From studying political philosophy in college, I learned that defining “justice” is impossible. Even so, we like to grope about for its meaning. For example, many political philosophers have explored the connection between justice and law. The conclusion? It’s always tenuous. Rule by law — as opposed to rule by tyrants — seems at first glance to be something that, by constraining people, is a form of injustice. Yet by permitting people to go about their lives without fear of arbitrary retribution, rule by law actually frees people. No matter what, law always has its roots in particular customs, and because customs vary widely from society to society, laws vary widely as well.

In the tragic case of Ameneh Bahrami, an Iranian woman now living in Spain, the fundamental...

Last week Jeffrey Young reported in The Chronicle that conference attendance is down due to cutbacks on travel funds by hard-pressed colleges and universities. Rosemary Feal is quoted as saying that the MLA last December saw a 6-percent decline in attendance, and I am sure that is not the worst case. The cuts are supposed to affect senior scholars disproportionately, since some institutions are protecting younger faculty, and there is concern that fewer graybeards will show up. I can’t be sure if that is true, but I attended the Organization of American Historians’ annual meeting in Seattle last week, and it seemed to me that my doddering age group was well represented. Rick Shenkman reported for the History News Network that 1,800 registered for the...

I still can’t believe that John Hope Franklin is gone. I met him a handful of times, and each encounter was awe inspiring. He was the scholar’s scholar, always working, thinking, writing. His research was decidedly political without being polemical, an example of rigorous scholarship that changed the world with little need to self-righteously proclaim as much.

I only had one really substantive conversation with John Hope Franklin. It was about five or six years ago, on a plane ride from Tennessee to Durham, North Carolina. We had just spent a weekend on the same “advisory panel,” two of several scholars brought down to talk about the future of the prestigious Race Relations Institute at Fisk, Franklin’s alma mater.

I’m a Howard grad myself, and...

In Bill Moyers’s letter to The Chronicle last month in response to my post on his actions while in LBJ’s administration, Moyers refered to Jack Shafer’s piece in Slate as a sample from the Right wing noise machine. Shafer has a long follow-up to his original piece and Moyers’ reply here in Slate. Among Shafer’s statements is a reference to a defense Moyers wrote in Newsweek many years ago:

“What does Moyers say in the Newsweek column? The context in which the column appeared bears mentioning: Congressional hearings were revealing abuses of power at the FBI. According to the New York Times news story (Feb. 28, 1975, paid), Justice Department officials confirmed that Moyers had ‘asked the bureau to gather data on campaign aides to Senator Barry Goldwater, the Republican Presidential...

On February 12 Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner announced he would make investors and the public trust banks again. The idea is that in a few weeks from mid-February — that date is approaching — the results of a bank stress test of the largest banks would be known.

The stress test is supposed to give a realistic picture, transparency, and thus confidence about these important institutions. Stress testing your new relationship might entail wrecking your boyfriend’s new car. You’d learn valuable information. A stress test is a little exercise aimed to identify which banks could fail under the most dire circumstances: Many people lose jobs and default on credit card etc. The stress situation is supposed to be the worst of the worst — a 3 standard deviation event. But if the stress conditions are just the status quo, the stress test creates stress....

One of the characteristics of artists like me who’ve been around a long time is the aplomb with which we assert our taste, as well as our willingness to venture out on a limb even when it comes to opining about famous artists. At a certain point (after about 20 years of wrestling first-hand with putting paint onto canvas), painters switch from sentences that begin with the hesitant words, “I’m not really all that fond of so-and-so’s work,” to more categorical assertions, such as, “So-and-so is a terrible painter.” When young artists assume this attitude, it’s a bad thing, of course. They’re unnecessarily blocking their own development. Mature artists who don’t have it lack any conviction.

Accompanied by my friend from graduate school days, Edith Newhall (she’s the art critic for The Philadelphia...

She’s just finished her liberal arts degree and although she’s worked part-time since she was sixteen, she’s now looking for full-time work in New York. Her guy is in the city; they would like to be together.

Fair enough.

She e-mails me and asks for advice — after all, I had her weekly advice when she was my student last year. She’s young, smart, and hip but scared: Who would want to hire her? What can she offer?

Another friend is also looking for work. Senior by 22 years to the former student I’ve just mentioned, she is nevertheless as nervous and feels, perhaps, even more unprepared. After being at home with her kids for 14 years, she’s decided it’s time to get a renewed sense of accomplishment outside her family. And she needs the dough. She’s desperate for the financial independence. She wants and...

This week in The Chronicle, Robin Wilson has a story on the “diversity” factor in tenure and promotion guidelines at Virginia Tech. According to the guidelines, the promotion and tenure committee “expects all dossiers to demonstrate the candidate’s active involvement in diversity.” The provost at Virginia Tech claims that the guideline does not “require” professors to join diversity activities, but only “encourages” them to do so. The diversity criterion goes back to a few years ago, he adds, when the university wanted to make sure that people who did pursue diversity activities were valued for their efforts.

This is a lesson in the academic version of “mission creep.” What starts out as a benign and unobjectionable approval policy evolves into...

The longer I work in public policy, the more I think about conventional wisdom. These little nuggets of thought – -some essentially correct, others partially so, others not at all — are the building blocks of a shared narrative that profoundly shapes how we see the world, and thus how we act within it. While some methods of changing public policy involve directly influencing key decision makers through persuasion, bribery, etc., most amount to engaging in a chaotic struggle to force ideas through the hourglass-center aperture that controls access to conventional wisdom and as such the public mind. It’s a low-success rate / high-payoff business. The vast majority of ideas and findings die lonely, anonymous deaths. But if, by dint of force or accuracy or plain dumb luck, you can maneuver an idea past the point of increasing returns, the result is close to...

Photo of John Hope Franklin tending his orchids is at IndyWeek.com.

The country, academe, and the field of history lost one of their finest this afternoon, when John Hope Franklin died at the age of 94. John Hope was one of the most important historians of his generation — and of the 20th century. His influence has been profound, and I think it will endure, for he had a profound impact on the historical profession.

He wrote many books, but of them my favorite is The Free Negro in North Carolina, 1790-1860, originally his Harvard doctoral dissertation, first published in 1943. The book was pathbreaking in many respects, especially in its mining of manuscript court records, and I think it has...