Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars (NAS), is a skilled writer with a quick wit. His latest article on American higher education, “Helium, Part 2,” published in The Chronicle of Higher Education, deftly weaves together a variety of the favorite targets of the NAS—government funding of higher education, lack of “rigor” in colleges, President Obama, the decline of “college curricula rooted in the civilization that has sustained the university for more than a millennium,” radicalized college faculties, complacent college administrators, the failure of traditional institutions to embrace online instruction—into a single and supremely self-assured narrative of imminent collapse.

Maybe Dr. Wood is right about all of this. I hope not, but then, as he would be quick to point out, I am, as the president of a liberal-arts college, deeply invested in…

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The New York Times Education Life section featured a fascinating story on Sunday about the “New Community College,” an experiment within the City University of New York (CUNY) to reinvent two-year schools with more resources and a higher degree of paternalism.  This mixture has proven quite successful in some K-12 charter schools, most notably the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP), so the New Community College approach is being closely watched by national observers. As noted in the article, by Richard Perez-Pena, the New Community College, set to open next month, is nothing less than “a multimillion dollar experiment in how to fix what ails community colleges.”

Reading the article, I was of two minds – hopeful that the new approach will work better than most community colleges do, but also bothered by the premise that students from low-income households are unlikely to be…

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As promised, today’s post will follow up on my last by offering a brief context that explains the NCAA’s traditional jurisdiction and how it typically behaves. Before the NCAA handed down its sanctions against Penn State this week, college football fans and sportscasters alike were speculating that they would administer the “death penalty,” that is, cancel the team’s entire 2012 season of play. Let’s look at the most infamous time that phrase was invoked and that penalty was imposed by the NCAA: the investigation of Southern Methodist University’s football program, which revealed that it routinely secretly paid players from the mid-1970s through 1986 when the investigation concluded and the 1987 season was canceled.

First, the NCAA’s regulations are exhaustive, though they center on two fundamental principles: College players are to remain amateurs and are to act as…

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Well, it’s impossible to resist weighing in on the NCAA’s sanctions of Penn State’s football program, handed down on Monday. It was the lead story in today’s Chronicle and it’s the elephant in the room even for those academics who don’t care about intercollegiate sports. My verdict on the sanctions echoes my opinions of the Sandusky case, about which I wrote last month, but I’m even more surprised and outraged by what the NCAA decided to do. In short, they treated a football program as if it were a person, and handed in a melodramatic, grandstanding assortment of punishments that Yahoo sports writer Dan Wetzel rightly calls “worse than death.”

Let me first try to put the punishments in context and then provide some history to explain why the NCAA’s decision is so unprecedented and so clearly media driven. First, the penalties: 1) a $60-million dollar fine—I have …

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We are not the first to suggest that enrolling for college classes has a lot in common with signing up for a gym membership. The promise of both types of investment is that you will emerge from them a changed person. The gym provides an opportunity for you to build muscles, slim down, or become more fit; the college offers an environment where you can learn facts and theories, or learn how to do certain things, or perhaps change in deeper ways, in values or in outlook or in the range of people you know.

But as many gym members who sign up in response to a New Year’s resolution know, just forking over the cash won’t make your mirror image look any different three months later. And registering for classes won’t by itself make you smarter or more learned or better able to solve problems. Both types of enterprises offer you the opportunity to transform yourself, in smaller or larger…

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I’m grateful to Bruce Henderson for writing a terrific article in the Chronicle on June 11, “Just Because We’re Not Publishing Doesn’t Mean We’re Not Working.” The article concludes with a nod to Ernest Boyer, who more than twenty years ago argued that teaching should be redefined as scholarship, an argument only to be met with positive lip service and no policy changes that enacted his recommendations. Year after year, administrators have praised Boyer and excellence in teaching in general, but have rewarded scholarly publication because it’s tangible and quantifiable. I’ve always championed Boyer’s position, but have been at a loss to recommend to administrators a clear way to put it into place.

Henderson comes up with an ingenious idea: a professor of psychology at a non-research university (Western Carolina U.), he coins the term “consumatory scholarship.” He…

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“Why does a stationary skater remain stationary?” That’s a question that Lou Bloomfield asks his students in the opening lecture of “Physics 1050: How Things Work,” which he has taught at the University of Virginia for 21 years.

Many physics students think they understand inertia. But they might not actually understand how profound inertia is unless we see it in … uh, inaction.

So Lou stands up on one of those huge lab tables that anchor science lecture halls and places a smaller table on top. On that table he places a crimson tablecloth, a plate, a glass of wine, and a flower vase. Then he whisks the table cloth out from under the items, leaving them intact. It’s one of his simpler demonstrations, but it frames and illustrates inertia better than any diagram or sentence ever could. Students never forget that trick.

Lou is an outstanding professor in every sense. His…

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