At the College Founded in Response to the Scopes Trial, the Administration, Faculty, and Students Have Become Embroiled in a Controversy over “Origins”
The motto of Bryan College is “Christ Above All.” The college, which has an enrollment of between 700 and 800, was originally named William Jennings Bryan College, after the thrice unsuccessful presidential candidate who became a special co-counsel for the prosecution in the Scopes Trial. In addition to “Free Silver,” the “Great Commoner,” as Bryan…
Mastering the Transition from College to the Real World
For many non-traditional students, Commencement Day will be a day of celebration on a Saturday or Sunday, followed by back to work on Monday morning. The adult or non-traditional learner has mastered the art of juggling school, family and work, and will look at graduation as an opportunity to take a breath. Fitting classes into…
Colleges Must Rethink How They Finance Their Future
Word is leaking out from the spring meetings of college and university governing boards across the country that the most expensive institutions have now crossed the $60,000 level in their just posted annual comprehensive fees. It’s an important psychological threshold. The comprehensive fee – generally defined as tuition, fees, room and board — is a…
Core Paradoxes in the National Character and Schisms in the Far Right’s Political Ideology
All nations, and this seems especially true of great nations, have paradoxes at the core of their national characters that define them. The tensions within these paradoxes are alternately, or in times of crisis simultaneously, a dynamic source of national strength and also an anarchic source of national turmoil. In the United States, these paradoxes…
President Obama’s and Joel McHale’s Remarks at the White House Correspondents Dinner, 2014
Alternatives to the Growing Corporate Model of Education and Educational Assessment
One of the things the assessment gurus of corporate-style education don’t like is the idea of professors in complete control of the curriculum and pedagogy in their own classrooms. They want everyone “to be on the same page,” feeling that education has no value unless done in unison. This is the thinking behind most cries…
Beyond Occupy
The Occupy Movement has been the first major grassroots progressive movement in the United States in decades. But, at its core, the appeal of the Occupy Wall Street movement has been that it is politically unaffiliated, and that lack of structure, or, more precisely, that lack of structural purpose, has also been its undoing. Occupy…
Ten Reflections on What We Do with Our Time
I have been thinking a great deal about John Ziker and his coleagues’ detailed study of the work that we, as faculty members, do, and I think that their study supports, directly or at least conceptually, most of the following observations: 1. We work very hard—much harder than most people realize and, in most cases,…
President Obama’s Remarks at the White House Correspondents Dinner
Tonight, President Obama will be attending the White House Correspondents Dinner for the sixth time during his presidency. Below are links to the transcripts of his remarks at the first five dinners. I think that they are of interest for several reasons. First, he does this sort of thing better than any president—if not in history,…