The ways in which the concept of “religion” operates in that culture as motive and as effect, how it mutates, what it affords and obstructs, what memories it shelters or excludes, are not eternally fixed.
Should we be as concerned about equality of outcomes as we are about equality of opportunity?
Whatever their differences, these accounts of a university in crisis shine a bright light on the system that manages the relationship of the university to the broader culture.
The author’s interpretive framework truncates the narrative by forcing her to see thick cultural issues only through the lens of social class.
The successful formation and launching of children still matters; it is just that parents don’t want to launch them very far.
Given that most Americans now assume that children are priceless and fragile, it is no surprise that many have striven to remove all risks they might face.
We have allowed the American university to be a farm team for professional sports.
Training in objective, scholarly techniques would produce particular types of ethical subjects.
Every productive adult in our society needs an education that fully engages the mind and the heart.
Whether revering or rejecting his work, McGuffey’s fans and detractors both manage to miss the point of his original project.
Education in the service of reparation can heal and make whole both individual persons and all of us.
Metrics do not and, in fact, cannot measure any intelligible conception of excellence at all
We shouldn’t assume that the measures we take to combat the coronavirus today are temporary.
One of the problems with crises is that they require too much time and attention.
The title of "doctor" is a very useful thing, provided you can make other people believe it is important.
How is an alignment of the authentic self and the college admissions process possible?
The liberty of the adult citizen depends on the subordination of the prepolitical child.
The ultimate semantic receivers, selectors, and transmitters are still us.
Today, the “college experience” centered on a residential life that promises to envelope students in a warm, intimate community has hardened into something more totalizing than even the blundering late-twentieth-century project of enforcing political correctness.
The growing damage to truthfulness reflects something more—not just a personal discrepancy but a deep social discrepancy as well.
This is why the stories we surround ourselves with and immerse ourselves in matter.
We do not know how to evaluate what makes up a good college education.
Ignorance is ugly, particularly in prison. It’s loud and obnoxious and violent. It tumbles into my cell right now as I write this. But for some, education can quell that.
Confident pluralism at its best requires people and institutions that know themselves well enough to articulate the reasons for their differences.
Why should anyone focus on the life of the mind when individual and societal survival is threatened?
The workplace had become so toxic that it was affecting my well-being.
Self-knowledge and pleasure, the Idiosyncratics teach us, go hand in hand through the library.
It’s easy to see how lectures got a bad rap. We have all been subjected to someone who abused the privilege of an audience.
The benefits of the humanities have danced so gracefully through these tutorials that it’s never occurred to any of us to ask what’s the point.
There is no shortage of jeremiads about the American university.
We can learn from the outdated Western Civ model, even as we transcend it.
Warikoo might have explored the ways in which Asian cultural repertoires matched up with the neoliberal transformation of our schools and colleges.
Considering the purpose of free speech, from courts to classrooms.
The answer cannot simply come in the form of another list of dos-and-don’ts.
The language of self-censorship removes the question from the moral realm in which it properly belongs.
The emptiness of words, and our shared resignation to meaning manipulation, is no small matter.
What looks like a disastrous collapse in students’ literacy may be simply a reversion to a kind of mean.