BY AARON BARLOW The emails can be overwhelming. Hundreds of them from well-meaning colleagues, campus IT departments, our chairs, deans, provosts… everyone who can is chipping in to help us make hurried conversions to online instruction. In a way, it’s wonderful to see this response (though a little frustrating: many of us were advocating planning…
BY EVA-MARIA SWIDLER I wrote “The Purge of Higher Education,” which appears in the winter 2020 issue of Academe, this past fall while at the start of a year-long furlough from a financially troubled, unconventional liberal arts college. I wondered what would be left standing on the college landscape once the current purge of institutions…
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BY AARON BARLOW Oh, the fear of losing relevance! Responding to a Chronicle Review collection of essays on the demise of traditional studies in English called Endgame, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, in “The Academic Apocalypse: The crisis of English departments is also a crisis of faith” (01/11/20), expresses the worries of some: [O]ur…
BY AARON BARLOW At the “OEB Global, incorporating Learning Technologies” (once Online Educa Berlin) conference in Berlin today, Audrey Watters, one of the most perceptive thinkers on education that I know of, spoke on “Ed-Tech Agitprop.” Though her primary purpose was to debunk some of the bits of received “wisdom” about the future, ones we…
BY AARON BARLOW Another professor, this time an Eric Rasmusen who teaches business and economics at the Indiana University Kelley School of Business, is being raked over the coals for a Tweet. This one was particularly stupid (in my view—and certainly for a teacher with classroom responsibilities for a diverse body of students). Rasmusen is…
BY AARON BARLOW Old News Department: Selling diplomas as a means to economic success turns them into a commodity—and people find all sorts of ways to pay, if not by work then by cash. When different diplomas are seen as providing different dividends, people angle to get those they believe most valuable, some paying through…
BY AARON BARLOW Second-semester students come into their classrooms as jaded veterans knowing exactly what their status is. They know that the teachers of their core curriculum courses (normally, all that they are taking, this year) are, for the most part, either untried graduate students, adjuncts so harried they have no time for their students,…
BY AARON BARLOW Two posts on Facebook recently focused my attention to how we see ourselves in the classroom. In one, the teacher bragged that a student had shouted out that she was the most wonderful teacher ever. In the other, the teacher entered the classroom to find a student sitting at her desk and…
BY AARON BARLOW One of the latest fads at the City University of New York is the “interdisciplinary” course. It has become, on many campuses, a requirement for graduation and a plum atop administrative fruit baskets. To me, it always seemed so much window dressing, something to impress the flaneurs but offering little in the…
BY AARON BARLOW “Can I let you know? Why must I hesitate?” –Reverend Gary Davis Though I like the resolution passed by the House of Representatives condemning Trump’s tweets, maybe there’s something to be said for hesitating, for delaying a bit. The Democrats, though they did the right thing, walked right into Trump’s trap. For…