A young dissertation student at the University of Chicago, I first came to Howard to teach composition in the Department of English. From 1978 to 1983, I taught four writing courses a semester for five difficult years. The campus on …
There is no more Czechoslovakia, nor is there likely to be one in the foreseeable future. The governments of the two rump states, the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic, do not like to be reminded that there ever was …
I was preparing to drive from Cambridge, Massachusetts to my alma mater, Lincoln University, near Oxford, Pennsylvania, the day last fall that General Colin Powell announced his exit from what was a kind of presidential campaign. His decision not to …
In contrast with the headlines generated by the original GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) controversy of two years ago, the news from Geneva on January 17 made barely a ripple; small items in the business pages reporting that …
Leftists generally respect working-class people and their political and economic struggles. Yet they rarely exhibit respect toward prostitute organizations or their political activists and intellectuals. For the most part, such groups and individuals are ignored. Again, why?
Many on the left are befuddled by the American public’s staunch resistance to taxes— a seemingly irrational hostility that often paralyzes public policy. Americans are convinced that they are overtaxed, although their tax burden is lower than those of other …
The best antidote to feminist despair is knowledge of our own history. With each new skirmish in the gender wars, feminists fall into greater despair. We lose so often that we forget how greatly we have transformed American political culture. …
The exodus of rural African-Americans from the South to northern cities had all but ceased by the 1970s. Since then, the process has reversed. Black Americans have been leaving an urban economy that failed them and returning South. The South …
Jim Rule, a valued Dissent colleague, and I have a very sharp disagreement. In the aftermath of Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination, I wrote in praise of this man’s revolutionary transformation while prime minister; it brought mutual recognition between the PLO and …
At the new Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland, you don’t, as you do at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, get a bright tin badge to wear once you have paid admission. Instead, …
Dissent has always taken pride in its openness to a range of democratic and egalitarian ideas, its refusal to impose a “party line.” This makes for bracing intellectual exercise, as one follows the converging and colliding trajectories of its editors’ …
From late November 1995 until a few days before Christmas, the workers of France’s public sector occupied center stage. They brought buses and subways in French cities to a halt, cut rail traffic to a trickle, slowed the flow of …
In December 1993 a law known as Finanziaria 1993 was approved by the Italian legislature. A minor article of this law, article 4, introduced a revolution in the Italian educational system, since it required that each single school should be …
This is an oddly depressing book. The oddity has little to do with its allegiances, more to do with its tone, its view of what is worth writing and thinking about, and its author’s conception of the human condition. It …
A key finding in a new Department of Justice report on the nation’s prison population is attracting considerable attention: nearly 7 percent of black males were in prison in 1994, compared with less than 1 percent of white males. These …
