Michael Kevane

I love how he sings “contemplal” for “contemplar”…

Everybody is talking about it.  I made up my mind a long time ago.  When I have to make a choice, I prefer not to buy products where the profits go to people who are already very wealthy. It is as simple as that.  Sure, go ahead and ask me some silly question about whether it is a consistent approach to the world, or if it even makes sense.  Or if I even really do it.  I can take the criticism.

But it really does make a (OK probably small) difference in my choices, and if everyone did it…. why…. there wouldn’t be so much inequality.  The places you can start are extremely obvious: if you have to watch live sports, go to a high school game; if you have to buy a computer, don’t buy Apple (trust me… I’ve just finished interacting with 60 college students, and the ratio of Apple to PC of “I don’t know how this actually works” is like 2:1); if you have to eat at a restaurant, go to a local ethnic restaurant or some other small place; if you have to watch a movie or television, don’t ever pay for Michael Bay; if you have to buy clothing… go to Goodwill; and so on… you get the idea… the billionaires and plutocrats would really hate it if my frugal anti-.1% buying habits became very popular…

Now excuse me while I go cancel this WordPress blog and our Netflix streaming subscription.

It is a fine review paper (Changes in land tenure and agricultural intensification in sub-Saharan Africa) of some of the recent literature (especially by the authors and co-authors), but I cannot resist pointing out that there is no mention of gender at all in the article, and the one reference dealing with gender (by Quisumbing and co-authors) is not actually cited in the current draft. Also there is no reference to the extensive literature from French West Africa (Lavigne-Delville, Mathieu, Jacob, etc) … they really need to find a bilingual co-author so that they can incorporate lots of the important Francophone literature… Guys, I’m available!

I guess if I were advising a university president, I would advise against treating faculty as short-sighted rabble-rousers… a staff member in my school had the funniest retort… “gee, I wasn’t aware that anything was being planned… maybe we should plan something now?”

While we work towards building a stronger Santa Clara, I am troubled that some members of our community are considering approaches that may be disruptive or destructive rather than constructive. I understand that some of the actions being contemplated include encouraging a work stoppage and conducting a “no-confidence vote” targeted at individual administrators or the entire Board of Trustees. I believe these and similar proposed actions are short-sighted and fraught with serious repercussions that could harm Santa Clara University for years to come.

The last chapter for full gender convergence, according to Goldin, is about reorganizing (private sector) flexibility and life-cycle job experience away from 24/7 type “all-in” jobs…. and she notes optimistically this is happening in many sectors.  But one sector where it is not happening (by anecdotal accounts) is the “coding” sector here in Silicon Valley, which is producing most of the wealth in my corner of the world… it still seems 100% all-in.

Lifetime job experience rose along with labor force participation. Years of education for women increased more than it did for men and it changed in content for secondary and college education toward more investment-oriented and fewer consumption-oriented courses and concentrations. Professional and graduate pro-gram enrollment increased for women so that about half of all law and medical enrollments today are women, and women lead men in fields such as the biological sciences, pharmacy, optometry, and veterinary medicine.Women, particularly college graduates, increased their desire to attain “career and family.” Hours of work for women increased in the market and decreased in the home relative to those of men. Female earnings rose relative to males in an era that saw women “swimming against the tide” of generally rising income inequality.

via A Grand Gender Convergence: Its Last Chapter – aer.104.4.1091.

 The Faculty Senate Council [of Santa Clara University], by majority vote at its March 12 meeting, approved the following statement in response to the Board of Trustees’ letter of February 14, regarding President Engh’s decision to drop insurance coverage of “elective” abortions and his decision’s implications for shared governance at SCU:

To all members of the Santa Clara Community,

President Engh’s decision, supported by the Board of Trustees, contradicts Santa Clara’s mission. The Trustees’ letter invokes the recent additions to their bylaws that state that President Engh “has a duty to enhance and advance the identity and mission of the University as a Jesuit, Catholic university. In making the Decision, the President carried out this duty.” With identity and mission thus determined as under the President’s purview, faculty and staff are no longer recognized as crucial partners in the advancement of the university’s mission, goals, and success. We become merely the instruments through which the President’s and the Trustees’ definitions and visions are carried out, diminishing our vibrant community in two particularly important ways.

First, the decision contradicts our stated goal of fostering a diverse and inclusive community. Prohibition of health care coverage for a medical procedure on the basis of theology reflects a profound lack of respect for the moral discernment of faculty and staff (and dependents) as whole persons of conscience. How can we educate citizens and leaders of competence, conscience, and compassion, if we are not deemed worthy of exercising our own consciences?

The Trustees erroneously claim that this decision is necessary to uphold SCU’s Jesuit, Catholic character. To the contrary, such a choice upholds the doctrine of the Catholic Church while drastically undermining our unwavering commitment to the philosophical, paradigmatic, and theological pluralism that has formed the hallmark of Jesuit, Catholic education and attracted excellent and diverse students, staff, and faculty to SCU. Integral to welcoming and respecting other religious and philosophical traditions is feeling welcome and respected ourselves. As a Jesuit, Catholic institution, our primary goal is not to enforce doctrine, but to engage in intellectual and academic discourse, which requires a deepening of respect for and engagement with other discourses. Our mission is best served when the university models that same respect and engagement in its internal operations.

Second, this decision and its enforcement by the Trustees have led to a crisis of faith and trust in the mission, governance, and administration of the university. These feelings of alienation and betrayal are exacerbated by the tone as well as the content of the Trustees’ letter: “The Trustees decline the Faculty Senate’s request to instruct the President to follow and be bound by the ‘long established procedures of shared governance.’” If this new paradigm is implemented, anything to do with the identity and mission of the university as a Jesuit, Catholic university (which imbues everything we do as a community) is now beyond the shared governance system.

Santa Clara’s shared governance is not a matter of mere faculty perception. The Faculty Handbook, the UPC Charter, and other governance documents establish structure, rules, and principles. Prior to the Trustees’ decision, these documents created space for consultation and negotiation. In areas of disagreement, our tradition was to find solutions that were acceptable to all parties. The Trustees’ decision, if implemented, would obviate that tradition.

The Faculty Senate Council rejects the Trustees’ reasoning and conclusion, and strongly objects to their decision. We remain adamant that President Engh must work closely with faculty to achieve a shared understanding of the mission, identity, and evolving goals with which the entire SCU community is charged.

Passover at the University of Texas at Austin this year will feature matzo with a hint of jalapeño. The Haggadahs will be in Hebrew, English and Spanish. The celebration will feature the sounds of a mariachi band, and the taste of guacamole will replace the more familiar maror and charoset. If past years are any indication, the March 26 seder at Hillel will draw more than two hundred participants…. Similar scenes of Jews and Latinos coming together are playing out at universities across the nation. UT-Austin, the University of California at Irvine and the University of Pennsylvania are just a few campuses where Latino-Jewish student groups have been formed. In Tucson, Arizona there is even a Jewish-Latino Teen coalition run by the Jewish Federation of Southern Arizona…..  “Groups that have a similar cause or ideology can act together, because one big voice can help create change,” said Deborah Kolton, a Guatemalan Jew and a member of the coalition.

via Spicy Texas Passover at UT-Austin – Forward.com.

Millions of euros spent on President Zuma’s private home…

Normally, in Word, when hovering your cursor over an EndNote-linked piece of text, the background to the text will go grey. If you try to copy & paste that chunk of text, the grey background will also be copied, no matter what you do!

Once you paste it into Word, there is a little “clipboard” that appears until you do something else. Click on it and select, “text only” and it will remove the “hyperlink” and field information. — if it has italics, it might also remove that though.

If you just want the hyperlink gone, reformat the bibliography on the original document and turn off that option in the dialog. bottom, of the first tab, untick box. This will keep the endnote “field” but not the hyperlink.

As an alternative, make a copy of the original document and removed all the field links. This will break any link to Endnote though. This is an option remove field codes on the endnote toolbar. If you want the “field” info intact linking it to Endnote, and thus reformat-able and just don’t want your Word document to reflect it, you should turn off the “field highlighting” in word which is of 3 flavors. Only show when selected, always show, or never show. These are in the Word Options, advanced in Word 2010 accessible from the file menus.

Sigh. All great answers. but in my case copy editor has already edited the bibliography and NOW wants me to remove the hyperlinks (defined by squirrelly brackets {}) but the copy editor uses those too for comments, so i can’t remove them…. Argh!

via How to delete the grey background? – Thomson Reuters Community.

Wonderful essay by Walter Dean Myers.

Books transmit values. They explore our common humanity. What is the message when some children are not represented in those books? Where are the future white personnel managers going to get their ideas of people of color? Where are the future white loan officers and future white politicians going to get their knowledge of people of color? Where are black children going to get a sense of who they are and what they can be?  And what are the books that are being published about blacks? Joe Morton, the actor who starred in “The Brother From Another Planet,” has said that all but a few motion pictures being made about blacks are about blacks as victims. In them, we are always struggling to overcome either slavery or racism. Book publishing is little better. Black history is usually depicted as folklore about slavery, and then a fast-forward to the civil rights movement. Then I’m told that black children, and boys in particular, don’t read. Small wonder.  There is work to be done.

The point is just as true if you are a kid in an African village, or in Accra.

For FAVL books see here.

For Kathy Knowles books see here.

via Where Are the People of Color in Children’s Books? – NYTimes.com.

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Not only is defining life futile, but it is also unnecessary to understanding how living things work. All observable matter is, at its most fundamental level, an arrangement of atoms and their constituent particles. These associations range in complexity from something as simple as, say, a single molecule of water to something as astonishingly intricate as an ant colony. All the proposed features of life — metabolism, reproduction, evolution — are in fact processes that appear at many different regions of this great spectrum of matter. There is no precise threshold.Some things we regard as inanimate are capable of some of the processes we want to make exclusive to life. And some things we say are alive get along just fine without some of those processes. Yet we have insisted that all matter naturally segregates into two categories — life and nonlife — and have searched in vain for the dividing line.It’s not there. We must accept that the concept of life sometimes has its pragmatic value for our particular human purposes, but it does not reflect the reality of the universe outside the mind

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via Why Nothing Is Truly Alive – NYTimes.com.

There has been a steady and large change in the demographics of the Jesuit community (and the Catholic Church more broadly) that may be very important for the question of the “mission and identity” and who has the greater influence in defining those terms.  I think it also worth noting that for me the relevant discussion is about “the Jesuit and Catholic identity of Santa Clara University” where I would emphasize the of Santa Clara University; our concerns can be unapologetically parochial: We care about this university, and the larger enterprise and institution sets a context but we can choose to be followers, leaders, revolutionaries, conformists, conservatives or whatever.

Here is a great blogpost from Georgetown University’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate CARA summarizing the demographics of the Jesuit community.

Their summary conclusion:
“Over the course of 30 years the Society of Jesus worldwide will have “flipped” in its geographic composition from two-third / one-third division of developed to developing world, to the reverse.  Added to this is the great change in age distribution across the Society which is resulting in a rapid shift from a more European/USA Vatican II perspective to a more Indian/African post-Vatican II perspective.  The change is both in generation and in geography which may be more creative and/or disruptive than might be assumed.”

Disruptive change can be embraced, surfed, suffered… but it cannot be held at bay.