Making a Strategic Case for College Athletic Programs

At many American colleges and universities, the athletic program is something like a machine that runs unto itself – parochial and inward looking, defensive, and quite separate from the academic program. While athletics support a residential learning experience, the number of student athletes contributing to a balanced admissions class, the win/loss record, and the ability…

You Don’t Have to Be Perfect to Be Honored and Beloved

As the snow piles up and the Arctic Vortex descends on most of the continental United States, we can probably all use something heart-warming to read. Jerry Coleman passed away today at age 89. He may not be a household name nationally, but elderly and diehard Yankees fans will remember him as a solid second-baseman…

Big Data and Writing Studies

As writing in the twenty-first century increasingly takes place in digital spaces, where keystrokes are seamlessly translated into oceans of bytes, Writing Studies finds itself with a vast resource of data not previously imagined, explored, or applied: Big Data. As an open and informal round-table style event founded in curiosity, we would like to invite…

Intimidating the Public Intellectual

North Carolina (my home state, though only in my heart today) has a government that brooks no opposition, one whose political leaders are themselves led by the exceedingly rich Art Pope (creator of the Civitas Institute and state Budget Director). Through this Institute, Pope (though not directly: he no longer runs the institute) tries to…

Ancestry, Identity, and What It Means to Be American, Part 1

How ancestry defines identity and what it means to be American are two inextricably linked and fundamental questions for most Americans. By extension, they have become the focal concerns of many academics across a number of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. We think of those issues as especially pressing and complex for immigrants…

Plagiarism and Cryptomnesia

This is another item that I am re-posting from Futility Closet (www.futilitycloset.com). It is re-posted with the permission of Greg Ross, who maintains the site. You can have daily updates from the site delivered to your e-mail each morning. ______________ Several years after publishing Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson was abashed to discover that he had…

My New Year’s Resolutions

At the start of each new year for the last twenty to twenty-five years, I have made the same two resolutions: to be on time and to lose weight. Since I am almost never on time and since I keep gaining weight, I think that one of the following conclusions can be drawn from this…

Remarks in Response to a Bond-Trader’s Case for Dramatically Reducing Federal Debt, in 63 Charts: Part 2

The first post in this series is available at: https://academeblog.org/2013/12/15/remarks-in-response-to-a-bond-traders-case-for-drastically-reducing-federal-debt-in-63-charts-part-1/ Here is an excerpt from that post to re-establish the context; you can skip to the end of the italicized part if you read and recall the initial post: Jeff Gundlach is the CEO of Doubleline Capital, a Los Angeles-based investment firm. He was previously…