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A new generation rises, and with them, our hopes
Today I gave the keynote address at the regional Model UN student conference sponsored by Bard College at Simon’s Rock. On the one hand, it was heart-warming to look out and see that crowded lecture...
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Censorship in Academe, 21st century style
Unfortunately, the banning of books by Mexican Americans in Tucson last week was not an isolated incident. It’s part of a larger pattern in American education. At the elementary school level, it takes...
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Green Teaching: What the World Needs Now
In President Obama’s speech last night, he talked a fair amount about the importance of making higher education affordable for all Americans, and about how essential a highly skilled workforce is to...
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A Crucible Moment in Education
There was some rolling of eyes in my community when President Obama announced he would like to see high school mandatory until age 18. That’s because at Bard College of Simon’s Rock, my alma mater,...
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Who’s Afraid of Distance Learning?
It used to be that a smart, motivated young person could work hard, earn a doctorate, do a good job as a junior professor, and live happily ever after as a tenured professor. It also used to be that a...
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May Day: Here, There and Everywhere
A reader asks why I did not stay home from work and join the May Day protests today, and I feel like this question deserves a serious response. Partly, I have always had a phobia about crowds, and...
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Welcome to the Knowledge Factory
The lead article in this week’s Chronicle of Higher Education Review is titled “The Ph.D. Now Comes With Food Stamps.” More than 350,000 Americans with advanced degrees applied for food stamps in 2010,...
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Fault-lines of American Educational Policy & Practice
When I read about how students at Stuyvesant High School and Harvard University, to name only two recent prominent examples, used everything from notes on scraps of paper to texting answers on cell...
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Holding the Fort for the Humanities
In a recent address to the American Council on Graduate Schools, out-going Modern Language Association president Michael Bérubé argues trenchantly that American graduate education in the humanities is...
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Sparks fly around the table–of the seminar room or the lunchroom
There’s something seriously wrong when the dominant methods of education do not foster the skills most valued by potential employers. In a recent spate of op-ed pieces in The New York Times, pundits...
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21st Century Leadership: Learning to Love in the Digisphere
We have a whole structure for training young people about the dangers of alcohol, drugs & sex…but next to nothing in place that mentors and supports them in becoming responsible citizens of the...
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Yes, we have work to do! Seizing the potential of the borderlands between...
For me, as a parent and a teacher, one of the biggest areas in need of “new consciousness” has to do with rearing the next generations. We must fight the domination of the corporate media by insisting...
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