Where the Buck Stops
Yes, there was always someone who screwed up before students arrived in our classes. There were parents who failed their children, teachers who failed their students, and a society…
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November 11, 2020
Foucault’s Soldiers
Several decades ago, when the writings of Michel Foucault were at the peak of their popularity in academia, my former colleague, Jim Riley, remarked insightfully that what was most…
October 11, 2020
Vampire Universities
It was a test of my parenting, and I think I passed. We were on a trip to investigate colleges with our teen-aged son, and Yale had become part…
September 24, 2020
COVID-19 and the Unindicted Co-Conspirators of Academia
It is a lovely image, a beautiful example of the high quality of contemporary newspaper photography. The composition is perfect. The diagonal slats of the blinds carry the viewers’ eyes…
August 3, 2020
Postcards of an Education
Jean-Luc Goddard’s 1963 agitprop film, Les Carabiniers, was a New Wave shaggy dog story. For most of the somewhat tedious film the two loutish protagonist commit a series of…
July 6, 2020
Mitch Daniels, Purdue University, and the COVID-19 Calculus
This blog was initially inspired primarily by my sense that students and their learning had relatively little value in the decisions made in higher education. To capture this concern,…
June 1, 2020
Decoding On-Line Learning
Moving Beyond Pedagogical Triage in the Covid-19 Era In the last few months teachers around the world at all levels of education have been presented an unprecedented challenge. Facing the…
May 21, 2020
Teaching and Social Responsibility in Higher Education / The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL)
Pedagogical Triage
In higher education, as in so many other areas of our lives, the COVID-19 virus has turned the world upside down. At least in the short term the impossible has…
April 5, 2020
Teaching and Social Responsibility in Higher Education / The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL)
The Revolt of the College Teachers
[For some time two concerns have hovered in the back of my consciousness: the total inability of contemporary culture to generate visions of a positive future and the absence of…
January 20, 2020
Teaching and Social Responsibility in Higher Education / The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL)
Amoebas, Sexual Reproduction, and a History Department
I have spent a significant amount of my life in faculty meetings. Time that might have been spent in meaningful activity. Hours that will never be returned to me.…
December 2, 2019