May 3, 2012, 02:53 PM ET

Editor's Note

(Updated 5/11/12 at 1:57 p.m.) NB: To see Chronicle editors’ final response to the post mentioned in the note below, please read “A Note to Readers.” Editor's Note: When we created the Brainstorm blog five years ago, we hoped it would be a forum for debate — where views about higher education, academic culture, and ideas could be aired and discussed and often challenged. It is a blog for opinion, sometimes strong opinions, not news reporting by the staff. The writers on the blog—13 in all, from institutions around the country—fall on different points of the ideological and political spectrum. They are not staff members of The Chronicle nor do they represent the views of the staff or of the newspaper. Many of you have asked The Chronicle to take down Naomi Schaefer Riley's recent posting, "The Most Persuasive Case for Eliminating Black Studies? Just Read the Dissertations.... Read More

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May 3, 2012, 02:52 PM ET

Grad Students Respond to Riley Post on African-American Studies

As graduate students in Northwestern University’s department of African-American studies, we were thrilled with the informative and important article by Stacey Patton for The Chronicle of Higher Education that looked at the state of our discipline through the lens of an important academic conference bringing together the 11 African-American studies doctoral programs together for the first time. So imagine our surprise when almost two weeks after The Chronicle’s original article appeared, The Chronicle’s Web site published a lazy and vitriolic hit piece by blogger Naomi Schaefer Riley that summarily dismisses our academic work while debasing us as something less than “legitimate scholars.” Riley then holds up our research as the reason African American Studies as a discipline should be “eliminated.” Instead of taking her own advice given to her readers to “just read the ... Read More

May 3, 2012, 01:47 PM ET

Punch Your Gay Kid Straight

The pastor of a Baptist church in Fayettesville, N.C., Sean Harris, told parents that if they have a boy who wants to act like a girl or a girl who wants to act like a boy, then they need to "squash like a cockroach" such gender diversity for the glory of God (you can watch the sermon here). According to Pastor Harris, parents need to enforce strict gender roles on their children:

Dads, the second you see your sons dropping the limp wrist you walk over there and crack that wrist. Man up! Give a good punch... 'You're not going to act like that. You were made by God to be a male and you're going to act like a male.' And when your daughter starts acting too butch you rein her in. You say 'Oh No Sweetheart. You can play sports... but sometimes you're going to act like a girl, walk like a girl, talk like a girl and smell like a girl. And that means you're going to be beautiful and...

The X Factor

Today, Harvard University jumped on the accelerating online-education train. The creation of edX in partnership with MIT marks the latest development in what's shaping up to be a fascinating contest between the nation's leading research universities and its most ambitious private-sector entrepreneurs for domination of virtual higher education. Things began heating up last December. Throughout the fall 2011 semester, a group of well-known Stanford professors had been running an unorthodox experiment by letting over 100,000 students around the world take their courses, online, for free. Those who did well got a certificate from the professor saying so. Then MIT announced the creation of MITx, a new nonprofit organization, branded by the university, which would also offer so-called Massively Open Online Courses, or "MOOC's," and would also offer certificates to those who earned them--a new... Read More

May 2, 2012, 09:52 PM ET

The X Factor

Today, Harvard University jumped on the accelerating online education train. The creation of edX in partnership with MIT marks the latest development in what's shaping up to be a fascinating contest between the nation's leading research universities and its most ambitious private-sector entrepreneurs for domination of virtual higher education. Things began heating up last December. Throughout the fall 2011 semester, a group of well-known Stanford professors had been running an unorthodox experiment by letting over 100,000 students around the world take their courses, online, for free. Those who did well got a certificate from the professor saying so. Then MIT announced the creation of MITx, a new nonprofit organization, branded by the university, which would also offer so-called Massively Open Online Courses, or "MOOCs," and would also offer certificates to those who earned them--a new ... Read More

May 2, 2012, 05:57 PM ET

Why Good Guys Sometimes Do Bad Things

After the L.A. Times recently published photos showing U.S. soldiers posing triumphantly with the desecrated bodies—or in the current case, body parts—I received numerous requests for media interviews, since people wanted to know why so many presumably good American boys regularly engage in such clearly bad behavior. I suggested that there are probably many answers, some of them relatively easy to grasp. Thus, many of these soldiers are 19 and 20 years old, little more than children. Although they have been invested with awesome killing power and subjected to serious training as to what behavior is acceptable and what is not, the fact remains that especially under conditions of high stress, very young adults (perhaps males in particular) are more driven by their hormones than by higher thought processes. Indeed, it is precisely their lack of “cerebral inhibition” that makes... Read More

May 2, 2012, 11:31 AM ET

Elementary Forms of Gendered Life

Watch a gender reveal party here! We live in incredibly uninteresting times when it comes to the meaning of sex and gender. Unlike the years of second-wave feminism's ascendency, today most Americans accept that babies are born male or female and will grow up to be masculine or feminine as a result. Forget "free to be"; embrace sex as destiny. Whether it's our favorite gender theorist Larry Summers explaining that there are so few senior professors in the sciences because of differences in "intrinsic aptitude" or the many pop-neuroscience books that tell us women are hardwired to shop and men to be aggressive, we have a culture where it is now "commonsense" to believe that socialization is far less important than what is between your legs. Given this reinvigoration of the weight and scope of the gender binary, Americans have created a variety of rituals surrounding it. That's... Read More

May 2, 2012, 10:50 AM ET

Philosophers of Science: the Gym Teachers of Academe?

“Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.” This is the reported judgment, by the Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman, on my lifelong profession. It is a sentiment shared by other scientists, most recently the physicist and popular science writer Lawrence Krauss. Taking extreme umbrage at a severely critical review of his most recent book by a philosopher of physics at Columbia University, he described his tormentor as “moronic” and lit into the whole area from which the negative judgment had come.

Philosophy is a field that, unfortunately, reminds me of that old Woody Allen joke, "those that can't do, teach, and those that can't teach, teach gym." And the worst part of philosophy is the philosophy of science; the only people, as far as I can tell, that read work by philosophers of science are other philosophers of science. It has no impact...

'Why Can't We All Just Get Along?'

Twenty years ago this week, riots swept through Los Angeles. Rioters looted stores and then burned them to the ground. Photographers and journalists attempted to capture the mêlée, but some were physically assaulted in the process. South Central and South East Los Angeles were on fire. The vitriol and violence emerged hours after several white police officers were acquitted by an all-white jury in the infamous Rodney King beating case. A year before, Rodney King’s name left an indelible mark on our collective conscious as did the video tape of his brutal beating at the hands of baton-wielding officers. Indeed there was a sad double consciousness for some blacks—pain and empathy for King while at the same time his beating provided some political expediency, because it offered proof that police could be prone to egregious violence against blacks without consequence. Such were ... Read More

May 1, 2012, 05:45 PM ET

Everyone Should Learn Statistics

I spent the last two days on jury duty in the District of Columbia. (Whatever the broader shortcomings of D.C. municipal government, their process for hauling you into the jury pool every two years works with uncanny efficiency; watch this space for jury-related blog posts in early May 2014.) It was a DUI case, and, sidebar, before we talk about the need for statistics education, let me say this: If it at some point in your life you decide to spend a long Tuesday evening partying at the home of a friend / business associate known only as "Cesar," and after the conclusion of said partying you elect to get home by driving 60 miles per hour through Rock Creek Park at 3:00 AM, and you get pulled over for speeding, and you fail the various standardized roadside sobriety tests, and get arrested for DUI, and rather than take a plea deal decide to avail yourself of your constitutional right to... Read More