Academia
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When I was in high school and thinking about college, I thought of the admissions process as a test which I might or might not pass, a door whose default position was closed and which was only opened to those who met certain standards. The college, in my mind, was not offering to accept me;
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I am beginning to accept the fact that there are simply too many books for me to read and too many recordings for me to hear in the amount of time I have left to live, even stretching my potential longevity as far as it can be stretched. I'm finding this surprisingly difficult. It was
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Francesca Murphy has written a fascinating piece for First Things about the push for revision of the curriculum to make it more "goal-oriented." Like most bits of educational jargon, the phrase seems vague and harmless on its face, but in fact means, for those who are in the trade, something more specific. In this case it
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Coincidentally, in relation to our discussion of the situation of the humanities in contemporary education, this piece on that very subject appears in The New Criterion. It's by Mark Bauerlein, a professor of English at Emory. He argues–if I may allow myself an over-simplified summary–that the academics who should be fighting to preserve the place of the humanities,
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It's a commonly heard question among college and university faculty. Well, here's one answer. I do find it pretty amusing that it's a "diversity coordinator."
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From Donald Kagan's farewell speech upon his retirement from Yale: Whatever the formal religious attachments of our students may be, I find that a firm belief in the traditional values and the ability to understand and the willingness to defend them are rare. Still rarer is an informed understanding of the traditions and institutions of
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Remember the Objective Room from C.S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength, an environment designed to undermine or destroy a person's natural responses to disorienting or repellent things? This story made me think of it: as part of a university (!) classroom exercise students were told to write the name of Jesus on a piece of paper
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I have been trying to write something about this for more than a week now, but there's so much I could say about it that I haven't been able to get started in the brief snatches of time I've had available. So I'm going to give up and just point you elsewhere. The topic is
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…that when someone describes himself as an ethicist you should run away? Especially if he refers to "the ball and chain of our squeamishness and irrationality." "expert in practical ethics" indeed.
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…is always already participating in the poetics of the gendered body. This is fun.
Light On Dark Water 