As an empty nester, it is now easy for me to reflect upon the joys of parenting. The greatest joy, of course, is watching that beautiful little baby grow and develop into the complexity of an adult human, replete with gifts we celebrate and quirks that, undoubtably, come from the lineage of the other parent. But the second greatest joy may well be the way that our F2's challenge us to rethink our past assumptions, to see the world in a different way, to learn something that we never before found interesting, and to rethink our priorities and sense of world order. With that, I want to share a lesson I learned from one of my own sons, in part because this lesson might be helpful to others, and in part because I hope it causes you to take a moment to think of your own child's wisest moments. 

Like many of my fellow higher-ed brethren, who devote our lives to ensuring that other...

I’m back from my quick trip to Santa Barbara to spend an evening with the trustees and faculty of the Cate School (which is actually in Carpenteria, just up the coast from Santa Barbara). Cate is a century-old private boarding high school. It has 265 students and 63 faculty members, and the most beautiful school location, atop a seaside mesa, that I have ever seen.

The Cate faculty has been reviewing the School’s curriculum, which is currently heavily skewed to Advanced Placement courses. They offer 21 A.P. courses, and this past year 124 students took at least one of the courses, while 110 students took 238 A.P. exams. They do pretty well -- 85 percent of the students earned a grade of 3 (on the A.P. scale of 1-5) last year. The faculty surveyed itself to determine whether their curriculum was maximally designed to get their students admitted to the colleges of their choice, to better...

 
In my previous post, I laid out the predicament facing contemporary abstract sculpture. I argued that the plethora of handsome man-made objects in the modern world made it hard for people even to notice abstract sculpture, let alone contemplate it for its aesthetic value. I offered a list of some of the most famous abstract sculptors -- artists who have made it to the top of the art-career mountain -- and pointed out that much of the time they make sculpture that is actually better described as either “installation art” or “assemblage” rather than straightforward sculptural objects.

It’s not easy to find serious, good abstract artists who make straightforward, sculptural objects. Simply put, abstract sculpture has gone out of fashion -- even more than abstract painting -- and it takes a certain dogged determination for any sculptor to keep on making single...

At first I thought that multitasking was just a bogus concept, on the one hand an obvious truth and on the other an obvious falsehood. If multitasking meant reading a book while listening to music, of course it happened, and had happened long before the term "multitasking" ever came along. But if multitasking meant talking on the phone while doing email, or doing homework while watching TV, or carrying on six chats on your laptop -- no way. Those activities exercise the same parts of your brain, and in order to do them you don't multitask, you switch-task.  And the bad part is that in the switching process you have a warm-up time with the new task before you reach full engagement with it. Doing those things at the same time actually ends up taking longer than doing those things one after the other.

But the dangers of multitasking go beyond inefficiency. Here's a page from the New York...

Whenever I have to drag my abstract paintings around, I find myself longing to be a poet. (Ever hear of a poets throwing out their lower backs from carrying around books of poems?) Then I remind myself that at least I’m not a sculptor. Whatever problems abstract painters face -- physically, in having to move around heavy, but fragile, flat rectangles, and intellectually, in finding a way to make abstract paintings that move anyone other than art worldies -- pale in comparison to what abstract sculptors face. In this post and the next, I’ll discuss contemporary abstract sculpture -- the yin, you might say, to the yang of abstract painting.

The painter Ad Reinhardt once remarked caustically that sculpture is that thing you bump into when you step back to look at a painting. (We painters can be an arrogant bunch, that’s for sure.) Centuries earlier, in his brazen and frequently silly attempt...

Newsweek has published a mini-debate (the "Student Loan Smackdown") between for-profit bank representative John Dean and myself, on the subject of whether Congress should pass President Obama's plan to redirect $8-billion in lucrative subsidies for for-profit banks to Pell Grants and other worthy causes. Dean says "No!" while I say "Yes!" Newsweek went with "Yes."

Apparently the standard tactic($) of spending tens of millions of dollars on lobbyists and campaign contributions isn't working, because Dean is now saying that the legislation "adds $1-trillion to Treasury borrowing over 10 years." In a time of exploding budget deficits and growing national debt, that seems pretty scary. Why would Obama burden us so? The answer, of course, is that he's not. Dean's statement is a combination of exaggeration and wordplay.

First, the exaggeration: $1-trillion. What a coincidence, that borrowing...

Hi, Miroslava, I'm your "childless academic peer."

I read Professor Chávez-García's article called "Superprofessor Meets Supermom," and I could only think about how absolutely middling my own ambition and performance has been in comparison to hers.

I have to say that I was bothered by Professor Chávez-García's rather smug -- or at least it seemed that way to me -- reference to her envy of her "childless academic peers": "Unlike my childless academic peers, I do not have the luxury -- and, yes, it is a luxury I covet -- of spending all my time conducting research or simply thinking about the significance of my work."

Do you think that just because people don't have kids they don't have lives?

Do you think that somehow not having a small child actually frees you having the burden of an emotional life?

This is in no way to detract from my colleague's courageous and daunting ambitions. As a...

x-posted: howtheuniversityworks.com

During last week's massive 10-campus walkout, several dozen students and workers occupied (video) the Graduate Student Commons at the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC), issuing statements frankly acknowledging their intention to escalate the conflict: "Occupation is a tactic for escalating struggles," they note at their website, "We must face the fact that the time for pointless negotiations is over."

Their supporters aim to initiate some actual thought about the role of higher education in the economy. "A university diploma is now worth no more than a share in General Motors," observes the author of the compelling Communique From an Absent Future:

We work and we borrow in order to work and to borrow. And the jobs we work toward are the jobs we already have. Close to three-quarters of students work while in school, many full-time; for ...

(Please see correction in fourth paragraph.)

Rice pudding. A new Rorschach test: some see a nostalgic dessert; I see a recession indicator.

The stock market might be doing better; but the real economy is a swamp; unemployment is scarily stuck; The New York Times reports the gap between job openings and job seekers is at record highs. Unemployment is mostly permanent loss: income never to be recovered; detachment from work habits and skills; and much higher rates of mortgage and credit-card defaults. These are losses that devastate families long after an official recovery starts. And, more people are taking early Social Security benefits -- and a permanent 28 percent cut in benefits -- because they can't find work now. (Warning! Higher elderly poverty rates in 10 years.)

I watch traditional recession indicators; but, there are other, more subtle signs of desperation. Sunday, on a...

William Safire died of pancreatic cancer today. He was 79. His obituary appears here. After retiring from the Times, he went to work heading the Dana Foundation, among other things supporting the work of the National Endowment for the Arts (and showing himself in gatherings to be an entirely unassuming guy).  He wrote great speeches for Spiro Agnew, which I cited last year on Brainstorm here, but he turned into a hard critic of secrecy in government after learning that his boss Richard Nixon taped meetings he attended. And one of his best analyses of political secrecy appears in this op-ed on Bill Clinton and Vernon Jordan. Remember when Jordan was asked about his and his superior's role in obstructing justice in the Lewinsky case. I think the whole investigation was a waste of time and money, but the machinations of it all were fascinating to watch. Here is Safire on Jordan's actions in...