Here is how Paul Krugman opened his op-ed in the New York Times the other day:

“A note to Tea Party activists: This is not the movie you think it is. You probably imagine that you’re starring in The Birth of a Nation, but you’re actually just extras in a remake of Citizen Kane.”

Let’s take that imputation seriously—not the Kane part, but the Nation part.

Why would Krugman suggest that Tea Partiers believe they are starring in Griffith’s legendary and notorious film?

The stars in Birth of a Nation are, of course, white Southerners from South Carolina who have lost the war, had brothers, sons, and fathers die, and, now that the battles are over, face one social, political, and personal abomination after another.

• Clownish black men going into politics.

• Fraud at the polling booth.

• Northern politicians scheming to subvert white supremacy.

• State legislatures ...

One of the more popular terms in education discussions is "learning styles."  The short version of it is that people perceive and think and learn in different ways, "meshing" with classroom content with different cognitive maps and dispositions.  With a diversity of learning styles in any classroom, then, pedagogies must themselves diversify, allowing each learning style its chance to flower. 

Educators apply it throughout primary, secondary, and higher education, the notion sparking changes in how people are supposed to teach, what resources schools should invest in, and how students are to be evaluated.

Like so many popular ideas in the field, however, the empirical evidence for learning styles is still weak.  A study of the current scientific literature appears here in Psychological Science in the Public Interest. 

Authors Harold Pashler, Mark McDaniel, Doug Rohrer, and Robert...

Journalism programs are under pressure these days, and articles like this one by Andrew Ferguson don't help their cause.  But college students interested in the field have a worthy option in the new Student Free Press Association.  It's a group made up of college-aged reporters and opin-ers operating in print and online media, supported by veteran journalists.  Here's the mission statement:

A few weeks ago, President Obama delivered a speech in Virginia, and at one point he made a curious assertion about taxes.  He was quoted in the Boston Globe:

"We could get that done this week," he said. "But we’re still in this wrestling match with John Boehner and Mitch McConnell about the last 2 to 3 percent, where, on average, we’d be giving them $100,000 for people making a million dollars or more — which in and of itself would be OK, except to do it, we’d have to borrow $700-billion over the course of 10 years. And we just can’t afford it."

Note the word "giving."  That's an odd take of tax payments, one that reverses the order of transfer.  When a government doesn't take revenue from citizens, the logic goes, in effect it "gives" that money to them.

Is this just a rhetorical phrase designed to build support for letting the Bush tax cuts expire?  Or is it a case of ideological...

The Chronicle's annual "Diversity in Academe" issue has come out, this year with the cover story on "Social Class on the American Campus."

There are other stories on:

•"hiring minority scholars"

•five nations (Canada, China, France, Lebanon, and India) that "struggle with their own diversity issues"

•undocumented students who "describe their challenges--and their dreams"

•the training of American Indians at Creighton to be dentists

•getting more minority undergrads to pursue PhDs in the humanities

•why there aren't more black computer scientists

•remembering gay and lesbian applicants

•teaching at HBCU's

•and a bilingual creative writing program at UTEP

I haven't read most of the articles, just skimmed through them, but it seems that not a single one speaks of what may be the most important kind of diversity when it comes to learning outcomes in higher education:...

When Princeton political scientist Robert P. George attended a conference a while back, he found a pamphlet on his seat containing the Declaration of Independence, the Gettysburg Address, and the U.S. Constitution. It was provided by the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy, and inside was written:

"The printing of this copy of the U.S. Constitution and of the nation’s two other founding texts, the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address, was made possible through the generosity of Laurence and Carolyn Tribe."

The inclusion of the Address as a "founding document" gratified George and took him back to his sixth-grade class when we was required to memorize it. As he ran the word over in his head and compared them to the printed text, though, something odd happened. The final lines of the printed version didn’t match his own memory. Here, it read ". . . that...

One of the extraordinary phenomena in campus culture in the last two decades is the rise of "diversity" as a concept, condition, banner, and ambition.  How is it that "diversity" went from being a routine term with no particular cachet into the notion/term of the moment.  It appears everywhere from my son's kindergarten classroom wall ("CELEBRATE DIVERSITY") to high-level administrative office doors at universities everywhere. 

Harvard Law Professor Randall Kennedy has an explanation in The American Prospect in an essay entitled "The Enduring Relevance of Affirmative Action."  Kennedy begins by recounting the numerous challenges to and the rising unpopularity of affirmative action in the 1980s and 90s, then asserts that the tide has shifted.  People who don't profit directly by affirmative action practices aren't so angry about race-based practices any more, Kennedy writes, and for one ...

In my own experience in recent months, the reactions that the Tea Partier evokes among academics fall into three categories: laughter, contempt, and fear.  People who like Sarah Palin and watch Glenn Beck appear to campus dwellers as if they were a backward clan best approached through the eyes of a social scientist, not a fellow citizen. What is missing (at least in my own experience, including newspapers and news broadcasts excluding Fox) is an attempt to understand why so many people are willing to rise up and head to a town hall meeting or travel to the Mall to join the crowd a few weeks back.  

An alternative approach is laid out by Amitai Etzioni at CNN a while back. He begins with the standard response:

"Several observers on the left side of the opinion spectrum write dismissively of the followers of the Tea Party.

"About the kindest labels appended to them are 'rednecks,'...