Pity the poor women of the University of North Carolina squeezed into a booth in a gritty Chapel Hill bar waiting for "Mr. Right" to pass by.   Bless their hearts, they really do seem desperate …. see the article in today's New York Times and judge for yourself!   While it's too bad that all those Tar Heel ladies feel a need to drown their sorrows so publicly, what I really mind about the article is — surprise! — the writer's statement that, "North Carolina, with a student body that is nearly 60 percent female, is just one of many large universities that at times feel eerily like women’s colleges."

Wow.  Eerie.  I wonder how he knows?  I mean, seriously, has Alex Williams ever spent any time on a women's college campus?  What's the "eerily" word really intended to convey?   Strange?  Spooky?  Like something out of the Adams Family?  Ok, so we have our rituals and traditions.   But really, eerie?  I'm having a hard time seeing a sinister meaning in class colors and junior rings.   I felt compelled to add my own comment to the article, see comment #11.

Here's what's really strange, spooky and sad:  smart women acting like bimbos, drinking heavily as a gambit to attract men.   Puh-leeze!  We know guys like beer, but really, does smelling like a beer truck make it more likely that the guy in the baseball cap will marry you?

Ok, so I'm being overly critical and the women in the article are probably mortified.   Or at least their parents are mortified.

Here's what's even sadder:  time was when women were not welcome on the campus of UNC at Chapel Hill.   Women were routinely excluded from many institutions of higher education until the 1960's and later.   Women's colleges were founded to combat gender discrimination in higher education, and the success of these institutions in the late 19th and 20th centuries convinced the (mostly male) leaders of all-male institutions that women could go to college successfully without suffering nervous breakdowns.     In fact, the admission of women raised the standards at most formerly-male institutions, while, sadly, the women's colleges that made women's educational equality possible suffered severe enrollment losses.

Today, 50 historic women's colleges continue to promote the education and advancement of women as their primary mission while welcoming men and women of all ages into most campus programs.   Far from being "eerie" and isolated male-deprived wastelands, today's women's colleges are remarkably vibrant and inclusive centers for education in the communities we serve.   Our graduates have amazing track records of achievement — and have wonderful families, spouses and partners,  and vast networks of lifelong friends.

Perhaps we can help those lonely women in North Carolina learn to be more self-sufficent.

Seriously, there's an increasingly alarming trend in news articles about the majority of women on college campuses.   The gist seems to be that women should know that being too smart will hurt their chances for getting married.  Now, isn't this exactly why women's colleges have to exist in the first place — because women and girls are told repeatedly that it's not cool to be smart, that they should hide their brilliance so as not to scare off the guys?   When women's colleges raise this point, we get accused of making it all up — yet, the alarm bells over the new "gender gap" on college campuses continue to ring loud and strong.  There's even a federal investigation into the question of whether some universities are using "affirmative action" to boost male enrollment.

I have a solution to this hand-wringing:  more women should consider choosing colleges that will take them seriously and promote their lifelong success — that's what women's colleges have been doing for more than 150 years, and given today's climate where smart women once again appear unwelcome on many campuses, we'll need to do it even more in the future.

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Trinity resident students spent part of this snowy day writing Thank You cards and posters for all of the staff who stayed on campus overnight this weekend to prepare meals, shovel walkways and provide security during the Blizzard of 2010.   Kaitlyn Breslin and friends organized this effort and Kaitlyn sent along these photos….

We share the sentiments expressed by our students… THANK YOU to our colleagues in Food Service, Facilities and Public Safety for giving up your own personal comforts in order to stay overnight on campus to be sure that essential services continued uninterrupted during the storm.  You are real heroes for Trinity!

We go for many winters in a row with no snow, and then — bam! blast! crunch! — we feel like we're living in the Arctic Circle.  Actually, the Arctic Circle feels like Washington used to feel, rather warm with significant ice melt — the evidence of global climate change, perhaps, or just the ebb and flow of weather cycles that go well beyond human memory.

Disruption to our lives at Trinity and throughout the Washington region seems to occur more frequently this winter with too much snow — a very large storm predicted for the upcoming weekend, yet again! — and even tonight on campus, a power outage that seemed like "one more thing" in a string of gremlins trying to thwart our best efforts to teach and learn.  Yet, the disruptions, themselves, are teachable moments.   Learning to cope with the inconvenience and frustration of plans gone awry is a life skill we all need to work on each day.

When I'm frustrated by the myriad things that can go wrong on any given day at Trinity — my flashlight didn't work tonight and I couldn't find that box of batteries I thought was on my shelf — I think of how fortunate we are to have this wonderful community of students, faculty, staff, friends and colleagues.   Our campus amenities are modest compared to many others, but our community life is vibrant, deeply caring and capable of expressing hope and joy each day.   Other universities might envy the wonderful spirit of the Trinity community.

