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 a tribute to the Normans and how they came to shape modern Europe. It draws primarily from the book The Normans: From Raiders to Kings by Lars Brownworth and also from a recent essay in Unherd by Ed West. The Normans were Vikings who in the ninth century conquered a piece of … Continue reading How the Normans Shaped Modern Europe
This post is a recent piece by Matthew Yglesias from his Substack site Slow Boring. Here's a link to the original. It's part of an ongoing series of posts here about the problems of meritocracy (for example, this, this, this, and this.) As Yglesias notes, most critiques of meritocracy are focused on the failures of … Continue reading Matthew Yglesias — Meritocracy Is Bad
This post is an wonderful essay by Jonathan Rauch, The War on Professionalism. It was published in the current issue of National Affairs. Here's a link to the original. This essay is a celebration of professionalism, in a populist period when to call someone professional seems seems slanderous. Here's how he sets the context for … Continue reading Jonathan Rauch — The War on Professionalism
