[Introduction to "Is Biology Destiny?" articles.]
For venturing to explore the role of biology in our social lives, I have had more than my share of interesting moments. In addition to slander and calumny--depressingly standard fare in the academy today--I have received bomb threats at lectures in Vancouver and Montreal and the promise of a "kneecapping" at the New School for Social Research in New York.
The artists, poets, composers, and dramatists now reaching their maturity have lived through a time of crisis for the arts. Some of us are questioning the whole 200-year-old tradition of the avant-garde and rethinking our aesthetics from the ground up.
Budget cuts. Debt reduction. Smaller government. One hundred and fifty years ago, the state of New York fired the first shots in a nationwide political revolution strikingly similar to today's.
[Introduction to "cluster" of articles on the American university]
During the half-century since World War II, American colleges and universities have been education's Emerald City, not only for Americans but for millions of others who have followed the yellow brick road from abroad. No matter what ups and downs have afflicted the economy, no matter that the stunning mediocrity of our primary and secondary schools has been recognized as a national crisis--through all this and more, higher education has grown in scale, in wealth, in allure and, at least until the very recent past, in stature.
The corporation is downsizing and going international. Government is being reinvented, even disinvented. Unions are disappearing. Churches are turning themselves into spiritual shopping malls, offering something for everyone. The family has fractured or recombined. Radical change is the order of the day in the life of American institutions--except in academia.
In last autumn's barely defeated referendum, supporters of sovereignty for Quebec claimed a "distinct society" as the strongest justification for severing most ties with the rest of Canada. The author explores that difference in the character of Quebec City.
It is hard to think of a phrase whose revival in the language was as welcome, and whose subsequent history has proved quite so disappointing, as "public intellectual."