The struggle for Vietnam occupies a central place in the history of the twentieth century. Fought over a period of three decades, the conflict drew in all the world’s powers and saw two of them—first France, then the United States—attempt to subdue the revolutionary Vietnamese forces. For France, the defeat marked the effective end of her colonial empire, while for America the war left a gaping wound in the body politic that remains open to this day.  In the below essay, Logevall distills key points from his book.

“Why are we in Vietnam?” The question resounded in dorm rooms and lecture halls and student centers on America’s college campuses in the late 1960s. It sparked heated debates at dinner tables in the nation’s homes. Norman Mailer made it the title of an iconic novel in 1967. And in a sense the question never went away, even as it was altered to the past tense after the signing of the Paris Peace Accords in 1973. It now became “Why were we in Vietnam?” and in short order it came dominate much of the writing about the war by journalists, memoirists, and historians.

And no wonder it did so, given the war’s deep and continuing resonance in American politics and culture. The intervention in Vietnam has been called the defining experience of the second half of the twentieth century for Americans, and it’s arguably the longest and bloodiest conflict in post-1945 world affairs, killing perhaps three million and more than 58,000 Americans. It also wreaked vast destruction on huge portions of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.

The large and growing literature on the conflict contains a curious feature. In their rush to analyze “America’s war,” most authors have given remarkably short shrift to the French war that came before it. This is unfortunate, for close attention to that earlier history is imperative if we are to understand why the United States ended up in this faraway place, 7,000 miles from the coast of California, a place many Americans did not know existed. It is imperative if we are comprehend why the United States, borne out of an anticolonial reaction against Britain, opted to back France in a colonial war against Ho Chi Minh’s revolutionary nationalist forces, and then, once that effort ended in defeat, chose to try to succeed where the French had failed. It turns out that the Second World War and the French Indochina War that followed were absolutely crucial to all that would happen later in the Vietnam.

Nor is it merely as a prelude to America’s Vietnam debacle that the earlier period merits our attention. Straddling as it did the twentieth century’s midpoint, the French Indochina War sat at the intersection of the grand political forces that drove world affairs during the century. Thus Indochina’s experience between 1945 and 1954 is intimately bound up with the transformative effects of the Second World War and the outbreak and escalation of the Cold War and, in particular, with the emergence of the United States as the predominant power in Asian and world affairs.

And thus the struggle is also part of the story of European colonialism and its encounter with anticolonial nationalists—who drew their inspiration in part from European and American ideas and promises. In this way, the French Indochina War was simultaneously an East-West and North-South conflict, pitting European imperialism in its twilight phase against the two main competitors that gained momentum by mid century: Communist-inspired revolutionary nationalism and U.S.-backed liberal internationalism. If similar processes played out around much of the world after 1945, Vietnam deserves special study because it was one of the first places where this destructive dynamic could be seen. It was also where the dynamic remained in place, decade after bloody decade.

Embers of War considers this fascinating and important history anew, using archival materials from several countries and the full range of published sources. I worked on the book for ten years and have been honored and humbled by the discussions it has initiated and the feedback I’ve received: one reviewer named it the definitive history of the French war and the making of America’s struggle.

I invite you to read my book and to consider using it in your courses. I am confident it will get your students thinking—and talking—in new, meaningful ways about this important and transformational time in their nation’s history.

Fredrik Logevall is John S. Knight Professor of International Studies and professor of history at Cornell University, where he serves as director of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies.  His 2012 book, Embers of War, was the winner of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in history.

Charles Murray’s book Coming Apart offers a thought-provoking commentary on class in contemporary America. Drawing on five decades of statistics and research, the book demonstrates that a new upper class, who live in hyper-wealthy zip codes called SuperZIPS, and a new lower class have diverged so far in core behaviors and values that they barely recognize their underlying American kinship—divergence that has nothing to do with income inequality and that has grown during good economic times and bad.  In the below essay, Murray discusses trends that have occurred since 2010.

I began the discussion of the SuperZips with a promise to update the results in later editions of Coming Apart when the 2010 census results became available.  Those results were published from December 2011 through the spring of 2012.  This is the story they tell:

Ethnic Composition

My expectation that Asians would increase their presence in the SuperZips was borne out: From 2000 to 2010, the proportion of Asians in SuperZips rose by half, from 8 to 12 percent of people living in SuperZips. These are extraordinary numbers for an ethnic group that still constituted fewer than 5 percent of the national population in 2010. The ratio of Asians in SuperZips to Asians in the population as a whole is 2.6 to 1.

