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Today, Mr. Roesch is the co-owner of a master franchising firm called Dazser, Inc. It employs sixty individuals and took in $40 million in revenue last year. The company has offices in Tampa, Baltimore, Birmingham, Charlotte, and Orlando, and is still expanding. Most impressively, Dazser was in the Incorporated 400 four times; just one more time will land it in the Hall of Fame.

Dazser sells and supports franchises of Jani-King, an international commercial cleaning business. Jani-King has offices in almost every major U.S. city and more than 20 countries abroad. Dazser provides its Jani-King franchises with marketing, sales, and accounting services.

Initially, when Roesch and his friend, David Zillig, decided to enter business together, they only planned to purchase an individual franchise. Franchises are proven business models, so it seemed a safe venture. They chose Jani-King because it was the franchise ranked second highest return on investment. Instead of opening a single franchise, however, they opened their own company to sell Jani-King franchises.

Roesch and Zillig encountered several challenges on their way to success. In Dazser’s infancy, the men worked 14-hour days cleaning office buildings. Neither took a salary. Because they lacked much working capital, they financed their first expansion by opening as many credit cards as possible. “Building the business to the size where it can support itself takes several years,” Roesch attests. “We didn’t realize it would take so long to get over that hump. We thought within 10 or 15 years we would be retired.”

This initial setback did not extinguish their determination. Motivation and ambition are essential to the success of a business. Since Roesch and Zillig were responsible for their profits and losses and not reliant on the government, they were driven to succeed.

An ongoing obstacle Roesch faces is finding and keeping good employees. Jani-King requires the lowest initial investment of any franchise in the world. Buyers are less likely to remain committed because there is not a lot of money at stake. Roesch says, “It’s hard to get people to act like business owners when they are not your employees.” He attributes overcoming challenges like this to his well-balanced partnership with Zillig.

Another characteristic necessary to success is the desire for profit. This mentality is what drives businesses to better their products; naturally, this pleases the consumer. In a nation where the government controls commerce, consumers rarely are satisfied. The government knows individuals will buy goods out of necessity and has no incentive to improve. In a capitalist economy, however, businessmen work in their own interests, resulting in better and more affordable products.

Dazser seeks to earn profits by addressing a problem with commercial cleaning services. Small “mom and pop” companies have great customer service and close supervision but often do not have proper training or insurance. Big national companies have the opposite problem. Jani-King is a big company with proper procedures and record-keeping combined with the small business owner who provides customer service and supervision. Their interest in making money benefits those looking for a reliable cleaning service.

Dazser engages in other profit-seeking ventures that please the customer. Unlike other master franchisers, Dazser promises initial business to those who purchase Jani-King franchises. Roesch says, “When someone purchases a franchise from us, part of our commitment to them is to provide them with some customers.” This unique guarantee – though it helps small business – is applied only because it brings Roesch revenue.

This kind of self-interest is what drives individuals to turn profit while incidentally benefiting their communities. Roesch became an entrepreneur for personal gain, not to make a difference in the world. “I wanted to be financially secure at as early an age as possible. I didn’t want to help anyone.”

Dazser supports its communities by putting 10 percent of its profit into charities such as Young Life and Family First. Public knowledge of this boosts the company’s appeal in the community. The company has also been converting to “green” cleaning technologies, but as Roesch points out, “not because it’s required but because it’s a good business practice. It’s a marketing strategy that is a way to separate us from our competition.”

This notion of self-regulation is truly at the heart of successful business. The best perk of being his own employer, Roesch says, is “control over all aspects of the business.” The government, however, still imposes many requirements on businesses that decrease their effectiveness.

For example, government mandates such as those imposed by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission are more harmful than helpful. Roesch is against the quota in hiring employees because it doesn’t allow him to hire the best candidate for a job and limits his ability to fire underperforming employees without fear of frivolous legal retaliation. “Anybody can walk in to the EEOC and file a complaint without a single shred of evidence. It costs him nothing and costs us thousands of dollars just to reply to the inquiry.”

Despite government red tape, Roesch is glad he made a career in business. He works approximately 30 hours a week doing what he loves and gains personal satisfaction from engaging in work that will make people more productive and businesses more profitable. Additionally, Roesch says, “Business can be a reflection of our values and principles; we can use it to help others.”

The most interesting part of Stephen Roesch’s story is the lesson that business is more than just a job to an entrepreneur. From a young age, Roesch was involved in starting businesses and spearheading productivity and finance projects. Entrepreneurship is a lifestyle sustained by personality traits such as zeal and motivation for profits.

Mr. Roesch says the most important thing he has learned from his career has been that what really matters is the journey, not the destination. As people and businesses grow, ideals and goals may change, and this is good. His advice for aspiring entrepreneurs is simply, “Do it.”

Today’s headlines are ridden with warnings of the impending doom of the American economy. Layoffs, dividend cuts, and even bankruptcy have become the norm for businesses around the country. Despite this difficult climate, a handful of college students ignored the crumbling markets and engaged in an activity that is at the heart of economic growth: they started their own business.

It is not uncommon to hear of an enterprising college student starting a simple business such as babysitting, a laundry service, or tutoring. But the project started by Jake Klinvex and Dan Kervick is not your typical Sunday afternoon carwash. No, these Villanova University students thought outside the box and created a web-based concept that provides a much needed tool to businesses.

Their idea is called “Persontation” (www.persontation.com). It is a video communication system that brings the internet, Microsoft Office, and webcams to the same interface. With an account and unique domain name, a company can use Persontation to create custom video productions complete with accompanying graphs, charts, text, or images. Persontation works seamlessly with all Office applications as well as Adobe software.

Persontation had a classic beginning in the sophomore dorms of Klinvex and Kervick. In less than two years their staff has grown to 15 employees, including subcontracted software developers in Pakistan. The successful concept and subsequent growth of Persontation has not gone unnoticed. The founders are currently finalizing the sale of their startup to a local financial services software company, eMoney Advisor. After being acquired, Klinvex and Kervick plan to continue operations as a subsidiary of eMoney Advisor. Being a part of a larger, more established organization will give these entrepreneurs the additional resources they need to increase their sales, improve their customer service, and explore new areas of development.

Kervick describes that the most difficult hurdle to starting Persontation was securing financing for the operations of the company in the midst of a global financial crisis, tightening credit markets, and decreasing risk tolerance. The costs to create this service totaled approximately $100,000. This includes software development, travel costs, and printed materials. Despite the daunting price tag, the founders’ status as students helped to remove personal compensation from the equation and allowed them to contribute the necessary time to build their project while keeping expenses low. Startup capital was provided primarily from personal savings of the founders and a few friends.

Selling their idea was another challenge. Their concept needed to be marketed to potential investors, clients, and any firm that would have an interest in acquiring Persontation. Kervick found that the youth of Persontation’s team was an unexpected asset in the sales process. The clients perceived that younger generations are by definition technologically savvy and therefore their idea would be feasible. Kervick anticipates 2009 revenues at roughly $2.8 million. The success of Persontation in obtaining clients and being acquired by eMoney clearly demonstrates their technical skills and ability to sell their service.

