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…
Scientific Higher Education in America
So it is characteristic of us professors of political philosophy to neglect what is really going in the “hard” sciences. I remember, for example, being astonished that…
Should a Liberal Education Include the Study of Law?
So here’s my contribution to a symposium on “originalism” as the mode of interpreting the Constitution that facilitates the maximization of the libertarian value of “negative liberty.”…
Funding the Forecasting Failures of Political Science
There’s a distinguished political scientist—Jacqueline Stevens—who agrees with me that the National Science Foundation (NSF) ought to cut the funding for political science. The Republicans in Congress…
The Comedian vs. The Smart Phone
https://youtu.be/5HbYScltf1c Kids are by nature mean. Smart phones make them meaner. Why? They can’t see the faces and experience the reactions of those they diss. Their “humor”…
