The University of Chicago hit two mile-markers in its decade-long transformation this week. The first, generally celebrated by students, alumni, and their parents, is a new high-water mark in the school’s US News & World Report ranking. The University now shares the fourth spot with Columbia, rising from 12 a few years ago and leapfrogging […]
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I hesitate to criticize sociology or sociologists. After all I am now at nearly a lifetime in the discipline, which I have taught for more than thirty years. But I would be dishonest if I did not acknowledge that throughout that time I have been a dissident in the field, a role, protected by tenure, […]
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For a few years now, distinguished literary scholar Gerald Graff has been disputing with “social justice” professors and “radical teachers” over the proper use of authority in the classroom. While president of the Modern Language Association, he spoke forcefully against the stigmatizing of conservatives, and in the pages of PMLA and Radical Teacher he has […]
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An Inside Higher Ed article yesterday by English professor Satya P. Mohanty of Cornell on “Diversity’s Next Challenges” constructs an elaborate house of cards but then inadvertently knocks the whole thing down. The piece features, in particular, an argument suggesting that “stereotype threat”—the claim that fear of being judged by a stereotype can cause minorities […]
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One often hears about stressed and stretched and over-scheduled college students, but every survey I’ve seen, including those issued by National Survey of Student Engagement (Indiana University) and the Higher Education Research Institute (at UCLA) shows dismayingly low levels of study time and academic engagement among undergraduates. Another one came out the other day. It’s […]
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Here’s a field of academic endeavor that I’ll bet you’ve never heard of (and may not even want to know about): “waste studies.” And it’s not the study of sewage systems or waste-processing plants, either. It’s about, as its founder, Susan Signe Morrison, an English professor at Texas State University’s San Marcos campus, explained to […]
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Karl Marx did everyone a huge favor when he announced that all history was the history of class struggle because then it was simple to analyze anything and everything confidently and crisply. But in Anthropology a new holy explanatory trinity has emerged to replace the good old simple one: Race/Class/Gender. You can barely refer to […]
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