The hit television show The Big Bang Theory is about young scientists, and the real co-creator of the show, along with many cast and crew members, has created a scholarship for science students at the University of California at Los Angeles. Read more...
By William Bradley. Generally speaking, it is safe to say that most college commencements are the same. The students file past their camera-wielding relatives offering smiles and small, inconspicuous waves. A speaker invokes Robert Frost or Dr. Seuss or Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society to encourage the graduates to live lives of purpose and distinction. Degrees are conferred. A representative from the alumni organization urges these new alums to donate money to their school. The alma mater is sung. The young adults file back out. Read more...
By Scott McLemee. You don’t often come across references to “the moral sciences” these days, unless you read a lot of biographies of well-educated Victorians, and maybe not even then. The term covers economics, psychology, anthropology and other fields in what are now usually called the social sciences. I’m not sure when the one gave way to the other. Read more...
By Nate Kreuter. Academe is one of the most institutionally conservative communities that I’ve ever encountered. I have observed to many of my academic friends that when I left a job in the federal government to pursue an academic career, I left the second slowest, second most resistant to change institution in the nation for the absolute slowest, most resistant to change institution in the country. While that quip is mostly tongue-in-cheek, it holds true to a certain extent, at least in my own experience. Read more...
By Robert Talbert. A while ago, I blogged an invitation to the 18th annual Legacy of R.L. Moore and Inquiry Based Learning conference, to be held in Austin, Texas on June 25–27. That’s only a month away! To lead in to this event, I’ve asked a few members of the organizing committee, who are leading practitioners in inquiry-based learning, to join us here for a 4+1 interview. The first of these is Victor Piercey. Victor is an associate professor in the Mathematics Department at Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan (practically a neighbor to me, in other words). More...
By William Germano. At Cannes recently, the actor Matthew McConaughey spoke out on the negative response to Gus Van Sant’s new film, The Sea of Trees.
“Anyone has as much right to boo as they have to ovate,” the actor observed. More...
By Lawrence Biemiller. Michael J. LaCour, the UCLA graduate student accused of faking research for a paper about gay marriage that was published in Science in December, sent the Los Angeles Times a 23-page email Friday that calls his critics “unethical” and says he destroyed data supporting the paper’s findings because UCLA’s privacy policy required him to do so. Science retracted the paper Thursday. More...
By Andy Thomason. After Laura Kipnis, a professor in the department of radio, television, and film at Northwestern University, wrote the provocative essay “Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe” earlier this year in The Chronicle Review, students marched in protest. More...
By Robert Zaretsky. During the last week of the semester, I held my senior seminar outdoors. The weather was too glorious and the students too excited. Most of them graduate this year; settling themselves on the grass, they chatted less about what we were doing today than what they would do tomorrow. Bouncing back and forth their plans for the next chapter, the next phase, the next stop in their still-young lives, they were rushing toward the future and fastened on their life after university. More...
By Melonie Fullick. For the sake of institutional memory, universities need to foster a culture of collective documentation. More...
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