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?
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?
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
Last Friday afternoon I posted the following graph, promising that I’d come back to it this week: Let me pick up by reiterating that “institutions of higher learning” includes everything from Research I universities to “colleges in name only” and lots of post-secondary diversity in between. I didn’t have the time to code things so … More When Colleges Close: A Historical Sketch
I don’t often do posts like this, but it’s Friday afternoon and I’m out of steam… Let me just frame and pose a question, show some data, invite comments, and then come back to the subject next week. If you haven’t heard, my place of employment is going through a fairly significant financial crisis. Still, … More How Many Colleges and Universities Have Closed, Decade by Decade, Since 1900?
Among my favorite posts from this past February was this second entry in my — not yet complete — series on “The Vocation of a Christian Historian,” asking whether historians ought to think of what they do as a profession, vocation, or both. As I mentioned last week, as part of Bethel’s faculty promotion process … More Best of The Pietist Schoolman: Profession vs. Calling
I’ll be honest: the primary point of this post is to cover one English major at Bethel with so much praise that she’ll feel compelled to take at least one History course from me before she graduates. But in the process, readers not named Abby Stocker might also find themselves reappraising their assumptions about what … More Students as Scholars
That’s the topic of this morning’s Room for Debate forum at the New York Times website. It asks six contributors, “…in today’s economy, what should ambitious young people pursue? Which majors and careers have a reliable “return on investment?” Click here for the full forum. Just to pull out a few responses… Katie Bardaro, an … More College and Jobs: Are There Safe Bets?
The Pietist Schoolman 