Mind and Soul

NRO, Feb. 21 — “America suffers from a dangerous separation of its mind and soul,” wrote columnist David Frum, as “its elite intellectual institutions are too often hostile to the country’s culture and founding values.”

“The corruption of the universities” is due to political correctness and a sense of themselves as “multinational, multicultural enterprises independent of the nation and the people that created, sustain and defend them,” argued Frum on National Review’s website.

He added that laments about modern academe are born of “terrible regret that some of the most essential institutions of this great country … have so often perverted their best natures to serve bad causes.”

Dead-on Dandy

THE N.Y. TIMES BOOK REVIEW, Feb. 6 — In an essay, editor Rachel Donadio reported on the critical reaction by student reviewers to Tom Wolfe’s latest novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons, and its harsh critique of the “hookup culture” of casual sex on many campuses.

“Even the negative student reviews — and there are a lot of them — acknowledge a painful accuracy in Wolfe’ portrait,” said Donadio.

For example, Eve Fairbanks, writing in The Yale Review of Books, was “fully prepared” to hate the book, but ultimately she and her friends found it “pretty dead-on.” She found “amazing” what “this 74-year -old dandy has managed to pick up.”

Hotline Moving

CHRONICLE.COM, Feb. 16 — A suicide-prevention hotline for graduate students is cutting its ties with the evangelical organization that established it “so that more colleges may be willing to promote the service,” reported the website of The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The hotline, 1-877-GRADHLP (472-3457), was established in 1999 by Grad Resources, a service of Campus Crusade for Christ International. Despite the group’s evangelical character, the counseling was and will remain “devoid of religious content.”

Hotline calls were never actually answered by staff members at Grad Resources. That part of the service was provided by trained counselors at Girls and Boys Town, the famous Catholic charity in Nebraska.

Puzzling Gonzaga

TOWNHALL.COM, Feb. 22 — In a column, Mike Adams, a professor of criminology at the University of North Carolina, took issue with the Gonzaga University law school’s Jesuit and Catholic identity in that it permits pro-homosexual and pro-abortion campus groups but has refused to recognize a pro-life student group because it restricts leadership positions to Christians.

In reporting on Adams’ column, LifeSite.com, the Canadian pro-life news site, acknowledged the paradox of Gonzaga’s policies, especially in light of the fact that the school’s president, Father Robert Spitzer, “is prominent in the pro-life world” as the founder in Washington, D.C., of University Faculty for Life and the Center for Life Principles.

 Father Spitzer is author of the book Healing the Culture, a veritable textbook for pro-life speakers. A board member of Human Life of Washington since 1990, he is an internationally respected consultant on ethics.