"I should have made him my campaign manager," Dukakis said of Galbraith after the service. "I might have won."

Dear Miss Manners:

I am a student at a large university, and thus most of my communication with professors (for better or for worse) is done in writing (via e-mail). I find myself over and over in the same predicament as to how to address my professors.

When initiating contact, I always greet the professor with "Dear Dr. Jack Jones."

However, more often than not the professor will respond to my message with "Dear Seth . . . Sincerely, Jack." What is the correct way for me to respond that is neither haughty nor rude? Should I continue to use the professor's full name and title in my future correspondence, or should I assume that by using only their first name, they are inviting me to do the same?

******************************************

They are inviting you to think of them as your equals and your friends, but Miss Manners advises you not to count on such pals to be good to you at grade time. Rather than mistaking a posture intended to make themselves feel young as a personal gesture, she would suggest continuing to address them by the title of professor or doctor, whichever is more used in your university (and the first name should be omitted from the salutation).

tone-deaf to the American Republic, whose liberties it relies on yet whose virtues it no longer nurtures. It has forsaken such pedagogical heavy lifting for market come-ons and a falsely compensatory moralism about sexism, racism, and “jock culture" -- ‘proxies for misgivings about deeper values.’ The college no longer turns freshmen into adults who can recognize and take responsibility for hard moral choices: ‘The Enlightenment ideal of human liberty and the philosophy embodied in American democracy barely exist in the current Harvard curriculum.’… It would be better to impose serious core curricular requirements on students than to offer ‘what they myopically claim to want,’ Lewis writes, admitting that more teaching takes time from scholarship, but the faculty needs to ‘develop a shared sense of educational responsibility for its undergraduates.’…Harvard's assumption that ‘students are free agents and . . . should study what they wish’ drains its ‘long-term commitment to the welfare of students and the society they actually serve,’ he writes. Even administrators with ‘perspective on deep and enduring problems’ have left or been forced out of ‘the new retail-store university.’

O my brave brown companions, when your souls
Flock silently away, and the eyeless dead
Shame the wild beast of battle on the ridge,
Death will stand grieving in that field of war
Since your unvanquished hardihood is spent.
And through some mooned Valhalla there will pass
Battalions and battalions, scarred from hell;
The unreturning army that was youth;
The legions who have suffered and are dust.

' Witch hunts go in stages. First frenzy, when everybody damns the souls of people they don't know. Then confusion, as the first wave of contradictory facts comes in. Then deafening silence, as everybody studiously ignores the vicious slanders they uttered during the moment of maximum hysteria.

But now that we know more about the Duke lacrosse team, simple decency requires that we return to that scandal, if only to correct the slurs that were uttered by millions of people, including me.

We know now that the Duke lacrosse players are not the dumb jocks they were portrayed to be. The team has a 100 percent graduation rate. Over the past five years 146 members of the team made the Atlantic Coast Conference Academic Honor Roll, twice as many as any other A.C.C. lacrosse team. According to the faculty report written by the law professor James E. Coleman and others — which stands out as the one carefully researched and intellectually honest piece of work in this whole mess — "The lacrosse team's academic performance generally is one of the best among all Duke athletic teams."

We also know that the lacrosse players are not the amoral goons of popular legend. The members of the Coleman commission interviewed many of the people the players came into contact with and found almost universal praise and admiration. The groundskeeper and the equipment manager described the current team as among the best groups of young men they have worked with during their long tenures at Duke.

"The committee has not heard evidence that the cohesiveness of this group is either racist or sexist," the Coleman report says. The current and former black members of the team are "extremely positive" about the support they received. The coach of the women's lacrosse team says relations between the men and women are respectful and supportive. "They are great kids," she has said of the male players.

The male lacrosse players "volunteered for numerous community service activities," the report says, including reading programs, mentoring programs, the Special Olympics and Katrina relief.

Curiously, Nexis searches suggest that these facts have scarcely been reported in any newspaper or magazine.

We also know, as the Coleman report makes clear, that the members of the lacrosse team drank heavily, and when they did, they behaved irresponsibly. Of the 14 cases of "alcohol-unsafe" behavior reported at Duke in the fall of 2005, three involved lacrosse players. Of the four reported cases of disorderly conduct, one involved a lacrosse player.

Team members were caught playing drinking games, publicly urinating and hitting golf balls at buildings. The report notes that their behavior was alarming and deplorable, but adds: "Their conduct has not been different in character than the conduct of the typical Duke student who abuses alcohol. Their reported conduct has not involved fighting, sexual assault or harassment, or racist behavior."

We also know that the events of the night of March 13 are anything but clear-cut. In The National Journal, Stuart Taylor has written a devastating couple of essays on the weak case of the prosecutor, Mike Nifong. Citing the lack of DNA evidence, the seemingly exculpatory digital photos and the testimony of a taxi driver, Taylor, who is one of the most admired legal journalists in the country, estimates that there is an 85 percent chance the players are innocent.

Now, with the distance of some time, a few things are clear. There may have been a rape that night, but it didn't grow out of a culture of depravity, and it can't be explained by the sweeping sociological theories that were tossed about with such wild abandon a few weeks ago.

Furthermore, when you look at the hyperpoliticized assertions made by Jesse Jackson, Houston Baker and dozens of activists and professors, you see how mighty social causes like the civil rights movement, feminism and the labor movement have spun off a series of narrow social prejudices among the privileged class.

The members of the lacrosse team were male, mostly white and mostly members of the suburban bourgeois middle class (39 of 54 recent graduates went on to careers in finance). For many on the tenured left, bashing people like that is all that's left of their once-great activism.

