This spring’s college graduates face better job prospects than the dismal environment encountered by last year’s grads. But that doesn’t mean the job market is thriving.

Average starting salaries are down, and employers plan to make only 5 percent more job offers to new graduates this spring compared to last spring, when job offers were down 20 percent from 2008 levels, according to a survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, which tracks recruitment data.

Liam O’Reilly, who just graduated from the University of Maryland with a bachelor’s degree in history, said he had applied to 50 employers ”” to be a paralegal, a researcher for a policy organization, an administrative assistant ”” but he had gotten hardly any interviews. While continuing to search for something he truly wants, he has taken a minimum-wage job selling software that includes an occasional commission.

“Had I realized it would be this bad, I would have applied to grad school,” Mr. O’Reilly said.

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The U.S. economy faces major problems while Europe’s is “teetering,” the head of General Electric Co (GE.N) told a class of graduating college students on Monday.

“We are at an unprecedented moment in the history of our country. There is economic and social anxiety,” said Jeff Immelt, chairman and chief executive of the largest U.S. conglomerate. “Europe appears to be teetering.”

Still, the risk that the Greek debt crisis could drag down other European economies does not appear to be enough to derail the world’s overall economic recovery, he told reporters after addressing Boston College’s commencement.

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When President O’Donnell asked me to give this address, I expressed one concern: “Will there be a protest? And will you prosecute the protestors? Or at least 88 of them?” He made no commitment. I accepted anyway.

So what can I tell you? This is a time of crises. The economy is a mess, the culture is a mess, the government is out of control. And, in the last three years, Notre Dame lost 21 football games. But this is a great time for us to be here, especially you graduates of this superbly Catholic college. This is so because the remedy for the general meltdown today is found only in Christ and in the teachings of the Catholic Church. Let’s talk bluntly about our situation and what you can do about it.

Read it all but please note: I would be grateful to readers if there could be no comments about the historical reference to Germany but instead to the larger argument–thank you; KSH.

ERIN ROY: One day I came home from class, walked in my house, and my housemates were huddled around the computer, and they said that they had heard of and found this Web site. So I went over, checked it out and just saw terrible, terrible things written. Initially it definitely affected a lot of girls I know. I think they were just devastated, embarrassed, upset. Marist is a very small school, so one person hears something, and it spreads like wildfire even if it holds no truth.

[BETTY] ROLLIN: The Web site that was spreading the malicious gossip at Marist and 500 other colleges and universities was called JuicyCampus. Incredibly, the students had no way to stop it since the messages were all anonymously written, and the Web site was under no legal obligation to remove it.

ROY: Some of them definitely, probably were written by men who maybe left off on the wrong foot with a girl. Maybe something happened, and you know he didn’t think of her in the highest regards, and for girls””jealousy. They know this site is anonymous, so they are just so willing to jump on their computer and write comments about people, because they know they will never be caught….

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Follow up: There is more on this important subject there.

The idea of a football star receiving lenient treatment after testing positive for drug use would raise no eyebrows at most colleges. But the United States Naval Academy “holds itself to a higher standard,” as its administrators are fond of saying. According to policy set by the chief of naval operations, Adm. Gary Roughead, himself a former commandant of midshipmen at the academy, we have a “zero tolerance” policy for drug use.

Yet, according to Navy Times, a running back was allowed to remain at Annapolis this term because the administration accepted his claim that he smoked a cigar that he didn’t know contained marijuana. (He was later kicked off the team for a different infraction, and has now left the academy.)

The incident brings to light an unpleasant truth: the Naval Academy, where I have been a professor for 23 years, has lost its way. The same is true of the other service academies. They are a net loss to the taxpayers who finance them, as well as a huge disappointment to their students, who come expecting reality to match reputation. They need to be fixed or abolished.

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In the month since Pelham Memorial High School in Westchester County advertised seven teaching jobs, it has been flooded with 3,010 applications from candidates as far away as California. The Port Washington District on Long Island is sorting through 3,620 applications for eight positions ”” the largest pool the superintendent has seen in his 41-year career.

