By Lucy Ferriss. There probably is such a thing a scrutinizing a public speaker’s language too carefully—but not on this blog. Our radar screen lit up this past week as the Twittersphere ricocheted responses to President Obama’s August 1 one-liner: “We tortured some folks.” The We here are the agents of the Bush administration in the aftermath of 9/11. More...
By Geoffrey Pullum. The dinner-table conversation touched for a few moments on Usain Bolt, earth’s fastest featherless biped, who’s in Scotland to ensure a win for Jamaica in the men’s sprint relay at the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow (mission accomplished!). Apropos of nothing more than this brief mention, a 70-year-old guest at my table suddenly remarked with a scowl: “I don’t like Jamaicans.” More...
By Allan Metcalf. Dude, there seems to be no end to curiosity about the word that began as a label for a sissified dandy in New York City but developed into almost the coolest label for a young man nowadays, as well as a cool form of address to persons of any gender. Dude was unknown in 1882 but swept the nation in 1883, thanks to the equivalent of the Internet in those days: newapapers.
And yet—did the meme really begin on January 14, 1883, with an 84-line poem in the New York World by Robert Sale Hill? Or was dude in the air before Hill was there? More...
By Anne Curzan. There was an “aha!” moment in my class this week that reminded me just how important it is to talk with students about the human conversation represented by academic citation. This idea of an academic conversation on the page is far from new. More than 70 years ago, Kenneth Burke used the metaphor of the parlor filled with a heated ongoing discussion that we are choosing to enter and participate in as academic writers. More...
By Ben Yagoda. John Updike once commented in a letter to his editor William Maxwell, “It occurs to me that the world would not be significantly poorer if I stopped writing altogether. Only a bottomless capacity for envy keeps me going. That, and the pleasure of reading proofs and designing book jackets.”
I know what he meant, though I would never presume to design a book jacket, or, indeed, anything. More...
By Chronicle Staff. Report: “Consumer Information Report”
Author: National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators’ Consumer Information Task Force
Summary: A nine-member panel was convened by the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators to study federal requirements for consumer-information disclosure. The panel recommended 15 improvements in federal disclosure rules to “streamline both the content and delivery of those requirements.” More...
By Avi Wolfman-Arent. There’s big news today in the race to offer same-day book delivery. Barnes & Noble announced it would team up with Google Shopping Express to offer same-day delivery in select cities. The move appears to take aim at Amazon, with which both companies compete and which already has same-day service in 10 cities. More...
By Nick DeSantis. A federal judge in California ruled on Friday that NCAA rules barring college athletes from sharing in the revenues produced by the use of their names and likenesses violate antitrust law, handing the plaintiffs a key win in a case that has threatened to upend the association’s principles of amateurism, CBS Sports reported. More...
By Andy Thomason. For the sake of the U.S. Department of Education, if only it were still this easy. As lawmakers, college presidents, and interest groups bicker over a proposed federal college-ratings system, a fossilized version has popped up on Twitter. From 1911. This is thanks to Robert Kelchen, an assistant professor of higher-education at Seton Hall University, who tweeted that he discovered the 1911 ratings years ago, while writing a paper. As Vox’s Libby Nelson notes in a chronicle of the 1911 ratings, the Association of American Universities actually asked the government to devise them. More...
By Andy Thomason. Colleges prize selectivity. They also want to graduate their students. But the former has very little to do with the latter, according to a study published on Thursday in the American Educational Research Journal.
In fact, the study found, there is only one institutional variable that has a significant effect on a student’s graduation prospects, and that is tuition. The likelihood that a student will graduate increases by a fraction of a percent for every $1,000 in tuition charged at his or her college, according to the study. More...
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