Meanwhile, the percentage of whites in the SuperZips declined from 82 percent in 2000 to 74 percent, a substantial reduction.  In one sense, this means an increase in the ethnic diversity of America’s elites. But the unusual status of Asians in American life that I noted earlier in this chapter—their status since around the 1960 as “honorary whites”—clouds the situation. In terms of minorities considered to be disadvantaged, black representation in the SuperZips grew from 3 to 4 percent and Latino representation from 3 to 6 percent. Whites plus Asians constituted 90 percent of the SuperZips’ population in 2000 and 86 percent in 2010.

By Rashid Khalidi, author of Brokers of Deceit (Beacon Press, March 2013).

I served as an advisor to the Madrid and Washington Palestinian-Israeli negotiations from 1991-1993, and long wanted to use documents that I collected then, but I never found an opportunity to do so. Then the research of one my graduate students on American Middle East policy revealed a trove of newly declassified American and Israeli materials that cast a fascinating light on what I had experienced in the early 1990’s. Together with my observations on the Obama administration’s failures in dealing with the Palestine issue, it inspired me to write this short book. This is not a comprehensive history of US Middle East policy, or of US policy on Palestine. Instead, it focuses on three “moments:” one is the period 1978-82, another is the 1991-93 negotiations, and the third is the last two years of Obama’s first term. I saw that the specific patterns of US bias in favor of inflexible Israeli positions that we had seen in our negotiations with the Israelis were precisely mirrored in earlier administrations, and that little or nothing has changed under this president.

The book addresses some of the common distortions of language that are so prevalent where the Palestine issue is concerned in Israeli-American official and media discourse. I deal with corrupted terms like “peace process,” “Palestinian autonomy,” “Israeli security,” and “terrorism,” all of which in this parlance have a heavily loaded meaning. I thus am challenging both those who use these terms in policy-making, political discourse and the media, and the vast literature that reproduces them without critical analysis of what they actually mean. As I suggest in the book, this is truly Orwellian, and this corrupt language has a profound impact on reality.

I show that an “autonomy” scheme for the Palestinians devised by Menachem Begin to provide permanent Israeli control over the entirety of “greater Eretz Israel” in the late 1970’s has defined every essential feature of the so-called “Palestinian Authority.” In practice, this has meant ultimate Israeli control of security, land and water, unlimited settlement, and exclusive Israeli possession of Jerusalem. The book shows that this was not just Begin’s wish list. It has become the bedrock of the policy of every Israeli government since. Even worse, it constitutes the ceiling of what US policy will allow to the Palestinians. Needless to say, such a scheme cannot produce peace, but is rather designed to prolong occupation, settlement and the subjugation of the Palestinian people, which it has successfully done for the past 20 years.

In this book I unpublished documents produced by the Palestinian delegation from 1991-93 (originals are available at http://www.palestine-studies.org/ppd.aspx ), together with other documents, to show that American policy on Palestine has echoed key Israeli desiderata from 1977 until 2012. The result is that the United States never was an “honest broker.” In fact it usually served as “Israel’s lawyer,” a description by Aaron David Miller of how he and other policy-makers under several administrations actually operated.

I intended this book for a general audience, as well as academics and people in the media and government, and I encourage you to consider it for use in your courses on American politics and government, U.S. foreign policy, and the politics and international relations of the Middle East.

Rashid Khalidi is the author of seven books about the Middle East, including Palestinian Identity, Brokers of Deceit, Resurrecting Empire, The Iron Cage, and Sowing Crisis.  His writing on Middle Eastern history and politics has appeared in the New York Times, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and many journals.

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In Why Nations Fail professors Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson assert that strong, inclusive political and economic institutions—not geography, culture, or market-based tendencies—determine a nation’s success or failure. Their findings, based on fifteen years of original research, have garnered excellent to favorable reviews from academia as well as from leading voices in the international aid and development community. However, in February, Microsoft founder Bill Gates criticized the book in a much-publicized review on his website (link to his review).

