Paterson to CUNY: “Take a Hike…A Tuition Hike!" 
The money used to fatten Mathew Goldstein’s wallet isn’t going to grow on trees, people, so get ready to pony up some cash! As if David Paterson hasn’t already caused the students at CUNY and SUNY enough grief with his statewide cuts to higher education, Governor Justice is now looking to help the struggling university systems recoup some of those losses by proposing legislation that would allow the Boards of Trustees at SUNY and CUNY to increase and/or adjust tuition rates at will. Paterson’s new bill (euphemistically titled the
Higher Education Empowerment and Innovation Act) would neither empower students nor provide for any greater innovation
This morning, as I slipped into my underwire, c-cup-with-a-hint-of-padding Donna Karan bra, I realized, again, that I have yet to find the perfect-fitting brassiere. No, I am not seeking a nature-defying, power-boobs effect (I need to be able to see the book in my lap, for starters) nor...
A New Literary History of America by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors. Belknap Press (2009).A book as long and as rich as A New Literary History of America cannot have justice done to its many individual essays in the space of a single review. Nevertheless, highlights from the volume fairly leap out every twenty or thirty pages or so, begging especial mention
The Marketplace of Ideas by Louis Menand. W. W. Norton and Company (2010).
The Great American University: Its Rise to Preeminence, Its Indispensable National Role, Why It Must Be Protected by Jonathan R. Cole. Public Affairs (2010).In The Marketplace of Ideas, Menand narrows his emphasis to a set of particular issues, but in the process provides a useful overview of American higher education. The book is organized into three essays examining three particular issues in higher education: 1) the history of the general education curriculum, 2) the logic of academic disciplines and the allure of “interdisciplinarity” as a buzzword in academia, and 3) the politics of professors and the academic labor market.
A Village Life: Poems by Louise Glück. Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2009).One way to approach a book of poems is to imagine not how the poet speaks, but from what stage. Wordsworth talks out of the woods, on a long walk. Allen Ginsberg shouts to his reader from a crowded bar.
