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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
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
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