Coming to Stay: Teaching Angelou
Some books just lend themselves to the classroom. They’ve sufficient complexity, wit, style, and gravitas to carry students in the myriad directions students like to wander as they learn. Though they can be broken down, they can’t be broken, “formulated, sprawling on a pin,” killed through close reading. No matter what you do to them,…
The Ratings Problem
John Dewey starts off Experience and Education (1938) with this: MANKIND likes to think in terms of extreme opposites. It is given to formulating its beliefs in terms of Either-Or, between which it recognizes no intermediate possibilities. When forced to recognize that the extremes cannot be acted upon, it is still inclined to hold that they are…
“It’s Like Rating a Blender”
That’s how Jamienne Studley, Deputy Under Secretary at the Education Department, regards the Obama administration’s proposed system of ranking colleges. “This is not so hard to get your mind around.” Actually, it is. All blenders have a single purpose. They take certain types of organic material and combine them into products of chosen consistency. They can be judged…
"If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Rich?"
Money, the goal of all goals, today is ruining both education and government. When money becomes, as it has, our only measure of value, structures protecting anything else melt before it. As the “business model” is most keenly attuned to profit, it has become the one model for all of our endeavors. In my first “real” job out…
Reichman in the Times
Our own Hank Reichman (click here to see a list of his posts) has contributed to a New York Times opinion section “Room for Debate” spread, “Tongue-Tied on Campus.” Not only is he an important contributor to this blog but Reichman is the AAUP’s first vice president and chairman of the Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure. His most…
May/June 2014 Issue of Academe
AAUP members should receive their print copies of the May/June issue of Academe over the next few days. In the meantime, they can read it online–as can anyone else (there’s no paywall around here). If you only know us through the blog, you may find the magazine worth your while. More in depth and carefully prepared,…
"We Are All Crap Artists Now"
The Hillbilly Divide
The following thread comes from Appalnet, the Appalachian Studies listserv (slightly edited), May, 2014: Colleagues, if you read the following on your institutional discussion board in reference to a complaint about a barefoot student, how would you respond to the professor? “My approach would be to assure this student that going barefoot is not against…
The Journal Issue
Thanks to a post on Retraction Watch, I just read an essay by University of Michigan’s Gerald Davis, “Why Do We Still Have Journals?” He concludes: there is room for many kinds of contributions, and it is reasonable for journals and other kinds of outlets to have a division of labor. But it is worth being cognizant…