Where Is Our Freedom to Exercise Sympathy?
The same things that happened to the family farms, and to farmers like my father, are now happening to the colleges, and to faculty like me.
Lives at Stake: Education in the Academic Year 2020-2021
Students may return to universities that post a philosophy statement but have no philosophy department. Yet as we look at our country, divided over history and by economics, home to scientific innovation and scientific ignorance, education is both more needed and more endangered than ever.
The College and the Community: A Strange Saga in Tallahassee
As President John Thrasher alienates Florida State University from segments of the broader Tallahassee, Florida community, a lesson from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, is worth considering.
Protestants and Western Civ.
Hillsdale, Michigan. Which is more surprising? To read that a Great Booksy curriculum—which you, a fairly committed Protestant who tries to keep faith under...
Failing in a Pandemic
The whole mode of online education screams that now I must be the source of attraction. But I’m not entertaining. In fact, I’m pretty unentertaining. If you ask most of my students, they may even say I’m boring.
Saint Thinkery University for Unlimited Personalized Execution, or, STUUPE©
In my elder, more invulnerable years, when the Untied States had finally established a formal E. Unibus Pluram, I was appointed by lot to assume the position of SAT (Self-Actualizing Therapist[1]) at Saint Thinkery University for Unlimited Personalized Execution.
Wendell Berry and Zoom
While the futurists and transhumanists and purveyors of educational technologies would have us voluntarily cut off our arms so we can enjoy their fancy new prostheses, our priority should be to avoid dismembering ourselves.
With Students At Home, Let’s Make America Local Again
Perhaps we ought to hope that things won’t quite go back to what’s normal: rootless young folk siphoned away by elite universities and groomed to lead the managerial bureaucracies and mass popular culture that dominate our national life. The students who remain in their hometowns have the potential to restore declining local institutions and community associations.
The Metamorphoses and #MeToo
As difficult as some content is to teach, we have a responsibility to educate our students about the past, good and bad. A curriculum which leaves out the bad would gaslight our students.
The Classroom as a Welcoming Space
If we have all the knowledge in the world but have not love, the apostle Paul says, then we’re as annoying as a banging cymbal. It’s no wonder students wouldn’t want to listen to us.