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 an essay by my favorite Substack author, a philosophy professor at a regional state university in Pennsylvania, who has a wonderful pen name: Hilarius Bookbinder. Here's a link to the original. In this essay, he explores the way in which the rise of AI on college campuses has exposed the credentialing game … Continue reading Hilarius Bookbinder — The End of Credentialing
This post is a reminder about my most recent books. As a retired guy with time on his hands, I decided -- what the hell -- to self-publish three books in the last three years. Kindle Direct Publishing makes this possible. I thought it might be useful to put together collections of my papers and … Continue reading Three Books
This post is a classic commencement address by David Foster Wallace from 2005. Here's a link to the transcript. Enjoy. This is Water David Foster Wallace Greetings parents and congratulations to Kenyon’s graduating class of 2005. There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, … Continue reading David Foster Wallace — Commencement Address
This post is an op-ed by Harvard undergrad Aden Barton, which was published a few years ago in the Harvard Crimson. Here's a link to the original. To see the graphs he refers to, click on the link. The essay explores the reasons for the recent surge in careerism among Harvard undergraduate as a way … Continue reading Aden Barton — How Harvard Careerism Killed the Classroom
This post is a brief commentary on historian Walter Scheidel's book, Escape from Rome. It's a stunningly original analysis of a topic that has long fascinated scholars like me: How did Europe come to create the modern world? His answer is this: Europe became the cauldron of modernity and the dominant power in the world … Continue reading How the Fall of the Roman Empire Spurred the Rise of Modernity — and What this Suggests about Rise of US Higher Ed
This post is a lovely essay by Michael Lind, which was published in Tablet magazine. Here's a link to the original. In this piece, Lind provides a rich analysis of the history of the American elite. The key to this story is that the elite used to be plural -- a set of local elites … Continue reading Michael Lind — The New American Elite
This post is a piece I wrote a couple years ago. I tried unsuccessfully to publish in five different venues and gave up, so I'm posting it here. It is also republished in my book, Being a Scholar. I focus on an issue that I've been thinking about for quite a while: How to understand … Continue reading Universities Give Away Knowledge and Sell Degrees
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
