They work for every executive and administrative agency — Department of Defense, State, Health & Human Resources, Treasury, Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs, Agriculture, Interior, NIH, NEA, NEH, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Post Office, IRS, Bureau of Labor...

The phrase “politically correct” began its life about a century ago as a satire on gentlemen who had all the right opinions, thoughts, and — no small thing — prejudices. They worshipped alike, belonged to the same clubs, and shared the tepidity of utterly unshakable belief.

When the phrase was taken over by American communists in the 1930s, the joke was squeezed out of it, the communists being thoroughly humorless. To them, to be politically correct was unshakably to follow the party line, whatever contortions that effort might require — and surely that was no joking matter, given (among other things) Stalin’s and Hitler’s brief minuet danced to the tune of the von Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact.

It is not surprising that “politically correct” lost currency, and I imagine when the phrase came back in the 1970s and ‘80s, those who used it probably did not know that they were unearthing an ...

Oh, you won’t need all that . . .

With all the talk about the affordability of attending college, and the recent initiatives by some of America’s best-endowed universities to enhance their accessibility to people from all walks of life, including those who fall between the poles of rich and poor socio-economically, a random piece of data caught my eye the other day.

It revealed that New Mexico’s public four-year colleges, on average, had some of the lowest tuitions in the nation, coming in at under $4,000 a year. Going beyond New Mexico, the article reported that tuitions at two-year colleges nationwide (which educate about one-half of all American college students) were about $2,361. Taking into account aid, their average net cost is only $320 dollars per year. That’s...

Yes, more of that red one, please . . .

When I came to Washington almost 20 years ago, my accountant was still a classmate of mine from James Madison High School in Brooklyn. He was tough minded about his role and determined that his clients surrender no more money in taxes than was absolutely necessary. I decided that living as I now did, down the street from the headquarters of the Internal Revenue Service, and with not one but two former IRS commissioners on my board of trustees, I needed to become a little friendlier to the regulators and I engaged a local accountant with cautious instructions to always keep me on the safe side of the street.

I determined that it made sense to pay a little more, if necessary, to sleep a little better. There is something about reading the front page of The Washington Post every day, with it’s above the fold headlines about the foibles of...

“We’ll waive the meal plan, thanks.” I

Architecture in Washington, D.C. reflects a piece of Federal legislation known as the 1910 Height Act. This law among other things limits the height of new construction to no more than the width of the street the proposed building will face plus 20 feet — to a maximum of 130 feet. Although intended in great measure to ensure that the view of the U.S. Capitol is not obstructed, real estate developers quickly realized that this restriction, while enhancing the aesthetics of the city’s skyline, severely limits the economic use of a piece of land. The defined quantity of square footage curtails the number of possible floors (and ceiling height) that can be built from ground to roof, giving interior space in D.C. a “short feel.” The constrained footprint defines the rental, sale, and ultimate value of the properties. Few buildings in D.C. are...

Forty-five years ago, one of my mentors was the late, great Harvard sociologist, David Reisman. So it will come as no surprise that now that I’m about to enter the classroom after a long absence, I find myself re-reading some of his works. I’ve come to the conclusion that either Reisman was prescient, or the questions being asked about higher education haven’t changed very much in almost half a century.

In his essay, “Alterations in Institutional Attitudes and Behavior,” Reisman talks about several things that are today in the news.

Who do faculty talk to? At large universities, it is easy for a faculty member to only talk to “his own,” for an English professor to converse with fellow English professors, for an historian to talk only among her specialty, American historian speaking with American historians and not with Europeanists or experts in Latin American history. At small...

It takes about 45 minutes on the subway to get from my childhood home in Brighton Beach to Grand Army Plaza, the site of the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library. It was freshmen year at James Madison High School, the 9th grade, when I went for the first time to that library, an adventure that was no less consequential, in my mind, than Columbus’ crossing the Atlantic to reach the new world.

I set out in the morning to research a topic for a term paper, an assignment that separated the men from the boys. Elementary-school students looked things up in Compton’s Encyclopedia; serious, grown-up high school students did their research in the library. Clutching my stack of ruled 4”x6” index cards to be used for note taking, I walked up the wide shallow steps to the building’s entrance as if I was approaching a...

I’m new to the technology game. I put my first computer on my desk this past summer, the week after I gave up the presidency of George Washington University and the last three secretaries in the Western World who took dictation in shorthand. Now I have a PC on my desk at home and on campus, a Blackberry on my hip and a cell phone in my pocket. I’ve made it from the 19th to the 20th century – I’m not sure I’m fully into the 21st. I hunt and peck, haven’t mastered etiquette and fumble when the phone is on vibrate.

My wife and children, on the other hand, are what is known as early adopters. In the mid 1980s my wife was using Lotus 123 and a long gone word processing system known as MultiMate. When managing a large construction project on a spreadsheet, she called up the file, left the room, got a cup of coffee, walked to the mail room, stopped at the rest room and made it back to...

All this talk about billion-dollar university endowments has inspired me to wonder when is a billion dollars not a billion dollars? Or to put it another way, is a billion dollars for one institution the same as a billion dollars for another?

As president of The George Washington University I was thrilled, over an almost twenty year tenure, to oversee the growth of the university’s endowment from around $200 million when I arrived to about $1.2-billion when I stepped up to a professorship: A pat on the back to me, my faculty, my deans, my trustees, my alumni and my benefactors. Yes, indeed. But, as Einstein instructed us, everything is relative. GW likes to compare itself to a “market basket” of other universities; they are similar in size and mission. Private, urban, comprehensive, you will recognize the names: Boston University, New York University, the University of Southern...

Across the 64 campuses of the State University of New York (SUNY), approximately 417,000 students attend class each year, nearly 375,000 as undergraduates. Tracing its roots to Potsdam, a school founded in 1816, the formal incorporation of SUNY in 1948 made it the last official state system to come into existence in the then 48 contiguous states. Today, nearly 31,000 faculty members and over 50,000 staff power the energy of the system stretching from Buffalo to Stony Brook.

In May 2007, New York’s Governor Eliot Spitzer established a State Higher Education Commission to take an informed look at the enterprise. Quoted as saying, “New York has ‘slipped in stature’” and that its once-powerful position in national research has “faded,” the Governor recognized that the New York colleges and universities not only do good by...