For all the controversy over University of Florida quarterback Tim Tebow’s decision to feature in a pro-life ad aired during the Super Bowl, there was at least one positive outcome.

It made the radically pro-choice left look indisputably silly. The hyperbolic nature of the episode revealed the deep frustration of the pro-choice lobby at the direction of the nation’s abortion debate.

What was noteworthy about the ad, which was made by conservative group Focus on the Family and showed Tebow playfully tackling his mother as she spoke vaguely about the decision to keep her dangerous pregnancy, was how little it actually said about abortion. In fact, the word “abortion” was never stated even once.

By contrast, what was noteworthy about the reaction to the ad, which began before the ad even aired, was its stridency and vitriol. Pro-choice groups practically threw the kitchen sink at Focus on the Family for daring to raise the issue of life, however obliquely, during the Super Bowl.

A few quotes are valuable for perspective:

Before the ad aired, Jehmu Greene, president of the Women’s Media Center said, “An ad that uses sports to divide rather than to unite has no place in the biggest national sports event of the year – an event designed to bring Americans together.”

After it aired, the National Organization for Women alternately declared that the manner in which Tebow tackled his mother reflected an “undercurrent” of “violence against women.”

If only they were joking. The criticism is revelatory, if only of the paranoid psychology of its advocates.

The reaction to the Tebows’ ad from pro-choice groups seems to mask a deep sensitivity among these groups to having any kind of national debate about abortion at all. That the ad, mild as it was, sparked the outrage that it did before and after its airing, reflects the desperate need among pro-choice groups to not let pro-lifers get away with a public relations victory.

Considering the larger trends in the abortion debate and recent poll numbers on the subject, it’s not hard to see why.

A May 2009 Gallup poll send shockwaves through the political world for its revelation that for the first time, more Americans self-identified as “pro-life” than “pro-choice” by a substantial 51 to 42 percent margin.

The data set was not an outlier. Another poll conducted by the Marist Institute for Public Opinion in late December and early January 2010 showed that young people (voters aged 18-29) among the most pro-life, with 59 percent calling abortion “morally wrong.” The most pro-choice group seemed to be the Baby Boomers, aged 45 to 64, of which only 51 percent found abortion morally wrong.

The data on young-people has taken the pro-choice lobby particularly by surprise. Where attitudes among older populations are easier to dismiss as white noise from polling, the numbers on youth suggest a true generational shift. Nothing could be more alarming to abortion defenders who have lived the last forty years with a distinctive upper hand in the culture war.

Clearly, the momentum in the abortion debate has shifted towards pro-lifers. According to the popular narrative, the profusion of fetal imaging technologies and increased knowledge about embryonic development has heightened public sensitivity to the humanity of the unborn child. The narrative may well be true. The result is a pro-choice lobby that is bewildered, frustrated, and as we now know, neurotically hyper-sensitive.

One has to wonder what groups like NOW and Planned Parenthood are so afraid of.  That those who defend “choice” recoil at the prospect of a robust public conversation on abortion that could better inform the decisions of women considering the procedure seems contradictory, to say the least.

Resolution may come from the fact the “pro-choice” moniker is more a function of political convenience than ideological accuracy. “Choice,” as NOW, Planned Parenthood, and like-minded groups envision it, conveys entitlement, not deliberation.

Which is precisely why a national abortion debate is so horrifying to them. Pro-lifers might actually win.

I want a lot of things – a good career, happy family, nice house, health care, limited government, etc. I expect that I will have to work and sacrifice to attain those ideals. However, it seems that on a larger scale, Americans have forgotten this simple principle. We expect government to achieve our interests without any sacrifices – we want health care but don’t want to pay higher taxes, climate change as long as the change doesn’t involve us, and action on unemployment without increasing the deficit.

We expect the government to fix itself and the economy, but we also want it to be smaller and have less power. Well, it’s time to either lower our expectations or continue being disappointed.

If we want change, we cannot expect it to be free. The mortgage crisis and economic recession was caused largely in part by a ‘something for nothing’ mentality – large homes that cost little (at first), large loans with small down payments. With that evidence against us, why do we keep thinking this way?

