Virginia Tech

At Virginia Tech, where I taught for 10 years, the magic number was one million dollars. According to many of my fellow teachers, that was the cost of closing the campus for a day and, although I never saw any evidence that it was true, that number ruled my life. I sometimes walked to class on...

Eileen Wilbur, a 74 year-old blind woman living by herself, recently got a nasty shock when her daughter was helping her go through her mail. Apparently, Ms. Wilbur had failed to pay part of a water bill from the preceding year, and the city was now threatening her with a lien against her home. The...