By Brian Mathews. I’m serving on a “Student Experience Task Force”— which among other things is exploring the relationship between residence halls, classrooms, laboratories, dining facilities, student centers, libraries, gyms, and outdoor spaces across my campus—with an eye toward long-term strategies. This is a yearlong process. Our first assignment was to “free think” one possibility twenty to thirty years from now. More...
By David Silbey. A year ago, Rebecca Solnit wrote a “Diary” item for the London Review of Books titled “Google Invades”, complaining of the influx of moneyed Silicon Valley types, from Google, Apple, Facebook, Genentech, etc., into San Francisco. I sent in a short response, and the LRB published it (it’s appended to the piece online). Since then, the argument has grown livelier, and I’ve even heard from a couple of journalists. (See “The dawn of the ‘start-up douchebag’”, in the Independent. I’m not the douchebag — I almost wish I could boast I was.) But I don’t think I’ve managed to get across what needs to change. More...
By David Silbey. Neuroscientists are discovering that online reading rewires the brain in favor of high speed sorting and filtering, rather than deep concentrated reading:
To cognitive neuroscientists, [the rewiring] is the subject of great fascination and growing alarm. Humans, they warn, seem to be developing digital brains with new circuits for skimming through the torrent of information online. This alternative way of reading is competing with traditional deep reading circuitry developed over several millennia.
This “eye byte culture” (awesome phrase, by the way) becomes, of course, a source of panic. English professors are consulted. More...
By Robert Talbert. Last week I posted what I considered to be an innocuous and mildly interesting post about a proposed formal definition of flipped learning. I figured it would generate a few retweets and start some conversations. Instead, it spawned one of the longest comment threads we’ve had around here in a while – probably the longest if you mod out all the Khan Academy posts. It was a comment thread that made me so angry in places that it has taken me a week to calm down to the point where I feel I can respond. More...
By Vincent DeFrancesco. In Chapter 3 of What Is College For? Elaine Tuttle Hansen proposes that the public purpose of higher education is to “emancipate students from the shackles of consumerist society,” to produce “liberated consumers.”
It’s a bold statement. And the phrase is contradictory at first blush. More...
By Vincent DeFrancesco. While teaching a class one day, Douglas Taylor writes in Chapter 2 of What Is College For?, he discussed the evolutionary history of the many species of snapping shrimp that inhabit the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean. He called the subject “one of the most elegant examples of evolution in action.”
Mr. Taylor wondered aloud how anyone could deny the existence of the evolutionary process given such evidence. More...
By Jeffrey J. Kripal. It was an odd but invigorating media cycle for me last week. The week began with The Chronicle’s publication of my essay on why the “impossible” experiences of precognition, clairvoyance, and mystical experience may well be keys to unlocking the nature of consciousness and the mind-brain relationship and why the sciences and the humanities need one another to address those questions. The piece quickly became the object of a materialist screed in The New Republic by Jerry A. Coyne entitled “Science Is Being Bashed by Academics Who Should Know Better.” More...
By Richard D. Kahlenberg. Opponents of affirmative action have leveled a new three-pronged attack on affirmative action in higher education that could significantly change admissions at selective universities and colleges for the better. The Project on Fair Representation, which was behind the recent Supreme Court litigation in Fisher v. University of Texas, has launched websites soliciting white and Asian plaintiffs who believe they were discriminated against by racial-preference policies at three institutions: Harvard University, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. More...
By Noliwe M. Rooks. Recently two black male high-school students made news when they each earned impressive numbers of acceptances to Ivy League Universities. Kwasi Enin is a first-generation American from Long Island, whose parents, who are nurses, emigrated from Ghana. He was accepted into all eight Ivy League colleges: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, and Penn. More...
By William G. Bowen. As most of us are well aware, important challenges to today’s existing order in athletics are under way, from the court system and through the widely discussed National Labor Relations Board ruling that Northwestern football players are employees of the university and have the right to unionize. Regardless of their final outcomes, these challenges are long overdue. I believe they represent an inevitable recognition that the oft-acclaimed “amateur” status of big-time college sports is a sham. More...
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