Among the many effects of student careerism, campus marketing, Facebook, texting, and other anti-intellectual forces hitting undergraduates today is the flat insensitivity to language. Teenagers read and write more words than ever before, but the speed of exchange has only made the idiom they use unseen and unthought. To appreciate a turn of phrase, a fresh metaphor, a mot juste, and a lilting rhythm requires that they slow down, examine the verbal surface, and realize that style can be a signature, not just a group lingo.

Everything in their lives works against that sensitivity. If teachers wish to cultivate it, then, they must make language itself an object of study and craft assignments on it. That means bringing some philology, semantics, prosody, and phonics into the classroom.

It happens less and less, though. It used to be that history of the language was a required course in...

At Emory University, undergraduates working through the courses that they need to take outside their major in order to graduate can find guidance in the college catalog. There, they learn that they must complete a certain number of courses in different subject areas, but “no rigid program for either degree [BA or BS] is prescribed by Emory College.” Students do, in fact, have lots of discretion in their college career. “Each student,” the catalog assures, “must design a program of study suited to individual interests and needs.”

But only a few sentences later appears a statement that runs against the individualist creed. The section “General Education Requirements” begins, “These courses provide for a common core of academic experience for Emory College students.” The term “common core” is a loaded one, with echoes in Core Knowledge Foundation, Common Core, and the Association for Core...

Today The New York Times ran a forum with seven people weighing in on summer homework, my contribution being a strong "Yea!" The comments are profuse, with lots of personal anecdotes and indignation coming from both sides. One line of objection, however, is puzzling, and it begins with the second contributor, Nancy Kalish, who offers a portrait of "how miserable a child looks as he slogs through that pile of book reports, math packets, journal entries, and other typical assignments."

One commenter urges, "Lay off the required summer reading lists, book reports, etc. It’s absurd. Children need more play opportunities, which will help them grow and mature, and give them a necessary break."

Another says, "The method to fix education in the U.S. today is not to make kids study all the time but to fix the U.S. education system. Children need room to grow, by doing other things. Do we want ...

Laurie's post on bad writing by students wisely cautions against what we might call the nostalgic impulse, that is, the tendency of people to regard everything as heading downward.  It afflicts people middle-age and older, and conservatives, too.  One of the mottos of conservatism is a statement I've seen attributed to Lord Palmerston at the height of Victorian reform: "Change, change, change--all this talk about change--aren't things bad enough already?"

And so, those folks who think student writing keeps getting worse need to check their pessimism for evidence.

But there is another impulse to be identified as well.  It's the opposite one, the "progress" belief, in its extreme form, the claim of "revolution."  We see it in the quotation from Andrea Lunsford: "I think we're in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization." 

Think about...

This week The Chronicle's annual Almanac of Higher Education hit the mailboxes, and deep in the data are some usual and unusual findings.

On the "Political Orientation" question, the customary breakdowns appear. The percentage of faculty members who declare themselves "Far left" or "Liberal" outnumber that of "Far right" or "Conservative" by more than three to one: 55.8 percent to 15.9 percent. The other category, "Middle-of-the-road" stands at 28.4 percent. Given the political climate of the campus, I assume that most of those moderates aren't, in fact, in the middle, but rather fall into center-left or liberal. Compared to their colleagues, perhaps yes, but not compared to the general U.S. population.

The slant to the left is no surprise, of course, but the "far" polarities do merit notice. If we just take far left and far right, the imbalance runs to more than 12 to 1. This has...

After all the scorn was piled onto Trina Thompson, the young lady who filed suit against Monroe College for failing to assist her in obtaining a job after graduation, a few significant publications weighed in on her side.

At Slate, Mark Gimein identified the serious question underlying the comedy:

"The story of Thompson's suit isn't a one-liner about a grad too naive to know that graduating from college doesn't guarantee a job. It's a story about what 'college' means and about marginal, for-profit 'colleges' that squeeze four years of fees from their students and leave them with all the debt and little of the education or prospects that they counted on."

Precisely correct.  What does "college" mean?  If schools compete for applicants by promising "success," then at what point does the promise turn into a case of false advertising?  When campuses start to look more like four-year...

I was in a meeting the other day with some teachers from around the country, and one of them mentioned that her niece was on her way to begin graduate study in English. I mentioned that it's a tough choice, but she countered that the school she will attend recruited her with a trip to campus, nice dinners and lunches, tours of the grounds, and a nice display of resources.

That sure is a far cry from my experience, and it's impossible not to slide into a "when I was a kid, things sure were a lot harder" riff. It was true, though, at least at state universities back then.

I started at UCLA in the early 80s, being admitted to the master's program without any support. I just had to manage "registration fees" of around $1,000 a year. Books were expensive, but I could find most of them in the library. I had a 1967 Dodge Dart in decent condition, and L.A. had lots of cheap tenements if ...

In The Washington Post last week appeared a remarkable editorial by two former-police officers. As opposed to stories on other victims of the War on Drugs, this one turns to the other side of the problem:

"Six years ago one of us wrote a column on this page, 'Victims of the War on Drugs.' It discussed violence, poor community relations, overly aggressive policing and riots. It failed to mention one important harm: the drug war's clear and present danger toward men and women in blue."

Why are cops vulnerable?  It's not just because dealers are armed.  It's because of a particular economy at work that places the dealing out into public, not behind closed doors.

First of all, the risks are different:

"When it makes sense to deal drugs in public, a neighborhood becomes home to drug violence. For a low-level drug dealer, working the street means more money and fewer economic risks. If...

I have found another reason to admire John Coltrane. Inside the booklet that comes with “The Complete 1961 Village Vanguard Recordings” is a picture of Coltrane reading a book, the pages open near the end. The title is The Opium of the Intellectuals, Raymond Aron’s trenchant study of the left-wing mind, best exemplified by Sartre. (Aron’s question: "Why is it that the left-wing intellect holds liberal democracies to the standards of the Kingdom of Heaven, while it excuses and overlooks the greatest crimes of totalitarian governments”?)

No surprise, though. By 1961, Coltrane was heading deeper into ponderous musings upon form and spirit and inspiration, a heady mix of abstraction and feeling. The music was getting more meditative, brooding, and experimental, and lots of people didn’t like the drift. That didn’t matter to Coltrane -- or at least if it did, he didn’t alter his direction....

Several weeks ago in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Rob Jenkins discussed threats for tenure at community colleges. He has good reason to do so, because tenure has no future. In fact, tenure has been declining for a long, long time. Professors with tenure haven’t been fired, to be sure, but when tenured profs have retired, the administration hasn’t replaced them with tenure-track lines. It’s a simple process of attrition, and because the remaining professors keep their tenure, they aren’t inclined to raise a ruckus.

The numbers are obvious and clear, but let’s review them again.

If you’re a dean with a tight budget, when a senior professor retires, it opens up a nice pile of cash. What do you do with it? You could hire a tenure-track assistant professor at $40,000-a-year salary plus $10,000 in benefits. From that hire you would get anywhere from four to six courses a year, if you...