Humanities & Society

Under Secretary of the Army Joseph W. Westphal, PhD, will preside over the 93rd annual Army ROTC Commissioning Ceremony at Washington University at 2 p.m. Friday, May 13. The ceremony in which 17 cadets will become commissioned officers in the U.S. Army, Army Reserve or Army National Guard will be held at Tisch Commons in the Danforth University Center, 6475 Forsyth Blvd., on WUSTL’s Danforth Campus. Westphal will also deliver a talk on leadership and the future of the Army and attend a reception for the new lieutenants and their families.  

President Barack Obama released his birth certificate on April 27, but “birther” arguments continue. Election and constitutional law expert Gregory Magarian, JD, professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis, says that Obama clearly meets the constitutional qualifications to hold his office. Magarian discusses various situations where “natural born citizen” (as required by Art. II, sec., 1 cl. 4 of the Constitution) may come into question during a presidential election.

Social Security’s yearly cost-of living adjustments (COLA) are targeted for reduction through a proposed “chained COLA” formula, and that could be a huge problem for those dependent on Social Security income. “COLA is an invaluable feature of Social Security,” says Merton C. Bernstein, LLB, a nationally recognized expert on Social Security. According to Bernstein, Republican “reformers” propose to reduce COLA claiming that the current method of calculating it overstates inflation. “This unrealistically assumes that people have the opportunity to buy lower priced substitutes when millions of people lack access to markets that offer such choices,” he says.

Despite all the “irrational exuberance” April 26 surrounding the first-ever news conference conducted by a Federal Reserve bank chair, the issues that Chairman Ben Bernanke chose to dance around were equally unsurprising as those he managed to address, says Michele Boldrin, PhD, the chair of the Department of Economics in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.

Gary S. Wihl, PhD, dean of the faculty of Arts & Sciences and the Hortense and Tobias Lewin Distinguished Professor in the Humanities, recognized the challenges faculty were having in accepting some of the more prestigious and highly competitive fellowships and last year instituted a Competitive Fellowship Leave program, which allows humanities and social sciences faculty members to minimize the unintended negative consequences of accepting competitive fellowships.

As fuel prices soar, food prices are beginning to creep up to crisis levels most recently seen in 2007. “Coupled with the financial crisis, high food prices can take a significant toll on nutrition, especially in developing countries,” says Lora Iannotti, PhD. “The same consequences can be true for wealthier countries, as households opt for less expensive, poor quality foods. Hidden hunger is a problem across the globe.”

Evidence supporting the link between savings and college success is growing. Three studies out of the Center for Social Development (CSD) at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis offer a connection between assets and college enrollment and completion. “This research underscores the importance of policies and programs that help Americans of all income levels to save for college,” says Margaret Clancy, policy director and College Savings Initiative director at CSD. In a study forthcoming in the Journal of Children and Poverty, CSD researchers found that among youth who expected to graduate from a four-year college, those with a savings account in their name were approximately six times more likely to attend college than those with no account.  

In the late 20th century, Chinese authorities enacted sweeping legal reforms, but in recent years, officials have stepped back from these reforms in the face of increasing citizen protests and concerns about social stability. “Horrified by the chaos of the Maoist era, Chinese authorities rebuilt their legal system in the 1980s and 1990s,” says Carl Minzner, JD, leading expert on Chinese law and politics and associate professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis. Now Chinese Party and court authorities have begun to move away from the reform track of the last several decades, reasserting tighter control over the Chinese judiciary, restricting the activities of public interest lawyers, and resurrecting earlier mediation practices.

With over a dozen states considering banning Sharia (Islamic law) in their courts, laws governing other countries are facing increased scrutiny. “This is emblematic of U.S. fears about international law,” says Leila Nadya Sadat, the Henry H. Oberschelp Professor of Law and director of the Whitney R. Harris World Law Institute at Washington University in St. Louis. “International law has become a ‘whipping boy’ for the ills that are being felt because of globalization.” Sadat say that this is unfortunate because the United States proudly led the trial of the major German leaders at the end of World War II at Nuremberg. “In fact, the entire post-World War II framework of modern international law was, if not an American creation, at least American inspired and American driven,” she says.

That FOX Broadcasting Company has a conservative slant and MSNBC skews liberal may reflect widespread opinion, but a Washington University in St. Louis study suggests that news networks’ biases can be measured. Published in March 2011 in the journal Behavioral Research Methods, the findings are important in their validation of a new research tool developed by Washington University psychologists, according to lead author Nicholas Holtzman, a graduate student in psychology in Arts & Sciences at the university.