Top Pay

THE CHRONCILE OF HIGHER EDUCATION, Dec. 7 — The trade publication's annual compensation survey of private-college officials found representatives of three Catholic colleges among the top 20 earners, excluding presidents and medical professionals. All three slots were filled by men's basketball coaches: St. John's University of New York's Mike Jarvis ($683,815, 9th); Steve Lappas of Villanova University ($608,000, 12th) and Seton Hall University's Tommy Amaker ($501,000, 16th).

Bullies Beware

LAKE SHORE VISITOR, Nov. 28 — The Erie, Pa., diocese is asking its Catholic schools to implement a bullying-prevention curriculum by the end of the 2003-04 school year, reports the diocesan newspaper. The kindergarten-to-12th-grade program is designed to “permeate the attitudes and actions of a school.”

Marilyn Reiser, principal at Erie's Our Lady's Christian School, said administrators and teachers are looking at bullying with new eyes. “People thought bullying was age-appropriate. But not anymore,” she told the newspaper.

Junk History

THE DARTMOUTH REVIEW,Nov. 12 — The undergraduate newspaper includes a positive review by Jeffrey Shaw of Non Campus Mentis, a book compiled by Anders Henriksson of Shepherd College.

The book consists exclusively of student gaffes taken from papers written at colleges throughout North America. They form an original, often zany, history of the world that begins with the “Stoned Age,” and includes references to religion and Catholicism.

Mary was “different from other women because of her immaculate contraption.” She and Joseph were turned away from the inn “because they were Jewish.”

In later centuries, Catholic dissenters were “burnt at the steak” when they “refused to decant” heresy. An outbreak of “Small Box,” in colonial America “bothered the Spanish little for, as Catholics, they did not believe in God.”

Tabula Rasa

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL,Nov. 23 — In light of the new interest in world affairs and American history that is being shown by college students since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, a Journal editorial decries the results of a recent Roper survey that shows how little history American students are asked to study.

Just three of the top-ranked 55 schools in the nation — Columbia, Colgate and the University of the South — require a course in Western civilization. None of the 55 requires a course in American history and many schools allow students to substitute other disciplines or offer exemptions based on high-school performance.

Cultural Cleavage

NEWSandOPINION.COM, Nov. 27 — In a column on how the cultural elites, including many in the academic establishment, have stumbled in their thinking since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, John Leo includes comments by Lawrence Summers, the new president of Harvard University that could just as easily be applied to religion: “The post-Vietnam cleavage between the coastal elites and certain mainstream values is a matter of great concern and has some real costs.”

Leo reports that President Summers urged the academic world to rethink its attitudes toward patriotism, and said Harvard has a responsibility to support all public servants, especially “those who fight and are prepared to die.”