Society, Education, and John Dewey
Wesleyan University president Michael Roth wrote an opinion piece for The New York Times that appeared yesterday. Titled “Learning as Freedom,” it brings us back to John Dewey and his vision: Education should aim to enhance our capacities, Dewey argued, so that we are not reduced to mere tools. Roth is responding to critics who see…
“They Are Different”
This morning, Diane Ravitch quotes from Mike Lofgren’s story in The American Conservative, “Revolt of the Rich.” She comments: What is so astonishing these days is that the super-rich… have control of a large part of the mainstream media. They can afford to take out television advertising, even though their views are echoed on the news…
What Will the Student-Loan Crisis Mean for Colleges?
Paul Solman of PBS, says “Student loan debt is actually a crushing burden for many, especially in the current jobless maybe-it-is/maybe-it-isn’t recovery.” Students now starting college–or a year or two away–are absolutely aware of that burden. Their choices are going to be determined by how much of it they are willing to take on. Their…
The Proposed Evisceration of Tenure at Saint Louis University
This, from the Chronicle of Higher Education yesterday: “Post-tenure review should be for the purposes of assisting faculty members in improving their performance,” says B. Robert Kreiser, associate secretary of the AAUP. “But the policy that has been proposed would effectively eviscerate tenure as it’s understood at most institutions of higher learning.” Unfortunately, that seems to be…
The Continuing “Silent Crisis”
Wal-Mart for Walden Pond
When Dave Tomar’s new book The Shadow Scholar: How I made a Living Helping College Kids Cheat appears next month, the attention is probably going to be on the failings of the students and on the ethical faults of those abetting them. Perhaps it should also be on the rest of us, who have allowed a diploma…
Once More: The Value of History and Context
Last week, Mitt Romney directed that Obama “take your campaign of division and anger and hate back to Chicago.” For good and bad, ‘division and anger’ have always been part of American politics. Take the case of Alexander Hamilton. He was called “Tom S**t” in one New York paper, was accused of having African ancestry…
Commodifying “Content”
Four recent incidents have made me aware again of one of those itches it seems impossible to scratch, the valuation of “content” as a product rather than as the culmination of a process. Scholarship, today, becomes simply the thing for sale. The first of these was the resignation of Jonah Lehrer from The New Yorker. The second…
More on the Future of Peer Review
In the August 17 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education is an article by Beth Mole, “The Future of Peer Review in the Humanities is Wide Open.” She focuses on Peter Sigal, a Duke University historian and one of the editors of the Hispanic American Historical Review. His journal is experimenting with an “optional open-review process”: Authors who choose…