Blogs

There's some bad instruction going around regarding dialog tags.

Scanning the headlines today, I came across this article about Oxford University turning off Google Docs. Having made a friend at Oxford of a colleague in IT there, Tony Brett, I looked at my watch, recognized that it was noon for him, emailed him the link with a subject line: Tell Me More! To which Tony immediately replied with this more extended discussion of the technical security rational for the administrative decision.

STEM initiatives are all the rage in academia these days. They’re popular with policymakers, who see them as a form of high-end workforce development; they’re popular with parents, who see them as high-end job placement; and they’re somewhat popular with students. At the community college level, developmental math has long been -- and continues to be -- a major challenge for graduation rates; it continues, rightly, to receive substantial attention.

Whenever I teach an introductory lesson on “gender” in my first-year international affairs and international relations classes, I find myself prefacing my explanation of “feminism” with the familiar “Feminism is not about man-hating. Feminists are concerned with both men and women,” in order to fend off the usual hostile responses from both male and female students.

If the liberal arts college really is Downton Abbey, as I somewhat facetiously suggested last week, then I think we’re in trouble. It’s been clear all season that despite paying some lip service to progressivism, the series’ ideological commitments are conservative: the preservation of the stately manor is the pre-eminent goal of the family and of the story.

Remember printed sets of encyclopedias? Thick, heavy books enlightening us about everything from aardvarks to zoology while taking up an entire bookshelf or two. As consumers of facts we now have two main online encyclopedias: Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica online, each offering a distinct value proposition. And there might be some market confusion between them.

I was at a great conference this weekend. Here are some preliminary and fragmented thoughts.

Town and gown. How long we've all heard about the tension between a college or university and the community that surrounds it. As a trope, it's been around for decades -- maybe longer.