Comments on: Tony Grafton on the higher education crisis, and your turn to talk back!

By: The “crisis” in higher ed? truffula sniffs out “administrative bloat.” : Historiann : History and sexual politics, 1492 to the present

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 16:17:42 +0000

[...] the contributions I’ve had to the “crisis” of higher education meme inspired by Tony Grafton’s recent review in the New York Review of Books, no one has yet called out administrators and/or administrative bloat. Most of us humanist [...]

By: Sunday round-up: the “crisis in higher ed,” your turn edition : Historiann : History and sexual politics, 1492 to the present

Sun, 13 Nov 2011 16:42:21 +0000

[...] did my post last weekend soliciting your views on the “crisis in higher ed” get an avalanche of replies, like, immediately! As regular readers will recall, I commented on [...]

By: What’s the matter with higher ed? Too much talk about degrees, not enough talk about achievement. : Historiann : History and sexual politics, 1492 to the present

Sat, 12 Nov 2011 16:27:47 +0000

[...] have a comprehensive post up tomorrow with all of your wonderful links and contributions to this conversation, but I thought I’d lay out briefly something that I’ve been thinking about this week [...]

By: undine

undine — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 04:18:53 +0000

Thanks for starting this great conversation, Historiann; as Dr. Crazy says, it’s a good one to have.

By: CBS

CBS — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 19:05:41 +0000

May I ask, in the experience of the people responding to this post: is this true?

“Their results are sobering. The Collegiate Learning Assessment reveals that some 45 percent of students in the sample had made effectively no progress in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing in their first two years. And a look at their academic experience helps to explain why. Students reported spending twelve hours a week, on average, studying—down from twenty-five hours per week in 1961 and twenty in 1981. Half the students in the sample had not taken a course that required more than twenty pages of writing in the previous semester, while a third had not even taken a course that required as much as forty pages a week of reading.”

I certainly didn’t have an experience like that as an undergraduate at an (admittedly famously prestigious) university in the UK. It’s almost enviable if it weren’t such an enormous waste of everyone’s time (and money).
C.

By: Why I’ve fallen down on the (uncompensated) job this term : Historiann : History and sexual politics, 1492 to the present

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 18:52:57 +0000

[...] I’ll have a post up this weekend about all of your wonderful (and speedy) responses to Tony Grafton’s challenge for more specifically grounded descriptions of the “crisis” in American universities. If you just can’t wait, please see this thread for lots of smart, detailed, and contrarian views! [...]

By: Our Universities: Why Are They Failing? Some (internet) dialogue | Brush off the dust! History now!

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 13:10:30 +0000

[...] call came out from history professor and blogger Historiann, who responded to Grafton with Tony Grafton on the Higher Education Crisis and Your Turn to Talk Back and tagged some of her colleagues to [...]

By: Another memelicious monologue

Another memelicious monologue — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 03:30:23 +0000

[...] Historiann has thrown down the gauntlet in response to Tony Grafton’s round-up of a spate of recent books about higher ed. [...]

By: Flavia

Flavia — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 03:16:23 +0000

My second series of reflections is up.

By: Shelley

Shelley — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 15:46:09 +0000

Out here in California college professors are losing their jobs, students are drowning in debt, and yet the “presidents” and “chancellors” of public universities continue to award themselves huge bonuses of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

In the education world, they are the 1%.