Last month, Notre Dame professor Patrick Deneen, who should know better, described academic freedom as permitting “the airing and defense of any and all views.” It is not so simple as that, of course. As the 1940 AAUP Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure puts it, there are (as most of us know)…
No matter the measure you use–education, income, heritage, race, family size, job type, language–Americans are moving to greater segregation than we have ever before experienced. This is a no-brainer; it has been the pattern for decades, and it becomes more dominant each year. We must be satisfied with it, for we are doing nothing, absolutely…
This was no surprise: Deluged by more applications than ever, the most selective colleges are, inevitably, rejecting a vast majority, including legions of students they once would have accepted. Admissions directors at these institutions say that most of the students they turn down are such strong candidates that many are indistinguishable from those who get…
Marc Bousquet writes in The Chronicle of Higher Education of “The Moral Panic in Literary Studies” today. He believes that it stems from “loyalty to a pedagogy from the 1950s.” I think he’s right—and I’ve little sympathy for the handwringers. Though I do think that the shift in English Departments toward Rhetoric and Composition and Digital Humanities…
One of the many carefully orchestrated myths of the corporate “reformers” who have hijacked American education this century is that opposition comes only from the Tea Party and from teachers union ‘dead enders.’ All right-thinking Americans, the myth goes, recognize that our public schools have failed and that education in the United States can only be…
Since the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) were introduced, The New York Times has been in constant, clamorous support. Columnists as diverse as Paul Krugman and David Brooks have lauded them; new stories have assumed their obvious utility and necessity. Today, however, that started to change. Columnist Timothy Egan wrote this: The push for Common Core standards…
Taylorism, the systematization of labor developed by Frederick Taylor, makes the worker immediately replaceable. Individual skill and knowledge becomes irrelevant–on the part of the worker. Only at the higher levels of management and ownership does creativity count for anything. It’s an elitist system positing that those at the lower echelons are merely cogs, not thinkers.…
After something of a hagiography of Shavar Jeffries, David Brooks gets to his point in a New York Times column called “How Cities Change”: Now Jeffries is running for mayor of Newark against City Councilman Ras Baraka. The race has taken on a familiar shape: regular vs. reformer. Brooks is casting Jeffries as an education reformer and…