Last week Johnathan Ferrell had a horrible car crash. He broke out the back window to escape and walked, injured, to the nearest home hoping for help. Ferrell may have been too hurt, too in shock to remember to whistle Vivaldi. Ferrell is dead. Social psychologist Claude Steele revolutionized our understanding of the daily contextRead More “When You Forget to Whistle Vivaldi”
Monthly Archives: September 2013
A Quick Note on For-Profits and Policy Interventions
We have a theoretical conundrum when it comes to explaining the expansion of for-profit colleges. Gilbert, Saunders, and Stoddard (2013) sum up this conundrum as a puzzle of why so many would self-select (Chung 2012) into expensive, narrow career training with contested outcomes. That puzzle limits effective policy interventions. As you can see in theRead More “A Quick Note on For-Profits and Policy Interventions”
On Loving Libraries
I love libraries. I love librarians. A post from my friend at the Intellectual History blog brought to mind how my personal love of all things library-ish relates to some larger concerns about structure, intellectual capital, and public sphere. I have resisted considering my fetish for physical books as an object of serious inquiry. ItRead More “On Loving Libraries”
When Your Hired Guns Are Hacks: Big Thinkers on HigherEd
Look, I embrace that I am a nobody. It works for me. However, where and when possible, I extend what applied knowledge and expertise I have to issues that I think matter. This blog is an exercise in that activity. I do not do it because it pays well or because I think I haveRead More “When Your Hired Guns Are Hacks: Big Thinkers on HigherEd”
Fall 2013: Public Lectures
In my other life I research for-profit higher education and inequality. As a necessary complement to those interests I also study structural change, labor, and the morass that is today’s higher education “disruption” economy. MOOCs (C and X), DOOCs, badges, stamps, burn books and whatever else we’ve come up with lately. While I will beRead More “Fall 2013: Public Lectures”