Understanding that youth was not enough of an advantage to get a new online service started, Persontation’s management team approached James Danko, the Dean of Villanova’s School of Business, who was impressed with their work. Dean Danko then referred Persontation to VSB alumnus Edmond Walters, founder and CEO of eMoney Advisor. Leveraging what little capital was available and using priceless resources such as Dean Danko, Klinvex and Kervick propelled their innovative idea to new heights.

Through this unique experience, Dan Kervick has learned that “Small businesses are the lifeblood of the economy.” According to Kervick, the way to stimulate the economy is to reduce taxes on small businesses and provide incentives and safety nets to those taking appropriate risks, such as entrepreneurs. “To actually create wealth and shake a recession, the federal government should not disproportionately benefit those who work less and who are less likely to take risks and create jobs for others,” explains Kervick. As a successful entrepreneur, Kervick is thankful that this country and its economic structure are still favorable towards small businesses. However, he is worried by the potential deterrent to entrepreneurs that increased taxes would present.

Persontation and its management recognize that they are very blessed to have enjoyed their level of success. Because of this they recognize their duty to provide assistance to those who are not as fortunate. Persontation is committed to assisting philanthropic organization that it views as having a “strong purpose.” They screen potential groups, donate a Persontation account to the top organizations, and feature them in a Philanthropy section of their website. One of the supported philanthropies, Bread for Bread, collects donations from restaurant patrons when they receive complimentary bread in order to support local food banks.

Persontation also reaches out to several student groups at Villanova that are seeking to start their own businesses. Some of these groups are affiliated with the fraternity Sigma Phi Epsilon and the business ideas being worked on include a political website and a Greek community website. Kervick and Klinvex realize the contribution that others have made in their venture and in turn seek to encourage and inspire other potential entrepreneurs.

In light of current events, many Americans can take courage from the story of Kervick, Klinvex, and Persontation. Despite their environment, two college students demonstrated remarkable vision by pooling their talent and resources and bringing an idea to life. Enabling its clients to personify their projects, Persontation may be the future in presentation methods and could someday be a name as common as PowerPoint.

What an outsider might not guess is that Kramer stumbled across his job as a landlord “purely by mistake – or serendipity.” In 1990, having spent about twenty years in the pest-control business, he planned to purchase a piece of property on East LaSalle Street. He had intended to tear the house down and convert the land into a parking facility for business trucks. However, when he approached the owner, he learned that some St. Mary’s students had a lease for the following year. Kramer bought the property anyway, intending to honor their lease and then follow through with his original plan.

By September or October, though, he had received inquires from Notre Dame students about renting the house for another year. “I just kept going,” Kramer said. “I had to turn students away because I only owned the one house. At first, I still planned on turning the property into parking, but after a while I started asking the students questions about what they wanted.”

In 2004, he sold his pest-control business and began purchasing property aggressively. Kramer noted that there are two main parts of his job: “The first is ‘rehabbing’ older homes and making them a vibrant part of the community. The second part would be the people. I’ve met so many people in this business, and I really do enjoy meeting the students and parents and interacting with them. Everyday, there’s a surprise, and it’s usually a good one. The rewards of my job are much greater than the drawbacks.”
When questioned about the negative aspects of being a landlord for students, Kramer admitted that he certainly faces difficulties. “This is the first time the students have lived alone, and they’re not familiar with the inner workings of homes. It may sound petty, for example, but many of them don’t know what should be put down a garbage disposal. So maintenance can be an issue, because the students don’t know how to use a house.”

He was slower to mention what many assume would be the main challenge in the student housing business: partying. “Naturally, there are some students who have had a few too many parties by the time the year is over. Our goal is not to take their deposits, but sometimes we find that we need to – and we are constantly showing them how to get their deposit back.” He added, “We educate the students too: they need to learn how to be neighborly and live in a home. And by in large, they respect the houses.”
Kramer emphasized that the student safety is a greater concern than property damage. “Student safety is an issue that I do not take lightly,” he asserted. “I feel the same responsibility towards each one of my tenants as if they were my son or daughter.”
In addition to hiring his own security guards, Kramer pointed out that each of his homes is furnished with an ADT security system and good lighting. “It’s an ongoing challenge,” he concluded, “and the very worst thing that could happen is if one of my tenants should be physically harmed.”

Less flexible people might have found the transition from the pest control business to the property businesses rather abrupt, but Kramer finds the two businesses similar in one essential respect: customer service. “Both are about serving clientele and built on the same model of superior service,” he remarked. “If you offer excellent service, people will come back and refer others to you. My time in the pest-control business was useful for the advertising experience, but even there, year after year, around thirty-five percent of my business came from referrals.”

Now, Kramer estimates that fifty percent of his business comes from word-of-mouth referrals from students. He cited an example of a family of six brothers, four of whom have lived or are currently living in one of his houses. “The fifth brother will be in another home next year, and they tell me the sixth will very likely come to Notre Dame and live in one my houses too.”

Kramer highlighted the pleasure he derives from these interactions with the students: “I show the majority of properties myself, and when one student comes, I see brothers, sisters, cousins, and friends.”
Kramer quipped, “Conceivably, one day, I’ll see a son or daughter of a tenant living in one of my houses – but I hope my daughter will be running the business by then.” Kramer Properties can be called a family-orientated business in more ways than one: his daughter is one of Kramer’s six employees and works as the company’s leasing agent.

Kramer attributes his success to the quality of the service that he provides. He said, “The first house that I rented was popular, but in less than desirable condition when I bought it. The students were happy because that was the norm.” During the first summer he owned the original rental, he made substantial improvements to the property, including carpeting the bedrooms and replacing the roof, windows, siding, and floor.
“When the girls who had rented it came back in the fall, they came to me and asked, ‘What happened to our house?’” he recounted. “They were juniors, and right away they signed a lease for the following year. And when they moved out, they had it rented out for the next two years.”
Kramer felt there was an essential difference between him and the typical landlord. Kramer explained that many landlords have the attitude that “they’re students; they’ll tear it up anyway.”

Contrary to this, Kramer thinks that “if you give a young person an old, beat-up car, they’ll treat it like one. And in the same way, if you give them a shiny new car, they’ll want to keep it in that condition. My attitude is to always look at our houses with the question ‘Would I allow my daughter to live in this house?’ in mind. If the answer is no, then the house isn’t fit for the students.”

Kramer stated that he does “as much as he can to make the experience enjoyable for the students.” Students’ experiences extend to everyday details of living, not just the moment they move in. Kramer commented, “I don’t make the students wait a long time for a plumbing difficulty or something of the kind. I expect them to do their part, and they have a right to expect that I will do mine.”

His philosophy goes a long way toward explaining why Kramer Properties has always enjoyed a one hundred percent occupancy rate. Ninety percent occupancy is the rental industry norm. “I hope to be doing this for a long, long time to come,” he concluded sincerely.