We need to change or limit our expectations. We need to decide what we want accomplished and what we are willing to sacrifice. This does not include backroom deals or the health care bill earmarks – I’m talking about what individual Americans need to sacrifice: either an overall increase in taxes or an overall decrease in government spending. Our growing deficit shows us that we cannot continue to support the something for nothing trend.

Americans seem to want the government to actively solve our problems, while simultaneously also arguing for government to do less. When asked to identify the most important issues for the President and Congress to deal with this year, over 80 percent of Americans responded “extremely important” or “very important” to the following issues: the economy, unemployment, and the federal budget deficit¹.

Just a few months earlier, however, 57 percent of polled Americans (the highest percentage in a decade) said, “the government is trying to do too many things that should be left to individuals and businesses.”² Granted, more Republicans agree with this statement, but even numbers among Democrats are rising. As much as this is a party issue, it’s more of a national issue. The growing number of independents indicates discontent with both parties.

It is an easy oversimplification to lay the blame entirely on political parties and argue that partisanship is accomplishing little and that members of Congress are too focused on their own special interests. These are important concerns that need to be addressed, but who is going to address them? Americans elected Obama hoping he would “fundamentally change the way Washington works” – to change the system Americans had lost faith in. The majority of Americans expected Obama to fix things. He didn’t.

Congress hasn’t either, and neither has the Democratic majority. So, Massachusetts elected Scott Brown, a Republican, but he’s not going to fix things either. Scott Brown has the same conflicting ideals we do: he wants to save money and spend it too. (Brown is in favor of tax cuts, opposed to Medicare cuts.) The problem isn’t that individual parties have conflicting ideals – it’s that WE have conflicting ideals. Americans want the benefits without the costs, the budget in the black and our taxes in the red.

Reduced taxes in combination with reduced government spending have already proven effective on a state level. As governor of New Mexico, Gary Johnson balanced the budget and lowered the rate of governmental growth by 50% without raising taxes or firing staff³. He did this by rejecting bills that created expenditures and favoring bills that allowed for privatization and increased freedom. Although he was rejected by some members of his party, his actions allowed the government to address pressing needs rather than stretching thinly to make up for a growing deficit.

At a national level, even small expenditures need to be sacrificed in order to meet the pressing needs of the population. If we, as members of any party, are willing to concede some benefits, we can provide for more essential costs while also reducing the size of government and the size of our deficit.

Ultimately, the buck needs to stop with US. First, evaluate your expectations. Identify which issues are most important and sacrifice the others. Second, don’t expect anyone to grant your wishes without knowing what they are. Write or phone your representatives and let them know where you stand. If they don’t know your interests, they’ll keep pleasing special interests. Finally, feel free to complain. Our nation was founded on complaints against the status quo. But it was only founded because citizens took action against that status quo, and they sacrificed plenty to achieve change. Unless we are also willing to speak up and sacrifice, we’ll have to lower our expectations of the change we deserve.

1 CNN/Opinion Research Corporation Poll. January 2010. Federal budget, taxes, economic policy. <http://www.pollingreport.com/budget.htm>

2 Newport, F. September 2009. Americans more likely to say government doing too much. Gallup, <http://www.gallup.com/poll/123101/Americans-Likely-Say-Government-Doing-Too-Much.aspx>

3 Anonymous. January 2010. Governor Gary Johnson, chairman of OUR America Initiative, travels to New Hampshire to spread message of lower taxes. Business Wire, <http://proquest.umi.com/pqdlink?index=350&did=1942770391&SrchMode=3&sid=1&Fmt=3&VInst=PROD&VType=PQD&RQT=309&VName=PQD&TS=1266808265&clientId=15020&aid=2>

There is something about youth that is uniquely susceptible to hubris.

The phenomenon may help to explain why so many young people have an uncanny affinity both for utopian ideology and for the elitist snobbery, sometimes masquerading as self-anointed intellectualism,which accompanies it. Students today seem increasingly elitist in their political views, as they dismiss the reactions and arguments of those who they deem less educated than they are.

