Nicolaus Mills 2014-12-25T20:37:24-05:00 Nicolaus Mills Copyright 2008,, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Nicolaus Mills Good old fashioned elbow grease. Sticking It to the President,2014:/theblog//3.4936860 2014-03-10T16:21:40-04:00 2014-05-10T05:59:02-04:00 Nicolaus Mills
A case in point -- August 12, 1941. That's when, by a 203 to 202 margin, the House of Representatives changed the course of American history by voting to extend the peace-time draft law that Congress had passed a year earlier.

The close vote was no accident. Since the summer of 1940, Republicans had enjoyed criticizing President Franklin Roosevelt and the Democrats for their support of the unpopular, peace-time draft law.

What changed on August 12 was that a small, but important, group of Republicans broke ranks with their party to allow one-vote passage of a draft bill that the Senate then quickly approved.

The relevance of this historic 1941 vote is that it offers us perspective on just how far out-of-power parties are prepared to go when they believe they benefit from sticking it to the president.

Today's Tea Party-led Republicans, who continually oppose whatever legislation President Obama backs -- from immigration reform to raising the minimum wage -- have nothing on the Republicans of the pre-Pearl Harbor years, most of whom were unwilling to cut the president slack, even with the armies of Germany and Japan on the march.

In his memoir, My First Fifty Years in Politics, Joe Martin, the Republican House minority leader during that era, did not hesitate to defend the contradictory role he played in opposing the draft extension bill of 1941, which he believed would weaken the Democratic Party but which he also thought the country needed. "Thus, while as a leader I voted against it myself, I hoped that it would pass," Martin wrote years later.

A miscalculation by Martin in 1941 would have sent America into war against Japan and Germany with a military that was downsizing rather than expanding. Yet, Martin concluded that risking such a disaster was worth the potential political gain. Small wonder then that today's Tea Party militants are willing to perpetuate a Congressional stalemate when America's military survival is not at stake.

The question that remains is, What can President Obama do in the face of this political stalemate?

After World War II began, FDR did not have to face Republican opposition to the draft or to military spending. Unemployment dropped from 14.6 percent in 1940 to 1.2 percent in 1944, and during the war, Roosevelt was able to make domestic progress by playing the veteran card.

In 1944 he succeeded in getting Congress to pass the G.I. Bill, which, after the war ended, helped 4.3 million vets purchase homes at low interest rates and allowed 2.2 million vets to get a college education in which their tuition and fees were paid for.

Today, by contrast, the Democratic-Republican standoff shows no signs of improving. Tea Party conservatives in their safe seats are not worried about the stalled recovery's effect on the poor, and Democrats can't yield any more on such basics as the extension of long-term unemployment insurance without losing the trust of their supporters.

That puts achieving any change in the status quo squarely in the hands of the president as he heads toward mid-term elections in which the party occupying the White House typically loses seats in Congress. The president has one clear option, though, if he wants to make headway on the domestic front -- make sure his health care reform lives up to its potential.

There are already parts of the Affordable Health Care Act everyone regards as a triumph. Nobody is proposing changing the provision that allows the young to stay on their parents' health plans until they are 26, and nobody is arguing that those with pre-existing health conditions should be denied coverage or forced to pay higher rates.

The immediate challenge for the president is to get the families who have had trouble navigating online access to health care in a position in which they can benefit from the new law.

A February Kaiser Health Tracking Poll showed that 50 percent of the uninsured say they don't have enough information to know how the Affordable Care Act will impact their families. Worse still, 76 percent of the uninsured don't know they have to sign up for health care by March 31 or pay a penalty.

That's a lot of Americans in need, a lot of voters who will go to the polls this November.]]>
Safe at Home: Learning from Jackie Robinson,2014:/theblog//3.4562638 2014-01-08T16:17:45-05:00 2014-03-10T05:59:02-04:00 Nicolaus Mills eliminate violent collisions at home plate between catchers and base runners.

As the Mets general manager, Sandy Alderson, chairman of the rules committee, observed, "Ultimately what we want to do is change the culture of acceptance that these plays are ordinary and routine and an accepted part of the game."

The change sounds like one that would only interest the hardcore fan. The new rule will prevent runners from deliberately running into catchers rather than simply trying to beat a throw home, and it will, in turn, require catchers to give runners a clear path to the plate, making close plays at home no different than at second or third base, where a runner can't be impeded by an infielder.

There is, however, nothing arcane about the proposed changed. In an era like the present when sports safety -- particularly preventing concussions in football and hockey -- has become a national concern, the new rule would not just affect professional athletes. It would influence players at all levels of baseball.

Over the years collisions at home plate have gotten widespread publicity. The most notorious one occurred in 1970 during the All-Star Game. Cincinnati's Peter Rose, who would go on to establish the major league record for the most career hits, barreled into Cleveland Indians catcher Ray Fosse, fracturing a bone in Fosse's shoulder and giving him a lifetime injury that forced him to develop a less powerful swing. Fosse was never the same home run hitter he had been before the 1970 All-Star Game.

More recently, Buster Posey, the San Francisco Giants catcher and the National League's Most Valuable Player in 2012, had his entire 2011 season cut short as a result of a fractured bone and three torn ankle ligaments in his left leg that he sustained following a home plate collision with the Miami Marlins' Scott Cousins.

The argument against changing the rules to stop home plate collisions comes from those who think the change makes the game soft. "Now you're not allowed to be safe at home plate? What's the game coming to?" Pete Rose asked after learning of the new proposals.

Rose's objections remind us that at one time many veteran players opposed wearing the now-required, protective batting helmets that mitigate the effects of a beaning, but Rose's remarks also ignore how baseball does not need collisions at home plate to remain a game of skill and daring.

The most exciting home plate play in baseball history occurred in the first game of the 1955 World Series between the New York Yankees and the Brooklyn Dodgers. That's when -- many years after he broke baseball's color barrier -- Jackie Robinson stole home on Whitey Ford and beat the tag of Yankees catcher Yogi Berra in a close play.

It was a dramatic moment that centered on three future Hall of Famers, but it might easily have been a tragedy if Robinson (a former UCLA football player) had barreled into Berra instead of sliding, or the smaller Berra (who stood just 5'7") had decided to prevent Robinson from scoring by standing in his way.

The tragedy of Robinson and Berra having their careers cut short as a result of a single, violent play at home never occurred. Both were able to remain in baseball until age caught up with them in their late thirties.

