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…
Category: Reviews
Reviews of books, articles, and the like
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…
Animal Studies and Ody’s Journey
I grew up with dogs, cats and fish. I rode horses. My mother’s relatives in Ohio had farms. I like animals, and for whatever reason, most animals seem to like me. My first job as a teenager was working as a kennel assistant in a local animal hospital. I loved it and it was extraordinarily good…
Cheap – A Liberal Arts Challenge
Ellen Ruppel Shell, Boston University journalism professor and author, is a smart and informed writer. In her latest book, Cheap: the high cost of discount culture, Shell looks at the rise of discount culture – discount shops, outlet malls, and the proliferation of the cheap. Cheap, she takes pains to point out, is not the…
Necessary Lies
A well-crafted history arranges space and time into a set, frames a proscenium for our viewing, and knows when to raise the curtain and when to let it fall. It crafts order out of chaos; it conjures up beginnings, middles and ends where none exist, boxing up time, processing it and rendering it digestible. History…