Not only is this supreme self-confidence hysterically unwarranted, it hinders a great deal of actual learning. It dovetails with an obnoxious belief in the specialness of Now, captured succinctly in then-Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign line that “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” and seems to all too often preclude introspection among the college-age demographic. With a health care debate and economic crisis reinvigorating American populism, it’s worth considering why students are so in the wrong when it comes to their high opinion of themselves.

When we choose to go to college to further pursue our education, the implicit assumption, one would hope, is that we recognize that we have more to learn. For budding scientists and engineers, perhaps this consists of technical knowledge. But for students of the humanities, the path forward can be less clear. Before this ambiguity, there may be a tendency for some students of the liberal arts to view their education as a rubber stamp—a necessary process that must be undergone to enter the professional world, rather than something of intrinsic value.

Alternately, I would argue that for most students of the humanities, the real purpose of an undergraduate education is to develop our thinking skills and situate ourselves within an intellectual history. To do so, we must necessarily look back on previous thinkers who have explored and reflected on age-old questions and themes relating to the human condition, most of which continue to be the subject of dispute and contestation. This lack of settlement, one would think, should inspire both humility and curiosity.

Yet the do-gooder attitude of these self-appointed “intellectuals,” characterized by a righteous indignation at the moral or intellectual inferiority of other persons or some aspect of society, seems too frequently driven by emotional and egoistic, rather than rational, impulses. This is not to say that the ideological liberalism with which the mentality often conspicuously dovetails lacks an intellectual tradition—far from it. Indeed, students of all political stripes benefit from immersion in arguments from thinkers on the left, as well as from on the right.

But for the lay student, leftist policy positions, with theirutopian self-confidence in the ability of a select few ivory tower academics to lead society towards greater wisdom, are pure hubris. The assumption underlying this attitude, too often, is that because of our Duke education, we are automatically and uniquely qualified to hold these positions without reflection and introspection. Our status as “de facto” intellectuals is reason enough.

The more one reflects on this idea of “student intellectuals,” the more laughable it becomes. If anything, our education should lead us to ponder the extent of our own ignorance.

The idea that we are already “intellectuals” by virtue of where we stand insulates students from the type of deep self-reflection and self-criticism that true education requires. Learning demands the humility to question oneself and one’s most basic assumptions about the world—and accepting that those assumptions exist.

Part of this approach involves the recognition that we are not ahistorical beings, existing independent of a history of ideas. Indeed, we live very much within such an intellectual history and are deeply influenced by arguments originating with intellectual ancestors both dead and alive, whether we recognize it or not. Our education should help us recognize our place within this history and lead us to reflect on the influences we have inherited and selected.

Instead, the attitude of the amateur egoist privileges the young intellectual as if his beliefs are the purely the product of a spontaneous creativity, rather than the absorption of external influences. This generates a sense of certainty unbecoming of a recent teenager. When students—barely twenty years old—think themselves above imperfection and fully prepared to judge the actions and ideas of those much older than them, fully devoid of any context, we may have a problem.

To be sure, this is not yet a rampant phenomenon and a good many students at Duke are genuine and reflective in their temperament. But for all of us, little humility would go a long way.

I believe in America. America is the leader of the free world, the strongest military power, and a beacon of freedom for the world. America is great, and I’m not afraid to admit it.

There is no need to apologize for our greatness. We set the bar high to be an example for other nations to follow. We are a protector of world order, and we value freedom above all else. America strives to do what is right.

America makes mistakes, and we are certainly not perfect. There are always things to work on, and challenges to overcome. But I still have pride in my country. I have confidence that we will succeed.

I find that people tend to lack spirit and patriotism for their country. They get bogged down in our problems, and fail to see the beauty of America. It’s all a state of mind. Take pride in your country! America is great only because of the people who live here — they strive for excellence and believe in their nation.

America is first in my mind. I am so proud to be a citizen of the greatest nation in the world. It is such a blessing to call it my home and I will never deny the greatness of the people that live here. Don’t be afraid to remember our heritage– the people who have worked before us to create such a great nation. Remember the founders and the principles they enacted. Remember the immigrants who built this nation from the ground up. Remember the soldiers that gave you freedom. But most of all, believe in excellence. Believe in America.

