I was interested in Jennifer Howard's May 23rd Hot Type report on complaints that digital scholarship in the humanities is not receiving adequate critical notice. Howard offered the Gutenberg-e digital-history project as an example of a series of born-digital books that received very few reviews in the appropriate history journals. And she quoted the director of the University of Virginia Press (Penny Kaiserlian) as saying that Rotunda, her digital imprint, was not usually receiving reviews from scholarly journals. The question, Howard said, is "how to get academe's gatekeepers to take digital work seriously." But she also noted that some scholarly journals (her example was The Journal of American History) do produce reviews of Web sites and other digital material, and she cited Jerry McGann's Nines, and the Digital Humanities Quarterly to show that there are at least a few interesting a...

A few weeks back, a post on Frank Rich's rhetoric yielded a lively comment section, with several people defending Rich against the charge that in spite of his sharp intelligence the prose slides into lazy locutions, easy allusions, and overheated metaphors. Let's look at Rich's column this weekend. It raises the issue of the Obama Administration's handling of the Gulf spill, particularly in light of recent attacks on the competence of the president coming from all parts of the ideological spectrum.

(See this Times story, which contains some feeble bureaucrat-speak from Carol Browner, Obama's climate adviser, such as this: "'This is obviously a difficult situation,' Ms. Browner said on NBC's Meet the Press on Sunday, ‘but it's important for people to understand that from the beginning, the government has been in charge.'")

Rich's column addresses the question of Obama's competence,...

The latest on the never-ending Gulf disaster is that some 12,000 to 19,000 barrels of oil a day (not the 1000 barrels a day BP first reported) are spewing into the Gulf of Mexico from the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion and the subsequent failure of the blowout preventer. All efforts to plug the underwater well up to now have failed.

It doesn’t really matter who’s at fault or who’s in charge—whether it’s BP or the Obama administration—except in terms of money (who will pay what and how much) and politics (whether or not this catastrophe will stick like oil to Obama the way Katrina stuck to Bush). Despite everyone everywhere screaming “Fix it!” no one knows (as in possesses practical knowledge) how to fix it. Already the largest environmental disaster in American history, the gushing oil threatens to continue gushing another two months—right up until August, when a relief well that’s in...

My friend, a domestic policy maven (he is responsible for most of this post), points out that among the many virtues of the landmark health-reform bill, one is directly related to higher education. The legislation finally puts an end to subsidies paid to banks for student lending with a savings to taxpayers of $61-billion over 10 years. Years ago these subsidies were justified as promoting private "competition" with a government run program.

And the Republicans are howling in protest. They want to restore taxpayer subsidies to private banks. Just this month, former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich cited the policy change as part of his evidence that the Obama Administration is "socialist."

You might say that those billions in bank subsidies are OK if they helped students find better loans at lower prices—after all, that's the promise of privatization, right? (Though, with...

Here's an article at Education Next on a spreading trend in secondary education: the competition.  According to the author, bees and other contests are proliferating by the year, and participation in each one continues to rise. The article mentions several of them in different subjects: the Scripps National Spelling Bee, the National Geographic Bee, MATHCOUNTS (with participants increasing by 10 percent in the last two years), the National Science Bowl (sponsored by U.S. Dept of Energy), a Bible Bowl, and the International Brain Bee. They host competitions and give out awards and dollars to winners.

Of course, the elements and principles behind the competition run against many of the basic premises of education theory. "Today's teachers generally cringe at everything about that development," author June Kronholz writes. "All those hours spent on one narrow academic focus! All that rote ...

1. The Short Man in History: Is the Napoleonic complex real? An examination of men under 5'6" who have influenced the social, political, literary, and economic landscape of the last 200 years in British and American texts. We will examine a series of such diverse figures as Tiny Tim, George from Seinfeld, Tom Cruise, the guy from Fantasy Island, Gary Coleman, and Mini-Me.

2. Nancy Miller's Father's Penis. Using Nancy Miller's seminal 1991 essay "My Father's Penis" as a springboard, this multimedia course will consider other significant paternal penii as they pop up in popular culture.

3. Human Resource and Beer-Pong Management. This course will review the human-resource-management body of knowledge and explore methods and practices related to the successful management of both daily and weekend beer-pong playing in the context of both university and non-university organizations. It...

I have been following an effort begun by three outstanding academic psychologists to think about the relationship between ethics and accomplishment in professional lives. The scholars involved are Howard Gardner (Harvard School of Education), Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Claremont Graduate University), and William Damon (Stanford School of Education). They call their effort the “Good Work Project,” and it has already resulted in several books, including Gardner, Csikszentmihalyi, and Damon's Good Work: When Excellence and Ethics Meet (Basic Books, 2001). A helpful descriptive paper can be found online here. Howard Gardner is currently editing a new volume of essays to be published in several months as Good Work: Theory and Practice.He has shared with me Bill Damon’s piece “Mission Creep and Bad Work in Higher Places,” which I think brilliantly exposes the tension that the Good Work Project ...

Discussions of technology and higher education tend to veer from "This. Changes. Everything" techno-triumphalism to assertions that using the Internet to educate people is clearly a plot to turn higher education into a cheap corporate commodity on par with bulk packages of frozen french fries. As is often the case, the most interesting work in the field right now sits close to the equipoise between the two, as my colleague Ben Miller documents in his new report, The Course of Innovation, which you should read.

The report focuses on the National Center for Academic Transformation (NCAT), which has spent the last decade working with scores of colleges and universities to transform mostly introductory college courses with technology. NCAT's track record is impressive. To the extent that such things can be proven without elaborate randomized control trials, they've proven that thoughtful,...

I see from my last post on the Gulf oil drilling disaster that a few commentators found me too arrogant for their taste. In beginning and ending with a reference to the acerbic H.L. Mencken, whose opinion on the smallness of American intelligence is well known to all but the ignorant, I hoped to put in context my lack of confidence that Americans are prepared to tackle complex 21st-century problems, such as the necessity to “wean” (note that ubiquitously used word “wean" when people talk of Americans and their dependence on oil, implying, of course, that we are babies) ourselves not merely from oil, but from fossil fuels in general. (Too long a sentence, but you get the point.)

As every college kid does not know, the United States consumes about 20 million barrels of oil per day—almost half of it gobbled up by our passenger cars. With only 4 percent of the world’s population, we consume 2...

I read in today's Chronicle that the NCAA is now disallowing Division I bound high school athletes from  using  replacement credits earned through either the Bringham Young Independent Stdudy or American School's online programs. One would hope that it wasn't the Michael Oher story that prompted this decision. After all, I think the point of that movie was to inspire, not condemn. But since NCAA officials are being their typically tight-lipped selves about this decision,  one is  left to assume that the NCAA has decided that online instruction provides an easier way for a student to earn a better grade, and thus boost their eligibility for admission to a Division I school. Perhaps such is the case, but perhaps not. 

Perhaps online learning is a better modality for some students, since it affords them the opportunity to spend more time on topics with which they struggle, while allowing...