Essays & Commentary

Colleges must address America's crisis of religious ignorance, writes Stephen Prothero, chairman of the religion department at Boston University.
(Illustration by Courtney Granner)

American Idol demonstrates a hunger for expertise and honest critical judgment -- a combination otherwise known as pedagogy, writes Christopher Ames, provost and dean of the college at Washington College.

Engineers need to revamp their curricula to include elements of law, economics, history, and other fields beyond math and science, write Domenico Grasso, dean of the College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences at the University of Vermont, and David Martinelli, chairman of the department of civil and environmental engineering at West Virginia University.

For Gaynell Gavin, a writer living in Lincoln, Neb., interviewing for a professorship became a voyage through academe's tortuous race politics.

Norman Birnbaum, a professor emeritus at Georgetown University Law Center, remembers the worldly historian as global player -- and scholarly mentor.

TA's say Mr. Socrates is laying the groundwork for Western philosophy, so that's cool, I guess. He's kind of full of himself, though. By Thomas Cushman, a professor of sociology at Wellesley College.

CRITICAL MASS: Do kids have any time left to play, or are they way overscheduled?

The Arts

In the 1960s East Village counterculture, the photographer Nathan Farb was too young to be a beatnik and too old to be a hippie. But he was just the right age for the New Journalism.
(Photograph by Nathan Farb)