"The Message from the Glaciers"

The May 27, 2010, issue of The New York Review of Books contains an article by Orville Schell that will remind the Glenn Fellows of Dessler and Parson's The Science and Politics of Global Climate Change. Here's the message that Schell hears from Earth's melting glaciers:

There are many links in the chain of cause and effect that stretches from the melting glaciers of the Greater Himalayas to the Indian or Chinese peasant who relies on the waters of the Ganges or the Yellow River to survive. And many more studies should be undertaken to scientifically clarify all these links. But there is already enough information for the world to know that we confront a very dangerous prospect, with no adequate effort underway to find the missing link between the knowledge we already have and action.

Jonathan Spence Delivers Jefferson Lecture

Last Thursday evening a number of Glenn Fellows attended the 2010 Jefferson Lecture, delivered by Yale scholar Jonathan Spence, one of our leading experts on the history of China. Spence's lecture focused sharply on a letter of recommendation sent in July of 1687 by Thomas Hyde, librarian at the Bodleian, to the famous scientist, Robert Boyle. In it, Hyde made a case for Boyle to find time to meet a third man, a rather remarkable Chinese named Shen Fuzong.

In his introductory comments, Spence acknowledged that he has a tendency to focus on "small-scale happenings in circumscribed settings," justifying it in terms of teasing "a more expansive story" from an apparently prosaic artifact. I'm not certain how effectively Spence did this, though his parsing of the letter was fascinating, even charming. I'm also not certain that he fully succeeded in building a bridge between the world of humanities scholarship and public affairs, which the Jefferson Lecture is supposed to do, which makes sense when one considers that it is sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Still, I found the event stimulating and a useful innoculation against the widespread notion that there were no important cultural encounters between East and West prior to the day before yesterday.

Read Spence's lecture here.

Read Serena Golden's review here.

Bachelors in Public Affairs

Dr. Charles Wise, Director of the John Glenn School of Public Affairs, broadcast this message earlier in the week.

Colleagues-

On behalf of the faculty and staff of the John Glenn School of Public Affairs, I am pleased to announce that the University’s Council of Academic Affairs has approved our Bachelors of Public Affairs Program. This is the final step in the University curriculum approval process. Our undergraduate program is now officially available for undergraduate students to enter. Special appreciation must be extended to Trevor Brown and Chris Adams who have spent so much time and effort in developing our proposal and guiding it through the multi-stage curriculum review process.

The degree includes instruction in core public affairs knowledge and skills: policy analysis, public finance, leadership, policy process etc. It also includes a choice of several specialty tracks including non-profit management, urban policy and management, and community organization and management among others.

If you know of students who are looking for an undergraduate program that will equip them for a career in public affairs and/or participation in public policy, please tell them to contact Chris Adams, Undergraduate Programs Coordinator.

To read more about our new undergraduate degree, click here.

Scarlet and Gray Congressional Breakfast

Yesterday was the annual Scarlet and Gray Congressional breakfast, held this year at the Hyatt Regency on Capitol Hill and attended by nearly 300 supporters of The Ohio State University, including numerous Members of Congress, Congressional staffers, and local alumni. Retiring Senator George V. Voinovich reflected on his two terms in the United States Senate. The Glenn Fellows were among hosts of the event, which meant, among other things, that they got to join Archie Griffin on the dais for a lively rendition of Carmen Ohio. Afterwards, they spent some time in conversation with President E. Gordon Gee.

