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. Newly Customized Majors Suit Students With Passions All Their Own (Ilana Kowarski. Chronicle of Higher Education, 9/9/2010): Is this what it takes to get creative students to go to Drexel? Note: a little dig at my [Tom] friends who are alum. Despite my homemade mix of Biology major, religion classes, and ministry internships (including one with InterVarsity which resulted in me coming on staff), I wish something like this was available when I was an undergrad! Is this some influence of the British model? Wish such possibilities existed on the graduate level in my areas of interest, i.e., higher education which is largely dominated by administrative concerns versus philosophy and ‘whole person’ student formation. I wonder if customized majors (or existing majors with flexibility) are easier to design at smaller colleges where faculty are involved with mentoring the students. Would be much more difficult to pull-off in prep for professional schools, in particular Medical School comes to mind. What are some core classes which are foundational to general education and specific majors? How are they determined? Thoughts?
2. Rereading the University Classics (Kai Hammermeister. Chronicle of Higher Education, 9/9/2010):
Editor’s Note:Â This is the first in a monthly series intended to introduce new generations of faculty members and administrators to a core set of classic books about higher education and its institutions.
The American university is often considered to be an unlikely and precarious, if highly productive, conjoining of the British residential college and the German 19th-century research university. In his short treatise, Mission of the University, José Ortega y Gasset rejects both models and wants to replace them with an Italo-Spanish emphasis on student participation that was decisive for the founding of the medieval European university but quickly receded into the background. …
Photo credit: David Masters via Flickr
After the jump, tech/life balance, Stephen Hawking, and more (yes, more) on James Davison Hunter.
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