Month: August 2002

Stanford students are the 12th happiest students in America.

How interesting. A few thoughts:

1) We beat Cal by 7 points. 🙂
2) I wonder what measure they used to determine happiness? Is it related to the fact that we’re the 19th most gay school in America?

According to this survey, we’re also one of the most Democratic schools in America.

We also have the 13th nicest dorms in America, the 15th most beautiful campus, and the 15th best relationship with our host community (which makes me think the surveyists were smoking crack, because the town/gown relations here seem a might strained to me…).

I would never have found this survey had not Andrew Careaga lamented his school’s despair and Mean Dean pontificated on his professorial possibilities. Thanks!

the following is a rough paraphrase of a very cool encounter that occured just hours ago

The scene: I’m sitting at my desk, thinking about what to put on our web site when I receive a phone call:

“Hi–my name is Aileen, I’m a student at Stanford and I live in Oak Creek. I saw your website and had some questions about Chi Alpha. It looks like you believe in being filled with the Holy Spirit. Do you?”

Me: “Wow. [long conversation, skip a lot of stuff] How did you come across our website?”

Aileen: “I did a search for Oak Creek Apartments and your website came up.”

The bottom line: we wound up inviting Aileen (a Singaporean Ph. D. student studying the biology of cancer) over for supper. We had a great time!

God is continuing to arrange divine appointments for us to facilitate ministry among the students at Stanford!

I just found out that Stanford has a center called Bio‑X.

Is it just me, or does that sound like some sort of shapeshifting superhero?

In reality, Bio‑X is arguably the most ambitious interdisciplinary bioscience research effort in the world. (source)

There’s an interview with Matthew Scott, chair of Bio‑X, on the Stanford website. In it, he talks about his hopes for the superhero-monikered program.

One section I found particularly interesting:
We have a bioethics expert, Hank Greely [professor of law] as a member of the Bio‑X Leadership Council, and he will be advising about this. Many issues are likely to come up — issues of access to health care, debates about the meaning, practical applications, and dangers of new technologies, or genetic privacy — all kinds of things arise, some of them ethical issues and some of them scientific issues with social impact, not strictly ethical.

Hmm… if I had to pick ethical issues related to interdisciplinary genetic and biological research, access to health care would not be the very first thing on the top off my head.

Still, it sounds like a tremendously important research project–giving me another occasion to repeat our rallying cry–today they learn, tomorrow they lead. These future leaders must be reached with the gospel!

Here’s a bizarre little annoyance: no one from Stanford can dial my telephone number (or my wife’s). Whenever they try it asks for an authorization code!

I called the IT department at Stanford to let them know, and they’ve been very helpful. They seemed just as surprised at the news as I was.

Let’s see–what could account for this ministry hinderment. Could it be… Satan? (soundbyte)

Another note on those amazing students at Stanford: the undergrads are engaging in original, funded research.

How wild is that?

One student featured in the story is doing research on the dowry system in Kerala, India. My cousins, who are of marriageable age, are victims of the system, and if my parents had not come to the States, theres a good chance I would have been also, she said. I was a bit bothered by always reading about Kerala as the model state. I knew it had its good and its bad, like everywhere else … but this dowry system, a very present bad, is one Im interested in learning about more, understanding and contributing to stopping it.

Yet another reason we feel so passionately that Stanford is a strategic mission field. I said it before, and I’ll say it again: today they learn, tomorrow they lead.

Professor Christian Smith of UNC Chapel Hill wrote an interesting article for Books & Culture called Force of Habit attempting to explain a tenacious anti-religious sensibility among many faculty.

Several anecdotes effectively highlight his thesis: anti-religion is still alive and well among the university professoriate. Particularly anti-Christianity, which disdains a faith neither exotic nor “subaltern” enough to merit the admiration of intellectuals.

After spouting some very confusing sociological terminology, he uses a concept called habitus to account for this consistent trivialization of faith. They way Smith uses it, habitus seems to mean an idea carried forward by momentum rather than merit.

In particular, the notion of habitus helps to explain some curious features of academic anti-religion. One is that none of the anti-religious faculty I know as individuals are nasty people out to make religious believers feel bad. They’re smart, interesting, morally serious, and well-intentioned. I prize my relationships with them. They’re not aiming to be anti-religious, anti-Christian. They don’t have to try. It just comes naturally to them, almost automatically, as if from a fundamental predisposition.

I’d have to say that’s been my experience: the irreligious among the cultured elite seem genuinely shocked when they discover someone that they previously considered thoughtful and well-educted is possessed of a deep and abiding faith. They’re flummoxed.

More importantly, this habitus is infectious. The most pernicious struggle I see students engaged in springs from a perception that smart people just don’t believe in God.

That’s hard to battle: it’s not as though there’s an actual argument being made here. It’s just an attitude picked up by osmosis. That’s one of the reasons I try to bring information on intelligent believers to their attention such as a list of living famous Christian scientists and information on Christian faculty at Stanford such as Don Knuth.