Missing batteries have been the least of the problems besetting the suffering people of Haiti.   When we experience the minor disruptions to our lives here, we should also contemplate what it is that makes us impatient with the disruption — a class schedule set back, dinner plans cancelled, maybe a paper lost on a computer crash.   Such inconveniences pale in comparison to the hardships of daily life for most people on this small planet.  So, even while wishing for no more snow days, we should give thanks that we have classes to cancel and schedules to care about.   Our very routine in academe is a rare and privileged gift among the citizens of the earth.

My gratitude to the hard-working staff and faculty of Trinity is great, especially those colleagues in Facilities Services and Public Safety who are outside in all of this bad weather trying to be sure that our roads and walkways are cleared and that our campus is safe.   Thanks to our students for cooperating with faculty on make-up lessons and adapting schedules to the uncertain conditions.

This is the winter of our coping skills.   When spring returns, we will enjoy it even more!

So it snowed on Saturday, far more than the weather mavens said it would, in the middle of the day disrupting classes and events schedules and plans for dinner and running errands.  Everyone was cranky and sick and tired of this winter and the cold and too much snow already.  Our hard-working facilities colleagues were outside all day in the blistering cold trying to keep up with snow removal in a storm that cruelly blew the white stuff back all over the walkways and driveways they had just cleared.  This is hard, back-breaking thankless work — but I thank them profusely all the time, what would we do without this wonderful team?

But as I drove home late in the gathering darkness it was still snowing and icy, and when I got home and looked at my blinking blackberry there were email complaints from some campus constituents saying that we had not cleared the campus fast enough, complaining that when we let out classes early they had to walk through inches-high snow to their cars, that we should have done something different, earlier, faster, making it more convenient for all.   I sighed and opened my newspaper to catch up on the world's woes.

And then, I saw the news that made the cold and snow melt away, news that made me so sad, so angry I got up and went outside to shovel my own walk in the middle of the night.

America has halted all medical emergency flights from Haiti. That's right.  This vast, wealthy nation has no more room for the suffering Haitian children with raging infections or adults missing limbs or people with massive crush injuries.  Florida's governor rolled up the welcome mat because he wants clarity about money.   That's the real bottom line for health care — it's all about the money, and money is corrupting the very quality of mercy that the United States once was known for throughout the world.

The United States has spent countless billions on two wars halfway around the world.   Hundreds of billions have gone to bank bailouts for institutions whose managements are still reaping millions in bonus packages.

But there is no room in our health care system for the broken, suffering people of Haiti, neighbors at our doorstep.

This nation is in a self-indulgent moment of isolationism and narcissism that threatens to prevent any sensible solutions to contemporary problems, whether home or abroad.

In a column in Saturday's New York Times, Gail Collins wrote of the "cult of selfishness" that exalts resistance above results.  "We're currently stuck in a place where people no longer feel as though they need to be part of the solution."

Even as I write this blog, I'm listening to Channel 4's "Viewpoints" program on Sunday morning, and my good friend Dr. Maria Gomez, founder and president of the extraordinary Mary's Center for maternal and child health in DC, just gave another example of this dreadful state of affairs:  she just said that some of her major donors have told her that they will stop contributing to Mary's Center if she supports President Obama's health care reform plan because they are afraid that they — wealthy taxpayers — will wind up paying a disproportionate share of tax for health care reform.   So, children and mothers  in Mt. Pleasant will suffer because donors have a dispute with Congress and the president.

Children in Haiti will die because we can't figure out the difference between a principled debate about future public policy choices and the urgent demand for charity and justice today.

**NOTE: Late Sunday night the U.S. military announced that it would resume the emergency airlift of critically injured Haitians to the U.S., and Governor Crist of Florida said his state would welcome them.

I'm not all that upset about Scott Brown's victory in the Massachusetts Senate race.

Say, what?

My Democratic friends are saying I've lost my mind.

My Republican friends (yes, I have one or two) are wondering what I'm up to.

For one thing, Senator-elect Brown's Chevy truck with 200,000 miles on it sparks new hope for the possibility of my own Senate seat some day.  My truck has 165,000 miles on it.  (Ok, it's a Honda CRV, which is barely classified as a truck, and obviously the wrong make for national politics, though we Marylanders tend to be a little more tolerant of such things.)

Seriously, while the idea that a relatively unknown Republican would win the "Ted Kennedy" Senate seat in Massachusetts occurred to no one just two months ago (except Scott Brown and those who supported him), this jolt to the national legislative scene will prove to be immensely healthy in several ways.

