Grad Students to the Barricades
If graduate students like myself do not want to come into work one day to find ourselves replaced by video lectures delivered by “information curators,” we will have to learn to take collective action.
Winter 2025
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The Corporatization of Higher Education
It is not just the economic climate in which our colleges and universities find themselves that determines what they charge and how they operate; it is their increasing corporatization.
From Master Plan to No Plan: The Slow Death of Public Higher Education
When Mitt Romney urges Americans to “get as much education as they can afford,” or when university administrators call the police as their first response to student protest, it’s Ronald Reagan’s playbook they’re working from.
Europe’s Perfect Storm: The Political and Economic Consequences of the Eurocrisis 
What exactly is the Eurocrisis a crisis of? Is it a currency crisis? A crisis of economic policy-making in Europe? Is it a crisis of a particular, expensive social model, as American conservatives like to claim? Or of the whole …
When Universities Go Abroad: NYU in Abu Dhabi
Scores of American universities have opened campuses abroad, New York University, where I teach, among them. (Others include Georgetown in Qatar, Yale in Singapore, Columbia in Jordan, and Duke in China.) Criticism and debate surround these developments, but have been …
Is America Ready for Democracy?
Is this country ready for democratic elections? That’s a question we often ask about countries emerging from despotic rule or civil war. But it’s a good general question; it invites political introspection and collective self-criticism. With regard to our own …
Citizenship and the Right to Birth Control
Calling this year’s political fight about funding for contraception a “war on women” may be a catchy slogan and a strong mobilizing call. But as an analysis, it is misleading. True, birth control does affect women disproportionately, because women still …
Can We All Get Along?
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt Pantheon, 2012, 419 pp. “This book,” writes Jonathan Haidt in his introduction to The Righteous Mind, “is about why it’s so hard for us to …
Introduction
If U.S. higher education is in crisis, as a spate of recent books and articles would have it, then it’s a strange crisis. Outside the anti-intellectual Right, and even inside it when its writers forget themselves, we hear that advanced …
Big Dollar, Little Democracy
Republic Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress—and a Plan to Stop It by Lawrence Lessig Twelve, 2011, 381 pp. Money talks. It is also a conversation stopper. Almost any discussion among progressives of what is really needed to solve the nation’s …
Second-Chance Collegians: Inside the Remedial Classroom
There is a lot of attention being given these days to remediation in higher education. “Failure to Launch,” reads one representative headline, “Community College Students Can’t Meet Higher Goals.” The numbers vary but, on average, suggest that about 35 percent …
James B. Rule Replies
Click here to read James B. Rule’s initial essay, “Israel: The Great Disconnect,” and here to read Michael Walzer’s response. Michael Walzer is a desperate man. When people this smart start making arguments this bad, you know that their worldview …
Alumni Weekend
The hype for my forty-fifth college reunion this past June started months in advance. The school, one of those that “changes lives,” is the archetypal small liberal arts college. It was the place, my parents promised, that would prepare me …
Michael Walzer Responds
Click here to read James B. Rule’s reply to Michael Walzer (and here for Rule’s initial essay, “Israel: The Great Disconnect.”) Jim Rule has provided us with a useful example of a critique of Israel that is fairly common in …
With Friends Like These… Who Will Defend Liberal Education?
Like free markets and Christianity, liberal education in the United States has more noisy claimants than true friends. Lately, it’s conservatives who’ve been crying hosanna to the humanities and funding campus institutes that conscript classic texts into training future Platonic …
