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Doctor Cleveland blogs about politics, education, literature, and the arts. His personal obsessions include live theater, Red Sox baseball, and powerful black coffee. He teaches college under another name, somewhere along America's glorious North Coast. While he blogs about the general academic life, he does not discuss his current institution, its students, or its employees on the blog. Nor does he use any university resources to blog. Any public statement he chooses to make about his employer will be made under his legal name.

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Opening Day Farewell

by Doctor Cleveland 4/5/2012 - 12:08 am   |

Today is Opening Day for most of Major League Baseball, including my beloved Red Sox. For most baseball fans, the experience of falling in love with the game is inextricably bound up with their relationship to the men in their family, to the father or uncle who took them to games and played catch with them in the yard. But my love of baseball grows out of my love for a woman: my aunt Ann, who was laid to rest this week. Today is the first time I have been in Boston for Opening Day since I left New England fifteen years ago. And today is my first Opening Day without Ann. I had expected her to have another, and another. I was not prepared for this day to come without her. [Read more]

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Trayvon Martin and "Making It About Race"

by Doctor Cleveland 3/26/2012 - 11:10 pm   |

Whenever an unarmed black person gets shot to death, the way Trayvon Martin was, you'll hear some people defend the shooter by claiming that the shooting wasn't racist, and how dare you judge what's in the shooter's heart? The shooter would have killed any unarmed person for walking down the street in a sweatshirt, or walking down the street with a wallet, or performing whatever "suspicious" everyday activity prompted the homicide. The defense is that the killer is not a racist, but a universal menace to society. This is supposed to be reassuring somehow. It's a thoroughly illogical defense. It even suggests that no matter what the person making the argument says, and no matter what they tell themselves, they know in their hearts that racism was the motive for the violence. In fact, their own sense of safety is based on their rock-bottom belief that the killing was racist. [Read more]

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Why College Costs So Much, Part 2

by Doctor Cleveland 3/19/2012 - 2:33 pm   |

In my previous post about college prices, I focused on the massive state spending cuts that have driven up tuition at public school universities and also made it easier to raise private tuition, because private universities no longer face serious price competition from the public sector. (See also tmmccarthy's excellent post on tuition and budget cuts.) In this post, I'd like to focus on the cost side of the question, and start with the private universities instead of the public ones.
 [Read more]

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Why College Costs So Much, Part 1

by Doctor Cleveland 3/15/2012 - 3:30 pm   |

Mitt Romney recently told an aspiring college student that if he had trouble affording college, he should just shop around for the best price, which proves that Romney has no idea how college prices work: [Read more]

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Barack Obama, Warlord of the 21st Century

by Doctor Cleveland 3/10/2012 - 8:09 pm   |

You know who I really, really wouldn't run against on a national-security platform? A Nobel Peace Prize winner who killed Osama bin Laden.

But that's just me. Last week Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic, in an extended and generally thoughtful interview with President Obama, asked the following question:
  [Read more]

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Teaching by the Numbers

by Doctor Cleveland 3/2/2012 - 3:55 pm   |

Last week, New York City released Teacher Data Reports for every teacher in its system. This week, I got my own teaching numbers: last semester's teaching evaluation scores. Getting my numbers was a good thing for me personally; they were very high, and my bosses tend to reward that. [Read more]

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Prime Time Persecution

by Doctor Cleveland 2/14/2012 - 11:52 pm   |

Anyone on television talking about how they're being persecuted for their religion is not being persecuted. How do I know this?

Because they are on television.

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Birth Control Makes Catholicism Work

by Doctor Cleveland 2/8/2012 - 11:56 pm   |

The brilliant Ramona and Destor have been especially brilliant this week on the Catholic bishops' outrage at having to pay for full employee health insurance. Destor is so smart about the church and state principles involved, and Ramona so good on the women's-health issues, that I have nothing left to add but my own personal experience. I am a former employee of the Catholic Church. I used to have a health-insurance card with the Archdiocese of Boston's seal printed on it. That wasn't an experience of religious liberty. [Read more]

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The GOP's Drunk-Dad Primary

by Doctor Cleveland 2/2/2012 - 9:59 am   |

There's been a lot of punditty chatter about what the Romney vs. Gingrich struggles means: insiders vs. outsiders, establishment vs. Tea Party, elite vs. non-elite, whatever. But listening to that clip of Gingrich attacking John King, listening the open, undiluted pleasure that Gingrich takes in his own rage, made it clear to me what this is really about. The Republican primary voters are electing their political family a new Drunk Dad. And they want to be sure they get the right kind.

  [Read more]

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Gingrich and "Protecting Barack Obama"

by Doctor Cleveland 1/20/2012 - 11:42 pm   |

So, Newt Gingrich is getting all kinds of media love after blasting the media in Thursday's debate, and saying that he's "tired of the elite media protecting Barack Obama by attacking Republicans," for example by reporting on things that Republicans running for President have actually said and done. I mean, the "elite media" hasn't fact-checked anything Barack Obama has said in a Presidential debate since before he was elected! How can that be fair?
 [Read more]

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