Buddhists speak of learning to see the world with “beginner’s mind,” and that’s precisely what you have to do every semester: begin again, from scrat… - Michael Bérubé

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.

One signal virtue of teaching undergraduates, then, is that it serves as a powerful reminder that pedagogy should be understood as a means of dissemination rather than a means of reproduction, even — or especially — on those bad days when you are teaching only to the six.

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.