The resignation of Lawrence H. Summers as president of Harvard University raises anew the most important question facing higher education today — Is there any hope for academic and institutional reform?

“Don’t waste time talking to anti-choice people.” That is the straightforward instruction provided by NARAL Pro-Choice America in its “Campus Kit for Pro-Choice Organizers.” The director of the Pro-Choice Action Network answered a question about why his group does not engage in conversation with pro-life advocates with this statement: “Along with most other pro-choice groups, we do not engage in debates with the anti-choice.” In other words, they are scared to death of a genuine argument.

On Monday’s edition of The Albert Mohler Program, I interviewed columnist Nicholas D. Kristof of The New York Times about the Sudanese genocide in Darfur. He offered cogent analysis and suggestions for making a difference. Listen to the program here.

The stunning success of the Hamas party in the Palestinian election is sending shock waves through the world — and especially through the Middle East. Hamas demands the destruction of Israel, and sponsors terrorism. Yet, the party won a shocking landslide in the election for a Palestinian parliament, ousting the Fatah party of the late Yasser Arafat.

Read Nicholas D. Kristof’s article, “Genocide in Slow Motion,” The New York Review of Books, February 9, 2006. Also, check out these Internet-based resources: U.S. State Department Survey of Sudan, U.S. State Department Documenting Atrocities in Darfur, British House of Commons Background Dossier, Darfur Genocide, Sleepless in Sudan, Christianity Today, John Ryle, “Disaster in Darfur,” The New York Review of Books, August 12, 2004.

Historian Niall Ferguson warns that the situation in the Middle East is growing more and more dangerous — especially with the development of nuclear weapons in Iran. Indeed, he sees the real possibility of nuclear catastrophe and a possible world war within the next ten years.

Authors Jon D. Hanson and Adam Benforado argue that structural, intellectual, and social factors all play a part in the leftward drift evident in so many justices of the U.S. Supreme Court. Their argument appears in “The Drifters: Why the Supreme Court Makes Justices More Liberal,” published in the January/February 2006 issue of the Boston Review.

Martin Peretz is worried that liberalism has no future in America. Editor-in-Chief of “The New Republic,” Peretz writes of his concern in a major article published in the 90th anniversary issue of his magazine. “Not Much Left,” is a cry from the heart, offered by Peretz to what remains of a liberal movement in America. Peretz begins by arguing that, in the 1960s, it was conservatism that was devoid of ideas and facing a dismal political future.

Reporter Elaine Jarvik of the Deseret News [Salt Lake City, Utah] offers a summary of the issues involved in transhumanisn and radical forms of human enhancement in “Shall We Enhance?,” published in the January 7, 2006 edition of the paper.