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…
“Katrina ruined it all; Katrina ruined me”
How should history be written? And when we do write it, whose voices should we hear? Two of my colleagues and friends, Roy Rosenzweig and Michael Mizell-Nelson, both now sadly deceased, believed that we can only really understand the past if we listen to the voices of the too often faceless and nameless majority. It…
Does Playfulness Crowd Out Rigor?
If you’ve been a reader of what I’ve been writing about teaching and learning the past several years you’ll know that I’ve been arguing that historians should make room for a more playful approach to the past in the undergraduate history curriculum. I’ve never argued that playful teaching and learning should be the only way…
How to Close a College
Yesterday, the board of trustees of one of the older colleges in Virginia–Sweet Briar College–announced they were closing the college at the end of this academic year, despite the fact that the college still has an endowment worth over $80 million for its student body variously reported as being between 550-700 students. This choice to…