Even hard-to-fill specialties are no longer so hard to fill. Jericho, N.Y., has 963 people to choose from for five spots in special education, more than twice as many as in past years. In Connecticut, chemistry and physics jobs in Hartford that normally attract no more than 5 candidates have 110 and 51, respectively.

The recession seems to have penetrated a profession long seen as recession-proof. Superintendents, education professors and people seeking work say teachers are facing the worst job market since the Great Depression. Amid state and local budget cuts, cash-poor urban districts like New York City and Los Angeles, which once hired thousands of young people every spring, have taken down the help-wanted signs.

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This past Sunday, hundreds of Siena College graduates donned lightweight black gowns and placed tasseled caps on their heads for their 9:45 a.m. commencement.

Given the bleak national outlook for post-collegiate hiring, perhaps they should have suited up in sturdier combat attire: They and their fellow graduates nationwide face a fierce battle just to secure a job interview, let alone full-time employment.

About 2.4 million students will graduate with bachelor’s and associates degrees as part of the Class of 2010, says the National Center for Education Statistics.

Those job-seekers will go head-to-head not only with fellow classmates but also with laid-off workers, financially strapped retirees and still-unemployed 2009 and 2008 grads. There are more than five job seekers for every opening, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics figures analyzed by outplacement firm Challenger Gray & Christmas.

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The Church of Nigeria (Anglican Communion) has said Nigeria’s quest for technological advancement will remain a mirage until technical education is given its pride of place.

The position of the church was contained in a communiqué issued at the end of the third session of its seventh synod in Abuja on Sunday.

The communiqué, which was signed by the Primate of the church, Most Rev. Nicholas Okoh, and two others, made a case for better attention to be paid to technical education.

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Dorchester District 2’s well-regarded schools are in danger in the wake of severe budget cuts, school leaders and residents told County Council at a public hearing Monday night.

Allyson Duke, district chief financial officer, made a presentation to council’s Finance Committee on the 2010-2011 schools budget. She said the district faces a multimillion-dollar budget shortfall next year.

Her presentation was followed by a public hearing, which drew a standing-room-only crowd. At the hearing, district leaders and residents voiced their concerns about the impact of budget cuts on the schools.

Superintendent Joe Pye said, “the biggest issue is class size.” There will be more children, on average, in classrooms next year, which will impact students, he said.

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Most electronics are made in the form of integrated circuits, which are tiny chips that contain transistors and other components etched onto silicon wafers. While fine for computers and other products, they are inflexible and cannot be easily wrapped around curved surfaces or pliable ones, making them hard to be used in the body. Researchers have devised ways to make flexible electronics, for such things as electronic paper. Now, John Rogers of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, who is one of the pioneers of flexible electronics, has devised a new technique to create ultra-thin and flexible circuits suitable for medical use.

Dr Rogers first fabricated a mesh containing a circuit of silicon electronics by thinning silicon until it becomes flexible. But this causes a problem. Since it is so thin, it soon collapses. To avoid this, Dr Rogers deposited the circuit onto a special silk to provide structural support without sacrificing flexibility. The silk was engineered by Tufts University, near Boston, from a silkworm cocoon that had been boiled to create a silk solution that can be deposited as a thin film. When the film containing the circuit is placed on biological tissue, it dissolves naturally. What it leaves behind is the circuit, attached to the tissue by capillary forces and supported by it.

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Here is one:

So what is the take-home lesson from the decimation of scripture classes by the ethics-course trial that Anglicans had predicted?

It’s not a judgment on the quality of SRE classes, because it was parents who made the choice, without attending SRE classes or the trial classes. It’s not a judgment on the quality of SRE teachers, because the ethics course teachers are simply civic-hearted volunteers like those SRE teachers who do not have theological or teaching qualifications (as many do). And it’s not a judgment on the relative value of religion or ethics.

The take-home lesson is that the implementation of the ethics course created an ethical dilemma, which was the need to choose between ethics and religion when that choice should not have been necessary. The timetable slot is for SRE.

