A dinner several years hosted several students from a newly created environmental science program at a local university, one of the first such programs in the nation. A student, in response to a question probing the range of the program, answered that the potential was huge and spilled from the science of global warming to its international implication. "Suppose," she offered, "that the Chinese decide to attack global warming unilaterally and launch rockets to seed the stratosphere with reflectors to reflect sunlight away from the globe. That would be an international incident and the government would need our advice." She smiled and everyone laughed.
Last year a cabinet representative suggested that exact scenario in an interview. No one laughed.
Majors in Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual Transgender degrees are offered by Wesleyan, U. Chicago, Brown, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, York University (Sexuality Studies, 2009), University of Toronto, Miami University (Ohio, 2010) The University of Glamorgan in the UK offers a degree in Astrobiology, which is the search for life beyond earth.
A search on Intelligent Design, Creationism revealed no university degrees available as yet.
In this time of turmoil, nothing could be more satisfying than the creation and establishment of a broad field of respectable research, especially if this area is a part of your own credo. There is a way of doing this, cheaply and with a viral-like expansiveness: Endow a university chair in the field you wish to create. Your notion, no matter how partisan or crazy, will be instantly shielded from criticism by the aegis of academic freedom. Anyone who dismisses your notion will be seen as an anti intellectual at best, a philistine at worst.
You and your family can open subsidiary businesses that might do appropriate--nonprofit--research and sell tee shirts.
At last the university, no longer aloof, is joined with the culture, its economics and its business people!
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