“I Want to Make Sure I Don’t Educate Monsters”

During an “On the Issues with Mike Gousha” discussion at Eckstein Hall on Sept. 11, Michael Berenbaum, a prominent scholar of the Nazi Holocaust, described the Wannsee Conference held near Berlin on Jan. 20, 1942, when 15 leaders from branches of the German government met to develop ways to cooperate effectively in killing Jews by the hundreds of thousands. The leaders did not set the policy of killing Jews, he said, but they greatly increased the pace and efficiency of the genocide. At the time of Wannsee, four out of five of the six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust were still alive, Berenbaum said. Fifteen months later, four of five were dead.

What Berernbaum noted about the conference was that all 15 participants had university degrees. Eight had doctorates. Seven were lawyers.

A responsibility of all teachers, he said, is “to make sure that we do not create educated monsters who have all the skills and the abilities of modern men and women, all the genius of modern technology, all the capacity for creative thought, and no moral core.”

“I want to make sure that I don’t educate monsters,” Berenbaum said in summarizing his goal as an educator.

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Chasing Happiness

HappinessA July 2014 article in the Wisconsin Lawyer magazine describes a nationwide study about the happiness of lawyers.  This study shows factors that correlate with lawyer happiness, as well as those that don’t correlate.  Those factors that correlate most strongly are what the article calls internal factors, and the factors that are least likely to correlate are external factors.  The internal factors relate to how well a person is able to communicate and interact with others, and the external factors relate to points largely outside one’s immediate control.

The article highlights the following internal factors, which positively influence lawyer happiness:

•Autonomy, or being authentic and having a sense of control over one’s choices (0.66)
•Relatedness to others (0.65)
•Feeling competent in performing one’s job (0.63)
•Internal motivation at work (0.55) – that is, finding the work itself meaningful, enjoyable, and so on, rather than being motivated by external factors, such as pressure from others or needing to impress others
•Autonomy support at work (0.46)
•Intrinsic values (0.30) – these may include personal growth, helping others, and so on, in contrast to such extrinsic values as power, affluence, and others

 

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Lovell Wants to Build on “Penned Up Energy” of Marquette Community

One thing Michael Lovell has learned about Marquette University since starting as president on July 1 is that there are many people on campus who have great pride in the institution and who want to make it better.

“There’s a lot of penned up energy,” Lovell said during an “On the Issues with Mike Gousha” session at Eckstein Hall on Tuesday. “People have some great ideas and they’re just waiting to go . . . For some reason or other, they just didn’t feel empowered to take those great ideas and just make them happen.”

That will be one of his main goals, Lovell said: Providing the resources and guidance for fresh ways to improve Marquette in all its aspects.

But Lovell held off on giving many specifics on what his agenda will be. For one thing, he said he is planning to unveil some plans during the events marking his inauguration next week. He reiterated previous statements that filling “a lot of open senior positions,” as he put it, is his first priority. “It is so important to get the right thought leaders in place.”

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