Campus News: Multimedia Belt

“Are there more males or more females in the world today?” New York Times op-ed columnist Nicholas D. Kristof polls the audience at the beginning of his lecture. “Males?” A few tentative hands go up. “Females?” Most of the attendees in a packed-to-the-ceiling Hendricks Chapel raise their hands.

The answer is men. But Kristof’s answer to the world’s troubles is women.

When I became a Remembrance Scholar, I anticipated spending a lot of time in university archives learning about an exceptional, far away person who died too soon. I imagined talking about the Pan Am 103 tragedy with current scholars, and readied myself for many a weepy phone call home to my mom.

All of that came true. But what I didn’t realize before this process began was the connection I would make with the families of the victims of Pan Am 103, the message they would have for us, and how close I would feel to the tragedy, despite the distance.

Randy Cohen writes “The Ethicist” column in The New York Times Magazine, but said he is not an expert in ethics and sometimes wonders how he got his job.

But after writing the weekly column for 11 years, he must be doing something right.  

“I was not hired to personify virtue, but rather to analyze it,” Cohen told a Hendricks Chapel audience Tuesday night as part of the University Lectures series.

In the aftermath of a devastating earthquake that killed 23,000 Guatemalans in 1976, journalist, Fred Francis looked up to see US Air Force planes whizzing in.

He’s never felt prouder, he said. Within 72 hours the US had four field hospitals set up, kitchens and thousands of soldiers on the ground. “We were the good guys then,” Francis said, “We jumped through hoops to help people.”