Formation Continue du Supérieur

By Jeff Selingo. How can we reimagine the undergraduate college experience in the future?
That was the question at the heart of my column last week on the overworked bachelor’s degree, which generated plenty of discussion, agreement, and pushback in the comments. It was also a question at the center of a yearlong exercise at Stanford University’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, also known as the d.school. More...

By Aaron S. Lecklider. For those of us who teach, work, and study in universities–especially those who, unlike me, find themselves within Ivy League institutions—no topic has aroused more passion recently than William Deresiewicz’s New Republic article, “Don’t Send Your Kids To the Ivy League.” If one can look past the article’s click-bait headline, one discovers that the substance of the piece deals with a number of weighty issues in American life: the dramatic increase in income inequality; the slow and painful decline of the humanities; the lack of creativity in lucrative professions (and the lack of lucre in creative ones); the troublingly narrow metrics for measuring a meritocracy. More...

By S. Alan Ray. Operating in a pluralistic society, America’s institutions of liberal learning have always faced a fundamental choice: to create cloistered sanctuaries from social difference, or to embrace difference as central to our teaching missions. More...

By Padraic X. Scanlan. “What,” William Deresiewicz asks in an essay in The New Republic, “is college for?” “College,” he writes, “is an opportunity to stand outside the world for a few years.” Deresiewicz argues that elite colleges, and especially the Ivy League, have duped students into thinking that what they offer is a “life of the mind,” when in fact they offer careerism and the temptations of money. Elite colleges, he argues, don’t do much but measure and perpetuate status and wealth. He urges parents to consider public universities and private liberal-arts colleges as a solution: democracy instead of meritocracy. More...

By Rachel Applebaum. In honor of International Women’s Day, the university where I am currently a postdoctoral fellow held a conference on “glass ceilings in academia.” The midcareer professor who organized the conference invited me and a couple of other female postdocs to speak about our experiences as young women in the profession. But is the “glass ceiling” a relevant concept for describing the challenges we face at this stage in our careers? As postdocs, adjuncts, lecturers, and visiting assistant professors, “glass house” might be a better metaphor. More...