#UVA revisited….

In today’s NYT magazine, Andrew Rice’s Anatomy of a Campus Coup, here. This is a saga that wont go away. Reading the comments section is actually enlightening for once–the consensus seems to be that it wont go away because, counter to the conventional wisdom about academics, the stakes are so high.

Old Digs…

I’m waiting for a meeting in my all time favorite part of the NIH campus in Bethesda: the slightly dive-like Clinical Center basement cafeteria (now food court).  It was the locus of many an intense conversation during my postdoctoral years here. In those days the food was foul, the cigarette smoke pungent, but the science talk was great!  Well the smoke is gone, but all the rest is  still here.  Here’s hoping that the NIH sees fit to preserve the black socks and sandals atmosphere long into the future.

UVA’s Teresa Sullivan on Higher Ed…

From today’s Richmond Times Dispatch, here. Money quote:

“It’s fair to say that higher education is under attack nationally, and the attack is not purely financial,” Sullivan said Wednesday in the first lecture of the season for the U.Va. Miller Center.
“Many of the fundamental values of higher learning are being questioned,” she said, including “the essential value of a college education … and even the notion of public education as an instrument of the public good.”
Sounds to me like the Summer Crisis at UVA hasn’t completely subsided….

The new normal….

It’s eleven years after that crisp Fall day when fear suddenly became part of of the American psyche. This morning, on the eve of the anniversary, the weather is eerily similar to that morning. But after a decade, there is a new normal to living inside the Washington Beltway. The startle response that used to accompany an unexpected low-flying aircraft in one’s peripheral vison is largely gone. The armed camp atmospherics around the Pentagon are a thing of the past. The jersey barriers have become bollards or planters. While the giant flags are out this morning covering Rossyln’s high-rise tower blocks, they aren’t a ubiquitous feature of our town anymore.

Even in New York, the skyline has become rebalanced with the topping-out of WTC 1 down by the Battery.

In short, the national trauma of 9/11 has eased and the country is in the process of turning the page. The current worries of fiscal cliff, national debt and dysfunctional politics are of an altogether different character from the affliction that began early in the previous decade. So perhaps this is…the new normal.

It couldn’t be more welcome.