This post is a piece of mine that was published a few years ago in Inside Higher Ed. Here’s a link to the original. It's also included in my newish book, Being a Scholar. It’s about an inherent tension in the act of writing between arrogance and humility. AN EXERCISE IN ARROGANCE AND HUMILITY TO BE … Continue reading Writing as an Exercise in Arrogance and Humility
This post is a collection of some favorite cartoons about the nature of academic research. All of them are from the website PhD, which stands for Piled Higher and Deeper. The author is Jorge Cham, who got his PhD in Mechanical Engineering at Stanford and then taught at Cal Tech. Enjoy!
This post is an overview of the book I published several years ago. It’s available on Amazon both as an e-book and a paperback. The title is Being a Scholar: Reflections on Doctoral Study, Scholarly Writing, and Academic Life. Below is the book’s introduction, which provides the rationale for the book and summarizes the eleven pieces that you … Continue reading Being a Scholar
This post is an essay by Carl Hendrick published on his Substack, The Learning Dispatch. Here's a link to the original. In it he develops a pleasingly optimistic argument about the increasing role that humans will have to play in the emerging world of artificial intelligence. Given all the gloom and doom surrounding the subject, I … Continue reading Carl Hendrick — AI Automates Scut Work But Requires Increased Human Supervision
This post contains all of the material for the class on the History of Higher Education in the US that I taught for at the Stanford Graduate School of Education for the last 15 years. In retirement I wanted to make the course available on the internet to anyone who is interested. If you are … Continue reading Course Syllabus: History of Higher Education in the US
This post is an essay by Toke Reichstein from his Substack. Here's a link to the original. The key issue is the title: "Who Gets to Decide What Matters Most?" In the course of this essay, he deploys economics at its best in trying to sort out this problem. He shows that simplistic approaches to setting … Continue reading Toke Richstein — Who Gets to Decide What Matters Most?
This post is a set of slides for a talk I gave recently, "The AI Challenge to Education and the Triumph of Credentialism." It's an effort to put the challenge that artificial intelligence poses for American education in historical perspective. Today, students can have AI do course readings for them and then write the required … Continue reading The AI Challenge to Education and the Triumph of Credentialism
This post is an essay by Katy Purviance from her Substack "the joy of learning." Here's a link to the original. She's exploring an issue that has became increasingly interesting to me: the damage that schooling can do to many students, especially boys (see here and here). The problem is the unnatural process that schooling inflicts … Continue reading Katy Purviance — Schools Don’t Just Fail the Kids Who Struggle. They Are Run by the Kids Who Didn’t.
This post is the text of a keynote address I gave on July 14 (Bastille Day!) at the Building Blackboard Together 2026 conference in Dallas. This is an annual event hosted by Blackboard -- the learning management systems (LMS) company -- which brings together the Blackboard staff and the system's users at colleges and universities … Continue reading Know It Before You Mess With It
This post is a classic essay by David Cohen. The version I'm reproducing here comes from a conference paper he prepared for the Benton Center at University of Chicago. Here's a link to the original. An earlier and shorter version was published as a chapter in 1988 in a book edited by Philip Jackson, Contributing … Continue reading David Cohen — Teaching Practice: Plus Ca Change
