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How a Student-Friendly Kindle Could Change the Textbook Market

Wed, 06 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Chronicle of Higher Education - By Jeffrey R. Young - May. 06 (News Report) - Rumors that Amazon will introduce a wide-format Kindle have the news media and bloggers speculating about whether the new gadget will spark an electronic-textbook revolution and lighten backpacks nationwide.

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Student Lending Would Change Under Senate's Budget Plan

Fri, 01 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Chronicle of Higher Education - By Kelly Field - May. 01 (News Report) - The U.S. Senate last night gave final approval to a budget blueprint that sets the stage for an overhaul of student lending.

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Books Can't Compete

Fri, 23 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Chronicle of Higher Education - By Mark Bauerlein - Jan. 23 (Opinion) - Here’s a depressing and blunt comment from Larry McMurtry, speaking not only as a novelist but as a bookstore owner (it’s an interview): The end of the culture of the book. I’m pessimistic. Mainly it’s the flow of people into my bookshop in Archer City. They’re almost always people over 40. I don’t see kids, and I don’t see kids reading. I think little kids love to have stories read to them, but when they get to 10 or 11 or 12, they run into this tsunami of technology: iPod, iPhone, Blackberries. They don’t resist it, and it’s normal that they wouldn’t; it’s their culture. I’m not so sure they ever come back to reading. Some will, but most won’t. The tsunami metaphor is apt, and it points out the relationship between books and other media in kids’ lives. The list of options has grown, with books now joined by games, Web surfing, music downloading, Photoshop, YouTube, social networking, blogs, texting, IM, and the rest. Lots of folks think that the environment has grown more challenging and rewarding and enlightening, the addition of digital diversions fostering a rich plurality of texts and images and stories and sounds in which books maintain a central place.

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The Legacy of the Bush-Cheney Years: Trends That May Linger

Sun, 04 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Chronicle of Higher Education - By Karen J. Winkler - Jan. 04 (News Analysis) - New York — For the last eight years, progressive historians have been vocally critical of the Bush-Cheney administration’s war in Iraq, war on terror, stress on free markets, and push to privatize government services like charter schools and social-welfare programs. But at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association here, the collective judgment seems to be that those trends haven’t been all that new — and won’t be easy to change. In 2007 a group called Historians Against the War was successful in its call on the membership of the association to pass a resolution against the invasion of Iraq, over the objections of some historians that doing so would take a political stand as a group of scholars. The antiwar group has continued to meet, holding national conferences and sponsoring online publications that include an analysis of the historical record of the Bush administration and studies of the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the war in Iraq, and resistance movements in World War II. At this year’s AHA meeting, the group gathered to reflect on the legacy of the Bush-Cheney years. While the session was not advertised in the official program, it drew more than 100 scholars. “Much of my work as a historian has had to do with ideology and its role in shaping lives and policy,” said Alice Kessler-Harris, a professor of history at Columbia University. In the Bush-Cheney years, she said, three ideologies have had a major impact on American society. An “elusive concept” of terror has allowed the administration to wage pre-emptive war, support military force over diplomacy, and hide the human cost of the war in Iraq; the ideology of free markets has undercut government regulation of the economy and the workplace; and a “shift in the ideology of the individual” has emphasized that individuals need to have control over decisions — like what kind of health care they want.

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Classroom Clickers and the Cost of Technology

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Chronicle of Higher Education - By Michael Bugeja - Dec. 02 (Investigative Report) - Last spring I received an e-mail message from my university's Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching that read like an advertisement: "If you are thinking of ordering personal response system units, or clickers, for your class next fall, be sure to attend the upcoming CELT session, Using TurningPoint Clickers to Engage Students in the Classroom." Staff members at the center provide valuable services to evaluate and improve teaching. Their first impulse is to help, a trait they share with information-technology and bookstore personnel. In this case, though, the center was helping a company by providing workshops and promotion for a device resembling a television remote control.

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Health Care: a Campaign Primer

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Chronicle of Higher Education - By David Glenn - Oct. 09 (News Analysis) - John McCain and Barack Obama have offered proposals that would — in very different ways — reshape the landscape of American health care. The Chronicle spoke with several scholars about how the study of health economics and health policy has evolved since the Clinton plan collapsed in 1994 — and whether this year's candidates seem to have learned anything from that scholarship.