If the ethics course is not SRE, it should not be scheduled then and parents would not be forced to choose between a (heavily promoted) ethics course and religious education.

Claire Smith Roseville

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The controversial trial of secular ethics classes has ”decimated” Protestant scripture classes in the 10 NSW schools where it has been introduced as an alternative for non-religious children, with the classes losing about 47 per cent of enrolled students.

The figure was calculated by the Sydney Anglican diocese, which is so concerned about the trial that it has created a fund-raising website to ”protect SRE” (special religious education). The website says the values underpinning ”Australia’s moral framework” are under threat.

The website, created by Youthworks, a department of the diocese, says the objective of the ethics trial is ”to not only remove Jesus Christ from the state school system, but from the consciousness and hearts of the next generation”.

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Charlottesville Police charged fourth-year College student George Huguely with first-degree murder yesterday in connection with the death of fourth-year College student Yeardley Love, who passed away early Monday morning.

Both Huguely and Love, members of the men’s and women’s lacrosse teams, respectively, were set to graduate May 23.

Charlottesville police officers were called to apartment 9 in the Camden Courtyard complex on 14th Street at 2:15 a.m. Monday to respond to a case of possible alcohol poisoning. Love was found unresponsive and appeared to have undergone serious physical trauma. Officials attempted to revive her, but those efforts were unsuccessful. Love was pronounced dead at the scene.

Police officials, who have yet to determine the cause of death, declined to discuss the nature of Love’s injuries but are treating the case as a homicide investigation.

I would be grateful if you could spare a prayer for the campus community of U.Va. today. Read it all–KSH.

Newark Archbishop John J. Myers said a course on same-sex marriage to be offered in the fall at Seton Hall University “troubles me greatly.”

“This proposed course seeks to promote as legitimate a train of thought that is contrary to what the church teaches. As a result, the course is not in sync with Catholic teaching,” the archbishop said in an April 30 statement.

He said the university’s board of trustees has asked the school’s board of regents to “investigate the matter of this proposed course, and to take whatever action is required under the law to protect the Catholicity of this university.”

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Out in the world, when people talk about the shootings at Kent State University on May 4, 1970, they call it “Kent State.” But in the small town of Kent, 35 miles south of Cleveland, and on the university campus, they call it “May 4th.”

It was 40 years ago Tuesday that the shootings ”” which killed four people and wounded nine others ”” stunned the nation. Even at the height of the Vietnam War protests, no one imagined that government soldiers would fire real bullets at unarmed college students.

“I saw the smoke come out of the weapons, and light is faster than sound, and so I knew immediately [they] were not firing blanks. So it was almost instinctive to dive for cover,” remembers Jerry Lewis, who was 33 and teaching sociology at Kent State in 1970.

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Within the 242 pages of Diane Ravitch’s lightning rod of a book, “The Death and Life of the Great American School System,” there appear exactly three references to Catholic education. Which makes sense, given that Ms. Ravitch is addressing and deploring recent efforts to reform public schools with extensive testing and increasing privatization.

Yet what subtly informs both her critique and her recommendations for improving public schools is, in significant measure, her long study of and admiration for Roman Catholic education, especially in serving low-income black and Hispanic students.

In that respect, Ms. Ravitch and her book offer evidence of how some public-education scholars and reformers have been learning from what Catholic education is doing right. What one might call the Catholic-school model is perhaps the most unappreciated influence on the nation’s public-education debate.

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The schedule is here. The featured keynote speaker is the 2009 Dougherty Fellow Dr. Allen Guelzo, the Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era and a professor of history at Gettysburg College. Dr. Guelzo and I have corresponded but it was great to get a chance to meet him face to face this morning. His “Why Study History?” talk was very enjoyable indeed.

Tonight two music groups in which our youngest daughter Selimah is involved are part of a concert this evening to which we are looking forward–KSH.

Students applying to colleges are advised to do a lot: Make good grades; get good recommendations; play a sport; edit the yearbook; invent a simple, hand-held device that would run on solar energy and would provide a simple solution to climate change.

