By James Livingston. Do we live in a "Second Gilded Age," a reiteration of the late 19th century, when "robber barons" like Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and J.P. Morgan soaked the poor, bought the Senate, and swashbuckled their way into the imagination of Mark Twain, who coined the term in 1873. More...

By Tara Isabella Burton. How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? 
For most people, this is the prime example of a nonsensical question: the kind of useless theorizing that characterized centuries of theological debate. More...

By Sheila Liming. "Where are you from?" people ask — innocently, not understanding that my answer is likely to exceed the limits of their time and their patience. I can offer two replies. More...

By Gregory Jones-Katz. Over the past four decades, scholars in the American humanities have used deconstruction — a style of interpretation pioneered by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida — to question the binary oppositions that structure society and enforce power relations. More...

By Corey Robin. As an archetype, the public intellectual is a conflicted being, torn in two competing directions.
On the one hand, he’s supposed to be called by some combination of the two vocations Max Weber set out in his lectures in Munich: that of the scholar and that of the statesman. Neither academic nor activist but both, the public intellectual is a monkish figure of austere purpose and unadorned truth. Think Noam Chomsky. More...

By Gary Schmidgall. As the presidential race grinds wearyingly on, I find myself fondly reminiscing about the Illinois Republican Everett Dirksen, a congressman and senator for three decades. Perhaps he is best remembered as being crucial to the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, but I remember him as a partisan for Tagetes erecta, the marigold. More...

By Corinne Ruff. When Scott F. Johnson got an email on Wednesday from Academia.edu asking if he was interested in paying "a small fee" to get his future papers considered for recommendation by the website’s editors, he thought it was a scam. More...

By Andrew J. Policano. Diversity initiatives always begin with highly passionate individuals expressing great enthusiasm about enhancing the numbers of minority students, faculty members, or staff members. More...

By Sara Hebel. Public universities should deepen their engagement with their communities and make those partnerships part of their core academic missions, says Robert J. Jones, president of the University at Albany, part of the State University of New York system. Universities' expertise should be used to solve society's complex problems, he says, and public engagement needs to be integrated into both faculty-reward systems and students' educational experiences. More...