In response to Gates’ assessment, the authors responded with a pointed and detailed retort:

“Why Nations Fail received the harshest reviews from those who see geography and culture as the root causes of poverty, and enlightened leaders — or even more enlightened outside donors and organizations — as the keys to economic development. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given his dedication to international aid, billionaire foundation chief Bill Gates falls into this category: His Feb. 26 review of our book was particularly uncharitable. Unfortunately, however, it was also dead wrong on many counts.”  To read the rest of their essay, click here.

What do you think of Bill Gates’ assessment of Why Nations Fail?  What of the counterpoints made by the authors?

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For years, hundreds of colleges, university, and high school courses have used my books, The Russians and The Power Game: How Washington Works, in their courses. Professors and teachers have trusted the quality of my reporting, research, and writing. Students have found my work readable and intellectually engaging.

My new book, Who Stole the American Dream?, is especially well suited for university courses and seminars and high school classrooms. It combines on-the-spot reporting and storytelling with academic-level research (more than 1,000 footnotes), making it both authoritative and highly readable. My thematic treatment of American political and economic history from the 1970s to the present would work well in interdisciplinary seminars as well as courses in government, economics, political science, public policy, journalism, and modern American history.

In The Russians, I took a generation of students inside the Soviet Union. In The Power Game, I took a second generation inside Washington’s corridors of power. Now, I am taking a third generation across America to show how seismic changes, sparked by landmark political and economic decisions, have transformed America over the past four decades. Drawing on fifty years of experience, I have pieced together a revealing and fascinating narrative, starting with Lewis Powell’s provocative 1971 memo that triggered a political rebellion, which permanently altered the landscape of power in Washington.

As The New York Review of Books observed, my book provides an important alternative to the conventional, market-based explanation of America’s transformation from the middle-class power and prosperity and political bipartisanship of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, to the gridlocked politics, starkly unequal democracy, and gaping economic inequalities of today.

“Hedrick Smith has done it again,” says Harvard Business School Professor Jay Lorsch. “Who Stole the American Dream? provides a readable and comprehensive account of how Americans have been robbed of our dream of a broad middle class over the past forty years. . . . It is essential reading.” Essential for students seeking to understand the evolution of contemporary America.

Among other things, my book documents the accidental beginnings of the 401(k) plan, with disastrous economic consequences for millions of Americans; the major policy changes that began under Jimmy Carter (before Ronald Reagan); how the New Economy disrupted America’s engine of shared prosperity, the “virtuous circle” of growth; and how America lost the title of “Land of Opportunity.” I describe the transfer of $6 trillion inmiddle-class wealth from homeowners to banks before the housing boomwent bust, and how the U.S. policy tilt favoring the rich is stunting America’s economic growth. I show how pivotal policies were altered while the public wasn’t looking, how Congress has often ignored public opinion, how America has lost the vital moderate center in politics, and how Wall Street has forged a symbiotic connection with Washington.

In lectures, my goal is to connect with college students. On two- or three-day campus residencies, I have enjoyed meeting with classes and student groups, leading discussions, enjoying give-and-take, sharing my reporting and life experience, even answering questions about career advice. These visits constitute my most rewarding experiences touring for the book. I look forward to the opportunity to visit your campus, and to connect with your students.

Hedrick Smith is a bestselling author, Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter, and Emmy Award–winning producer. His books The Russians and The Power Game were critically acclaimed bestsellers and are widely used in college courses today. As a reporter at The New York Times, Smith shared a Pulitzer for the Pentagon Papers series and won a Pulitzer for his international reporting from Russia in 1971–1974.

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The first five commenters will receive a free copy of The Taste of Ashes.  Email us at rhacademic@randomhouse.com with your mailing address.

I was at an impressionable age when the revolutions came. This is the short answer I often give when asked by Poles or Czechs or Russians why I became interested in their part of the world. In 1989, I was seventeen years old and knew nothing about Eastern Europe. Yet growing up in suburban Pennsylvania, it was impossible not to absorb that we were locked in a struggle with the Evil Empire that might well bring about the end of the world. 

And then one day it was over. Soon pieces of the Berlin Wall were for sale at the local mall. For me, the drama of 1989 was the opening of a part of the world that had been seemingly closed forever. I was seduced by this sudden opening, personified in the fairy tale of the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, of the imprisoned playwright who became a philosopher-president.

