One signal virtue of teaching undergraduates, then, is that it serves as a powerful reminder that pedagogy should be understood as a means of dissemi… - Michael Bérubé

The rules for literary analysis are the same rules in play for any kind of analysis: mastery of the material. Cogency of supporting evidence. Ability to imagine and rebut salient counterarguments. Extra points for wit and style, points off for mind-numbing clichés, and permanent suspension for borrowing someone else’s argument without proper attribution.

Universities can try, with a little imagination, a little nerve, and a little more money, to provide a humane working and living environment for every human being they employ and every human family in every form of human social arrangement. A few are already doing so. And like those universities that have adopted livingwage policies and have negotiated in good faith with campus unions, they are setting an example for the rest of American business culture to follow — and perhaps even an example for which our children and our gay colleagues will someday thank them.

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.