Education & Liberal Learning 87
Common Arts Education: A Review
In a world mediated through technology, the common arts bring us into daily encounters with a material world where we have not made the rules. They orient us to truths…
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 wraps, happen to teach in—turns Protestants…
Flatten the Curve and Respect the Experts
The issue is not the the health care experts versus the ordinary American who doesn’t like the way this shutdown is going. It is actually a question of expertise worthy…
Can You (or anyone) Put Wendell Berry’s Lightning in the Bottle of U.S. Higher Education?
Below is the text of a review for Orthodox Presbyterians -- of all people -- of Jack Baker and Jeff Bilbro's new book on Wendell Berry (some words have been…
A Call for a Politically Inclusive Classroom
Teaching Tolerance in a Time of Trump sounds like a short-course a firebrand professor might offer, though I mean it in a more comprehensive way than one might imagine. While…
Shared Governance and Mandatory Training: The New Incoherence
So long as gravity obtains, sawing off the branch you’re sitting on is never a good idea.
Politics as Religion: A Brief Assay Essayed after Midnight
For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds; / Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.
David Bosworth on his New Book, Conscientious Thinking: Making Sense in an Age of Idiot Savants
No one who cares about the condition of our culture can afford to ignore Conscientious Thinking. --Jackson Lears, editor, Raritan
From The Multiversity Cave: Conclusion
Saginaw, MI This is the final post of a series that explored what prominent thinkers can teach us about today’s public multiversity, the modern university with its many colleges, departments,…
In (Partial) Defense of the Liberal Arts Degree
One of the articles which recently crossed my desk was an interactive online presentation from Georgetown University’s Centre on Education and the Workforce, highlighting which college majors are the most…
Growing Up Stoic
For our home-schooling lessons my daughter and I have been reading Greek and Roman philosophers, and she has taken a shine to the Stoics – not only reading them with…
From the Multiversity Cave: Students and the State
Saginaw, MI This post is part of a series that will explore what prominent thinkers can teach us about today’s public multiversity, the modern university with its many colleges, departments,…
The Web, Our Brains, and You
Like most avid readers I have a queue of books I'm reading and plan to read. When a new book gets added to the queue it gets bumped to the…
Res Idiotica
South Bend, IN My students are know-nothings. They are exceedingly nice, pleasant, trustworthy, mostly honest, well-intentioned, and utterly decent. But their minds are largely empty, devoid of any substantial knowledge…
From The Multiversity Cave: General Education
Saginaw, MI This post is part of a series that will explore what prominent thinkers can teach us about today’s public multiversity, the modern university with its many colleges, departments,…
From the Multiversity Cave: The Universal Sciences
Saginaw, MI This post is part of a series that will explore what prominent thinkers can teach us about today’s public multiversity, the modern university with its many colleges, departments,…
From the Multiversity: Three Reformations
Saginaw, MI This post is part of a series that will explore what prominent thinkers can teach us about today’s public multiversity, the modern university with its many colleges, departments,…
From The Multiversity: The New Paradigm
Saginaw, MI This post is part of a series that will explore what prominent thinkers can teach us about today’s public multiversity, the modern university with its many colleges, departments,…
An Athenian Coup, or Slapstick Bedtime Story?
For tonight’s lesson, I said to my ten-year-old, tell me how the first democracy was created. “Sure,” she said, remembering our lessons past. “It was in Athens, about 2,500 years…
30 More Years of Rootless Professors
In the thirty years since writer-professor Eric Zencey first published his essay “The Rootless Professors” in the Chronicle of Higher Education, much has changed, and much hasn’t, regarding academe’s reputedly rootless…
On Commencement Addresses
Holland, MI It is graduation season. On campuses across the country graduates will be subject to the last compulsory and least remarkable rite of passage: the commencement address. By my…
The Trouble with Limits
Modern persons have a problem with limits, three in fact. They want every good thing to be unlimitedly available for their desires, and scarcity is taken for a cause of…