The Chicago Blog

In the July issue of Physics Today William H. Wing reviews Daniel S. Greenberg's recent book Science for Sale: The Perils, Rewards, and Delusions of Campus Capitalism—a revealing look at academic science and its commoditization in the hands of private interests. From the review:

Greenberg's research is extensive. His knowledge of the institutions, policymakers, and industries involved in the development of marketable science, and their effects on the science community and public policy, is vast.…

[But] many of Greenberg's examples pertain to the biomedical sciences. Some difficulties he describes—the complex ethical issues involved in human-subject research, extensive regulations, and massive documentation requirements—are issues that physical scientists rarely encounter. Thus those scientists may infer that the book is not relevant to them. They should not. Results in the physical sciences can have enormous human and societal impacts and can raise knotty moral problems, as history has shown. Science for Sale is a cautionary tale that should provoke thoughtful discussions among researchers and academic administrators.

Read the review on the Physics Today website.

Archived in Biology | Economics | Education | History and Philosophy of Science | Reviews
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The July 6 Boston Globe published an enlightening interview with Steven Shapin, Harvard professor of the History of Science and author of the forthcoming book The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation. In the interview Shapin discusses his book and its critique of conventional notions about the various motivations and incentives that drive scientific production. Instead, Shapin proposes a much more nuanced picture of of the scientific career and character. From the preface to the interview:

Testifying before congress in 1950, MIT president Karl Compton declared, of American scientists: "I don't know of any other group that has less interest in monetary gain."

That view of scientists might draw a few wry smiles around Kendall Square today. But it also represents a lingering 20th-century ideal: The scientist as a virtuous academic who pursues knowledge as an end in itself. In contrast to that ideal stands the wealth-seeking industrial scientist, a specialist who merely applies science to the problem of putting new products on the market.…

That's the wrong way to think about the whole scientific enterprise, says Steven Shapin.… Scientists, Shapin thinks, do not merely choose between virtue and riches, instead worrying more about where they can pursue their intellectual goals, and thus open up new scientific frontiers.

Thinking otherwise means we fail to understand the very people whose inventions in medicine or computer science are, Shapin writes, "making the worlds to come."

Read the interview on the Boston.com website.

Also see these other books by Steven Shapin previously published by the press:

A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England
The Scientific Revolution

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Economics | Education | History and Philosophy of Science | Sociology
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Last year’s report from the National Science Foundation dolefully confirmed what many researchers have suspected for years: while the number of PhD graduates in the sciences continues to increase, tenure-track positions have remained static since the early 1980s. And after spending years in the post-doc trenches, this glut of PhDs is enough to make many would-be scientists wonder about their next steps.

As the founders of their university’s first office for postdoctoral affairs, Victor A. Bloomfield and Esam E. El-Fakahany have first-hand experience with the challenges young scientists face. Together, they’ve mentored thousands of students, and now they’ve combined that experience in teaching, counseling, and research to create The Chicago Guide to Your Career in Science. From preparing a CV and resume, to writing grants and scientific papers, to networking with fellow scientists, The Chicago Guide to Your Career in Science truly is a “toolkit” for aspiring scientists—helping them not just cope but excel at this critical phase in their careers.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biology | Education | Press Releases
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The University of Chicago News Office has posted a podcast featuring Charles Lipson, author of Succeeding as an International Student in the United States and Canada speaking about his new book. In the podcast, Lipson addresses many of the hot button topics for foreign students trying to adapt to life in the United States and Canada, both in and beyond the classroom. From the norms of classroom participation to obtaining health insurance, Lipson covers what students need to know to have a successful and enjoyable adventure as an international student.

To find out more listen to the podcast or see this special website for the book featuring reviews, info on institutional use, and an excerpt from the book, "Passports and Visas: A Quick Overview."

