“The truth is that I could have had gotten more money or more prestigious places.” So says David Patraeus, who has diffused a controversy about his pay for teaching a couple of courses (with numerous teaching assistants) at a City University of New York campus by refusing compensation of possibly $200,000 in favor of a…

They are right. All of them. We are in the midst of a dismantling of the United States as we have known it for nearly a century, a dismantling sparked by those with less interest in sharing the wealth than in amassing as much as they can for themselves—to hell with the rest of them.…

Once I worked as a waiter in an elegant hotel. The headwaiter, just as I happened to be passing one day, dropped a tray. I scurried to help clean up; the manager ran over in response to the noise. The headwaiter intercepted him, telling him that I was the one who dropped the tray. You…

In Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter, Major Scobie steps outside of a house filled with the ill and dying: The lights inside would have given an extraordinary impression of peace if one hadn’t known, just as the stars on this clear night also gave an impression of remoteness, security, freedom. If one knew,…

For the past six months, I’ve been hearing odd complaints that the humanities, once home, supposedly, to the study of “truth, beauty and goodness,” have been overwhelmed by concern for “race, class and gender.” Another came last Friday, using the exact phrases of the older ones, all stemming from a single “study” put forward by…

The title here is from the end of David Brooks’ column in today’s New York Times. He’s lamenting how we’ve let the humanities become debased, allowing them to fall from their 20th-century high (in terms of college graduates) to a new low (though he doesn’t consider that, before the 20th century as well as in…

Barbara Bowen, President of the Professional Staff Congress, the faculty union of the City University of New York (CUNY), sent this message to union members yesterday: Dear Colleague: The results of the referendum of No Confidence in Pathways are in: 92% voted No Confidence in Pathways. The vote is a stunning rebuke to the Pathways…

It startles me each time I hear another person (usually, but not always, a non-educator) adamantly claim that education can successfully follow the same patterns of automation as industry or that it can be structured identically to business. This is nonsense. To be blunt (and has been pointed out for years–to unresponsive ears), it arises…

The New Yorker writer George Packer (who served in Peace Corps in Togo just a few years before I did–more on that in a minute) wrote a piece for The New York Times today. Entitled “Celebrating Inequality,” it blasts our new culture based around a new elite of celebrity and, of course, money. In it, Packer writes: This new…

Want to do something to show that faculty can come together? Contact colleagues at the City University of New York and ask them to vote “no confidence” in the Pathways curriculum initiative, the abrogation of shared governance foisted upon the system by a central administration with no interest in working with–and no respect for–the faculty.…