Just two days after announcing via his Twitter feed that he had stage 4 cancer, Dallas Willard died yesterday. At the end of this post, I’ll offer my own small contribution to the collection of tributes that is already proliferating, but first a few words from people who knew him well: • Richard Foster wrote … More RIP Dallas Willard (1935-2013)
Today’s semi-rerun takes me back pretty far in the life of this blog, to December 2011. But then, the debate goes back to the eve of the Civil War… Original Post: “This Day in History: John Brown’s Body” Follow Up: “An Exchange on John Brown” (New York Review of Books, May 9, 2013) “I tend … More Following Up: Debating John Brown
Last week I had the chance to chat by Skype with some 8th grade social studies students in Kalispell, Montana. Their teacher, Mr. Ferda (one of my favorite Bethel alums), had each student draft a question ahead of time, and while we didn’t quite get to all of them, the questions were so good that … More Good Questions: Did Your History Teachers Make You Want to Be a Historian?
There are several reasons that my employer is currently going through something of a budget crisis; one that’s hard to complain about is that our president and board adopted a new faculty compensation plan that would raise salaries, particularly at the level of full professor. (Some years ago the problem was that we weren’t competitive … More How Well Paid Are Christian College Faculty?
Here… • Medieval wisdom that could have saved some moderns. • I closed my series on the recent history of college closures. • Then three brief follow-ups on earlier posts about higher education: what professors do with their time, the role of competitive sports in colleges, and questioning the applicability of “return on investment” to … More That Was The Week That Was
Today’s not-quite rerun revisits one of my favorite hissy fits, directed against an op-ed arguing that those of my profession don’t work hard enough. Original post: “Do college professors work hard enough?” Follow up: Nate Kreuter, “The Math Doesn’t Work” (Inside Higher Ed, April 22) It took me about a year, but sometime during spring … More Following Up: How Hard Do College Professors Work?
Another not-quite rerun: this week I’m following up on topics that I’ve blogged about before and recently received new attention from other media or blogs. Original Post: “A Grand Experiment: Why Sports Belong in Higher Education” Follow Up: “Room for Debate: Dropping the Ball” (nytimes.com, April 22) Last summer the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) … More Following Up: Should Colleges Drop Competitive Sports?
Back when I taught my history of World War I course on campus instead of gallivanting around the Western Front itself, I made extensive use of clips from The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century, a documentary miniseries from PBS and the BBC. (It came out in 1996, but the website is … More Why the Middle Ages Could Have Saved Lives in WWI
I’ve got to make some serious progress on some other projects, so I don’t plan on a lot of blogging this week. But instead of just going into my “Best of The Pietist Schoolman” reruns, I thought I’d point readers to some recent articles or posts elsewhere that follow up on some topics I’ve blogged … More Following Up: The Return on a College Investment
In last week’s historical sketch of the closures of American colleges, universities, and other institutions of higher learning, I closed by noting an oddly symmetrical pair of statistics: Of schools that closed between 1950 and 1979, 36% opened before 1945 Of schools that have closed since 1980, 37% opened before 1910 Much of the attrition of the … More When Colleges Close: Recent History
The Pietist Schoolman 