Michael Bérubé

"Buddhists speak of learning to see the world with “beginner’s mind,” and that’s precisely what you have to do every semester: begin again, from scratch, knowing that anything can happen — seeing those…"

"I suggest, therefore, that we try to see the intellectual challenges of contemporary literary study as enriched by rather than in competition with knowledge of the history of literary theory. In the s…"

"One of the strengths of Cultivating Humanity is that it explicitly explores the conflict between authority and reason, even if the book does not entirely resolve this conflict. Nussbaum’s untrammeled …"

"I’m not suggesting that every aspect of popular culture has the pedagogical potential of Antigone or the Aeneid, and I’m not suggesting that “classic” popular culture can do all of the intellectual wo…"

"Sokal was right to warn us that a certain kind of skepticism toward science could allow for a meeting of the minds between postmodernists and Creationists but was wrong to imagine that such a skeptici…"

"We sometimes play the blues, too, but we don’t talk about which blues club or which blues tradition we’re “affiliated with.” Who knows? Maybe if there were fewer academic workers caught up in the mech…"

"Amazingly, this disdain for aggressive marketing and self-promotion is matched or exceeded by academe’s aversion to the kind of structural, systemic change that has made the American economy so remark…"

"The paradox is that university life can be both terrific and troubling for parents and children alike: the workplace environment is casual and accommodating on the one hand and clueless and hostile on…"