This post is a piece I just wrote about an issue I've been mulling over for years. It's about how getting a doctorate is not just another in a long chain of degrees. It's a transformative experience, and prospective doctoral should prepare to strap themselves in for the ride. Doctoral Study as a Transformative Experience … Continue reading Doctoral Study as a Transformative Experience
My new post is an essay by David Brooks that provides one of the best analyses I've read about the Trump victory. It appeared right after the election in the New York Times. Here's a link to the original. It explores some of the themes that I developed in my slide-show post 10 days ago. Voters … Continue reading David Brooks: Voters to Elites — Do You See Me Now?
This post is an analysis of the engine for scholarly production in American higher education. The issue is that the university is a unique work setting in which the usual organizational incentives don’t apply. Administrators can’t offer much in the way of power and money as rewards for productive faculty and they also can’t do … Continue reading The Lust for Academic Fame
This post is an essay by Amna Khalid and Jeffrey Aaron Snyder that recently appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education Review. Here's a link to the original. I fully agree with the argument they make here -- about how higher education institutions have increasingly been failing to treat their own students as adults. I … Continue reading Khalid and Snyder: Stop Treating Students Like Babies
This post is about how the last election can be understood as a rebuke to America's leaders in the Democratic Party. As David Brooks put it in the headline of his first column after the election: Voters to Elites: Can You See Me Now? I want to explore this issue at two levels, arguing that: … Continue reading Voters Give a Big Thumbs Down to America’s Leaders
This post is focused on an excerpt from a recent essay by Walter Russell Mead, which appeared in online magazine Tablet. Here's a link to the original. To me, it captures something important about the presidential election -- the way in which the contest turned out to be a referendum on the character of America's … Continue reading Walter Russell Mead: American Leadership Has a Versailles Problem
This post is a reflection on one particular component of the practice of teaching — the need for each teacher to construct an authentic and effective teacher persona. In the first part of the post, I draw on a section from chapter five of my book, Someone Has to Fail. In the second part, I explore the … Continue reading Teacher Persona
This post is an essay by Alva Noë that was recently published in the online magazine, Aeon. Here's a link to the original. Noë is a philosopher at Berkeley who is addressing a key issue that is often misrepresented in the conversation about artificial intelligence. The central point is computers can't think. The computers that drive … Continue reading Alva Noe — Computers Can’t Think
David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing 