Too Perfect?
BY AARON BARLOW Maybe it was just too perfect a topic for my classes today. Certainly, though, I couldn’t resist. It had everything. It had: Topicality that would keep students interested; Relationship to our university system (City University of New York); Room for discussion of student value, something particularly important for first-year college students; Relevance,…
Academic Values and Innovation
BY LESLIE BARY Yesterday a public official, dropping the name of the Lumina Foundation, asked Louisiana faculty for ideas on how to innovate. Did we need help learning to use technology? Would mini-grants help us find new books to replace the outdated ones we might be using? Perhaps we do not need books, but teaching…
Those Who Can Do, Can’t Teach
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH The title of this post is the title of an op-ed written by Adam Grant and published in the New York Times. Grant is identified as an organizational psychologist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, the author of Give and Take, Originals, and Option B with Sheryl Sandburg,…
Scholarly Effort Extending across More than a Half-Century Is Winding Down
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Writing for Huffington Post in late summer of last year, Katherine Brooks reported on the scaling back of the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE), a project that was begun in 1962 that has led to the publication of six volumes of distinct words and phrases from all corners of the…
What Makes a University Great?
The University as Anxiety Machine
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH In the online journal published by Still Point Spaces, Andrea Brady has written a lengthy, three-part personal essay on the “University as Anxiety Machine.” The essay should resonate with many academics in the U.S., as well as those in other nations. Here is the opening section: It was Welcome Week at…
Meaningful Work and the Creative Impulse
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH When David Graeber’s book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory was published in the late spring, it received considerable media attention. Writing for Salon, Erin Keane provided a fairly succinct summary of Graeber’s definition of such employment: The first half of the book is devoted to building a clear understanding of what is…
Tell Us about Your Summer
BY KELLY HAND You’re probably all too familiar with the common misperception that academics have a cushy schedule. If you are only in class fifteen or fewer hours per week and do not teach at all during winter, spring, and summer breaks, the assumption is that you can do whatever you want with your abundant…
New Academe Focuses Inward
POSTED BY KELLY HAND May–June 2018 | Vol. 104, No. 3 Contributors to the new issue of Academe remind us that even in the face of attacks against higher education from the outside, it is from the inside that we must work to keep our colleges and universities the best in the world. Articles include discussions of…