It’s commencement season. Yet amid conservative complaints about liberal dominance of the commencement industry, some speeches have reverberated with conservative ideas.  That was no more evident than when Michelle Obama took the opportunity to reiterate more of her husband’s politics of black respectability at Bowie State University.

She told the audience at the historically black college’s graduation last week that the focus on education had been lost by a community with a history in which slaves had risked their lives to learn to read. She spoke of the struggles to integrate America’s schools. But those words were a mere setup to yet again demonizing and pathologizing today’s black youth. “Instead of walking miles every day to school,” she said, “they’re sitting on couches for hours playing video games, watching TV. Instead of dreaming of being a teacher or a lawyer or…

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Our higher-education system is often thought of as a model for elementary and secondary education because top American universities rank among the very best in the world. But maybe it’s the reverse that is true. After all, only about half of first-time college students earn certificates or degrees within six years, a completion rate much lower than among high-school students. At community colleges, while 81 percent of first-time entering students say they would like to earn bachelor’s degrees, only 12 percent do so within six years.

Why are completion rates so low in higher education, especially community colleges? One reason, according to a blue-ribbon panel assembled by the Century Foundation, is that higher education has not directly confronted the growing economic and racial separation of students within its ranks. Largely separate sets of institutions for white and minority…

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About halfway through my first semester teaching American culture and society at Tsinghua University, cradle of Chinese leadership, a student asked me if we could watch a movie—something about “American culture.” It was in this way that I stumbled upon a most intractable dilemma.

If you were given the opportunity of showing some of China’s future leaders one movie that encapsulated the American essence, what would it be?

Koyaanisqatsi is probably not the first movie you would think of. (Probably not even in the first 100.) The somewhat obscure Godfrey Reggio masterpiece was never in the running for mainstream acceptance and box-office gold when it was released, in 1982. Even as a cult classic, it has never attained the same level of acclaim as a Rocky Horror or an Eraserhead.

Koyaanisqatsi is a big-concept movie, and lexicographically, Koyaanisqatsi is a big concept word…

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As most of us learn in high school and introductory college literature courses, the central drama of early American fiction involves a resourceful man confronting head-on the wonder, dangers, and vastness of America. Natty Bumppo, the Deerslayer, roams the wilderness of central New York; Ishmael ponders the frightening endlessness of the sea; Huck Finn “lights out” for the territories. We are told that such men—and they all are men—represent the American quest for independence, space, and novelty. With a whole continent before them, these characters act on an insatiable desire, as Emerson put it, to build their own worlds.

Yet most early- and mid-19th century Americans did not experience their country as some trackless wilderness awaiting their footprints and plows but as a complex social landscape marked by continuous and profound transformations. Consider that the national…

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