Blogs

Below is a screenshot of what I saw when I opened my Audible.com Library this morning. 0 results. No audiobooks. Nothing. Nada.

There were plenty of people who were quick to jump all over me when I said that I didn’t want my daughter to grow up and want to become a teacher or a professor. And there are more who criticize my tendency to discourage students from going into graduate school. My wish, as it stands, would be that my daughter goes to graduate school and becomes a professor. My wish is that plenty more people, especially women and other historically underrepresented groups, go to graduate school and get jobs as professors, shaping the lives and dreams of the next generations.

I have been fortunate to serve at several well-respected institutions of higher education that have aspired to “educate the whole person,” one who will go on to lead a successful career and live a meaningful life. Yet, throughout my career, I have been surprised by the barriers often created by our institutional structures that seemingly work against this noble endeavor.

Rising star of the Twitterverse Tressie McMillan Cottom has a must-read post about her observations as a sociologist and former admissions staffer at a for-profit college. It’s about the interaction between the prestige hierarchy of higher education, economic class, and self-image.

The text that you're reading now did not come from my fingers hitting the keyboard, rather me speaking to my MacBook Air.

During childbirth, the most painful stage of labor is known as transition. As one website puts it, “this is a physically demanding and draining time and you may feel exhausted, frustrated, impatient, and overwhelmed.” Transition comes just before the baby is born, but it can go on for a while and in the moment it often feels more painful than productive.

In the grand scheme of grad life, teaching responsibilities loom large. Teaching is an important part of the professor’s career and yet learning to teach every student well is a process. In academic spaces, mentioning the word “inclusion” to grads and faculty has eye-turning effects. Some faculty and grads do not glance over to the people of difference in the room to check if in fact, they are still female, differently-abled, bilingual, working class, homosexual, non-White, Jewish, immigrant, bi-racial, or atheist; yet many do.

I get a little twitchy whenever I read about “undermatching” as a problem. Broadly, “undermatching” is the claim that high-achieving students from low-income backgrounds often attend colleges that are “beneath” them academically, and that therefore they miss certain kinds of opportunities. If only the elites were more thoughtful about reaching the masses, the argument goes, they’d do a better job of creating a pure meritocracy, and the talented tenth (or twentieth, depending on taste) wouldn’t be shackled to institutions built for the unwashed masses.