The Pietist Schoolman

Having been out of the country and out of my routine for almost all of January, I find myself with more flagged, starred, bookmarked, and otherwise highlighted links than I could possibly list in one Saturday links post. So instead I’ll be putting out three best-of-January posts, each clustered around one of the three stated themes of this blog. First up, some intriguing posts on education…

• Some of the findings from the annual provost survey by Inside Higher Ed: tenure remains prevalent, but backing for it “appears soft at best”; a split decision on the impact of MOOCs, but considerable concern about those courses’ impact on existing academic business models. I haven’t downloaded the full survey yet, but I’d love to see if it’s possible to break out religious institutions like the CCCU schools I mostly study…

• And speaking of provosts at Christian colleges… Congratulations to Dr. Deb Harless on being named to that position here at Bethel University! It’s my favorite news story of the academic year.

• Is fellow evangelical institution Cedarville University dropping its philosophy major? I appreciated the reaction from a Christian philosopher teaching at another school with fundamentalist roots. (Time permitting, I’d like to do some research into this: just how many CCCU schools have philosophy departments and/or majors?) In any case, it seems like this might be just one of several changes afoot at Cedarville.

• Nathan Gilmour asked five very good questions about Christian colleges, two of which center on the nature and role of general education. (As it happened, that was a main topic of conversation at a meeting earlier in the day: whether our core curriculum was a distinctive of a Bethel education. I vote yes, not surprisingly. Again, this seems worthy of its own post at some point…)

• Why the seemingly straightforward goal of wanting “our students to be able to apply what they learn beyond the classroom” — or even to carry it over into a class the next semester — isn’t as easy as it seems.

• The attractive-challenging-flexible-terrifying life of the independent scholar.

• Those last two links courtesy of the Chronicle of Higher Education, which itself became news as its launching of The Adjunct Project prompted criticism that it was moving from journalism to activism.

• The National Association of Scholars (NAS) report on U.S. history courses at the University of Texas and Texas A&M provoked heated responses from historians, much of it linked by Kenneth Pomeranz (critical of the report). Then Samuel Goldman offered a critique of the critiques.

• What do Alaska, Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, Montana, Nebraska, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Texas, and Wyoming have in common? They’re the only states that have increased funding of higher education since 2008 (and Illinois’ increase has to do with covering unfunded pension liabilities).

• Minnesota’s dropped nearly 18%, though most of us who work in the state’s many private colleges were no doubt excited to see our governor propose a 25% increase to the State Grants Program that many of our students rely on.

• I would have thought of myself as an “academic blogger,” but Alex Marsh’s definition suggests I’m more of a “blogger who is an academic,” since I rarely confine myself to fields of expertise. (H/T John Fea, in the same boat)

• Two big fans of MOOCs: NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman, and conservative Christian homeschooling leader Mary Pride (in a Times profile by Mark Oppenheimer).

• This week I’ve already stated my affinity for one archaic mode of teaching… Why not another? The case for requiring memorization and recitation of texts.

• The surprising lack of congruence between what colleges and universities cost, and what they spend on students.

• Why the US trailing other industrialized nations in international test scores for subjects like math and readings might point to a social inequality problem more than an education problem.

• The story of an unusual collaboration between a research university and an arts education nonprofit that turned Milwaukee high school students into civil rights historians.