The world wearies of defenses of liberal education and the humanities.
The AAUP and AAC&U issue statement in support of a hollowed liberal arts.
Ian Lindquist writes on the flaws of civics education, and on how it can be improved.
Common Core offers students dumbed down and biased news articles to fill an appetite of "informational texts."
The new issue of Academic Questions takes on questions about common readings, "translingualism," and more.
Philosophy professor Jack Kerwick writes that the purpose of education is not traditionalism, careerism, or activism, but what he calls "conversationalism."
In the Fall 2014 issue of Academic Questions, Duke Pesta, associate professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh, writes on the limitations of postcolional criticism.
Minding the Campus holds a symposium on the question of whether the decline of the liberal arts is actually constructive.
A sensible university in the Midwest shows a light-hearted side in a video featuring its president. Peter Wood gives a nod to the good humor and reflects on the strains of political correctness cropping up in the university's curriculum.
In the Claremont Review of Books, Harvey Mansfield and Paul Franco disagree about What Does Bowdoin Teach?
In an interview with Charles Kesler, NAS president Peter Wood discussed What Does Bowdoin Teach?
David Clemens reviews a new collection of essays and asks, "What is real education, and why does it need defending?"
NAS president Peter Wood interviewed about NAS's findings on Bowdoin College.
Peter Wood Responds to Samuel Goldman's Criticism of the Bowdoin Report
Why most undergraduates don't learn much of anything in their required liberal arts courses.
Harvey Mansfield congratulates Peter Wood on the Bowdoin report.
Peter Wood and Michael Toscano respond to the criticisms of the president of Bowdoin College.
Read the responses to NAS's What Does Bowdoin Teach?
NAS president Peter Wood asks Bowdoin College to consider, "Is your curriculum really teaching students how to think critically?"
NAS invites readers to share their responses to What Does Bowdoin Teach?
A 360-degree look at the politicization of a contemporary liberal arts college.
NAS has published its thirteenth and final entry, "Active Learners: The Liberated Student," in its series of contextualizing observations for the Bowdoin Project.
NAS has published its twelfth entry, "Research-Teachers: A Validation," in its series of contextualizing observations for the Bowdoin Project.
NAS has published its eleventh entry, "From Collegiate Professors to Research-Teachers," in its series of contextualizing observations for the Bowdoin Project.
NAS has published its tenth entry, "'Financial Aid at Bowdoin: A History," in its series of contextualizing observations for the Bowdoin Project.
NAS has published its ninth entry, "'Diversity' Comes to Bowdoin," in its series of contextualizing observations for the Bowdoin Project.
The humanities, once the core of higher education, have fallen on hard times.
NAS has published its eighth entry, "Gender Deconstructed," in its series of contextualizing observations for the Bowdoin Project.
NAS has published its seventh entry, "The Common Good's Uncommon Usage," in its series of contextualizing observations for the Bowdoin Project.
NAS has published its sixth entry, "Bowdoin's History from 1978 to Present," in its series of contextualizing observations for the Bowdoin Project.
NAS has published its fifth entry, "Bowdoin's History from 1952 to 1978," in its series of contextualizing observations for the Bowdoin Project.
NAS has published its third entry, "Bowdoin's History from 1794 to 1871," in its series of contextualizing observations for the Bowdoin Project.
NAS has published its second entry, a collection of 41 charts, tables, and basic facts about Bowdoin College, in its series of contextualizing observations for the Bowdoin Project.
NAS has launched a new webpage dedicated to our study of Bowdoin College. It will feature a series of contextualizing observations in the weeks leading up to our publication of the full report.
NAS member Paul Moreno is recruiting teachers for a Hillsdale College program in Washington, DC.
William Young discusses the need for liberal educatrion for today's workforce.
We would desire a free life all the more if we really grasped what the liberal arts has to teach.
Suggestions for how the faculty of the traditional liberal arts, the physical sciences and the management and business programs can collaborate to better educate professionals.
We add another academically solid program to our list.
Jascha Kessler explains why teaching the humanities just isn't what it use to be.
Why can’t we decouple liberal learning from college degrees?
Tax policies favor rich colleges, even though small, struggling liberal-arts colleges probably make far better use of incremental private donations, says Richard Vedder.
Online courses are very popular with students, and have the enthusiastic endorsement of senior academic administrators. The only problem, says J.M. Anderson, is that the students aren't learning anything.
A community college dean argues that the value of a liberal arts education is not primarily monetary or vocational, and that's just fine.
Peter Wood has an interesting couple of articles on the Chronicle's Innovations blog this week. He compares Lily Bart, a fictional character in the 1905 novel The House of Mirth with Lady Gaga and talks about how higher education is responsible for giving "trash culture a veneer of respectability" and how it "encourages students to open themselves to many of their worst impulses" (Lily Bart vs. Lady Gaga).