What better argument for the new rules change! For the change to become effective in 2014, all that now awaits it is the approval of the MLB owners and the Major League Baseball Players Association at their next meetings.

Nicolaus Mills is professor of American Studies at Sarah Lawrence College and author of Winning the Peace: The Marshall Plan and America's Coming of Age as a Superpower.]]>
A Longer Look at the Emmett Till-Trayvon Martin Comparison,2013:/theblog//3.3606636 2013-07-17T13:11:58-04:00 2013-09-16T05:12:01-04:00 Nicolaus Mills
In the Zimmerman case we have an eerie historical link to the notorious trial of the two men who in 1955 murdered 14-year-old Emmett Till, a Chicago teenager visiting his relatives in Mississippi. Comparisons between the two cases have been drawn in a number of newspapers in recent days, but the link between the cases is a much deeper one than the comparisons suggest. At issue is not just the South and its past but who draws the boundaries that divide us as a society.

In Martin's case the outward boundaries he crossed were geographic. On his way home with candy and a soft drink, he passed through a townhouse complex where he was an unfamiliar figure to George Zimmerman, who had a history of repeatedly calling the police in Sanford, Florida, to report those he saw as threats. In Zimmerman's eyes Martin was, as he characterized him in his call, one of those "punks" who "always get away."

In Till's case the outward boundaries he crossed were verbal. Till and his cousin, both from the South Side of Chicago, were in rural Mississippi visiting family when they ran into trouble. On a dare from one of the teens he was talking with outside a local country store, Bryant's Grocery and Meat Market, Till was goaded into talking back to the white woman running the store. "Bye, Baby," he allegedly said to Carolyn Bryant, the wife of Roy Bryant, the store owner after buying candy from her.

Roy Bryant was out of town at the time of the incident, but when he returned three days later, he was told what had happened by his brother-in-law, J. W. Milam. The two set out to put Till in his place, and at midnight they showed up where Till was staying, the home of his cousin's grandfather, Mose Wright. Wright, understanding the seriousness of what had happened, begged the men to give Till a good whipping and stop at that, but his pleas were ignored.

Till was found days later in the Tallahatchie River, his body badly beaten and wrapped in barbed wire. A cotton-gin fan had been tied around his neck in an effort to keep him from floating.

As in the Martin case, the protest from outside the town in which the killing occurred was much louder than the local protest. Till's mother insisted that her son's body be returned to Chicago and not buried in Mississippi as the sheriff wanted. The result was a national horror. Till had been shot in the head, and one of his eyes had been badly gouged. The open casket that Till's mother insisted upon made her son's injuries available for all to see.

At the trial none of the violence made a difference, nor did the testimony of Mose Wright, who identified Bryant and Milan as the men he saw take Till away. In just over an hour, an all-white jury came back with a "not guilty" verdict.

Months later, Bryant and Milan, knowing they could not be retried, told Alabama journalist William Bradford Huie exactly what they did in exchange for a fee of $4,000 ($3,000 for them and $1,000 for their lawyer). Huie's article, "The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi," appeared in the January 1956 issue of Look magazine.

We are a long way from the crudities of the Emmett Till trial. The jury in the Zimmerman case took 16 hours over the course of two days to reach its verdict, and today, the Justice Department has the authority to act if it can be shown that a civil rights violation took place in the killing of Trayvon Martin.

What we can't get away from, though, is how the sequence of events that led to Till's and Martin's deaths began with the two teenage boys failing to accept their "assigned" social place without realizing what a threat that posed. After that line was crossed, everything else followed.

Nicolaus Mills is professor of American Studies at Sarah Lawrence College and author of 'Like A Holly Crusade: Mississippi 1964 -- The Turning of the Civil Rights Movement in America.']]>
Roosevelt and the Affordable Care Act,2013:/theblog//3.3600103 2013-07-16T13:10:26-04:00 2013-09-15T05:12:01-04:00 Nicolaus Mills
The surprise is that President Obama has given new life to the opponents of Affordable Care by the timidity with which his administration has announced that it will wait until 2015 before requiring employers with more than 50 full-time workers to offer health care coverage or pay a fine.

The first news of the employer-mandate delay came in a blog post by the assistant secretary for tax policy at the Treasury Department. It was as if the administration wanted nobody to notice what it was doing, when, in fact, it had no reason to feel defensive.

According to Mark Duggan of the Wharton Business School, the employer-mandate delay will affect just 1 percent of the nation's workers and a fraction of the 5.7 million firms in the United States (most big firms already offer health insurance).

At this stage of the game, President Obama should be optimistic about the future of the Affordable Care Act. History is on his side. He can take heart from how President Franklin Roosevelt managed the fight over Social Security on the eve of its implementation.

After Congress passed the Social Security Act in 1935, its opponents launched a tax-no-prisoners attack against it. With the pay roll tax for Social Security due to begin on January 1, 1937, they used the 1936 presidential election to try to persuade the country Social Security was a liability.

In the spirit of Republican senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, who has charged the Affordable Care Act with failing to protect "the all-important relationship between you and your doctor," Alfred Landon, the Republican presidential nominee and Kansas governor, called Social Security a "cruel hoax" that "involves prying into the personal records of 26 million people."

The attack by the business community against Social Security was equally vicious, as the New Deal historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. has pointed out. In the weeks before the election, signs went up in plants across the country telling workers, "You're sentenced to a weekly pay reduction for all your working life. You'll have to serve that sentence unless you help reverse it November 3."

In their pay envelopes workers found the following message: "Effective January, 1937, we are compelled by a Roosevelt 'New Deal' law to make a 1 percent deduction from your wages and turn it over to the government. Finally, this may go as high as 4 percent. You might get this money back... but only if Congress decides to make the appropriation for this purpose."

The message made no mention of the employers' contribution to old-age and unemployment insurance, just as today's critics of the Affordable Care Act don't talk about how it will allow individuals with a pre-existing health condition to pay the same insurance rates as healthy people.

The attacks on Social Security angered Roosevelt, and in an October 31 address at Madison Square Garden on the eve of the election, he went directly after his critics. "Every message in a pay envelope, even if it is the truth, is a command to vote according to the will of the employer," Roosevelt declared. "But this propaganda is worse -- it is deceit."

FDR went on to spell out the ways in which Social Security would benefit workers plus require a significant contribution from their employers. Then he took on the implication that Social Security's reserves might be "stolen by some future Congress."