Here is an interesting article from Fox News that details a poll about what Americas are fed up with.

Not surprisingly, 81% Americans are tired of the growing federal debt. 73% claim “they are fed up with Uncle Sam’s spending spree.” And on a side note, 53% of Americans are sick of “people having loud cell phone conversations.”

It’s clear that Americans in general are not happy with what’s going on in Washington. It doesn’t matter if you are a Republican or Democrat. What needs to change at the capital? I want to know what you think– leave some comments.

Happy New Year’s everyone!  Now that it’s another year and another decade, take some time to recap on the biggest events in recent history.

• 10 Biggest Political Scandals of the Past Decade (NY Post)
• Biggest Political Winners and Losers of 2009 (USA Today)
• Biggest Political Disappointments of 2009 (Huffington Post) … talk about the liberal media slant…
• Top 5 Outrageous Political Videos of 2009 (Politics Daily)
• Most Read Stories of 2009 (Wall Street Journal)
• Top 9 Political Flubs of 2009 (ABC News)
• Top 40 Political Quotes of 2009 (Fox4kc)
• TIME’s Person of the Year: Ben Bernanke
• Frank Rich’s Person of the Year: Tiger Woods (NY Times)
• Dave Barry (Miami Herald)

A grad student at Duke recently published a story on Salon.com documenting his experience living in a van to better afford tuition.  An interesting read for anyone that needs a break from studying during finals week!

http://www.salon.com/life/pinched/2009/12/06/living_in_a_van/index.html

When Ada Gregory, the director of the Duke University Women’s Center claimed in the Chronicle article on the new rape policy that the Duke sex offenders are the “crème of the crop” due the high intelligence of Duke students and their consequent “cunning” and “manipulative” powers, she assumes that the female victims of sexual offenses have been out-smarted by their male offenders.  She has since apologized for the implications of her claim, but she did offer statistics to back her claim up in the same article.  For this reason, I would like to explore the implications of her comments without necessarily pinning them to her.  Aren’t Duke women also the crème of the crop?  Should it be taken for granted that the leading cause of rape is women being led into danger unawares by superiorly equipped men?

The young men I met at the last party I attended (it was a prep school themed party à la Gossip Girl) may have been bright, or even calculating in the light of day, but the artfulness of their pick-up lines could hardly delude me as to their intentions or their levels of intoxication.  As I danced with them (if it can really be called dancing anymore), both of these dashing young gents asked where I lived and how far that was from the party before they remembered to ask for my name.  As I had my wits about me, I told them that I lived so far away, that chances were, they would get lost before they ever found their way to my dorm.  After these men had finally got my not-so-subtle hints, they decided to move onto less prepared prep school girls, preferably freshmen in short pleated skirts and fishnets.

Like most of the girls at the party, I was dressed in a way that might have suggested intentions I didn’t have, and I started to wonder why.  For my own part, I dressed up for fun and because I was going with my friends, who know my intentions.  While the majority of girls probably dressed up for similar reasons, I couldn’t help but wonder after my experience dancing with those men, who seemed nice, but that I didn’t know.  I realized it was highly possible that many of these girls didn’t dress up solely in the spirit of camaraderie and fun, but perhaps because they wanted to be asked to their dance partners’ room for the night.  As I considered this possibility, I started to feel sick.  I felt not only sick, but also angry, not at these drunken boys, but at the fact that these women felt like they had to be the victims of the Duke party scene. While it is undeniable that the freshman orientation presentation sponsored by Duke Student Health (now called True Blue) depicts the manifest reality of the Duke dating scene, does the presentation promote the ideal lifestyle of most Duke students?  According to the Duke Women’s Initiative, the answer is no.  Even though many students participate in a party scene that reinforces the campus hook-up culture, both men and women regret Duke’s lack of a more traditional dating scene.  Although the presentation may attempt to be student-friendly in its refusal to dog the Duke party culture that many of its viewers have already become immersed in, the premise of the presentation is to “[equip] students with the information and proper resources they need to guide good decision-making” (Lindsay Bickers Block, a Duke sexual health educator).  If the university’s goal is to guide freshmen and help them to lead more successful personal lives, then it seems that these programs should focus on the shared goals of the student body, as opposed to catering to a normative culture that makes many “uninitiated” students feel uncomfortable.

