The Emerging Scholars Blog

What are you reading, watching, thinking about this week? As usual, here’s a few which have been on our mind. Let us know your thoughts on any/all of them. If you have items you’d like us to consider for the top five, add them in the comments or send them to Tom or Mike.

1. Who pays for higher education, in the U.S. and around the world? Scott Jaschik interviews (by email) the authors of Financing Higher Education Worldwide (D. Bruce Johnstone & Pamela N. Marcucci. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010) in Financing Higher Education Worldwide (Inside Higher Ed. 6/24/2010).

2. Who pays for continuing education in the medical community? The question being explored in this article extends beyond the medical community and various related research fields. What does it mean to be truly free from [industry] bias? How does someone in a field which involves the application of research in real world contexts avoid flirting with becoming a mouthpiece of industry? Do you agree with Dr. Francis S. Collins, N.I.H director,” who criticized the move as a “breathtaking sweep to squash something that is really important to us, which is the science that’s going on in the private sector.”

Dr. James O. Woolliscroft, dean of Michigan’s medical school, said leading faculty members “wanted education to be free from bias, to be based on the best evidence and a balanced view of the topic under discussion.”

While the financing in question amounts to as much as $1 million a year at Michigan, commercial payments for industry speakers and courses nationwide come to about $1 billion, nearly half the total expenditure for such courses.

The debate over whether the medical profession should develop an industry-free model of postgraduate education is a delicate one. A conference at Georgetown University on Friday, called “Prescription for Conflict,” will highlight the arguments on both sides through presentations by federal health officials, professors from leading medical schools, hospital executives and a Senate investigator. — Natasha Singer & Duff Wilson. Debate Over Industry Role in Educating Doctors. NY Times. 6/23/2010.

3. What is the cost of For-Profit Education? New Grilling of For-Profits Could Turn Up the Heat for All of Higher Education (Paul Basken. Chronicle of Higher Education. 6/22/2010). Interesting case. Worth following the discussion Washington, D.C. How do Emerging Scholars intersect with the changing field of higher education?

Click “Read more” to read about Wendell Berry, social media, and UK basketball.  Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s the top five articles, books, websites, etc., that we’ve been reading or thinking about the past week. Let us know your thoughts on any/all of them.  In addition, if you have items you’d like us to consider for the top five, add them in the comments or send them to Tom or Mike.

1.  Week in Review: Big Questions Edition touched on if Universities have lost sight of their purpose and the potential value of increased career services.  The Chronicle of Higher Education opened this week with Are Too Many Students Going to College? (November 8, 2009) and What Do Parents Think? (November 9, 2009).  Both articles wrestle with whether the whole population can afford or should pursue this American dream.  In the survey of 1000 parents of pre-college students:

Nine of 10 parents told us that, despite the toughest economic climate in decades, they still view sending their kids to college as an essential part of the American dream … Almost eight in 10 Americans agreed that it’s very important to obtain a degree, while only a little more than half said their parents had felt it was very important for them to attend college (William F. Glavin Jr. What Do Parents Think? Chronicle of Higher Education. November 8, 2009).

2.  In Why College Professors Don’t Envy the Young (Chronicle of Higher Education.  November 08, 2009), Gina Barreca, professor of English/Feminist Theroy at UConn, delivers a unique perspective on midlife crisis as an older member of the academic community observing the younger members (and reflecting upon her own past).

While friends in other professions are waking up to their midlives (or what we choose to call midlife but how many people do you know who live past 100 — not counting Lévi-Strauss?) and frantically wishing they could return to their twenties or thirties, those of us who have been dealing with undergraduate and graduate students don’t want to time-travel back to those years. … To be adorable and energetic would be great, but to feel that perpetual trepidation that I’ll never find a job, a partner, a place in the world, or an apartment that I don’t have to share with six other people? No deal. To feel as if the whole world is open to me would be lovely, but to live with the anxiety that I’ll end up on the outskirts or end up an outcast? No thanks.  To wonder whether I’ll ever do work meaningful to me, let alone anyone else? Not a chance. …

3.  Reduce the Technology, Rescue Your Job (Chronicle of Higher Education. November 09, 2009) by Michael J. Bugeja, director of the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication at Iowa State University and author of Interpersonal Divide: The Search for Community in a Technological Age (Oxford University Press, 2004) provides a number of practical recommendations.

