The Blackboard
In Praise of “Old”
Similarly, I believe that most people can tell the difference between ugly and beautiful buildings.
More Articles in The Blackboard
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…
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…
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…
Learning about Food and Proper Nouns
Berry moves the conversation from common nouns to proper ones and implicates us all in something deeply practical and doable, yet inexplicably difficult: to love our neighbor, the person right next to…
Early-Alerting Early-Alert Systems on College Campuses
The university’s best, most utopian aims must not beget dystopian early-alert policies that infringe on students’ personal liberties while turning campus into a place where everyone is an informant, and deviations from…
Recapturing the Real: Physicality, Imitation, and Tradition in a Digital World
Our educational approach should include the validation of physicality, the imitation of the master, and the celebration of tradition.
Online Learning Isn’t All It’s Cracked Up to Be
There is certainly a place for online learning in undergraduate education, but we should not undercut traditional higher education for the sake of innovation or profit margin.
Optionality and the Intellectual Life: In Gratitude for the Real World Risk Institute
Something about Taleb’s emphasis on practical wisdom unleashes in his readers a sense of humility, a renewed trust in reason, and a spiritual hunger courageous enough to move beyond the cynicism and…
Two Forms of Despair
What I’m writing is not an exposé of the Christian college, nor a bitter and defiant account of my triumph over an evil system, but a confession of my own failures, faulty…
Learning to Read “the Book in Front of Us”
As the fall semester looms, the minutia of meetings and syllabi revisions threatens to drain the excitement from my impending return to the classroom. As a way of warding off this danger,…
Fierce Velleity: Poetry as Antidote to Acedia
In “Lying,” the late Richard Wilbur diagnoses one of our age’s endemic ills with the paradoxical phrase “fierce velleity.” For those of us who don’t use “velleity” every day, the OED defines…
What Groucho Marx Can Teach Us About Liberal Education
The world wearies of defenses of liberal education and the humanities. What cannot be denied is that all over the country the liberal arts are dying out, with students abandoning the subjects…
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