First, the filibuster-proof Senate was a bad idea all along.  In a Democracy, no matter what party we support, all of us citizens should embrace the necessity and desirablity of politics as the art of compromise among equally serious and well-considered interests.   The whole idea of the filibuster is preposterous as well, but surely, that unfortunate political tactic should not even be on the table if the responsible politicians from both parties would work together in crafting legislation and laws that reflected the true will of the People, not just the will of Democrats or Republicans.   (Perhaps all 535 members of Congress should re-read John Stuart Mill on the dangers of the tyranny of the majority.)   The Democrats need this "wake-up call" to get out of their complacency, and the Republicans need to use their new-found leverage prudently, lest by reverting to past bad form they lose the moment once again.

Second, the "danger" that the House and Senate might actually have to produce laws forged through shoulder-to-shoulder engagement by members of both parties should encourage the Obama Administration and leadership in the House and Senate to create more acceptable legislative packages.   This nation absolutely needs reform of the health insurance system, but clearly the approaching stalemate over the House and Senate versions of the bill signified trouble even before Brown's election.   We need leadership across-the-boards who are leaders for "We, the People" and not just leaders of specific political parties.   The People have many different opinions about health care, war and peace, the economy and what should happen to improve education — citizens are not monolithic, and both major parties should stop treating this nation's 300 million+ citizens as if we all thought only one way or the other.    Good leadership pierces through party lines to get at real solutions for the common good.

Third, we need our political leaders to show some backbone in pushing back on special interests that have only one interest, their own.   Unfortunately, the Supreme Court's decision earlier this week allowing virtually unfettered corporate spending on political campaigns will make it even harder for politicians to have the gumption to stand up to one-dimensional special interests.   But this puzzling ruling will make it even more important for citizens — We, the People, with our small change pocketbooks and real economic concerns — to engage with the political process directly so that we can be sure that ALL voices are heard, not just the wealthiest.

We citizens also need to stop our own obsession with single-issue politics.  This is the most pluralistic nation on the face of the earth, ever in history, and with more than 300 million citizens today, we have an obligation to the health of our Democracy to accept compromise.   The rigidity of single-issue politics not only fractures our communal bonds, but worse, it guarantees that workable solutions become impossible because one dimension of a solution might not be pleasing to one group.

So, for example, it makes zero sense for pro-life advocates to appear to lobby against health care reform, since access to health care is fundamentally a life issue for millions of people, especially children.  Calling the health care bill an "anti-life bill" as Congressman Steve King (R-Iowa) did at the March for Life last week is the kind of wild rhetoric that does a grave injustice to people who really need a solution to the health care crisis.  People are dying because they can't afford decent health care; isn't that a pro-life issue, too?   Work to craft a bill that restricts abortion if necessary, yes, but do not crusade to "kill the bill" as if health care reform, itself, is unimportant for this nation's citizens and quality of life.  This is but one example of the polarization that degrades not only our political environment but our social fabric.

And, before my pro-life friends get worked-up about the paragraph above, I wrote a blog with similar concerns about the over-the-top rhetoric of pro-choice advocates who threatened to go to war against Democrats when the House version of the health care bill passed in November without abortion funding, and that blog invited a rather pungent reply by Frances Kissling.    I stand by my centrism — our Democracy needs passionate advocacy, yes, but at the end of the day we also need respectful and thoughtful compromise in order to achieve the best ends for the common good.

In a terrific article in the Philadelphia Inquirer today, columnist Mark Bowden writes about political oratory and the need to take great oratory more seriously.    He writes,  "The decline of public speaking in this country contributes to a culture of political stalemate. When political debate consists of rival camps hurling stink bombs at each other over an impassable ideological wall, it suggests there are no answers to the serious problems of our day, only conflict. Politics ceases to be the art of resolving that conflict through dialogue, reason, and compromise, and becomes a form of entertainment. Restoring substantive argument to political debate reasserts the importance of statesmanship. It sees the higher calling of politics, which is to make things happen in a democracy."

I recommend the full article, and also, we might take up an assignment to go back and read all of the great speeches he cites as evidence that thoughtful, well-reasoned argumentation, not partisan bickering and filibustering, needs to be restored to center stage on Capitol Hill.

Scott Brown's victory in Massachusetts is not really a game-changer for either the Democrats or Republicans.  Rather, his election reminds us that the real game has the kind of stakes that require thoughtful and progressive intellectual engagement by every member of Congress and all citizens; no one has a default position, everyone must get into the game.

The game is on.  Let's play it as if our lives depended on the outcome.  In fact, they do.

Your thoughts, pro or con this blog, or on other topics?  Click on the "comments" link below and have at it!

Read my thoughts on Scott Brown's overnight success and musings of other panelists in "On Success" at the WashingtonPost.com

Follow me on Twitter @TrinityPrez

Read "First Senator of the Reality Show Era" on Politico