BY AARON BARLOW What the Eric Rasmusen situation at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business (read more about that here and here) brings to the fore is a slipping away from any sort of consensus about what a professor should be and what a student should expect. IU Provost Lauren Robel tried to respond to…
BY AARON BARLOW Another professor, this time an Eric Rasmusen who teaches business and economics at the Indiana University Kelley School of Business, is being raked over the coals for a Tweet. This one was particularly stupid (in my view—and certainly for a teacher with classroom responsibilities for a diverse body of students). Rasmusen is…
BY AARON BARLOW Students are treated differently dependent on race and class and disability and sex. That’s a truism, something educators have known for at least half a century. But it’s also a truism we’ve still failed to address effectively. Why? In part because of the way students treat us but mostly because we don’t…
BY AARON BARLOW At one point in North by Northwest, Leo G. Carroll’s character The Professor says “It’s so horribly sad. Why is it I feel like laughing?” Of course, he isn’t really a professor but is an intelligence agent. But this professor had exactly that reaction this morning on reading in The Guardian about…
BY AARON BARLOW Old News Department: Selling diplomas as a means to economic success turns them into a commodity—and people find all sorts of ways to pay, if not by work then by cash. When different diplomas are seen as providing different dividends, people angle to get those they believe most valuable, some paying through…
BY AARON BARLOW Second-semester students come into their classrooms as jaded veterans knowing exactly what their status is. They know that the teachers of their core curriculum courses (normally, all that they are taking, this year) are, for the most part, either untried graduate students, adjuncts so harried they have no time for their students,…
BY AARON BARLOW My colleague on this blog, and one of its founding editors, John K. Wilson, objects to my advocacy of gatekeeping at colleges and universities on free-speech grounds. A decade ago, I would have agreed with him. Now, I do not. Wilson has been consistent; I have not. Part of this is that…
BY AARON BARLOW On Thursday evening, October 10, former Wisconsin governor Scott Walker will interview former Vice President Dick Cheney at Beloit College’s Eaton Chapel. I once knew the place well, having graduated from the college getting close to fifty years ago. Alumni like me, as well as a number of current students and faculty,…