A recent article in the Chronicle, “Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don’t Go,” has received some sustained attention on this blog. It’s a well-timed contribution, since the job market apocalypse is basically here. Might as well pile on, right? Herewith my own contribution.
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The thesis of this series of articles, of which this is the final installment, is that the modern, liberal, pluralist, secular democracy (MLPSD) is incapable of educating itself. Education is the communal (social, political and cultural) imposition of a particular image of the good upon the members of a community, and MLPSD, by self-definition, rejects the program of paideia, which is what all education ultimately is and must be.
Read the rest.
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As we reflect upon President Obama's State of the Union address, we should also cast an eye to Freedom House's annual Freedom in the World report. Freedom House began publishing these global assessments in 1973; according to the reports of the last decade, things do not look as hopeful for liberty around the globe as they once did.
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How do you teach a course on three-quarters of the world’s population and all of the world’s problems? How do you teach a course about the lived experience of people with whom your students have no connection whatever? If the problem of economic development is ultimately ethical (as well as scientific), what is the best way to teach it?
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. . . [W]e can hope to do little more now than snatch a fingernail of a saint from the rack or a handful of ashes from the faggots, and bury them secretly in a flowerpot against the day, ages hence, when a few men begin again to dare to believe there was once something else, that something else is thinkable, and need some evidence of what it was, and the fortifying knowledge that there were those who, at great nightfall, took the loving thought to preserve the tokens of hope and truth.– Whittaker Chambers to William F. Buckley, 1954
Whittaker Chambers, never the most optimistic of chaps at the party, once famously quipped that when he joined Christianity, conservatism, and the West against his old communist cohorts, he was joining the losing side of history.
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Lewis Lehrman published a piece in four Connecticut newspapers recently about the life of Martha Washington and the precedents she set as America's first First Lady. Here is an excerpt and a link to the full article.
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Last month the Canadian Association of University Teachers set out to investigate Trinity Western University for its initiative to require faculty to take an oath affirming their Christian faith. CAUT worries that this requirement is an infringement on academic freedom, and has received support from those who are confident that the process of secularization will soon make the religious university obsolete.
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In the past two decades, a wealth of information has been printed in hard-copy and on the web that allows ready access to some of the most important primary documents regarding Abraham Lincoln. Herewith a list of ten of the most useful and reliable sources.
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Young America's Foundation has been publishing a list of "Top Conservative Colleges" for several years now because thoughtful and patriotic young people, along with their penny-wise parents, want to know that the college education they are about to buy will not speed out of control and a crash them into a moral and philosophical wall.
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There’s some research (and dissertation-writing advice) that suggests that “writing first” is a key to a prolific writing career. Are there other strategies for mastering the literary way of life?
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