"Geekfest" is my term of endearment for the APSA, where several of your humble NLT bloggers are now camped out. True, political scientists not as geeky, as, say, a gathering of English professors or economists, but still rate a solid 8 on the 1 - 10 Geekiness Scale (with 10 being physicists).

We moved up a solid notch last night during dinner at the Capital Grille, where the Claremont Institute had graciously invited about 25 of us pasty-faced fellow travellers to overindulge red meat. (I thought you had a tan from the beach in California?--Ed. Yes, but it’s fading quickly, and the lighting was very dark.) About midway through the festivities, a totally hot babe from a nearby table wandered over to inquire who the heck we were.

Tamar Lewin reports to the New York Times that many small, selective, liberal arts colleges are no longer demanding SAT scores (yet most students applying, submit them). While interesting enough, there are some sillies in the article. Note this from the VP for enrollment at Mount Holyoke:

The good folks at The American Spectator were kind enough to post a more formal version of my thoughts on the situation at Georgetown, first adumbrated here.

Well, since everyone’s getting in on the act I may as well, too. I’ll be in Philadelphia along with Peter and Joe ("But who will be blogging?"--Ed. Schramm can pick up the slack, if someone will siphon Isabella’s gas tank), doing this panel on Churchill, and also speaking at the Churchill Centre’s annual APSA dinner at the Union League Club, which is described here,, on the topic, "The Use and Abuse of Churchill in History."

The new issue of the journal I edit--PERSPECTIVES ON POLITICAL SCIENCE--is out! It includes a symposium edited by the world famous DANIEL J. MAHONEY on the most prudent and still among the most profound of the French thinkers of the 20th century, RAYMOND ARON. The contributors to this symposium include Bryan-Paul Frost, Pierre Manent (!!!), and Miguel Morgado of Portugal.

As if that weren’t enough, there’s an article by me on "Tocqueville at 200" and a pathbreaking commentary on Locke, absolutism, and toleration by Christopher Nadon. There’s still more! Including review essays on Philippe Beneton’s EQUALITY BY DEFAULT by (distinguished NLT blogger) Carl Scott and on Mansfield’s MANLINESS by Ivan Kenneally. And a review of Mahoney’s book on Jouvenel by (NLT’s sagacious) Will Morrissey.

Let me piggyback on Peter L.’s post by saying that I, too, will be in Philadelphia, with the family in tow (a home school field trip to study American history). I’ll be on a panel with, among others, John von Heyking, discussing American civil theology; my focus will be on GWB’s religion. I’m also presenting a paper on Tolkien, using his reflections on human finitude to address one of the largest issues in the background of our current concerns with bioethics.

If you’re in the Philadelphia area and are really bored, you might want to attend this panel with the great title "The Power of Virtue" tomorrow at the American Political Science Association Meeting. My talk--now entitled "Real Men Prove Darwin Wrong Again"--will actually be on the manly dimension of virtue in the recent novels of Tom Wolfe and Harvey Mansfield’s MANLINESS, but it will also include a biotech conclusion. The actual manly Mansfield will be there, which could mean I’ll be in big trouble. Manly men, we learn from Wolfe, most of all fear HUMILIATION. This will be one of my least psychologically Christian talks in recent years, but I will balance it with a pretty darn Christian one the next day.

A few days back Peter related a private conversation that a skeptical liberal of some promience held with Bush recently at the White House. As I understand it, Bush told this person that one of the things he had changed his mind about was the environment, though no further details were forthcoming. Rumors are starting to swirl around Washington that Bush is soon going to do something large and dramatic "to take global warming off the table" as an issue in the 2008 presidential election, though why he would want to do this is beyond me, unless he supposes this will prevent Al Gore from running, and thereby deliver the nomination to Hillary, who will be easy to beat in November. (So goes the conventional wisdom on Hillary, even among many Democrats.) Is it all another Rove plot?

Comes now this report from Mike Allen in Time, with this tantalizing tidbit:

Previewing the final quarter of Bush’s presidency, officials disclosed to TIME that the Administration is formulating a huge energy initiative designed to "change the whole nature of the discussion" and challenge the G.O.P., Democrats, the oil and electricity industries, and environmentalists. An adviser said Bush’s views about global warming have evolved. "Only Nixon could go to China, and only Bush and Cheney--two oilmen--can bring all these parties kicking and screaming to the table," the adviser said.

John Wilson, hardly anyone’s idea of a foaming-at-the-mouth right-wing evangelical theocrat, upbraids Randall Balmer’s attempts at a caricature of his (Balmer’s, as well as Wilson’s) evangelical brethren. The concluding paragraph:

I hope that in time Balmer will write another book covering some of this territory, a book in which the moral passion that informs Thy Kingdom Come will not be dimmed but which will do greater justice to the moral complexity of the terrain, a book that will be likely to unsettle some of his university colleagues as much as it angers many on the Religious Right. That’s a book I’m eager to read.

