How nice that we are willing to give $3,500 or $4,500 in taxpayer dollars to upper-income people who made the bad decision to purchase a gas guzzler in the past, and now want to enjoy the luxury and savings associated with a new, fuel-efficient car.  Keep in mind that even with the government "allowance rebate", poor people still can't afford a new car, and especially not a new hybrid, so this money is not going to help the working poor.  When you realize that the rebate is available on new cars with puchase prices of up to $45,000, you can see just who Congress had in mind when creating this program. 

So, while some of us nurse along our aging, yet fuel efficient, Hondas and Toyotas that won't qualify for the rebate program, the government is happy to reward our monster-truck driving neighbors with a sizable gift to help them purchase a newer, less...

Last week in The Chronicle Review, I wrote that in several areas of the humanities, scholars are facing (or not facing) an identity-shaking prospect. It is that their objects of study have received so much critical attention in the last 50 years that further attention, at least of the same kind, is unnecessary. After 100 books on novelist X, do we really need #101?

Perhaps a tiny coterie of experts in X will take a look at it, but it won’t change the teaching of X in high school and undergraduate classrooms across the United States. Lay readers of X won’t bother with it, and once it enters the library the chances are good that it will never leave the shelf. As for buyers, if you take away standing library orders, sales of literary monographs to individuals hover in the mid- to low-two...

I hope all of you college and university presidents out there are paying attention and have added a new tool to your conflict resolution toolkit. The next time two or more students are embroiled in conflict, it appears that the best way to solve it might be to invite all parties over to the presidential mansion to have a cold beer. Even really smart people seem now to recognize that in small quantities, alcohol might make calmer or more reasonable people out of all of us, that somehow it could enhance the value of the conversation, or at least the ease with which it flows. Just chug that mug and let the good times roll.

Oh, but that's right. You have been charged with being the moral leaders of young people in the U.S. and the deliverers of the message that alcohol won't solve problems but will instead exacerbate them. You are the mandated keepers of dry campuses in order...

I don’t know about you, but reading Nicholson Baker usually gives me intellectual indisposition. If it were up to me, I would sentence him to life in a room containing nothing but a library card catalog; or at least I would deny him access to the library’s OPAC. But I have to give the guy a little credit, since he is at least pretending to give technology a chance. In this week’s New Yorker he has a characteristically dyspeptic piece entitled “A New Page: Can the Kindle really improve on the book?” Baker bought a Kindle 2 e-book reader and his judgment about it is, at best, dubitante. He admires the device’s wireless capacity to receive information from the Kindle Store at Amazon (the developer of the product) and he is fairly comfortable...

Here are more suggestions -- although, unlike the previous list, these are drawn from outside the office -- concerning what folks would like to see invented during the next 50 years:

One of my former students suggested that he would like to be able to play new-release movies on the inside of his contact lenses. This way he would appear to be paying close attention to whatever he was meant to be doing while watching, for example, The Hangover.

A newly single friend wants a version of a meter reader that would allow her to tell whether a man is genuinely interested in having a relationship, just interested in being friends, interested in a one-night stand, or a 10-minute stand.

A neighbor wants photographs that would self-destruct once you realize just how terrible you actually look, or when the relationship ends, whichever comes first. This will...

A couple of days ago, I received an e-mail from the teachers' union-funded "Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice" touting a new study written by Holly Yetick of the University of Colorado at Boulder, allegedly uncovering rampant pro-think tank bias in the mainstream media. As the policy director of a think tank, I was naturally interested -- we're always looking for new ideas when it comes to prosecuting our nefarious media-manipulation plans. Alas, I was disappointed. In an analysis of 864 articles published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Education Week, the author found that:

Although university and government sources were cited more often, a higher percentage of reports produced by advocacy-oriented think tanks were cited by both types of publications. Universities produce 14 to 16 times more research than think tanks, but the three...

Last week I spoke at a meeting of the Lumina Foundation's Achieving the Dream Initiative, a meeting of policymakers from 15 states all working to improve the effectiveness of community colleges. At one point, a data working group shared results of its efforts to create new ways to measure college outputs. This was basically a new kind of report card, one capable of reporting results for different subgroups of students, and enabling comparisons of outcomes across colleges. Something like it might someday replace the data collection currently part of the IPEDS.

While it's always gratifying to see state policymakers engaging with data and thinking about how to use it in meaningful ways, I couldn't help but feel that even this seemingly forward-thinking group was tending towards the status quo. The way we measure and report college outputs right now...

True, I’ve been crazy to stick with AOL for my personal email address, and not switch to my gmail account—in more ways than one, it now turns out. Today I truly see the error of my ways. Why? Because 58 percent of AOL respondents--58 percent!--checked the box that said they were doubtful President Obama was born in Hawaii. I share an email address with the same ending as these people?

I will not stoop to the absurd indignity of going over, yet again, the reasons (i.e., proof) for why the “Birther Movement” is wrong--on each and every count. If you're reading this, and you think I indeed ought to do this, I simply urge you to seek professional help in order to learn how human reason works. Nor will I stoop to name calling in talking about people who question President Obama's place of birth, although it’s tempting to bring up the...

In the Chronicle Review, Brian DeLay has a thoughtful discussion of the war on drugs, placing it in light of border wars in the Southwest 160 years ago. At one point, DeLay has a clear summation of the war, one that recognizes that it isn't an answer to the problems of drug abuse, but a compounding of them.

"The drug war is born of law. According to estimates by the United Nations, roughly one in 20 adults worldwide uses illegal drugs—and nowhere more than in the United States, where the vast market for illicit drugs remains immensely profitable. Prohibition has failed. What it has done is deny drug producers, distributors, and consumers access to the protections and conveniences of the legal marketplace."

A week ago, The New York Times sponsored a

A couple of weeks ago (15 July), Sara Hebel posted a report in The Chronicle on a speech Stanley Ikenberry had given to a meeting of state higher-education leaders. Ikenberry, who was for a number of years the president of the American Council on Education and is now the co-principal of something called the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment, told the group that they were now doing a great deal to assess student learning, but not doing enough to use the assessment data to improve learning outcomes. “The risk is learning-outcome assessments can be an end in themselves.”

Ikenberry apparently urged the state leaders to “do more to stress the broader social purpose of assessing learning.”