http://www.popecenter.org/recommended_reading/ Tue, 28 Jun 2016 15:53:53 EDT PHP/5.2.9 en http://www.popecenter.org/images/common/xml.gif http://www.popecenter.org Wed, 16 Apr 2014 0:00:00 EDT http://www.popecenter.org/recommended_reading/article.html?id=2997 A surprising number of college and university presidents depart unexpectedly or face turmoil that nearly ends their tenure as president. Within the past six months, leaders of Illinois State, St. Augustine’s, the University of Wyoming, Tuskegee University, Howard University, and SUNY-Upstate Medical University have resigned under pressure. In Tue, 15 Oct 2013 0:00:00 EDT http://www.popecenter.org/recommended_reading/article.html?id=2916 One of the most famous phrases in American oratory is the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.’s statement in his March on Washington speech that he looked forward to the day when all people would be judged not on the color of their skin, but on the content of their character. That idea has rightly become so much a part of American life that it’s shocking to encounter people who... Wed, 28 Aug 2013 0:00:00 EDT http://www.popecenter.org/recommended_reading/article.html?id=2894 Some people have an unshakable belief in the ability of government to solve problems. We hear lots of demands, for example, that the government fix all the problems in our health care system with a “single payer” system where it pays the bills and writes the rules. Robert Samuels, who teaches writing at UCLA and serves as president of the University Council of the American... Tue, 9 Jul 2013 0:00:00 EDT http://www.popecenter.org/recommended_reading/article.html?id=2871 You’ve never heard of Sarah Danaher or the company she founded, Ampersand Photography. What makes Sarah’s story interesting is that she could easily have gone to college after finishing high school, but chose not to. She likes learning, but is passionate about photography and didn’t want to spend years in college taking courses she wasn’t especially interested... Sun, 30 Jun 2013 0:00:00 EDT http://www.popecenter.org/recommended_reading/article.html?id=2867 Over the last decade, freshman reading programs at North Carolina college have been, variously, controversial, touchy-feely, and arguably too easy. Now, they seem to be dying off. Four North Carolina colleges have dropped their programs outright, and several more have scaled them down considerably. The idea of a “common reading program” has been around for several decades.... Fri, 28 Jun 2013 0:00:00 EDT http://www.popecenter.org/recommended_reading/article.html?id=2866 Meet Aiden—the student of the future. Jeffrey Selingo, editor at large for the Chronicle of Higher Education, introduces Aiden late in his new book College (Un)Bound: The Future of Higher Education and What it Means for Students. Aiden does not attend a... Tue, 11 Jun 2013 0:00:00 EDT http://www.popecenter.org/recommended_reading/article.html?id=2859 (Editor’s note: This is the second article critiquing Neil Gross’s book Why Are Professors Liberal and Why Do Conservatives Care?) If Neil Gross’s analysis of the "why are professors liberal?" question is weak (as I argued here), his analysis of the "why do conservatives care?"... Tue, 4 Jun 2013 0:00:00 EDT http://www.popecenter.org/recommended_reading/article.html?id=2856 (Editor's note: This is the first of two articles. The second can be found here.) Why is it that the great majority of college professors are liberal (i.e., hold mostly to “progressive,” pro-state ideas about politics and economics) and why should conservatives be... Tue, 30 Apr 2013 0:00:00 EDT http://www.popecenter.org/recommended_reading/article.html?id=2840 State flagship universities have an image problem. They want people to think of them as places where students are dedicated to their studies, but can also have some fun. Watch the glowing ads such schools run at halftime in televised football and basketball games. The problem is that information keeps getting out, showing that for many students, the fun overwhelms the studying. When... Wed, 24 Apr 2013 0:00:00 EDT http://www.popecenter.org/recommended_reading/article.html?id=2837 The “everyone should go to college” belief is coming under more and more criticism. One of the critics is Dale Stephens, the founder of UnCollege. His book Hacking Your Education: Ditch the Lectures, Save Tens of Thousands, and Learn More than Your Peers Ever