Gerald Graff’s presidential address at last December’s MLA Convention (go here and scroll down to “Listen to the 2008 Presidential Address”) identifies “courseocentrism” as a disabling but unnoticed disease in the humanities. In a courseocentric system, classrooms are discrete spaces, courses don’t “communicate” with one another, and faculty members operate as free agents in disregard of each other’s teaching. Worse, an undergraduate majoring in a courseocentric field leaves college having collected many credits and read lots of books, but the knowledge hasn’t accumulated into a learned formation.

Without more coordination among teachers and complementarity and reiteration among courses, students keep the things they learn in the course precisely within the course. As Graff observes, with a few studies to back him up, “students who learn a subject...

Here’s an article in the Wall Street Journal this week with the headline “Education Board in Texas Faces Curbs.” Approving last month a science curriculum that allows for creationist objections to evolution in science class and textbooks, the board has, according to some lawmakers in the state, stepped over the line separating ideology from scientific study. One proposal in the Texas legislature would take away the Board’s role in certifying curricula and in reviewing and evaluating textbooks. Another would remove a “vast pot of school funding” from its control.

The governor hasn’t taken a position on the proposals yet, but people shouldn’t consider this just a state-level matter. What Texas decides about textbooks reverberates across the country. Along with California (which a few years ago garnered 11 percent of ...

A few minutes into Gerald Graff’s presidential address at last year’s Modern Language Convention (go here and scroll down to “Listen to the 2008 Presidential Address”), he recalls a conversation early in his teaching career.

“I had assigned an essay that asked my students to discuss the meanings of a certain novel. A young man came up after class and reported that the professor in one of his other courses had said it was a serious error to attribute meanings to a literary work, a practice that confused moral messages with propaganda. His professor had invoked the New Critical mantra that ‘A poem should not mean / But be” as well as its pop culture equivalent, the movie mogul Sam Goldwyn’s statement that ‘If it’s a message you want, call Western Union.’ I conceded that there were problems with the message-hunting approach to literature, as the ...

Laurie’s post on “The Worst Lecture in the World” brought to mind three dozen episodes of excruciating second-counting — chilly classrooms at 8 p.m., colleagues squirming in seats and trading irritable glances, 55 minutes in and no sign of wrap-up…

Those are guest lectures which often are expected to last for an hour, but the run-on happens on conference panels, too. A four-person panel scheduled for an hour and 15 minutes allots each person at most 15 minutes to speak and the audience 15 minutes for Q & A. But I’ve attended more sessions at which at least one person exceeded the limit than I have sessions at which everyone observed it. Overtime is the norm.

I did it myself in my first panel back in 1992, a philosophy and literature conference at Berkeley. Only halfway into my brilliant argument I’d already run over. The panel chair gave me one more minute, then cut me off in...

Here’s a story on some survey research in the UK on patterns of technology consumption among the young and their impact on social relations. I haven’t tracked down the original report, but the headers say that offline interaction is still the primary “driver” of young people’s behavior.

The report finds that of their top 10 favorite activities, “seven are still offline.” They include “hanging out with friends, listening to music, and seeing boy/girlfriends.”

But several other findings in the study suggest that the presentation of them downplays the impact of digital tools.

The summary here notes that young people are “involved in an astonishing 48 digital communications every day.”

It notes that “The technology itself is ‘invisible’ to the young consumer” —...

In Bill Moyers’s letter to The Chronicle last month in response to my post on his actions while in LBJ’s administration, Moyers refered to Jack Shafer’s piece in Slate as a sample from the Right wing noise machine. Shafer has a long follow-up to his original piece and Moyers’ reply here in Slate. Among Shafer’s statements is a reference to a defense Moyers wrote in Newsweek many years ago:

“What does Moyers say in the Newsweek column? The context in which the column appeared bears mentioning: Congressional hearings were revealing abuses of power at the FBI. According to the New York Times news story (Feb. 28, 1975, paid), Justice Department officials confirmed that Moyers had ‘asked the bureau to gather data on campaign aides to Senator Barry Goldwater, the Republican Presidential candidate … on behalf of President Johnson a few weeks...

This week in The Chronicle, Robin Wilson has a story on the “diversity” factor in tenure and promotion guidelines at Virginia Tech. According to the guidelines, the promotion and tenure committee “expects all dossiers to demonstrate the candidate’s active involvement in diversity.” The provost at Virginia Tech claims that the guideline does not “require” professors to join diversity activities, but only “encourages” them to do so. The diversity criterion goes back to a few years ago, he adds, when the university wanted to make sure that people who did pursue diversity activities were valued for their efforts.

This is a lesson in the academic version of “mission creep.” What starts out as a benign and unobjectionable approval policy evolves into a demand that everybody do the things that will be approved. For the provost to...

Remember the Kansas School Board decision to delete evolution from the state science curriculum? Here’s an old CNN story on the decision, and here’s a CBS News story from 2005 on it’s second act, after the state revised the decision in the wake of national denunciation and ridicule.

Anybody who thinks that the battle ended there should look at what’s going on in Texas. Here’s a story from today’s Wall Street Journal, entitled “Texas School Board Set to Vote on Challenge to Evolution.” The Board plans to vote this week on a revised science curriculum, with the status of the theory of evolution the central issue. The debate has been brewing for several months, as this...

With lengthy statements about the humanities such as here and here and here circulating widely through the digital airwaves and academic hallways, it seems that we’re in the midst of yet another crisis in the liberal arts. This one isn’t a matter of “politicization” (as in the mid-1980s) or of half-baked “theorization” (mid-1990s — Sokal, Bad Writing . . .). It’s a dollars thing.

Searches cancelled, graduate admissions slashed, salary freezes . . . the humanities seem hit the hardest, and humanities professors are scrambling for grounds for pushback. The big question this time is, how to justify the humanities to others?

That’...

The fury that has exploded over AIG continues to climb, with New York Attorney General Andrew Cruomo revealing that the company issued 73 employees payments of $1-million dollars plus just a few days ago. (See here at Yahoo News.) Multiply the $165-million in bonuses at AIG by eight and a half, however, and you get the dollar amount that the U.S. government has pledged to aid the Mexican military in combating drug activity and violence near the border.

Here is a paragraph from a story in USA Today from two days ago, headlined “Mexicans tire of drug strategy.”

“About 50,000 Mexican troops — more than the United States has in Afghanistan — patrol border cities and comb the deserts for drug smugglers. The United States has...