The Blackboard
On the Necessity of DEI for Restoring Trust in Higher Ed
I can’t help but notice that DEI might be the perfect solution to the politicization of the academy in general, and of the humanities and social sciences in particular.
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The Student’s Dilemma
The promise of AI is utopian and seems futuristic, but its effects on the educational landscape will make students nostalgic for the pre-ChatGPT days of yore.
Large Language Models and the Final Paragraph
Like the sonnet, the five-paragraph essay traps investment in truth felt in the heart and forged in the mind by means of its life-respecting limitations.
I Can Hear Music
As C.S. Lewis noted in The Abolition of Man, the souls of our youth are not jungles that need pruning but deserts that need irrigation. We could start by getting them to…
The Streak: A Legendary Semester
Our participation streak brought forward more diversity of opinion and expression in the classroom while forming the students into a team with a shared objective.
The Final Prayer of Jim Barry
—it took 40 years for me to begin to realize these words Jim silently put into my hands on that last day of class were a prayer.
A Garden of Children
If you understand that a child’s growth comes from a spark within, just as does the growth of a flower, a crystal, or a mighty oak, you might take a more trusting…
Every Day Do Something that Won’t Compute
How has your intellectual practice prepared you not just for success but also for failure?
Working for the Life Beyond Words
In his brief and not altogether satisfying rejoinder to the question, “why write?” Berry says, “To serve that triumph I have done all the rest,” and he ends the poem there. “That…
The Liberal Arts: Take it or Leave it
Let’s point to the wiser and the well off and ask people if they want what those people have–often they do. Many times, those people have a love for the liberal arts.
My Father’s CV
Reading for the shape of a life can be medicinal, especially when we allow that life to diagnose and heal ourselves. And maybe then that understanding can encourage doctors of all kinds–but…
Dante’s Virgil as a Guide for College Professors: Insights from Inferno
Students sometimes come to us in crisis, but always they come from a world filled with challenges and are with us only for a season. We could do far worse as professors…
Nothing to F***ing Cheer About: Preserving Moral Authority in Public Education
Preserving moral authority in schools would truly be something to cheer about.
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