BY AARON BARLOW In response to a recent post of mine, a professor wrote, “We are in a highly competitive and insecure field. How the heck do we rise together?” The competitive nature and insecurity of academia certainly have been exacerbated of the past decades (they were always with us); the only way that is…
BY AARON BARLOW Two posts on Facebook recently focused my attention to how we see ourselves in the classroom. In one, the teacher bragged that a student had shouted out that she was the most wonderful teacher ever. In the other, the teacher entered the classroom to find a student sitting at her desk and…
BY AARON BARLOW “She may have, and would have been right.” This cavalier dismissal points directly to the corruption at the heart of contemporary academia. It’s a response from MIT Media Lab co-founder Nicholas Negroponte to an inquiry from New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo concerning a warning from scholar and entrepreneur Sarah Szalavitz about…
BY AARON BARLOW Yale is not college. What goes on there has little relevance to life on the majority of American campuses. Pundits across the country who write on education need to put this on little notecards and place them by their bedsides so that they can read them when they wake each morning. That…
BY AARON BARLOW One of the latest fads at the City University of New York is the “interdisciplinary” course. It has become, on many campuses, a requirement for graduation and a plum atop administrative fruit baskets. To me, it always seemed so much window dressing, something to impress the flaneurs but offering little in the…
BY AARON BARLOW Is Liberty University the future of the American university? Most of us have dismissed Liberty as an outlier. Though an accredited university, Liberty’s focus has always been education through religion rather than, as traditional American religious colleges and universities have it, religion through education. Its leaders have not the confidence in their…
BY AARON BARLOW “Can I let you know? Why must I hesitate?” –Reverend Gary Davis Though I like the resolution passed by the House of Representatives condemning Trump’s tweets, maybe there’s something to be said for hesitating, for delaying a bit. The Democrats, though they did the right thing, walked right into Trump’s trap. For…
BY GALEN LEONHARDY Guest Blogger Galen Leonhardy teaches English and humanities classes at Black Hawk College in Moline, Illinois. On Sunday and Monday, President Trump, offered tweeted comments we need to contemplate. On Sunday, he pointed out that minority representatives he claimed were from foreign countries should return to the places from which they…
BY AARON BARLOW There’s another way: We don’t need to be conforming to artificial numerical scales (based on testing, grades or whatever) or to universal “outcomes” for teaching in order to improve or pedagogy and remain vigorous. All we teachers need to do is turn to each other. We were hired based on a demonstrated…
BY AARON BARLOW Never were online courses adequate substitutes for face-to-face teaching. Like correspondence courses before them, they do fill a need and they can provide motivated students with a viable alternative. But they should never have been preferred or seen as a blanket equivalent to direct interaction with a professor. That is more true…