Here is a taste of Molly Worthen’s piece at The New York Times: Colleges should offer a radically low-tech first-year program for students who want to apply: a secular monastery within the modern university, with a curated set of courses...
college life
Everything in season: why you will love and likely sometimes hate your alma mater
College is an interesting time. You get constant social approval for Chili’s and Taco Bell. Staying up all night to read Beowulf isn’t all that weird. You worry about “printer money” and parking and what you’re doing for spring break....
Turkeys are invading college campuses
Not a joke. Here is The New York Times: They are lounging next to bike racks and outside dorms. They are strutting across Harvard Yard. And, yes, they are occasionally fanning their feathers and charging at innocent students. Across the...
Are you a TikTok influencer?
If you answered yes to the question in the title of this post, I encourage you to read writer and English professor Barrett Swanson‘s recent piece at Harper’s. I am guessing, however, that you won’t read it. Way too long....
Out of the Zoo: The ones who have taught me everything
Annie Thorn is a senior history major from Kalamazoo, Michigan and our intern here at The Way of Improvement Leads Home. As part of her internship she writes a weekly column titled “Out of the Zoo.” It focuses on life as a history...
Out of the Zoo: Traditions
Annie Thorn is a junior history major from Kalamazoo, Michigan and our intern here at The Way of Improvement Leads Home. As part of her internship she is writing a weekly column titled “Out of the Zoo.” It focuses on life as...
Song of the Day
For all those who have sent their kids off to college for the first time in the midst of this pandemic. Replace “friend” with “son” or “daughter.” Into the traffic changingA good friend I have hadToday, today he’s leavingMakes me...
Out of the Zoo: 2,254 COVID Tests
Annie Thorn is a junior history major from Kalamazoo, Michigan and our intern here at The Way of Improvement Leads Home. As part of her internship she is writing a weekly column titled “Out of the Zoo.” It focuses on life as...
Gettysburg College sends students home due to COVID-19 outbreak
Here is the Gettysburg Times: Many Gettysburg College students will be heading home soon, according to a letter President Bob Iuliano sent the college community on Friday. First-year students and “a cohort of other students” will be allowed to remain […]
Out of the Zoo: Trying Our Best
Annie Thorn is a junior history major from Kalamazoo, Michigan and our intern here at The Way of Improvement Leads Home. As part of her internship she is writing a weekly column titled “Out of the Zoo.” It focuses on life as...
Out of the Zoo: Back to School
Annie Thorn is a junior history major from Kalamazoo, Michigan and our intern here at The Way of Improvement Leads Home. As part of her internship she is writing a weekly column titled “Out of the Zoo.” It focuses on life as...
“Students will be seated one fallen statue of a historical figure apart. As statues are the only way we learn history, this will also remove the need for students to buy books.”
McSweeney’s strikes again! Check out Bethany Keenan’s “Discipline-Specific Guidelines For Classroom Social Distancing.” Here are a few: History Students will be seated one fallen statue of a historical figure apart. As statues are the only way we learn history, this...
College Teaching and the Planting of “Intellectual and Moral Seeds”
David Brooks offers some advice to the college class of 2020: The biggest way most colleges fail is this: They don’t plant the intellectual and moral seeds students are going to need later, when they get hit by the vicissitudes...
How Will Coronavirus Redefine College?
The following piece is by University of Georgia history professor Stephen Mihm. Warning: What you are about to read is not pretty. A taste: Imagine, for a moment, if August rolls around and the pandemic has abated but colleges and...
Out of the Zoo: The Hedgehog and the Fox
Annie Thorn is a sophomore history major from Kalamazoo, Michigan and our intern here at The Way of Improvement Leads Home. As part of her internship she is writing a weekly column titled “Out of the Zoo.” It focuses on life as...
What Kind of Technology Do Undergraduates Want?
According to the EDUCAUSE Center for Analysis and Research, undergraduates: want mostly face-to-face learning environments. want lectures, student presentations, question and answer sessions, and class discussions to take place in a face-to-face learning environment , as opposed to homework, exams,...
Episode 54: Why College?
Increasingly, college campuses have transformed from places of rigorous scholarly pursuits into glorified centers for job training. But is this what college is really for? Host John Fea and producer Drew Dyrli Hermeling sit down and discuss the need for...
Duke University Rejects Young Life
Universities like Duke claim to be bastions of free speech, inclusion, and pluralism, but they tend to define these commitments very narrowly.  For example, the student government at Duke recently rejected Young Life‘s official status on campus because the Christian...
Moving Into the Dorms, Circa 1785
My youngest daughter went to her first college class yesterday morning (Spanish I). She moved into the dorms last week and has managed to survive four full days of new student orientation. I think I will send her J.L. Bell’s...
Identity Politics on Steroids at Amherst College
The Office of Diversity & Inclusion at Amherst College in Massachusetts recently posted its “Common Language Guide,” a forty-page glossary of terms that calls for “a need to come to a common and shared understanding of language…around identity, privilege, oppression...