As Frank Bruni notes, giving a good commencement speech isn’t easy. For every brilliant address from the likes of David Foster Wallace, you get a lot of Joe Biden, or worse. Yet the form endures — people like getting advice that they can reflect back on years later and say, “You know, in retrospect, that made a lot of sense. Maybe I shouldn’t have ignored it and learned it all the hard way on my own.” But only about 40 percent of people earn college degrees in this country and only a subset of those attend commencement ceremonies. Most people go straight to the workforce — what about them? Well, you could do much worse than recall what Jason Isbell’s father told him as he set...

States deliver health care, and essential social and educational services to Americans. When the states are poor, the poor are really poor. California is asking the federal government to be backstop insurance so private investors will loan California money. Without the help, 2 million low income people will lose health insurance, thousands of teachers and firefighters will be laid off. The losses are concentrated among the vulnerable, the aged, the sick, and children in all states when economic downturns affect state revenues. States don’t have a Federal Reserve bank or the ability to run deficits like the Feds do. Federal aid is hard to get.

In a Financial Times article, which was festooned with a picture of Obama and Schwarzenegger, UCLA economist Daniel Mitchell summed up the...

The Post ran a story recently titled “Colleges Consider 3-Year Degrees to Save Undergrads Time, Money.” This is one of those ideas that gets rolled out every now and then and never goes anywhere. And I think it’s pretty clear why. There are actually two distinct proposals mentioned in the article, which confusingly oscillates between them. The first is giving students a way to earn a traditional four-year bachelor’s degree in three years. The second is awarding a degree for only three years of learning. Both ideas ultimately suffer from higher education’s opaque and limiting convention of measuring academic progress in terms of time. The problem with the earn-a-four-year-degree-in-three-years idea is that there’s nothing really new about it....

Malcolm Cowley (photo from here)

With news coming every month, it seems, of controversial figures being invited and sometimes disinvited to speak on college campuses (Summers, Ayers, Churchill, Obama . . .—see here for one account), many people might think that the controversies are a fairly recent phenomenon. Or, they date it no further back than the academic culture wars of the late-1980s, with the rise of conservative criticism of academe being its initial impetus.

I recently came across another episode from way back in 1948. It appears in the volume...

I spent Tuesday and Wednesday in Washington, D.C. at the spring meeting of the National Historic Publications and Records Commission — on which I serve as the representative of the American Historical Association. NHPRC is perhaps the least well-known of the nation’s federal cultural agencies, but for historians and archivists it is a very important funding agency. NHPRC was originally founded to support the publication of historical records and, later, to assist with archival and records projects. It has been authorized for congressional funding of $10-million a year, though it has seldom received anything like that amount. Indeed, for several years during the second term of George W. Bush, the White House zeroed NHPRC out of the budget entirely, but the hard work of historians and archivists always resulted in some level of appropriations for the agency. Supporters of...

Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh have gotten all worked up about Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination, calling her a racist and demanding that she be held accountable for it.

By now, most people have seen the controversial Sotomayor comment:

I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.

Couple that with her claim that judicial decisions are tantamount to (have the material impact of) making policy, and you can see why some conservatives are agitated.

“Imagine a judicial nominee said ‘my experience as a white man makes me better than a Latina woman,’” blogged ex-House Speaker Gingrich. “Wouldn’t they have to withdraw? New racism is no better than old racism. A white...

Can we recover from our past?

Or does it seep through to the present as the garish color of underlying old wallpaper left unstripped will usually show through to the pale expensive layer on top and spoil everything?

You know the answer.

The past is never safely in the past.

It punctures the present: a needle pricking a balloon. It sneaks into right-now life, sly as a pickpocket, invisible and unnoticed until a witness cries out.

The unhealed past will seep through layers of time as a deep enough wound will bleed through layers of gauze bandages, however neatly applied.

It’s not like hanging wash on a line, where everything is clean and pinned into place, waiting for you to gather and fold it neatly into bundles.

The past is not done, or washed through, or finished. Don’t fool yourself,...

Last week, I blogged about a short review of Spike Lee’s Kobe Bryant documentary, labeling the blog entry “Tillet on Spike on Kobe.”

One of the readers, Just Asking, wrote the following response:

Why does Jackson on Tillet on Lee on Kobe feel so removed from anything that really matters, even in popular culture? (Tillet needs a c.v. line for the tenure hearing?) Jackson should write about Kobe directly. Or Jackson should write about Lee’s movies directly. What is this, homeopathic academics?

Got to run. There’s a piece I want to read by a Prof. Smith, about what Prof. Davis thinks about William C. Rhoden’s opinion of SportsCenter’s coverage of what the tabs are saying about Michael Vick.

This isn’t the first...

Fellow Brainstormer Mark Bauerlein’s recent post (along with the comments it elicited) on what the digital revolution has done to young people got me thinking again about the effects of all of this on art.

Yesterday a colleague who teaches painting emailed me that it’s hard for him to get his students to go to a museum to look at a work of art. They just can’t see the point. Why schlep into New York to go to a museum to see a painting, especially since, as often as not, the hyper-bright, clean crisp image of it that’s posted on the museum’s Web site makes the real thing look limp and lame by comparison? (The brightness of Web color is always several notches higher than that of either pigment or natural color.)

Most of us can agree that sustained, undistracted linear thinking challenges many of today’s college students to the...

A couple of weeks ago I published a column in The Chronicle more or less denouncing 529 college savings plans on the grounds that policy makers have used them to avoid the hard choices inherent to actually keeping college affordable while simultaneously inducing families to gamble away their hard-earned money in a casino run by a particularly mendacious house.

Not long afterward I received an appreciative e-mail, signed, simply, “Mom who lost the college funds for her daughter.”

I thought of that while reading about the recently announced initiative spearheaded by the New America Foundation and the Center for Social Development (CSD) at Washington University in...