Love this remark made how Buddists want return to respectable dignity?
Respectable Dignity - what they going to do operate like Oral Roberts or
Jimmy Swaggart. Oral Roberts at least built a University, old ORU and
Jesse Jackson contributed what
Now these Golden Buddahs - like Golden Dragons have an axe to grind -
and oh so much money....tell me in this day and age so quick to have so
much, and is this going to be another laundering tub for more drug
money?
Tell me have they paid any taxes to this country; is this this same
bunch Gore knew whereby he took a lot of questionable money? Is tthis
the school of the future - Americans to be turned into "respectable
Buddist types". Or what is it - you would think they would buld their
temple in Japan or elsewhere in the world?
What is behind all this stuff is it the selling of America? Oh these
poor Japanese Buddists see to live pretty high on the hog when oh so
many people over here seem to be going busto.
Over 20,000 jobs Lucent will drop - qui bono, for they want to make a
profit this year. Wonderful, let their workers eat cake.
George Bush - where are you - who the hell cares about that god damned
EU or that bunch ou met with as of late where people were shot down in
the streets while "bilderbergers" ate in fine style at public expense?
Screw them all and let us take our country back.
Or do we have a Buddist President in the making at some university who
will buy his way into office - and then we all eat rice like pigs while
Buddists learn to eat steak?
Regardless while some knock the Pope continually in an ttempt to destroy
the Catholic Church these buddists have the right idea for it is obvious
they have been forced to "buy respectability and dignity" from the likes
of say a Gary Condit?
So Remember Pearl Harbor and this one Japanese who said Americans so
stpid they cannot find Japan on the map - to which I say tough crap
bucko - after world war II you are luckey to still be on the map?
Still have a friend of the family residing at the bottom of Pear Harbor
aboard the USS Arizona.
Saba
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July 25, 2001
New West Coast College, Born of the Far East
By TODD S. PURDUM
Yoshi Nagaoka/Seikyo Shimbun
The Buddhist-inspired Soka University of America, in Aliso Viejo,
Calif., has 125 students in its first class.
Misha Erwitt for The New York Times
Norman Pfeiffer was a principal architect for the Soka campus.
LISO VIEJO, Calif., July 20 — On a lavender-covered hilltop halfway
between Los Angeles and San Diego, in the midst of miles of look-alike
red-roofed tract houses, an architectural and educational marvel reaches
skyward above the Pacific, waiting to spring to life next month as the
first new private liberal arts college to be built in California in 25
years.
Soka University of America has a grand dream: to join the ranks of
venerable institutions like Pomona, Haverford, Hamilton and other small
but respected colleges. And it is starting out with a grandeur that
older, more established institutions would envy: a $220 million campus
in the style of a Tuscan hill town, designed by the architectural firm
that restored Radio City Music Hall and rebuilt the Los Angeles Central
Library.
The college has enrolled 125 students from 17
states and 19 foreign countries. Some students turned down admission to
the likes of Bryn Mawr and Brown to be pioneers in a Buddhist-inspired
experiment where everyone from the president to a janitor has the
same-size office. Here in the newest incorporated city in Orange County,
a place once better known as home of the John Birch Society and John
Wayne, humanistic, egalitarian values are to be put to work in the cause
of world peace.
Soka is financed by Soka Gakkai International, a Japanese sect that is
one of the world's largest lay Buddhist organizations, with tens of
billions in assets. Founded more than 70 years ago by Tsunesaburo
Makiguchi, a pacifist and education reformer who died in prison in 1944
for his opposition to Japan's militarism, the sect has sparked
controversy for its influence over Japanese politics.
The Soka sect founded the Komeito reform political party in the 1960's,
and some former members have compared it to a cult, an accusation the
organization dismisses.
Many of the university's administrators and some faculty members are
also Soka members.
But the appeal is broader for others, like Anne M. Houtman, who gave up
a position in the six-member biology department at Knox College in
Galesburg, Ill., to become the sole initial member of Soka's biology
faculty.
(Ah so........American teachers with big bucks in their futre???)
"I was the first-generation college student in my family," said
Professor Houtman, the daughter of a blue- collar airline worker in
Hawaii, "and Pomona College literally changed my life; I've seen the
difference it can make."
Professor Houtman, drawn to Soka by a national recruiting advertisement,
said: "You don't get to start up new liberal arts colleges. It just
isn't done. The idea of being able to start from scratch and say, `What
is it that a global citizen should know about science?´ was just
incredible." (here we go - a Global Citizen....aka NWO Al Gore
style?)
For Norman Pfeiffer, the architect who, with Jean Gath of Hardy Holtzman
Pfeiffer Associates, drafted the campus master plan and designed 14 of
the first 18 buildings, it was also a once-in-a-lifetime chance.
Working with Dick Law of SWA Landscape Architects in nearby Laguna
Beach, Mr. Pfeiffer carved a campus out of nothing, scouting the same
Italian quarry that provided the rough-hewn travertine stone that clads
the Getty Center in Los Angeles to anchor the buildings here.
"This was a brown, bare piece of earth, 103 acres of nothing," Mr.
Pfeiffer said as he escorted a visitor through the vaulting library and
dormitory rooms that feature solid cherry doors and windows fitted with
sensors that shut off the air-conditioning when they are opened to take
advantage of the breezes from the ocean two miles away. Mr. Pfeiffer has
designed projects for Stanford and is just starting work on the
renovation of the Griffith Observatory near the Hollywood sign in Los
Angeles. But when asked if he had ever had a commission like Soka, he
answered with a belly laugh, "Nobody gets a commission like this."
