i have to say brooks is very right about students, especially the best, these days: "If they had any flaw, it was that they often had a professional and strategic attitude toward life. They were not intellectual risk-takers. They regarded professors as bosses to be pleased rather than authorities to be challenged. As one admissions director told me at the time, they were prudential rather than poetic." and one might point to the culture of standardized testing - again bushobama's only idea in education, or for the eradication of education - as a symptom and a cause of this slavishness.

but in addition to finding that disturbing ("What we have is a person whose career has dovetailed with the incentives presented by the confirmation system, a system that punishes creativity and rewards caginess"), i find it surprising that someone is a law professor at chicago or a dean of the harvard law school, without an elaborate record of scholarship. maybe i don't understand the standards operating in that zone of the academy. can you be those things as mere academic entrepreneur?