A collection of 74 posts
Our campuses are stuffed with non-academic office workers. If elected to Harvard’s Board of Overseers, I‘ll propose firing most of them.
Human identity is inextricably tied to group affiliation. So what happens when all the groups we know and love become ‘problematic’?
Roland Fryer Jr.’s life is a movie script: A man abandoned by his mom and raised by an alcoholic dad became the youngest black professor to ever secure tenure at Harvard University. After ascending to the academic elite, Fryer didn’t resign himself to irrelevant technical puzzles; he put
At the American university where I teach, one of my assigned tasks is to advise undergraduates—mostly freshmen and sophomores. This essay describes a conversation I had in 2017 with one of those advisees. I will call him Daniel. Daniel was a sophomore at the time. He had been an
Standards-based learning does lead to more equal outcomes, but only by flattening everyone down to a lower educational standard.
People differ from one another in many different ways.
In a 2018 report published by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), China ranked first in mathematical proficiency among 15-year-olds, while the United States was in 25th place.
The fact that higher education is suffering from the pandemic is not surprising—every sector has been affected one way or another.
While the pandemic has been challenging for everyone, let’s hope the disruption that is taking place in higher education is the beginning of a broader reform movement that refocuses the emphasis on the learner and how instructors and faculty can empower them to create value in the marketplace.
Once the institutions become ideologically homogenous within, the only credible threats are the ones from without: hence the importance of deplatforming outside speakers.
College is so accessible in the United States that it’s easier to get student loans and enroll in college than it is to enlist in the armed forces.
Visionaries may be moody, obsessive loners but without them to provide a good idea in the first place, implementers end up working diligently to implement a faulty vision, like clockwork toys set off in the wrong direction.
We have probably done more to encourage business crises and immoral managerial behaviours than prevent them, a fairly insane outcome considering how often we speak of corporate social responsibility.