This blog is going on vacation as my family and I head off to Europe

for ten days. I have some moral misgivings about vacationing abroad while

people are being killed in the Middle East. I also feel some jitters about

traveling with loved-ones while terror warnings are high and there are

protests against my government (but not against my views) in the very

places that we intend to visit. Basically, I am looking forward to the

trip. This blog, however, is going to have to lapse into silence until

I return, since I will have no Internet access.

We met over lunch with the founder of Liquid

Reason, an interesting Website whose purpose is to teach young

people social marketing. I also answered quite a few press calls that

arose from yesterday’s press conference. Reporters are mainly interested

in what is actually a fairly peripheral topic: the size of the decline

in youth turnout since 1972. In the evening, I briefed students from

University of Maryland and other Maryland state campuses about the Rhodes

Scholarship. I tried to persuade them that the application process can

be valuable, even though the odds of success are very low, because writing

an application essay forces you to come up with a provisional plan of

life just at the point when you are finishing college and your future

is less planned than it has ever been before.

My day was consumed with three activities that are not appropriate topics

for a public/professional weblog: visiting my younger daughter’s nursery

school; preparing a two-year budget for CIRCLE;

and planning for a spring-break family vacation in Greece. This blog will

be back in action on Monday.

A day spent frantically working on grant proposals for CIRCLE and the

Prince George’s Information Commons—three proposals in all. I did

have an interesting phone conversation about the degree to which high

school students volunteer in order to improve their chances of being admitted

to college. This is very common, apparently. I don’t necessarily draw

cynical conclusions about the kids’ characters. Instead, I’d tend to blame

an increasingly efficient system of sorting the whole national student

body by "merit," which causes everyone to compete on a common

scale, whether they aspire to Harvard or the local public college. More

and more people know how to play the game of college admission. As a result,

I fear that kids are waiting until after high school for their real lives

to begin, and much of what they do as adolescents feels hollow.

I had a string of meetings today, the first day back after almost a week

off for snow. Since travel was still disrupted in many parts of the city,

I agreed to meet one out-of-town colleague at her previous appointment

in Silver Spring; we then conducted most of our business on a campus shuttle

bus to College Park. Two of the meetings were with graduate students who

are just starting on major research projects. I tried to give them lots

of research ideas so that they wouldn’t be overly influenced by any particular

idea I suggested. In one case—again because of travel disruptions—we

conducted most of the meeting standing on top of a pile of plowed snow

in a median strip in a residential neighborhood near the College Park

Metro.