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…
Toolkits and Community College Presidential Searches
As a community college president, I read Aspen Institute publications closely. Aspen has positioned itself as one of the nation’s preeminent nonprofit foundations involved in community college education. Several years ago the foundation initiated the Aspen Prize to recognize community colleges for exceptional outcomes in student learning, degree/certificate completion, employment and earnings, as well as access and…
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…
Education’s LMS Challenge
Edutechnica recently posted a fascinating analysis of the LMS (Learning Management System) market. For those unfamiliar with the term of concept, an LMS is a software system that supports an electronic courses, training, or learning. Estimated to grow from $2.5 billion to nearly $8 billion by 2018 – a serious amount of money by any measure…
First Days – Planned and Unplanned
The start of a fall semester at college, like the beginning of a lengthy journey, is inherently exciting. New people, new knowledge, new work, and all manner of new experiences beckon. Taking a course is a jump to the future. Enrolling in a degree program is an even greater investment in the future, a projected possibility of a…
Cheerfully Defending the Status Quo
Oh, to be so right and yet so wrong. . . . How College Works, a new book by Daniel F. Chambliss and Christopher G. Takacs, is the product of nearly a decade of research on students at Hamilton College. The authors – Chambliss is a professor of sociology at Hamilton and Takacs is a…
Bringing a Book to a Bar Fight
The gifts of an academic mind are curiosity and diligence. Wonderful traits, they give us discoveries, innovation, and the ability to see the familiar anew. Unfortunately, their side effect is an inherent difficulty with clarity and concision. Higher education is notoriously bad at explaining itself and a common understandings of shared terms lacking. “And why…