The Emerging Scholars Blog

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?

This was the top hit on my Creative Commons' search for "Bible study." Insert your own metaphor!

Today, I’ve been invited to a faculty Bible study at Northern Kentucky University, and I hope that my schedule will let me attend. InterVarsity is committed to building “witnessing communities of students and faculty,” and group Bible studies are an integral part of those communities. With our upcoming ESN Book Club discussion of The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship, we’ll have more opportunities to talk about communities of Christian scholars. (Spoiler! Chapter Six is titled “Building Academic Communities.”) The ESN Book Club starts on Wednesday with a post from Tom. If you still don’t have your copy of Marsden’s book, search your local library or download the Kindle edition. (Did you know there is a free Kindle iPhone app? But I digress…)

Photo: Bible Study BBQ by amanky via Flickr

ESN’s partner, InterVarsity Faculty Ministry, has created a number of Bible study resources for faculty, and I think graduate students would benefit from them as well. Faculty Ministry has collected a few Bible studies written specifically for faculty. On Friday, FM published a new Bible study on 1 Peter, along a daily quiet time guide and several essays related to 1 Peter by Bruce Winter, Miroslav Volf, and Gilbert Meilaender.

If you’ve had good experiences with on-campus Bible studies, how did they help you? What did you study? And, if your experience have been, er, less than great, what were the problems? Did you encounter barriers specific to the academic context?

Insider Higher Ed reports on a meeting of the New England Association of Schools and Colleges, in which assessing student outcomes was discussed. I’ll let you read the article yourself, but one of their conclusions was:

It might be possible, and could be valuable, for humanists to reach broad agreement on the skills, abilities, and knowledge they might seek to instill in their students, and that agreement on those goals might be a starting point for identifying effective ways to measure how well students have mastered those outcomes.

Notice the words “might” and “possible,” which express considerable reservations.

So, how should student outcomes in the humanities be assessed? Or can they be assessed? And what sorts of outcomes should be sought in the first place?