In the 1920s, jazz was widely condemned as "the devil's music," and "Ladies' Home Journal" warned its readers that young people were being morally corrupted as they danced along to "the abominable jazz orchestra with its voodoo-born minors and its direct appeal to the sensory center." But within a few decades, jazz was fully absorbed into the…

In academe, the game of how to win friends and influence people is serious business. Administrators and grant makers want proof that a researcher's work has life beyond the library or the lab. But the current system of measuring scholarly influence does not reflect the way many researchers work in an environment driven more and more by the social…

Eight years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq and a few months after the withdrawal of the military forces from the country, Iraq's universities, devastated by years of dictatorship, sanctions, and war, are still struggling to recover. The security situation has improved since the deadly, dark days of 2006 and 2007, when the country teetered on the…

The author talks about a new generation of Ph.D.'s that is advancing the field with a multidisciplinary approach. Like their predecessors who worked to establish black studies as a respected academic discipline, today's Ph.D. students are also attracted to the social mission of the field. But younger black-studies scholars are willing to work with…

On the road to producing the best possible work, one encounters dead ends and speed traps that are difficult to avoid because they are disguised as promising, rewarding, or helpful. In this series on "good deeds" that can backfire in one's career, the author does not challenge the virtue of doing good deeds, in theory or in practice. However, some…

Before all the talk about "public intellectuals," Michael Walzer was one. For 50 years, he has gone back and forth between positions at Princeton and Harvard Universities and then at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, New Jersey, where he is now emeritus. His writings appear regularly in "Dissent" magazine, which he has co-edited for…

A persistent criticism of the digital-humanities movement is that it is elitist and exclusive because it requires the resources of a major university (faculty, infrastructure, money), and is thus more suited to campuses with a research focus. Academics and administrators at small liberal-arts colleges may read about DH and, however exciting it…

The modern world's understanding of American university press has long been shaped by university-press books. American university-press books are good international advertisements for the universities whose logos grace their spines. The growth of transnational scholarship and the expansion of digital communications networks are converging in ways…

Academic fame is an even stranger goddess than her nonacademic counterpart. In this article, the author contends that academic fame is not easily lost, compared with other kinds of fame. In the world of films or novels, one's fame is fleeting--one is often only as good as his last production. Films that splashed across marquees in the summer are…

Scholarly groups have long served as hubs of academic life and the embodiments of their disciplines, but they face uncertain and divergent futures. Some disciplinary associations are struggling to remain relevant and financially viable as demographic and technological changes threaten their traditional sources of revenue. The core of their…

While university presses grapple with the economic and technological challenges now affecting how books are published--the subject of a thousand and one AAUP conference sessions, e-mail-list debates, and news articles--discussion of "what" is published seems to have taken a back seat. And understandably so. Why obsess about content if books are…

This article reports on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) public-access policy, which requires that agency-financed research results be made publicly available within 12 months of publication. The policy, which went into effect in April 2008, came under assault last year when Rep. John Conyers Jr., Democrat of Michigan, introduced the Fair…

In this article, the author talks about the challenges of a public scholar's life and argues that the rigid standards of hiring and tenure stand in the way of humanities professors as public scholars. She states that the usual lament of the humanities--"There is plenty of money to support work in science and engineering but very little to support…

A recent report from the Modern Language Association, "Standing Still: The Associate Professor Survey," unfortunately passed over an important aspect of women's rise through the professorial ranks: how they move through the process of monograph publication, especially in comparison with male colleagues. As an acquiring editor in the scholarly and…

Most people do not understand what religious study really is. Professors of religion are often confused with, or assumed to be allies of, professors of theology. The reason for the confusion is no secret. All too often, even at public universities, the religion department is peopled by theologians, and many of those theologians refuse to make the…