What would be the best, the most perfect, the most amazingly desirable academic T-shirt in the universe?

And let us accept as a given that any T-shirt occupied by Clive Owen, Cate Blanchett, or whoever floats your particular fantasy boat would be the most desirable, etc., so no need to make that joke, OK? Good.

Because I’m asking a serious question here.

What line would absolutely slay you if you saw it printed on a garment? What would stop you in your tracks and compel you to offer cash, undying love, or an honorary degree to the wearer?

Would you design it with an image or keep it simple, using words alone? If you choose a quotation, would you offer an attribution or let your front and/or back speak only to those who can identify it without asking? Would you hope others might notice? And what would you like them to say?

I’ve gained so much from people’s comments on the “Graduating While Black!” post. The responses have been compelling and sophisticated. And I can’t help but think about how these issues of race/racism and sex/sexism in the academy translate into our larger sociopolitical present.

I just got through Geraldine Ferraro’s Boston Globe op-ed, and it made me ponder some of the many ways in which her reading of the election’s dynamics feeds directly into the conversations we’ve been having here.

During the central section of her piece, Ferraro tries to explain why she thinks that “Clinton Democrats” (white “Clinton Democrats”) are reeling from how identity...

This morning I had an e-mail from a friend whose spouse works for a campus-based Teaching and Learning Center. His message reminded me of how important such centers are, and how fragile they are as institutions.

The Teaching and Learning movement, in its modern form, is really only about a generation old. Current staff of the centers are really the first full-time student learning and faculty teaching professionals on our campuses. I am far from an expert on the subject, but I have followed the development of our center (the McGraw Center) from its inception, and I have the impression that we are one of a very large number of universities (and, doubtless, colleges) that have established such centers.

The McGraw Center Web page says that “effective teaching and successful learning depend on an understanding of the research on human learning,” and I...

It’s green. But it isn’t.

Given the general eco-consciousness of contemporary artists, often directly expressed in their art, and given the generally lefty, liberal tendencies in the contemporary art world, you’d think that the art world would be green — or at least trying to get there. Not so.

Take installation art, a still-hot art form that’s been around since the 1970s. Almost without exception, it’s designed to be ephemeral and site-specific. Most installation art is time-consuming to set up, difficult to move from one place to another, and a one-shot, one-time, one-gallery moment. Only the rare installation piece — like Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party at the Brooklyn Museum — manages to find a permanent...

The chieftains of science are grumpy. The marathon presidential primary campaigns have appealed, and pandered, to many interests — the jobless, the inflation-pressed middle class, environmental purists, the medically uninsured, the war-weary, and others. But nothing for science, apart from a few perfunctory nods from the campaign trail.

Science is hurting for money and political respect. Budgets — mostly from the federal government — are big but stagnant, crimping new projects, which are essential for a vibrant scientific enterprise. Without letup, the Bush administration has been trampling scientific sovereignty, limiting federal support of stem-cell research, scoffing at global warming and endangered-species protection, bowing to crackpot challenges to evolutionary theory. The President’s science adviser, science’s own man in Washington...

For more than 50 years unfettered access to a college education has been the stated goal of most higher-education policy. Everyone who wanted a college education, who had prepared themselves to earn the degree and had exhibited the discipline and stick-to-it-ness necessary to succeed deserved a chance. A person’s race or ethnicity or gender, his or her financial circumstances, political or religious beliefs, or physical incapacities could not be allowed to matter.

The term itself — access — reflected a deeply held belief that unfettered participation in the nation’s higher-education system required the elimination of those very real barriers that had historically limited participation to the advantaged few.

The first barriers to fall were products of racial and religious discrimination — outright legislated segregation in the one...

More and more colleges seem to be making the SAT or ACT examinations optional. This, of course, has the effect of raising their average SAT or ACT scores, since only students who have high scores will send them in with their applications for admission. And this leads to looking a little better in the U.S. News and World Report rankings. But, never mind. When I read that Smith College and Wake Forest University were no longer going to demand that applicants submit achievement-test scores, I wondered what would come next.

High-school transcripts, perhaps? We all know that many grades are highly inflated and may not be a genuinely accurate reflection of a secondary-school student’s accomplishments. And surely, different schools have different standards. An “A” at most schools is probably not the same grade as it would be at the Bronx High School of...

Marty’s stats from the Public Policy and Higher Education center displayed some of the high attrition rates among college students. The percentages are a sober contrary to the many stories of high achievers earning spots at competitive colleges and heading into professional schools. Marty focuses on the Bay Area, and the national picture is just as bad.

Here are figures from the Center for the entire country. If we count from the beginning of high school forward, we find that out of 100 kids who entered 9th Grade, 32 didn’t make it through 12th-grade on time.

Of those 68 successes, 40 enrolled in college the following September.

Of those 40, 27 were enrolled in college the next year.

And of those 27, 18 earned an associate’s degree within three years or a bachelor’s degree within six years.

So, on average,...

My department just circulated its annual call for summer reading suggestions. I have long promised an “academic labor bookshelf” series of entries, and will probably deliver on that in a few weeks.

In the meanwhile, my three suggestions for summer fiction:

Chris Bachelder, US! (2006). hilarious, relevant political novel based on the conceit that Upton Sinclair (The Jungle, Oil!) is serially resurrected (and serially assassinated.)

Thomas King, Green Grass, Running Water (1993). Hilarious, brilliant, irreverent, captivating, and defies description. My...

The graduation season has come and (just about) gone, a time of helium-filled balloons, celebratory brunches with extended family, bittersweet stock-taking of one’s student career, and the soupy mixture of fear and excitement about what unknown life chapters have yet to be written. For all students, but especially the ones earning advanced degrees, this yet-to-unfurl future means radically different things depending on whether or not there is a job option waiting on the other side of the ceremony.

One newly minted Ph.D., someone who should have been excited about her upcoming post at a liberal arts college, was busy pondering a colleague’s recent effort to place a purloined asterisk next to her procurement of that lucrative position.

The colleague, who was also a friend of hers, matter-of-factly stated, without any obvious displays of animus or...