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 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
on Getting It Wrong — Rethinking a Life in ScholarThis 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 … Continue reading Getting It Wrong — Rethinking a Life in Scholarship
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 Bruce Kimball and Sarah Iler that was published recently in Inside Higher Ed. Here's a link to the original. Drawing on their new book -- Wealth, Cost, and Price in American Higher Education -- they argue that leaders of elite universities are engaged in an endless pursuit of financial resources, … Continue reading Bruce Kimball and Sarah Iler — College Leaders as Cookie Monsters
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 Ascendancy … Continue reading Exceptionalism in US Higher Education
This post is a piece from a recent edition of The Economist. Here's a link to the original. It focuses on a key issue in educational policy in the developing world. When you expand educational opportunity to a population that has had little access in the past, where do you focus your efforts? As the … Continue reading India’s Education Problem
This post is an op-ed by Jon Zimmerman that was recently published in the Wall Street Journal. Here's a link to the original. A Trump Voter Walks Into My Office It’s no joke—universities impoverish themselves by suppressing conservatives. By Jonathan Zimmerman Despite what you might have read about left-wing monoculture in academia, we really do … Continue reading Jon Zimmerman — A Trump Voter Walks Into My Office
If the greatest joy that comes from retirement is that I no longer have to attend faculty meetings, the second greatest joy is that I no longer have to grade student papers. I know, I know: commenting on student writing is a key component of being a good teacher, and there's a real satisfaction that … Continue reading Robin Lee Mozer — I Would Rather Do Anything Else than Grade Your Final Papers
My new post is an essay by David Brooks that provides one of the best analyses I've read about the Trump victory. It appeared right after the election in the New York Times. Here's a link to the original. It explores some of the themes that I developed in my slide-show post 10 days ago. Voters … Continue reading David Brooks: Voters to Elites — Do You See Me Now?
David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing 