Just about every aspect of collegiate life can be leased for corporate profit these days. Increasingly, universities subcontract to large companies services they used to provide themselves; on campuses nationwide, corporate logos are becoming as ubiquitous as backpacks, as Barnes …
The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy by Nicholas Lemann Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999, 368 pp. In respectable American opinion, perhaps the Constitution is the only institution treated with more obligatory reverence than the elite university. …
Two pedagogical principles seem to pull in opposite directions. On the one hand, proponents of Great Works argue that university students in the social sciences and humanities should be exposed largely, if not exclusively, to the contributions of profound and …
The New Military Humanism: Lessons from Kosovo by Noam Chomsky Common Courage Press, 1999, 199 pp $15.95 Early in Noam Chomsky’s diatribe against NATO’s military intervention in Kosovo, he cites George Orwell’s preface to Animal Farm. Orwell discussed the way …
Many western liberals have always mistrusted the Austrian postwar conversion to liberal democracy, and recent political events appear to confirm their wariness. In the last year’s general elections the right-wing populist Freedom Party (FP) won 27 percent of the vote, …
American Beach: How Progress Robbed a Black Town—and Nation—of History, Wealth, and Power by Russ Rymer HarperCollins, 1998 337 pp. $25 cloth $14 paper Russ Rymer has written a powerful book of what C. Wright Mills called “sociological poetry,” escorting …
No one could walk into the now infamous “Sensation” exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum of Art (BMA), without having been over saturated by media hype. An unmediated look at the show has became impossible. By the time I walked through …
Those who discuss socialism confront two distinct but not incompatible strategies: the essentialist and the historical. The former, Weber-like, presents socialism as an ideal-type, deduced from the activities or ideas of those identified as socialists. Once the concept is constructed, …
Considering the mass murder and Nazi-style brutality that engulf so much of the world in the 1990s, it takes chutzpah for an American to say that our collective life contains any trouble at all. Our economy is thriving. It wasn’t …
I suspect we all share Marshall Berman’s craving for a “critical culture . . . that struggles actively over how human beings should live and what our life means.” But when he laments “the amazing lack of jaytalking” in contemporary …
If timing is everything, one can imagine how pleased Günter Grass’s publishers were to have the Nobel Prize for Literature announced during the Frankfurt Book Fair this past October, where Grass was an honored participant. But there was a greater …
The Life and Times of Pancho Villa by Friedrich Katz Stanford University Press, 1998, 985 pp., $29.95 John reed once asked Pancho Villa his opinion of socialism. “Socialism—is it a thing?” Villa retorted. “I only see it in books, and …
It is hard to figure out what the stakes are in this year’s presidential election. “Compassionate conservatism” looks very much like a Republican version of the “third way,” and the third way looks more and more like a Democratic version …
Twice since John Sweeney became president of the AFL-CIO, the federation has held national conventions, and on each occasion Sweeney’s keynote address has been preceded by the same distinctive introduction. In 1997 in Pittsburgh, and again in 1999 in Los …
Who wants to criticize a commentator as well-meaning and warm-hearted as Marshall Berman? He is a bard of urban life with an infectious enthusiasm for New York. For many years he has been singing of the joys of city streets …
