It’s hardly news that the academy leans left, or that many conservatives believe liberal professors are biased against those who hold conservative political positions. Now there’s research offering new reasons for the liberal slant of professors: Liberals, and not conservatives, are the ones who want to become professors in the first place. Neil Gross and Ethan Fosse, two sociologists who co-authored the paper, “Why Are Professors Liberal?” use data taken from the General Social Survey of opinions and social behaviors to compare professors with the rest of Americans.

They conclude that jobs ranging from farmer and nurse to policeman and professor are typecast in different ways—according to gender, political leanings, etc. Because being a professor is one of those jobs that’s typecast as a job for liberals, young liberals frequently want to become professors while young conservatives on...

The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 -- to this day considered one of the most destructive earthquakes ever -- struck on a religious holiday. It flattened what had been a beautiful city, including almost every single church. Europeans -- especially the literati -- were shocked. How, if there was any kind of divinity at all, could so many innocents be slaughtered? The Enlightenment considered man’s ignorance to be the core reason for man’s misery, and reason to be the solution to man’s superstitious attachment to faith and the route to his progress. The Lisbon earthquake in particular -- and the uncalled-for suffering wrought by nature more generally -- made this idea appear deeply wrongheaded.

Voltaire’s Candide (1758) was written at least partially in response to the Lisbon earthquake, but it also tackled the great problem of human suffering in general. The work satirizes optimism -- or at...

The appointment of 57-year-old Jeffrey Deitch, the well-known New York dealer in contemporary art, as director of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) in Los Angeles marks the first time that the owner of commercial gallery has become the director of a major nonprofit art museum. No matter how thickly MoCA slathers the news with public-relations frosting, this is a conflict of interest. Not a “possible” conflict of interest, but an obvious conflict of interest. Can a man who’s made his living dealing contemporary art put all that behind him and now approach art as something to be valued for its own sake, and for a non-buying general public’s sake, and not something that’s for sale? Well, you tell me.

In terms of money, the appointment makes a sort of sense -- at least that’s how MoCA’s Board sees it. The museum has been in serious financial straits for quite a while. It ran up deficits...

Two in one blow: Another quiz show scandal (remember the old one with Charles Van Doren back in the 1950s?) and another talent show narrowly averted.

“Our Little Genius,” a new Fox quiz show about child geniuses competing for huge amounts of money that was set to begin on Fox next week, has been put on the back burner -- or maybe even permanently cancelled -- because of “concerns about the integrity of the show.” The producer released a statement saying “he recently discovered that there was an issue with how some information was relayed to contestants during the preproduction of ‘Our Little Genius,’” and that “as a result, I am not comfortable delivering the episodes without reshooting them.”

Did someone give the little tykes the answers? To those who know how to read Flack (the Esperanto of our times), the answer lies in the vast and murky territory in between yes and no. To the rest ...

My daughter is always on the lookout on behalf of her professor-mom for news stories about Hofstra. Today, I received an email from her about Hofstra that she found in today’s online version of the freebie daily people read on the subway, a.m.New York. In a special section entitled “Aim High,” the paper’s guide to choosing “the right college,” Hofstra is singled out on the cover with a huge headline that declares, “Hofstra: A Success Story in the NYC Area.” We learn about Hofstra’s ambition to raise its status from a fallback school to a first choice (it’s working) and its steady rise in the higher-ed hierarchy (a fact).

The PR people at Hofstra must be over the moon right now—or maybe even breaking out the champagne. I have a tip, however. For any parents considering letting their children attend Hofstra, DON’T LET THEM STUDY PAINTING! It’s dangerous! Scroll down to p. 16 of a.m.New...

I just learned from my very smart colleague, Neil Donahue, associate dean of Hofstra’s Honors College, that I’ve been stupidly following the wrong academic calendar in setting up my spring courses. I was structuring the content of my courses around our two-day spring break, our long spring vacation, our study days and the examination schedule. How foolish could I have been? Turns out the real academic calendar follows the successive philosophical stages through which all students necessarily progress.

For the reader’s benefit, I’ve added my own words of explanation to Neil’s academic calendar and have forwarded this to the provost’s office. I’m confident that by next spring our academic calendar will be organized the right way, and look like this:

Idealism
Early January. Because students don’t have very many claims on their attention, it’s good to send out reading assignments even...

Blogging is about instantaneousness, but there are times a blogger has to sit on something before knowing what’s bothering her. About two months ago, The Chronicle Review ran a question-and-answer forum entitled, “Are Too Many Students Going to College?” Nine experts in higher education -- drawn from economics, political science, public-policy analysis and career counseling -- responded to such questions as, “Who should and shouldn’t go to college?” and “At what point does the cost of going to college outweigh the benefits?”

The experts offered a variety of oftentimes conflicting opinions. Postsecondary education (especially that which leads to a B.A.) correlates with higher income, although there are some who think this correlation won’t last much longer. The best jobs of the future will require going to college, but some believe the B.A. degree is inherently worthless. Individual...

In my previous post, I wrote about the phenomenon of hoarding, an obsessive-compulsive disorder where people become incapable of throwing away anything. Thinking about hoarding led me to conclude that individual hoarding is a metaphor for the condition of our times. We live in a consumer society that continuously entices us to accumulate stuff we don’t need.

I keep a fairly neat home with lots of empty space in it. My inner hoarder never gets to show its face, instead living hidden away inside drawers, cupboards and closets. One early morning this past fall, I sleepily bid goodbye to my husband as he departed for a 5-day trip out west. I’d decided that his trip was my moment. I would kill my inner hoarder by doing a deep clean. Hoarding horrifies me, perhaps in part because it is profoundly ugly. The spiraling chaos that comes with hoarding violates order and harmony. Nature frequently...

Hoarding -- the obsessive-compulsive disorder where a person saves everything even to the point where the home becomes what most of us would call unlivable -- is a very hot topic right now. There are said to be 3 million hoarders in the United States, with researchers and psychologists intent upon figuring out what causes them to hoard, and how to cure them of the disorder. The public, meanwhile, is luridly feasting on A&E’s second season of the reality “intervention” TV show, “Hoarders.” Each show vividly documents cases of extreme hoarding, where the audience gets to sit back in stupified shock while psychologists tenderly coax hoarders to throw away years of accumulated rubbish. Success comes when the hoarder finally permits family, friends and kindly volunteers to empty the contents of the house into some dumpsters. There is nothing grosser than watching people shovel gucky layers of...

It’s no accident that the dimensions of two of the greatest of the grand-scale figurative paintings in the history of art—John Singer Sargent’s “The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit” (1882), which hangs in the MFA in Boston, and Velázquez’s “Las Meninas” (1656), which hangs at the Prado in Madrid -- are nearly perfect squares. Only the most audacious painters, harboring the grandest painterly ambitions, dare try a figurative painting on a square -- a shape that resists interference with its already perfect state. Most figurative painters prefer to paint on rectangles (the vertical for portraits, the horizontal for groups). Modern abstract painters (such as Mondrian or Ad Reinhardt) were different, of course. In their longing to reach out and touch the underlying, eternal order of things, they frequently painted on square canvases, or canvases that at least appear to be square.

I...