Judith Stein’s Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies makes for depressing reading. Her narrative counters Whiggish histories of continuous progress with a sobering account of economic decline. It is a chronicle of poor decisions, written from the vantage point of a post-industrial United States with fractious politics and a…
Category: The Disciplines
Academic Disciplines
Making Sense of How We Lived, When We Lived
Truly knotty complicated questions rarely fall into tidy categories. This fundamental truth challenges deans, departments, faculty and students, for disciplines only go so far and then it is necessary to find different perspectives. Marjorie Garber is a literary scholar who has consistently and successfully strayed beyond English. She has served as Director of the Humanities Center…
Animal Studies and Ody’s Journey
I grew up with dogs, cats and fish. I rode horses. My mother’s relatives in Ohio had farms. I like animals, and for whatever reason, most animals seem to like me. My first job as a teenager was working as a kennel assistant in a local animal hospital. I loved it and it was extraordinarily good…
On Shakespeare and Stoppard, on Reading and Recommending
Reading combines pleasure and utility, and does so elegantly. Whether curled up in a book or poring over a tome, thoughtful reading affords an extraordinary opportunity to engage while disengaging, to travel while staying still, and to connect while remaining alone. The gift of a book and the power of a thoughtful recommendation is much…
Cheap – A Liberal Arts Challenge
Ellen Ruppel Shell, Boston University journalism professor and author, is a smart and informed writer. In her latest book, Cheap: the high cost of discount culture, Shell looks at the rise of discount culture – discount shops, outlet malls, and the proliferation of the cheap. Cheap, she takes pains to point out, is not the…
Necessary Lies
A well-crafted history arranges space and time into a set, frames a proscenium for our viewing, and knows when to raise the curtain and when to let it fall. It crafts order out of chaos; it conjures up beginnings, middles and ends where none exist, boxing up time, processing it and rendering it digestible. History…
How Now, Mission Statement?
What makes for institutional effectiveness? If looking at a business organization, an array of well-recognized and well understood measures can answer the question. Profitability, market share, growth, earnings per share – the list is exhaustive and recognized. The measures themselves are also constantly being tested, evaluated and critiqued, for the market provides multiple incentives to…