I have reached that generation where my friends have children and grandchildren of college age. In the public interest, since I’ve been in higher education more than half a century, I thought I would provide friends and readers with a guide to how colleges and universities rank in this country. We all know who ranks […]
September 14, 2017
A few semesters ago I taught a course online at UA on the first half of the history of Christianity. The students in this course sampled how Christianity came into being and evolved over the first 1500 years. One of the questions they had to address was how the Church could have produced both a […]
September 14, 2017
There is a war on these days between the intellectual world and the rest of us. Who are intellectuals? Basically, it is those who embrace and esteem the world of the mind higher than the common world most of us inhabit. Merriam-Webster defines intellectual as someone chiefly guided by the intellect rather than emotion or […]
July 3, 2017
I am going to write here as an educator, not a capitalist, socialist, entrepreneur, one percenter, a member of the silent majority or rioting loudly in the streets exercising my First Amendment rights. That Amendment reads, by the way, just in case you don’t have it handy, when you’re trashing the campus: It “prohibits the […]
February 11, 2017
Well, if you know me a bit, you’ll think the old history prof is sounding off. “You gotta take history or you’ll be an ignoramus, or worse.” Maybe a politician I’m thinking, but not saying it. But I want to take up a larger issue, although I admit a partiality to history. It has been […]
January 8, 2017
“Old fashioned” and “useless” I thought could be me and my cohort of pre-boomers (those born before 1946) on our way into retirement homes and given to just doddering around the garden watering the petunias. Writing cursive, or “long hand” as we used to say, is, I quickly discovered from a short search on the […]
November 29, 2016
William Shakespeare of course put the phrase into English coinage a lot more eloquently than me: To be, or not to be, that is the question: Whether ’tis Nobler in the mind to suffer The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune, Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles, That was Hamlet’s soliloquy in […]
November 29, 2016
Here I go again, into No Man’s Land. I am of course not literally stepping out into No Man’s Land, but I will no doubt offend a few readers. So here goes. The following invitation to a webinar (google it if you are interested) arrived in my email inbox last week. Invitation: “Retention through Response: […]
November 29, 2016
Those of us with a few years behind us know that Moses was of course Charlton Heston. Spartacus, the Roman slave, was not Russell Crowe but Kirk Douglas. And the movie Exodus starred a youngish guy named Paul Newman, who was Jewish. The girls loved Newman since he was a good-looking dude. The older girls […]
September 4, 2016
The impact of education in this country is huge. And well it should be. It is through education that we bring our children into the world of adults with the values and knowledge and opportunities we want them to have. We all have a stake in education, from K-12 through college and beyond to graduate […]
November 29, 2017
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