Jim Sleeper

Yale's president and trustees think they've found in Singapore a new haven for a liberal arts college and the kind of civil society a liberal education nourishes and needs. Their university sustained such a college for more than 300 years and, through it, the American republic, and for much of...

Hoping to head off alumni resistance to the brand-new "Yale-National University of Singapore" college that the Yale Corporation has created somewhat stealthily in collaboration with the government of that authoritarian city-state, Association of Yale Alumni chairman Michael Madison has inadvertently demonstrated one of the ways Yale College is...

Just as the Tunisian vendor who sparked the Arab Spring was provoked not only by one bureaucratic or police affront but also by a long train of abuses, petty and large, that had alienated many Tunisians from the government, so the Yale professors who passed a resolution decisively (100 to...

The stampede (or is it a gold rush?) abroad by dozens of American universities to plant their flags, brand names and, some of them claim, the seeds of liberal education and democracy was starting to seem thoughtless and chaotic by any serious pedagogical or political measure, even before Yale made...

This short, troubling PBS NewsHour segment on the Chinese-government's new American TV News network, CCTV, must be causing some sleepless afternoons at the Supreme Court for conservative justices who opened the door to this with the Citizens United ruling.

As I showed here at the time,...

You could have heard a pin drop among the 150 professors -- three times more than usual -- in attendance at a closed-door, March 1 meeting of the Yale College Faculty as one of them told president Richard Levin something he didn't want to hear. The message was that his...

The stunning murders of two senior American officers within the high-security command and control center of the Afghanistan's Interior Ministry, followed by the wounding of other American soldiers by a grenade thrown into a camp in Kunduz, is a bitter disgrace for the counter-insurgency strategy that Gen. Stanley McChrystal brought...

There are delicious ironies in "How to Win Female Votes: What Obama Can Learn From Elizabeth Warren," a terrific piece just posted by Paul Starobin in The New Republic. Starobin reflects on Warren's message in her U.S. Senate campaign against Massachusetts Republican Scott Brown, who took the...

Only two weeks ago Yale star quarterback Patrick Witt's decision of last Nov. 13 to decline a Rhodes scholarship interview, in order to lead his team against Harvard in New Haven on Nov. 19, the only day Rhodes was willing to interview him in Atlanta, seemed the result of his...

In his State of the Union address two years ago, in 2010, President Obama kept alive faltering hopes for our fraudulent and now broken political system by appealing movingly to Republicans for bipartisanship and civility. As Ryan Lizza reminds us in a New Yorker article that "everyone" is...

Glenn Beck University has just been displaced by Newt Gingrich University in the U.S. Bad News and World Be Gone college rankings, not least because NGU's star Professor of Populism is even better than Huey Long at playing to racism while denouncing it.

Beck's moving invocation of Martin Luther King,...

You really can't get more egg on your face than Barack Obama's neoliberal Beltway apologists have after his big speech in Kansas. That's because a portion of the speech reads as if the president were channeling the pundits' nemesis, the political psychologist and consultant Drew Westen.

Last August 7 Westen's...

"The reader should know," writes Henry Kissinger in his lengthy coronation of John Lewis Gaddis's "magisterial" biography of the American foreign-policy seer and remonstrant George Kennan in the November 13 New York Times Book Review, "that for the past decade, I have occasionally met with the students of...

Faced with an order from Portland, Oregon Mayor Sam Adams to disperse as of 12:01 am Sunday, Occupy Portland's Jim Oliver told the PBS News Hour Friday evening that "We have called for an Occupation Fest 2011 that is starting on Saturday evening. Every citizen of Portland is invited...

The least bad assessment of Obama's failure that has come so far from the blinkered Washington Beltway pundits' worldview (or Beltanschauung, as I immortalized it here in an essay that launched a thousand links and that everyone in the political chattering classes read under the bed covers...

In Zuccotti Park a few Sundays ago a noose of news cameras tightened quickly around a willowy, long-haired woman, her parchment face lined with the gentle cares of an aging, slightly dotty humanities professor. She had begun dancing alone, shoeless and trance-like in a long, Indian skirt and simple top...

Long before I dabbled in new media I was a timorous dabbler in markets, my investments driven algorithmically by computers at speeds that left me ignorant of what I "owned" from day to day. But now a rapid, unprecedented convergence of online "new media and the motley Occupy Wall Street...

The recent death of New York University law professor Derrick Bell, a tenacious black champion of "critical race theory," and a recent report that the Supreme Court may take up a new challenge to affirmative action on campus both mark the decline of racial "identity politics" and "diversity"...

Just after four American civilian planes brought low the world's only superpower and greatest nerve center ten years ago, I said on All Things Considered that they'd made a mockery of the dollar-driven premise that our massive defense establishment can still defend an open society.

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I often enjoy and benefit from Maureen Dowd's columns, but today she's fallen off her wagon of arch and noble punditry into the smallish world-view, or Beltanschauung, of the Washington Beltway's sophisticated chattering classes. These worthy purveyors of Capitol-corridor realism believe -- or find it quite...