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Education | Reference and Writing
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Joseph M. Williams, Professor Emeritus of English and Linguistics at the University of Chicago, died Friday, February 22 at his home in South Haven, Michigan. Williams will be remembered as the founder of the University's writing program and for his contributions to the development of some of Chicago's most influential books on the teaching of writing. These include his Style: Toward Clarity and Grace, as well as the book he co-authored with the Gregory Colomb and the late Wayne Booth, The Craft of Research—the third edition of which is slated for publication this spring. Williams was also a contributor to Kate L. Turabian's A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations and was at work on the accompanying Students Guide at the time of his passing.

William's contributions to the University and its students, and to writers and scholars everywhere, will most certainly be missed, as will he himself.

Archived in Chicago | Commentary | Education
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The Chronicle of Higher Education is running an article by James M. Lang on the current state of undergraduate education titled "The Myth of First-Year Enlightenment." In the article Lang cites Tim Clydesdale's recent book, The First Year Out: Understanding American Teens after High School to explore modern students' reactions to their first introduction to academe:

You'll recognize this story: Intelligent but naïve high-school graduate heads off to college… [and] discovers how limited her worldview has been. Her consciousness is awakened. She emerges from her first year of college a changed human being, with more thoughtful views on religion, politics, and her own identity.

Our institutions… hawk the tale to prospective students and their parents on Web sites, in brochures, and on campus tours: You will come back from your first year a changed man or woman. You will be on the path to your new and more enlightened life. You will have had the best four years of your life.

Not so, according to Tim Clydesdale, an associate professor of sociology at the College of New Jersey, and author of The First Year Out: Understanding American Teens After High School.… "Most of the mainstream American teens I spoke with neither liberated themselves intellectually nor broadened themselves socially during their first year out," he writes. "What teens actually focus on during the first year out is this: daily life management."

In other words, freshmen spend most of their time and intellectual energy figuring out how to handle life without parental restraints and support: how to deal with money; negotiate newfound freedoms with sex, drugs, and alcohol; and determine how much time to devote to studying, working, and playing.

But what freshmen don't do during their first year of college comes as more of a (perhaps depressing) surprise: "Most American teens keep core identities in an 'identity lockbox' during their first year out and actively resist efforts to examine their self-understandings through classes or to engage their humanity through institutional efforts such as public lectures, the arts, or social activism."

Read the rest of the article on the Chronicle website.

Archived in Books for the News | Education | Philosophy | Religion | Sociology
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An interesting review of Daniel S. Greenberg's Science for Sale: The Perils, Rewards, and Delusions of Campus Capitalism is currently running in the January-February issue of the American Scientist. Reviewer Robert L. Geiger praises Greenberg's book for its lucid and balanced look at the influence of corporate funding on American academic institutions:

[In] Science for Sale, [Greenberg] ventures outside the Beltway to scrutinize the state of academic science and its supposed burgeoning ties with the corporate world. Although the somewhat fraught title would seem to place this work with an abundance of books condemning university ties with industry, Greenberg has provided a more nuanced analysis and offers some different conclusions.…

He begins with an iconoclastic portrayal of corporate-sponsored research. Far from dominating or corrupting universities, it has been a marginal and (since 2000) shrinking portion of the research they conduct. Academic research has great value for industry, but companies prefer to let the government pay for it. "Not many corporations are besieging universities to take their money," Greenberg says. "Eagerness for even more business is strongest on the university side of the relationship." Moreover, he sees little scope for industry to take advantage of this hunger: "In the current era of heightened sensitivity to abuse of academic integrity, the risk of public opprobrium for offending accepted values is substantial." Given the predominance Greenberg ascribes to self-interested behavior, it is not surprising that he frequently alludes to the fear of institutional embarrassment or individual ruin as the force driving ethical behavior. However, when he returns to this theme in his conclusion, he emphasizes the growing effectiveness of the systems now in place to police and punish scientific misconduct.

The review concludes:

Overall… Greenberg has provided an important assessment of the state of academic science. He finds that public doubts about the integrity of the research enterprise are probably overdone: "Science is in good shape, productive and socially beneficial," he says. "The negative elements," he believes, "pose a more complicated, less measurable story." But Greenberg's account makes it clear that those negative elements are concentrated in the biomedical borderlands, where vigilance in the enforcement of ethical standards is indeed called for.