I humbly submit that Joe Biden has no idea what he’s talking about.

This April 15^th, true American patriots (3,000 of ‘em) met at Lafayette Square across from the White House to protest unprecedented levels of government spending, taxing, and control. The protest was a peaceful demonstration that not all of America is willing to lie down to a centralized government with the hubris to think it can spend our money better than we can. Despite a few hiccups, the protest proceeded smoothly in the freezing rain. Speakers spoke, “Don’t Tread on Me” flags flew, and horns honked in support as participants held up signs saying things like “Taxes ‘r Theft,” “Legalize Capitalism” and “If you tax more, I hire less.”

More than 800 such Tea Parties took place nationwide, involving more that 250,000 people. Started as a grassroots reaction to the “porkulus” bill, and spurred on by Rick Santelli’s now famous call for a “Chicago Tea Party in July,” the movement picked up steam as an avenue for increasingly outraged citizens to show what they thought of government intrusion into the economy. Though the Tea Parties were a bi-partisan appeal to reason, many on the left have denigrated them as Republican events backed by corporate interests and K Street lobbyists. That such leftist criticism has turned so shrill, so quickly, is evidence that supporters of big government are scared. They’re scared that these protests might not be simply Republican “rah-rah” demonstrations.

And, in fact, they’re not.

Several conservative Democrats got up to speak at the event in DC, calling for common sense in government spending. As Michelle Malkin observed at the Sacramento protest: “[Tea Party organizer] Meckler said he heard that California GOP chair Ron Nehring was in the audience. Meckler invited him to say hi to the crowd — and then ripped him for waffling on the massive tax hike ballot measures (particularly Prop1A – $16 billion tax hikes). Massive boos from the crowd of thousands here against the Calif. GOP establishment.”

As to the assertions of Tea Parties being connected to corporate interests; that’s an intellectually disingenuous argument. Any politically active group can be linked to “corporate interests” (a la ACORN, Code Pink and the rest of the lefty protestosphere). Saying the Tea Parties have tenuous connections to vague, disembodied “corporate interests” is the same as saying that many of the people who attended them have hair: true, but vacuous.

Just because some political groups helped organize and coordinate protests does not mean they “co-opted” them or even initiated them. Correlation does not imply causation, and simply because FreedomWorks and AFP were involved does not mean that they were manipulating the message of the thousands of grassroots participants (like myself) for some sinister, undefined “corporate” aim.

Additionally, the fact that Fox News was covering these protests and giving them air time, even allowing individual anchors to promote them is by no means a reflection on the actual events themselves. Sean Hannity et al are not the “Fair and Balanced” part of Fox News. That leftist commentators allude to such a conclusion is an indicator of just how biased (and manipulative) they are. It would be like saying Kieth Olbermann is an objective reporter of facts: comically absurd.

All that said, the participation of such people and groups has as little to do with the actual message of the Tea Parties as logic does to Obama’s economic policy. Saying that big, evil corporate interests are behind protests attended by hundreds of thousands of disgruntled Americans nationwide is a red herring, intended to discredit Americans who have legitimate grievances. There were three thousand people at the DC protest alone (this, in a city which went 98% Obama) and I doubt Halliburton bused all of them in from their secret headquarters deep inside a volcano.

In fact, I know they didn’t because I talked to many of the protesters. I spoke with several small business owners, an employee of a construction company, some students, a public school secretary and a high powered consultant, among others. They were a mix of Republicans, conservative Democrats and libertarians (like myself) who had as much bad to say about Bush as Obama. Their message was overwhelming: bring accountability back to government, stop taxing us to redistribute wealth to those who don’t deserve it, and stop spending on massive entitlement and bureaucratic programs which don’t work, harm the free market, and saddle future generations with debt and inevitable tax increases.

Maybe our government got the message, but if not, there’s always July 4^th…

Stanford Review: How have you been received since coming back to Stanford?

Condoleezza Rice: I have been very well received—particularly by students, who come often. They send emails, and ask me when I’m going to start teaching again.

SR: What is the role of politics in the university setting?

CR: I think it would be too much to believe that people won’t have political views, particularly in Political Science or History or Economics. Because generally if you are studying those areas and you have no political views it is a little odd. But the question is how you communicate those views in the classroom. And I think it is very important that the curriculum be balanced in two ways. First of all, every faculty member should have an obligation to entertain alternative views. So it’s not just you have to have a balance in the faculty, though I think that’s a good thing too, I think its good to truly have people that represent those different views. But it’s also important for individual faculty to allow for alternative views both from students and from their colleagues.

SR: Why are conservatives underrepresented in academia?

CR: I’ve been asked that a lot and I have never really been able to come up with a good answer. Some people say that it dates back to the 1960s, when really universities were the epicenter of more revolutionary, activist thought and that [they say that the liberal] people stayed, and the conservatives didn’t. I think it would be an interesting research project to set up to see why that’s the case. I do think there are a lot of varying views. You have people who would be almost 100% liberal in their views and you have people who might be libertarian in their views. But I think if you looked at most faculty you will find that they have eclectic views—you will find social liberals and fiscal conservatives. You will find people who are socially conservative but don’t mind big government. I think it’s probably one of the reasons why it looks that way is voting patterns, but I think it’s more eclectic than people think.

SR: Can you tell us about the toughest decision you had to make as National Security Advisor or Secretary of State?

CR: Let’s take the case of September 11th. Once something like that happens and you’re in a position of authority, the hard question for you is there anything that I didn’t do or could have done? You really do resolve to not let it happen again if at all possible. That means making some very tough decisions concerning the use of force. I look now at, for instance, we hunted [Abu Musab al-] Zarqawi for years in Iraq. We knew that he was keen to the sectarian violence, and when he was found and killed, I never thought that I would be someone who would be so gratified by all that: I’m a ministers daughter…

That kind of toughened attitude about the use of force and what you have to do is something that comes with living in an environment in which you have seen Americans jump out of 80-story buildings as the Twin Towers came down. I think it was a difficult decision for the president to finally decide that Saddam Hussein had to be dealt with. One of the things I find very odd is this argument is that somehow people were looking for a reason to go to war. Nobody wants to go to war. But if you’re facing a circumstance in which you’re told and really believe [Saddam] has weapons of mass destruction, and he’s continuing to shoot at American aircraft, [and] he’s been a scourge in the Middle East. He’s dragged you into war several times. It’s a tough decision. Because any decision involving the use of force is very, very hard.

SR: In terms of your foreign policy trainings, you came up during the Cold War focusing on the Soviet Union. Was it a difficult transition focusing on new challenges?

CR: I think those of us who came up during the Cold War believed it was the end of conflict. Because we were so steeped in this bipolar in which you had the balance of terror between the Soviet Union and the United States—and spheres of influence. I remember when Germany was unified people thought “what else could be done” once Germany unified. Obviously people thought about transnational threats, people thought about terrorism. But I don’t think anyone in the country, specialists, or pundits, were prepared for just how much it could transform security threats. Probably, there was almost a little bit of a false lull between the collapse of Soviet Union in 1991 and what starts to happen with Al-Qaeda, at least by 1998 when they bombed our embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. [At the end of the Cold War] I think there was a little bit of a sigh of relief. The extreme version of it was the book The End of History by Francis Fukayama. It wasn’t quite the end of history.

