Princeton historian Anthony Grafton has an interesting review of two recent books* on education reform. His assessment of neither book is positive, but in engaging the topic of education reform, Grafton offers some interesting insights and factoids. Here’s one: The cost of a year’s study at a college or university escalates, year upon year. Yet […]
Hayek vs. Keynes Rap Anthem
In case you missed it, here’s a fun economics lesson. If you know what’s behind all the references and allusions in it, you know a good deal of economics relevant to the recent crisis:
Health and Wealth Over the Last 200 Years
Here’s a very cool video, whose coolness operates at many levels: cool window into history, cool window into human health and wealth, cool window into graphical representation of statistical data, etc.: SOURCE
Richard Hamming on Becoming a Great Scholar
Richard Hamming’s famous talk titled “You and Your Research” is widely available on the web (click here for pdf version and html version). It’s also quite long. Below are some highlights from the talk. If you are serious about become a great scholar, check out the ideas below. Note that Hamming was a scientist, so […]
Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture
If you were going to die in a few months and had to compress your best thoughts about life and what makes it worth living into a single lecture, what would you say? Here’s computer scientist Randy Pausch’s answer once he learned that pancreatic cancer had sealed his fate: This lecture made such an impression […]
Balancing Instant-Gratification Technology with Delayed-Gratification School Work
A few weeks back SuperScholar featured a piece by Baylor neuroscientist Matthew Stanford on how students can keep their brains healthy. One is to limit electronic media. The New York Times has an interesting piece on this. Multitasking with electronic media can certainly be fun — often a lot more fun than reading a book […]
The Waste Called University Life?
Just as health care needs reform and overhaul, so does the college and university system. Inertia being what it is, don’t expect far-reaching educational reform too soon, but the sense that our educational paradigms are outdated may be gaining ground. Simon Jenkins, earlier this month, wrote a piece in the Guardian on the sheer waste […]
The Future of Secular Humanism
Although card-carrying secular humanists are few, secular humanism has been enormously influential in American culture and, particularly, in American education. For this reason, SuperScholar decided to cover the recent conference on secular humanism in Los Angeles (granted, we’re a bit late reporting on it). The Council for Secular Humanism, publisher of Free Inquiry magazine, celebrated […]
Tenure a thing of the past?
Tenure, a lifetime faculty appointment at a college or university, is still a fixture of higher education, but it is increasingly coming under pressure. Many still think it’s the way to go — that it provides a just reward for exceptional scholarship, that it ensures academic freedom by preventing faculty from being fired for espousing […]
How about a lucrative career as a college president?
A college presidency may not earn you as much as a top college football coaching career, but it’s not bad. Thirty college presidents earn $1,000,000 or more: SOURCE