Harvard

Harvard's President Is Again at Odds With His Faculty
By ALAN FINDER, The New York Times, February 14, 2006

CAMBRIDGE, MASS., Feb. 13 — A year after weathering a no-confidence vote by the faculty, Harvard University's president, Lawrence H. Summers, is facing another showdown with dissident faculty members, raising new questions about his ability to maintain control over the university and perhaps even to remain in office.

The latest conflict was set off by the abrupt announcement late last month that William C. Kirby, the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science, the university's largest school, would step down in the summer. The arts and science faculty has scheduled a vote on Feb. 28 on a new resolution of no-confidence in Mr. Summers.

"I believe that the business of the university has been seriously compromised by this bad leadership and it has become evident to a lot of people on campus," Mary C. Waters, a sociology professor, said in an e-mail message.

Mr. Kirby, a professor of Chinese history, has said the decision to relinquish his post was reached mutually with Mr. Summers, but many professors say they view it as a forced resignation, particularly because The Harvard Crimson, the student daily newspaper, quoted unidentified university officials as saying Mr. Summers had pushed out Mr. Kirby.
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Evolution

Steve Rissing, a university professor, demonstrating Monday in Columbus, Ohio, in favor of teaching evolution.


Ohio Expected to Rein In Class Linked to Intelligent Design
By JODI RUDOREN, The New York Times, February 14, 2006

COLUMBUS, Ohio, Feb. 13 — A majority of members on the Board of Education of Ohio, the first state to single out evolution for "critical analysis" in science classes more than three years ago, are expected on Tuesday to challenge a model biology lesson plan they consider an excuse to teach the tenets of the disputed theory of intelligent design.

A reversal in Ohio would be the most significant in a series of developments signaling a sea change across the country against intelligent design — which posits that life is too complex to be explained by evolution alone — since a federal judge's ruling in December that teaching the theory in the public schools of Dover, Pa., was unconstitutional.

A small rural school district in California last month quickly scuttled plans for a philosophy elective on intelligent design after being challenged by lawyers involved in the Pennsylvania case. Also last month, an Indiana lawmaker who said in November that he would introduce legislation to mandate teaching of intelligent design instead offered a watered-down bill requiring only "accuracy in textbooks." And just last week, two Democrats in Wisconsin proposed a ban on schools' teaching intelligent design as science, the first such proposal in the country.
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Science Tuesday - Music, Pandas, Therapy, and Low Fat Diets

In Music, Others' Tastes May Help Shape Your Own
By BENEDICT CAREY, The New York Times, February 14, 2006

Frank Sinatra or Tony Bennett, classical or baroque, early Los Lobos or late: Taste in music seems a deeply personal matter, guided by a person's unique internal compass. But two new studies suggest that social considerations influence not only the music people buy but the recordings they call their favorites.
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Eats Shoots, Leaves and Much of Zoos' Budgets
By BRENDA GOODMAN, The New York Times, February 12, 2006

ATLANTA, Feb. 11 — Lun Lun and Yang Yang have needs. They require an expensive all-vegetarian diet — 84 pounds a day, each. They are attended by a four-person entourage, and both crave privacy. Would-be divas could take notes.

But the real sticker shock comes from the annual fees that Zoo Atlanta must pay the Chinese government, $2 million a year, essentially to rent a pair of giant pandas. Giant pandas are also on loan to zoos in Washington, San Diego and Memphis.

The financial headache caused by the costly loan obligations to China has driven Dennis W. Kelly, chief executive of Zoo Atlanta, to join with the directors of the three other zoos to negotiate some budgetary breathing room. If no agreement with China can be made, Mr. Kelly said, the zoos may have to return their star attractions.
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More and More, Favored Psychotherapy Lets Bygones Be Bygones
By ALIX SPIEGEL, The New York Times, February 14, 2006

For most of the 20th century, therapists in America agreed on a single truth. To cure patients, it was necessary to explore and talk through the origins of their problems. In other words, they had to come to terms with the past to move forward in the present.

Thousands of hours and countless dollars were spent in this pursuit. Therapists listened diligently as their patients recounted elaborate narratives of family dysfunction — the alcoholic father, the mother too absorbed in her own unhappiness to attend to her children's needs — certain that this process would ultimately produce relief.

But returning to the past has fallen out of fashion among mental health professionals over the last 15 years. Research has convinced many therapists that understanding the past is not required for healing.

Despite this profound change, the cliché of patients' exhaustively revisiting childhood horror stories remains.

"Average consumers who walk into psychotherapy expect to be discussing their childhood and blaming their parents for contemporary problems, but that's just not true any more," said John C. Norcross, a psychology professor at the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania.
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News Analysis: Maybe You're Not What You Eat
By GINA KOLATA, The New York Times, February 14, 2006

In an early 19th-century best seller, a famous food writer offered a cure for obesity and chronic disease: a low-carbohydrate diet.

The notion that what you eat shapes your medical fate has exerted a strong pull throughout history. And its appeal continues to this day, medical historians and researchers say.

"It's one of the great principles — no, more than principles, canons — of American culture to suggest that what you eat affects your health," says James Morone, a professor of political science at Brown University.

"It's this idea that you control your own destiny and that it's never too late to reinvent yourself," he said. "Vice gets punished and virtue gets rewarded. If you eat or drink or inhale the wrong things you get sick. If not, you get healthy."

That very American canon, he and others say, may in part explain the criticism and disbelief that last week greeted a report that a low-fat diet might not prevent breast cancer, colon cancer or heart disease, after all.

The report, from a huge federal study called the Women's Health Initiative, raises important questions about how much even the most highly motivated people can change their eating habits and whether the relatively small changes that they can make really have a substantial effect on health.
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