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Firelighting

On some 20 nights scattered throughout the year in Providence, Rhode Island, volunteers dress in black “like Kabuki stagehands” to ignite three-foot-high braziers lining the city’s downtown rivers—100 fires in all. The event, called WaterFire, draws residents to once deserted public spaces and attracts approximately a million tourists annually, giving a boost to the city’s economy. “With its resonance of both baptism and funeral Mass, WaterFire turns the process of urban redevelopment into something nearly sacred,” particular in a state that is 60 percent Catholic, writes Carlo Rotella, professor of English and director of the American studies program, in the September 17, 2006, issue of the Washington Post Magazine.

From the late 1800s to the mid-1960s, a patchwork of public works projects left Providence’s three central rivers extensively paved over with concrete decking. By the early 1990s, the city had uncovered and rerouted the rivers; the first WaterFire, devised by Barnaby Evans, a local artist, took place in 1994. Evans’s model was the passeggiata, says Rotella, “the Southern European habit of the evening stroll . . . an informal street pageant that sustains community and connection to place.”

Rotella recounts a night of volunteering and walking along WaterFire: “I am seized by a heightened sense of city-ness—of a great crush of humanity . . . all gathered in one place by the water, their desires and labors and cares shaped by Providence and shaping it in turn. The upwelling of feeling resonates in the buildings, the bridges, the curve of the river, the faces of the people gazing at the fires. . . . Everything else that isn’t this feeling seems to evanesce and lift away, like wood turned to smoke.”

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Improvement needed

India, the world’s largest democracy with a population of 1.1 billion, is also home to the world’s third-largest system of postsecondary education, with 10.5 million students attending 17,625 universities, colleges, and junior colleges. With a few, notable exceptions, however, the country’s higher education, which is largely public, “strains even to achieve mediocrity,” writes Philip G. Altbach, Monan Professor of Higher Education at Boston College, in the Autumn 2006 Wilson Quarterly. Only one-third of the nation’s academics hold Ph.D.s, and rote learning prevails. Underfunding is a key issue, says Altbach. As a measure of priorities, government spending in India for higher education amounts to 0.37 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, compared with China’s outlay of 0.50 percent and the United States’ 1.41 percent.

At the apex of the Indian system are the seven nationally funded and much-heralded Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT), whose graduates regularly move on to elite careers outside the country (an estimated 40,000 live and work in the United States alone). Below IIT and a few other select public universities and institutes (specializing in medicine or management) is “the swollen middle tier of Indian higher education,” funded by regional governments and riddled with “low-level corruption,” writes Altbach. At these institutions, local politicians dole out “student slots as well as staff positions—from janitor to professor.”

The last 50 years have seen a succession of national commissions proposing reform, with little result. Public education has taken a backseat to politics, writes Altbach. A reminder of this came last spring, when India’s prime minister, Manmohan Singh, announced a drastic change in the country’s quota system for IIT and other elite universities: The schools will be required to hold 50 percent of their seats for disadvantaged students, up from 22 percent. “However laudable the professed goal of reducing social inequality,” writes Altbach, this move will “destroy international competitiveness at India’s top institutions and deal a powerful blow to the fragile meritocratic ethos in Indian higher education.”

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Vatican precedent

In its 2003 decision Lawrence v. Texas, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a Texas law that criminalized sexual relations between consenting gay adults, declaring that the law’s basis in morality lacked Constitutional legitimacy. Writing in the Fall 2006 issue of the Southern California Interdisciplinary Law Journal, Gregory A. Kalscheur, SJ, assistant professor at BC Law, cites other moral issues—capital punishment, affirmative action—that the Court has recognized as being within the purview of law and asks, “in the wake of Lawrence, how are we to distinguish those moral justifications that provide a legitimate basis for lawmaking from those that do not?”

The Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on Religious Freedom, which postulates, as Kalscheur describes it, a “government whose legitimate scope and power are limited by the demand for responsible freedom rooted in human dignity,” may inform the discussion, he suggests. According to the declaration, a state’s ability to draft morality-based laws should be limited to protecting the public order. “Attempts to take direct responsibility for shaping the moral character of individuals through coercive laws,” Kalscheur writes, therefore would not be justified. The question of whether a law legitimately protects the public order or “illegitimately regulates private morality may sometimes be difficult to answer,” he says, “but it has the virtue of being the proper question over which to fight.”

Paul Voosen ’03 writes for the Prague Post

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