So it's a couple more this time, so sue me.  You don't have to read them all.

A pedagogical point, about the need to read more in order to write better.  This is actually I think a much more powerful piece of pedagogical strategy than almost any technique for resisting, or improving, the "five-paragraph essay".

Paul Tough's book The Years that Matter Most makes the case that the key factor to confront in thinking about higher ed today is the massive public disinvestment in public higher education, especially at levels below the "flagship" universities, in regional universities and community colleges.  This is right, I think--it's a slow-motion disaster, and it's been going on long enough for us to feel the effects of it even today.  

You ever hear of the "Dunning-Kruger Effect"?  Oh, you say you know all about it?  You're an idiot.  

"Attack my taste, by all means: call me a pseud, dismiss me as dumb, dump me and tell me I deserve to die for liking Toto’s ‘Africa’. In short, make war on my taste. That tells me you care about what I think and love."  An essay which observes, rightly, that we used to argue about aesthetics, and now we argue about politics.  Is this an advance?  In one sense we've come to tolerate different tastes, and certainly accept much broader tastes.  But the author fears something important has been lost in jettisoning the connection between one's taste and one's inmost being.  It's worth considering.

"Area studies", which involves part of the liberal arts, and its importance for national security, by a political theorist friend of mine who teaches at Fordham.  Good stuff.  (Once again--education! It's a good thing...)

A small bit of esoterica for you today--the epistolary exchange between Hannah Arendt and Eric Voegelin sparked by Voegelin's encounter with Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism.  There was a published exchange, but these letters actually were written before that.  Given that, in a way, Voegelin's position still has some power as a deep antecedent of a certain kind of theo-con critique of modernity, and Arendt's has a certain kind of antecedence for many post-Marxist and critical theory critiques of modernity, it's quite interesting.