This post is an essay by Blake Smith that first appeared in Tablet. Here's a link to the original. It's about a phenomenon I started noticing a few years ago in the peculiar process of admissions to elite universities. In this process it's not enough to present yourself to the admissions committee as the ultimate … Continue reading Blake Smith — The Woke Meritocracy
This post is a piece I published in 2020 in the Chronicle Review. It’s about an issue that has been gnawing at me for years. How can you justify the existence of institutions of the sort I taught at for the last two decades — rich private research universities? These institutions obviously benefit their students and … Continue reading How NOT to Defend the Private Research University
This post is an essay of mine that was just published in a book -- Production, Presentation, and Acceleration of Educational Research: Could Less Be More? -- edited by Paul Smeyers and Marc Depaepe. An earlier version appeared in Aeon in 2018. Here's a PDF of the chapter. Here's the setup for the argument: The … Continue reading The Lust for Academic Fame
This post is an op-ed I published on my birthday (May 17) in 2018 on the online international opinion site, Project Syndicate. The original is hidden behind a paywall; here are PDFs in English, Spanish, and Arabic. It’s a brief essay on what is distinctive about the American system of higher education, drawn from my book, A Perfect Mess: The Unlikely … Continue reading The Exceptionalism of American Higher Education
This post is a reprint of 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. The idea is that a key to understanding the strong public support that US colleges and universities have managed to generate is their ability to reach beyond … Continue reading Nobel Prizes Are Great, But Football Is Why American Universities Dominate the Globe
This post is the text of the preface I just wrote for the Chinese translation of my book, A Perfect Mess: The Unlikely Ascendancy of the American System of Higher Education. The translators are Professor Sun Bi and research assistant Liu Zitai from the School of Education at South China Normal University. It will be … Continue reading Preface to the Chinese Edition of A Perfect Mess
This post is the transcript of a conversation I recently had with Ryan Maloney, who is a strength and conditioning coach at Fredonia University. He has a very interesting blog, Cerebral Conversations, in which he discusses issues in higher education with a wide variety of people in the field. This discussion was posted on his … Continue reading A Conversation about US Higher Education
This post is an essay I wrote about the history of the uneasy relationship between American teacher education and the university. It was published in 2008 in the 3rd edition of the Handbook of Research on Teacher Education (edited by Marilyn Cochran-Smith, Sharon Feiman-Nemser, and John McIntyre). This is a PDF of the original. Here's … Continue reading An Uneasy Relationship: The History of Teacher Education in the University
This post is a dialogue I had last winter with Sara Goldrick-Rab, which covered a wide range of topics surrounding higher education policy in the US. It was just published online by History of Education Quarterly. Here's a link to the original. It's part of a series of such dialogues that the journal has been … Continue reading Policy Dialogue with Sara Goldrick-Rab
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
David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing 