Making the Unfamiliar Familiar – Many Thanks to Will Gompertz

One of the job requirements of a provost is the ability to communicate with faculty across the disciplines and sound moderately intelligent and informed. You cannot  present as more informed than the faculty – that simply shuts down conversation and fosters resentment (see Larry Summers at Harvard). One the other hand, if you don’t know…

On College and On Colleges – DelBanco’s Ideal

Andrew DelBanco is a smart and accomplished man. Director of Columbia University’s American Studies program, he is an award-winning scholar, prolific critic, and critically acclaimed author and editor of many books. His works on Melville are outstanding. DelBanco would be at the top of any short-list of prominent American scholars of arts and letters, particularly…

Being a Professor – There’s Stress and Then There’s Stress

Forbes Magazine’s recently published a list of the ten least stressful jobs, borrowing from a post by an online job site called Careercast. At the top of the list? University professors, of course. Faculty enjoy high status, relatively high income, good job protection, and suffer little by way of accountability. Like a game of telephone,…

Decline in the 1970s – A Pivotal Decade

Judith Stein’s Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies makes for depressing reading. Her narrative counters Whiggish histories of continuous progress with a sobering account of economic decline. It is a chronicle of poor decisions, written from the vantage point of a post-industrial United States with fractious politics and a…

Making Sense of How We Lived, When We Lived

Truly knotty complicated questions rarely fall into tidy categories. This fundamental truth challenges deans, departments, faculty and students, for disciplines only go so far and then it is necessary to find different perspectives. Marjorie Garber is a literary scholar who has consistently and successfully strayed beyond English. She has served as Director of the Humanities Center…

Cities, Sustainability, and Schools – An Educated Guess About an Urban Future

To get a really clear view of the uneasy tension between what makes us feel good and what makes ecological sense, tour residential college campuses. Most likely you will need a car to reach the college of your choice, and once you arrive, you probably will have to hunt for the appropriate parking lot in…