"They attack the integrity and honor of American government itself," Roosevelt observed of Social Security's foes. "Let them emigrate and try their lot under some foreign flag in which they have more confidence," he thundered.

The speech was Roosevelt at his most persuasive. Voters thought so, too. FDR won the 1936 election in a landslide, carrying all but two states, Maine and Vermont.

The kind of political anger Roosevelt showed at Madison Square Garden does not come easily to President Obama, but he does not have to be a second FDR in order to be persuasive about the Affordable Care Act.

Personal stories will do just fine, starting with what it already has meant for millions of families to have their insurer required to offer them free preventive services, such as flu shots and mammograms.

Nicolaus Mills is professor of American Studies at Sarah Lawrence College and author of 'Winning the Peace: The Marshall Plan and America's Coming of Age as a Superpower.']]>
The Innocents of Newtown and Christmas,2012:/theblog//3.2352693 2012-12-23T11:04:04-05:00 2013-02-22T05:12:01-05:00 Nicolaus Mills
That companion story is the tragedy that follows after the magi have left their gifts and are on their way home: the massacre of the innocent children of Bethlehem depicted in the Book of Matthew.

This aspect of the Christmas story is one that we avoid thinking about as much as possible. It rarely makes its way into Christmas sermons. But this year there should be no ducking one of the darkest moments in the bible.

Religious leaders, meeting at the National Cathedral in Washington on the Friday before Christmas at the exact hour Adam Lanza, the Newtown gunman, opened fire, have already made their position on the need for gun control clear, and the deliberate symbolism of their gathering is worth dwelling on.

Just as Franklin Roosevelt once defended the compassion of his New Deal unemployment insurance by declaring, "Your Government is still on the same side of the street with the Good Samaritan," so gun-control regulation must be elevated to more than a political issue.

In the Book of Matthew the man responsible for the massacre of the children of Bethlehem is King Herod of Judea. When Herod hears that the child who will be the future king of the Jews was born in Bethlehem, he becomes fearful for his power as a ruler. He wants to kill the future king of the Jews, but he disguises his intentions, knowing how awful they are. He sends the magi to find the child destined to be the future king of the Jews, telling them to report back to him so that he may go and pay his respects.

The magi travel to Bethlehem by following the birth star, and after finding Jesus, they leave Him their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. But the magi do not obey all of Herod's instructions despite their initial trust of him.

They are told in a dream not to report back to Herod, and they return home by a different route that makes it impossible for Herod to trace their path to Bethlehem. At the same time an angel warns Joseph of the danger from Herod and instructs him to flee to Egypt with Jesus and Mary.

Herod, after learning what the magi have done, decides that he has only one option left. He orders his soldiers to kill every child in Bethlehem under the age of two. It is a crazed and desperate decision, but Herod's soldiers do his bidding, and what follows is mass infanticide.

Such murderous behavior from Herod, like that from Adam Lanza in Newtown, could not have been predicted by any ordinary person, but what most deeply ties Herod's rampage to the Sandy Hook Elementary School killings is his need for enablers.

The difference is that the enablers of Adam Lanza--- those who have over the years stood in the way of gun control legislation--- did not act with deliberate malice. They acted by turning a blind eye to previous mass murders in the United States that have come before Newtown.

Who is worse---Herod's enablers or today's enablers of Adam Lanza? The answer does not finally matter. The end result is the same. In the Book of Matthew, the outcome to the massacre of the innocents is Rachel weeping for her dead children. In Newtown, Connecticut, the outcome is the tears of mother after mother burying her child.

No painter caught the horror of the biblical massacre of the innocents more compellingly than the 17th-century French master, Nicolas Poussin. In his stark "The Massacre of the Innocents" (1627-28), three figures dominate the foreground of his painting: a child about to be slaughtered, a Roman soldier with his sword upraised, his foot on the child's neck, and a mother, her face contorted in horror over the certain death that awaits her son.

In Poussin's painting the mother's helplessness, like that of the biblical Rachel, speaks to us today. Poussin's mother knows that even sacrificing her own life will not prevent her son from being murdered before her eyes.

The mass tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut, dramatizes how such helplessness is not limited to a distant, biblical world. The 20 dead children at Sandy Hook Elementary School were as much in need of protection as Rachel's children, and like the Nativity itself, their vulnerability is a story worth recalling as we struggle to eliminate such tragedies in the future.

Nicolaus Mills is professor of American Studies at Sarah Lawrence College and author of The Triumph of Meanness: America's War Against Its Better Self.]]>
Plagiarism's Enablers -- Fareed Zakaria,2012:/theblog//3.1825472 2012-09-04T14:50:20-04:00 2012-11-04T05:12:01-05:00 Nicolaus Mills Time magazine columnist, who also hosts his own CNN show, has been treated for the recent plagiarism that he has admitted to.

Plagiarism by college students is usually a product of fear and ambition -- fear of failure in combination with a desire for a good grade. For students who plagiarize, the missing element is genuine intellectual curiosity. They are not interested in getting to the bottom of a problem so much as appearing to have gotten to the bottom of a problem.

I rarely get plagiarism at the small college where I teach, but my rules for dealing with plagiarism have always been clear. I fail the plagiarized paper and report the plagiarism to the dean of students.

The one-on-one discussions I always have with a student who has plagiarized -- and here I am talking about word-for-word theft, not borrowing with insufficient attribution -- have never precluded punishment.

So what am I to tell my students when they ask about how Fareed Zakaria was treated for a Time column with passages lifted virtually word for word from a New Yorker essay published a few months earlier by historian Jill Lepore?

The answer is, I am afraid: if you are prominent enough, your plagiarism gets you a slap on the wrist, nothing more. After a brief investigation and suspension, Zakaria is back in business at Time and at CNN.

Zakaria is not in the same league as the writer Jonah Lehrer, who resigned from the New Yorker when he was caught fabricating Bob Dylan quotes. But Zakaria, who has a Ph.D. from Harvard, is no naïf when it comes to the rules surrounding plagiarism.

What is worrying is the double standard he benefits from after making, as he acknowledges, "a terrible mistake." The primary excuse Zakaria's defenders give is that he is a busy man with so many commitments that his plagiarism was just an oversight.

By way of making amends, Zakaria has promised to cut back on his work load. "There's got to be some stripping down," he has said. In one sympathetic account of how complicated Zakaria's current life is, he was even lionized for spending a weekday morning cooking pancakes and French toast for his children.

