Culture
On Prudence
Over the last five years, we have learned that a significant portion of this blog’s readers are Millennials. With that fact in mind, I thought that it might be useful for those of us who are not Millennials to occasionally read leadership reflections from members of this very misunderstood generation. ...
Cultural Oxygen
Our children are breathing toxic air. I’m not talking about air from pollution. I am talking about cultural oxygen. Peggy Noonan, one of the most thoughtful public intellectuals in our society today, makes precisely this point when she notes that “…a nation has an atmosphere. It has air it breathes...
Improving the Cultural Foundation of Bad Behavior
Some of my readers will remember the series Mad Men. Mad Men is a fictitious story about a New York advertising agency set in the early 1960s. Don Draper, the lead, is a successful professional, husband, father—and womanizer. Nearly every other male in the series either harasses or preys on...
Something Better Than Trophies
I played baseball when I was young, and was a member of a team that won a citywide championship. I still have the trophy from that year, the caption of which reads: “League and Tourney Champs: F.A.C Bucks 1971”. I suppose I saved the trophy after all these years because...
About the Noise
Based on our data, only 16% of my blog readers live in the Dubuque community. That means my Editorial below, published in the Dubuque Telegraph Herald on Sunday, December 17th, 2017, will probably mean nothing to you. But before you exit the page and go on with your day, I’d...
A Leader’s Responsibility in Public Discourse
I just finished reading an engaging book titled On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Yale University professor, Timothy Snyder. The book isn’t a commentary on either our current President or past Presidents, nor is it a commentary on one political party or the other. Rather, it is...
Charlottesville, et al.
Our campus Chaplain talked to me about a student from California who had inquired whether I was going to issue a statement about Charlottesville. By the time this piece is made public, every one of my readers will know about the events in Charlottesville. They will have read or listened...
Remembering Giants in the Earth
In addition to being a great novel, most scholars agree that the 1927 publication of Giants in the Earth by O. E. Rölvaag marks one of the first painfully honest assessments of the human price paid for the settling of the American West. Giants is a story of Norwegian immigrants...
A Case for Intellectual Pluralism
Published in the Dubuque Telegraph Herald on June 18th, 2017 I still recall with equal measure of fondness and terror my professor’s green pen. I don’t know what it was with my former professors, but most seemed to write their critiques with green ink. Such was the case with one...
The Beauty of Impracticality
Lynn Dobson started building pipe organs in 1974. As an undergraduate industrial design major, he needed a senior project. His project was to repair a broken pipe organ that had long ago been stuffed away. He dissembled the organ and began to reassemble it in a chicken coup on his...
