Ive been interested in academic branding and profiling for a while. I’ve begun to do a much-less-than-systematic trawl through university home pages. You know, the official pages where university staff have to describe themselves. I’m up to about fifty webpages now. They’re spread across random disciplines and institutions, and even countries. I started with people […] … learn more→

While The New York Times reports on action by the University of Oklahoma, kicking out Sigma Alpha Epsilon for a racist chant, a Daily Kos blogger argues that the chant has roots elsewhere, that there’s a pervasive though hidden racism throughout the fraternity and, by implication, elsewhere. No, not by implication. The blogger reproduces pictures […] … learn more→

We excel, in the research university, at preparing our students to do world-class research — everywhere except the classrooms in which they teach. From the beginning we insist that Ph.D. applicants explain their research plans. When they arrive we put them through their paces in methodology classes, carefully taking apart their ideas of what they […] … learn more→

Badges? Certification? Can these replace college? Or is this a false binary? The problem, I think, is that we no longer know what “college” means and end up conflating differing entitites. Or, maybe we simply have conflicting ideas of “college.” One vision of “college” centers on a Deweyesque vision of education as concerning the person. […] … learn more→

So I started looking at an essay making the case against for-profits, an essay that makes two key errors in its argument: 1 It ignores the corrupting effect of the student loan scheme, even as it repeatedly points out that for-profit education WORKED before the student loan scheme buried schools in money, whether these schools […] … learn more→

I’ve mostly focused on the immense corrupting of public/State higher education, and not simply because this is what I’m most familiar with. I’ve often thought “everyone knows” for-profit schools are frauds, and so I’ve put little time into “exposing” a fraud everyone already knows about, in favor of exposing the fraud that is much of […] … learn more→

There are three major genres of academic writing that we use most of the time. It’s good to understand the differences between them and where they are used, and how. Recount A recount is a text which talks about what happened, and what we/I/others did. Two types of recounts occur regularly in scholarly texts: (1) […] … learn more→

The world is changing. The weather is becoming more volatile, with the number of extreme weather events on the rise. Climate change represents the new normal: the Earth is already showing the impacts of our actions, which will continue to become more visible. More and more businesses recognize what is at stake and are grappling […] … learn more→

On July 31, 2012, a massive blackout swept across northeast India. At 1 pm local time, a power line in the state of Madhya Pradesh became overloaded and tripped out. As the supply grid struggled to pick up the slack, other lines went down. By 1:03, a cascading series of failures had pushed the electricity […] … learn more→

We weren’t walking like animals with horns. “Rappelez-vous, vous êtes des rhinocéros!” exhorted Mr. Sturges, swinging his own head ponderously back and forth in the approximation of a rhino’s. And so we moved, on all fours in a chilly classroom in Sam Phil, trying for all the world to embody the humans in Ionesco’s play […] … learn more→