Academia

Does the Ivy League Turn You Into a Moron? Walter Kirn Critiques Princeton in "Lost in the Meritocracy"

Anis Shivani | Posted 10.23.2009 | Politics


Anis Shivani

Walter Kirn, author of the novels Up in the Air and Mission to America, has written the most enticing recent indictment of education in this country.

Speaking Truth to Power: The Mythology of Imperialism

Rick Ayers | Posted 10.17.2009 | Books


Rick Ayers

When I decided to teach Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness at Berkeley High School, it had been out of favor as an appropriate text because it was considered too controversial.

Occidental College Offers Course In Stupidity

Huffington Post | Alex Leo | Posted 09.24.2009 | Comedy


We honestly don't know what's funnier the class title or the hyper-deconstructionist language used in the course description. Only in the bubble of th...

Books in Limbo

James Shapiro | Posted 09.19.2009 | Media


James Shapiro

What effect will the proposed Google Book Settlement (or its derailment) have on students and scholarship?

Top 15 Greenest Colleges (PHOTOS)

Huffington Post | Ami Cholia | Posted 08.29.2009 | Green


The Princeton Review just came out with a list of the green honor roll for 15 colleges across the country based on their eco-friendly practices and su...

Romancing the Academy

Joanne Rendell | Posted 08.14.2009 | Media


Joanne Rendell

Yet for all the scholarly appetite for love, popular romance fiction has long been shunned, ignored, and seen by many in the ivory tower as the errant and sex-craved stepdaughter of "real" literature.

The Academic Man's Burden

Jaime Pozuelo-Monfort | Posted 10.04.2009 | Politics


Jaime Pozuelo-Monfort

Academics are laggards, eternal followers that lack the ability to innovate and continue to inhabit a world of quantitative models oftentimes not descriptive of today's reality.

PhD Economists: 0% Unemployment Rate

Carpe Diem | Mark J. Perry | Posted 06.01.2009 | Business


Economics has long been called the dismal science. The general economic outlook today is indeed dismal, but that doesn't mean job prospects in the fie...

Opening the Black Box of Peer Review

Michèle Lamont | Posted 05.30.2009 | Business


Michèle Lamont

An essay excerpted from How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment (Harvard University Press) Excellence is the holy grail o...

TED - Day 1ch

Steve Rosenbaum | Posted 03.07.2009 | World


Steve Rosenbaum

At a time when ideas are needed to change the world, both the distribution and the wide interest in TED talks suggest that there is a hunger for knowledge, and an appetite for ideas.

Dutch University Has Tribal Head

AP | TOBY STERLING | Posted 01.23.2009 | World


AMSTERDAM, Netherlands — It's a brutal 19th century revenge story: An African tribal chief kills two Dutch emissaries and hangs their heads from...

Harvard's Endowment Loses $8 Billion

AP | Posted 01.03.2009 | Business


CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Harvard officials say the university's largest-in-the-nation endowment lost about 22 percent of its value, or $8 billion, in ...

Why Academics Should Blog (Redux)

Hugh McGuire | Posted 12.26.2008 | Media


Hugh McGuire

Academia should be a vanguard of our understanding of the world. It's a place where people have the time and space to think about the shape of the world, the source of some of the ideas that transform us.

Conservatives' College Strategy Aims To Combat Perceived Liberalism On American Campuses

NY Times | PATRICIA COHEN | Posted 10.23.2008 | Home


COLORADO SPRINGS -- Acknowledging that 20 years and millions of dollars spent loudly and bitterly attacking the liberal leanings of American campuses ...

Turkish Ambassador Dismisses U.S. Scholar For Telling the Truth on Armenian Genocide

Harut Sassounian | Posted 06.11.2008 | Politics


Harut Sassounian

The Turkish government has a scandal on its hands, thanks to the reckless behavior of its ambassador in Washington, who clearly violated the academic freedom of a prominent American scholar.