And maybe the saddest part of the whole reaction is not the rush to judgment at the start, but the unwillingness by so many to face the truth now that the more complicated reality has emerged. '

The school owns a $1 million Memphis home that underwent a recent $500,000 renovation.

Yet UT bought a second Memphis home last August -- this one for $1.3 million -- because of a promise it made to chancellor Bill Owen when he was hired last year.

Because of a lengthy bid process, the school can't sell the old home until August of this year, said UT spokesman Hank Dye.

UT is paying utilities and maintenance on both homes, all at taxpayer-expense.

…Alice Owen [Angry Wife] said she took a good look at the old chancellor's home, a 5,559-square-foot home at 549 Goodwyn, and decided she didn't like it.

By August, UT arranged for the state to buy the new chancellor's home on Morningside -- complete with a wet bar, four fireplaces, four baths and a swimming pool.

Alice Owen soon found plenty to complain about with the new home too.

In a Jan. 3 e-mail to chief of staff Ken Brown, she threatened to return to Durham, N.C. The family was "promised university housing that was not safe or livable," she wrote, saying "promises of a decorating budget to decorate the chancellor's residence" weren't fulfilled.

For the last few weeks I have ... been participating in a faculty seminar on teaching, specifically concerning the question of difference in the classroom… [An] incident in the seminar upset me greatly, and seemed to detail a number of problems not only with thinking through difference in our teaching but also difference among the professoriate.

…[T]he apex (or perhaps nadir) of our seminar sessions was a heated discussion of a recent racial controversy on campus. Many of the students involved in this controversy were actually enrolled in various classes of mine, and a number of them approached me: What should we do? How should we respond? How should we deal with our feelings of anger? (Although this wasn’t usually stated so eloquently, for more often my students wanted to literally go find the offending party and whup their ass: “We’re trying to find out where [offending party] lives.”)



As a faculty of colour, this is obviously not my first time in proximity to a campus racial controversy, nor the strong emotions that tend to accompany them, and I urged my students to craft, along with their feelings of anger and rage, an intellectual response to this conundrum. The reasons as to why I would respond thusly are manifold, and both personal and professional. One clearly is that physical violence has no place in a learning environment… Another is that emotional and rash reactions of this sort, as well as the pure emotive hair-pulling performed in invariably endless meetings, conforms to the vicious stereotypes of people of colour as incapable of intellectual and reasoned response….

[The idea] was to connect my students with their budding intellectual training at Cold City U: if white supremacy is a discursive system that manifests itself in both material and metaphysical ways and is moreover invisible as a system, how do we differentiate the level of risk in confronting it, as well as the level and intensity of response. In other words, how do we craft an intellectual response to the problem of white supremacy as ideology as well as through material action (literal resistance, struggle, protest, self-protection)?

The fact that this incident encapsulates many of the principles of the teaching seminar itself, principally how do we handle and accommodate different stakeholders in the classroom, would purportedly make this a perfect “teachable moment.” However, that was not they way it played out. Several white faculty were disturbed by my intellectual response to the campus controversy, and quickly moved to critique it (which of course was not the point of sharing it in the first place; I was not asking for their opinion). One of my immediate colleagues offered a professional critique that was well worded, immediately followed by an older white woman from another division who said, “Yeah, if I was your student and you said that to me [the need to develop an intellectual response], I would want to punch you in the face!”




… [S]everal other white faculty voiced their agreement with this woman’s statement at the moment (“Yeah!", “Exactly!”), in essence, saying that they believed in fact the correct response of students of colour to this campus controversy was violence, unbridled emotion, reaction, hysteria. Intellectualism was not, for these good white people, the appropriate response to this controversy. However, if the university is not the place for an intellectual response, then indeed where is that place?

…I am a trained humanist with a doctorate, but I am not a psychotherapist. I see my role as guiding my students towards fundamentally intellectual patterns of thought and critique. I, for one, am not ashamed to call myself an intellectual, a thinker, someone who uses their brain, who by choice and training privileges, to a large extent, reason over emotion… At the end of our class time together, my students leave the room and walk back into the gloom of a deeply irrational and emotive society that loathes thinking and intellectualism and intellectuals. … Our students arguably are up to their eyeballs in anti-intellectual sentiment. They certainly don’t need, in my opinion, that standpoint reified in the context of the classroom. Here, they might be able to achieve a state they cannot easily achieve elsewhere. If we don’t believe in the life of the mind, however defined, why are we here then at the university? To change society radically? A decidedly poor choice of venue, in my book, considering how rabidly conservative the Shop is.

… If this incident in the teaching seminar was meant to chastise me for my method, it in fact reasserted the belief that what we need is more intellectualism, more thinking, more methodology, in approaching these complicated situations of the new academy filled with race, difference, tension. A simple retreat into the emotive is simply not enough, for we need to find a way to broach this divide between emotion and intellectualism in ways that honour the ability of students of colour to think critically and empathetically, within and beyond themselves, and have the confidence that they can do it.

I think that your critic was redirecting attention away from the incident *and* from your thinking about it/advice to the students, onto herself. Specifically, onto *her* emotive reaction to the incident. I don't think it's a question of discussions about institutional racism finding redirection to people of color; I think it's discussions about institutional racism finding redirection back to reassuring white people about their own self-image. In this case (as so often with liberal whites), her self-image as one who sympathizes with--feels for--the "plight" of the students of color. Because, of course, for a lot of white liberals, the problem with racism is how it makes them feel.