There is an Olympic-size swimming pool, a gym with the latest equipment,
a library built to house 225,000 volumes, a student center and classroom
and dormitory buildings all in a pale tan shade of high- tech stucco
topped with red-tile roofs and copper downspouts that echo California's
long tradition of Mission-style architecture. Four other buildings,
including a grand reception hall, were designed by Shinji Ishibashi and
Steve Davis of Summit Architects in Santa Monica, Calif., a
Soka-affiliated firm that also managed the entire construction project.
Phillip E. Hammond, a professor of religious studies at the University
of California at Santa Barbara and co-author of "Soka Gakkai in America:
Accommodation and Conversion" (Oxford, 1999), said that Soka, first
brought to the United States by Japanese war brides in the 1940's, "is
not nearly as well known in the United States as Zen or Tibetan
Buddhism, but it has more members than any Buddhist sect in Japan" and
claims 300,000 members in this country, though Professor Hammond said
his surveys suggested the number was closer to 45,000. (so from where
do they get all this money when American is stumbling blindly into
banana boat republic - tell me, will a little Buddist child lead us and
sit with lion and asp)
"I don't think they would like this characterization but I think this
campus is a step toward respectability, dignity," Professor Hammond
said. "The fact is they are a very engaged kind of Buddhism. They are
not trying to escape from the world, they're trying to change the
world."
The word soka means to create value, and members meet regularly to chant
their principal mantra, "Adore the lotus of the wonderful law."
The group has a network of primary and secondary schools in Japan and a
university founded by its longtime leader and now honorary chairman,
Daisaku Ikeda. The first American university outpost was started in 1987
in Calbasas, a Los Angeles suburb, to teach English to Japanese graduate
students.
There was no room to expand, so the group chose the Orange County site.
Alfred Balitzer, who gave up tenure and a 30-year career as a professor
of government at Claremont McKenna College to become dean of Soka's
20-member faculty, said that as a Jew long active in his own faith he
felt not the slightest pressure to proselytize on behalf of Soka.
"Obviously, we have a sectarian tinge," he said. "We're going to be
teaching religion but not the way you teach doctrine at Notre Dame.
There's no chapel, no mandatory religious services."
In the beginning, Soka will offer a bachelor's degree in liberal arts
with three concentrations: humanities, international studies and social
and behavioral sciences, adding more as the enrollment expands to the
planned level of 1,200.
All students will study one of three foreign languages oriented toward
the Pacific Rim — Japanese, Chinese or Spanish — and spend half of
their junior year studying or working abroad. As it matures, the
university intends to offer master's and doctoral degrees, and it will
field intercollegiate teams in 10 sports. Its mascot is the lion. (What
are all students to be English speaking - what no Russian to be taught
???? )
First-year tuition, room and board costs $24,000, the midrange for
comparable California colleges, and like most major universities, Soka
does not consider a student's ability to pay in making admissions
decisions.
Students must live on campus, where smoking, drugs and alcohol are
banned and fiber-optic cables and outdoor ports for laptop computers
abound. (Love this behavoral sciences to be taught....to control whom?)
For Carmen Vali, the new mayor of Aliso Viejo, which was incorporated
only this month with a population of about 45,000, Soka is a boon in a
fledgling community whose town center amounts to a single shopping mall.
She acknowledged that "one of the biggest stumbling blocks for them was
that they've been accused or suspected of being a cult. But they did a
very good job of informing people what they wanted to do and they have
been just the nicest people to work with."
"We thought, `What a fabulous improvement,´ " she added. "This brings
a high-level work force, with very attractive demographics, to come live
here, and having gone to Stanford and looking at how Palo Alto has
developed around the university, this just provides a really nice blend
of services. People accuse Orange County of being devoid of culture, and
this is something that is definitely going to fly in the face of that
concept." (Ah so, Stanford, home of MInd Control atrocities and school
of Ehud Barak)
SOLD Like Philipine Island - one American City to Buddist State of
Enlightenment - who are so damn dumb the gave Al Gore money? Something
fishy here - a handful of Buddists with billions and billions of
dollars? Welcome to the pits of For Sale - America.
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TODAY'S HEADLINES
The New York Times on the Web
Wednesday, July 25, 2001
------------------------------------------------------------
For news updated throughout the day, visit www.nytimes.com
QUOTE OF THE DAY
=========================
"We found that the adults are as much afraid of the kids as
the kids are of the adults."
-BARRY JOHNSON,, prison warden, on segregating youthful offenders from adults.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/25/national/25PRIS.html?todaysheadlines
NATIONAL
=========================
As Young Inmates Adjust, So Do Prisons and Jails to Their Special Needs
To adapt to state laws that convict youthful offenders as
adults, some prisons are segregating juvenile inmates from
adults.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/25/national/25PRIS.html?todaysheadlines
-----
New West Coast College, Born of the Far East
A California college, financed by a Buddhist sect, has set
its sights on becoming like other small but respectable
schools, but in New Age fashion.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/25/national/25COLL.html?todaysheadlines
-----
Camp in Samoa Draws Criticism in U.S.
Nearly two dozen American children have left an academy camp
in Samoa citing physical, emotional and sexual abuse,
inadequate medical care and a lack of wholesome food.
