Back in the 1990s, Leonard Sax began to notice in more and  more familiies "from every economic condition where the daughter is hardworking and motivated while her brother is a goofball: he's more concerned about getting to the next level in his video game than he is about getting a good grade on his Spanish final." His observations led to a widely-cited book Boys Adrift (see here for info).  It joins works by Richard Whitmire, Peg Tyre, and others in establishing general acceptance of a "boy problem" among American teens today, particularly as measured by their academic achievement relative to girls.

Now, Sax has a new book out entitled Girls on the Edge: The Four Factors Driving the New Crisis for Girls (see here for details). In it, he draws a far-reaching distinction between the troubles with girls and the troubles with boys.

"Both the girls and the boys are disadvantaged, but they...

Yesterday afternoon I went to a widely-advertised a d well-attended lecture on our campus entitled "Leading Universities in the 21st Century: Chances and Challenges." It was delivered by our former colleague and the current president of the University of Pennsylvania, Amy Gutmann, who is, among many things, one of the country's most distinguished political theorists, and the author of the best book I have ever read on Democratic Education (1987). The occasion was not only one of Princeton's most important endowed lectures, but also the 20th anniversary of our University Center for Human Values, of which Gutmann was the first director. It was clearly a celebration of both the Center and Gutman, who has established quite a reputation for presidential leadership at Penn over the past six years. Both our former president, Harold Shapiro, and our current president, Shirley Tilghman, were...

How would anybody who knew me well know I'd finished teaching for the semester?

--They'd see that my socks were matched. All those random, lonely socks, thrown into a wire basket in the closet for three months, are now bundled up with their partners like dancers at a high-school prom.

--They'd be eating a three-course meal, where two of the courses had not been removed from the microwave. They'd be savoring dishes with fresh cilantro, curly parsley, and oregano from the new plant in my kitchen (yes, a live plant, one I hadn't been able to kill yet—such signs of life and spring!). No frozen peas. No frozen pearl onions. No garlic from the tube. Maybe there'd still be some of those mashed potatoes from the container however; I really like those.

--Were...

I remember the dead silence in a faculty meeting when a Notre Dame Dean said over 60 percent of the grades in English and Humanities classes were A's, the rest were A-minuses and B-pluses. It was an attempt to embarrass professors' lack of effort at identifying variations in student performance. Shaming didn't work, nothing. And, as a new report shows, Notre Dame is not alone. Grade inflation is alive and well.

Stuart Rojstaczer has just updated his scathing analysis of the increase in grade inflation.

He may be the messenger that elite colleges and their professors will want to kill but he has done yeoman's work exposing the industry practices. Using data on grades from over 210 U.S. colleges and universities, and over two million undergraduate students, Rojstaczer has found that grade inflation is increasing and private colleges are the worst offenders.

Perhaps the increase in...

I have long been involved in the fight on behalf of evolution against Creationism and its offspring Intelligent Design Theory. One of my biggest beefs, and I don’t think I am alone in this, is how few scientists are willing to get involved in the fight.  I obviously don’t mean this as a general proposition for there are and have been some notable exceptions. At the trial in Arkansas in 1981, when a federal judge ruled unconstitutional a law mandating the teaching of Creationism along with evolution, two of the witnesses on behalf of the American Civil Liberties Union (the main force behind the challenge to the law) were the geneticist Francisco J. Ayala and the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. Nor were they fairweather friends. Ayala through the National Academy of Sciences has worked hard to make the case for evolution and Gould often wrote on the subject, including authoring a book (

Our cherished Brainstorm contributor has been named a 2010 William T. Grant Scholar.

Here are some details, quoted from the University of Wisconsin news release:

This year the foundation received 70 applications. Each scholar receives research support through mentorship, interdisciplinary experience and $350,000 distributed over five years.

"This is an extraordinary opportunity," says Goldrick-Rab. "I'm grateful to the foundation for recognizing that, after we become professors and researchers, our own education should continue."

The program will help Goldrick-Rab expand on a landmark, randomized trial of need-based student financial aid, which she co-directs with Douglas Harris, associate professor of educational policy studies and public affairs. In this new project, "Rethinking College Choice in America," Goldrick-Rab will apply ideas and methods from developmental psychology and ...

A new study by Richard Stettersten of Oregon State University and Barbara Ray of Hired Pen, Inc., entitled What's Going on with Young People Today?: The Long and Twisting Path to Adulthood, reports that young adults in 2005—including those with a college education—were not doing as well as their baby-boomer parents who reached adulthood in the 1960's and 1970's. In fact, the study suggests that in their pathway toward establishing independence, today's young people more closely resemble their grandparents and great-grandparents than their prosperous boomer parents who enjoyed high-paying and secure jobs during the period of strong economic growth following World War II.  Like young adults of the early 1900's, today's young adults are slow to leave their family homes and start families of their own, although in the 1900's the lingering child was likely to participate in supporting his...

In a somber on-campus memorial service Wednesday, long-time Bottomley College employee Wally Lipscombe was remembered for his crotchety demeanor and his ability to tell whimsical and cautionary stories in nearly any situation.

Lipscombe joined Bottomley College in 1993 as director of IT implementation at the Duffy Center for Project Management. He stayed in that position until his passing on Sunday at the age of 65.

"You would see Wally wandering around the center almost every day," Professor Jon Smith, director of the Duffy Center, said. "He'd putter around on his computer for a couple of hours, yell at the screen about things he didn't like, then make his rounds. You could set your watch to it. He'd come looking for me in my office around 11:16 every day," Smith added. "There is a void now."

It was his life experiences that allowed Lipscombe to interject a long and rambling story in...

As usual, your friends at The New York Times let higher education employers off the hook. After finally picking up on the nationwide scandal of unemployment claims denial, a story that Joe Berry broke years ago specifically in connection with higher-ed employers, the Times mentions the complicity of just about every kind of employer except higher ed.

Here's how it works. Because employers fund unemployment insurance (UI) in this country, generally in some relation to how many of their employees receive UI, they are highly motivated to contest claims. The system was designed, of course, to penalize employers who try to dump the costs of their workforce on the public by making those who aggressively churned their staff pay more.

As Jason De Parle's piece makes clear, this incentive to fight the claims of the unemployed has created a boom industry for niche sleazebags like the Talx...

Today I learned that there are moments when I see eye-to-eye with the military. After General Stanley A. McChrystal, the leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, viewed a near-nigh incomprehensible slide of a diagram consisting of seemingly countless swirling and overlapping thin, colored, arced lines—part of a PowerPoint presentation designed to explain American strategy in the region—he said, “When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war.” Having seen the diagram reproduced in The New York Times today), I realize that to comprehend it requires an advanced degree in Superlogical Nuerophysiological Opticophysical Psychology, as well as at least a decade of hands-on practice in The Art of Idiotic Drawing.

When the PowerPoint program first came out in the late 80s, I laughed at its vapidity. Its charts looked like the stuff of 1950s communist meetings that would celebrate...