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 Bill Stamets. I can imagine that the life Hannah Arendt lived in America could inform her "life of the mind" in ways the books she read in America might not. If Richard H. King’s book Arendt and America omitted how her years of life among the Americans mattered, the reviewer Charles Clavey ("Arendt Among the Americans," January 22) did, too — and omitted mentioning King’s omission. 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 Jeffrey R. Young. One student's perspective: "It’s Thursday night and you have two big homeworks due Friday. Your friends are going out. You’re just like, I just want to finish this, I don’t really care how this gets done". More...

As we did last year, we are inviting several academic and start-up leaders to make three-minute pitches about innovative projects or products they think will deal with key problems facing higher education. 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...