The Review

I took a little time off last week, so in lieu of the usual newsletter column — which will return next week — I’ve gathered The Review’s ten most-read stories of the summer. Below the break, a selection of essential reading from June, July, and August.

“Why Are There So Few Conservative Professors?,” by Steven M. Teles
“The Harvard Corporation Tries to Kill Faculty Governance,” by Andrew Manuel Crespo and Kirsten Weld
“J.D. Vance is Coming for Higher Ed,” by Eboo Patel
“Michel Foucault, the Bogeyman of the Culture Wars,” by Caleb Smith
“It’s Time to Stop the Double Talk Around Diversity Hiring,” by Matt Burgess
“The Impossible College Presidency,” by Brian Rosenberg
“AI and the Death of Student Writing,” by Lisa Lieberman
“A Harvard Dean’s Assault on Faculty Speech,” by Keith E. Whittington
“Curricular Trauma,” by Len Gutkin
“Can Small, Struggling Colleges Survive?” by Robert Kelchen

Recommended

• “Take the peacocks on the left side of the garden in the Rolin Madonna. Are they just rare, beautiful birds, or are they also moralizing symbols of pride? Can they be both?” In The New York Review of Books, Marisa Anne Bass investigates Jan van Eyck’s quotidian otherworldliness.
• “The march of history had revealed that, whatever longstanding philosophies and theologies may have taught, to treat others as of equal moral concern did require a common ideal of citizenship, rather than the feudal differentiation of men into ranks, orders, corps, and stations.” In American Affairs, Gregory Conti writes about several new studies of liberalism.
• “The wild spontaneity of Rowlands’s performances in the pictures she starred in directed by her husband John Cassavetes — Faces (1968), Minnie and Moskowitz (1971), A Woman Under the Influence (1974), Opening Night (1977), Gloria (1980) — is matched by her metronomic oscillations between joy (or something like it: love, pleasure, hope, relief) and suffering — you at times feel you’re witnessing a 20th-century American version of the Stations of the Cross.” For Metrograph, Christian Lortentzen looks at Gena Rowlands’s career — the actress died earlier this month.
  

Write to me at len.gutkin@chronicle.com.

Yours,

Len Gutkin