I wanted to go to that place where magical things happen. I wanted to go where there was a happy ending. Yet fairy tales inevitably have their darker sides. When I came to live in post-communist Eastern Europe, I saw that not everyone was living happily ever after. And this was so not only because prices were rising drastically while wages and pensions remained very low. There was much more that was tormenting.

For Freud, the unconscious was like a dark psychic closet in which everything too disturbing for our conscious minds was hidden. Freud had no illusions that opening that dark psychic closet would be pleasant. For decades, the communist archives had played the role of the Freudian unconscious.

“A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of communism,” Karl Marx began The Communist Manifesto. Marx, the militant materialist, opened his most famous text by confessing to his own metaphysical moment. Now, in Eastern Europe in the 1990s, I came to understand that communism, once a “specter to come,” was far more haunting as a specter from the past.

In researching my dissertation about Polish avant-garde poets who became communists (the short version of their story is that it ended very, very badly for all of them), I spent all told several years in former communist Europe. I dug through seventeen archives in five countries. I encountered the friends and enemies—at times the children and grandchildren—of my protagonists. And I began keeping a journal with notes on all of the stories that were too personal to go into a strictly scholarly book.

The book that grew from those notes is about the darker side of the fall of communism. It is a book about what we, who did not live there, did not understand. It is a book attesting to Hegel’s insistence that actions inevitably have consequences that exceed their intentions. The post-communist moment has illuminated painfully the omnipresence of guilt: after 1989, people had to account for choices they made, often in extreme moments, in a world in which all the rules had suddenly changed.

This is also a book about what it means to study history. To go into the archives in search of truth is to read letters never meant for you to read. Understanding the past demands an empathy that can never
be innocent. In this book I try to make the reader feel the ethical dilemmas of the historical process: the risk of moral relativism that comes with the striving for empathy, and the voyeurism of reading pages in
the lives of others.

Marci Shore, an associate professor of intellectual history at Yale, has spent much of her adult life in central and Eastern Europe. She is the author of Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death in Marxism, 1918–1968, which won eight prizes, including a National Jewish Book Award. She is also the translator of Michal Glowinski’s Holocaust memoir The Black Seasons.

The first five commenters will receive a free copy of The Fall of the House of Dixie.  Email us at rhacademic@randomhouse.com with your mailing address.

In a recent national survey, nearly half of all those queried denied that slavery was the main cause of the U.S. Civil War. And that view is gaining, not losing, ground. Among younger people polled (those under 30 years of age), fully 60% responded that way. Many university students share that view. Like so many other modern Americans, they have come to regard the Civil War as a dramatic conflict in military terms, one filled with derring-do and pathos, but one without much larger meaning or import. They are therefore surprised to learn not only that slavery brought on the Civil War but also why and how the defense of the national Union led to slavery’s destruction. As we now observe the 150th anniversaries of the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation, these questions are in the public view more than at any time in the recent past. I wrote The Fall of the House of Dixie in part to clarify those subjects and to place them where they belong—at the center of the Civil War narrative.

In 1860–61, leaders of both the Union and the Confederacy knew and said that it was precisely the sharpening dispute over slavery’s future that was leading most slave states to try to break from (and so break up) the U.S., initiating the bloodiest war in the nation’s history to accomplish that goal. In his inaugural address, “One section of our country believes slavery is right, and ought to be extended,” Abraham Lincoln noted, “while the other believes it is wrong, and ought not to be extended. This is the only substantial dispute.” The Confederacy’s secretary of state agreed. Southern whites had decided, he wrote, that the swift growth of the anti-slavery Republican Party threatened “to destroy their social system.” “With interests of such overwhelming magnitude imperiled,” Jefferson Davis explained, “the people of the Southern States were driven . . . to the adoption of some course of action to avert the danger.” If the preservation of “those interests” and that “social system” required war, Confederates added, so be it.

