I used to think feminists had  a lot of things to worry about, such as the fact that even the most educated and capable of women still make 78 cents on a man's dollar, that women are still subject to many more crimes of physical and domestic violence than men, and that hard-won reproductive rights are in danger of being systematically withdrawn without our consent.

I thought that if you ask any woman what her big problem is on any given day, she wasn't going to cry out, "The grave act of misogyny perpetrated by those who discriminate against the feminine hirsute."

I once believed that a woman who was interested in fighting the good fight would grab anybody who would listen by the collar and tell you that she needs to find adequate child care, affordable health insurance, a decent retirement plan, and a partner who won't freak if she takes 20 minutes...

Maybe I'm just a little too sensitive these days. After all, women at the end of their third trimester can be like that. But when I read about a new campaign, one to prevent unplanned pregnancies among community college students, I was a bit taken aback.

According to the nonpartisan group in charge, 48 percent of community-college students "have ever been pregnant or gotten someone pregnant." And this is a problem, the group contends, because dropout rates are higher among students who get pregnant while in college. So, presumably in order to increase degree attainment in the public two-year sector, we need to slow this trend and prevent unplanned pregnancies.

OK, on the face of it, this seems like a plausible argument and approach. After all, it's hard enough to get a degree while...

Thanksgiving is one of the few American holidays that hasn't been destroyed by consumerism. Sure, there’s a Macy’s Day parade and a slew of football games on television. But how many turkeys can you eat? How many potatoes can you mash? How many paper Pilgrims can you stick on your window? There’s only so much of it that can be bought and sold in the marketplace.

Some people bend the holiday to make it very religious. Others merely give special thanks for their blessings. Some do a politico-religious turn on the holiday, using it as an occasion to be especially thankful for their freedom to practice their religion. But Thanksgiving cannot be distorted into a religion, and no single religion owns it. Whatever it’s history, it’s now a secular holiday...

With college campuses becoming ever more preprofessional and vocational, it's getting harder for humanities teachers to get freshmen and sophomores to appreciate the aesthetic side of things.  That goes for both their interpretation of texts and for their creation of texts. They read everything for the kernal of fact and value, the information, the point, not for the expression (whether beautiful or vulgar or flat or conventional . . .).  And they write sentences that have no flair, no element of balance, rhythm, metaphor, or other aesthetic feature.

And why shouldn't they? When so much of the liberal-arts curriculum has turned toward "informational text" -- the NAEP reading exams for 12th Graders now have 70 percent of their passages as informational, 20 percent fiction, 5 percent verse, and 5 percent literary essay -- students understand...

x-posted: howtheuniversityworks.com

Several hundred students gathered at the Oakland courthouse Monday to protest the filing of felony burglary charges against protesters last week, then began an impromptu march over to the University of California's Office of the President (UCOP), the building from which Mark Yudof directs the entire UC system. About 70 members of the crowd pushed past police and gained entry by a rear door of the building, according to at least one report, including photographs taken from a cellphone. 

During the ensuing sit-in, students demanded to meet with Yudof, and eventually were met by two staffers who apparently admitted earning salaries of between $250,000 and $350,000.

I was surprised:

1. That my colleagues (which is how I regard the readers of Brainstorm) would find my students' essays as fascinating as I do. Let face it: Their essays were read by more people, and read more carefully, than most academic books and scholarly articles. And while my students were astonished by the attention -- and a little nervous, as you are when you're put under an unfiltered, focused, and raw spotlight for the first time -- they were impressed by the level of engagement and by the passion shown by the commenters.

2. That some of my colleagues are shocked to discover that our students look at us. We expect them to listen to us, but we're disturbed by the fact that they notice our physical selves? We consider it jejune for them to notice our speech patterns, our chewed cuticles, our resemblance to movie stars (or monsters), our hair (wherever...

As a former UC Berkeley student I am devastated by the tuition hikes. My contribution to the crisis is to help explain the mentality that wrongly cuts government spending in a recession. This is precisely the time the Federal government  should be inflating the economy, like California's, to keep up investments in education. Sadly, in China last week President Obama announced policies going in the wrong direction.

He said "It is important though to recognize if we keep on adding to the debt, even in the midst of this recovery, that at some point, people could lose confidence in the U.S. economy in a double-dip recession".

Most all economists were slack-jawed at the declaration....

My father heard the news from a guy in the next office. He was a graduate student in math at Berkeley, and his neighbor stepped inside the door and said, "Well, that's it -- that's the second one they've killled for pushing civil rights."

The assassination had just happened, information was sketchy, but for this fellow the narrative was already complete.

On the plane from Dallas to Washington, Mrs. Kennedy used the same pronoun. When Lady Bird Johnson urged her to change out of her bloody clothing, she replied, "No, I want them to see what they have done."

"Who, exactly, were 'they'? And what did 'they' do?"

Those questions are posed by James Piereson in a great study of the assassination and its aftermath entitled Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F....

As I read the story in Friday's New York Times, my belly twisted with the sharp movements of the nearly 9-month-old fetus inside. My daughter's little hand punched forward when I came to this line: "Children often have to be trained to listen to questions from strangers and to sit still for about an hour, the time it takes to complete the two tests." 

It's ok, I found myself whispering to her (out loud): I won't let this happen to you.

But can I really protect Annie from the world outside, a world in which New York City toddlers are being raised by parents willing to spend $90 a session to prep their children for tests used to determine admission to KINDERGARTEN? When my highly educated counterparts...

I have been on the road much more than usual over the past week, and I am about to head to Havana for a couple of days tomorrow. I tried to ease up a bit by cancelling a trip to Texas for the annual meeting of a learned society ten days ago (pace John Jackson!), but it still feels to me like too much rushing about. One of the trips, however, was to Brown University to meet with colleagues interested in civic engagement, and that was an emotional pick-up for me.

I began by having lunch with Katherine Bergeron, a musicologist who is also the Dean of the College, and Sheila Bonde, an archaeologist who is the Dean of the Graduate School. We were joined by Roger Nozaki of the Swearer Center, who is the director of Brown’s civic-engagement efforts. Brown (apart from its medical...