Mediocrity happens. At this very moment at an institution of higher education near you, a mildly hung-over student is finishing a mildly plagiarized paper on travel-industry marketing, for which he'll receive a B-plus. Across campus, an assistant professor is drafting a tepid scholarly article that will eventually be read by 43 people and cited by one.
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At the most recent meeting of the American Political Science Association (APSA), the Lehrman American Studies Center sponsored two faculty initiatives: a short course and a working group on the topic of statesmanship and democracy. Both of these efforts are part of a substantive set of initiatives on the part of the Center to reach audiences beyond its traditional constituency. It is great to report that both efforts were quite successful.
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Is the Constitution still “higher law”? It is because the Court still recognizes the Supremacy Clause and frequently exercises its judicial review power to protect individuals against majoritarian decisions. Yet, there is a unintended consequence of this higher-law function.
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A common perception in our society has it that people who create wealth directly, such as the businessman or the laborer who works with his hands, produce more wealth than a university professor, who is seen as a parasite on their efforts. The university professor, especially one who teaches humanities and social sciences and thus does not invent some machine that enhances industrial production, produces nothing of value. It’s even worse if he teaches at a public institution, because then he draws his inflated salary from the backs of those who actually work for a living. A recent encounter of mine challenges this perception in a fundamental way.
Part One of Two
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As the battle lines for the mid-term congressional election are drawn and the 2012 presidential field begins to emerge, there is all the more need to present an alternative to Obamaism that is both consistent with fundamental conservative ideals and able to respond to the growing public discontent with the present administration and congressional leadership. To do this, Republican leaders and would-be leaders need only recover their political heritage and reclaim the founding principle of the party and the defining ideal of its first president: equal justice for all.
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Responsibility, temperance, sobriety, and thrift are hard virtues to acquire, which might explain why "recurring" debt crises are common: the same country will hog the headlines decade after decade.
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American education fails to understand or achieve its purpose: to educate. Primarily, universities fail because they cannot define what it means to be educated.
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Our society tends to regard the university professor of liberal education as parasitic to the wealth creation of the laborer and CEO. This false view neglects the moral economy in which each of them participates, and to which each adds his own unique value.
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There may be a fundamental conflict between the moral intuitions that sit behind notions like the rule of law and democracy, such that looking at the Court from a counter-majoritarian point of view, leads us to focus on the wrong set of issues when we try to evaluate its role in American government.
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As a result of common pronouncements about the end of books and my own love of the same, I have been thinking about the future of books and libraries. I offer the following as some optimistic opinions about the future of books, libraries, and bibliophilism.
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