… Mr. Guest directed … "Mister Drake's Duck" (1951), starring Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and [Yolande] Donlan as owners of a duck that lays uranium eggs; and "Penny Princess" (1952), in which Dirk Bogarde plays the love interest of a young woman (Ms. Donlan) who inherits a tiny European principality.

There was worse to come, notably the beatnik drama "Expresso Bongo" (1960), which starred Cliff Richard as Bongo Herbert; and "Toomorrow" (1970), starring Olivia Newton-John. Mr. Guest was also one of a great many directors who worked on the poorly received James Bond spoof "Casino Royale" (1967).

Most disastrous of all, many critics thought, was "When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth" (1970), which Mr. Guest wrote and directed. Based on a story by J. G. Ballard, it starred Victoria Vetri, a former Playboy centerfold, and was, The Daily Telegraph of London wrote last week, "one of the worst films ever made."

Valmond Maurice Guest …made his directorial debut with "The Nose Has It," a wartime instructional film about the perils of sneezing.

Ex-Dean Says Harvard Run Like Day Care

Harvard University leaders are running the school like ``a day care center for college students," trying to dazzle undergraduates with concerts and a new pub, rather than teaching them to be responsible citizens, a former Harvard dean writes in a newly released book.

Harry R. Lewis -- the former dean of Harvard College, who many believe was pushed out of his post for being critical of President Lawrence H. Summers -- writes that the university has gone off track in a number of ways. His book is "Excellence Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education," published earlier this month by PublicAffairs.

The book is generating a lot of buzz on campus; Lewis's reading at the Harvard Coop was standing-room only, and the book is on Harvard Book Store's bestseller list. Many students are aghast at the idea they are being coddled, but some of Lewis's colleagues expect the book will be influential as the university searches for a new president and tries to breathe new life into efforts to revise the undergraduate curriculum. Several Harvard administrators whose policies Lewis criticized, including Summers, declined through spokesmen to comment on the book.

... Lewis says his book is not sour grapes over his ouster, and he dwells only briefly on Summers, writing that the president was arrogant, a poor manager, and ``voiced opinions but advanced no reasoned intellectual agenda." Rather, Lewis said in an interview, the book is the result of his attempt to make sense of the forces pushing his beloved university into a ``consumerist" mode.

He said that other elite universities suffer many of the same problems.

Parents paying the full cost of Harvard, or $41,675 this year, "expect the university to treat them like customers, not like acolytes in some temple they are privileged to enter," Lewis writes.

They routinely call professors to complain about their children's grades, he writes, and they believe that the university should erase any evidence of bad academic performance or personal misconduct, excusing those failings as symptoms of psychiatric problems or disabilities.

Harvard, meanwhile, participates in the coddling, Lewis said. Administrators, he argues, get carried away with their concern about Harvard's low scores on a student satisfaction survey, compared with peer institutions.

In an effort to improve the scores, the college has created a bloated student life bureaucracy, Lewis said. Students who rarely bother to take a subway ride to Boston to see a show want their own expensive on-campus concerts to help create a Harvard "bubble."



Worse yet, Lewis says, is Harvard's new pub, located near freshman housing. Although students under 21 are not supposed to be served beer, Lewis suggests the university is turning a blind eye.

"Desperate for approval by its students, Harvard now comes very close to saying that undergraduate drinking is acceptable as long as you don't get caught," he writes.

But one freshman, Eleanor Wilking, said the pub and other new social spaces are important alternatives to the exclusive, male-dominated "final clubs" that are not recognized by Harvard but host many student parties.

"I find this to be an exceptionally competitive environment, bordering on unhealthy, so anything you can do to alleviate that is a good thing," she said. "There's a dearth of community feeling."

Even some colleagues who agreed with other points Lewis makes differ with his take on student life.

"If the college does it, there are going to be some controls," said William Mills Todd III, former dean of undergraduate education and a friend of Lewis's. ``I would very much rather have [the pub] than see a fraternity system reborn or the final clubs increase in number."

Two Yale University professors, Ian Shapiro and Michael J. Graetz, expected to receive a 2006 Sidney Hillman Award on Tuesday at a ceremony in New York City. Instead, they got phone calls on Tuesday morning telling them that the judges had reversed the decision to honor the professors' book on the repeal of the estate tax, Death by a Thousand Cuts: The Fight Over Taxing Inherited Wealth.

"I was stunned," said Mr. Shapiro, a professor of political science. "I'd been about to get in the car to go to the city to pick up the award."

Mr. Graetz echoed his co-author's shock. "It came out of the blue for me," he said. "Obviously, I was disappointed."




The telephone calls came from Bruce Raynor, president of the Sidney Hillman Foundation, which sponsors the awards. The foundation is a project of the labor union Unite Here, of which Mr. Raynor is general president. The awards and the foundation are named for Sidney Hillman, who was a leading worker-rights activist in the New Deal era and founding president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, a precursor of Unite Here.

First presented in 1950, the awards honor "journalists, writers, and public figures who pursue social justice and public policy for the common good," according to the foundation's Web site.




Mr. Raynor told the authors that the last-minute reversal had been based on information that came to light about Mr. Shapiro's dealings with members of GESO, the Graduate Employees and Students Organization, in its efforts to organize a graduate-student union at Yale in the 1990s. Unite Here has been involved with GESO's continuing union drive at Yale.

In an interview with The Chronicle, Mr. Raynor cited allegations of "unfair labor practices" and unspecified "threats against graduate students" by Mr. Shapiro. [Why weren't they specified?]

