When I was a child, I knew that if a Brussels sprout passed my lips, one of two things would happen — I’d vomit, or I’d die. Unfortunately for me, my mother loved Brussels sprouts and so they showed up on my dinner plate far, far too often. Because she had a “sit at your…
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More Than a Few Tough Things (3)
In my second post in this series I took on my colleague Steve Pearlstein‘s argument that “universities” should engage in less research, more teaching. In this final post in the series, I want to take up his argument about general education. Cheaper, better general education. The reform of general education is something I’ve had a…
Rankings, Schmankings
If you are in any way connected to American higher education, you have had to live through 24+ hours of blather about the latest U.S. News and World Report rankings of colleges and universities in the U.S. All across America there is jubilation, gnashing of teeth, hand wringing, self-satisfied smirking, sadness, and relief-that-we-didn’t-go-down-a-spot. Honestly, I…
History’s Smaller and Smaller Pond
Last spring I wrote a post called “History’s Future” in which I pointed out the unsettling trends in history enrollments from the 2011-12 IPEDS data. Today, I was reminded of that post, and an earlier on on the gender (enrollment) problem in our field, because the most recent projections from the National Center for Education…