A few weeks ago, Mark Lilla had an article in The Chronicle on the high-handed way in which conservatives and conservatism are treated in academe in general and the Center for the Comparative Study of Right-Wing Movements at Berkeley in particular.

A month later the Chronicle published a "Counterpoint" by Lawrence Rosenthal, executive director of the Berkeley center. It is a symptomatic reply, and it deserves further comment.

Lilla's main contention is that the academic understanding of conservatism tends toward flat narratives and smooth summations, such as the placement of anti-communism at the center of conservative thought and the identification of conservatism with right-wing...

With C-SPAN's BookNotes, various local cable shows such as Connie Martinson's interviews, and author appearances on national shows such as Charlie Rose and Colbert (which are preserved on the Web--see this appearance, for instance, by Andrew Keen), there is, in fact, more screen exposure for authors and books than ever before.

It's a fact that cultural conservatives mistakenly overlook, and when they speak of culture going down the drain, they are vulnerable to example after example of literary and bookish material out there on multiple channels all the time. A better conservative argument is that while book culture has spread across TV, non-book...

Teachers need Machiavelli.

Okay, teachers also need a couple of things Machiavelli lacks, such as a generosity of spirit, a sense of empathy, and a creative delight in the sheer magnificence of the universe, but that doesn't rule out my whole needing-Machiavelli theory.

Who, apart from those working with students, are a more perfect audience for the advice freely dispensed by this notorious author of the hard-hearted political masterpiece? True, most of us associate Machiavelli with ruthlessness, viciousness, and an unapologetic appetite for power most often associated with the Borgias, the Medicis, or those occupying the higher ranks of administration. 

Machiavelli is not an author you'd shelve next to most books written by those with an eye toward...

What are "best practices" when it comes to student mentoring? How can we distinguish good models from bad ones?

I've been thinking about this quite a lot lately, and not just because of my post as associate dean of undergraduate studies in the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication. Before coming to Penn, I taught at Duke University for four years and spent three of them living in a dormitory with first-year undergraduate students. The students inspired me far more often than their periodic displays of youthful recklessness made me frustrated and disheartened, and most of the Duke students I keep in contact with now were people I first met in Giles Dorm. 

I haven't been teaching nearly long enough to have a Mr. Holland's Opus-type moment yet: the realization that one might impact a student in seemingly small and imperceptible...

First, thank you to The Chronicle's Brainstorm editors for publishing news about my drawing exhibition. I was both surprised and delighted to see the post!

Here I'd like to tell a little tale about how sometimes big government bureaucrats are the solution.

I first experienced vertical life -- i.e., living in a residence in a tall building rather than living in a one- or two-story house -- when I moved to New York. The first loft my husband and I rented was a third-floor artist’s loft -- a walkup (no elevator) with slanting steps as steep as the flat side of the Matterhorn. At the time, we had a baby, no money, and -- fathom this -- no washer and dryer. (Laundromat days were especially fun.)

Twenty years ago we moved into the fifth-floor loft we now inhabit. This time, the building had an elevator. It was old, and it broke down a lot, but...

We just want to let readers know that Brainstormer Laurie Fendrich's "Drawings from the South of France" will be on view at GARY SNYDER/Project Space, 250 West 26th Street, 4th Floor, New York, NY 10001, from November 4 through December 19. Laurie blogged during the summer (for instance, here) about working on these images, and this is your chance to see them up close. The opening will be from 6 to 8 p.m. on Wednesday, November 4. The gallery's phone number is 212-929-1351, and the Web site is www.garysnyderart.com.

Congratulations, Laurie!

x-posted: howtheuniversityworks.com

Is your administration using "the economy" as an excuse to extort more work for less pay from an already overburdened faculty?

Buying Howard Bunsis a plane ticket to your campus might be the best investment you can make right now.

Bunsis, a Michigan professor of accounting and treasurer of the AAUP, has been tracking administrator claims of fiscal crisis for several months. His conclusion, published in this issue of The Chronicle, is that at many campuses, there's no financial crisis at all. At many schools,...

Maybe you think I've just been in the ladies' room all this time, but that's not the case. I haven't been blogging as frequently as I had in the past for a couple of reasons: I'm still not confident about or comfortable with the new software and format of "Brainstorm" and miss the more lively, if insane, exchanges with readers who made up names and, in all probability, entire personalities -- and I've had a complicated semester (both good and bad) this fall. But I'm knocking on wood and hoping that things will calm down and resume their routine.

Routine starts to look great when you've been away from it for a while. Ever...

I was saddened to read the obit on Ted Sizer in the Washington Post last Thursday. Ted was, for me, the wisest and most humane of the education reformers of my generation. I came to know Ted in graduate school at Harvard, where we were both students of a then very young Bernard Bailyn. Ted was in the Education School and I was in the History Department, but we were both historians at a time when Bailyn was explicating the social embededness of schooling. 

Ted Sizer took this insight and ran with it for his whole career. He was then, and until his death, among the most thoughtful of men -- one of...

What is the most important thing a government can do with its citizens?  Collect taxes? Build roads? Public education? All important; but the power to take away liberty, through punishment and imprisonment, is the most fundamental power and democratic governments have a special responsibility to be rational and accountable in using it.

The United States uses this power a lot. We have 5 percent of the world's population, but 23 percent of the world's incarcerated.

And the most severe form of punishment is irrevocable, putting people to death. Unlike most countries in the world, the United States allows the death penalty and uses it.