Kenneth Bernstein just retired from a career as a high school teacher in suburban Washington, DC, and he has a stark message for college professors: the students entering your classes this year will be less prepared than ever. He points to two culprits, both related to increased testing: –More and more students are taking AP…
The AAUP has just issued a new report on “The Role of the Faculty in Conditions of Financial Exigency.” The report “insists that faculty members must be involved in consultation and deliberation at every stage of the process, beginning with a determination that a state of financial exigency exists.” According to the report, “Financial exigency…
As the clock ticks closer (if clocks can, in fact, still be said to tick) to Lance Armstrong’s confessional interview with Oprah, it’s worth noting that as the Union Cycliste Internationale used the findings of the United State Anti-Doping Agency to strip Armstrong of all of his cycling titles, including his record seven Tour de…
The following op-ed piece was originally published in the Los Angeles Times. It is reprinted here with the permission of the author. Hey, Kids, Don’t Forget Your Guns Op-Ed What’s missing from the typical kindergartner’s backpack? A pistol. December 28, 2012 By Daniel Akst Here we go again. After the tragic school killings in…
The movement toward presenting core curricula through MOOCs delivered by outside providers will continue unabated until some basic questions are answered. What is the maximum number of students who can take a MOOC before the scale becomes preposterous: 30,000–300,000–3,000,000? How do digital videos of classes avoid the pedagogical issues inherent to large lecture classes, issues…
As we move to the last phase of this year’s college admissions cycle, it is useful to look at how selective colleges and universities construct their admission classes. For years, the two fundamental admission building blocks were legacies and athletes. At selective colleges –especially those with active, loyal and engaged alumni – the practice by…
By Robert Jensen Here’s an interesting question for historians: Why do ideologues never seem to be aware of their own ideology? Such is the case with the recent report from the Texas Association of Scholars and the National Association of Scholars’ Center for the Study of the Curriculum, “Recasting History: Are Race, Class, and Gender…
The National Association of Scholars (NAS) today issued a report on the teaching of American history at the University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M. UT-Austin professor Jeremi Suri wrote a response to the NAS report on the blog of The Alcalde, the University of Texas alumni magazine, which we reprint here.
In Chinua Achebe’s second novel, No Longer At Ease, the main character ends up taking bribes. He excuses himself by arguing to himself that the people given favor are all qualified… the son of the man in the following passage is already on the short list for a scholarship: ‘Please have a seat.’ ‘Thank you.’ He…
I’m getting rather tired of finding myself agreeing with Stanley Fish–but it has happened again. Though I have admired Fish’s intellect and verbal ability for some thirty years now, only recently have I found myself nodding in agreement with things he writes. What bothers me is that I suspect either 1) I wasn’t reading him…