Universities can try, with a little imagination, a little nerve, and a little more money, to provide a humane working and living environment for ever… - Michael Bérubé

I also tell students that an essay of two thousand words doesn’t give them all that much space to get going. “You’ve only got a few pages to make that argument of yours. You don’t need a grand introductory paragraph that begins, ‘Mark Twain is one of Earth’s greatest writers.’ It’s far better to start by giving us some idea of what you’ll be arguing and why. If you like, you can even begin by pointing us to a particularly important passage that will serve as the springboard for your larger discussion: ‘Not long after the second scaffold scene in The Scarlet Letter, when Arthur Dimmesdale joins hands with Hester Prynne and her daughter, Pearl, Nathaniel Hawthorne asks us to reconsider the meaning of the scarlet A on Hester’s breast.’”

In foreign affairs, both left and right claim to speak for the conscience of America, but on Iraq the right has no moral clarity and the left has lost its moral compass. This is not a problem for the masters of realpolitik, who have long since inured themselves to the task of doing terrible things to human beings in the course of pursuing the national interest, but it is utterly devastating to those few souls who still dream that the course of human events should be judged — and guided — by principles common to many nations rather than by policies concocted by one. The emergence of the antiwar right, however, may yet hold a lesson for the left, insofar as the antiwar right relies on Brent Scowcroft’s internationalism rather than Pat Buchanan’s isolationism: the challenge clearly is to learn how to be strenuously anti-imperialist without being indiscriminately antiwar. It is a lesson the American left has never had to learn — until now.

The paradox is that university life can be both terrific and troubling for parents and children alike: the workplace environment is casual and accommodating on the one hand and clueless and hostile on the other. Usually all at the same time.