Try offering up such excuses at any serious college in the country! Imagine a student saying she plagiarized because she had a heavy course load, a weekly job, and volleyball practice. (Not an unusual schedule by any means.) Imagine that same student's roommate defending her by saying on the morning she turned in her plagiarized paper she baked home-made granola for everyone on her hall.

Such "I'm so busy" excuses would never fly -- although when applied to a 19-or 20-year-old they are a lot more convincing than the rationales offered on behalf of Zakaria.

Call me old-fashioned, but I'd like to see Zakaria try to make his plagiarism case before a college dean rather than his journalistic enablers.]]>
Woody Allen's Roman Holiday,2012:/theblog//3.1642733 2012-07-03T19:38:30-04:00 2012-09-02T05:12:16-04:00 Nicolaus Mills To Rome with Love, Woody Allen, continues his European film tour. Italy can now be added to Allen's take on England, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger; Spain, Vicky Cristina Barcelona; and France, Midnight in Paris.

But the movie that To Rome with Love most resembles is William Wyler's 1953 Roman Holiday. Roman Holiday was Audrey Hepburn's breakthrough film. In it she plays a young princess (from an unknown country) who decides to escape from the constrictive life she has been forced to lead by sneaking away from her overprotective staff.

The princess has the good luck to be taken up by a handsome American reporter (Gregory Peck), and for 24 hours she has the time of her life before resuming her formal duties.

Wyler's film is a paean to the value of breaking free from convention, and nearly 60 years later, the same sentiments are at the center of To Rome with Love. Only the setting is different. Contemporary Europe, mired in debt and austerity programs, has replaced the social conformity of the 1950s.

To Rome with Love has no single narrative. It instead consists of a series of separate tales in which the characters don't meet but are challenged over what they want to do when the unexpected comes their way.

In some cases the unexpected is easy to embrace. When in the opening scene a young American tourist (Alison Pill) asks directions from a handsome Italian lawyer (Flavio Parenti) with the name of Michelangelo, it is only natural that the two should end up having dinner and before long getting engaged.

The surprises of To Rome with Love come when the unexpected violates taste and propriety. In another of the film's romantic tales, a newly married couple arrive in Rome to meet the relatives of the husband (Alessando Tiberi). The couple get separated when the wife (Alessandra Mastronardi) becomes lost on her way to a beauty shop. The result is that she gets taken up by a movie star and has an affair with the burglar who intrudes on them. He gets pursued by a beautiful call girl (Penelope Cruz), whom he finally can't resist.

When the couple meet up again, neither says anything about what really happened. But neither has been damaged by the day. To the contrary, they have found a capacity for sex they did not know existed in them before, and when they decide to leave Rome and return to the small town they come from, it is with a larger appreciation of their own erotic appetites. Mercifully absent is any handwringing by them or Allen about the need for safe sex or the shallowness of hookups.

But what makes To Rome with Love special is how far Allen will go in endorsing the unexpected. When a young architect (Jesse Eisenberg) takes up with a quirky and narcissistic Hollywood actress (Ellen Page), then gets dumped, he learns something about his own shallowness. He shows every sign of being a better man for his experience and even more appreciative of his kind, but predictable, girlfriend.

Similarly, when a mortician (the renowned opera singer Fabio Armiliato) who in To Rome with Love can only sing in the shower gets a chance to perform in public by being put in a shower on stage, he is delighted with the change his performances make in his life despite the ridiculousness he is subjected to. He also knows the novelty of his theatrical shower singing cannot last, and after a series of triumphs, he happily returns to his job working with the dead.

And so it goes in To Rome with Love. Allen's characters don't even need to be in love or to have a special talent in order to thrive. An ordinary office worker (Roberto Benigni) becomes a celebrity for no good reason and discovers that the pleasures of being noticed are far more important than the loss of privacy. When he is finally abandoned by the media, he realizes that the routines of his life do not need the defending he once thought they did.

"Can one's work be influenced by Groucho Marx and Ingmar Bergman?" Allen once asked in a tribute he wrote to Bergman. The answer in To Rome with Love is yes.

Now 76 years old, Allen not only shows no signs of slowing down (he appears as an actor in To Rome with Love), he shows no signs of worrying about death. The madcap comedy that was part of such early Allen hits as Bananas and Annie Hall may be gone, but what remains is the work of a director who believes that joy is as profound a teacher as tragedy and sees no need to conceal that belief with irony.

Inside the March Against Stop and Frisk,2012:/theblog//3.1608951 2012-06-19T17:31:55-04:00 2012-08-19T05:12:08-04:00 Nicolaus Mills
From the start there were quiet conversations going on about how many were present and what impact the march would have on New York mayor, Michael Bloomberg, who spent Sunday morning defending the stop-and-frisk program by speaking at a predominantly black church.

The quietness of the march did, however, define it. As thousands of people walked down Fifth Avenue, the atmosphere was closer to that of a church service than a political rally.

On Monday New York's three major newspapers put the march story on their inner pages rather than feature it, but that is only a sign of how easy it was to underestimate the diversity of those who marched.

Only one other march that I have been on, the 1965 Selma march for voting rights, compares to Sunday's. At Selma, which began with Martin Luther King aide Andrew Young organizing everyone in straight rows, there was more order than on Sunday, but what the two marches shared was the belief that at issue was a fundamental right to equal treatment under the law.

With 87 percent of the 684,300 people who were stopped by New York police last year being black or Hispanic, any claim that stop-and-frisk measures are evenly handled is virtually impossible to defend. Blacks and Hispanics make up only about half of New York's population.

According to a March Quinnipiac University poll, 59 percent of white voters approve of stop and frisk, but the makeup of Sunday's marchers reflected anything but such a racially lopsided figure. Even for New York, this was an extraordinarily integrated crowd.

Equally revealing was the age of the marchers. The crowd was not, like Occupy Wall Street, dominated by the young. It was filled with middle-aged people and families, including mothers with strollers.

The United Federation of Teachers members in blue T-shirts were easy to spot, and so were the members of Al Sharpton's National Action Network in their white T-shirts with NAN in block letters. But clearly any number of marchers had come on their own. Home-made banners (in Spanish and English), while not as striking as the glossy banners union members carried, were actually more numerous.

How many participated in the march will be debated in the coming days. The estimates start at 25,000, and that number feels right to me. It took me over two hours to cover the mile and a half from 110th Street, where the march started, to 78th Street and Fifth Avenue, where it ended.

