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…
Author: David Potash
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…
The Unfortunate Durability of Good Inequality Scholarship
Dalton Conley’s Being Black, Living in the Red is an important book about race, wealth and social policy. Published in the late 1990s, a version with a new afterword came out in 2010. It was important then and it remains relevant today. Many believe that rising inequality is one of the most pressing problems facing American today.…
Doing Good Works
You’re on a ship, the weather turns stormy, and you see a fellow passenger fall overboard. Risking life and limb, you jump into the water, rescue the floundering soul, and get them back to safety. You are hailed as a hero – well done. A philosopher teaching ethics would look at this scenario through two…
College Without Security
The Hope Lab at the University of Wisconsin, working with the University of Michigan’s Healthy Minds Study, the Association of Community College Trustees, and Single Stop, a national organization focused on helping economically vulnerable students and their families, posted at the end of 2015 a powerful report – Hungry To Learn – on food and…
Understanding Others – Harder and More Useful Than You Realize
Few life skills are more useful than understanding what other people are thinking. Successful leadership demands an awareness of it. Meaningful projects inevitably require of groups of people working together. Negotiating without it is close to impossible. Empathy – knowing and sharing another’s feelings – is vitally important to being a connected human. But empathy…