The American Anthropological Association is holding its annual meeting in Philadelphia this week, and I'll be there with bells on (maybe literally).

I realize that the last time I mentioned anything about academic conferences in one of my blog posts, the critical responses came fast and furious.

One of the consistent commenters for that posting was someone named goxewu, who kept asking me if I had to cancel any of my classes so that I could trot off to these "conferences." Even though I answered the query a few different times, goxewu continued to push the point, even implying that I would probably have canceled my classes this semester if they were on Mondays and Fridays (instead of Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays).

But goxewu's major gripe wasn't necessarily about those missed class sessions. One of goxewu's final comments makes the argument plain: "Prof. Jackson may have done...

The current Great Recession started in December 2007, so this was the second Thanksgiving in the worst downturn since the Great Depression. Unemployment is over 10 percent, and predicted to continue at that level well into next year. People who hoped to retire are struggling to rebuild their savings and facing years of additional work. Housing foreclosures remain a serious threat. 

So you would think the discussion around the Thanksgiving table, when friends and family gathered, would have been about how to get the economy growing again.

But at least in my admittedly unscientific sample, people's legitimate anxieties about losing their homes, or jobs, or retirement savings were focused in the wrong place. Instead of calls for continued job creation, I'm hearing a lot of misplaced fear about inflation and the growing federal debt -- what Paul Krugman correctly calls the phantom menace.

Nothing could be more appropriate, and celebratory, than the recent acquisition by the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. of Byron Kim’s “Synecdoche.” The work consists of a grid of 8-inch by 10-inch panels (still growing in overall size, as the artist’s project is ongoing), each painted to match the skin color and tone of various people, some famous, some not, whom Mr. Kim had sit for him.

A huge “high modernist grid” with a conceptual bent? Ordinarily this would make my Venetian blinds come down. But this is not the case here. I first saw “Synecdoche” at the 1993 Whitney Biennial. At the time, I thought it both gorgeous and deeply suggestive in its multiple readings -- a knockout work of art in an otherwise tedious and didactic exhibition that was, even at the time, dubbed aggressively politically correct.

Seeing the variety of beiges, browns, slight pinks and palish yellows...

I made a quick trip to Havana last week, just before Thanksgiving. I had two objectives. The first was to complete arrangements for the Woodrow Wilson School undergraduate seminar that will be held at the University of Havana this spring. Each of our WWS juniors must take what we call a Policy Task Force each term, in order to learn the techniques of public-policy analysis. We offer several of these PTF's abroad, with our students enrolling in other host university courses for the remainder of their program. Some, but not all, of these PTF's are taught in local languages, and the one in Havana will be in Spanish. It will be organized by the Cuban Center for Demography (CEDEM), and will focus on a variety of Cuban human migration problems.  We have nine students signed up, and I think they are going to have a very good experience at the University. Several other U.S. universities are...

For a few years now, a recurring concern has been the widening gap between boys and girls at the college level.  With girls making up around 58 percent of the undergrad population, college-admissions offices are scrambling (see here), and the U.S Commission on Civil Rights is investigating whether colleges are practicing affirmative action for boys to keep the entering classes from reaching the critical 60-40 imbalance that puts the "operational sex ratio" out of whack (see here, and also this).

Much of the problem isn't an in-school issue. Yes, girls do more homework and take more AP classes, but a more fundamental factor in the problem may stem from leisure habits, particularly reading time.  Indeed, leisure reading trends play a huge role in academic achievement (see this U.S. Dept of Ed report). Kids who don't enjoy reading on their own time don't do as well in school....

I used to think feminists had  a lot of things to worry about, such as the fact that even the most educated and capable of women still make 78 cents on a man's dollar, that women are still subject to many more crimes of physical and domestic violence than men, and that hard-won reproductive rights are in danger of being systematically withdrawn without our consent.

I thought that if you ask any woman what her big problem is on any given day, she wasn't going to cry out, "The grave act of misogyny perpetrated by those who discriminate against the feminine hirsute."

I once believed that a woman who was interested in fighting the good fight would grab anybody who would listen by the collar and tell you that she needs to find adequate child care, affordable health insurance, a decent retirement plan, and a partner who won't freak if she takes 20 minutes to parallel park.

Who knew? Facial...

Maybe I'm just a little too sensitive these days. After all, women at the end of their third trimester can be like that. But when I read about a new campaign, one to prevent unplanned pregnancies among community college students, I was a bit taken aback.

According to the nonpartisan group in charge, 48 percent of community-college students "have ever been pregnant or gotten someone pregnant." And this is a problem, the group contends, because dropout rates are higher among students who get pregnant while in college. So, presumably in order to increase degree attainment in the public two-year sector, we need to slow this trend and prevent unplanned pregnancies.

OK, on the face of it, this seems like a plausible argument and approach. After all, it's hard enough to get a degree while working full-time, let alone while parenting too. And sure, there's plenty of research suggesting that the ...

Thanksgiving is one of the few American holidays that hasn't been destroyed by consumerism. Sure, there’s a Macy’s Day parade and a slew of football games on television. But how many turkeys can you eat? How many potatoes can you mash? How many paper Pilgrims can you stick on your window? There’s only so much of it that can be bought and sold in the marketplace.

Some people bend the holiday to make it very religious. Others merely give special thanks for their blessings. Some do a politico-religious turn on the holiday, using it as an occasion to be especially thankful for their freedom to practice their religion. But Thanksgiving cannot be distorted into a religion, and no single religion owns it. Whatever it’s history, it’s now a secular holiday where families and friends gather together and pig out.

When I was growing up, the history of Thanksgiving was an enormous part of the...

With college campuses becoming ever more preprofessional and vocational, it's getting harder for humanities teachers to get freshmen and sophomores to appreciate the aesthetic side of things.  That goes for both their interpretation of texts and for their creation of texts. They read everything for the kernal of fact and value, the information, the point, not for the expression (whether beautiful or vulgar or flat or conventional . . .).  And they write sentences that have no flair, no element of balance, rhythm, metaphor, or other aesthetic feature.

And why shouldn't they? When so much of the liberal-arts curriculum has turned toward "informational text" -- the NAEP reading exams for 12th Graders now have 70 percent of their passages as informational, 20 percent fiction, 5 percent verse, and 5 percent literary essay -- students understand their own work in the same terms.

This makes...

x-posted: howtheuniversityworks.com

Several hundred students gathered at the Oakland courthouse Monday to protest the filing of felony burglary charges against protesters last week, then began an impromptu march over to the University of California's Office of the President (UCOP), the building from which Mark Yudof directs the entire UC system. About 70 members of the crowd pushed past police and gained entry by a rear door of the building, according to at least one report, including photographs taken from a cellphone. 

During the ensuing sit-in, students demanded to meet with Yudof, and eventually were met by two staffers who apparently admitted earning salaries of between $250,000 and $350,000.

"The most important thing was the occupation of the building itself and the students' defiant mood," wrote one participant. "They were not going to be stopped by a few cops."

Follow the...