Teach For America, an organization that puts its recruits through fast-track training to teach in U.S. regions where students have fallen behind in academic achievement, is now recruiting for its 20th cohort of new teachers.  It's not surprising, then, that TFA recently has received extra scrutiny in the U.S. press. The verdict is still out on the effectiveness of the program—it depends, really, on how you measure effectiveness—yet it's still sending thousands of teachers into U.S. schools each year.

A few years ago, a family member (I'll call her Wanda) was principal of a middle school. "Jane," a sixth-grader, asked her to mediate a conversation between her and her best friend, "Maria." Wanda thought this was a very mature suggestion, so she brought both girls into her office. "Maria," Wanda said, "Jane tells me she would like to discuss a recent misunderstanding." Jane nodded, then said, "I didn't really go down on your boyfriend."

Today, I began my Seminar on College Teaching by having the grad students and postdocs enrolled in it draw a picture that served as a metaphor for higher education today. Images of violence figured prominently in a few doodles. My students depicted the research university as a guillotine, a hunting lodge filled with trophy heads, and--perhaps most graphically--as a meat grinder into which students are fed like cheap steak destined to be hamburger.

Black men have long been overdiagnosed with schizophrenia, according to a new book by University of Michigan psychiatry and women's studies professor Jonathan Metzl.  The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease suggests that black men are diagnosed with schizophrenia at a rate at least five times higher than any other group, a practice that likely began when "experts" made a connection between blackness, civil rights activism, and mental illness.  Metzl's finding is consistent with earlier findings of psychiatric overdiagnoses of people of color and women.

Trash strewn throughout neighborhoods, young men uprooting stop signs, people peeing in front yards, drunken brawls, people breaking into strangers' homes and falling asleep there, men punching pizza delivery drivers, and women vandalizing police cars.  No, it's not Skid Row, a gang-infested community, or a post-apocalyptic landscape.  Rather, it's 1 a.m. in a relatively upscale professorial neighborhood of State College, Pennsylvania.  The National Public Radio show This American Life recently profiled the city and Pennsylvania State University, which was recently ranked the #1 "party school" by the Princeton Review.