The Clios? ...

My colleague, Hugo Schwyzer, looks back over his blogging and offers his five favorite posts as"The Best of Hugo Schwyzer." That made me wonder whether we ought not establish The Clios as annual awards for best posts at Cliopatria and our allied blogs. It probably would involve a lot of headscratching about appropriate categories, because our tastes are so diverse and choosing bests requires comparison that may seem invidious. Nonetheless, the thought led me back to our archives and to nominate some that are memorable – some, even, notorious:

For helping to resolve the weighty issue of whether you and I are rightly called"a historian" or"an historian," I nominate:"Talent on the HNN Comment Boards."

For sheer clarity of thought about the uses of historical analogies, I nominate Tim Burke's"One of These Things Is Just Like the Other."

For on the spot reporting, I nominate Jonathan Dresner's series,"Hawai'i Strike Report," here, here," here, and here.

For compulsive anal retentiveness, I nominate"Anonymity and Invisibility."

For identifying mistaken reasoning in public debate, I nominate Jonathan Dresner's"Illogic in Public Discourse."

For an early sign that Derek Catsam is likely to go to hell, I nominate"Mmmmmm, Pork Chops."

For bad poetry, I nominate"On the Unity of the Faith".

For Derek Catsam's"God and Man at Bob Jones University," I nominate Derek Catsam's"God and Man at Bob Jones University."

For the most outrageous story in American higher education of the year, I nominate almost any good report on the University of Southern Mississippi; and, still, the best statement about it comes from my colleague, Tim Burke:

In a way, this shows you why some of the discussions we have on academic weblogs are, though interesting, somewhat irrelevant. Because the frame of reference that matters isn't Swarthmore or Harvard or the University of Michigan. It's Southern Mississippi which is more representative of the breadth of academic life by far ... the tinpot dictatorship of its current president seems to me is widely typical of academic administration once you get past the places where there is wide public scrutiny. The key thing is that those of us in much better situations can't afford to wash our hands and look on with distant dismay: if ever there was a place that the thunderbolt of academic wrath should fall upon, it's this one. Every sanction that we have in our quiver should be unloosed.

If you compare that sensibility to the dismissal of the University of Southern Mississippi story by Oxblog's David Adesnik as"a tempest in a teapot," you can understand my felt moral obligation"to tweak a Yalie's nose" at every opportunity. Well, actually, that's just a taste of some of the best of Cliopatria in our first four months, before some of our more thoughtful colleagues joined us. It's been a very good year.