Judith Stein’s Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies makes for depressing reading. Her narrative counters Whiggish histories of continuous progress with a sobering account of economic decline. It is a chronicle of poor decisions, written from the vantage point of a post-industrial United States with fractious politics and a…
Making Sense of How We Lived, When We Lived
Truly knotty complicated questions rarely fall into tidy categories. This fundamental truth challenges deans, departments, faculty and students, for disciplines only go so far and then it is necessary to find different perspectives. Marjorie Garber is a literary scholar who has consistently and successfully strayed beyond English. She has served as Director of the Humanities Center…
Cities, Sustainability, and Schools – An Educated Guess About an Urban Future
To get a really clear view of the uneasy tension between what makes us feel good and what makes ecological sense, tour residential college campuses. Most likely you will need a car to reach the college of your choice, and once you arrive, you probably will have to hunt for the appropriate parking lot in…
Animal Studies and Ody’s Journey
I grew up with dogs, cats and fish. I rode horses. My mother’s relatives in Ohio had farms. I like animals, and for whatever reason, most animals seem to like me. My first job as a teenager was working as a kennel assistant in a local animal hospital. I loved it and it was extraordinarily good…
On Shakespeare and Stoppard, on Reading and Recommending
Reading combines pleasure and utility, and does so elegantly. Whether curled up in a book or poring over a tome, thoughtful reading affords an extraordinary opportunity to engage while disengaging, to travel while staying still, and to connect while remaining alone. The gift of a book and the power of a thoughtful recommendation is much…
A Tale of Two Systems
The nation is dependent upon its public higher education systems to educate and train millions of students. Approximately 70 percent of everyone who is enrolled in higher education today, about 14 million people, is studying in a community college, a four-year public colleges, or a public university. Our focus, however, is almost always upon the…
Business and Technology Bring Continuous Innovation – But Will Higher Education Take Advantage?
Making sense of ever-changing conditions is one of the primary functions of the mainstream business press. Regardless of one’s line of work, publications like The Economist, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, and the Harvard Business Review offer a lenses and perspective on the almost incomprehensible dynamism of human economic and technological activity. They are…