In Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter, Major Scobie steps outside of a house filled with the ill and dying: The lights inside would have given an extraordinary impression of peace if one hadn’t known, just as the stars on this clear night also gave an impression of remoteness, security, freedom. If one knew,…
The Campaign for the Future of Higher Education – CFHE for short – is a GRASSROOTS NATIONAL CAMPAIGN to support quality higher education. It was initiated in Los Angeles, California, on May 17, 2011, by leaders of faculty organizations from 21 states. CFHE’s fifth meeting was held in Columbus, Ohio, on May 17 and 18, 2013.…
by Peter Wood This post was originally published on June 17 at Minding the Campus. Author Peter Wood is President of the National Association of Scholars. We asked for (and received) permission to re-post the article here, in light of a guest post by Allan Lichtman of American University that is a response to Wood.…
Periodically, it’s always prudent to take a step backward to reflect on the state of American higher education in the first years of the 21st-century. It looks very different today from the higher education system that we inherited from the leadership guiding higher education policy after the Vietnam War. The currents affecting American colleges and…
For the past six months, I’ve been hearing odd complaints that the humanities, once home, supposedly, to the study of “truth, beauty and goodness,” have been overwhelmed by concern for “race, class and gender.” Another came last Friday, using the exact phrases of the older ones, all stemming from a single “study” put forward by…
The title here is from the end of David Brooks’ column in today’s New York Times. He’s lamenting how we’ve let the humanities become debased, allowing them to fall from their 20th-century high (in terms of college graduates) to a new low (though he doesn’t consider that, before the 20th century as well as in…
The following 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 delivered to your e-mail each morning. ************************* Marvin Harold Hewitt was bright enough to find schoolwork boring, so he dropped out of high school.…
For most of my professional career, I have believed that institutions, more or less, happen upon a seminal moment in their evolution. Indeed, when approached about consulting or management opportunities I typically first begin by looking at some combination of ethos, culture, board and management leadership, and cold, hard numbers to determine the possible. It…
Here is another item from Futility Closet (http://www.futilitycloset.com/), re-posted with the permission of Greg Ross. ************************* It was British wordplay expert Leigh Mercer who coined the classic palindrome “A man, a plan, a canal—Panama” in Note & Queries on Nov. 13, 1948. He later said that he’d had the middle portion, PLAN A CANAL P, for a…