Author Archive | Kenneth Anderson

Insta points us to this scatterplot at the Chronicle of Higher Education.  It plots (within the limits of reported numbers, and in any case limited to private universities) university president salaries against average professor salaries within that institution. The thing I found most surprising was not so much the university president salary as the average […]

I am saddened to learn of the death of Montserrat Figueras, the great Catalonian early music singer.  With her husband, gambist and conductor Jordi Savall, she was a central part of the great early music revival of the past few decades.  (A VC reader adds this recollection of Figueras’ appearances in the Bay Area; thanks.) […]

This is a real question, so please point me in the direction of serious national security outlets and reporting.  Is it the US? Israel? Combined ops? Someone else? Is the US engaged in “real” covert ops, rather than simply obviously on-going but “unacknowledged” drone strikes? (I’d like to know the state of current respectable and […]

Pepperdine law professor Gregory McNeal has a guest post at Lawfare on the US military’s processes of targeting and target review, drawing on his outstanding new paper, up at SSRN, “The US Practice of Collateral Damage Estimation and Mitigation.” The paper is descriptive, qualitative political science, drawing on extensive reviews of available US government documents […]

Over at Lawfare, I’ve posted a new review of three academic books on combatants, civilians, and POWs, if you’re interested in fairly technical academic writing on laws of war issues.  My conclusion about the principle of humanitarianism that two of the three books take as essentially overriding is below the fold:

The CIA Officers Memorial Foundation is seeking donations to provide educational support for children of CIA officers killed in the line of duty: CIA officers are asking people to mark the 10th anniversary of the death of the first American killed in the Afghan war by donating to help the children of their fellow fallen. […]

Over the last few months, as the eurozone crisis has gathered steam, I have wondered (here and at the international law blog Opinio Juris) what the crisis means for the governance structures of the EU.  One answer is, not much – the political leadership will somehow muddle through as it always does, on the basis […]

And here from our house in DC, we give thanks for the blue and sunshine beauty of the day, the moist and tender deliciousness of the turkey breast I cooked at 500 degrees F and all the dishes prepared by Beloved Wife and Everyone Else, for the attendance of my sister and her family at […]

Just in case you’ve been wondering where I’ve been: Tropical Storm Kenneth has formed in the eastern Pacific Ocean, with forecasters calling it a rare late-season tropical storm. The U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami said Sunday that Kenneth had maximum sustained winds near 40 mph (65 kph). The storm was centered about 525 miles (845 […]

Over at Lawfare, I have posted a new review of three books on international law, war, and counterterrorism, with a particular focus on the changing shape of counterterrorism through drone warfare and targeted killing.  The three books are all technical and academic, so not everyone’s cup of tea.  Sample below the fold.

Steven Brint is a sociologist at the University of California, Riverside, and the author of a book, In an Age of Experts, I once reviewed in the Columbia Law Review, along with books by Anthony Kronman and Christopher Lasch (mine was a long review essay on the New Class and lawyers and the legal profession). […]

Drones, that is, as in Predator drones and targeted killing.  Although my editor is likely to kill the idea, I am considering as a title for something on targeted killing, drone warfare, and covert action, “A [?] of Drones.”  Where the bracket should be a newly minted collective noun – i.e., such collective nouns as […]

(Bumped to this post of its own from the ending to my last post on returns to non-STEM college majors, because I think is worth thinking about separately.) In general, I agree entirely with the many commentators who have argued that the United States needs to produce more STEM graduates.  But I also take note […]

As Generation Jobless tries to figure out where its job possibilities went, we might consider possible relationships between higher education and return on investment.  I want to limit these possibilities to graduates of four year institutions in non-STEM subjects, rather than the important but separate issue of college non-completion rates.  Consider the following, noting that […]

The Wall Street Journal’s outstanding series on the job market, college, and young people (“Generation Jobless”) continues  today with an interview with a leading investor in the student loan bond market.  I asked a while back for reader help in finding examples of student loan bond documentation – and my thanks to the commenters who […]