Okay, I am now officially running late. But here’s this http://thebaffler.com/past/academy_fight_song perfect for the first day of school. The guy who wrote it is so market-obsessed that he literally doesn’t see how government policy drives the expansion of university administrations. So this is only half the necessary analysis. It’s still a pretty good half. I…

I have reached that point in the run up to the new term where I begin to wonder if I actually want to produce a syllabus. This is the product of frustration.  When I stand back and look at it rationally, I know I want to produce a syllabus.  The syllabus is the first line…

Sometimes I find it very discouraging that the seasons just keep going around and around the way they do. You get used to one of them and the next one shows up. You settle into one schedule and then you have to rip your biological clock into shreds for the next. It’s the end of…

So yesterday was one of those days–I kept getting links to various blog posts and op ed pieces and articles, and I kept reading them and getting headaches. One of those headaches had the distinction of being a time bomb, something that doesn’t happen to me often at this stage of the came. I agreed…

Sometimes I get up in the morning, do my work, check my mail, and it’s as if nothing in the world has happened. I don’t even have mail from work. Over night last night, on the other hand, a lot seems to have happened.   So let me see if I can address some of the…

Yesterday was Thursday, and as on every Thursday, we got our issue of our little weekly newspaper. And, interestingly enough, there was actually some news in it–the cops in a local town had made one of their very infrequent serious drug busts; and a guy in a parking lot of a 7-11, seeing a police…

This morning, after I was finished with actual work (and mailed that work to myself  in case the entire computer went kablooey), I came across this: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/08/16/how-students-are-being-set-up-to-fail/ This is an article about the first test results using the new Common Core, which is a curriculum promulgated by  the Department of Education that can be, but…

Sometimes Sacrosanct Sundays don’t happen because I have too much work to do, and sometimes they  happen because…well, because. This morning we had a power outage just before seven.  It was a very short power outage, lasting not much more than a single minute, but in that minute it shut down the computer, lost me…

 So.  I was thinking over the discussion yesterday, and what occurred to me was this: I don’t think we have a problem in  this country these days with  lots of people thinking work is beneath them, or that it is contemptible in the way Aristotle thought it. In fact, especially in the United States, we…

Well, the good news is that it took  me this long to get to the blog today.  I actually did some work I  might want to  keep.  Yay. But mostly what I have to say has to do w ith yesterday’s post, and Lymaree’s comment that Aristotle’s Great Souled Man is Donald Trump. No. Aristotle would…