Once upon in the ’80s, a time of undergraduate education I experienced as a student and can vouch for, dorm rooms at colleges looked surprisingly dingy. This was the case also at very expensive liberal arts schools, one of which I attended. I remember being slightly taken aback upon seeing my dorm room for the…
Aarons, Edward Sidney. Assignment to Disaster. New York: Fawcett, 1955. This novel is the first of more than forty featuring San Durrell, a C.I.A. operative whose assignments take him to all corners of the world. The most conspicuous gimmick of the series is that every title begins with the word “Assignment.” Aarons was so prolific…
Some books just lend themselves to the classroom. They’ve sufficient complexity, wit, style, and gravitas to carry students in the myriad directions students like to wander as they learn. Though they can be broken down, they can’t be broken, “formulated, sprawling on a pin,” killed through close reading. No matter what you do to them,…
Clara Wajngurt lists numerous ways that bullying can manifest itself on campus, from coworkers to students, and the possible effects, both psychological and physical. In her article for the May-June 2014 issue of Academe, she discusses not only the causes and symptoms of bullying, and ideas for how to end or prevent it. As her…
Actually, it turns out that the list depends at least somewhat on the audience whom Scott Jaschik is addressing. In an interview with E-Campus News [http://www.ecampusnews.com/top-news/ten-higher-ed-stories-020/], he listed the following ten stories: 1. College incompetence handling sexual assaults 2. Links between college sexual assaults and other issues 3. Sexual assaults and student athletes 4. Anonymous…
John Dewey starts off Experience and Education (1938) with this: MANKIND likes to think in terms of extreme opposites. It is given to formulating its beliefs in terms of Either-Or, between which it recognizes no intermediate possibilities. When forced to recognize that the extremes cannot be acted upon, it is still inclined to hold that they are…
On first gloss this title might seem humorous, but my wife and I, who are childless by choice, have over the years been the proud people-companions and caretakers of three to four dachshunds at a time. On numerous occasions we have had to take our animals, called our children both by people who are supportive…