Campus Watch

Getting Old

TOUCHSTONE, September — “In the ’80s, if I suggested in class that there might be any problem with sexual liberation, [my students would say] that everything was fine.

“Now, if I raise questions, many of them speak differently,” reports J. Budziszewski, a philosophy professor at the University of Texas, in the ecumenical Christian magazine. “It's getting old. They are beginning to sound like the children of third-generation Maoists.”

She adds, “Even some of the diehard proponents of that enslaving liberation have begun to show signs of fatigue and confusion.” Her solution: teaching the natural law.

Multiple Goals

BBC NEWS, Sept. 22 — The Indian government says it will reward girls from single-child families with free education through college and beyond.

The move is intended to bolster India's “dwindling female population” while remaining faithful to the official “population control” policy, reported the BBC.

The program implicitly acknowledges that many families strive to keep to the one-child policy but are determined to have a boy, prompting them to abort female infants.

The new program will reward a couple that is willing to accept and love their first daughter but withdraws all aid once there is a sibling, male or female.

India has only 933 women per thousand men, according to the 2001 census.

‘See You at the Pole’

RELIGIONJOURNAL.COM, Sept. 18 — It has become common to see American students gathering at the flagpoles in front of their public schools to pray and intercede for each other, their schools and families.

However, while the familiar “see you at the pole” rallying cry is heard in all 50 states, the prayer movement has spread in recent years to some 19 other countries, including several each in Africa, Asia, South America and Europe.

In addition to 2 million students per year “at the pole,” one student leader said, “We're training up Christians so that they can go out into their classrooms, the hallways, to show God's love.”

Parents Protest

THE WASHINGTON TIMES, Sept. 22 — The Washington daily reports that sexual education textbooks yanked from the classrooms of Fayetteville, Ark., public schools included one for the youngest grades that explains “masturbation, homosexual relationships and abortion with a positive tone.”

Parents’ protests also led to the withdrawal of one for ninth graders that describes pornography as “natural and fine.”

The Times also focused on a clash of cultures as “Fayetteville, home of the University of Arkansas, with the self-consciously liberal instincts of a college town, is surrounded by a conservative county in the heart of the Bible Belt.”

Notre Dame's New Father

CHICAGO TRIBUNE, Sept 26 — In a feature on Holy Cross Father John Jenkins, who was inaugurated in September as the 17th president of Notre Dame University, the Chicago daily captured the priest's love of prayer, solitude and the virtues.

The piece opens with “Father John,” as he is known on campus, before the Blessed Sacrament for a half-hour of adoration late of an evening in a preferred setting — a chapel that “is empty and silent.”

He says Mass every day, often in private.

“Baby-faced” at age 51, Father Jenkins is also “surprisingly” funny. He is also humble, “declining to say what he gave up for Lent for fear it would sound boastful.”