Christian publishing house Thomas Nelson has pulled David Barton’s book The Jefferson Lies from distribution. According to NPR: “When the concerns came in, from multiple people, and that had weight too, we were trying to sort things out,” said Thomas Nelson Senior Vice President and Publisher Brian Hampton. “Were these matters of opinion? Were they differences…
Could education (higher education in particular) be about to follow the path journalism found itself on, starting just under a decade ago? Could digital possibilities be on the verge of ushering in a new paradigm reflective of what happened to the newspaper business as a result of the rise of the blogosphere? I doubt it.…
Republican candidate-presumptive Mitt Romney recently blasted Barack Obama for suggesting that it takes more than an individual to build a country: To say that Steve Jobs didn’t build Apple, that Henry Ford didn’t build Ford Motor, that Papa John didn’t build Papa John pizza, that Ray Kroc didn’t build McDonald’s, that Bill Gates didn’t build…
When I teach my technical-writing students about executive summaries, I tell them to imagine that their boss is either too dumb or too hurried to look carefully at the material behind the summary. They laugh, but they get the point: the boss (who is probably smart, actually, and a good judge of time) doesn’t want…
Three years before publication of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America in 1835, Frances Trollope, mother of Anthony (then not yet twenty), saw her Domestic Manners of the Americans reach print. It’s a delightful book, though not particularly kind to the people of the young republic. Nonetheless, Mrs. Trollope had quite the eye, and wit to match.
One of the interesting things about fishing in unknown waters is that you never quite know what will come up when you reel in the line. It has only been a few weeks since my first post here, but I am already getting intriguing responses. One on Tuesday follows my post with the tongue-in-cheek title Reminder…
The things we get most exciting about, the things we find most enticing and revolutionary, are also things most likely to be old–once you strip away the new skin. They are the familiar wrapped up in shiny new presentations. The MOOCs (Massive Open Online Classes) are a case in point. When you look at them…
In a New York Times opinion piece that appeared last month, Jeff Selingo of The Chronicle of Higher Education lays out ‘urgent needs’ for American colleges and universities. There are many; we are not in a position where coasting along on old assumptions will suffice. But Selingo completely ignores one area where change must come, the physical layouts of our…
A couple of months ago, someone sent me a link to an article from The Washington Post by David Levy called “Do College Professors Work Hard Enough?” It still rankles. Levy writes: Though faculty salaries now mirror those of most upper-middle-class Americans working 40 hours for 50 weeks, they continue to pay for teaching time of nine to 15…