Will has been published recently and after reading it, I asked him to answer ten questions about the book and his... Fri, 9 Nov 2012 0:00:00 EST http://www.popecenter.org/recommended_reading/article.html?id=2761 Last year’s most important book about higher education, Academically Adrift, showed that a high percentage of American college students coast through without learning much. One reason is that many of them cheat. Harvard prefers to make headlines for its Rhodes Scholars and stratospheric rankings, but it recently made headlines over a cheating scandal. In a notoriously... Sun, 4 Nov 2012 0:00:00 EDT http://www.popecenter.org/recommended_reading/article.html?id=2759 When a witness makes an admission that is against his personal interest, that admission is given particular deference by the court. It must be true or he wouldn’t have said it—that’s the logic. In Thu, 4 Oct 2012 0:00:00 EDT http://www.popecenter.org/recommended_reading/article.html?id=2746 Right now, parents who are preparing to send a child off to college are perusing Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble. They’re looking for anything that can give them an edge—an edge on how to wisely invest in their kid’s education. One book they may come across is Tue, 18 Sep 2012 0:00:00 EDT http://www.popecenter.org/recommended_reading/article.html?id=2739 At most colleges and universities today, you find courses and even entire programs in Women’s Studies and Black Studies; at many others, you’ll also find Chicano Studies, Queer Studies, Cultural Studies, and the like. Their defenders say that those courses are academically rigorous explorations of fields that were previously neglected and are important in our increasingly diverse,... Tue, 11 Sep 2012 0:00:00 EDT http://www.popecenter.org/recommended_reading/article.html?id=2736 One of the arguments for education at an elite college is the “networking”—the connections students make at those schools. Writing recently in the New Yorker, Columbia Journalism School dean Nicholas Lemann made that argument, saying that Ivy League tuitions are “undervalued” because admission to a Harvard or a Yale... Wed, 4 Jul 2012 0:00:00 EDT http://www.popecenter.org/recommended_reading/article.html?id=2712 The “opening salvo in the Culture War,” as critic Camille Paglia described it, turned 25 years old this year. In 1987, Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind rocked thinking America by openly discussing the dangerous path America was treading by embracing continental Europe’s philosophical relativism. Bloom’s narrative of the central role... Tue, 27 Dec 2011 0:00:00 EST http://www.popecenter.org/recommended_reading/article.html?id=2630 In recent years, there have been quite a few books on the ways in which innovation will change higher education. Richard DeMillo’s Abelard to Apple is, I think, the most intriguing one yet. In it, the author, who has held numerous posts in the academic world (most recently as dean of computing at Georgia Tech) and in business (Hewlett-Packard’s chief technology officer),... Thu, 22 Dec 2011 0:00:00 EST http://www.popecenter.org/recommended_reading/article.html?id=2627 If I could recommend a survey course for parents and students on the potential pitfalls of college, it would be Lee Doren’s eBook Please Enroll Responsibly: Avoiding Indoctrination at College, available for download from Amazon.... Thu, 10 Nov 2011 0:00:00 EST http://www.popecenter.org/recommended_reading/article.html?id=2604 As the parent of a high school junior, I am about to enter the world of SATs and college applications. So when I was asked to review the book Choosing the Right College, a new book from the Intercollegiate Studies... Wed, 2 Nov 2011 0:00:00 EDT http://www.popecenter.org/recommended_reading/article.html?id=2600 One of the big controversies in higher education is the proper role of standardized tests—the ACT and especially the more famous SAT—in evaluating students applying for admission. Initially, the SAT was created so that good students who didn’t have prestigious high school diplomas could demonstrate their academic capabilities, but in recent years, the SAT has frequently been... Tue, 11 Oct 2011 0:00:00 EDT http://www.popecenter.org/recommended_reading/article.html?id=2591 Clayton Christensen is well known in business circles and, increasingly, in the field of education. He became famous with The Innovator’s Dilemma, the 