As a break from the rising tide of defeatism and all Abu Ghraib all the time, herewith a variety of items in the garden of public issues. . . .
From academia, these things:
- A study of grades at the eight Ivy League schools plus Stanford, MIT, and the University of Chicago has found grade inflation rampant - with A's totaling 46 percent of the grades awarded. At least some of the schools are imposing quotas.
- As with Harvard (early last year Jane Fonda demanded the return of $12.5 million), Yale (in 1995 Lee Bass forced the return of $20 million, and the school rejected a proffered grant of $200 million from the class of 1938), so now with Princeton. The Robertson family, which funds 75 percent of Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School budget, wants back all $525 million of the money it has donated, because - the family says - Princeton has failed to abide by stipulations as to how the money should be spent.
- Although the issue at Princeton has less to do with ideology than did the demands made of Harvard and Yale, students across the country are moving to address the lopsided leftism on college faculties. Campus conservative groups are multiplying like dandelions in spring. During the past five years, College Republican chapters have tripled; since 1995 the number of campus conservative newspapers has doubled. At the University of Texas, the nation's largest, a student has started a widely emulated Website "watch list" to warn students away from leftist profs.
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Is the near-eradication of elm trees across the nation now to be the fate of oaks? Dutch elm disease practically wiped out elms in just 25 years. The latest arboreal threat is a fungus called "sudden oak death," hosted by more than 50 plants and spread principally by wind and rain. Having destroyed thousands of trees in California, it now is showing up in Eastern nurseries. A plant pathologist who co-discovered the fungus says the East's most vulnerable area may be the Southern Appalachians.
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Two items about television and video games - the first bad, the second apparently good.
First, from The Washington Post: "Very young children who watch television face an increased risk of attention deficit problems by school age, a study has found, suggesting that TV might overstimulate and permanently 'rewire' the developing brain. For every hour of television watched daily, two groups of children - ages 1 and 3 - faced a 10-percent increased risk of having attention problems at age 7."
Second, from the Associated Press: "All those years on the couch playing Nintendo and PlayStation appear to be paying off for surgeons (in eye-hand co-ordination). Researchers (have) found that doctors who spent at least three hours a week playing video games made about 37 percent fewer mistakes in laparoscopic surgery and performed the task 27 percent faster than counterparts who did not play video games."
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