Opinion

I once attended a seminar presented by the National Endowment for the Humanities on the Philosophy of Math. As an economist teaching in a math department, I was obviously the participant with the most unusual background, as most of the other participants were philosophers of math, many teaching in philosophy departments. While there, I recall one woman discussing the question of “is there a middle number?” Since there is no highest or lowest number, the question became whether there is a middle number. Her conclusion was that there is, indeed, a middle number, and that number is zero.

Plenty of folks see the move to digital textbooks as "inevitable." After all, more and more people are buying e-books and e-readers. Yet college students in particular continue to turn up their noses to digital textbooks. What assumptions are we making that lead us to think that digital textbooks are what students want, let alone need?

Yesterday was the kick-off for our campus celebration of Black History Month. After a wonderful introduction by the Provost, a colleague in the History department gave an impassioned, scholarly, engaging presentation that asked the question: what should Black History Month mean to us?

“Why don’t we just automate all of our routine mail?” It all started so innocently, with such a seemingly logical question...

Which is it, collaboration or groupthink? And does the myth of the solitary scholar actually hurt us? We need to be more open on how we collaborate in higher education, even when we don't mean to.

For more than one year, almost every two months, I enjoy writing a book review. Most of the books I am interested in cover the main issues I am focused on in my daily lectures; there are books on political science, history of Central and Eastern Europe, foreign affairs and identity, ethnic minorities and tolerance.

We increasingly depend on companies whose business is collecting information about us – what we read, what we say, what we watch, what we buy, where we go, and who we know. It’s scary how much the tools that we use every day capture and use personal information - and how little we care. But perhaps that will soon change. Both Facebook and Google will be revealing some of the astounding amount of information they’ve gathered about us, and it may make people uncomfortable enough to stir things up.