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Category Archives: Academia
Simplicity vs. Sustainability
Last week, I was at an event where there was some talk about Swarthmore trying to embrace sustainability and simplicity to a greater degree. Afterwards, I was trying to parse out why those two words provoke really different gut-level reactions … Continue reading
The Microhistorical Unknown
In some forthcoming work, I’ve argued that historians tend to overinterpret or misread silences in archival records, seeing instrumental or intentional erasures of knowledge instead of the incidental accidents or the peculiar character of modern archival culture. I suggest that … Continue reading
Posted in Academia, Production of History
5 Comments
Pricing the Priceless Class
One of the hardest things about managing budgetary contraction in colleges and universities will be the differing ways that academics talk about what they value in a curriculum. We believe that the cost of curricular programs and institutional projects has … Continue reading
Posted in Academia
2 Comments
Ghosts in the Machine
Every once in a while, I’ll catch a colleague from the natural sciences playfully tweaking a humanist for the volume of prose they lavish on a routine task like writing an email or a committee report. (Or, yeah, a blog … Continue reading
Posted in Academia
2 Comments
How to Read a Curriculum
We already know that higher education applicants and their families have some difficulty decoding the information available about colleges and universities to find the institutions that they want to apply to. That’s the major reason that higher tuition prices in … Continue reading
Posted in Academia, Swarthmore
15 Comments
The Right Firewood
Back from an extended camping trip where I was blissfully out of range of digital technology for most of the time. (Though I weep now looking at my email inbox.) A good time was had by all. One interesting experience … Continue reading
Posted in Academia, Domestic Life
1 Comment
Putting Syllabi Online
I kept meaning to get around to this last week, but I was snowed under with two other things that needed to get done before the academic year starts up again. Adam Kotsko asks an eminently sensible question: why don’t … Continue reading
Posted in Academia
14 Comments
Red Herrings Overboard
Many of the criticisms directed at information technology in the classroom get hung up on a misattribution issue. Eric Rauchway makes this point very effectively: the problem with bad PowerPoint presentations is often not the software, but the presenter. The … Continue reading
Posted in Academia
7 Comments
Mine!
I didn’t catch the complaint of some philosophers against a small NEH course-development program called “Enduring Questions” the first time around, but picked up on it via Savage Minds. The NEH program offers a small amount of financial support for … Continue reading
Posted in Academia
9 Comments
Passages to Meritocracy
If nothing else, Sunday’s New York Times story on pricey consultancies helping well-heeled students get into the selective university or college of their choice was memorable for the juxtaposition of a quote from Amy Gutmann, president of the University of … Continue reading
Posted in Academia, Swarthmore
8 Comments