By Dan Greenstein. That college you have your eye on for your teenager? It may be going out of business. Your alma mater, too. Here’s why: we keep seeing reports that the financial model undergirding much of higher education is weak and getting weaker. The way colleges are financed is out of date with the demands of a much larger student population. Few people outside higher education are aware of this, but college and university leaders are deeply concerned. Read more...
By Lisa Chesser. Education sprouts in many forms depending on how you look at it. Our views of what it should look like and how it should materialize depend on our value of it and our experience with it.
What if a class consisted of words that led to information that whirled into blended realms of creativity set up just for students, created by students. The students then dictated what they learned instead of reluctantly ingesting information and standards imposed upon them. See more...
By Allison M. Vaillancourt. Two frustrating feedback requests in a single week have prompted me to ponder how much advice people really want when they request it. When are requests sincere, and when are they simply a guise for obtaining recognition and validation? Last week began with my receiving feedback on my feedback. Because we have a university policy that isn’t really working as it was intended, several of us agreed a revamp was in order. Read more...
By Jennifer Polk. Let me tell you about an exercise that coaches do with clients. The most used coaching text recommends that we use the Wheel of Life, and many coaches use this tool with clients to help them sort out how they’re doing in different areas of their lives. To do it for yourself, draw a big circle, and divide it into 8 or so segments. Name each segment after a different part of your life. For example, you may have physical environment, career, money, health, friends and family, intimacy, personal growth, and recreation. Then shade in as much of each segment of the circle as you rate your life in that area. A bumpy ride, as it were, signifies an unbalanced life, and taking stock can help suggest an agenda for coaching. My own training program offers up the Pillars of a Balanced Life exercise, which is a similar tool that breaks down a life into ten parts, from finances to family to fun. More...
By Scott McLemee. This year is the 50th anniversary of Anti-Intellectualism in American Life by Richard Hofstadter, whose greatest achievement, someone once said, was keeping it to just the one volume. As discussed here a short while ago, the revisionist interpretation of American populism appearing in Hofstadter’s book The Age of Reform (1955) has taken a lot of positivistic hits by subsequent historians. He over-generalized on the basis of a (very) narrowly selected pool of primary sources -- and in the final analysis, he wasn’t really writing about the 1890s at all, but rather his own times, equating the mood and worldview of McCarthyism with the agrarian radicals of the People’s Party. Read more...
By George David Clark. November can be a long month for academic job seekers, perhaps the time when academe seems coldest. With several fields holding their national conferences shortly after the holidays, many applicants will know in these first weeks of December if they will have an opportunity to interview. Until then we wait and practice the morbid algebra of the market: x ads minus y internal candidates, divided by the number of qualified applicants equals … well, it’s not pretty. In the anonymous space of job wikis or the comments streams of The Chronicle’s blogs, job seekers seem suspicious, jaded, angry, arrogant, and entitled by turns, but more than anything else our worrying strikes me as deeply lonely, quick to pit the individual against a faceless system. It’s when I read our posts that I feel most isolated from my peers and colleagues.By contrast, I had a profound experience of community in my field this past July when I participated in the annual Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Read more...
By Jennifer Howard. Guy Leonard received an unpleasant surprise in his inbox early this morning: a notice from Academia.edu saying it had taken down a copy of an article of his that he’d posted on the research-sharing platform. The reason? A takedown request from Elsevier, which publishes the journal in which the paper had appeared. Mr. Leonard, a research fellow in the University of Exeter’s College of Life and Environmental Sciences, tweeted his dismay and posted a link to a screengrab of the notice. Read more...
By Liz Koblyk. While the rewards of work can certainly outshine the challenges, sometimes the challenges take centre stage. This week, a normally calm, philosophical friend put a giant mock grin on her face and asked, in a game show host voice, “How many people am I disappointing right now?” Read more...
By Matt Reed. I read once that anything older than you is natural, anything invented in your childhood is technology, and anything invented in your adulthood is magic. There’s a real emotional truth to that; the DVR that my kids think of as normal still strikes me as miraculous. The power of the observation is in pointing out that things that seem like they’ve always been there usually have histories. That doesn’t make them any less real, of course. Buildings are constructions; anyone who doubts that they’re real is invited to jump off a tall one and let me know how it goes. Something can be real, even imposing, and still be both “constructed” and, in some important sense, fleeting. Buildings come and go. Technologies come and go. Read more...
By Adam Kotsko. This summer, the faculty of Shimer College held a discussion of Jacques Rancière's book The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation. In it, he discusses the educational theory and practice of Joseph Jacotot, who claimed that one could teach a subject one didn't even know in the first place. For Jacotot, teaching isn't a matter of expertise, but of determination. It isn't about transmitting knowledge to the student, but about holding students accountable to the material that they are working on. Read more...
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