How goes it with the institution of philosophy? Consider the situation of “Jeremy,” a Ph.D. student in the graduate program at the University of North Texas. As a second-year student, he has a teaching fellowship. This means that in addition to taking nine credit hours of graduate coursework, he teaches two sections of “Contemporary Moral […] … learn more→

How do you know the people billed as science experts that you see, hear and read about in the media are really all that credible? Or have they been included just to create a perception of balance in the coverage of an issue? It’s a problem for any media and something the BBC’s Trust is […] … learn more→

I often get asked if students are allowed to use professional editors. In most universities you can and there are even funds provided for this purpose in some cases. Brendan Brown, Director of The Expert Editor, an Australian professional editing company that specialises in thesis editing, sent me this article recently. I thought the article […] … learn more→

By the end of the 20th Century, a number of American colleges and universities – often in close geographical proximity – began to look for ways to cooperate. Regional college-based consortia emerged in a number of places and took a variety of forms. New relationships emerged with institutional leaders looking to move beyond the lobbying […] … learn more→

On Astor Place in Lower Manhattan, you can stand on a street corner and see, for higher education, the power and fragility of the word \”free.\” To the right stands the Cooper Union Foundation Building, a steel-re­inforced Italianate brownstone that has, since 1859, been home to Peter Cooper’s vision of a college, \”open and free […] … learn more→

Continuing with a book by an Australian academic, I see more reinforcement of what I’ve testified to in this blog. What I’ve read leads to another conjecture on my part. See, there’s obviously something really wrong in the world right now. America, as “world leader,” obviously has to be part of that wrong. Fraud, lies, […] … learn more→

The student was angry. Why hadn’t I mentioned there was a shorter version of the book I assigned for this week’s class? After brashly announcing she had unearthed an earlier article by the author (\”Same thing, right?\”), she instructed me that anything said in a book could be reduced to an article. The rest is […] … learn more→

Writing in The New York Times, Gretchen Morgenson observes: In the years before the mortgage crisis, financial regulators often looked the other way as banks and other lenders pursued reckless activities that cost investors, taxpayers and borrowers billions of dollars. When trouble hit, these regulators had to scramble to fix the mess that their inertia […] … learn more→

Of late I’ve been reading a book by an Australian academic, which details the collapse and fraud of Australia’s higher education system. I should point out, what he sees there and I (and many others) see here isn’t really a result of higher education, per se. It’s quite common in institutional systems for administrators and […] … learn more→

Strolling about London on a recent vacation, I was gobsmacked to come upon this: The reason for my surprise was that, on my mother’s knee, I was taught that quality should not be used as an adjective but exclusively as a noun referring to a feature or characteristic of a person or thing. I haven’t […] … learn more→