This essay is adapted from a talk I was invited to give at the Wesleyan University Library on the occasion of historian William Manchester’s archive becoming officially open to the public. On June 1, 2004, when William Manchester died, I went to a shelf in my home where I keep some books from my late father’s … More William Manchester and the Art of Popular History
A new report from the Harvard Graduate School of Education wants to make students less anxious and better citizens. In a report entitled “Turning the Tide,” researchers have declared that elite colleges are asking high school students to do too much in order to advance to the next level. Emerging from a multi-institution working group … More Does Harvard’s New Admissions Report Really “Turn the Tide”?
This is a (slightly) shorter version of a presentation I gave eight years ago at the 2008 American Historical Association Conference in Washington, D.C. I wrote it at a time when I had come to terms with some professional challenges. Most immediately, my promotion to full professor gone horribly awry, and as I began to … More From the Electronic Archive: My Second Career at the Same University
Earlier today I sent in a post to a special message board set up by the American Historical Association. The Board is an extension of AHA Communities, and has been created for AHA members to debate matters to be presented at the Business Meeting in advance. (Please note: you cannot access it unless you are a … More We’ve Been Here Before: The HAW Resolution on Israel at AHA
As many of you know, I am the blogger formerly known as the Chronicle of HIgher Education’s Tenured Radical. You can still access the work I did online between 2007 and 2015 by clicking on the link in the menu above. Because I am writing at many different places now, I redesigned my old webpage to … More My Writing Workshop
There are books that matter. Then there are books that matter more, like Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990) that marked its 25th anniversary in 2015. Dipping back into it now, Gender Trouble’s achievements were astonishingly broad, and reached into multiple disciplines. It collated and built on … More Books That Matter: Twenty-Five Years of Gender Trouble
Who is Joan Didion anyway? In The Last Love Song: A Biography of Joan Didion, Tracy Daugherty decided to find the writer in her most public work. “Does the life reveal the art, the art the life?” he asks in the prologue (xxiii). If you find fault with The Last Love Song it will be … More Not Fade Away: Joan Didion’s Hollywood Life
This open access version of my essay is reposted from a roundtable on Russell Jacoby’s The Last Intellectuals, published in The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 29 2015. In 1987, I was in graduate school at New York University, living among the “milk-toast professors” who, in Jacoby’s words, “turned purple” with rage at his book’s arguments. When … More Is the Internet the Final Bohemia? (OA Version)
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