By Robert Talbert. Remember how earlier this semester I wrote that, despite the constant influx of projects and tasks that I am working on, I am really focusing on just four things: relationships, balance, simplicity, and kindness? Well, unsurprisingly it turns out that this is harder than it looks. More...
By Michael McCarthy. When the president of a university is dragged from his bed in the middle of the night and shot point-blank in his garden by an elite squad of the national military, we must pause to ask why.
This month the Universidad Centroamericana in El Salvador, known as UCA, will be commemorating the 25th anniversary of the killings of eight people on its campus, including six Jesuit priests: the president, vice president, and leading faculty members. Universities—especially those of the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities—will be sending delegations to San Salvador for a range of events to remember these martyrs. More...
By Geoffrey Pullum. Mention an interest in grammar education to most people and they will assume you are concerned about incorrect use of English. What concerns me, by contrast, is the incompetence of those who pontificate about it and set quizzes on it. Google fetches more than 300,000 hits for the term "grammar quiz"; yet if quizzes on chemistry were as uninformed as those on grammar, they would ask silly questions on peripheral topics (“Who is the Bunsen burner named after?”), and would make no reference to the periodic table, or atoms or molecules. The web’s grammar quizzes deal in minor pieces of puristic flotsam with roots in dimly understood 18th-century grammatical analysis. More...
By Lucy Ferriss. History is so annoying.
Just when you gird your loins to pen an eloquent article about the fine distinctions of language, threading your way among the thickets of the prescriptivist debate to request that we all pause to acknowledge what might be lost when such distinctions collapse, history comes along and thumbs its snotty nose at you. I refer to the difference in meaning accorded the adjectives disinterested and uninterested, of which the noun forms are (or should be) disinterest and uninterest. More...
By Allan Metcalf. I’m looking at a little blue pin, the size of a quarter, with the words FREE SPEECH in two lines of capitals and below them the abbreviation F.S.M. in smaller capitals curving around the bottom. That’s all. But half a century ago, when I and many others wore it during the fall semester 1964 at the University of California, Berkeley, it made a significant contribution to the success of the most successful political campaign I have ever experienced: the Free Speech Movement. It was created, flourished, succeeded, and then because of its success quietly faded away, all in a few months time. More...
By Allan Metcalf. As long as I can remember, the humanities have felt neglected at our colleges and universities—underfunded, underenrolled, underappreciated by those who want a “practical” education.
Recently the sciences have felt neglected too, at least in the matter of enrollment. We have too few young people aiming for careers in science, they say. So, unlike the humanists, they did something practical about it. They created an acronym: STEM. It stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. It emphasizes the interconnections of the sciences, and it serves as shorthand for the kind of career they want to attract students to. It works well in public-service announcements. More...
By Rebecca Koenig. Diana Cobbe believes she has a way to help students communicate their skills to potential employers: Make filling out an online résumé feel more like a video game than like paperwork, and use it to connect students looking for jobs with businesses looking for talent. In short, she’s created an app that she describes as a mix of Candy Crush and LinkedIn. Read more...
By Eric Hoover. When a bandwagon becomes crowded, passengers get antsy. “The more the merrier” might sound good at first, but as popularity grows, the load has a way of weighing down the wheels. Sooner or later, a new bandwagon comes along. Perhaps that’s a useful way of thinking about the latest news from the college-admissions realm. As The Chronicle first reported on Friday, a group of highly selective colleges is exploring the possibility of creating a shared application that students could use to apply to one or more of the participating institutions. More...
By Robert D. Zaretsky. "Either this class is dead, or my watch has stopped." As I stared at 20 silent and blank faces, I wondered if I should try the line. Perhaps even wag my pen and wriggle my eyebrows?
Instead, I sighed. Why bother? Those blank faces were my answer to a question I had just asked: Has anyone ever seen a Marx Brothers movie? Silence. Has anyone, I followed, ever heard of the Marx Brothers? As the silence grew louder, I felt the urge to dart my eyes across the room and do Groucho’s crouching shuffle out the door. More...
By Beckie Supiano. From his office window, Eric Johnson can see the groundskeeping staff clearing off the sidewalk with leaf blowers. Colleges like the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he works, pull out all the stops to make their campuses inviting. But rarely, he says, do they work as diligently to create a welcoming presence online, even though that’s where today’s prospective students encounter them first. More...
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