On April 19, 2010, Robert Paquette, professor of history at Hamilton College, in New York, published an article entitled “Dictatorships and Double Standards” on the Web site of the National Association of Scholars. It’s a biting piece on dogmatic liberal/progressivist attitudes among professors, and it takes as a prime example the fate of Christopher Hill, a medieval historian hired to teach at Hamilton on a “term appointment” in 2006. Paquette reviews Hill’s record as a scholar and teacher, then recounts the unpleasant fact that he was rejected as a candidate when his position was redefined as tenure-track. Paquette believes that Hill was turned down because of his politics (a “self-described libertarian”) and for his failure to fit preferred diversity categories. Others hired recently “seemed not to have faced the same standard for publications that were excluding Professor Hill from...

Below are links to recent articles in newspapers and magazines on the future of reading in an e-reader and laptop universe.

Here is Kevin Kelly writing in Smithsonian Magazine on “Reading in a Whole New Way.” The subtitle asks how “the act of reading” will change as people “move from print to pixie.” One observation he makes: `

“But it is not book reading. Or newspaper reading. It is screen reading. Screens are always on, and, unlike with books we never stop staring at them. This new platform is very visual, and it is gradually merging words with moving images: words zip around, they float over images, serving as footnotes or annotations, linking to other words or images. You might think of this new medium as books we watch, or tele­vision we read. Screens are also intensely data-driven. Pixels encourage numeracy and produce rivers of numbers flowing into databases. Visualizing data is...

Take a look at discussions in The Chronicle and elsewhere about public anger, the “rage” phenomenon, and note some of the explanations. Here is Sasha Abramsky:

“One way of looking at what is happening is that it is an expression of our anxiety over what increasingly looks to be Pax Americana's departing hegemony.”

Abamsky proceeds with some misleading statements about conservatism, such as stating that conservatives are opting for a “stab-in-the-back narrative” that presents a “fine” era of global dominance that extended through the tenure of George W. Bush (in truth, most conservatives had deep reservations about Bush before and throughout his terms).

And here is David Barash:

“Consider the widespread anger generated by the Wall Street and AIG bailouts: Regardless of whether they were justified as national policy, those and other departures from perceived evenhandedness have a long ...

In response to the article in The Chronicle on overproductivity in scientific research publication, a couple of e-mails have come in worth presenting at Brainstorm. Our thesis in the original article was that productivity demands in the sciences foster the publication of too much inferior or useless material and tax the peer-review system beyond its capacity to maintain quality control.

Soon after, Michael Skolnick sent a pdf file containing the article “Does Counting Publications Provide Any Useful Information about Academic Performance?” (published in Teacher Education Quarterly, Spring 2000). In it, Skolnick opens with an acknowledgment of the pervasiveness of item counting in hiring and tenure decisions:

“This practice is so pervasive that it extends even to the selection process for positions in which one would not expect publication counts to be a significant indicator of a...

Today at The New York Times Room for Debate forum is a four-part discussion of student cheating entitled "When Did Cheating Become an Epidemic?"  (I'm one of the discussants.)  The contribution from a recent graduate of Cornell is particularly disturbing.  It focuses not on student cheating, which he claims happens "a lot," but on faculty response to it.  While at Cornell, he served on a "hearing board" with professors and had the opportunity to talk with them about cheating cases at length.

Here is what he heard:

"I listened to weak arguments about the pressures students face today and how we should take it easy on them and not consider suspensions because of the personal devastation it could cause. I winced through arguments for students' innocence based on their ignorance of the rules of the road."

In other words, little accountability and lots of sensitivity. And the recent grad...

How much money does the Afghan war cost each month? 

$6.7-billion

How many American lives lost?

1,000+

How long will it last?

Nine years and . . .

A few days before The Chronicle of Higher Ed profiled Clay Shirky, he penned a summary of his outlook in The Wall Street Journal under the title “Does the Internet Make You Smarter?” It’s worth reading not only for its pithy rendition of a leading technology theorist’s views about the impact of the Web, but for something less praiseworthy—the thin evidence for his optimism.

The piece begins with an acknowledgment of how much junk the Internet contains, the “endless streams of mediocrity, eroding cultural norms about quality and acceptability.” But then Shirky contains it, stating “that’s what always happens.” Every time a technology brings an “increase in freedom to create or consume media,” he argues, the rules of communication shift and we have a period of apparent chaos and decline. Hence, the digital setting “alarms people accustomed to the restrictions of the old system, convincing...

A fair degree of praise has come down on Elena Kagan for her performance at the confirmation hearings.  I don't get it.

She isn't eloquent. Just count the number of "uh . . . uh . . . uh" sequences in any five minutes. The halting, sometimes mumbling delivery is annoying.

She isn't pointed in her legal ideas. Her general statements about law and justice sound altogether routine.

She avoids debate.  Note what she said in response to one senator who cited a supporter terming her a "legal progressive." She denied knowing even what that term "means." Does anybody here buy that? When pushed, she declared that people should really be able to pick their own labels for themselves.  That's a sentiment one might hear in a middle-school classroom.

Finally, her idealism of the courts is hard to take. At certain moments, especially when defending Justice Marshall, she hailed the courts as the...

It was in 1991, I think, an American Studies regional meeting at San Jose State.  I was in my second year as an assistant professor at Emory and had never even considered giving a conference paper while still in grad school or as a lecturer (I spent a year after the Ph.D. teaching survey courses containing 300 to 450 students looking to fulfill a gen-ed requirement). In fact, I still didn't feel qualified to do so at age 31 with three semesters of faculty experience behind me. To stand before 20 scholars and merit their attention for 20 minutes required a few more years of teaching and study, I assumed. Take the podium before you had acquired the composure and expertise that comes from many years of homework and you were ripe for humiliation.

But a senior colleague had noticed no conference papers on my C.V. and frowned. Others my age were piling up appearances. I was told of one peer...

Last week, Education Week issued its Graduation by the Numbers issue in which it counts the most recent high school graduation figures.  The data are sobering.

The summary looks at the class of 2007, which is the most recent national data available.

Overall, the graduation rate stands at 68.8 percent.  That's a drop of .4 percent from the class of 2006 (which declined slightly from 2005).  The drop of .4 percent amounts to 11,000 fewer diplomas for the year.

Racial and gender gaps continued, distressingly so.

The rate of girls graduating was several percentage points higher than the rate of boys graduating, 72.9 percent to 66 percent.

By race:

The rate of Asians stands at 80.7 percent.

Whites are at 76.6 percent.

Hispanics at 55.5 percent.

Blacks at 53.7 percent.

American Indian at 50.7 percent.

Another thing the data reveal is that the low gradaution rates are...