Read the full review on the American Scientist website.

Archived in Biology | Economics | Education | History and Philosophy of Science | Reviews
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The Sacramento Theatre Company reimagines Euripides' Electra as Electricidad, while off-Broadway's Signature Theatre puts on Iphigenia 2.0 and an Indian director stages Raja Oedipus, an adaptation of the famous Sophocles play featuring Karbi gods and goddesses in place of the original Greek deities: if you've seen any of these recent performances—or one of their countless counterparts on stages across the globe—you've experienced the timelessness, renewed popularity, and ever-broadening reach of Greek tragedy. But how are today's productions different from their ancient peers? What are the best strategies for interpreting these dramas on contemporary stages? In this follow-up to his acclaimed Love, Sex & Tragedy: How the Ancient World Shapes our Lives, renowned classicist Simon Goldhill responds to these questions (and many others) with his long-awaited guide How to Stage Greek Tragedy Today.

Read the press release.

Archived in Classics | Education | History | Literature | Press Releases
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Now Available in Paperback—In Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University William Clark argues that the research university—which originated in German Protestant lands and spread globally in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—developed in response to market forces and bureaucracy, producing a new kind of academic whose goal was to establish originality and achieve fame through publication. With an astonishing wealth of research, Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University investigates the origins and evolving fixtures of academic life: the lecture catalogue, the library catalog, the grading system, the conduct of oral and written exams, the roles of conversation and the writing of research papers in seminars, the writing and oral defense of the doctoral dissertation, the ethos of "lecturing with applause" and "publish or perish," and the role of reviews and rumor. This is a grand, ambitious book that should be required reading for every academic.

Read the press release.

Archived in Education | History | Press Releases
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The media are awash with stories about increasingly close ties between college science departments and multi-million dollar corporations, but is that relationship endangering science? Have universities, bedazzled by visions of huge profits from biotechnology and drug patents, allowed themselves to be fatally compromised by corporate cash?

With Science for Sale, journalist Daniel S. Greenberg draws on sources developed through his forty years of reporting to paint a clear and detailed picture of the state of university science. Taking on everything from drug tests to the technology transfer offices that have sprung up at many universities, Greenberg reveals that campus capitalism is more complicated—and less profitable—than media reports would suggest.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biology | Economics | Education | History and Philosophy of Science | Press Releases
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The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article in the July 6 issue on the recent activities of Edward Castronova in furthering the study of online gaming and virtual worlds. Two years ago we published his book, Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games.

Castronova has been working on several new projects at Indiana University. One is the construction of the online space Arden, a virtual world that draws upon Shakespeare's works. Castronova "sees Arden as the first virtual environment among many at Indiana that will serve as a 'petri dish' for large-scale social-science experiments.… Experiments could involve testing basic economic principles, setting up different political systems, communist or capitalist, and comparing how the communities evolve, or doing an ethnographic study that contrasts people from different parts of the world." A test experiment will take place in August.

Another project is "an unusual academic conference that tries to replicate the enthusiasm and hubbub that people experience playing competitive online games." Ludium II, the second conference in the series, was held last month. Participants used the role-playing technique of online games to create a set of public policies for virtual worlds. "The group came up with ten policies for virtual worlds that they decided to send to Congressional and presidential candidates in the 2008 elections."

Learn more about the worlds of Edward Castronova at his blog, Terranova.

Also read our interview with the Castronova.

Archived in Books for the News | Economics | Education
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Susan Basalla May, co-author of So What Are You Going to Do with That?: Finding Careers Outside Academia has posted an interesting FAQ for students preparing for a nonacademic career to the website of the Chronicle of Higher Education. Culled from the question and answer sessions that follow her frequent lectures, Basalla comments on a variety of topics including how to get started as a freelancer and how to explain to potential employers about unfinished dissertations. You can find the full article in the career section of the Chronicle.

