What does it take to win a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award? The foundation (which officially rejects the "genius" label in favor of the "MacArthur Fellows Program") tells us that these "unrestricted" fellowships are awarded to "talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction." This leaves a lot of space for subjectivity, but we are also told that there are three specific selection criteria: "exceptional creativity, promise for important future advances based on a track record of significant accomplishment, and potential for the fellowship to facilitate subsequent creative work." Now you are clear, right?

The program was initiated 1981 shortly after the foundation opened its doors. It has always been a separate and rather special MacArthur program, since its purposes are not clearly ...

Late last spring I accepted an invitation from Cat Warren, a literature professor at North Carolina State and the new editor of the AAUP magazine, Academe, to contribute to an issue she was putting together on assessment and accountability in higher education -- Assessing Assessment.  The issue has now appeared, in print and online, including my piece entitled "Beyond Crude Measurement and Consumerism".  I had not previously met Cat, but I enjoyed working with her and have found I learned a lot from reading what my "collaborators" (we never communicated except with Cat) have written.  Since this is the journal of the AAUP, the focus of most of the essays is of course on what the professoriate should make of assessment, and that is certainly the problem that most interests me.

I have long worried that most of us (certainly me) have thought of undergraduate education primarily in terms ...

In this morning's "Week in Review" section of The New York Times, Marc Lacey writes that Cuba is "resetting" its revolution.  He is referring to what he describes as the September 13 "eye-popping announcement" that the Cuban government would significantly cut public employment in the expectation that the laid-off workers would find employment in the private sector.  Most of us who follow Cuban affairs have been hoping for several years that Raul Castro (who has long been rumored to favor economic reform) would move in this direction.  Over the past 18 months, he has made a few moves to broaden the private sector, but they have not amounted to a real change in economic policy.  His statement last week was backed up by the country's sole labor federation, which asserted that "our state cannot and should not continue supporting companies . . . with inflated payrolls, losses that damage the ...

I was fascinated to read a brief note in The Chronicle on Monday, picking up on a long article in the Yale Daily News the same day, on Richard Levin's announcement that Yale University had signed a nonbinding agreement with the National University of Singpore to establish a four-year liberal arts college to be named Yale-NUS College adjacent to the existing NUS campus. Yale is being cautious. Levin was careful to say that Yale's participation would be dependent upon the consent (not yet sought) of the Yale faculty and the actual budget figures to be presented to Yale by NUS.

Apparently "NUS will pay for the new college down to the last cent," with a tentative budget commitment to "provide for teachers' salaries and other expenses comparable to those at Yale."  NUS will also reimburse Yale for the salaries of Yale professors who teach in Singapore, although the plan is apparently not to ...

I seldom read the New York Times Sunday Book Review section these days. I find the selection of books to be reviewed odd (to be kind), and the choice of reviewers somewhere between obscure and obtuse (ditto). But I have to confess that I usually flip through the section while working myself through Sunday's lox and bagels, and I confess to reading the occasional review.

Alas, this week I stumbled on David Frum's review of Laura Kalman's new history of American right-wing politics in the late 1970s and made the mistake of reading it. I gather from the editorial note on Frum that he has written a book on the 1970s, but his "review" of Kalman (a friend and fellow legal historian, I confess) is silly and vicious.

Frum begins by saying that "as a work of history . . . there is nothing seriously wrong" with Kalman's account: "The facts are accurate, the writing is clear and the point of view is ...

One of the greatest pleasures of my summer each year is the opportunity to read books that I do not feel I have time for during the school year. I am sure that I am no busier than any other academic during term-time, but am usually preparing classes or otherwise working during evenings and weekends. So I collect books from September to May in anticipation of turning to them come June. My taste is pretty eclectic, and I am usually surprised when I review my summer reading in September.

I have been addicted to Swedish detective stories ever since I was turned on to them long ago by the work of Per Wahloo and Maj Sjowall. More recently I have enjoyed the Kurt Wallander novels of Henning Mankell, though I have been less interested in his more recent work. But I am now reading his new collection of stories that create Wallender's pre-history, and I like them quite a lot. I guess I...

My historian friend Morty Horwitz of the Harvard Law School faculty is fond of saying that those who abuse history by using it selectively to prove a point, are "looking for their friends in history."  This sort of instrumental use of history is common, especially when it is by nations to falsify their pasts.  This is why so many countries try to control the interpretation of history in school textbooks in an attempt to keep school children from learning about the misdeeds of earlier generations.  An even more egregious state abuse of history occurs when nations manipulate history texts and teaching in order to promote desired values, ordinarily by portraying as heroes those who stand for the desired national values. 

I was trained professionally as an historian, and although I have not formally taught history for a number of years, I cannot escape my commitment to what I understand...

Adria and I traveled to Washington the night before last so that we could make it to the Administration Building of Arlington National Cemetery by 8:30 a.m. yesterday morning for the interment of the ashes of our friend Col. Walter F. Murphy, USMC ret.  As any of you who have visited Arlington will recognize, the Cemetery is an awesome place, with its row upon row of identical white grave stones.  We had visited a few years before for the interment of Walter's first wife, Terry—spouses of veterans are entitled to be buried with them.  But Terry had not been a member of the armed forces, and we were not prepared for the stunning impact of a burial with full military honors.

We gathered at the Administration Building with Walter's second wife, Doris, a childhood sweetheart from Charleston, S.C. who lovingly saw him through his last illness, a small number of public law colleagues, an...

Jennifer Howard's piece this morning on Shakespeare Quarterly raises the interesting question of whether "crowdsourcing" has a role in the humanities communication system. 

Howard reports that SQ has experimented with a version of open sourcing for a special issue of the journal, which is published by the Johns Hopkins University Press for the Folger Library.  The journal is thus regularly available online as part of the JHU Press Project Muse subscription database.  The special issue on new media was guest-edited by Katherine Rowe of Bryn Mawr "to investigate how scholarly authority works in a networked environment."  The process was to "put out a call for papers, cull submissions, then offer authors still in the running a chance to post drafts online."  All of the pre-selected authors accepted the opportunity to post their drafts, and the editors then invited a number of experts to...

I was fascinated by Paul Fain's July 20 piece in the Chronicle that asked "Why Do Few Provosts Want to be Presidents?"

Becoming a provost has traditionally been the natural route to a presidency, although surely not all provosts aspire to the highest leadership position. But Fain's piece suggests that there has been a significant decline in the overall interest of provosts in becoming presidents. A recent Council of Independent Colleges survey showed that fewer than one-fourth of the provosts at smaller private institutions planned to seek a presidency. This is a limited sample of higher education as a whole, of course, but it represents an important group of high quality institutions, and CIC president Rich Ekman is quoted as saying that "All but the most prestigious institutions" face "a shrinking talent pool of potential presidents." The survey showed that three-quarters of...