In an article in yesterday’s Washington Post, Blake Gopnik reports that revisionist thinking in art history is that all those nudes in Western art are actually about sex. Stupid me. Here I was, bopping along, thinking they were about rutabagas.

For example, take Titian’s reclining Venus d’Urbino—a lovely, buck-naked lady whose eyes gaze straight out at us while her hand perches tantalizingly on top of her crotch. For years, art historians have held forth on why that picture is Art with a capital “A,” and not Sex with a capital “S.” Erotic, yes, but overtly sexual? No. And art history students, eager to pass their art history exams, have obligingly written reams of essays parroting their...

I suppose that all of us who have been teaching have the reaction that our students are growing younger as we age. I still have to remind myself that my current students had not yet been born at the time that the “recent” events I am teaching about took place.

Initially it was Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima, then the Korean War, then the assassination of JFK, then the Vietnam War that they could not recall. Today it is the fall of the Wall in Berlin in 1989, exactly 20 years ago. For those of us who were adults at that time, the impact of those soft revolutions was tremendous, seeming to bring the cold war to an end. For undergraduates born in that year, of course, 1989 is simply another date in ancient history.

But the year is both close...

We have spent a great deal of time over the last decade -- and certainly during the last year -- discussing the federal student-loan programs from the perspective of the cost of the program to taxpayers. However, we have failed to concentrate on the truly pressing issues that are most significant to students and families, including the overall level of indebtedness that recent and future graduates will face and the fact that despite increased loan limits (particularly in unsubsidized student loans), many students remain unable to pay the costs of higher education without relying on other, even more burdensome, lending vehicles.

I think the main problem with the student loan program is that we allow institutions, financial aid officers, and the federal government to euphemistically refer to student loans using terms that, in the minds of many students and families, connote...

The papers were filled with headlines on Saturday that the House passed a comprehensive health care bill, by a narrow 220-215 margin. Predictably, only one Republican voted for it, and he will be gone soon, as he holds a historically Democratic seat in Louisiana. 

The action now shifts to the Senate, where the two main committee bills are still being reconciled, and then the reconciled bill will be presented and filibustered. Joe Lieberman has already announced that he will filibuster any bill with a public option in it -- other Democrats might as well -- assuring that such a bill cannot get the 60 votes needed to bring it to a vote. Because of the overuse of fillibusters, the minority rules in the Senate blocking any hope for a public option.

So will we get a...

One of the great thing about being a college professor is that you don't envy the young.

While friends in other professions are waking up to their midlives (or what we choose to call midlife but how many people do you know who live past 100 -- not counting Lévi-Strauss?) and frantically wishing they could return to their twenties or thirties, those of us who have been dealing with undergraduate and graduate students don't want to time-travel back to those years.

Don't get me wrong: Sure, there are afternoons during my twentieth year I wouldn't mind revisiting on a regular basis (Tuesday afternoons in October, to be more precise). And yes, there are advantages simply assumed by some of my students (a wide range of...

I can’t stop thinking about teacher training. I recently posted on Arne Duncan’s blistering critique of schools of education, admitting that university-based teacher training suffers from long-standing deficiencies -- one of which is our inability to recruit the best undergraduates into schools of education. Last Monday on the New York Times op-ed page, Susan Engel, the director of the teaching program at Williams College argued that since the universities are uninterested (or incompetent) to attract their best student into education careers, it is time “to get the best colleges to throw themselves into the fray.” Ms. Engel wants college-based teacher training programs to be highly selective,...

Productivity is up over 9.8 percent in the third quarter of 2008; which is mostly good news. When a recession starts, stunned companies keep paying their bills while they sell less output. Not until they idle factories and lay off workers does labor productivity improve: Workers produce more per hour than ever before.

That raises profits, raises wages, and raises spirits.

Productivity gains kept earnings from falling during the Great Recession -- earnings were up over 2 percent this year. The fact that workers are saving costs by doing the work of two or three people -- after their colleagues have been ditched -- is the good news.

The bad news is that unemployment rose to 10.2 percent after the economy lost 190,000 more jobs in October. The consensus prediction was for a "mild"...

Who are all these Americans who so love their health insurance that they’ll go to Washington to demonstrate against a government plan to offer health insurance to those who don’t have any health insurance? You know, the ones who utter such sentences as, “I love my health insurance plan,” and “Get the government bureaucrats off my back.” People who “love” their health insurance plans? How is that? Because it’s “freedom of choice,” they say. I have a name for people who dig in their “live-free-or-die” heels in order to prevent a government “takeover” of health care: the “I’ve got mine” crowd.

The news last evening reported that the “I’ve got mine” crowd cheered Representative Michelle Bachman and House GOP leader John Boehner. Boehner stood at a podium...

The latest issue of the Chronicle includes a survey of the nation's highest paid college presidents, a list topped by Shirley Ann Jackson, who was paid $1,598,247 to lead Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute last year. Jackson also sits on six corporate boards that pay her another $1.3-million per annum. The article is accompanied by a text box listing Jackson's "Key Accomplishments at Rensselaer." They are:

"$690-million in new building and renovations to date. Highlights include the Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies, the Computational Center for Nanotechnology Innovations, the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, and the East Campus Athletic Village.

"Completed $1.4-billion fund-raising campaign, including a $360-million...

x-posted: howtheuniversityworks.com

The 2000 students sitting in at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts ignited occupations at a handful of neighboring buildings and campuses, then leapt across Austria and into Germany (where already last summer a quarter-million students, faculty, teachers, and parents struck to fight...