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The Russians Are Coming

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Chronicle of Higher Education - By Stephen Kotkin, Nina L. Khrushcheva, Edward Lucas, Ellen Carnaghan, Marshall I. Goldman, Sean Kay - Sep. 05 (Opinion) - When the Russian army invaded the former Soviet republic of Georgia last month, it was little surprise to many observers, who have noted for several years the increasingly assertive and aggressive foreign policy of Vladimir V. Putin, Russia's prime minister and former president. But is Russia as resurgent as its recent military posturing might suggest? The Chronicle asked several experts to comment on the country's likely political, social, and economic prospects over the next 10 years.

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Supply-Side Education

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Chronicle of Higher Education - By David Glenn - Jul. 25 (Review) - "There was enormous growth in educational attainment between 1900 and 1970," Goldin says in an interview. "But after 1970, the growth in attainment became much more sluggish. Putting those two parts together, you can explain a large amount of the story of wage inequality in the 20th century."

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For Professors, 'Friending' Can Be Fraught

Wed, 05 Dec 2007 11:31:45 -0800

Chronicle of Higher Education - By Sara Lipka - Dec. 05 (Special Report) - For all its pitfalls, Facebook can prompt meaningful exchanges. Some professors look up students who e-mail them with questions or are scheduled to come to office hours. What the professors learn, they say, makes them better advisers. Comments that students have posted -- concern over a bad class presentation, for example -- can provoke a thoughtful conversation. One professor knew to go easy on a student when he saw his status change from "in a relationship" to "single."

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What We Don't Know About Gambling, but Should

Thu, 11 Oct 2007 15:16:29 -0700

Chronicle of Higher Education - By Alan Wolfe - Oct. 11 (Opinion) - Do religion and gambling both flourish wherever uncertainty exists? That, it seems to me, is a worthwhile question for scholars to ponder.

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Journal-Publishing Giant Will Halt Lucrative Business in Weapons Bazaars

Tue, 05 Jun 2007 19:44:03 -0700

Chronicle of Higher Education - Jun. 05 (News Report) - Despite the profitability of the company's five shows -- including the Defense Systems & Equipment International Exhibition, which bills itself as "the world's most prestigious defense exhibition" -- Reed Elsevier's chief executive, Sir Crispin Davis, said in a written statement that "it has become increasingly clear that growing numbers of important customers and authors have very real concerns about our involvement in the defense exhibitions business."

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Fears for Democracy in India

Fri, 18 May 2007 13:14:08 -0700

Chronicle of Higher Education - By Martha C. Nussbaum - May. 18 (Opinion) - What has been happening in India is a serious threat to the future of democracy in the world. The fact that it has yet to make it onto the radar screen of most Americans is evidence of the way in which terrorism and the war on Iraq have distracted us from events and issues of fundamental significance. If we really want to understand the impact of religious nationalism on democratic values, India currently provides a deeply troubling example, and one without which any understanding of the more general phenomenon is dangerously incomplete. It also provides an example of how democracy can survive the assault of religious extremism.

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Hannah Arendt's Fame Rests on the Wrong Foundation

Fri, 08 Dec 2006 13:45:46 -0800

Chronicle of Higher Education - By Russell Jacoby - Dec. 08 (Editorial) - ... who or where are the other political philosophers? The last great political American philosopher, John Dewey, died in 1952. Since then American philosophy -- with the partial exception of Richard Rorty -- has vanished into technical issues; within the subfield of political philosophy, the largest of its figures, John Rawls, remains abstract and insular. His work may quicken the attenuated pulse of academic philosophers, but it does not move the rest of us.

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The Social Responsibility in Teaching Sociobiology

Fri, 17 Nov 2006 10:00:12 -0800

Chronicle of Higher Education - By David P. Barash - Nov. 17 (Other) - Although the study of evolution is, in my opinion, one of the most exciting and illuminating of all intellectual enterprises, there is at the same time, and not just in my opinion, something dark about the implications of natural selection for our own behavior.

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