As I was checking out a few weeks ago with my $uper duper dog food at one of the several pet supply stores in town, I thought back a bit to when I was growing up. I think all pet food was in the local grocery store and the big choice was bags or cans, […]
December 2, 2018
A few weeks ago, we directed some attention to the phenomenon of grade inflation in America in the past half century. Today students are thought of as “customers” and “clients,” rather than acolytes in search of knowledge, at least in theory. I’d like to examine another novelty in higher education, “branding.” My wife was reared […]
September 24, 2018
We all get graded, all the time. You may have thought of “grading” as something just to do with school and colleges. But grading is also a phenomenon across the spectrum of all our life. Traditional grading goes, of course, from 0 to 100. Sometimes we reduce the scale from 0 to 10. “On a […]
November 29, 2017
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
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 […]
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 […]
February 11, 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 […]
December 2, 2018
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