I know from bad boys. I grew up on Ocean Avenue in Brooklyn. My cousins were the beautiful ones with black hair and eyes like sharks: so dark so you couldn’t tell the pupils from the iris.

I never dated an Italian although my tastes in guys were otherwise what you might call eclectic.

Trust me, they’ve been called worse.

I liked the tougher boys because they offered drama. As a kid, one of my favorite songs was Connie Francis’s “Johnny, Get Angry.” Connie begs her boyfriend to get angry and get mad, to give her the “biggest lecture” she’s ever had. She tells him that she wants a “brave man” and a “cave man,” and that by being angry will prove that he “cares, really cares” for her.” His anger and her fear of him are seen as “proof” of their love. Conjuring up images of cave men, dragging women around by the hair, the 1950’s song is representative of a school of romance that...

Last winter I wrote about a Teagle Foundation-funded task force I am co-chairing for the National History Center (an offshoot of the American Historical Association). Ours is one of several grants to disciplinary organizations to explore the impact of disciplinary education on undergraduate liberal learning. We have had a broadly constituted group of historians working on this project for nearly two years, with our report due at the Foundation just after Labor Day. Somewhat to my surprise, I think we will have it done in time — and when it is received the foundation will post in on its Web site.

My co-chair, James Grossman, vice president of the Newberry Library for Education, and I have now revised our report two or three times. We began by sending a survey to history departments in a number of different sorts of colleges and...

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

Faculty who serve contingently are not surplus labor that need to be shunted into another line of work. It should be obvious to anyone without “market”-themed toilet paper stuck to their shoes that there’s plenty of work in higher education for all of these people — they’re all working, duh! — it’s just that the work has been converted from what used to be a decent job into adjunctery and nontenurable drudgery by well-paid, generally tenured management knuckleheads who get off on spending money squeezed from your wages on skyboxes and “centers of excellence” for their cronies.

Faculty serving contingently are a boatload smarter on the academic workplace than management, who are paid not for their intelligence but for their dulled ethical sense and their embrace of a spectacularly vacuous corporate culture.

You can hear some of their ...

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

The 17th Annual Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions (CGEU) conference finished yesterday, and the 4th Annual Canadian Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions conference begins Thursday.

Click the Flash player above to screen part 4 of 4 in my extended interview with activists from Graduate Students United at the University of Chicago, a portrait of an emerging union drive at a private institution. They reflect on the benefits of organizing, whether unionism is an end in itself, and on the nature, purpose, and extent of democracy in higher education.

In a couple of weeks, I’ll feature another grad-employee four-parter with a group of activists from GSOC-UAW at NYU, another private institution, but at entirely a different point in their experience. The NYU folks reflect on a successful organizing drive and first contract, setbacks...

Like my fellow Brainstorm bloggers, I write in a wide range of genres: articles for disciplinary journals and popular magazines, books for university presses and college undergraduates, dispassionate analyses and calls to arms. My range of subjects is also wide: the American presidency, the politics of gambling, the music of Frank Sinatra, the life and works of C.S. Lewis, the literature of college sports, and so on.

What I can’t write is fiction. I probably read more fiction than anything else, and I am in awe of people who write it well. Richard Russo, Richard Price, P.D. James, and Tom Wolfe: you are my heroes.

And so I offer up two stories — both of them political, both of them true — that I wish I had the talent to recast as short stories, with all the nuance and insight that good fiction affords. (Calling Ward Just, who, starting with his 1973 story collection The Congressman ...

So my friend is publishing her first book and I’m trying to offer her practical advice, right?

So this is what I tell her: I tell her that while it’s tempting to call the editor “just to check in,” the impulse usually translates most directly into the following (if thinly disguised) screed: “What are you doing, anyway? How long can it take to FINISH PRINTING the damn thing? Why is it taking longer to publish it than it took me to write it? Why aren’t you showing me examples of the possible covers, why aren’t you asking me to write up a decent press release, why aren’t you returning my calls, answering my e-mails?” What every author wants to know is, “WHY AREN’T YOU TAKING CARE OF ME?”

The short answer is: If your book is slated for publication, your best line of attack is to keep writing OTHER THINGS and stop calling the editor.

Look — here’s the hard part — it isn’t the publisher’...

This is an earnest question. I’m not trying to provoke advocates of the adjunct-faculty agenda. But I couldn’t help wondering today as I was reading an advance copy of tomorrow morning’s Washington Post Magazine: Education Review about an apparent contradiction.

The headline on the cover is “Outsourcing Our Schools.” The paper reports that the Prince George’s County public schools are desperate for qualified teachers and have begun to import hundreds of them from the Philippines. Reading the story, I was reminded of a piece I read in The New York Times sometime in the last year or two about New York City bringing faculty members to the public schools from Europe and Latin America. This teacher shortage is going on at the same time that several of the nation’s public school systems...

Most people are familiar with E.D. Hirsch as the founder of Core Knowledge, a K-8 education program that runs in some 400 schools across the country. Core Knowledge offers an impressive curriculum that teachers love, but that many educators consider a reactionary initiative opposing all the best progressivist thinking in the field. This is a misconstruction, for while the curriculum endorses a central body of knowledge that all students should acquire, that body involves broad multicultural representations and includes among its motives a class orientation. Hirsch is, I believe, a lifelong Democrat, and his espousal of “cultural literacy” for kids stems not from an elite notion of culture and tradition, but from an observation about American society. The higher one goes in professional worlds, he maintains, the more cultural literacy is...

McCain’s camp went on the racial offensive this week, accusing Barack Obama of playing “the race card” in recent speeches and characterizing some of Obama’s statements as “divisive, negative, shameful, and wrong.”

The remarks in question pivot on Obama’s claim that Republicans might attempt to engage in race-based and xenophobic fearmongering to win the election against him — that they might point out his foreign-sounding name and subtly remind voters how much he “doesn’t look like all those other presidents on dollar bills” (a clear nod to his racial difference).

I’ve already commented on this kind of accusation before, when Dennis Miller went off on Obama for a similar statement back on June 20th.

Miller and McCain want to argue that Obama is calling McCain and the Republicans a bunch of racists and that unless Obama has explicit proof about some cabal of Republican...