When I was a freshman, the orientation presentation then called the Real Deal bombarded me with renditions of the sexual scenes and party scenes that I had striven for the rest of orientation to avoid in real life.  On watching the vulgar skits that were supposed to represent typical Duke experiences, I could feel my expectations sink as the crowd laughed.  To amend the program, the women’s center decided that they should eliminate party boy Chad, who represented a humorous party boy, who walked around a party trying to get girls drunk (in other words, Party Boy Chad represented a humorous potential date rapist).  The women’s center decided to eliminate him because according to reports, Duke’s men were emulating Party Boy Chad humorously or otherwise.  According to Sheila Broderick, the sexual assault services coordinator for the Women’s Center, Duke’s young men weren’t the only ones that took to Party Boy Chad.  She states in the Chronicle article that she has had “victims come to [her] crying and say, ‘I went to The Real Deal, they told me about Party Boy Chad and I fell for it anyway. I should have known better.’”

Frankly, I believe that these women are selling themselves short if they genuinely believe that they fell for Party Boy Chad.  More likely, I believe that they might not have thought they could do better than the intoxicated, sexually opportunistic partygoer that Party Boy Chad represents.  When I watched the Real Deal presentation, I remember being more struck by the women in the skit than by its star.  Were Duke women really supposed to act so stupid?  Now, I realize that the women in the skit weren’t actually stupid if they should be taken to represent their real-life counterparts; they were probably only jaded and afraid to expect more from a culture that they had been told had nothing more to offer them.  Although Student Health tried to arm Duke students with realistic expectations and strategies to avoid the common party pitfalls, I remember being afraid, even during my first week of freshman year, that my standards for romantic relationships would drop soon after my expectations.

To people who hold the view that Duke rapists typically operate by manipulating clueless women who are looking for true love, I would say that all too often, Duke’s sexual offenders are not masterminds that lure women unawares into dangerous situations.  For the most part, Duke women are perfectly aware of the dangers accompanying Duke parties, alcohol, and the catastrophic misunderstandings that often come after.  The drunken men I danced with the party sidled up to the women in fishnets and garters after I had shaken them off not because they wanted to rape them, but because they felt themselves immune from the possibility of rejection by these girls that looked impossible to violate.  Sometimes, whether the night ends in sexual assault depends on when these women realize that they are capable of being violated: before or after the events of the night unfolded.

“If we teach today as we taught yesterday, we rob our children of tomorrow.” – John Dewey

It was a normal Tuesday night for Kevin Zhu. After finishing his differential equations homework and hanging with his hallmates, he opened up his laptop and checked his email. Nearing 1 am, he finally decided it was time for class. That’s right; at 12:48 am, Kevin Zhu sat down for his physics lecture.

Across the campus Tuesday night, Kevin was probably not the only one streaming a lecture. In fact, with DukeCapture’s availability in 58 classrooms and lecture halls across the campus—not to mention the mobile units—hundreds of lectures from teachers in all departments, undergraduate and beyond, have been recorded and uploaded.

In a world where technology changes faster than most undergrads do laundry, it is important for the campus to keep pace. The Duke Digital Initiative  (DDI) was created to ease technology into the classroom while helping faculty and students to realize what the digital age has to offer. According to Samantha Earp, Director of Academic Services for DDI, “Duke undergraduates have had access to a variety of cutting edge tools and technologies […that] contribute to an overall environment that enriches the educational experience.”

DDI

DukeCapture is one new teaching technology that gives students a way to return to difficult lectures or to hear important details they might have missed the first time.

But it doesn’t end there.

Earp goes on to mention that the DDI has many other centrally-supported systems. Among these is Blackboard, a website that hosts class pages so that teachers can easily interface with students through document postings, assignment listings, and a discussion board for each class. The DDI also maintains Duke’s iTunesU—the offshoot of the Duke First-Year iPod Experience—that contains podcasts of lectures from certain classes.

