But I'm going to give The Namesake Series a whirl anyway. Brendan proposes:

In This is Spinal Tap, David St. Hubbins shows Marty DiBergi a tape from the "Namesakes" series, in which celebrities read works by authors with the same last name. For example, Denham Elliott reads T.S. Eliot and Dr. J reads the collected works of Washington Irving.

What if you ran an "intro to theory and pop culture" course along similar lines? Each unit features a theorist discussed in class and related to a namesake in pop culture [. . .]

Here's my attempt:

• Habermas on Kate Moss
• Chaim Perelman on Rhea Perlman
• I.A. Richards on Mary Richards
• Raymond Williams on Venus Williams
• Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick on Kyra Sedgwick
• Laura Mulvey on "Mulva"
• Homi Bhabha on Homey the Clown
• Stuart Hall on The Wall
• Kenneth Burke on Delta Burke

More later.

Look at the whole set.

First, a bit of setup: In the movie Is It Fall Yet?, Quinn Morgandorffer -- my favorite character in the Daria series -- gets her PSAT score. She and the other girls in the fashion club compare scores, and Quinn is disappointed. She thought she'd get a higher score than the other girls, and she wants to get into Pepperhill, a well-known party school. She decides to get a tutor, David, a nerdy college guy. The guys, of course, think that's oh so cool, so the other girls get David to tutor them too. The representations of their tutoring sessions in this movie speak to a lot of cultural notions about what it means to tutor and be tutored. First, there's the general frustration and uneasiness that results from needing extra help (Why do I have to do this?):

More below the fold.

Advice for new graduate students from Fontana Labs at Unfogged.

The recent Blogging For Kids With Disabilities event hasn't gotten NEARLY enough uptake, in my opinion, so please go and read (and link to) the posts now. Laura's posts about her son's severe verbal apraxia are here , here, and here. A humble query: Wouldn't a "culture of life" allot far more resources for these children and their parents?

An interesting thread about teaching and research at The Valve. Matt Greenfield asks:

I am talking to a colleague about how my semester is going. I find myself talking about “my work.” And I feel a twinge of uneasiness. If my research is “my work,” what should I call my teaching? Is it someone else’s work? Is teaching work done on behalf of someone else, or work done by another version of me?

This dissonance, as well as the question of whether or not instructors should bring their own research into the classroom, is discussed.

An excellent article about students in two-year colleges in the Chronicle. I can just see John Lovas nodding vigorously in agreement.

[W]hat I've found surprising, during my 18-year teaching career in the community-college arena, is not how many of my students aren't well prepared for college, but how many of them are. One of the best-kept secrets in higher education today is the proliferation of honors programs at two-year colleges.

Those programs are designed to accommodate students whose SAT scores would allow them to get into "prestigious" colleges, but who find themselves at a community college for any number of personal reasons.

[. . .]

For many of those students, the local community college is an attractive alternative, because of its low cost, proximity to home, or popular programs. Tuition is often two-thirds or even half what students would pay at a four-year college. And they can usually cut expenses even further by living at home.

I'm nodding too. In the class I taught this summer, which had only ten students, two or three had gone to community colleges. They cited the reasons above (proximity to home, low cost), but they also pointed out that their community colleges' career and personal counseling services far surpassed those of the University of Minnesota -- not that the U of M's are bad or anything, but there are so many more students that the counselors don't seem to have as much time to meet repeatedly with the same person. One student, referring to the community college he attended, said, "There, you could meet with someone every single day if you wanted." Anyway, just my two cents. I recommend the article highly.

Seems that this service is treading a little close for FERPA comfort. I guess it's good for enrollment and retention, though.

How'd I miss this one? A university is hiring Smarthinking to assess student essays:

In a move that may take outsourcing past traditional levels, Kentucky’s community colleges this fall have started a pilot project in which an outside company is reading and providing evaluations of student essays in freshman composition courses. The program is small to date — only 48 students are having their papers assessed in this way — but Kentucky officials are enthusiastic about the potential for expanding the effort. And the company — Smarthinking — sees this as a service it would like to offer other colleges.

“The idea is that we can take the grading burden off of professors, and free up their time to do other things, such as working with students who need extra help,” said Burck Smith, CEO of the company, which has previously focused on providing outsourced tutoring centers for colleges in which students receive assistance online.

Not everyone is enthusiastic about the prospect of outsourced grading. “I’m appalled,” said Douglas Hesse, board chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication. “This is abdicating something that is crucial to instruction,” said Hesse, a professor of English and director of the honors program at Illinois State University.

[. . .]

Faculty members have long complained about the “laborious grading process,” yet at the same time the system needs to find ways to educate more students without getting much more money, Cook said. Currently, class size tends not to exceed 25-30, she said, but the system would like to double or possibly quadruple that figure. “Our faculty have said that to scale up, they need more support,” she added.

