He who desires or attempts to reform the government of a state, and wishes to have it accepted and capable of maintaining itself to the satisfaction of everybody, must…
Early last March I drove from the Big Ten university, where I taught for forty years, to Bedford, Indiana, where I had been asked to talk to a high school…
Martin Luther King Day, 2020 -- It was a deeply painful spectacle to watch. In front of perhaps a thousand people, the President of my university was called upon to…
Like much of the world’s population, I have spent the last four years contemplating what has led so many people to support Donald Trump, despite a series of shameful…
Yes, there was always someone who screwed up before students arrived in our classes. There were parents who failed their children, teachers who failed their students, and a society…
Several decades ago, when the writings of Michel Foucault were at the peak of their popularity in academia, my former colleague, Jim Riley, remarked insightfully that what was most…
It was a test of my parenting, and I think I passed. We were on a trip to investigate colleges with our teen-aged son, and Yale had become part…
It is a lovely image, a beautiful example of the high quality of contemporary newspaper photography. The composition is perfect. The diagonal slats of the blinds carry the viewers’ eyes…
Jean-Luc Goddard’s 1963 agitprop film, Les Carabiniers, was a New Wave shaggy dog story. For most of the somewhat tedious film the two loutish protagonist commit a series of…
This blog was initially inspired primarily by my sense that students and their learning had relatively little value in the decisions made in higher education. To capture this concern,…