But those students are also being advised not to do one important thing: Leave a cyber trail that admissions offices can follow directly to their Facebook pages.

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The reasons for this communitarian emphasis were obvious to American leaders in the nineteenth century. Loyalty to the Republic had to be developed, as well as adherence to Enlightenment ideals of liberty and toleration. For without universal indoctrination by the schools in such civic virtues, the United States might dissolve, as had all prior large republics of history, through internal dissension.

The aim of schooling was not just to Americanize the immigrants, but also to Americanize the Americans. This was the inspiring ideal of the common school in the nineteenth century, built upon a combination of thrilling ideals and existential worry. By the end of the century we were educating, relative to other countries, a large percentage of the population, and this forward movement continued well into the twentieth century. In the post”“World War II period, the US ranked high internationally according to a number of educational measures. But by 1980, there had occurred a significant decline both in our international position and in comparison with our own past achievements. Two decades ago I was appalled by an international comparison showing that between 1978 and 1988 the science knowledge of American students had dropped from seventh to fourteenth place. In the postwar period we have declined internationally in reading from third place to fifteenth place among the nations participating in the survey.

The root cause of this decline, starting in the 1960s, was a by-then-decades-old complacency on the part of school leaders and in the nation at large. By the early twentieth century worries about the stability of the Republic had subsided, and by the 1930s, under the enduring influence of European Romanticism, educational leaders had begun to convert the community-centered school of the nineteenth century to the child- centered school of the twentieth””a process that was complete by 1950. The chief tenet of the child-centered school was that no bookish curriculum was to be set out in advance. Rather, learning was to arise naturally out of activities, projects, and daily experience.

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The Bishop of Durham, Dr N. T. Wright, has announced that he will be retiring from the See of Durham on August 31.

Dr Wright, who will be 62 this autumn, is returning to the academic world, in which he spent the first twenty years of his career, and will take up a new appointment as Research Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at the University of St Andrews in Scotland.

Announcing his move, Bishop Tom said, ”˜This has been the hardest decision of my life. It has been an indescribable privilege to be Bishop of the ancient Diocese of Durham, to work with a superb team of colleagues, to take part in the work of God’s kingdom here in the north-east, and to represent the region and its churches in the House of Lords and in General Synod. I have loved the people, the place, the heritage and the work. But my continuing vocation to be a writer, teacher and broadcaster, for the benefit (I hope) of the wider world and church, has been increasingly difficult to combine with the complex demands and duties of a diocesan bishop. I am very sad about this, but the choice has become increasingly clear.’

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…fidelity to Thomas also demands that a Catholic university teach theology as a divine science, and not religious studies, a human one dependent on rational inquiry alone. Even though the core beliefs of Christianity are revealed and held by faith, students have to be informed of what they are. Aquinas never suggests that explaining the content of the articles of faith will bring about a response of faith, but he does think that we need to be told them. Theology courses at a Catholic university propose sacra doctrina. They set out what Christ taught in the Gospels, since he “is the first and chief teacher of spiritual doctrine and faith”. Consequently, a Catholic university should be a place in where special attention is given to ensuring that students learn from theologians who propose the teaching of Christ as historical and authoritative.

Authentic Christian faith does not fear reason “but seeks it out and has trust in it”. Faith presupposes reason and perfects it. Nor does human reason lose anything by opening itself to the content of faith. When reason is illumined by faith, it “is set free from the fragility and limitations deriving from the disobedience of sin and finds the strength required to rise to the knowledge of the Triune God”. The Holy Father observes that St Thomas thinks that human reason, as it were, “breathes” by moving within a vast horizon open to transcendence. If, instead, “a person reduces himself to thinking only of material objects or those that can be proven, he closes himself to the great questions about life, himself and God and is impoverished”. Such a person has far too summarily divorced reason from faith, rendering asunder the very dynamic of the intellect.