A witty, accessible guide full of concrete advice for anyone contemplating the jump from scholarship to the outside world, So What Are You Going to Do with That? covers topics ranging from career counseling to interview etiquette to translating skills learned in the academy into terms an employer can understand and appreciate. Packed with examples and stories from real people who have successfully made this daunting—but potentially rewarding— transition, and written with a deep understanding of both the joys and difficulties of the academic life, this fully revised and up-to-date edition will be indispensable for any graduate student or professor who has ever glanced at her CV, flipped through the want ads, and wondered, "What if?"

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Education | Reference and Writing
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The current issue of the New York Review of Books is running an interesting article titled "Scandals of Higher Eduction" written by Andrew Delbanco, professor in the humanities and director of American studies at Columbia University. The article is the typical NYRB in-depth review of recent books, in this case offering varying critiques of the state of the American educational system, especially the higher educational system as it is embodied by the nation's elite schools. Delbanco's article draws on several books that rehash now commonplace critiques of flawed admissions policies that favor money over smarts. But he reserves a special place for former U of C dean Donald Levine's new book, Powers of the Mind: The Reinvention of Liberal Learning in America; a work with an insightful approach that picks up where the others fall short in its incisive analysis of the state of higher eduction. Delbanco writes:

If…it is a scandal that so few disadvantaged students are able to attend our most advantageous colleges, it is also urgent, in the words (the italics are his) of Donald Levine, former dean of the college at the University of Chicago, to notice that

the scandal of higher education in our time is that so little attention gets paid, in institutions that claim to provide an education, to what it is that college educators claim to be providing.

In Powers of the Mind: The Reinvention of Liberal Learning in America, Levine has written a fascinating history of curricular debates at the University of Chicago, reaching back to its founding more than a century ago. It is a story of serious teachers responding to continuous change in the world and in their particular academic disciplines while always keeping in view the enduring goal of liberal education, which Levine succinctly calls "the cultivation of human powers."

Drawing on his own lifetime of teaching and educational leadership at the University of Chicago, Levine's book looks beyond the headlines to provide an intelligent critique of the American university system and offer a viable paradigm for liberal arts today.

Archived in Education | Reviews
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Ruth Fredman Cernea, editor of The Great Latke-Hamantash Debate, was interviewed in the February 20 edition of the Jewish Ledger, a Connecticut weekly. In her conversation with staff writer Judie Jacobson, Cernea talks about the genesis of the University of Chicago's famous Latke-Hamantash debates, some of its notable participants, and the meaning—or lack thereof—in its annual deliberations. From the interview in the Ledger:

Q: When and why did the debate get started?

A: It began more than 60 years ago as an inspired "lark" by three people at the University of Chicago—Professor Sol Tax, an anthropologist; Professor Louis Gottshalk, a historian, and Rabbi Maurice Pekarsky. They were worried about the intellectual and social climate at the university for the numerous Jewish faculty and students there. This was a time when it was not professionally advisable to advertise your ethnic background on campus, when being an objective scientist meant burying the "yid" inside. In fact, many of the faculty had been brought up in homes rich in Eastern European Jewish culture: they knew Yiddish, ate the traditional East European foods, and went to "cheder." In another world they might have become Talmudists. …

The Tax-Gottshalk-Perkarsky spur-of-the-moment idea? A shmooze in the Hillel house, with faculty arguing the merits of familiar traditional foods, just before winter break. It would be a haven in the midst of the Christmas carols on campus. Sol Tax would make latkes. Faculty would let their hair down and speak the in-group vernacular of their childhood homes, Yiddish, and students would experience these forbidding figures as approachable, whole human beings.

Q:Who are some of the people who've participated in the Latke-Hamantash Debate?

A: It's almost easier to list who has not! The book includes papers by two Nobel Prize winners, Milton Friedman and Leon Lederberg; three university presidents, former Chicago President Hanna Grey, former Princeton University President Harold Shapiro, and Barnard's current President Judith Shapiro; and key people from a wide range of academic disciplines. Considering that it takes significant effort to produce an academic paper, spoof or not, it's noteworthy that such serious scholars took the time to write and joke about their lives and their life's work.

