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…
Category: The Disciplines
Academic Disciplines
Stories and Histories: Journeys and Meaning
When I taught history, I sought conversations with students at the end of the semester about the course. What mattered to them? What would they remember, if anything, in the semester or years to come? Learning outcomes assessment evaluations and summary grades are valuable, but there’s nothing like an open-ended conversation with a student. It is often…
Making Sense of Signals in the Noise
Quick! Your favorite 18th century English philosopher is . . . David Hume? Edmund Burke? Adam Smith or Bishop Berkeley? Don’t worry if one one comes to mind – Nate Silver, author of The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail But Some Don’t, has a provocative suggestion: Thomas Bayes. Silver is a terrific statistician and…
Neighborhoods and the Great American City
Chicago is a big and complicated city. As a newcomer, I read widely to get a better understanding of my new home. The staff at the Unabridged Bookstore, an independent in the Lakeview neighborhood, has organized a section filled with Chicago books, ranging from the coffee table variety to academic monographs. On that shelf with a…
Rendering The Abstract Accessible – Economic Theories Made Clear
Appearing informed about contemporary affairs requires familiarity with economics. Being informed, especially understanding current political debates, demands real grounding in macroeconomic policy. Economics today is more than an influential discipline. Leading economists – Paul Krugman, Jeffrey Sachs, Amartya Sen, Joseph Stiglizt and Larry Summers – are public intellectuals and thought leaders. Many of the big political…
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,…