What does this mean for Catholic universities today? Pope Benedict answers in this way: “The Catholic university is [therefore] a vast laboratory where, in accordance with the different disciplines, ever new areas of research are developed in a stimulating confrontation between faith and reason that aims to recover the harmonious synthesis achieved by Thomas Aquinas and other great Christian thinkers”. When firmly grounded in St Thomas’ understanding of faith and reason, Catholic institutions of higher learning can confidently face every new challenge on the horizon, since the truths discovered by any genuine science can never contradict the one Truth, who is God himself.

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The latest school battle over the separation of church and state may not feature prayers at football games, after-school Bible clubs or even a moment of silence.

Actually, there’s no prayer at all.

The newest battleground could be a church building itself ”” and whether it’s a proper venue for public school graduation ceremonies. In school districts searching for ever-bigger venues at bargain prices, churches are an appealing (and weatherproof) alternative to civic centers, high school gyms and athletic fields.

An advocacy group that monitors church-state disputes says it has intervened in nine proposed church commencements in seven states over the past two years.

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The school’s action not only raises questions about the CLS students’ freedom of association ”” which lead counsel Michael McConnell compellingly raised in Monday’s oral arguments before the court ”” but it also threatens a founding principle of religious freedom. Hastings says that it is banning discrimination against gays and lesbians, but they are doing so by singling CLS out and punishing it for its religious beliefs. If a future, more liberal CLS leadership decided to allow voting members to promote or engage in premarital or homosexual intercourse, they would obviously regain official status because they will have adopted the school’s preferred belief: the affirmation of homosexual practice.

This decision could set a precedent for broader state action against traditional religious groups. Would the court be prepared to apply the all-comers standard to organizations representing any and all faiths? The justices should remember that many religions, including Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and Sikhism have significant constituencies with similar beliefs about sexual behavior.

Christians like those in the CLS hold that the Old and New Testament’s prohibitions against premarital and homosexual sex still apply today. This is a serious, albeit disputed, religious belief about sexuality that is protected by the First Amendment. Authentic freedom of religion requires broad, utterly compelling justifications for the state to deprive anyone of privileges because of his beliefs, no matter how offensive the precepts in question are to some Americans. We should not require religious organizations such as the CLS to abandon core convictions in order to remain in the state’s good graces.

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[University of Illinois basketball coach Bruce] Weber says college coaches are getting involved with possible recruits at an ever-earlier age. “So if it means going to seventh- and eighth-grade games, we are starting to do that,” he says.

But it wasn’t always this way. “I’ve been involved in Division I basketball for 31 years now, and when I first started, we were worried about seniors in high school and that was it,” he says.

“Now there’s the early signing period. It went to juniors, then sophomores — we’ve even had a commitment from a freshman in the last four years, so everything’s accelerated.”

No school wants to lose out on recruits. “I’m not sure it’s good, but it is there,” Weber says. “If you don’t do it, it’s going to hurt you.”

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The Catholic bishops have refused on principle to be drawn into party politics during the general election campaign.

But the Rt Rev Malcolm McMahon, the Bishop of Nottingham, broke ranks to accuse the Lib Dems of seeking to destroy the partnership between the state and the churches in the provision of education.

“Catholics should give it very serious consideration before they vote Liberal Democrat,” said Bishop McMahon, the chairman of the Department for Education of the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales.

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How does a religion teacher get an invitation to appear, in June, on Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report? By writing a book saying that Gandhi, the Dalai Lama, and others have preached about the shared, benign beliefs unifying all great religions ”” and then dismissing that message as garbage.

Stephen Prothero’s God Is Not One, which hits bookstores today, argues that the globe’s eight major religions hold different and irreconcilable assumptions. They may all push the Golden Rule, as progressives like to point out, but no religion really considers ethics its sole goal. Doctrine, ritual, and myth are crucial, too, and on these, writes the College of Arts & Sciences professor, there is no meeting of the religious minds. For example, Christians who think they’re doing non-Christians a favor by saying they too can be “saved” ignore the fact that Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and Confucians either don’t believe in sin or don’t focus on salvation from it. (Hinduism, Daoism, and the African religion Yoruba round out the eight.)