The Labor and Employment Relations Association, previously called the Industrial Relations Research Association, is a learned society devoted to industrial and labor relations. Traditionally, LERA has supported the National Labor Relations Act but it had not been overtly partisan. In fact, its most prominent member, John T. Dunlop, had served as Secretary of Labor under President Gerald Ford. When I finished my doctoral studies in 1991 I found the organization to be pro labor rather than neutral in orientation, and I had not participated in it since the January 2000 meeting. Since it is one of the only games in town, I decided to give it another chance in 2011. What I found is shocking. LERA is not merely ideologically biased, but overtly partisan and Democratic. Virtually every session I attended included an attack on the GOP. I submitted a blog to LERA's new website, called the Employment Policy Research Network (EPRN), questioning the group's partisan atmosphere. The LERA leadership, which oversees the website, not only refused to publish it but refused to respond to me in writing. I had to call the LERA office to obtain a verbal response. I posted the blog on my Website.
In the final piece of his four-part series, Peter Wood argues that the United States needs the versatility that the for-profit sector provides.
A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled "Doing Time, With a Degree to Show for It," discusses the value of higher education for prison inmates. The author is a distinguished fellow at the Bard Prison Initiative. I was especially arrested by this excerpt from the author's conversation with a former inmate:
As I pressed him to explain, he talked of growing up in Harlem, where his friends in the street always wanted to know "who was putting us down." Bard taught him, he said, to think critically about statements like that. His classes in history and anthropology had enabled him to understand his situation in a social context. "Now," he said, smiling, "I know life is more than 'us versus them.'"
Life is more than 'us versus them.' I'm glad that history and anthropology classes are teaching this to the incarcerated. But for most students, liberal arts classes teach just the opposite - that history is the history of identity-group-based oppression. Just look at Howard Zinn's textbooks. It sounds as if colleges and universities have something to learn from programs such as the Bard Prison Initiative. To read further on prison education, check out this article from the NAS:
Inmates in liberal arts programs frequently invoke the language of inner freedom to describe their experience. The irony, of course, is that so many students who are on the outside attending elite four-year colleges and universities adopt the pretence that their freedom is phony and that they are victims of an oppressive society.
Online education should serve as a home for orphaned liberal arts and "boutique" courses for motivated students.
This center fosters the study of free institutions, Great Books, Shakespeare's plays, and the meaning of life.
In light of SUNY-Albany's cuts to its foreign language programs, the New York Times asked eight higher ed experts, "Do colleges need French departments?" Heres a takeaway sentence from each one. (See also this SUNY-Albany professor's remarks on the language cuts, posted at NAS.org.) Martha Nussbaum, author of Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities: "Even if a nation’s only goal were economic prosperity, the humanities supply essential ingredients for a healthy business culture." Louis Menand, author of The Marketplace of Ideas: "The loss of any department is a loss to every department at that institution." John McWhorter, author of Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold Story of English: "I believe we should reconsider having vocational tracks like those in European educational systems." Mark Bauerlein, English professor at Emory University: "Lose [the humanities] and the college produces a half-educated graduate." Ellen Schrecker, author of The Lost Soul of Higher Education: "Languages, literature, philosophy, history – by exposing students to a wide range of new and old ideas and allowing them to articulate their own responses to those ideas – can create the reflective and self-aware citizens our nation needs." Gaye Tuchman, sociology professor at the University of Connecticut: "No one put a price tag on either the appeal or utility of Latin, of reading Racine or Confucius, or of learning the structure of a symphony." Richard Vedder, director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity: "As resources tighten and that luxury no longer is available, universities need to do what businesses routinely do – reinvent what they do to meet the changing needs of society." Anne E. McCall, professor of French at the University of Denver: "That said, the attraction of particular subjects does shift, and universities need to adjust offerings that make sense for their mission, size, geographical location, and budgets."
A call to readers to contact New York's gubernatorial candidates about the massive cuts to foreign language at SUNY Albany.
In the movie Up in the Air, George Clooney's character works for a company that sends him around the country to fire people. To save the company money on airfare, hotels, and rental cars, Clooney's female colleague, a young Cornell grad, suggests that they switch to firing people through videoconferencing on laptops. The method seems to work, but the viewer feels instinctively that this is even more demeaning than getting fired by a third party company. There's something so impersonal and distant about talking to a screen. Later in the movie, the girl (Cornell grad) gets dumped by her boyfriend via text message, and once again, we see the medium itself as adding to her humiliation. We've always had the sense that with any communication short of face-to-face conversation, there's something vital missing. That's been the abiding concern during the rise of online education. But an article in today's Inside Higher Ed declares that online education will lose none of the elements that make traditional education what it is:
As we look to the future of liberal education, we seem unlikely to change the fundamentals of what has made that model successful. We will enhance the curriculum with interactive smart classrooms, course and lecture capture, ubiquitous wireless connecting smaller and more capable digital devices, and other technologies not yet invented, but close faculty-student and student-student interaction will remain the core. What seems more likely to change – and to offer transformative possibilities – is the medium.
But isn't the medium the message? The author maintains, however, that "there is every reason to believe that whatever 'liberal education' is, 'it' can travel over a network." He offers some compelling reasons.
Nussbaum’s apparent defense of the liberal arts turns out to be just another rallying cry for diversity and socialism. But the liberal arts should give citizens the knowledge to understand the worth of freedom and the humanity to make a free life worth living.
In the second of this three-part series, Tom Wood connects Thorndike's theory (that all training is specific to the task at hand, and that there is no transfer of learning from one practice or field to another) and Charles Murray's criticism of the liberal arts.
Creeping public controversy about the role of zombies in our society prompts us to consider their place in higher education.
