My advice to the 47 higher-education ministers headed to Armenia in May to discuss the future of the Bologna Process is: Celebrate Bologna’s extraordinary achievements and then bid it goodbye. The Bologna Process, formally begun in 1999, is the boldest higher-education reform ever undertaken in Europe and perhaps in the world. Its goal was that […] … learn more→

1. Do you think climate change is an urgent problem? 2. Do you think getting the world off fossil fuels is difficult? Those are the questions with which Gernot Wagner of the Environmental Defense Fund and Martin L. Weitzman of Harvard begin Climate Shock: The Economic Consequences of a Hotter Planet (Princeton University Press). The […] … learn more→

I am an academic going through my midtenure review. It’s a process whereby senior colleagues in my department, along with other supervisors, review my job performance for the past two and a half years and make comments on whether I am on track to earn tenure. Several weeks ago, I nervously submitted my portfolio, which […] … learn more→

In 1828, a faculty committee at Yale declared that the aim of a liberal education “was not to teach that which is peculiar to any one of the professions, but to lay the foundation which is common to them all” by imparting information and training students in how to think. The committee advocated the establishment […] … learn more→

Admin: “You want to offer that course, you need to have ‘Women’ in the title.” –why “Women and The Works of Steinbeck”, “Women in Shakespeare”, and “Women in Western Civilization” are college courses, among many examples. One of the many problems with higher education is the “student as customer” paradigm that has really warped what […] … learn more→

The only thing growing faster than the cost of college is the number of former Corinthian College students refusing to pay their debts. What started as a 15 person strike has now grown to approximately 100 people. The protest is raising important big-picture questions of what role the U.S. Department of Education should play in […] … learn more→

ICDDET programme for packs v2 At the end of March I attended the 2nd International Conference on Developments in Doctoral Education and Training at Oxford University (the program is online here if you are interested). I enjoyed catching up with colleagues in the ‘hallway track’ and hearing about new stuff happening in various universities. In […] … learn more→

Much of higher education is a fraud, and much of the reason higher education is such a huge fraud is the structure of the student loan scam. It’s a three step process. First, students take out loans for educations, not knowing the educations are bogus. Next, the students spend years in bogus schools, getting “educated”. […] … learn more→

Sometimes people tell me that they can’t find any literature that is relevant to their research. They are doing something that nobody else has researched and written about and so there isn’t anything to read. What, they ask, can they do for their literature chapter. A lack of literature is very rarely a real problem. […] … learn more→