1997 book that introduced the concept of “disruptive technologies.” His major insight is that no matter how competent their management, leading companies in most industries cannot withstand an assault by successful... Wed, 7 Sep 2011 0:00:00 EDT http://www.popecenter.org/recommended_reading/article.html?id=2575 Like many academics of a “certain age,” I have long noticed the growth of the campus bureaucracy. For example, at the University of Illinois—where I spent 28 years—it seemed that half of all new construction was to house administrators. The administrative expansion was relentless even though enrollments remained almost unchanged and faculty salaries remained... Tue, 5 Jul 2011 0:00:00 EDT http://www.popecenter.org/recommended_reading/article.html?id=2545 If you listen to the glowing rhetoric about higher education, you hear about how it does so much to enhance students’ skills, how it will raise their earnings, how it makes them better citizens for our democracy, and so on. All that being true, how could anyone be against expanding “access” to college so that as many young Americans as possible attend? Readers of this... Fri, 4 Mar 2011 0:00:00 EST http://www.popecenter.org/recommended_reading/article.html?id=2486 Much of the commentary on our higher education system is fawning, creating the impression that our system is superb and lacking only in adequate financial support. The authors of these books think otherwise. American higher education has a great reputation, but that reputation masks some serious problems, as the books on this list (in alphabetical order by author) reveal. Read any or all of... Tue, 8 Feb 2011 0:00:00 EST http://www.popecenter.org/recommended_reading/article.html?id=2475 Under Mikhail Gorbachev, the rigid Soviet system gave way to glasnost (openness and freedom of discussion) and perestroika (restructuring of the system). Well-intentioned people proposed lots of changes to transform the nation’s inefficient economy. They wanted to make better use of technology. They wanted more accountability for enterprise managers. They wanted... Thu, 23 Dec 2010 0:00:00 EST http://www.popecenter.org/recommended_reading/article.html?id=2453 Vance Fried is a down-to-earth, plain-speaking business school professor from Oklahoma State University. He doesn’t think much of the academic mindset. “Colleges today are focused on serving the Ivory Tower, not their students,” he writes in his new book, Better/Cheaper College: An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Rescuing the Undergraduate Education Industry. He wants... Wed, 3 Nov 2010 0:00:00 EDT http://www.popecenter.org/recommended_reading/article.html?id=2431 In my review of Higher Education? by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, I suggested that the similarities between the thinking of that book’s politically left authors and my own (libertarians are often but misleadingly placed on the political right) indicated the possibility of a convergence. The... Sun, 26 Sep 2010 0:00:00 EDT http://www.popecenter.org/recommended_reading/article.html?id=2414 Is economist and philosopher Thomas Sowell merely a “secure inhabitant of the right-wing think tank world,” one who has no “genuine vitality,” who “learns nothing that does not confirm what he already knew,” and whose “main idea is the hatred of ideas”? That’s what Alan Wolfe, a Boston College political science professor and a... Wed, 25 Aug 2010 0:00:00 EDT http://www.popecenter.org/recommended_reading/article.html?id=2398 Never judge a book by its jacket blurbs. Higher Education? by Professors Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus sports praise from Jonathan Kozol, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Joseph Stiglitz, all of them individuals with whom I have deep philosophical disagreements. So my pre-reading hunch was that I would despise the book on the theory that a friend of my enemy is my... Wed, 14 Jul 2010 0:00:00 EDT http://www.popecenter.org/recommended_reading/article.html?id=2376 The topic of “globalization” has been discussed from many angles. Some praise the trend toward increasing international exchanges as a good thing; others wring their hands over the harm it allegedly does. Ben Wildavsky’s new book The Great Brain Race is the first book that examines the globalization of higher education and to his credit, he takes a firm... Wed, 23 Jun 2010 0:00:00 EDT