By Allan Metcalf. Earlier this year I welcomed selfie as a new word that reflected the unselfish selfishness of the currently young millennial generation, epitomized by the Electronic Dance Music song “Selfie” by the Chainsmokers. More...
A Postcard From Vienna
By Geoffrey Pullum. Vienna, Austria—I don’t think any lecturing visit has left me quite as awestruck as my visit this week to the University of Vienna. The mind boggles both at the roster of former faculty (Adorno, Boltzmann, Brentano, Freud, Hayek, Kaposi, Lorenz, Luick, von Mises, Schleicher, Schrödinger, Schumpeter…) and at the list of notable alumni (Bettelheim, Doppler, Feyerabend, Gödel, Husserl, Koestler, Mahler, Mendel, Popper, Preminger…). More...
Super!
By Lucy Ferriss. One of the many casualties of spell checkers is students’ ability to describe their family rituals. Too frequently, recently, they seem to be having super in the dinning room. And from their emails, I infer that the typographical slip comes from the superfluity of the word super, which pops up everywhere, mostly as an adverb: super happy, super hungry, super fantastic. I noticed it particularly when I learned of the passing of a friend’s mother from a mutual friend who wrote to say that he was super sad about it. I do not doubt for an instant the sincerity of my friend’s sympathy. But the oddity of the word choice, to my ears, may stem from an amalgam of at least three influences on our current super craze. More...
Turkey Talk
By William Germano. Nobody can explain the turkey. The expression to talk turkey has been with us for a long time. We’re still not sure where it comes from, though, much less how turkeys got involved. You’d think turkeys had enough to worry about besides English usage. Especially this time of year. More...
The List Lilt
By Ben Yagoda. I told you about vocal fry. And you know all about uptalk? The inflection that was first discussed by Robin Lakoff in 1976, that was given its name by James Gorman in a 1993 New York Times article, and that continues to rouse the ire of right-thinking people everywhere. More...
Lawmaker Calls for Investigation of U.S.-China University Deals
By Ian Wilhelm. Rep. Chris Smith, a New Jersey Republican, has called for the Government Accountability Office, Congress’s investigative arm, to examine agreements American colleges and universities have signed with the Chinese government, asking if the institutions had made “quiet compromises” on academic freedom in the process. More...
The Talk—and Pledges—at the White House Summit on College Opportunity
By Kelly Field. Hundreds of college leaders are now heading home, still giddy from Thursday’s White House Summit on College Opportunity. Now comes the hard part: Making good on their varied promises to enroll more low-income students and help them graduate. More...
Access to Child Care Declines Across Higher Education
By Andy Thomason. A report by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research shows a decline in child-care services across higher education, and particularly at community colleges.
The percentage of two-year colleges that offer on-campus child-care services fell from 53 percent in 2004 to 46 percent in 2013. More...
Good Science for the American Taxpayer
By Lamar Smith. A hallmark of a great university is an active, engaged board of trustees that asks tough questions and holds university leadership accountable for meeting the highest standards. So I was surprised that the leaders of the Association of American Universities recently registered concern about similar oversight efforts by the House Science Committee, which I chair, involving requests for information from the National Science Foundation. More...
How Sociologists Made Themselves Irrelevant
By Orlando Patterson. Early in 2014, President Obama announced a new initiative, My Brother’s Keeper, aimed at alleviating the problems of black youth. Not only did a task force appointed to draw up the policy agenda not include a single professional sociologist, but I could find no evidence that any sociologist was even consulted in the critical first three months of the group’s work, summarized in a report to the president, despite the enormous amount of work sociologists have done on poverty and the problems of black youth. More...