Anyone who has ever heard Dr. Gee speak knows that he is unusually eloquent on the subject of what makes The Ohio State University a special institution. He is not alone in recognizing that our land-grant universities rank very highly among our national treasures. In a recent issue of the New York Review of Books, Tony Judt, an Englishman, describes how he drove across the country in a rented Buick when he first visited the United States in 1975. Somehow, he seems to have bypassed Columbus, but he didn't miss the larger point: Our land-grant universities, and particularly their libraries, are America's cathedrals. Judt puts it this way:

By far the best thing about America is its universities. Not Harvard, Yale, e tutti quanti: though marvelous, they are not distinctively American—their roots reach across the ocean to Oxford, Heidelberg, and beyond. Nowhere else in the world, however, can boast such public universities. You drive for miles across a godforsaken midwestern scrubscape, pockmarked by billboards, Motel 6s, and a military parade of food chains, when—like some pedagogical mirage dreamed up by nineteenth-century English gentlemen—there appears…a library! And not just any library: at Bloomington, the University of Indiana boasts a 7.8-million-volume collection in more than nine hundred languages, housed in a magnificent double-towered mausoleum of Indiana limestone.

A little over a hundred miles northwest across another empty cornscape there hoves into view the oasis of Champaign-Urbana: an unprepossessing college town housing a library of over ten million volumes. Even the smallest of these land grant universities—the University of Vermont at Burlington, or Wyoming’s isolated campus at Laramie—can boast collections, resources, facilities, and ambitions that most ancient European establishments can only envy.

The contrast between the university libraries of Indiana or Illinois and the undulating fields almost visible from their windows illustrates the astonishing scale and variety of the American inland empire: something you cannot hope to grasp from afar.

Is this a great country, or what? Read Judt's article in its entirety here.

OPM and OMB implement hiring reforms called for by President Obama

Close collaboration between the Office of Personnel Management and the Office of Management and Budget is fairly unusual, and the reforms announced yesterday promise to streamline the federal hiring process. Yesterday's joint news release can be found here. Still, those of us who have been around this town for awhile can recall other times when sincere efforts to rationalize the hiring process resulted in disappointment. In today's Post, Joe Davidson reflects on the significance of yesterday's announcement.

Paul C. Light on GAO

Paul C. Light of New York University (pictured), one of America's leading public policy scholars, wrote about the appointment of a new Comptroller General, "perhaps the most important job that most Americans do not know about," in Friday's Washington Post. The Comptroller General is head of the Government Accountability Office (GAO).

Public Service Recognition Week

The Spring 2010 Glenn Fellows may have been too busy serving the public to notice, but this is Public Service Recognition Week, a venture cosponsored by the Partnership for Public Service and the Public Employees Roundtable. Here is a link to a schedule of pertinent events. In addition, of course, there is the Glenn School's Excellence in Public Service Award reception next Wednesday evening.

Supreme Court Bolts Door

Philip Kennicott can be a harsh critic, but his views are always well expressed and not easily dismissed. In today's Post, Kennicott argues that the Supreme Court's "mindless" decision to bolt its front door is "a grand affront" to the citizens of a democratic republic. "We are becoming a nation of moles," Kennicott maintains, "timorous creatures who scurry through side and subterranean entrances." What's more, the Court's action has jurisprudential implications, which Kennicott takes to be a sign that we are losing our architectural literacy.

I am inclined to agree, but it is worth noting that the Supreme Court building has never been easy to read. The work of a distinguished Beaux-Arts architect, Cass Gilbert, the Supreme Court building was a Depression-era public works project intended to underscore the authority of an independent judiciary; nevertheless, it was not viewed with favor by all members of the Court. Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone, in particular, seems to have thought it a pretentious monstrosity. It is said that Stone complained that the nine justices would be diminished by the building's ostentatiousness--that they would be "nine black beetles in the Temple of Karnak."

Meanwhile, in Architect magazine, Lawrence Hurley reports that some Justices have expressed strong objections to the Court's new security measures.

Saraceno on Sanctions

On Thomas Ricks's blog, The Best Defense, former Glenn Fellow (Summer 2009) Daniel Saraceno argues that there is no way China will consider joining the West in imposing sanctions on both Iran and North Korea. Thus, "we may be forced to choose." Saraceno is currently working at one of Washington's most interesting think tanks, the Center for a New American Security.