Even had I wanted to, I could not have gone faster. There were too many people ahead of me, and no room on the sides of the march. Fifth Avenue was filled from curb to curb.

Without speeches and without political chanting, the march stopped when it got within a block of the mayor's Upper East Side apartment. Those who wanted to stay were asked to stand on the sidewalk. Many did. There was a feeling that the march had made its point with the kind of dignity most protests -- with an eye on what will make good television -- so often lack these days. At the end of the march, people simply didn't want to go back to their apartments and their private lives.

For Mayor Bloomberg, whose poll numbers have been sinking since his third term began, the march is bad news, and for Police Chief Raymond Kelly, who has been talked about as a mayoral candidate, the news is even worse.

As it showed with its self-discipline, this was the kind of crowd that takes its politics seriously -- and votes.

Nicolaus Mills is professor of American Studies at Sarah Lawrence College and author of Like a Holy Crusade: Mississippi 1964.]]>
Imperial University,2012:/theblog//3.1533986 2012-05-30T18:03:54-04:00 2012-07-30T05:12:13-04:00 Nicolaus Mills
What the imperial nations of Europe were to the international order of the 19th century, imperial universities, as a consequence of their competitive search for overseas campuses, are to higher education in 2012. They reflect a desire for new academic markets. The days when American universities were content to sponsor a series of modest foreign language programs abroad are quickly passing.

In today's higher-education world, the imperial university can be an established Ivy League school such as Yale, which under its president, Richard C. Levin, has committed itself to a campus in Singapore, but the imperial university can also be a second-tier state school anxious to improve its reputation. A 2010 survey reported 38 American schools had 65 branches in 34 countries, all with mandates to grant a degree.

In an era in which university endowments are still recovering from the 2008 financial meltdown and tuition is reaching the breaking point for more American families, it is not surprising that universities should search for new sources of revenue. The question their imperial pursuit raises is: what is the cost to the university's values and its students?

The two best-known imperial university foreign campuses -- Yale's in the city-state of Singapore and New York University's in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates -- are in authoritarian countries (Human Rights Watch has labeled Singapore a "textbook example of a politically repressive state") in which civil liberties are sharply circumscribed. The location of these campuses feeds the suspicion that Yale and NYU simply went where the money is.

"Expansion is everything," Cecil Rhodes, the English diamond mogul from whom Rhodesia took its name, declared more than a century ago, and in defending New York University's "global university," NYU president John Sexton has updated Rhodes's message by declaring, "Our mission is spreading our education and knowledge."

The religiosity of Sexton's language is no accident. For him and those who share his faith in the global university, having students and faculty who are comfortable moving between continents is by itself a worthy accomplishment. As university leaders, they are, moreover, prepared to carry out their imperial mission with the academic equivalent of the British foreign service -- top down administration.

For years America's colleges and universities have been increasing their use of administrators. Between 1998 and 2008, America's private colleges raised their spending on instruction by 22 percent, but during this same period they increased their spending on administration and support staff by a 36 percent. The imperial university, which requires numerous layers of officials to do everything from negotiate with foreign governments to supervise building plans, promises to further this trend as it turns students into exports and imports.

Especially for universities worried about their competitive standing, the upside of empire is that establishing a foreign campus creates the opportunity to get a jump on rivals. For decades gaining a top rating in the U. S. News's annual higher education issue has been a goal of colleges and universities. Universities with an international footprint now have another way to improve their status.

As critics have pointed out, these same universities could, if they just wished to expand, build a junior college or community college near their campus. The trouble is such a step would not improve their prestige.

A college -- as opposed to a language center -- on foreign soil is, on the other hand, a different matter. As the provost of Michigan State University observed in defending MSU's decision to start a university in Dubai, "The financial side is only a small part. The biggest return is the visibility. We want to be associated with a winner, and Dubai is a winner."

Opposition to academic empire building is bound to take a while to become effective, but the good news is that the rise of the imperial university comes at a time when there is also a concerted effort under way to make American higher education more affordable and more humane.

President Obama is in the midst of a campaign to prevent the interest rate on students loans from increasing, and in his influential new book, College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be, Columbia University professor Andrew Delbanco has pointed out how frequently the expansion of our major universities has marginalized their undergraduates.

Parents and College Admissions,2012:/theblog//3.1495170 2012-05-08T11:09:59-04:00 2012-07-08T05:12:08-04:00 Nicolaus Mills
The result is a tense time for students worried about their futures. These days even the winners of the race to get into college feel exhausted. I saw their exhaustion first hand when I went to Admitted Students Day at the college where I teach.

The students I spoke to were in the enviable position of being able to choose between us and wherever else they had been accepted. They were happy about their good fortune, but when I asked them about how the admissions process had gone, most just shook their heads. They were like runners who had just completed a marathon -- filled with aches and pains. Completing their application forms, going for interviews, then waiting to be judged added up to an experience that they were glad was behind them.

I have not spoken to the students who were rejected by us, but when I think of the strain on the winners in the race to get into college, I can easily imagine how difficult these days are for those students who did not get the college acceptances they wanted.

For them and their parents, this is going to be a rough spring. In this regard I have special compassion for the families in which a son or daughter applied to, but did not get in, the group of colleges that give parents the option of writing student reference letters.

The schools that follow this practice, which range from Smith and Mt. Holyoke to Holy Cross and the University of Richmond, are limited in number, but they deserve our attention all the same. They reflect a growing trend of colleges demanding more and more from prospective students at a time when the student population has grown faster than the openings at selective colleges.

The colleges who give parents the letter-writing option justify their decision on the grounds that parents know their children in ways nobody else does. That is true in any number of cases, but it is also beside the point. Caring and knowing parents are not necessarily articulate parents, especially if English is not their first language.

Great parenting begins with loving a son or daughter unconditionally. Great admissions decisions begin with a cool assessment of a student's strengths and weaknesses. The gap between the two could not be wider. The sons and daughters of parents who write well should not get a leg up when it comes to college admissions.

It is understandable why colleges may want extra parental input. In many high schools a teacher may have as many as five classes with 30 or more students in each class. For that teacher, writing a comprehensive letter about an individual student is often out of the question.

The paucity of high school college guidance counselors only adds to this problem. According to a 2010 Public Agenda study, the counselor-to-student ratio is on average 460 to 1.

But asking parents, many of whom have already ponied up for expensive tutors and SAT prep courses, to make up for this shortfall of unbiased, quality information borders on educational sadism. It is time to do everything we can to ease the burdens families face when their sons and daughters are ready for college.