http://www.popecenter.org/recommended_reading/article.html?id=2367 If you have studied economics, you may be familiar with Frederic Bastiat’s famous essay on “the broken window fallacy.” In it, Bastiat (a Frenchman who lived from 1801 to 1850) explains that a good economist takes account of not only the seen, but also the unseen. That is, a good economist thinks about not only the immediate and readily apparent results of... Tue, 15 Dec 2009 0:00:00 EST http://www.popecenter.org/recommended_reading/article.html?id=2273 Does “political correctness” predominate in American higher education? If so, is that a bad thing? And if it’s a bad thing, can anything be done about it?A new collection of sixteen essays, The Politically Correct University, digs deeply into those questions. The editors (Robert Maranto of the University of Arkansas, Frederick Hess of the American... Tue, 17 Nov 2009 0:00:00 EST http://www.popecenter.org/recommended_reading/article.html?id=2260 Human capital means the mental toolkit a person has—the stock of knowledge and skills that enable him to produce and solve problems. We benefit from accumulating human capital just as we benefit from accumulating physical capital (tools); both increase our productivity. We augment our human capital through learning. That fact leads many people to jump to the conclusion that... Mon, 6 Oct 2008 0:00:00 EDT http://www.popecenter.org/recommended_reading/article.html?id=2073 It bothers many of us that colleges operate in a sea of money. Tuition has been rising faster than inflation to the point where spending $50,000 a year for college is not unusual, and colleges are competing for students with costly features such as luxurious dorm rooms with double beds, state-of-the-art gym facilities, and million-dollar athletic coaches. A new book by a... Tue, 22 Jul 2008 0:00:00 EDT http://www.popecenter.org/recommended_reading/article.html?id=2038 Several years ago, Tom Brokaw wrote a best-seller, The Greatest Generation, a tribute to the Americans of the World War II era. After reading Mark Bauerlein’s new book The Dumbest Generation, you have to wonder if history wouldn’t have turned out much worse if the “Millennial Generation” – today’s youth and young adults – had been in... Mon, 2 Jun 2008 0:00:00 EDT http://www.popecenter.org/recommended_reading/article.html?id=2015 Alan Kors is a highly-regarded professor of history who has taught at the University of Pennsylvania for decades. Kors was the recipient of the Pope Center's Caldwell Prize for academic leadership in 2002. Among his other achievements, Professor Kors has recorded a lecture series on European intellectual history for The Teaching Company. His recent essay Mon, 7 Apr 2008 0:00:00 EDT http://www.popecenter.org/recommended_reading/article.html?id=1986 College professors yearn for academically interested students—eager young minds that want to grasp new ideas and soak up information. But not many students are like that. Most come to college to get a degree and have fun while doing it. Faced with such kids and their tiresome questions “what will be on the test?” and “will this count toward the... Mon, 16 Jul 2007 0:00:00 EDT http://www.popecenter.org/recommended_reading/article.html?id=1868 Ivory Tower Blues: A University System in Crisis, By James Côté and Anton Allahar, University of Toronto Press, 2007, 251 pages For a university press to have published this book is the same as if the American Bar Association published a set of self-help legal books. In both instances, the impact of the book is contrary to the interests of... Fri, 29 Jun 2007 0:00:00 EDT http://www.popecenter.org/recommended_reading/article.html?id=1864 What Ever Happened to the Faculty? Drift and Decision in Higher Education, by Mary Burgan. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Editor's Note: John Staddon is the James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and a professor of biology and neurobiology at Duke University. He does research on adaptive behavior, evolution, and learning;... Tue, 20 Feb 2007 0:00:00 EST http://www.popecenter.org/recommended_reading/article.html?id=1796 Theory’s Empire: An Anthology of Dissent Edited by Daphne Patai and Will H. Corral Columbia University Press, 2005, 725 pages, $29.50 Editor's Note: Nan Miller, retired English professor and author of the Pope Center paper English 101: Ticket to Literacy or... Tue, 25 Jul 2006 0:00:00 EDT