Adria and I traveled to Washington the night before last so that we could make it to the Administration Building of Arlington National Cemetery by 8:30 a.m. yesterday morning for the interment of the ashes of our friend Col. Walter F. Murphy, USMC ret.  As any of you who have visited Arlington will recognize, the Cemetery is an awesome place, with its row upon row of identical white grave stones.  We had visited a few years before for the interment of Walter's first wife, Terry—spouses of veterans are entitled to be buried with them.  But Terry had not been a member of the armed forces, and we were not prepared for the stunning impact of a burial with full military honors.

We gathered at the Administration Building with Walter's second wife, Doris, a childhood sweetheart from Charleston, S.C. who lovingly saw him through his last illness, a small number of public law colleagues, an...

Please can we start a group called "What Would Emily Say?" I mean, Emily Bronte's birthday is July 30th and heartsick lovers everywhere need to celebrate—or at least consult.

Members of WWES already exist, even if they don't have an official name or offer official T-shirts (yet). This was proven to me by the fact that I was asked to complete a series of questions concerning love and romance in Wuthering Heights for a popular online dating site.  With an eye towards making my comments revelant to what are somtimes called "singles" in today's world, I accepted the challenge because it was too funny to pass up.

Here, in celebration and in lieu of balloons (I don't think Emily Bronte would have been a balloon type, frankly) is my opening statement for newly-minted "WWES?" fans:

1. What's up with the whole class issue deal? The issue of class distinctions is an important one...

E.J. Dionne wrote a column today entitled “In American Politics, Stupidity Is the Name of the Game.” Before calling politics (I assume he means politicians) stupid, he should have considered the fact that he might not have been so smart to cite data in his column that in no way supports his assertion that $250,000 per year households are wealthy and under-taxed or that this is the income level that should separate the tax burdened from the tax advantaged.  I do agree with Mr. Dionne that, for better or worse, tax increases are imminent given the humongous national debt we have accumulated, but the evidence he cites in no way supports the idea that $250,000 is the right place to draw the line. Maybe it’s higher and probably it’s lower, but neither study cited by Mr. Dionne can answer that question.

The first report referenced by Mr. Dionne was produced by the Congressional Budget Office ...

Man, these survivor shows are popping up everywhere. Did you read about the one in Malaysia with the wannabe imams? And now there’s one about us academics.  Called Survivor: Academe, it’s on The Learning Channel (2:00 a.m. Tuesdays). If you missed the first episode, I can tell you all about it. It’s a lot like Bravo’s Work of Art and Project Runway, only instead of artists or fashion designers, it has five assistant professors from the Cultural Studies Department at Westbrook College, a small, select liberal-arts college in New Jersey. (I know, I know, it’s a crazy place what with so many assistant professors in one small department.) They’re vying for the double grand prize of tenure and an office with a window.  

On the first episode, the five contestants were nervous wrecks. One guy fussed obsessively with his goatee, and one of the women kept reaching up to twiddle her Peruvian...

Jennifer Howard's piece this morning on Shakespeare Quarterly raises the interesting question of whether "crowdsourcing" has a role in the humanities communication system. 

Howard reports that SQ has experimented with a version of open sourcing for a special issue of the journal, which is published by the Johns Hopkins University Press for the Folger Library.  The journal is thus regularly available online as part of the JHU Press Project Muse subscription database.  The special issue on new media was guest-edited by Katherine Rowe of Bryn Mawr "to investigate how scholarly authority works in a networked environment."  The process was to "put out a call for papers, cull submissions, then offer authors still in the running a chance to post drafts online."  All of the pre-selected authors accepted the opportunity to post their drafts, and the editors then invited a number of experts to...

Less than half a century after John Erskine taught the first college course based on “Great Books” (also known as the “Western canon”), confidence that higher education curricula could center on “Great Books” collapsed. Neither Allan Bloom’s passionate defense of a “Great Books” curriculum (in The Closing of the American Mind, 1987), nor Harold Bloom’s offering of a great critic’s particular list of great books (in The Western Canon, 1994), were able to prevent higher education from sliding over to the “smorgasbord” approach, where students choose to study whatever they want.

Except for a few pockets—St. John’s College, Annapolis, Columbia University, the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Study of Core Texts and Ideas at The University of Texas, Austin—there are few places today where people think of college as a time and place to study “Great Books.” All eyes are focused on future...

In my first post on the episode at Hamilton College, I made a mistake in casting it as “Paquette and Urgo.” The pairing focused the issue on two people instead of on the specific facts of the case, or rather, on the interpretation of them.

The problem with highlighting names is that it encourages questions into background and history and politics of the ideological and campus kinds. With Paquette having a lengthy adversarial relationship with several Hamilton College professors and administrators, each moment of conflict implies a train of earlier moments sometimes complicating the merits of the immediate occasion, but also sometimes clarifying them. Indeed, I have received private correspondence from people more or less close to the case rightly asking for fuller “context” for the barring of Paquette from search committees.

That would be hard for me to provide sufficiently, so I have ...

Should The New York Times exist?

Ha—you're thinking, "What an unfair question!" Or "You've framed the debate in an obviously unfair or careless way."

And right you are. But since I'm a rich and powerful chunk of media capital with a stake in the answer, I don't care what you think, and I'm free to compound the injury by holding a false "debate" on a question that unfairly asks one side to argue for its existence.

Enter The New York Times and its latest bungled attempt at analyzing higher ed, which just riffs on a piece reported by Robin Wilson for The Chronicle. As if framing a loaded question weren't enough, they stack the deck, a couple of different ways. In the more obvious manipulation of the lineup, opponents of tenure outnumber proponents 3-2.

More importantly: In a debate about the "demise" of tenure, the debate's framers don't include any voices of persons who are living the...

Have you ever had the academic version of "empty nest syndrome," which I’ll cleverly call “empty office syndrome” since I don’t have a better name for it?

Have you ever experienced a profound sense of loss when a graduate student does exactly what a graduate student is meant to do, is trained to do, and is expected to do—which is to leave?

Have you ever had a graduate student who worked so closely with you that she or he became a real friend and a virtual member of the family, thereby causing you to feel bereaved even when you’re celebrating her or his deserved and welcome new faculty position at another institution?

I’m experiencing empty-office syndrome right now, which is the very reason I don’t have a better name for it: Karen isn’t here to help me figure out how to sound smarter than I actually am. Along with teaching, writing, editing, publishing, playing softball, and having ...

While I was in London, I found a couple of hours to slip into the National Gallery on Trafalgar Square.  It is not the greatest art collection in the world—the Louvre comes straight to mind—but for anyone who grew up in England, as I did, the collection is dearly beloved. On the wall of every classroom of the nation there is a copy of one of the paintings. The Leonardo Cartoon of the Virgin with St. Anne, something purchased by the whole nation’s contributions in 1962 when there was the threat of export; Jan van Eyck’s portrait of Giovanni di Nicolao Arnolfini and his wife (we all thought she was pregnant and that this is a wedding portrait, which gave it a rather nice frissance, but apparently her looks are an artifact of the style of the day and it is just a regular, everyday portrait); the Ambassadors, of course, by Hans Holbein the Younger (that distorted skull still gets to me as ...