This post is an overview of the book I published several years ago. 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 … Continue reading Being a Scholar
This post contains all of the material for the class on the History of Higher Education in the US that I taught for at the Stanford Graduate School of Education for the last 15 years. In retirement I wanted to make the course available on the internet to anyone who is interested. If you are … Continue reading Course Syllabus: History of Higher Education in the US
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 a favorite piece by an old friend and terrific scholar, Harold Wechsler, who sadly died a few years ago. Here’s a link to the original, which appeared in Teachers College Record in 1981. In this paper, Wechsler explores a longstanding issue in American higher education. How do students and colleges respond when the initial core … Continue reading Harold Wechsler — Group Repulsion in the History of US Higher Ed
This post is a piece I wrote recently about an issue that's been on my mind for a while. Here's a link to the article, and here's a link to the slide talk I gave on the subject. The story is in the title. You Don’t Need to Kill Yourself Trying to Get into the Ivies: … Continue reading You Don’t Need to Kill Yourself Trying to Get into the Ivies
This post is an essay by Dominic Ng from his Substack, Brain Health Decoded. Here's a link to the original. His argument is that we too often think that consuming content is the same as learning it. And this is particularly true today, when such massive amounts of material are now available to us online. This … Continue reading Dominic Ng — Consuming Content Is Not the Same as Learning It
This post is piece was originally published in Aeon in December, 2018 (a British publication, thus the spelling). Here's a link to the original. It 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 … Continue reading The Lust for Academic Fame
This post is an essay by Michael Elliott recently published in Atlantic. Here's a link to the original. In it he explores a topic dear to my heart, that college -- and intellectual life in general -- should be experienced as a form of play. It's not a chore that you need trudge through out a … Continue reading Michael Elliott — College Should Be Way More Fun
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
