A while back while debating a bright 24-year-old on Canadian radio about the benefits and harms of digital habits, I played up the no-tech exercises I assign students, including the study and recitation of verse. “Yeah,” I said, in old-fogey tones, “I make sophomores memorize 20-plus lines of their own choosing out of the anthology every few weeks and vocalize them to the class the next meeting. It’s good for their minds and characters.”

The other guest jumped on the task. “Please,” she observed [I’m paraphrasing]. “Teachers need to realize that we’re in a different era, and that they can’t expect their students to sit back and take in what they or the book says and just regurgitate it.” It’s an old point going a century back to the progressives and their objections to “drill-and-kill.” The latest technology has provided a new argument against it.

In a digital age, it goes, students...

(Brainstorm illustration incorporating photos by Flickr users woodleywonderworks and eyeliam) A few weeks ago, popular recording star Kanye West gave an interview to Reuters, explaining among other things:

“‘Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed,’ West said. ‘I am not a fan of books. I would never want a book’s autograph.’

“‘I am a proud non-reader of books. I like to get information from doing stuff like actually talking to people and living real life,’ he said.”

This in spite of the fact that West’s mother, who died in 2007, was an English professor at Chicago State University. Indeed, in Time Magazine a few years earlier she compared her son to Walt Whitman (who himself, it should be re...

The pedagogical pendulum swings back and forth, but at the end of the day, in designing a curriculum, you still have to choose some texts over others. (Image from photobucket.com) Anybody who has sat in on curriculum meetings and projects in the humanities has experienced those awkward moments when it comes down to selecting certain contents and materials as essential and required. Traditionalists in the room want to identify core texts, events, figures, and ideas, and on various grounds of historical influence, civic inheritance, and aesthetic virtue they stick with a generally Eurocentric tradition.

Progressivists want to enlarge the canon and contexts, to give representation to other cultures and identities, and explode the reigning “normativities,” and they resist a core knowledge of any kind being set down as official.

By now it’s an old and tired antagonism, an...

Consider this scenario.

A bright young man graduates from Emory University law school with a high ranking and big ambitions. He has an interview at one of the leading law firms in Atlanta, and he walks in with all the confidence of the best and brightest ones with a pile of recorded achievements on his resume. Besides, he did a summer associateship with the firm a year earlier, and all went well.

The morning goes smoothly, with young people in the office finding him energetic, genial, and smart. Lunch is set with a few senior partners and one of the founders, people who’ve been with the firm since the beginning or soon after. He joins them at the table and the conversation flows, but drifts off into issues well beyond clients and cases.

They are in their fifties and sixties, and their memories of Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush are fresh. One of...

I just received in the mail this illustrated edition of The Elements of Style, William Strunk, Jr., and E. B. White, with illustrations by Maira Kalman and a foreword by Roger Angell, White’s stepson.

Angell calls it “this quiet book,” but notes that it “has been in print for forty years, and has offered more than ten million writers a helping hand.” The little volume provided “a compendium of specific tips” and “larger principles . . . to be kept in plain sight,” and “They help — they really do. They work. They are the way.”

One reason stems from the easy and straightforward style of the prose, along with the relaxed approach to stylistic matters. Here is a sample:

“Who can confidently say what ignites a certain combination of words,...

Malcolm Cowley (photo from here)

With news coming every month, it seems, of controversial figures being invited and sometimes disinvited to speak on college campuses (Summers, Ayers, Churchill, Obama . . .—see here for one account), many people might think that the controversies are a fairly recent phenomenon. Or, they date it no further back than the academic culture wars of the late-1980s, with the rise of conservative criticism of academe being its initial impetus.

I recently came across another episode from way back in 1948. It appears in the volume Robert B. Heilman: His Life in Letters, edited by Edward Alexander, Richard J. Dunn, and Paul Jaussen. Heilman was head of the English Department at the University of...

Photo of Oscar Levant at dorothyfields.co.uk

Most people today don’t remember Oscar Levant, but for three decades he stood as one of the leading wits of the age. He was a classical pianist who studied at UCLA with Schoenberg, an actor/musician in films including “Humoresque” and “An American in Paris,” host of the talk show “The Oscar Levant Show,” and author of sketch-filled reminiscences “Memoirs of an Amnesiac” and “The Unimportance of Being Oscar.”

I just read “Unimportance,” and laughed and smiled all the way through. It’s a pleasure to find comedy based on word play, worldliness, self-deprecation, and a recognition of fallen realities. For years his quips stood alone — I think he first said, “I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin” — and in his books they come at you in rapid fire. And the revelatory tales he spins made him enemies of long standing.

He wandered in...

“Regardless of how you try to explain to people it’s a ‘war on drugs’ or a ‘war on a product,’ people see a war as a war on them. We’re not at war with people in this country.”

That’s what new White House Drug Czar Gil Kerlikowske said in an interview a few weeks ago. (See here for full write-up in The Wall Street Journal.) And he’s right. How can you fight a war on a thing. Once you declare war on a ‘product,’ you carry it to the people involved in the product, and if you want to prosecute the war well, you end up doing things such as raiding medical marijuana dispensaries in the 13 states in which the people at large have voted to approve it. (This is another area in which social conservatives and small government and libertarian conservatives clash — What happened to the principle of federalism? the latter ask ...

The current issue of The Chronicle Review has a short piece by Carlin Romano on the marriage and partnership of Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese. The occasion is the publication of Gene’s memoir, Miss Betsey, a reminiscence of their long and happy romance.

It’s a delightful essay, and it catches well the extraordinary affection of two brillant minds and forceful temperaments. Like the many obituaries that followed upon Fox-Genovese’s death a year and a half ago, it mentions, too, her controversial position in academe, particularly in the world of women’s studies. As is well known, her anti-abortion position put her at odds with her field, and even though she founded the first doctoral program in women’s studies in the...

A few months back, the Telegraph reported a distressing finding: IQ scores for British teens are going down. In the last 30 years, it says, the IQ of the average 14-year-old has dropped two points, and for the upper half it has dropped six points.

That’s an astonishing reversal of the so-called Flynn Effect, one of the most cited and discussed phenomena among cognitive psychologists and intelligence experts. The effect is simple: For decades, IQ scores have been steadily rising around the globe. Psychologist James Flynn discovered the rise back in the 1980s, and people in the cultural sphere have cited the effect as evidence against those gloomy cultural conservatives who have...