"It flies in the face of Sidney Hillman's beliefs and his life," he said, "to present the award to someone who had been actively engaged in resisting union-organization attempts by graduate teaching assistants to join Sidney Hillman's union."

Mr. Raynor added, "We wish we had had this information before the award announcement went out. We regret it, and we certainly don't seek to embarrass Professor Shapiro." [No embarrassment to Shapiro -- all the embarrassment is to the Hillman people.]




Mr. Graetz and Mr. Shapiro pointed out that the book, which was published last year by Princeton University Press, does not address labor organizing. "There is no connection to GESO at all," Mr. Graetz said. "This book has absolutely nothing to do with the graduate students."

Mr. Shapiro also defended his dealings with graduate students over the years. "In the 1990s, when I was director of graduate studies in political science, I told a group of our students that I thought they had every right to try and form a union," he said, "but in my view it was not a good idea and not a good use of their time. ... I've never threatened anyone in my life, and I'm generally supportive of unions."




The move toward rethinking the award began last week. On Thursday, May 18, the Hillman Foundation ran an advertisement in The New York Times listing the 2006 winners in several categories: book, magazine, broadcast, photojournalism, newspaper, and blog, a new category this year. Mr. Shapiro's and Mr. Graetz's book was listed as the winner in the book category.

Although Mr. Shapiro and Mr. Graetz had written "an excellent book," Mr. Raynor told The Chronicle, the decision came down to "more than just the words on the page." [You've got to be a soldier of the lord too.]

Once news of the award got out, Mr. Raynor said, his office received dozens of complaints "from numerous current and former graduate teaching assistants who'd been involved in these campaigns."

"We got deluged by this information that we did not know," he said. "I brought it to the attention of the judges."

One of those judges, Harold Meyerson, editor at large of The American Prospect, said that Mr. Raynor called him on Monday and said, "Harold, we have a problem." Mr. Raynor then told him about the objections to the award but left the final decision to him and the other judges, who include Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation, and Sheryl WuDunn, an editor at The New York Times.




Mr. Meyerson read a reporter the statement he delivered Tuesday night at the awards ceremony. "Normally judges evaluate the dancer, not the dance," he said. "What we tried to do in the excruciatingly limited time available to us was to gauge the severity and credibility of the allegations. ... A crucial factor for us was that the National Labor Relations Board in the region issued a complaint against several Yale professors, and Professor Shapiro most particularly, for these actions."

As Mr. Meyerson and Mr. Shapiro both noted, the labor board never adjudicated the graduate students' complaint because their labor action failed to meet certain legal criteria.

"There was never any hearing on the merits of the complaint," Mr. Shapiro said. "People like me never got to come into a hearing and say, What's the evidence that I threatened anyone?"

Mr. Meyerson said he had consulted with a friend who was a labor lawyer, who told him that "such a complaint would not have been issued if the NLRB attorneys had not found the claims to be credible and meritorious." In the end, Mr. Meyerson and the other judges concluded that "Professor Shapiro's actions rose to a level that required the rethinking of the award."

"What we came down to was that the book was eminently qualified to win many other awards," he said, but did not fit the criteria of the Hillman Prize.

"We regret of course that this highly improbable situation ever occurred," Mr. Meyerson told the awards audience. "I'm acutely aware that for all of you this comes rather like a pickle in the middle of a chocolate éclair."

George Washington University has taken a serious beating lately. In fall 2005, the university was sued by a former student named Jordan Nott, who was barred from campus after seeking hospital care for severe depression and thoughts of suicide. In March, after the university responded in court to Nott's complaint, the Washington Post ran a front-page whammy about the case, followed by a blistering editorial called "Depressed? Get Out!"

Schools aren't necessarily wrong to take a tough stand. And in fact, some quasi-disciplinary measures may be in a suicidal student's best interests.

...[If the student] depression was caused by his friend's suicide, which occurred on campus the previous spring, an administrator might have believed it was in his best interests to take time away. Two additional GWU students had committed suicide in the previous six months, so the school was legitimately worried about copycat deaths.

GWU also may have had reason to rely on its disciplinary code in handling a potentially suicidal student—to stay on the right side of disabilities law. The law permits schools to crack down on disruptive or violent behavior, but not, of course, to punish underlying conditions or disabilities. Thus, the school may have settled on "endangering behavior" as a general ground for taking action. That might not fit with the facts in Nott's case, since Nott denies that he attempted suicide or had a suicidal plan. But we just don't know. GWU may have chosen to rely on its disciplinary system because it provided a well-tested set of procedures, and in theory thus complied with the due process requirements of disability law.

Illinois does not treat suicide as a "victimless crime" or a cry for help, but rather as an unacceptable act of violence. Students who threaten or attempt suicide are required to attend four assessment sessions, in which they are asked to respond to questions regarding the events, thoughts, and feelings that led up to the suicide threat or attempt. If they refuse to participate, they can be removed from school.

On a men's program that, according to a recent report after an internal investigation, was described in 2005 by a dean for residential life and housing to be "building toward a train wreck." A program found to have 52 disciplinary incidents in the past five and a half years at a rate that was accelerating. A program that produced the fateful party on March 13 at which drinking and stripping were the primary attractions and racial epithets directed at two hired dancers were reported to the police by a neighbor.

While the numbers support the general impression that many college students abuse alcohol, [an] anonymous Ivy League [lacrosse] player said that a serious commitment to Division I athletics, coupled with a challenging academic workload, creates enormous pressure.

