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 a speech that Stanford's former provost, John Etchemendy, recently gave to the university's board of trustees. Right now, the threats to universities are coming fast and furious from the outside, with the new administration canceling research grants, threatening to cut indirect cost reimbursement, and to tax endowment income. But in this speech … Continue reading John Etchemendy — The Threat from Within
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 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 is a paper I published Educational Theory back in 2011 about the factors shaping the rise of quantification in education research. It still seems relevant to a lot of issues in the field educational policy. Here's an overview of the argument: In this paper I explore the historical and sociological elements that have made educational researchers … Continue reading The Lure of Statistics for Educational Researchers
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?
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 piece I wrote for the 1989 book, American Teachers: Histories of a Profession at Work, edited by Don Warren. Here's a link to a PDF of the original. A slightly different version appeared as a chapter in my 1997 book, How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning. I agreed to … Continue reading Career Ladders and the Early School Teacher: A Study on Inequality and Opportunity
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
This week's post is a piece I presented at a conference in Switzerland and then published in an obscure book in 2010. Here's the original version. And now it's a chapter in my new book, The Ironies of Schooling. It's a story about the contest for dominance in US education in the early 20th century … Continue reading How Dewey Lost
