Diversity — of Ideas

PORTSMOUTH HERALD, Oct. 30 — Concern about campus speech codes resounded at a U.S. Senate committee hearing on “intellectual diversity” at colleges, as speakers told the Education Committee that overbroad conduct policies are stifling the free-speech rights of students, especially those that do not adhere to the favored liberal viewpoint.

The New Hampshire daily said speakers objected to ideological and political uniformity of views among faculty and campus speakers, a watered-down, onesided curriculum and indoctrination by administrators.

Coming in for special criticism were, the newspaper said, “speech codes that limit free inquiry and debate.”

Mea Culpa

WINSTON-SALEM JOURNAL, Nov. 5 — Wake Forest University's medical school has apologized for the school's support of a state-sponsored program that sterilized mentally ill and mentally retarded people in the 1940s and 1950s, the North Carolina daily reported.

“The program was based on eugenics, a now-discredited philosophy advocating the use of sterilization to prevent individuals considered ‘less desirable’ by society from reproducing,” the newspaper reported.

The school decided to conduct an investigation of its role in eugenics research in January following a series of articles in the Winston-Salem Journal that detailed the school's participation. The Journal reported that among those forced or persuaded to undergo sterilization were children as young as 10.

Catholic Flavor

CHRONICLE.COM, Nov. 5 — ChicagO's DePaul University and Marquette University in Milwaukee are among the five schools the Big East Conference has recently invited to join its ranks in 2005. The others include the universities of Cincinnati, Louisville and South Florida.

The additions replace Boston College, the University of Miami and Virginia Tech, which have announced plans to leave the Big East for the Atlantic Coast Conference.

The expanded league “would have a strong Roman Catholic flavor,” said the Web site of The Chronicle of Higher Education,“matching DePaul and Marquette with Providence College, the University of Notre Dame, Georgetown, St. John's, Seton Hall and Villanova universities.”

Not Sportsmanlike

MASSACHUSETTS NEWS, Nov. 6 — The newspaper reported that when Dartmouth College played host to Columbia College in an Ivy League football game earlier this fall the Columbia band began its show with an announcer making disparaging remarks about Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and the Terri Schiavo case.

“The announcer then introduced the Columbia halftime show by inviting the crowd to join the band in [its] ‘celebration of partial-birth abortion,’” the newspaper reported. “This was followed by some ranting against the Pope and what the announcer described as his ‘drooling and stuttering’ speech.”

Stepping Down

UNIVERSITY OF DALLAS, Oct. 30 — Msgr. Milam Joseph, president of the university since 1996, will retire at the end of the current school year, the school announced.

Ordained in 1964, Msgr. Joseph was the first priest to lead the only Catholic university in north Texas.

Msgr. Joseph, 66, has served in parish assignments and as a high school principal. His career also included service as vocations director and as a notary on the diocesan marriage tribunal.