W&M faculty in the media this month
Following are selected examples of William & Mary faculty and staff members in the media. - Ed.
What are the best majors for jobs of the future?
In a Sept. 22 GoodCall article, David M. Long, professor of organizational behavior at William & Mary, discussed which college majors had the most earning potential for graduates.
According to the GoodCall, college students pursue a degree to land a job after they graduate. However, while employment directly out of school is important, it shouldn’t be the only consideration. Some jobs may look promising presently but outsourcing and decrease in consumer demand can negatively impact the number of available jobs, the article says. Therefore, a student’s ability to attain diverse degrees may help in job-hunting.
Experts like Long, agree that looking at different options may help. For example, he believes that getting a management degree could offer an advantage.
“Unlike specialty degrees in business, management is about leading and working with diverse groups of people,” said Long. “The bottom line – a person can either be an expert in something, or know how to work with and lead experts in something, and managers are often the latter.”
Rarely used defense gets wife acquitted in Newport News case
In a Sept. 17 Daily Press article, Cynthia V. Ward, professor of law at William & Mary, discussed the intricacies of using an insanity defense in regards to a murder case that happened in the city of Newport News, Virginia.
According to the Press, a woman by the name of Rose Marie Uribes was found not guilty by reason of insanity by a Newport News Circuit Court judge of shooting and killing her husband. She was committed to Central State Hospital in Petersburg, a psychiatric treatment facility.
She is one of only five murder defendants in the Hampton Roads area to be found guilty by reason of insanity in the last decade.
“The defense is used in a tiny percentage of cases and is successful only in a tiny fraction of those,” said Ward. “This is because cases in which it is successful tend to get a lot of media coverage and that tends to perpetuate the false idea that the defense is frequently used and frequently successful.”
How to teach 9/11 to students with no memory of it
In a Sept. 9 U.S. News & World Report article, Jeremy Stoddard, the Spears Distinguished Associate Professor of Education, discussed how to teach students about 9/11 when they were born after and have no memory of the event.
Fifteen years ago, two planes crashed into the World Trade Center, one into the Pentagon and one into the countryside of Pennsylvania. Sari Rosenberg, a high school teacher in Manhattan decided to see how sensitive students were to the tragedy.
"It's become less of a sensitive topic – though it's still very sensitive,” said Rosenberg. “And more of a really useful way to get kids to start thinking like historians."
Experts say that the problem is students really don’t know how it affects their lives.
“They don't actually know a lot about the events of 9/11," said Stoddard. “"They don't know what it's like to walk through airport security with a cup of coffee. It is sort of shocking how little they actually know about those events and what led up to them."
Religious freedom doesn't protect child abuse
In a Sept. 2 article in The Atlantic, James Dwyer, the Arthur B. Hanson Professor of Law at William & Mary, discussed why religious freedom doesn’t protect child abuse.
According to the article, a woman was arrested for allegedly beat her 7-year-old son with a coat hanger. She argued before the court that the state of Indiana’s religious-freedom law protects her right to punish her children as she sees fit.
Dwyer, who also studies child welfare, did not agree with her statement.
“It’s totally implausible that you could ever win [a case like this] on a religious defense,” Dwyer stated. “[She] used an unusual form of corporal punishment, and an especially gruesome form of corporal punishment. The state has a compelling interest in much more modest forms of child protection, the courts have said repeatedly.”
The article also stated that Indiana law allows for “reasonable corporal punishment,” which is most of the time up to the discretion of the officiating judge to determine what is “reasonable.”
“It makes the public and judiciary in general skeptical and hostile to those sorts of claims,” said Dwyer. “It will hurt the cause of religious parents who might want to assert the defense in the future since this case involved such an extreme form of punishment.”
