What is it that "Conservatives" want to conserve? It is a suspiciously strange name for a political movement. I say that because it seems to me that everyone wants to conserve something. So "Conservativism" really doesn't distinguish any particular group. For example, I assume that liberals want to conserve liberal values. Members of the Green Party want to conserve certain environmental values.

The fact is that only certain people do call themselves "Conservatives." But who are these people and what are they trying to conserve? Sometimes it seems to me that they merely want to dig their feet into the ground and resist change of any kind. Conserve the status quo. If that's true, it's a very negative political movement and quite ill defined since "the status quo" is always something different.

In recent times, conservative Republicans have rather successfully convinced the nation that they are the ones who want to conserve moral values. Evidently, in their minds, Liberals have no moral values and only want to destroy theirs. I don't understand how they have gotten away with this farce, nor do I understand why Liberals are so shy about expressing their positive values, values which they have tried to defend and conserve for the last forty years in the face of constant Republican attack.

I believe that the present status of Homeland Security issues bears a significant lesson for faculty and administrators of Harvey Mudd College. To be exact, Americans tend to rely on technological fixes for everything. The question that looms in our minds is what new technologies can be brought to bear against terrorists who may now be hiding explosives in their underwear. Solution --- subject everyone to virtual-image scans.

The sad thing about this American disposition is that it ignores the obvious needs to “be on the ground among people, to communicate and to understand.” This is something that experts in intelligence continually tell us --- about Iraq, about Afganistan, about Al Quaeda. What we need is less emphasis on sorting through digital information and more people in the field who actually know how to move among people and to communicate.

I am making these observations because I thought that this was what Harvey Mudd College was really all about --- approaching science and engineering with a kind of restraint tempered by an awareness of the human community in which we live. If we can only act out of our scientific and technical expertise, we are really “dead in the water.” We need young professionals educated in the Mudd tradition to be at the center of national policy construction as much as we need our graduates in development labs and other spheres of technological creation.

Note: While these remarks were addressed to HMC faculty, they may have some general interest.