SIVACRACY.NET

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The Bush administration will seriously self-destruct. The war in Iraq will appear more and more to the American public as a disaster. There will be more defections from the administration, more whistleblowers. There will be more desertions from the armed forces, and more protests from soldiers in the field about the wisdom and morality of their mission.

The economic consequences of the huge expenditures for war and the associated corporate corruption will become more and more evident to the public. The movement against the war will grow, reaching beyond the activist core into the general public.

-- Howard Zinn, professor emeritus of political science at Boston University

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Iraqis will elect a Shiite-dominated parliament, which will set about crafting a constitution. The Sunni Arabs will be underrepresented unless extraordinary postelection measures are taken.

U.S. military forces in Iraq will continue to be too few to deal with the Sunni-fueled guerrilla war, which will continue to produce car bombings and attacks. The number of U.S. dead in the war will approach 3,000 by December.

The new Iraqi constitution will enshrine Islamic personal-status law as the law of the land, in such a way as to set back women's rights. Kurds will reserve the right to retain civil law in their province, provoking a constitutional crisis.

-- Juan R. Cole, professor of modern Middle East and South Asian history at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor

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With Republicans controlling Congress and the White House, the likelihood of radical changes in Social Security is the greatest since the system was enacted, in 1935. But the benefits of creating Social Security individual accounts would be ideological, speculative, and far off, and the costs would be immediate, large, and painful. The chances of privatizing Social Security in 2005 are nil.

-- Teresa Ghilarducci, associate professor of economics and director of the Higgins Labor Research Center at the University of Notre Dame

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The public sphere is in deep political flux, with conservatism, liberalism, and ancillary forms shifting in unusual directions. In the university, however, political understandings have remained fixed, in part because of the insularity of campus life. In the coming year discord between academe and public life will continue, but we will also see some university leaders envision new initiatives that bring academe to a prominent place in the evolution of American politics. Symposia that host academic and public intellectuals, campus think tanks that emulate private think tanks and craft public policy -- such endeavors will proliferate, bolstered by the spreading conviction that academe must engage public life in a nonadversarial manner.

-- Mark Bauerlein, professor of English at Emory University

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William Rehnquist will step down as chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. President Bush will pick a conservative, with an ideology similar to Rehnquist's, for the vacancy. It is possible that in 2005 we will see a Democratic filibuster of a conservative Supreme Court nominee. This might be accompanied by an effort by Republican senators to eliminate the filibuster for judicial nominations.

-- Erwin Chemerinsky, professor at the Duke University School of Law

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The biggest intellectual-property story will be the proliferation of "open source" software and "open culture" models of production and dissemination. We will witness the rapid spread of open courseware and open journals in the academy, directly challenging the oligopolistic stranglehold of the big corporate journal publishers.

The most revolutionary event will be the mainstreaming of "Creative Commons" licensing for art, music, literature, and video productions. As many famous and serious creators lock their work open, thousands more will follow.

-- Siva Vaidhyanathan, assistant professor of culture and communication at New York University

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As I write in Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe (2004), an attack on an American city is more likely than not in the decade ahead, absent a radical departure from current policy and practice. By that, I mean at least 51 percent likely. For the year ahead, I will therefore predict that the likelihood of a nuclear terrorist attack is 7 percent.

-- Graham T. Allison, director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University

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Four score and seven new reality-TV shows will demonstrate that reports of the genre's imminent demise have been greatly exaggerated. A family-friendly Super Bowl halftime show will feature a clown making balloon animals, interrupted by commercials offering easy and practical solutions to erectile dysfunctions. Dan Rather will deliver his farewell broadcast, which promises to be more moving than a baby armadillo on an airport baggage carousel.

-- Robert J. Thompson, professor of television and popular culture and director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University