"From my experience, the play-hard, party-hard label is true," he says. "But the whole deal is hard work. We're not taking Golf 101 at Florida State. You get up at 9 in the morning and go lift, eat breakfast, go watch film, go to class all day, practice for three hours, get dinner, do your homework and try to get to bed at a decent hour.”

Here's your opportunity to enjoy an evening of fine dining, high design, and conversations with architects--as well as the executive chef. On May 24 in Washington, D.C., the National Building Museum will host Dine by Design and celebrate the premiere of Agraria restaurant.

Designed by Adamstein & Demetriou (A & D), the firm behind Washington eateries IndeBleu, Zaytinya, and Zola, the restaurant is located in Georgetown's Washington Harbor. The event will include a four-course dinner and discussions about the space with A & D architects Olvia Demetriou and Theodore Adamstein.

Over coffee and dessert, executive chef Paul Morello, most recently of Les Halles fame, will discuss the culinary design of both the dinner and the menu. Owned by the North Dakota Farmers Union, Agraria will feature foods from throughout the country produced by family farmers and small businesses.

A reception will be held from 7-7:30pm. Dinner will run from 7:30-10:00pm. The event is $105 for museum members; $125 nonmembers. Prepaid registration required by May 21. The price includes reception, dinner, and gratuity. Liquor and wines are on a cash basis.

The ritzy Georgetown area of Washington is famous for fine dining, offering everything from French cuisine to eclectic Moroccan fusion.

Next week, Georgetown's newest chic restaurant opens it doors — offering the finest tastes of North Dakota. And hold the lutefisk jokes. [Glad to, since I don’t know what lutefisk is.]

Called Agraria, it's unlike anything that's come before. The restaurant is cooperatively owned by farmers from the Upper Midwest, who created the idea, invested $2 million to make it a reality, and who will produce much of the fresh food. Together, they share a vision of linking diners in the city with farmers on the land. [I prefer my labor invisible and alienated, thank you.]

"We're putting a face on the people who are raising the food, and we're trying to connect them with consumers through a food experience," said Doug Peterson, president of the Minnesota Farmers Union, which offered some of Agraria's startup funding. [You’re making me nervous.]

Still, he admits, the idea of owning a fancy restaurant "is, frankly, something that farmers have not tried before."

When it opens, Agraria aims to be high-class all the way. Located on the pricey Georgetown waterfront, the restaurant features rich woods of walnut and hickory, four fireplaces, fine wines, private catering and an award-winning chef. There are also private rooms, ideal for an office party or congressional fundraiser.

At nearly 14,000 square feet, it's a huge space — and it's a country mile from the typical rural-themed restaurant decorated with rusty lanterns, gingham curtains and seed signs.

"This is a fine-dining establishment in a very affluent neighborhood," said Tom Prescott, the project manager. "We don't have any lanterns in our space."

What Agraria hopes to offer is fresh cuisine with personal stories: that all its food was produced on family farms, that its breads and pastas were milled by its North Dakota owners, that perhaps the beef just arrived from southern Minnesota, the potatoes from Idaho and the organic chicken from an Amish farmer in Pennsylvania.


…The distant hope is that Agraria will be so successful that the concept can spread to other cities. But Agraria is not entirely about money. Its owners also dream of renewing the lapsed connection between farmers on the land and consumers in the city.

"The important thing we want them to see is, farming is a very professional business, and the people doing this now are very good at what they do," Watne said.

Agraria hopes to deliver this message in bite-sized morsels, not in thick slabs.

"We recognize that when people dine, they don't want to be inundated with an educational component that is too much to handle," Prescott said. "We have subtle images," and the message is conveyed in many ways, from the décor to the menu to the waiters. [What? The waiters will be dressed as professional farmers?]

And on opening day, farmers will learn whether Georgetown is ready for fine dining from the Upper Midwest. Already, the Dakotans have been surprised to hear some things about East Coast patrons, such as the fashion at some high-end places of having a few "communal tables" for customers who like the idea of meeting new people while dining. [Communal tables? Educational pictures? Include me out.]

Seven years after making a $1.1 million gift to endow a chair in economics at the University of Missouri, Lay is now trying to have the money returned. Last September, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, he personally sought to have the money — as yet unused — transferred back to Houston to assist 14 charities in relief efforts, including preacher-author Joel Osteen's megachurch.

Five months later in February this year, the trustee for Lay's assets went to the campus in Columbia, Mo., seeking the money to pay for legal fees instead. The trustee went home empty handed, but now university alumni — only recently apprised of the negotiations — are buzzing with indignation. The university, meanwhile, is stuck with the name — and has put off all decisions about the chair, including who will fill it, until the verdicts are in.

…Hovering over the entire saga is the question of whether it's such a good idea now to have an economic chair named after Ken Lay, given Enron’s spectacular collapse. Members of the alumni board have bandied about the question of retracting Lay's name, which was added at his request in 2002 — just after the company went bankrupt.

Although discussions with Lay are ongoing, the university is required by its agreement to honor the name. Lay's family has a longtime connnection with Mizzou: his late mother worked at the university bookstore while his father, a Baptist preacher, had strong ties to the community in Columbia. "It's not the university's goal to be antagonistic with a fine family," says Charton. The final call is up to the MU Board of Curators, an appointed board, which oversees university affairs.

The search for an academic to fill the chair continues, meanwhile, with over 60 candidates screened in the last eight months. Battistoni suggests one solution to the controversy would be to make ethics part of the lesson. "If the university is going to do a chair in economics named after him, to be true to its own values, the university should set it up as the Ken Lay Chair in Economics and Business Ethics."

