Our Racial Nightmare

Our Racial Nightmare

(From Minnesota to Louisiana to Dallas, tensions between police and the African-American community are at a boiling point) By Tom Robotham   If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, recreated from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us:...
Rocks of Ages

Rocks of Ages

By Tom Robotham    The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see. ― G.K. Chesterton   The first time I visited England, in 1979, most of the people I encountered were British. That may seem like a terribly obvious statement. But during...
Selective Service

Selective Service

By Tom Robotham When I was 15, in 1971, I thought there was a good possibility that I wouldn’t live to see my 19th birthday. The Vietnam War seemed to have no end in sight, and many of the older kids in my neighborhood had already been drafted. My only hope for...
Selective Service

Student Outcomes

By Tom Robotham   Last month The Post and Courier, a newspaper in Charleston, SC, ran a story about a professor at the College of Charleston who was suspended because his syllabus was “gravely deficient.” The story caught my attention because the dispute, to my mind,...
Selective Service

Us and Them

  There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman. ~ Margaret Fuller, Woman in the 19th Century.   Some years ago, while delivering a lecture on the women’s movement to one of my classes at Old Dominion University, I paused to ask my students...