Let admission officers struggle to make sense of the mountains of essays, transcripts, and references (imperfect as they are) that they already have before them. Let parents remain free to do what they do best: provide their sons and daughters with a safe haven from the terrible pressure to come out on top in the college admissions game.

Truman, Obama and Israel,2012:/theblog//3.1411955 2012-04-09T14:56:52-04:00 2012-06-09T05:12:01-04:00 Nicolaus Mills
After extricating America from Iraq, nothing could be worse for President Obama than a new war in Iran. Such a war would, if it became regional, draw in American forces and pose a direct threat to the democratization process now under way in so many Arab countries across the Middle East and Africa.

But the president also knows that even the appearance of softness in his support for Israel will add to his troubles with Jewish voters and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the powerful, pro-Israel lobbying group that Israel's prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a friend of Mitt Romney since they worked together in the 1970s at the Boston Consulting Group, met with during his last visit to America.

Harry Truman confronted similar electoral and diplomatic challenges in 1948 when, as underdog, he ran for president against New York's Republican governor Thomas Dewey and faced opposition from both South Carolina's Dixiecrat governor Strom Thurmond and liberal Henry Wallace, President Roosevelt's former vice president -- each of whom drew over a million votes in his presidential bid.

Truman's Middle Eastern problems began in the spring of 1947 after Great Britain announced that by the summer of 1948, it would end the special mandate over Palestine that the League of Nations had awarded it following World War I. In their consequences, Truman's difficulties in the Middle East were as much domestic as international.

The case for exercising caution with regard to Israel was, ironically, made most powerfully not by the isolationists in Congress but by Truman's State Department, led by World War II hero and former Army chief of staff George Marshall.

American support for partitioning Palestine in order to create a Jewish state, the Policy Planning Staff of the State Department declared in January 1948, "has already brought about loss of U.S. prestige and disillusionment among the Arabs," and promises to foster "deep-seated antagonism" for many years to come.

If America wants a Jewish state to come into existence, the Policy Planning Staff went on to say, it "must be prepared to grant economic assistance, together with aid to the Jewish authorities through the supply of arms, ammunition, and the implements of war."

Such warnings could not be ignored, but with the 1945-46 Nuremburg Trials of Nazi war criminals still vivid in voters' minds, there was enormous pressure for America to champion the creation of a Jewish state.

Truman was not guilty of hyperbole when in his Memoirs he wrote that "Jewish pressure on the White House" was unrelenting. From Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver and the American Zionist Emergency Council (AZEC), which had been formed in 1939, there was a steady drumbeat for the creation of a Jewish state.

On May 16, 1948, a "Salute to Israel" rally organized by AZEC filled Madison Square Garden and included among its speakers political heavyweights Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, New York City Mayor William O'Dwyer, and Franklin Roosevelt's former secretary of the treasury, Henry Morgenthau Jr.

Throughout 1948, Republican presidential candidate Thomas Dewey was outspoken in his defense of Israel, openly courting the Jewish vote, and in June the Republican National Convention promised full recognition of Israel in accord with the boundaries set by the 1947 United Nations resolution.

At the same time Truman was never free from pressure by the left to support a Jewish state. The most prominent of Israel's liberal supporters was Eleanor Roosevelt, but a host of intellectuals, ranging from Nation magazine editor Freda Kirchwey to playwright Ben Hecht, were also firmly in the Israeli camp by 1948.

Even Truman's closest friends were willing to use their personal influence to win his support for the creation of a Jewish state. In March 1948, while there was still intense debate going on in the United Nations over Palestine, Truman's old friend from Kansas City, Eddie Jacobson, took advantage of his ties with the president to secure a private White House visit for Chaim Weizmann, the future president of Israel.

The turning point for Truman came at a May 12 White House meeting with Secretary of State Marshall and officials from the State Department. At that meeting Truman's special counsel, Clark Clifford, made the case for prompt recognition of the Jewish State after Britain's mandate ended on midnight May 14. Clark urged Truman to get out ahead of events by announcing his intention to recognize Israel on May 13.

Marshall, in turn, argued that Clifford's advice seemed like nothing so much as a "transparent dodge to win votes," and in his official memorandum of the meeting, Marshall made no effort to hide his anger. "I said bluntly," Marshall wrote, "that if the President were to follow Mr. Clifford's advice and if in the elections, I were to vote, I would vote against the President."

Marshall's fear was that America was putting itself in a position in which it would be continually obligated to bail out Israel from hostile neighbors. He was, as Israel's future ambassador to America, Abba Eban, would complain, filled with "scepticism" about Israel surviving in the midst of a sea of hostile Arab states.

Truman now faced a terrible predicament. He could not afford an open break with Marshall, who commanded far more respect in Congress than he, but he was determined to recognize the existence of a Jewish state as soon as the British mandate over Palestine concluded,

Truman's decision was to compromise. As Clark Clifford observed years later in an essay, "Recognizing Israel," written for American Heritage magazine, Truman knew that with an election coming up it was important to be guided by "political considerations" as well as his deepest beliefs.

In deference to Marshall, Truman refused to announce in advance his intention to recognize Israel. When asked at his May 13 press conference if the United States would recognize a Jewish state, Truman replied, "I will cross that bridge when I get to it." But eleven minutes after Israel declared itself a state, Truman issued a press release announcing America's de facto recognition of Israel's provisional government. De jure recognition would wait until Israel held elections in 1949.

Marshall's fear that Israel would "be able to survive only with continuous assistance from abroad" (Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of U. S. foreign assistance since World War II, according to the Congressional Research Service) has been borne out by history, but while in office, Marshall never made his May 12 confrontation with Truman public.

The result was a foreign policy victory for Truman that paid off in the polls. In November Truman upset the heavily favored Dewey in a close election, taking 49.5 percent of the popular vote to Dewey's 45.1 percent.

Whether Obama can walk the same tight rope that Truman did in 1948 is the question. Truman never put American troops in harm's way in the Middle East, nor did he allow himself to get trapped between a rock and a hard place, as the president has by rejecting a containment strategy (Truman's way of dealing with the Soviet Union) for Iran and declaring "it is unacceptable for Iran to have a nuclear weapon."

