This post is the text of a lecture I gave in 2013 at the annual meeting of the John Dewey Society. It was published the following year in the Society's journal, Education and Culture. Here's a link to the published version. The story I tell here is not a philosophical … Continue reading College — What Is It Good For?
This post is an essay by Francis Fukuyama that recently appeared in Persuasion. Here's a link to the original. Societies are built on trust, and the most successful ones have the broadest foundation of trust. The US has long been seen as a high-trust society, from the time that Tocqueville toured the country. But, as … Continue reading Francis Fukuyama — The Crisis of Trust
This is an essay that is published in my recent book, Being a Scholar: Reflections on Doctoral Study, Scholarly Writing, and Academic Life. For years, I'd been thinking about writing a piece about college teaching and I finally put it down on paper a couple years ago. Everyone complains about the quality of college teaching, … Continue reading College Teaching Is Better than You’d Expect
This post is an essay by Jennifer Morton that recently appeared in the online magazine Aeon. Here's a link to the original. I have been posting every Monday and Thursday on this blog for four years, but I feel the need to stick in this post out of sequence because the election date is so near, … Continue reading Jennifer Morton — The Specter of Insecurity
This essay by Steve Lagerfeld was published in 2021 in Hedgehog Review. Here's a link to the original. This brief piece is a striking reflection on the evolving meaning of privilege over time. In the current period of meritocratic privilege, people acquire status by getting exclusive degrees. This gives them the right to high level … Continue reading Steve Lagerfeld — A Different Sense of Privilege
This post is a reflection on the role that the Ottoman Empire played in shaping the modern world. It draws on a new book by Alan Mikhail, God's Shadow: Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World. The Ottomans are the Rodney Dangerfields of empires: They don't get no respect. If … Continue reading Alan Mikhail — How the Ottomans Shaped the Modern World
This post is an essay by Nick Burbules that recently appeared in Inside Higher Ed. Here's a link to the original. How Activist Speech Threatens Educational Values Nicholas C. Burbules argues that activist speech, while generally protected, exists uneasily in a campus context. By Nicholas C. Burbules Many universities are struggling to reconcile the principles of … Continue reading Nick Burbules — How Activist Speech Threatens Educational Values
This post is an essay about the brief but glorious golden age of the US university during the three decades after World War II. American higher education rose to fame and fortune during the Cold War, when both student enrollments and funded research shot upward. Prior to World War II, the federal government showed little … Continue reading An Affair to Remember: America’s Brief Fling with the University as a Public Good
This post is a lovely essay by Steven Mintz, which was published in January in Inside Higher Ed. Here's a link to the original. It connects with a piece I posted here a couple weeks earlier, looking at the way schools turn off students and what college might do to improve their own ability to engage … Continue reading Steven Mintz — Most Kids Find K-12 Education Boring and Stressful
Here are the syllabi for classes I taught at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. Each syllabus includes links to nearly all course readings, tips for doing the reading, and class slides. As a result you can take the course, either individually and in groups. Feel free to share the syllabi with anyone you want. … Continue reading All of My Course Syllabi, Including Links to Readings, Reading Tips, and Slides
David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing 