Grafton, Anthony. "Britain: the Disgrace of the Universities." NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS BLOG March 9, 2010.

British universities face a crisis of the mind and spirit. For thirty years, Tory and Labour politicians, bureaucrats, and “managers” have hacked at the traditional foundations of academic life. Unless policies and practices change soon, the damage will be impossible to remedy. As an “Occasional Student” at University College London in the early 1970s and a regular visitor to the Warburg Institute, Oxford, and Cambridge after that, I—like many American humanists—envied colleagues who taught at British universities. We had offices with linoleum; they had rooms with carpets. We worked at desks; they sat with their students on comfy chairs and gave them glasses of sherry. Above all, we felt under constant pressure to do the newest new thing, and show the world that we were doing it: to be endlessly innovative and interdisciplinary and industrious. British humanists innovated too. Edward Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm, Frances Yates and Peter Burke, and many others formulated new ways of looking at history for my generation. But British academics always admitted, as we sometimes did not, that it is vital to preserve and update our traditional disciplines and forms of knowledge: languages, precise interpretation of texts and images and objects, rigorous philosophical analysis and argument. Otherwise all the sexy interdisciplinary work will yield only a trickle of trendy blather. There was a Slow Food feel to British university life, based on a consensus that people should take the time to make an article or a book as dense and rich as it could be. Good American universities were never exactly Fast Food Nation, but we certainly felt the pressure to produce, regularly and rapidly. . . . Read the rest here: http://blogs.nybooks.com/post/437005501/britain-the-disgrace-of-the-universities.

Menand, Louis. "The PHD Problem." HARVARD MAGAZINE (November-December 2009).

Menand, Louis. The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University. New York: Norton, 2010. Bass professor of English Louis Menand is a literary critic and intellectual and cultural historian—author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Metaphysical Club and a regular contributor to the New Yorker. He is also a scholar of his discipline (he co-edited the modernism volume in the Cambridge History of Literary Criticism) and of the very notion of the academy itself (Menand edited The Future of Academic Freedom, 1997). His new book, The Marketplace of Ideas, to be published in December by W.W. Norton, is informed in part by his recent service as faculty co-leader in the development of Harvard College’s new General Education curriculum, introduced this fall (the book is dedicated to his colleagues in that protracted task). In this work, Menand examines general education, the state of the humanities, the tensions between disciplinary and interdisciplinary work, and, in chapter four, “Why Do Professors All Think Alike?” The following excerpts, from the third and fourth chapters and his conclusion, probe the professionalization of a research-oriented professoriate and the practice and consequences of contemporary doctoral education, and the resulting implications for liberal-arts colleges, universities, and the wider society. . . . Read the rest here: http://harvardmagazine.com/2009/11/professionalization-in-academy. See also:

• "Author Menand on Reforming American Universities." National Public Radio January 18, 2010 (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122702647);
• Lewis-Kraus, Gideon. "The Opening of the Academic Mind: How to Rescue the Professoriate from Professionalisation." Slate January 17, 2010 (http://www.slate.com/id/2241555/);
• McClay, Wilfred M. "The Conundrum on Campus." Wall Street Journal January 14, 2010 (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704281204575003251630833606.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion).

Showalter, Elaine. "'Changing Places' in Changed Times." CHRONICLE REVIEW September 12, 2008.

Thirty years ago, every American academic going on a research trip or a sabbatical to England carried a copy of David Lodge's comic classic, Changing Places (1975), which told a tale of two 40-year-old professors of English literature and two embattled campuses in the eventful spring of 1969. An ineffectual British academic, Philip Swallow, from the University of Rummidge (think Birmingham), and a hotshot American star, Morris Zapp, from the State University of Euphoria (a fictional state between Northern and Southern California), in Plotinus (Berkeley), switch places for a six-month exchange of offices, courses, and even wives. Both are transformed by the experience, and since the women's-liberation movement is just beginning (the Plotinus Gazette announces its first demonstration, for free child-care centers), the wives are changing, too, in ways none of the characters can foresee or control. . . . Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i03/03b00401.htm. See also Showalter's Faculty Towers: the Academic Novel and its Discontents (Pennsylvania: U of Pennsylvania P, 2005).

Furedi, Frank. "Spell It Like It is." SPIKED ONLINE August 12, 2008.

Those of us who work in universities are used to reading essays by students who have liberated themselves from the oppressive regime of good grammar and spelling. Some of us still bother to correct misspelled words; others have become tired and indifferent to the problem of poor spelling. Now, an academic has come up with an interesting compromise. Ken Smith, a criminologist at Bucks New University, England, argues that we should chill out and accept the most common spelling mistakes as ‘variant spellings’. . . .

Read the rest here: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/5574/.

Jaschik, Scott. "A Moderate MLA." INSIDE HIGHER ED December 31, 2007.

The Modern Language Association frequently helps out its critics with provocative session titles and left-leaning political stands offered by its members. At this year’s annual meeting, in Chicago, some MLA members have worried that the association was poised to take stances that would have sent David Horowitz’s fund raising through the roof with resolutions that appeared to be anti-Israel and pro-Ward Churchill. But in moves that infuriated the MLA’s Radical Caucus, the association’s Delegate Assembly refused to pass those resolutions and instead adopted much narrower measures. The association acknowledged tensions over the Middle East on campus, but in a resolution that did not single out pro-Israel groups for criticism. And the association criticized the University of Colorado for the way it started its investigation of Ward Churchill, but took no stand on whether the outcome (his firing) was appropriate. . . . Read the rest here: http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/12/31/mla.

Berger, Joseph. "Exploring Ways to Shorten the Ascent to a PhD." NEW YORK TIMES October 3, 2007.

Many of us have known this scholar: The hair is well-streaked with gray, the chin has begun to sag, but still our tortured friend slaves away at a masterwork intended to change the course of civilization that everyone else just hopes will finally get a career under way. We even have a name for this sometimes pitied species — the A.B.D. — All But Dissertation. But in academia these days, that person is less a subject of ridicule than of soul-searching about what can done to shorten the time, sometimes much of a lifetime, it takes for so many graduate students to, well, graduate. The Council of Graduate Schools, representing 480 universities in the United States and Canada, is halfway through a seven-year project to explore ways of speeding up the ordeal. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/03/education/03education.html?_r=3&em&ex=1191556800&en=f96cc1319be46d7b&ei=5087&oref=slogin&oref=slogin&oref=slogin..