Category: Department

When Is Competition a Positive Force?

Is competition good?

By Claire Potter (The New School)

Yesterday morning I was gliding down the river in my single scull. I was ten to fifteen minutes from the dock, workout complete, leg muscles burning slightly, warming down and starting to think about the rest of the day. After I navigated the last turn, a long bend that can make you or break you in the annual 3.5 mile race our rowing club hosts in October, it would be a straight shot back to the boat house.

Then I noticed another sculler on my port side: I was about a half length ahead. Continue reading “When Is Competition a Positive Force?”

Are Elite Colleges Worth It?

Who gets to be on top?

By Pamela Haag

Kurt Vonnegut’s son, Mark, wrote in his memoir The Eden Express that the best thing about graduating from college is that you can say what a pile of crap college is and “no one can accuse you of sour grapes.”

Mark attended Swarthmore College. I did too, graduating in 1988. I got a Ph.D. from Yale seven years later. My education might brand me as an “elite” today—the word has become an insult. But since I didn’t come from privilege, money, power, or connections, my story is a variation of what we used to celebrate, not ridicule, as upward mobility.

In my high school, I was one of a few Continue reading “Are Elite Colleges Worth It?”

Colleges Should Teach Intellectual Virtues

What should colleges teach?

By Barry Schwartz and Kenneth Sharpe (Swarthmore)

Look at what colleges state as their aims, and you’ll find a predictable list: Teach students how to think critically and analytically; teach them how to write and calculate; teach them the skills of their discipline. As important as such goals are, another fundamental goal is largely being neglected—developing the intellectual virtues they need to be good students, and good citizens.

Some academics may cringe at being charged with the task of developing virtue, believing that it’s a job for others—especially when there is so little agreement about what “virtue” even means in a pluralistic society like ours. They are mistaken. In fact, we often encourage such development—if a bit unreflectively. We would do much better to take the time to think through what the central intellectual virtues are, why they are so important, and how they should be integrated into our curricula: Continue reading “Colleges Should Teach Intellectual Virtues”

Next Time, Fail Better

How can you become a better learner?

By Paula M. Krebs (Wheaton)

Humanities students should be more like computer-science students.

I decided that as I sat in on a colleague’s computer-science course during the beginning of this, my last, semester in the classroom. I am moving into administration full time, and I figured that this was my last chance to learn some of the cool new digital-humanities stuff I’ve been reading about. What eventually drove me out of the class (which I was enjoying tremendously) was the time commitment: The work of coding, I discovered, was an endless round of failure, failure, failure before eventual success. Computer-science students are used to failing. They do it all the time. It’s built into the process, and they take it in stride. Continue reading “Next Time, Fail Better”

Poverty Is A Shortage Of Money

What have you learned about life?

by Larry Schall (Oglethorpe)

Ten years ago, Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a book called Nickel and Dimed. She brought home in stark detail how hard it is for a family to break out of poverty. I recall one story about something as common as gathering the funds needed to put down a security deposit on an apartment while working a minimum wage job. First month, last month and a deposit on a $500 a month apartment while taking home $5 an hour. Do the math. One would have to save every cent you earned for 300 hours of work — seven and one-half weeks of work — to accumulate sufficient funds. Let’s go crazy and suggest your job is paying you twice that rate. It would take only a month of work while you spent absolutely no money on food, clothes or rent. Hallelujah. God forbid any one in your family needs health care, which your employer does not provide. I think Nickel and Dimed is in something like its tenth printing. It’s not a long book and it’s absolutely worth the read. Continue reading “Poverty Is A Shortage Of Money”

There’s More Than One Way to Defend Your Country

How should higher education be funded?

By Joseph R. Urgo  (St. Mary’s – Maryland)

I remember receiving my college financial-aid package in 1974, and among the grant and work-study information was a letter about my eligibility for a National Defense Student Loan. I don’t remember what the letter said, but I do remember stopping cold. What did my acceptance to a residential liberal-arts college have to do with national defense? Continue reading “There’s More Than One Way to Defend Your Country”

Stop Telling Students to Study for Exams

Are students learning the best way?

By David Jaffee (North Florida)

Among the problems on college campuses today are that students study for exams and faculty encourage them to do so.

I expect that many faculty members will be appalled by this assertion and regard it as a form of academic heresy. If anything, they would argue, students don’t study enough for exams; if they did, the educational system would produce better results. But this simple and familiar phrase—”study for exams”—which is widely regarded as a sign of responsible academic practice, actually encourages student behaviors and dispositions that work against the larger purpose of human intellectual development and learning. Rather than telling students to study for exams, we should be telling them to study for learning and understanding. Continue reading “Stop Telling Students to Study for Exams”

Anyone for Summer Camp?

Are students learning the best way?

By Ilan Stavans (Amherst)

Middle age is a strange place. The past is set. It has a taste. But the future is shorter than before. How to navigate it without repeating what we’ve done? How to keep passion alive?

I didn’t set out to be a teacher. My dreams were elsewhere. Yet teaching is what I’ve been doing for the past 20 years. Other than the time I’ve spent in my home, I haven’t been anywhere as frequently as in the classroom, with people increasingly younger than me. I often ask myself: Is it possible to discuss a book I know by heart, like One Hundred Years of Solitude, without sounding trite? Continue reading “Anyone for Summer Camp?”

Hum Along: Or, How I Took Up Guitar and Became a Poet

What have you learned about life?

by David Baker (Denison)

Bob and Carol Crawford lived four houses down from us, on East Circle Drive, in Jefferson City, Missouri.  Right in the middle of their tiny trimmed yard was the white-brick house, so heavily paneled and carpeted inside that, sitting there one summer afternoon, I felt like I’d been plunked into a Kleenex box.  But when Mr. Crawford—Bob—leaned over to slip me a new half-dollar, silver as a tooth, I knew I was destined to play music for the rest of my life.  It was 1966.  I had lugged my plum-red Gibson Melody Maker guitar and my amp, the size of a boot box, down to Crawford’s for my first professional performance.  I played two songs—some scaly melody out of Mel Bay #2 or #3 and “Wildwood Flower” (or “The Groovy Grubworm,” as one guitar book called it).  I no longer own the amp or guitar, but I still have that coin. Continue reading “Hum Along: Or, How I Took Up Guitar and Became a Poet”

The Professor Was a Prison Guard

How does college relate to the real world?

By Jeffrey J. Williams (Carnegie Mellon)

When I was 20, I left college and took a job in a prison. I went from reading the great books as a Columbia University undergraduate to locking doors and counting inmates as a New York State correction officer. Since I’m an English professor now, people never entirely believe me when the issue comes up, probably because of the horn-rimmed glasses and felicitous implementation of Latinate words. I fancied I’d be like George Orwell, who took a job as an Imperial Police officer in Burma and wrote about it in “Shooting an Elephant.” I thought I’d go “up the river” to the “big house” and write “Shooting an Inmate” or some such thing. It didn’t quite happen that way, although as a professor, I’ve worked 14 of 16 years in state institutions. Continue reading “The Professor Was a Prison Guard”