Books, Articles, and Items of Academic Interest

Pistols and Hymns

My first book, written in a seven-month blaze ending in early 1998, was a forget-the-door-knock-down-the-walls assault on the vanities, hypocrisies, betrayals, self-dealings, willful blindness, moral squalor, dubious policies, ideological corruption, and magnificent farrago of high principle and low behavior of American higher education. The book’s path to publication may have been hindered a little by the title, Rough Drafts, which caused one editor to ask when he could see the finished manuscript.

Rough Drafts never saw the light of day as a complete book, though several chapters have appeared here and there—mostly here, in the pages of Academic Questions. (See “Dogfish: Why College Presidents Will Not Save Higher Education,” Summer 1999; and “Homicides in Higher Education,” Fall 2007.) Drafting Rough Drafts, however, was its own reward, and attempting to sail her to harbor proved