“The likelihood is that we’re going to get an information railroad and not an information highway,” Abdul Alkalimat told his audience at the Harold Washington Library last March (Video, May/June). The government, he pointed out, gave railroads public land for free, then let them charge riders and freight shippers. “At a latter stage, based on automobile technology, the government built and continues to maintain the highways we are all free to enter. If the information revolution is a highway we should all be able to get on free, but since we are being expected to pay a fee it’s a railroad and not a highway.”
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McUniversity? From a Valparaiso University newsletter: “Question: What do the Golden Arches of McDonald’s and Valparaiso University’s Chapel of the Resurrection have in common? Answer: More than one would guess, according to Paul D. Schrage, a 1957 graduate of VU. Mr. Schrage, senior executive vice president and chief marketing officer for McDonald’s Corporation, sees many similarities between the ‘billions sold’ hamburger empire and the nation’s pre-eminent Lutheran University. ‘Valpo is a business; a nonprofit business, yes, but a business nonetheless.’”
Will the pope be pleased to hear this? Social scientist and Catholic priest Father Andrew Greeley, reporting in Society (May/June) on the surprisingly low rates of marital infidelity found by the U. of C. National Opinion Research Center’s 1991 General Social Survey: “Nearly six out of seven married Americans have been faithful to their spouse(s)….The strongest predictor for fidelity is [belief in] the moral principle against infidelity which has not changed in the twenty years since the General Social Survey was started and which has been found to exist independent of religious devotion (only 9 percent of those with no religious affiliation think that adultery is never wrong).”
