These days tenure for teachers is such a brawl in America's elementary and secondary schools that it's easy to forget that it's more a cornerstone of higher education.  When Austan Goolsbee, Chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisors, announced earlier this month that he was leaving the White House to return to the University of Chicago it was a reminder just how strong the ties — and inducements — of university tenure can be, and why ...

Earlier this year, the National Pork Board introduced its new slogan: "Be inspired." It isn't nearly as catchy as "the other white meat," an earlier campaign that touted the health benefits of pork, but it did evoke something even higher and nobler. But nobility hardly describes the public image of the industry this week, and if consumers are inspired to do anything at all, it would be to stop eating pork entirely. That's because of the release ...

WOUNDED KNEE has been the catalyst," says Donald White, an Oneida Indian who is a student at the University of Illinois. "We have been apathetic for too many years. The people out there are willing to die for us. Maybe it's our time to do something too." Many other Indians, particularly the young, echo his sentiments.Although the American Indian has been the subject of insatiable curiosity and unrelieved romanticization by whites, almost 500 years of losing battles have made him nearly invisible. But recently the Indian has ...

Trapped on a swarming sector of Long Island where the backwash of Suburbia blurs into the edge of New York City, the West Side Tennis Club at Forest Hills is a green refuge from the crowded reality about it. Outside its high fences, the Long Island Rail Road rattles on its rounds and ordinary citizens endure the twice-daily war of commuting. Inside the club, the polite plunk of tennis balls, the whisper of sneakers on trim grass courts, the ...

For the first two years of Barack Obama's presidency, Mitch McConnell never got a phone call from the White House. Instead, he sat in his office on the second floor of the Capitol and plotted Obama's political demise. Now, ask the Senate Republican leader when he last spoke to Vice President Joe Biden, and he lets out a laugh, his golden presidential-seal cuff links — a gift from George W. Bush — flashing as his hands go ...

There are illegal immigrants on the loose in the Midwest. Originally hailing from Asia, they're about 3 ft. long and weigh up to 100 lb. , and are known to resist capture. Once they establish residency, they can eat you out of house and home. They're called Asian carp, and they emigrated to the lower reaches of the Mississippi River in the 1970s. Now they're knocking on the door of the Great Lakes, threatening to destroy ...

In Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth, the fortuneteller unfurls her skirts, hoists her bodice, strolls downstage and heckles the audience. Oh, she can tell the future, all right. "Nothing easier," she says. "But who can tell your past, eh? Nobody! You lie awake nights trying to know your past. What did it mean? What was it trying to say to you? Think! Think!" Think, indeed. The only action one can take toward the past is to think about ...

"Every white man knows his time is up," snapped the frail-looking Negro in the embroidered pillbox to 5,500 Negroes packed into Manhattan's St. Nicholas Arena one hot afternoon last week. "I am here to teach you how to be free. Yes, free from the white man's yoke. We want unity of all darker peoples on the earth. Then we will be masters of the United States, and we are going to treat the white man the way he should be ...

The "all-American drug" has hit like a blizzard, with casualties rising. C17H21NO4. A derivative of Erythroxylon coca. Otherwise known as cocaine, coke, C, snow, blow, toot, leaf, flake, freeze, happy dust, nose candy, Peruvian, lady, white girl. A vegetable alkaloid derived from leaves of the coca plant. Origin: eastern slopes of the Andes mountains. Availability: Anywhere, U.S.A. Cost: $2,200 per oz., five times the price of gold. Whatever the price, by whatever name, cocaine is becoming the all-American drug. No ...

When President Barack Obama announced on May 1 that U.S. forces had killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, I was among those who headed to the White House. The mood in Lafayette Park was joyous, ebullient, cathartic — though hardly the bacchanal of vengeful jingoism that some in the media have portrayed it to be, or an expression of "orgasmic euphoria in news of bloodshed" as David Sirota claimed on Salon.com. An outsider would have been struck ...