A few months back in the opening essay of First Things (Aug/Sept 2011), editor R.R. Reno opened with an assertion that would strike most academics as backwards.  “But as a culture,” he stated, “liberalism has become insular and narrow-minded.  It lacks the capacity for the generous appreciation of other points of view needed in a pluralistic society.  That capacity is more likely to be found today among conservatives, particularly religious conservatives.”

To the liberal intelligentsia, of course, Reno should transpose his terms.  Conservatives are open-minded and liberals aren’t?  C’mon.  This is to reverse one of liberalism’s central claims, indeed, one of the things that sharply distinguishes a liberal from a conservative (and ennobles the former).  Liberalism is all about receptive minds and inclusive societies.  Conservativism is about restriction and denial. …

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Much of the commentary on the firing of Naomi Riley from The Chronicle has focused on the substance in her original post.  The main charge against her is that she condemned a field without even reading the evidence and that her follow-up was glib and evasive.  The main charge against the respondents is that they are mouthpieces of political correctness tossing irresponsible, ad hominem charges of racism.

The substance of Riley’s charges is an empirical matter that may be settled through, for instance, a general review of the dissertations in black studies for the last five years.  That kind of study, however, if it came up with a negative evaluation, would likely provoke the same ire even if it offered a careful summary of the theses.  That’s why the emotional and rhetorical side of the reaction is a topic in itself.  They exceed the thing that prompted them.  The…

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The most significant element in the controversy surrounding Naomi Riley’s blog posting is the disproportionate nature of the responses.  Consider the following.

The Northwestern faculty letter includes this sentence: “To write such disparaging comments about young scholars and their expressions of intellectual curiosity is cowardly, uninformed, irresponsible, repugnant, and contrary to the mission of higher education.”

Northwestern graduate students weigh in with a defense that offers these remarks : “Instead of taking her own advice given to her readers to ‘just read the dissertations,’ Riley displays breathtaking arrogance and gutless anti-intellectualism by drawing such severe conclusions about our work and African-American studies as a whole based on four or five sentence synopses of our dissertation projects. . . . One can only assume that in a bid to not be…

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Alsop (right) with journalist Turner Catledge (photo from Wikipedia)

In the Wall Street Journal last week, Terry Teachout tells a story that might serve as a sober parable for our time.  It’s about Joseph Alsop, a prominent political columnist during the 50s and 60s, about whom a play has just opened (starring John Lithgow–see review here).  Noting Alsop’s personal condition as a “closeted homosexual,” Teachout recalls one disturbing episode in his life, “something that happened to Mr. Alsop when he visited Moscow in 1957, at the height of the Cold War.”

“It seems that he picked up a young man at a party and spent the night with him,” Teachout writes, “not knowing that the fellow in question was a KGB operative and that he had inadvertently stumbled into what is known to intelligence agents as a…

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Jonathan Haidt’s research and writings have received ample notice in recent months, including this profile in The Chronicle, this upcoming panel at American Enterprise Institute, and this article by Haidt in Reason Magazine.  One reason is that Haidt and colleagues have designed studies that attempt to measure differences between conservatives and liberals, and the results have been newsworthy.

Among his premises is the identification of six pairings of “moral concerns,” namely, care/harm, fairness/cheating, liberty/oppression, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation.  One of the applications of those pairings is a study that Haidt describes in Reason this way:

“In a study I conducted with colleagues Jesse Graham and Brian Nosek, we tested how well liberals and con­servatives could understand each other. We asked more than 2,000 American visitors to fill…

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Here is an interesting study that came out a few days ago.  Using “biometric belts” and glasses with cameras inside, it followed 30 people, some of them digital natives and some digital immigrants, for 300 nonworking hours and counted their media habits.  The natives, it turned out, switch media platforms 27 times per hour.  (The rate was 35 percent higher than immigrants’ rate.)

The quick changes younger people make in leisure time worries advertisers because advertisers need eyes and ears to stay in one place in order to make their marketing effective.  That’s the focus here.  But, of course, educators have a different concern.  If students move so quickly from one medium to another, if a few seconds of boredom send them running for stimulation elsewhere, they have a heckuva time reading chapters in textbooks, finishing The Scarlet Letter, writing the research paper, and other…

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It is increasingly urgent and necessary that someone in the White House, or a high figure in the Democratic Party, or, perhaps best, an ex-President remind President Obama that he is the president of the entire United States and every citizen in them.  For his entire term, every president is the leader of those who voted for him and those who didn’t, those who like him and those who despise him.  This is one of the toughest tests of leadership, that is, the ability to lead those who disagree with your policies and dislike your character, but it’s part of the job nonetheless.

