My new post is an essay by a philosophy professor who has adopted the handle Hilarius Bookbinder for his Substack Scriptorium Philosophia. Here's a link to the original. Why Philosophy Matters Earlier this month Martin Peterson, a very fine philosopher at Texas A&M “University”, was forbidden to teach Plato’s Symposium in his Contemporary Moral Issues class because Plato is all … Continue reading Hilarius Bookbinder — Why Philosophy Matters
This piece is an essay about my life in scholarship and some of the lessons I learned from it. It was written in mid career, after publishing The Trouble with Ed Schools, and it first appeared in print as the introduction to a 2005 book called Education, Markets, and the Public Good: The Selected Works of David … Continue reading Adventures in Scholarship
This post is a column by my favorite education writer, Jay Mathews from the Washington Post. Here's a link to the original. I've posted two other pieces by him recently (here and here). In it he addresses an issue that creates so much craziness -- the way upper-middle class American families obsess about getting their … Continue reading Jay Mathews — Don’t Fret that Harvard Turned You Down. Top Public Universities Have a Lot More High-Scoring Students than the Most Selective Privates
This post is an essay by Marie Newhouse recently published in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Here's a link to the original. She is an associate professor of law, philosophy, and public policy at the University of Surrey and a visiting fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas at Austin. She provides a … Continue reading Marie Newhouse — The Campus Civility Collapse
This post is an essay by Beverly Gage published recently in the New York Times. Here's a link to the original. In it, she draws on Richard Hofstadter's 1963 book, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, to show how this is not the first time that American universities found themselves the target of political attacks. Let's not forget the … Continue reading Beverly Gage: The American University Is in Crisis. Not for the First Time.
This post is a collection of some of my favorite cartoons about academic life, many of which come from the Jorge Chan website PHDComics.com. Enjoy.
This post is an essay by John Warner that was published in Inside Higher Ed. Here's a link to the original. He takes a smart approach to the problem of how to teach writing to college students in the era of AI, where an algorithm can produce an adequate essay in response to the instructor's prompt … Continue reading John Warner — Teach Writing, Not Document Production
This post is a piece I published in History of Education Quarterly in 2006. Here's a link to the original, complete with footnotes. It's an elaboration on the presidential address I presented at the annual meeting of the History of Education Society in October, 2005. It then became a chapter in my 2017 book, A … Continue reading Mutual Subversion: A Short History of the Liberal and the Professional in American Higher Education
This post is an essay by Hilarius Bookbinder recently published in his Substack. Here's a link to the original. I posted another piece of his here recently. He is my favorite read these days in my favorite new medium, Substack. He’s got a great nom de plume, don’t you think? Based on a few clues in … Continue reading Hilarius Bookbinder — In Praise of Frivolous Research
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
