Yesterday The New York Times ran a piece by Tamar Lewin reporting that major universities were hiring consultants (like Bain & Company) to help them reduce redundancy and administrative cost, just as “many executives in private industry do.” That should come as no surprise, and in principle there is nothing wrong with hiring management consultants, although considering what large businesses our major research universities are these days, it is surprising that that they are in such urgent need of outside management expertise. After all, The Chronicle has just published its list of the salaries of the highest paid...

I suppose that all of us who have been teaching have the reaction that our students are growing younger as we age. I still have to remind myself that my current students had not yet been born at the time that the “recent” events I am teaching about took place.

Initially it was Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima, then the Korean War, then the assassination of JFK, then the Vietnam War that they could not recall. Today it is the fall of the Wall in Berlin in 1989, exactly 20 years ago. For those of us who were adults at that time, the impact of those soft revolutions was tremendous, seeming to bring the cold war to an end. For undergraduates born in that year, of course, 1989 is simply another date in ancient history.

But the year is both close...

I can’t stop thinking about teacher training. I recently posted on Arne Duncan’s blistering critique of schools of education, admitting that university-based teacher training suffers from long-standing deficiencies -- one of which is our inability to recruit the best undergraduates into schools of education. Last Monday on the New York Times op-ed page, Susan Engel, the director of the teaching program at Williams College argued that since the universities are uninterested (or incompetent) to attract their best student into education careers, it is time “to get the best colleges to throw themselves into the fray.” Ms. Engel wants college-based teacher training programs to be highly selective,...

This sounds like an unpromising subject for a photo exhibition, but in fact the Bernstein Gallery of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton is currently showing a deeply impressive set of images under the title of “Intended Consequences: Rwandan Children Born of Rape.” The photography was done by the Israeli-American photojournalist Jonathan Torgovnik while on assignment for Newsweek magazine.

The exhibition is one of a series devoted to art that comments on public policy problems that the gallery curator, Kate Somers, and I (as chair of the faculty committee on the Gallery) arrange in a space adjacent to the School’s classrooms. The idea is that our students -- majoring in public policy -- should consider the ways that...

I was saddened to read the obit on Ted Sizer in the Washington Post last Thursday. Ted was, for me, the wisest and most humane of the education reformers of my generation. I came to know Ted in graduate school at Harvard, where we were both students of a then very young Bernard Bailyn. Ted was in the Education School and I was in the History Department, but we were both historians at a time when Bailyn was explicating the social embededness of schooling. 

Ted Sizer took this insight and ran with it for his whole career. He was then, and until his death, among the most thoughtful of men -- one of...

Both educators and politicians have been bashing schools of education for the past couple of decades, complaining that ed schools are not doing an effective job of preparing new teachers for the classroom. We have had innumerable reports detailing what is wrong with teacher training, despite serious and continuing efforts to remedy the problem. Now Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has entered the fray with a couple of attention-getting speeches critical of colleges of education.

Two weeks ago at the University of Virginia he called ed schools “the neglected stepchild” of higher education, as Kelly Field reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Then he

I spent the last couple of days at a Princeton conference organized by Jim Axtell and John Cooper on “new approaches to the educational legacy of Woodrow Wilson.” That will sound to some as a pretty unpromising topic for a conference, but in fact it was quite lively and altogether relevant for anyone concerned with the state of undergraduate education in this country. 

The conference dealt frankly with  problems that confounded Wilson, such as race and gender, two of the challenges that Wilson simply could not handle in a manner acceptable to us today. But what most interested, and surprised, me was the extent to which Wilson the college president anticipated much of what has turned out to be essential to the best in modern liberal education....

This week The Chronicle published a short piece promoting a book that will shortly be published by the Princeton University Press with the sexy title, Educating Scholars: Doctoral Education in the Humanities. 

The book is based on the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s decade-long Graduate Education Initiative, which invested $85-million in 54 humanities departments at 10 universities “to improve the structure, organization, and financial support of their Ph.D. programs.” The key reason for this massive Mellon investment in...

David Glenn’s October 7 article in The Chronicle tells the sad but familiar story of a member of the Congress who would like to halt federal funding of social science research, in this case by eliminating the political-science category of funding at the National Science Foundation. The villain this time is Senator Tom Coburn, the Oklahoma physician renowned on the Hill as “Dr. No” for his attempts to kill appropriations bills. But, as Glenn points out, Sen. Hutchison of Texas introduced a bill to kill most federal social science spending in 2006, and there have been other assaults on federal support of social science in recent years.

In fact, of course, the feds provide only marginal support for social science research, most of it coming through...

I suspect that most faculty members do not spend much time worrying about the superb museums that grace so many of our campuses. The exceptions are probably the art historians whose institutions support art museums, the ethnographers and archaeologists whose universities maintain anthropological-archaeological museums, and the small number of scientists who research in local repositories of natural-history specimens. 

I can’t speak for the scientists, though I suspect that fewer and fewer natural scientists do their research on museum specimens these days, but I am pretty sure that relatively few anthropologists any longer base their ethnographic research on the sorts of cultural objects that constitute the major portion of collections of university anthropological museums. There are...