This post 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 don’t apply. Administrators can’t offer much in the way of power and money as rewards for productive faculty and they also can’t do … Continue reading The Lust for Academic Fame
This post is an essay by Amna Khalid and Jeffrey Aaron Snyder that recently appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education Review. Here's a link to the original. I fully agree with the argument they make here -- about how higher education institutions have increasingly been failing to treat their own students as adults. I … Continue reading Khalid and Snyder: Stop Treating Students Like Babies
This post is about how the last election can be understood as a rebuke to America's leaders in the Democratic Party. As David Brooks put it in the headline of his first column after the election: Voters to Elites: Can You See Me Now? I want to explore this issue at two levels, arguing that: … Continue reading Voters Give a Big Thumbs Down to America’s Leaders
This post is focused on an excerpt from a recent essay by Walter Russell Mead, which appeared in online magazine Tablet. Here's a link to the original. To me, it captures something important about the presidential election -- the way in which the contest turned out to be a referendum on the character of America's … Continue reading Walter Russell Mead: American Leadership Has a Versailles Problem
This post is the text of a lecture I gave in 2013 at the annual meeting of the John Dewey Society. It was published the following year in the Society's journal, Education and Culture. Here's a link to the published version. The story I tell here is not a philosophical … Continue reading College — What Is It Good For?
This post is an essay by Nick Burbules that recently appeared in Inside Higher Ed. Here's a link to the original. How Activist Speech Threatens Educational Values Nicholas C. Burbules argues that activist speech, while generally protected, exists uneasily in a campus context. By Nicholas C. Burbules Many universities are struggling to reconcile the principles of … Continue reading Nick Burbules — How Activist Speech Threatens Educational Values
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
This post is a lovely essay by Steven Mintz, which was published in January in Inside Higher Ed. Here's a link to the original. It connects with a piece I posted here a couple weeks earlier, looking at the way schools turn off students and what college might do to improve their own ability to engage … Continue reading Steven Mintz — Most Kids Find K-12 Education Boring and Stressful
Here are the syllabi for classes I taught at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. Each syllabus includes links to nearly all course readings, tips for doing the reading, and class slides. As a result you can take the course, either individually and in groups. Feel free to share the syllabi with anyone you want. … Continue reading All of My Course Syllabi, Including Links to Readings, Reading Tips, and Slides
This post is a review essay of a book called Research Universities and the Public Good. It appeared in the American Journal of Sociology. Here's a link to a PDF of the original. Research Universities and the Public Good: Discovery for an Uncertain Future By Jason Owen-Smith. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2018. Pp. xii … Continue reading Research Universities and the Public Good
David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing 