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Category Archives: Swarthmore
Conduct Unbecoming
A campus Title IX coordinator recently made some interesting comments to Elizabeth Nolan Brown at the Dish about the problem of sexual assault on college campuses. A lot of the national debate, such as it is, about what’s gone wrong … Continue reading
Posted in Academia, Swarthmore
13 Comments
The Listicle as Course Design
I’ve been convinced for a while that one of the best defenses of small classes and face-to-face pedagogy within a liberal arts education would be to make the process of that kind of teaching and coursework more visible to anyone … Continue reading
Playing the Odds
The idea that higher education makes you a better person in some respect has long been its soft underbelly. The proposition makes most current faculty and administrators uncomfortable, especially at the smaller teaching-centered colleges that are prone to invoke tropes … Continue reading
Subtraction Stew
If the greatest trick the Devil ever played was convincing people he didn’t exist, the greatest trick of a certain kind of neoliberalism has been to convince people that in all circumstances and times we live in the shadow of … Continue reading
Posted in Academia, Politics, Swarthmore
1 Comment
Frame(d)
High Anxiety In modernity, dread only takes a holiday once in a while. Right now Mr. Dread is hard at work all around the world, and he’s not just sticking to the big geopolitical dramas or some single-issue fear. He’s … Continue reading
Who’s the Boss?
In the current wave of online ill-will between contingent and tenure-track faculty (which of course most faculty in either group will never see, know about or care about), one of the common sentiments that produces some modest degree of agreement … Continue reading
Posted in Academia, Politics, Swarthmore
20 Comments
Now I’m In For It
So I’ve overhauled my survey course on the history of the Atlantic slave trade in West Africa this semester as an experiment in “flipping the classroom”. I’m not quite flipping the way that some do, with lectures as homework and … Continue reading
Posted in Academia, Africa, Defining "Liberal Arts", Swarthmore
5 Comments
In Loco Parentis?
I used to believe much more in procedural reform as a way to deal with questions of fairness, equity and justice. That every institution and community should have its established rules and processes, and if you signed on, you accepted … Continue reading
Posted in Academia, Politics, Swarthmore
14 Comments
Smarter Than You: The Ideology of the Incentive (Parking Lot Edition)
I’ve already made my feelings about most uses of “incentives” by technocratic planners fairly plain, and besides, I’m just really at best a handmaiden on this point for my colleagues Ken Sharpe and Barry Schwartz, who make the argument more … Continue reading
The Cheese Stands Alone
The movement for higher education to divest from fossil fuel producers frustrates me. First and foremost in the way that participants in the movement are anointing themselves as sole moral paragons struggling through a wasteland of sin and sinners. I … Continue reading
Posted in Academia, Politics, Swarthmore
5 Comments