http://www.popecenter.org/recommended_reading/article.html?id=1713 Does Education Matter? By Alison Wolf Penguin Books • 2002 • 332 pages • $16.00 Yes, of course education matters. The author, who holds the Sir Roy Griffiths professorship of public sector management at King’s College, London, is not questioning whether education is good at all. Rather, she questions whether governmental efforts to expand... Fri, 7 Jul 2006 0:00:00 EDT http://www.popecenter.org/recommended_reading/article.html?id=1710 The Tumultuous 1960s By J. Stanley Marshall Sentry Press, 2006, 344 pages, $27.50 J. Stanley Marshall was president of the Florida State University (FSU) from 1969 until he retired from the position (but not from a career in education) in 1976. In 1978, he ran and lost a race for Florida state superintendent of education. In 1987, he was the founding... Wed, 21 Jun 2006 0:00:00 EDT http://www.popecenter.org/recommended_reading/article.html?id=1705 Excellence Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education By Harry R. Lewis Public Affairs • 2006 • 305 pages • $26.00 People usually wait until they have retired to write books that air a good deal of dirty laundry. Maybe it’s a mark in favor of tenure that a professor who is still very much a part of a university faculty can... Tue, 21 Feb 2006 0:00:00 EST http://www.popecenter.org/recommended_reading/article.html?id=1672 Our Underachieving Colleges By Derek Bok Princeton University Press, 413 pages, $29.95 Americans are so used to hearing that our higher education system is “the envy of the world” that most will be surprised to learn that the former president of Harvard thinks it’s loaded with underachievers. He does, though, and Derek Bok’s most recent... Wed, 25 Jan 2006 0:00:00 EST http://www.popecenter.org/recommended_reading/article.html?id=1665 Declining by Degrees: Higher Education at Risk Edited by Richard H. Hersh and John Merrow Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, 244 pages, $24.95 Books critical of higher education in America used to be written almost exclusively by “outsiders” who were armed with well-sharpened philosophical axes – Dinesh D’Souza and Charles Sykes, for example. ... Fri, 16 Dec 2005 0:00:00 EST http://www.popecenter.org/recommended_reading/article.html?id=1653 Toxic Diversity By Dan Subotnik New York University Press • 2005 • 268 pages • $45.00 Some ideas are so transparently foolish that only an intellectual could believe them. History gives us plenty of examples and perhaps the best modern ones are the rantings of academic race and gender theorists. Tenured at universities across... Mon, 14 Nov 2005 0:00:00 EST http://www.popecenter.org/recommended_reading/article.html?id=1645 The War Against Grammar, by David Mulroy, Boynton/Cook Publishers, 2003, 118 pages Professor David Mulroy has taught classics at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee since 1973. This academic specialty gives him a unique platform from which to write about what he calls the “war against grammar,” waged by American schoolteachers and their professional... Mon, 14 Nov 2005 0:00:00 EST http://www.popecenter.org/recommended_reading/article.html?id=1644 The Freefall of the American University, By Jim Nelson Black, WND Books, 2004, 366 pages, $24.99 Malice, recklessness, betrayal, exploitation – those are words that are associated with prisons or insane asylums. One wouldn’t usually associate them with colleges or universities. But Jim Nelson Black, in Freefall of the American University, shows us... Wed, 11 May 2005 0:00:00 EDT http://www.popecenter.org/recommended_reading/article.html?id=1573 Independent Institute and Cambridge University Press, 2005, 279 pp., $28.99 American colleges and universities are hothouses of hypocrisy and the principal exhibit is the fact that while their spokesmen talk endlessly about their commitment to openness, tolerance, critical thinking, diversity, and so on, many of them have adopted speech codes designed to stifle the expression of... Wed, 16 Mar 2005 0:00:00 EST http://www.popecenter.org/recommended_reading/article.html?id=1544 • Richard Vedder: Going Broke by Degree: Why College Costs Too Much; American Enterprise Institute; 2004; 232 pp.; $25 It is incontestably true that ­ the cost of going to college has been steadily climbing for decades. Tuition, mandatory student fees (which compel students to pay for a lot of non-academic folderol), books, and campus...