But that war yielded results drastically different from those its leaders intended. Abraham Lincoln’s Union government initially hoped to quell the rebellion quickly and without laying hands on the institution of slavery. But what the former slave and abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass called “the inexorable logic of events” eventually compelled a change of course. The logic of the situation taught Lincoln and his party that military victory required an attack on slavery and the recruitment of former slaves as laborers and then as soldiers in the Union cause. And in the event, as Lincoln noted repeatedly, the active aid of almost 200,000 black soldiers and sailors proved crucial to the rebellion’s defeat. The emancipation and recruitment of these people, Lincoln explained, was “the only” policy that could “can or could save the Union. Any substantial departure from it insures the success of the rebellion.”

This war-spawned dynamic ultimately led to the constitutional liberation of all slaves living anywhere in the United States and to the outlawing of slavery per se as an institution. Thus, a conflict that slave owners initiated to preserve slavery ultimately abolished it far earlier and more radically than could have occurred otherwise. That war also wiped out much of the Southern elite’s wealth and broke its once-powerful grip on national government. This fundamental transformation of social and political reality represented (as many at the time recognized) a second American revolution. The story of how that occurred must form a key building block of any real understanding of this country’s history. In that context, I invite you to consider using my book to engage your students as they encounter this defining era.

Bruce Levin is the J. G. Randall Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Illinois. An associate editor of the Civil War magazine North and South, he has published three books on the Civil War era.

Water is getting scarce. This year has brought extreme drought, low snow packs, and record low stream flows in a number of river systems. We see Las Vegas waging water war with the open ranch lands to the north, Atlanta in protracted battles with downstream states over its primary water supply at Lake Lanier, and water tables beneath the San Joaquin Valley—the source of 40 percent of the nation’s fruits and vegetables—dropping. A recent study by the Natural Resource Defense Council (NRDC) suggests that by mid-century, half the counties in the U.S. will be facing water scarcity.

For any one of us, these problems can feel overwhelming. We may sense that our own role is negligible, our power to make change inconsequential. And, it’s easy to find fault with government policies, corporate behavior, and farming practices. Yet, taken together, our aggregate behavior is the source of these problems. An individual home can waste 10,000 gallons of water a year to leaking fixtures; as a nation, we lose one trillion gallons of water to leaks. We buy 450 million pair of blue jeans every year, each of which requires about 2,200 gallons of water to produce, mostly to grow cotton for denim. That’s a total of 990 billion gallons of water, or enough to provide copious domestic water supplies to almost 10 billion people. And the list goes on.

While this may all seem distressing, it also implies a potent truth. As consumers, we have the power to change our own behavior. We can make choices about what and how much we purchase, and we can influence what types of products and services are sold in the market—all of which can lead to increased water use efficiency and decreased water demand. And, as educators, we can play a critical role in raising the awareness that will catalyze necessary change. We can do this by weaving sustainability into our curriculums, modeling changes in our own behavior, and pushing to implement changes in school programs, infrastructure, and management to better steward water and other resources.

Several schools stand out as shining examples of how these principles can be modeled for students. One in particular—the science wing of the Bertschi School in Seattle—is Washington state’s first “living building,” achieving net zero water and net zero energy, meaning that all water and energy used on the premises is supplied onsite, reducing both direct water use and the building’s larger water footprint (via reduced energy use and onsite food production). The building functions as a living laboratory. All water used is collected and treated onsite: a rain garden treats all storm water and provides food, an interior green wall treats wastewater grey water, and a composting toilet treats black water. Collected rainwater runs through the classroom so students can test water quality. Solar panels provide all electricity for the building, and students are charged with tracking energy production and use. Students learn to grow and harvest their own food in the school’s garden. Climate conditioning comes from a moss-covered roof, natural ventilation and radiant floor heating. Via the power of example, this school is likely to produce the water and resource stewards of the future. If we are to solve our water problems, we need more schools and more educators walking down the path towards sustainability.

Wendy J. Pabich is an environmental scientist, educator, adventurer, and artist obsessed with all things water.  She is the founder and president of Water Futures, Inc.

by Tom Reiss, author of The Black Count (Broadway, May 2013) which was recently awarded the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in biography.

I’ve always loved exploring history. It’s like an uncharted hemisphere, and when you look at it closely, it has a tendency to change everything about your own time. I’m also drawn to outsiders, people who have swum against the tide. I often feel like a kind of detective hired to go find people who have been lost to history, and discover why they were lost. Whodunnit?

