Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus is one of my favorite plays. At the...
Recent News
Dealing with controversy: The ostrich approach
By Bill Tierney
We live in a non-stop news cycle and colleges do not get to opt out. Every scandal at a college or university may not make national news, but it will be reported by someone, somewhere. The president of Balmoral State who is arrested for DUI may not find himself on the Today Show, but I’ll [...]
A SummerTIME blog by Victor Cruz
Our first day of SummerTIME was on July 1, 2009. I remember waking up and thinking to myself “Why am I going to ruin my summer with this program? I should be sleeping in like everybody else.” Just then it occurred to me, in life, I cannot conform to cultural norms – sleeping in during [...]
A SummerTIME blog by Salvador Avila
This first full week in SummerTIME has been great. I’ve meet many new and exciting people, and the instructors are awesome. The instructors are very patient and are motivated everyday. Unlike school, your fellow students are constantly participating and having great discussions. Although SummerTIME sounds like fun, it has its challenging parts. The essay prompts [...]
A SummerTIME blog by Betty Wanjiku Njenga
The past week at SummerTIME has been one of my most intense learning experiences. The program seeks to prepare high school students for college writing. I have learned to identify different passages in a text that can be vital in any discourse, a skill that was previously unrefined in my colleagues and I. We have also learned to [...]
It’s SummerTIME (and we have three new guest bloggers)!
The Center for Higher Education Policy Analysis operates SummerTIME. The program is a month-long intensive writing seminar designed for high school seniors entering a four-year college or university in the fall. Students attend daily writing seminars, conferences with writing tutors, and engage in “college knowledge” workshops on issues relating to college enrollment, such as financial [...]
Is innovation in public education possible?
Public school systems are notoriously lame and unimaginative. Think of the connotations that arise in most when considering NCLB. The law supports a focus on academic achievement and high-stakes testing. It does not prescribe a lot. Yet, states and districts have, in general, focused on prefabricated, uniform curriculums and high-stakes testing, while sweeping over the [...]
A Blog by Special Guest Contributor Yvonna Lincoln
Who’s Reading—and What? Two quiet, but momentous, revolutions are taking place in the U.S., and their combined outcome is unclear for both undergraduate and graduate students and for American life more broadly. The Nation, The American Prospect, Newsweek, and other thoughtful news periodicals have commented extensively on the first, the demise of significant daily newspapers in the [...]
Professors and Academic Freedom
By Bill Tierney
When discussions turn to the expansion of higher education in the third world the norm is to speak in terms of ‘markets’: The Asian ‘market’ is due to expand dramatically. Many established universities in Europe and the United States look at the ‘Chinese market’ as an opportunity for dramatic growth. Working adults is a ‘market’ to [...]
Freeconomics in Education
By June Ahn
Tom Vander Ark’s recent blog post about freely available media is getting some play in the education blogosphere lately. He points out how free web services are starting to mature, and how we’ll start to see this business model infiltrate education. I think he’s pretty much on the right track. We’re entering an era where [...]
Eduworlds: A weekly column by Gib Hentschke
Necessary limits to student access? Until recently I had assumed that student access was an unbounded goal and an unqualified “good” – more is, without exception, better, and, far into the foreseeable future, we can’t have too much of it. Current debates on promoting access via financial aid, however, raise some questions about the inherent [...]