The notion of “pretend pluralism,” as Prothero derides it, may be nobly intentioned, but it is “dangerous, disrespectful, and untrue.”

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School districts around the country, forced to resort to drastic money-saving measures, are warning hundreds of thousands of teachers that their jobs may be eliminated in June.

The districts have no choice, they say, because their usual sources of revenue ”” state money and local property taxes ”” have been hit hard by the recession. In addition, federal stimulus money earmarked for education has been mostly used up this year.

As a result, the 2010-11 school term is shaping up as one of the most austere in the last half century. In addition to teacher layoffs, districts are planning to close schools, cut programs, enlarge class sizes and shorten the school day, week or year to save money.

“We are doing things and considering options I never thought I’d have to consider,” said Peter C. Gorman, superintendent of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools in North Carolina, who expects to cut 600 of the district’s 9,400 teachers this year, after laying off 120 last year. “This may be our new economic reality.”

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The Supreme Court struggled Monday with whether a state-run law school may refuse to recognize a religious student group that excludes gay students and non-Christians.

“Why doesn’t this just all work out?” Justice Anthony Kennedy asked in frustration about why the conflict is before the court in the first place. “If the Christian Legal Society has these beliefs, I am not so sure why people that don’t agree with them want to belong to them.”

The case pits a university’s interest in safeguarding students from discrimination against a religious group’s interest in preserving its identity and message by limiting participation.

In some respects, the justices appeared divided along ideological lines. Liberal-leaning justices such as Ruth Bader Ginsburg sympathized with the anti-bias goals of the University of California-Hastings College of Law, and more conservative justices such as Samuel Alito seemed inclined toward the students.

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A group of Christian students is asking the US Supreme Court to strike down as unconstitutional a school anti-discrimination policy that forces them to accept as voting members and potential leaders classmates who do not share their core religious beliefs.

A lawyer for the Christian Legal Society is set to argue on Monday that the school’s policy violates the Christian students’ First Amendment right to freely associate with like-minded individuals who share a common faith.

At issue is a non-discrimination policy that applies to all student groups at the University of California Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco. The policy bars student groups from discrimination based on race, color, religion, national origin, ancestry, disability, age, sex, or sexual orientation.

Hastings officials refused to recognize the Christian Legal Society (CLS) as a registered student organization because they said the group’s faith-based by-laws reflected intent to discriminate against gay and lesbian students and others who do not embrace the group’s religious beliefs. Under the school policy, student groups must agree to accept any student as a voting member.

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Americans are an optimistic lot. If there is one thing they believe in above all, it is the ability to move ahead. In poll after poll, a majority reject the notion that success is determined by forces beyond their control. In early 2009, hardly a sunny period, 71% still agreed that hard work and personal skill are the main ingredients for success. A high degree of social mobility has always defined American culture, from the work of Alexis de Tocqueville and Horatio Alger to the remarkable story of Barack Obama himself.

But the reality for most Americans is becoming more complicated. The recession came at the end of a period marked by record levels of inequality. Many Americans, lacking true upward mobility, bought its trappings, such as a bigger house or better car. Disaster duly followed. As a result, American optimism has been pierced by doubt. In a new poll for The Economist by YouGov, 36% of respondents said they had less opportunity than their parents did, compared with 39% who thought they had more. Half thought the next generation would have a lower standard of living, double the share that thought living standards would rise. As the country recovers, two problems cloud its future. Rates of social mobility are unlikely to grow. Inequality, however, may widen even further.

These trends have been building up for years. In 1963 John Kennedy declared that a rising tide lifts all boats. Indeed, in 1963 this was true. Between 1947 and 1973, the typical American family’s income roughly doubled in real terms. Between 1973 and 2007, however, it grew by only 22%””and this thanks to the rise of two-worker households. In 2004 men in their 30s earned 12% less in real terms than their fathers did at a similar age, according to Pew’s Economic Mobility Project. This has been blamed on everything from immigration to trade to declining rates of unionisation. But the driving factor, most economists agree, has been technological change and the consequent lowering of demand for middle-skilled workers.

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