Monumental Differences,2011:/theblog//3.1029402 2011-10-24T20:23:35-04:00 2011-12-24T05:12:01-05:00 Nicolaus Mills
In a 1945 essay for Art News, Philip Johnson, then at the start of his architectural career, observed, "Today the climate of opinion in this country is unfavorable to the concept of the traditional war memorial."

Johnson was right. At the end of World War II, the memorials that held America's interest were "living memorials," such as buildings and parks, that could be put to practical use. Before it ever became the Marine Corps War Memorial, Felix de Weldon's sculpture of Joe Rosenthal's famous picture of the Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima was used to raise money for a nationwide bond drive.

We have come a long way from the late 1940s as far as memorials go, and the differences between now and then reflect a sea change in American taste and politics.

Over the last decade, America has built memorials to honor the victims of 9/11 as rapidly as possible. Just a few months after 9/11, New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani delivered his final address in office by talking about the need for a soaring memorial at Ground Zero. Giuliani got his way, and his thinking about 9/11 memorials has come to represent that of the nation.

In addition to Michael Arad's National September 11 Memorial at Ground Zero in New York, we now have 9/11 memorials at the Pentagon in Washington and in the meadows of Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where United Flight 93 crashed after its passengers fought back against their hijackers.

The new memorials, with their minimalist design and names of the dead, reflect the influence of Maya's Lin's 1982 Vietnam Veterans Memorial, but at the core of the differences between the memorials of today and the forties lie more than architectural choices. Even more important is the thinking of two wartime presidents who could not have been more unalike in their goals.

In his 1944 State of the Union Address, President Franklin Roosevelt prepared the way for the post-World War II world he wanted America to have by putting forth what he called a second Bill of Rights. At the heart of Roosevelt's speech was the idea that security from foreign enemies was only meaningful if it meant economic security on the home front.

"Necessitous men are not free men," FDR told Congress as went on to outline a Bill of Rights that included the right to a useful and remunerative job, the right to a decent home, and the right to enjoy good health. The nation had sacrificed during the war, subordinating "individual or group selfishness to the national good," and it needed to keep the national good in mind after the war, Roosevelt believed.

Roosevelt's death in April 1945 stopped him from presiding over the postwar America that he dreamed about, but the G.I. Bill he signed into law in June 1944 helped set the political tone for what was best about late forties. The G.I. Bill allowed 4.3 million vets to purchase homes with low-interest loans the government guaranteed, and 2.2 million vets to attend college with government assistance. When President Harry Truman ended segregation in the armed forces in 1948 and got Congress to pass the National Housing Act of 1949, he was, above all else, continuing FDR's legacy of increasing opportunity for all.

Six decades later President George W. Bush set the stage for a post-9/11 world that is radically different from that of the late forties. In contrast to FDR, who during World War II insisted "ahead their lies sacrifice for all of us," George Bush took the opposite stance in response to the terrorist attacks of 2001.

Just four days after 9/11, Bush was asked by a reporter what kinds of sacrifices ordinary Americans could be expected to make in the coming years. "Our hope, of course, is that they make no sacrifice whatsoever," Bush replied. "We would like to see life return to normal in America."

A month later Bush was still giving the same advice. Following his second visit to Ground Zero in New York, he declared, "The average American must not be afraid to travel. Go to restaurants. Go to ball games."

During Bush's two terms in office, his advice on how individual Americans should be living after 9/11 translated into cutting taxes twice during the Iraq War and putting forth the idea that what FDR called the "national good" could best be achieved by looking out for oneself.

Today, the consequences of President Bush's thinking continue to shape America's political landscape. In the midst of the worst economy since the Great Depression, Social Security is under siege and so is the Affordable Health Care Act that Congress passed in 2010.

Even vets from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars are now having it tougher when they try to go to college. This year Columbia University has been forced to increase its General Studies financing by $200,000 in order to accommodate returning vets who have had their G.I. Bill benefits cut.

The irony is that for the vets of World War II, who in the 1940s came back to an America that sought to make their lives better, the last decade has been a good one. Three years after 9/11, they got their long-overdue memorial. On Memorial Day weekend in 2004, Friedrich St. Florian's triumphal National World War II Memorial was unveiled on the main axis of the Mall directly between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial.

The vets, the majority of them in their eighties, were gratified by this turn of events. But those vets who lived to see the memorial completed were lucky in another way as well. They never had to answer the question of what it would have been like for them and their generation if the America they settled back into was replete with war memorials but couldn't be bothered helping them get an education or find work.

Parents, Grads, and the End of the Commencement Season,2011:/theblog//3.875764 2011-06-13T15:20:04-04:00 2011-08-13T05:12:01-04:00 Nicolaus Mills
The meetings are all-too-brief, but they still open windows into the lives of my students that I have not looked through before. With many of my students, I am able to see where they got their values and their inner drive. The care -- and most of all, the time -- their parents have put in to help the students I have been teaching is deeply moving.

Equally significant for me, however, is the knowledge that comes from seeing how many students who didn't get the parental support they needed have still turned out all right. My admiration for what these students have achieved on their own increases by leaps and bounds after I meet their parents.

Above all, in this era of multiple divorces and remarriages, my meetings with parents remind me of how at too-early an age so many of my students became skilled diplomats, figuring out which set of parents to visit on vacations and how to negotiate breakfasts with stepbrothers and stepsisters they barely knew.

As for goodbye tears, they are rarely part of graduation these days. Between e-mail, Twitter, and Facebook, my students don't feel they are leaving anybody behind. They have been keeping in touch online with their parents and their friends daily, and they don't see geography changing that tie.

Much to my surprise, my students also do not fear the world they are entering. The Great Recession, with an unemployment rate of over 17 percent for their age group, doesn't scare them. They assume they will figure out ways to deal with hard times. They just want some leeway to get their bearings. They are not anxious to commit themselves to a specific career, let alone settle down and start families, and they are easy being looked upon as a trial-and-error generation.

By any comparative yardstick, I am the sentimental one at graduation. I will, I know, have a new crop of students to teach next year, but the ones I am losing seem irreplaceable to me, and all the Twitters and e-mails in the world don't feel like adequate compensation for their going.

The hardest fact for me to face is that the students I have come to know over the last four years have been on loan from parents who have paid a staggering price for them to be educated and trusted from the outset that people like me had their sons' and daughters' best interests at heart.

Blue Valentine's Sexual Politics,2011:/theblog//3.815398 2011-02-01T11:37:26-05:00 2011-05-25T18:30:24-04:00 Nicolaus Mills
What we don't think of very often is the toll that the economy has taken on people's intimate lives, which is illustrated in Derek Cianfrance's new Indie film, Blue Valentine.

