Opinion

While Niall Ferguson's new book, Civilization: The West and the Rest, is mostly about the past, it true importance is what it says about our future. Nowadays it is hard not too worry about the future, as we struggle from one funding crisis to the next, watching resources for public investments (like education) erode.

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One of the challenges in trying to get folks to understand how a future can be both more sustainable and subjectively better than what we're used to is getting them to step back from what they "know" to be true. Simple basic facts like "more money is better than less money", and "efficient is better than inefficient". For some reason, most Greenback students have trouble challenging either of those ideas. (Of course, so do most Greenback faculty. And most Backboro residents. And most everybody I've ever met.)

I am not done writing about the connection between big-money sports and rape culture on college campuses. Today, though, I would like to describe two experiences that highlighted for me the value of a shared activity that engages such huge numbers of people across geographical, cultural, and economic boundaries.

In 2012, I want to take action. But what kind? How? And to what end?

In the first installment of a series on pathways to the academic presidency, Emily Miller and Richard Skinner say the next generation of two-year-college chief will have to narrow their institutions' missions.

As he drifts further away from the age of his students, Andrew Gillen considers how much the higher education landscape has changed for today's undergraduates.

Sometimes I worry that libraries that try to create alternatives to big publishing are just adding more publications to the already bloated number of scholarly journals being published. I worry that well-intentioned alternatives too often end up filling a niche that may be valuable, but doesn’t do anything significant to change the way we share knowledge.