THE PERILS OF DEFENDING TENURE

A review I did of Ellen Schrecker's book, The Lost Soul of Higher Education, plus many comments about can be found here:

http://www.democracyjournal.org/20/in-defense-of-tenure.php?page=all

ONE I'M PARTICULARLY PROUD OF...

This piece has a brief history to tell: It was originally written for the reconstituted Baffler, indeed went through a full series of edits there. Then, the Baffler went belly-up due to a funding problem, and so now this piece finds a home at Dissent. If you go to the front page of the magazine, the on-line editor has a very nice image for the article. Enjoy.

http://dissentmagazine.org/online.php?id=440

REMEMBERING DANIEL BELL

Over the last two days, I was busy writing this piece on Daniel Bell who passed away this week:

http://chronicle.com/article/Daniel-Bell-1919-2011/126106/?sid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en

WHAT I READ

A small and fun little interview I did with the Chronicle for Higher Education about what I read:

http://chronicle.com/blogs/pageview/my-daily-read-kevin-mattson/28048

The Everglades...

When I was in graduate school, I had scheduled a visit to Everglades National Park. I didn't make the trip for complications (too long to travel, too many deadlines at the moment). I've always wanted to explore the park, and so this winter break instead of skiing, we headed down to the park. We did a eight day canoe trip through the heart of the park and then saw the grasslands region on another trip. It was wonderful (we canoed down the Wilderness Waterway over a half of the course and then wound up going around out to the Gulf Coast where we camped on key islands). I post some pictures here. We saw dolphins, marlin jumping out of the sea, tons of alligators, and multiple birds. We slept on our boat one evening, because we had traveled eighteen and a half miles and couldn't find our camp. This is how we got the nicknames from friends -- the "Crazy Mattsons."

Fox News

Did an interview (on camera) for this story at Fox News. Somewhere there's video, but for now, this is what I have:

http://politics.blogs.foxnews.com/2010/11/23/should-obama-dream-primary-colors

DECLINE???

On Monday, October 25 I'll be on the Kerri Miller show with James Fallows. We'll be talking about the idea of American decline... Here's a link to the show.

http://minnesota.publicradio.org/radio/programs/midmorning/