"The Devil Wears Prada," Lauren Weisberger's veiled account of her time working as an assistant to Anna Wintour, the Vogue editor, ushered in the modern "underling-tell-all" genre, abetted by other revenge-of-the-employee tales like "The Nanny Diaries," by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus. Both became best sellers that will be showing up on movie screens, with "Devil" opening next month.

Busted bloggers like Jessica Cutler (a former Capitol Hill intern whose blog, Washingtonienne, is now a novel), Nadine Haobsh (a former beauty editor whose blog Jolie in NYC earned her a two-book deal) and Jeremy Blachman (a lawyer whose blog Anonymous Lawyer is being released as "Anonymous Lawyer: A Novel" this summer) were all interns, entry-level employees and worker bees who traded up on in-the-trade secrets.



...A blog and a job don't necessarily have to clash, some bloggers say.

Alexx Shannon's celebrity blog, www.britboyla.com, came up during his interviews for his internship at Paramount Pictures in Los Angeles this spring because he lists it on his résumé.

Mr. Shannon, 21, who is British and is spending a year at the University of California, Los Angeles, before finishing his studies at Kings College, London, said he signed an employee confidentiality agreement with both Paramount and Beacon Pictures, where he is now an intern. Beacon made clear that his blog, while about celebrities, would not include information he picked up at work.

Amit Chatwani is the toast of Wall Street's junior set. He doesn't work for a bank.

From a studio apartment in Manhattan's East Village, the 23- year-old writes Leveraged Sell-Out, a Web log that chronicles the life of today's young financiers: the pastel Lacoste polo shirts, the "bottle service" at Meatpacking District clubs, the women pursuing men from Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Blackstone Group LP during bonus season.

…[Chatwani‘s] eight-month-old site gets more than 30,000 page views in the four days after he posts an essay, he says. …

Leveraged Sell-Out, DealBreaker and a half-dozen more online diaries are gaining popularity among young bankers. The sites blend blogging, a regular habit for Wall Street's college-age summer interns and entry-level employees, with an older tradition of insider memoirs such as "Liar's Poker," Michael Lewis's tale of Salomon Brothers bond traders in the 1980s.

More than four thousand students and business school graduates are starting jobs at New York securities firms in the next few months, including about 1,800 at Goldman Sachs, 1,000 at Merrill Lynch & Co. and 400 at Credit Suisse Group.

They are entering "analyst" and "associate" programs that demand hundred-hour workweeks spent answering to senior bankers, preparing presentations known as pitch-books and sitting in cubicles doing computer modeling.

About Time

"It's about time there are blogs about it," says Johanna Tyburski, 29, who left Credit Suisse in March after six years in the Zurich-based company's telecommunications banking and high- yield departments in New York. "You know that your life is crazy and not real, and there's a humor that goes with it."

The on-line spoofs and gossip pages are typically written by outsiders with contributions from unnamed industry workers. Securities firms tend to fire employees who publicly break their silence about clients or internal politics.

"People layer their communications," says Douglas Rae, a professor at the Yale School of Management in New Haven, Connecticut. "There are things they want to say to their peers that they can't afford to say to their superiors. That hidden transcript is everywhere."

Going Private, billed as "sardonic memoirs" of the private-equity world, told readers on May 22 that its anonymous lead writer received a note demanding money to keep from being named publicly. Among the site's other offerings: a May 3 celebration of Italian philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli's 537th birthday. …

`Love and Banking'

BankersBall, started in October with the tagline "Where Bankers Come to Party," has sections including "the Natty Banker," with tips on Manhattan suit sales, and "Ask the Ex- Working Girl," with advice on "love and banking." It also offers shortcuts for using Microsoft Corp.'s Excel software, the junior banker's primary tool for financial models. …

While young bankers who blog may get in trouble, the sites aren't blocked from work stations at Goldman, Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Morgan Stanley or Credit Suisse, spokespeople at those New York firms say.

At Merrill, access is limited by a policy blocking any site with a chat room because "the company can't supervise, retain or archive the information," spokeswoman Selena Morris says.

Wall Street's new Web chatter also includes dozens of sites focused on serious analysis of markets and the economy.

It's all part of an explosion of blogging, where Internet users post opinions, unchecked news and links to other sites as often as a dozen times a day.

…DealBreaker, a two-month-old "online business tabloid" has been getting an average of 30,000 visitors daily, says publisher and lead writer Elizabeth Spiers. More than 80 percent of readers are men, and 68 percent work in financial services, she says. The median age is 29.

Spiers, 29, is the founding editor of Gawker, the most-read New York celebrity blog. On her new site, Spiers brings the same breathlessness to investment-banking personnel shifts as Gawker does to movie-star sightings on Madison Avenue.

A DealBreaker section called "Planespotting" on May 22 included an "unconfirmed" account that a Lear jet registered to Denise Rich, ex-wife of Marc Rich, the one-time fugitive financier pardoned by former President Bill Clinton, flew from New York's Westchester airport to Arkansas's Rogers Municipal Airport-Carter Field and back…'

It's a car that gets up to 50 miles a gallon, pollutes very little and can slip into just about any parking place.

But buying the European 'Smart Car' and actually driving it in the United States can be very difficult.

Just ask John Robinson, a University of Maryland professor, who first got interested in the tiny, two-seater when he saw it in Paris in 1999.

He spent years cutting through red tape, making thousands of phone calls, before finally getting his car this spring. He says the obstacles never seemed to end.