Of course, the burden of leadership conflicts with the burden of campaigning, and it has always put a sitting president in a delicate position in the last year of his first term.  He has to serve as president for all, and yet to win reelection he has to define himself against an opposition.  The temptation is …

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I teach freshman composition nearly every semester, and I’m changing my assignments.  I require 25 or so pages of finished, edited essay writing for the course to go along with 10 or 12 one-page homework exercises (such as: “Why are books dangerous in Montag’s society?”).  Usually, the essay requirement involves three or four papers that have a thesis and an argument, with lots of analysis.  Sometimes, though, I’ve tried short papers now and then, 2-page assignments that require one simple method: summarize all or part of an assigned reading.

From now on, my syllabus will require no research papers, no analytical tasks, no thesis, no argument, no conclusion.  No critical thinking and no higher-order thinking skills.  Instead, the semester will run up 14 two-page summaries (plus the homework exercises).  When we read portions of Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid, Divine Comedy, and…

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How often do works of genius happen in the humanities fields?  Not works of intelligent, careful scholarship, which appear every year, but works that alter basic assumptions and practices, that change thinking.  These are the works that you can’t ignore if they touch upon your expertise, the ideas and methods that seem to mark a division of pre- and post-, as in literary criticism before Derrida and after.

In my area of literary studies, genuinely original and incisive books and essays come along infrequently–once a decade or so is my impression.  Literary studies moves forward with some 70,000 items of scholarship published every year, but  the arrival of the radically or sweepingly new, which takes the form of a theory more than that of a discovery, is altogether rare.  The humanities move slowly, 99.99 percent of its research labor being accretive or summary or contributory, …

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(Photo by Flickr CC user Mark Samsom)

The findings of an important study came out last week, and they were reported in The New York Times here.  A pilot program conducted by the NYC Education Department and implemented in city elementary schools, funded by a private charity and started by school chief Joel Klein in 2008, compared reading achievement for two sets of students, those instructed in the “balanced literacy” method, and those instructed in the Core Knowledge curriculum.

The results were striking, with the Core Knowledge group performing significantly higher on reading comprehension than the balanced literacy group.  The study added examinations of the students’ knowledge in social studies and science, and here, too, Core Knowledge produced significantly higher outcomes.  (The inclusion of social…

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More than 10 years ago, I decided to stop teaching graduate courses in English at Emory University.  The reasons were:

• the job market for Ph.D.’s in English was so bad that I couldn’t see participating in the system any longer;

• the steady prestige decline of the humanities at research institutions called for more faculty members to bolster their disciplines by taking on freshman and sophomore courses;

• a growing disenchantment with the research productivity agenda in the humanities.

An article in The Chronicle by Robin Wilson is forcing others to do the same.  It recounts declines in enrollment in graduate programs in the humanities at several campuses, including Emory (the  history department).  It offers three reasons for the cuts:

“Some of that is the result of an extra push to get longtime graduate students to finish up and get out the door. But…

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I have a three-strikes rule.  In public places, I let two obscenities pass by, and if a third one comes along, I say, “Watch your language, please.”   The f-word, the b-word, a-word, the c-word, and the sl-word all count.  I ride the bus all the time (I don’t own a car), and it seems like a week doesn’t go by that I don’t have to step into the aisle, lean over, and make someone stop.  Almost every time, I get a quick “Sorry” or just a flat stare (which is fine), and the language does stop.  I don’t care what people say in private, and I’m guilty myself at home now and then, but the public space is different.

That goes for the airwaves, too, and cultural conservatives should be the first to censure Rush Limbaugh for his tirade.  One central tenet of cultural conservatism is that norms of decency have eroded—think Moynihan’s “defining deviancy downward”…

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Laurie Essig’s post on illegitimacy raises an important point, one with far-reaching implications for social science research. Her point is that the widespread concern over illegitimacy is misplaced, specifically, that it, at first, attributed the (supposed) harmful effects of illegitimacy to racial characteristics, but in recent years has shifted the blame to class/income characteristics.  This is an important question and a serious charge, one ultimately settled by empirical inquiry.

To get to that resolution, though, Laurie frames the issue so polemically, and relies so much on insinuation and generalization and partial evidence, that we never reach a reliable and objective conclusion.  Note how the post opens:

“There has long been a lot of hysteria among US elites about children born ‘out of wedlock.’ Every since the 1965 Moynihan Report’s claim that black families …

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The phrase has become a watchword in liberal thinking in the last year, from President Obama’s speeches to Todd Gitlin’s entry this week at Brainstorm.  It stands as the colloquial encapsulation of a capitalist survival-of-the-fittest system that runs on greed and heartlessness.  The opposite is, precisely, state policies that help the unfortunate and disadvantaged.

