What should graduate teaching look like when it aims to prepare students for a range of careers? That's a welcome question, but it is not an easy one. The author takes up the problem in two parts, this month from the individual faculty member's perspective, and next month on the curricular level (that is, from the point of view of departments and…

In 1966 a group of friends gathered for a dinner party in Manhattan. As the evening was winding down, one of the guests, Lloyd N. Morrisett, a vice president at the Carnegie Corporation, turned to his host, a television executive named Joan Ganz Cooney, and asked a seemingly innocuous question: Can television educate young children? Unknown to…

Nobody shouts "It's alive!" in the novel that gave birth to Frankenstein's monster. "Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus," does not feature mad scientists messing around with beakers in laboratories, nor does it deliver any bug-eyed assistants named Igor. Hollywood has given people those stock images, but the story of the monster and his maker…

The decoding of the human genome was supposed to have been the dawn of the age of personalized medicine. It turned out, though, that health is affected by a lot more than genes. As scientists were already aware, the environment and life experiences also have a huge impact on disease. Researchers, such as Jeremy K. Nicholson, have worked to make…

Disquisitions about public intellectuals usually conclude that they are not what they used to be. The pessimism about public intellectuals is reflected in attitudes about how the rise of the Internet in general, and blogs in particular, affects intellectual output. Critics fail to recognize how the growth of blogs and other forms of online writing…

The connection that critics make between medical genetics and eugenics is historically fallacious. Activists on the political right are as mistaken as activists on the political left: Genetic screening was not eugenics in the past, is not eugenics in the present, and, unless its technological systems become radically transformed, will not be…

Earlier 20th-century thinkers like Lewis Mumford and Edmund Wilson kept the university and its apparatus at arm's length. Indeed, they often disdained it. They oriented themselves toward an educated public, and, as a result, they developed a straightforward prose and gained a nonprofessional audience. As his reputation grew, Wilson printed up a…

Is ethical leadership possible in the politics of this era? Had the question no specific time frame, the answer might be yes, or at least yes and no. In the 21st century, the idea that people can expect ethical leadership in American politics is to believe that hope triumphs over experience. The purpose of politics is no longer to do what is right…

While Freud's reputation is in decline among psychiatrists and psychologists, it is on the rise among literary and film critics, historians, anthropologists, and political scientists, where it is being adopted as a tool to help analyze historical movements, literary works and films, cultural patterns, and political theories. (MSE)

Although feminist inquiry has gained security and respectability, a move away from theory may have emerged from this proven proficiency in theoretical discourse. Feminists must initiate a new, intergenerational dialogue for the 1990s. (MSE)