One of my favorite bumper sticker declares: “Unions: the folks who brought you the Weekend.” Unions also brought us this weekend’s holiday (for those who have Monday off, that is…).

Personally, I take Labor Day seriously, even though doesn’t have the same significance for me as it does for some people because I don’t own white shoes. But I like Labor Day for what it conjures up: images of hot-dogs, stoop-based Spauldings games, the day-before-school-starts, and ladies fanning themselves with folded paper plates.

I also like it because I am a working-class girl. It is a badge I wear proudly, along with “Union Made.” (And yes, “Union Maid.” That too.)

Soon after she got off the boat from Sicily, my grandmother started sewing buttonholes for the shirts of elegant, unknown men who worked in...

Gina Barreca and Michael Nelson on Brainstorm have already weighed in on John McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin to be his running mate. This is an election year, and the stakes too important, for any of us to stay out of the fray.

John McCain, looking around at all the possible VP candidates, decided that Sarah Palin was the best possible candidate. Is it that she’s the best qualified because she’s a former beauty queen, sports reporter, mayor of a small town, and now the governor of Alaska for a couple of years? Is it because John McCain has known her for a long time and deeply admires her mind? Is it because, when interviewed about the VP position, she said, “What is it exactly that the VP does every day?”

Let’s sum things up for those who don’t understand what’s going on right in front of us. John McCain tapped...

My former student, Hanley, called me this afternoon and said “You’re not voting for McCain, are you?”

Hanley teaches tough kids in New Hampshire (yes, they exist) and is writing a novel. He’s a smart kid himself and we talk about his writing a couple of times a month even though he graduated from UConn a few years ago. He took several classes with me and knows me pretty well.

He knew, therefore, that asking if I intend to vote for McCain is like asking me whether I’m going to start teaching Jazzercise or learning to skydive. These are not reasonable questions. Certainly not for a person who is sober.

But I hadn’t heard the news about Sarah Palin, you see. I hadn’t heard that McCain threw his trackers off-scent and decided to...

The Chronicle of Higher Education Almanac Issue for 2008-09 is out, and it contains some interesting comparisons with the preceding year’s results. A few highlights:

——-As reported a few days ago, SAT scores remained the same this year, but the preceding year (the most recent scores in the 2008-09 Almanac) saw a drop of 1 point on “Critical Reading” by boys, a 3 point drop in math by girls and by boys, and a 2 point drop for both in writing.

——-On “Political Views,” 2007 freshmen inched slightly to the left of 2006 freshmen. 23.9 percent of 2006 called themselves “conservative,” while 23.1 percent of 2007 did so. Liberals in 2006 reached 28.4 percent, while liberals in 2007 reached 29.3 percent. (An added note not contained in the Chronicle data is that the youth vote runs about 2-to-1...

CNBC, Fox News, and now NBC are reporting that John McCain has chosen Sarah Palin, the 44-year-old, first-term (first year!) governor of Alaska, as his vice presidential nominee. What a terrible choice.

McCain’s mistake is not in choosing a woman, a governor, or a pro-life conservative—all of which Palin is. It’s in choosing someone whose resume is so short and thin. McCain has just forfeited his two major assets as a candidate—long experience in government and strong commander-in-chief credentials—for, well, for what? And don’t think he won’t pay a price on Election Day: McCain’s age means that, even more than usual, voters will be looking at Palin as a potential president as much as a potential vice president.

Candidates for president can get too clever by half in choosing their running mates. In 1968,...

I am spending the week in Michigan, which means that I’m just about completely caught up on the scandal surrounding Detroit’s Kwame Kilpatrick, the so-called “hip-hop mayor,” who faces the prospect of being ousted as early as next week during a “removal hearing” ordered by Michigan’s governor, Jennifer Granholm.

Of course, Michigan was one of the two states trapped in the middle of the Clinton-Obama vote tabulation dispute this primary season, so it is also interesting to see local coverage of the Democratic Convention. The message doesn’t seem too differently pitched than the one offered up by national media outlets (although every other TV commercial seems to be that McCain ad linking Ayers to Obama).

But where do we all stand now? Well, we have already heard the Clintons offer their two-pronged support of the...

When I was asked last fall to blog for the Chronicle Review, I thought only of the impossibility of blogging. Who are these people who think they’re saying something coherent, on all these crazy topics, two to three times a week? No way that could ever be me. And if someone had said to me, “Laurie, in about ten months you’re going to have written 100 posts on your little blog,” I would have laughed with disbelief. Yet here I am, at exactly that point, looking back on my 100 posts in, well, stupefaction: a vast collection of small essays on topics ranging from Georges Seurat to the Monkey Puzzle tree. What I find hardest to comprehend isn’t so much that I wrote them, as that I thought them up in the first place.

As a professor, I’m used to talking about ideas, and people who know me well think of me as a yammerer. I’ve also...

When I was in graduate school in English in the 1980s, nobody talked much about the job market. Other students focused on completing seminar requirements, passing qualifying exams, defining a dissertation topic, and writing the darn thing. Professors, too, stuck to intellectual matters, talking about novels, poems, ideas, and theories, not about dossiers, the MLA Job List, and campus interviews.

I thank my teachers for that, to an extent, for apart from letting graduate students know from the start just how bad the tenure-track job prospects were, I’m not sure that more information about the profession would have helped. Yes, as Marc Bousquet has rightly declared, we should have been informed about the worst trends of “adjunctivization,” but further discussion of all the mechanisms of the market and how to enter it successfully probably wouldn’t...

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

Gary Rhoades, who transformed our understanding of the professoriate with the publication of Managed Professionals and Academic Capitalism in the New Economy, will join Cary Nelson at the helm of the AAUP in January. As director of the Institute for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Arizona, he is already a leading international authority on the complex of issues most pressing for AAUP: the assault on faculty culture by administration via the forced introduction of academic-capitalist values and practices; deprofessionalization and casualization; and the complex global-economic relations between state, market, and campus actors.

Taking on the General Secretary’s position, Rhoades will...

Today is Opening Day for me. Counting occasional summer sessions, it’s about my 70th first day of class as a college professor. I still get excited, still get nervous. I don’t play competitive sports anymore, but I feel the same pregame sensation of needing both to drink and to pass water.

What do I hope to accomplish today in each of my classes?

First and foremost, I want to get my students excited about the subject we are about to spend four months studying together. That means I need to show them that I’m excited about it. Serene offhandedness and critical detachment—stances that we academics often adopt when talking about teaching with each other—ain’t gonna cut it with a group of undergraduates. If you’re not excited about what you’re teaching, what are the odds that they’re going to be?