But “you’re on your own” isn’t necessarily a statement of cruelty.  Given a little background in American classics, we can open it to the opposite interpretation.  In this version, which comes out of classical liberalism (which is closer to today’s libertarian conservatism than to today’s liberalism), to be on your own is to be freed from social and biological ties of fate, as well as state restrictions.  It isn’t an abandonment of people, but rather an empowerment of them.  People are not forever defined by class or…

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…Only 58 percent of students starting their first year of higher education last year believe that there is a good chance they will be satisfied with their college.

That’s a mighty disappointing rate of expectation.  Where’s the optimism?  They have applied and won admission.  High school is over, a new chapter of life has begun, new friends and new freedoms, the world is all before them . . . and yet, more than two out of five have meager hopes.

That’s just one illuminating result of the 2011 American Freshman Survey, which last year got 204,000 entering students to answer a lengthy questionnaire on background, habits, and ambitions.  More significant findings:

• While in their last year of high school, 88.9 percent of respondents “frequently” or “occasionally” studied with other students.  That high rate is a measure of two things: one, the extension of teen social…

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When I was in 7th Grade, I first heard the terms “definite article” and “indefinite article”–or rather, “l’article indefini” and “l’article defini.”  It was in the first French class I took.  I hadn’t learned about articles in English Language Arts courses in elementary school, and when I did diagrams of sentences and other grammar exercises in English in 7th and 8th Grade, the basics didn’t stick as well as they did in French class, which I took for the next five years and in college as well.

There’s a lesson.  Foreign language study helps with the understanding of native language.  It also deepens one’s sense of philology, etymology, phonetics, and idiomatic, slang, and formalized expression in general.  To pinpoint a curious word in a text under study in a college literature class such as “deliberate” or “fabulous” and ask the students, “What is the etymology of that word?” a…

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Some miscellaneous news reports with implications for higher ed–

The Wall Street Journal reports today on a study by Stanford researchers showing a strong correlation between media multitasking and social and emotional development for pre-teen girls.  The study by Clifford Nass and Roy Pea found that the more the subjects (sample size 3,461) watched videos, emailed, texted, etc., the more they experienced “low social confidence, not feeling normal, having more friends whom parents perceive as poor influences, and even sleeping less.”  It’s only a correlation, the authors warn, but they proceed to identify a common and simple antidote: face time.  The direct encounter with faces, they say, teaches young girls to develop social awareness, to learn body language, to read other people’s facial expressions.  Face-to-face communication is “just enormously important,” Nass asserts….

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Here is a story in the New York Times about an issue in higher education writing assignments.  It begins with Duke professor Cathy Davidson’s aim “to eradicate the term paper and replace it with the blog.”  To Cathy, the long research paper is a “mechanistic” practice that “is a real disincentive to creative but untrained writers.”

Others weigh in and defend the term paper, such as Douglas Reeves, founder of Harcourt’s Leadership and Learning Center, who says,

“Writing term papers is a dying art, but those who do write them have a dramatic leg up in terms of critical thinking, argumentation and the sort of expression required not only in college, but in the job market.  It doesn’t mean there aren’t interesting blogs. But nobody would conflate interesting writing with premise, evidence, argument and conclusion.”

And Will Fitzhugh of the Concord Review, who…

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Here is a story in the New York Times about a case that may have far-reaching implications for higher education.  It could also form a significant chapter in the chronicle of political bias in higher education, an issue that has diminished in recent years (for various reasons).

The Times piece opens: “Teresa R. Wagner is a conservative Republican who wants to teach law. Her politics may have hurt her career.”  Wagner alleges that the University of Iowa Law School rejected her job application because of her politics, which are vocally social conservative.  The story quotes a 2007 letter from the associate dean to the dean stating, ““Frankly, one thing that worries me is that some people may be opposed to Teresa serving in any role, in part at least because they so despise her politics (and especially her activism about it).”

The latest episode is this: “Late last month, a…

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A GUEST POST BY DANIEL DECKNER

[Daniel Deckner is a German graduate student of literature at the Philipps-Universität Marburg and is currently enrolled as a visiting student at the University of Alberta.]

Mark Bauerlein’s essay “The Research Bust” poses questions about productivity policies in literary studies at research universities, but before we revise policies, we need to ask a fundamental question about the purpose and focus of literary research.

How are we supposed to select worthwhile subjects for our research if we haven’t determined the role that literature plays in people’s lives? I believe that the lack of such knowledge is one of the main reasons for the meager impact of literary scholarship. The real problem with this scholarship is not that its reception is meager within its own field, but that its reception anywhere else is virtually nonexistent….

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