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The Quiet Throat-Cutting of the American University

Syracuse University announced the other day that it will phase out 93 of its approximately 460 academic programs. The administration framed the decision as strategic alignment, calling it a portfolio review driven by student demand and institutional focus. Provost Lois Agnew insisted the move was “not a cost-cutting exercise.” Taken at face value, some of these cuts are routine catalog maintenance. Fifty-five of the ninety-three programs had zero students enrolled. Twenty-eight were advanced certificate supplements to graduate degrees. The provost herself noted that Syracuse offered more than double the roughly 200 programs typical of peer institutions, and a university trimming a bloated catalog to concentrate faculty resources is doing ordinary academic management. Reasonable people can call that housekeeping.

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The Face on the Building: America’s Palazzo Braschi Moment

In 1934, the Fascist Party Federation draped the facade of Rome’s Palazzo Braschi with an enormous sculpted face of Benito Mussolini, surrounded by the word “SI” repeated in cascading rows. The building sat between Piazza Navona and the Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, in the heart of a city that had been shaping political identity through architecture for two thousand years. That face functioned as an instruction. Citizens who walked beneath it understood, whether they could articulate it or not, that the state had claimed the visual field, and that to exist in public space was to exist under observation and under obligation, holding the urban semiotic.

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The Funeral of Handwriting: What We Lose When the Hand Stops Moving

In 2010, the Common Core State Standards Initiative dropped cursive instruction from its recommended curriculum. The decision arrived without ceremony. No public debate, no period of mourning, no recognition that a cognitive practice stretching back to the Sumerian reed stylus was being retired from American education. Forty-one states adopted the standards. Cursive, along with its slower sibling manuscript handwriting, began its institutional death.

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The Borrowed Saint: The Book That Watched Me Back

I have been thinking about mirrors for forty-eight years. The thinking started in a dressing room at a community playhouse in Lincoln, Nebraska, where a row of mirrors lined the wall above a counter cluttered with spirit gum and cold cream and the residue of faces that had been built and removed hundreds of times. I was thirteen years old and I was watching an actor apply a prosthetic nose, and the thing that struck me was the moment when his own face disappeared under the new architecture. His eyes changed. The man in the mirror stopped being the person I had been talking to thirty seconds earlier and became someone whose bone structure carried a different social signal, a different set of expectations, a different gravitational field. Same eyes. Different face. Different world.

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Reheated Laughter: The Sitcom’s Long Retreat from Risk

Norman Lear did something in 1971 that no network executive would permit today: he put a bigot in a living room chair and dared America to recognize itself. “All in the Family” premiered to confusion, outrage, and then unprecedented ratings, because Lear understood that comedy’s sharpest instrument is discomfort. Archie Bunker worked because he was allowed to be wrong in specific, recognizable, unredacted ways. The audience had to do the moral labor of sorting the joke from the injury. That transaction between screen and viewer, that demand that the audience participate in meaning rather than consume a pre-digested emotional product, defined what the American sitcom could be at its most ambitious. Fifty-five years later, the form has abandoned that ambition with an enthusiasm that borders on institutional policy.

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