Michael Berube,"48 Hours," 11 July, responds to the decision of Pennsylvania's state House of Representatives to establish a committee to inquire into matters of intellectual diversity at colleges and universities supported by the Commonwealth.

Congratulations to our colleague, Caleb McDaniel, whose"Blogging in the Early Republic" gets a review notice in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

In"New Challenge to Columbia, and to Chomsky, Finkelstein, and Cockburne," Alan Dershowitz ratchets up the charges and counter-charges of plagiarism over at David Horowitz's Front Page Rag. Really, I wish Harvard professors would not lend the dignity of their office to that scandal rag and that distinguished academic people would not use the charge of"plagiarism" as a purely political devise. Whether one has committed plagiarism or not isn't a function of Middle Eastern politics.

In"The Confidence Man: Meet Mark C. Taylor, the Virtuoso of Nietzschean Boosterism," Books and Culture, July/August, Villanova's Eugene McCarraher reviews Taylor's Money and Markets: Confidence Games in a World Without Redemption. The book is"Hipness unto death," says McCarraher,"braincandy" for"the Bobo set." Ah, Eugene, I wish I could have said it as well, myself. Just for fun, here's what the website of a mortal professor at Williams College looks like; and here's what Mark C. Taylor's website at Williams College looks like."Hipness unto death," indeed.

At coffee grounds, Evan Roberts very smartly lays out the evidence suggesting that the Chronicle of Higher Education's"First Person" columns are so formulaic that they might be cranked out by the same staffer time-after-time, like any advice columnist. But, at least we do know that the CHE solicits contributions to it and Rob MacDougall wants it known that his own"whiny First Person column did not use a pseudonym." After the CHE ran Ivan Tribble's"Bloggers Need Not Apply," Rex at Savage Minds comments on the irony of being invited to submit a column to the CHE about the job search. So, it's o. k. to dish the dirt in the Chronicle of Higher Education, so long as you don't do it on a blog? It tends to re-enforce Tim Burke's intuition that behind Tribble's problem lies both a technophobia and a fear of non-traditional publication. Thanks to Sharon Howard for the tip.

If you've not stopped by Mark Grimsley's Blog Them Out of the Stone Age lately, do go there to read"Crash" and"SITREP." In the former, Mark has some thoughtful recommendations for handling conflict. A month separates it from"SITREP" and that interim suggested to me that our colleague at Ohio State was grappling with difficulty. What holds my admiration for him is the candor and courage with which he faces it. Professor Tribble should be his understudy. Welcome back, Mark.