This post is the announcement of my new book, Essays on History, Writing, and Schooling. It's a collection of essays that I published on this blog since its start in 2019. It is the fourth in a series of books that I self-published in the last four years using Kindle Direct publishing. I produced this … Continue reading New Book: Essays on History, Writing, and Schooling
This post is an essay I wrote recently and tried to publish in several different venues, without success. So I'm publishing it here on my blog, where editorial standards are a bit more flexible. After spending many years decrying the rampant credentialism in the modern structure of schooling, I'm beginning to think about its possible … Continue reading The Upsides of Credentialism
This is an essay about the historical construction of the American meritocracy, which is to say the new American aristocracy based on academic credentials. This essay is included in my new book, The Ironies of Schooling. Here’s a link to the original, which was published 2020 in Bildungsgeschichte: International Journal of the Historiography of Education. An overview … Continue reading Schooling the Meritocracy
This post is a short piece I published a while ago in Insider Higher Ed. Here's a link to the original. Scholarship Thrives on Peripheral Vision Don’t be limited by what’s straight ahead, David Labaree writes The problem with scholarly focus is that it leads where you intend to go. And this is a … Continue reading Scholarship Thrives on Peripheral Vision
This post is an overview of the book I published two years ago. It’s available on Amazon both as an e-book and a paperback. The title is The Ironies of Schooling. It's available as both an e-book and paperback. As I did with my earlier book, Being a Scholar, I published this one myself using Kindle Direct … Continue reading The Ironies of Schooling
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 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 piece I published in Quartz in 2017. Here’s a link to the original. It’s an effort to explore the distinctively populist character of American higher education, drawing on my book, A Perfect Mess: The Unlikely Ascendancy of American Higher Education. The idea is that a key to understanding the strong public support that … Continue reading How Football Helped Make US Universities Great
This post is an overview of my life as a scholar. I presented an oral version in my job talk at Stanford in 2002. The idea was to make sense of the path I’d taken in my scholarly writing up to that point. What were the issues I was looking at and why? How did … Continue reading Getting It Wrong — Rethinking a Life in Scholarship
This post is a piece I wrote for Kappan, published in the March 2020 edition. Here’s a link to the PDF. It was also reprinted in my recent book, The Ironies of Schooling. Bureaucracies are often perceived as inflexible, impersonal, hierarchical, and too devoted to rules and red tape. But here I make a case for these characteristics … Continue reading Two Cheers for School Bureaucracy
