This post is an overview of the book I published last spring. 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 will … Continue reading Being a Scholar
This post is an essay by Len Gutkin that was recently published in the Chronicle Review. Here's a link to the original. The essay does a great job of capturing the essence of a new form of discourse on American university campuses he calls the "hyperbolic style" -- which he characterizes as "breathless, declaratory, at … Continue reading Len Gutkin — The Hyperbolic Style in American Academe
This post is the text of a lecture I gave in 2009 at the University of Berne. It was originally published in the Swiss journal Zeitschrift für Pädagogische Historiographie and then found its way into my 2010 book, Someone Has to Fail. Here is the link to the first published version. It’s about a longstanding problem in American … Continue reading What Schools Can’t Do
This blog post is an essay by Caitlin Flanagan recently published in Atlantic. Here's a link to the original. If colleges were in fact teaching students how to think, she says, then they would be encouraging students to consider the best arguments on the other side of the issue they are most ardent about. Colleges … Continue reading Caitlin Flanagan — Colleges Aren’t Teaching Students How to Think
This post is about an issue I’ve wrestled with for years, namely why reforming schools in the U.S. is so difficult. I eventually wrote a book on the subject, Someone Has to Fail: The Zero-Sum Game of Public Schooling, which was published in 2010. But you may not need to read it if you look at this … Continue reading The Chronic Failure of Curriculum Reform
This post is an essay by Scott Carlson about the high cost of staying competitive at the top of the higher education pyramid, which recently appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Here's a link to the original. Status is everything for universities at the very pinnacle of the highly stratified system of US higher … Continue reading The High Cost of Playing the Status Game in Elite Higher Education
This post is a piece I published five years ago in Aeon. Here’s the link to the original. I wrote this after years of futile efforts to get Stanford students to think critically about how they got to their current location at the top of the meritocracy. It was nearly impossible to get students to consider … Continue reading Luck and Pluck — Alternative Stories of Life in the Meritocracy
In the last few years, I’ve been reading and writing about the American meritocracy, and I’m going to be posting some of these pieces here from time to time. But today I want to post a wonderful statement on the subject by Michael Lewis, which I somehow had missed when it first came out. It’s … Continue reading Michael Lewis: Don’t Eat Fortune’s Cookie
This post is a piece I published in Kappan in November, 2018. It's about the declining American commitment to schooling for the public good. Here’s a link to the original. PUBLIC SCHOOLS FOR PRIVATE GAIN: THE DECLINING AMERICAN COMMITMENT TO SERVING THE PUBLIC GOOD When schooling comes to be viewed mainly as a source of … Continue reading Public Schools for Private Gain
David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing 