This is a Q and A I did with Scott Jaschik about my book, A Perfect Mess, shortly after it came out. It was published in Inside Higher Ed in 2017. ‘A Perfect Mess’ Author discusses his new book about American higher education, which suggests it may be better off today than people realize … because … Continue reading Q and A about A Perfect Mess
Category: History
Perils of the Professionalized Historian
This is a short piece about the problems that professionalism poses for the academic historian. History is a different kind of subject, and too often academic rigor gets in the way of telling the kinds of historical accounts that we need. An earlier version was published in 2017 in the International Journal of the Historiography … Continue reading Perils of the Professionalized Historian
Schooling the Meritocracy: How Schools Came to Democratize Merit, Formalize Achievement, and Naturalize Privilege
This a new piece I recently wrote, based on a paper I presented last fall at the ISCHE conference in Berlin. It's part of a larger project that focuses on the construction of the American meritocracy, which is to say the new American aristocracy of credentials. Schooling the Meritocracy: How Schools Came to Democratize Merit, … Continue reading Schooling the Meritocracy: How Schools Came to Democratize Merit, Formalize Achievement, and Naturalize Privilege
An Unlikely Triumph: How US Higher Education Went from Rags in the 19th Century to Riches in the 20th
This is a piece I published in Aeon in October, 2017. It provides an overview of my book that came out that year, "A Perfect Mess: The Unlikely Ascendancy of American Higher Education (University of Chicago Press). From the perspective of 19th-century visitors to the United States, the country’s system of higher education was a … Continue reading An Unlikely Triumph: How US Higher Education Went from Rags in the 19th Century to Riches in the 20th
David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing 