BY HANK REICHMAN I’m an historian by discipline, but I didn’t attend this year’s meetings of the American Historical Association (AHA) last week in Denver. I wish I had, if only to have heard the discussion of “Historical Expertise and Political Authority,” described by Colleen Flaherty in her report on the meeting for Inside Higher…
BY AARON BARLOW What’s the point of having academic credentials if you can’t use them? Sure, we make them into bludgeons inside the ivory tower, but that’s really just child’s play: the bludgeons do all the real damage of balloons. Only when there is ‘real-world’ application can they have an impact, do they really mean…
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…
While I was reading Stanley Fish’s New York Times article “Religious Exemptions and the Liberal State: A Christmas Column” all I could think of was a comment Bill O’Reilly made at the beginning of the month, claiming Christianity as a philosophy, not a religion–and of an experience of mine as a young man. Fish discusses Brian Leiter’s…
Stanley Fish’s offering “Higher Education’s Future: Discuss!” in today’s New York Times doesn’t provide anything new–but that’s not his fault. He writes about a panel discussion among four college presidents, ending: Not that I have anything more scintillating to offer. I’ll just wait for the next panel discussion and hope to hear the good news. He…