When I teach my technical-writing students about executive summaries, I tell them to imagine that their boss is either too dumb or too hurried to look carefully at the material behind the summary. They laugh, but they get the point: the boss (who is probably smart, actually, and a good judge of time) doesn’t want…
Three years before publication of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America in 1835, Frances Trollope, mother of Anthony (then not yet twenty), saw her Domestic Manners of the Americans reach print. It’s a delightful book, though not particularly kind to the people of the young republic. Nonetheless, Mrs. Trollope had quite the eye, and wit to match.
One of the interesting things about fishing in unknown waters is that you never quite know what will come up when you reel in the line. It has only been a few weeks since my first post here, but I am already getting intriguing responses. One on Tuesday follows my post with the tongue-in-cheek title Reminder…
The things we get most exciting about, the things we find most enticing and revolutionary, are also things most likely to be old–once you strip away the new skin. They are the familiar wrapped up in shiny new presentations. The MOOCs (Massive Open Online Classes) are a case in point. When you look at them…
Ron Lipsman, a former senior associate dean at the University of Maryland, writes at Minding the Campus attacking tenure: “In effect, the only tenured professors who get the sack are those who have robbed a bank, raped a co-ed or pistol-whipped a colleague.” This is nonsense. Plenty of tenured professors do get fired every year…
In a New York Times opinion piece that appeared last month, Jeff Selingo of The Chronicle of Higher Education lays out ‘urgent needs’ for American colleges and universities. There are many; we are not in a position where coasting along on old assumptions will suffice. But Selingo completely ignores one area where change must come, the physical layouts of our…
A couple of months ago, someone sent me a link to an article from The Washington Post by David Levy called “Do College Professors Work Hard Enough?” It still rankles. Levy writes: Though faculty salaries now mirror those of most upper-middle-class Americans working 40 hours for 50 weeks, they continue to pay for teaching time of nine to 15…
This is a guest post by Don Eron, one of the authors of the just-published “Report on the Termination of Ward Churchill.“ The new AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom contains a report by the AAUP’s Colorado conference chronicling the University of Colorado’s prosecution of Native American studies professor Ward Churchill, in response to Churchill’s characterization of…