Historiann

At Inside Higher Ed today, William Bradley offers a humorous and self-deprecating essay on his memories of college versus the conduct he observes in his students.  With every essay he finds cut-and-pasted from Wikipedia, with every mobile ringtone he hears during his classes, and with every complacent D student he meets, he wonders about the erosion of higher education in the United States:

“I had so much respect for my own professors,” I tell myself. “Yet these students seem to be mocking my efforts.”

It’s easy to understand why those who have been doing this for their entire lives might get frustrated, isn’t it? It’s depressing, to think that the college experience now is so degraded, compared to how we remember our own college years, a time of discovery and the excitement that comes with acquiring knowledge.

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First, go read Tenured Radical’s post from yesterday.  I’ll wait.

Doesn’t President Barack Obama’s speech at the University of Michigan remind you of the time that George W. Bush went to Notre Dame and Bob Jones and told them to stop being such one-issue whiners about abortion?  Or like that time he went to Haliburton and lectured them about keeping costs down, otherwise he would de-fund the National Security State?  Yeah:  just like that!

Personally, I liked this response–  Continue Reading »

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Yesterday, I read the comments on the teaching evaluation forms my students filled out last semester for the pilot course in the History of Sexuality in America class I co-taught with a colleague.  (We covered just about 1492-2011.)  The comments were overwhelmingly positive with only a few outliers.  Even people who liked the course complained that there was too much reading, but I and my co-instructor always get that on our teaching evaluations.  (Here’s an easy solution:  read through the syllabus on the first day of class, and drop the class if you don’t want to read all that!  It’s win-win for everyone that way.)

We had one suggestion–and only one–from a student who suggested that next time we might consider offering the course with one man and one woman professor, instead of two women.  Right–because our male colleagues are just lining up to teach this course, and it will be soothing and more objective if a male professor is in the room.  Continue Reading »

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Dr. Crazy caught a plagiarist this week.

Plagiarists have no idea how much they don’t know, and no clue about how much we know about our own subject as well as how much we know about what they don’t know.  The ones that always amuse me most are the students who think they’re being clever by using a book 80 or 100 years old.  Google books is now making that scheme pretty transparent, but it just kills me that 1) they think that academic interests and writing styles aren’t subject to change over time, and 2) that it’s not patently obvious when they plagiarize something written by a fusty academic writer from the 1920s or 1930s (or even earlier) and try to pass it off as work by an early twenty-first century college student.

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Via Leslie M-B at The Clutter Museum, we learn that someone has made a very funny mashup called Public History Ryan Gosling, in which said Gosling “seduces you with public history theory.”

Too funny.  But I must ask you:  Continue Reading »

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Nice use of the subjunctive, but please correct punctuation!

Tenured Radical offers more thoughts on academic honesty, plagiarism, and cheating this morning in the form of an imagined conversation with her imagined spawn as she sends the child back to college after Thanksgiving break to complete hir exams.  Go read, and send it on to your students.  Continue Reading »

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Make my day!

Flavia at Ferule and Fescue wrote recently about snagging some plagiarists in an upper-level class for majors, and she writes about how sad it makes her although of course she’s standing up for fairness and academic integrity.  Go read the whole thing, but here’s a little end of term/exam week plea for students:

[T]his is what I’d like to tell my plagiarists, and what I wish they’d hear and believe:

“You did something unethical, and you knew it was unethical; ‘giving you a break’ would be unfair to your classmates and it would be unfair to you; it’s my job to enforce academic standards and to see that you wrestle honestly with tough intellectual tasks. You’re selling yourself short when you think that you can’t come up with good ideas or write a good paper on your own. You will fail this class and the academic dishonesty charge will go on your record. Continue Reading »

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Lesson one, just begun:  growing up is not much fun. Continue Reading »

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Used and discarded by the king!

In “The Dissenter” in the current New Republic (h/t RealClearBooks), Kevin Carey has written a fascinating article on professional education reformer Diane Ravitch.  As many of you may recall, she has switched sides recently from being a conservative supporter of No Child Left Behind, charter schools, and vouchers, to identifying those very reforms as part of an intentional effort to “destroy” public education.

The whole portrait of Ravitch is worth the read.  Like many women of her generation (Ravitch was born in 1938), she achieved her graduate education only after marrying and starting a family.  Even then, she couldn’t win acceptance into Columbia’s doctoral program in History–she was deemed too old (at 34!) and too female.  But Carey makes it clear that hers is really the career of a polemicist, not an academic.  More important than graduate school is the fact that she volunteered for six years at The New Leader, “a small but influential publication of the anti-communist left, [where she] asked for a job. When the editor, Myron Kolatch, said he couldn’t afford to hire her, Ravitch offered to work for free.”  Carey continues:

The New Leader was where Ravitch received her true education. The small staff was crammed into one room on the fourth floor of an old building. Then and future luminaries like Daniel Bell and Nathan Glazer would drop by to turn in their latest essays; strong argument was prized. “This is where she learned how to write,” says Kolatch. Ravitch worked intermittently for The New Leader until 1967, when she took a part-time assignment from the nonprofit Carnegie Corporation to report on the city’s school system.  Continue Reading »

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Go read–it’s one impressive feminist meta-analysis of what ails education at all levels, as well as a tasty linkfest.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, I agree with all of her turkeys, and then some.  (Go ahead–guess where she puts Linda P. B. Kathei, the UC Davis Chancellor.  Also, don’t miss the fact that she not only puts the eternally dopey U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan on her list, she also co-nominates the man who elevated him to his eminent position, President Barack Obama.  So please, all of you who complain every time I write something you deem insufficiently worshipful of The One, go over to her comments section to b!tch for a change.)

Meanwhile–here’s something that’s worth 75 seconds of your time: Continue Reading »

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