Feigning Competence and Teaching Government
Here is a little article I wrote on the connection between higher education and civic engagement. It refers to a longer and more solid article written by…
Civic Engagement: Making Students Partisan Activists
As a professor of political science, I can’t help but be concerned with all the enthusiasm about “civic engagement” as some radically transformative, disruptive, “Copernican” revolution in…
What Can the Puritans Teach Us About Philanthropy?
Here’s our most characteristically philanthropic antidote to the excesses of individualism in the American political tradition: the thought and deeds of our first founders—the Puritans. Philanthropy, of…
Higher Education as American Counterculture
The author of the best book ever written on America, and the best book ever written on democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville, claimed to see almost no higher…
Are Americans Too Busy?
From a certain view, the most probing question Alexis de Tocqueville had to answer in Democracy in America is “Why are the Americans so restless in the…
Tocqueville on Keeping Our Countercultural Churches
To begin with a simple point, one basic insight of Tocqueville is that things are always getting better and worse. Thus, it is hardly surprising that Tocqueville…
Conservative Postmodernism, Postmodern Conservatism
Astute thinkers from Hegel onward have claimed that we live at the end of the modern world. That does not mean the modern world is about to…
Meaning, Identity, and Learning: Just Read It!
Someone might say—and libertarians skeptics often do—that classes in philosophy and literature are given a quite an arbitrarily inflated value by according them credit. Do away with…
Teaching as Shouting
I’ve gotten several emails about this article by Joanne Lipman in the Wall Street Journal. The bottom line is that the teachers who get the best results are all about…
Having Issues with “Issues”
So here’s a funny article on the sheer silliness and passive-aggressive hostility of the jargon that dominates the worlds of management, consultants, marketing, and all that. That world, it…
Liberal Education is for Everyone
What Villanova should be famous for is its well-funded and brilliantly staffed ”great books” gen-ed alternative program and a real surge in “great books” humanities majors. The…
Are Conservatives (or Libertarians) Ruining Liberal Education?
Plenty of liberals—and not just liberal professors—think there is a conservative conspiracy to use online education and MOOCs, to destroy genuinely higher education in this country. I see…
Conservative Liberal Education?
One reason I can’t buy the claim that conservative intellectual has become an oxymoron is that on our campuses it’s so often the conservatives who defend “liberal…
The State of American Liberal Education These Days
What are the ends of education? We mean, of course, the ends for us, for us democratic Americans. So we begin with the best book ever written…
We Can Measure Educational Value in Words
E.D. Hirsch (the cultural literacy guy) has, I think, written the most important article on educational “outcomes” in a long time. The great benefit of education, “the…