As a former UC Berkeley student I am devastated by the tuition hikes. My contribution to the crisis is to help explain the mentality that wrongly cuts government spending in a recession. This is precisely the time the Federal government  should be inflating the economy, like California's, to keep up investments in education. Sadly, in China last week President Obama announced policies going in the wrong direction.

He said "It is important though to recognize if we keep on adding to the debt, even in the midst of this recovery, that at some point, people could lose confidence in the U.S. economy in a double-dip recession".

Most all economists were slack-jawed at the declaration....

My father heard the news from a guy in the next office. He was a graduate student in math at Berkeley, and his neighbor stepped inside the door and said, "Well, that's it -- that's the second one they've killled for pushing civil rights."

The assassination had just happened, information was sketchy, but for this fellow the narrative was already complete.

On the plane from Dallas to Washington, Mrs. Kennedy used the same pronoun. When Lady Bird Johnson urged her to change out of her bloody clothing, she replied, "No, I want them to see what they have done."

"Who, exactly, were 'they'? And what did 'they' do?"

Those questions are posed by James Piereson in a great study of the assassination and its aftermath entitled Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F....

As I read the story in Friday's New York Times, my belly twisted with the sharp movements of the nearly 9-month-old fetus inside. My daughter's little hand punched forward when I came to this line: "Children often have to be trained to listen to questions from strangers and to sit still for about an hour, the time it takes to complete the two tests." 

It's ok, I found myself whispering to her (out loud): I won't let this happen to you.

But can I really protect Annie from the world outside, a world in which New York City toddlers are being raised by parents willing to spend $90 a session to prep their children for tests used to determine admission to KINDERGARTEN? When my highly educated counterparts...

I have been on the road much more than usual over the past week, and I am about to head to Havana for a couple of days tomorrow. I tried to ease up a bit by cancelling a trip to Texas for the annual meeting of a learned society ten days ago (pace John Jackson!), but it still feels to me like too much rushing about. One of the trips, however, was to Brown University to meet with colleagues interested in civic engagement, and that was an emotional pick-up for me.

I began by having lunch with Katherine Bergeron, a musicologist who is also the Dean of the College, and Sheila Bonde, an archaeologist who is the Dean of the Graduate School. We were joined by Roger Nozaki of the Swearer Center, who is the director of Brown’s civic-engagement efforts. Brown (apart from its medical...

Follow the Berkeley standoff via microblog. Best updates on California occupations here; best strike and breaking media from UPTE; and all other UC news at Newfield et al's place here. Update 5pm PST: Berkeley police turned off the campus wireless and sent in the SWAT team: the last transmission was the microblogger recording SWAT smashing the hinges off the doors. Image of the cops bursting in can be found here.

Latest: reports of 40 UC-B students arrested, 1 seriously injured. Update 530 pm: it appears that UC Davis is reoccupied, with as many...

x-posted: howtheuniversityworks.com

Arrests of 52 students at UC Davis and others at UCLA ended one-day occupations at both places, and at San Francisco State, but a new occupation has begun at Berkeley, where the occupiers report that police beat and pepper-sprayed students to re-take the building's first floor. Students appear to hold the second floor at this time. Two buildings remain occupied by hundreds of students at UC-Santa Cruz, which has been the...

Humans are first and foremost attracted to the patterns we see in life because of their beauty. Only afterwards do we discover their utility. What supreme irony, then, lies in what inevitably happens next: The more we use the patterns we discover, the more we lose our awareness of the beauty that attracted us to them in the first place.

The Trixie Telemetry company is a case in point. I’d never heard of the thing until this morning, when I was drinking my morning coffee and read about it in an online article in The New York Times. In “Are Metrics Blinding Our Perception?” we learn that the Trixie Telemetry company sells a program to help parents raise their babies by quantifying their little lives, and turning what they do into data. Parents use the program to keep...

UConn junior and English major Timothy Stobierski adds his perspective on professorial behaviors in the classroom:

Dear Faculty,

Since I'm hoping you don't catch me as I nail this letter to your office door, allow me to take a moment to introduce myself. I am one of your disgruntled students.

Why disgruntled, you ask? Well, to put it simply, you do something that pisses me off. And make no mistake about what I mean by saying "you piss me off." I do not mean that you do something that "annoys me"; waiting in line at the library later to print out this letter when I'm done with it will annoy me. I do not mean that you do something that "tries my patience"; watching the interns...

The University of California system is reeling. Crushed by the recession and the total collapse of governance in the Golden State, the UC system just raised student tuition by a mind-boggling 32 percent. A few weeks ago, New York Times Magazine interviewer Deborah Solomon sat down with UC Chanchelor Mark Yudof. Naturally, she asked him tough, insightful questions about how he was going to maintain academic and scholarly standards and preserve the UC system's historic leadership in American higher education spent the bulk of the interview mindlessly haranguing Yudof about whether he was overpaid and deserved a free house. Because the single most important thing to remember when conducting an interview is that it's all about...

Later on today, Oprah Winfrey is supposed to announce that she's closing up shop on her wildly influential daily show. The lights go out on that televisual institution in 2011, and that will be the end of a pop-cultural era.

Of course, Oprah didn't invent the genre (and she wasn't the first person to ratchet its stakes up to national prominence), but she has owned that format for much of the last two decades, using it as an amazingly powerful platform, one that has made her the most recognizable first-name celebrity on the planet.

Some credited her "book club" with almost single-handedly keeping America literate (and the publishing industry solvent), a not completely hyperbolic claim.

I probably watched about 10 to 15 episodes of the show a year, but they were some of the most riveting moments of network TV: Tom Cruise prancing around on that couch and...