December 3, 2008, 09:28 AM ET

The Disciplines and Undergraduate Education

I wrote in my last post about the downside of specialization, and one of the commenters quite rightly responded that whatever the virtues of a more general orientation, generalists have a hard time finding academic employment these days.

Quite right. I am, alas, sure that the trend to subdisciplinarity will not disappear anytime soon. But the problem is even more profound. Luke Menand, one of my favorite commentators on higher education, recently gave a paper at Princeton on interdisciplinarity, a much ballyhooed style of scholarship and pedagogy these day s. Luke’s main point was that what we normally call “interdisciplinarity” is really better described as hyperdisciplinarity, since it depends utterly upon disciplinary knowledge: “It is not an escape from disciplinarity; it is the scholarly and...

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December 2, 2008, 04:27 PM ET

Technology, Labor, and College Costs

By Kevin Carey

Education Sector, the think tank where I work, sponsored a panel discussion in Washington this morning. The subject was “Is Technology the Answer to Rising College Costs?” You can listen to the audio here. The discussion centered on a recent article that I wrote for Washington Monthly on the same subject. Briefly, the argument goes like this: College is becoming increasingly expensive, which makes many people unhappy. This problem could be partially (although not fully) addressed if higher education did what many industries have already done: increase efficiency by using technology to make labor more productive. We know this is possible because many colleges and universities have already done it. But the cost savings aren’t being passed on to students in terms of lower prices — partly because public officials are cutting funding for higher ed, but also because universities operate in a ...

December 1, 2008, 02:07 PM ET

A Letter From My Brother, 1978

By Gina Barreca

I was 21 and my brother was 28. I was living in England at the time, and I would continue to live there — on and off — for the next four years. In 1978 my father was moving out of the house where, several years earlier, my mother had died.

The winds of chaos were whistling right outside the windows of both of our lives and night was right outside the door but we didn’t know it. Not entirely. We wrote to each other often and I now know for a fact what I only suspected back then: His letters are better than mine.

Here’s one of them.

June 1978 Dear Gina,

It is Sunday afternoon and I’m sitting in the living room, in our living room, where the white pictureless walls stand listening and watching. They’ve seen me here before, in this yellow sofa that used to be downstairs which we just brought up here again, years ago where I sat and read mystery stories and did my science homework....

December 1, 2008, 01:26 PM ET

Counting Minutes

By Graham Spanier

We spend a great deal of time at universities preparing for the very worst that man or nature might throw our way. Nowadays we worry not only about coping with the crisis but also about how to communicate about it. With the rapidity of communications, we are cognizant that the world is watching — and counting.

Counting? Yes, counting the minutes from when we first heard of an issue to when we alerted everyone. There is no argument about the need to communicate, but every crisis is different, and sometimes it is unclear what one should say, and when.

At Penn State we have a Foodborne Illness Committee and an Avian Flu Committee. There is a committee that plans for emergencies at our huge football stadium. There is another group that plans for emergencies at the local airport, one of the busiest in the state, which is located on university land.

The biggest potential problems a...

December 1, 2008, 12:22 PM ET

The Honor Code Has No Honor

By Laurie Fendrich

I just read a report that 64 percent of high-school kids admitted to having cheated. It’s reasonable to assume that a lot of these high school cheaters go on to college, and it’s also reasonable to assume that, once in college, they’re not going to suddenly stop cheating.

Most colleges and universities think they contain the problem of cheating by prominently displaying in their bulletins some sort of honor code or honor system. Students are on their honor not to cheat, and many colleges add the requirement that students are on their honor to report cheating if they see it. Anyone who thinks these college and university honor systems are working believes that the tooth fairy lives and breathes and the sun revolves around the earth.

Allow me to put the problem in a broader context: How can an honor system in a high school,...