Sounds kind of assembly-line to me. Lots of people have commented under the article; check it out.

From issues of Mademoiselle, early 1970s. Click thumbnails for larger versions, then "All Sizes" for the largest versions:

Mademoiselle ended publication in 2001, and their subscriptions were rerouted to Glamour. I haven't thumbed through Glamour in some years, so I'm asking: Do they have similar ads now?

I should preface this by saying that I don't subscribe to the WPA listserv or read the archives very often, so this isn't meant to address any debates or specific people on the list. These arguments are simply what I imagine might enter the minds of writing program administrators. By the way, sorry about burying it below the fold, but there's horizontal scrolling for the whole page involved if I don't.

...will resume on Tuesday when I get back to St. Paul.

I'd rather find someone else who blogged about that article about women in elite colleges who want to forego career for stay-at-home childrearing, but I haven't found anyone who's written about it yet. Oh well. I was both disturbed and encouraged by various parts of the article.

While the changing attitudes are difficult to quantify, the shift emerges repeatedly in interviews with Ivy League students, including 138 freshman and senior females at Yale who replied to e-mail questions sent to members of two residential colleges over the last school year.

The interviews found that 85 of the students, or roughly 60 percent, said that when they had children, they planned to cut back on work or stop working entirely. About half of those women said they planned to work part time, and about half wanted to stop work for at least a few years.

Two of the women interviewed said they expected their husbands to stay home with the children while they pursued their careers. Two others said either they or their husbands would stay home, depending on whose career was furthest along.

At least the Times does acknowledge in the article that there are many people who don't have the financial luxury of being able to choose not to work outside the home. And "depending on whose career was furthest along"? Fair enough, I guess, assuming that lots of people marry outside their economic classes and that we're on a level playing field in terms of gender. But I don't think either of those assumptions is a safe one.

In recent years, elite colleges have emphasized the important roles they expect their alumni - both men and women - to play in society.

For example, earlier this month, Shirley M. Tilghman, the president of Princeton University, welcomed new freshmen, saying: "The goal of a Princeton education is to prepare young men and women to take up positions of leadership in the 21st century. Of course, the word 'leadership' conjures up images of presidents and C.E.O.'s, but I want to stress that my idea of a leader is much broader than that."

She listed education, medicine and engineering as other areas where students could become leaders.

In an e-mail response to a question, Dr. Tilghman added: "There is nothing inconsistent with being a leader and a stay-at-home parent. Some women (and a handful of men) whom I have known who have done this have had a powerful impact on their communities."

Well, okay. This line of thought is promising, but do all the faculty share Dr. Tilghman's view of leadership? I doubt it.

University officials said that success meant different things to different people and that universities were trying to broaden students' minds, not simply prepare them for jobs.

"What does concern me," said Peter Salovey, the dean of Yale College, "is that so few students seem to be able to think outside the box; so few students seem to be able to imagine a life for themselves that isn't constructed along traditional gender roles."

THANK YOU, PETER SALOVEY! Mr. Salovey's point will be illustrated later in the article.

Sarah Currie, a senior at Harvard, said many of the men in her American Family class last fall approved of women's plans to stay home with their children.

"A lot of the guys were like, 'I think that's really great,' " Ms. Currie said. "One of the guys was like, 'I think that's sexy.' Staying at home with your children isn't as polarizing of an issue as I envision it is for women who are in their 30's now."

Okay, this just makes me shudder. Cf. Salovey.

"I'll have a career until I have two kids," [a student at Yale] said. "It doesn't necessarily matter how far you get. It's kind of like the experience: I have tried what I wanted to do."

Ms. Ku added that she did not think it was a problem that women usually do most of the work raising kids.

"I accept things how they are," she said. "I don't mind the status quo. I don't see why I have to go against it."

Cf. Salovey. I'm trying to figure out all the reasons this article bothers me so much. The first, I suppose, is reflected in my title, which is also the title of an essay by Adrienne Rich about inequality in the educational system, both public and private, from elementary, to secondary, to college level. Isn't it true that some professors already see women as interlopers in higher education who, but for a few bluestocking exceptions, are there for an MRS degree, as the joke goes? Obviously it would be a better situation if: a.) the distribution of wealth in this country were such that more people could have the choice to stay at home with kids; b.) parenting were valued in our society, and I don't mean in the "revered in rhetoric, reviled in policy" sense; c.) staying at home with kids weren't viewed as an almost exclusively feminine vocation (even to the point of being SEXEE!), and as a corollary d.) masculinity weren't inextricably linked with breadwinning, such that the men I know who stay at home with their kids seem to feel obliged to explain it or apologize for it; and e.) education weren't so closely tied to career, i.e. learning has inherent value, and every student is worth teaching, equally, whether he or she goes on to apply that knowledge in a conventional career or not.

That's a start.

UPDATE: More at feministing and Rebel Dad.