4. Getting Started with Zotero – Zotero is a free citation and research manager that you can add on to Firefox. Amy Cavender at ProfHacker.com started a series this week to introduce new users to Zotero, which I (Mike) have never really used but have heard great things about.

5. Someone’s Trying to Find You – In a good way. IVP Editor Dan Reid, writing on IVP’s Addenda & Errata blog, expresses his frustration, and bafflement, at how hard it is to find faculty information on some universities’ websites. Dan uses the information to look for potential new authors, but the benefit of easy-to-find, easy-to-read faculty pages goes beyond that:

This is important not just for the sake of publishers and others finding your faculty. Good academic websites also contribute to a faculty member’s platform. And it is a good thing for academic institutions to have faculty with a platform that extends beyond the classroom. This doesn’t really need to be argued, does it?

Here’s the top five articles, books, websites, etc., that we’ve been reading or thinking about the past week. Let us know your thoughts on any/all of them.  In addition, if you have items you’d like us to consider for the top five, add them in the comments or send them to Tom or Mike.

Claude Levi-Strauss

1.  The Big Questions: Have our colleges and universities lost sight of their purpose? (Jerry Pattengale, Books & Culture, November/December 2009) critiques Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life (Anthony Kronman, Yale University Press, 2008) and recommends The American University in a Postsecular Age (Co-edited by Douglas & Rhonda Jacobsen, Oxford University Press, 2008).

2. Can a biologist trust an evangelical Christian? – InterVarsity Graduate & Faculty Ministry at Indiana University will be hosting this event next Thursday, Nov. 12.

This panel discussion features three evangelical scholars on the topic of Christianity, science and evolution. Our primary audience for this event will be scholars who are skeptical or even hostile about the idea of integrating religion and science. We have chosen the topic as part of the Indiana University “themester” on “Evolution, Diversity, and Change.” Our goals, at this point, are to provide a model of what it might look like to integrate belief in God with scientific inquiry; to put names and faces behind what can often be the demonized other (evangelical Christians); to foster a discussion about the integration of religion and science; to work at eroding the destructive binary that is assumed to exist between science and religion; and to work at building trust between the scientific community and evangelical Christianity.

For more information, check out their website, www.iugfm.blogspot.com.

3. Claude Lévi-Strauss Dies at 100 – One of the most important intellectual figures of the 20th Century died last Friday. From the NY Times’ obituary:

A powerful thinker, Mr. Lévi-Strauss was an avatar of “structuralism,” a school of thought in which universal “structures” were believed to underlie all human activity, giving shape to seemingly disparate cultures and creations. His work was a profound influence even on his critics, of whom there were many. There has been no comparable successor to him in France. And his writing — a mixture of the pedantic and the poetic, full of daring juxtapositions, intricate argument and elaborate metaphors — resembles little that had come before in anthropology.

Other reflections on his life and work: WSJ’s obituary and an elegy, NPR’s story about his 100th birthday, Eric Banks’ post at the Chronicle of Higher Ed about Lévi-Strauss’ importance.

Photo: Claude Levi-Strauss in 1992, from sagabardon via Flickr

4.  In a NY Times Op-Ed entitled Teach Your Teachers Well, Susan Engel (a senior lecturer in psychology and the director of the teaching program at Williams College) builds upon Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s Urging for ‘Revolutionary Change’ in Nation’s Teacher-Training Programs.  How about this angle on the problem?

Our best universities have, paradoxically, typically looked down their noses at education, as if it were intellectually inferior. The result is that the strongest students are often in colleges that have no interest in education, while the most inspiring professors aren’t working with students who want to teach. This means that comparatively weaker students in less intellectually rigorous programs are the ones preparing to become teachers.

So the first step is to get the best colleges to throw themselves into the fray. If education was a good enough topic for Plato, John Dewey and William James, it should be good enough for 21st-century college professors. — Susan Engel, Teach Your Teachers Well, NY Times, 11/02/2009

5. Online Education, Growing Fast, Eyes the Truly ‘Big Time’ (Marc Perry, Chronicle of Higher Education, October 30, 2009) as The $50K Club: 58 Private Colleges Pass a Pricing Milestone (Reported by Scott Carlson, Kathryn Masterson, and Jeffrey Brainard, and written by Mr. Carlson. Chronicle of Higher Education. November 1, 2009).  Looking for some thoughts on how liberal arts colleges and their ideals will survive the current economic crisis?

