Academic Questions articles from March 2000

Academic Questions archives from March 2000

LETTERS.(Letter to the Editor)
March 22, 2000... Confining the Classics To the editor, Your reflections on the use of highlighters and underlining text ("From the Editor's Desk," Spring 1999) brought to mind a visit of the formidable Professor Philip Rieff to Concordia's Great Books...

The Reluctant Academics of Capitalism.
March 22, 2000... I. The State of Business--How and Why? Over the past two years, the news of Cendant Corporation's creative earnings, Archer Daniels Midland's price fixing, Bankers Trust's leveraged derivatives, and Long-Term Capital's high-risk bets with...

Critical Medical Theory.
March 22, 2000... Identity politics and other themes in the culture war are beginning to infect the health professions. A major preoccupation of schools of public health, institutions of medical training and research, and the Department of Health and Human...

Pedagogical Advocacy.
March 22, 2000... Although I am affiliated with Harvard's Graduate School of Education, that is usually not enough to redeem me in the eyes of scholars in the arts and sciences or in other professional schools, at Harvard, as well as at other universities....

Corrupting the Rule of Law.
March 22, 2000... A Russian, a Cuban, an American, and a lawyer are seated in the same compartment on a train. The Russian takes a bottle of vodka out of his luggage, pours some into a glass, drinks it, and firmly states: "In Russia, we have best...

A Word.(Poem)
March 22, 2000... No, nothing weightless like a soul Can possibly exist, except as just a word, Nothing that one can't see or touch Like someone's eyes or someone's face, Though words, it's true, are more than random noise Like aspens...

Gramsci's Revenge: Reconstructing American Democracy.
March 22, 2000... Sometime during the 1990s the culture war entered a second stage. If the period from the late 1960s to the mid 1990s could be called the era of "deconstruction," the early to mid 1990s witnessed the beginnings of the period of "reconstruction."...

Great Books in the Undergraduate Curriculum.
March 22, 2000... Many people in Morningside Heights, on the Upper Westside of Manhattan, where I live, know that great books have had a long history in the undergraduate curriculum. When pressed to say how long, most will say very long; some will venture a...

My War with the AHA.
March 22, 2000... For the past twenty-three years I have been a practicing historian in three different academic departments, and during that time I have had an intermittent, generally difficult relationship with my professional organization, the American...

Literary Studies, Then and Now.
March 22, 2000... It is a very great honor to receive an award in the name of Peter Shaw. Peter was a giant among the few in literary studies who stood against the destructive trends that have now overwhelmed the field. Nobody stated the situation better than...

The Rise and Fall of English: Reconstructing English as a Discipline.(Review)
March 22, 2000... The Rise and Fall of English: Reconstructing English as a Discipline, by Robert Scholes. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998, 203 pp., $20.00 hardbound. Should English professors stop teaching literature and start teaching bumper...

Shattering the Myths: Women in Academe.(Review)
March 22, 2000... Shattering the Myths: Women in Academe, by Judith Glazer-Raymo. Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999, 237 pp., $38.00 hardbound. In the opening pages of Shattering the Myths, Judith Glazer-Raymo describes her...

The Twilight of the Intellectuals: Culture and Politics in the Era of the Cold War.(Review)
March 22, 2000... The Twilight of the Intellectuals: Culture and Politics in the Era of the Cold War, by Hilton Kramer. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1999, 363 pages, $27.50 hardbound. Merriam-Webster defines an intellectual as one engaged in activities regarding...

Reconstructing History: The Emergence of a New Historical Society.(Review)
March 22, 2000... Reconstructing History: The Emergence Of a New Historical Society, ed. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn. New York: Routledge, 1999, 399 pp., $21.99 paperback. In May 1998, a group of distinguished historians announced the...

Books and Articles of Academic Interest.
March 22, 2000... The Journal of Education is published by Boston University's School of Education, and the Fall 1998 issue (vol. 180, no.3) provides a stimulating examination of the theme, "Relativism and Pluralism." These issues, notes NAS member and guest...