SR: Do you see yourself getting involved with the move by former Secretaries of State Kissinger and Shultz, and other Hoover Fellows to rid world of nuclear weapons?

CR: I plan to leave foreign policy aside for a while. I had my chance. I got to negotiate the end of the Lebanon War in 2006, I tried my hand in Middle East peace, I got to help with the liberation of Liberia, I was there in Baghdad, and Anbar and Kabul. Now they [Obama officials] get their chance. So I will likely avoid that. I am going to do education and those issues. I was fortunate to do diplomacy at the highest possible levels, and I think I will take a break. I talked to George [Shultz] and Henry [Kissinger] about their project and I think it’s very interesting. They are also looking at the hard questions, like what does it mean to be at zero. I guess I think what the big nuclear threat right now is comes at a somewhat different way. To me the biggest surprise on the nuclear front is not the North Koreas or the Irans of the world, I fully expected those, but when I really got to understand what the AQ Khan Network was about—the Pakistani scientist who was a black marketer in nuclear technology—that seems to me is a threat that is very hard to get your hands around and needs some attention.

SR: Would you be opposed to their plan if China surpassed us militarily and economically?

I think you could make an argument that when the United States was dependent on nuclear weapons, a world of more nuclear weapons was actually more advantageous to the United States. Now when the United States is by far the most powerful country in the world militarily, economically, I know we are having our troubles, but still, and I would argue [the US is most powerful] in terms of influence. I actually think nuclear weapons will recede as an instrument of state power. Nuclear weapons have been coming down, the number have been coming down dramatically since the cold war. It is because they are not useful. You need to keep enough for deterrence, but I would be much more concerned if we did not keep our conventional strength up to speed. I have been asked many times about the rise of Chinese military power. And there is no doubt that it is outsized relative to China’s regional role. But if we allow Chinese military power to outstrip American military power then we’ve done something really stupid. We should be able to maintain both the technological and even numerical edge that is significant in the Asia-Pacific. Particularly when you look at the alliances that we have in the region. We’re also talking about strong militaries like South Korea, Australia, and you know, capable states like Japan. I would worry much more about the maintenance of our conventional strength more so than nuclear strength.

I’m much more interested in missile defense, frankly, because I think with missile defense you can deny to states North Korea and Iran any benefit from seeking these long range missiles with nuclear capability.

SR: What do you make of the Obama administration’s movement with respect to European Missile Defense.

CR: You can make a lot of critiques of whether or not it was a good idea to put missiles in the Czech Republic and Poland. I happen to think it was a good decision. But let’s stipulate that people have an argument that we should have put them in Turkey, or Great Britain or Denmark—Great Britain and Denmark already being part of the missile defense network. But you can’t go back and re-visit that decision. Now this becomes about geopolitics. This becomes about whether or not Russia is going to have a veto over what the United States does with its NATO allies, Poland and the Czech Republic both, of whom have put a lot of political capital into allowing these missile defenses to be deployed. The Russians told me straight up, “we would not care if they were in Turkey or Britain.” This is about Poland and the Czech Republic, [which] used to be a part of the Warsaw Pact. So you cannot encourage thinking that suggests that there is a deal to be made over Poland and the Czech Republic because that empowers elements in Russia that want to revisit the terms of the end of the Cold War. So I’m more concerned about that. We actually told the Russians, Bob Gates and I, sat with Putin and told him that we will not put missiles in the interceptors unless the Iranians test long range. We told them, “you [Putin] can put people in the Czech Republic and Poland that can watch what is going on with the missile defense system to make sure it is not aimed at you. We can do things to make sure that the radar is not aimed at you.” This isn’t about missile defense. This is about Poland and the Czech Republic.

SR: What would you say is the Obama Administration’s biggest foreign policy challenge?

CR: There are plenty of them. I think Afghanistan has more going for it for all that is given to them. They have a pretty good army, but it is a very poor country. If you have ever flown over the mountains as I have, it is very easy to see how terrorists hide. So it is going to be very challenging.

I think the challenge in Iraq is not to lose focus. It is not a question of when American combat forces withdraw. The distance between what the Obama Administration is talking about and what we negotiated is very small, but Iraq is on its way to becoming a strategic asset, but it’s not there yet. You can’t afford to lose focus on it.

But one [challenge] that I would pay a lot of attention to is Mexico. I think what’s happening on the border with the cartels, cartels that are being fed through Central America… There were 5,000 assassinations in Mexico last year by the cartels. This is starting to take on Columbia-like proportions. And I think the Calderon government is trying to do the right thing. It’s a very strong government, friendly government to the United States. When the Mexican president tried to ask the United States to help with law enforcement…. we now have a Samaritan initiative. I spend a lot of time worrying about that because it’s a real security threat to the United States as well.

SR: In Afghanistan, do they have the capacity to become a functioning government like you said Iraq is on its way to becoming?

CR: Ultimately yes, but it is going to be a long struggle. The Iraqi budget for 2009, I think was 49 billion dollars, or something like that, The Afghan budget with 5 million more people was $678 million. They just are poor. It’s the fifth poorest country in the world. We often said when you’re talking about Afghanistan, you’re not talking about “re-constructing”, but you’re talking about “constructing” Afghanistan. It’s a place with no roads—we’ve put enormous amounts of money into road networks. One reason that people continue to grow poppy is because it’s easy to transport poppy—it doesn’t spoil. It’s always been very decentralized. Kabul has never had a great stroke over the rest of the country. And it’s had 30 years of civil war. But it’s got very hardy, resilient people. It’s got a good army; it’s got a lot of will. I think we’ll make it but it’s going to be a struggle. I’ve always thought it would be tougher than Iraq.

SR: In terms of the stability of the international system, how does the financial crisis affect the Washington Consensus? Have American economic values been discredited?

CR: The Washington Consensus comes out of the collapse of central planning and statist economies. I don’t think anyone wants to go back to central planning. But I think you will see a degree of statism creeping in through regulation. That’s only natural and will be corrective. One impact for US policy is that there are a number of countries across the world not just in Europe, but in Latin America, Eastern Europe and Africa that bought into the de-regulation, “Let businesses get started quickly” use your foreign assistance to fight corruption but, basically free market economies, flat taxes. The Baltic States are in that category Estonia, which is probably the most wired country in the world, they do e-commerce and so forth. They sort of bought into that model in a major way. Second, the pressures on trade policy, shortly after the G-20 meeting in Washington they all took an oath not to go back and do anything protectionist, then immediately India and China go back and do something protectionist.

