BY AARON BARLOW Will New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s “free” college tuition plan have much positive impact on the City University of New York (CUNY), the massive system where I teach? I doubt it; it’s really not much more than repackaging of programs already in existence. And, as David Brooks points out in The New…
BY AARON BARLOW An article in Inside Higher Ed by Colleen Flaherty points out something all of us in academic should already know but that many of us conveniently ignore: women, to put it bluntly, are the dogsbodies of most academic departments. Not only that, but I suspect that they teach a disproportionate percentage of…
BY AARON BARLOW Somewhere around 1970, I walked by a wall on a college campus that had been plastered with a huge poster of Dr. Frankenstein’s monster. Below, someone had splashed the words “loco parentis.” That was exactly how we students felt in those days about college and university power over our lives. Then, it…
BY AARON BARLOW Stella Nyanzi, a medical anthropologist who earned her PhD at the University of London and who is currently a research fellow at Makerere University’s Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR) in Kampala, Uganda (though her exact status at MISR seems a little uncertain), has been arrested in Kampala for “various offenses related…
BY AARON BARLOW Anyone who teaches at a community college, an urban state university or almost anywhere outside of the top research institutions has run across it: We are not the equals of the scholars at Harvard, the University of Chicago and others of their ilk. Nor are we quite the teachers they are; our…
BY AARON BARLOW When my father returned home from the Pacific after the end of WWII, he found no signs remained of his existence in his parents’ house. His mother, probably fearing he would never return (he was gone for three years), had ‘disappeared’ all of his belongings. He never forgave her for that. This…
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BY AARON BARLOW Charles Murray is a complicated figure. A Returned Peace Corps Volunteer (RPCV), he married into a wealthy Thai family and spent time in the countryside as a PCV there during the 1960s. That type of experience, as any RPCV can tell you (as I can tell you), is formative. Immersion into another…
BY AARON BARLOW If you want to teach students to think, you have to challenge them—challenge their beliefs and assumptions. Confirming what they (or their parents, or their communities) already believe does not serve that purpose. You also need to teach students to be honest with themselves and to examine their own beliefs by standards…
BY AARON BARLOW Teaching the Alien and Sedition Acts to my journalism students the other day, I concentrated on this passage: The vituperative quality of the opposition press began to worry even the Federalists more and more, especially President Adams (even though the Federalist press was doing pretty much the same thing). A touchy and…
BY AARON BARLOW Retraction Watch, one of my all-time favorite blogs, posted an interview today with psychologist John Antonakis, who had identified the five diseases of academic publishing, significosis, neophilia, theorrhea, arigorium and disjunctivitis. I was immediately struck by the first: Significosis is the incessant focus on producing statistically significant results, a well-known problem but one…