The Users of the University
Next time you hear a pundit say that to preserve America’s competitiveness or dynamism, we must replace the liberal arts with something more “practical,” take a second to check what they studied. {…}
The Rise and Fall of the American Linguistic Empire
Lawrence Summers’s celebration of the global reach of English can only be read as an unabashed apology for American empire. By even the most strategically hard-headed criteria, however, cadres drawn from a monolingual American elite are a poor choice as ambassadors of U.S. interests. {…}
Grad Students to the Barricades
If graduate students like myself do not want to come into work one day to find ourselves replaced by video lectures delivered by “information curators,” we will have to learn to take collective action. {…}
The Corporatization of Higher Education
It is not just the economic climate in which our colleges and universities find themselves that determines what they charge and how they operate; it is their increasing corporatization. {…}
From Master Plan to No Plan: The Slow Death of Public Higher Education
When Mitt Romney urges Americans to “get as much education as they can afford,” or when university administrators call the police as their first response to student protest, it’s Ronald Reagan’s playbook they’re working from. {…}
Universities and the Urban Growth Machine
Why has the price tag of an American college degree skyrocketed (500 percent in the public sector since 1985) in recent decades? {…}
When Universities Go Abroad: NYU in Abu Dhabi
Scores of American universities have opened campuses abroad, New York University, where I teach, among them. (Others include Georgetown in Qatar, Yale in Singapore, Columbia in Jordan, and Duke in China.) Criticism and debate surround these developments, but have been … {…}
Introduction
If U.S. higher education is in crisis, as a spate of recent books and articles would have it, then it’s a strange crisis. Outside the anti-intellectual Right, and even inside it when its writers forget themselves, we hear that advanced … {…}
Second-Chance Collegians: Inside the Remedial Classroom
There is a lot of attention being given these days to remediation in higher education. “Failure to Launch,” reads one representative headline, “Community College Students Can’t Meet Higher Goals.” The numbers vary but, on average, suggest that about 35 percent … {…}
With Friends Like These…Who Will Defend Liberal Education?
Like free markets and Christianity, liberal education in the United States has more noisy claimants than true friends. Lately, it’s conservatives who’ve been crying hosanna to the humanities and funding campus institutes that conscript classic texts into training future Platonic … {…}
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Belabored Podcast #7: Social Arsonists· May 24, 2013 ·
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Traversing the U.S. Food System: An Interview with Tracie McMillan· May 22, 2013 ·
