4/10/14 – Thanks to G.W. Carlson for drawing my attention to the recent passing of a fellow Covenanter in higher education: Robert T. Sandin. An alumnus of Bethel College and Seminary who went on to earn a PhD in philosophy from the University of Minnesota, Sandin served as an administrator at Northwestern (MN), North Park, Mercer, … More RIP Robert Sandin (1927-2014)
Interesting findings about undergraduate enrollment to report, via a study by Jerry Jacobs (sociology, University of Pennsylvania) and Linda Sax (education, UCLA), as reported in Inside Higher Ed: Using data collected by UCLA, Jacobs and Sax write that from 1997 through 2005, the proportion of freshmen planning to enroll in STEM fields declined, hitting a … More STEM Up, Pre-Professional Down
One of the blessings of taking a two-week break from blogging myself is that it gave me time to catch up on some other blogs. One is Christ & University, a newer group blog that I’d particularly recommend to those who come to The Pietist Schoolman for reflections on the intersection of Christianity and education. Featuring a roster of scholars from … More Check Out the Christ and University Blog
V. Elving Anderson died on March 9, 2014 after serving a distinguished career as educator and researcher. (See his obituary here.) He was born in 1921 in Stromsburg, Nebraska, into a family deeply rooted in the Swedish Baptist heritage. He attended Bethel Junior College (A.A. degree), studied at the Seminary, and then completed his B.A. … More RIP V. Elving Anderson, 1921-2014 (G.W. Carlson)
Probably no one has done more to encourage me to think about my vocation to serve those beyond the academy than John Fea of Messiah College. Not just on his blog, but in his frequent speaking engagements and a continuing series of “Virtual Office Hours” posted on YouTube, John models how historians can balance public … More John Fea on Historians as Public Scholars
From January… Another metaphor for education, this one occurring to me in the midst of teaching my course on the international history of World War II. In its final episode, “A World Without War,” Ken Burns’ The War arrives at the Allied liberation of concentration camps in the Third Reich. This chapter is introduced by an … More Best of The Pietist Schoolman: The Purpose of the Liberal Arts is Purpose
In this turbulent year, when the most pessimistic corners of my mind conjure scenarios in which schools like my employer go under, I’ve occasionally imagined what it would look like to start a new Christian liberal arts college from scratch. For some reason, my imagination keeps turning to the end of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, a … More Home-Colleging?
It was the fall of 1993, and I was a freshman at the College of William and Mary. One night I answered a knock at our dorm room door to find a group of three very attractive women, looking through their facebook (note to readers younger than 30: I mean that they were holding a booklet … More What Do Movies Get Right and Wrong about Teaching?
That noise you heard Friday morning emanating from somewhere in the Upper Midwest was the sound of me exhaling in relief after sending our InterVarsity Press editor the first draft of The Pietist Vision of Christian Higher Education: Forming Whole and Holy Persons. There’s still a long way to go until the book comes out (December?), … More Table of Contents for Our Forthcoming Book on Pietism and Christian Higher Ed
Generally speaking, academic historians and public historians approach the past from two different vantage points. For historians, a productive career has traditionally revolved around producing monographs and engaging with other professional historians on the fine points of interpretation, theory, and effective arguments. Public historians, on the other hand, do their work with a different audience … More Historical Schizophrenia: Academic and Public History
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