Perhaps the strongest barrier in expanding these programs into all classrooms is in the ability of each instructor to learn the new material. Nevertheless, Lynne O’Brien, DDI’s Director of Academic Technology & Instructional Services, does not see this as a challenge. O’Brien says that Duke professors are smoothly being transitioned to a blog-type website entitled WordPress: “The [Office of Information Technology] installed the software; [the Center for Instructional Technology] consultants met with faculty and helped them get started on using the software for their course activities.”

During this academic year, Earp promises that the DDI “is continuing its programs to promote innovative use of technology in support of the academic experience.” Earp notes that WordPress along with other Web 2.0 tools are being explored not only at Duke but also by students abroad. Also, the DDI has recently been expanding the DukeCapture program in an effort to make more lectures accessible to ill students as H1N1 continues and the flu season approaches.

Classrooms Going Beyond

While the DDI  has many entry-level technologies made accessible for the faculty, many faculty are going very far beyond. Annabel Wharton, Professor of Art, Art History and Visual Studies, is taking one of her classes on a field trip—through virtual reality.  Wharton has spent several months studying the effect of digital architecture in immersive online gaming experiences—notably Second Life and Assassin’s Creed—and plans to bring Art History students along for the ride this year.

Cathy N. Davidson, Professor of English and Interdisciplinary Studies, teaches “Your Brain on the Internet,” a course designed to help students defamiliarize themselves with the internet as they are accustomed to seeing it in order to understand how society and the web are interconnected.  According to Davidson, the “Web 2.0 forms of iterative, collaborative processes—whether one is creating Linux or Mozilla or Wikipedia—depend on […] each person [having] something unique to contribute and a unique form of qualification.” In Davidson’s class, students use WordPress to create an interactive blog and are required to post weekly in the blog or elsewhere within the web to learn about the facets of the internet and the collaboration it encourages.  In this way, Davidson has less interest “in technology for itself than in what new forms of creative, collective thinking it enables.” Davidson’s class ran for its first time in Spring of the previous academic year, and will have a new 15 students in Spring 2010.

Also noted in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Negar Mottahedeh, Assistant Professor of Literature, organized the world’s first ever Twitter Film Fest, and it became a part of a Spring 2009 syllabus for 30 lucky students. After creating a list on a blog of 39 film clips from YouTube, students watched these clips over a weekend and tweeted their way through the films. If this was not enough, the class discussion the following day was a roundtable Twitter tweet-fest. Combining blogging, YouTube, and Twitter—just one of the classrooms at Duke fully embracing the technological horizons.

DukeMobile

Duke’s commitment to expanding into the ever-widening technological horizons doesn’t stop within the classroom. Created as a free app for the iPhone, DukeMobile is one of Duke’s newest ways to use students’ favorite gadgets as an interface for information. While it isn’t used for classes, DukeMobile brings campus maps, course catalogs, University news, athletic schedules and rosters, student group calendars, and so much more to a student’s fingertips in an instant.

While the original app was designed and produced by Duke staff working with technology consulting groups in March of this year, the second version, launched at the end of August, includes new functions that were designed by students. Michael Ansel, a junior Electrical and Computer Engineering major, is the creator of one of these who found that he “was hungry and didn’t feel like looking stuff up.” “Places,” designed, tested, and now utilized by Ansel, integrates dining hours, GPS coordinates, and the time of day into a program that will tell a user where the nearest food can be found. While Terribly Clever Design and Duke’s Office of Information Technology supported Michael in this venture, he spent his summer doing the actual programming and coding. To Ansel, using the technology was rewarding, and it pleased him to be “doing something that needed to get done, and making it happen.”

Duke continues to find new ways to pull the technology of tomorrow onto the campus and help it find relevance to students. Whether it is a project of the Duke Digital Initiative, classes like Davidson’s or Wharton’s, or finding campus information in the palm of a student’s hand, Duke students can rest assured that their education is technologically enriched. Perhaps most relieving of all though, is that when hunger strikes somewhere between East and West Campus at around 2:34 in the morning, there’s an app for that.