I had the honor of giving the graduation talk at Nassau Community College a few weeks ago. As I was crafting the speech, I found myself scribbling notes for an impassioned plea: “Let family members and loved ones take as many photographs of you as they want. DO NOT make goofey faces or untoward gestures with your fingers. Please, please, remember that one day your loved ones might no longer be there; give yourself the pleasure of being generous to them.”

I scratched that part out. I mean, I’m there as Ms. Humor, right? As Professor Fun.

My pathology goes way back.

We were a don’t-count-your-chickens kind of family. We never made elaborate plans for good things — graduations, births, or even weddings — because we were never entirely positive that good things would happen.

Here, as an illustration, is a piece of dialogue; please understand that the significance of the remark...

Which television news program provides, more than any other, the most frequent media outlet for academics? If you reply, The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer on PBS, then your hunch agrees with mine. I admit this is unscientific speculation but nonetheless it could still be true. Five nights a week, leading academics from colleges and universities around the country, along with many other professionals, share their expertise with the public addressing complicated and timely issues on topics ranging from astronomy to Zimbabwe.

For over 30 years, in various incarnations — from the 1975 The Robert MacNeil Report to The MacNeil/Lehrer Report, to the present day The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer, in-depth coverage has been this program’s trademark. In 1983, it became the first nightly newscast to expand from 30 minutes to an hour, allowing for the coverage of more subjects with greater...

Following publication of America’s Most Overrated Product: A Bachelor’s Degree, I received a fat packet from a Harry Stille, who, after retiring from the South Carolina Legislature, started the Higher Education/Policy Center.

That packet contained a variety of statistics on the four-year colleges in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live. I was particularly saddened to see that, except for UC-Berkeley, which attracts an unusually high-performing student body, the graduation rates, especially at the public colleges, is frighteningly low.

Of course, the term “four-year” college is a misnomer. Most students at such institutions don’t graduate in four years … if at all. Here are the six-year graduation rates for these colleges and the 25th %ile of their students’ SAT scores.

San Francisco State: 880 SAT, 40 percent...

How many physicians are needed to care for the population of the United States?

There’s no sure answer. Nonetheless, given the long lead times required for expanding doctor training, the medical-education establishment is on a track aimed at increasing output 30 percent by 2020. Five new allopathic schools are in the works, which will bring the national total to 134, and many schools are expanding class sizes. Expansions are also under way in osteopathic training, which now numbers 25 schools.

In the economics of higher education, there is nothing like a medical school for gobbling up money. Class sizes are tiny — often around 100 — and faculty members far outnumber students. Labs are necessary for the pre-clinical years, and hospital affiliation is a must. Little wonder, then, that groundbreaking for a new medical school is a rare event.

Great uncertainties about expansion are...

Have you ever met someone — perhaps at a conference — like this? He or she is just a little too eager to befriend you. And before long, you know why: The person is looking for a job or otherwise wants something from you? I don’t know about you, but I usually find myself then wanting to resist. My unconscious thought is something like, “This person doesn’t like me, s/he’s just trying to network me. And if s/he were that good a job seeker, she wouldn’t need to do that.”

So, whether you’re trying to land a job or otherwise profit through networking, you might want to remember the ancient Chinese aphorism, “If you ask before a proper foundation is laid, it will not be granted.”

Or if you feel you don’t have the time to lay much of a foundation, actor Spencer Tracy’s advice pertains. He said, “Never let ‘em catch you acting.” I say, “Never let ‘em catch you networking.”

The Ivies, the elite liberal-arts schools, and boutiques like Julliard will undoubtedly have no shortage of applicants in the years to come, but everyone else will feel the pinch of the decreasing universe of 18-year olds, the age of a traditional college applicant. While the number of students applying to college will be going down in the next two decades, so too will the socio-economic background of the student pool. There will be a rise in the number who will be seeking financial aid. The census will include more African-Americans and Hispanics. Even with the expanded aid programs recently introduced at the well-endowed colleges and universities, there will be considerable unmet need.

As our population continues to shift geographically toward the south and west, and new Americans begin to send their children to schools of higher education, a greater number of students will be...

My Chronicle article America’s Most Overrated Product: A Bachelor’s Degree argued that four-year colleges should not admit underprepared students.

A number of posters to the Chronicle Forum disagree. Here are their arguments and my responses:

Criticism #1: Marginal students struggle even with a college degree. Why would you discourage them from getting even that?

My Response As my article documented, every year, four-year colleges enroll hundreds of thousands of students who graduated in the bottom half of their high-school class, the large majority of whom learn little, acquire much debt, and have only a 1/3 chance of graduating even if given 8 1/2 years.

Those students will likely learn more and have a brighter career future if they choose an option other than four-year college: an apprenticeship program, community ...

Shortly after I blogged on this year’s Whitney Biennial for Brainstorm (offering the same essentially negative take on the exhibition as almost everyone else who reviewed it), I received a phone call from a reporter at Voice of America News. She’d read my post and wondered if I’d consent to a video interview for VoA News. I said sure, as long as the interview would be taped, and not live. (I know enough about journalism to know live interviews pose risks only people running for office should take.)

The interview, conducted in my loft in New York, was very straightforward. Most of the questions were framed so that they elicited longish responses from me — my opinion about the tenor of the exhibition as a whole, what I meant by saying so many young artists were making art that doesn’t directly deal with aesthetics, and why my opinion was basically on the downside.

I’ve always known...

Let’s hear it for the infrastructure of scholarship! We tend to focus on scholarly products — books, articles, lectures, databases, and the like — without acknowledging that our scholarly productivity is highly dependent upon a complex series of institutions and services.

I work in the humanities and social sciences, but let me speak for the moment from the vantage point of a humanist.

The central institution for those of us in the humanities is surely the library. We are the people of the book (and the article), and humanists are probably more dependent upon library resources and services than anyone else on a university campus. We need the texts we study, whether they are in our own libraries or elsewhere in the country (and the world). We need the assistance of expert librarians, ranging from book selectors to government documents librarians. We need the growing library capacity...

A few weeks ago, the Chronicle published my article, America’s Most Overrated Product: A Bachelor’s Degree.

One of that article’s contentions is that each college’s student recruitment materials be required to include a report card containing such information as graduation rates and average student growth in thinking skills, writing, etc. disaggregated by SAT score bands.

I’ve been pleased that the article has generated national interest: It has been republished in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Dallas Morning News, and I was interviewed about it on a number of shows including National Public Radio’s Talk of the Nation. I’ve received so many supportive emails from professors, administrators, students, and former students.

The article has...