Our online feature for the book includes the text and audio of Ted Cohen’s “Consolations of the Latke” as well as recipes for both the immortal pancake and the equally worthy pastry. With Purim about two weeks away, there's still time to learn to make hamantashen.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Education | Literature | Religion
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The October 23 issue of the New Yorker has a fascinating review by Anthony Grafton of William Clark's Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University:

Clark thinks that the modern university, with its passion for research, prominent professors, and, yes, black crêpe, took shape in Germany in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. And he makes his case with analytic shrewdness, an exuberant love of archival anecdote, and a wry sense of humor. It's hard to resist a writer who begins by noting, "Befitting the subject, this is an odd book."

It's also hard to resist Grafton's review when it's titled "The Nutty Professors" and asks some perfectly sensible questions:

Why, in the age of the World Wide Web, do professors still stand at podiums and blather for fifty minutes at unruly mobs of students, their lowered baseball caps imperfectly concealing the sleep buds that rim their eyes? Why do professors and students put on polyester gowns and funny hats and march, once a year, in the uncertain glory of the late spring?

Why indeed? Clark shows how the university developed in response to market forces and the intrusiveness of the state bureaucracy, and established itself as a self-regulating research enterprise. Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University investigates the origins and evolving fixtures of academic life: the lecture catalogue, the library catalog, the grading system, the conduct of oral and written exams, the roles of conversation and the writing of research papers in seminars, the writing and oral defense of the doctoral dissertation, the ethos of "lecturing with applause" and "publish or perish," and the role of reviews and rumor.

Extending Clark's history into the present, Grafton writes:

Today, academic charisma—and the ascetic life of scholarship that goes with it—retains a central place in the life of universities. Scholars in all fields continue to gain preferment because they are "productive" (the academic euphemism for obsessive), and students continue to emulate them. Future investment bankers pull all-nighters delving into subjects that they will never need to know about again, and years later, at reunions, they recall the intensity of the experience with something close to disbelief—and, often, passionate nostalgia. The university has never been a sleek, efficient corporation. It's more like the military, an organization at once radically modern and steeped in color and tradition.

Archived in Education | History | Reviews
Posted by DB at 08:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

William Clark's most recent work, Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University, is one of the first books to take on the daunting task of charting the evolution of academics in the western world. Full of profound insights into the development of the profession, the academics themselves have been quick to praise Clark's book for its comprehensive and insightful account of the discipline. Sheldon Rothblatt, professor emeritus of history at the University of California, Berkeley writes in a review for the American Scientist:

In almost any way that one can imagine, Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University is an astonishing book. Earlier reviews have said as much. It is astonishing in style, voice, structure, method, conception, breadth, and learning.…

[Clark's book] introduces a startling set of new ideas: It was not the professors who created the modern academic profession; rather, it was the rationalizing, bureaucratic, market-conscious functionaries who served the various German states of the 18th century.… This emphasis on the state as the ultimate, if indirect, source of intellectual creativity challenges received opinion, but it also challenges a certain high-mindedness about the pursuit and embrace of knowledge that the inherited account assumes. The corrective is necessary; but it is also a corrective derived from a certain skepticism about current academic values.

A eye opening account of the discipline, Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University is a grand, ambitious book that should be required reading for every academic.

Archived in Education | History | Reviews
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Great reviews continue to pour in for David S. Brown's Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography. In his review for Slate.com, David Greenberg called the book "perceptive and lucid."

Wilfred M. McClay of the Wall Street Journal wrote about Brown's honest examination of Hofstadter: "The paradoxical effect of Mr. Brown's biography, however, is to lower rather than raise our estimation of Richard Hofstadter as a historian and thinker. This may come as a bit of a shock to those who have admired him for so long and have clung to his example as an alternative to the narrowly academic or tendentious historical writing of the present day. It is a bit disconcerting, like the archetypal visit to one's childhood home and neighborhood, where everything that once seemed so great and magical looks infinitely smaller and shabbier than one remembered. But Mr. Brown's book makes it hard to evade the fact that Hofstadter was a historian who, for all the charm of his work, was nearly always wrong in his most important assertions."

