May 2, 2008, 11:35 AM ET

Why a College Professor Teaches Taste

Reader responses to my previous post compel me to digress from my planned post—on how I go about teaching taste—in order to address the question of why I presume to teach taste to my students.

My initial post on taste reveals the extreme, even raw sensitivity many people—even university professors—have when it comes to the mere suggestion that taste might be a hierarchical matter. That a college professor like me dares to teach good taste—instead of simply “explaining” it, as if it’s a neutral matter, like a fact—elicits the charge of elitism (not so bad), snobbism (pretty bad) and even worse, words that don’t belong in print on a blog site dedicated to issues of higher education (very bad).

Ah, that nasty word elitism. But like Jon Stewart said, in mocking the flurry of commentators who charged Barack Obama with “elitism” after his comments about small-town Pennsylvanians, do...

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May 2, 2008, 07:27 AM ET

Poetry Out Loud

By Mark Bauerlein

The Poetry Out Loud finals were held in Washington this week, and the winner was a student from the Virgin Islands who recited “Frederick Douglass” by Robert E. Hayden. You can hear him perform here. A story in USA Today on this year’s contest is here, and the Web site for the project is here. Go here for visuals and audio of previous contests.

It’s a national competition like the National Spelling Bee, except that students recite poems instead of spell words. Contestants are scored on a range of performance measures, and they win scholarships for themselves and cash awards for their schools. The competitions are intense...

May 1, 2008, 09:42 AM ET

The Problem of Aesthetic Taste

By Laurie Fendrich

In the next few posts, I’m going to tackle the topic of aesthetic taste — what’s happened to it in the past couple of decades, whether or not we can, or ought, to teach it, and if so, how we can teach it.

Freshmen arrive on campus with their own taste in everything from music to clothes, food, and electronic equipment. Consciously or not, they also have developed certain tastes in art. Taste being what it is, and young people being what they are, freshmen usually arrive with either no taste or very bad taste — not just in art, but in everything — but in either case, they’re very comfortable with their tastes. They don’t expect or want to change them. The paradox is that it just so happens that their taste, which they consider to be something that’s very particular and individual, is, in most important respects, exactly the same as that of most other college freshmen.

If college...

May 1, 2008, 09:21 AM ET

Thanks, Karen

By Stan Katz

This morning The Chronicle reports a really important story — the departure of Karen Arenson from The New York Times.

Anyone who is reading this blog is likely to be a higher-education news junkie (bless all of you!), but for many Americans Karen was one of the few mainstream reporters who provided coverage of higher ed. She was the best the Times had, and I will always be grateful to her for turning her Metro Desk beat into a perch from which to comment knowledgeably and intelligently on what was going on in our colleges and universities. Karen took a buyout, in part to deal with pressing family issues, but also, I think, because of the increasing difficulty of doing her job well on a paper that is having a hard time deciding what it wants to be in an era of declining print readership and killing electronic competition.

I first met Karen about a decade ago when...