First Days – Planned and Unplanned

The start of a fall semester at college, like the beginning of a lengthy journey, is inherently exciting. New people, new knowledge, new work, and all manner of new experiences beckon. Taking a course is a jump to the future. Enrolling in a degree program is an even greater investment in the future, a projected possibility of a…

Cheerfully Defending the Status Quo

Oh, to be so right and yet so wrong. . . . How College Works, a new book by Daniel F. Chambliss and Christopher G. Takacs, is the product of nearly a decade of research on students at Hamilton College. The authors – Chambliss is a professor of sociology at Hamilton and Takacs is a…

Bringing a Book to a Bar Fight

The gifts of an academic mind are curiosity and diligence. Wonderful traits, they give us discoveries, innovation, and the ability to see the familiar anew. Unfortunately, their side effect is an inherent difficulty with clarity and concision. Higher education is notoriously bad at explaining itself and a common understandings of shared terms lacking. “And why…

Bits, Bytes, Blackboard and the University

Blackboard, Inc. is a massively successful academic technology company. Best known for its learning management system, Blackboard was purchased by a private equity firm in 2011. A new CEO, Jay Bhatt, took the helm in late 2012. Under his leadership Blackboard has been rethinking its mission, products, and strategy. I attended Blackboard World 2014 this…

Learning And Relearning

After a part of his lung was removed to save him from an invasive melanoma, Roger H. Martin, president of Randolph-Macon College, decided to take a sabbatical and return to college as a student. His memoir, Racing Odysseus: A College President Becomes a Freshman Again, recounts his semester at St. John’s College, a private institution committed to…

Ravitch’s World

Diane Ravitch is a force of nature and social media. Relentlessly energetic, this scholar of K-12 education is at the heart of a movement and counter-reformation in our school system. Ravitch’s aim is no less than to reshape the national debate on education. In Reign of Error, Ravitch employs her formidable polemical skills to discuss four…

Degrees of Inequality and the Failed Policyscape of Financial Aid

A consistent theme in American discourse today is that higher education is in crisis. The common refrain is that a college education is not worth the cost, with spiraling tuition costs pricing college out of the reach of middle class Americans and the result neither relevant or able to compensate for student debt. But what…