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Building Schools with Straw Bricks
Click to hear Carlin on the 10 Commandments The Christmas season always puts me into a movie watching mood. Our family has some standard favorites: National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, Miracle on...
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College’s Liberal Agenda: Critical Thinking Skills
Click to view The standard consensus is that colleges are bastions of liberals pushing their agenda onto helpless and unsuspecting 18-22 year olds. Bill O’Reilly, conservative commentator masquerading...
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Laundering our Higher Ed Dollars
When I was working on my PhD at the University of North Texas, a group of us headed down to Austin to visit with our legislators regarding tuition waivers for teaching assistants. At Texas public...
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Digging in the Couch Cushions To Pay the Light Bill
One of the consistent complaints about higher education is our apparent inefficiency. Admittedly, there are some areas where we can cut costs, but there aren’t as many available efficiencies as our...
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There Are No Emergencies in the English Department
Susan Adams, over at Forbes Magazine, sent the professoriate into an uproar the other day claiming “College Professor” as the least stressful job of 2013. Daniel Luzar, blogging on the College Guide at...
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Bored of the Board of Regents
Word out of Austin is the Senate will hold hearings on the University of Texas Board of Regents to determine “whether the regents are going beyond their policy-setting roles and are meddling in...
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Give the Employers What The Want: Liberal Arts Majors
Truly Devastating Graph from the Atlantic Monthly–click to see the article Drop in state funding for higher ed from Atlantic Monthly. Click to view. It’s no secret that higher education has been under...
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Save Some Money but Lose Some Learning: The Dilemma of the E-Text
Nothing brings home the cost of higher education more than having a child prepare for college. Various studies show the rising costs of tuition and various other studies offer a variety of...
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Accounting for Accountability
I’m generally a supporter of President Obama. He’s far more capable than his critics allow and he’s working in an increasingly out of touch Washington environment peopled with extremists posing as...
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Cheaters Never Win, but They Do Go To Harvard
The big news coming out of Harvard this week is that their incoming group of first year students is more interested in cheating than having sex. What’s the point of cheating on homework if you don’t...
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Give Everyone an “A” and No One Gets Hurt
My second year of teaching as a graduate student, I had a student march to the front of the room after I returned their first essay of the semester. “You can’t,” he said with a barely masked measure of...
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Inflatable Education
I rambled my way through a discussion of grade inflation in my last post. Spurred by an article in the San Antonio Express News that argued our “consumer-based” culture has turned university classrooms...
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Correlation Isn’t Causation But Sometimes It’s Close
The recent report from the SAT folks comes as no surprise to those of us teaching first year courses at American public universities. The quality of student writing has plummeted over the last 15...
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Efficiently Inefficient
Back in the old days when higher education was inefficient and less expensive, we scheduled classes in late October, students registered in November, and faculty turned in book orders, hopefully, some...
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The Best Choice Might Be No Choice
Earlier today, I had a grandfather stop by the office on a reconnaissance mission for his grandson. He was here, he said, because his grandson is undecided on a major, isn’t a very good student, but he...
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I don’t think that word means what you think it means
From the Princess Bride–one of the great movies of all time In the world of higher education, twitter has been abuzz the last few days. The Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) released its 51st...
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