Love of Learning

How happy I was to see your reference to Alma Miller, R.S.C.J., in the editorial, The People’s Schools (9/18). It was a privilege to be both her student and a dear friend, with whom I corresponded weekly throughout her life. Mother Miller demanded and expected the best from us. In addition to receiving a marvelous education, I was given a love of learning that I have never lost. Her enthusiasm for knowledge was contagious. After 50 years I am still taking courses, reading and writing. I know that would please her.

Phyllis Townley

Worth Reading

I was delighted to read the articles by Robert Ellsberg and the Rev. Gerald S. Twomey concerning Henri Nouwen (9/8). My son, a priest, gave me Nouwen’s book, Bread for the Journey, for my birthday in April 1999.

Since that time it sits on my kitchen table, and I don’t miss a day without reading it. It is truly a beautiful book with inspirational thoughts for every day of the year.

Keep it on your kitchen table or your nightstand, because it is really worth reading!

Frances C. Higgins

Voice in Wind

Thank you extremely for publishing such a well thought out editorial, with which I thoroughly agree (Sowing the Wind (8/14). I felt that you were expressing my very thoughts over the last few weeks. It makes me prouder to be a Jesuit who grew up in a Catholic environment in Jacksonville, Fla. with a large Maronite minority, and even a few Catholic Iraqi families. Please continue to be a voice in the wilderness.

Bert Mead, S.J.

Wake Up

Terry Golway’s column A Nation of Idol-Worshipers (7/31) was right on target.

It’s sad to see so many young adults wasting their time and energy for such low standards, while there are so many challenges everywhere to benefit society. There are numerous fields of labor that can make one feel fulfilled. The sad part of this pop culture is that our children feed on it.

Wake up, America; there is work to be done by you!

Regina Licameli

Agenda of Manipulation

FIRE, FIRE, HOUSE ON FIRE would have been a better title for your Current Comment Al Gore’s New Mission (7/17). You state that this documentary (I use the term loosely) An Inconvenient Truth, which deals with Gore’s version of global warming, is sobering stuff.

More sobering to me is your illustrious Jesuit magazine buying into the movie hook, line and sinker, and passing your gullibility off to your readers. An Inconvenient Truth is nothing more than an infomercial and propaganda blitz portraying Al Gore as so much more intelligent than us mere mortals.

If Al Gore were selling a product in this movie, the Federal Trade Commission could charge him with false and deceptive advertising. Maybe your magazine could have done some fact checking before presenting the movie to your readers as glowingly as you did, and bestowing on Al Gore the mantle of a genuinely dedicated public servant.

Unfortunately, America lost an opportunity to shed light on this important topic or add anything of substance to the conversation. You have only allowed the uninformed minority to frame the global warming discussion. How unfortunate.

Barbara Ann Mueller, O.P.

Gospel Ethic

Regarding the article by Wilson D. Miscamble, C.S.C., The Corporate University (7/31), I agree that much of third-level education today emulates the corporate business model. But I question whether this corporate university model is as intrinsically immoral as Father Miscamble seems to imply. If it is, then what other model would he propose?

University education today has become institutional on a grand scale, and we do not correctly read the signs of the times if we simply yearn for a return to the way higher education was administered in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Responding to the core of Father Miscamble’s concerns, I think that the management and marketing models that a university espouses do not necessarily imply an underlying ethic. Corporate is not necessarily bad and non-corporate is not necessarily good. I suggest that one can have a corporate university based on a Gospel ethic that is capable of being communicated to its students.

One final point: Father Miscamble says that as a matter of urgency Catholic universities should take the lead in American higher education in providing just compensation for adjunct faculty. I must say that I am adequately compensated for my duties as an adjunct professor. Adjunct faculty are, by definition, temporary faculty who supply some particular need not provided by the regular faculty. Historically it has been assumed that they have or had some other primary profession and so do not need to be compensated with a living family wage for their adjunct contributions.

Robert N. Barger