Category Archives: Academia

History As It Was

I’m finally getting around to last week’s NY Times piece by Patricia Cohen about the decline of the “traditional” specializations in history departments. Rather like the last Cohen piece that drew my attention, it feels a bit detached from time … Continue reading

Posted in Academia | 2 Comments

The Usefulness of Scholarship

If you define erudition as encyclopedic knowledge about a body of discrete facts, then welcome to the age of distributed erudition. It’s still a very good thing to have those facts in your head rather than to pop up on … Continue reading

Posted in Academia, Africa, Information Technology and Information Literacy | 5 Comments

Jump. Jump Now! (Or Later.) (Or Climb Down Slowly.)

Elite colleges and universities chased each other to a budgetary precipice. Did peer institutions build a new building of some kind? You need one! Did they dramatically expand services to the student body? Do it too! Redesign the dining hall … Continue reading

Posted in Academia, Swarthmore | 13 Comments

What’s Distinctive About Africanist Historiography?

Swarthmore has an elaborate system of Honors seminars. The basic premise of the system is that third and fourth year students participating in the system take four small, intensely focused double-credit seminars, three in a major subject, one in a … Continue reading

Posted in Academia, Africa, Swarthmore | 6 Comments

The Laptop in the Classroom

Our Lady of Scathing Online Schoolmarmery forgive me, but I don’t think I will be banning laptops in my classrooms in the near-future. The case against classroom laptops is that they encourage students to divert their attention from class, either … Continue reading

Posted in Academia, Information Technology and Information Literacy | 35 Comments

Why Can’t You?

I had a fun conversation with a student this week who had a number of challenging questions about issues to pose to me. The question I’m still knocking around: if academic cultural critics understand expressive culture so expertly, why can’t … Continue reading

Posted in Academia | 17 Comments

The Road to Utopia

Mark Taylor’s op-ed has not exactly lit a fire under America’s academics. A lot of the criticism I’ve seen has been pretty legitimate. I’m still enamored of the idea of trying to make departments more supple and flexible as administrative … Continue reading

Posted in Academia | 8 Comments

Taylor on the University

I can tell my views about the current state of academia are no mystery by the number of people who’ve told me to take a look at Mark C. Taylor’s piece calling for the reorganization of universities in today’s New … Continue reading

Posted in Academia | 18 Comments

Show Me the Money

I’ve been following conversations here and at many other higher education institutions about financial issues. As I said somewhat sheepishly to colleagues yesterday, a lot of what I believed in when times were flush is still what I believe in … Continue reading

Posted in Academia, Swarthmore | 5 Comments

Building the Teaching University

Say you’re an ambitious new university president who has just become the head of a large public university. Let’s say for the sake of argument that it is widely conceded in your state that this new university has been underfunded … Continue reading

Posted in Academia | 16 Comments