In a comment on a post of mine yesterday, Frederick Glaysher wrote, “Human experience is much deeper and profound than what the humanities has come to allow in our time, creating a disharmony that has deeply damaged itself and contemporary culture.” Indeed, many in humanities departments across American have created—or have allowed the creation of—an…
What’s the point of calling academia, or an association of academics like the AAUP, “too liberal”? Doing so always has a political goal; it’s an attempt to make academia—or the organization—more conservative. It’s never an unbiased or objective (whatever that means) complaint; it is part of an agenda to transform academia into one’s own image and…
[F]or those of us who think that universities exist for academic purposes — to teach academic knowledge and skills, to pass on academic virtues, and to sustain academic research — the stakes could not be higher. [former Secretary of Education under George Bush and newly appointed head of the University of North Carolina system Margaret]…
T. E. Hulme was an English thinker who achieved some notice during the decade before the First World War, the conflict that would take his life. Though his positions would change over his short career (he was 34 when he died), Hulme was driven by the tensions between the individual and the community and between…
The W. B. Yeats poem “The Second Coming” first appeared in 1919, almost a century ago. That’s probably why, though he alludes to it frequently in his column “Enter the Age of the Outsiders,” David Brooks never quotes from it directly–nor does he mention Yeats directly. He knows that most of his readers will understand…
In his influential “‘Good-bye, Teacher… ‘” Fred Keller lists five aspects of his Personalized System of Instruction that differentiate it from more conventional methodologies: (1) The go-at-your-own-pace feature, which permits a student to move through the course at a speed commensurate with his ability and other demands upon his time. (2) The unit-perfection requirement for…
Close to the start of “An Essay on Criticism,” Alexander Pope writes, “’Tis with our Judgments as our Watches, none/Go just alike, yet each believes his own.” The cornerstone of education, I have come to believe, is development of judgment–but with recognition that it is not uniform. Judgment is an elusive quality, impervious to quantification.…
In The New York Times today is an article, “For-Profit Colleges Accused of Fraud Still Receive U.S. Funds.” Exploitation of the failed student loan programs (failed, that is, in terms of protection against fraud by for-profits) continues, the Times says, even in the face of an Education Department crackdown on “bad actors.” The article claims:…
The American professoriate once ranged from professionals who taught a course as an adjunct—a contribution to their professions, the compensation being almost nothing—to the regular (but generally poorly paid, often relying on family fortune to sustain them) faculty who generally assumed lifetime security at institutions whose operation their colleagues dominated. That changed over the decades starting…