In 2005, Auburn University Professor W. David Lewis finished Eddie Rickenbacker: An American Hero in the Twentieth Century. A labor of love and personal obsession, the biography took Lewis decades of research. It is a magisterial tome, the definitive work on one of the major celebrities of early twentieth century America. Accomplished in multiple arenas…
Author: David Potash
Saxifrage – A Provocative Model
Will innovation in higher education come from technologically sophisticated low-cost disruptors? Can costs be contained without reliance on MOOCs? A different model is the Saxifrage School. Founded by a young visionary, Tim Cook, the school will offer students a career focus and liberal arts education at a low cost. Dependent upon charity and a catch-as-catch-can…
Function, Form and Student Learning
In 2005, the Regents for the University of Minnesota shuttered UM’s School of General Studies and moved its faculty and students to the University’s College of Education and Human Development. The School of General Studies, created in 1932, was something of an anomaly: a two-year developmental unit at a four-year flagship university. GS provided a…
Making the Unfamiliar Familiar – Many Thanks to Will Gompertz
One of the job requirements of a provost is the ability to communicate with faculty across the disciplines and sound moderately intelligent and informed. You cannot present as more informed than the faculty – that simply shuts down conversation and fosters resentment (see Larry Summers at Harvard). One the other hand, if you don’t know…
On College and On Colleges – DelBanco’s Ideal
Andrew DelBanco is a smart and accomplished man. Director of Columbia University’s American Studies program, he is an award-winning scholar, prolific critic, and critically acclaimed author and editor of many books. His works on Melville are outstanding. DelBanco would be at the top of any short-list of prominent American scholars of arts and letters, particularly…
Being a Professor – There’s Stress and Then There’s Stress
Forbes Magazine’s recently published a list of the ten least stressful jobs, borrowing from a post by an online job site called Careercast. At the top of the list? University professors, of course. Faculty enjoy high status, relatively high income, good job protection, and suffer little by way of accountability. Like a game of telephone,…
Decline in the 1970s – A Pivotal Decade
Judith Stein’s Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies makes for depressing reading. Her narrative counters Whiggish histories of continuous progress with a sobering account of economic decline. It is a chronicle of poor decisions, written from the vantage point of a post-industrial United States with fractious politics and a…