So I think trade policy is going to be under a lot of pressure. That’s really dangerous, because if you start to get into protectionist trade policies then you’re really going to deepen the global recession. Third, the issue of political stability in some places, I’m concerned about Eastern Europe, although I think that the institutions are strong enough. Some of them followed aggressive economic and financial engineering and now they can’t pay patrons. Fourth, I’m concerned about foreign assistance. The United States can’t afford… we tripled foreign assistants world-wide, we can’t afford to have that rollback. Countries have made big bets with us; it’s really important to not have that rolled back. I was pleased to see that growth rates in Africa next year are projected to be around 3.5%. So that’s not good [compared to] if it were 7% or 8%, but it’s better than if it were negative growth in those countries. Places like Ghana, Senegal, Mozambique, that are just coming out and becoming reasonable and stable democracies in Africa, you don’t want them to fall back. Now on the other hand, there are some big places where you’ll see some stresses. China: Ju Jintao told us that he needed to create 25 million jobs per year in order to keep pace with the exodus out of the villages. They’re creating 9 million this year. You’ll see some stresses there. You’re seeing stresses and strains in Russia; one of the silver linings is that the lower price of oil will probably disable some of the states that were using high oil prices for foreign policies that were very antithetical to US interests whether it’s Hugo Chavez in Venezuela or the Russians, you know, “Russia Inc.” That’s some of the silver linings about the Washington Consensus, which had already given way to what we call the Monterrey Consensus—that you do have to worry about things about education and healthcare, that they cant just be macroeconomic policies. You have to have a microeconomic effect.

SR: Is the world more or less safe than it was ten years ago? Will it be more or less safe ten years from now?

CR: I think that it is safer because we know what’s out there and we have structures in place to start to deal with them. I think there was a false sense of security in the 90s in the Middle East, which was just toxic with Al-Qaeda underneath the surface, and with these radical madrasahs, and radical mosques that were growing this thing and that explodes and we get semblances of it in ’93 and ’98 when the embassies are bombed and then the USS Cole, it explodes and then 911. It was all underneath the surface and largely because of the absence of legitimate political channels in these authoritarian states. So instead you had this malignant thing—there was politics but it was just in the radical mosques. The very fact now that some of that is being addressed I think makes it safer though not yet safe. When I hear how much more unstable the Middle East is, I say to myself “as opposed to what?” In 2001, with Al-Qaeda growing up underneath the surface, Syrian forces occupying Lebanon, Yassir Arafat in power in Palestinian territory stealing his people blind and refusing to make peace? An intifada between the Palestinians and the Israelis where we were talking about thousands of Palestinians dying, and we weren’t talking about suicide bombings in the West Bank, we were talking about suicide bombings in Tel Aviv. So when I hear this argument about the stable Middle East, and therefore we’re not making it safer, I think people just forget what it was like.

SR: Do you think there will be more self-emerging democracies in the Middle East?

CR: Rather than the Iraqi example?

SR: Yes.

CR: Good question. I think we will see greater pluralism in Middle Eastern politics. I distinguish between pluralistic politics where you begin to open a space for competitive forces, for alternative voices for human rights to be an issue, for women’s rights to be an issue-, and democracy where you begin to grow institutions that actually secure that. So even in a place like Saudi Arabia, King Abdullah has begun to create space for people to have alternative views. How long it takes comes down to organizing a set of democratic institutions, In Kuwait, their parliament is quite active. I think you’ll see more of them [Middle East Democracies]. Lebanon is a democratic state, [although it is] a little odd because of the sectarian balance, but it is a democratic state.

SR: How did you come to the conclusion that the War on Terror would in fact be a “war” as opposed to a law enforcement problem?

CR: I think most of us who were there on September 11th never thought about it in any other way. One reason I’d like to teach decision-making is that there is a caricature of decision-making where everything is done by a set of option-papers: you sit and you debate options. [But] some things are kind of evident. On September 11th, they went after the center of American financial power, they went after the Pentagon, and they were going after either the Capitol or the White House. We think now it was the Capitol. That is an act of war. They didn’t intend to terrorize us; they intended to bring us down.

I remember going into the Situation Room, I got word of the first plane hitting and I thought it was an accident, I got down in the Situation Room and my assistant gave me word of the second plane and I knew it was a terrorist attack. Looking for Don Rumsfeld, and then seeing that the Pentagon had been hit, and false reports that the State Department had been hit and going to the Presidential Emergency Management Center, and meeting the vice president there and there’s Norm Minetta, who was Secretary of Transportation who is trying to take down numbers to find how many planes are still in the air. And then, thinking we’d shot down that commercial plane that went down in Pennsylvania. [I remember] calling up Vladimir Putin and saying that we’re going up on full alert. Him saying, “we’re bringing our forces down so that there’s no spiral of alerts.” Telling Rich Armitage at the State Department—Colin was in Latin America—that you have to send out a cable saying that America has not been decapitated. This is not war?

So I don’t even understand the argument. Why it is important though, is of course there are elements of law enforcement, but in law enforcement, you punish a crime, you investigate and punish a crime after it has been committed. [In this case] if you allow the crime to be committed, thousands of innocent people die. So, you have to prevent the crime from being committed. And that means, if you find people who you think are going to engage in an attack, you have to lock them up, and it means that if you have terrorists that you have picked up on the battlefield, you can’t just release them into an unsuspecting population. It has real policy implications, but that [idea] that it was not a war that we were in engaged in, never occurred to me. I do think that the unfortunate thing is that we were never able to make clear that it was not a war against Islam or war with the Middle East; it was war against terrorists, and we had plenty of Islamic and Middle Eastern allies, because they were the targets as much if not more than we were. We know now that Al-Qaeda’s intention was to bring down the Saudi regime. That was their number one intention, their idea was that if you could somehow separate the United States from the Middle East, that the Saudis would be exposed, and they would bring down the Saudi regime and establish the caliphate in the Middle East. It’s why, by the way, Al-Qaeda’s defeat, almost defeat in Iraq, in the center of the Middle East is so important because Al-Qaeda in exile in some other place is not like Al-Qaeda winning in the center of the Middle East.

SR: Which member of the Bush administration is most misperceived by the media?

CR: The president. The person that I know and worked for—there’s almost no resemblance to the public perception, which was as someone who was not on top of the details. Any cabinet secretary who ever went in to brief with the president, knew two things: the first was, you better get to the point, because the president was already way ahead of you. Secondly, you better have your details straight, not just from that briefing, but from the one you gave six weeks ago, because he was going to say “but on February 5th, you told me that…” [He has] a memory like an iron-trap. [He has] great familiarity with the details, and a great sense of ability to go to the strategic issue. Many cabinet secretaries, including me, would walk in and giving a briefing thinking “why didn’t I think of that” before he asks you that question. So many people when they came out of those meetings… let’s take an assistant secretary of state, would say “you know I wish somebody could have came in and seen the president in this meeting”

SR: How is he doing now?

CR: He’s great, we talk to each other frequently over email.

SR: Is that the first time you’ve been using email in the last 8 years?

CR: [laughter] Pretty much.

SR: What were the most influential books in your life? Personally or academic.