"Every time you turned around, there was one or another," he says. "If it's not from the federal officials in one country or another country, it's also the situations you might run (into) with state and local officials also."

Eventually, Robinson found a California company called ZAP or Zero Air Pollution that helped get the car shipped to the U.S. and retrofitted to meet federal regulations, even though it actually pollutes less than conventional vehicles. The car was sent to a dealership in New Hampshire and he drove it back to Maryland earlier this month.

"It is really a lot of fun to drive," says Robinson. "The only difference in terms of driving the car, I think, from an ordinary car is that if you look behind you there's just nothing there."

But that makes the car very easy to park. Sometimes Robinson can drive straight into a spot, so he doesn't have to do much parallel parking.

The cost to fill up the gas tank isn't much -- about $15, since it holds just five gallons.

The car costs $30,000, and in Robinson's case cost even more, since his is a convertible.

That doesn't matter to Robinson. He likes his so much, he has another one in California -- and he's trying to get a third.

'In Ulysses, James Joyce compressed his musings on life, the universe and everything into a single day in Dublin. Eircom has similarly packed an awful lot into its short history as a privatised entity.

On Tuesday, it agreed to its second leveraged buy-out in the space of five years. Babcock & Brown Capital, a listed Australian investment fund, alongside Eircom's employee trust, will become the Irish telecommunications operator's fifth owner since 1999. …

A separate, securitised fixed-line network would generate low-risk returns over the long term. That would allow B&B potentially to de-gear and sell on the retail operations. Regulators should also welcome this. Eircom's odyssey of ownership looks set to continue.'

...[N]ationally, we educators have created a culture in which parents spend thousands on mind steroids to help their kids score 50 points higher.

…[An] Atlantic article [about college admissions] examines how enrollment managers "have changed financial aid -- from a tool to help low-income students into a strategic weapon to entice wealthy and high-scoring students." Oregon State's head of enrollment management is quoted as recommending that attitude in relation to competing institutions: "I'm going to go out there and try to eat their lunch. I'm going to try to kick their ass."

Not an elegant statement, perhaps, but an acceptable one if you believe that competition makes the world a better place. In this case, however, it makes the world all the more inequitable. "It's a brilliantly analytical process of screwing the poor kids," Gordon Winston, a Williams College economist, is quoted as saying. And when another admissions officer suggested that it was wrong to give money to people who don't need it if that means turning away students who do, he was criticized for proposing "unilateral disarmament." College admissions as Vietnam and Iraq; enrollment gurus as tin soldiers.

In that same issue, Ross Douthat writes that in a single decade, the 1990s, private colleges increased aid to the wealthy (top quartile) from $1,920 to $3,510, whereas poor kids (lowest quartile) improved only from $2,890 to $3,460. College faculty members who rail against Reaganomics but who urge buying well-prepared students with merit fellowships might find a strange reflection in their mirrors.

… I love the freedom Reed [College] purchases by scorning the rankings [Reed doesn‘t cooperate with US News and World Report] -- no class-size manipulations created by employing adjuncts to lower the numbers, no doctoral requirement for faculty members where that degree might be irrelevant or even insensible. Reed is a better-known four-letter word than Drew, and we may not yet have the legs to walk away from U.S. News, but never will we spend a moment allowing its quantifications to shape any policy.

It is past time to banish the three hags of this demonic admissions trinity -- the SAT obsession, the antidemocratic "merit" scam, and the U.S. News obsession…

A history teacher at Horace Mann School in Riverdale has used his intimate view of the city's movers and shakers to pen a novel about a leafy campus in New York City where 17-year olds drive Mercedes cars, take prescription drugs to boost their academic performance, and turn to seduction and plagiarism to guarantee a slot in the Ivy League.

"Academy X" is hitting bookstores this week and some parents are calling its author, Andrew Trees, a regular Benedict Arnold.















"I think this is the biggest self-righteous, arrogant traitor walking the face of the earth," a member of the board of trustees at the nearby Riverdale Country School, Victoria Goldman, said. "He's sending up the entire community that he works with, and that takes nerve."



The city's private schools - where influential parents battle for everything from better grades for their children to asking federal judges to intervene in disputes - are known to be tight-lipped when it comes to what happens within their halls. The head of school at Horace Mann and several other administrators did not return numerous calls seeking comment yesterday, and some teachers also refused to talk about the book.

On its copyright page, "Academy X" is listed as being in the "Rich People - Fiction" category. Tuition at the school is almost $30,000 a year. Celebrity parents at the school include the state attorney general, Elliot Spitzer, and an entertainment mogul, Sean "Diddy" Combs.

To build some buzz, the author was listed as anonymous on early copies of the book. Mr. Trees's name was added when Bloomsbury officially released it.



In a pre-emptive strike, Mr. Trees published a letter to the Horace Mann community in the student newspaper last week, alerting it to the imminent release of his novel.

"My goal in writing Academy X is simply to satirize the follies that occur at virtually every elite private - and many public - high schools these days, particularly the insanity that accompanies the college admission process," he wrote.

The protagonist of the novel, John Spencer, is an English teacher who struggles to teach Jane Austen, but is often distracted by the students' "exposed thongs and butt-skimming skirts." A high-maintenance parent tries to bully him to boost a grade to A-minus from B-plus, while another sets him up in a rent-stabilized apartment on the Upper West Side.



In an interview yesterday, Mr. Trees, 37, said that in his five years as a history teacher at Horace Mann he noticed a lot of "entertaining things that would make a good story."

