We’ve heard a lot about the “boy crisis” in higher education, and strong evidence for it has come from a variety of sources. College admissions offices struggle each year to keep their entering classes at less than a 3-to-2 ratio of girls to boys. The American Association of Publishers reported in 2005 that “male students study one-third less than women, party more often, are more likely to earn a ‘C’ or less in their courses, and expect to take longer to graduate, according to a nationwide study of 1,800 college students released today by Student Monitor.” And former Newsweek editor Peg Tyre wrote last month at The Huffington Post that “boys get expelled from preschool at nearly five times the rate of girls...

When I ask clients, “When did you start procrastinating?,” I often hear responses like this:

“When I was in junior high school, I got this big, hard assignment. I knew I should get started right away but I always found something more fun to do. I waited until the last minute when the adrenaline pushed me to crank it out. I was afraid I’d get a bad grade because I had done it so last-minute but, lo and behold, I got a good one. That gave me the message that by procrastinating, I’d generate the adrenaline to get me to do the task. Before long, I was procrastinating on most unpleasant tasks — I was addicted to adrenaline.”

Of course, procrastination tends to reduce the quality of the work produced, not exactly the sort of lifelong work habits we’re trying to engender in our students. So, you might want to try one or more of these procrastination deterrents:

— Offer a few-minute...

(Image by Yves Lorson, at flickr.com)

As many recent readers’ comments indicate, a lot of reasonable, smart people —including some artists — have nothing but contempt for contemporary art. A few even suspect contemporary artists — in particular, the famous ones whose moves from one mega-dealer to another are always in the art news, and whose exhibitions greedily gobble up whole museum interiors with gosh-and-golly “installations” — of pulling a fast one on the public.

Even people with broad taste in art, who like everything in modernism from Cubism to Abstract Expressionism, become enraged when they see so much contemporary art that to them looks deliberately ugly, or calculatedly offensive, or outrageously oversized or overproduced, or ridiculously expensive, or deliberately slack. The chorus of protest veritably shouts, “Why can’t contemporary artists just make beautiful art — ...

I totally missed it (and had to get a heads-up late last night from other bloggers ), but Ralph Nader hasn’t been mincing words when it comes to his take on Barack Obama.

Some of his recent comments have caused a bit more of a stir than usual, mostly because he accused Obama of pandering to special interests (per the advice of his handlers) and even of trying to “talk white.”

Nader’s invocation of talking white seems to split the difference between (i) a critique of Obama’s policies and campaign priorities (i.e., not adamantly going after the issues that plague poor black communities, such as payday lending) and (ii) a take on the very way in which Obama carries himself (his walk, his talk, etc.), something that pivots upon popular and academic discussions of “acting white,” the notion that people of color can be delegimatized for not behaving in conspicuously (read:...

Even higher educators, some of society’s highest achievers, are subject to procrastination. In fact, higher educators are particularly tempted to procrastinate because they face challenging tasks that have long-ahead deadlines: a grant proposal, the syllabus for a new course, completing a research project, drafting a committee report, etc.

Of course, procrastination can hurt the quality of your work — something thrown together last-minute is rarely as good as work done deliberately. I’ve often seen procrastination impede people’s careers.

Like so many of us, I care about books, and bookstores, and libraries, too. I like the feel of a hard cover; it adds gravitas to my reading even when the plot is thin. And I know I’m proprietary about my books, as I don’t really like to lend them out, even to friends. If someone appears terribly interested in what I am reading, I gift her or him with a copy, keeping my own close at hand. When a friend or colleague writes a book, I usually buy one, recommend it to others, and try to get the library to purchase one. It is all part of the ritual of friendship.

I have a special place in my heart for independent bookstores, those quirky shops where books are arranged to the owner’s taste, sometimes in recognizable categories and sometimes not. It makes the hunt all the more enjoyable, roaming from area to area, searching out favorite authors or themes, collecting volumes under my arm a...

I worry about the next generation of young women.

A few years ago I was telling a story about growing up and listening to such high-self-esteem songs on the radio as “Love Has No Pride” or “I Will Follow Him.” At one point, a young woman in the back of the room raised her hand and pointed out that “two full generations have passed since you were growing up.” (I thanked her for sharing and then told her, gently, that she failed the class.) But I decided to go and listen to some new music.

That week it so happened that on the cover of Time magazine there was a singer-songwriter named Jewel. Her hit song was called “You Were Meant for Me.” I don’t know whether it’s actually been identified as the theme song for clinical depression, but I think it should be. It goes something like, “I get up in the morning and you’re not here, even though you were meant for me. I make one egg but I...

Partisan scoffing has inevitably greeted John McCain’s proposal for a $300-million prize for a super battery to propel cars.

It is kind of gimmicky, as Barack Obama says. The prize amount simply represents $1 per head of the American population, with no relation to the costs of research or the commercial, political, or social worth of success. Moreover, at present, there’s no lack of effort on battery research, given the bonanza that a winner will reap in the ordinary marketplace. Plenty of smart people and rich organizations have been working on the battery conundrum for years, with limited success in appealing the laws of physics.

On the other hand, history shows that prizes can fire up the creative neurons. Jim Watson was sniffing the Nobel Prize as he and Francis Crick doped out the double helix, a step ahead of Linus Pauling. In 1714, the British Longitude Act...

Photo: Louis Lanzano, Associated Press

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

So yesterday I suggested that some other person take up a camera and assist the trustees to introduce themselves.

But then I thought, why wait?

These clever, selfless folks have overseen the vicious gutting of the faculty —earnestly saving on our wages and benefits (”$1000 a class — what great managers we are! maybe next year we can get it down to $950! oh boy!”) in order to build themselves business centers, business colleges, and skyboxes. Being such wizards of ethics, administration, and the greater good, many of these gentle, accomplished souls have already found ways to introduce themselves to wider public notice.

The inspiration for this series is John The Boot LeBoutillier, too much of a right-wing fanatic for even Reagan’s Congress, author of Harvard Hates America, now dividing his ...

Has anyone gotten a chance to watch Katrina Browne’s documentary “Traces of the Trade” on PBS? I just caught it last night.

The film unfurls a nine-year story about the contemporary offspring of a wealthy slave-trading/slave-owning family (from 19th-century Rhode Island) that supposedly trafficked in more slaves than any other family in American history.

The descendants of those family members traveled from the United States to Cuba and Ghana (earlier this decade), revisiting important nodes of the trans-Atlantic circulations that organized “the peculiar institution.”

The documentary is also an attempt to examine what it might look like for whites to talk honestly with one another about racial history’s implications for contemporary American lives and life chances — as a precursor to more-sustained multi-racial conversations in the United States and abroad.

One poignant...