Higher education performs two critical functions: dissemination of knowledge and information (education), and certification of that knowledge and information (credentialing). We spend the majority of our work in higher education on the first half of that equation. We argue about relevance and value, about teaching and research, and wrestle endlessly about better ways to help…
Author: David Potash
Dominican American Studies and Empowerment
There is no one best model to understand immigration to the United States. It is shaped – uniquely – by country of origin, politics, history, and people. Two countries share the island of Hispaniola: Haiti and the Dominican Republic. From the early part of the 20th century and President Theodore Roosevelt’s interventionist foreign policy, the…
Civic Engagement and Civic Responsibility
Meira Levinson is an educator who walks the walk and talks the talk. A Harvard professor, she is trained in philosophy (Yale and Oxford) and has taught middle school in Atlanta in Boston. She is prolific – five books thus far – and influential, sitting on several boards and organizations. Her primary focus is civic education.…
It’s Greek To Her
Alexandra Robbins is a best-selling author who has written about at nurses, Yale’s Skull and Bones, geeks, overachieving kids, twenty-somethings and Greek life. She is a regular contributor to many popular magazines. In Pledged: The Secret Life of Sororities, she turned her gaze to the life of sorority women in the south. A Yale graduate, Robbins tried to live…
Our Daily Bread
Sociologists often see what the rest of us miss. Les Back is a professor of sociology at Goldsmith’s, University of London. A prolific scholar, he is known for his work on race, popular culture, and urban life. Back is witty and funny. He is an active presence in popular media. In The Art of Listening, he wrote about sociology’s…
Program Change in the Academic Marketplace
If you wanted a college degree in the 1800s, there was a good chance that you would have been required to demonstrate proficiency in Latin and Greek. Americans didn’t use the languages all that much, but an earlier generation of colleges in the 1700s were created to train clergy – and if you’re going into that line…
American Dream, American Nightmare
The “American Dream” may be difficult to define, but it rests on well-recognized and shared assumptions: that everyone is created equal (per the Declaration of Independence), that freedom allows for personal choice, that opportunity should be available to all, that hard work and playing fair will result in good outcomes, and that our children’s lives…