The Emerging Scholars Blog

Over the weekend, I started reading Stephen Carter’s The Emperor of Ocean Park. Carter, a law professor at Yale, made his name with nonfiction books like The Culture of Disbelief, and he also wrote a column for Christianity Today for several years. He’s now successfully transitioned into a career as a bestselling novelist. The novel’s narrator, Talcott Garland, is an African American law professor at a fictional Ivy League-type university (like they say – write what you know!), and a number of scenes are set within the academic world: departmental politics, classroom teaching, even pick-up basketball with fellow professors.

Reading this novel got me to thinking: What are the best novels about the academic life? To qualify, the novels would have to be good novels themselves, but they would also need to represent the academic world truthfully. I start with one that I’m certain should be on the list, and a few others that I enjoyed reading, though I’m not sure how truthfully they represent the academic world. Do you agree with my choices? What are your suggestions? Read the rest of this entry »

In A Great Man, Dumbledore,  Rob Jenkins, an associate professor of English and director of the Writers Institute at Georgia Perimeter College, proposes

Albus Dumbledore, headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, might just be the greatest academic administrator of all time. … Of course, not everybody can be a Dumbledore, but two-year college administrators can certainly benefit from his example. At the very least, they can learn to resist their more Umbridge-like urges, and thus save a herd of angry Centaurs (which I take to be something like the members of a faculty senate) the trouble of carrying them off into the Forbidden Forest.

What a vibrant mental picture as we prepare for the fall term on any campus.  According to Jenkins, what does Dumbledore bring to the administrator’s desk or his buzzing about through the halls of power?

Michael Gambon as Albus Dumbledore in "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire"

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Welcome to this week’s Week in Review! If you have your own link or suggestion, please add it to the comments, or email it to Tom or Mike.

From Tom

1.  Another piece to throw into our technology conversation:  How about teaching naked, i.e., sans machines?  Do you agree with José A. Bowen, dean of Southern Methodist University’s Meadows School of the Arts, in his comments regarding the quality of classroom powerpoint instruction and the rise of on-line classes to replace such offerings?  Note:  The video complents Jeffrey Young’s Chronicle of Higher Education article When Computers Leave Classrooms, So Does Boredom (July 20, 2009).

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