In his review in the Summer 2006 issue of Bookforum, Robert S. Boynton called Richard Hofstadter "excellent."

In the Boston Globe, Christopher Shea noted that Hofstadter "had a knack for picking topics that resonated with the present" and that "some of [Hofstadter's] themes seem presciently in tune with our times, too-tension between rural and urban America, grass-roots distrust of experts and intellectuals, democracy's vulnerability to demagoguery. All of which makes Brown's biography, the first of Hofstadter, especially timely." On a similar note, in an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times, author David S. Brown describes how Hofstadter predicted the rise of today's right wing.

The author of The American Political Tradition and the winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, Richard Hofstadter was one of the most celebrated and respected historians of twentieth-century America—and certainly one of its most influential public intellectuals. His championing of the liberal politics that came out of the New Deal, his fierce opposition to McCarthyism and then the acolytes of Barry Goldwater, and the many ideas that he introduced to our nation's political conversation shaped not only the way we think of the historian's role in civic life, but steered the direction of American politics as well. This masterful biography explores Hofstadter's remarkable life story in the context of the rise and fall of American liberalism.

Read an excerpt.

Archived in Biography | Education | History | Reviews
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Publishers Weekly recently praised Richard A. Lanham's The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information. From the review: "Lanham's points are strong and well-researched, as shown through his 'background conversations,' substitutes for endnotes included at the end of every chapter. If style is going to increasingly operate as the decision-making arbiter, Lanham should be commended on his: clear, jargon-free and forward-thinking."

Richard A. Lanham here traces our epochal move from an economy of things and objects to an economy of attention. According to Lanham, the central commodity in our new age of information is not stuff but style, for style is what competes for our attention amidst the din and deluge of new media. In such a world, intellectual property will become more central to the economy than real property, while the arts and letters will grow to be more crucial than engineering, the physical sciences, and indeed economics as conventionally practiced. For Lanham, the arts and letters are the disciplines that study how human attention is allocated and how cultural capital is created and traded. In an economy of attention, style and substance change places. The new attention economy, therefore, will anoint a new set of moguls in the business world—not the CEOs or fund managers of yesteryear, but new masters of attention with a grounding in the humanities and liberal arts.

Read an excerpt.

Archived in Economics | Education | Literature | Reviews
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The New York Sun recently reviewed David S. Brown's Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography. From the review by Adam Kirsch: "As David Brown shows in his fascinating new study, Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography, Hofstadter's life and times prepared him to be the kind of historian he was. Indeed, the sometimes unsettling insight that drives Mr. Brown's book is that each generation of historians reads their own experience into the American past, turning historiography into a kind of biography.… As Mr. Brown shows, Richard Hofstadter has receded into the American past he helped to illuminate; but he remains one of its most honorable figures."

In this masterful biography, David S. Brown explores Hofstadter's life within the context of the rise and fall of American liberalism. A fierce advocate of academic freedom, racial justice, and political pluralism, Hofstadter charted in his works the changing nature of American society from a provincial Protestant foundation to one based on the values of an urban and multiethnic nation.

Read an excerpt.

Archived in Biography | Education | History | Reviews
Posted by at 10:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The author of The American Political Tradition and the winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, Richard Hofstadter was one of the most celebrated and respected historians of twentieth-century America—and certainly one of its most influential public intellectuals. His championing of the liberal politics that came out of the New Deal, his fierce opposition to McCarthyism and then the acolytes of Barry Goldwater, and the many ideas that he introduced to our nation's political conversation shaped not only the way we think of the historian's role in civic life, but steered the direction of American politics as well. Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography explores Hofstadter's remarkable life story in the context of the rise and fall of American liberalism.… Read the press release.

