It’s all criticism (and other less refined sniping).
3. Myopia
I think these threads are myopic, but maybe not in exactly the sense Lincoln mentions1. Many on these kinds of threads seem to be unable to see past their own nose. There are factual inaccuracies, hasty generalizations, fallacies of accident, and a host of other logical and rhetorical blunders. The funny thing is, these people seem to think that their time away from BJU (for that is really the topic most of the time) gives them an outsiders considered perspective. In reality, most of their thinking is still governed by the fundamentalist (BJ) culture. They’re just reacting to ideas they disagree with, rather than offering substantive original ideas. Their methods offer little for edification.
A word on my view2: I tend to think that a number of the more thoughtful commenters on these threads actually have some decent ideas and criticisms. But the ideas are buried so far beneath the caustic rhetoric that they are no longer powerful.
I think fundamentalism, even the BJ variety, could stand a little more self-criticism than it sometimes gets. Not everything in the movement is worth keeping. In some places, tradition and cultural distinctives have supplanted biblical truth. In some places, theology has become suspect (though this is rare in the BJ circles, IMO). But regardless, the tone and substance of the few Facebook discussions I’ve seen are doing nothing to help solve any problems, much less help anyone reading and participating.
- I’m not sure that these people have enough impact on those around them to seriously damage the future cause of the Kingdom. Maybe some do, in which case, Lincoln’s comments are sound back↩
- In thinking about this subject, I considered the difference in content and tone between the Facebook threads I’ve read and a site such as SharperIron. SI has its share of people who don’t care for BJU or certain aspects of fundamentalism. However, the tone with which people criticize BJU and fundamentalism in general is quite different from that on the Facebook threads. There are some interesting demographical differences between the sites, which actually may contribute to the difference between their treatments of the issues at hand back↩
Dec
1
I have a job…for now
Filed Under News | 3 Comments
On Thursday I started a temporary job at SunGard in the VT Corporate Research Center. It’s more or less 40 hours per week, at a decent hourly rate. I’m doing OCR corrections on a computer with about 20 other temp workers.
OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition. A document is scanned into a computer, then software tries to read the characters and interpret them. In this case, the computer gives each character a score, depending on how well it thinks that it read the character. If the score is too low for a character or a word, that character will come to us so that we can read it and type in the correct letter or number (or word).
The documents that we are working with are insurance claim forms from California. The software scans the form initially to locate the various fields on the paper. When subsequent forms are scanned, the information in those fields goes into a database. When fields are blank or misaligned, we have to correct them in addition to correcting the characters.
SunGard uses a program to make corrections go very fast. It’s really pretty impressive. We are supposed to average about 6000 keystrokes an hour (and they can track our speed). I’m not sure how fast we are supposed to be able to correct the forms, but yesterday I did 600 of them. Doing a little math, I estimate that there are probably a little under a million forms to check. Obviously, speed is very important.
Once I’ve worked there a little more, I might post again about some of the nifty technical things that the programmers have employed. Some of them are very well-thought-out. But the work itself can become mind-numbing because you have little or no context for the corrections. I wouldn’t want to do this kind of work for the rest of my life–or even the rest of the school year for that matter. But for now it is a job and I am grateful.