21st Century Scholar

Peter Scott uses the metaphor of “the angle of repose” in his nice new book, Harnessing America’s Wasted Talent. The angle of repose is an engineering term, but I know it as the title of a book by one of my favorite authors, Wallace Stegner. In engineering an “angle of repose” is the angle at [...]

Andrew Rosen has penned Change.edu: Rebooting for the New Talent Economy which in some respects is a typical text that talks about the need for new kinds of postsecondary institutions. It’s a breezy easy-to-read book and for those who are not in higher ed there’s nothing wrong with reading it to learn about the changes [...]

Let me begin with a bit of hesitation since the rest of this comment will be glowing. I’m really not sure if Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom: A Novel published in 2010 is the best book of the last 10 years. How can one determine the “best” of anything over a specific time horizon? He also doesn’t [...]

When I was in college I read The Idea of Fraternity in America by Wilson Carey McWilliams. I was impressed enough with the book that I kept it all these years and I reread it a year or so ago. McWilliams’s book, unfortunately, has fallen by the wayside. He writes beautifully and offers an impressive [...]

Technology is changing the ways in which people communicate their thoughts and experience their surroundings. Augmented reality apps, for instance, add layers of information to places like museum exhibits and sporting events. Twitter connects individuals to trends. Social networking sites provide quick access to information about nearby places including parks and movie theaters. In their [...]

About 90% of books published about higher education every year are dull, repetitive, or armchair treatises that have little of interest to say about the current state of academic affairs. –Benjamin Ginsberg. The famous sportswriter, Howard Cosell, once wrote an important book entitled I Never Played the Game. When Cosell was in his prime he [...]

Naomi Schaefer Riley does not like tenure. I do not like this book because it is poorly argued. What do these two sentences tell us? The first statement is factually correct; I assume that anyone who reads The Faculty Lounges: And Other Reasons Why You Won’t Get The College Education You Pay For will come [...]

by Bill Tierney Blackboard Jungle opens with a screen saying “We are fortunate to have a school system that is a tribute to our American community and our children. But we are now threatened by something that has to change—juvenile delinquency.” Glenn Ford, in 1955, comes to the rescue in an inner-city school. The movie [...]

by Bill Tierney Here’s another movie on the same theme as Waiting for Superman and The Cartel. We have four cute kids who are trying to get into “good” (a.k.a. “charter”) schools in Harlem by way of a lottery. Geoffrey Canada once again is the voice of reason saying how important good schools are and [...]

by Bill Tierney At least the graphics and background music in Waiting for Superman were professionally done. In The Cartel we have another documentary about schools made by a reporter, Bob Bowden; this time the storyline is largely about New Jersey public schools. Early on in the movie he gives us a voiceover that what [...]