Anger and the Banality of Academe
…glimpse of itself, I don’t know. But it is that time of year when it seems allowable to offer a metaphor instead of an argument. Something like throwing marshmallows to…
Search Results for: don't learn much
Nora Ephron’s Commencement Talk at Wellesley, 1996
…saying is, don’t delude yourself that the powerful cultural values that wrecked the lives of so many of my classmates have vanished from the earth. Don’t let the New York…
A Very Short Commencement Speech from the Wizard
…out of credentials. I think of science fiction writer Ray Bradbury, who once announced, “I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don’t have…
Cheaper Student Loans–A Bad Idea Whose Time Has Come
…workers to compete in the global marketplace. But students don’t need cheaper loans. What they need are loans that give them an incentive to get good enough college educations to…
The Next Toxic Ism: Realism
…me or your lying eyes?” Non-academics cannot imagine just how easily this “don’t believe your eyes” cosmology can be built and imposed on wide-eyed students. Students have already been softened…
What “Western Governors” Does Well
…course materials just don’t excite them, or because they don’t seem relevant to their backgrounds and futures. But another reason is that neither the pace of the course nor the…
Misconduct Hearings on Campus Are Rotten and Have to Change
…not because they have great respect for faculty members. They really don’t, if you really analyze it. But because they have no respect for the speech rights of students. And…
R.I.P. John Payton–But He Was Part of the Problem
…“I guess people who look like me don’t matter when it comes to discrimination,” she concluded. Equally myopic in her inability to see that “diversity” requires racial discrimination was Barbara…
Why ACTA Is Needed
…could then turn its attention to other matters. But, of course, we don’t have a perfect academy–far from it. As a result, those interested in academic quality, now more than…
The White Male Shortage on Campus
…famously said, “Grab a brew. Don’t cost nothing”) suffering the obligatory freshperson lectures given by a feminist counselor on non-alcoholic alternatives to beer and on the need for informed consent…
Competition and Choice Bring Reform, but There’s a Problem
…benefits of Finnish reform: teacher autonomy in grades 1-9, no external tests or test-based accountability, and a collaborative approach at the school level to the curriculum. But they don’t seem…
How To Bridge the Educational Divide
…M. Anderson is dean of Humanities, Fine Arts, and Social Sciences at Illinois Valley Community College, and author of The Skinny on Teaching: What You Don’t Learn in Graduate School….
Our College Graduation Rate Doesn’t Matter
…they assent to the proposition that we are losing productivity because we don’t have a higher college graduation rate. If you don’t have time for Professor Wolf’s book, however, I’ll…
Look Who’s Endorsing a Race-Based View of Knowledge
…succeeded in ways that these self-defined outsiders do not grasp. They want to replace “The data show….” with “I feel this to be the truth and don’t contradict me since…
Are Too Many People Going to College?
…premium.” We know that many college graduates have to accept jobs that don’t call for any academic preparation whatsoever, and don’t pay more just because the worker happens to have…
What Do the Law Schools Think They’re Doing?
…so many Americans don’t hire lawyers” when they genuinely need legal assistance or advice. One reason for that is that lawyers who incur a fortune in student loans need to…
The Many Problems of Online Education
…attending to the issue at hand, and actually learn less in the process. As UCLA psychology professor Russell Poldrak discovered, “multi-tasking adversely affects how you learn. Even if you learn…
How Federal Aid Drives Up College Tuition
…years of college, in large part because colleges don’t make academics a priority,” according to a widely-publicized January report from experts like NYU’s Richard Arum. “36% showed little” gain after…
What Will They Learn? Maybe Not Much
…expensive system of higher education. So what are students learning? They’re learning about music, movies and the party scene. At Vanderbilt University, a course called “Country Music” can serve as…
Three Cheers for Useless Education
…what you don’t know.” Even the venerable American Council of Trustees and Alumni maintains that a college education is ultimately about employability. “A college education is rightly part of the…
Check Out This Alternative to College
…learning, 90 percent of them as full-time students, according to Labor Department statistics for 2010. Yet only 20 percent of high school graduates ever manage to complete bachelor’s degrees—and that…
The Chilly World of the Campus Male
…have to focus on doing what needs to get done (e.g., homework) to get what they want (video games). In the process, they learn postponed gratification. They learn to focus…
In Defense of Bad Teaching
…de facto message here is be “inclusive” even if a waste of time, and don’t ever disrespect racial ethnic or racial sensibilities by arguing with the thin-skinned, no matter how…
‘SlutWalks’ Take Over from ‘Take Back the Night’
…flowing. It does not work so well when that same girl, wearing the same miniskirt, ventures into a part of town where the men either don’t know the rules or…
The Resentment of the Diversity Officer
…characteristics of the European outlook from the beginning is to explore other cultures, to learn about them, to record them, to incorporate them. To say “completely ignores the contributions of…
Bowdoin’s History
…allegations of excessive “liberalism” by the professoriate don’t reveal much, absent more information about hiring patterns. That said, a striking aspect of the subfields listed by Bowdoin’s history professors is…
Why Don’t Progressives Support U.S. History for Freshmen?
Herb London and KC Johnson have already posted on the disappointing findings of the ACTA project What Will They Learn? But it is worth pondering some of the implications of…
A Great Article on a Disastrous Act of Federal Meddling
…don’t understand the power imbalance between women and men.” I said, “You don’t understand the legal equality for which women have fought.” All fundamental fairness disappears from campus judicial systems…
Betrayal of Liberty on Campus
…warning to those of you who don’t yet have such programs on your campus. You’ll see why the threat to all schools is real. Until very recently, those who ran…
Beware the “Outcomes and Assessment” Movement
…Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. After attending a conference on teaching and learning in 2004, Plopper had an epiphany of sorts, and now uses Bloom’s Taxonomy to assess student learning in his two…