CR: Hans Morgenthau’s book, Power Among Nations was very influential to me. I got a reputation as being a realist as a result. But realist, as an analytic tool, you’ve have countries resembling billiard balls bumping into each other in international politics and it doesn’t matter what’s inside them—that actually doesn’t work in policy terms, so I wasn’t captured by realism in policy terms.

I was very influenced by a book on Russia, which is probably one of the reasons I ended up studying Russian. James Billington, who is still the librarian at this library, wrote a book The Icon and the Axe and it was a book about Russian history and culture that I still love to read. There are many of them, but those two stick out.

SR: What about books that you have personally enjoyed?

CR: I love to read biography. I went on a tear in the summer of 2006, reading the biographies of the founding fathers. I read the biographies on Washington, on Hamilton—[Ron] Chernow has a great book on Hamilton—my favorite really. [I read biographies] on Franklin, on Madison, just lots of books about the founding fathers, partly because 2006 was a very rough year, and it helped me to remember that history has a long tail, not a short one. It helped me to remember that, by all rights, the United States of America should never have come into being—fighting the greatest military power of all time, Washington losing a third of his men to smallpox every time he would raise an army; Hamilton, as Washington’s aid to camp, throwing away all of the dispatches from Congress telling him what to do, rather than bother Washington. This cantankerous group of founding fathers that we had could not even decide what the great seal of the United States would look like. There were three committees to decide the seal of the United States of America. It was a good corrective to what we were going through. There was a lot of criticism, [such as] “the Iraqis just couldn’t get it right.” Maybe their leaders just couldn’t get it right… We were lucky, we had great founding fathers, but boy did they squabble a lot and make their share of mistakes.

SR: Can we improve education in America?

CR: I do, and I think it is necessary. There are two reasons it is important for national security. As a former secretary of state, I advocate for it as a national security priority. One thing, it’s important because if we don’t do better, we won’t compete, our people won’t compete, and then we will start to protect, and that will be really bad for the world because if the United States protects then everyone will protect. Secondly, it is important for who we are. People come here from around the world because they believe that you can get ahead here on merit and it doesn’t matter what your circumstances were, you can still do great things. I call it the “Log Cabin Myth.” A myth is not something that is not true, it’s just something that is outside in your thinking, and Americans really fundamentally believe this: if you just work hard enough, you will succeed. And if we ever lose that, I believe we will lose the one thing that really unites us. Because it is not blood, it’s not ethnicity, it’s not religion, we’re all kinds of mélanges, but it’s this core belief. A great multiethnic democracy has got to have that continuing sense of upward mobility and education is the key to that. Now what do we do? I think the first thing that we do is to recognize that we have to have tough standards and we have to meet them. I came up at a time when the “self-esteem movement” was just getting started, where there weren’t any wrong answers… But actually there are in math and science! [laughter]. Getting kids to recognize that excellence is the goal to self-esteem, not just feeling good about yourself is very important. And that means that curricula have to be toughened, demanding. We need to know when kids are having trouble, which is why I think President Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” was so important, because you have to test; it wasn’t punitive. You have to reward good teaching, because teachers are flat-out underpaid. Finally, you have to recognize that America will never test at the very top in math and science, but we can do better than what we are doing, but if you add to that the question of creativity, and you simultaneously ask how others are doing in terms of creativity, you might understand why 1 in 10 patents are right here in this [San Francisco Bay] Area. I think math and science education is very important, but I wouldn’t want to supplant in American education, the belief in broad education, challenging people but also [cultivating] different talents. Something I would re-introduce in the schools if I could is music education. Because if you really want to get disciplined, learn music. I would make people study languages from the third grade, because, abstract systems like that really do develop your mind. So I just think [the important keys are] rigorous curriculum and support for teachers, and it’s high standards that we need to actually assess.

Preprint from the April 3, 2009 Volume XLII, Issue 4 edition of the Stanford Review.

The invitation of President Barack Obama to be Notre Dame’s commencement speaker this year has sparked not just a campus discussion, but a national controversy. Rev. John Jenkins, C.S.C., has justified his decision to invite Obama for many reasons, but most notably that extending the invitation will serve as a basis for engaging Obama in dialogue about life-related issues.

According to Father Jenkins’ press release, “The invitation…should not be taken as condoning or endorsing [Obama’s] positions on specific issues regarding the protection of human life, including abortion and embryonic stem cell research. Yet, we see his visit as a basis for further positive engagement.”

Instead of engaging Obama on issues of human life, the invitation ignited a different debate about whether hosting Obama is an appropriate way for a Catholic university to engage these issues. Is abortion the most important moral issue in modern society, such that when deciding whether or not to host Obama, his pro-choice stance outweighs his stance on other social justice issues? Or does Obama’s stance on other social justice issues outweigh his support of abortion? How should Notre Dame balance a commitment to academic freedom with a refusal to compromise on certain moral issues?

The Notre Dame campus, according to the Notre Dame Mission Statement, should be a place where these questions are answered: “As a Catholic university, one of its distinctive goals is to provide a forum where, through free inquiry and open discussion, the various lines of Catholic thought may intersect with all the forms of knowledge…”

Notre Dame’s administration is tightly controlling the release of information because of the onslaught of responses by students, alumni and Catholics around the country. The Rover contacted seven members of the Department of Development, the Office of News & Information, and the Office of the President, and each one was unable to be reached, did not respond, or refused to comment when asked questions concerning the commencement invitation. Each person directed the Rover to University Spokesman Dennis Brown for the official University position.

In an interview with the Irish Rover on Friday, Brown was asked to confirm or deny whether an outside public relations firm was hired by the University to help address the situation and to produce talking points for the University’s departments, the Office of Development, and faculty members. Brown refused to comment on the matter saying, “I don’t comment on rumors.” He was unwilling to entertain other questions on the subject. However, an email was circulated throughout the Mendoza College of Business containing such talking points. It is unclear whether the talking points originated from the Office of News & Information itself or from an outside party.

The email was designed to help professors deal with calls and emails they receive about the announcement that Obama would speak at commencement. Recipients of this email were told to ignore general correspondence—“blast emails…can be deleted without response”—and to direct phone calls from the general public to Dennis Brown. They were told to direct the sender to Father Jenkins’ statement: “E-mails…sent to you as an individual can be answered with a short message: ‘Thank you for your thoughtful letter regarding the University’s invitation to the president of the United States to speak at Commencement and receive an honorary degree. Please visit the following link to view Father John Jenkins’ statement: [link included].’”

Professors were also told to “keep a record of names, affiliations and contact information of the individuals calling and e-mailing, and forward the information” to Carol L. Elliott, the Director of Newswriting for the Mendoza College of Business. If correspondents requested to speak with Carolyn Woo, the dean of the College of Business, they were told to “respond that she is not available,” and that they should “NOT give out [Dean Woo’s] main address.”

