I’m drawing close to completing and defending my dissertation. I’m going to write up some stuff about it soon, as I genuinely think there’s some interesting things for people who are interested in educational policy in there. (You may roll your eyes if you choose.) Briefly, though, I want to say a quick word about […]
Continue reading →Last week I wrote a long post on what I see as a dangerous trend in my field’s focus, away from the traditional prose instruction that institutions and policymakers still see as valuable, and towards increasingly abstruse and disconnected subjects in critical pedagogy, pop culture, theory, and digital abstraction. I find these areas to be engaging and generative, […]
Continue reading →I have two memories tonight, both from Wilbert Snow School, my childhood school, my childhood home. In the first, it was a typical day on the blacktop, which means it could have been pretty much any grade, K-5. In those days the school was an actual campus; there was a main building with the office, […]
Continue reading →Some people will no doubt ding me for being positively quoted in this National Review piece about campus speech codes. That sort of thing never really bothers me; I said what I said on Twitter about the chilling effect of current campus speech norms and I stand by it. Guilt by association doesn’t move me. No, the […]
Continue reading →This post is very long, and on a subject of interest to few. Consider invoking your privilege to not read it. (Seriously it’s really very long so please don’t read it and then complain that it’s too long. You’ve been warned.) For the last few years I’ve filed dispatches from the Conference on College Composition and Communication. […]
Continue reading →This Michelle Goldberg essay on the Laura Kipnis kerfuffle at Northwestern is the sort of piece that seems to push my buttons so precisely that I don’t want to write about it, if that makes sense. It also reflects the tangled issues at the heart of questions of free thought and free expression. I applaud the […]
Continue reading →I’ve just added to my teaching portfolio a syllabus and some course materials for a proposed class in information literacy and data journalism, embedded below. These are materials that I developed for a job that just rejected me. It’s a shame I won’t get a chance to teach this course there, but maybe I’ll get […]
Continue reading →Whenever I write about controversial issues, such as intersectionality politics or Israel-Palestine or any number of things, I receive a certain kind of counsel, sometimes admonishment. Sometimes it’s a kind of well-meaning advice from people who agree with me, sometimes a kind of scolding by those who don’t. But in each case, the argument is […]
Continue reading →This is a topic about which I will reliably lose my temper, so let me try to stay in control. It’s an undeniable fact that there’s a level of casual bigotry against Muslims that is permissible in our media that would not be permissible against any other group. That’s why The Atlantic can yet again publish […]
Continue reading →For awhile now I’ve counseled leftists to apply the inverse of Gandhi’s famous dictum: think of the most privileged person you have ever seen, and ask if your next act will be of any threat to him. I call this the Rich Uncle Pennybags test, after the guy from Monopoly. The question is, does your next […]
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