x-posted: howtheuniversityworks.com

Arrests of 52 students at UC Davis and others at UCLA ended one-day occupations at both places, and at San Francisco State, but a new occupation has begun at Berkeley, where the occupiers report that police beat and pepper-sprayed students to re-take the building's first floor. Students appear to hold the second floor at this time. Two buildings remain occupied by hundreds of students at UC-Santa Cruz, which has been the...

Humans are first and foremost attracted to the patterns we see in life because of their beauty. Only afterwards do we discover their utility. What supreme irony, then, lies in what inevitably happens next: The more we use the patterns we discover, the more we lose our awareness of the beauty that attracted us to them in the first place.

The Trixie Telemetry company is a case in point. I’d never heard of the thing until this morning, when I was drinking my morning coffee and read about it in an online article in The New York Times. In “Are Metrics Blinding Our Perception?” we learn that the Trixie Telemetry company sells a program to help parents raise their babies by quantifying their little lives, and turning what they do into data. Parents use the program to keep...

UConn junior and English major Timothy Stobierski adds his perspective on professorial behaviors in the classroom:

Dear Faculty,

Since I'm hoping you don't catch me as I nail this letter to your office door, allow me to take a moment to introduce myself. I am one of your disgruntled students.

Why disgruntled, you ask? Well, to put it simply, you do something that pisses me off. And make no mistake about what I mean by saying "you piss me off." I do not mean that you do something that "annoys me"; waiting in line at the library later to print out this letter when I'm done with it will annoy me. I do not mean that you do something that "tries my patience"; watching the interns...

The University of California system is reeling. Crushed by the recession and the total collapse of governance in the Golden State, the UC system just raised student tuition by a mind-boggling 32 percent. A few weeks ago, New York Times Magazine interviewer Deborah Solomon sat down with UC Chanchelor Mark Yudof. Naturally, she asked him tough, insightful questions about how he was going to maintain academic and scholarly standards and preserve the UC system's historic leadership in American higher education spent the bulk of the interview mindlessly haranguing Yudof about whether he was overpaid and deserved a free house. Because the single most important thing to remember when conducting an interview is that it's all about...

Later on today, Oprah Winfrey is supposed to announce that she's closing up shop on her wildly influential daily show. The lights go out on that televisual institution in 2011, and that will be the end of a pop-cultural era.

Of course, Oprah didn't invent the genre (and she wasn't the first person to ratchet its stakes up to national prominence), but she has owned that format for much of the last two decades, using it as an amazingly powerful platform, one that has made her the most recognizable first-name celebrity on the planet.

Some credited her "book club" with almost single-handedly keeping America literate (and the publishing industry solvent), a not completely hyperbolic claim.

I probably watched about 10 to 15 episodes of the show a year, but they were some of the most riveting moments of network TV: Tom Cruise prancing around on that couch and...

x-posted: howtheuniversityworks.com

Yesterday the University of California Regents walked into a room packed with gasoline and nonchalantly lit their cigars -- handing down tuition increases that will hike 2010 rates 44 percent over 2008, turning higher ed into a gated...

I was sitting in the Fargo airport awhile back, and there was Glenn Beck talking with David Horowitz about Jimmy Carter. People were watching, some smiling and some grim. I couldn't tell whether they agreed with Beck or not, but they paid attention. He's a gadfly.

Gadflies prosper in particular circumstances. They gather fans when elements of public life strike enough people as strange, perverse, or just plain wrong, but those people don't feel that they have the access or the influence to change them. Gadflies arise when prominent figures are aggrandized into figureheads, when dubious ideas expand into right-thinking wisdom, or when insulated groups perceived as "elites" seem unaccountable to democratic processes.

For Beck's supporters, the last six months are a case in point. They regard Obama's popularity as an irritating phenomenon -- not the fact that...

Former United States Senator Rick Santorum penned an op-ed in this morning's Philadelphia Inquirer that questions the military's commitment to "diversity." Santorum's "The Elephant in the Room: Diversity, but at What Cost?" argues that the Naval Academy's characterization of diversity as "highest personnel priority" is not just silly (as manifested in an attempt to diversify an all white and male color guard before a recent world series game) but also potentially "dangerous," especially if "the military's commitment to 'diversity' as job one prevented military officials and the Department of Defense from 'connecting the dots' when it came to the accused [Fort Hood] shooter."

Of course, academics hear a great deal about diversity,...

In the course of presenting a very interesting paper on international college rankings at an accountability conference I co-hosted yesterday, Ben Wildavsky made an observation that I strongly endorse: international competition in higher education isn't a zero-sum game. In fact, I think there's a good argument that America would be better off if we no longer towered above most other countries in college attainment.

Which doesn't mean we shouldn't compare ourselves to other countries and act on the results. The legitimate methodological questions raised in this recent report from Cliff...

One of the excellent students in my creative writing class, Michelle P. Carter, tells us more about what students would like their instructors to know:

1. We make lists of all your weird-ass mannerisms.

You start every sentence with "that said." You say "literally" when you mean "actually" or "I'm not exaggerating." You squeak "m'kay?" at every lull in your lecture, just to make sure that the crickets you hear and the tumbleweed you see blowing through this 300-seat hall is just your imagination. You stroke your chin whenever someone coughs. You're loud enough to wake the dead. You need to know that we make games out of these things. We count how many times you say "sort of" in 50 minutes (it was almost 200, by the way). We instigate a chorus of coughs to see if we can get you to rub that stubble off your chin. If we made a drinking...