In this case, I found solid evidence that, of all people, Napoleon did it:  he buried the memory of this great man – Gen. Alexandre Dumas, the son of a black slave who led more than 50,000 men at the height of the French Revolution and then stood up to the megalomaniacal Corsican in the deserts of Egypt. (The “famous” Alexandre Dumas is the general’s son – the author of The Three Musketeers.) Letters and eyewitness accounts show that Napoleon came to hate Dumas not only for his stubborn defense of principle but for his swagger and stature  – over 6 feet tall and handsome as a matinee idol – and for the fact that he was a black man idolized by the white French army. (I found that Napoleon’s destruction of Dumas coincided with his destruction of one of the greatest accomplishments of the French Revolution – racial equality – a legacy he also did his best to bury.)

I first came across Gen. Dumas’s life in the memoir of his son Alexandre, the novelist. And what a life! Alex Dumas, as he preferred to be known, was born in Saint Domingue, later Haiti, the son of a black slave and a good-for-nothing French aristocrat who came to the islands to make a quick killing and instead barely survived. In fact, to get back to France in order to claim an inheritance, he actually “pawned” his black son into slavery, but then he bought him out, brought him to Paris, and enrolled him in the royal fencing academy, and then the story begins to get interesting.

What really stuck with me from reading the memoir was the love that shows through from the son, the writer, for his father, the soldier. I could never forget the novelist describing the day his father died. His mother met him on the stairs in their house, lugging his father’s gun over his shoulders, and asked him what he was doing. Little Alexandre replied: “I’m going to heaven to kill God – for killing daddy.” When he grew up, he took a greater sort of revenge, infusing his father’s life and spirit into fictional characters like Edmond Dantes and D’Artagnan, with shades of Porthos, too. But the image of the angry child stuck with me and drove me onward to discover every scrap of evidence I could about his forgotten father.

And recovering the life of the real man behind these stories was the ultimate historical prospecting journey for me: I learned about Maltese knights and Mameluke warriors, the tricks of 18^th-century spycraft and glacier warfare, torchlight duels in the trenches and portable guillotines on the front; I got to know about how Commedia del Arte influenced Voodoo and how a Jacobin sultan influenced the Star-Spangled Banner, about chocolate cures for poisoning and the still brisk trade in Napoleonic hair clippings. I discovered the amazing forgotten civil rights movement of the 18th century – and its unraveling – though the most amazing thing about this story of a black man in a white world was how little race stood in his way: how Alex Dumas’s future father-in-law never once questioned his daughter marrying a man of color but only asked that he get promoted to sergeant first (later he lovingly referred to his son-in-law simply as “the General”).

Finally, the memoir set me not only on a historical adventure but on an adventure in the present day that was straight out of a Dumas novel. I began by visiting the gray town in northeast France where the general died – where I found a dead museum secretary, a locked safe, and a host of unlikely, inspiring characters to make my journey a far from lonely one.

Tom Reiss is the author of the celebrated international bestseller The Orientalist.  His biographical pieces have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times and other publications.  He makes his home in New York City.

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The first major protest movement in decades—a response to austerity measures, rising food prices and unemployment—sparked into life in North Africa and Europe, circled the globe, and finally came to the United States in the fall of 2011.

With the economy in deep crisis, the population was seething. It finally erupted with the launch of Stop the Machine and Occupy Wall Street.

I participated in protests in several locations, not only as a journalist or cartoonist, but also as an organizer. The book that resulted is an account of the first few months of the movement.

It goes beyond dry observation to provide a genuine insider’s perspective.  The text and drawings combine interviews, dialogue, description, political struggle and personal observation, to present a well-rounded picture of a unique historical moment.

I’ve been an organizer since I was in high school, in the 1980s. People often become politically active in their late teens and early 20s—an age when many question the assumptions on which society is based, and begin to search for a meaningful direction for their lives, for their right place in the world.

“The Beginning of the American Fall” situates my participation in the Occupy movement—my attraction to it as well as my reservations about it—within the context of a lifetime of work. I understand the questions students are asking, I have also asked them. Their experiences, skepticism, and passions  will determine what questions they ask in the future and what rights they feel  need protecting. Organized dissent is one of many possible choices that students face as they contemplate their futures. I hope my experience helps bring clarity  to that process.

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