A very good historian, NYU’s Tom Bender, chaired a panel at the American Historical Association conference last week entitled “The Crisis In Public Higher Education.” Joining Professor Bender were Robert Berdahl of the Association of American Universities, Roger Geiger of Pennsylvania State University, Douglas Greenberg of Rutgers-New Brunswick, Carla Hesse of Berkeley, and Terrence McDonald…
Graduate Education – Growing Again
Is the MA the new baccalaureate? Is a graduate degree critical to professional success? Many seem to think so, but the big picture is more complicated, and interesting, than one might imagine. Each year the Council of Graduate Studies and the folks who bring us the GRE do a survey of graduate schools, asking questions…
Playing in the Shallows – Just What is the Internet Doing to Our Brains?
I read The Shallows by Nicholas Carr in an old-fashioned format: hardcover book. It wasn’t an accident, either. Carr penned “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” for The Atlantic, and the article generated a good deal of thought and discussion around the house. We tend to be Google-philes and the “gee-whiz” factor of what emanates from…
Netherland
Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland is a very good novel. A post 9/11 narrative, a book about post-modern living, love and family, a buddy story, a novel about exiles (modernism, anyone?, a love story, a narrative about New York City – it is more than fiction, it is literature. Snobbish, perhaps, but outstanding fiction can transcend itself and…
How Much For That Higher Education in the Window?
Part of the Jossey-Bass Wiley Series, Selling Higher Education: Marketing and Advertising America’s College and Universities by Eric J. Anctil is an unusual publication. A monograph with a valuable perspective on a key part of higher education, the book is neither as critical nor as prescriptive as one might expect. Lisa Wolf-Wendel, the series editor,…
Eagleton and Beaumont on Eagleton
Eagleton and Beaumont talking about Eagleton, for nine months, transcribed, edited and shaped into themes, is the bones, sinew and meat of The Task of the Critic: Terry Eagleton in Dialogue. Eagleton is a brilliant critic, a provocative writer and an extremely thoughtful man. But as a raconteur . . . . . What sticks?…
How Many Zeros Does It Take?
Randall Lane’s The Zeroes is a messy, rambling, engaging, provocative and challenging first-person account of Lane’s experiences as a magazine publisher catering to Wall Street in the “boom boom” years. Subtitled “My Misadventures in the Decade Wall Street Went Insane” might well be rephrased as the decade “Wall Street and I Went Insane.” Lane is a…