cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com Emile had a visit with his physician upon our return from Quebec, and at 7 1/2 months, he was up 11 pounds and 11 inches. The eleven inches part is kind of scary when you think about it — 1.5 inches a month!

He also has 3 teeth, nearly 4, and pre-verbalizes, we would like to believe, in both French and English. Just in the past week he’s gone from amiable explorer of space in an eight-foot diameter to I-can-race-across-the-room-before-you-can-blink.

Happy New Year to our readers, Jewish and otherwise. May 5769 be a sweet year for everybody of all faiths and even those of you without a religious persuasion. May it bring peace, health, and fulfillment.

This one is for my Almost Goddaughter Rebecca, an amazing young woman about to embark upon the Fearsome Journey of College Applications.

I thought I’d do the academic version of insider trading — although naturally I’ll do it in public, and ask for your help — and hope that our advice will prove more profitable than advice from ANYBODY on Wall Street.

This is between you, me, and everybody who reads Brainstorm, OK?

What to remember when applying to college:

— Admissions policies at every institution aim at fairness. Life, however, is not fair.

— Many folks get into college because their mothers or fathers attended that particular institution, making them “legacies,” a sort of in-ground swimming pool of privilege. This imbalance is not acknowledged fully enough by university admissions...

One of the big news stories in Philadelphia this week has to do with the fallout from a series of controversial exchanges between a city councilman’s aide and a local broadcast journalist.

The controversy pivots on the fact that the aide, a black woman, held up a handwritten sign during a council meeting accusing the journalist and his station, Fox29, of racism. One of the makeshift signs read “Jeff Cole KKK.” Cole is the journalist in question, and he’d been targeting the aide, Latrice Bryant, as part of an ongoing probe into allegedly falsified time sheets at City Hall.

If you don’t know about the story, Fox29’s version of things (above) includes videotape of the two hastily made signs (ostensibly flashed to shame the cameraman into turning off the camera) and of Bryant’s boss, Councilman Wilson Goode, Jr.,...

A couple of days ago I received the following message from a valued friend who has been teaching for some time abroad:

“Yesterday late afternoon I went to a meeting of humanities teaching staff convened by our head, who is as good for us as can be. The problem is in the ‘can be’, the full truth of which came through in brutal clarity. What’s brutal about it (in the etymological sense) is not the reflection of the hard economic times. That wouldn’t have depressed me at all, simply been a rephrasing of what comes in the news every night. The brutishness of our head’s message was in its exclusive focus on quotas that have to be met in order to show ‘profitability’ and in the cheerleader’s false upbeat tone he struggled to maintain. He spoke not a word about why it is that we become academics, why it is that we should care...

During the early 1970s, the school I was at experienced a surge in enrollment. The yield that year — percentage of students accepts to those who enrolled — was extremely high, too high, in fact, in relation to the number of dormitory rooms available to house incoming students. Thus, what was great for the university’s bottom line created a problem. Where were we going to put these students? One option that appeared was an off-campus dormitory at a local theological seminary that had the opposite problem: not enough students to fill its quarters. However, when the students on my own campus heard about the off-campus alternative, they “requested” (a.k.a. protested) the administration to create triples out of the resident halls’ doubles and keep everyone around the quad....

Once you’ve read Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, it’s hard not to read everything that happens in America through anything other than a Tocquevillian lens. Sure, he got some things wrong (such as the quality of American literature), but mostly he got things right.

A few posts back, I talked about how right he was in his notion of the “tyranny of the majority.” In expressing his fear that in democracies the majority would oppress the minority — not so much by legislative power, but more by exerting an invisible, insidious intimidation that would inexorably end up silencing the minority — Tocqueville understood us better than we understand ourselves.

In the current presidential campaign, since voters mostly fall into two evenly divided, intensely hostile camps, they are best thought of as “two...

Here was the neatest thing about being in the media tent adjacent to the site of last night’s presidential debate: the ribs from Rendezvous, downtown Memphis’s famous barbecue restaurant, were free and abundant. So was the beer, pretty much everything Anheuser-Busch makes, draft or bottled.

A close second: seeing that nearly every political and media figure looks worse in person than on television — older, paler, more wrinkly and, in most cases, considerably shorter. At a certain age, this becomes a guilty pleasure.

Here’s the worst thing about being in the tent: You really are sealed in an information bubble, into which news from the world you’re supposed to be covering barely intrudes.

Case in point.

Throughout the entire debate, the consensus among the press people sitting around me was that McCain was cleaning...

Dear Prof. Fendrich

Sorry to be using e-mail for this, but I wanted to be sure to reach you in time.

About that last e-mail I sent you, where I said I wouldn’t be able to give my presentation? Turns out Academic Records says they’ll be able to sort things out real soon and I’m not really needed there while they do it. Sorry for all the bother.

Is it ok if I give my presentation after all?

John

No matter when it takes place, there will be a first debate between the candidates. Here are 10 (naturally — this is America) tips for getting the most out of it and the debates that follow.

1. Ignore the “morning line” about how well each candidate is expected to do, what each candidate “needs to accomplish,” and so on. All that chatter is noise in the system — it has nothing to do with anything.

2. Tune in early and watch the pre- and post-debate programming on C-Span. Why C-Span? Before the debate, you’ll get a sense of the setting — what the scene is like, who’s in the audience, etc. Afterward, you can see how the candidates behave when they think the cameras are off.

3. Are the candidates you see and hear in the debates consistent with their commercials and their...