One of my favorite books around the age of twelve was True Tales of Terror. A nonfiction account of murders, mayhem, and disasters, it mixed gore and goth, leading to a fascination with unhappy stories. While I eventually I tired of reading about catastrophes, every now and then the sentiment returns and I catch the…
Category: Reviews
Reviews of books, articles, and the like
Who Has the Crook? On Excellent Sheep
Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life, is a cleverly titled dark manifesto from a former professor of English at Yale, William Deresiewicz. It is also, like so many other recently published books on academia’s failures, a critique that is about much more than higher education. Excellent Sheep is a…
Thinking Through Modern History with Professor Judt
For most folks, a historian is a scholar concerned about the past, possibly with an obsession over dates. Within the academy, historians are considered unreliable social scientists (economic history is never quite as rigorous as real economics) or denizens of the humanities who focus in nonfiction. Good historians write well, but not too well. As a discipline, a systematic…
Bits, Bytes, Blackboard and the University
Blackboard, Inc. is a massively successful academic technology company. Best known for its learning management system, Blackboard was purchased by a private equity firm in 2011. A new CEO, Jay Bhatt, took the helm in late 2012. Under his leadership Blackboard has been rethinking its mission, products, and strategy. I attended Blackboard World 2014 this…
Degrees of Inequality and the Failed Policyscape of Financial Aid
A consistent theme in American discourse today is that higher education is in crisis. The common refrain is that a college education is not worth the cost, with spiraling tuition costs pricing college out of the reach of middle class Americans and the result neither relevant or able to compensate for student debt. But what…
Making Excellence Visible In Community Colleges
We identify excellence in four-year colleges and universities through well-known markers: exclusive and difficult admissions criteria, a lengthy institutional history with famous alumni, at least one venerable building (usually featuring a clock and a bell), a large library, state-of-the-art science facilities, award-winning faculty who write books, appear in the media, and make discoveries, and a stately…
Community Colleges and Baccalaureate Completion – Actionable New Research
One of basic facts of higher education completion is that students who start at community colleges are less likely to graduate from a four-year institution than students who start at a four-year institutions. It is a constant source of concern for all of us who work at the community college level. David P. Monaghan and…