Day: November 8, 2011

College Inertia, Gradual Change, and Radical Disruption

A few years ago, at a luncheon at Harvard University, Larry Summers noted an interesting fact.  If you look at the top ten players in any industry or business 50 years ago, the list would look wholly different than it does today–except in higher education.  It was Harvard, Yale, Princeton . . . back then, […]

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Greatly Exaggerated Death of the Novel

Thomas C. Foster’s book is three years old, but it still holds the gold medal for Turnoff Title of the New Millennium: How to Read Novels Like a Professor. The author, who teaches English at the University of Michigan, attempts to sanitize his work with the subtitle, A Jaunty Exploration of the World’s Favorite Literary […]

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The Harvard Protest: Theatricality Mixed with Incoherence

Like their compatriots in Zuccotti square, the 70 Harvard college students who walked out of Greg Mankiw’s economics class were larger on theatrics than on message, and failed to articulate a reasonable, much less coherent, justification for their protest. Gabriel Bayard and Rachel J. Sandalow-Ash, the two organizers of the protest, discuss the reasoning behind […]

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