Further on the subject of “scholar-athletes.” This is a message I received last weekend from a friend who teaches at a smaller public university with a highly successful Division II football team. He has given me permission to quote him, anonymously.

“this has not been a good semester. because i teach a required class early in the morning, i get an overflow of athletes in the class. they get preferential treatment in an effort to keep their grades up. they have special study sessions and academic advisers which really is unfair since no other segment of the student body gets those advantages. in the past the athletic department wanted faculty to file weekly reports on each of their wards. i would have had close to 100 such reports to file each week. i refused to comply and had a visit from one of the faculty on the advisory board trying to pressure me to comply. he did not succeed and ...

We’ve seen the trends on AP course and college enrollments for boys and girls. In 2005, 57 percent of undergraduates were female, and the disparity will only rise in the coming years (see this summary). Furthermore, while in college, women work harder and engage their professors more. In 05-06, women scored 26 points higher on graduation rates. One reason appears in last year’s American Freshman survey numbers from the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA (go here and click on the first HERI “Brief” listed). “Interestingly,” the summary stated, “men and women reported engaging in a few essential learning behaviors in high school with very different frequency.” Many more female students than male students reported that they frequently revise ...

Happy Birthday (a few days early) to Claude Lévi-Strauss, born one hundred years ago this Friday, November 28, in Brussels.

In France, the centennial celebration has been the occasion for a year-long fête, with essays and articles devoted to his life, work, and intellectual legacy. The highpoint took place in May, when Gallimard made Lévi-Strauss the newest addition to the 198 authors whose collected works appear in its Bibliothèque de la Pléiade series — the publishing equivalent, begun in 1931, of election to the Academie Française. The Bible-paper volumes of the Pléiade, in their concise and perfect Gallic elegance, are a perfect lure to book fetishists, and the Lévi-Strauss edition is no exception. At a budget-busting price of 71 Euros, it has nonetheless sold more than 20,000 copies in six months.

It’s rare for a living figure to appear in the Pléiade — in fact, with Julien...

Dear Search Committee:

Are you bleary-eyed and exhausted from all the applications you’ve received and read thus far? Hey, have you already decided on your choice for the position? Is there an inside candidate I don’t know about, somebody who effectively makes my reference letter a waste of everyone’s time?

I usually don’t ask such questions when I start recommendation letters for graduate students, but I’ve decided to cut to the chase this year. I want the skinny. There are so many credible candidates for your advertised post (I know of at least 10 folks, and I’m writing reference letters for three of them); I can’t imagine that the process will be easy.

First of all, we know that sometimes such letters are pitched at a level of gushingly celebratory support that they rival grade inflation in terms of rendering their measurements/benchmarks useless. We deploy terms like...

Nice people will sometimes ask me if I have a hobby. I feel a little awkward answering their kind inquiry because the short honest reply — ”no” — doesn’t do much to move conversation along.

I’m at a loss to answer the hobby question because while I genuinely respect and applaud the fun stuff my friends do to relax and entertain themselves, I have no similar habits.

Usually I end up sputtering out some lame fib, such as “I like to shop” or “cooking can be fun.”

I mean, my aunts used to spend hours making ravioli which were not then referred to as “home-made” because everything you ate in a house such as ours was “home-made” because nobody had any “money.” Nowadays pasta-making can actually count as a hobby, I suppose, because there are machines to replace the aunts and hours of preparation can go into the creation of these unique delicacies.

(Yet somehow I imagine it’s tough...

It’s that time of the year for holidays … and that time when students aren’t on campus much due to breaks in classes. It reminds me of one of the most vexing issues faculty and administrators face: The Calendar.

Every few years or so we debate whether to reinvent the wheel, anguishing about when to start the Thanksgiving break — after classes on the Friday before, at the end of the day on Tuesday or Wednesday, or at noon on Wednesday. We’ve tried them all, often in a vain attempt to discourage students from missing the last day of classes before the holiday.

Christmas has its challenges as well. When do we schedule the winter commencement? How much time should the students have allotted to get home? Do we make the break long enough for a short winter educational experience? Do we start classes for the spring semester close to New Year’s, or later? Before or after Martin Luther King...

It’s been great blogging for you on the vice presidency, the debates, baseball, and sundry other political and nonpolitical matters during this four-month guest gig. I’ve been accumulating a pet-peeves list in hopes that it would get long enough to make a decent post, but I guess I’ve been in too good a mood to think of many. All I’ve come up with is: saying “two-thousand ten” instead of “twenty-ten” (and so on — we really need to make the transition before 2066); “early on” when “early” does just as well; and “election cycle” instead of, well, “election.” These are the latest in a long list of pumped-up words and phrases headed by “5 a.m. in the morning” and “medication.” More is less when it comes to language.

So let me wrap things up on an entirely different note, recounting two stories of early-career mentoring for which I am deeply thankful. The first is conventional, the latter...

Hair, the bane of every plumber, the glory of woman, the stuff that rolls around like tumbleweed on the floors of the homes of everyone who’s addicted to long-haired cats — hair is the da Vinci code to the Ice Age. A couple of scientists at Penn State have reported that the technology now exists to take clumps of mammoth hair and decode it (which they’ve done for a large part of the genome of a mammoth) and then ultimately decode from that the full genome of the mammoth — the elephant-like creature that roamed across Siberia and North America before going extinct around 10,000 years ago. They haven’t figured out the full genome yet, but all that’s required, the scientists say, is to modify an African elephant’s cell at the 400,000 or so places necessary to make it resemble a mammoth’s...

I am a certifiable sports nut. I think my father intended that I should be. I grew up in Chicago during a great sports era — one of my first pro sports memories is the Bears beating the Redskins 73-0 to win the National Football League championship in 1940, and I saw the Bears play the Cardinals in Comiskey Park on December 7, 1941. I actually saw the Cubs play in the World Series in 1945! I was a small and skinny kid, but still dreamed of playing for the Bears some day. As it happened, one of the part owners of the Bears lived in the apartment below ours, and on some Sundays before home games, he had the whole team (about 20 players, I think) over for a steak breakfast. I was occasionally invited to join the team.

Imagine the bliss of an 8- or 9-year old to mingle with Sid Luckman, Bulldog Turner and, yes, Bronco Nagurski! But my hero was one of the Bears’ guards, Danny Fortman. I...

When asked how much homework college students must do to complete their course assignments successfully, college teachers generally set the bar at around 25 hours per week. But in the last National Survey of Student Engagement, which I linked to in the previous post, few students came close to the minimum. On the question, “Hours per 7-day week spent preparing for class (studying, reading, writing, doing homework or lab work, analyzing data, rehearsing, and other academic activities,” here is how first-year students came out:

1-5 hours 17 percent 6-10 hours 26 percent 11-15 hours 20 percent 16-20 hours 16 percent

In fact, only 11 percent exceeded 25 hours per week. This means that nearly two-thirds of first-years come in at two hours a day or less, or, if they have a four-course load, a half-hour or less a day on each one. Add their in-class time and it...