If a personal correspondence required a more in-depth response, these professors were told to respond with a statement based on the following: “…the invitation recognizes the president for his historic election, for his concern for the poor, for his efforts to improve educational standards, his respect for the role of faith and religious institutions, and for his commitment to ending war. These issues are dear to the heart of Notre Dame and all Catholics. We believe there is an opportunity to build a relationship, create dialogue and find more commonalities in the hope of shaping public debate,” followed by, “But I understand your position, and appreciate that it comes from a deep commitment to your faith and beliefs.”

Despite the call for a creation of dialogue in the prepared statement, the e-mail to the Mendoza College of Business included a bulleted list of advice to faculty members, quoted below:

• Do not engage in a debate, agree or disagree; just let them talk
• Do not offer any information that is not required (i.e., number of complaints we’ve received, why the decision was made, etc.)
• If the caller tries to engage you in a debate, try something like “I’m not here to try to convince you, but I will listen.”
• Do not offer a call back or other response; if they insist, get a name and number

When asked by the Rover to elaborate on what the administration meant by “dialogue” and for examples of ways the administration is going to engage Obama, Dennis Brown would not give specifics. He responded only that: “[Father Jenkins] has some things planned relative to engagement as a whole, not necessarily directly with the President while he’s here. That’s the beginning or rather the basis of an engagement going forward. While he’s here three or four hours on a Sunday afternoon, that’s the beginning of what we hope will be ongoing contact with the Obama administration…on life, but also many other issues.”

On the subject of dialogue inside the University, Brown said, “We think that dialogue and conversation about various issues is healthy on a University campus, and we encourage it,” referring to the March 25 press release (See Page 5) from ND Response, a student coalition focused on organizing a pro-life student response to the invitation. Brown did not comment about any particular issues raised in the press release.

ND Response is composed of ten student groups at Notre Dame that oppose the invitation to Obama. Many groups outside the University, however, have also vowed to protest Obama’s visit. The Cardinal Newman Society, founded in 1993 to strengthen the Catholic identity of America’s Catholic universities, has a petition signed by over 210,000 people at the time of this publication imploring Jenkins “to halt this travesty immediately.” Operation Rescue, run by founder Randall Terry, has opened an office in South Bend and says that he will “turn over tables until the traitors surrender.”

In ND Response’s press release, they separated themselves from outside groups that have no direct connection to the University: “We request any groups who are committed to respectful actions to support our efforts, thereby ensuring a unified front and a more compelling public witness,” believing that any response should be initiated and driven by students.

In addition to declining comment about the University’s hiring of a public relations firm, Dennis Brown also did not comment about several other issues. When asked about the response the University has received from benefactors or how the Development Office has been responding to donors who claim to be withdrawing their support from the University, Brown remarked that, “We don’t discuss our relationships with benefactors. That’s not the policy of the University.” When asked for even a general comment, he cited University policy again. Then when pressed about long-term financial fallout or consequences from the situation, Brown said: “You’re asking me to speculate on something? I don’t speculate on such things.”

Brown was also asked how Father Jenkins might draw the line between honoring, on the one hand, and entering into an academic dialogue, on the other, with a political leader who acts in ways contrary to the fundamental moral principles of the Church—does giving Obama an honorary degree blur that line? This is one of the many points of contention in the dialogue about the commencement invitation that Jenkins has not addressed. Yet in response to the question, Brown was unwilling to comment further and directed the Rover to Jenkins’ previous press release on the issue.

D’Arcy will not attend the commencement, believing that in inviting Obama, “Notre Dame must ask itself, if by this decision it has chosen prestige over truth,” according to his March 24 press release. D’Arcy also said in the statement, addressing Obama’s approval of federal funding embryonic stem cell research, “While claiming to separate politics from science, [the President] has in fact separated science from ethics and has brought the American government, for the first time in history, into supporting direct destruction of innocent human life.”

The University responded to Bishop D’Arcy’s statement on the matter with only a one-sentence statement of regret: “Bishop D’Arcy has been a long-time friend and supporter of Notre Dame, and we’re sorry he will not be there,” according to an Observer article.

As part of his decision, Bishop D’Arcy referenced the statement from the U.S. Catholic Bishops in 2004 that “…Catholic institutions should not honor those who act in defiance of our fundamental moral principles. They should not be given awards, honors or platforms which would suggest support for their actions.” D’Arcy went on to comment that, “the measure of any Catholic institution is not only what it stands for, but also what it will not stand for.”

Concerned students of Professor Sean Tarter contacted The Informer after finding closed doors around every corner. Members of the professor’s Fall 2008 class unanimously supported a petition delivered to President Reveley, the Economics Department, and The Flat Hat. Members of the course strongly expressed their interest in further pursuing their Fall course’s content with a follow-up course in the Spring.

Former students of the professor have gained substantial benefits from the material taught in the class. One student was accepted to a prestigious graduate program at Columbia University; the professor was then sent a letter by Columbia asking him to send more students with exposure to the course’s content.

Professor Tarter often hosted extended office hours and in one notable case taught a supplemental lecture, in response to students’ requests, from 9 PM on a Friday night until 1 AM in the morning. According to Stephan Jensen (’09), “nearly the entire class showed up… I don’t know any professor who would spend hours with students talking, that’s pretty extraordinary.”

Reviews of Professor Tarter available on ratemyprofessor.com frequently invoke the word “brilliant” as a primary descriptor. One entry from a student of Econ 400 says, “this class was the most challenging, most rewarding, and most memorable experience[s] of my college career… you will not find an instructor who is more knowledgeable, helpful, or genuine at William and Mary.” Most entries describe the courses taught by Professor Tarter as extremely difficult, but are nonetheless extremely favorable.

Students enrolled in the Fall 2008 course studied financial derivatives and were each responsible for maintaining a mock $100,000 trading platform throughout the semester. Many desired to continue the course’s content into the Spring 2009 semester. Professor Tarter was contacted by The Informer and shared, “the students wanted the class, and I wanted to do it.” Attempting to establish the course, Mr. Tarter decided that “I didn’t care if I was paid,” saying that sharing his knowledge is his primary mission in his life.

Efforts to establish a course for the current semester were met with support by various faculty members, including Economics Department Chair Will Hausman. According to Mr. Tarter, “Will Hausman, David Lutzer, and even Eric Jensen tried to help, but for reasons we really don’t understand, we were unable to proceed.” The course was ultimately unable to be offered this semester, much to his students’ disappointment.

The petition that students then took upon themselves to draft read, “Adjunct Professor Tarter’s dedication to teaching is evident to anyone who has encountered him in an educational setting,” and details the particularly astonishing feats the professor when through for his students. Students Julian Vignaud (’09) and Stephan Jensen (’09) decided to circulate the petition to express “in very clear terms that not having this professor teach the course was madness.”

Jeremy Powers (’09) formerly took two courses with Professor Tarter and was a supporter of the petition effort. “The amount of material that Sean was able to not only cover but make understandable is simply amazing,” says Mr. Powers, “his expectations were high, but he taught with artful simplicity and made himself completely available to answer questions after every class, even holding 4 hour review sessions on Friday nights.”

