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…

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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 of …

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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 …

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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…

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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 …

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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 to …

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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, and …

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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…

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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 the …

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Permit me one more post on the late, great Barry Karl. I concluded my last post by referring briefly to an important book review that he published 35 years ago, and I want to say more about it. 

Barry was reviewing a large and important biography (by Ray Allen Billington) of the historian  Frederick Jackson Turner, best known for the “frontier thesis” he had first announced at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. Turner’s argument was that it was the frontier experience of our “westward movement” that had shaped the contours of our democracy. This widely-noted thesis made Turner famous at an early age—he was thereafter widely sought after as a public speaker and considered a sort of guru of American civilization.  But, as Billington painfully describes in his biography, Turner never wrote the book summarizing his views of American history that he relentlessly and recurrently…

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My friend and long-time historical collaborator Barry Karl died while undergoing emergency open-heart surgery in Chicago early this week.  Barry would have celebrated his eighty-third birthday on the 23rd of this month — which will be the date of the first birthday of his only grandchild, Ethan.  It is too bad that he could not have lived longer, but he had a long, successful and interesting career.  Barry was raised in Louisville, Kentucky and attended the University of Louisville, from which he received his first degree in 1949.  He moved to Chicago, which proved to be his appropriate spiritual and intellectual home, for a master’s degree in philosophy in 1951.  He then took a job in publishing, as associate editor in the humanities and history, at the University of Chicago Press.  It was there that, while helping Louis Brownlow write his autobiography, Barry discovered his vocation …

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I knew that John Strassburger was retiring as President of Ursinus College, but I was still drawn up short by Scott Carlson’s nice vignette on John in the July 4 Chronicle.  I have known John for a long time, since we were both originally trained as historians of early America. But we reconnected several years ago after one of my favorite former students joined the Ursinus faculty—and I discovered for the first time where and what “Ursinus” was. Since then, I have visited Collegeville and followed the transformation that John and his colleagues have worked there. Ursinus seems to me a wonderful example of all that is best in liberal-arts college education in this country.

I was struck by the typically self-effacing quote that Carlson elicited from John, when asking about how he got into the presidential game:  “We all got into administration in part because we didn’t become the best…

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It always cheers me up to see the original holograph text of the Declaration of Independence reproduced on the last page of The New York Times when I open the newspaper each July 4th. Then, as I always do, when I read the Preamble aloud before dinner, I find Jefferson’s words thrilling—and sobering—he sets a high mark for those of us who want to live under a truly republican government. We understand his concepts significantly differently than he did, of course. We are committed to the notion that the all in all men are created equal has substantive force. And some of us, at least, think that men is a generic rather than a gendered term. We still contest the meaning of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but all of us agree that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. A historically sensitive…

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A friend has just called my attention to a short report in the most recent (July-August 2010) issue of Harvard Magazine entitled, “Bye-bye, Blue Books?” The hook for the piece is the fact that on May 11 the Harvard faculty of arts and sciences (FAS) formally abolished the long-standing procedure in which a final examination is scheduled for each FAS course unless the instructor notifies the Registrar that no examination will be required. 

Starting next fall, this traditional default (scheduling a final examination) will be replaced by a new default—that no examination will be scheduled for a course unless the instructor formally notifies the Registrar that a final will be required. This reverses an educational policy that is probably more than a century old. It is apparently the result of the realization that few current Harvard courses in fact require their students to “sit” for finals—…

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For years I have been using a phrase that I would like you to consider.  I took it, I suppose, from the final line in my favorite movie, Casablanca.  Readers of a certain age will remember the last line of the film, delivered by Claude Raines, the local police chief: “Round up the usual suspects!” Over the years, I have found a number of uses for the concept of “the usual suspects,” but for some time now I have mainly been using it when thinking about working in a university.

In my academic experience it is pretty frequently the the case that one is asked who could be counted on to assist in some activity that will not produce any self-evident benefit for the volunteer. The question “whom could we ask” has become much more frequently asked over the half-century of my career. I suppose the obvious reason for this is that careerism of a narrow and nasty sort has become the norm among…

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