It was late in the morning of a warm spring day a few years back, right after I’d finished my morning class. I was settling in to do a little paperwork before taking a noon-hour stroll to grab some lunch and check out the new buds on campus. One of my hipper, but more laid-back colleagues tapped lightly on my office door.

Would I be willing, he asked, to come hear a lecture by an Italian conceptual artist he’d invited to speak on campus that day? Forgetting to advertise the event (like I said, he’s laid-back), he was afraid no one would show up. Now he was trying to scare up enough warm bodies to make the auditorium look something better than empty.

“Sure,” I said, silently kicking myself for having been snared so easily. I followed him out into the hall to join a quietly shuffling group consisting of a couple of other hapless professors who also couldn’t say no, and forty or so...

We’ve got so many problems at home right now that the last thing Americans want to think about is the predicament of women in faraway places. But if you’re at all like me, you were deeply shocked by the video of the flogging of the young woman in Pakistan that surfaced on the Internet last week. Look, it’s not as if I don’t know these things happen in the world. It’s just that seeing such a vivid, specific example drove it home to me more viscerally.

The video (apparently taken surreptitiously with a cell phone) shows a 17-year-old Pakistani girl lying in a prone position in some kind of outdoor public area. A large crowd of men is gathered in a circle around her. Her burqa has been pulled up so that you see her legs and bottom, clothed in full-length pink pants. Three men, one of whom is said to be her...

That the British fuss and fret over whether or not Michelle Obama should have touched the Queen is their own sorry business, but I don’t get why Americans are perturbed. Isn’t it enough that Mrs. Obama greeted the Queen politely, while wearing a nice dress and a pretty smile? It was the Queen who first rested her hand (encased, natch, in a white glove) onto Mrs. Obama’s back, after all — not Mrs. Obama initiating the move. But returning the gesture triggered the Times of London to blare in this morning’s headline, “Protocol is abandoned as Michelle Obama cozies up to Queen.” Back home, Time and CNN (Anderson Cooper probed the intricacies of meaning in Michelle’s gesture on the 11 o’clock news last night) both deemed...

From studying political philosophy in college, I learned that defining “justice” is impossible. Even so, we like to grope about for its meaning. For example, many political philosophers have explored the connection between justice and law. The conclusion? It’s always tenuous. Rule by law — as opposed to rule by tyrants — seems at first glance to be something that, by constraining people, is a form of injustice. Yet by permitting people to go about their lives without fear of arbitrary retribution, rule by law actually frees people. No matter what, law always has its roots in particular customs, and because customs vary widely from society to society, laws vary widely as well.

In the tragic case of Ameneh Bahrami, an Iranian woman now living in Spain, the fundamental question of political philosophy — What is ...

One of the characteristics of artists like me who’ve been around a long time is the aplomb with which we assert our taste, as well as our willingness to venture out on a limb even when it comes to opining about famous artists. At a certain point (after about 20 years of wrestling first-hand with putting paint onto canvas), painters switch from sentences that begin with the hesitant words, “I’m not really all that fond of so-and-so’s work,” to more categorical assertions, such as, “So-and-so is a terrible painter.” When young artists assume this attitude, it’s a bad thing, of course. They’re unnecessarily blocking their own development. Mature artists who don’t have it lack any conviction.

Accompanied by my friend from graduate school days, Edith Newhall (she’s the art critic for The Philadelphia Inquirer, and is a painter in her own right), I recently wandered through the

In my previous post, I argued that it was futile to defend the humanities on the basis of their usefulness and suggested, albeit lightly, we try defending them on the basis of their inherent beauty. I wrote that studying the humanities is “a beautiful activity, done for its own sake, that used to be unfairly restricted to those who are privileged. Now that we live in a democracy, we want everyone to have the chance to do it.”

Why the vehement, not to say vitriolic, response from so many readers? (I was even told by one commentator that I ought to be “ashamed” of myself.) What’s up? Did people take me to be flip or ironic? Did I say anywhere that majoring in the humanities was a bad thing? Did I say that people who studied the humanities were doomed to fail in life? No. I said that we should value studying the humanities as an end in itself, and not go through rigmaroly, mostly...

Recent posts by Brainstorm bloggers Stan Katz and Mark Bauerlein have laid out how vulnerable the humanities are in times of economic stress. Now that state legislatures and university administrators are not just stressed, but panicked, they’re in slash-and-burn mode. When it comes to funding for education, technology will probably get a free pass, science a few questions, and the humanities? Some very, very hard questions.

It’s a little premature to declare the end of the humanities as we know them, however, since the grim reaper does business on his own terms. But it doesn’t take a college degree to suss out that for the immediate future, degrees in history, literature (unless it’s Arabic or Chinese), literary criticism, philosophy, religion, the creative arts (dance, drama, fine arts), women’s studies, American studies, African-American studies—have I left out anything?—won’t be...

I was amazed to read “Cheating Goes Global as Essay Mills Multiply” in this week’s Chronicle. Thomas Bartlett takes readers inside an “essay mill” to see how a business dedicated to cheating works — by churning out a steady stream of made-to-order essays for busy students who don’t have the time (or ability) to do the work themselves. The very matter-of-factness of the business of cheating — without anyone fussing even for a minute over the ethics of it all — staggers the old-fashioned mind.

Hear Ye College Professors. The days when student cheating was confined to a few quaintly scrawled words (in ballpoint ink) on the palm of a hand are gone forever. Today one orders a made-to spec essay — anything from a specific basic freshmen English composition to a grand Ph.D. thesis in aerospace engineering.

Like most...

While relishing last night’s glass of merlot, I made a list of all the parties I need to sue for causing the decline in value in my TIAA-CREF retirement portfolio.

First on my list was the SEC. (It would have been great to have figured out a way for the SICA to help me out, and avoided all this lawsuit business, but for the life of me, even after a few sips of wine, I couldn’t.)

Next on my list were the CEO and CFO of TIAA-CREF. Who are these people, anyway? Do they fly private company jets? I bet the whole company is a wholly owned subsidiary of something-or-other I never heard of. And who knows whether or not they’re keeping multiple sets of books, like Bernie Madoff did?

But my philosophy has never been to go after only the big guys. I believe in going after the little guys as well — in this case, “Steve,” our TIAA-CREF campus rep. “Steve” defrauded me by giving me several...

Here’s looking at you, data.

There are only so many times a person can be jerked around before rising up and shouting, “Enough!” Let’s see. Not that long ago, a glass of red wine was deemed helpful to the heart — but not the colon. Or is it that it helps the brain, but not the breast? Or is it red wine only, never white wine? Or is it moderate drinking, no heavy drinking? (Forget the liver — we all know about that.)

Women, “some researchers at Oxford” say you can forget about having even one glass of wine. That glass puts you at a dramatically increased rate for cancer of just about everything.

Having first read this news in an editorial in this morning’s Times (my daily paper, but one I take with a grain of wine — especially since the Judith Miller fiasco), I immediately remembered my...