Traditional reasoning about the enrichment of the “student as future citizen” can only go so far when parents who pay the tuition or students taking the courses can’t see a bottom line in the form of a lucrative job after graduation. — Katharine S. Brooks, Close the Gap Between the Liberal Arts and Career Services, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 1, 2009

In Close the Gap Between the Liberal Arts and Career Services, Katharine S. Brooks, director of liberal-arts career services, University of Texas at Austin, offers some good ideas regarding career services.  For parents, students, and educators she has a new book,  You Majored in What? Mapping Your Path From Chaos to Career (Viking, 2009), which might be worth exploring.  If you’ve read it, let us know what you think.

In this week’s Week in Review, new graduates dealing with the recession, some notable reviews of N.T. Wright’s new book, Justification, a new website for Christian lawyers, some additional coverage of A. N. Wilson’s conversion, and more! If you’d like to contribute to next week’s Review, add your link(s) in the comments, or send them to Tom or Mike directly.

Reminder: We start our ESN Book Club on Your Mind Matters next Tuesday, June 9. We’ll start with the forewords and Chapter 1. If you haven’t gotten your copy yet, you can download next week’s selection directly from IVP’s website as a PDF. Read the rest of this entry »

As you have a passion for higher education, you no doubt follow March Madness with great interest and/or concern.  So join me in swinging by Culture Making to wrestle with the 5 Culture Making Questions applied to March Madness:

1. What does March Madness assume about the way the world is?
2. What does March Madness assume about the way the world should be?
3. What does March Madness make possible?
4. What does March Madness make impossible (or at least a lot more difficult)?
5. What new culture is created in response?

But before you go, what do you think about the promise by Courtney Paris, an all-American center at the University of Oklahoma, to repay the cost of her scholarship if she does not bring the national championship back to her campus? –  Putting a Price on a Title Run Stirs a Debate, by Jere’ Longman, NY Times, 3/23/09.

Is that what investment in athletic scholarships are understood to mean?  Is it too romantic to consider college athletic scholarships as an opportunity to enter and receive the long term value of higher education?  

With regard to financial investment and visibility, star athletes seem to be in a unique situation.  I don’t think a similar promise to produce results or repay (publish or perish, win the Nobel Prize, etc) could be given by those who receive a full ride academic scholarship, grant money, or a named academic chair.

In the midst of conversations regarding the recession and the bailout, I find myself talking with colleagues, friends and family about the complex price tag of higher education.  If you’re like me or have a curiosity regarding the topic, take a moment to bone up by reading this week’s Chronicle of Higher Education’s piece STICKER SHOCK: The $375-Billion Question: Why Does College Cost So Much?  Here’s a few paragraphs which I’ll refer in the coming days (Note:  read the article for the data/examples): 

A poll of likely voters commissioned by the National Education Association and released two weeks ago showed that 70 percent of parents and 65 percent of students said making college affordable was an important issue for them in the fall election.  … Read the rest of this entry »

On Friday, I led an International Discussion Forum on Randy’s Last Lecture at U. of Pennsylvania, sponsored by InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, the Penn Graduate Christian Fellowship, and Intercultural Friends.  Note:  Discussion questions posted here in PDF.

Afterward, there was an opportunity for participants to offer suggestions for future topics.  The international students in my discussion group desired an introduction to the practical elements of navigating American culture, one significant area being the management of money while studying in the U.S.

If you have suggestions of web resources/links on this topic or some helpful tips, please post them here.  To get us started below are some pieces from InterVarsity Christian Fellowship’s International Student Ministry Website:

Read the rest of this entry »

No, this isn’t a post about the cost of discipleship. It’s about finding ways to pay for your registration and travel to Following Christ 2008, InterVarsity’s conference for graduate students, faculty, professionals, and even ESN members.

Jon Boyd, FC08 conference director, has put together a helpful video describing the many ways you can reduce your out-of-pocket costs for FC08, including a way to win one of three $50 registration discounts, just for watching the video.

FC08: The Director’s Videos #6 from Graduate & Faculty Ministries on Vimeo.

BTW, you can see all of Jon’s FC08 videos (there are six and counting) here.