What is a week in the life of a slappy tenured professor like? Here’s Day 1, Monday. Kids home from school because of Martin Luther King Holiday so was able to sleep in:8:00am: Wake up, coffee, shower, dress8:45am: Quick check of emails and pack up computer and work stuff9:00am: Drive to indoor tennis center andContinueContinue reading “Day 1 Work Log”
Category Archives: Higher Education
Tenure!!!
The follower of this sporadically updated blog will notice a change in its title and description. These changes reflect the fact that I earned TENURE in the spring of 2008 and was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor effective last July. The landmark moments in the life of an academic are few, but allContinueContinue reading “Tenure!!!”
Why are my students so DOUR?
Dour. If I had to use one word to describe my students, that would be it. Maybe I’ve already blogged about this. I can’t remember. But it bears repeating. On more than one occasion, I have looked out at a room full of students and yelled, “Why are you so DOUR? You have EVERYTHING!” IContinueContinue reading “Why are my students so DOUR?”
Frump and Circumstance
At the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association meeting in Toronto in August 1997, I was riding the escalator down into the atrium of the conference hotel with my fellow sociology graduate students Josh Rossol and Black Hawk Hancock. Black Hawk noticed alot of people milling around, so he turned to Josh and meContinueContinue reading “Frump and Circumstance”
Work Hard, Play Hard?
Many students at elite colleges and universities in the United States adhere to the motto, “Work Hard, Play Hard.” I tell my students applying this motto to higher education creates a false dichotomy between work and play. I insist that my courses will require them to work, to be sure, but that we will haveContinueContinue reading “Work Hard, Play Hard?”
No Poor Folks at Wake Forest
According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, of the 75 wealthiest private universities in the United States (those with endowments of $500 million or more), Wake Forest University ranks 74th (second to last) in the proportion of undergraduates who receive Pell Grants. This is a rough measure of the proportion of students who are lowContinueContinue reading “No Poor Folks at Wake Forest”
Title IX, Properly Understood
As a sort of follow-up to my previous entry on college athletics, a few thoughts on the infamous and badly misunderstood “Title IX.” (1) “Title IX” is actually part of the Education Amendments of 1972 to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It specifies, quite uncontroversially, I hope: “No person in the United States shall,ContinueContinue reading “Title IX, Properly Understood”
College Sports — Yay or Nay?
The New York Times last week ran an excellent series of articles on the chase for N.C.A.A. scholarships, the scarcity of athletic aid, and the challenges facing coaches and scholarship athletes The articles confirmed my uneasiness about “big time college sports.” On the one hand, I am an avid fan of many college sports andContinueContinue reading “College Sports — Yay or Nay?”
Inequity in College Sports
Wake Forest football coach Jim Grobe could have left the university for the University of Arkansas and gotten PAID handsomely for abandoning his players. Any Wake Forest football player who wanted to do the same, however, would have been PENALIZED by the NCAA — forced to sit out one season. Frank Deford comments on theContinueContinue reading “Inequity in College Sports”
No reading, bad writing
Everyone I know who is a good writer is also a good reader. A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, then, helps to explain why so many of the students I teach are (to put it bluntly) bad writers. The article reports on a study released by the National Endowment for the ArtsContinueContinue reading “No reading, bad writing”