"The book is a novel. It's not meant to be Horace Mann, but it definitely draws on my experiences here," he said.

As a graduate of the Deerfield Academy, a boarding school in Massachusetts, Mr. Trees is no stranger to the world of the wealthy. He also received a degree from Princeton and a doctorate in history from the University of Virginia.


The onslaught of tell-all books about the children who reside in the city's wealthiest zip codes and the people who educate them has some schools now talking about asking teachers to sign nondisclosure forms.

"The Nanny Diaries," which centers on nannies dealing with the city's wealthy 4-year-olds, kicked off the slew of books. The most recent additions include "Glamorous Disasters," a novel by a 27-year-old Harvard graduate, Eliot Schrefer, about an Upper East Side SAT tutor who rakes in $395 apiece to boost the scores of 16-year-olds. In "The Ivy Chronicles," author Karen Quinn takes readers inside the insane world of what parents will do to get their tots into kindergarten.



Mr. Trees called himself an "equal opportunity satirist" who makes fun of parents, teachers, and students. So far, he says that the head of school is laughing along with him. "His reaction has been supportive. I know that he's concerned about what people will say about it, but he told me that he thought the book was funny," Mr. Trees said.

If the book generates problems for Horace Mann, Mr. Trees said he might be out of a job. Other private school principals said they couldn't believe that he would be invited back.

"As far as I know, I'm still coming back to teach," Mr. Trees said. "To be honest about it, clearly not everybody at school is happy about the book. I'm hopeful that once the book comes out and people read it, it will be fine."

In the meantime he has at least a few supporters. "Some parents are fulfilling a fantasy life through their children," a parent at Horace Mann who asked not to be identified said about the book release. "Some parents are embarrassingly over-involved and become stereotypes of themselves. So many of them are drooping with money and want everybody to know it."

… With evolutionary biology we have come, full circle, back to the Greeks: happiness is in the luck of the draw, how we fare in the genetic sweepstakes, the modern name for Fortuna's wheel. Not even geography or economic position is as influential a factor.

Several years ago in the journal Science & Spirit, another psychologist, Robert Biswas-Diener, wrote about the remarkably high spirits he found among people in a Calcutta slum and on the harsh northern coast of Greenland. "Research shows that we are the fortunate inheritors of a highly evolved emotional system that leads us to be, for the most part, somewhat happy," he wrote. "We have a tendency to interpret things positively and to adjust quickly to most events."

The downside is that this reflexive optimism can keep us from making good guesses about what will or will not bring us joy. It is not just the hard lives of others that we have trouble imagining but also our own. In Stumbling on Happiness, Daniel Gilbert, a Harvard psychologist studying "affective forecasting," shows that people have inflated expectations about the joy they will derive from a vacation, a new car or child, or a second dessert. But our failure as futurists also cuts the other way. We overestimate how bad we will feel if we get fired or lose a tooth or even a friend or mate. Rationalization, our emotional immune system, insists on putting the best face possible on even the saddest events.

"We treat our future selves as though they were our children," Gilbert writes, "spending most of the hours of most of our days constructing tomorrows that we hope will make them happy." But the children turn out to be ingrates, complaining that we should have let them stay in the old house or study dentistry instead of law.

Taken together, all these findings may seem a little depressing. But true to our nature, we can see them in a sunnier way. A whole industry has sprung up -- mass-market therapy, cosmetics, cheap luxury cruises -- promoting a kind of gross national sappiness, an obligation to have fun. A little knowledge from the psych labs may take off some of the pressure, providing grist for the inverse of a self-help book -- not a guide on how to achieve happiness but on understanding why, in the end, you probably won't.

'The left, [Gitlin] argues, took a wrong turn when it abandoned knowledge as its guiding light on the grounds that knowledge, as argued by theorists like Michael Foucault and Edward Said, was merely a masked form of power, and illegitimate power at that. "If discourse was central to power," Gitlin writes with a note of bitterness, "then the exposure and transformation of discourse was the left's central task, and academia would become indispensable ... the university would become the main battlefield in the struggle for power. ... Defeated in Washington, you could march (as a consolation prize) on the English department."

Gitlin recounts a conversation with a committed feminist who, like her fellow postmodernists, thought, as did the premodern scholastics, that there was no reality other than that constituted by "discourse." For the postmodernists who dominate many of our humanities departments, it is as if the scientific revolution never occurred. "The category of 'lived experience' was, from her point of view, an atavistic concealment; what one 'lived' was constituted by a discourse that had no more -- or less -- standing than any other system of discourse."

When asked, the feminist was unable to provide a reasoned justification for her own commitments. They could only be asserted as a matter of power and will. But her problem was more than personal. If, as Michel Foucault told the Berkeley faculty in 1983, "There is no universal criterion which permits us to say, this category of power relations are bad and those are good," then there is no way to prefer a liberal society to fascism, communism, or Islamism.

What that means, by extension, is that, as in the 1930s, many leftists either sympathize with an authoritarian alternative to liberalism or have a hard time explaining why a liberal society should be defended against its enemies. The upshot is that the "fundamentalist left" -- Gitlin's description -- is reduced to the role of a spectator jeering at the American team in its conflict with terrorism.'

'Not only have [William Jefferson’s] lawyers "expressed outrage" at this [raid’s] blatant violation of the separation of powers, [says Jefferson, but] "all of those who consider themselves scholars in the matter have also done so." Jefferson didn't reveal how he ascertained the opinions of "all of those who consider themselves scholars"; perhaps he did so between trips to his freezer.'