By William Germano. Ex. 1: torture.
By Andy Thomason. President Obama made a splash Thursday night with his announcement that the White House would push for free community college nationally “for everybody who’s willing to work for it.” By Friday morning, it was clear the president’s plan had struck a chord. More...
By Andy Thomason. An adjunct sociology professor at three New Jersey colleges has apologized for sharing racially insensitive jokes on her Facebook page, the South Jersey Times reports. More...
By Andy Thomason. The chancellor of the University System of Georgia will recommend that Georgia State University and Georgia Perimeter College be consolidated, creating the system’s largest institution, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports. More...
By Rebecca Koenig. Women and men behave differently in online class discussions, at least in science, engineering, and computer-science courses, according to a new study conducted by Piazza Technologies, a company that makes a digital class-participation tool. Read more...
By Lance Lambert. Student-loan payments are the bane of many new graduates. A recent analysis by the Brookings Institution explains why: The typical new graduate is likely to devote 14 percent of his or her paycheck to student loans. That’s about half of what the average American spends on housing each month. More...
By William G. Bowen and Eugene M. Tobin. The occasional tendency to link the focused concept of academic freedom to the much broader concept of "shared governance" reinforces the need to re-examine how shared governance should be thought about. The first thoroughgoing attempt to link the two concepts seems to have been the adoption in 1966 by the American Association of University Professors of its Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities, which it had jointly formulated with the American Council on Education and the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges. Then, in 1998, the AGB issued its own Statement on Institutional Governance, which was widely read as pushing back on active faculty involvement in addressing issues of many kinds. More...
By Sean Wilentz. In the very first paragraph of The New Republic’s very first issue, the founding editors proclaimed their belief that there was a place in America for what they called "a journal of interpretation and opinion." These men—Herbert Croly, Walter Weyl, and Walter Lippmann—were eminences of the Progressive Era, who were repulsed by what had become of the nation’s business civilization. They aimed, as Croly later put it, a bit grandly, to help "mould social life in the light of the best available knowledge and in the interest of a humane ideal." More...
By Jeffrey J. Williams. Paris. February 26, 1635. The Abbé François de Boisrobert stands before the newly minted Académie française and denounces Homer as a base street poet who eked out a living by declaiming his verses to the mob. Boisrobert’s impassioned speech was perhaps the first skirmish in la querelle des anciens et des modernes, whereby one group of writers sought to differentiate themselves from those who paid undue deference to the Greek and Latin poets. But the ancients couldn’t be dislodged so easily. When the corpus of Western literature consisted largely of two dozen writers who had set the standard for plays, essays, verse, and satires, it was no simple matter to consign them to the past, especially when the past was still present. More...
By Jeffrey J. Williams. Literary criticism once had an outsize reach, influencing the terms and concepts of disciplines like art and legal studies. With it came an outsize ego. During the 1970s and 80s, the heyday of literary theory, scholars aimed to explode the foundations of Western metaphysics, foment a revolution of the sign, overturn gender hierarchies, and fight the class struggle. More...
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