Professor Tarter not only is an extremely engaging and talented professor, who shares mutual respect and admiration for his students, he is also suffering from a severe neurological disorder. His medical condition has caused him to go through great pains to teach. According to Mr. Tarter, it is worth it, “I am consistently blessed with the best students imaginable, both as academics and as people,” says Mr. Tarter, who describes a guiding mission in life to impart the knowledge he has acquired to students, no matter the personal cost.

Dean of Arts and Sciences Carl Strikwerda was contacted to determine the effects of budget cuts on the employment of adjunct professors. According to Mr. Strikwerda, “no one was let go or had a contract canceled because of the budget. We were very careful only to hire the adjuncts we truly needed this semester to meet student enrollment needs, but the number of adjuncts this spring is not significantly different from past semesters.”

Mr. Strikwerda also said that “generally, we do not have adjuncts teaching for free.” He notes that there are a few exceptions and believes that there have been instances where “due to special circumstances, we have allowed someone to teach and they have refused payment or we have allowed them to teach for free,” but that, “I can’t recall any instances of this right now.”

Mr. Tarter notes that even if the course had been established this semester, his doctors would have strongly opposed his plans to teach. His medical condition is currently quite severe, but Mr. Tarter plans to work as hard as possible to be well enough to return next semester. Although the student-initiated effort to create a class this semester failed, Mr. Tarter says, “I have only experienced gracious support and encouragement from the school and have absolutely no complaints.”

Professor Sean Tarter hopes to return to teaching in the Fall 2009 semester. Many of the students contacted for this story will have graduated by that time, losing the opportunity to continue studying under a professor they consider to be a true asset to William and Mary.

The crucifixes have been a part of The Heights in scattered classrooms since the 1970s. Former University President and current University Chancellor J. Donald Monan, S.J. has confirmed that there was no specific directive or university initiative to make the classrooms uniform in appearance. Indeed, many of the professors who have come forward against the new crucifixes typically lecture in Merkert, a hall which did not have crucifixes adorned on the walls prior to the current semester. Some classrooms in Gasson, meanwhile, have had crucifixes for the past few years.

Professor Hoveyda, the Vanderslice Millennium Professor and Chairperson of Chemistry at Boston College, found it disconcerting that the faculty were not consulted before the decision to implement crucifixes was reached by administrators. He stated that “in any respectable university, it is the faculty who are responsible for the level and the quality of the education of our students; this does not pertain to administrators, particularly those who are either not scholars or are have never in their lives been highly respected serious scholars.”

Professor Hoveyda went even further when he said “I can hardly imagine a more effective way to denigrate the faculty of an educational institution. If that has been the purpose of the administration of Boston College, I congratulate them, as they have succeeded brilliantly.”

Even some professors who recognize a duty on the part of a Catholic university to expose its students to Catholicism object to the crucifixes on the basis that they impose too much upon the religious freedom of students. Professor Scott, a member of the chemistry department, commented that “as a Jesuit university, BC does have a duty, in my opinion, to expose its students to Catholicism. However, ‘expose’ and ‘impose’ ought never to be confused.”

The university denies that the crucifixes were ever meant to be or are in any way offensive to the campus community. In fact, it seems as though the move to introduce crucifixes into the classroom has been underway for some time as the administration has searched for some time for crucifixes that represent both Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross and BC’s commitment to social justice and missions around the world.

In a short statement to The Observer, University Spokesman John Dunn said that “Several years ago, University President William P. Leahy, SJ, appointed a Committee on Christian Art at Boston College, chaired by T. Frank Kennedy, SJ., then chairman of the Music Department and now director of the Jesuit Institute. The committee’s charge was to promote Christian art on campus, reflecting the Jesuit, Catholic mission and character of Boston College. Over the past few years, the committee’s efforts have resulted in statues, banners, paintings, musical recitations, crucifixes and icons in buildings, residence halls, and classrooms throughout campus. Many of the artifacts have been donated by students who brought them back from immersion trips. This Christian art is meant to constitute an enrichment of the culture at Boston College and is reflective of the University’s pride in its religious heritage.”

Student reaction, meanwhile, remains mixed. Although Professors Hoveyda and Scott cited several examples of even Christian students taking offense to the new icons and crucifixes, some members of BC find their arrival “comforting.” Billy Cody, A&S 2011, argued that “having a Crucifix or an icon in the room is a powerful daily reminder of Christ’s sacrifice for us and that without him we are nothing. It fits perfectly with the Jesuit motto ‘Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam’ (For the Greater Glory of God) because its presence reminds us that even in the classroom, we act for His greater glory.”

The university has declined to comment on what, if any, action will be taken against professors who refuse to hold classes in their assigned classrooms. How far professors will press the issue also remains unclear, as one professor recently said, “I do not feel comfortable sharing with you what the faculty plan to do, but I can tell you that we are not going just to sit back and watch this.”

This article originally appeared in the January 27, 2009 issue of The Observer at Boston College.

Its title succinctly summarizes the objective of the book: to encourage young people to seek a collegiate experience more akin to Plato’s Academy than to John Belushi’s Animal House. Langan is well-versed in Platonic teaching and uses this philosophy as a starting point for the book. Yet, although the work is inspired by philosophical truths, it is by no means an erudite piece of philosophy; rather, it is very conversational, an easy read for the average freshman.

This slim paperback is first and foremost practical, with advice regarding, among other things, making a schedule, avoiding late nights, and creating a vision of one’s future a month, a year, and ten years in advance. However, Langan offers more than a “to do” list– he provides the philosophical basis for his admonitions, interspersing pragmatic suggestions with quotes and explanations from Plato, Scripture, and others. Not only does Langan present his material in a lucid manner, but he does so in an approachable way. For example, Langan writes a chapter on alcohol and its potential dangers in a balanced fashion, neither puritanical nor lax. Throughout his work, the author instructs young people in perhaps the greatest challenge of college, and indeed, of all phases in life: how to become virtuous.

By the end of the work, Langan establishes the building blocks upon which an individual may embark on the struggle of virtue. Utilizing a model he learned from Coach John Wooden, UCLA’s ten-time NCAA basketball champion, Langan describes the “mountain of virtue,” which contains a triangle of fifteen virtues arranged in a certain order. One finds virtues such as humility and sincerity lining the base of the mountain, with charity at its peak. Theory becomes practicality as Langan describes the implications of virtue, which extend to all areas of a student’s life. One such area is one’s friendships and romantic relationships. In a time of true crisis regarding courtship and marriage, the author provides fresh insights into the secrets of how to build strong relationships based in virtue. Langan’s discussion of virtue and its implications for the college student’s life offers an excellent conclusion to an entertaining and formative book.

Written for the college freshman, From Animal House to the Academy provides a guide to living a virtuous life and succeeding in college and beyond. It is so helpful that indeed most anyone in any stage of life could benefit from the author’s wise words. So whether as a present to a graduating high school senior or a fun read for anyone wanting to live a more virtuous life, From Animal House to the Academy does not disappoint.