In telling the story of a working-class couple, Dean (Ryan Gosling) and Cindy (Michelle Williams) and their daughter Frankie (Faith Wladyka), Cianfrance has turned out a small masterpiece on a marriage that fails because it can't escape the poverty in which it is mired. Cianfrance's two leading actors, Gosling, who appears on the cover of the current GQ, and Williams, who appears on the cover of the current Marie Claire, could not be more attractive in real life. But in Blue Valentine, they have not only de-glammed themselves, they have turned in brilliant acting performances (for which Williams has received an Academy Award nomination).

Cianfrance's bad luck is that the sex scenes in Blue Valentine -- which capture how Dean's and Cindy's marriage has gone bad -- have generated enormous publicity for their graphicness and have not helped the picture draw an audience. The sex scenes, which by comparison to those that recently featured Anne Hathaway and Jake Gyllenhaal in Love and Other Drugs, are a turnoff rather than a turn-on, have proved a critical distraction. They originally landed Blue Valentine a NC-17 rating rather than its current R designation.

Blue Valentine opens in the early morning with Dean and Frankie looking for their dog, who has escaped from his pen. From this point on, the film moves back and forth in time, covering the six-year span of Dean's and Cindy's relationship. We see them meet at a nursing home, where Dean, in his job as a mover, is helping an old man settle in, and Cindy is visiting her grandmother. Then we go back to their courtship, in which Dean wins Cindy over on a date in which she tap dances and he plays a ukulele while singing, "You always hurt the ones you love."

The sex scenes in Blue Valentine cover this same six-year span and let us see why Dean and Cindy married rather than went their separate ways. In the first sex scene we see Cindy and her high school boyfriend having sex standing up. It is a rushed, brutal moment. Cindy has her shirt on the entire time, and we have no sense that she has enjoyed the encounter. When the scene ends, neither Cindy nor her boyfriend speaks. All we see is her go into the bathroom and wash herself off.

We later learn that Cindy has been having sex since she was thirteen, and we can only assume that her relationships with boys have been one of the few areas in her life that let her escape from a dreary home in which her father bullies everyone. Cianfrance never has Cindy explain whom she sleeps with, but we do see that she appreciates tenderness when we see Cindy enjoying sex with Dean, who with great gentleness goes down on her (the source for the original NC-17 rating). The scene captures how much Dean wishes to please Cindy. Alienated from his family, a high school drop out with a dead-end job, Dean's appeal rests in his willingness to do anything that will make Cindy happy.

It is no small wonder that when Cindy becomes pregnant and decides against an abortion that she chooses to marry Dean (she does not know if Dean or her high school boyfriend is the father of her child). Dean is someone with whom she can be safe. The problem is that as the years go by, being safe with Dean is not enough for her. Cindy, who hoped to become a doctor, is now the chief wage earner in the family in her job as a nurse, but together she and Dean can do little more than pay their bills and maintain the small, dingy house they share.

Dean tries to break the monotony of their lives by taking Cindy to a motel with a choice of exotic suites that include Cupid's Cove and the Future Room. But once at the hotel, sex holds little pleasure for them. When Dean joins Cindy while she is taking a shower, she is repelled by his presence, and this third sex scene ends with them doing lots of drinking but not having sex.

For Cindy, this failed intimacy is the last straw. She drives away from the motel alone. Later she tells Dean that she wants a divorce. "I can't do this any more" is her final judgment of their marriage. In the closing scene of Blue Valentine we see Dean going off alone while his daughter runs after him in tears. Dean has been a loving father, indeed a more empathetic parent than Cindy, and there is no sense that he is getting what he deserves. Like Cindy, he is simply stuck in a marriage in which the future seems sure to be a repeat of the past. He is willing to endure this kind of marriage. She is not.

Dean and Cindy's breakup does no reflect badly on either in the end, and in his refusal to have Dean and Cindy discuss what has driven them apart, Cianfrance has made the right choice. Blue Valentine is a film built on silences and austerity. In contrast to the talkative, unhappily married couples of modern American literature -- from Tom and Daisy Buchanan in Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby to Frank and April Wheeler in Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road -- there is nothing Dean and Cindy have to say that could improve their lot.

Grade Inflation: The A Team,2011:/theblog//3.813234 2011-01-25T13:17:25-05:00 2011-05-25T18:25:24-04:00 Nicolaus Mills
To combat grade inflation, Princeton has adopted guidelines that say no more than 35 percent of its undergraduates should get A's. At Reed College students' transcripts come with an explanatory card that discloses what the grade point average of their graduating class was. Other colleges are trying to counter grade inflation by disclosing what the median grade average in a particular course was.

In a tough economy colleges are fearful that graduate schools and employers won't be able to tell who their best students are. It is a justifiable fear, and as a professor in a small, liberal arts college, I, too, am concerned with grade inflation.

What, however, most worries me about the current grade inflation debate is that it covers up a more serious issue -- how do we make grades, especially good grades, meaningful for all students?

As things now stand, an A can have a variety of meanings. It can describe a student who is a skilled researcher, an original thinker, superb test taker, a gifted writer. But what an A does not tell us is the depth at which these skills exist or how they are combined in an individual student. In a large university, an A student can sit through a lecture course and not know what he did to draw the admiration of his professor.

At the college where I teach, one of our answers to this ambiguity is a written evaluation, roughly a page in length, that we issue at the end of every term. The evaluations we as teachers turn out are not a perfect solution to grade inflation and the ambiguous A, but they mean we go far beyond just offering up a final grade.

We individualize those we teach. A talented student who did well, but not great, work might, for example, get a far more critical evaluation from me than an average student who went above and beyond the requirements of my course.

The difficulty is replicating this model of evaluating students, It doesn't work if the closest connection a teacher has with his students is through e-mail. You need faculty who are willing to turn out written reports at the end of every term. You need a teacher-to-student ratio that allows professors to know their students, and you need professors who meet with their students in one-on-one settings.

These are not insurmountable obstacles, but they are formidable. In combination they mean giving students a priority they don't have at institutions where publication, above all else, determines who gets tenure and classroom teaching is, as a consequence, a side issue.

Nicolaus Mills is professor of American Studies at Sarah Lawrence College and author of Winning the Peace: The Marshall Plan and America's Coming of Age as a Superpower (John Wiley and Sons).