Another snow day. Steve had to shovel out to get the train station. Jonah was guilt tripped to get out of bed and help him. The boys are home all day.
Great conversation about 529’s last week. I’ll follow up with a similar post later in the week. Right now, I’m getting back in the swing of blogging, after a weekend off. Here are a few things that I caught:
A great article on 529s at the Atlantic.
Reihan Salam writes, “upper-middle-class people don’t just use their political muscle to keep their taxes low. They also use it to make life more expensive for everyone else.”
“Voters are voting straight-party tickets at the highest level in 100 years. This is a result of several forces that have combined over the past decade: (1) the ideological sorting of the parties; (2) residential sorting, where people tend to live in enclaves of like-minded people…”
Academics could save the humanities by teaching.
Lots of thoughts about Andew Sullivan and his depature from blogging. From Tyler Cowen and Ezra Klein.
Apt. 11d 
I haven’t shovelled a bit of snow all winter. I tell my guys, ‘snow is why God made boys’.
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My dad felt the same way about girls and dishes.
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Regarding teaching, there was a time, up to about 1960, when a professor could become famous for his teaching, as someone who filled freshman lecture halls and/or changed lives in upperclass seminars. (In the same way, today, in churchly circles, a pastor can become famous for his preaching: not his theology, nor his essays, nor his pastoral care, nor his church administration, but his preaching.) But that possibility has faded for academics, and writing unmemorable articles in unread journals has become the primary activity of most professors.
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The “public intellectual” is still a thing.
That has a certain amount of teaching in it, although it tends to extend well beyond the classroom.
However, the dark side of “public intellectuals” is that they are often professors operating well outside their scope of academic practice.
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I think there are still professors becoming known for their presenting (I don’t call it teaching, since, as you say, it’s preaching, not pastoral care, and I think teaching includes both)(i.e. filling now, not just freshman lecture halls, but online courses).
I am more aware of the phenomenon in science, and, I do not know that it can precede tenure, but if the goal is becoming “famous” to the point where they become a draw, for students at the university, or for book publishers, or for media sources, that still happens.
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there was a time, up to about 1960, when a professor could become famous for his teaching, as someone who filled freshman lecture halls and/or changed lives in upperclass seminars.
There’s a degree to which this is still so even at (or maybe especially at? I can’t say I’m sure) places like Harvard. Michael Sandel, for example, surely has had more influence because of all the (huge number of) undergrads who have taken his famous “justice” class than do to his (much less substantial) academic out-put. (His first book was important for making an argument that, while not really novel, hadn’t been made clearly and concisely since it had been made, more rigorously, by Bradly almost 100 years before. His later work, while having some use, isn’t substantial.) Sandel’s publications based on his lectures (His book _Justice_ and _Why Some Things Should Not be for Sale_) are not without use, but they are semi-pop things, not what you’d expect from someone at Harvard, and he only rarely advises grad students. His domain is the big, undergrad, lecture course. My understanding is that there are actually quite a lot of people like this at Harvard, and probably at other similar places. So, my take is that this objection is at best over-put, and more likely not really accurate.
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Academics could save the humanities by teaching (more/better) says the prof teaching one esoteric elective-seeming course in the current term. Really? He’s all dismissive of the prestige move to esteem faculty positions by how little they teach yet he clearly participates in that same reductionist economy. Bah.
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