I caught part of Balmer’s appearance on Michael Medved’s show. Balmer didn’t acquit himself well, constantly insisting against the evidence that theologically conservative evangelicals are incipient theocrats.

Courtesy of Beloit College, the annual "What Freshman Don’t Know" List.

Georgetown University is terminating its relationship with evangelical student groups (like IVCF). Your can read Georgetown’s letter here and other coverage here, here, and here. If you want to see what Georgetown says about itself, you can go here and here. Is it ironic or what that the link to a statement describing "Georgetown’s Catholic and Jesuit identity" is, at the moment, broken?

My own view is that if Georgetown wants to centralize control over the official expression and exercise of religion on campus, it’s certainly entitled to do so. After all, it is a religious institution (though the details are at the moment hazy because of the ironically broken link) and fidelity to its mission may require the sort of centralization and oversight it’s now proposing. But, still, I can’t halp thinking that the motives are a little less pure than that. Do they, for example, have a particular beef with evangelicals who want to evangelize, or with evangelicals whose theological outlook might be described as conservative? Inquiring minds want to know.

Update: Even though he didn’t know I was asking it, Joseph Bottum ventures an answer to my question:

The problem, of course, finally boils down to this: The evangelical groups represent only a few hundred students, but they are strongly pro-life and opposed to homosexual marriage. The mainline Protestant employees of Campus Ministry find such things embarrassing, and so they kick the evangelicals off campus, employing the power of the officially Catholic chaplain’s office and the rhetoric of the school’s Catholic identity.

There’s an obvious irony here—employed too often to be surprising—in which people begin by protesting in the name of diversity against centralized authority, and later discover, once they’re in charge, how useful those old forms of authority can be in controlling diversity.

But it also represents a tactic we’re likely to see more of: claims of old-fashioned Catholicism, used by people who are far from old-fashioned Catholics, to maintain control of officially Catholic institutions and to ban the people whose political opinions they don’t like. Watch for it at Boston College, and Marquette, and Notre Dame, and Loyola Marymount, and on and on.

Update #2: This was in the Georgetown student newspaper, which I’m sure will cover the brouhaha, if any, in the coming weeks.

Last update: The link works again, so we learn this:

The vision of John Carroll continues to be realized today in a distinctive educational institution -- a national University rooted in the Catholic faith and Jesuit tradition, committed to spiritual inquiry, engaged in the public sphere, and invigorated by religious and cultural pluralism.

***

Assisted by Roman Catholic, Jewish, Protestant, Orthodox Christian, and Muslim chaplains, Director of Campus Ministry Rev. Timothy S. Godfrey, S.J., oversees Campus Ministry programs. From its inception in 1789, Georgetown has welcomed students of -- in the words of founder Archbishop John Carroll -- "every religious profession."

In the late 18th century, approximately one-fifth of the university’s student body were Protestant. In Fall 2004, 52.6 percent of undergraduates self-reported that they were Roman Catholic, 5.3 percent Jewish, 2.1 percent Muslim, and 24.1 percent another Christian denomination.

You can also find something of a vision of faith and learning in the inaugural speech of Georgetown President John J. DeGioia:

Like all great American universities, we also live another set of tensions as we seek to fulfill our role. Enlightenment universities were established with the idea that there is a unity of knowledge, and truth is there for human discovery. The last 30 years of higher education has brought the development of multiple methodologies, schools of thought, and specialties, each with their own assumptions and inclinations. The university’s role is now to provide a home to a great multiplicity of what are sometimes called "interpretive communities." We are a community of communities.

***

I have talked about three organizing questions for Georgetown. Other universities have their own. I believe ours are uniquely rich, compelling, and difficult. The questions central to us carry powerful tensions and elude fixed, final, definitive answers. Our work is messy. Our business lies in disorder and conflict. But make no mistake, our responsibility is to preserve the tensions not to finesse them away.

If you’re not a Darwinian conservative or even a postmodern conservative, it may be because you really think that we must attend to both reason and revelation to understand who whole human persons are. These Thomistic conservatives have mentioned us--and in a very classy and thoughtful way. So we’re happy to mention them back, although their real identity is very mysterious.

A few posts over on my other site:

Compassionate conservatism doesn’t require government.

Reflections on efforts to charter new cities in the Atlanta metro area: rent-seeking, Tocqueville, or something else?

Thoughts about Walter Russell Mead’s essay on religion and foreign policy.