Read an excerpt.

Archived in Biography | Education | History | Press Releases
Posted by at 09:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Publishers Weekly recently reviewed David S. Brown's Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography. From the review: "Richard Hofstadter wrote several of the 20th century's most popular and important works of American history, but, as historian Brown reminds readers in this nuanced study, those works were as much a critique of the political culture of his own day as they were an analysis of the past. [Brown offers] brief, pointed readings of the Columbia-based thinker's books and analyses of his era's conflicts…. As he makes a strong case for the relevance of Hofstadter's influential understanding of political conflict to contemporary society, Brown is attentive to his flaws, as well: most notably, his personal devotion to postwar, meritocratic liberalism often led him to apply and selectively develop his historical arguments. Although the Hofstadter estate's prohibition against quotation from his letters weakens the presentation of his inner life, Brown's thorough research has yielded plenty of well-chosen snippets from the words of Hofstadter's family, colleagues and students to flesh out this valuable intellectual portrait."

Read an excerpt.

Archived in Biography | Education | History | Reviews
Posted by at 11:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Latke-Hamantash Debate was born at the University of Chicago some sixty years. In Chicago the debate is traditionally held on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. On other campuses—Cornell University, for example—the debate takes place around the celebration of Purim.

Purim, Hanukkah, or, heck, the Fourth of July, any time is an appropriate time for the intellectual and gastronomic delights of The Great Latke-Hamantash Debate, a collection of the best of nearly sixty years of brilliant University of Chicago oratory deployed on behalf of latkes and hamantashen.

In the Jerusalem Report Matt Nesvisky writes, “Editor [Ruth Fredman] Cernea, herself an anthropologist and a former Hillel official, has done a creditable job of combing through the organization’s archives to come up with essays that are never quite hilarious but are usually at least moderately amusing. I for one confess to a fondness for Ralph Marcus’s charming couplet: ‘Though David admired Bathsheba’s torso/ He liked her hamantashen more so.’ A close second is when Lawrence Sherman has Mercutio remarking ‘Women who are cold, cold latkes/ Cannot warm a young man’s gatkes.’”

Our online feature for the book includes the text and audio of Ted Cohen’s “Consolations of the Latke” as well as recipes for both the immortal pancake and the equally worthy pastry.

Archived in Books for the News | Education | Literature | Religion
Posted by DB at 06:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"Go into any inner-city neighborhood, and folks will tell you that government alone can't teach kids to learn. They know that parents have to parent, that children can't achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white."
—Barack Obama, Keynote Address, Democratic National Convention, 2004

Ron Netsky, a writer for City (Rochester, NY), observed that the term "acting white" has been appearing in the media a lot lately (most recently in The Philadelphia Inquirer and the New York Times) . Signithia Fordham and John Ogbu popularized the term in a study published in Urban Review in 1986. Fordham is also the author of Blacked Out: Dilemmas of Race, Identity, and Success at Capital High, a book which explores academic achievement within the Black community and the price students pay for attaining it.

Earlier this month, Netsky interviewed Fordham about Black education issues and what it means to "act white."

City: In Blacked Out, you write that one of the things that seems to make the education process difficult is generational.

Fordham: After the Brown decision and the Civil Rights act—in the 1960s generally—black people were engrossed in acknowledging what they had achieved. Their children were the kids that I studied, and their parents were always baffled by why their kids wouldn't take advantage of what they saw as the wider opportunities available to them. And rightfully so. You fight for something so hard, why don't the kids do so much better? Because if we had those opportunities, we would have gone much further in life than we've actually gone.

But they don't get what is happening in culture systems, how they operate. These kids are fearful of the loss of identity. This is not something they would verbalize or even have the understanding to talk about if you asked them.

The rest of the interview and an essay by Signithia Fordham titled "Was Rosa Parks 'acting white'?" can be read here.

Visit our black studies catalog.

Archived in Anthropology | Black Studies | Books for the News | Education
Posted by at 10:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)